Zornberg's Latest Biblical Study Complex, Poetic, Essential
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Schocken (Hardcover: 480 pages)
ISBN-10: 0805242473
There are smart people and then there are exceedingly smart people. In the world of Biblical criticism, it is difficult to find anyone smarter—no, make that wiser, more thoughtful, more insightful—than the marvelous Jerusalem-based teacher and author Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Her earlier books, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (which deservedly won the National Jewish Book Award), and The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, were truly enriching, even enthralling, and written in remarkable intellectual fashion. Could it be her doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University in her native England? Or her profound understanding of psychology, as well as Hebrew and Jewish religious texts, which make her like a Jewish Northrop Frye in her astonishing brilliance? All this—and from an Orthodox religious standpoint, too!
Rather than continue her way through all five books of the Torah, she has now chosen to write lengthy chapters on key characters and events in the entire Tanach: the Garden of Eden, the Flood, Jonah, Esther from the Purim story, the Akedah (of course!), Ruth and Boaz, and a half-dozen others. The title of her latest volume may seem off-putting or at least daunting, and rightfully so; much of this book reads like a gleaming university level text: The Murmuring Deep—Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. It is indeed daunting, but oh, it’s worth it, and worth the $33 Canadian price tag, if you want your brain and Jewish knowledge to get a real work-out.
The examples I long to share with you are many. After Adam eats the forbidden fruit, Zornberg notes, he “replies to God in mixed genres: confession and rationalization. . . . How is the complexity to be read? Is Adam perhaps not as embarrassingly evasive as we had thought? . . . [Or does] his plea have some validity: he had regarded the woman given him by God as a reliable guide?”
Here is the gifted scholar on the Flood: “Between soliloquy and covenant, however, God blesses Noach and his children: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ A virtual repetition of His blessing to Adam immediately after Creation, these words declare that the empty world needs to be filled. But this emptiness is different from that primal void. Now, in the devastated world after the Flood, God’s blessing resounds with a new poignancy.”
I told you that reading Zornberg isn’t easy! Quotations from Freud and many other giants of the mind, references to major scholars of every faith, snippets of novels and poems of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats abound, and that’s where much of the pleasure of reading this remarkable scholar comes from: she understands that insights can be found anywhere, not only in Rashi and Maimonides (although we get plenty from them, as well!) Sometimes her insights are drawn directly from the text, but because Zornberg is such a scholar of the holy tongue, the Torah, the Talmud and Midrash, every page has a mental jolt or two: did you ever notice that “God’s last word to Abraham is his command to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Never again will God address Abraham.” (I never thought before now of how terrifying that is.) She tracks down “a daring midrash” which has Satan accosting Abraham on his way to sacrificing his son, declaring that it was he—the devil—who had ordered the Akedah of Isaac, and not God! Zornberg notes with near trembling, “How is Abraham to know for sure which is God’s voice, which Satan’s?”
Reading Dr. Zornberg—and one cannot skim such a brilliant thinker!—I found myself frequently pulling my Chumash off the shelf and checking her out, shaken by what she had seen and I had not: for instance, that everyone around the suffering Jacob (mourning over the “death” of his beloved Joseph) knows the truth—that he is alive and was sold into slavery (his sons, his father Isaac, even God clearly know the truth), “but all are bonded in a pact of silence. Mysterious and absolute, this silence isolates Jacob for the next twenty-two years, until Joseph finally reveals himself in Egypt. (“His spiritual life went into limbo” she notes.) Wow.
Good teachers and writers enrich our appreciation of a text. Great teachers and writers inspire us with their insights, and drive us to greater study, understanding, wisdom. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is the latter.
Rather than continue her way through all five books of the Torah, she has now chosen to write lengthy chapters on key characters and events in the entire Tanach: the Garden of Eden, the Flood, Jonah, Esther from the Purim story, the Akedah (of course!), Ruth and Boaz, and a half-dozen others. The title of her latest volume may seem off-putting or at least daunting, and rightfully so; much of this book reads like a gleaming university level text: The Murmuring Deep—Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. It is indeed daunting, but oh, it’s worth it, and worth the $33 Canadian price tag, if you want your brain and Jewish knowledge to get a real work-out.
The examples I long to share with you are many. After Adam eats the forbidden fruit, Zornberg notes, he “replies to God in mixed genres: confession and rationalization. . . . How is the complexity to be read? Is Adam perhaps not as embarrassingly evasive as we had thought? . . . [Or does] his plea have some validity: he had regarded the woman given him by God as a reliable guide?”
Here is the gifted scholar on the Flood: “Between soliloquy and covenant, however, God blesses Noach and his children: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ A virtual repetition of His blessing to Adam immediately after Creation, these words declare that the empty world needs to be filled. But this emptiness is different from that primal void. Now, in the devastated world after the Flood, God’s blessing resounds with a new poignancy.”
I told you that reading Zornberg isn’t easy! Quotations from Freud and many other giants of the mind, references to major scholars of every faith, snippets of novels and poems of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats abound, and that’s where much of the pleasure of reading this remarkable scholar comes from: she understands that insights can be found anywhere, not only in Rashi and Maimonides (although we get plenty from them, as well!) Sometimes her insights are drawn directly from the text, but because Zornberg is such a scholar of the holy tongue, the Torah, the Talmud and Midrash, every page has a mental jolt or two: did you ever notice that “God’s last word to Abraham is his command to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Never again will God address Abraham.” (I never thought before now of how terrifying that is.) She tracks down “a daring midrash” which has Satan accosting Abraham on his way to sacrificing his son, declaring that it was he—the devil—who had ordered the Akedah of Isaac, and not God! Zornberg notes with near trembling, “How is Abraham to know for sure which is God’s voice, which Satan’s?”
Reading Dr. Zornberg—and one cannot skim such a brilliant thinker!—I found myself frequently pulling my Chumash off the shelf and checking her out, shaken by what she had seen and I had not: for instance, that everyone around the suffering Jacob (mourning over the “death” of his beloved Joseph) knows the truth—that he is alive and was sold into slavery (his sons, his father Isaac, even God clearly know the truth), “but all are bonded in a pact of silence. Mysterious and absolute, this silence isolates Jacob for the next twenty-two years, until Joseph finally reveals himself in Egypt. (“His spiritual life went into limbo” she notes.) Wow.
Good teachers and writers enrich our appreciation of a text. Great teachers and writers inspire us with their insights, and drive us to greater study, understanding, wisdom. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is the latter.
