Stop Trying to Understand Kafka

Franz Kafka wasn’t a rabbi, exactly, but he is the high priest of 20th-century literature, and he also wrote in parables. In a brief one called “On Parables,” he asks, in effect, what they’re good for. Why do sages feel obliged to illustrate their principles with tales, requiring their listeners to, as he puts it, “go over” to another world? Kafka answers: The sages don’t mean that we should go to “some actual place,” but rather to “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least.” In short, even the sage can’t articulate the meaning of his own parables, and so they’re useless to us. “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.”