Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah

Memories and Promises (Continued)

The entanglement of the oath and Being (or existence that bears promise / a promise / the structure of promise) entails a situation where it is not merely our physical constitution that is in jeopardy but rather the whole of our existential condition that flirts with disaster (or, throwing a glance at the expression of Maurice Blanchot: dis-aster–the lack of a star, the absence of a guiding light, the missing point above by which we can orient ourselves below, a loss of a moral compass etc…).

Here we will once more call upon Heidegger to testify on the issue of an oath/promise which is uttered in Y-H-V-H’s Name [The essential name for God which itself means Being]:

Addressing in this way, while withholding itself in default, Being is the promise of itself. To think to encounter Being itself in its default means to become aware of the promise, as which promise Being itself “is.” It is, however, in staying away; that is to say, insofar as there is nothing to it. This history—that is, the essence of nihilism—is the destiny of Being itself. Thought in its essence and authenticity, nihilism is the promise of Being in its unconcealment in such a way that it conceals itself precisely as the promise, and in staying away simultaneously provides the occasion for its own omission. (59)

Thus to utter a false oath is to negate, in a certain sense, the promise of Being enframed as the sweep of history microcosmically portrayed as the seven days of creation so that “even the stars and dust” might disappear without a trace.

We should not be surprised to find, among the cluster of guises worn by the name—foundation, Living God, righteous one, memory, promise—the station of the law. CHuKiM, as the statutes of law, cement the foundation in its place. (60) They also accomplish a far more subtle task of plastering the foundation to itself. The cumulative strength of a foundation may, in the end, have more to do with its internal bonds than in the way it resists moving in relation to the substances that surround it.

As an interlocking system, law appeals to itself to justify and respond to weaknesses both within and without. Werner Hamacher, in his essay on “the Promise of Interpretation” has awarded the notion of promise with the legislative powers to create and act as guardian over the law—over the very concept of law which provides for society, among other things, a foundation. Continuing to expound upon these same relationships, Hamacher writes:

A promise is a promise only insofar as it gives itself the law and gives itself as the law (61)—insofar as it gives itself a ground [emphasis mine] and gives itself as the constant ground [emphasis mine]. ⁽⁶²⁾ By thus giving itself a law and ground, it is a transcendental speech act, a speech act that grounds a universal law of language and speaking.Only the individual will that posits itself as its own presupposition and thereby turns into its own ground can be a will that indeed wills and thus a will that is at once subjective and universal. (63)

Contrast with this, the characterizations Gikatilla employs in his strange conceptual congress such as KoL AyT (64) which literally means all the time or anytime. Taken the sense that Hamacher uses it above, we may render it as constancy, as in the “constant ground.”

Gikatilla illuminates this facet of constancy in our context of a verse from Psalms that bears the stamp of an earlier character with whom we are already acquainted with is righteousness or the agent thereof, the TZaDiK. “Happy are those who act justly, do TZeDeKah (rightly to others) at all AyT (times),” exclaims the psalmist, who according to Gikatilla, deposits funds into this mutual account of our constellation. Sourced as A (righteousness) equaling or related to B (all times), the pattern embroidered by this second chapter continues to grow in complexity.

Mining a bit more from Hamacher, we acquire a new sense of all speech having a promissory nature the makes it possible:

A promise is in fact more than just another example of the autonomy of practical reason: it is the legislation of reason itself, a speech act in which language gives itself a law and thus constitutes itself as language in the first place. This act does not have a merely empirical character but is constitutive of every will and every language—a transcendental speech act. (65)

Continuing in a similar vein:

In every promise, the promise makes a promise to itself to be a promise. Only insofar as a promise is an a priori autosynthesis and thus autonomous can it also be the discursive synthesis that binds any given word with a future one, any word with an act, each word and each act with every other. (66)

Lacking in Gikatilla’s presentation, but focal to many other treatments of the sphere of YeSoD is the notion of ATeReT haYeSoD, “the crown on the tip of the BRiT.” Without really engaging this phenomenon now, let us merely toss out a hypothesis that this dimension defines a feedback loop or reflective circuit wherein the dissemination of language or speech act, first and foremost, catches and affects the agent of this action prior to its reception by any other. We thus find ourselves in a situation where, as Hamacher put it “the promise [which is the transcendental speech act] makes a promise to itself.” Before all else, our own words and the realities they create must have some general sensibility for ourselves. Attached to memory and promise, they insure their own future within the covenant of self-certification that anticipates being meaningful to others.

One last ingredient to throw into the mix is the use of the name El SHaDaY which we will loosely translate as “God Almighty”. A more idiomatic rendering of this name, which implies God’s power of self-limitation curtailing the creative impulse and allowing entities to rest in their definitions and bodies, might be “God [over] finitude” or “God or the finite.” This function is related by Gikatilla in the form of a Talmudic teaching from tractate Chagiga: “SHaDaY, in this Name He said to His world, ‘enough’.” (67)

Giving only to the point when enough is enough, till we are full but not bursting, is the faculty of the name. It highlights our finitude. Recognition of this aspect underscores another quality of our condition—a discernibly temporal one, one in which Düttmann concludes that “…we cannot promise unless we expose ourselves, or even are already exposed, to finitude. A promise is, by definition, directed towards a finite being.” (68) There must is enough time to complete one’s promise, but only enough. An endless delay would unbind the promise and render it meaningless.

⁵⁹ See Heidegger’s monumental work Nietzsche vol.4 “Nihilism” p.226.

⁶⁰ See for example Gates of Light. pp. 90-95 where Gikatilla gives extensive treatment to this new dimension added to the constellation of chapter two.

⁶¹ CHuK: the law. This is one of the terms on the constellation that Gikatilla’s relates in the second gate of his work.

⁶² YeSoD: foundation. Here relationship between law, promise and foundation as well as speech is forged.

⁶³ Premises. Pp.97-98. Might we speculate further that the terms “subjective” and “universal” mentioned by Hamacher might be understood has deciphered analogues of the expressions “lowest root [or extremity] of the letter vav” (p.88 Gates) and  “KoL” (Everything, All i.e. the universal—p.103 Gates). These connections warrant further investigation.

⁶⁴ Gates of Light pp.103-104.

⁶⁵ Premises. p.97.

⁶⁶ Ibid. p.97.

⁶⁷ Gates. P.58.

⁶⁸ The Gift of Language. P.90.

 http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/memory-and-promise-part-8/

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