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When Pharaoh Was Shamed
Shoshana Brown
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There was no room at the William Alanson White [Psychoanalytic] Institute large enough to hold the gathering of New York analysts, therapists, rabbis and miscellaneous intellectuals who had gathered to hear a lecture by Avivah Zornberg - a distillation of a chapter from her new book, on Exodus. But while there was some grumbling about the overflow (some sat in a separate room watching Zornberg on a TV monitor), there was none about the absorbing web that the "wise-hearted" Zornberg began to fashion from one word in the text of Exodus to another.
Like a spider, indeed, this Jerusalem-based, and U.K.-born-and-educated Orthodox rabbi's daughter spins out from within a vast knowledge of rabbinic and hasidic commentaries; great world literature; studies in developmental psychology; existentialist philosophy; literary theory; cinema and children's literature. Her supply of silken thread seems inexhaustible.
Nevertheless, when invited to ask her questions at the end of the lecture, no one in the highly learned audience raised a hand. Perhaps they were simply overwhelmed by the superabundance of psychological profundities and dazzling feats of exegesis. One needs time to savor and digest such rich, intense food.
For Zornberg brings to her reflections on Exodus a rare combination: vast knowledge of classical Jewish sources and, seemingly, complete ease with the "secular" disciplines. It is clear, for example, that Zornberg, who has a PhD in English literature from Cambridge, and who lectured for a time in the English department at the Hebrew University, is well-schooled in the texts of psychology and psychotherapy.
Which brings me to a delicate point about Zornberg's latest book: The exhorbitance of riches - and the sometimes fantastically wrought settings out of which these jewels shine - may intimidate some readers. When I mentioned this new book to an acquaintance - a rabbi, once a fellow Talmud student with me at the Jewish Theological Seminary - she commented, "I bought it, but I couldn't read it!"
And indeed, "The Particulars of Rapture" (so titled, like her earlier, 1995 book, "Genesis: The Beginning of Desire," after a line from the poet Wallace Stevens) is not easy to read. Unlike a more philosophically focused writer (such as Michael Walzer, in his 1985 "Exodus and Revolution"), Zornberg is not trying to drive home one or two grand points. Rather, like her rabbinic and midrashic predecessors, she is responding to the many curves in the text-road of Exodus, and - as her subtitle makes explicit - "reflecting" as she goes along, following the "song lines" of her text. This type of loose, associative thought so ubiquitous in classical Jewish commentaries, midrash and the Talmud may be disconcerting to some readers. Others may be put off by her wealth of literary references and dense use of philosophical and psychological language. Read superficially, it would be easy to conclude that the former professor is "putting on airs." But read a second, and a third time (as the reader may have to do with many passages), one sees that Zornberg is actually condensing profound ideas into an economy of language - again, like the classical Jewish exegetes (particularly Rashi) in whom she is so steeped.
TO TAKE AN ALMOST RANDOM example, Zornberg introduces us to Rashi's commentary on Exodus 7:15, "Look, he goes out to the water" - where the Lord is encouraging Moses to confront Pharaoh when he goes out of the palace on his regular morning trip to the Nile:
Rashi: "to perform his bodily needs. For he would make himself into a god, claiming that he had no bodily needs (literally, 'did not need to clear his bowels'); he would rise early in the morning, and go out to the Nile to perform his bodily needs there."
After a brief paraphrase of Rashi, Zornberg hits her unique stride, extending the range of our vision, as we peer down with her, and with all her many psychoanalytic, philosophical and literary "friends," into the profundities of Rashi's comment:
"The euphemistic shorthand idiom for the natural process that Pharaoh denies is the word 'needs.' Since Freud, many thinkers - among them Norman Brown and Ernest Becker - have discussed the peculiar implications of 'anality' for human experience. Natural bodily functions are the most disturbing blow to a child's illusion of 'godlikeness' - the 'causa sui' project, as Becker, quoting Spinoza, calls it: the fantasy that one's individuality is total and integral engenders suspicion of the body, in its vulnerability, as well as of the female and the sub-species role. Underlying this fantasy is the fear of death: the shocking knowledge, as Montaigne puts it, that on the highest throne in the world man sits on a part of his anatomy that signifies excretion, dependence, lack of control, need.
"What Pharaoh denies is the unbearable lightness of being: the meaningless movement of fluids and solids that mark human life. Kundera's word, 'lightness,' is the word the midrash uses to describe Pharaoh's condition: in the moment of defecation, he stands in kalon, in shame, whose root is 'lightness.' This is the moment of 'neediness,' that he must hide at all costs: for to recognize one's lightness is to experience a radical and unbearable shame. To acknowledge the apertures in one's body - the openings and cavities for which Jews traditionally thank God after each experience of the natural physical process - is to surrender the claim to immortality. We remember Kafka and his concern with shame, a concern that Walter Benjamin termed his 'strangest gesture': the honest recognition of a complex and mortal humanity, subject to fluctuation, in its essence neither lordly nor metaphysical. Pharaoh's response to such a surrender is to make himself as kaved, as heavy, dense, significant, and impregnable as possible: in fact, to make himself a god."
If you had no difficulty with the preceding excerpt, then you may breeze through Zornberg's "rapturous" reflection on Exodus, slowing down only to underline a brilliant passage. But if you had to read it several times over to let it all sink in - or to wonder at how we got from the simple words of the Torah text, "Look, he goes out to the water," to Freud to Montaigne to Kundera, Kafka, and Walter Benjamin - then you may find that you can only read Zornberg's commentary in small doses.
But I would emphasize that it is worth finishing. Zornberg's reflections on the incidents surrounding the Golden Calf and the building of the Mishkan (which fall in the last half of Exodus) are easily the best parts of the book, for it is here that she opens a window for the reader onto the profound ambivalences and ambiguities of the Biblical text. Were the Israelites passionately eager to serve God - or an idol? Was the Mishkan filled with a concentrated dose of God's presence - or God's absence? Did Moses shatter the first set of tablets because of his anger over the Golden Calf - or because he realized that the tablets themselves might become idols?
Although such questions are often ones that traditional rabbinic and hasidic commentators asked before her, they will be new for most of her primarily English-reading, but religiously interested audience. In a time when lines between "Orthodoxy" and "modernity" seem to be hardening rather than softening, it is exciting to discover that some of our "pious" forebears asked hard questions - that they were not satisfied with simplistic religious pablum.
I was disappointed that Zornberg never addresses head on the problem of God's easy excitability to murderous rage in the Exodus story. Perhaps, considering her Orthodox upbringing in Glasgow and her clear love of traditional Judaism, this should not be a surprise - indeed this may be asking a "traditionalist" to subject the tradition to a more radical questioning than it can bear without self-destructing.
Nevertheless, Zornberg does leave the door open to further questions on any and all of the most difficult issues encountered in the Torah text, and she helps us to see the Jewish tradition as one in which questioning is supremely valued. In her discussion of the Questions of the "Four Sons" in the Haggadah, she makes the point that "someone must ask a question; someone must become aware of a difficulty, a blank, a dissonance" in order that new narratives may be engendered.
She utilizes the words of Midrash Mekhilta to introduce us to a "problem" implicit in the Torah text: We are commanded there (Ex. 13:14; Deut. 6:20) to recount the story of the Exodus to our children because the Torah's author knew that in the future our descendants would "forget" the story - that they will have to ask:
Mekhilta: "At that moment, bad news was brought to the Israelites: that the Torah would be forgotten. Some say that good news was brought to them: that they would have children and children's children!"
Zornberg illuminates the midrash's rather cryptic bad news-good news comment:
"Is this - the inevitability of forgetting - bad news? Or is it good news, implying the constant rebirth of narratives, responses to the questions of those in whom distance and forgetting create desire?
"The issue is not decided, as so many questions are not decided. It does, however, evoke yet again the ambiguity that, in rabbinic commentary, haunts the notion of narrative. How do we understand the questions of the future? Are they tragic, deplorable? Or a manifestation of life? For questions do destabilize: they find difficulty and distance, where one might have dreamt of ease and continuity."
ZORNBERG ESCAPES THE horns of both fundamentalism and historicism, focusing instead on deep, timeless truths, while simultaneously noting the counter-truths that shadow every "truth" grasped.
This is an enormously exciting way to engage the Sacred Text that is, consciously or unconsciously, embedded in the psyche of every Jew. Zornberg puts her finger precisely on what makes it a great, enduring story, despite its difficulties and perplexities:
"For the reader of the Torah ... there remains the 'double reading,' the comic and the tragic interpretations of the same drama. As in an Escher engraving, the text... flickers with ambiguity. And the reader experiences that inner shift that destabilizes the idolatrous security of meaning. Perhaps only a text that flickers in this way can maintain its power through time."
"Difficulty and distance ... where one might have dreamt of ease and continuity": Zornberg's "Reflections on Exodus" is not always easy - but the endeavor to "go the distance" with her is worth the difficulty.
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Shoshana Brown is an adjunct professor in the Department of Comparative Humanities at the State University of New York, Old Westbury.
(July 2, 2001)
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