Introduction 1
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Introduction
"Some books cannot be taken by direct assault; they must be taken
like Jericho" (Ortega).
Since these essays on Exodus are largely concerned with the interpretation
of the narrative as it is found in midrashic sources, I would like to introduce
them by offering a working definition of "midrash" and --- perhaps more to the
point --- a personal meditation on the midrashic model for reading texts. My
working definition --- with all due caveats, acknowledging the essentially
undefined nature of the term1 --- would be this:
Midrash, derived from the root darash, "to seek out" or "to inquire," is a
term used in rabbinic literature for the interpretive study of the Bible.
The word is used in two related senses: first, to refer to the results of that
interpretive exegesis; and, second, to describe the literary compilations
in which the original interpretations, many of them first delivered and
transmitted orally, were eventually collected.
These essays on Exodus make extensive use of some of these midrashic
1
See Gary Porten, "Defining Midrash," in The Study of Ancient Judaism,
ed. J. Neusner (New York, 1981), 59-60.
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Introduction 2
collections, notably Midrash Rabbah and Midrash Tanchuma. In addition,
Rashi, the great French eleventh century commentator on the Torah, includes in
his text a significant selection of midrashic interpretations; often, I refer to
Rashi’s versions, where they offer interesting nuances on the original sources.
Since Rashi’s commentary has been absorbed into the bloodstream of Jewish
culture, his midrashic material has become a kind of "second nature" in the
traditional reading of the biblical text.
Before turning to a more personal view of the nature of midrashic reading,
some technical observations are in order. These essays are based on the literary
and liturgical device of "Parshat ha-Shavua," or "the Parsha": the Bible is read
in Synagogue in weekly sections, so as to be completed in yearly cycles. Each
Parsha is titled after a significant opening word. This device constitutes a way
of living Jewish time; each week is saturated, as it were, with the material of
that particular biblical section. One thinks, one studies, one lives the Parsha. If
one is a teacher, this process is intensified. It is as a result of years of teaching
the Bible in this form that I have come to articulate the ideas in this book.
Since on one level, then, this book began life as oral presentations,
delivered to a wide range of students, of all ages, backgrounds, and intellectual
habits, these essays remain separate attempts to engage with a particular literary
unit, the Parsha of the particular week. They address themes that arise
compellingly from the Torah text, often from the midrashic or other
interpretations of the text. On another level, however, they flow into one
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Introduction 3
another, engaging with the narrative of the Exodus as a whole, and addressing
the themes of the grand narrative: redemption, revelation, betrayal, and the
quest for "God in our midst."
In my approach, the biblical text is not allowed to stand alone, but has its
boundaries blurred by later commentaries and by a persistent intertextuality that
makes it impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present
in the isolated text. Such an approach represents perhaps the greatest difficulty
for the modern reader. It continues, in a sense, the rabbinic mode of reading,
where "the rabbis imagined themselves a part of the whole, participating in
Torah rather than operating on it at an analytic distance . . . [I]t follows that the
words of interpretation cannot be isolated in any rigorously analytical way from
the words of Torah itself."2 Elliot Wolfson articulates this reading practice: "the
base text of revelation is thought to comprise within itself layers of
interpretation, and the works of interpretation on the biblical canon are
considered revelatory in nature."3
The blurring of boundaries between revelation and interpretation, between
the written and the oral Torah, is a fundamental mode of the rabbinic
2
Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992), 115.
3
Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 328.
Introduction 4
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imagination. In this book, I have adopted this mode. I confess to a perhaps naive
sense of the naturalness of this mode. However, as I invite the reader to enter
the world of midrashic reading, I would like to offer an account of my reading
practice, of how I understand the midrashic enterprise.
*****************
Central to this enterprise is the telling of stories that fill in gaps in the
written biblical text. For instance, the midrash that, in a sense, engenders this
book --- about women’s play with mirrors and the "secret of redemption"4 --intends to explain a mysterious verse at the end of Exodus: "He made the laver
of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who thronged,
who came in throngs to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting" (38:8). The reader
is baffled: Which mirrors (the mirrors)? What is the purpose of this specific gift
to the Mishkan (Tabernacle)? Why is the expression tzava --- to throng, to
proliferate --- repeated? Why is this particular copper contribution singled out
from the larger mass of copper donated to the Mishkan? The midrash offers a
narrative and, consequently, an interpretation of the enigmatic text: The women
created the hosts, the throngs of Israel by their play with mirrors. As the
midrash puts it: "It was all done with mirrors!"
Such a narrative spins away from the biblical text; in a sense, it seems
4
See Chapter 1, pp.***********
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Introduction 5
unrooted, fantastic. Yet close study of the midrash reveals multiple skeins of
connection, a network of textual roots within the language of the Bible. And --perhaps more importantly --- the midrash offers an answer to a repressed
question: How are this people to be redeemable? Can they be imagined as, in
some sense, generating their own freedom? If we make use of the classic image
of birth, must we have recourse to a forced birth, a forceps delivery, in
imagining the relations of God the "midwife" and the newborn?5 Or is there
some way of catching the elusive moment of inner transformation that creates
human possibility where before there was only necessity? The "secret of
redemption," as the Rabbis call it, is the real problem at the heart of this
midrash.
While the question of "redeemability" is repressed in the biblical text, it is
articulated in many midrashic sources, and it emerges significantly in Rashi’s
commentary. Here, I would like to claim that this articulation of the repressed is
the genius of midrashic narrative. If I adopt the psychoanalytic model, I suggest
that the peshat, or plain meaning of the text , functions as the conscious layer of
meaning; while the midrashic stories and exegeses intimate unconscious layers,
encrypted traces of more complex meaning. The public, overt, triumphal
narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into
multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious,
undercut, destabilize the public narrative.
5
See Yalkut Shimoni, 828.
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Introduction 6
The result is a plethora of possible stories of redemption. Some of these
will be attributed to "the enemy": they are false, adversarial narratives, Egyptian
narratives, narratives of obtuse misunderstanding. These counter-narratives, the
demonized expression of unthinkable thoughts, construct the official Israelite
history of the Exodus as incomplete, inflated, or mythic invention. In Chapter
3, I discuss the problem of such counter-narratives and the implications of the
Rabbis’ willingness to articulate them.
Most significant, however, is the midrashic hospitality to the very concept
of multiple alternative narratives. Time and time again, the magisterial biblical
history of the Exodus is fractured in these midrashic versions. Moreover, the
biblical text itself seems to give warrant for such retellings. Several times, the
Torah itself emphasizes the importance of telling the story to one’s children and
grandchildren. At certain moments, this imperative to narrate Exodus becomes
the very purpose of the historical event: it happened so that you may tell it. At
the heart of the liberation account, indeed, God prepares Moses with a story to
tell a future child; this rhetorical narrative, astonishingly, precedes the historical
narrative of liberation.
One might perhaps assume that these stories of the future are standard
retellings of the biblical narrative. Not so: the biblical text itself includes four
versions of the narrative to respond to four hypothetical questioning sons of the
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Introduction 7
future.6 These become typologies of four sons, who are later characterized in the
Haggadah --- read each year on the night of Passover --- as the wise, the
wicked, the simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. Even in the
biblical sources, where the four passages are dispersed, the difference between
the four versions is remarkable. In the Haggadah, this difference is presented as
a psychological response to different types of child; but even the biblical text
seems to offer an invitation to modulate the story to meet varying rhetorical
ends.
If the stories of the future are to be multiple, responsive to time and place
and temperament, then the midrashic narratives exemplify this diffraction of the
original narrative at its most radical. Essentially, I suggest, they raise both
philosophical and psychological questions: about metaphysical truth and about
the nature of the self. The notion that knowledge of reality is singular, absolute,
static and eternal is tested in these midrashic narratives of the foundational
events in Jewish history. The midrashic versions convey a plural, contextual,
constructed and dynamic vision of reality. The "Platonic ideal" in the history of
philosophy is describe by Isaiah Berlin: it posits
. . . that all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only,
all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must
6
These dialogues are found in Exod 12:26--27; 13:8; 13:14; and Deut
6:20--21.
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Introduction 8
be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third
place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible
with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be
incompatible with another --- that we knew a priori. This kind of
omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.7
As against this view, which obtained in Western philosophy till the late
nineteenth century, the midrashic literature presents a heterogeneous, even --consciously and ambivalently --- a heretical multiplicity of answers.8 Exodus as
a narrative that consistently deploys the "omnipotence effect," to use Meir
Sternberg’s term, is significantly diffracted by the many counter-narratives that
the midrash generates from within the triumphal and unequivocal master story.
"What really happened in Egypt?" becomes a less important question than
"How best to tell the story? Where to begin? What in the master story speaks to
one and therefore makes one speak?"
The psychological dimension of these counter-narratives is no less crucial.
Diffracted narratives interrogate the nature of the self. The American
psychoanalyst, Stephen Mitchell, describes one facet of the problem:
People often experience themselves, at any given moment, as containing
7
Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf,
1991), 5-6.
8
See Chapter Three, pp. *************
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Introduction 9
or being a "self" that is complete in the present; a "sense of self" often
comes with a feeling of substantiality, presence, integrity, and fullness.
Yet selves change and are transformed continually over time; no version
of self is fully present at any instant, and a single life is composed of
many selves. An experience of self takes place necessarily in a moment
of time; it fills one’s psychic space, and other, alternative versions of
self fade into the background. A river can be represented in a
photograph, which fixes its flow and makes it possible for it to be
viewed and grasped. Yet the movement of the river, in its larger course,
cannot be grasped in a moment. Rivers and selves, like music and
narrative, take time to happen in.9
The "self" that was liberated from Egypt --- whether we consider the people
as a psychological unit, or imagine an individual participant in the Exodus --experienced a limited, fragmentary version of events and a provisional sense of
his or her own self. It is precisely through narration, by fulfilling the biblical
imperative to tell the story, by the continuing interaction between parents and
children, that transformed versions of self and of the meanings of liberation will
be generated.
In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann discusses the use of narrative to
9
Stephen Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. (New York:
Basic Books, 1993), 102.
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Introduction 10
experience the self in time:
[T]ime is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are
inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space.
Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures,
articulates time . . . Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can
only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one
thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are
complete in the present, and unrelated to them save as all bodies are,
whereas narration --- like music --- even if it should try to be completely
present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.10
Narrative needs time to do its work, to renegotiate the sense of total
presence and fullness that the self craves. This, I suggest, is the core tension that
the midrashic narratives express. By intimating unconscious conflicts about
living in time, about the self as multiple, diffracted, discontinuous, the midrash
often confronts the apparent simplicity of the biblical narrative with a more
complex and nuanced notion of the self.
In the midrashic account of the Exodus, these conflicts come to a head in
the narrative of the Golden Calf.11 Here, the dilemmas of temporality are
figured in grotesque and yet inevitable form. Moses’ "lateness" in descending
10
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. (New York: Knopf, 1991), 541.
11
See Chapter Nine.
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Introduction 11
the mountain precipitates a panic response whose shock waves spread wide and
deep. In the midrashic versions, and in commentaries profoundly influenced by
these versions, all the certainties of liberation, on the psychological as well as
the historical and philosophical planes, are destabilized. Possible demonic
narratives are released that will shape the nightmares of the future. The people
experience the whips and scorns of time; the melancholy of those who do not
know, in Julia Kristeva’s expression, "how to lose"; the insecurity of those who
require certainty and yearn for total presence, who are, as one nineteenth
century chasidic thinker has it, impatient with that need for prayer that is the
posture of those who live within the veils of time.12
For the midrash to read in the biblical text such intimations of the
unconscious life of a people becomes legitimate, in view of one necessary
assumption of the Rabbinic mind: the implied author of the Torah is God. As
Daniel Boyarin succinctly puts it: "This is not a theological or dogmatic claim
but a semiotic one . . . If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps,
repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be read . .
. "13 The midrashic search for multiple levels of meaning, the attempt to
retrieve unconscious layers of truth, is warranted by the assumption that, as
God’s work, the Torah encompasses all. "Turn it, and turn it, for all is in it,"
12
Mei HaShiloach I, 30a-b.
13
Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 40.
Introduction 12
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says R.
,14 using the image of the plough turning the earth, breaking,
transforming, reversing, subverting. Two thousand years later, such an image of
excavation becomes the informing image in Freud’s project: to unearth the
repressed life that is encrypted within the human experience. The
psychoanalytic project, like the midrashic one, represents a dissatisfaction with
surface meanings, and a confidence that rich if disturbing lodes seam the earth’s
depths. The activity of the ploughman is not only legitimate but imperative: in
this way, the interpreter responds to the claim of God’s text.
**********************
At this juncture, I would like to discuss one specific example of the
midrashic retrieval of unconscious traces from within the biblical narrative. By
contrast with the Genesis sagas, the absence of women from the narrative of
Exodus --- and indeed from all the later books of the Bible --- is quite striking.
This is not, of course, a total absence. There is the opening sequence in which
women figure prominently: Jochebed, Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter, the
midwives, Moses' wife, Zipporah. All are related to the theme of birth, all are
dedicated to what Waclav Havel calls the "hidden sphere" that endangers the
totalitarian structure: to the baby crying within the brick.15 Once this theme has
been established within the biblical text, however, women essentially disappear.
14
Pirkei Avoth 5:26.
15
See Chapter One, pp. **********
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Introduction 13
Miriam makes a brief reappearance, singing and dancing at the Red Sea, and
later, in Numbers 12, she is afflicted with leprosy for maligning her brother
Moses. Aside from this, there is one significant biblical moment devoted to
women: in Numbers (27:1--12), the daughters of Zelofhad successfully claim a
share in their father’s inheritance. A minor reference to women places them
among the "wise-of-heart" who weave cloth for the Mishkan (Exod 35:25--26).
The omission of women from the narrative can, of course, be seen as
simply that --- an omission, a lack of specific interest in the feminine, which is
absorbed into the larger body of the "children of Israel." However, Rashi
precedes the feminist movement by many centuries when, in an extraordinary
midrashic comment, he excludes women from the most intense moments in the
biblical drama: they simply did not participate in the major rebellions of the
people in the wilderness. Rashi comments on the final census of the people
before entering the Holy Land:
‘In this [census], no man survived from the original census of Moses and
Aaron, when they had counted the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai’
(Num 26:64): But the women were not subjected to the decree against
the Spies, because they loved the Holy Land. The men said, ‘Let us
appoint (nitna) a leader to return to Egypt’ (14:4); while the women
said, ‘Appoint (t’na) for us a holding among our father’s brothers’
(27:4). That is why the story of Zelafhad’s daughters is narrated directly
after this.
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Introduction 14
Rashi’s point is simple but revolutionary in its implications. Taking "man"
literally, he limits the destruction of a generation, in punishment for the sin of
the Spies, to the males only. While all the men over twenty died in the course of
the forty years’ wandering, the women survived --- because, unlike the men,
they loved the Land of Israel.
Rashi’s midrashic claim is provocative in the extreme. With barely a hint in
the text to support him, he presents a startlingly asymetrical demographic image
of the people who entered the Holy Land, with women in the large majority. His
basis in the text is the expression "No man survived . . ." and the fact that the
story of the daughters of Zelofhad, who were inspired by love of the Land,
immediately follows: the sequence invites the reader to notice that these women
and the rebels involved with the Spies use the same word (t’na/nitna) to
opposite effect.
The compelling implication of Rashi’s comment, however, is not the
demographic one. Rather it is that the absence of women from the text does not
necessarily mean that they are assimilated into the general "children of Israel,"
as the plain meaning (peshat) of the text might indicate. Women have a
separate, hidden history, which is not conveyed on the surface of the text. This
history is a faithful, loving, and vital one, which excludes them from the dramas
of sin and punishment that constitute the narrative of the wilderness. Indeed,
Rashi’s midrashic source includes both the major crises in the wilderness as
dramas in which women were not incriminated:
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Introduction 15
In that generation, women would repair what men tore down. For you
find that when Aaron said, ‘Break off your golden earrings [to make the
Golden Calf],’ the women refused and protested, as it is said, ‘The
whole people broke off the golden rings from their ears’ (Exodus 32:3).
The women did not participate in the making of the Golden Calf.
Similarly, when the Spies slandered [the Holy Land], and the people
complained, God issued His decree against them for saying, ‘We cannot
go up against the people . . .’ (Num 13:31). But the women werer not
part of that movement, as it is written, ‘No man of them survived . . .’ --no man, not no woman, since it was the men who refused to enter the
Holy Land, while the women approached Moses to ask for an
inheritance (27:1).16
Women emerge as exemplary in this midrash: they repair what men have
torn down, they reaffirm the value of love of the Holy Land and loyalty to the
one God that men, in the rebellions of the Spies and of the Golden Calf, have
eroded. This admirable history of women, however, is found only in the
midrashic texts. Within the biblical narrative, it is barely intimated. The
implication of this is profoundly paradoxical. In the written text, the absence of
women would seem to imply that they are included in the large dramas of the
Israelites in the wilderness; it is precisely in the midrash that women figure as
having a separate, hidden history. In effect, the midrash makes the reader aware
16
Tanchuma Pinchas, 7.
Introduction 16
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of a mistaken reading: all along, women have been really absent, really
elsewhere. An alternative history, the midrashic history of women, would take
us, at least at the most significant moments in the narrative, beyond the margins
of the biblical account.
Women’s story can be seen, then, at least at certain critical junctures, as the
repressed narrative of the biblical text. Midrash retains the traces of that
narrative and brings it to consciousness, with marked effects on the manifest
level of meaning. All the midrashic narratives about women, indeed, can be
registered in this way: the women’s mirror-play with their husbands in Egypt;
the rich material on the experience of women at the Red Sea and on Miriam’s
song/dance; Miriam’s well and its disappearance; and the strange emphasis on
the female role in Korah’s rebellion.17 All construct a counter-reality to the one
officially inscribed in the Torah; all deplore a complex ferment disguised by the
lucidity of the text. Like the unconscious in the psychic economy, women
remain a latent presence in their very absence; they represent the "hidden
sphere" which must remain hidden if it is to do its work with full power, but
which must be revealed in some form if that work is to be integrated.
***********************
If women serve as the unconscious of the biblical story, the place where
17
I am grateful to Dina Kazhdan, Tali Stern, and Bracha Zornberg who
pointed this out to me.
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Introduction 17
they come to light is the midrashic narrative. We have suggested that midrash
articulates the unconscious of the text: the hidden narratives, almost entirely
camouflaged by the words of the Torah, emerge from the spaces, from the gaps
in meaning, from the dream resonance of those words ("No man, not no woman
. . .") This tradition of reading is intensively developed in a later period by the
chasidic masters, who treat the midrashic texts as having, in their turn, emerged
into conscious meaning, and who play with the latent meanings within and
between those texts.
Ultimately, conscious and unconscious layers of meaning inform one
another; the written and oral Torah are not separated by an impermeable wall.
The conscious level alone, the written text with its plain meaning, the
undifferentiated history of the Israelite people in the wilderness, would provide
a sterile version of the Exodus. It is the interplay of conscious and unconscious
motifs that make for the grand narrative, which is capable of providing the
matrix within which future narratives can take shape. The "particulars of
rapture," in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, can evolve only where
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
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On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
iv.
The grand narrative of the Exodus, then, must be a midrashic narrative in
which the hidden, the repressed, can be at least partially witnessed. If the
Exodus is to be a narrative for all times and all places, as Sefath Emeth, for
example, claims,18 it must be capable of particular reincarnations through time.
As in Roland Barthes’ famous example of those names of countries which
cover the map in such large capitals that they become effectively invisible, the
Exodus has come to constitute the very framework of Jewish perception and,
for that very reason, is only partially visible.
This metanarrative of the Exodus is the subject of a lyrical passage in R.
Kook’s Olath Re’iya:
The Exodus was such an event as only a crudely superficial eye could
read as an event that happened and ended, and that has remained as a
18
See, e.g., Sefath Emeth, VaEra, 25.
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Introduction 19
magnificent memory in the history of Israel and in the general history of
mankind. But in reality, with a penetrating consciousness, we come to
realize that the essential event of the Exodus is one that never ceases at
all. The public and manifest revelation of God’s hand in world history is
an explosion of the light of the divine soul which lives and acts
throughout the world and which Israel, through its greatness and training
in holiness, merits to disseminate powerfully through all the habitations
of darkness to all generations. The essential work of the Exodus
continues to have its effect; the divine seed which achieved Israel’s
redemption from Egypt is still constantly active, in the process of
becoming, without interruption or disturbance.19
All the life of the worlds, of individuals and nations, all power of
generation and regeneration, can be read in the metahistory of the Exodus. For
R. Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the restored State of Israel, it is the organic
connection between the "explosion" of particulars and the rapture of the Exodus
that is accessible to the penetrating consciousness. The Exodus has no end and
no limit. Such a view sets itself firmly against the historicizing consciousness,
which Susan Sontag has characterized as the "predatory embrace" of the modern
period, "the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself . . . More
and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archaeologists of
19
R. Kook, Olath Re’iyah, 26--7.
Introduction 20
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these ruins-in-the-making."20
From R. Kook’s perspective, the original liberation from Egypt participates
in a continuum of sun-bursts: the history of man’s possibilities is not exhausted.
Indeed, in the tradition of Chasidic thought from which he draws his inspiration,
the original Exodus need not even be regarded as the overwhelming epic event
that reduces all future experiences of liberation to pale replicas. Precisely the
opposite dynamic may be true: the people who left Egypt were perhaps unfit for
redemption, incapable of hearing God’s word in any real fullness. Their hopes
in leaving the land of terror were shriveled by the cramped conditions of their
nurture; they were cramped hopes, Egyptian-shaped hopes. Like the patient
entering analysis, who can have only a distorted view of the process awaiting
him, of the way in which it will expand the underlying structures of experience,
the Israelites leave Egypt
more like a man
Flying from sonething that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
( William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey.")
And like the analyst whose hopes for the patient are radically different from
20
Susan Sontag, ‘“Thinking Against Oneself”: Reflections on Cioran,’ in
Styles of Radical Will (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 74-5.
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Introduction 21
those of the patient for himself, God begins a process with His people in a stage
of arrested development, a process that will lead them into fuller, unimagined
life.
However, in this scenario, in which God’s hopes and the people’s hopes are
profoundly different, there is a hidden assumption about the arrested "truer self"
of Israel, the self that harks back to the foundational narratives of Genesis. Both
analyst and patient share a hope for the unfolding of that truer self. But such a
shared hope is at first almost invisible; only the discordance is visible.
Intensely challenging passages in Chasidic literature tell of the
development of that divine seed in history. Later narratives of the Exodus
complete and compensate and restructure the inadequacies of the historical
event as the people first lived it. Redemption is engendered by the changing
stories of redemption that, with richer idiom, amplify the particulars of rapture.
Sefath Emeth, for example, addresses the unconsummated experience of
the historical Exodus.21 Telling the story of the Exodus is so imperative because
of the chipazon, the panic haste, in which the original generation left Egypt. The
existential quality of the historical Exodus, that is, reflected a rawness, an
immaturity of spirit that later narratives, in some sense, will bring to ripeness.22
In this way, Sefath Emeth beautifully explains the people’s "deafness" to the
21
Sefath Emeth, Pesach, 72.
22
See Chapter Three, pp.*************
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Introduction 22
possibility of redemption: "And they could not hear Moses for shortness of
spirit and hard labour" (6:9). What they are unable or unwilling to hear is God’s
promise couched in four synonyms for redemption ("I shall release . . . I shall
save . . . I shall redeem . . . I shall take you to Me as a people . . ." [6:6-7]) --the classic arba leshonot geulah (four languages of redemption). "And
therefore," writes Sefath Emeth, "we must now tell the story of the Exodus!"
The paradox is compelling: out of the inadequacy of the historical event as
it was registered by those who lived it is generated "Torah for all generations,"
each with its own language, its own existential framework for conceiving of
redemption. Each generation thus has an exclusive opportunity to reorganize,
reorder (seder --- order --- is the theme as well as the name of the Passover
night) what originally was inchoate, disoriented. So "the story of redemption is
constantly being revealed," as a fuller, more complex sense of self yields richer
understandings of the master-narrative.
The four languages of redemption, then, represent the infinite particular
idioms that will inform the narratives of the future, which will continuously
articulate aspects of what was only implicit in the original event. In the context
of an uninterrupted interaction with the master narrative, the people will
engender forms of testimony to God’s redemption that are not merely
restatements of the known, but testings, trials of self and world that give birth to
new structures of knowledge. Like the technique known as "remastering," in
which precious original musical performances are liberated years later from the
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Introduction 23
limitations and distortions of primitive recordings, the later languages of
redemption seek to liberate an original divine impulse in an unprecedented
manner.23
Such a concept of narrative cuts away the security of an ideal original
narrative. Indeed, in a rather disconcerting sense, it dismantles the very platform
that the original narrative uses to do its work: a privileged story of redemption
replete with miracles, an inspired and infallible leader whose every word comes
from God. The issue is not the objective truth of these ideas, but the people’s
need to wean themselves of the infantile longings that have invested Moses with
such powerful transferential significance. The power of the transferential
fantasy helps to move the patient towards healing; but, at a more mature stage,
the fantasy must be dissolved. The anguish of this paradox is the subject of
Chapter Nine: in the light of a comment by Meshech Chochma,24 --- Talmudist
and contemporary of Freud --- Moses’ "transferential" role becomes the latent
theme of the Golden Calf episode.
If fuller and richer languages for redemption are to evolve, fantasies that
fetishize the past must be relinquished. The "particulars of rapture" can come
23
For a similar notion of transgenerational religious experience, in which
the later experience completes and in a sense transcends the original,
scriptural experience, see Sefath Emeth, Pesach, 55.
24
Meshech Chochma to 32:19.
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Introduction 24
forth only when "Two things of opposite natures" interplay. This is where the
midrashic mode is powerful. Here, past and present interact: the original text of
Exodus and the narrative that will endow that matrix with generative force. Here
is the mutual dependence --- "as a man depends On a woman" (Stevens); for
without the black-on-white words of the scriptural narrative nothing can be
generated, but without the evolving "languages," idioms of redemption, the
foundational rapture recedes beyond recall. Or, more importantly: a strong
written narrative endows the future with a structure of meaning; but it is the
weakness, the gaps, the "unthought known" (Christopher Bollas’s expression) in
that narrative that paradoxically invites the future to discover the primordial
energy repressed in the text. As we have seen, it is the Israelites’ inability to
appropriate their own redemption that makes redemption a matter of endless
testimony.
In this sense, I have suggested that there are two narratives of Exodus: the
narrative of the day, and the narrative of the night (see Chapter Three). The daynarrative tells of the public, manifest, consciously perceived and transmitted
liberation from Egypt; the night-narrative tells of chipazon, of panic haste, of
unassimilated experience, as it tells also of God who "leaps" (pasach) --- a
lurching, syncopated movement --- over houses, creating gaps for liberation. It
is this second narrative that engenders questions and multiple, not always
harmonious narratives. This narrative, too, is the domain of the unconscious, of
midrashic counter-worlds that endow the manifest world of the biblical text
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Introduction 25
with depth and vitality.
The most potent image for the interaction of opposites that I am trying to
convey remains the erotic one: " . . . as a man depends On a woman . . . This is
the origin of change." It is for this reason, it seems to me, that the midrash is
fascinated by that alternative world of the feminine, which must not be revealed,
but which must be intimated. The mirrors in which women play with their
husbands, "swinging them with words,"25 remain, for me, the most evocative
symbol of redemption. Here is the mode of infinite possibility, of six hundred
thousand babies at a birth --- and it is all done with mirrors. A river of
coruscating souls, endlessly varied, shimmers forth from these mirrors: who can
predict the force of these particulars of rapture? And yet, Moses’ voice,
suspicious, fastidious, is retained as a counter-force in the midrash. The effect is
of an almost unbearable tension: even as God chides Moses, supporting the
women with their mirror play, the values of gezera, of what must be, of order
and consciousness and control, are not totally neutralized.
Freedom and law, possibility and necessity: these are the poles between
which the electric current of redemption must run, if the particulars of rapture
are to come forth. In terms of reading practice, this means a dialectical tension
between peshat (plain meaning) and midrashic narrative. In philosophical or
psychological terms, this means an awareness of the tension between "finitude
25
Rashi to 38:8. See Chapter One, pp. ***********
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Introduction 26
and infinitude," to use Kierkegaard’s expression.
The central issue for Kierkegaard, and for readers of Exodus, is freedom:
"freedom is the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and
necessity."26 Each mode has its own danger, its form of despair. On the one
hand, there is "[t]he fantastic . . . which leads a person out into the infinite in
such a way that it only leads him away from himself;"27 in its relation to God, as
well, "this infinitizing can so sweep a man off his feet that his state is simply an
intoxication. To exist before God may seem unendurable to a man because he
cannot come back to himself, become himself."28 On the other hand, there is
another kind of despair which "seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self
by 'the others'. . . such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely
understood."29 This second despair, the despair of finitude, is entirely
unregarded in the world: this is the pathology of the gezera modality, which is
vindicated by all the prudential wisdom of the world:
For example, we say that one regrets ten times for having spoken to once
26
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),
30.
27
Ibid., 31.
28
Ibid., 32.
29
Ibid., 33-4.
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Introduction 27
for having kept silent --- and why? Because the external fact of having
spoken can involve one in difficulties, since it is an actuality. But to
have kept silent! And yet this is the most dangerous of all . . . Not to
venture is prudent. And yet, precisely by not venturing it is so terribly
easy to lose what would be hard to lose, however much one lost by
risking, and in any case never this way, so easily, so completely, as if it
were nothing at all --- namely, oneself.30
Between silence and speech, silence is the more dangerous: its very safety
endangers the self. Through such paradoxes, Kierkegaard conveys the
difficulties of the dialectic: between finitude and infinitude, possibility and
necessity, the human being struggles for an authentic freedom.
This struggle, I suggest, lies at the very heart of the project of reading
Exodus.31 Between the self that is and the self, or selves, that may be, the
particulars of rapture are always being reborn. It is for this reason that the
Exodus, and the Passover32 festival that celebrates it, focuses so compellingly
on telling and retelling the story. It is only by taking the real risks of language,
30
Ibid., 34.
31
See Chapter Eight for a discussion of finitude and infinitude figured in
the "bells and pomegranates" of Aaron’s priestly robe (*********)
32
Cf. the classic midrashic pun on Pesach - Peh sach ("the mouth
speaks").
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Introduction 28
by rupturing the autistic safety of silence, that the self can reclaim itself. To
venture into words, narratives, is to venture everything for the sake of that "self
before God."33
And yet --- and here, the dialectic becomes most painful --- perhaps all the
many words of the Exodus narrative, of the narratives of the future, specifically
of the Seder night, all in a sense weave endless words around the inexpressible
heart of the matter. As though by indirections to find direction out, we talk and
we tell at such length because we cannot articulate what is essential. We cannot
pluck out the heart of the mystery. Perhaps all the narratives in the book of
Exodus are externalized versions of an intimate story more truly told in The
Song of Songs. This, at least, is the midrashic view of the matter. The longing,
the dynamics of desire: this is the subject of Exodus.
So we speak and unpack our hearts with words, knowing that the essential
longing is enthralled in silence. R. Hutner34 writes of this tension, of the
repressed desire like an erotic longing that, inexpressible, erupts in displaced
forms. These complex eruptions of language are the progeny of a great silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent."
33
Sickness, 35. See Chapter Two for a discussion of speech as an
expression of liberation from Egypt.
34
Pachad Yitzhak, Pesach, 77. It is interesting that it is women’s desire
that serves as a model for this inexpressible spiritual energy.
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Introduction 29
R. Hutner describes the Jewish practice of a kind of verbal catharsis that
resembles the Freudian; his version might be, "Whereof one cannot speak, one
must say everything." Commenting on the lechem oni, the bread of affliction
(i.e. the matza) eaten on the Seder night, he bases his essay on the talmudic
expansion: "bread to which one responds with many words" (a pun on oni
[affliction] and onin [response]).35 These many words of the Seder night, of the
continuing narratives of Exodus, represent an absence, an unattainable longing
for full presence. The molten core of the self remains unreleased, unspeakable.
Therefore, the cascade of language, ideas, images, which, by displacement,
evoke a speechless passion. On Passover, the mouth speaks (peh sach): all the
particulars of rapture intimate an absolute desire.
R. Hutner’s account has a somber, almost tragic resonance. Ultimately,
there is no expressing the heart of the matter. All the coruscations of possibility,
all the midrashic versions of an original moment of liberation, all leave some
core self still in prison, still in Egypt (Mitzrayim), still constrained in narrow
places (meitzarim). All the mirrors of all the women cannot offer total
liberation.
And yet, even in R. Hutner’s somber account, there is the moment of
surprise: language is the very means by which the imprisoned heart gains
freedom. As in the psychoanalytic model, speaking of many things, one comes
35
B. Pesachim 36a.
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Introduction 30
by indirection at the core. This generation of truth through language, the
experience of speaking beyond one’s means, has an unwitting character. It
happens in the interaction between two people: "one does not have to possess or
own the truth in order to effectively bear witness to it."36
Language as testimony, then, can give access to the hidden passion; in a
sense, the "many words" of the Exodus narratives beget that passion. This
experience is, one might say, the very taste of freedom:37 the taste in the mouth
that is impossible to communicate to those unfamiliar with it, and that makes
one willing to become a medium of testimony.
I think of midrash with its "many words" concealing/revealing a central
mystery as offering a bridge between old hopes and the fullness of an unknown
future identity. New narratives of redemption create the very freedom that the
original protagonists could not "hear." The old hopes, as Wordsworth intimates,
are born from dread. The midrashic mode offers a transformation of those old
hopes and a new way of imagining the self. And the quest for such
transformation continues to inform the reading practice and the spiritual hopes
of those who enter this world of Exodus. This, at any rate, has been my quest in
36
Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of
Teaching,” in Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and
History (Routledge, Kegan, Paul), 15.
37
See Mei HaShiloach ll, 13b.
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Introduction 31
this book. I ask not to share the "secret of redemption" --- that is far beyond my
reach; but to find those who will hear with me a particular idiom of redemption.
And within the particulars of rapture to hear what cannot be expressed.