Reviews of Avivah Zornberg's books
Genesis: The Beginning of Desire also in soft cover (retitled:The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis), can be ordered from
Laurie Schlesinger, Director of Sales & Marketing, The Jewish Publication Society
lschlesinger@jewishpub.org800-234-3151 ext. 50613 or (215) 832-0613
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Desire-Avivah-Gottlieb-Zornberg/dp/0385483376#noop
Laurie Schlesinger, Director of Sales & Marketing, The Jewish Publication Society
lschlesinger@jewishpub.org800-234-3151 ext. 50613 or (215) 832-0613
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Desire-Avivah-Gottlieb-Zornberg/dp/0385483376#noop
Review in TIKKUN
Reading Genesis
review published in TIKKUN
Daniel Boyarin
Gensis: The Beginning of Desire, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Jewish Publication Society, 1995, 456 pp., $35.
One version of the commonplace that there are seventy faces to Torah has it that each face is revealed in a different generation. If that be so, then it might fairly be said that the face for our generation is the literary, not as a reduction of the text from its status as Holy Writ or even revelation—the "Bible as Literature" paradigm—but for what literary analysis can reveal of meaning and structure that is left unread, using other modes of interpretation. The literary methods have, moreover, providentially provided a "postmodernist" answer to "modernist" historical/critical methods that fragmented the text and left it nonexistent except as a window to other, reconstructed prior texts (the documentary hypothesis) or reconstructed histories. Just as methods drawn from the Arabic grammatical tradition or early modern rhetoric once informed Jewish Bible interpretation, now tools of analysis of the New Critics, the New Historicists, feminists, and psychoanalysts aid those who search the Scripture for meaning(s).
In the last decade or so, Avivah Zornberg has established herself in Jerusalem and—through teaching tours—beyond as the premier contemporary teacher of Torah (Bible) through literary analysis. Although a written text could never live up to the magic of her shiurim (teaching), we are nevertheless privileged to see the publication of the first volume of her interpretive work.
It is perhaps characteristic of our postmodern moment that where once scholars, critics, and interpreters strove above all to divine order within apparent disorder, reading disorderly texts as the signs and remnants of orderly ones (source criticism) or as the verbal icons of ambiguity (new criticism), we now, in Zornberg's words, seek "to detect the intimations of disorder within order, instability within stability, the tensions evoked by questions about human life and the search for God that the midrash expresses to such ambiguous effect." Somehow, disorder in our texts, even in our sacred ones, has become a source of great comfort to us, as if it somehow validated and made bearable the disorder in the world around us.
The univocal modernist Bible has become a forbidding one; its meanings are clear, so it bespeaks to us oppressions, social and intellectual, dogmatism and doctrines that we, no longer in any simple sense of the word, can "believe." Zornberg's literary, postmodern reading of the Torah restores it as unfinished, unclear, deeply engaging in its mysteriousness, not forbidding at all. Thus, for instance, rather than reading the Esau/Jacob narrative as the working out of a divinely ordained destiny for the Jewish people, basing herself on midrash and classical Jewish commentaries, Zornberg creates for us an exquisite meditation on power and powerlessness, one in which the imperfections of Jacob and the attractions of Esau are ever-present. Instead of the reductions of both scholarship and homily, her discourse reproduces the ambiguities and mysteries of the text itself. The Bible is transformed in her hands to a great work of literature, not because it is "beautiful," but because of the expressive manner in which its multiple layers of meaning are disclosed.
Zornberg's work is accordingly a good guidebook for a postmodern religious quest. And it is, perhaps, ultimately this characteristic, in addition to the sheer creativity and brilliance of her teaching of Torah, that has made her the mentor that she is.
Let me conclude this brief account of a superb book by giving one example of how Zornberg's reading "works." With reference to the verse that states, "Isaac loved Esau, because game was in his mouth" (Gen. 25:28), Zornberg comments:
The Zohar makes the most challenging comment, undercutting our vague assumption that this love is a case of "attraction of opposites," that the blind recluse needs the lusty, outdoors energy of Esau to nourish some inward hunger. On the contrary, the Zohar claims, "Everyone loves his own kind—one who is similar to himself." What Isaac loves in Esau is precisely the hunter, the alienated "disintegrated consciousness" of one for whom all the "noble" privileges and promises of life have dissolved in blood.
Isaac recognizes the fury evoked by animal life: the desire to extirpate what has no proper existence. In his own case, existential helplessness led to withdrawal, to a rigid respect for the priorities and structures of the given world. To Isaac, the spectacle of Esau's despair turned to destructiveness suggests a passion for truth, an intolerance for palliatives, a kind of tortured authenticity. To Isaac, Esau is the analytical mind, obsessed with the unreality of existence. A figure of Byronic melancholy, Esau appeals to his father's heart: this is a son who deeply needs blessing from a father who, despite all external differences, intuits the rhythm of his despair.
The paradoxical similarity of Isaac and Esau is indicated by the notation of "the field." Isaac is first encountered by Rebecca, "meditating in the field toward evening" (24:63). "Meditating" translates the word la-suah, for which many translations are offered, ranging from "walking among the shrubbery" (sihim) to "praying." The more mystical understandings of the phrase include in their palette the melancholy coloring of "toward evening," and the midrashic decodings of "the field" as referring to Mount Moriah, the site of the Akedah.
What emerges from such a subtle layering of meaning is a portrait of Isaac imprinted with the deep death-knowledge of his Binding, face turned toward the dying of the light, darkly narrating his story to God. The field in which Isaac walks he transforms into the language of prayer. The field of Esau's darkness, however, is a field of silence; the tension of ambush, the release of bloodshed provides the illusion of a vital heartbeat in emptiness. Isaac's love for Esau is a knowing love that seeks to bless—that is, to animate and populate—that emptiness. (p. 163)
This is, I submit, a rich and beautiful translation of the somewhat alien expression of both Bible and midrash into a language that we can read, and, in the next sentence, we find Isaac interpreted through a comparison to Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire as wanderer. This is not a book to be read but to be studied, slowly, week by week, as each of the Torah's portions is encountered, a modern midrash in its own right.
Daniel Boyarin, Taubam Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash.
review published in TIKKUN
Daniel Boyarin
Gensis: The Beginning of Desire, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Jewish Publication Society, 1995, 456 pp., $35.
One version of the commonplace that there are seventy faces to Torah has it that each face is revealed in a different generation. If that be so, then it might fairly be said that the face for our generation is the literary, not as a reduction of the text from its status as Holy Writ or even revelation—the "Bible as Literature" paradigm—but for what literary analysis can reveal of meaning and structure that is left unread, using other modes of interpretation. The literary methods have, moreover, providentially provided a "postmodernist" answer to "modernist" historical/critical methods that fragmented the text and left it nonexistent except as a window to other, reconstructed prior texts (the documentary hypothesis) or reconstructed histories. Just as methods drawn from the Arabic grammatical tradition or early modern rhetoric once informed Jewish Bible interpretation, now tools of analysis of the New Critics, the New Historicists, feminists, and psychoanalysts aid those who search the Scripture for meaning(s).
In the last decade or so, Avivah Zornberg has established herself in Jerusalem and—through teaching tours—beyond as the premier contemporary teacher of Torah (Bible) through literary analysis. Although a written text could never live up to the magic of her shiurim (teaching), we are nevertheless privileged to see the publication of the first volume of her interpretive work.
It is perhaps characteristic of our postmodern moment that where once scholars, critics, and interpreters strove above all to divine order within apparent disorder, reading disorderly texts as the signs and remnants of orderly ones (source criticism) or as the verbal icons of ambiguity (new criticism), we now, in Zornberg's words, seek "to detect the intimations of disorder within order, instability within stability, the tensions evoked by questions about human life and the search for God that the midrash expresses to such ambiguous effect." Somehow, disorder in our texts, even in our sacred ones, has become a source of great comfort to us, as if it somehow validated and made bearable the disorder in the world around us.
The univocal modernist Bible has become a forbidding one; its meanings are clear, so it bespeaks to us oppressions, social and intellectual, dogmatism and doctrines that we, no longer in any simple sense of the word, can "believe." Zornberg's literary, postmodern reading of the Torah restores it as unfinished, unclear, deeply engaging in its mysteriousness, not forbidding at all. Thus, for instance, rather than reading the Esau/Jacob narrative as the working out of a divinely ordained destiny for the Jewish people, basing herself on midrash and classical Jewish commentaries, Zornberg creates for us an exquisite meditation on power and powerlessness, one in which the imperfections of Jacob and the attractions of Esau are ever-present. Instead of the reductions of both scholarship and homily, her discourse reproduces the ambiguities and mysteries of the text itself. The Bible is transformed in her hands to a great work of literature, not because it is "beautiful," but because of the expressive manner in which its multiple layers of meaning are disclosed.
Zornberg's work is accordingly a good guidebook for a postmodern religious quest. And it is, perhaps, ultimately this characteristic, in addition to the sheer creativity and brilliance of her teaching of Torah, that has made her the mentor that she is.
Let me conclude this brief account of a superb book by giving one example of how Zornberg's reading "works." With reference to the verse that states, "Isaac loved Esau, because game was in his mouth" (Gen. 25:28), Zornberg comments:
The Zohar makes the most challenging comment, undercutting our vague assumption that this love is a case of "attraction of opposites," that the blind recluse needs the lusty, outdoors energy of Esau to nourish some inward hunger. On the contrary, the Zohar claims, "Everyone loves his own kind—one who is similar to himself." What Isaac loves in Esau is precisely the hunter, the alienated "disintegrated consciousness" of one for whom all the "noble" privileges and promises of life have dissolved in blood.
Isaac recognizes the fury evoked by animal life: the desire to extirpate what has no proper existence. In his own case, existential helplessness led to withdrawal, to a rigid respect for the priorities and structures of the given world. To Isaac, the spectacle of Esau's despair turned to destructiveness suggests a passion for truth, an intolerance for palliatives, a kind of tortured authenticity. To Isaac, Esau is the analytical mind, obsessed with the unreality of existence. A figure of Byronic melancholy, Esau appeals to his father's heart: this is a son who deeply needs blessing from a father who, despite all external differences, intuits the rhythm of his despair.
The paradoxical similarity of Isaac and Esau is indicated by the notation of "the field." Isaac is first encountered by Rebecca, "meditating in the field toward evening" (24:63). "Meditating" translates the word la-suah, for which many translations are offered, ranging from "walking among the shrubbery" (sihim) to "praying." The more mystical understandings of the phrase include in their palette the melancholy coloring of "toward evening," and the midrashic decodings of "the field" as referring to Mount Moriah, the site of the Akedah.
What emerges from such a subtle layering of meaning is a portrait of Isaac imprinted with the deep death-knowledge of his Binding, face turned toward the dying of the light, darkly narrating his story to God. The field in which Isaac walks he transforms into the language of prayer. The field of Esau's darkness, however, is a field of silence; the tension of ambush, the release of bloodshed provides the illusion of a vital heartbeat in emptiness. Isaac's love for Esau is a knowing love that seeks to bless—that is, to animate and populate—that emptiness. (p. 163)
This is, I submit, a rich and beautiful translation of the somewhat alien expression of both Bible and midrash into a language that we can read, and, in the next sentence, we find Isaac interpreted through a comparison to Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire as wanderer. This is not a book to be read but to be studied, slowly, week by week, as each of the Torah's portions is encountered, a modern midrash in its own right.
Daniel Boyarin, Taubam Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash.
Review in Commonweal (scroll down)
The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis. Author: Oakes, Edward T. Article Type: Book Review Date: Mar 14, 1997 Words: 1347 Publication: Commonweal ISSN: 0010-3330
For my money the best Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century was Yehezkel Kaufmann, a Russian Jew who emigrated to Palestine in 1920 and became professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He subsequently wrote a six-volume history, in Hebrew, of the religion of ancient Israel, only a much-abridged version of which was ever translated into English.
But even that truncated husk of Kaufmann's original was enough to show the English-speaking world what Old Testament scholarship can look like when freed of the Hegelian hammerlock that became so dominant in the German scholarship of the nineteenth century, a developmental outlook on historical causation that then went on to influence almost all the rest of later scholarship (much to its detriment, in my opinion). In contrast to the vague evolutionism of the German school, Kaufmann was able to show - without ever straying from strict historical-critical principles - that Israel did not grow into its monotheism: its religion neither arose from a "dialectic" with its neighbors nor did it achieve its final (universal) monotheism because of the later influence of the more theologically elaborate and self-consciously literary prophets. And correlatively, whatever conceptual borrowings Israel made from its Near Eastern environment, these borrowings were fitted into a world view that from the outset was at fundamental odds with the mythological polytheism of its neighbors.
Crucially, in pagan religion the gods have a genealogy: they are born and, in most tellings, usually take over the pantheon by usurping the earlier generation of divinities, as when Zeus rebelled against his father Chronos. But the God of the Hebrews, in Kaufmann's lapidary words, "has no pedigree, fathers no generations; he neither inherits nor bequeaths his authority. He does not die and is not resurrected. He has no sexual qualities or desires and shows no need of or dependence upon powers outside himself."
Reading Kaufmann makes clear how revolutionary the book of Genesis has been to the religious legacy of humanity, how at a single stroke it altered the implicit metaphysical presuppositions of paganism, and how much contemporary scholarship misses the point if it is solely bent on tracing influences and not radical differences. Upon reflection, it is obvious that if the gods have a genealogy, the world-womb out of which they were born is greater than themselves, and so "in myth the gods appear not only as actors but as acted upon. Fate, says myth, apportions lots to the gods as well as to men." This is also why the gods are not only sexually differentiated but are subject to sexual needs, desiring and mating with each other; moreover, they eat and drink, fall sick and require healing, need and invent tools, etc.
When I first read Kaufmann I asked myself why these perfectly obvious truths seemed to be slighted in other scholarship: Was it Kaufmann's native fluency in Hebrew, his Jewishness, or his innocence of schooling in the German/Hegelian tradition? I do not have answers to these questions, but they provide, I believe, the right context for understanding the vividness, clarity, and insight available in these two books under review. Here, under Alter's and Zornberg's ministrations, Genesis looks different, startlingly different.
Alter's book is first and foremost a translation - and only secondarily a commentary. But as Kaufmann was for history of religions, Alter is. to translation: a man uniquely positioned to counteract the tendentious posturing of most other modern translations and the extratextual spin-doctoring of, for example, so many panelists in the recent PBS talk-fest on Genesis hosted by Bill Moyers, too many of whom would indulge in embarrassing fatuities like accusing Abraham of child abuse, etc. It is hard to describe in the space of a short review the many felicities of this remarkable translation, but surely Alter's dual competence as biblical scholar and literary critic has uniquely positioned him to give us a translation that is both vigorous and contemporary.
My only regret in reading this work is to realize how much the translation of the whole Bible nowadays transcends the capacities of any one individual, at least if the translator wants to take into consideration the vast expanse of recent research in biblical semantics and philology. For the churches and synagogues desperately need a translation of all the books of the Bible of this quality. Although the Revised Standard Version is still the best overall translation of the whole Bible, Alter convincingly shows in his introduction, but more especially in the success of the translation itself, that the time has come for a fresh rendering, one that is vivid, vigorous, biblical - and so completely contemporary that one does not notice the language but lives in the telling of the story itself.
Avivah Zornberg's reflections on Genesis are as different from Alter's approach as might be imagined: where he is sober, she is expansive; where he insists on the spare narrative, she builds on those later embellished narratives called midrashim. This habit of expanding on the biblical material grew up in Jewish Bible-based cultures because of a feature everyone immediately notices about so many biblical narratives, especially those in Genesis: their laconic telling. So brief, so spare are the narrative interventions of most biblical tales that they positively invite later elaboration.
Because of what struck me as, on the whole, the rather silly things some of the panelists said on Moyers's special on Genesis, I have grown rather leery of specifically modern embellishments on Genesis and so I approached this book with wariness. My fears were misplaced. Not only is Zornberg's book leagues removed from popular trivializations, it does what all successful midrash is meant to do: open up new perspectives on ancient texts. She does not weave her tales from whole-spun modern cloth, leaving the reader with a queasy feeling of just having watched a soap opera of negligent fathers and neurotically repressed mothers; rather she takes only traditional semicanonical midrashim for her theme. Indeed this is the usual practice in many Jewish homes that have a weekly study group: the "Bible" they study is the Bible and the semicanonized tradition of stories that go with them.
And fascinating they are! Abraham, for example, is a "philosopher" who comes to monotheism through rational speculation and then smashes his father's idols in disgust. In another version, Abraham is living the high-life: he feasts and entertains but neglects to sacrifice to God, and when Satan points this remission out to the good Lord, God is provoked to ask Abraham to atone for this negligence by sacrificing his son. Sarah swoons and dies when she hears of her son being bound to the altar; in another story Isaac goes blind on the altar because the tears of angels falling from heaven at his plight get into his eyes. (Although she does not mention it, some of Zornberg's stories have interesting parallels with those in Greek mythology: Niobe's tears, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, the wife who died of grief under the mistaken impression her husband had died in the Trojan War, etc.)
This book also casts a rather uncomfortable glare on modern sensibilities. Because the midrashim Zornberg selects for her treatment are all traditional, they provide a refreshing alternative to modern homiletic sentimentality. (How has God suddenly become so nice in all our preaching?) And while the comments she makes on these midrashim ransack contemporary authors (Ricceur, Kermode, Kafka, etc.), these authors usually have something disconcertingly, well, Kafkaesque to add - a dimension which is very much in line with the midrash tradition itself, where indeed Kafka got so much of his material and his sensibility. And that only highlights how far we have moved from the inner world of the Bible. It's going to be a long haul back up Milton's Mount Moriah again, whence alone we can sense the majesty of Genesis in all its radiant distinction and eerie difference from us.
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is associate professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. The paperback edition of his book Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar has just appeared from Continuum. COPYRIGHT 1997 Commonweal Foundation Copyright 1997, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
For my money the best Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century was Yehezkel Kaufmann, a Russian Jew who emigrated to Palestine in 1920 and became professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He subsequently wrote a six-volume history, in Hebrew, of the religion of ancient Israel, only a much-abridged version of which was ever translated into English.
But even that truncated husk of Kaufmann's original was enough to show the English-speaking world what Old Testament scholarship can look like when freed of the Hegelian hammerlock that became so dominant in the German scholarship of the nineteenth century, a developmental outlook on historical causation that then went on to influence almost all the rest of later scholarship (much to its detriment, in my opinion). In contrast to the vague evolutionism of the German school, Kaufmann was able to show - without ever straying from strict historical-critical principles - that Israel did not grow into its monotheism: its religion neither arose from a "dialectic" with its neighbors nor did it achieve its final (universal) monotheism because of the later influence of the more theologically elaborate and self-consciously literary prophets. And correlatively, whatever conceptual borrowings Israel made from its Near Eastern environment, these borrowings were fitted into a world view that from the outset was at fundamental odds with the mythological polytheism of its neighbors.
Crucially, in pagan religion the gods have a genealogy: they are born and, in most tellings, usually take over the pantheon by usurping the earlier generation of divinities, as when Zeus rebelled against his father Chronos. But the God of the Hebrews, in Kaufmann's lapidary words, "has no pedigree, fathers no generations; he neither inherits nor bequeaths his authority. He does not die and is not resurrected. He has no sexual qualities or desires and shows no need of or dependence upon powers outside himself."
Reading Kaufmann makes clear how revolutionary the book of Genesis has been to the religious legacy of humanity, how at a single stroke it altered the implicit metaphysical presuppositions of paganism, and how much contemporary scholarship misses the point if it is solely bent on tracing influences and not radical differences. Upon reflection, it is obvious that if the gods have a genealogy, the world-womb out of which they were born is greater than themselves, and so "in myth the gods appear not only as actors but as acted upon. Fate, says myth, apportions lots to the gods as well as to men." This is also why the gods are not only sexually differentiated but are subject to sexual needs, desiring and mating with each other; moreover, they eat and drink, fall sick and require healing, need and invent tools, etc.
When I first read Kaufmann I asked myself why these perfectly obvious truths seemed to be slighted in other scholarship: Was it Kaufmann's native fluency in Hebrew, his Jewishness, or his innocence of schooling in the German/Hegelian tradition? I do not have answers to these questions, but they provide, I believe, the right context for understanding the vividness, clarity, and insight available in these two books under review. Here, under Alter's and Zornberg's ministrations, Genesis looks different, startlingly different.
Alter's book is first and foremost a translation - and only secondarily a commentary. But as Kaufmann was for history of religions, Alter is. to translation: a man uniquely positioned to counteract the tendentious posturing of most other modern translations and the extratextual spin-doctoring of, for example, so many panelists in the recent PBS talk-fest on Genesis hosted by Bill Moyers, too many of whom would indulge in embarrassing fatuities like accusing Abraham of child abuse, etc. It is hard to describe in the space of a short review the many felicities of this remarkable translation, but surely Alter's dual competence as biblical scholar and literary critic has uniquely positioned him to give us a translation that is both vigorous and contemporary.
My only regret in reading this work is to realize how much the translation of the whole Bible nowadays transcends the capacities of any one individual, at least if the translator wants to take into consideration the vast expanse of recent research in biblical semantics and philology. For the churches and synagogues desperately need a translation of all the books of the Bible of this quality. Although the Revised Standard Version is still the best overall translation of the whole Bible, Alter convincingly shows in his introduction, but more especially in the success of the translation itself, that the time has come for a fresh rendering, one that is vivid, vigorous, biblical - and so completely contemporary that one does not notice the language but lives in the telling of the story itself.
Avivah Zornberg's reflections on Genesis are as different from Alter's approach as might be imagined: where he is sober, she is expansive; where he insists on the spare narrative, she builds on those later embellished narratives called midrashim. This habit of expanding on the biblical material grew up in Jewish Bible-based cultures because of a feature everyone immediately notices about so many biblical narratives, especially those in Genesis: their laconic telling. So brief, so spare are the narrative interventions of most biblical tales that they positively invite later elaboration.
Because of what struck me as, on the whole, the rather silly things some of the panelists said on Moyers's special on Genesis, I have grown rather leery of specifically modern embellishments on Genesis and so I approached this book with wariness. My fears were misplaced. Not only is Zornberg's book leagues removed from popular trivializations, it does what all successful midrash is meant to do: open up new perspectives on ancient texts. She does not weave her tales from whole-spun modern cloth, leaving the reader with a queasy feeling of just having watched a soap opera of negligent fathers and neurotically repressed mothers; rather she takes only traditional semicanonical midrashim for her theme. Indeed this is the usual practice in many Jewish homes that have a weekly study group: the "Bible" they study is the Bible and the semicanonized tradition of stories that go with them.
And fascinating they are! Abraham, for example, is a "philosopher" who comes to monotheism through rational speculation and then smashes his father's idols in disgust. In another version, Abraham is living the high-life: he feasts and entertains but neglects to sacrifice to God, and when Satan points this remission out to the good Lord, God is provoked to ask Abraham to atone for this negligence by sacrificing his son. Sarah swoons and dies when she hears of her son being bound to the altar; in another story Isaac goes blind on the altar because the tears of angels falling from heaven at his plight get into his eyes. (Although she does not mention it, some of Zornberg's stories have interesting parallels with those in Greek mythology: Niobe's tears, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, the wife who died of grief under the mistaken impression her husband had died in the Trojan War, etc.)
This book also casts a rather uncomfortable glare on modern sensibilities. Because the midrashim Zornberg selects for her treatment are all traditional, they provide a refreshing alternative to modern homiletic sentimentality. (How has God suddenly become so nice in all our preaching?) And while the comments she makes on these midrashim ransack contemporary authors (Ricceur, Kermode, Kafka, etc.), these authors usually have something disconcertingly, well, Kafkaesque to add - a dimension which is very much in line with the midrash tradition itself, where indeed Kafka got so much of his material and his sensibility. And that only highlights how far we have moved from the inner world of the Bible. It's going to be a long haul back up Milton's Mount Moriah again, whence alone we can sense the majesty of Genesis in all its radiant distinction and eerie difference from us.
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is associate professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. The paperback edition of his book Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar has just appeared from Continuum. COPYRIGHT 1997 Commonweal Foundation Copyright 1997, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
Washington Post Review of THE PARTICULARS OF RAPTURE: Reflections on Exodus
Washington Post Featured Reviews: Signs and Wonders
Reviewed by Paul William Roberts Sunday, April 1, 2001; Page BW01
WALKING THE BIBLE A Journey by Land Through The Five Books of Moses By Bruce Feiler
THE PARTICULARS OF RAPTURE Reflections on Exodus
By Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
It would be difficult to conceive of two books ostensibly dealing with the same subject that are more different in every way than "Walking the Bible" and "The Particulars of Rapture." Different as they are, both are also, in every way, equally marvelous if not indispensable reading for anyone remotely interested in the Torah. And as the great literary critic Northrop Frye showed, in his book "The Great Code," the Bible is the collective myth of Western civilization. So that should exempt no one.
Bruce Feiler makes a pilgrimage in "Walking the Bible," which is literally that: a 10,000-mile trek around the places mentioned in the Torah. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg takes us on a more complex and difficult journey, down the midrashic rabbit hole that leads into the many layers of esoteric meanings that give the text its power and -- dare I say it? -- reveals its holiness.
................
"The Particulars of Rapture," Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's reflections on the Book of Exodus, is quite simply a masterpiece. I know of no other book that presents the enormous subtleties and complexities of rabbinic Biblical interpretation with such skill, intelligence, literary flair and sheer elegance of style. Zornberg's dazzlingly eclectic erudition would be oppressive in the hands of a lesser writer, but such is the beauty and succinctness of her writing that her references to Thomas Mann, Wordsworth, Isaiah Berlin, Wallace Stevens, Susan Sontag and Freud, to name but a few, seem more like the illuminated letters in medieval manuscripts, heightening both beauty and meaning.
Her purpose here, however, is not so much to explain the midrashic technique -- revealing the significance of a Biblical text through later commentaries by rabbinical scholars -- as to show that technique in action. She explains her approach by quoting the hermeneutics scholar Gerald Bruns: " 'the rabbis imagined themselves a part of the whole, participating in Torah rather than operating on it at an analytic distance. . . . It follows that the words of interpretation cannot be isolated in any rigorously analytical way from the words of Torah itself.' "
This is what makes the Torah a living text, endlessly relevant to now, not just to then -- in a sense eternal and, if you like, holy. For her examination of Exodus, Zornberg adopts the psychoanalytic model, suggesting that the plain meaning of the text functions as the conscious layer of meaning, while the midrashic commentaries intimate unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning. The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted into multiple, contradictory, unofficial stories. The result, as Zornberg writes, "is a plethora of possible stories of redemption. Some of these will be attributed to 'the enemy': they are false, adversarial narratives, Egyptian narratives, narratives of obtuse misunderstanding. These counternarratives, the demonized expression of unthinkable thoughts, construct the official Israelite history of the Exodus as incomplete, inflated, or mythic invention."
The very concept of multiple, alternative narratives would seem to be alien to any religious tradition, but the midrashic rabbis embraced the idea. In fact, as Zornberg points out, the Biblical text itself seems to give warrant for such retellings. On several occasions, the Torah itself emphasizes the importance of telling the story to one's children and grandchildren. At times this imperative to narrate the Exodus becomes the very purpose of the historical event: It happened so that you may tell it. Indeed, at the heart of the liberation account, God prepares Moses with a story to tell a future child; and this rhetorical narrative, astonishingly, precedes the historical narrative of liberation itself.
It is not possible to deal here with even a fraction of the points and insights made and gained in a book of this length and density, but one more example may serve both to illustrate the caliber of Zornberg's elucidation, and to answer a question that may perhaps be on many readers' minds: Why would a woman become so involved with a religion that seemingly requires little involvement from women?
As Zornberg observes, by contrast with the Genesis sagas, the absence of women from the narrative of Exodus -- and indeed from all the later books of the Bible -- is quite striking. It is not, of course, a total absence. Pointing to the exceptions -- Jochebed, Miriam, Pharaoh's daughter, the midwives, Moses' wife, Zipporah -- Zornberg observes that all of them are related to the theme of birth, "all are dedicated to what Vaclav Havel calls the 'hidden sphere' that endangers the totalitarian structure: to the baby crying within the brick."
Once this theme has been established, however, women essentially disappear from the biblical text. This omission of women from the narrative can, of course, be seen as simply that -- an omission, a lack of specific interest in the feminine. But, Zornberg continues, "Rashi precedes the feminist movement by many centuries when, in an extraordinary midrashic comment, he excludes women from the most intense moments in the biblical drama: they simply did not participate in the major rebellions of the people in the wilderness. Rashi comments on the final census of people before entering the holy land: 'In this [census], no man survived from the original census of Moses and Aaron, when they had counted the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai (Num 26:64): But the women were not subjected to the decree against the spies, because they loved the holy land. The men said, 'Let us appoint . . . a leader to return to Egypt (14:4); while the women said, 'Appoint . . . for us a holding among our father's brothers. That is why the story of Zelofhad's daughters is narrated directly after this.' "
Rashi's point, Zornberg tells us, is simple but revolutionary in its implications. By taking the word "man" literally, he limits the destruction of a generation, in punishment for the sin of the spies, to the males only. While all the men over 20 died in the course of the 40 years' wandering, the women survived -- because, unlike the men, they loved the Land of Israel.
However, it is not the demographic implication that Zornberg finds compelling; it is rather that the absence of women from the text does not necessarily mean that they are assimilated into the general children of Israel, as the plain meaning of the text might indicate. Women have a separate, hidden history, which is not conveyed on the surface of the text. This history is a faithful, loving and vital one, which excludes them from the dramas of sin in punishment that constitute the narrative of the wilderness.
Indeed, the midrashic source includes both the major crises in the wilderness as dramas in which women were not incriminated -- the other being the building of the golden calf, where they refuse Aaron's request to donate their earrings for the task. In Rashi's midrash women emerge as exemplary: They repair what men have torn down; they reaffirm the value of love of the holy land and loyalty to the one God that men, in the rebellions of the spies and of the golden calf, have eroded. But this wholly laudable history of women is, of course, found only in the midrashic texts. Within the biblical narrative it is barely intimated.
The implication of this is profoundly paradoxical. In the written text, the absence of women would seem to imply that they are included in the larger dramas of the Israelites in the wilderness; it is precisely in the midrash that women figure as having a separate, hidden history. In fact, the midrash makes the reader aware of the mistaken reading: All along, women who were absent in the text were really elsewhere.
"Women's story," Zornberg tells us, "can be seen, then, at least at certain critical junctures, as the repressed narrative of the biblical text. . . . women remain a latent presence in their very absence; they represent the 'hidden sphere' which must remain hidden if it is to do its work with full power, but which must be revealed in some form if that work is to be integrated."
Thus it is the interplay of conscious and unconscious motifs that makes for the grand narrative. The "particulars of rapture," in Wallace Stevens's phrase, can evolve only where "Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another, as a man depends/ On a woman, day on night, the imagined / On the real."
Those who feel that the Bible is no longer relevant, or is indeed simply nonsense, would be well advised to read Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's extraordinarily brilliant book in conjunction with the biblical text. In fact, it cannot be understood without the aid of the various commentators -- few of whom possess anything like the penetrating insight of Zornberg, let alone her unique ability to open up a door into the esoteric worlds below the surface of the text that, once opened, stays open. Zornberg has here provided a very significant tool for both the layman and the scholar to use in their readings of not just the Bible but any other mystical text in the Jewish tradition. We owe her an enormous debt of gratitude. •
Paul William Roberts has written extensively on the Middle East and its
religions; his most recent book is "The Demonic Comedy: Some detours in
the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Review in the Forward By Ilana M. Blumberg
The Other Side of Silence: Listening Into the Bible Books
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious By Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg Schocken Books, 480 pages, $27.95.
Virginia Woolf famously said that George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” was one of the few English novels “written for grown-up people.” “The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious,” Avivah Zornberg’s new study of the biblical unconscious is, likewise, a study for grown-up people, asking of its readers the courage to leave behind the soothing convictions of religious infancy for the demanding recognitions of religious maturity.
Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s writing exists in quiet but splendid isolation from both secular analysis and contemporary Bible criticism. Zornberg, a Jerusalem-based Bible scholar, has previously published acclaimed books on Genesis and Exodus, but here she sets out to consider the psychoanalytic resonances of the biblical and rabbinic depictions of the relations between human beings, between human beings and God, and between parts of the self. As she notes, the first two categories are the traditional division made by the rabbis in considering Jewish law. Zornberg’s third category explores the internal divisions and ruptures within individual human beings; this dimension, she claims, is present, if not always explicit, in the texts she studies. It is by adding this third category that Zornberg transforms the other two and renews the biblical texts in ways that make her the foremost scholar of the Hebrew Bible for readers who seek not only intellectual and creative achievement (which her book offers in abundance), but also that rare sensibility capable of explaining, exploring and deepening our sense of what it means to be a human being of faith in a world as fractured and fragmentary as ours.
This is not a reassuring book, except if truth is reassuring. The religious life, as Zornberg reads it in the Bible and in the rabbinic exegetical texts, is no opiate, no escape from the deep pains and haunting half-knowledges we host unaware; it’s a demand upon us to become aware of them, to live fully with others, with our fullest selves and with a God who knows the difference. How wonderful to find a psychoanalytic account of the religious life that would have challenged Freud himself. Whereas Freud analyzed the need for religion, Zornberg turns to the content of religion and finds it richer than Freud might have imagined.
In considering biblical figures as mysterious to themselves, subject to traumatic erasures of experience and memory, and moving slowly toward the beginnings of a fuller consciousness, Zornberg hears entirely new murmurings in a wide range of stories, from the first patriarchs and matriarchs to the prophet Jonah and the heroines Ruth and Esther. Whereas on their own, Zornberg suggests, these characters can only begin to attend to the “murmurings, whisperings, restless cracklings of life [that] animate the space between us and within us,” when we afford God the role of psychoanalyst, the murmurings can become more fully audible to human beings.
If the idea of God as a sometimes-psychoanalyst seems surprising, Zornberg reminds us of the varied roles in which the Bible casts God: father, lover, artist, man of war. Why not psychoanalyst, as well? Yet her study does not depend on this analogy, nor does it demand specialized knowledge of psychoanalytic theory. In Zornberg’s account, what it means for God to be a psychoanalyst is that God gives potent hints and speaks in messages that cannot be fully understood, but rather “initiate work for those who take the hint.” As Zornberg reads the biblical text and its rabbinic interpretations, from early midrash through the Hasidic masters, she proves to be a masterful taker of the hint. Over and over in this volume, Zornberg presents her own readings by beginning with “I suggest” — and how apt a verb “suggest” is, for the entire volume eschews forceful argumentation in favor of what Zornberg calls “seduction,” using it in its etymological as well as usual sense, drawing out and drawing forth in conversation, in thought experiment, what could not be previously imagined or tolerated or thought. And yet by the time the thought experiment has been tried out, the suggestion has an extraordinarily suggestive force, even a momentary necessity to it.
“The Murmuring Deep” is convincing, even for a skeptical reader not inclined toward the marriage of psychoanalytic thought and Torah. By the halfway point, it comes to seem as if only a highly repressed reading would not have noticed how the Bible deals in traumatic events in which the horizontal and vertical ripples shape the inter-biblical account as well as centuries of rabbinic commentary. Zornberg’s multi-chapter reading of Isaac’s binding presents it as the traumatic event par excellence, shifting shape in the life of a doubting Abraham, who seeks the clarity of a sacrificial moment and thus forces God’s hand to test him; in the life of a surviving Isaac, who confronts the “unthought known” of the binding only at the much later moment, when he blesses his own sons, blind and trembling, and in the life of a near fatherless Jacob, who can become a father only once he faces his “unwilled collision with the avoided place” in an unchosen marriage.
Zornberg illuminates the problem of prayer for Noah, for Jacob, for Jonah; the radical suspense of human toil and female pregnancy in the generations before the flood; the essential contingency faced by the Moabite Ruth and the powerful desire for answers, for the closure of narrative, felt by the dreamer Joseph. These stories merge and stand alone in Zornberg’s poetry of Jewish seeking.
As in her previous books, Zornberg ranges widely among Jewish sources from the ancient, medieval and modern periods; from classic works of psychoanalysis by Freud and Winnicott to more recent interventions by Julia Kristeva, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas; from literary critics Frank Kermode and D.A. Miller to the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell; from Henry James and Eliot to Paul Celan and Marguerite Duras. The book, however, does not flit between these sources. Zornberg builds a framework from these thinkers and writers, one that gives form and heft to her conceptions of the biblical drama, often illuminating these sources as she goes.
It’s also striking that perhaps the thinnest part of the vast bibliography comes from contemporary Jewish scholars and writers. Today’s great many writers of biblical criticism and Jewish thought play only the most peripheral role in this major and profound study; likewise, so far as this reader can tell, Zornberg’s book does not participate in any current trends, nor is it part of a critical conversation, though it offers much for members of that conversation to consider and emulate.
Is Zornberg’s separation from contemporary work in Jewish studies a dismissal of it? My own speculation is that this difference is a function of tone and sensibility. “The Murmuring Deep” is a private book, a book of intimate sorrows and loves, that speaks and answers to itself and to any listening reader. It is a case study that is unique and overflows its uniqueness. Or, as Zornberg herself writes in a final sentence to this most luminous study, “This is the Torah that, like its teacher, can never be fully known, that is always discontinuous, of which we ask, Who are you? And rejoice in the silence that animates its response.”
Ilana Blumberg teaches literature and Jewish studies at Michigan State University. Her memoir, “Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books” (University of Nebraska Press; this year, Bison Books), won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Choice Award.
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious By Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg Schocken Books, 480 pages, $27.95.
Virginia Woolf famously said that George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” was one of the few English novels “written for grown-up people.” “The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious,” Avivah Zornberg’s new study of the biblical unconscious is, likewise, a study for grown-up people, asking of its readers the courage to leave behind the soothing convictions of religious infancy for the demanding recognitions of religious maturity.
Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s writing exists in quiet but splendid isolation from both secular analysis and contemporary Bible criticism. Zornberg, a Jerusalem-based Bible scholar, has previously published acclaimed books on Genesis and Exodus, but here she sets out to consider the psychoanalytic resonances of the biblical and rabbinic depictions of the relations between human beings, between human beings and God, and between parts of the self. As she notes, the first two categories are the traditional division made by the rabbis in considering Jewish law. Zornberg’s third category explores the internal divisions and ruptures within individual human beings; this dimension, she claims, is present, if not always explicit, in the texts she studies. It is by adding this third category that Zornberg transforms the other two and renews the biblical texts in ways that make her the foremost scholar of the Hebrew Bible for readers who seek not only intellectual and creative achievement (which her book offers in abundance), but also that rare sensibility capable of explaining, exploring and deepening our sense of what it means to be a human being of faith in a world as fractured and fragmentary as ours.
This is not a reassuring book, except if truth is reassuring. The religious life, as Zornberg reads it in the Bible and in the rabbinic exegetical texts, is no opiate, no escape from the deep pains and haunting half-knowledges we host unaware; it’s a demand upon us to become aware of them, to live fully with others, with our fullest selves and with a God who knows the difference. How wonderful to find a psychoanalytic account of the religious life that would have challenged Freud himself. Whereas Freud analyzed the need for religion, Zornberg turns to the content of religion and finds it richer than Freud might have imagined.
In considering biblical figures as mysterious to themselves, subject to traumatic erasures of experience and memory, and moving slowly toward the beginnings of a fuller consciousness, Zornberg hears entirely new murmurings in a wide range of stories, from the first patriarchs and matriarchs to the prophet Jonah and the heroines Ruth and Esther. Whereas on their own, Zornberg suggests, these characters can only begin to attend to the “murmurings, whisperings, restless cracklings of life [that] animate the space between us and within us,” when we afford God the role of psychoanalyst, the murmurings can become more fully audible to human beings.
If the idea of God as a sometimes-psychoanalyst seems surprising, Zornberg reminds us of the varied roles in which the Bible casts God: father, lover, artist, man of war. Why not psychoanalyst, as well? Yet her study does not depend on this analogy, nor does it demand specialized knowledge of psychoanalytic theory. In Zornberg’s account, what it means for God to be a psychoanalyst is that God gives potent hints and speaks in messages that cannot be fully understood, but rather “initiate work for those who take the hint.” As Zornberg reads the biblical text and its rabbinic interpretations, from early midrash through the Hasidic masters, she proves to be a masterful taker of the hint. Over and over in this volume, Zornberg presents her own readings by beginning with “I suggest” — and how apt a verb “suggest” is, for the entire volume eschews forceful argumentation in favor of what Zornberg calls “seduction,” using it in its etymological as well as usual sense, drawing out and drawing forth in conversation, in thought experiment, what could not be previously imagined or tolerated or thought. And yet by the time the thought experiment has been tried out, the suggestion has an extraordinarily suggestive force, even a momentary necessity to it.
“The Murmuring Deep” is convincing, even for a skeptical reader not inclined toward the marriage of psychoanalytic thought and Torah. By the halfway point, it comes to seem as if only a highly repressed reading would not have noticed how the Bible deals in traumatic events in which the horizontal and vertical ripples shape the inter-biblical account as well as centuries of rabbinic commentary. Zornberg’s multi-chapter reading of Isaac’s binding presents it as the traumatic event par excellence, shifting shape in the life of a doubting Abraham, who seeks the clarity of a sacrificial moment and thus forces God’s hand to test him; in the life of a surviving Isaac, who confronts the “unthought known” of the binding only at the much later moment, when he blesses his own sons, blind and trembling, and in the life of a near fatherless Jacob, who can become a father only once he faces his “unwilled collision with the avoided place” in an unchosen marriage.
Zornberg illuminates the problem of prayer for Noah, for Jacob, for Jonah; the radical suspense of human toil and female pregnancy in the generations before the flood; the essential contingency faced by the Moabite Ruth and the powerful desire for answers, for the closure of narrative, felt by the dreamer Joseph. These stories merge and stand alone in Zornberg’s poetry of Jewish seeking.
As in her previous books, Zornberg ranges widely among Jewish sources from the ancient, medieval and modern periods; from classic works of psychoanalysis by Freud and Winnicott to more recent interventions by Julia Kristeva, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas; from literary critics Frank Kermode and D.A. Miller to the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell; from Henry James and Eliot to Paul Celan and Marguerite Duras. The book, however, does not flit between these sources. Zornberg builds a framework from these thinkers and writers, one that gives form and heft to her conceptions of the biblical drama, often illuminating these sources as she goes.
It’s also striking that perhaps the thinnest part of the vast bibliography comes from contemporary Jewish scholars and writers. Today’s great many writers of biblical criticism and Jewish thought play only the most peripheral role in this major and profound study; likewise, so far as this reader can tell, Zornberg’s book does not participate in any current trends, nor is it part of a critical conversation, though it offers much for members of that conversation to consider and emulate.
Is Zornberg’s separation from contemporary work in Jewish studies a dismissal of it? My own speculation is that this difference is a function of tone and sensibility. “The Murmuring Deep” is a private book, a book of intimate sorrows and loves, that speaks and answers to itself and to any listening reader. It is a case study that is unique and overflows its uniqueness. Or, as Zornberg herself writes in a final sentence to this most luminous study, “This is the Torah that, like its teacher, can never be fully known, that is always discontinuous, of which we ask, Who are you? And rejoice in the silence that animates its response.”
Ilana Blumberg teaches literature and Jewish studies at Michigan State University. Her memoir, “Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books” (University of Nebraska Press; this year, Bison Books), won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Choice Award.
