PLUMBING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEPTHS OF HUMANITY
THE MURMURING DEEP: REFLECTIONS ON THE BIBLICAL UNCONSCIOUS
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Schocken Books, 2009
Review by David Shasha
Back in 1995, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's first study of the Book of Genesis provided contemporary readers with a window into the often misunderstood genre of rabbinic midrash. The book, The Beginning of Desire, successfully fused traditional exegesis with postmodern ideas in a highly readable prose accessible to the average reader.
Now we are privileged to have The Murmuring Deep, another wonderful study from Zornberg on a number of biblical episodes from a midrashic (traditional rabbinic interpretive) perspective; this time her inquiry is organized under the rubric of psychological study.
The Murmuring Deep is set out in three parts: "Between God and Self"; "The Stranger Within"; and "Between Self and Other." These three sections enable the author to look at human reality from a number of different viewpoints. Enabling Jewish discourse to take part in the ongoing study of the human condition, each of the sections embraces the examination of the mind within the framework of the Divine revelation.
In the book's dense but deeply enlightening introduction, we read:
The community represented by God may be found, I suggest, precisely in the void between people. The abyss of otherness from which we reach out to translate and retranslate the world may be invisible, but it is not inaudible. Murmurings, whisperings, restless cracklings of life animate that space between us and within us. The other is other than me because he is other than himself.
In this luminous passage, we see Zornberg setting the table for her book. Her Bible readings maintain a deft and complex engagement with human reality seen in the light of the Divine. Her template is Religious Humanism: a liberal reading of our moral condition that cracks open the ancient texts by using the midrash as a heuristic device. She is not interested in critically examining the particular texts or asserting their historical provenance. She is intent on reading the texts in order to extract from them the meaning that is their primary significance.
Reclaiming the Relevance of Jewish Texts
Both of Zornberg's earlier works, The Beginning of Desire and its 2002 companion volume, The Particulars of Rapture, were masterful readings of the books of Genesis and Exodus utilizing the midrashic framework. Not since the seminal studies of the great scholar Max Kadushin, whose name is barely known to nonspecialists today, had we seen such a thorough attempt to make known the wisdom of rabbinic midrash to a general audience.
The Orthodox publisher ArtScroll has published many volumes of biblical and rabbinic texts that are used by Jews of all denominations. The classic ArtScroll style seeks to embed the midrashim into the very fabric of the literal meaning of the Bible. Using the fundamental scheme of Rashi, ArtScroll editors read the midrash literally as peshat (the surface meaning of the text). This modality will be familiar to those who have studied in an Orthodox Jewish Day School. Midrashic texts are often presented as the primary meaning of the Bible. When such midrashim strain credulity, the child is exhorted to see Jewish tradition in neomagical terms.
After many years of having to deal with scholars who have drained Jewish texts of their meaning and relevance, we are now stuck with the deleterious ArtScroll-ization of Judaism. This literalization of the midrashim has subsequently led to a counter-tendency in the Jewish world.
Rather than digging deeper into the midrashic tradition itself — midrash is a key rhetorical component in the rabbinic discourse — some "enlightened" Jews have thrown midrashim out like the baby with the proverbial bathwater.
Finding midrashic texts irrational and bordering on the unbelievable and the mythical, such Jews — echoing the beliefs of Protestant Christian tradition — seek a "pure" Bible without interpretive accretions. But — as the scholar Michael Fishbane has shown in his masterful study Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, using the idea that his teacher Nahum Sarna called "inner biblical exegesis" — the Bible itself is already a mediated document. There is no "original" Bible: it is a construct put together by the sages themselves who arranged the books of the Hebrew Bible as we now have them in our Masoretic Text.
The new Jewish "Karaites" — an ancient but still existing Jewish movement that rejects rabbinic interpretation — sought to restore the nascent Protestantism of midrash hatred.
Zornberg's first two books formed a counterpoint to both ArtScroll hyperliteralism and the antirabbinic phobias of many Jewish intellectuals. Zornberg was able — outside the cozy and incestuous confines of academic Judaic studies — to bring Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan into dialogue with the Jewish tradition.
In Zornberg's brilliant new work, we have a heroic reconstruction of the rabbinic canon in ways that seek to make it relevant to contemporary readers, allowing them to use their education to incorporate Jewish texts into their actual lives.
There Is No Single Orthodox or Academic Truth
A perfect example of Zornberg's method can be found in The Murmuring Deep's chapter on the story of Joseph. I will cite three passages that display the book's methodology:
- When, for instance, Joseph brings his sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, to his father for blessing, Jacob reacts with strange alienation: "Israel [Jacob] saw Joseph's sons and asked ‘Who are these?'" (Gen. 48:8). After seventeen years of living together in Egypt, he seems not to recognize his grandsons. Two verses later, his failing vision is offered as a possible explanation: "Israel's eyes were dim with age; he could not see." But if blindness is responsible for his question, the Torah should have prefaced the story by telling of his failing vision; instead it emphasizes that he saw Joseph's sons.
- Rashi [one of the Ashkenazi rabbis most responsible for presenting the midrashic tradition in his own commentary] comments: He wished to bless them but the Divine Presence departed from him, because he saw that the wicked kings Jeroboam and Ahab would be descended from Ephraim, and Jehu and his sons from Menasseh (Tanchuma). "And he said, ‘Who are these?'" — "Where do these come from who are unfit for blessing?"
- Jacob experiences two things: a desire to bless his grandchildren and a mysterious blank, as God's presence suddenly withdraws. The reason for this loss of inspiration is given by Rashi: it is to be found in the future, in the wicked descendants of Ephraim and Menasseh. Something of those descendants is already implicit in his grandsons.
In section one, Zornberg presents the question that occasions the midrash: what is it that is "wrong" in the Biblical text?
For the Bible scholar there is the matter of authorship, transmission, and editing; for the midrashist there is an endless series of interpretive possibilities. In the ArtScroll world, the midrash's "answer" is definitive. But in a more careful reading of the midrashim we are able to see that they often elaborate on a point in multiple ways and frequently stand in opposition to one another.
To the Orthodox mind, such a possibility is not acknowledged, as there must ultimately be only one "correct" reading. But in Zornberg's mellifluous reconstruction of this tradition we come to learn that midrash is an exploration rather than a philosophy, a literary exercise rather than a fundamentalist epistemology.
The "question" of section one leads to a presentation in section two that would effectively answer it. Rashi argues that Jacob saw the children, but in the act of blessing them he "saw" something else in the future. Prophetically, Jacob saw that Ephraim and Menasseh would give birth to two of the most despicable kings in Jewish history. Therefore he hesitated giving them the blessing.
In section three Zornberg seeks to apply the meaning of this interpretation. History in this midrashic context is a complex dialectical process where one figure is seen in the light of future figures. History is understood as a human continuum where the character of the progenitor will be judged in light of his descendants.
This is a deeply complex unpacking of an opaque Biblical text. Where there was once confusion over Jacob's actions, the reader now has a more transparent understanding of the matter. In an Orthodox context, the midrashic interpretation becomes normative and serves to definitively shore up the loose ends of a puzzling text. For the scholars, the text is itself illegible and the midrash is mere sophistry that tells us nothing about the purview of the original document.
But in Zornberg's expert hands, the Bible is brought back to life. There are no certainties here, only the possibility of understanding the human condition in a deeper and more nuanced fashion. What the Orthodox Jew and the academic scholar have in common is the need to extract the truth from a text. But midrash, akin to postmodernism, seeks to multiply new and often contradictory meanings from a text. There is no one right way of seeing a text.
Why We Must Rewrite Our Stories
The Murmuring Deep records the Abraham to Jacob cycle in its first two sections. Zornberg's reading of the Joseph saga is particularly striking as it brings to mind the uses to which the great novelist Thomas Mann put the tradition in his epochal but often forgotten novel Joseph and His Brothers. Joseph becomes the historical exemplar of the interpreter. Discussing the possibility of closure, of permanent endings and of final truths, Zornberg, citing Mann, states:
Here, precisely, is the problem with biblical closure. For Joseph, a character in the drama, to read so fully and unfailingly the meaning of his own narrative creates problems and tensions not only for his brothers, but for his readers as well. Thomas Mann puts it succinctly: "It is possible to be in a plot and not understand it." Joseph is in the troubling position of "always knowing far too well what was being played."
This is the hermeneutical model that marks the great significance of exegesis, and Zornberg expertly marks this narratology in socio-historical terms within a rabbinic framework. In her discussion of the exilic story of the Scroll of Esther, she allows us to see how interpretation gives human beings a way to live in a world without direct Divine messages:
In their comments on this moment of Esther's narrative, the Sages reflect on their own situation. Cut adrift from the biblical world of miracle, from the fictions of closure that redeem and organize time, Esther, as the last prophetess, must discover new meaning for prophecy. After her, the world of prophecy and miracles yields to the world of chokhmah, of wisdom, of hints and interpretations. Instead of the overwhelming revelations of Sinai — with its visual, perhaps blinding manifestations of God's presence — there is the world in which God and the human are separated and linked by a third force — by the text, the messenger, the transmission.
Zornberg's hermeneutics are in the end deeply reflexive, as in the following discussion relating to the Book of Ruth:
From this midrashic perspective, Ruth and Orpah represent these two modalities [narrative and closure]. Ruth has the capacity to generate a story. Precisely because of her vulnerability, her "outsider" status, as well as her mysterious desire to find her way in, she sets episodes in motion. Lacking everything, she makes a decision to leave behind her the stability of family, nation, and religion, and to embark on a narrative: on a course that offers no visible fulfillment.
This is a brilliant encapsulation of the book's conceptual foundation and of the midrashic enterprise in general: Narratives allow us the ability to burrow into life and serve as a way to reflect on who we are as human beings.
Our stories, once constructed, are never truly finished — we are always writing and rewriting who we are and what we might become as people. It would be worthwhile here to recall the great comedian Danny Kaye's portrayal of Hans Christian Andersen in the 1952 film of the same name, where stories serve a therapeutic function for all those who hear them. The film establishes the resounding power of the tale and of the teller in human psychology. Gentle, generous, and kind-hearted, Andersen, like the sages, awakens the moral goodness and human compassion within all those who listen to his stories.
Zornberg's dazzling reading of the Book of Ruth brings The Murmuring Deep to a deeply satisfying caesura; after having explored feminist resonances in the tale of Rebecca, the author finds in the story of Ruth the capacity of human beings to adapt, to change, to transform themselves. In essence, that is the core of the book's teaching. It is what Zornberg calls "the murmuring deep."
How Do We Know Who We Are?
We know who we are by constructing new narratives, new readings of experience and of history — both the personal and the public.
Such knowledge is at the very foundation of the Jewish tradition and must not be obscured by the vain and arcane questions of the Orthodox and the scholars, both of whom seek a single, unwavering truth — the very "closure" that Zornberg inveighs against.
By opening up the midrashic traditions, Zornberg has given us the freedom to open up the book of our own psychological lives and to understand how the ancient traditions illuminate who we are and what we can become.
Reading the story of the matriarch Rebecca, Zornberg opens the human mind to these new vistas of self-exploration. Parsing the meaning of the Hebrew phrase uttered in Genesis 25:22 by Rebecca — Lamah zeh anokhi (Why me?) — we see:
The message that Rebecca receives from God respects, in a similar way, the provisional nature of her anokhi [I am]. Her baffled questions had been addressed to the God who would respond in an evocative mode, without inundating her, without even referring to His Anokhi — as one inexpressible being speaking to another. Included in His address is Rebecca's unconscious life — as well as, perhaps, the relational unconscious that is created by God and human together. His words provoke further deepenings of the human mind, always elusive to itself, only partly known.
This form of analytical discourse expands the psychological frame of the biblical text in order to discover within it a deeper, richer, and ultimately more complex anatomy of who we are and what we may understand about ourselves.
In a startling explication of Ruth's relationship to Boaz, Zornberg explores a sexual dimension that is central to both the Bible and its rabbinic interpreters but is often lost in the false piety of Orthodox readings:
Naomi sends Ruth to the granary where Boaz lies during the night after the harvest, to uncover his feet and lie there. Ruth's preparations are to be those of a woman before sexual encounter: washing, scenting, dressing, and secrecy. Boaz's acts are precisely foreseen: he will eat and drink and lie down — and he will tell her what to do.
I cite this passage to show how distant Zornberg's discussion is from the cloistered Orthodox perspective. Her analysis is informed by a maturity that never degenerates into arcane scholarship. Rabbinic texts are deployed for their relevance to the theme of psychological investigations. In The Murmuring Deep, Nahmanides brushes up against Sigmund Freud, Rashi against Julia Kristeva, the Hasidic masters with French theorists like Derrida, Laplanche, and Shoshana Felman. Sensitive literary readings engage masters like George Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, bringing the rabbis into dialogue with some of the best-known purveyors of modern thought and classic literature.
Zornberg's method is a prime example of what I have called "Radical Traditionalism": it takes the Jewish heritage as its very foundation and freely applies that tradition to the most cutting-edge contemporary approaches.
In the end, for Judaism to survive and thrive, it must engage the world. Competing Jewish groups ranging from Orthodoxy to academia have sought to cordon off Jewish tradition and place it in some hermetically sealed box, available only to experts and the already converted believers, inaccessible to the general reader, whose needs and concerns are seen as irrelevant.
Midrash provides a much-needed rhetorical structure through which we as human beings can come to terms with the vast complexity of experience and knowledge. In The Murmuring Deep, Avivah Zornberg expertly lays out the human condition in ways that will enrich Jews and non-Jews alike. In her masterful readings of the biblical episodes, she makes ample use of midrashic and kabbalistic traditions that have been wrongly occluded by a cadre of Jewish "experts" who have effectively blocked the way for the average reader.
If education is the very core value of Judaism, it is by reading books like The Murmuring Deep that we can fulfill the precept of Talmud Torah, Torah study. And by adumbrating the midrashic tradition, Avivah Zornberg has permitted us to witness the greatness of the Jewish sages, Hazal, in a freshly creative and intensely dynamic way. The path of such understanding is not simply to allow us to be more religious, but also to better assert our human ethicality and our place in this vast and complex universe.
David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. The center publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter, Sephardic Heritage Update (http://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha), and promotes cultural events.
