A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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is most frequently invoked is the “power of stones.” Judah and Eleazar describe an array of stones whose seemingly inexplicable properties point to an array of divine truths. For instance, Judah recurrently discusses the even tekumah (“preserving stone”), an amulet mentioned in rabbinic literature that was purported to prevent miscarriages.106 According to Judah, its workings can be attributed to the power of scent: “The even tekumah … has a scent that enters a woman’s belly and [reaches] the fetus. The belly does not block the [scent of the] stone from the fetus, and the fetus remains in place until the woman’s pregnancy is complete. This is done through the power of the scent of the stone.” The even tekumah, like the more mundane phenomena traced above, sheds light upon God’s attributes: “Therefore, do not wonder at the actions of God (ha-tsur, lit., “the Rock”), for he does everything through His power even though we do not sense how he does them.”107
The Pietists seem to have been particularly preoccupied by one stone in particular—the magnet or lodestone, which they varyingly identify by its Hebrew, Latin, and German names (even sho’evet, magnet, and Augstein, respectively). “God created an example in his world: a stone which attracts … iron to itself, known in German as a magnet or Augstein. We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.”108 Like so many of the natural phenomena we have encountered thus far, Judah utilizes this object for theological ends: “The wondrous proof that God can cause the righteous to cleave to Him is the stone that attracts iron to itself, despite the fact that no one can see by what means it pulls it. It is intended to show that God knows those who trust in him—‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’”109 The Pietists were interested in the practical applications of magnetism as well, and invested these, too, with spiritual significance. Judah provides a lengthy (if confused) description of the nautical compass in his discussion of how the souls of the dead “navigate” the next world:
Now if one were to ask, “How will [the souls of the dead] be transported immediately [to Heaven or Hell]?” The stone that attracts iron can demonstrate this, for it attracts a needle to itself in an instant. And the captain of a ship can even use it to discern in which direction his ship is traveling. He brings the magnet in a bowl of water, and places a needle next to it, and asks his fellow: “Where should the ship travel?” If he answers, “east,” and the ship is pointing west, the needle will travel round the magnet via a circular path … and if the ship is pointing east, [the needle] will remain straight. “He has created a remembrance of His wonders,” so that we may believe that in an instant the soul can cleave to Heaven or to Hell, via a straight or circular path.110
In addition to these stones, herbs, and magical incantations, Judah and Eleazar also located “remembrances” in the animal kingdom. At times, they recount the properties of mundane animals that they would have had occasion to encounter in daily life. For instance, “a dog can smell the footsteps of a thief, although we cannot see anything of the thief remaining in the place of his footsteps, and his footsteps are not marked in the ground. Nonetheless, there is some fine, invisible substance in the place of his footsteps, which the dog uses to recognize the thief.”111 But often the animals in question manifest wondrous and apparently inexplicable qualities. Thus the salamander, “which is not ruled over (i.e., harmed) by fire,” proves that “God’s will and existence” should not be doubted despite the inability of human beings to perceive of them.112 Elsewhere, in discussing God’s restorative powers, Eleazar argues similarly: “He has created a remembrance of His wonders: There is a certain kind of fish … which, if it is chopped into pieces and thrown into the water while it is still convulsing, will reattach its components to one another and live. The tail of a lizard does something similar. [The lizard] can remove its tail, and return later on and reattach it to itself.”113 An additional confirmation of the plausibility of resurrection, Eleazar asserts, can be derived from “the weasel, which resurrects its fellow using a certain plant.”114
Another invocation of wondrous phenomena in the animal kingdom appears in reference to the lion; in a yihud text, Judah argues:
‘He has created a remembrance of His wonders.’ … A lion can make a circle like this ○ and move on, and any animal that enters it is unable to leave the circle, till it dies. Behold, the lion can seal and unseal this circle, and allow an animal to leave it, for [the lion] understands every language, and if one goes and beseeches it, [the lion] will understand and indicate what its will is…. Behold this wonder…. Who taught [the lion] to draw a circle in the earth? Is [the lion] a magician?! Moreover, how is it that by drawing a circle animals become trapped within it? … And how does it know every language? Who created animals that are possessed of such wisdom? We cannot help but believe that “there is wisdom on high” (Ps. 73.11)—that ‘the Lord is a God of wisdom’ (I Samuel 2:3). The lion knows how to draw a circle and trap animals within it, even when he is not present—certainly the Master of All … even though he cannot be seen.115
Elsewhere in Pietistic writings, other wondrous animals, such as the phoenix and the barnacle goose, are invoked to similar effect.116
Finally, the Pietists recurrently locate wondrous remembrances in the written sources they had before them. One figure who features prominently in such citations is Alexander the Great, whose legendary exploits were recorded in an array of rabbinic texts.117 Several times, Eleazar invokes a talmudic story in which Alexander revived some salted fish by dipping them in water flowing from the Garden of Eden: “It says in Tractate Tamid [that] Alexander the Macedonian washed the [dead] fish [in the waters of the Garden of Eden] and they lived.”118 For Eleazar, this story proves the reasonableness of God’s ability to resurrect the dead. Another marvel described in the same talmudic sugya is mined for theological meaning as well, namely an eyeball that alternates between being extremely heavy and extremely light. Judah proves the theological notion that the entirety of Creation praises God119 by referring to a midrashic tale in which Alexander descends under the sea in a kind of proto-submarine, and hears the water singing God’s praises.120 Alexander is also invoked in reference to other wondrous theological tenets, such as the location of the Garden of Eden and Gehenna.121
As I noted at the outset, scholars have focused on inexplicable “remembrances” of this sort in claiming that in medieval Ashkenaz “the universe [was] … empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” I have argued that such a claim is belied by the consistent tendency to invest natural causation, empirical observation, and prosaic objects and phenomena with spiritual profundity. But even the incantations and wondrous objects just surveyed should not be read as pointing to an exclusive concern for “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural.” In order to understand their manifest interest in the wondrous powers of incantations, herbs, and stones, it is necessary to briefly survey the intellectual landscape in which the Pietists, along with their high medieval neighbors, were operating.
NATURE BEFORE “NATURE”: NIFLA’OT AND MIRABILIA
The once common notion that mechanistic, comprehensible “nature” can be sharply distinguished from the arbitrary and inexplicable “supernatural” has not fared well in recent decades.122 Just as historians and philosophers of science have problematized the traditional opposition between “science” and “pseudoscience,”123 an array of philosophers and critical theorists have demolished the edifice of an unchanging, essentialistic “nature,” instead emphasizing that conceptions of nature are historically contingent and culturally constructed. Thus post-structuralists, feminist and queer theorists, political ecologists, and others have noted that what gets defined as “natural” often has less to do with any intrinsic properties than it does with the specific power relations that are enacted through the very process of crafting definitions. Rather than conceptualize nature vaguely as a “jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks,”124 these scholars are far more likely to interrogate the manner by which “nature” (and, concomitantly, “science”) are produced, and the agendas they further, than they are to unquestionably