Rectifying the Shattered Vessels: Lurianic Kabbalah in David Shahar’s ‘Summer in the Street of the Prophets’

Abstract

The article discusses David Shahar’s novel ‘Summer in the Street of the Prophets’ and its use of Lurianic Kabbalah representations as tools for border crossings. Shahar, who was profoundly influenced by Gershom Scholem, turns mysticism, which Scholem saw as a border crossing between man and the transcendental, into a poetic theme. He focuses on the Street of the Prophets, a clearly defined geographical seam line in Jerusalem, in 1936 – a year of radical change. This is the liminal zone where Shahar’s gallery of characters lives and their identity constantly changes. Shahar’s literary Street of the Prophets resembles the historical street, but it is reconstructed through the narrator’s memory. This creates a situation where the border between the real and the imagined is crossed again, a situation that enables Shahar to present an ideal world that collapses when reality intrudes upon the imagined place. The final chapter focuses on the possibility of crossing the impassable border between life and death through literature, thus turning the writer into a demigod who can recreate the lost, ideal world from the pieces of a broken reality.