Jacob Frank's Dreams of Profanation

Jacob Frank's Dreams of Profanation

Many of the sayings in Jacob Frank's The Collection of the Words of the Lord take the form of dreams or visions — modes of speech that resist verification and refuse the binary of true and false. By casting revelation in this indeterminate register, Frank unsettles the epistemic and nomian boundaries that ordinarily separate the holy from the profane. If, as Carl Jung suggests, the unconscious might produce a dream “which proposes an irrational and therefore unexpected third thing as a solution,” then the content of The Collection functions precisely as that third term: a form of utterance that slips beyond the either/or of truth and falsity, of sanctity and transgression. 

Jewish scholar Elliot R Wolfson asks, ‘What does it mean to cast one’s teachings in this way?’: 

"The appeal to the oneiric indicates an epistemic challenge to the customary distinction between truth and untruth — the logical underpinning of our sensory and cognitive experiences in the world as well as the axiological foothold for the values that inform our socio-political communities—since within the parameters of the dreamscape, the image is true to the extent that it is untrue and untrue to the extent that it is true. By anchoring his anti-Mosaic duty to undermine the nomian binary of holy and unholy, Frank conveys that the nature of the message that he was destined to communicate bears the structure of the parable that both reveals and conceals the literal truth, indeed, it reveals by concealing and conceals by revealing. To acknowledge the inherently parabolic nature of his words means, therefore, that Frank was cognizant of the dissembling character of his comportment." 

If the true/untrue binary is played out in the form of a vision or dream, it is Frank’s profanation that exposes the undecidability of what is holy or unholy. Profanation acts as a transgressive signifier that cuts across the holy/unholy binary, undoing its privative logic, erasing the distinction, and occupying both sides simultaneously. In effect, Frank’s profane anticipates not only Bataille’s base materialism, but also Serres’s ‘parasite’, and Derrida’s dethroning of logocentrism. 

Frank’s profanation even prefigures an essay written in 1931 by Theodor W. Adorno, in which the German theorist argues that religious ideas (“theological content”) must pass through “the realm of the secular, the profane” (by which he meant ethics, culture, politics, philosophy) if they are to avoid irrelevance on one side and nihilism on the other. Adorno reiterated this idea many years later, saying that the profane tends to secularize the sacred “to the point that only as secularized does the [sacred] endure.” In short, the sacred can endure only if it is made profane. 

At times the path to profanation was puerile, as when he claimed to have sat naked upon a Torah scroll, and he once asked why, if God had constructed a dwelling for His spiritual light, He had not also built Himself a “privy” — a toilet: 

"When Rabbi Mardocheusz told me of the 10 Sephiroth and drew them on paper, I asked him, What is this? He answered me, They are houses. I asked him, And where is there here a privy? For when they build houses don’t they always allocate a place for a bathroom first of all? When they build houses in Bucharest they dig a very deep hole in the ground first and then they spill quicksilver there to bore through the earth as deep as an abyss. Then they build a privy on top of it; and only then do they put up a house."

Yet Frank’s profanation of the sacred could also boast a rough common sense. For instance, Frank says it is a dog — not an angel — that protects the infant Jacob from evil. He even claimed to have cut up a Torah scroll to make shoes for his friends. As historian Simon Schama observes, “Jacob Frank’s style was to turn matters from the poetic to the physical.” 

Indeed, Frank claimed to be astonished that anyone would pray to go to heaven when nobody has ever seen it “with their own eyes.” “It might be that they ask and pray by a place that is the worst of all,” he adds caustically. One might also add another of Frank‘s utterances: “I do not look to heaven, that help might come to me from there, but I only look at what God does on the earth in this world.”