Moses and Freud: “God is in the Detail”1

The publishers of Freud's collected writings have grouped the texts of the twelve volumes in keeping with their topics and named the volumes accordingly. Volume X (Freud, 2008) and Volume XI (Freud 2007) have non-clinical titles, which will interest the “educated public” the most: Society and religion and Art and literature, respectively. To this reader, who, like a mushroom hunter, is devoted to searching for the characteristic patterns and ways of Judaism and Jewish thought in the Freudian mode of experience, the works from the areas of literature, art, and religion are abundant forests, indeed. An underlying aspect of the entire Freudian project, its substructures included, is the relationship between The Jewish religion's view of the The Almighty and his unlimited and impenetrable rule, on the one hand, and the psychoanalytic understanding of the influence of the ever-enigmatic Unconscious on how our lives evolve, on the other: both offer an irreducible Last Resource, which we can approach but which always remains hidden behind the next corner of our view. Each of these central powers is literally Ein Sof (= without end).

These two perspectives on existence, whose gravitational centers are outside of what is immediately observable, also convey the experience that what is truly real remains a riddle to man, one that has preoccupied the philosophers and was expressed, among other ways, in Kant's “Das Ding an sich”. The common basic element of the two systems of knowledge - Judaism and Psychoanalysis - that human reason is never able to fully grasp what happens, more than in fragments, and that this is determined at the very center from where our fates are directed, also illustrates how the point of departure for the irreligious atheist Freud in the final analysis was influenced by the Hasidic orientation of his fathers and forefathers, which can be taken as a confirmation. We are, after all, often convinced that something important becomes clear only when we realiz