high, enabling metaphor. Derrida comments: “When a Jew or
a poet proclaims the Site, he is not declaring war....The
site is not the empirical and national Here of a territory. It is
immemorial, and thus also a future. Better: it is tradition as
adventure” ( 66 ).
“Tradition as adventure,” rather than the “national Here
of a territory”: with his beautiful definition of Jewish learning
and writing, Derrida separates himself from the triumphalist
praise of the Israel that had survived destruction, and unex-
pectedly increased its geographical dominion, in the Six-Day
War. (Though the essay on Jabès dates from several years ear-
lier, it was republished in 1967 , the year of the Six-Day War: a
fact that casts a new light on these sentences.)
For Derrida, Jewishness does not take place within his-
tory, as a narrative of war, exile, and cultural achievement, but
at the sourceof history—seen as the bewildering separation
between God and man. In the garden of Eden there was no his-
tory; when God turns away from his creation, historical time
begins. (This idea reads like a transposition into religion of
Derrida’s point about Husserl in relation to Joyce: Joyce wan-
ders within history, whereas Husserl asks a more basic ques-
tion about the origin of historicity; see chapter 1 .) Here we
have the underlining of origin, of a traumatic starting point,
common to Derrida’s readings of his Jewish sources, from
Freud to Lévinas to Jabès. The feeling of being abandoned,
even rejected, by God is basic to the Hebrew Bible. Derrida
writes that Moses’s breaking of the stone tablets of the law “ar-
ticulates, first of all, a rupture within God as the origin of his-
tory” ( 67 ). Beginning with the Flood, God at times turns his
back on his chosen people, repenting of his generosity. “God is
in perpetual revolt against God,” Jabès writes (cited 68 ). The
division within God consists of his combination of tender
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 121