‘A Land that Devours its People’: Mizrahi Writing from the Gut

‘A Land that Devours its People’:Mizrahi Writing from the Gut

RUTH TSOFFAR

There in the abyss of abandonmentis a lostchildSilenced by a gaping-maw-momentAnd he vanishedAnd yet, at times, this moment emergesforeverinside himAs if the slaughtering knife of life hadgrasped himThus we said the knife-food1 we experience,experienced us consumedwhile we abide in the totality of longing.

(Hess, 1993: 7)2

Hanoch Levin (1944–99), the renowned Hebrew poet, playwright, essayist andjournalist, opens his play The Sorrows of Job (1993), with a macabre descriptionof Israeli society with its hierarchy and taxonomy of eating. At its apex is thenoble Job ‘who has eaten his fill’, followed by Job’s beggars, the highest class ofbeggars, who suck on leftover chicken bones. Below them are the beggars of

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beggars, who eat the leftovers of the leftovers, a soup of chewed bones. And, atthe bottom, the most beggarly beggar of all beggars, who is toothless and there-fore delighted by his liquid repast: the bone stew regurgitated by his fellowbeggars. Levin is interested in far more than presenting a morbid, gruesomedescription of the beggar stew. In this grotesque taxonomy of the chicken bonesthat have fed a dozen people (beggars), he pushes hunger and satiation to theirmythological extremes: one dies and is reborn into one’s rightful place aroundone’s food.

Within the philosophical framework of reward and punishment, the Book ofJob has become in Jewish culture a conventional allegory of the suffering Jew.Job, a virtuous believer in God who is happy and prosperous, is being tested bySatan, who inflicts upon him destruction upon destruction. Job responds to thisseries of tragic events by entering into a theological polemic addressing theproblem of evil along with three friends whom he engages in conversation,laments, hymns and prayers. It can be argued that the Book of Job is about thelimits of faith, an attempt to reconstruct human response at a moment whenthe understanding of divine justice is suddenly plunged into crisis. Accordingly,the Book of Job challenges the limits of Job’s faith, or, as Funkenstein (1993: 39)put it, the minimum of faith that one still must have in order to pass such a test.And so the biblical hunger for faith becomes, for Levin, the test of faith throughhungering. The play protests the imposition of faith on the individual. Levin notonly lowers the threshold of suffering to its lowest – literally, at the end, skew-ering Job on a spit as a human-kebab – he also strips faith to its bone, by repre-senting it instead through hunger and flesh.

Replacing faith with food brings us closer to the subject of ideology if weremain with the metaphor of feeding and the cultural institutions that mobilizeit. Levin’s description epitomizes the symptomatic treatment, not only of eatingand feeding in Hebrew literature, but of the ideological extremes that constructtheir language and rhetoric. In this sense, the graphic depiction of the mouth thateats gives way to the mouth that speaks. If it can be argued that ideology is nota question of essence but a question of extent, then the main issue to considerhere is at what point ideology becomes transmogrified from a cultural systeminto a cannibalistic force, and what in its initial articulation enables its transform-ation into violence.3

The focus of this article is on eating and feeding – including their extrememanifestation as cannibalism – as cultural tropes. Hebrew provides us with aunique point from which to begin; namely, the articulation of the root ’akhal, toeat. Indeed, in order to explore the origin of the discourse of hunger and itsrepresentation in Israeli/Jewish culture, we may be better served by turning from

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the master narrator of Job to the ma’akhelet, the sacrificial knife in the Genesisstory of ’akedah, or the binding of Yitzchak (Isaac). In Genesis 22:1–18, Godcommands Abraham to sacrifice his most beloved son, Yitzchak. The story tellsof Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah. Ultimately, as Abraham raises thema’akhelet, the slaughtering knife, God’s angel calls out, forbidding him to harmhis son. God provides a ram in Yitzchak’s stead. Normative Judaism emphasizesAbraham’s confidence in God as a precondition of the covenant, highlighting thattrials or tests in the Bible – the prototypes of which are the stories of Abrahamor Job – are ‘a test for the sake of he who is being tested’. These tests confounda man for the sake of his own consciousness, and with the purpose of determin-ing the limits of his faith and realizing his innate virtue, rather than provinghimself to God (Maimonides, 1999).

It is around the object of the ma’akhelet, its root ’akhal, to eat, and the narra-tive of the binding of Yitzchak, that the demands of ideology and its theoreticalethical standards for individuals and culture are articulated, and the paradigmsfor the binding – its language, imagined geography and reward – constructed.The article approaches the binding of Yitzchak as one of the founding narrativesof Israeli/Jewish consciousness, articulating, like the ma’akhelet, the roots of thepsychodrama of historical hunger, and its antipode, feeding, in contemporaryHebrew literature and culture. Despite the centrality of the binding to Levin’swriting, and despite his leftist radicalism and later censure, he is increasinglyrecognized today as a canonical writer. In order to locate counter-argumentsaround the history of the Israeli/Jewish ideology of food and hunger and theirsignifier, the ma’akhelet, it is useful to shift from the established canon to otherelements of the Israeli literary corpus. I focus on the way the psychologicaldrama of hunger and feeding is translated into poetic and aesthetic forms locatedat the intersection of ethnicities, genders, religions and politics within Israelisociety.4

The biblical description of Israel as ‘a land that devours its people’ (Numbers13: 32) embodies both the demands of the land and its potential power toconsume its people. It expresses a radical counter-version – a dibbah (libel) even– of the normative ideal of ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Numbers 13:5).5 As such, these polar images of a voracious land and a bountiful land presagethe 20th-century history and ideology of the state of Israel. Zionism, initially thediscourse of a European minority, has more recently been understood by post-Zionists and new historians as a totalizing system.6 With its sweeping creed offulfilling the nostalgic dream of a Jewish homeland, and with its boundlessappetite to settle the account of 2000 years of wandering and oppression in theJewish Diaspora, Zionism has become an immense ideological apparatus that,

‘A Land that Devours its People’ ! 27


mimicking the biblical description, has produced its own cannibalistic system ofthose who devour and those who are devoured.7 Zionism’s meta-narrative ofhomecoming, ‘Kibbutz Galuyot’, conveyed not only the physical ingathering ofJews from all over the world, but also became a new metaphor for the immenseenterprise of converting the Diaspora Jews – their experiences, histories,languages and appearances – into one homogeneous society. Not surprisingly,numerous tactics were employed to engender collectivity, communalism and anethos of belonging and rootedness (Katriel, 1987; Dominguez, 1989; Rogoff,2000).

The creation of the Israeli-born Sabra and the ‘cannibalistic’ mechanism ofthe melting pot worked to blend differences by rapidly assimilating them. Infact, the naturalization of Ashkenazi-Zionist culture and the erasure of thehistory of other ethnic minorities went hand in hand with the attempt to propa-gate a Jewish national culture and to promote eastern European models ofnationhood and society. Consequently, Mizrahi8 and other minority cultures,more organic to Israel’s Asian, North African or Levantine geography andpeoples were demoted and ‘disappeared’ (Shohat, 1988, 1989; Alcalay, 1993;Chetrit, 1997). The crisis of ideology that Israelis have experienced over the pasttwo or three decades was mostly motivated by the twofold desire to diversifythe record of Israeli society and to provide a more authentic description of it.As I and other scholars have demonstrated, the excessive ideological forcedeployed to foster national and religious unity has precluded the representationof minority cultures and the very possibility of perceiving the Zionist enterpriseas anything other than a closed and totalizing system. The dominant Zionistmodel has yet to provide, if it ever can, an adequate definition of Palestinians,Mizrahim and other minorities, such as Karaites or Bedouins, much less one ofgender, sexuality, religion or personhood.

Recent post-Zionist studies have attempted to describe the historical concep-tion of the dominant culture through the articulation of the ‘chosen body’ (e.g.Weiss, 2000), the ‘erotic, masculine body’ (Gluzman, 1997) and the ‘neo-colonial,assimilating body’ (Boyarin, 1997). From a perspective beyond the canonsituated in post-Zionist or Mizrahi territory, the ‘Jewish body’ belongs within aThird World politics, wherein it augments and extends the critical and contextualcultural analyses of Ella Shohat (1988, 1989, 2001), Ammiel Alcalay (1993, 1996),Gil Anidjar (1996, 2003), Raz-Krakotzkin (1998). In a later section, I will engagewith and contextualize the work of the Mizrahi poets Shelli Elkayam and EliBacher, and recuperate both their distinctive contributions to Hebrew literatureand their critique of the trope of hunger, eating and violence.



Hebrew Intertextuality and Cannibalism

How and why was this ‘Jewish body’ cleaved from its multi-ethnic situation toreflect instead the Zionist and biblical cannibal? As a construct of Jewish history,Zionism was arguably shaped in the image of European colonialism. Premised ona Eurocentric genealogy of knowledge, especially after the Holocaust, Zionismis represented as the ultimate common denominator of a past that leads naturallyto the solution of and in Israel.9 The 20th-century Israeli discourse of Hebrewmodernity has consistently relied on Jewish intertextuality as a site of legitimacyand legitimization, as an unfathomable source of knowledge and power that hasplayed a crucial role in the interpretation of Jewish (diasporic) history, collectivememory, calendars and life cycle. This discourse informs many sites of nostalgiaand longing for the creation of a native national culture. Hebrew intertextualityis based on a long tradition of the dialogic reading of texts, and on the debate andinterpretation of their meaning at different moments and location in Jewishhistory. The practice is evident in the creation of a Jewish body of works thatprovide a domestic archive of linguistic, legal or ethical references and principles.Over time, Jewish textual sources came to embody an institution of knowledgefor the people of the book, even within a secular framework, endorsing particu-lar narratives, models and codes with relevant significance.

The impact of nationalism on the representation of the Jewish past, and itshistory within a tradition of Jewish textuality, is important in understanding therole of biblical texts. At its early stage, the ‘making of collective memory andnational tradition’ is, as Zerubavel argues, at the heart of the idea that Zionismaimed to ‘recover’ the roots of Judaism by reclaiming the Jewish past. As in thecase of memory and history, the construction of the intertextual core of modernJewish identity was based on the solidification of a national canon of intertexts.The endorsement of certain texts for national consumption relied on an arbitraryand selective mechanism in which historical Jewish narratives and symbols werereinterpreted within a new Zionist-inflected narratological framework(Zerubavel, 1995: 3–12). Many of the Zionist ideologues in Vienna during the midand late 19th century, for example, tended to project a complete articulation ofZion (Israel) as a unique synthesis of local (Eastern European) Jewish traditionsand Talmudic values with European culture (Boyarin, 1997: 127).

Paradoxically, intertextuality by definition engages any given symbol, text, orwriter with other synchronic and diachronic texts in a cultural dialogue beyondtheir times and places. The incorporation of Jewish texts and biblical narrativesinto the national discourse closed off and suspended the cultural system ofmeaning. Likewise, Hebrew literature conformed to its Zionist apparatus. The



nationalization of Israel’s past along prescribed and didactic ideas of the newreality reduced the texts’ multivocality in an attempt to incorporate their diversehistories into the grand narrative of Zionism. The Bible itself was appropriatedinto the national discourse as a national text of return after 2000 years of exile.Stories such as the exodus from Egypt, David and Goliath, and the Maccabeesare reduced to the intertexts of Jewish heroism and survival in the face of imposs-ible odds (Zerubavel, 1995, 2004). Consequently, Hebrew intertextuality hasbeen rendered fixed and frozen as a static, symbolic national model. Somescholars (Berg, 1996; Dekoven Ezrahi, 1999) have claimed that the addition ofhitherto novel positions such as post-Zionist, feminist and even Mizrahi ethnic-ity have disrupted the received canon. Suffice it to say here, as I argue, that evensuch novel subjects are still conceptualized and constituted from within theZionist paradigm, which remains intact.10

Crucial to articulating the new ontology of the Jewish state is the Hebrewlanguage, which was imbued in Zionist discourse with a mystical dimension andrevolutionary momentum of its own (Kimmerling, 2001). Throughout historyJews read the Bible in Hebrew. From the late 1800s, the story of the Hebrewlanguage has been entwined with the historical chapter of Zionism; to write inHebrew became a redemptive act that not only helped to inscribe the Israelimaster narrative and its native subject, the Sabra, but was also instrumental ininventing the ‘new Jewish man’ of modernity (Almog, 1997: 127–32; Peled, 2002:28–30). Hebrew became an ideology in and of itself, simultaneously articulatingthe project of Israeli nationalism while building on old semiotics and structures(Zerubavel, 1995). The invention of the Sabra was just as much the creation of anew Hebrew-speaking Jewish native as it was of a trained reader of Hebrew texts.Benjamin Harshav puts it in a different order, describing Israel as ‘an ideologythat created a language that forged a society that became a State’ (1993: viii).

Minority literature and discourse, unlike radicalism in Israeli literature, is notsimply a site of agency and self-representation. The Hebrew language sets thelimits of the imagined geography of the body; it delimits one’s chance to imagineidentity as well as to belong. Historically, the choice to write in Hebrew wascrucial to writers of the Levant, who believed it would secure their inclusionwithin Israeli culture (see Alcalay, 1993: 1–27). Later social, economic, demo-graphic and literary developments led to the diversification of Hebrew, produc-ing a hierarchy of different literatures, each with its own ideological parametersof inclusion and exclusion.11

In emphasizing the distinctive contribution of Mizrahi authors, my intentionis not to diminish the relevance or effectiveness of non-Mizrahi writing andpoetry.12 Rather, I argue that, on the one hand, intertextuality is much more



problematic – ironically so – for minority writers, as their voices are drowned outin an intertextual cacophony that notates their geographical, historical and linguis-tic differences within the boundaries of national unity. On the other hand, inter-textuality also exposes the distorted power relations of canonic cultural modelsfor minorities, redefining them repeatedly as strangers to and in their own culture.From a minority perspective, intertextuality operates as a Janus-faced system. Itssignifying process ruptures the relationship between a signifier and its signified,thereby shifting meanings farther away from the lived experiences of minorities.If engagement with intertextual codes preconditions one’s ability to identify withand belong to the dominant culture, then minority writers could easily be rele-gated to constantly repositioning themselves within that culture.

To write from an ethnic or religious minority position outside the intertextualmatrix is to contest both cultural exclusion and the linearity and singularity ofthe national narrative, and to elaborate on – and to disturb – its complex andmulticultural nature. As in any attempt at writing post-structuralist history,minority writing can also be understood as an attempt to subvert the project ofZionist modernity by deconstructing the colonial moment from its counter-position.13 Because of the very different nature of their engagement in the politicsof power and domination, Mizrahi authors introduce new alternatives as a ‘siteof theory’, a minority position that potentially critiques the whole Zionist appar-atus. Such a minority ‘site of theory’ resituates intertextual references andcultural authority ‘through incommensurable positions’ while simultaneouslyexposing ‘the indeterminacy of intertextuality’. In fact, because of its immenseauthority, intertextuality is a feasible site from which to introduce the rupture ofreading and the ‘transmutations and translations’ of under-represented minori-ties, as it exposes their struggle to challenge the most canonical signifiers of desirein culture (Bhabha, 1994: 32–3).

The problem of intertextuality in Hebrew poetry and prose becomes especi-ally apparent in the general cultural engagement with the metaphor of food andfeeding. Still a young modernist, S.Y. Agnon published in 1932 a short story ‘PatShlemah’ (‘A Whole/Perfect Loaf’) (1960 [1932]).14 In it, alone in a restaurant,the hungry narrator orders a whole loaf of (perfect) bread, an order so absolutethat it can never be fulfilled.15 The desire for pat shlemah – an impossible utopianbread of redemption – grotesquely consumes the hungry narrator. Agnon’snarrator himself provides the disclaimer of his excessive and ultimately unattain-able choice, remarking, ‘I started admonishing myself for ordering pat shlemaheven though I would have more than enough with a single slice of bread’ (Agnon,1960: 153). For Agnon, in ‘Pat Shlemah’, the nightmare of hunger occasions anightmare of being gnawed on by a rat.



Fifty years later, Eli Bachar, a little acknowledged Israeli poet of MiddleEastern origin, asks, in his 1980 poem, ‘40 Days before Death’ (in Bachar, 1982),for ’okhel meduyak, or ‘precise, exact food’. It is within this discursive spaceopened by these two requests – one for satiating, surreal food, and the other formeasured, finite feeding – that I wish to recast Israeli culture and its relationshipwith the , ma’akhelet, the slaughtering knife. The poetic, literary articu-lation of the verbal root ’akhal, ‘to eat’, in connection with the ma’akhelet – theslaughtering knife in the binding of Yitzchak, in Genesis (22:1–18) – provides anexceptionally cogent cultural location in and from which to examine relation-ships between nurturing and violence, ethnic subjectivity and national ideology.

The accelerated production of Israeli society has been costly to minoritycultures if we realize that every aspect of culture – not only poetry and prose butalso children’s rhymes, youth initiation ceremonies, popular songs, army induc-tion ceremonies, and even the social concepts of food and eating – has beencoated with a European ‘whitewash’. To invoke a ‘bread’ metaphor: this massiveenterprise not only privileged the challah bread (an Eastern European twist breadmade for the Sabbath) at the cost of the pita bread (flat bread, common in theMiddle East), appropriating Mizrahi and Middle Eastern foods as Israeli, but alsoconsumed and devoured individual autonomy and cultural difference as acannibal act of colonial practices (Shammas, 2004).16 In fact, it is hard to find aMizrahi poet or writer who explicitly or implicitly does not address the issue ofconsuming ideology and the devoured self.

The discourse of eating helps to mark cultural differences. As anthropologistMaggie Kilgour puts it:

food in general is both a most basic human need and a highly complex symbolic system used todefine personal, national and even sexual differences. Since we are what we eat, cultural identityis constructed by dietary taboos that prescribe what is and is not edible. (Kilgour, 1998: 239)

Indeed, throughout history, certain eating practices came to identify and definespecific groups, delineating group boundaries along with the criteria of inclusionand exclusion.

As mentioned above, however, the act of eating not only can diminish differ-ences, but can also signify cannibalism, in the sense of the consumption of theweak by the strong in cases where survival is at stake. Symbolically, the term‘cannibalism’ refers allegorically to ever intensifying, violent power relationshipsbetween a nation-state and its people, resulting in the symbolic ingestion andconsumption of the individual. While the image of cannibalism may at first seemforeign to Jewish and Israeli discourse, the symbolic ‘ferocious devouring’ isactually invoked in the cultural discourse of Hebrew literature and the Jewish



imagination, and is tightly bound with the notion of extreme hunger and star-vation.17 As a metaphor, cannibalism highlights the distorted dialectics of ‘lack’and ‘excess’ in the individual’s relationship with the land, the language and theredemptive ‘re-past’ of Zionism at the moment wherein ideological feeding hasactually been transformed into overfeeding as an all-consuming, all-consumableextreme. The cannibalism metaphor captures the radical construction of apsychological, private self appropriated and incorporated into the ideologicalstate apparatus. The trope of cannibalism can generate an important criticalexposure of the deep pathological and violent manifestations of such relation-ships (Yue, 1999).18

Scholars such as Maggie Kilgour (1998) and William Arens (1998) approachthe anthropological study of cannibalism as a critique of colonialism, suggestingthat, as a myth, cannibalism was continually used as a tool of empire, a colonialdiscourse whose strategy was to justify the European imperialist ‘desire to absorb. . . others by projecting that desire onto a demonized “other”’.19 The modernworld, as Maggie Kilgour vividly argues, ‘has built itself on the blood and bonesof others’ (1998: 241) by differentiating itself from the cannibal savage as civil-ized and superior.20

And yet, another layer of critique argues that these critical works also effec-tively invert the colonialist trope of cannibalism and redefine it (Shohat and Stam,1994: 307–12). As a strategy of resistance (Bellei, 1998: 99), cannibalism can beunderstood as a metaphor of a cultural programme ‘based on the diagnosis of thesocial evils plaguing an undeveloped, colonized country desperately in need ofbecoming modern in terms of aesthetics, politics, and social reform’ (1998: 92).21

In this sense, anthropophagy represents a ‘collage of discourses’ that aggressivelystruggles to digest ‘varied cultural stimuli in all their heterogeneity’ (Shohat andStam, 1994: 310). Earlier, I characterized intertextuality as generating a cacoph-ony that – ironically – drowns out difference. It is also productive to recognizethe cannibalistic force of intertextuality as a colonizing system that devours theotherness it ostensibly acknowledges and exoticizes.

Feeding on Information

‘We are what we eat’ is a popular cliché. However, as I have suggested – and asHanoch Levin so gruesomely details in The Sorrows of Job (1993) – eating andfeeding, hunger and satiation, are acts and consequences that are both informedby and constitute Israeli social – and ethnic – hierarchies and taxonomies.Moreover, eating in Judaism has become a practice that is marked with a moraland ontological meaning. Traditional Judaism perceived food and feeding as



divine gifts and reward, instituting abundant distinctions between the edible andinedible that incorporate the experience of land, animals and the human body.22

As such, eating, in the Hebrew language, is tightly connected to its constitutivenarratives, from Eve’s first bite of the apple from the tree of knowledge to themagical manna of the Sinai desert, and from the priestly ritual of eating thesacrificial offering (korban, Leviticus 18:5) to many other types of offering, suchas the tithe, the meal offering (bikkurim) or the offering of the Paschal lamb. Thisconnection is most highly articulated in the imperative to eat the korban, themeat offering for, ‘In the most holy place shalt thou eat it, every male shall eatit; it shall be holy unto thee’ (Numbers 18:10). The ritual of eating symbolic foodis a way of internalizing history and memory. As such, food not only definesJewish collectivity and its shared traditions, it also becomes that very traditionitself.

Moreover, one’s identity is premised on taxonomies of food. A cultural site ofdiscipline and order, these food taxonomies consist of a long list of permissionsand prohibitions, from avoiding pork or shellfish to searching for the trademarksymbols of rabbinic authorities who certify the products as kosher for consump-tion. Eating kosher involves more than the strict dietary separation betweendairy and meat products. To be ritually permissible an animal should be slaugh-tered according to halakhic rules and salted and cooked halakhically.23 Eating isa conscious act, marked by distinctions, with attention to aspects of both spaceand time, and to the careful separation of meat and dairy cooking utensils. Theseculinary practices are a crucial aspect of the production of the conscious mouth,which becomes the site of control over hunger and desire.

’Akhal is an ancient Semitic root, common to all Semitic languages, and yet itsdevelopment in Hebrew is unique and relevant. Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s dictionaryenlists seven usages of the word: (a) to eat, (b) metaphorically, to consume, (c) toexpend and appropriate, taking something that belongs to someone else, andusing it, (d) to pass the time, waste time, (e) to occupy a space, (f) to use, and (g)to corrode (1959: 208–14). The subject of eating, that is, who (and what) eats, isimportant. In addition to the actual eater, the metaphorical subject that eatsusually has a capacity to take over: fire eats; moths eat; jealousy eats; cancer, likeother diseases, also eats. And so eating becomes a ferocious violent act: land eats;knives eat and swords eat.

The object of eating, as expected, also varies in Hebrew: in addition to foodand swords, one eats a scroll, money, time, knowledge, hardship, bitterness(mrorim) and plagues. Moreover, one can simply eat her- or himself sick withworries, regret or guilt (from Yiddish) and also be eaten by black bile (melan-choly). Modern Hebrew (in a way similar to English) elaborates further: cars eat



gas; machines eat paper. The relationship between subject and object is ambiva-lent. Notice the following biblical allusion: ‘Must the sword devour forever?Don’t you know that it will end bitterly?’ (II Samuel 2:26) The fact that theimperfect form of the verb to eat, to’khal, is identical in both the second personmasculine (you) and the third person feminine (she, it, the sword), expands themeaning of the question by moving from the animated sword to the personholding it, as both subject and object are devouring and being devoured by warand ‘man’s’ desire for victory. The hunger of the sword for blood and death iseternal, as much as ‘you’ (second person masculine) will devour the swordforever.

The object of eating, as expected, also varies in Hebrew: in addition to foodand swords, one eats a scroll, money, time, knowledge, hardship, bitterness(mrorim), and plagues. Moreover, one can simply eat herself or himself sick withworries, regret or guilt (from Yiddish) and also be eaten by black bile (melan-choly). Modern Hebrew (in a way similar to English) elaborates further: cars eatgas, machines eat paper. The relationship between subject and object is ambiva-lent. Notice the following biblical allusion: ‘Must the sword devour forever?Don’t you know that it will end bitterly?’ (II Samuel 2:26) The fact that theimperfect form of the verb to eat, to’khal, is identical in both the second personmasculine (you) and the third person feminine (she, it, the sword), expands themeaning of the question by moving from the animated sword to the personholding it, as both subject and object are devouring and being devoured by warand ‘man’s’ desire for victory. The hunger of the sword for blood and death iseternal, as much as ‘you,’ (second person masculine) will devour the swordforever.

Hebrew culture, at least in vernacular language, highlights less what one eatsand more the very idea that everyone is cooking something and that this some-thing can be a plot, a business scam, a humorous pun or childish teasing. Thesemantic field of ‘eating’ includes not only the sexual and social recipient, butalso the feeder.24 This, the causative position, from the verb le-ha’akhil, does notnecessarily refer to food, but also to information, knowledge, ideas, noodles(lies)25 and tricks. Eating, in this context, refers to ‘believing’, in the sense ofaccepting and trusting the information, or, in a more cynical sense, to being a‘sucker’ who actually pays the consequences of gullibility. Le-ha’akhil is aderogatory reference to the fact that one is unfavourably in a disadvantageouspower position of being teased or mocked. An expression such as ’akhalta ’otah,‘you ate it’, where ‘it’ is always feminine, means that ‘you swallowed it’ (i.e. theruse), with an implicit sexual allusion: ‘you ate her’. If in American culture‘seeing is believing’ (Dundes, 1977), in Israeli culture ‘eating is believing’, as a



reminder that one should remain alert to the possibility of being deceived byanother Israeli feeder. And if one has doubts or if one is gullible, then, as theHebrew expression goes, ‘he will eat ten people like you for breakfast’. Thataccepting information passively in Israeli culture poses a threat to one’s integrityreveals much about the flimsiness and easily contested nature of discursivechannels of communication. One response to the overfeeding and overloading ofinformation can be found in the graphic metaphor of vomiting as an expressionof repulsive excess.

Pioneer folklore established new parameters for the socialization of eating.The ‘we’ generation emphasized collective eating as metaphor and practice. Forexample, the expression ‘we all ate from the same plate (mess kit)’ was a nostal-gic expression of solidarity and shared values. Likewise, to eat chatzatz (gravel),kadachat (malaria), kash (hay) or chara’ (shit), represents the hardships enduredduring those early pioneering days.26 In the same way, the metaphor of cookingwas invoked at times of national crisis: ‘Golda’s kitchen’, for example, replacedthe ‘war room’ during the Yom Kippur War, a reference to the then primeminister’s secretive meeting place for military strategizing. The expression playedupon the idea that in a ‘political kitchen’ something is always being cooked(plotted).

The Mizrahi Altar and Elkayam’s Knife

Many Mizrahi writers have responded to the paradigmatic forces of the themesof excessive overfeeding by addressing issues of violence, sexuality, desire andbody image. In many ways, the idea of internal exile, or exile within thehomeland, is a theme that highlights the estrangement and alienation of writersof Middle Eastern and North African origin. Second- and third-generationIsraeli Sabras depict ‘the ethnic problem’ through countless tactics and literarydevices, including the binding of Yitzchak. For example, in his first novel ’Akud(The Bound), the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa, is haunted by thequestion ‘What did Yitzchak think on the morning of the ’akedah (binding)?’More generally, he asks, ‘What would be the childhood stories of the fathers inGenesis if they were to be told?’27 Like Yitzchak, Swissa’s protagonist, Yochai,will follow his father, at least as a young boy. But because he is guided by thenarrative of Yitzchak (and its absent voices), Yochai ends up running away fromthe itinerary his father charted for him only to realize that the old story of theFathers has already predetermined his movements: he is forever bound. ’Akud,the passive participle of ’akedah, means having the hands and legs tied together.



It points to a permanent state, an adjective that ties Swissa to Yitzchak and tothe tradition of Jewish narratives. Swissa’s dilemma, therefore, is how to recon-struct a language for the historical silence not of the children of Genesis but ofhis own.28 What kind of narrative can be written from that bound position, aposition that has kept him running away from one exile to another only to learnthat he is unable to unbind his father’s vow to obey? On his journey Yochai isexposed to a series of physical abuses: he is molested, beaten and raped. Hisdesperate run in the alleys of the righteous fathers, the tsadikim – ‘What, thehell, did the tsadikim do during their adolescence?’ – ends with the totalcolonization of his body. For Swissa, the ’akud is the ontological condition ofmultiple exiles.

As I noted earlier, Mizrahi writing helps us explore alternative textual strat-egies to circumvent the power of intertexts and their tenacious automatic connec-tion to Zionist ideology, for the space that this intertext describes is not onlyrestrictive, silencing other narratives, it is also violent. In fact, Mizrahim areushered into this intertextual space only after they have proved that they are wellversed in canonical culture; it is as though they needed to ‘do their homework’in order to obtain a licence for admission into the literary world. Many writers,such as Shimon Ballas, Sami Shalom Chetrit and Tikva Levi, earned advancedacademic degrees in disciplines such as literature, political science, sociology orArabic. Many are engaged in academic careers that help to legitimize theirliterary pursuits.29 But perhaps something of the peculiar position of Mizrahiwriters in relation to the canon can be exemplified in their position with regardto God. As Ella Bat Zion reveals in her poem: ‘We, a group of poets, speakto/converse with God with our face backward’ (1993: 7).30 Can Mizrahi writersexpand the allegorical space of intertextuality while negotiating new possibilitiesfor dialogue within Israeli culture? Two poems by Shelly Elkayam address thequestion of ‘edible limits’ through a poetic dispute over the cultural semantics ofthe root ’akhal, to eat, with reference to measure and quantity.

Elkayam, born in 1965, lives in Jerusalem and is an activist on issues includ-ing peace, women’s politics and writers’ social rights. One of the founders of themovement East for Peace and a former delegate to international women’s confer-ences in Nairobi and China, Elkayam is a lively and outspoken public figureamong intellectuals in Jerusalem. She has published two collections of poems,Nitsat Ha-Limon (1983) and Shirat Ha-’Architekt (1987), along with severalchildren’s books. Her poetry engages the construction of an alternative ethnicand feminist location from where she can articulate questions, observe newlyplaced mirrors, and invoke sensual sites of new sounds and smells.



Where to Do You Love Me?

Where from do you love me so, and where toWhere to do you love me, and whyWhy precisely me and how muchHow many years can one for years so many years and more what have I made.Tell me, what have I made if I had made so I would know how to make such love

If you put me in your heart like a knife (ma’akhelet),From within your heart I will ask you a knife-cutting (ma’akhelet) question.Why, of all pawned items did you choose a knife (ma’akhelet).What inside you demands the binding of the knife (ma’akhelet).

On its face it seemsEasy and simpleThat your heartHas become a burning bushWhich has not beenScorched (’ukkal)

Whereof do you love me so, and whereinWherein do you love me, and whereforeWherefore precisely me And how longHow many long years can one for years so many years and more how did I make it.Tell me what have I made if I had made so I would know if to make such love.31

In Elkayam’s poem ‘Where to Do You Love Me?’ the woman probes herbeloved about his desire and love for her. If her questions to him imply that hehas the answers, articulating them assumes an agency – one of solicitation – onher part. It would be possible to read the poem as a powerful protest against theshortcomings of heterosexual love if not for two words – ma’akhelet and ’ukkal– that reveal the intertextual depth of the poem and the long-lasting reverbera-tion of biblical narratives in contemporary Israeli culture and Hebrew poetry.For speakers of contemporary Hebrew, the ma’akhelet, the slaughtering knife,and ’ukkal, from the unconsumed (inedible) burning bush, allude directlyto their originary narratives (Genesis 22, and Exodus 3:2, respectively). Theinvocation of these biblical terms transports the reader to their specific narrativesand geographical sites. They tend to be limited to their biblical contexts (Kartun-Blum, 1996).32 In a broader sense, the terms constitute cultural tropes whichhistorically have articulated their genealogy spanning their archaic and modernconceptions – the very predicament Elkayam addresses thematically.

Elkayam invokes the boundlessness of time by using many different questionwords. In the first stanza, for example, the questioning subject augments anadditional question in each line, followed by the connective vav (and). The resultis the doubling of the number of questions from five to ten: ‘Where from do you



love me so, and where to/ Where to do you love me, and why.’ The questionsare jammed together, referring repeatedly to open-ended adverbial expressions oftime: ‘How many long years can one for years so many years and more how didI make it.’ Such an intense interrogation, with its repetitions, is tantamount to anassault on the limits of knowledge. Do they inspire endless possibilities? Anobvious answer? Or perhaps, more tragically, do they point to an innate inabilityto answer at all? Like a parable, Elkayam’s questions become her answers.

Elkayam juxtaposes the verb ’akhal (to eat) with both ma’akhelet (slaughter-ing knife), and ’ukkal (the unconsumed [inedible] burning bush), exposing theirsignifying role in Israeli consciousness and their violent agency in directingcultural trajectories. By invoking the slaughtering knife and the burning bush,Elkayam enters into an ultimate male, patriarchal, space. She thrust the twoobjects into the heart of the male, and the poem, in the process of activating thetwo master narratives: Abraham’s binding of Yitzchak and God’s appearance toMoses in the burning bush. The female’s apparent naiveté and quest for knowl-edge become her subversive position from which she rethinks the meanings ofthese narratives and reads them as both a woman and a Mizrahi. Ironically, hermarginal position enables her to appropriate the immense space of patriarchalknowledge that her insistent questions have penetrated.

Ma’akhelet and sneh, the knife and the burning bush, have drawn the contoursof Hebrew consciousness around the root ‘to eat’ as a space of materiality andimagined potentiality. They unfold the founding narratives about the genesis ofindividuals and people, as God enunciates a promise: one people, one nation, oneland. The two sites in Elkayam’s poem constitute the paradigm of Jewish his-toriography, underscoring the revelation of identity and divinity. Mount Moriah,on which both Temples were built, is perhaps the most sacred place in Judaism,and is identified as the very locus of divinity.33 Today, what is known as TempleMount is at the heart of the Palestinian/Jewish dispute over Jerusalem. Similarly,the site of the burning bush is Har Ha-Elohim, God’s mountain in the SinaiDesert. It is later referred to as Mount Sinai, on which God gave the Torah toMoses. From within the burning bush God reveals himself ‘historically’, saying,‘I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the Godof Jacob’ (Yerushalmi, 1989: 6), thereby already inscribing the opening lines ofthe grand narrative of Judaism and the patriarchal genealogy of the new nation.The idea of the chosen people, with its emphasis on the aetiology and mytholo-gized origin of the relationship of Israel with God, is a crucial aspect of thebiblical narrative and the historical consciousness it engenders, which compen-sates for the relatively recent, non-mythical origin of the people of Israel(Funkenstein, 1993: 31–4).



But more intimately, both objects, the knife and the burning bush, figurepredominantly in Jewish consciousness, for in these objects the divine hastouched humans and has transformed them forever. In these two sites, God’spresence is approximated and becomes perceptible through voice, objects andvisual appearance, subverting the materiality of the objects in these sites and tran-scending everyday reality in an unfathomable moment with a revelatory messageabout totality. This totality, in part, communicates primordial love in the histori-cal intimacy that the relationship between God and Israel will gain. But, ironi-cally, as soon as Abraham’s gesture of lifting the knife is transformed from an actof violence into an act of love, the meaning of the knife is further complicated:despite its devouring nature, the , ma’akhelet (slaughtering knife) does notsimply ask for blood. (This change is also reflected in the general usage of theterm ’akedah.) Although ’akedah literally means ‘binding’, referring to the act oftying the sacrifice to the altar, in its later usage the word has become a synonymfor the act of sacrificing, which is how it is translated into English. The story ofAbraham is perceived, accordingly, as the story of the sacrifice of Yitzchak, eventhough Abraham did not actually sacrifice him.

Elkayam’s intertextuality makes use of the fact that in Hebrew, the knife,ma’akhelet, is grammatically female, and the bush sneh is unambiguously gram-matically male, alluding to the possibility of reading these objects as metonymicrepresentations of male (which includes God) and female. The first-personspeaker in Hebrew, accordingly, can be understood as the collective female I,especially in regard to the question of being chosen:

Why precisely me and how muchHow many years can one for years so manyyears and more what have I made.

Elkayam highlights the assumption that there ought to be a connectionbetween being chosen and doing something to deserve that status. The infinitedance of love between the male – like the burning bush, he appears inhuman,unconsumed and unconsuming – and the female – like the knife, she is sharp,decisive, uncompromising and threatening to consume – encodes the irreconcil-ability of sexuality as embedded in the dominant gender ideology in Israeli/Jewish culture. It engages the couple in an eternally disruptive entanglementbetween the consuming female and the inconsumable male. And, despite theirlinguistic proximity, the distance between the narrative of the ma’akhelet andthe narrative of the burning bush, is tantamount to differences in the reading ofthe promise, the covenants and the ‘chosenness’. As specially configured in thepoem, the narrative of knife and the one of the burning bush negotiate a new



position: now the female approaches not only male culture but God himself withsome long overdue questions.

If you put me in your heart like a knife (ma’akhelet),From within your heart I will ask you a knife-cutting (ma’akhelet) questionWhy, of all pawned items did you choose a knife (ma’akhelet)What inside you demands the binding of the knife (ma’akhelet)

Issues of gender and religion are intertwined here, alluding to the fact thatJewish textuality is a product of the institution of male culture and its represen-tation. Elkayam’s subversive reading, and the very subversion of these two inter-texts, redefines love in the contemporary Israeli context, in which Israel, buildingon its traditional depiction, is imagined as a ‘woman’. Elkayam asserts thatresorting to love is but an illusion of escaping the potential and potent violenceinherent in the fire (burning bush) and the knife. By positioning them togethershe activates the broader semantic meaning of the root ‘to eat’ ’akhal, animatingits seductive capacity to conceal its devouring and violent nature.34 Both objectsare arguably what literary theorists Shoshana Felman and Mieke Bal attribute toboth the fire and the sword, namely, an ‘interesting challenge to truth’ becausethey move between being a ‘thing’ and being an ‘event’. Like the fire and thesword-in-action – sacred and divine – the knife and the burning bush can become‘the instrument of “rupture,” the breaking off of relations, and of “coupure,” thecutting: penetrating and dividing’ (Bal, 1988a: 22).

As I have noted, the Semitic root ’akhal refers to simple eating, but it alsomeans to devour, to consume, to destroy and to take away, and it is in this sensethat the 11th-century Talmudic commentator Rashi explains the root ofma’akhelet, saying that ‘it is “a knife,” because it eats the flesh’ (Rashi, Genesis22:10). An object of rupture and assimilation, the knife penetrates and ‘eats’. Thesame is true of fire. Elkayam’s ‘knifing monologue’ deconstructs erotic love byinsistently posing unanswerable questions, slicing through violent patriarchalauthority and warping linear time. She builds on the wide semantics of the verb’akhal. Not only is ma’akhelet invested with cannibalistic desire, but eating toohas been strongly invested with sexuality and the language of love. This desire isevocative of the satisfying breast as a ‘prototype of the expression of sexual satis-faction’ (Freud, 1961: 48 in Kilgour, 1998: 245). Eating is tied to libidinalpleasure, survival, and desire for incorporation and fusion of boundaries. Foodand hunger also threaten to transform the eater into the one who is eaten, as inthe case of the narrator in Agnon’s ‘Pat Shlemah’, noted earlier.

Elkayam’s ma’akhelet keeps the glittering and sharp cutting-edge of its terror.For Elkayam’s inquisitive female subject, the knife is her mouth, a mouth that



cuts. Her discursive position becomes a violent act that insists upon knowing andtherefore becomes an instrument of penetration and rupture. The poem’s laststanza makes it clear that this relationship leads to nothingness and oblivion.Elkayam tells us that love, especially women’s love, is severed by the knife andcharred by the burning bush. Precisely because these all-consuming objectscontained and thereby limited the horizons of the new Israeli (Zionist) imagin-ation, they have effectively constructed the dead zone of language.

The Smell of the Covenant

In many ways the poem ‘Where to Do You Love Me’ extends Elkayam’s earlierpoem (and question), ‘How Many Years Can a Man’, which opens her collection,The Poetry (Or Singing) of the Architect (1987).

How many years can a man (Adam) paceAmong the Pieces of flesh35 –The smell of the covenantStronger for him than the smell of the carcass.

In ‘How Many Years Can a Man’ Elkayam takes us back to the problematic,rarely visited site of ‘Ha- Brit ben ha-Btarim’ (the Covenant of the Pieces/Flesh)in Genesis 15. Time, in her poem, stretches far beyond the path that Hebrewpoetry and the covenant have drawn. In Genesis, this covenant is the firstdialogue between God and Avram (later Abraham). Before this interaction, Godspeaks to Avram and he, Avram, responds by acting in accordance with God’sdemands by going to the land of Canaan and builds an altar to God.36

This covenant is important because it constitutes Abraham’s identity inrelation to God through his newly invented nativeness. In this covenant, Godmaps out the borders of the Promised Land and lists the ten different nativenations over which Israel will take control. Abraham is given both the land andthe peoples of the land. God’s first promise is ‘Fear not, Abram, I am a shield toyou; your reward shall be very great’ (Genesis 15:1). In response, Abraham posesthe questio: ‘O Lord God, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die child-less’ ‘Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs’(Genesis 15:2) and God asserts, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if youare able to count them . . . so shall be your offspring’ (Genesis 15:5). Further,God promises the land: ‘I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of theChaldeans to assign this land to you as a possession’ (Genesis 15:7). Abraham’ssecond question is: ‘O Lord Godm how shall I know that I am to possess i?’(Genesis 15:8). In that sense, Elkayam’s corollary question in the poem, ‘How



many years can a man . . .’ continues the spirit of inquiry in Abraham’s questions.Not only is the poem explicitly framed by the impossible duration of time,pointing to the fact that it has been too long, time is also implicated by the strongsmell of the terrifying vulture-attracting site of the covenant.37 God tellsAbraham to cut up into pieces (batar) for him five different animals. Abrahamobeys, but the horrific ordeal triggers a coma-like sleep.38 Regina Schwartzargues that this ‘cutting covenant’ is at the very heart of the violent discourse ofbiblical covenants, building as it does on the literal meaning of the verb karat, tocut and form, and thereby to establish a covenant (1997: 21–5, 15–38).

The enactment of the covenant performs a body-act ritual that reinforces thepromise of God’s speech act. On the one hand, it is not difficult to understandAbraham’s demand for a concrete sign as a kind of hunger: a hunger for knowl-edge and a hunger for offspring, especially now that God has introduced a cosmicmetaphor of countless stars and grains of sand. After all, it is highly ironic forGod to open a genealogical discourse of nation with Abraham, who is not yeteven a father. Focusing entirely on the promise and the infinite duration of thatgenealogy emphasizes the open-ended aspect of God’s speech act and its poten-tial to become a cosmological myth. Abraham emerges from his coma as theultimate believer, having internalized God’s prophecy of Jewish history throughits lasting covenant.

Although Elkayam’s constructed site of the covenant is increasingly informedby time, it is identified by its distinctive scent.39 Here, the sacred space is trans-formed into a site of competing smells: that of the internalized, phantasmagoriccovenant associated with the carcasses presented to God by Abraham. Herpoem’s discursive blend of truncated and contested history makes its meaningnot through textual signifiers, but rather through the evocation of a repressedcultural memory. The carcasses (pgarim) and their rotten smell are not andcannot be confined and restricted to the five animals that Abraham slaughteredand dismembered. Figuratively speaking, decaying body parts remain strewnabout the discursive space of Israeli and Jewish texts, after all these centuries,after all these years. Time, if frozen, is emptied of its historical value in grotesqueways. The smell of time, however, is progressive, evidenced by both the extreme,continuous obscenity of the carcasses and the accumulated layers of historicalslaughters. The sensation of smell revives and binds the historical memory ofcorporeal experience in the same way that Adam, this history’s main protagonist,is still stepping among the pieces of the covenant.40 Elkayam makes his actionseem more concrete than God’s promise to Abraham. It draws attention to thefact that dead carcasses have paved the road of history and that their smellsummons a testimony that we so assiduously try to ignore.



Elkayam is well aware of the power of this biblical narrative that has force-fully produced a precise geopolitical claim for Jewish land, tirelessly redrawingmore than a map; indeed the entire course of Jewish/Israeli national history isdelineated. The site of the smelly covenant implicitly documents an entirenational narrative of death and dying that directly challenges received percep-tions of the covenant. Intended to be read in conjunction with its biblical inter-text, Elkayam’s poem makes a strong claim about linguistic rupture, forcing usto realize that we have long since joined Abraham in his act of stepping amongthe rotting pieces of the covenant.

But if the suffocating stench of the covenant and the reek of the slaughteredanimals seem to have originated from two different forces, Elkayam makes itclear that their source is the same.41 In other words, the competing smells ofdecaying flesh and God’s promises are forever indistinguishable. And if thecovenant is closely connected with blood, then it should convey its meaningthrough stench of its enactment and not through nostalgic and canonical textu-ality. The grotesquely paradoxical fact is that the cosmic force of God’s promiselies precisely in its ability to make us forget what is deeply inherent in fulfillingit. The covenant, with all its horror, and in spite of the putrid carcasses, is not insynch with history and time.

Elkayam’s focus on metaphoric smell is her attempt to mobilize a culturalcritique that shifts from a prefigured, textualized ‘reading’ to the performativeaspect of texts (see also Clifford, 1986: 11–13). Olfactory knowledge introducesa less canonical discourse associated with the covenant, and yet aims to capturethe intimate texture of reality, especially in its relation to the economy ofbodies/corpses and time. Can the repulsive stench of death ever superimposeitself on the desirable ‘aroma’ of God’s presence? And can it be achieved throughpoetry as the only indisputable document of the senses? Is it possible that, forElkayam, the poetics of smell, and poetry as smell, can provide another testi-mony of history and its carnage, but, more importantly, of the way we are impli-cated as inheritors through a long intertextual dance of horror that does notdistinguish between our food and our knife?

The overbearing presence of the ma’akhelet in Israeli consciousness makesclear that there is no place from which to articulate an Israeli/Jewish culture notaffected by the knife. The ma’akhelet, the sacrificial knife that Abraham wieldedin order to sacrifice his own kind – the consumption of the son for the father’ssustenance in God’s order, has become the signifier that feeds the collectiveconsciousness of all their children. Elkayam alerts us to the potency and poten-tiality of the ma’akhelet in modern Israeli culture and of its discursive space inHebrew literature, especially with its connection to ‘akhal (to eat) and ‘ukkal



(food). Ma’akhelet, the cannibal object, sabotages any narrative that is notalready consumed by its own language.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that, only 40 years after Agnon, Eli Bacharasks in his 1980 poem ‘40 Days before Death’ for ’okhel meduyak, ‘precise, exactfood’.

40 Days before Death

40 days before deathA man changes. He blames his parentsHis body moves away from his actions and for the first timeHis compassion utters signs of life.He asks his father for precise food (’okhel meduyak).His mother will iron his clothes, leaving tenderness in the folds.No man touches his mercy. No one washeshis heart. He will get angry with his brotherLike a single snap shot, moving away.Suddnely he will walk with feelings of one who is dead.He will laugh42 (Yitchak, Isaac)

At the bottom of his chin dimples will appear.40 days before death a man changes.He blames his parentsHis body moves away from his actions.Until the next meeting,Until the nextMeeting.

Bachar’s ‘son’ attempts to bracket ideology and its constraints from within ameasured (40 days) discipline of body and language. Only in this secure momentof compassion removed from action, can he finally suspend his guilt and ask hisfather for ’okhel meduyak, ‘precise’ or ‘exact food’. But what exactly is ‘precisefood’? How will its preciseness or exactness promise its quality? Quality ismeasured – allegorically – in days, which in turn allude to Bachar’s appeal to thehyper-real. In fact, hyper-realism replaces the ideology that had either starvedthe body or stuffed it. If ‘precise food’ can ‘naturally’ remedy the urgency ofhistorical, cultural, physical and emotional starvation, it can also set free oldfantasies and longings for excess. One’s well-being can be perceived and experi-enced only through exact measures, which set strict boundaries that offer protec-tion against the cannibalizing maw of the world. Bachar’s choice to invoke thebiblical name Yitzchak (Yitzchak) is crucial to understanding the significance ofthe internal change that the son undergoes. Only now, removed from his bodyand its acts can the son cast blame on his parents and ancestors. This new phys-ically concrete, accessible and readable scale of life can help him go back to the



originary narrative of the ’akedah (the binding) where he can establish the legit-imacy of ethnic difference. From there, he will laugh.

Conclusion: Writing from the Gut

The determined space of the fathers sets the discursive limits of Israel/Jewishculture as much as it demarcates the possible answers for questions raised fromwithin those parameters. What specific to Mizrahi writing is specific to the effortto contain and measure the cannibal act? Elkayam, in her questions about opentime and space and smell, teaches us about the difficulty of carving a space ofknowledge from within. Bachar’s ritual, on the contrary, accounts for immediatefigures, including the body, and thus is able to prepare for a new space of precisefood. Can one actually step out of the boundaries of the received covenant toconceive a new covenant? Can this new covenant be written in a child’s language?A woman’s? A Mizrahi’s? Can it account for blood or body? Or, for that matter,pain and pleasure? How will this help to restore a sense of boundaries and safedistance for ethnic and gendered bodies and identities? For as much as inkinspires narrative, it is the cutting blade of the , ma’akhelet (the slaughter-ing knife) that constitutes text and identity. Nevertheless, in Mizrahi poetry, it isthe ma’akhelet that carves out new spaces and new rituals in order to relocateand redirect the trajectories of life and death.

As a metaphor that explains Jewish history and its fate, the ’akedah, or thebinding of Yitzhack, plays a critical role in Jewish consciousness. The Holocaust,in particular, was perceived by Hebrew writers as a modern, collective ’akedah,an allegory for Jewish suffering and persecution (Kurzweil, 1966: 311–27; Agnon,1998; Shaked, 1998: 487–511). These writers inscribed the narrative in thenational biography: ‘Here we are all bound, bringing the wood with our ownhands’ (Lamdan, 1982: 119). For the ‘statehood generation’, writers of the post-Holocaust 1940s and 1950s, the establishment of Israel was made possiblethrough the re-enactment of the original biblical sacrifice as a trope of redemp-tive heroism. In his poem, ‘About the Child Abraham’ (1943), Altermanannounces, ‘Get thee out through a night of knife and blood unto the land thatI will show you’ (in 1962: ??). Alterman conflates Genesis narratives of thePromised Land with anti-Semitic genocide by inserting Abraham’s knife (andblood) into Zionist history (path). For Haim Gouri, another important post-Holocaust poet, the ma’akhelet is no longer hanging above, held by Abraham,but is an explicit artifact of the Sabra’s generation. Mourning its persistentpresence, Guri concludes, ‘They are born with a , ma’akhelet, a knife, intheir heart’ (1960: 28; see also Kartun-Blum, 1999).43



Indeed, for the succeeding generation the biblical narrative of the sacrificeepitomizes the very predicament of national violence. With the realization of theimmense power of biblical ideology in shaping Israeli/Jewish fate came theengagement with the question of how to articulate that knowledge most effec-tively through words. David Avidan, for example, approaches Isaac’s ’akedah asthe first rehearsal in a long performative history through Jesus’ crucifixion andother consecutive victimizing acts (1978: 46). More radical was Hanoch Levin’spost-1967 war cabaret, which included his censored poem, ‘’Avi ha-yakar, kshe-ta’amod ’al kivri’ (My Dear Father, When You Stand over My Grave). The deadson, speaking from the grave, gains prophetic authority through his position asa war victim; can they meet beyond national narratives, language and ideology,‘flesh to flesh?’ (Levin, 1987: 92). Similarly, Levin’s short sketch ‘Ha ’Akedah’(The Sacrifice) brings the father and the son face to face, resulting in a grotesquedialogue that mirrors both as victim and victimizer (in Levin, 1987).

Other poets represent the ’akedah more graphically. Yehuda Amichai remindsus that ‘The Real Hero of the Akedah’ is the ram (Amichai, 1963: 345), while forMeir Wieseltier, the ’akedah symbolizes an act of sodomy; he alludes to Isaac’spenetration by the phallic knife (in Hirschfeld, 2002: xx). As the ultimate sourceof violence in Israeli society, the ’akedah figures consistently in the poetry ofYitzchak Laor, who moves restlessly from one version of the binding to another,the written and unwritten ones. Kartun-Blum correctly acknowledges that the’akedah is symptomatic of a ‘genetic code’ that programmes the life of the nationas much as it does the lives of individuals. Jewish history, according to Blum, canbe described as a ‘chain of ’akedot’ (plural of ’akedah), and any literary attemptto escape it results in ‘an intensified and garbled redramatization of the Bible onthe stage of the century’ (Kartun-Blum, 1996: 231–3). Most recent studies on thehistorical development of the ’akedah (Kartun-Blum, 1996, 1999; Hirschfeld,2002) connect it to the wider socio-cultural context of a national, collective ethosof patriotism (e.g. Almog, 1997; Zerubavel, 2004). Numerous Israeli scholarshave addressed the problem of self-sacrifice and its institutionalization in Israelicollective memory; together with standardized bereavement rituals they demon-strate the major role played by the ’akedah in the conceptualization of life anddeath in Israeli culture (Laor, 1995: 192–223; Kartun Blum, 1996, 1999; Almog,1997: 73–5; Rosental, 2001).

The tight proximity between the eating mouth as a banal fact of everyday lifeand the sacred narratives of the covenant makes clear that in Israeli Jewish life’okhel (eat/ing and food), ma’akhelet (the slaughtering knife) and ’ukkal(consumed), are inseparable. In effect, ‘the mouth of the word’ is superimposedon the mouth of the sword, highlighting the priority of language over the body



(Bal, 1988a: 24).44 Eating is always predicated and qualified by the very mouththat devours, and the , ma’akhelet is the precursor of that all-consumingact. Moreover, the fact that faith itself is inscribed in such a primary narrative ofdesire and longing further intensifies the effectiveness of that narrative. Faith anddesire are implicated within the very act of reading/eating, which informs life.The ideology of the text, that is, the immense authority of textuality – frombiblical narratives, to commentaries, Modern Hebrew poetry, songs and even themass media – thickens theological lineages into a weighty and cumbersome onto-logical burden. The irony of this situation is evident both in the injury to ourbodies by the striking blows of the knife, and, as conveyed by Amira Hess in theopening epigraph, the absorption of our emergence into the ‘totality of longing’.Put differently, it is death that fills the life that we carry within us; a death thatwill never die.

Slavoj Zizek and others have asserted that ideology as a generative matrixregulates not only the relationship between the imaginable and the unimaginable,but also the changes in this relationship. Thus any change is predetermined bythe logic of the existing order (Zizek, 1994: 1). Writing from a position of differ-ence can enable Mizrahi writers, such as Elkayam and Bachar, to imagine a newcovenant uninhibited by the at once cacophonic and claustrophobic unity ofcanonical (and cannibalizing) narratives. Israeli nationalism was an immenseforce in turning the , ma’akhelet, the slaughtering knife of Abraham, intothe agent and object of cannibalism. Placed at the core of the pre-constructedzone of Zionist discourse, the , ma’akhelet articulates the complexity ofthe phantasmagoric and starving ‘father’ with his insatiable hunger for power. Itis in this context that the ma’akhelet also strips, exhumes and slashes biblicaltexts and their interpretive – and encultured – practices.

NotesI would like to thank Gil Anidjar and Karyn Berger for their helpful comments; and, a special thankto my friend and colleague Jennifer Robertson. I also owe thanks to the editors of and reviewers forBody & Society.

1. Amira Hess distinguishes between ma’akhelet (the slaughtering knife) and ma’akholet (food,fuel consumption and devouring, usually by fire; Isaiah 9:4, 18]). In Hebrew, without vowel markers,both would appear identical.

2. All translations from the Hebrew are mine unless otherwise mentioned.3. In the most general sense, ideology represents what Althusser defined as ‘the imaginary

relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1994: 123). Always relational, over-determined, complex and preconscious, it constitutes one’s ‘lived relation to the real’ (Althusser, 1994:123). Crucial to the discussion of ideology is the notion of practices (and their rituals and apparatuses)



that have developed as its material manifestation (1994: 120–8). According to Zizek, ‘“Ideology” candesignate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social realityto an action-oriented set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out theirrelations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power’ (1994: 3–4).Compare this with Gertz’s definition in her study of Literature and Ideology in Eretz Israel duringthe 1930s (in Hebrew; Tel-Aviv: Open University, 1988: 11–12).

4. In this article, I focus only on Zionism’s approach to its own internal difference, that is, fromits Jewish other, rather than elaborating on its attitude towards Palestinians or other non-Jewishminorities within Israel. For a specific study of Palestinians through the trope of the cannibal seeShammas (2004).

5. Avraham Shlonski’s idealization of nature invites God, animals and the entire universe for anorgy of milk-suckling. In his poem ‘Yizra’el’ the hills of Gilboa are the nipples, feeding the fields withmilk that ‘flows over the banks and the earth . . .’. But the ‘I’ in the poem realizes that his human andflesh is an ‘overflowing breast that announces to the universe: “Oh, clodded fields of Jezrael! / Nurse!Suckle! . . ./ Come now, she-camels! Horses! Man! God! / and I will suckle you – / because yours arethe nipples of my breast”’ (Shlonski, 1966: 172–3).

6. By now the critique of Zionism is articulated along the lines of both an Israeli ‘crisis ofideology’ and ‘a cultural war’. Kimmerling’s recent term ’achusal, the Hebrew acronym for Ashkenazi,secular, old-timers, socialist and national (or Zionist), reflects its scope (2001: 11). See also Shohat(1988, 1989, 2001); Silberstein (2000); Rogoff (2000); Hever et al. (2002), Lubin (2002), Shenhav (2003).

7. Numbers 13:33. Consider the language of the report by the Israelite spies to Moses once theyreturned from their reconnaissance, saying:

And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the childrenof Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up(devours) the inhabitants in it and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature.And there we saw the giants, the sons of A’nak, which come of the giants: and we were inour own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. (Numbers 13:32–3)

8. Mizrahim are Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin.9. At the core of the heated debate around Zionist historiography are those who support the idea

of ‘return’ versus those who highlight ‘colonization’ (see for example, Ben-Ari and Bilu, 1997;Rabinowitz, 1997; Silberstein, 2000; Shohat, 2001; Anidjar, 2003; Kemp et al., 2004).

10. I agree that methodologically Zionism should be considered in its plurality and as a process.As in the case of ‘whiteness’, it would be a mistake to approach Zionism and Ashkenazi hegemony as‘unexamined, unqualified, essential, homogeneous, seemingly self-fashioned, and apparently un-marked by history or practice’ (Frankenberg, 1997: 1). The same can be said about the culturaldynamics and historicity behind the literary canon.

11. Samir Naqqash’s choice to write in Arabic as an Israeli citizen should be understood as apolitical statement against ‘committed’ and ‘partisan’ writing, which focuses on a narrow ethnocentricJewish theme rather than on a universal human condition of the individual (interview with Naqqash,in Alcalay, 1996: 105).

12. See ff. # 10 above. In this framework, I do not attempt to reduce Agnon’s work, for example,to the national consensus. In different periods of his writing, Agnon’s position, especially towardsJewish orthodoxy, was also considered immoderate if not iconoclastic. Nonetheless, Agnon’s central-ity in determining the Hebrew literary canon of modernism within Zionist ideology is unquestion-able, especially when recontextualized from an ethnic and gendered position.

13. In this article, I focus only on Zionism’s approach to its own internal difference, that is fromits Jewish other, rather than elaborating on its attitude towards Palestinians or other non-Jewishminorities within Israel.



14. ‘Pat Shlemah’ in Agnon (1960 [1932]). The story is framed within the conditions of extremesand their intensified, convergent impact on the protagonist’s hunger. The opening line reads, ‘All thatday I had nothing to eat’ (I have tasted nothing); his loneliness (the wife and the children are abroad);and the heat of the day (the sun burned like a kiln, threatening to burn the body).

15. Other important nouns are derived from the adjective Shalem, grounded in historic superla-tives such as the name of King Solomon, Shlomoh, the name of the city Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, andthe word for greeting and peace, shalom. The root means also to pay, repay and recompense.

16. In the Israeli Hebrew discourse it is more common to discuss the colonization of Palestinians.The colonization and cannibalism of ethnic groups is denied as part of the utopian insistence on hom-ogeneity.

17. Already the language of the biblical prophets explicitly uses a wide range of vocabulary todenote human ‘eating’ and ‘devouring’, usually alluding to the execution of God’s judgments onwicked men. Isaiah, for example, describes:

And he shall snatch of the right hand, and be hungry; and he shall eat on the left hand, andthey shall not be satisfied; they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm. . . . And theystill felt hungry; each man ate the flesh of the arm of the other. (9:18–20)

See also Ezekiel, ‘Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eattheir fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee . . .’ (5:10).

18. In her study of the politics of eating in modern Chinese literature The Mouth that Begs, GangYue argues that, ‘Epistemologically, the subhuman cannibal occupies a liminal site that belongs toneither the inside nor the outside: it constantly threatens the binary opposition on which the stabilityof the self hinges’ (1999: 25).

19. From Montaigne’s proto-romantic, pioneering study:

I thinke there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, than to feed upon them being dead;to mangle by tortures torment a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, to makedogges and swine to gnaw and teare him in mammockes . . . than to roast and eat him afterhe is dead. (1928, cited in Kilgour, 1998: 243)

20. Irrespective of actual practice, Hulme’s question of why cannibalism persists as a ‘contempor-ary trope’ in a broad swath of literature and art is relevant. Indeed, in Euro-American popular culture,especially films, cannibalism appears as a narrative about how psychological devouring is possible whenthe disgust/desire dichotomy dissolves into an ‘erotic desire’ (Hulme, 1998: 10). The polar oppositionof feast and famine is often graphically illustrated by the cannibal feast, in which the participants attacktheir food, and then each other as they participate in a gluttonous orgy of feeding (1998: 25).

21. In the Brazilian context, for example, anthropophagy was initially one of the main agendas ofBrazilian modernismo (1920–30), which attempted to synthesize the challenges posed by avant-gardeEuropean modernity with the Brazilian native, indigenous culture. According to Bellei, ongoingencounters between two cultures in Brazil often result in a power struggle between the dominant andthe weak, which bifurcates society into two distinct groups of those who eat and those who are eaten,highlighting the dialectics between violence and consumption (1998: 102).

22. One of the anonymous reviewers of this article suggested that it would be fruitful to developfurther the relationship between feeding and ‘gift exchange’. I will not develop my ideas about ‘giftexchange’ theory here, as my main interest in this article concerns the metaphor and reality ofeating/devouring. However, I will address this matter in my book-in-progress, ‘Cannibal Ideology:Sexuality, Ethnicity and Colonialism in Hebrew Cultures’; this article is a greatly abridged version ofone of its chapters. However, I should note here that, rather than pursue a Maussian treatment ofexchange, as suggested by the reviewer, I propose to follow Alfred Gell in arguing that exchange is a



‘hybrid product arising out of the ambiguous confrontation’ of different transactional modes. That is,as Gell argues, ‘the gift is admirably calculated to divert attention and conceal motives while certaincrucial rearrangements of social relationships occur’ (1999: 77).

23. We must of course recognize the different constructions of ‘kosher’ that have developed amongdifferent Jewish groups and communities. Although the basic laws are articulated in the Pentateuch,Rabbanites maintain a separation between meat and dairy, while Karaites allow, in general, such amixture. For a detailed explanation of this point, see Tsoffar (2006: ch. 8). In addition to ‘ethnic’ andreligious cuisines, other cultural institutions such as the Kibbutz or the army mark dietary distinctionsalong sex/gender or class lines, producing different definitions of kosher food as well as other practicesaround food and ways of eating.

24. Regarding the dialectical relationship between the feeder and the eater, potentially usefulanalogies could be drawn between perpetrators and victims in the discourse of the Holocaust, asdeveloped by German sociologist Bernhard Giesen (2004a; 2004b), who studies generational differ-ences – such as the devaluation of the experiences of the parental generation – in the formation ofcollective identity around both triumphant and traumatic corporeal experiences. Thanks to ananonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

25. Literally, to eat or feed noodles, le-ha’akhil loksh or lokshim, from lokshen, in Yiddish, to feedwith lies. The expression appears in other verbs, such as to swallow, to snatch or to devour.

26. There are more specific examples: the Burekas films (and culture), named after the Greek orTurkish baked dough stuffed with cheese, have become a specific genre of Israeli films and humour.

27. Different from the traditional approach that determined the age of Isaac as 39 years at the timeof his sacrifice.

28. According to Midrash Tanchuma, Isaac was 37 years old at the time of the ’akedah (V’yera).29. In its extreme, the demand to be well versed in the canonic literature is apparent in the writing

of Palestinians; as evident in the reception of Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, focusing on his virtuousmulti-layered Hebrew (often acclaimed as being ‘more Jewish than that of a Jew’) or A.B. Yehoshua’s1977 The Lover, in which the young Palestinian Na’im memorizes Bialik’s national poetry of longingfor the Jewish homeland.

30. Ella Bat Zion dedicated the poem to Shelly Elkayam and Amira Hess. There is an active poeticdialogue between the women poets, who all live in Jerusalem, and belong to the same generation/age.

31. Hame’asef (1993: 8); translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Persico and Ruth Tsoffar.32. The only other time that , ma’akhelet, is mentioned in the Bible is in the story of the

concubine in Judges (19:29): ‘he took a knife (ma’akhelet) and laid hold on his concubine, and dividedher, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel’.See Bal’s illuminating discussion of this account in ‘The Rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape:Speech Acts and Body Language in Judges’ (1988b).

33. Both the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, which were built towards the end of the7th century by Umayyad caliph ’Abdul Malik Ibn Marwan, are also among the holiest places in Islam,from which, it is believed, Muhammed ascended to heaven.

34. Freud himself relied in this subject on other philologists and philosophers, saying, ‘If every-thing that we can know is viewed as a transition from something else, every experience must have twosides; and either every name must have a double meaning, or else for every meaning there must be twonames’ (Freud, 1958: 60).

35. This refers to the Brit ben ha-betarim, the Covenant of the Pieces, or the Covenant of the Fleshas described in Genesis 15.

36. In Genesis 17, the other covenant is established around the sign of the Millah, the circumcisionof the male newborn. Here, again, Abraham does not challenge God, and if he replies, he does notquestion. The story of the binding of Isaac, which appears in Genesis 22:1–18, develops furtherAbraham’s persona as the ultimate obedient and amenable patriarch. The two different versions of the



covenant caused scholars to attribute the first, in Genesis 15, to the ‘P’ (‘Priestly’) writer of Genesisand the second to ‘J’ (Yehwistic documents, referring to no later than about the 8th century BC).

37. Yitzhak Laor’s ‘Ha-metumtam Ha-zeh Yitzchak, (Sof)’ (‘The Idiot, Yitzchak’) (1999: 87)reduces the binding of Isaac to the smell that the ma’akhelet (always in brackets) has left on the handas its enduring lethal essence. Laor’s question is, therefore, not what kind of narrative such a smell canconstrue; rather, after having written so many drafts (this is his last), the answer becomes obvious,making a clear case that there is no narrative, except for the terrible realization that the ma’akhelet hasleft its mark on the hand, and that this long linear genealogy through the smell of the hand that heldthe knife tells about the banality of its presence. Proposing several (im)possible answers, Laor leaveslines of questions; genealogies, narratives and poetry all conflagrate with a horrible smell that contra-dicts the possibility of constructing other answers.

38. As described in Genesis, ‘vultures descended upon the carcasses, but Avram drove them back.Now, when the sun was setting, a deep slumber fell upon Avram, and there, fright and great darknessfell upon him!’ (Genesis 15:11–12).

39. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s discussion of the sense of smell as a disorder ofwomen’s hysteria becomes another gender marker which discloses an attempt to anesthetize the body(1986: 32–9).

40. Although in the chronology of Genesis, the covenant narrative commences with Avram,Elkayam’s usage of Adam is consistent with her articulation of mythological, universalized time,emphasizing that history begins with Adam.

41. The ‘intoxicating aroma’ is also found in the Misdrash and Aggadah, particularly with regardto the Brit Millah, in which the rabbis wax romantic about the intoxicating odor of the mounds offoreskins.

42. Kartun-Blum (1996; 1999) also studies a group of poems that address the subject of the sacrifice.43. In her study of violence and rape in Judges, Mieke Bal distinguishes between the mouth of the

word (body language) and the mouth of the sword (speech acts), alluding to the fact that the femalespeaking body does not speak, but only through her body in its contiguity and metonymic figuration.She concludes:

The situation is war: we are in the middle of the political coherence. The mouth of the sword,not the mouth of the word, is the appropriate weapon in the circumstances. [But] . . . Themouth of the word enables the mouth of the sword to be effective, not the other way around.As such, the episode signifies the priority of language over the body, while at the same timeproclaiming the materiality of language, its bodily effectiveness and foundation; its basis iscontiguity. (1988: 24)

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Ruth Tsoffar, an Assistant Professor of Hebrew language and culture (PhD, University of California,Berkeley), is a scholar of Hebrew poetry, literature and film, and of Israeli society and culture. Bothher research and teaching deal with the history of competing ethnicities, sexualities and genderdiversity in Judaism and Israeli culture, with a special focus on minorities (Mizrahim, Sephardim,Karaites). Tsoffar has authored The Stains of Culture: Karaite Jewish Women in the Bay Area (anEthno-Reading) (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and articles, such as ‘Staging Sexuality: ReadingWallach’s Poetry’ (Hebrew Studies, 2002). She is currently completing a second book, ‘CannibalIdeology: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Colonialism in Hebrew Cultures’.



‘A Land that Devours its People’: Mizrahi Writing from the Gut

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