The Rabbi’s Cat

Illustration vs. Content

The Rabbi’s Cat seemed, at first glance, to be a children’s book: the cover could be an alternate for Aladdin and reading the first few pages seemed to be a set up for just a fantastical romp through an exotic setting, complete with talking animals.  I guess I should have known better considering it was assigned for a college course.  Regardless, despite its appearance Sfar’s book quickly heads into a mature discussion of lived religion—as opposed to inevitably unpragmatic written religion.

I’m not sure what to make of the apparent disconnect between the mature content and the child-oriented illustrations.  Sfar might just doing what he does best in the illustration department (according the jacket he writes children’s books) and just stuffing an adult narrative into it—or it also seems that it could be a conscious maneuver to bring casual readers into serious discussion.

Analogy vs. Metaphor

There was some discussion in class about the distinction between analogy and metaphor and I thought I’d recapitulate it as well as I can.  On page 25 the Rabbi is speaking to his cat of the distinction between Western Thought and it’s adherence to the linguistic device of metaphor and Judaic Thought (and by its dichotomous presentation, Eastern?) and it’s use of analogy.  Western thinkers, the Rabbi asserts, feel a need to turn “multiplicity into oneness.”  Thus, intuitively, their rhetorical device is metaphor, a place where things are other things, nothing is itself.  And so you turn and turn in enough circles until you arrive at the thought that Everything Is One.  I can’t claim to really wrap my head around the relationship between language and “reality” (or, the objects language intends to represent).

Analogy, on the other hand, for the Rabbi, allows stories, pictures, words, any kind of communication, to be itself and only itself.  You can move through the narrative of these rhetorical relationships and attempt to understand another situation, another relationship—but both sites of interaction are on the same level.  One does not exist primarily as a servant of the other, which is how it seems metaphor operates.

This distinction is a tad subtle but it is enormously important.  It seems to me that by granting language (and everything else) rights to be analogy but denying its metaphorical potential bypasses the hang ups I have with language, with its seeming inability to be anything of importance in itself.