Rav Shagar's "Praying Without Hope"

Cut from the book of translations, this short text discusses Derrida, Rebbe Nahman, and prayer after certainty

My translated collection of Rav Shagar’s derashot, Living Time (Amazon, Koren), was a long time in the making, and its path to publication was not a simple one. Several texts I translated in part or in full never made it into the final version. Below is one that was cut quite far into the publishing process, a short appendix to one of Rav Shagar’s other essays, fusing Jacques Derrida and Rebbe Nahman to talk about what it means to pray after certainty has ceased to be a possibility. (A much earlier version of this translation appeared on Prof. Alan Brill’s blog, where he provides some helpful context.)

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Praying without Hope^*

Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav and Jacques Derrida both taught that prayer—and faith, for that matter—is only possible through absolute renunciation—praying without hope or future. Rabbi Naḥman wrote: “Pray without any intent for personal benefit, without thinking about yourself at all, as if you did not exist, as written in the verse, ‘It is for your sake that we are slain all day long’ (Psalms 44:23).”^[1] Derrida’s version: “Prayer does not hope for anything, not even from the future.”^[2]

Prayer without hope does not demand the typical religious self-sacrifice, in which a person nullifies his self and his needs in favor of God. Rather, it embodies self-sacrifice in that the purest prayer is situated in its impossibility, as total self-sacrifice, purposeless suicide.

According to Derrida, prayer turns “to the other without future hope, only towards the past. It returns, without a future. However, despite this, you pray. Is this possible?” If this is so, we might ask: why, indeed, should you pray?

Is it possible to pray without hope, not just without any request, but while renouncing all hope? If we agree that this prayer, pure prayer, cleansed of all hope, is possible, would that not mean that the prayer’s essence is connected to this despair, to this lack of hope? [...] I can imagine a response to this terrifying doubt: even then, at the moment when I pray without hope, there is hope within the prayer. I hope, minimally, that someone takes part in my prayer, or that someone hears my prayer, or someone understands my hopelessness and despair. Thus, despite everything, there is still hope and future. But perhaps not. Perhaps not. At least perhaps. For me, this too is a terrifying state of prayer.^[3]

Prayer is empty mechanical speech, but in some form or another, it cuts through what Rabbi Naḥman called “the empty space” thereby overcomes the gap, even though it remains in the negative space of complete silence:

It requires you to affirm two opposites concrete existence (yesh) and nothingness (ayin). The empty space comes from the contraction (tsimtsum), as if God had removed himself from that space, as if there was no divinity there, otherwise it would not be empty [...]. But in the absolute truth, there must be divinity there despite this [...] and therefore it is impossible to understand the idea of the empty space until the future yet to come.^[4]

Even though both of them recognize the impossibility of prayer, Rabbi Naḥman and Derrida do the opposite—they pray. Paraphrasing Maimonides’ statement that God “exists, but is not in existence,”^[5] Derrida and Rabbi Naḥman ask: Cannot nothingness also be existence? Is it possible to pray without hoping? Is it possible to despair of hope and thereby to receive it, as a despairing hope? Then there is a hope and a future, and someone hears my voice. The connection to Maimonides is not incidental. Derrida saw the idea of negative attributes—Maimonides’ negative theology—as the basis for deconstruction, and thus also for prayer.^[6] Similarly for Rabbi Naḥman: “this is prayer, for when we call to God with the attributes of flesh and blood, and it is improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[7]

Many found Derrida’s statements about prayer incredibly shocking for “the philosopher who for years was considered the standard-bearer of anti-metaphysical radicalism, the guru of believers in materialism lacking any ‘beyond.’”^[8] Indeed, Derrida was forced to defend himself from criticism by thinkers including Jurgen Habermas, according to whom he was nothing less than a Jewish mystic.^[9]

Is this claim not correct? Derrida’s worldview is far from rationalist or anchored in philology. His deconstructive games sometimes seem, not coincidentally, like Kabbalistic-Hasidic homilies. He defended himself, claiming that his project was “a deconstruction of the values underlying mysticism,”^[10] and in this, he was correct. However, Habermas’ accusations are not wiped away or even confronted by Derrida’s claim, since the passage from deconstruction to mysticism is not just possible, but is, perhaps, obvious. Derrida’s project denied all positivity, but this orientation clears the way for the mystical leap, for the hope “that someone takes part in my prayer [...] At least perhaps.” The difference between Derrida and the mystic is a matter of pathos. Someone once said that the mystic and atheist say the same thing, “nothing.” The difference is that the mystic says it with a capital “N,” with a feeling of tremendous freedom that breaks him loose from the constraints of reality. Meanwhile the atheist says it as a dispirited, “terrifying possibility.”

Rabbi Naḥman and Derrida expressed—perhaps better than anyone else—the gap, the différance between the word and what we expect to accomplish.^[11] This empty space is the source of the structural contradictions of reality itself, what Rabbi Naḥman called “the questions without answers.”^[12] And yet they prayed?! This miracle happens in present tense. This moment has no external justification—it is an event, rather a result. This is grace that presents a possibility, a possibility for prayer without promise: “Prayer is when we call to God using flesh and blood qualities. He is then present for us in our calling to him. This is the grace of God. Without the grace of God, it would be improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[13]

The question becomes one of grace, and paradoxically this grace depends on the human renunciation of the will to transcend. Self-acceptance, giving up on transcendence, “is not true or false. It is, word for word, prayer.”^[14]

Self-sacrifice, suicide, is a condition for prayer because it liberates a person not just from the language, but from its logic as well. Prayer is therefore divine grace because it is impossible and yet occurs, or at least, perhaps occurs. This “perhaps” is important, because the “perhaps” elevates prayer to the realm of worldly possibilities—it therefore exists, if only as a possibility. Does someone hear and take part in the prayer with me? Perhaps, and this alone is enough to create hope. I pray, but am I certain that I will be answered? No, I am not certain. I am also not certain that I will not, but the prayer does something. Someone hears. Who is this someone? We say “God,” but this word lacks any independent meaning. It is enough for me that “I” hear, but who is the “I” that hears? I believe in the deep “I”, an “I” with a transcendental horizon. This is what the Hasidim called the root of the soul. Where there is an “I” like this, there is God.

The problem of attributes to which Rabbi Naḥman made reference denotes the impossibility of language actually doing what it claims to do, actually making contact with the Real. If I understand God as something that exists outside of me, I have strayed from the Real. Indeed, psychological reduction of faith is possible when faith is raised to the Lacanian Real.

However, reaching the Real requires the human renunciation of the will to transcend itself, and only after this is it correct to say that this “someone” is the “I”.

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* Based on a draft edited by Yishai Mevorach and published in The Remainder of Faith, 41–44.

[1] Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav, Likkutei Moharan I 15:5.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Guf Tefillah tr. Michal Govrin (Tel Aviv: Mekhon Mofet Vekav Adom Keheh/Hakibuts Hame’uḥad, 2013), 87.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Naḥman of Breslov, Likkutei Moharan I 64:1.

[5] Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I:57. Unlike Maimonides, Derrida rejects the second part of Maimonides’ teachings, which believes in the knowledge of God, in the unity of the knower, the knowing, and the known, in the possibility of “if I knew him, I would be him,” which according to Derrida is simply death.

[6] Derrida was not familiar with the theory of attributes from Maimonides himself. See Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, 68.

[7] Rabbi Naḥman, Likkutei Moharan I 15:5.

[8] Michal Govrin, “An Open Closure: Without End, or Closing” [Hebrew], Ha’aretz – Culture and Literature Edition, October 22, 2004. The article was written following Derrida’s death.

[9] Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, 112.

[10] Cited in Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, 111.

[11] In the language of Rabbi Naḥman, “there needs to be a separation, so to speak, between the filling and the surrounding. If not, then all would be one. However, through the empty space, from where God contracted his divinity, so to speak, and in which God created all of Creation, the empty space has come to encompass the world, and God surrounds all worlds, surrounding even the empty space [...] and in the middle appears the empty space from where God withdrew his divinity, so to speak” (Rabbi Naḥman, Likkutei Moharan I 64:2).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Rabbi Naḥman, Likkutei Moharan I 15:5. Based on this paradox of impossible prayer as the only possibility of prayer, the possibility of a miracle, Rabbi Naḥman and Derrida claim that they are the only people who really pray.

[14] Jacques Derrida, cited in Govrin, “An Open Closure.”