Book Review: Performer of Torah

Legendary Jerusalem scholar and teacher Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg discusses writing about the Hebrew Bible in English.

By BETH KISSILEFF
Avivah gottlieb Zornberg (photo credit: DEBBI COOPER)
Avivah gottlieb Zornberg
(photo credit: DEBBI COOPER)
Language is central to understanding any text. Yet to Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, there is something valuable in the “estranging mechanism” of writing about Hebrew texts in English.
Zornberg’s fourth book, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, was published at the end of February. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, the author, teacher, scholar and Jerusalem resident says that working in two languages “allows you to know that you don’t know.” Since “the language I use is essential to what I do,” she says, she likes “translating concepts” and “bringing in my own experience of the words. This is already interpretation.”
Her style of exegesis blends approaches from different aspects of her education and life experiences. She was born in London to a rabbinic family of Holocaust refugees who made their way to Glasgow, Scotland, where she was raised until she left home to attend Gateshead Seminary and later Cambridge University. At Cambridge, she earned a PhD in English literature; one of her peers was former UK chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. When she made aliya, she taught in the English department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then taught classes on the weekly Torah portion – initially in private homes and later at the capital’s Great Synagogue, Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Midreshet Lindenbaum and OU Center.
This complex background has allowed her to draw from English and European literature and from the most recent literary and psychoanalytic sources, as well as from her deep knowledge of Jewish texts, particularly classical rabbinic midrash and modern hassidic writers.
For her, writing biblical commentary that makes use of varied sources is a “meditative response” to the text that, “if it works well, has a great deal to do with the pshat [simple meaning] of the text.” She sees the Book of Numbers in particular as a “very powerful confrontation with the difficulty of being a human being, the darkness, the negative and profound manifestations that throw people into conflict.”
The conflicts of that period find expression in the difficulties of the Jewish people’s leader, Moses. In Zornberg’s reading in Bewilderments, the “underlying issue is Moses’ faith in his people’s faith.”
Regarding the episode where Moses hits the rock in the desert, she explains that his failure is that he “loses the opportunity to teach the people the natural resources of dibbur, of generative language. His failure, in this view, is not that he did not speak. It is that he spoke – in the rock’s presence – words of anger against the people.”
The chapter that discusses this issue, “Heart of Stone, Heart of Flesh,” focuses on Moses’s hands, the rod and the snake, in order to consider the relation between emuna (faith) and language.
For Zornberg, teaching and learning involve “taking what the Torah says to the depths of one’s being” so that it has a “generative effect.” She parses this by explaining that the text “has the capacity to grow inside people.”
Over the years, she has garnered a great deal of praise from her colleagues. A sampling of her speaking engagements during her US lecture tour between Passover and Shavuot this year demonstrates her wide appeal: Among other places, she will be at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York.
MY OWN first encounter with Zornberg occurred via a babysitting job. The woman who hired me to watch her daughters occasionally while I was studying in Jerusalem during my junior year of college was writing a book about learned Orthodox women in Jerusalem. Then, in 1988, the number was much lower than it is today. Happily it seems laughable to me now that one could imagine fitting all the learned women in this city between the covers of just one book.
But the author, Vanessa Ochs, told me that since I was an English major, I might like to meet one of the women she was profiling in what became the work Words on Fire.
I was not expecting to find transcendence when I went to my first class with Zornberg in the spring of 1988 at the Jerusalem Great Synagogue. Even all these years later, I remember that the subject of the class was the mirrors that women brought as offerings to build the Tabernacle.
Hearing her discourse on mirrors and play and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being with a lovely Scottish lilt in her voice, I was entranced, as many of her students are.
This newest book on Numbers is different from her first two books on Genesis and Exodus, in that it is organized along thematic lines rather than adhering strictly to the weekly-Torah-portion model.
She aims to be more generally accessible, following up on her previous book, The Murmuring Deep, which was an examination of 12 biblical characters. That book was her first to be translated into Hebrew, as Tehom el Tehom, and it has brought her new audiences.
But she will continue to write in English.
She likes “writing in English about texts that come from another language world,” she says, adding that “the act of translating can be quite transformative.”
She speaks of the value of “not understanding” particular Hebrew words, since “if you assume you know what it means, you are locked in” to an elementary understanding.
When I ask her whether she is trying to read the Torah as both a novel and a text to put under a psychoanalytic lens – given that she has said she wanted to be a novelist when she was younger and that she wrote her dissertation on author George Eliot – she replies that she does not see the Torah as a novel, but that she “brings to Torah the ethical seriousness that the great English novels demand of their readers.”
Of her methodology, she says that “everything I read or experience I regard as fair use. I am always making associations with the Torah text.”
She explains that “Torah is called shira [which means both ‘poetry’ and ‘song’ in Hebrew], and I feel that it generates shira in me; I am performing the poem that grows within me as I read.”
Ultimately, she adds, “it is not so much a matter of explicating a particular problem in the text as of attending to what the text leaves me with, how it is washed through with other things I have felt and thought.”
What was most interesting, in speaking with her after so many years of taking her classes and reading her books, is her use of poetic, evocative language to bring out the texture and sense of particular words and passages in the Torah. Though her spoken and written language is continually shot through with poetry, it never occurred to me how conscious her awareness of the performative power of language is, and how significant its allusiveness is to her in bringing out the sense of Torah as shira, in both its senses.
But I should not have been surprised that she makes use of poetry in her attempt to create textual understandings that will be generative and poetic for her readers and listeners, since the epigraphs of all four of her books are from poems: Bewilderments opens with lines from T.S.
Eliot, The Beginning of Desire and the Particulars of Rapture with the words of Wallace Stevens, and The Murmuring Deep with a verse from Psalms. Clearly Zornberg the writer and teacher is signaling to readers, with these openings, that the text within will be one particularly attentive to language.