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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