In her recently published collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, & Other Literary Essays, Cynthia Ozick’s overarching concern is literature itself, its value, and those who interpret it. Dara Horn detects a distinctly Jewish flavor in Ozick’s approach to these matters:
While she doesn’t quite spell it out here, Ozick’s idea of criticism being essential to literature is itself a claim with its oldest roots in Torah study. In a passage in Deuteronomy that directly denies the rhapsodic or incantatory power of scripture, Moses informs the Israelites that the Torah “is not in heaven, . . . neither is it beyond the sea. . . . No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart.”
The rabbis later understood this passage to mean that interpreting Torah was itself an indispensable component of Torah, that God—or a Hellenistic-style muse—is not going to show up and provide an answer to the text’s many questions. Therefore, careful readers are obligated not merely to read, but to consider, compare, situate, interpret. In other words: without critics, incoherence.
And this bring us to the central Jewish idea that drives this book, along with so much else Cynthia Ozick has given us, which at last explains her enduring fascination with fame: without critical reading, no eternal life. The blessings recited at public Torah readings announce that the book itself, rather than some mystical promises, is “eternal life planted in our midst,” the Tree of Life that had been walled off in Eden returned to us—not God, a prophet, or an artist, but as a book.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2227/cynthia-ozick-or-immortality/