Trauma's Legacy: Thoughts on Israel Independence Day

I took some time yesterday to go to Mount Herzl, the military cemetery in Jerusalem not far from my house. Yesterday marked the official state holiday, Yom Ha'zicharon or Memorial Day, instituted by the Knesset in 1948 followed by Yom Ha'tzma'ut, Israel Independence Day, commemorating the establishment of the State. The days have been called Israel's 'new High Holidays' - which is true in as much that they have become the days central to Jewish identity in the modern Jewish state. In the Israeli imagination, it's from the depths of despair to triumph - so Memorial day is followed by Independence day.

I have hesitations about the story implied in these two days, and especially their proximity to one another. But I took my daughter, Avital, to Mount Herzl anyway as a way of acknowledging - ha'karat ha'tov - the service and sacrifice on behalf of the State of Israel, and the people of Israel. It was moving and strange in that uniquely Israeli way - chaotic and public, at the same time intimate and dignified. Bottles of water piled in huge boxes offered by eager high school students. More young people in blue jackets behind tables with piles of flowers, some standing closer to the entrances, looking as if they wanted to hawk their wares, but freely dispensing flowers to the thousands piling in to the cemetery. Avital took a bunch - we would find, I told her, an unvisited grave upon which to place the flowers. We looked; but we didn't find one.

On Yom Ha'tzma'ut, Israelis gather for a family barbeque or mangal. As my friend Allen Hoffman, the novelist, told me yesterday, the question of whether one says Hallel - psalms of praise recited on Jewish holidays - on Independence Day is secondary: what is important, he quipped, is the mangal. In each of the tiers of the cemetery which my daughter and I visited, we found families gathered. Among them, the religious border policeman in his late sixties, in full uniform, who had brought tiny collapsable chairs, and his children and grandchildren - it looked like they had been there for decades. And in the middle of the family circle - the scene was repeated again and again -instead of the mangal, a gravestone, stoking not coals, but what seemed like an ancient grief. There were those whose loss was fresh, but the overall impression - a true one -was of a nation that has been grieving for a long time.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik distinguishes between moods and emotions - the former he writes are 'homogenous and singular,' while the latter are complicated, consisting of many different elements. The poet, T.S. Eliot writes in a similar vein, understands that 'implicit in the expression of every experience are other kinds of experience which are possible.' So Rabbi Soloveitchik writes that the Jew should pursue a complex life of emotion and not the singularity and satisfaction offered by the mood - the quick and reactive response which ends up as 'degrading.' The Torah cultivates emotions and not moods. When experiencing the plenty of G-d's benificence, the Jew in his pilgrimmage to Jerusalem is commanded in Deuteronomy to remember the poor. Amdist his own wealth and pleasures, he remembers the other - consciousness of plenty is balanced by the knowledge of poverty and need. When experiencing the mourning of the loss of God's presence in the Temple - the chorban beit ha'mikdash - on the ninth of Av, the Jew does not say penitential prayers of supplication, for the day is a mo'ed, a holiday, to also anticipate the coming of the mashiach, the messiah. Holidays on the Jewish liturgical calendar incorporate the opposite of the dominant emotion of the day: experience of abundance brings about acknowledgment of need; the absence of the divine presence is accompanied by hope for the fullness of divine presence at the end of days.

In America, Memorial Day marks the beginning of the beach season in May; or if you are religiously observant, the day where in some shuls you get to wear your white straw hat - with Independence Day following later on the Fourth of July. The sense of collective loss and national triumph is muted both by the passage of years, as well as the interval between the two holidays. One might have thought that in Israel the proximity of the holidays would lead to a heightened consciousness that even in national victory - I won't say salvation - the memory of suffering and vulnerability would be present, that the consecutive holidays would nurture a sensibility informed by emotions and not moods. But the two days - each representing a singularity of one mood despair on Memorial Day to the triumph of Independence Day - may preclude the sensitivity to complexity cultivated by Jewish holidays.

Trauma can have different effects - it can lead to the fostering of moods, or the cultivation of the complexity of emotions. 'Remember you were a slave in Egypt' is the Torah's instruction to transform the trauma of slavery into a more refined consciousness - one which includes self-knowledge and knowledge of the other. Trauma, the Torah tells us, cannot be ignored. Addressed, trauma can lead to an acknowledged vulnerability refined into a receptivity. But trauma can have another effect - the sense of a suffering and self-righteousness that justifies conquest and triumphalism. In this different kind of acknowledgment of trauma, my suffering justifies my triumph. My trauma and suffering become the license for a self-protection that turns into arrogance, redressing my pain as a way of asserting an (impossible) invulnerability. The stories that I tell - narratives of what the Torah calls cochi v'etzem yadi, of 'my strength and my power' - are asserted with an unambivalent certainty. I am not referring to politics, certainly not geo-politics, but to something more important - the constitution of the Israeli, or Jewish, soul.

What, I thought as we left the cemetery, if the placing together of the holidays - in a story of national and nationalist victory - does not lead to receptivity, but to an arrogant and self-justifying triumphalism? What if in our pursuit of the nationalism of other nations, in our pursuit of being Israelis first and not Jews, we lose the awareness of the stranger - in ourselves and others - which marks us off as a people? What if overtaken by feelings and taken by the mood of nationalist triumph, we fail to refine trauma into sensitivity, and allow all of those generations of suffering - and the pain felt at Mount Herzl - to be squandered?

Afikoman as Metaphysical Conceit: Paradox of Pesach

You tell the wise child when she asks about the laws of the holiday - we don't have dessert, 'ain maftirin, afikoman,' we don't have an afikoman after the meal. No dessert! Yet, the sages use the Greek term - afikoman - for what we do eat at the end of the meal. So what does it mean that we don't have dessert - 'afikoman' - when in fact we do eat the afikoman?

Afikoman can also mean,' bring me the dessert.' After the wine drinking and symposium partying, the Greek revelers would have dessert - bring it on! - and then look for other parties: the after-party, the after-after-party. For the Greeks and later the Romans, it's 'Carpe Diem, baby!' Enjoy the present moment. But the sages say, no afikoman. No after-party tonite, sorry. Have the taste of the matzahs in your mouth for the rest of the night - just like our ancestors had the taste of the paschal sacrafice. So, no afikoman - no dessert.

But... the last part of the meal is tzafon - which means literally 'hidden.' Bring out the hidden - bring the afikoman. Pay off the kids who hid the broken piece of the middle matzah - and bring it to the table - let every one have a piece - and end the seder with the taste of the afikoman. Another Jewish paradox: do not have an afikoman after the meal, but, bring the afikoman.

One has to know how the seder is based on Greek antecedents to know how the seder is NOT Greek. Bring the afikoman - not of more wine and revelry, but bring out the hidden essence of Pesach. The matzah we eat during the meal recalls our redemption from Egypt; the hidden matzah of the afikoman - 'bring the dessert which is not a dessert' - foretells, our tradition tells us, a future redemption. We end the seder not with Greek partying - but with the taste of past and future - in the present. 'We don't end the meal with an afikoman'; 'bring the afikoman!'

James Kugel Redux - Reply

In my review of How to Read the Bible, I did not suggest that Kugel is too ‘biased,’ as some commenters have suggested on a blog devoted to the subject have suggested nor did I, as Gil Student, in apparent agreement with my argument, suggest that Kugel is ‘subjective.’ I did express in a comment of my own a sense of disappointment in understandings of interpretation that rely upon the subject-object distinction. It is a nineteenth century philosophical distinction - wielded in various contexts, usually now as a form of polemic (which predictably happened following Gil’s Student's comments) - which has nothing to do with traditions of Jewish interpretation, nor conceptions of interpretation that go back to Newton, Milton and Aristotle. I went on to cite the analyst Jonathan Lear - that any knowledge entails a form of love - in order to argue that all forms of knowledge entail some form of union - and that there is no erasure of subjectivity, nor pure Truth or objectivity. Despite Kugel's dismissal of my claims - and the assertion that he acknowledges the importance of interpretation - he does, as my full review reveals, persistently write about the so-called objectivity of modern scholars, and their ability to deliver the Real Truth.

Have no doubt about it: the heroes of How to Read the Bible are the modern biblical scholars who supposedly ‘read the Bible scientifically’ and ‘without any presuppositions’ and conclude that the Torah is just a scramble of different human traditions and interpretive accretions. It is true, as Kugel writes, that I did not address him on some of his areas of scholarly expertise – in which I admittedly have limited expertise. But I do address him on methodological assumptions about hermeneutics – theories of interpretation – to which he offers no response. How to Read the Bible as the title announces is not only about the Bible, but about interpretation. My review took issue with Kugel’s methodological assumptions about interpretation (and assumptions about objectivity which come from it) – which, as I wrote, arose in the nineteenth century and have since been discredited by scholars working in a large variety of disciplines (and not by post-modernists with which he blithely groups me). The assumption that ancient interpreters ‘play fast and loose’ with the ‘face value’ of the Bible, and that modern scholars tell us like it really was, leads to Kugel’s clear advocacy of the conclusions of the latter, and the ‘great secret’ which they reveal. For, as Kugel writes, they understood Scripture to be on ‘the level of any ordinary human composition – in fact arguing that it was in some cases even worse: sloppy, inconsistent, sometimes cynical, and more than occasionally deceitful.’ This conclusion is based upon flawed methodological assumptions, and it is to these flaws that my review attempts to draw attention.

James Kugel and Me on How to Read the Bible

OMT gets dissed as a bush-league post-modernist Miltonist by noted author James Kugel - who responds to my review of his How to Read the Bible. Read his comments on my review below or here, but first an abstract of my review - which can be read in full in number 100.1 of the journal JQR. The review is available through JSTOR, or you can send a request for an offprint to me.

Here's the abstract of my review:

In How to Read the Bible, James Kugel employs the many resources at his disposal - among them archaeology, anthropology and linguistic - to reveal a Bible, at once thought unified, to be rather “contradictory and incoherent.” The story which takes center stage in the book is the contrast between the reading habits of “ancient interpreters” and “modern scholars,” – and of how “people went from one way of reading the Bible” to “reading it in another.”

The heroes of Kugel’s account, modern scholars, he explains, “understand the Bible afresh”; reading it “scientifically” and “without any presuppositions,” they embark upon a “cold, objective search for the truth about the text.” They write about the text’s “real meaning,” its “original meaning,” or the Bible at “face value.” Ancient interpreters “had a stake in what the text would end up saying,” while modern biblical scholars oblige by telling us what “really happened”; where “Biblical texts really come from”; and what these texts “really mean.”

Claiming allegiance to both sets of traditions, Kugel fashions himself as the one who delivers “reality” - that is, “the real Bible,” summoned by his own “unbiased interpretation.” For Kugel, there are two Bibles: the real biblical texts and the “Interpreted Bible”: they “make up side by side, two completely different books.” Modern biblical scholars are said to deliver the former; traditionalists, liberal theologians and literary critics offer instead the debris of “human dogmas” and “interpretations.” Kugel ends up delivering what Thomas Nagel calls a “voice from nowhere” – the ostensible perspective of objectivity and so-called unbiased interpretation. How to Read the Bible thus fulfills the dream of the nineteenth century, in having finally revealed what von Ranke calls “Wie es eigentlich gewesen,” the world—in Kugel’s case, the Bible—as it really was.

Kugel’s hypothetical “unInterpreted Bible” is also a fantasy – the fantasy of modern biblical scholars. Not just from a post-modernist sensibility (which Kugel rightfully dismisses), but, from a perspective which ranges from Aristotle to Kuhn, from Milton to Wittgenstein, that understands that perceptions are never innocent of assumptions, and traditions of interpretation are always the vehicles for encountering texts. The mostly etiological (that is causal) interpretations of Kugel’s modern scholars may be elegant, clever and ordered, but such interpretations leave the Bible as simplistic, even simpleminded. Kugel claims that the ancient interpreters ignore the “plain sense” of Scripture and supply the “final and definitive interpretation,” but it’s really the explanations he advocates that provide final and definitive interpretations of the biblical text. In Kugel’s reading, it is predictably the heroic modern biblical scholar, from his (ostensibly) Archimedean vantage point, who provides the causal link that renders everything coherent and final.

Foregoing the objectivity which turns the Bible into a sloppy collection of unrelated fragments may not mean, as Kugel says of traditional interpreters ‘crouching’ in front of the Biblical text, but rather trying to occupy the traditions of those ancient interpreters which allow us to attend to a work that transcends our (sometimes overly narrow scholarly) expectations of what texts should be.

Here's Kugel:

William Kolbrener’s “How to Read How to Read the Bible” presents a pretty good summary of some of my ideas, but he certainly errs in saying (p. 188) that while I “gesture to the role of assumptions in interpretation (p. 135), the mantra of ‘the real Bible,’ repeated throughout How to Read the Bible, betrays a faith in a somehow unmediated text.” I gesture? It is the role of assumptions in interpretation that is the true mantra of my book, chanted in every chapter. But if he is implying that I am not sufficiently interested in the interpretive assumptions of modern biblical scholars, I should point out that the Bible is a rather different from Paradise Lost, to which Kolbrener compares it. Much of the Hebrew Bible was written twenty centuries or more before Milton, in a society and literary environment very different from our own, and in a language still imperfectly understood. What is more, many biblical texts purport to recount historical events, and almost all of them presume a knowledge of specific historical and cultural details proper to biblical times. All these things have been immeasurably illuminated by the last six or seven generations of scholars working in various fields connected to the Bible. What I find lacking in Kolbrener’s article is any appreciation of this circumstance or, indeed, any real acquaintance with modern scholarship apart from the things that I have to say about it – and sometimes not even with those. He doesn’t seem to think that archaeological evidence, Assyriology, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history, and comparative Semitics need to play any decisive role in our attempt to understand the meaning of biblical texts. But it is precisely these things that must mediate any serious, critical engagement with the Bible today.

Kolbrener apparently believes that they can be dismissed with a postmodernist wave of the hand: they’re all just one possible way of reading. This may fly with Milton scholars, but I don’t think biblical studies are quite there yet. In short: I would like to be kinder, but I’m afraid this is one game he shouldn’t have suited up for.

Oedipus in a Kippa

At the beginning of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, a chorus of elder priests surrounds the oracle at Delphi. They mourn the terrible plagues that have befallen their city, Thebes, lamenting that the gods have abandoned them. Oedipus, who had already saved the city once, and is lauded by the elders as ‘chief of men’ appears, commanding the devout priests: ‘don’t pray to the gods; pray to me. I will grant your prayers!’ Jocasta, his wife (and, as we know too well, his mother), is distraught, skeptical, mocking the oracles of the gods and their supposed involvement in human affairs - ‘come off it Oedipus!’ Oedipus by contrast proclaims his knowledge of divine will, and his ability to enact it: ‘I am Apollo’s champion!’ I know what the gods want; and I will be the one to perform their will!

Imagine an Israeli production of Oedipus - with the chorus as ultraorthodox, the skeptical and secular Jocasta (in a pants suit), and Oedipus wearing a knit kippa. In Sophocles terrifying vision, you can’t know - even when the gods seem to be talking to you, revealing their will. This is what the psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, calls ‘the other Oedipus complex’: the belief in the certainty of your knowledge, that you always already know – not only the present, but the future as well. The chorus, who always proclaim their lack of knowledge and powerlessness, are part of a traditional culture that both Oedipus and Jocasta want to push aside. In the end, they are vindicated, but only in the catastrophic defeat of Thebes. The gods do prevail, but not in the way anyone had imagined. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means when he writes of Oedipus’s tragic flaw: he is a victim of his certainty – his belief in his knowledge of the gods, and that he is the one to bring about their will.

The modern public sphere in Israel is filled with versions of the knowing Oedipus –ultraorthodox, national religious, and even secular – all proclaiming their programs for redemption - as they scramble to define the public sphere, and bring the Jewish people to their ‘promised end.’ Even with the shock of the Lebanon War and Gaza, the national religious version of Oedipus still claims to know the divine will, and to be able to enact it – the inheritance of the Six Day War when Israel really did seem to be the divine hand. But the natural religious are not the only ones with their messianic agenda. The secular have their own vision of the public sphere with its own end, if not any more the Zionist state, then at least a state informed by the progressive and liberating forces of enlightenment. And the ultraorthodox – whose skepticism still makes them demur from some of these grandiose visions – have betrayed those skeptical principles by mixing politics and religion as they attempt to fashion the public sphere in their own image. All of these are maximalist, strong and exclusionary visions, betraying another Oedipal fantasy: ' I must rule!'

Perhaps it’s time to forgo this other Oedipus complex, and strive for a public culture stripped of the competing extremist dreams that currently define our lives. Of course, it’s a proposal in which everyone loses something, but may be one, in the end, where everyone wins. Ultraorthodox skepticism about the state means acknowledging Israel as a modern nation state – where one has obligations as well as rights. The national religious give up on their vision of the immediate realization of the divine promise of redemption. While the secular forgo their sometimes exclusionary and intolerant vision of progressive enlightenment. By comparison to the dreams of redemption, the benefits are admittedly more minimal: national religious gain a more inclusive sense of community – of secular and even ultraorthodox – who see themselves as fulfilling a more modest version of the zionist dream (note small case z). The secular gain a public sphere based on principles of genuine inclusion and a universalism generally open to difference. The ultraorthodox gain membership into a State that has divested itself of its messianic aspirations, and the possibility for economic mobility which such membership entails.

What we all gain is a non-coercive public space – for self-reflection and conversation, which in the process may lead us to realize that we have more in common then we had thought. The elders in Sophocles’ play are devoted citizens of Thebes; while Jocasta – the seeming skeptic – sneaks away to pray to the gods. So we might discover that the ultraorthodox – think of the nachal charedi – value the State and citizenship; and as a Haaretz poll recently shows, God’s promise to Abraham has a deep pull on Israel’s secular. When not pursuing the strident vision of exclusive visions, we may find ourselves open to those aspirations which we have secretly harbored, making it easier to identify with those we thought to have despised.

The immature dreams - fantasies perhaps - are discarded, but an admittedly more minimalist and inclusive set of possibilities emerges. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, ‘enough isn't everything, but enough is enough.’ Maybe it's time we all begin to settle with enough.

Open Minded Torah Goes Retro

From Papyrus to Script; from Script to Print; from Print to Electronic.

Despite this normal course of progress, OMT will be reversing the trend: Open Minded Torah will be published (as a book!) by Continuum in 2011!

Watch here for further developments and updates, and a new look to OMT!

Jerusalem Hanuka Event: Hod Hanuka at Barbur