You take the ‘nothingness of revelation’ as your point of departure, the salvific-historical perspective of the established proceedings of the trial. I take as my starting point the small, nonsensical hope, as well as the creatures for whom this hope is intended and yet who on the other hand are also the creatures in which this absurdity is mirrored [ … ] Whether the pupils have lost it [the Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to the same thing, because, without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not Scripture, but life. Life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill in which the castle is built. It is in the attempt to metaphorize life into Scripture that I perceive the meaning of ‘reversal’ [Umkehr], which so many of Kafka’s parables endeavour to bring about [ … ] Kafka’s messianic category is ‘the reversal’ or the ‘studying’.

Walter Benjamin, replying to Scholem in a letter