The Anger of Myth / the Myth of Anger: The "Other Face" of Narrativity in the Zohar and Rav Nachman

Scholem famously declared: “throughout the wide and scattered provinces of Kabbalism, the revenge of myth upon its conqueror is clear for all to see.” Long after the many critiques of its empirical accuracy, Scholem’s myth continues to grip the imagination. It contains the seed of an epic tale: that of a vast landscape of adventure across which two sworn adversaries, “Kabbalism” and “the myth-conqueror,” battle eternally for control of the narrative of Judaism – plundering, displacing, and even masquerading as each other. I contend that these paradoxical dynamics, in which an aggressive animus both produces and disrupts narrativity, informs some of the key tales in the Zohar and Rav Naḥman. I focus, specifically, on the role of anger – a passion that, in these writings, is demonically productive, indeed productive of the demonic. To paraphrase Scholem, the revenge of evil on the very divine wrath that it arouses – but that also enables it, paradoxically, to take on personified form – disrupts the cosmic narrative, diverting it from a seamlessly unfolding divine will and self-revelation into new channels, those of the will and self-revelation of demonic personages. This productive/disruptive power of anger re-appears in Rav Naḥman, as when he declares that anger creates a destructive angel, leading to a proliferation of “paths,” competing potential biographical narratives that beckon to a person – some linear, others punctuated by perilous crises: a meta-commentary on Rav Naḥman’s own tales and the Zoharic tradition as a whole.