Kamenetz spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the two men, about the relationship each had to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and about how Nachman’s fable about a turkey responds to Kafka’s tale of an insect. Running time: 17:57.

It tells the story of a country bumpkin who wishes to gain entry into the law, but discovers that the law is guarded by a hulking man with a thin black beard and a large pointed nose. Approaching the guard gingerly, the man asks if he will be allowed to enter. “It is possible,” replies the guard, “but not now.”

And so the man sits. And waits. Weeks go by, then months. The man peers at the gateway, contemplating a daring dash past the guard. This only makes the guard laugh: there are more guards down the corridor, he tells the man, one more fierce and menacing than the next; try breaking in, and they will break your bones.

Growing desperate, the man tries bribing the guard. The guard accepts the gifts, but still forbids the man from entering into the law. “I am taking this,” he tells the man, “only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”

Years pass, and the man is now on his deathbed. With a shaking finger, he motions to the guard, asking him to come near. And with his dying breath, the man asks the question that has been haunting him his entire life. “Everyone strives after the law,” he chokes out. “So how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”

“Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you,” says the guard. “I’m going now to close it.”

As with all things Kafka, this parable has many interpretations. My favorite one, however, is this: the law is freedom, a vast hall in which nothing ever happens and nothing ever will unless we take action. Charge past the guard, goes this particular analysis, and you may die, but you may also get your way. Sit and wait, and you’ll undoubtedly perish, dissatisfied and alone.

Judging by this week’s parasha, the Israelites would have nothing to do with this kind of thinking. They’re no Joseph K: in fact, as they stand on the foothills of Mount S, having just received the Ten C, they display a certainty, a commitment, a clarity that is decidedly unkafkaesque.

It all boils down to one simple sentence. As they receive the laws God gives them, governing everything from civility toward slaves to the slaying of sorceresses, the Israelites promise to obey: “All that the Lord spoke,” they swear, “we will do and we will hear.”

This logically confusing formulation—ordinarily, of course, people hear first and only then do—was a favorite formulation with Tomer, my sergeant at the Israel Defense Force’s basic training camp. Although more than a decade has passed since I first put on uniform and reported for duty, I can still hear Tomer’s surprisingly high-pitched voice in my mind, informing us that as we—trembling and tearful new inductees—were scum, and as he—tan and trim and a good ten months into his military career—was, well, God, we should respond just as the Israelites had in their moment, promising to obey blindly, to do first and only then, if at all, bother to hear.

Needless to say, this demand for oafish obsequiousness bothered me greatly at the time, and, reading this week’s Torah portion, it chafed me anew. Why couldn’t the Israelites, I asked myself, take a page out of Joe K’s book and learn to see the law not as something to be upheld without question but as something to be stormed, to be grappled with, to be interpreted at will?

Only they did. Rereading the parasha, I paid attention to its opening line, which God speaks to Moses: “And these,” He says, “are the ordinances that you shall set before them.”

For a deity who has been known, when the mood strikes Him, to make large bodies of water split in half or send frogs tumbling down from the heavens, this is a mild way of putting things. These, after all, are His laws, the very rules He believes must govern all human interaction; one, then, might expect a bit of a stronger statement, something more along the lines of “Thou shalt do as I sayeth or I shalt have no choice but to do some of that smiting I clearly enjoyeth so much.”

And yet, nothing. All God commands is that the law be set before the people. A soft sell, this, like one of those persistent folks standing at a street corner and handing out fliers for a new dry cleaners that just opened around the block: take it if you so wish, heed it if you want. Nobody’s making you do anything.

Which, of course, sounds a lot like freedom. Sure, the laws themselves are very detailed, but you could just as easily choose to reject the whole bundle. If, on the other hand, you choose to engage with the divine will, you must take concrete action; the doing truly comes before the hearing.

Accept, then, or reject, it almost doesn’t matter: the worst thing you could possibly do is sit and wait a lifetime for the law to call on you. Remember: this entrance was assigned only to you, and it won’t be long before they close it down.

Wherever the Castle was, though—if anywhere—Kafka worked for it. He made the language and protocols of its bureaucracy his own. More than for the Institute, more than for his own sense of self, Kafka worked for this ideal ministry, this ideal apparatus of oppression. The writing he did during the day at his workdesk would be transcribed into the margins of the writing he would do at his other desk at home and at night, constraining even his most fanciful imaginings with appropriate Castle form, and Castle diction. Kafka’s business writing became, in effect, Kafka’s writing business, and Kafka Inc. became Kafkan ink as his best stories found themselves straightened into assumed styles and genres. The essay, the speech, the Report to an Academy, the travelogue parody—Kafka’s fiction is anything but fiction. It was subsidiary work, always, of a “limited liability.”

What should be investigated, then, is Kafka’s embrace of the Castle—of his employer’s language, and rhetorical techniques. Such adoptions have almost always been accomplished in a spirit of subversion, and examples are copious, and brilliant: Andrei Platonov, who incorporated Stalinist slogans into his novels; mid-century American poets as diverse as Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg, who co-opted advertising language into verse practice; one also thinks of Lenny Bruce, who composed entire comedy routines reading from transcripts derived from his trials on obscenity charges. Kafka’s example is more ambivalent, however. It is not subversion so much as an author himself being subverted.

But this phenomenon of speaking in the voice of one’s superior, of eventually surrendering oneself to the voice of one’s superior, is best examined in extremis —through Nazism. It has become a commonplace to say that Kafka’s work prefigured, in image, or predicted, in word, the horrors of Nazism. That argument is most often advanced by a litany of external congruencies between Kafka’s fictional world and the Third Reich: bureaucracy (though the Nazis were always more efficient than the authorial imagination), the infringement of technology on daily life, random violence, unappealable official destinies, fates based on birth, etc. Kafka’s intuition of Nazism was far more personal, however, far more inwardly directed. It can be found in his characters’ desires to join something, to become part of something, whether a style or form of being, or even a Volk (which, in Kafka’s case, would have, perversely, been Judaism). Kafka’s people want to become one with another, but especially with a mass, or a power. They long to find a voice, a place, or station, to join an office, a ministry, a selfless Gemeinschaft or selfish Gesellschaft, a family, a religion. Their question at the door of the Law is Rainer Maria Rilke’s: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” For natives of Austro-Hungarian Prague, like Kafka, like Rilke (they were born eight years, and ten blocks, apart), angels come in hierarchies—Ordnungen in German, “orders”; the celestials have rungs and levels, too.

Kafka was desperate to link his art and life to each other, and to link his destiny in both to a respectable institution. This desperation derived from a desire to please his parents, perhaps, as if to satisfy a God he did not believe in. For a time, at the advent of the First World War, he even attempted to enlist in the army, but was refused as an essential worker in the service of State. The decisiveness with which the nervous, suffering Kafka attempted military service, and then the energy and application with which he campaigned for veteran’s rights and benefits after the War, seems obsessive, even pathological (he advocated to establish a sanatorium for veterans’ recovery in a resort called, of all things, Frankenstein).

“Some people have claimed that reconditioned square shafts are an adequate alternative to the newer cylindrical shafts.”

This desire to lose himself in another’s approval was almost animal, instinctual, as if a remnant of the impulse to herd, to disappear into the flock. It should be remembered that old Jewish cities such as Prague are still organized not by congregation but by communities. In Prague one could not, and still cannot, “belong” to a synagogue, but, instead, to the Prague Obec, the Jewish Community of Prague, which has a board of directors and president answerable only to the Chief Rabbinate of Bohemia and Moravia. To this day Prague’s Jews carry blue identification cards, though registration has been made wholly voluntary. There is safety in numbers, but danger in being counted, and there is absolution in both. One has only to think of the demonic heir to Kafka’s officialdom—the Desk Murderer of Nazism, the unaware, or half-aware, Schreibtischmörder. He is competent. He is useful. He and thousands of archons exactly like him decimated almost the entirety of Prague Jewry. People want to “belong.” People want to be hated and abused.

A person who works as a Nazi is just that, a Nazi, and everything he does is infused with the spirit of Nazism. Like that historical unfortunate, we, too, have learned the lessons of work, and incorporated them into our lives. The public has long penetrated the private, and the two spheres are now virtually indistinguishable. It is as if we repeat the words of Shakespeare’s Shylock: “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” Lately, though, we “execute” this instruction directly on ourselves.

This is only a poetic version of Marx’s thought, that bureaucracy manages to translate all social relations into a grammar of formal relationships between offices and ranks. Marx’s assertion can be transposed onto the community, or family. In our time, all relations, even the most intimate—those between lovers, those between a writer and a piece of paper—have been invaded with foreign language. This invading, adulterating force is today characterized as “the Media,” though its particular expression has historically been called many things: technical jargon, Amtsstil (the official Empire term for “officialese”), Orwellian Newspeak. Today, the individual has access to an unprecedented array of linguistic and identificational guises and feints—ways in which one might, through the Word, disappear into the mass. In The Metamorphosis the bugman Samsa goes from being a “he” to an “it.” His sister Grete says: “‘I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature, and so all I say is: we must get rid of it. We’ve tried to look after it and to put up with it as far as is humanly possible, and I don’t think anyone could reproach us in the slightest.’”

At the time he was writing The Metamorphosis, Kafka jotted in his diary: “In the next room they are talking about vermin.” Yes, they were, but in a new language. In translation, they were talking about Samsa. In translation, they were talking about him.