Between Desire and Wisdom: Where Exactly DOES One Begin?

The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Intellectual

Discourse, Cardozo Law School, March 16-17, 2008

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Adam Zachary NewtonYeshiva University

3/16/2008

In this talk, I want to focus our attention on an act we often

take for granted, as if we know exactly what it is and how to do

it in every case, but which is, at its best, more singular and

surprising that we think. That act is reading. I want at least

to suggest its sheer eventfulness for the Hebrew Bible as a

matter of resacralizing an ancient text we routinely claim we

possess by inheritance or acquisition, but which eludes full

grasp—which is why, in part, we keep re-reading it. And it is in

the intensive or adventuresome reading of that text that we

experience the gratuity of what two contemporary commentaries on

Genesis name “wisdom” and “desire.” Vayechal melachto asher asah—When

Scripture records that God has finished the work of creation—

whose “doing” Judaism’s morning liturgy emphasizes is diurnally

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renewed, m’chadesh b'khol yom tamid ma'aseh b'reishit—it encodes and pre-

writes William Blake’s marvelous proverb, “the most sublime act

is to set another before you”: the work of creation is re-enacted

(remade) as the work of the scriptural imagination, which in turn

begets the work of reading.

Lamentably, doing meta-criticism like this instead of just plain

criticism puts one already at second remove from the darsheni

(“search out my meaning”) that the 11th c. commentator Rashi

ventriloquistically attaches to the surface of the Biblical text

itself. Darsheni, “interpret me”: as if Scripture quite literally

spoke; it is a notion that certainly “speaks to me” in capturing

the dialogical conditions this text both presumes and prompts.

Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber may have had Rashi’s phrase in

mind when they referred to the Bible’ s Gesprochenheit, its

spokenness, whose reciprocal number is the community of readers’

alert presence before it, their Bereitschaft or “readiness,” as so

many Ohrenmenschen—which loosely translated means, “people of the

ear.”

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With this paper, however, I want to explore some parallel

implications of this idea in a more self-evident but still

tensile respect: and that is, the Bible itself as intellectual

discourse—pre-contemporary, of course, but with the accent on

discourse. More specifically, Biblical discourse as narrated—a

certain kind of rhetorical writing in reciprocal relation with

its own opposite number, performative reading—by which I mean,

akin to the way in which the Biblical text can be said to stage

itself—it does narratively, it does didactically, it does so as

genre and as canon—so reading assumes a correlative posture: it

performs its own staging in kind. I would go so far as to say

that such reading, which necessarily stops short of being

definitive, signifies at best “a report and an invitation: a

report on a certain living through of the literary and an

invitation to successive readers to share, for the duration of

the reading at least, this living through” (Derek Attridge, The

Singularity of Literature, 3). Let this, then, be both report and invitation.

Aptly enough for a paper on beginnings, a working title came to

me rather swiftly: “Between Desire and Wisdom: Where exactly DOES

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One Begin?” What I had in mind—though eventually abandoned—was a

certain framing juxtaposition of two contemporary readings of the

Hebrew Scriptures whose own titles seemed so invitingly to call

out to one another: The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis by

Avivah Zornberg; and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Leon

Kass. I take both of these readings or reflections as exercises

in what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutical problem, each an

attempt to understand the Hebrew Scriptures as a specific

instance of the general task of understanding, keyed to the

special circumstances of reading, in this case, the reading of a

sacred text. It’s safe to say that Zornberg hears that text, in

its Hebraic phonemes and grammatical infections, more acutely

than does Kass; her approach, notwithstanding her subtitle, is

thus more refractive than reflective. Just as, conversely, it is fair

to say that Kass tracks the Biblical text more linearly, with the

express purpose of explaining and retelling it on behalf of a

morally serious readership: wisdom, perhaps, being the probity of

extended paraphrase. As the sub-title of her follow-up book on

Exodus intimates, Zornberg reads particularly, singularly; Kass, reads

representatively, deliberatively. Not surprisingly, the two

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complement each other. Though Kass’s book followed Zornberg’s by

nearly a decade, any intertext between them was very possibly

waiting to be ventured by an enterprising reader. I’m certain

I’m not the first to have thought of it.

For those familiar with them, Zornberg announces her approach as

rhetorical rather than methodical; its style is midrashic in

restrictive and loose senses alike. It is the sort of “deep

reading” that the philosopher Stanley Cavell identifies as a

project “in which you depart from a given word as from a point of

origin [and] go deep into the woods.” Call it a different kind

of “Source Criticism.”

Kass’s book, by contrast, is at once less indebted to commentary

and more individuated, the work of an autonomous and sovereign

reading subject. It reads Genesis as one might expect it to be

read at the University of Chicago—methodically, with just a touch

of the neo-Aristotelian. For Zornberg, the problems for readers

of the Hebrew Bible exemplify how the text reads them; for Kass,

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the reverse, and less counterintuitive, polarity represents the

norm.

So, two very different acts of reading, two differently pitched

hermeneutic performances: together they seemed to say “darshenu”

as a joint occasion for meta-critical counterpoint. Nevertheless,

the two tropes themselves, desire and wisdom, coupled with the

problematic of Beginnings: what could provide a better framework

for entertaining the question that, even more recently than Kass

and Zornberg, doubles as the title of not one but two Mortimer

Adler-like, pedagogically weighted tomes?? How to Read the Bible,

indeed. That is the question.

I said my focus would be on scripture as narrative and narrated

text. Technically, therefore, I’m interested in the

hermeneutical attention paid by readers to the experience of

telling and being told, showing and being shown, and to the

particulars of narrative voice, point of view, and the

perturbations of plot by the discourse itself. Obviously as a

compound, plurivocal text, the Bible is a braid of multiple

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discursive strands. It is also the product of what Meir

Sternberg calls foolproof composition,

whereby the discourse strives to open and bring home its

essentials to all readers so as to establish a common ground,

a bond instead of a barrier of understanding…..The Bible is

difficult to read, easy to underread and overread and even

misread, but virtually impossible, so to speak, to counterread

(50).

If we take just point-of-view, we can speak of a fourfold dynamic

in perspective (thus distinguishing the Hebrew Bible in this

respect from most other kinds and genres of storytelling—

folktale, prose fiction, biography, even the Four Gospels). It

consists of 1) a narratorial level—the voice of the text or the

narrator, aligned with God’s omniscience but equally close to

those he speaks about and those he speaks to; 2) the plane of

character agents, or dramatic personae; 3) God as

plenipotentiary, the creator of a world over and beyond that

world’s narration and depiction, existentially inside it while

perspectivally above it; and 4) the covenantal-contractual

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partners in this whole hermeneutic process—by which I mean not

the People of the Book, but the people who read the book.

For Sternberg, author of The Poetics of Biblical Narrative; Ideological

Literature and the Drama of Reading, the last of the four categories,

that of readers, no doubt also deserves to be construed in terms

of dramatis personae. For indeed, how to read the bible presupposes

what he identifies as the DRAMA of reading—that reading a text as

manifold as this BE a drama, a labor undertaken, a duty

discharged, a work performed. Reading is dramatic to the extent

that the Bible as created artifact is ideological—shot through

with programmatic matters of belief that it wants its readers to

engage as alive and always in the making on the planes of

emplotment and discursive choice; and it is dramatic also insofar

as it stipulates scrutiny and adventure—or if you will, wisdom

and desire as the coefficient terms for the intentional work of

reading, a performance in its own right.

Sternberg reads scripture as a narrative theorist, which is

specifically different from reading as a midrashist or a

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philosopher. His book situates itself squarely in the Bible

and/as literature debate, which includes the likes of Frank

Kermode, Robert Alter, James Kugel, Mieke Bal, Joel Rosenberg,

and a host of other literary critics and theorists and biblical

critics (though I have to say it’s always intrigued me that

there’s no such thing, vocationally speaking, as a biblical

theorist). Sternberg’s book approach practices uncompromisingly

scrupulous and revelatory close-grained reading: reading for the

plot, for voice, viewpoint, and temporal aspect, for gaps and

ambiguities, for structures of repetition, in short, for

narrative poetics. It’s impossible to do justice to his project

in any preliminary way: interpretive subtlety wedded to

theoretical sophistication like this, as Auerbach famously

remarked of Biblical discourse itself, is “fraught with

background.”

—Similary, for Elaine Scarry, author of The Body in Pain: The Making

and Unmaking of the World. Like Sternberg, Scarry is

preternaturally attuned to narrative and literary particulars,

although she is not a Bible scholar. I won’t attempt to summarize

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her book either, as its argument goes far beyond the scope of

this paper. Suffice it to say that in its second half, Scarry’s

book focuses on the Scriptures, in particular the material

culture that informs so much of their narrative—the many

instances of embodiment and the many acts of making, creative as

well as procreative, that show the Bible to be “a tireless

laying bare of the workings of the human imagination” (181).

For, “material culture,” of course, also describes the

artifactual form of Biblical text itself, the poeisis after

genesis—not only a means of voicing an ineffable God (reporting,

quoting, witnessing his sayings), but also a prodigious vehicle

for human language as act, self-expression as self-extension.

If Sternberg privileges the surface feature of the text’s voice

and its readers’ sensitivity to its frequencies and harmonics,

Scarry foregrounds the depth-structure of voice and body, God

speaking to man and marking or wounding his body, man embodying

belief on God through fecundity and artifice—the making of

progeny, thing, and word. She concentrates on scenes of

production and reproduction, creation and procreation—the being

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fruitful of human genealogy together with the multiplying-ness of

human artifacts—altars, oaths, cities, weapons, the sanctuary in

all its contructivist plenitude, the tablets, the Golden Calf,

and last but not least individual, familial, and national

stories. Such stories, when plotted by God and quoted in the

text, characteristically cluster around formulae for making: “I

have made you,” “I will make your descendants,” “I have formed

you,” “I will make you the father of multitudes.” When narrated

by the storyteller, they often take the form of seriatem lists,

name after name, birth after birth, tolda after tolda. It is in

such a list, tucked away, that readers first descry Rebekah,

Isaac’s future spouse, product of the same eretz and moledet, land

and birthplace, bet av and mishpacha, father’s house and family.

I want now to look briefly now at Genesis 24, the story of

Rebekah’s selection as spouse, through these two readers’ eyes,

to watch them tracking the same textual moment. I choose it

because I think it has something to tell us about both wisdom and

desire as functions of reading and of hermeneutic self-

consciousness.

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While Sternberg’s and Scarry’s approaches differ as much from

each other as do Zornberg’s and Kass’s (neither of whom treats

this episode, incidentally), the point that needs emphasizing is

that however theologically persuaded or even ideologically

sympathetic a reader is on the plane of belief, it is the act of

inventively reading a singularly inventive text that creates its

own conditions of belief and hermeneutic fidelity. Scarry and

Sternberg alike call our attention to the pleasures and

strenuousness of this re-making, the latter quoting the famous

midrash on Psalm 29, verse 4, “The voice of the Lord is in

power,” which underscores the missing pronoun in the verse and

rewrites it, “The voice of the Lord is in your power,” i.e.,

according to the strength of each person’s understanding.

Genesis, Chapter 24 makes particularly dramatic claims on our

hermeneutic sensibilities in this regard. The wooing of Rebekah

is a task performed, of course, by proxy: by Abraham’s servant on

behalf of Abraham, and by both of them on behalf of the elected

son and bridegroom. Indeed, the opening verses of the chapter

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set the stage for a series of complex and nested mediations.

Some of these include verbal speech acts “on behalf of someone,”

Abraham’s enjoining his servant to swear to him to find the

appropriate wife for Isaac, and in so doing recounting God’s

promise to him in the Covenant of the Parts. Another more

stylized mediation features a single scene that is re-narrated by

the text three successive times—a conspicuous exorbitancy. The

densely plotted encounter with Rebekah is at first imagined,

petitioned for by Abraham’s servant—a story in vitro, so to

speak; then enacted by the two of them, a story delivered; and

finally recounted by the servant to Laban, Rebekah’s brother, a

story delivered in that second sense of “transmitted, rendered.”

The discourse is carefully and minutely altered through each of

these tellings, as certain elements are highlighted, others

added, still others omitted—a paradigmatic example of the

interplay between story (plot) and discourse (rendition).

This episode serves as the pregnant hermeneutic moment I have

not-so-covertly hinted it is for several reasons. 1) Because it

offers us a scene of reading: we watch the servant decode the

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events in front of him as he watches Rebekah at the well: we read

him reading parallel to the way we gauge him re-presenting (i.e.,

assuming the role of storyteller) the sequence of events the

narrator has just presented (to us). This a peculiarly

reflexive moment in the Bible, which, in its surplus of

repetition filtered through a figural interpreter who shifts from

dramatized spectator to dramatizing storyteller, wants us to read

ourselves reading as well. 2) Because if we take the immediate

frame of the episode to consist of the brief preceding chapter

(23) that chronicles Sarah’s death and the matter of her burial,

and the final verse of chapter 24 which supplies a reminder of it

(24:63), then it will appear that continuance, generative life on

earth, is very possibly modeled by the stuff of this work here—the

labor of interpreting and retelling that is so strikingly re-

worked in front of our eyes and in our hearing. 3) And because

it enchains a series of what Scarry calls “impersonations,” or

re-enactments. As she expresses it:

It is a deeply serious form of theater in which humanity so

acts on the assumption of God’s personal (impersonated)

participation that his participated is enacted. The passage

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from the verbal and wholly disembodied realm of God to the

wholly embodied realm of man occurs through the half-embodied

states of moral theater and mime in which one person devoted

himself to being someone other than who he is, at first

lending his body to one who has no body because he is not

at that moment physically present (as Isaac is not present

when Abraham becomes him in planning for a wife; as again

Abraham is not present in Nahor when the servant becomes

Abraham, and by extension Isaac, in locating a wife) (197).

Of course, the ultimate sanction for all these various proxy

sayings and mimetic doings culminating in embodied union (which

predictably and in short order, engenders both biological

succession and the divine facilitation of it) is the voice of

God: mi’hashem yatza ha’davar, “the matter (word) has proceeded from

God” (24:50). Yet that matter/word, too, works substitutively:

“may I know through her, “ says Abraham’s servant, “that You have

done kindness with my master” (24:14). With variations, as

Biblical persons stand in for each other or for Divinity (Moses

for God, Aaron for Moses, Isaac for Essau, Rachel’s Barrenness

for Rebekah’s, Rebekah’s for Sarah’s, Bilam for either Balak or

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the God of the Israelites, Joseph for Pharoh, his four daughters

for Zelophehad), so Biblical discourse (which is the narrator’s

purview), acts, as it were, on behalf of story, telling or

retelling what has already taken place.

But this entire chapter’s investment in “moral theater and mime”—

its wisdom twinned with desire—would merely impress itself upon

us inertly (and where is the wisdom or desire in that?), were it

not for the agency solicited from our other capacity as dramatis

personae, actors in the drama of reading.

This question of our hermeneutic agency, exercised by a careful

scrutiny of the Bible’s narrative poetics, is Sternberg’s

contribution, dovetailing with Scarry’s analysis of the

structures of making and belief and the modulation of one into

the other. To retrieve Blake’s aphorism, the Bible’s sublime

positioning of God’s presence both inside and implicitly above

the text sets a continually problematic act, and maybe even a

more sublime one, humanly considered, before its post-Biblical

interpreters (especially those who know their Cervantes as well

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as their Homer). Accustomed to omniscient narrators of the

George Eliot or Tolstoy variety that verge perilously close to

the personas of their authors, the Bible’s readers must sort

through an omniscient and all-powerful creator- commander- and

enactor- God on the one hand, and his ensign narrator, who is

aligned with and subservient to him, but in a wholly textual and

discursive sense, needs to be reckoned with as uniquely powerful

and gifted in his own right.

When Moses on the plains of Moab asserts the Torah’s non-

celestial nearness to the human as “in your mouth” (a birthright

and rite of passage reaffirmed by the famous aggada, “the Oven of

Aknai,” in Tractate Baba Metzia), it may be read as the rare

obtrusive moment when the Biblical narrator wants his readers to

recognize his role in the ordering of its affairs, and to remind

us that narrative is a human activity, in which while God might

be given voice, he is still narrated along with those humans,

elevated and erring alike He has created. Melville’s famous

rhetorical question from his novel Pierre, “for how can a man get a

Voice out of Silence?” is answered right here, on the surface of

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the Bible’s discourse, by a continual act of narratorial

puissance and savoir performed by an organizing intelligence who,

so to speak, perpetually renews his narration.

I’ll conclude with a single detail from Genesis 24 (though my

meta-critical conscience urges you to read Sternberg’s book for

yourselves). It centers on the figure of Abraham’s matrimonial

emissary who has the peculiar distinction of personifying the

drams of both reading and recounting, and thus stands out perhaps

as a figure for both wisdom and desire. When he comes upon

Rebekah at the well, both he and we are seeing her for the first

time. His knowledge of what he perceives, a function of plot, is

referred to his own prevision of the event, which is ultimately

referred to God’s providence. Our knowledge, contrariwise, is

entirely in the hands of the discourse, and the narrator.

Likewise, everything the servant sees transpires in front of him

in “real time,” even though its specific eventuation is to be

balanced against his two speech acts, one foretelling it (to

himself, which we overhear, along with God), the other retelling

it (to Laban). What we process, however, is the text.

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As Sternberg puts it, “[the servant] exercises interpretation on

a world of objects; we, on a web of words that projects such a

world” (141). It is there, and only there, on the surface of

that web, that the craft consisting of verbal cues and echoes,

subtle re-workings of diction and voice, is made known. Thus,

when the narrator describes Rebekah’s “running” and “haste” in

the identical language in which he evokes Abraham’s famous

hospitality in Genesis 18, we textualize something that the

servant at best notices or surmises. But the fact that the Bible

turns us into hermeneutic artificers at this point, capable of

piecing these bits of texts together and construing a

resemblance, means that in some sense our drama begins when that

of the servant and Abraham and Rebekah and Laban ends. If at

previous points, the play of our allegiances shifts according to

the way they are inclined this way toward the characters, that

way toward the narrator, this way parallel with his omniscience,

that way, with God’s, at a point like this a self-interpreting

text becomes a self-transcending one. The drama of reading

belongs to us, alone—one reason, perhaps, that midrashim imagine

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not only Moses and Aaron but God himself as Torah readers: this

is a drama whose wisdom they desire, too.

When I spoke earlier about belief, we can see its structure pared

down to the basics in the Binding of Isaac, about which Auerbach

wrote so starkly, “The Scripture stories do not court our favor—

they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are

rebels.” Scarry refines this same role as the business of

yielding, like Abraham and Isaac themselves, to something outside

oneself. Just as the agents of God’s directive become “the

created offspring of the thing in whose presence they stand”, in

Scarry’s phrase, so readers’ filiation co-parented by wisdom and

desire translates into becoming “the created offspring of the

text, of this text and of the many stories through which the

framework of belief is set in place” (205).

But while Scripture may indeed bind us in any number of ways,

belief also remains a function of imaginative poeisis, of having

it take place textually, and then soliciting our consent to that

event. If, as I said earlier, we can think of Biblical

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discourse as the poesis after genesis, this question of

constructing belief as a hermeneutic drama that continually re-

inaugurates and re-authorizes itself would be the genesis after

genesis, the wisdom and desire of beginning.

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