As an Indian I am living face-to-face with Covid; it is life confronting death. Franz Kafka’s story Before the law, according to George Steiner, contains “the nucleus of the novel [The Trial] and of Kafka’s vision.”… “Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law.” The protagonist of the story has no proper name: he is simply a countryman, or, more literally, a man from the land, from the soil. This hidden knowledge is the knowledge of ignorance without which it is impossible to depict the country man in front of the door of the Law as Kafka does in his parable. He is not a scholar of the law, or, more literally, is the wise pupil who possesses the art of learning. The Jews have been given the rabbinical stories and anecdotes that serve to explicate and confirm the teaching. Kafka listened attentively to the holy tradition: Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Truth expressed in an epic form is wisdom.

“The Storyteller” orally transmitted wisdom – the epic form of truth as stories which can be “more than parables.” It is in order to formulate this “more than” that Holy tradition is absent, is lost. Kafka’s parables incarnate all the properties of the Holy tradition except one, the most essential: they have lost their message. They are clarifications of a lost, absent, teaching. The man’s first surprise: the law is not what he thought it was; it is neither universal nor objective. From the start, the final teaching (“this door was meant solely for you”) is suggested, through the man’s surprised ignorance. He will have to spend an entire life in front of the doors of the law for this truth to be revealed. And for this to happen, he will need a partner: the doorkeeper. The man faces the door of the law; the doorkeeper has the law at his back. The man has come to the law, yet the doorkeeper was always there, as if waiting for the countryman since times immemorial. The doorkeeper does not delude the man from the country when he tells him that now is not the time. “The doorkeeper conveyed the message of salvation only when it could no longer be the gate.” The gate does not lead to the world of meaning, as the locus of meaning does not dwell inside the law, but before the law. Penetrating the law has no sense, the idea of penetrating the law, of fulfilling the law, is a false desire. Standing in front of the open gates of the law is not a sign of failure; rather, it is the only disposition that will eventually render it possible to hear a teaching. There is no accomplishing of the law, no entering the law. What does the man of the country know? What is his hidden knowledge? He knows – without knowing – that in being before the law he is at his place. He does not accomplish the law, and nevertheless he is – body and soul – before the law. He is in a living relation with the facticity of the law, with the very fact of standing before a commandment. His life is, from beginning to end, an existence before-the-law. What is the hidden knowledge of the ignorant person? In his existence, he in fact knows that law is not the issue here. He knows without actually knowing – he has a deep, implicit, knowledge – that what is at stake here is teaching, and not some kind of cold, meaningless and oppressive law. The doorkeeper is revealing to the man from the man the hidden law of the man’s existence, the very sense of his awaiting, of his patience. True law is not universal. True law is such only so far as it is the law of the singular. Therefore, only so far as it is not law anymore, but teaching: “Before the Law” Kafka brings us to the point where law becomes teaching, the time of the crisis of tradition, only the ignorant can recognize, beyond the law, a teaching. Only he is capable of recognizing – if he is prepared to spend his entire life before the law the grammar of life – the Torah mediated through the door keeper. The grammar cannot be lived without the other. Life before the law is a hearing, which is hearing the call of the other to hospitality.