It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer, whose protagonists’ continual but futile attempts to gain access to the “castle” or “the law” are metaphors for the modern search for God.
–David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, 55
