"One of the most important developments in Torah study in my lifetime is the growth of interest in Torah as literature," says Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in response to being asked whether the secular school system in this country is doing a disservice to students by teaching sacred texts as stories. "Literature has an expansive effect; it opens out the limits. If you study the Bible with a certain quality of attention, something begins to open up, so that even if you lead a secular lifestyle, you may very well find yourself coming to pray, in one sense or another."

Gottlieb Zornberg's impetus. 'It is through the unconscious that we communicate with ourselves.'
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

It should not come as a surprise that Gottlieb Zornberg, herself an Orthodox Jew, takes such a view. In addition to being a world-renowned biblical scholar, she also holds a PhD (from Cambridge) in English literature, a subject she taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1969 to 1977, after making aliya from the UK and settling in Jerusalem.

Born in London in 1944 and raised in Glasgow, the married mother-of-three got her first taste of the "expansiveness" of the Torah from her rabbi father, who "was very sensitive to its narrative and psychological aspects."

And it is these aspects that best characterize the biblical readings unique to Gottlieb Zornberg's lectures, essays and books - interpretations that have gained her international acclaim.

In her newly released book, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, Gottlieb Zornberg takes a step further in examining what lies beneath the behavior of figures in the Bible, who are so familiar on the one hand, yet so elusive on the other. Here, she gives a glimpse into what makes them, us and her tick.

How much has being a woman affected your interpretations of Bible stories and characters?

I hesitate to say that being a woman is an important factor here. Being a woman may color everything, but usually in the most subtle way. It might be interesting at some point to think about what role it has played in my analyses. But even then, it would be easier for someone else to make that distinction about my work than for me to do so.

Having said that, I do see that the way I deal with women characters has changed over the years. Early on, I saw no reason to pay special attention to women's experience. I thought that all the characters in the Bible had equal claim on my attention. But, as the years go by, I find that I am more interested in the women characters, and in the way spotlights can be shone on them that reveal them in higher relief than at first reading.

Yet you grew up in a religious household, where Torah learning itself is different for girls and boys. Surely, that has an effect...

Yes, it does. I studied with my father, and my education didn't focus on Gemara, for example, but rather on Bible, Rashi and midrash. I regard the fact that I wasn't subjected to the full rigors of a yeshiva education, in the male sense, as a kind of a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, men who've had the benefit of that education have an intense immersion in talmudic sources and an ease with talmudic discourse that gives them authority. On the other hand, there's a kind of freedom that comes with not having been immersed in that, and in needing to find a voice of a different kind. It is this freedom that has been very important for me, enabling me to include literature and psychoanalysis in the mix. It has enabled me not to look at things solely through a black-and-white lens where everything is either permitted or forbidden.

Which came first, your interest in the Bible or in English literature? Is there a connection between these two passions?

I would think so. In my early studies with my father, there was an emphasis on the narrative and psychological aspects of the Bible, which he was very sensitive to. That's what caught my imagination. And, of course, I read a great deal, so it's hard to say what came first - Dickens or Deuteronomy, so to speak. Clearly, it was a tendency I had to be interested in these things, and the two worked very well together.

What inspires your books in general, and what sparked your recent one in particular?

All my books are based on my lectures. But this book covers a larger area. It covers books that are not in the humash [the Five Books of Moses]. Unlike my other books, which follow the structure of the weekly Torah portion, this one is thematic. Its theme is the interplay between consciousness and the unconscious. The idea for it came to me in the middle of an airport in the United States. Thinking about the lectures I was giving at the time, it struck me that what they all had in common was an interest in the unconscious - in what was not manifest in the description of encounters between people, between people and God and within people's inner speech, their soliloquy. In each of these three areas, what most interests me is the way that elements that are not obvious on the surface nevertheless profoundly affect the meaning of the communication.

Can you give an example of the biblical unconscious?

There are many examples. My claim is that the sages of the Talmud and midrash and, later, the hassidic masters had a healthy sense of what we now call the unconscious. An expression used by them - "the area of the not known" - refers to the spiritual realm. But I think it is translatable into Freud's idea of the unconscious. The former seems to refer to higher dimensions of experience and the latter to lower elements. But I'm dubious about that higher-lower way of looking at this. I think everything can be reversed. One can excavate upward, and one can aspire downward. It goes in a mirror thrust.

One example that comes to mind is the story of Isaac's blessing of Jacob: He is deceived by Jacob into giving him the blessing he intended for Esau. This gives rise to all sorts of questions, such as: What good is a blessing that is given under deception? Why doesn't Isaac withdraw the blessing as soon as he realizes what has happened? What is a blessing? Why is it so valuable that you would be ready to deceive in order to receive one?