On the occasion of the K. on stage evening, which took place in Paris this month, centered on the theme of The Last of the Jews, Ruben Honigmann invited us to meditate on these never-ending endings. We publish the text of his performance.
There’s something a little incongruous about talking about solitude when you’re in the presence of 600 people in this room.
It reminds me of a saying that circulated in Eastern Europe before the Shoah: the day the last Jew in Odessa left his town, fleeing the pogroms, there would always be fifty or so Jews on hand to escort him to the ship and bid him farewell. This is what Deleuze demonstrates in his famous alphabet book, under the letter B for Boisson (TN: drink): the last drink is in fact always the penultimate drink. The last Jew is also always the penultimate Jew.
So, as I’m the ultra-Orthodox of the bunch, and K. is for Kippa , let’s take a look at how the last Jew is always the penultimate Jew. Like Kippa, let’s examine how this idea, of the last who is never really the last, is articulated in Hebrew, namely the language of those who from the first day of their existence have considered themselves to be “the smallest of peoples”[1]. In Hebrew, the end is Sof. To say infinity, for example, we say “ Ein-sof ”, no end. On the other hand, when you want to say that a thing is not only finite, but actually finite-finite, if anything can be more finite than finite, you say “ sof-sof ”.
But Sof can also mean the exact opposite of the end: the continuation. In truth, it’s something we’re familiar with in French, with the word that, depending on the context, is pronounced plu or plus.
When we encounter it in writing, we always have that moment of hesitation: should we pronounce the s or not, does it mean “stop” or “encore”?
In English, it’s even worse: last is last, but the verb to last means to endure, to ensure that the thing is not lost.
And we don’t even need to call on Raymond Devos to remind us that the word “rien”, etymologically, means “something”, hence “three times nothing”, because even when we say there’s nothing, there’s at least one speaker to say it.
But back to Hebrew, the Sof root is found in a very common name: Joseph, in Hebrew Yossef, which means both he will continue and he will cease. And it’s certainly no coincidence that the writers of the Gospels gave Jesus a father named Joseph.
For the Sof root regularly shows up in the Torah at narrative crossroads with a strong messianic charge[2], when the great Story is in the process of giving birth, in moments of confusion and abolition of temporalities.
And systematically, commentators are torn: are we in the presence of a first or a last time, the end or the beginning, was it a one-shot or an eternal event?
The moment that crystallizes this tension is Purim, the feast that commemorates the first plan to do away with the Jews. At the end of the Scroll of Esther, when the die has already been cast and the genocide thwarted, the text questions its own continuation. What will become of the memory of this avoided end?
“Lo yasuf mizaram” it says: this story will not disappear from among the Hebrews.
The masters of the Talmud conclude: in the messianic era, all the texts will be obsolete, except for the Purim story, the memory of the possibility of extinction.
A way of saying: reader, remember, there were others last before you.
Being last would then be the very condition of perpetuity.
For, in truth, there is perhaps no need to decide between the end and the continuation: to be a Jew is fundamentally to be the last Jew.
Every Jew, in every age, is the last of the Jews.
Last Jew is the pleonasm that outlines what it means to be Jewish: to balance above the abyss, straddling the line between extinction and eternity.
But it’s understandable that this tension can make you dizzy, that it can produce a sense of frustration, of which here’s an example.
Sometimes, as you wander through the Bible, you come across a monstrous word.
It rarely happens, but it does happen, like when you meet a man who’s 2m35 tall. Or, an even rarer phenomenon, an individual who manages to read in full, every week, the three texts that appear in the K newsletter.
In short, this kind of word is called a hapax, a word of which there is only one occurrence in the entire biblical corpus. The best known of these is tohu-bohu. These are, of course, very difficult words to translate, since to grasp the meaning of a word you need to be able to compare its use in different contexts, which is what commentators do every time they come across a rare word.
But how do you do this when the word is unique?
Well, the word we’re interested in is one of these: ASAF-SUF.
In asafsuf, we hear the doubling of sof.
Asafsuf is a group of people a little on the margins who accompanied the Hebrews into the desert, the people who came out of Egypt in the 25th hour, those who followed the movement.
Literally, they are the last of the last, or, as you might have guessed, the surplus of the surplus, the excess of the excess.
And they’re fed up, these people, they’re growling: enough of this off-the-ground, wandering life, hanging on by a thread, enough of the manna, this vital but volatile food that falls daily from the sky in the desert.
They want consistency, hardness, the guarantee of a palpable tomorrow: they demand meat, with its taste and scent.
Something real to sink your teeth into, something you can say: this really exists.
And they’re going to get it, they’re going to get a mouthful of it, until they choke, dead of overflow, saturated with the satisfaction of biting into reality.
As in the Grimm brothers’ tale of The Fisherman and His Wife: by dint of wanting more, they got none at all.
Powers and empires collapse under their own weight. Only the featherweights survive.
This is the spirit of the holiday we’re approaching, which always falls at a time when the days are shortest, when the world seems to be coming to an end: Hanukkah.
And what does Hanukkah mean: inauguration!
And what do we sing at Hanukkah? A song, Maoz Tzur, which reviews all the attempts to do away with the Jews. But as we all know: if you play with, you get burnt, and the project always ends up backfiring. Pharaoh is drowned, Haman is hanged…
In the end, when all plans have failed, when it’s all over to be done with the Jews, what happens is the possibility of finally being able to begin.
To be the last and to remain so, to hold on to a thread without fear of breaking: this is the task we must pursue and perpetuate.
