Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination 1666907960, 9781666907964

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Jewish Literary Illumination and the Earthly Body
Biblical Emigrants
Sexuality, Martyrdom, and Suicide in the Talmud
From Hekhalot to Kabbalah
Wonder and the Jewish Enlightenment
Twenty-First-Century Narratives of Jewish Identity
Twenty-First-Century Epic Theater and Eclectic Choreography in Margot Mink Colbert’s Ballet
Reflections
Bibliography
Index
Scripture index
About the Author

Citation preview

Sacred Body

LEXINGTON STUDIES IN JEWISH LITERATURE ‌‌‌‌‌Series Editor: Victoria Aarons, Trinity University Jewish literature is an evolving field drawing upon a rich intersection of contexts: cultural, historical, religious, linguistic, interpretive, and political. As an essentially interdisciplinary field of study, Jewish literature transcends geographical and temporal boundaries, taking us back to ancient texts as it moves into new and evolving directions and patterns. This series welcomes original scholarship that explores a wide range of diverse perspectives, approaches, and methodologies that advance our understanding and appreciation of Jewish literature. The series will cover all geographical areas and all periods and movements in the field of Jewish literature, including such diverse areas as American Jewish literature; modern and ancient Hebrew literature; Jewish immigrant writing; Holocaust literary representation; Jewish writing around the globe; movements and theoretical approaches, such as cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, etc.; and Jewish cinema. We invite scholarly contributions that cover a range of genres: memoirs; fiction, including novels, graphic narratives, and short stories; poetry; and film. We welcome original monographs and edited volumes as well as English-language translations of manuscripts originally written in other languages. ‌‌‌‌‌Titles in the Series Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination, by Roberta Sterman Sabbath Reenvisioning Israel through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018–2021 Electoral Crisis, by Matt Reingold Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience, by Sara Nomberg-Pryztyk, edited by Holli Levitsky & Justyna Włodarczyk The Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir-Writing: Rings of Memory, edited by Sophie Vallas The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture, edited by Hilene S. Flanzbaum The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust, by Jacky Comforty with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych, by Rachmil Bryks, Translated Memories: Transgenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust, edited by Ursula Reuter & Bettina Hofmann Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity, by Jennifer Rich

Sacred Body Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination Roberta Sterman Sabbath

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Cover image © Linda Alterwitz, Untitled #104 (detail) from the series While I Am Still, 2014 While I Am Still combines the visual languages of art and science to create dreamscapes of the invisible body. Untitled #104, a data-drive image of the human body derived from nuclear medicine, reveals an ethereal figure in an energized state of being. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sabbath, Roberta Sterman, author. Title: Sacred body: readings in Jewish literary illumination / Roberta Sabbath. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Lexington studies in Jewish literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Sacred Body analyzes exemplary Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the “sacred” from the divine and focus instead on the “everyday sacred,” earthly existence in order to celebrate life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoid abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023002564 (print) | LCCN 2023002565 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666907964 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666907971 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish literature—History and criticism. | Human body in literature. Classification: LCC PN842 .S33 2023 (print) | LCC PN842 (ebook) | DDC 809/.88924—dc23/eng/20230127 LC record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023002564 LC ebook record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023002565 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Jewish Literary Illumination and the Earthly Body: Storytelling, Irony, and the Everyday Sacred

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Chapter 1: Biblical Emigrants: Human Agency in Eve, Abraham, and Sarah

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Chapter 2: Sexuality, Martyrdom, and Suicide in the Talmud: Life Force and Death by Choice

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Chapter 3: From Hekhalot to Kabbalah: Accessing the Body of God

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Chapter 4: Wonder and the Jewish Enlightenment: False Messiahs, Philosophers, and Social Justice

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Chapter 5: Twenty-First-Century Narratives of Jewish Identity: The Schlemiel and the Messianic in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark

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Chapter 6: Twenty-First-Century Epic Theater and Eclectic Choreography in Margot Mink Colbert’s Ballet TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation

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Reflections

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Bibliography Index

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173

Scripture index About the Author



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For Our Children

Preface

I asked my ninety-eight-year-old father close to his death whether he believed in God. He retorted in a heartbeat, “That’s over my head.” At the time, I didn’t realize how Jewish his response was. Admittedly, he was a government patent attorney in the chemical engineering division who studied complicated molecular structures known as polymers (which make up cheeses, plastics, and medicines), who also loved geology and saw magic in all things material. He would stay up into the middle of the night when my brother and I were kids to study the secrets of the natural world. He was also one who appreciated the arts, poetry, and dance. Then there was my mother, likely a frustrated free spirit, who, when my father said to her, “Rosaline, those are the rules!” retorted, “But Milton, that’s only if you accept those rules.” To these two retorts, I dedicate this book. Both are equally Jewish and both reveal the breadth of our Jewish traditions in finding the balance between agency and tradition, seeking joy and managing grief, learning and changing in response to the everyday. Poet Alicia Ostriker takes the paradoxes attributed to Jews even further. When referencing literary works produced in the Jewish tradition, she opines that Jews are full of contrasts in texts, in characters, and even in God.1 This dynamic is the target of Jewish literary illumination and the impulse to express the messiness, the pain, and the beauty of everyday life. I will try to show creative ways in which Jewish literary illumination works through the millennia to emphasize the living dynamic endemic to everyday existence that contrasts so dramatically with emphasis on an afterlife, deferred pleasures, a loss of individuality, idealized merging into cosmic oneness, and suffering as purification. In so doing, Jewish literary illumination emphasizes the importance of life, maintenance of life, and fulfillment in life. Examples in this book are not meant to be comprehensive, but I hope they are representative enough to articulate a tradition that has existed for millennia in mythic, proto-historic, legalistic, mystical, philosophical, and aesthetic expression. Jewish literary illumination highlights the profound importance of this earthly life, the sacred life, the only one we have.

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Preface

NOTE 1. Alicia Ostriker, at Hebrew Bible seminar of scholar Naomi Graetz. Zoom. February 17, 2022.

Acknowledgments

This manuscript has been a fifteen-year journey that would never have been possible without the help of family, friends, and colleagues. Thanks go to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, College of Liberal Arts and the English Department, which have helped with funding and other support, with special thanks to Jennifer Keene, Kathryn Levasseur, and Gary Totten. Damon Barta accomplished essential editing work. Many others have helped by reading the manuscript and offering suggestions, including Zev Garber, David Penchansky, Rabbi Jordania Goldberg, and David Stohl. Research at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and Hebrew University in Jerusalem provided much-needed resources as did the UNLV Lied Library staff and especially Yuko Shinozaki, who always honored my library book requests with enthusiasm. Eliezer Shore of the Rothberg International School of Hebrew University in Jerusalem introduced me to the richness of Jewish mysticism and opened the doors to Talmudic and contemporary Jewish scholarship with his sensitive and generous instruction and stories. Leaders in feminist Jewish studies, including Tammi Schneider and Gail Labovitz in the United States, and Naomi Graetz and Ronit Irshai in Israel, have inspired the sense that readings of the Hebrew Bible can be diverse, rich, and inspirational. Thanks to Andrew Rippin, who left us much too early, and Marvin Sweeney, Al Esbin of blessed memory, Kecia Ali, Marianna Klar, Emran El-Badawi, and Richard Middleton, who enriched and encouraged my research as this project and its premise developed. My gratitude also goes to Michael Deckard for believing that my contributions related to Sabbatai Zvi and Moses Mendelssohn could resonate. Special thanks also go to Margot Mink Colbert, whose friendship and choreographic genius opened my mind to the complexity of intellectual thought built into her choreography. And thanks go to Linda Alterwitz, who agreed that her digital artistic photography exploring the mystery of the human body as storehouse of intellect, emotions, and agency should grace the cover of this book. I owe particular gratitude to Victoria Aarons of the Lexington Press Jewish Studies Series for her confidence in this monograph and to the press team of Judith Lakamper and Mark Lopez for their work in shepherding the manuscript to publication. To my xi

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husband, I owe continued inspiration, as his memory has been a blessing. This manuscript would not have been completed without my children, who provided not only consistent encouragement but also clarity in the formation of several key concepts as the manuscript developed over these many years and who continually fill me with gratitude. And to our loved ones and to my grandchildren, I hope one day you will find the beauty in these messages from stories that span the millennia.

Introduction

Jewish Literary Illumination and the Earthly Body Storytelling, Irony, and the Everyday Sacred

Telling stories has been a part of the Jewish tradition since biblical texts. The stories I examine in this book are not just any stories. They reflect the material reality of everyday life and celebrate human accomplishment in complicated circumstances. Focus on the body by Jewish traditions, narratives, and rituals has been critiqued as being too material, too sexual, too action oriented, and too prone to ignore the spiritual.1 Yet these critiques ring hollow. Biblical, ethical, mystical, philosophic, theatrical, literary, and choreographic texts testify to the complicated nature of a Jewish sensibility that accounts for the whole human experience, including the spiritual, as integral to the focus of Jewish tradition. Jewish literary illumination, from the Bible to contemporary works, share a this-worldliness, an emphasis on the body, and an avoidance of abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism. These texts deal in uncertainties and ambiguities and lack closure, thus illuminating the whole human earthly experience and celebrating the life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships that help humanity survive and thrive even in the most challenging of times. Jewish literary illumination begins with the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, and continues to this day in literary, legalistic, and aesthetic forms. Jewish literary illumination sheds light on the most salient message of Jewish texts, that earthly existence and the body are as important as the spiritual and divine, and it incorporates a tradition of works that, as described by Moyo Okediji, “constantly emphasize commitment to humanity through their conceptualization of the human life as sacred and dignified.”2 At the same time, I argue that illumination acknowledges the irony of an earthly life filled with difficulties 1

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and rewards. The goal of illumination is to provide a realistic road map to help and nurture a life worth living according to the individual vision and by extension the community of humanity. This book is not about theology, the study of the nature of God. Rather, it investigates how the portrait of divinity relates to human life. Nor is this book about theodicy, the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil. Rather, I explain that Jewish literary illumination provides a radical immersion in real everyday experience in order to better understand that experience, to appreciate its limitations, and to celebrate its beauties.3 This approach relies on a rabbinic saying in the Talmud:4 “Humanity cannot know what is above, beneath, before or after creation.”5 Of course, much ink has been dedicated, including in rabbinic literature, to what occurred before creation or in the supernal realm or will occur after death, but I argue that the spirit of the saying emphasizes that the preoccupation of sages, scholars, community leaders, and us as individual human beings should rest upon earthly experience and avoid conjecture about what cannot be known or achieved. This approach invites the question: if Jewish literary illumination texts focus such creative energy on the earthly life as central, how do those texts transmit that message? How does Jewish literary illumination avoid narratives of the utopic, apocalyptic, otherworldly, and even collectivity? The answer lies in the ironic stories about struggling against life-denying reality and affirming the uplifting tales of everyday life. Stories in the tradition of Jewish literary illumination are defiant, critical, and messy. They celebrate not fate, predestination, obedience, or abjection but the fight against the odds. This examination identifies the literary mechanisms that produce that outcome. Distinguishing between the life-affirming and life-denying sacred is at the heart of my understanding of Jewish literary illumination messaging. Through the millennia, Jewish literary illumination has limited the holy and the sacred and thereby consistently challenged the authority and totality of divine control by emphasizing and narrating life-affirming sacred and holy power as a strategy to disempower life-denying forces. The emphasis of the texts, as reflected in ritual and practice, both resists and refuses to honor divine authority and power that kills, destroys, and controls. This strategy places the responsibility for humanity squarely on human shoulders, thus replacing divine responsibility. Inevitably, because of their powerful presence as cornerstones of social identity, the texts discussed here, which include examples across the millennia, influence what individuals and societies think about themselves and each other. The study of such intersections between text and culture is often referred to as cultural studies. All sacred texts, Jewish or not, have served to justify both the worst of behaviors and the ideal, and they have inspired both



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the most restrictive and most liberating concepts. They are used by political, religious, and social institutions to define individual identity and promote collective norms, to justify cruelty and compassion. Providing the flexible scholarly tools to identify the mechanisms and functions of Jewish literary illumination in cultural context, a cultural studies methodology provides diverse theoretical tools to investigate the cultural power of these diverse literary artifacts. Cultural studies developed as a robust strategy embracing a diversity of methodologies. In the 1970s, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, notably Stuart Hall among others, studied texts to discover their influence on culture formation and their use in establishing and maintaining hierarchical power and control. Later twentieth-century Frankfurt School social critic Fredric Jameson examined how cultural systems construct our identities and set norms. More recently, twenty-first-century Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben applied a cultural studies lens to religious institutions and terminology. In his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben examines the categories of the sacred and profane and notes that power designated as sacred is often a thinly disguised tool for political and social control. Enriching the understanding of identity and its relationship to culture, law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has suggested another cultural studies concept, i.e., the concept of intersectionality, a term that serves to identify our combinations of identities and the role those combinations play in either empowering or disempowering us. I am reminded of the biblical story of Ruth, whose very identity exemplifies intersectionality. She is not only disempowered as a Moabite but also as a woman and finally as widow. The intersectionality of her multiple, marginalized identities radicalizes her status as a disempowered human being. By using an intersectional lens, readers identify how a text, in this case the story of Ruth, is informed by and constructs individual identity, agency, and collective responses. Another helpful concept within cultural studies is the exploration of individual power understood as a sacred body. Okidiji is credited with introducing the term metamodernism to theoretical discourse. Metamodernist theory reintroduces the everyday human experience into scholarly discourse. Okidiji writes that a metamodernist sensibility works toward inclusivity and anti-colonialist sensibility by “constantly emphasizing [a] commitment to humanity through [a] conceptualization of the human body as sacred and dignified. . . . Metamodern aesthetics is therefore both a critique and an arm of modernist and postmodernist art.”6 This perspective validates our multiple, dynamic identities. Building on Okidiji’s concept, Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, affirms the profound importance of the everyday human experience while maintaining a healthy skepticism about utopian or other simplistic aspirations.7 As a tool of

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cultural studies, metamodernist theory recognizes lived individual humanity as opposed to the discourses of modernism and postmodernism, which often minimize the individual experience and emphasize the collective experience. The discussion that follows will use cultural studies methodology to identify what provides Jewish literary illumination texts with their power to form identity, empower agency, and provide hope against life’s challenges. This book identifies three facets of Jewish literary illumination—storytelling, irony, and the everyday sacred—that serve to amplify the centrality of the human experience and to validate the importance of preserving and nurturing life. Using these three facets, a continuing tradition of Jewish texts positions the sanctity of life in this world at its core. Through the millennia, storytelling, irony, and the everyday sacred function in Jewish narratives to guide readers away from looking skyward to escape earthly entanglements and toward a focus on earthly struggles with life. STORYTELLING: THROUGH THE CRACKS Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Jewish cultural narratives point to the complexities of life rather than to its simplicity, its romanticized portrait, or its black-and-white judgments. My discussion rests on the belief that storytelling is the most potent carrier of cultural messaging. As Friedrich Nietzsche points out, stories can help us forget our loneliness as individuals and make us feel that others understand our pain, our joy, our confusion.8 And, according to Walter Benjamin in Illuminations, the best stories are not those that build empathy, as in the Aristotelian mimetic mode, but rather those that produce our astonishment “at the circumstances under which [the characters] function.”9 The narratives I examine in this book are not romanticized stories but lived ones. These may not be stories where we experience pity and fear for the hero but rather stories that make us think about what is at stake in the greater social panorama. These stories illuminate the sacred in everyday lives.



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My discussion asks the following questions. How do these stories amplify the centrality of the human experience? Validate that experience? How are human beings imagined to be in control of their surroundings? How do the texts I examine express that humans can and should resist predetermined odds, fight as advocates for their collective needs, and seek the fulfillment of their individual desires? The answer lies in the stories I examine in this book: stories about believable people, recognizable relationships, and familiar conflicts of every sort: internal, familial, military, and leadership. In the Hebrew Bible, conflict begins as soon as humans are created in the Garden of Eden, the second of the two creation stories of Genesis 2. In the following passage, God expels his creations from the utopic Garden of Eden after they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “YHWH, God, said: / Here, the human has become like one of us, in knowing good / and evil. / So now, lest he send forth his hand / and take also from the Tree of Life / and eat / and live throughout the ages . . . ! / So YHWH, God, sent him away from the garden of Eden” (Gen. 3:22–23).10 The elements of Jewish literary illumination recognizable in this brief yet striking episode alert the reader to the rawness of the stories about to be told. Stories will not be about gods, the supernal realm, or some imagined afterlife or other life. Rather, stories will be descriptive of this earthly life. The sine qua non characteristic of Jewish expression, according to Adin Steinsaltz, is “the imagery concept in Jewish thought.” He describes this strategy thusly: Jewish thought uses pictorial or imagery concepts instead of abstract concepts. The imagery concepts used are frequently derived from the commonplace, from the everyday life, and work. . . . The imagery concept is the product of a specifically Jewish mode of thought, and as such defies definition to other terms. It is not a symbol, a circumscription, or a metaphor, nor is it merely a Jewish substitute for an abstract concept. It is something unique, with a nature of its own.11

Rather than paint idyllic, simplistic, or extra-worldly images to tell a story, Jewish literary illumination uses imagery that suggests the visceral, sensual, and emotional to communicate abstract ideas like power, fate, love, hierarchy, divinity, and innumerable other earthly experiences. The importance of a this-world focus with all its contingencies, contradictions, and potential as the center of Jewish literary illumination cannot be overstated. Moshe Idel explains, There is a conspicuous absence of systematic metaphysical systems, or even theological impulses, in biblical and rabbinic forms of Judaism. They were oriented much more toward the communal, the social, and the behavioristic

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elements in religion, and this is why in these two forms of Judaism one cannot detect substantial ideals of subordination of the physical to the metaphysical.12

Yochanan Muffs concurs by pointing out that “Ancient Israel, instead of rejecting the world and worldliness, made God its creator. Worldliness is not an enemy to be vanquished, but a challenge to be faced.”13 As Idel and Muffs suggest, the Jewish tradition emphasizes living in a sanctified reality rather than dying for it, celebrating life rather than escaping it, and improving the world rather than rejecting it. To encourage a reader’s active engagement, in keeping with the worldly orientation gestured at by Idel and Muffs, the Hebrew Bible uses a minimalist style. Individual stories have minimal information about internal motivations or how events effect behaviors. Often, there are logical, informational, or motivational gaps between stories, sentences, and phrases, gaps that create unmet expectations of causality, association, resemblance, discourse, and emotion. This style differs dramatically from the mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in which every natural and human occurrence is explained through stories about gods with clear information about what motivates divine action. For example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar seeks revenge against Gilgamesh for having refused her sexual advances, and the beloved companion to Gilgamesh is therefore sacrificed. Or, for example, Homer’s Odyssey, where every detail of godly adventures is explained logically, which provides a sense of completeness in explaining human reality.14 Such myths provide a generous amount of information about causes for suffering, reasons for good fortune, and explanation for natural events. No such explanations are given for the often arbitrary, divinely motivated action or the sequences of short episodic stories in the Hebrew Bible,15 and this lack of clarity requires readers to input their own meaning to connect and explain sequences. The text has many silences. According to Erich Auerbach, “The decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place are undefined. . . . Thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed . . . the whole permeated with the most unrelieved suspense.”16 The resulting emotional response is one of angst, dissatisfaction, and questioning. Reading the narrative episodes of the Hebrew Bible is far from comforting. For example, the following episodes in the Hebrew Bible follow one another without any clear motivational reasoning. God’s promise to Abraham of the birth of Isaac (Gen. 17:17) is followed by the circumcision episode, then followed by Abraham’s challenging God, demanding the divinity not destroy the entire cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for the faults of a few (Gen. 18:30). This episode is then followed by Abraham claiming Sarah is his sister and giving her to an unsuspecting King Abimelech (Gen. 20:1). None of



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these episodes seem logically connected or even show a consistent portrait of Abraham’s character. None of the episodes explain natural events. As Robert Alter puts it, “vigorous movement of biblical writing away from the stable closure of the mythological world and toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of a fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history.”17 These stories do, however, represent complicated human behavior that challenges readers to explain, to become active readers, and to create additional stories. They are stories that feel believable, if often reprehensible. Roland Barthes refers to narratives as writerly texts when the texts require an active readership that must make sense out of the often-puzzling sequences of stories and the stories themselves. Barthes posits “the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest: . . . [W]e gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one.”18 As a writerly text, the Hebrew Bible is filled with contradictions that defy easy sensemaking. The Hebrew Bible requires the cognitive exercise of the reader’s imagination to explain its characters’ desires, unmotivated action, and dramatic consequences. Jewish literary illumination focuses on the particularity of human experience. As Elliot W. Wolfson puts it, “The architectonic of Judaism is emblematic of universality sought in the singularity and individuality of multiplicity of things experienced somatically and concretely in the ebb and flow of temporal being.”19 The stories we tell through the millennia testify to the profound importance of representations of individual, embodied experience to instruct, bond, and inspire a community and its individual members, who are always challenged yet surviving, and even thriving. Living in 2022 and experiencing a world of robust perspectives on biblical analysis, interpretation, and translations, I am increasingly convinced that what David Penchansky says could not be more true. As Penchansky puts it, the Bible “cannot easily be read as a single unitary narrative—and it is not even desirable that the text be so read. . . . And God equally—indeed, moreso [sic]—resists any attempt at reduction into some stable shape, one that is amenable to human understanding.”20 By extension, the works of the multiple genres discussed in this book are not closed texts. Approaching these texts as works of art, I have discovered that they meet the standard of Adorno, who opined that “Traditional aesthetics falsely inflates what is a relation into an absolute whole or totality, thus turning harmony into a triumph over heterogeneity and an emblem of illusory positivity.”21 In keeping with Penchansky and Adorno’s emphasis on the importance of multiple perspectives, both in reading texts and in examining works of art, what follows in this book are

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readings meant to enable a diversity of cultural and ideological perspectives. I cannot hope to be all-inclusive in the interpretations of the readings that follow. I can only hope that my readings of exemplary Jewish texts and their use of Jewish literary illumination will enrich an understanding of their cultural implications. IRONY: GOD LAUGHED Rabbi Nathan met the Prophet Elijah, and asked him: “What was the Holy One doing at that moment [the Rabbis made their decision]?” He said: “God laughed and said, ‘My children have defeated me! My children have defeated me!’” —Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Babba Metzia 59b22

Irony is the second essential facet of a Jewish literary illumination. Irony has had a long and successful formal literary career that crosses over into philosophy with lively contributions to epistemology, ontology, and theology.23 The importance of irony cannot be overstated, and the connection of irony to parodic humor is well-established.24 Thus, in addition to more sobering ironic examples, I look briefly at humor’s potential for Jewish literary illumination. The embracing of irony as an important literary strategy in Jewish literary illumination is not shared by other literary traditions that avoid irony altogether. Resisting an ironic storytelling strategy, the genre of romance conveys a dominant mythology of Western civilization by offering a narrative structure that has a happy ending for a hero blended into a vision of society as it should be or a reconfigured, stable, and more serendipitous status quo. From the medieval grail stories to contemporary popular culture, romance sends its message that individual effort can surmount incalculable odds. To the contrary, the narrative structure of Jewish literary illumination is that of an ironic view of life. The heroic character is like us all, not particularly grand, and yet the challenges that threaten the hero may be gargantuan. The outcome is neither a happy ending for the hero nor a society as-it-should-be but an outcome that continually challenges livelihood and desires, an outcome of successes and failures that features the laughter and tears of humanity writ large. Irony is essential to stories and portraits of the sacred in the Jewish literary illumination tradition, whose examples I discuss in this book, and it wears many hats. It is a figure of speech, a polemical strategy, a learning tool, a critical perspective, and a living orientation. An ironic perspective nurtures a variety of literary strategies including parody, humor, and comedy. Several philosophers and social critics have considered irony and its many functions



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and iterations. Quintilian, for example, writes that “irony” is that figure of speech or trope “in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood.”25 Socrates, well known for saying one thing and meaning another, used irony to get people to think, to critique, and to amuse. Famously, Socrates claims, “For I am not aware of being wise in anything, great or small.” At first glance, Socrates disavows being wise. A second glance refines that understanding of the sage by acknowledging that what he says means that, on the one hand, he claims he is not aware of being wise, but, on the other hand, he does not deny his wisdom.26 Such are the logical twists and turns that irony can produce, even in conversation. Another of irony’s admirers, early nineteenth-century German poet and philosopher Fredrich Schlegel, viewed irony as a learning tool that sharpens cognitive agility. For Schlegel, an ironic perspective shows a willingness to identify otherwise disguised logical or factual weakness.27 Schlegel also admired an ironic perspective for its ability to engender a realistic assessment of any given state (the objective in Romantic terms), encouraging reflection and creating fresh discourse, literature, and poetic wisdom.28 Schlegel notes that “Irony is the form of Paradox. Paradox is everything good and great.”29 Again, irony allows for the playful and serious, the guileless and hidden.30 Schlegel suggests that readers and viewers find pleasure and intellectual stimulation in the endless play between a simple tale and one that engenders the nuances that irony produces. Yet another essential contributor to the discourse on irony is nineteenth-century Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates. In this work, Kierkegaard recognizes the salvific potential of an ironic way of being in life.31 From his perspective, the great achievement of irony was to overthrow the pagan worldview. Kierkegaard is important in expressing the nuances, complexities, and potential of an ironic positioning within this-worldly experience. In his Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard identifies irony as embodied in one who doubts everything, one who challenges accepted wisdom, and one who problematizes discursive truths.32 He sees irony in its negative dialectical moment as a correction.33 As a tool that determines the unsatisfactory in any discourse, irony, according to Kierkegaard, became the necessary handmaiden to early Christians dissatisfied with their pagan and Jewish confessional alternatives. Reflecting an analogous perspective on the benefits of an ironic life-view, twentieth-century German philosopher Theodor Adorno describes an ironic dialectic as one that critiques the status quo when that status quo causes antipathy, anxiety, and outright anger. According to Adorno, this orientation produces a text that seeks “to struggle against the repressive identification compulsion that rules the outside world . . . fashioning the relation between

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the whole and its parts in accordance with its needs.”34 In Adorno’s hands, irony takes on a willingness to identify what, in culture, produces the laughter and the tears, what is life-edifying and life-suffocating for individual life.35 This tension between the life-edifying and life-suffocating in everyday life also constitutes the essential irony of Jewish literary illumination Twentieth-century French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch affirms the iconoclastic or critical function of irony. He calls the ironic conscience one that sees plurality in reality. Describing an ironic moment as one that sees through pompous vacuity, Jankélévitch acknowledges the power of a parodic seriousness, an irreverential bow, or an uncontainable burst of laughter to release the tension caused by the performance of inanity.36 While it may seem obvious that laughter is joyous, laughter comes in many forms, and is frequently derisory or controlling, as in laughing “at” rather than “with” someone or something.37 Even though laughter may result from identifying an ill, he sees a life-affirming force produced by ironic texts that conveys an understanding of paradox endemic to life. American twentieth- and early twenty-first-century philosopher Richard Rorty names as ironists those who embrace the importance of being critical about cultural phenomena, the status quo, about what is understood as natural or normal. Ironists identify a gap between the ideal and the real that may remain invisible to a less discerning eye. Ironists are liberated from the trap of preconceptions, unrealistic goals, and rigid ideologies. As a result, ironists come to embody a point of view producing action that advances individual and community betterment.38 An ironic outlook allows, even welcomes, a philosophic agility that invites limitless perspectives. The ironist resists the comfort of closure with continuing doubts, even about the most institutionalized of discourses and of hegemonic power.39 Reflecting on Rorty’s work on irony, Brad Frazier sums up Rorty’s point of view about life: “Facing up to the contingencies of human existence is a bracing and sobering task.”40 Rorty’s insights about the liberating aspect of irony that expresses reality rather than glossing it over validates the human condition of both unavoidable events and human agency. The brief survey above is meant to demonstrate the many functions of irony used to appreciate intellectual banter, formulate social criticism, and serve as inspiration for change that appears in literature, philosophy, and life experience. Taken as a mindset that allows both for life’s negations and affirmations, irony is a positive force, providing worldly affirmation determined to show, in the face of obstacles, tragedies, and limitations, the potential for life-continuing alternatives. Thus, irony aligns with epistemology rather than ontology, history rather than theology, and the everyday rather than supernal life. Irony has more to do with survival in the here and now than extra-worldly distraction from that focus.



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While irony is no laughing matter for some, for Jewish illuminators, irony that allows for laughter is essential. Like many of the above philosophers who see the silver lining of irony’s mixture of darkness and light, for Jewish illuminators, irony provides the mental and communal vehicle to learn, adapt, and survive. An ironic view that produces laughter has long been associated with a Jewish cultural orientation and comedic style and long been sought as a salutary relief from the earthly condition. Although I do not have the space to explore the vast scholarship of Jewish humor here, the topic does have a long tradition of scholarship, and its relevance is worth visiting, if briefly. One important comedic strategy in Jewish literary illumination is parody. Parody appears throughout the Jewish cultural tradition and is likely familiar to most. An ironic view of reality is required to deliver a parody, which is the exaggerated imitation of something used to ridicule that something. To help distance ourselves from crushing reality and to retain a sense of our own integrity, parody and its reflective powers enable a sense of retrieved power, even in the direst of circumstances. Parody, according to William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, delivers the insight “[to see] evidence of storm beneath the surface of the tranquility of the everyday.”41 Parody enables insight on the causes of suffering or angst. Zuckerman explains: Parody takes the common values and normal conventions of the tradition that are its object and twists them, usually turning them inside out—thereby making them look ridiculous and absurd. The surprise, even shock, of this effect compels readers to take a closer look at these traditional values that previously they had unquestioningly accepted as normal. Because the parody displays these values from a completely different perspective, readers see them with fresh eyes and begin to grasp what is abnormal in the “normal,” what is unconventional about the conventional.42

With parody, the audience is brought in as judge and jury, even as critic, all empowered positions. Parody produces just the sort of elevation and empowerment that Jewish texts seek to bequeath to their audiences. The ironic illumination of earthly experience in Jewish texts focuses on the tension between the ought and the is.43 The ought is what seems fair, just, and compassionate; the is is the experience of being human. The disjunction between the two is where we live. Perhaps we imagine a divine promise, but then reality faces us. Every day, we confront the difference between the ideal and the real, the ought and the is. Through irony, the Jewish texts I discuss in this book not only entertain but also teach, question, and offer alternative views. From biblical stories to those of contemporary art, from poetry to parody, this essentially epistemological strategy grapples with everyday reality and finds a sacred presence in it.

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THE EVERYDAY SACRED: PURITY AND RITUAL FROM PRIESTLY CONTROL TO INDIVIDUAL AGENCY Jewish rituals focus on human activity, bodily functions, and embodied conditions of life. The goal of such rituals is to maintain and honor the glory of this life on earth. As Marvin A. Sweeney puts it, “Holiness embodies eschatological promise during the course of history and not at its end.”44 Thus, Jewish literary illumination reflects a set of traditions initially formulated and practiced as rituals that make life on earth central, that glorify this-worldliness, and that refuse salvation in other than earthly terms. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, along with numerous others,45 discusses human understanding of divine power that, through the millennia, has attributed both life-affirming and life-denying events to the gods. In the traditions dominating the cultures from which the Hebrew Bible sprang, humans believed obedience and appeasement were the only two options regarding engagement with gods, as they attributed all of reality—both the life-affirming and life-denying divine powers as expressed in ritual, prayer, and communal activity—to the gods. If humans and the environment were fertile, the gods were happy. Humans had succeeded or failed in appeasing the gods as proven by the state of affairs. Douglas identifies a difference in the traditions of worship suggested in biblical stories and legalisms beginning with the Book of Leviticus. However, as we see in the following biblical examples, the tradition of human beings challenging divine power had already begun. In Genesis 3:9, “YHWH, God, called to the human and said to him: / Where are you?” In Genesis 26:24, “Now YHWH was seen by him [Isaac] on that night and said: / I am the God of Avraham your father.” Other encounters occur in Exodus 20:1, Ezekiel 1:3, and so forth through the later books. The dialogue is direct, immediate, grounded in some information sharing or action, and God is present on earth. As we saw in earlier examples, sometimes the individual biblical character disagrees with or ignores the divine command and is able to hold back lifedenying divine powers. Eve seeks sustenance, knowledge, and companionship against divine orders. Abraham advocates for the innocent of Sodom and Gomorrah. God calls Isaiah to be a prophet. In these examples, God is available without ritual preparation. These encounters even seem spontaneous and collaborative,46 and they established a tradition regarding how the individual layperson engages with divine power. The concept of purity is critical to this engagement. God can only be addressed when a human being achieves a state of purity, and humans can only address or otherwise turn to God for life-affirming powers.47 Purity and life-affirming divine powers require one another in Jewish literary



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illumination logic, and achieving a state of purity begins with the body. The body must avoid contact with death: corpses, excess semen, menstrual blood, or the blood of an animal not ritually slaughtered, for example. Maintenance of such rules lies entirely in human hands, and these rules notably address the reality that every human body experiences these states of affairs regularly, even on a daily or minute-by-minute basis. A man discharges semen. A woman produces menstrual blood regularly. A family member dies. An animal succumbs to disease or a predator. Such contact is inevitable: In the Israelite mind, blood was the archsymbol of life. . . . Its oozing from the body was no longer the work of demons, but it was certainly the sign of death. In particular the loss of seed in vaginal blood . . . was associated with the loss of life. Thus it was that Israel—alone among the peoples –restricted impurity solely to those physical conditions involving the loss of vaginal blood and semen, the forces of life, and to scale disease, which visually manifested the approach of death. . . . All other bodily issues and excrescences were not tabooed, despite their impure status among Israel’s contemporaries, such as cut hair or nails in Persia and India and the newborn child as well as its mother in Greece and Egypt.48

Thus, for priest and practitioner, hypervigilance became critical to practice and enforce the laws that avoid contact with death. Having contact or being in a state associated with death is impurity. Notably, both purity and impurity are temporary states of being, neither is sinful, and, generally, neither reflects moral righteousness. The question of achieving and maintaining purity for cultic worship of God has profound cultural implications in at least two important domains: those of the priesthood and of women. First, a priesthood developed during the periods of the two temples that concentrated power in a group of men that controlled a central part of communal life. These priests controlled access to holiness and could set the standards for sacrifice, cleansing, admission, and the orderly observance of all religious life.49 They determined the strictness with which the biblical rituals were practiced.50 Because of the male-dominated priesthood and broader social male privilege, menstruation carried tremendous consequences for women’s communal, religious, and political leadership. Women menstruate regularly, a state considered impure. Thus, women’s state of impurity required their regularly being barred for prolonged times from presence in temple and access to ritual leadership. Although release of semen was considered a condition of impurity, a man could achieve a state of purity through purification rituals. The condition fell within the laws of genital discharge (Lev. 15). Sexual intercourse with a menstruant could require more severe consequences. As

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Jonathan Klawans explains “A man who has sexual contact with a menstruant or a person who comes into contact with a corpse will be ritually impure for a week (Lev. 15:24; Num. 19:11).”51 Klawans and Douglas show that Jewish ritual law understood impurity as natural, temporary, and managed through cleansing rituals.52 Thus, while many of the temple-related rules of impurity concerning the body became moot after the destruction of the temple, relations between husband and wife continued in importance.53 The issue of impurity/purity took on important cultural consequences for social, religious, and political leaders and their control over women.54 Managing impurity through rituals that could be performed on a regular basis, and to which practitioners had regular access, is critical to understanding the innovation introduced by early ritual practices documented in the Hebrew Bible. According to Douglas, “The simple move, expressed in rules for controlling ritual contagion, teaches the people not to blame non-existent demons for misfortunes but rather human ritual behavior. Rituals prescribe action to remove impurity: washing in the case of minor impurities, sacrifice in the case of bloodshed, genital discharges, and the set of skin afflictions called leprosy.”55 Douglas’s example also emphasizes the point that the designation of “pure” and “impure” does not reflect morality, nor soiled or dirty bodies, but a temporary, individual human condition. Removing the blame for impurity from extra-earthly forces and assigning it to human agency underscores human responsibility for earthly consequence56 and means that humans control their potential, including the potential to experience divine presence and to contain divine power. During the time of the First Temple (until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and that of the Second Temple (from the time of the return by the Persians from exile in 532 BCE to the destruction by the Romans in 70 CE), encounters with the sacred were confined to the temple sanctuary. According to the Book of Leviticus and later biblical laws, the temple sanctuary, controlled by priests, was where lay practitioners could engage with divine powers and access the sacred divine presence through rituals. The supervision and maintenance of these rituals by priests created a state of readiness for kavvanah, a sense of loss of self to experience God’s love. Under the watchful priestly eye, the lay practitioner could experience kavod, divine presence and its strong emotional experience, and that is where devequt, the human-divine connection, was established and maintained. The fulfillment of these specific rituals by both priest and lay practitioner is called Imitatio Dei, the earthly imitation of the divine way, which was reflected both by the temple architecture and the priestly supervised rituals.57 However, the destruction of the temple in 70 CE necessitated the development of purity rituals for everyday use.



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After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, necessity dictated that the rituals once practiced in the temple sanctuary be accessible inside the home or local synagogue, the community temple replacement. In other words, what was once controlled by priests in a centralized cult of worship would now be controlled by the individual, the community, and the emergent priestly replacement, the local rabbi. As I will show in my discussion of the development from a centralized biblical tradition to a diasporic Talmudic tradition, ritual adapted to everyday life.58 As Eyal Regev points out: Beginning in the Second Temple period, the Jewish purity system contained an additional concept which we shall term “non priestly purity.” The best-known practice that illustrates this concept is the phenomenon of eating ordinary food in purity, which both Rabbinic sources and the New Testament ascribe to the Pharisees. According to this perception, every daily food should be kept from the same causes of the biblical Levitical impurity which threatened sacred food. [Later,] [t]his practice is called in Rabbinic sources hullin (literally, profaned or non-sacred) purity. . . . In contrast to the biblical priestly system and the centering of Jewish culture around the Temple, the notion and practice of non-priestly purity focused on the individual, and not on the community as a whole.59

Thus, focus on the individualized experience sustains the presence of the sacred in everyday life. Instead of relegating the sacred to priestly control, the experience of divine presence was made available for everyday use. This movement from priestly to individual control of access to divine presence had important social, economic, and political consequences. No longer was the sacred in the hands of privileged, priestly control. Priestly control meant limited access to not only ritual participation but also social celebration and communal participation. Priests controlled what was considered sacred and designated property, food, privileges, and luxuries accordingly. Priests appointed political leaders who served using the power and privileges that the priests bequeathed. Thus, a political leader issued edicts with religious justification. Priests wielded tremendous power, power that often deprived the lay practitioner of access to life-affirming activities and possessions in the interests of political control. Sometimes, priests could release property or prescribed activities from priestly control. When priests released something previously designated as sacred for common use, it was deemed profane and was then available to the lay practitioner. Agamben sees this binary between the sacred and profane as artificial, serving to enforce political and social power. According to Agamben, when religious institutions and rituals designate something as sacred, they remove many valuables from common use, such as freedom, pleasures, and luxuries. In this ritual logic, all items and experiences

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designated as sacred, both the destructive and beneficent elements, remain in priestly or institutional control. As Agamben notes, according to Roman jurists, the sacred belonged to the gods, and the profane was any entity released from godly purview and meant to be made available for human use: The great jurist Trebatius thus wrote, “In the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men.” And “pure” was the place that was no longer allotted to the gods of the dead and was now “neither sacred, nor holy, nor religious, freed from all names of this sort.” The thing that is returned to the common use of men is pure, profane, free of sacred names. But use does not appear here as something natural: rather, one arrives at it only by means of profanation. There seems to be a peculiar relationship between “using” and “profaning.”60

Agamben recognizes the liberating aspects of claiming what had been heretofore thought of as sacred and therefore unavailable for everyday use. As he explains, the original source verb for religion is not religare, that which unites the human and divine, but rather religio, that which maintains a scrupulous separation of the human and divine.61 Agamben argues for the sacred that benefits humanity be so designated for everyday use. In keeping with Agamben’s logic, Jewish literary illumination designates the life-affirming sacred as critical for human use while creating a firewall against the life-denying sacred. Thus, Jewish literary illumination embraces both functions of religious practice, to separate and to unite the divine and human realms, both religare and religio. As explained by Douglas above, Jewish literary illumination resists life-denying power and advocates for the life-affirming power attributed to God. As a result, Jewish literary illumination attributes responsibility for most of life’s misery to humanity. In Agamben’s terminology, the pleasures of life, the life-affirming divine, are sacred and available for human use, not removed from everyday use by the privileged, priestly, or powerful few. Pain, suffering, and death are not requirements for a reward in the afterlife but are rather to be avoided. Levitical rituals allow lifeaffirming experiences that, in Agamben’s words, “make a new possible,” and humanity reclaims its everyday pleasures as sacred and thereby validated.62 Thus, Jewish literary illumination embraces and amplifies life; it validates and prioritizes individual, lived experience and identifies that experience as sacred without a priesthood.



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CONCLUSION Chapter 1 examines three well-known biblical stories to reveal the powerful message of Jewish literary illumination. Biblical portraits of Eve, Abraham, and Sarah and narratives of these three iconic figures demonstrate the three facets of Jewish literary illumination, emphasizing the everyday sacred. I will review each to demonstrate the humanity of Hebrew Bible portraits, in which individuals feel believable, situations identifiable, and choices understandable. Each story has conflict, joy, and tears and focuses on the earthly, the sensual, and complicated human reality. Human experience is at center stage, and God is not omniscient nor omnipotent, nor all good nor all beneficent, but rather vulnerable, collaborative, and omnipresent. Chapter 2 addresses Jewish sacred texts written across the millennia related to the topics of sexuality, martyrdom, and suicide with compassion. These texts acknowledge that the bodily experience can be both one of fulfilling pleasure and one of profound suffering. The thoughtful discourse on such topics in the Talmud, for example, demonstrates a particular sensitivity to experiences that directly affect the human body. Chapter 3 explores how the boundaries ultimately blurred between the understanding of the Jewish God as transcendent and the understanding of God as also immanent, at once distant and near, both separate from earthly creation and at one with that creation. This chapter examines Jewish mysticism, which is a broad term that covers many human experiences, including changes in states of consciousness, extreme emotional responses, and access to fresh insights about reality. Often these experiences are associated with theological knowledge, ideas about redemption and salvation, and access to ultimate truth. Chapter 4 reviews some history of the Jewish experience during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to establish the distinct ways Jewish ideas about salvation developed, one utopic, one earthly. The first focus will be on the utopic salvation promised by Sabbatai Zvi that attracted millions of followers, who, even after his conversion to Islam, continued to believe in his message. The second focus will be on a shift in Jewish hopes of salvation from a messianic vision to a vision of social justice through a consideration of the work of Moses Mendelssohn, who espoused a Judaism focused on social justice, and his colleague Gotthold Lessing, whose play Nathan the Wise voiced ideas about social justice, religious tolerance, and human responsibility. Chapter 5 reveals how twenty-first-century Jewish culture also shares in these two traditions, one messianic, the other earthbound. On the one hand, an apocalyptic-redemptive narrative prevalent among many diasporic United States Jews is that the creation of the State of Israel served as a messianic

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redemption after the Shoah, or Holocaust. Rather than strict observance of Jewish law and communal religious life as the center of their identity, many diasporic Jews define their identity by these two historic events and the redemptive narrative that connects them. On the other hand, many Jews do not see the Shoah-to-Israel narrative arc as self-defining but rather see the abilities of Jews to survive the millennia as a distinct religion, worldview, and culture through periods of persecution and waxing and waning freedom as foundational to their identity. Chapter 6 uses Margot Mink Colbert’s ballet TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation to make several important statements about contemporary, diasporic Jewish life. Through her absence of references to the Shoah and the State of Israel, Mink Colbert rejects the apocalyptic-messianic narrative as defining Jewish identity. Instead, she offers an individual and collective Jewish identity that focuses on a life of departures, courage, and arrivals. For Mink Colbert, survival depends on strong cultural, social, and economic communal ties, on the love of family, and on the need for creative fulfillment. Creativity is not confined to the artist, according to Mink Colbert, but is a feature of all humans facing the existential void of an uncertain future and who possess the ability to create meaning for everyday life. Through the millennia, Jewish literary illumination consistently serves as a bridge to an everyday sacred, a sacred that inspires life rather than death, that validates struggle against suffering and pleasure against deprivation. From the mythic to the biblical, to the subsequent rabbinic traditions of laws and mysticism to the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, to today’s literary productions, the individual voice has argued with, ignored, and negotiated with divine power in defense of human agency. The earliest Jewish stories, rituals, and laws established the importance of individual human agency and responsibility for earthly activities to maintain a focus on the quality of earthly life. In so doing, Jewish literary illumination texts through the millennia consistently invoke this-worldliness and well-being as the province of the sacred body. NOTES 1. The materiality critique comes from Philo, among others, who read the Bible as metaphor and allegory, not pointing to any particular human experience but universal forces. For example, Abraham is virtue, Sarah the passive mind. For a discussion of allegory in the rabbinic tradition, see chapter 2 of this book. Early Christians criticized the Jewish insistence on circumcision and kosher rules, saying belief is “in the heart,” thus removing both from material practice. See Justin Martyr, “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” EWTN. Accessed November 17, 2022. https:​//​www​.ewtn​.com​



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/catholicism​/library​/dialogue​-with​-trypho​-the​-jew​-11333. See also Matthew Arnold’s “Hebraism and Hellenism,” Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126–37. 2. Moyo Okediji, “Returnee Recollections: Transatlantic Transformations,” in Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art in and out of Africa (Chapel Hill: Chameleon, 1999), 36. 3. I am comfortable with using the word Jewish in this monograph because the readings I discuss are self-identified as such, except, of course, references in the Bible that would better be called Israelite, a designation referring to the preexilic period (ca. 1225–586 BCE). See David Sperling, “Israel’s Religion in the Ancient Near East,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible Through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 5. My project is to distinguish the sense of Jewish from its use in its broad cultural and historical contexts to get beyond the fuzziness that the term implies. Admittedly, the word Jewish is fraught with complexities. The term is malleable when applied to historic, cultural, and individual expression, often religious but just as often secular, often self-identified but often rejected. For a cogent discussion of the term, see the introduction in The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, eds. Naomi M. Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni-Shapiro-Phim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 14. 4. The Talmud refers to both the Jerusalem Talmud (codified ca. 400 CE) and the Babylonian Talmud, the more authoritative Talmud (codified ca. 600 CE). The Talmuds are voluminous works documenting the stories, arguments, and discourse of Jewish scholars and rabbis debating the law as given in the Bible and how those laws should be adopted to the diasporic Jewish reality after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. 5. The full quote reads, “Everyone who tries to know the following four things, it were better for him if he had never come into the world, viz.: What is above and what is beneath, what was before creation, and what will be after all will be destroyed.” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Hagiga 2). See also my discussion of the everyday sacred later in this introduction. 6. Okediji, “Returnee Recollections,” 36–37. 7. Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor, 1956), 22. 9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 150. 10. The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, trans. Everett Fox (New York: Schocken, [1983] 1995). All quotes from the Torah in this book originate from the Everett Fox translation. Quotes from the Tanakh derive from Sefaria.org unless otherwise indicated. 11. Adin Steinsaltz, The Strife of the Spirit (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1988), 64. 12. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 57.

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13. Yochanan Muffs, Love & Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 7. 14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953). 11. 15. Herbert N. Schneider, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 292–94. 16. Auerbach, Mimesis, 11–12. 17. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic, 1981), 27. 18. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), 5. 19. Elliot W. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 40. 20. David Penchansky, The Politics of Biblical Theology: A Postmodern Reading (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1995), 94. 21. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 226. 22. Preceded by this is a debate between rabbis about strict rabbinic traditions, ostensibly representing divine will, and more lenient ones, representing human will, in which the more lenient interpretation prevails. This debate confirms laughter as a thread that intertwines theology, ethics, and storytelling and appears in other forms in the Tosefta and the Jerusalem Talmud. See Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 224. Joseph B. Soloveitchik points out the collaborative nature of the covenantal agreement between God and humanity, also referencing Bava Mezia 59b in The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 42. This Talmudic anecdote serves as a metonym for the continuous debate in rabbinic, philosophic, and broad religious discourse about the extent to which religious and moral law are one and the same. Most notable to this discussion is the ongoing work of Avi Sagi, noted Israeli professor, who argues against what has come to be known as the doctrine of “Divine Command Morality,” or DCM, which states that all morality is divine, and no human moral considerations enters into its static reality. This position includes a belief in an absolute transcendent God unknowable and unreachable by human means. The human relationship to this God is not one of collaboration or reciprocity but only of supplication to an unknowable Godhead. The fulfillment of God’s will, not that of humans, is the realization of religious devotion. See Avi Sagi and David Statman, Religion and Morality, trans. Batya Stein (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 9. 23. Fred Rush, Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 256. 24. Erica Weitzman, Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 37. Weitzman credits Kierkegaard with setting the limits on Hegel’s wisdom in recognizing its nihilistic view of the ironic moment. She also recognizes Fredrich Schlegel for his homage to the importance of irony in intellectual freedom and potential. 25. Quintilian, Institutio Oratorica, in Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21. 26. Vlastos, Socrates, 83.



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27. Kevin Newmark, Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (New York: Fordham, 2012). Schlegel was a part of the Jena Romantic movement of nineteenth-century Germany. 28. Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragment 42,” Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 148. 29. Schlegel, “Fragment 42,” 149. 30. Schlegel, “Fragment 42,” 156. 31. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Lee M. Capel (London: Collins, 1966). In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard discusses a variety of ironic lenses including those of subjectivity, ethics, humor, religion, aesthetics, and ontology. Aside from crypto- and transparent Christianity, the post-Kantian philosophic discourse of irony, upon which Kierkegaard builds, includes the global contingency of particularity/universality and finitude/ infinitude, all considerations relevant to this discussion. 32. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), xxii, 220, 234–35. 33. C. Stephen Evans, Kieregaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NY: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1983), 147. Evans argues that Kierkegaard, via Climacus, accepts both a transcendent God, arrived at by faith, and an immanent or natural God, available to all. Evans also explains the role of irony in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, who describes three “stages” (“existence-spheres”) of aesthetic, ethical, and religious lives. Between these spheres is irony and humor, which allow for individual free will, agency, and ultimately the paradox that Kierkegaard sees so exquisitely in Christianity (12–13). See also B. Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 122. 34. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 6. Hans Blumbenerg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Cornell University Library, [1960] 2010). 35. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 78. 36. Vladimir Jankévévitch, L’Ironie (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), 96. Saelid Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins (London: Routledge, 1997). 37. See Aristotle, Poetics; John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 38. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv, 22. 39. Michael Williams, “Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature,” Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 210. 40. B. Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15. 41. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), xvi.

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42. Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44. 43. Hayden White provides an inclusive discussion of tropes and the way thinkers relate the tropes to the development of mankind and to the “‘styles of thought,’ which might appear more or less hidden, in any representation of reality, whether manifestly poetic or prosaic.” See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1972), 32–33. 44. Marvin Sweeney, Tanak: A Theological and Critical Introduction to the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 12. Sweeney employs the word holy to reference what I am calling sacred. His use of the word eschatology refers to the divine purpose for life on earth. 45. Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8–10. For example, Émile Durkheim argues that gods form a projection of reality in the human imagination and that “these beings are nothing other than collective states objectified.” Durkheim credits Robertson Smith for clarifying this distinction in his own book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 416. 46. For Arthur Green, “Transcendence means rather that YHWH—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the profundity of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence.” See Arthur Green, Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 205. 47. Neusner writes, “The priestly law-code utilizes purity and impurity primarily in reference to the cult.” See Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 15. 48. Jacob Milgrom, The Anchor Bible: Leviticus 1–16, A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 767. 49. Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 145–74. Here, Klawans discusses dissatisfaction with the Temple and its priests as expressed by rabbis and as evident in Christian texts. 50. The word sin in a Jewish context means transgression. Thus, purity rituals after a transgression reinstate the desired purity. The only three transgressions considered permanent are murder, adultery, and idolatry. 51. Klawans, Purity, 54. 52. On the other hand, sometimes extremism overtook moderation in application of halakha. The consequences of a man entering his wife during a period of impurity were so serious that the Talmud contains strong warnings against it. See Naomi Graetz, “Intertextuality Sheds Light on the Text of Judges 19, the Concubine of Gilead: The Case of Genesis 24,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 153. Graetz explains, “The discussion in the Babylonian Talmud refers to terrorization resulting in a husband’s having intercourse with his wife when she is unclean, because she is afraid to tell him that she is menstruating. Terror causes his servants and family to run away and meet with or cause fatal accidents, and



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because she is afraid of him, she turns on lights after it is already dark, thus violating the Sabbath” (153). 53. Charlotte Fonrobert writes, “In post-Temple times, most of the halakhic regulations and observances still practiced today concern the prevention of sexual relations between husband and wife during the wife’s menstrual period.” See Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21. 54. Today, groundbreaking work is being done by feminist scholars to both highlight the misogyny in the Talmud and to retrieve women’s rights by using Talmudic and halakhic logic. This scholarship includes Tal Ilan, A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud: Introduction and Studies (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); Rabbinic Literature, eds. Tal Ilan, Lorena Miralles-Maciá, Ronit Nikolsky (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2022); Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021); Ronit Irshai and Joel A. Linsider, Fertility and Jewish Law Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012): Naomi Graetz, Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005); and Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, & Their Relevance for Today (New York: Schocken, 1995). Much is also being done to advance the discourse in gender studies and queer studies. Two prominent examples are Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, eds. Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, and David Shneer (New York: New York University Press, 2009) and Max Strassfeld, Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022). 55. Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, 10. 56. Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, 10. Of course, literary works blame God. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work, see the story “Gimbel the Fool” and Tevye’s soliloquy railing against God in Fiddler on the Roof. Nevertheless, the tradition of ritual emphasizes human control over human reality. 57. Milgrom, The Anchor Bible: Leviticus 1–16, 75. 58. Stuart W. Miller writes “The holiness of the land and the people of Israel continued to have meaning after 70 C.E. Once the holy temple had been destroyed, the inextricable connection between these residual notions of holiness and the biblically derived purity laws weas more acutely perceived, leading to an increase rather than a lessening of ritual purity practices in everyday life.” See “Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and other Identity Markers of ‘Complex Common Judaism,’” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 41, no. 2 (2010): 242. 59. Eyal Regev, “Pure Individualism: The Idea of Non-Priestly Purity in Ancient Judaism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 21, no. 2 (2000): 176, 201. Regev refers to the “common” Jew as the layperson, not priest (180). He writes that “The earliest halakhot of non-priestly purity in Rabbinic sources are attributed to Hillel and Shammai, whose activity is dated to the time of Herod” (180). Also, Regev writes that “The emphasized status of the body reflects an unprecedented individualization of the body . . . and the rise of the importance of the individual” (192). See also Vered Noam,

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“The Dual Strategy of Rabbinic Purity Legislation,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 39 (2008): 471–512 and John C. Poirier, “Purity Beyond the Temple in the Second Temple Era,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 247–65. 60. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007), 73–74. 61. Agamben, Profanations, 74. 62. Agamben, Profanations, 87.

Chapter 1

Biblical Emigrants Human Agency in Eve, Abraham, and Sarah

In this chapter, I will examine three well-known biblical stories to reveal the powerful message of Jewish literary illumination. First, I will discuss Eve, then Abraham, and finally Sarah. The biblical portraits and narratives of these three iconic figures demonstrate the three facets of Jewish literary illumination, emphasizing the everyday sacred. I will review each to demonstrate the humanity of Hebrew Bible portraits, in which individuals feel believable, situations identifiable, and choices understandable. Each story has conflict, joy, and tears and focuses on the earthly, the sensual, and complicated human reality. Human experience is at center stage, and God is not omniscient nor omnipotent, nor all good nor all beneficent, but rather vulnerable, collaborative, and omnipresent. Both the vilest and the most magnificent of human attributes are portrayed through these iconic figures. Desirous, striving, and calculating human nature mixes with vulnerability, sensitivity, and devotion. Human characters are notably independent of divine influence and make choices without divine intervention. In these three portraits and the myriad of others in the Hebrew Bible, the most intimate of human functions—sexual intercourse, urinating, sensual pleasure, and procreation—are liberated from divine reach and endowed with human responsibility. Such portraits are sometimes so vile, unethical, and thoughtless that they seem to rejoice in demonstrating just how despicable human beings can be. Perhaps this raw portrait of human reality serves as a cautionary tale that responsibility must accompany free will. Perhaps the biblical stories are meant to parody other mythic stories that explain every earthly reality by activity in the supernal realm. The stories in the Hebrew Bible leave us more questions than answers while the mythic stories presume to have all the answers. Reading biblical stories, we are left 25

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with struggling, questioning, and seeking to find answers. We are left with being human. EVE: THE FIRST HUMAN SUBJECT The Hebrew Bible begins with two versions of creation, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2:4. The first version does not reference any individual, and it narrates an orderly version of creation. “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) continues with a day-by-day report until day 6, when God said: Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness! Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the Heavens, animals, all the earth, and all crawling things that Crawl about upon the earth! So God created humankind in his image, In the image of God did he create it, Male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:26–27)

In this version, the male is called zachar (‫ )זכר‬and the female nekeiva (‫)נקבה‬, generic terms suggesting human transcendence. And God saw that all was “exceedingly good!” (Gen. 1:31) and, on the next day, rested. The sequence flows logically with neither detailed embellishments nor human activity. In the Genesis 2:4 version, the difference from the first creation version could not be more dramatic. The chapter is filled with anthropomorphic detail, with the messiness of human desire and agency, and with the disruption caused by divine power. This version begins with the following: At the time of YHWH, God’s making of earth and heaven, No bush of the field was yet on earth, No plant of the field had yet sprung up, For YHWH, God, had not made it rain upon earth, And there was no human/adam to till the soil/adama— But a surge would well up from the ground and water all the face Of the soil; And YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soil, He blew into his nostrils the breath of life And the human became a living being. YHWH, God, planted a garden in Eden/Land-of-Pleasure, in the East And there he placed the human whom he had formed. (Gen. 2:4–8)



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So far, the human is not a particular individual nor gendered. To avoid death, God warns the human against eating from the Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:9). Then the narrative continues with a complication. To provide the human with companionship, God creates animals and finally takes a bone from the human that God then builds into Isha (‫)אשה‬, woman. At this point, the word for the individual man, Ish (‫)איש‬, enters the text (Gen. 2:23): The human said: This-time, she-is-it! Bone of my bones Flesh from my flesh! She shall be called woman/Isha, For from Man/Ish she was taken! (Gen. 2:23)

This division of the body suggests the mythic division of the androgyne. This myth says that, upon creation, rather than the gods or God creating individuals with distinct sexes and genders, these entities were created as one.1 Yet, the ability to have sexual pleasure and produce children requires the separation of each unit. Until God takes the bone from the human, the human is an undifferentiated androgyne, representing all sexes and genders. After this brief mention of Man/Ish (Gen. 2:23), the text returns to the word human, adam (‫)אדם‬, while continuing to use the word woman, Isha (‫)אשה‬ in subsequent  episodes, such as eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and exile from the Garden of Eden. After God orders the human from the Garden of Eden, the human calls  the woman life, or living, or life experiences, chava (‫)חוה‬ (Gen. 3:20). Thus, the text emphasizes at once their oneness and their individuality. This mythic story removes humanity from nature and offers life experience to the individual human. The change from the human at one with nature to a separation from nature presumes a distinct identity for each. Of the two entities that emerge from the one, it is the entity called chava (‫)חוה‬, or Eve, who represents activity and independent thinking separate from nature and from God. Eve immediately shows the dynamic human dimension: agency, decisiveness, and energy, both physical and intellectual. Eve possesses a mind, curiosity, desire, and kinship. If Adam and Eve are considered as a unit, that unit represents active individual resistance to authority that would remove pleasures and fulfillment. Or, if Adam and Eve represent two individuals, then Adam is the passive and Eve the active. A traditional reading of this second version of creation has long marked Eve as the great temptress who convinces Adam, the unwitting partner, to eat the forbidden fruit.2 Almost immediately after her creation in the narrative,

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the snake, the most cunning of animals according to the biblical description, convinces Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, often translated simply as the Tree of Knowledge. The human beings then become like gods, according to the text. Eve is often described in mythic terms as the uncontrollable forces of nature, the preexisting matriarchal world, and primeval chaos, a status disdained by patriarchal hegemonic domination.3 As Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow note, “Women are identified with nature, body, the material realm, all of which were considered distinctly inferior to transcendent male spirit.”4 According to rabbinic logic and texts, Eve introduces death, presumably resulting from disobedience. In later rabbinic and Christian literature, Eve introduces sin. In this logic, her biting the fruit unleashes sexual desire, a dreaded and uncontrollable human primal force.5 The Hebrew Bible has long been recognized as a patriarchal work, and interpretations of the Hebrew Bible are as or even more patriarchal or androcentric.6 As Rachel Adler writes, “The pervasive male God images of Jewish tradition functions as models of and models for . . . a world in which women are subordinate to men. They both claim to tell us about the divine nature, and they justify a human community that reserves power and authority for men.”7 The central characters of the Hebrew Bible are male, narrative and description by and large focus on male characters, and women’s roles are typically to fulfill the needs of men.8 In patriarchal terms, independent feminine sexuality must be controlled. As Alain Daniélou puts it, “The persecution of sexuality—the essential element of happiness—is a characteristic technique of all patriarchal, political or religious tyrannies.”9 Like Pandora in the ancient Greek myth, Eve is given the dubious honor by traditional scholarship of introducing all evil into the world, which has become the common understanding of her legacy. A cultural studies approach to analysis helps to read past this patriarchal layer and provides the perspective to identify Eve’s agency. Eve’s biblical portrait represents not only an individual and a hero but a collective rebellion against predetermined destiny and authority as well. In Eve’s story, a heroic trickster figure emerges, framed as an obstreperous resident, a new arrival in the vast paradisiacal creation, a voice that contradicts her predestined fate of living ignorant of the difference between good and evil, never to know the joys and beauty of the world about her, to be forever self-absorbed.10 Her portrait demonstrates agency, free will, and choice.11 This story begins before the creation of Eve, with a divine interdiction to Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and the triggering narrative moment occurs when the snake speaks to Eve, not Adam, suggesting the value of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge would mean not to know the difference between good and evil,



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not to know the pleasures of life, and not to help the other human. As Phyllis Trible writes of this moment, “the woman is both theologian and translator.”12 Eve becomes the universal human being, endowed with agency, independent thought, courage, inquisitiveness, and critical thinking. According to Marvin Sweeney, “the snake’s advice suggests that God is keeping something from the humans. Faced with such ambiguity the woman acts in a manner that sets the pattern for all humanity, viz., she analyzes the situation then and acts on the basis of her analysis of the information before her. In doing so, she and the man gain wisdom.”13 The woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was a delight to the eyes and the tree was desirable to contemplate. She took from its fruit and ate And gave also to her husband beside her, And he ate. (Gen. 3:6)

Notably, not only does Eve decide to eat14 but she also finds sensory pleasure in eating: the sight, taste, reflection, and likely smell and sounds of eating the fruit. If the snake can also be seen as a phallic symbol and complement to the female, then the gift of Eve is the promise, not the curse, of sexual pleasure and children. Unlike traditional patriarchal interdiction against sexuality, Eve’s agency marks sexuality as a sign of reproduction, nurturing, and collaboration, all positive connotations.15 Yet, the act of eating the forbidden fruit implies much more than sexual awakening, although that is one of life’s pleasures. From a narrative structural perspective, Eve’s rejection of the divine interdiction of Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge is typical of the heroic refusal of parental or prophetic interdiction,16 and the act resembles the structure of pre-monotheistic mythic rebellions of the lesser gods against the greater gods. Giving the fruit to her consort is an equally rebellious act.17 She has formulated her now-internalized values, asserting agency and particularity. As Joseph Campbell explains, a “belly of the whale” moment comes when the rules understood as fixed have suddenly and dramatically changed.18 Such a moment comes with Eve’s choices to act upon her desires and curiosity. Finally, and triumphantly, the narrative apotheosis or the culminating point installs her as mother of all humanity, as she and her partner begin life as individuals as well as collaborators. Thus, the biblical Garden of Eden story describes human individual and social reality in all its complexity. The consequences of Eve’s agency represent a radical narrative difference from rebellious tales in other ancient mythologies. According to some

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polytheistic traditions, Eve should have been killed or dismembered permanently to serve as a sacrificial example against future rebellious behavior.19 After all, like Prometheus, she gifts wisdom to humanity and rejects subservience to divine hegemony. On the one hand, the text tells us that, like Prometheus, Eve faces the consequences of an individualized quest that disrupts divine plans: pain at childbirth and separation from the utopic garden. On the other hand, like Prometheus, she engenders wisdom and bequeaths benefits to humanity. Eve retains her power of fertility, pleasure, curiosity, and collaboration, and her identity as protohuman casts all subsequent humans in the Hebrew Bible as independent, transactional, and desirous actors. Thus, the Garden of Eden story shows an active Eve who, in contrast to the passive Adam, brings agency and autonomy to humanity. According to David Birnbaum, this was God’s intention the entire time—to present Eve and Adam with a test and the imperative to choose between subservience, on the one hand, and autonomy, on the other, with the latter being the divine’s true desire. Birnbaum writes: The Garden of Eden is generally considered a discrete event. Man tasted of forbidden “knowledge” and was “punished.” But what if Eden is to be considered a continuing process, and what if the “punishment” came bonded with a gift? Man continues to ascend intellectually and to taste of more and more knowledge. The intellectual demands for freedom, responsibility, privacy, and selfhood continue to mature. . . . But man’s potential is at its highest level when his freedom is greatest.20

Through Eve, free will has been introduced as a human attribute, and with the advent of choice come the burden of responsibility and the liberation of agency. Eve’s is the first story of human agency in the Bible, but it is not the end of the biblical narrative detailing the march toward subjectivity and individuation. As we will see with the laughter of Abraham pericope (Gen. 17:17), we come to recognize the complete freedom of the human condition and the realization of the subjectivity that began with Eve. ABRAHAM: OPPORTUNIST AND ADVOCATE FOR HUMANITY The narrative of Abraham’s life in the Hebrew Bible leaves us with more questions than answers. From southern Mesopotamia, to north along the Fertile Crescent, and then south to the Negev, his movements follow a pattern of migration between that of nomads and urban dwellers, avoiding conflict and



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responding to seasonal and trade opportunities while observing the civilized customs and laws of the Mesopotamian region.21 Abraham sets out from Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen. 11:31) with his wife, arrives in Haran (today’s southeast Turkey), and then leaves Haran for Canon (today’s southern Levant) when he is seventy-five years old. Afterward, with no clear narrative time line, he arrives in the region of today’s Hebron (south of Jerusalem), spreads his tent (Gen. 12:8), and then “Avraham journeyed on, continually journeying to the Negev” (Gen. 12:9). From there, he takes his entourage to Egypt, where, in an effort to protect himself and his fortunes, he gives his wife to the pharaoh, saying she is his sister (Gen. 12:13). Finally, the annunciation scene arrives, the first topic of focus for this look into the character of Abraham:22 Now when Avram was ninety years and nine years old YHWH was seen by Avram and said to him: I am God Shaddai Walk in my presence! And be wholehearted! I set my covenant between me and you, I will make you exceedingly, exceedingly many. Avram fell upon his face. God spoke with him, Saying: As for me Here, my covenant is with you, So that you will become the father of a throng of nations. No longer shall your name be called Avram, Rather shall your name be Avraham, For I will make you Av Hamon Goyyim/Father of a Throng of Nations! (Gen. 17:1–5)

Here, God honors Abraham by requesting the patriarch’s presence in order to engage in a contractual agreement, a covenant. The covenant entails a divine promise that Abraham will father nations. The covenant also entails a divine demand: circumcision. The importance of circumcision is therefore linked to the creation of life. Circumcision will always remind the individual male both about the privilege of being chosen and the duty to remember God. What follows this covenant is the announcement of the coming birth that will launch Abraham’s legacy of fathering nations. This announcement by God to Abraham is a new form of an annunciation scene where the husband or male, not the woman who will be giving birth, receives the announcement of a birth: God said to Avraham: As for Sarai your wife—you shall not call her name Sarai,

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For Sarah/Princess is her name! I will bless her, and I will give you a son from her, I will bless her So that she becomes nations, Kings of peoples shall come from her! But Avraham fell on his face and laughed, He said in his heart:23 To a hundred-year-old man shall there be (children) born? Or shall ninety-year-old Sarah give birth? (Gen. 17:15–17)

This laugh of Abraham launches a new era in the telling of human experience. The anecdote feels realistic in a visceral way. The reader can understand a laugh at unexpected and unlikely good news, a completely reasonable, uninhibited human reaction, even if the source of the news is the divine voice. With the laugh of Abraham, the emphasis of the text has irrevocably shifted from the supernatural to the natural world. The pivotal laughter of Abraham in Genesis 17:17 also marks a turning point in the prophetic tradition. It represents Abraham’s assertion of individuality, a watershed moment for the evolution of human identity as expressed in the Hebrew Bible. Rather than submitting, serving, delivering divine messages, or repeating obsequious prayers, the prophet will go on to argue persuasively to contain God’s wrath and defend humanity against God’s cruel judgments.24 The discussion that follows argues that the story of Abraham’s laughter at once reflects and constructs a new self-consciousness that indicates an awareness of the simultaneous loneliness, responsibility, and human potential for being.25 In this story, the relationship with divinity has been reconfigured from that of a human/divine oneness to that of a dialectic, a give-and-take, an engagement of empowered interlocutors. The portrait of Abraham as an obedient servant upholding an ideal of the submissive supplicant has been superseded by that of an advocate for humanity, an argumentative believer who will fight for justice. When Abraham falls down and grovels before God (Gen. 17:3), he exhibits behavior befitting a Mesopotamian myth requiring unquestioning human submission to divine will. But, with his laugh, a new era begins.26 Abraham’s laughter signals important shifts in mythic storytelling. The human feels comfortable enough to share a good laugh with the divine figure, a deed otherwise thought of as insulting since laughter has often been disdained as disrespectful of power. Yet, the portrait of two male figures, one human and one divine, sharing a moment of laughter at the expense of Sarah suggests a new, collaborative relationship, reinforcing a covenant that would follow when God promises a number of humans, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the people of Israel, the benefits of divine approval.



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Abraham’s laugh also acknowledges a profound theological shift. What was not possible within an earlier cosmology has now become possible. Subjectivity has been born, making laughter possible. This laugh is a sign of the mature cognitive processing required to appreciate and actualize divine covenantal promise. As J. B. Soloveitchik suggests, the covenantal agreement requires the egalitarian relationship suggested in a laugh: “The element of togetherness of God and man is indispensable for the covenantal community, for the very validity of the covenant rests upon the . . . principle of free negotiation, mutual assumption of dualities, and full recognition of the equal rights of both parties concerned with the covenant.”27 No longer will stories about the supernal world be enough to explain and justify natural phenomena and human deeds. Because of the equitable relationship so economically suggested by the laugher story, the narrative of Abraham inscribes the covenant with collaboration and the importance of human responsibility for the welfare of earthly life. After the promise of a child, a joyous moment, the Hebrew Bible text follows with the requirement to circumcise all males. This turn from the promise of procreation and its pleasures to circumcision anchor the experience of the divine in the body and underscores the importance of honoring, preserving, and preparing the body to fulfill its earthly potential according to divine command. Paradoxically, the ritual of circumcision underscores both submission to and independence from God. On the one hand, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz explains, “circumcision was for the ancient Israelites a symbol of male submission. Because it is partially emasculating, it was a recognition of a power greater than man.”28 Circumcision inscribes divine power onto the male body. On the other hand, that inscription also marks independence from divine control by acknowledging the power of the phallus and, by extension, the human, and the separation of the two. Daniel Boyarin explains that circumcision “concentrates in one moment representations of the significance of sexuality, genealogy, and ethnic specificity in one practice.”29 The ritual serves to remind the male of his duty to act independently of divine power while literally remembering his debt to that power.30 The act acknowledges that the biblical text upholds both the honoring of God’s lifegiving power while emphasizing that the earthy responsibilities are human, bodily, and intentional. After the circumcision episode comes the Sodom and Gomorrah episode, perhaps the moment when Abraham acts most admirably.31 In this anthropomorphic, divine soliloquy we learn that God talks to himself, apparently in a stage whisper, because Abraham overhears the conversation: Now YHWH had said to himself: Shall I cover up from Avraham what I am about to do?

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Avraham stood still in the presence of YHWH. Avraham came close and said: Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? Heaven forbid for you to do a thing like this, To deal death to the innocent along with the guilty, That it should come about: like the innocent, like the guilty, Heaven forbid for you! The judge of all the earth—will he not do what is just?32

Not only has Abraham gained interiority in the text but God displays unexpected vulnerability. Like Eve, who analyzes the situation and then acts, Abraham also determines that he must speak against a divinity who would deprive the innocent of life. This biblical story reinforces the new set of laws, behaviors, and codes appropriate for a monotheistic theology. This dialogue is a far cry from conventional human-divine mythic dialogue where power lies with the deity. In this dialogue, as suggested above, the human asserts responsibility for earthly matters. With courage and independence analogous to Eve, Abraham negotiates with God, serving as mediator to assuage God’s wrath and frustrate his determination to slaughter both Sodom and Gomorrah, and he succeeds. God is restrained and provisionally agrees to desist if ten righteous men are found. Instead of a conventional polytheistic scenario whereby the lesser god or the human earns punishment in advocating for peers, as in the Prometheus example, God rewards initiative and agrees with his earthly counsel, Abraham. The story of Abraham’s conversation with God foregrounds the change in human subjectivity occurring after the laugh episode of Gen. 17:17. It comes because of a dramatic, even shocking, turn of events. SARAH: ENTREPRENEUR, NEGOTIATOR, AMBASSADOR From a twenty-first-century perspective, the transactional relationship between Sarah and Abraham can be seen as ironic. The Sarah/Abraham relationship seems bereft of love, a relationship of waxing and waning hegemony, on the one hand, emphasizing Abraham’s control over Sarah. On the other hand, it recognizes Sarah’s undeniable value as a desired and assertive woman. Although the story of Sarah as the wife of Abraham perhaps parodies stories of spousal affection such as that between Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Rachel, what distinguishes the biblical portrait of Sarah is the suggestion that she is a force in her own right.



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To understand the character of Sarah, I attempt to unveil her from the androcentric gloss of biblical context. Genesis narrates the dominance of the male deity and the male hero,33 and many activities in the Hebrew Bible traditionally associated with women, such as creating life, birth, suckling, and nurturing, are co-opted by the deity and adopted as male. For example, in an ironic reversal of a traditional annunciation scene where an angel or the divinity announces to a woman that she will conceive a child, Abraham, not Sarah, directly receives the announcement of the birth of Isaac (Gen 17:17). Sarah merely overhears the announcement. This anecdote, among others, seems to demonstrate how Sarah’s power is diminished to conform more closely to an androcentric narrative. However, as I will show, this episode and others can be read differently. Sarah has been the subject of innumerable interpreters of her biblical role, her relationship to Abraham, and her importance in the development of religious ideas. Philo, an influential early first-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, emphasizes Sarah’s importance. While he ignores episodes where Abraham appears cruel, as when Abraham gives Sarah to the pharaoh and King Abimelech, Philo describes Sarah as noble, eloquent, and generous of spirit34 rather than a foolish woman.35 While Philo’s literal reading of Sarah episodes vindicate the biblical matriarch, his allegorical treatment transforms Sarah into an abstraction of Abraham’s soul in its journey toward perfection.36 Thus, the earthly presence of Sarah, as a woman, a wife, is folded into male identity. Virtue belongs to the male, who is active, and the mind to the female, who is passive.37 Other readings by Philo also fold her into an androcentric narrative, and later, in the first century, the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus ignores divine concern about Sarah.38 Subsequent portraits of Sarah, through the centuries, also tend to diminish Sarah and limit her power. For some, controlled by her husband and God, Sarah’s fertility consumes her worth,39 and the medieval Rabbi Rashi even questions the paternity of Isaac, given the time line of the biblical narrative.40 Others see her as mistreating Hagar,41 and Tammi J. Schneider portrays her as fulfilling God’s design while surviving an abusive marital relationship.42 Still others point to her victimhood.43 One scholar even refers to her simply as “Abraham’s beloved wife.”44 Overall, readers across centuries have largely limited Sarah’s agency. As discussed above, most readings focus exclusively either on the victimization of Sarah or on conjecture about sexual matters.45 In such readings, Sarah is merely a commodity, a valuable to be offered for protection, not a wife whose purity would be important. When Abraham gives her as a gift to the pharaoh, saying she is his sister, “Pray say that you are my sister / so that it may go well with me on your account, that I myself / may live thanks to you” (Gen.12: 13), things seem to go very well for Abraham. Sarah is taken

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into the pharaoh’s house, and Abraham’s flock and entourage flourish. But things do not go well in the pharaoh’s house. God plagues the pharaoh and his house “because of Sarah” (Gen. 12:17). Notably the Babylonian tradition is monogamous, and the suggestion of adultery is not acceptable.46 The pharaoh continues his accusation thusly: What is this that you have done to me! Why did you not tell me that she is your wife? Why did you say: She is my sister? So I took her for myself as a wife. (Gen. 12:18–19)

To make amends, whether to Sarah, Abraham, or the God of Abraham, the pharaoh sends Abraham on his way with plentiful livestock, silver, and gold (Gen. 12:10–20).47 Then Abraham moves to the oaks of Hebron, back to the region of Sarah’s preference (Gen. 13:15–18). Rather than read the Sarah episode of the pharaoh and the later and analogous episode of King Abimelech as stories of victimization, another option is reasonable. Sarah can instead be read as an independent businesswoman, ambassador, and negotiator whose purpose is to embellish the holdings and status of the couple. Sarah serves in many transactions initiated by both her and Abraham, and these arrangements are not meant to serve the sexual desires of these great men but rather to enrich and empower this entrepreneurial negotiator and her husband. When Sarah arrives in the court of the pharaoh, the text tells us that “the woman was taken away into the Pharaoh’s house / It went well with Avram on her account, sheep and oxen, donkeys, servants and maids, she-asses and camels, became his” (Gen. 12:15–16). When Sarah returns to Abraham after the King Abimelech sojourn, the text also reports the benefits gained: Avimelekh took sheep and oxen, servants and maids, and gave them to Avraham, and returned Sara his wife to him. Avimelekh said: Here, my land is before you, settle whereever seems good in your eyes. And to Sara he said: here, I have given a thousand pieces of silver to your brother, here, it shall serve you as a covering for the eyes for all who are with you and with everyone, that you have been decided for. (Gen. 20:14–16)

In both the episode of Sarah’s sojourn in the courts of the Egyptian pharaoh and King Abimelech, ruler of the southern region of the Negev where



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Abraham settles, Sarah serves as an important partner in establishing their holdings in what becomes a nexus of regional power. The text indicates that Sarah is an independent woman, not beholden to any man. Unlike other women, Sarah has no family named by the text, no father or brother to whom she would be beholden, who would have power over her (Gen. 11:29). She has spoken lines, unusual for a woman in a biblical text. She makes the request of Abraham to consort with Hagar in order to bear a son.48 Sarah speaks up when she is displeased. For example, she speaks out in the case of Hagar’s disrespect and expresses her displeasure when Ishmael plays with Isaac. Although the text calls her “barren,” this term only indicates that she never had a child, not that she could not bear one. Thus, her childlessness could be a choice, and several scholars have suggested that she is a religious woman guarding her celibacy.49 Furthermore, the Hebrew word for barren,‫עקר‬, shares a root with other words such as main, root, and principle,50 which suggests Sarah’s powerful role in the Abraham narrative. God says to Abraham, “listen to whatever Sarah tells you” (Gen. 21:13). Given her independent character, Sarah is likely an equal partner with Abraham in embellishing their holdings and status, and Sarah is perhaps complicit in Abraham’s ruse to the pharaoh and King Abimelech. Another element suggested by the text is that, if Sarah is in fact a princess, as her name would indicate, she likely had religious responsibilities, often required by regional tradition, to serve in cult practice.51 In many ways, the text describes a multifaceted, powerful, and active woman. An understanding of Sarah as powerful renders the annunciation scene humorous, or even derisory of the patriarchal usurpation of fertility.52 This scene is filled with irony.53 As mentioned above, instead of the divinity announcing the birth of Isaac to Sarah, the announcement is made to Abraham, who laughs. Sarah hears the news indirectly, not from the divine emissaries nor from God but from Abraham. Then “Sarah laughs within herself” (Gen. 18:12),54 just as Abraham laughed to himself (Gen. 17:17).55 At this textual moment, God does not talk directly to Sarah in keeping with the patriarchal tradition that God does not speak to women. Rather, God asks Abraham about Sarah and the reason she laughs. Sarah then denies laughing. Yet, in an ironic twist, the divine personage does not appear to be on an equal footing with this womanly human. In the divine laughter episode with Abraham, as I discussed above, the text implies that God and Abraham are equals. But in the episode with Sarah’s laughter, the text portrays God as vulnerable, insecure, defensive, almost as though the personage were speaking to a more powerful entity, almost as if Sarah were God’s consort: After I have become worn, is there to be pleasure for me? And my Lord is old!

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But YHWH said to Avraham: Now why does Sarah laugh and say: Shall I really give birth, now that I am old? Is anything beyond YHWH? (Gen. 18:1–15)

Presumably, Sarah has been without child all her life,56 and given her visits to the court of the pharaoh, her comment “Will I have had pleasure from her husband” seems derisory.57 The reader is never told whether Abraham knows Sarah, a phrase often used in biblical episodes to euphemistically refer to having sexual intercourse. In the next episode, Abraham gives Sarah to King Abimelech to protect himself and his property, analogous to his gift of Sarah to the pharaoh (Gen. 20:22). The fact that Sarah is old does not seem to detract from her desirability as a gift. The fact that God promises the couple a child does not stop the ruse to have Sarah enter the court of King Abimelech. Once again, the text gives us an episode in which Abraham offers Sarah to the regional ruler as a form of self-protection. Abraham misrepresents the truth again, this time to King Abimelech. The king is none the wiser, believing that Sarah is the sister of Abraham, and he takes her. According to Babylonian traditions with which Sarah and Abraham were aligned, marriage was monogamous. Therefore, a relationship with Sarah and King Abimelech, as with Sarah and the pharaoh, would be adulterous. In a dream, God comes to him and says: Here you must die because of the woman whom you have Taken, For she is a wedded wife! Avimelekh had not come near her. He said: My Lord, Would you kill a nation, though it be innocent? Did he not say to me: She is my sister (Gen. 20:3–5)

King Abimelech pleads for his people, saying they are innocent, in a narrative that parodies that of Sodom and Gomorrah when Abraham pleaded for the innocent people of those cities. In a gesture that suggests King Abimelech is a righteous, well-meaning ruler seeking peaceful coexistence in the region, he rewards Abraham with plentiful gifts to take Sarah back. Abraham returns to the Negev, having been enriched by Abimelech’s gifts. Once again, Sarah has increased their holdings and status. Immediately after this episode comes the birth of Isaac. The text tells us that “YHWH dealt with Sara as he had spoken. / Sara became pregnant and bore Avraham a son in his old age” (Gen. 21:1–2). Whether Abraham fathers the child is not clear. As the Jewish medieval scholar Rashi suggests,58 the child could have been fathered by King Abimelech, to whom Abraham gave



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Sarah, or by God. After the birth and weaning, Sarah sees Ishmael laughing or making fun of Isaac, and she instructs Abraham to exile Hagar and Ishmael. This grieves Abraham greatly, but God says to Abraham: “In all that Sara says to you, hearken to her voice” (Gen. 21:12). The last we hear Sarah speak in the narrative is this directive to Abraham to heed her. Two questions remain to explore. The first is whether Sarah leaves of her own free will and when. Perhaps Sarah leaves when she goes silent in the text, after the exile of Hagar. Perhaps, at that moment, Sarah returns to Hebron, where she will be buried and where Isaac will visit her tent with Rebekah. She is not present when Abraham takes Isaac to Moriah, presumably to sacrifice him, an incident known as the binding of Isaac or the Akedah in traditional rabbinic terminology. As the text indicates, an angel appears to Abraham telling him to substitute a ram for his son (Gen. 22:13). The sacrifice does not happen. The text tells us that Isaac does not return from Moriah with Abraham: “Abraham then returned to his lads, / they arose and went together to Be’er-Sheva.” (Gen. 22:19).59 No mention is made of joining Sarah. On the one hand, rabbinic tradition has her die as a mother bereft at the loss of her son, an interpretation that emphasizes her passivity, compliance, and subservience.60 On the other hand, as suggested above, she may have already departed, much earlier, at the time of the Hagar exile. Given her strong personality and identity, it would be in keeping with her assertive behavior pattern to return to an independent life rather than a life of subservience as a disrespected wife. When Sarah is present, she speaks. I suggest that she has chosen not to be present after the Hagar exile. The second of the two remaining questions is to what extent Sarah has influence over Isaac. After the binding episode, the next time we meet Isaac is in the Negev, not with his father. Abraham has sent his servant to find Isaac a wife from his birthplace.61 The servant’s mission is successful. He returns to the region with Rebekah, a woman from the region where Sarah and Abraham began. As the servant and Rebekah appear on the horizon in the region where Isaac lives: Yitzhak went out to stroll in the field around the turning of Sunset. He lifted up his eyes and saw: here, camels coming! Rivka lifted up her eyes and saw Yitzhak; She got down from the camel and said to the servant: Who is the man over there that is walking in the field to meet us? That is my lord. She took a veil and covered herself (Gen. 24:63–4)

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After the servant tells Isaac of Rebekah’s apparent enthusiastic complicity in leaving her homeland and family and taking the journey to a foreign land to meet a man she has never met: Yitzhak brought her into the tent of Sara his mother, He took Rivka and she became his wife, and he loved her. Thus was Yitzhak comforted after his mother. (Gen. 24:67)

Although Abraham has arranged for the marriage, he does not fit into the story of Isaac’s life after the angel’s appearance on Moriah, releasing Isaac from a sacrificial fate. Given Sarah’s disappearance after ordering the exile of Hagar, the text suggests the possibility that she immediately leaves Abraham’s entourage and returns to Hebron. Thus, she is not present at the time that God orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. We can reasonably conclude from the circumstantial textual evidence that Isaac does not remain with Abraham after the binding episode and is certainly not emotionally close to Abraham. He brings his betrothed Rebekah immediately after meeting her to his mother’s burial site and tent to consummate his marriage and establish a loving relationship with his wife. The beauty, social status, religious role, and diplomatic power of the first biblical matriarch, Sarah, serve Abraham well, and her cooperation is necessary to fulfill divine purpose. For most of the biblical episodes, Sarah has been a willing participant and an equal partner in the advancement of her and Abraham’s interests. Given her agency, when Sarah falls silent in the narrative, we can assume that she has exited on her own terms. In keeping with the readings of the Eve and Abraham episodes, the Sarah episode in the Hebrew Bible shows us complicated life journeys not unlike our own, driven by desire, agency, and conflicting needs. CONCLUSION The stories of the three biblical figures do not discuss purity, the sacred, or holiness in a transparent fashion. God sometimes appears as capricious, humiliated, and puzzled, and human figures are enmeshed in prickly relationships, needing to assert their desires and needs. What comes through are raw human stories that seem, by their often-detailed crudeness, to parody mythic closure. With her assertive, inquisitive intellect and nurturing spirit, Eve seeks knowledge of good and evil as well as the fruits of the garden. With his concern for earthly justice, Abraham advocates for the innocents of Sodom and Gomorrah about to be destroyed by divine wrath. While Sarah is often framed as a victim, a close look her appearance and disappearance in the text suggests a woman who wielded considerable power. Readers can



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identify with the complicated choices and consequences facing these figures: human beings dealing with familial, economic, and social challenges simultaneously, navigating the muddy waters of human everyday reality with its joys and sorrows. NOTES 1. Gail Labovitz, “Two-Faced and of Two Minds: A Jewish Feminist Reading the Rabbis Reading the Creation of Humanity,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 215–64. 2. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 31. 3. Anne Lapidus Lerner, Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 125. 4. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, “The Essential Challenge: Does Theology Speak to Women’s Experience?” in Woman Spirit Rising: Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1979), 21. 5. Lori Hope Lefkovitz, In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 19. See also Nehama Aschkenasy, Eve’s Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 41. Lefkovitz points to Genesis Rabbah 17:6–7: “As soon as she [Eve] was created Satan was created with her.” But, as Lefkovitz also notes, the dominant attitude of the rabbis toward Eve, which they give as the reason the serpent speaks to her, is that she is the weaker, more “light-minded” of the two. 6. Tammi J. Schneider, “Introduction to Women & Feminism,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 149–51. See also Tal Ilan, Lorena Miralles-Maciá, and Ronit Nikolsky, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2022), 1. 7. Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1998), 86; Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question is Theological,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken, 1983), 227–28 and Standing Again at Sinai (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 126–27; and Joshua Kul and Jason Rogoff, Reconstructing the Talmud (New York: Mechon Hadar, 2014), 174. 8. Judith Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 43. 9. Alain Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1992), 17.

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10. Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1949] 1968), 83. 11. Campbell, Hero, 45–177. Campbell describes the hero’s journey as episodic storytelling of a quest in which a hero is confronted with roadblocks to be surmounted until the goal is met. The episodes are meant to be both external and internal. 12. Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam,” in Woman Spirit Rising: Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1979), 79. 13. Marvin A. Sweeney, Tanak: A Theological and Critical Introduction to the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 59. 14. Typically, Eve, like Pandora in Greek myth, gets accused of introducing evil to the world and in particular to man (men). Philo’s comments reflect this common disdain for the female as expressed in many cultural mythologies: “Eve leads man into the beginning of evil and into a life of vileness. . . . and when man does not listen to his reason, he introduces the vice of the female part, perception.” See “Philo Questiones et Solutiones in Genesin (c. 20s–40s CE),” in Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender, eds. Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 66. Sweeney, in Tanak, notes that Eve is taken out of Adam’s side (the Hebrew word typically translated as “rib”) suggesting the primal creation of man and woman by splitting in half an undifferentiated being such as that humorously described by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. He also interprets Eve’s legacy to humanity as wisdom and the knowledge to distinguish good and evil, reminding readers that the injunction made to the undifferentiated being not to speak to the snake comes before Eve is created. Following this logic, Eve is considered as human, having critical thought, having to make decisions without having full information, and becoming self-aware. See Sweeney, Tanak, 58–60. 15. Aschkenasy, Eve’s Journey, 74. 16. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of a Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 27. 17. Christian mythology therefore places the blame for the fall (sin) of humanity squarely on Eve’s shoulders: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Tim. 2:13–14). As Carol Meyers notes, “Not only is Eve associated with sin; her creation is viewed as secondary and by implication, of lesser importance. . . . Augustine, the early Christian thinker most responsible for the doctrine of original sin and arguably the most influential figure in the development of Western Christianity, blamed both Adam and Eve for transgression. However, he focuses the blame on Eve, asserting that she is inferior to man (City of God 14:13) and proclaiming: ‘It is still Eve (the temptress) that we must beware of in any woman’ (Letter 245.10).” See Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 62. For a discussion of the problematics of gender and the Adam/Christ tropology, see Benjamin H. Dunning, Christ Without Adam: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in the Philosopher Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 18. Campbell, Hero, 45–170, 83–88.



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19. F. A. M. Wiggerman, “Theologies, Priests, and Worship,” Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York: Scribner, 1995), 59. 20. David Birnbaum, God and Evil: A Unified Theodicy/Theology/Philosophy (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1989), 161. 21. For a broader discussion of the migrations of pastoralists and specifically that of Abraham, see Walter C. Kaiser Jr. and Paul D. Wegner, A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age Through the Jewish Wars, revised ed. (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2017), 262. 22. Like the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Hebrew Bible, the story of Abraham presents as a patchwork sampling of what might have been a real life, given the economic and social conditions of the Old Babylonian Dynasty. Yair Zakovitch notes the artificiality and polemic nature of the Hebrew Bible, arguing “the connection of the three patriarchs to be artificial, the result of efforts to unite various ethnic elements, inhabitants of different geographical areas, into one nation.” See Yair Zakovitch, Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 10. 23. This Hebrew Bible translation by Everett Fox associates the phrase “in his heart” with the phrase often translated as “said to himself,” ‫בלבו‬, which includes ‫ב‬ “in,” ‫“ לב‬heart,” and ‫“ ו‬his.” This phrase could be understood in several ways: “Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself” (The Torah: A Modern Commentary) or “and laughed, as he said to himself” (The Contemporary Torah: A Gender Sensitive Adaptation of the Original JPS Translation) or “Abraham fell flat on his face and laughed, thinking . . . ” (The Torah: A Women’s Commentary) or “And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed saying to himself” (The Art of Biblical Narrative). The use of “heart” here adds to the dramatic nature of the moment, and the use of “El Shaddai” for “God” is also important. There are multiple names for God in the Hebrew Bible that often relate to different attributes. El Shaddai is God with breasts and is associated with the feminine attributes of God, such as nurturing, suckling, and fertility. See David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Bibical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Ellen Davina Haskell, Suckling at My Mother’s Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 24. Yochanan Muffs, Love & Joy: Law, Language, and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995), 9. Certainly, the eponymous moment of Genesis 32:29, Jacob’s struggle with God, suggests an analogous intimacy between deity and humanity. 25. This viewpoint is suggestive of Frederich Nietzsche’s description of a poetical expression of this existential transition cast in a Hellenistic gloss. See Frederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 56. 26. Dramatic differences of emphasis occur in various Jewish texts about the type of laughter expressed by Abraham and Sarah on learning of the promise of a child. James K. Kugel writes about Jubilees specifically, and he notes that the laughter is not laced with derision, doubt, or cynicism, but rather is a sign of joy. In Kugel’s words, “While Abraham laughs in Gen. 17:17, in Jubilees ‘Abraham fell prostrate and was very happy’ (Jubilees 15:17). Note that Abraham similarly ‘rejoices’ in the Onkelos translation of this same verse.” See James K. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide .

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to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 311. In the allegorical language of Philo, “laughter” becomes “a state of joy,” and the child becomes “happiness.” See Philo, Allegorical Interpretation, in The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, trans. C. D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 75. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests laughter’s visceral and spontaneous nature as a sign of pure presence of spirit, pleasure, and life. See The Birth of Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 373. 27. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 42. See also Richard Elliot Friedman, “Torah and Covenant,” in The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, eds. M. Jack Suggs et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 154–63. 28. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 161. 29. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 7. 30. “The body is essential to prophecy, which at once depends upon and transforms the prophet’s corporeality,” writes Rhiannon Graybill, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 143. For example, David Biale (relying on Eliot Wolfson’s insightful work on the Zohar) writes about circumcision being the “masculinization of the otherwise female shekhinah.” Biale continues to argue that “Isaac could be born only after Abraham was circumcised” as a gesture of the consummated and culminated repair of the male-upper and female-lower worlds. See David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 39. See also Charles Mopsik, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic tradition and the Kabbalah,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, eds. M. Feher, R. Naddaff, and N. Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 68. 31. Tammi J. Schneider would disagree with this position, arguing that Sodom and Gomorrah are not good candidates to be considered righteous and that Abraham has ignored the dignity of his undeniably righteous wife by sending her to Egypt. See Tammi J. Schneider, Sarah: Mother of Nations (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76. 32. Gen. 18:25, Five Books of Moses, trans. Everett Fox, 79. The Hebrew here is from The Torah: A Modern Commentary, ed. W. Gunther Plaut (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), 128. 33. See Campbell, Hero, 45. 34. Maren R. Niehoff, “Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse: Sarah in Philonic Midrash,” HTR 97, no. 4 (2004). 35. Niehoff, “Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse,” 428. 36. Niehoff, “Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse,” 430. 37. Niehoff, “Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse," 432. 38. Niehoff, “Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse,” 417–18. 39. Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 153. 40. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Image Books, 1995), 99.



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41. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 24. Trible’s focus highlights the unfortunate rivalry when two women live in an oppressed hegemonic environment. See also Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 204. 42. Schneider, Sarah: Mother of Nations, 84–88. 43. Susanne Scholz, “Eve’s Daughters Liberated? The Book of Genesis in Feminist Exegesis,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, ed. Susanne Scholz (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2017), 33–61. Scholz and others in this collection review a variety of feminist literary discursive strategies to remove the victimhood of biblical women figures. Scholz quotes Mary Daly, who reports eloquently on the victimhood and sinfulness of women robustly justified by Genesis 2 and 3. Daly writes that “Humorless treatises on the subject of Eve’s peculiar birth and woeful sinfulness written by the indefatigable sins of Adam down through the millennia are their own best parodies.” See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 46. 44. Athalya Brenner-Idan, The Israelite Woman: Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93. 45. For more recent readings on the standard view of Sarah as victim within the dominant Abraham narrative, see Schneider, Sarah: Mother of Nations and Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch, From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths & Legends, trans. Valerie Zakovitch (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2012). 46. I. Mendelsohn, “The Family in the Ancient Near East,” The Biblical Archaeologist 11, no. 2 (May 1948): 24–40. Rivkah Harris, “The Organization and Administration of the Cloister in Ancient Babylonia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 6, no. 2 (July 1963): 121–57. 47. Rashi writes in Midrash Tanchum, Toldot 1: “Between the time that Sarah left the control of Pharaoh and when she came under the authority of Abimelech, Isaac was conceived. Whereupon people asserted: ‘It is hardly likely that this centenarian could father a son, she must have conceived either from Pharaoh or Abimelech.’” 48. Schneider, Sarah, 47–48. Upon reading the original Hebrew closely, Schneider makes the point that Sarah does not command Abraham but rather that she entreats him. 49. If dating of Sarah and Abraham is early, in the Middle Bronze Age, then the possibility of her status as a Naditu religious woman exists. For a description of this tradition, see Harris, “The Organization and Administration of the Cloister in Ancient Babylonia,” 121–57; See also Rivkah Harris, “Independent Women in Ancient Mesopotamia?” in Women’s Earliest Records: From Ancient Egypt and Western Asia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) e-book; Stephanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 25; Caroline Janssen, “Samsu-Iluna and the Hungry Naditums,” Mesopotamian History and Environment Series I, Northern Akkad Project Reports 5 (Ghent: Ghent University, 1991): 3–39; and Marten Stol, Women in the Ancient Near East (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 584–608.

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50. The three Hebrew letters at the root of the word for “barren” (‫ )עקר‬are also the root of these words indicating the foundation or most important of possibilities. 51. Natalie N. May, “Neo-Assyrian Women, Their Visibility, and Their Representation in Written and Pictorial Sources,” Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East, eds. Saana Svärd and Agnès Garcia-Ventura (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018), 265. 52. Savina J. Teubal, Ancient Sisterhood: The Lost Traditions of Hagar and Sarah (Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, 1997), 32–38. Teubal explains that Hagar could be considered an Egyptian princess/priestess, as indicated by her likely position as a second wife with both duties to the first and privileges. 53. The irony of the situation is underlined by Sarah’s laughter. See Benjamin R. Foster, “Humor and Wit in the Ancient Near East,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East IV, pt. 9 (New York: Scribner, 1995), 2464. Midrash and Rashi suggest that the words “Abraham begot Isaac” mean that Abraham is not the father of Isaac. Rashi comments that God makes Isaac the spitting image of Abraham to silence the scoffers. See Rashi Midrash Tanchuma, Toledoth 1. Also, Abraham gives Sarah to the Philistine king Abimelech, who takes her into his harem (Gen. 20). The narrator, however, adamantly defends Isaac (who is born in the very next chapter) against possible Philistine paternity. Twice we are told that Sarah is never the object of Abimelech’s embrace (20:4, 6) and, as if these notices are not sufficient, we are informed that God “closed fast every womb of the household of Abimelech” (Gen. 20:18). See Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “The Problem of the Body for the People of the Book,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, eds. Timothy K. Real and David M. Gunn (London: Routledge, 1997), 138; Esther Fuchs, “Intermarriage, Gender, and Nation in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 85. 54. The Hebrew is ‫ ּבְ קִ ְר ָּבּ֣ה‬or “inside,” “close.” 55. The Hebrew is “‫ וּ֗בְ לִ ּב‬or “in his heart.” 56. Sarah Shectman, Women in the Pentateuch: A Feminist and Source-Critical Analysis (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 62. 57. The tone of the Sarah/Abraham relationship as Sarah speaking from a place of power disagrees with Schneider, who suggests that Sarah is afraid of Abraham when she retorts, “I did not laugh,” and the Lord replies, “Ah but you did laugh” (Gen. 18:15). See Schneider, Sarah, 72–73. 58. See endnote 53 on Rashi’s questioning of Isaac’s paternity. 59. Be’er-Sheva is located in the wilderness of Paran, the region where Hagar lives after Abraham exiles her upon Sarah’s command. 60. See Yaakov Elbaum, “From Sermon to Story: The Transformation of the Akedah,” Prooftexts 6 (May 1986): 97–116. 108, 116. “The narrative of the death of Sarah follows immediately on that of the Binding of Isaac, because through the announcement of the Binding—that her son had been made ready for sacrifice and had almost



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been sacrificed—she received a great shock (literally, her soul flew from her) and she died” (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 32, qtd in Rashi Genesis 23:2, Sefaria.org). 61. Schneider emphasizes the absence of any connection between Abraham and Isaac until Abraham’s management of finding a proper wife for Isaac. She also emphasizes that the suggested closeness of Sarah and Isaac brings Rebecca to Sarah’s burial city, and her tent, to consummate her marriage with Isaac and that, after death, Abraham honors Isaac as his legal son. See Schneider, Sarah: Mother of Nations, 106.

Chapter 2

Sexuality, Martyrdom, and Suicide in the Talmud Life Force and Death by Choice

Jewish sacred texts written across the millennia address the topics of sexuality, martyrdom, and suicide with compassion.1 They acknowledge that the bodily experience can be both one of fulfilling pleasure and one of profound suffering. The thoughtful discourse on such topics in the Talmud, for example, demonstrates a particular sensitivity to experiences that directly affect the human body. In this chapter, I provide cultural context for the rabbinic approach that emerged from this sensitivity and compassion, including literary and legalistic examples of the treatment of sexuality, martyrdom, and suicide.2 After the 70 CE Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, rabbis of the diaspora adapted ritual practices, life cycle events, and holiday observances to life outside of Israel. With no temple in which to make sacrifices, no priesthood to render ritual decisions, and no central gathering place for holidays, life cycle events, and pilgrimages, Jewish life had to develop alternate strategies to maintain religious observance and communal cohesiveness. Taking the place of a centralized temple, local places of worship and synagogues with rabbis serving as communal and religious leaders sprung up throughout the diaspora. Rabbis developed a system of practices and values that ultimately preserved Judaism so that the destruction of the temple did not also mean the destruction of Jewish life. The earthly orientation of the great rabbinic legacy, the Talmud,3 had begun even before the destruction of the Second Temple. For centuries prior to 70 CE, religious ritual centered on priests who adapted biblical laws for everyday practice. After the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing exile from Jerusalem that created a Jewish diaspora, an urgent need arose to compile the oral tradition of Jewish ritual observance into a written tradition 49

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to document customs and protect them from being forgotten as communities fragmented. Written by Rabbi Judah the Priest (Judah Ha-Levi) in Israel around 200 CE, the Mishnah documents debates and discussions about how various biblical laws related to agriculture, damages, holy things, personal status, and women, as well as laws about purity, relate to everyday life. After the completion of the Mishnah, two rabbinic centers sprung up, one in northern Israel and one in Babylon. The result was two versions of the Talmud, the Yerushalmi Talmud, completed about 400 CE, and the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, completed about 600 CE. Adapting the Mishnah as their core text, the rabbis at the two centers added to it the Gemara, which documented the various opinions on legal cases, laws, and customs explained in the Mishnah, and this diversity of opinion became an integral part of Jewish literary works. The Talmud’s focus on the customs of everyday living, a multiplicity of interpretations on legal matters, and an avoidance of theology ironically produced the kind of communal flexibility needed to embrace individual difference while maintaining a unitary community. When a strict application of biblical laws would result in harsh consequences for the defendants or parties involved in a conflict, rabbis adapted the law to maintain communal peace. The rabbinic voices documented in the Talmud focus on daily life, whether in the public affairs or private affairs of agriculture, business matters, incurring damages, sacred ritual, or family life. This strategy allowed for independent and diverse decisions about everyday situations both for individuals and communities. By documenting the individual voices of the rabbis disagreeing and debating even on the most minute interpretations, the “Rabbis promoted the idea of human autonomy, which in turn created the social environment for diverse exegetical interpretations and competing understandings of the biblical text.”4 Multiple interpretations of the Bible were honored, thus setting the stage to honor individual opinions and identities. The individual became the site of decision-making about ethical choices and ritual observance. Rabbinic writings acknowledge diversity in individual experience while seeking to affirm and balance the life of the individual and that of the community. The result is a unique rabbinic style that characterizes not only Talmudic writing but also Jewish mystical texts that developed at about the same time. Literary critic Paul Ricœur points out that the abstraction of Hellenism and its legacy among Christian patristic discourses include a seductive tendency to totalize and erase difference. He claims that to ignore the complexity of life’s choices and decisions is to miss a profound journey of self-examination. Ricœur lauds a writing style that honors nuance, multiplicity of opinions, and a collage of voices. He describes this style as a “specifically Hebraic form of speaking,” opining that “exegesis of this form of speaking reveals a multiplicity of significations that prevent eternity from being reduced to the immutability of a stable present,”5 and Daniel Boyarin attributes the



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“elasticity or plasticity of [this] discourse . . . [to its] ability and desire to allow heterogeneity on certain kinds of questions.”6 By using source material from multiple texts written over millennia that places the action in a remote past, an envisioned future, a mystical encounter, or an impromptu meeting, rabbinic intertextuality addresses everyday life and acknowledges multiple human experiences, and, in so doing, seems to celebrate the diversity of individuality. The genius of these rabbinic centers was that their focus stayed on the everyday decisions of life. For the most part, they avoided philosophical and metaphysical discourse, apocalyptic and utopic conjectures, and messianic dreams. Boyarin confirms a rabbinic single-mindedness in resisting the temptations of abstractions represented by Hellenistic or Christian cultures: “The Rabbis, in their nativism and their rejection of Christian Platonism, denied themselves virtually all of the forms of abstraction that enable the production of philosophical texts of interpretation in the senses in which we understand those terms.”7 Like Boyarin, Susan Handelman also identifies the contrarian relationship between rabbinic thought and the Hellenistic concept of logos, which she understands as the tendency to gather meanings into a single, universal oneness.8 The result was a rabbinic tradition that continues to this day, one that has the flexibility, adaptability, and wisdom to serve Jews around the world as they struggle with decisions about identity, community, and spirituality. SEXUALITY IN THE TALMUD: LIFE FORCE AND IMITATIO DEI The Talmud contains hundreds of pages of arguments about life’s minutiae: the source of water for ritual cleansing, the exact manner to slaughter animals for eating, how to clean a dish on which meat has been eaten so it can be used for milk or other food, how much money is owed an owner of a cow if the cow is hurt, and what is owed the husband of a woman who miscarries due to tripping on a neighbor’s refuse. In matters of sexuality, the discourse is no less absorbed with minutiae. While these matters are too numerous to address completely here, the following suggest the diversity and intimacy of topics covered: a husband must fulfill all his wife’s sexual needs, or onah, a practice thought to produce good children. A husband may not have sexual intercourse when his wife is menstruating. A man may not initiate sex while drunk (Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 21:12). The Talmud also advocates sex at night (Ruth Rabbah 2:16) and discusses types of sexual positions, frequency of sexual intercourse, and punishment for taking a son to a brothel

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(Berakhot 32:11). Such details demonstrate the importance in the Talmud of bodily matters and their relationship to the sacred. The topic of marital intercourse receives considerable attention in the Talmud. As Boyarin explains, the Talmudic approach to sexual intimacy differs from “the Christian conception of carnal relation—and of carnal filiation—as separate from spiritual life and devalued in relation to it.”9 Carnal knowledge in the Talmud is essential for the development of a full life, and sections of the Talmud designate when a married couple is allowed to have sexual intercourse and when not. For example, intercourse is encouraged on the Sabbath, a fact that reflects that sexual intercourse within marriage replicates cosmic order as an act of Imitatio Dei, or imitation of God. As Charles Mopsik explains Imitatio Dei, “The act of mortal flesh [human conjugal joining] only extends and translates a relation of the same order that takes place within the divine dimensions.”10 Rabbis considered marital intimacy, pleasure, and knowledge, even without the goal of fertility, as a sacred time and space. A well-known Talmudic anecdote encapsulates this approach to marital sexuality: The Talmudic sage, Rav Cahana, once hid under the bed of his master, Rav, and listened as he talked and laughed with his wife and performed his sexual needs. Rav Cahana exclaimed: “Such talk? It sounds as if the master has never tasted sex in his life!” Rav responded: “Cahana, get out of here! This is uncivilized!” Rav Cahana answered back: “This, too, is part of Torah, and I need to learn it.” (Talmud, Tractates Brachos 62a, Hagigah 5b)11

This anecdote demonstrates the importance of sexual intimacy to both spiritual and earthly life, a fact emphasized with regularity in the Talmud. Rabbis ultimately recognized the necessity of sexual intimacy to a satisfying marriage. No rabbi or scholar, no matter how great his desire to escape the body for the intellectual realm, could justify removing himself from his wife’s bed or his community rituals. In fact, one Midrashic or interpretive commentary suggests that God takes active interest in human conjugal activities, because any one of them may produce a righteous man.12 In other words, sexual activity is understood as essential to individual happiness, marital obligation, and, by extension, commitment to the community. Two examples further elucidate the treatment of sexuality in the tradition of Jewish literary illumination. The first, the story of Rabbi Akiva (50–137 CE) as a devoted husband shows the importance of sexuality to a satisfying marriage. The second is the Song of Songs Rabba, a midrash written about



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Song of Songs that illustrates rabbinic treatment of sexuality as having not only marital but also cosmic implications. In several sections devoted to the love and sexual closeness shared between Rabbi Akiva and his (some would say fictionalized) wife Rachel,13 the Talmud makes the point that Torah study implies conjugal and family ties. The tale of Rabbi Akiva and his wife appears in many iterations, including several versions in the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds alone. One of the stories affirms two elements critical to Rabbi Akiva’s role as a righteous rabbi: his study at a yeshiva isolated from his family twice, for twelve years each time, and the loyalty, love, and respect he shares with his wife Rachel. The Talmudic Nedarim 50 narrates a touching story of the latter. Rabbi Akiva and Rachel fall in love, but her family does not approve of her marrying Akiva. She marries him anyway, and they have little money and sleep on straw, which Rabbi Akiva would pluck from his wife’s hair. One day, a poor man begs for straw, and Akiva promptly shares the little straw he has. The story explains that the beggar is in fact the prophet Elijah and demonstrates the importance of marriage as well as the study of Torah. Another story about Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel makes the homiletic point that even those suffering from poverty and having to support children are obligated to study the Torah. Another point, perhaps more nuanced, is that Rachel serves as the ideal wife, a wife who is willing to live for decades alone without the physical presence of her husband, support her children, and suffer with stoic pride the humiliations of an abandoned wife. She maintains this attitude not stoically but joyfully. She must also be able to articulate her unconditional love for her husband in the face of such challenges: All the poor will one day be judged against Rabbi Akiva, for if one says to them: Why did you never study? [And they say: Because] we were poor! Then we will say to them: But wasn’t Rabbi Akiva even poorer, completely impoverished? [And if they say: It is because of our babies. We will say: but didn’t Rabbi Akiva] have sons and daughters as well? (But they will say: It is because) he merited to have his wife Rachel [to help him].14

Here, even long absences of a scholar known to spend months away from home and suffer legendary poverty at the start of his career does not preclude a fertile marriage, producing affection, devotion, and offspring. In addition to marital compatibility and satisfaction, Rabbi Akiva represents another important tradition in Jewish literary illumination—the central role of the Song of Songs to the understanding of the Torah. Well-known as a great believer in the Song of Songs, Akiva proclaimed that “the entire world is not as worthy as the day the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”15 Akiva’s

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admiration of Song of Songs reflects a belief that love is an integral part of not only filial and spousal relationships but also of the relationship between God and the people of Israel. In this view, the Torah is a gift from God to his people as a sign of love, devotion, and passion, and engagement between God and the people of Israel is as intense and, often imagined as an erotic relationship, not unlike human relationships. To Rabbi Akiva, Song of Songs served as an essential lens through which to understand biblical texts. As Green opines, “I think it does not go too far to say that Akiva, and the Akivan school in his name, viewed the Canticle [Song of Songs] as the heart of revelation, the secret love-gift that God gave to Israel along with the more public Torah of history, law, and covenant.”16 Focus on erotic passion in Song of Songs as a lens through which to understand sacred texts constituted a radical shift away from a remote God and toward a God accessible through the familiar human impulses of devotion, proximity, and materiality. In this context, interpreting Song of Songs allegorically presented a problem for the rabbis and in particular Akiva. On the one hand, the first- and second-century rabbinic readings of the Song of Songs as allegory, a discourse led by Rabbi Akiva, resembles that of the early Christian patristic author, Origen. Both readings are allegorical in the sense that the simple reading refers to another level of meaning. The two protagonists, Bridegroom and Bride, are God and Israel for the Jewish exegete, just as, for Origen, the two main protagonists are Christ and the Church for the Christian exegete. However, the distinction between the Jewish and Christian exegesis becomes apparent when considering what the authors understood as the divine plan revealed by the interpretive effort. Biale concludes that both Origen and his teacher, Clement of Alexandria, connect the erotic images in the Song to an altogether different existential plane, moving the message from the human to the spiritual plane and to the totality of Christ’s salvation message.17 Rabbis sought to avoid the obvious Christian choices: an idealized movement from an earthly to a salvific plane or the validation of a spiritualized, non-earthly ideal, much less a Christological message. Rather than focusing on the supernal symbolism that traditional Hellenistic and Christian allegorical readings produced, the rabbis used an intertextual strategy that interwove sacred narrative texts and, in so doing, infused texts with visceral, rather than abstract, meaning. The seventh-century midrash on Song of Songs, called Shir HaShirim Rabba or Song of Songs Rabba, interweaves the Song of Songs with other portions of the Bible and focuses on less abstract ways to illuminate the biblical story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Boyarin points to the differences in the way the rabbinic tradition works from that of its Christian context:



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It seems to me that we must clearly distinguish the midrashic reading of the Song from that of allegorists such as Origen. Aphoristically, we might say that the direction of Origen’s reading is from the concrete to the abstract, while the direction of midrash is from the abstract to concrete.18

To achieve this more concrete reading, the rabbinic tradition connects one familiar text with another, assigning the same central figures to two or more narratives. This interweaving of narratives embellishes characteristics of the main figures in both stories. The result is a larger narrative that introduces a richer character development, one more aligned with the lived human experience.19 The combination of stories is a form of Midrash that makes Talmudic legal discourse more understandable for the non-rabbinic community. The Song of Songs becomes a midrash when linked to the Torah story of Sea of Reeds. Song of Songs Rabba uses this intertextual reading to compare the passion experienced by the lovers of Song of Songs with the passion between the Israelites and God. Specifically, the closeness expressed in erotic terms helps readers experience the emotional moments when God saves the Israelites at the Sea. In the world of rabbinic imagination, the king of Song of Songs becomes an imagined God not only of youthful, masculine attributes but of cosmic size being desired by an adoring maiden: Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth, For your love is more delightful than wine. Your ointments yield a sweet fragrance, Your name is like finest oil—Therefore do maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us run! The king has brought me to his chambers. Let us delight and rejoice in your love, Savoring it more than wine—Like new wine they love you!20

Here, the earthy presence of the Jewish people sexually arouses God, and we can imagine them in bed or in a pastoral setting making love. This is a far cry from the allegorical reading of the Christian patristic Origen, who applies the allegorical connections of King/Jesus and maiden/Christians/the Church being rewarded in an afterlife with salvation. Boyarin refers to Song of Songs Rabba as a key to understanding Israelite salvation using phallic imagery to transmit the intensity of the biblical episode.21 Fishbane exudes enthusiasm for an intertextual reading of Song of Songs Rabba that provides a “fullness of possibilities and responsibilities,” suggested by the intimacy portrayed in the intertextual reading linking the erotic with the divine immanence.22 God is not seen as an old man with a beard here but rather a young man, potent and virile.

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In this next pericope from Song of Songs Rabba, the sheer panic of a people escaping Egyptian onslaught and facing the Sea of Reeds meets with divine comfort and rescue, all expressed using the emotional language of Song of Songs. This scene of near death suggests the scene in the Song of Songs of a dove, caught in the cleft of a rock, with a hawk blocking her flight up and a snake her retreat back. “My dove in the clefts of the rock, let me hear thy voice” (Song 2:14), is meant to make the reader not only understand but also actually feel the desperate panic and cry for help: The one of the house of R. Ishmael teaches: In the hour in which Israel went out from Egypt, to what were they similar? To a dove which ran away from a hawk and entered the cleft of a rock and found there a nesting snake. She entered within, but could not go in, because of the snake; she could not go back, because of the hawk which was waiting outside. What did the dove do? She began to cry out and beat her wings, in order that the owner of the dovecote would hear and come save her. That is how Israel appeared at the sea. They could not go down into the sea, for the sea had not yet been split for them. They could not go back, for Pharaoh was coming near. What did they do? “They were mightily afraid, and the children of Israel cried out unto the Lord” [Exod. 14:10], and immediately, “The Lord saved them on that day” [Exod. 14:30].23

The emotionality of this moment is translated into a bodily experience of the dove caught in the cleft of the rock. Here, in the intertextual activity of the Song of Songs Rabba, the sheer physicality of fear is translated into the natural experience of a wild bird wanting to fly to survive, which connects emotional stress and bodily experience. The powerful function of anthropomorphism in bringing to life a sense of divine presence is confirmed by Fishbane, who describes the mechanism in the midrash whereby the Song of Songs achieves its emotional impact as follows. The intensity of an erotic kiss suggests the intensity of the appearance of God at the Sea to save the escaping Israelites: In the language of ‘seeking’ and ‘finding’ (3:1–4), which dramatize the temporal deferments of love, or in the form of simile and synecdoche, which displace the physical energy of love throughout the natural world. . . . Through metaphor and simile, he transfigured earthly eros into tropes of tradition and memory. . . . The rabbis place the Exodus and, particularly, the events at Sinai at the center of their national reading of the Song. . . . The sages do not simply recount the events of the Exodus or Sinai, but much more, on the basis of hints found in Solomon’s Song. Do not simply read “like a mare among Pharaoh’s steeds I imagined you, my beloved” (Songs 1:9), but rather learn how God himself appeared, or seemed to appear, to Israel at the Sea; and do not think that the cry to “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (1:2) is mere erotic desire, but come and hear how



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God spoke the commandments at Sinai and how Israel was kissed for their willing acceptance of each and every word.24

This passage connects intense human emotions in an extreme situation to the intensity of God’s commitment to Israel. As Fishbane asserts, the imagery of the Song of Songs serves as a bridge between the human and divine whereby the immediacy of the divine presence is emphasized: “Most influential are the individualization of the kiss of God and its benefaction to the righteous for their deeds in this world.”25 The sexual imagery is aligned with divine power as the most beneficent, life-saving and affirming, and loving revelation of that power. In referencing the intimate passion of human lovers or the love-gift from God to humans, Talmudic authors and scholars alike invoke the Greek god of love, Eros, one form of love discussed in Plato’s Symposium. In Symposium, when Phaedrus describes Eros, he suggests a human, cosmic, and interactive dynamic similar to that which rabbis suggest occurs between God and humanity. According to the description of Eros in the dialogue between Socrates and the mythic female figure, Diotima, who describes many forms of love, the nature of life, and the identity of the good, humans strive to reach God to fill their lack: “Then what could Love be?” I asked. “A mortal?” “not at all.” What then?” I asked. “just as before between mortal and immortal.” What is he then, Diotima?” A great spirit, Socrates; for all the spiritual is between divine and mortal.” “What power has it?” said I. “To interpret and to ferry across to the gods things given by men, and to men things from the gods. . . . and being in the middle it completes them and binds all together into a whole.26

In this discourse on Eros, the god takes on much more than only the erotic attraction of two lovers. Eros becomes a vehicle to express the entire human experience of feeling a need, of striving, and of engaging with something beyond earthly experience. Diotima explains that this emotional space aspires to mystical experiences and is often managed by institutionalized rituals, sacrifice, and prayers. This individual ability to bridge the gap between the divine and human realms means that the supernal realm is open, as it were, for the business of human engagement and desacralized to the extent that humanity has access. While Diotima begins her discussion of love with Eros, which mediates between the human and divine realms, her discourse develops beyond Eros to discuss another form of love, a so-called superior form. This superior love is one that is “not adulterated with human flesh and colors and much other mortal rubbish . . . [and] will be granted him to be a friend of God,

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and immortal.”27 This view of love, as understood in the Hellenistic and later Christian traditions, does not ebb and flow, is immaterial, and is not contingent on human reality, i.e., a contemplative ideal.28 In the Christian conception of this love, the flesh needs to be transcended. In the dominant rabbinic tradition, the superior love of God engages with and pervades the material aspects of life. Thus, this rabbinic tradition veers steadfastly away from an ascetic course to one that incorporates eros and the (earthly) sacred in all bodily functions. However, Boyarin notes that the Talmudists of both ancient Israel and Babylon include rabbis who demonstrate ascetic practices, and, it must be noted, an ascetic tradition did later develop in Kabbalist practice with “a dichotomization of carnal passion and spiritual ethos.”29 Yet, as Wolfson points out, such asceticism is resisted in the language itself: “The erotic nature of the conjunction of the rational soul and the supernal light . . . emphasize[s] that the Hebrew word yedi‘ah (‘he knows’) can be used to connote both cognition and conjugal intimacy.”30 Another point relevant to the discussion of sexuality and communicated through the works of Jewish literary illumination is the value placed on virginity, sexual restraint, and celibacy. As we saw in the disquisition of Diotima, the ideal love expressed in this Hellenistic context is without the body or its passions. This approach characterized the early Christian view of the body as well. The body was to be surpassed to prepare for reward in heaven. Virginity was an ideal, even in marriage. Contrary to the patristic and medieval Christian position on virginity as superior to carnal knowledge, “the Rabbis disallowed virginity [in this context] in principle.”31 Daniel Abrams asserts that the sexualizing of God implies a critique of Christian celibacy.32 As Edmée Kingsmill writes, “The Rabbinic determination to discourage any asceticism which included celibacy has been enormously effective.” Kingsmill gives the example of a midrash on the Song of Songs in which Ben Azzai is said to have died because he chose to devote his soul to love of Torah rather than marry.33 The Song of Songs is meant to create in the reader the passion, the suffering, the longing, and the power of the Israelites experiencing the pain of alienation from their Egyptian homes, the torture of journeying through the divided Sea of Reeds, the bliss of their salvation at divine intervention, and their trepidation in facing the future in this unknown land.



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SUICIDE AND MARTYRDOM IN THE TALMUD: DEATH BY CHOICE In the previous section on sexuality, I discuss perhaps one of life’s greatest pleasures, the intimacy of the marital bed. In this section, I discuss one of life’s most troubling topics, suicide. Just as works of Jewish literary illumination focus on the life of the body here on earth, they include the most profound questions about whether to live or die. In the discussion that follows, I examine the appearance of suicide in the Bible, in later Talmudic texts, and in historical accounts from antiquity to the present day. This review examines the appearance of suicide as both a personal and communal event. In addition to emphasizing the variety of scenarios that trigger suicide in these texts, I show that the focus of these texts is not on the punishment of those who choose to die but rather on compassion and the earthly consequences of this choice. Although there are six suicides in the Tanakh—those of Abimelech, Saul, Saul’s squire, Ahitophel, Zimri, and Samson—the suicide of Saul is exemplary, serving to justify a compassionate, if reluctant, treatment by biblical and later rabbinic authors. The biblical narrative of Saul provides the motivation for his suicide, reasons that include selflessness, duress, military duty, and personal honor (1 Sam. 31.3), and it does not express any judgment against Saul for his suicide. God tells Saul that both he and his three sons will die on the same day, battling the Philistines. Later, as predicted, Saul, after having been mortally wounded on the same day his sons had already died and facing imminent defeat, falls on his sword.34 Saul’s squire, seeing that his master has died, also kills himself.35 Saul’s story is particularly tragic because he, like Oedipus of the Greek myth, came to the rescue of his people. The divine prophet Samuel anointed Saul, whose leadership vanquished many an Israelite enemy, yet God rejects Saul for showing mercy to the Amalekites (1 Sam 11:13) and not delivering total annihilation of the enemy in the cherem, or holy war. However, despite God’s rejection of Saul and his suicide, the exegetical work around these events renders Saul a hero and guiltless. This absence of judgment against Saul suggests a compassionate understanding of why anyone in Saul’s situation might consider or finally commit suicide. Over the millennia, Jews have been faced with real-life situations in which they must choose whether to live under the threat of social ostracism, brutality, exile, or death or to commit suicide. Part of this decision to live or die involves the extent to which observance of their religion can be openly practiced, and an important feature of the discussion that follows is the degree to which a Jew would maintain, lessen, or hide religious observance or, in the worst-case scenarios, escape or choose to die. Rabbis have generally

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encouraged life when at all possible, even if believers need to make adjustments to religious purity to survive.36 As discussed in the previous chapter, while the Second Temple stood, ritualistic actions performed by the priests and in keeping with Levitical prescriptions defined what was pure and impure. With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, decisions about the degree and necessity of purity came to rest largely with the individual. Documents that survived Roman persecution reveal that some Jews chose what we today would call assimilation rather than extinction, and a mindset of accommodation with the Roman empire reigned for several centuries shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. Hyim Lapin describes reports in Palestine regarding the occurrence and absence of martyrdom,37 and many documents suggest a continued trajectory of two approaches to physical threat, one of martyrdom and one of survival. The discussion that follows documents historical suicide events to demonstrate the long and sordid history of this choice as a response to persecution. One of the earliest examples comes after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. In his The Wars of the Jews, Romano-Jewish historian Josephus reported that as Romans persecuted Jews as part of military campaigns,38 960 survivors sought safe-haven at Masada, atop an isolated plateau in the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea.39 He reports the exhortations of Eliezer, the leader of this group of survivors, to die an honorable death by killing themselves and their families. Josephus quotes Eliezer as saying, “It is life that is a calamity to men, and not death; for this last affords our souls their liberty and sends them by a removal into their own place of purity, where they are to be insensible of all sorts of misery.” Here, the Jewish leader of the Masada holdouts uses purity of religious practice and identity in addition to the mortification and impending physical cruelty of capture to justify mass suicide. While Eliezer’s exhortations were apparently successful, some, such as Josephus himself, would argue that life with religious compromise, even under the most horrible conditions, is better than death. In his response to the exhortations, Josephus disagreed with the need for purity: “Now, he is equally a coward who will not die when he is obliged to die, and he who will die when he is not obliged to do so.”40 Josephus himself serves as an example of a Jew who chose to live under Roman rule rather than die and became an important historian of the period. Later, as Jews came under attack during medieval Christian aggression, the question of whether to live an impure life or to die pure also became all too real. To what degree must a Jew honor sacred rituals to claim the right to be called a Jew? Divergent rabbinic opinions about the degree of purity required of practitioners continued through the medieval period and loosely clustered around two mindsets. One opinion, generally associated with the Ashkenazi tradition of Franco-Germany, emphasized the overarching importance of



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purity and thus suggested that death was preferable to a life of impurity. The other opinion, associated with the Sephardim tradition of Andalusia,41 advocated whatever compromises of religious practices were necessary to survive. The Talmudic anecdote of four hundred boys and girls who jump into the sea to avoid idolatry suggests the former view, that death by suicide is preferable to the tortures of capture, brutal death, and impurity.42 This kind of thought reflected and influenced the views of persecuted Jews on martyrdom. Three Jewish chroniclers of the 1096 communal martyrdom by the Mainz Jewry described how Talmudic thought affected the decisions of the community in the face of the onslaught of the First Crusades. These three chroniclers shared a desire to frame the decision of killing and suicide through a specifically Jewish lens of purity and martyrdom. In the wake of Crusader advances, Jews faced the dire reality of forced conversion and brutality beyond imagination. How to make the most difficult of decisions? Chroniclers reported that communities resorted to ritual purity and prayer, pleading with the crusaders and negotiations with local and regional dignitaries, and finally the decision by many to kill their own children and commit suicide. The question remains whether suicide to preserve the purity of religious observance, a martyrdom to sanctify the name of God, is appropriate. On the one hand, chroniclers glorify the martyrs. On the other hand, these chroniclers were among the survivors of the 1096 persecutions, who chose the opposite path, life rather than death, often at the price of conversion to Christianity.43 While death by choice seemed preferable to some believers in and practitioners of Judaism to living a life of persecution and suffering, some of the persecuted decided that survival trumps purity. Their choice reflects what became the dominant view of the rabbis to live when possible and to preserve, even if minimally, religious observance. One notable example of survival over martyrdom is the late medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. While Maimonides lived after the closing of the Talmud, his personal story reflects analogous decisions made by Jews facing the dire circumstances of persecution. In the twelfth century, on the Iberian Peninsula, Jews, including Maimonides’s family, lived under an extremist Muslim sect, the Almohads. They were forced either to convert to Islam and proclaim the Shahada, “There is no God but God and Muhammed is his prophet,” or to face the consequences of either death or exile. Many chose to convert. Many, like Maimonides’s family, led the double life of crypto-Jews, professing another faith in public while practicing their Judaism in private. Ultimately this double life proved too taxing for Maimonides’s family, and they chose exile and left for Morocco. Maimonides’s “Epistles on Martyrdom” is a polemic against those rabbinic authors who instruct the Jews to martyrdom:

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A victim of this persecution should follow this counsel: Let him set it as his objective to observe as much of the Law as he can. If it happens that he has sinned much, or that he has desecrated the Sabbath, . . . let him be as careful about observance as possible. . . . What I counsel myself, and what I should like to suggest to all my friends and everyone that consults me, is to leave these places and go to where he can practice religion and fulfill the Law without compulsion or fear.44

The voice of Maimonides’s humanitarian sensibility here reaches across centuries. Maimonides “unites an intense compassion for human beings with his basic commitment to a heroic life in sanctification of God.”45 This firm commitment to life raises another question: What happens when an individual cannot sustain his or her life, not only in the face of persecution and impending brutality or death but in the face of psychologically tortured life? Is there punishment in the afterlife for suicide? A popular and particularly punitive view was advanced and maintained primarily by homiletics relying on tradition rather than law. Marc Shapiro goes as far as to say that such punitive interpretations have periodically and falsely used the phrase “suicides have no place in the world-to-come”46 as an accepted, documented, and normatively supported Jewish doctrine. Facts show that this conclusion could not be farther from the truth. In fact, Shapiro, after examining a complex and interwoven number of claims to the contrary, argues that Talmudic sources never indicate that suicides have no place in the world to come.47 Genesis Rabbah 34:13 reads “Suicides will be punished . . . [with the exception] of Saul . . . [and] Hananlah, Mishael and Azariah.”48 Thus, the exemplary Saul is presented as a suicide of unsound mind, desolation, and hopelessness. In another line declaring that suicide be treated as any other death, the Mishnaic Perkei Avot 4:22 reads “Those who are born will die, and the dead will live.” Shapiro argues that even if some factions think the rare if nonexistent case is determined to be a suicide, punishment is not for eternity. Paradoxically, contemporary and compassionate treatments most fully reflect the early, short Talmudic tractate Semachot, which forms the core of rabbinic argumentation and conclusions related to who should be determined a suicide. Because anyone determined to be a suicide by the tractate would be denied the ability for forgiveness and eternal life, it holds that “No one is determined a suicide.” I quote below the short paragraph that answers the question posed in Semachot 2:2,49 “What is a suicide?”: Not one who climbs to the top of a tree or to the top of a roof and falls to his death. Rather it is one who says “Behold I am going to climb to the top of the tree,” or “to the top of the roof, and then throw myself down to my death,” and thereupon others see him climb to the top of the tree or to the top of the roof and



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fall to his death. Such a one is presumed to be a suicide, and for such a person, no rites whatsoever should be observed.

This example is immediately followed by other determinations in Semachot 2:3 that, even when a person was found hanging or slain with his own sword, a death without a declaration of intent or witnesses is not considered a suicide, thus making the person inculpable.50 Why do rabbinic authorities so narrowly define suicide so that it excludes almost all possible cases? Who benefits from their legal leniencies? As we have shown, working within the strict confines of biblical law, rabbis have sought to adjudicate in a way that molds the law to their own compassionate judgment. Their leniency in not defining a death as a suicide not only allows for the full mourning rituals that comfort the bereaved but also allows comfort for the dead. Rabbis have sought to bestow the same benefits to the dead as to the living, and to vindicate suicide, even posthumously. By excluding the deceased from the category of a suicide, the person does not die as a designated murderer according to the halakhic or Talmudic order against killing oneself. The deceased not only receives an honorable burial in this world but has the chance of life in the hereafter. The fate after death of the body, even in the case of an otherwise designated suicide, is of central Talmudic concern. The body must live, even after death. CONCLUSION This section has shown how Talmudic tradition frames the most profound decisions about the human body, those related to sexuality, martyrdom, and suicide. Rabbinic writings treat sexuality as a life force within marriage, producing both pleasure and creation of life. They tell marital anecdotes about Rabbi Akiva to illustrate the importance, productivity, and joy a fulfilling marriage can bring. The pleasures of marital intimacy encourage healthy marital relationships and imitate divine creation and pleasure. At the other extreme of life’s realities, a multitude of Jewish texts from the Bible and Talmud to chroniclers in the medieval period and rabbinic responses today treat martyrdom and suicide. Such texts address questions of the preservation of honor, purity, and the avoidance of profound suffering. The short Talmudic tractate Semachot treats the choice to die with compassion, refusing to apply the label of suicide, and thereby preserving full privileges and comfort for mourners. These stories help readers learn about the ironic twists of life that bequeath both happiness and suffering. They also emphasize the preference for life as a sacred reality when the individual deems that choice possible.

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NOTES 1. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 25 BCE–50 CE), attests that compassion is the highest virtue. See Philo, On Virtue, in The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, trans. C. D. Yonge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 654. Thanks go to Françoise Mirguet, whose paper “Compassion in JudeoHellenistic Literature: An Expression of Resistance against Imperial Propaganda,” presented at the American Academy of Religion Western Region held at Arizona State University in March 2019, provided this Philonic insight. 2. Gratitude to De Gruyter Press for permission to use portions of the chapter “Suicide and Compassion in Judaic Writings,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 377–410. 3. The following is a summary of Gail Labovitz’s overview of rabbinic works in “Two-Faced and Two Minds,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 217. The major works of classical rabbinic literature may be grouped both chronologically and geographically. Chronologically, rabbinic works are traditionally divided into two periods, the tannaitic (named authorities of this period are tannaim/tanna in the singular) and amoraic (amoraim/amora). The tannaitic period is (roughly) bounded by the late Second Temple period until the early third century CE. The primary work of the tannaitic period is the Mishnah, sometimes attributed to Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi and likely “published” at about the turn of the third century. Other works attributed to rabbinic figures of this period (though likely redacted slightly later than the Mishnah) are the Tosefta and the “halakhic” (legal) midrashic (exegetical) commentaries to Exodus through Deuteronomy. All works from this period were composed and redacted in Roman Palestine. The Mishnah itself became center of the commentarial project that resulted in both the Jerusalem (Yerushalmi) and Babylonian (Bavli) Talmuds. Midrashic activity (biblical exegesis) also took place in both centers, but whereas in Palestine this resulted in distinct collections, most notably Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah, in Babylonia all rabbinic legal, exegetical, and folkloristic activity was collected in the Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud also includes an anonymous editorial layer that is understood in most modern scholarship to represent a late (or the latest) stage of its development, and which is often referred to as the “stam,” or “stammaitic layer.” All citations from Talmudic and other rabbinic texts can be found at sefaria.org. 4. Aharon Shemesh, Halakah in the Making: The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 38. 5. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 265. 6. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 66. 7. Daniel Boyarin, “Midrash and the ‘Magic Language,” Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), 135.



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8. Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 33. 9. Daniel Boyarin, Sparks of the Logos: Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneutics (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 56. 10. Charles Mopsik, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, eds. M. Feher, R. Naddaff, and N. Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 58. 11. Yaakov Shapiro, Halachic Positions: What Judaism Really Says About Passion in the Marital Bed (Jonathan Shapiro, 2017), front matter. This book, not published with a known publishing house, takes quotes from the Talmud related to sexual positions and other forms of sexual intimacy, including multiple ways to give pleasure to wives, diversity of positions in intercourse, concentration during the sexual act so as not to think about other women, and having sexual intercourse only at night to avoid distractions. 12. The Midrashic tradition is another rabbinic tradition that began and flourished along with the Mishnah in the Talmudic period, providing narrative fullness to legislative directives. Rashi, a medieval French rabbi and among the most well-known of Talmud commentators, emphasizes “the number of the rova of Israel: Their coition. The seed that is emitted in their conjugal relations” (see Rashi’s commentary on Numbers 23:10) “or the number of the seed: their copulations; the seed which issues from sexual intercourse” (see Mid. Tanchuma Balak 12, Num. Rabbah 20:19). In other words, God is interested in the number of copulations because any one of them may produce a righteous man. A number of rabbinic texts emphasize this point by using the pun on the Hebrew word rova, which translates to English as “quadrant,” or “four,” but also sexual intercourse. 13. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 153. 14. Avot D’ Rabbi Natan 6. Composed in Talmudic Israel/Babylon (ca. 650–ca. 950 CE). The minor tractates (Masekhtot Ketanot) are essays from the Tannaitic period or later dealing with topics about which no formal tractate exists in the Mishnah. The first eight or so contain much original material; the last seven or so are collections of material scattered throughout the Talmud. The Schechter edition contains two different versions (version A has forty-one chapters and version B has forty-eight). 15. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5. 16. Arthur Green, “Shekinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in the Song of Songs,” American Jewish Studies 26, no. 1 (April 2002), 3. 17. David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic, 1992), 91. Origen’s self-castration would support this position. 18. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 108. As suggested above, Michael Fishbane, in Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11, articulates the fullness of the mythmaking tradition by tracing a generous and diverse array of examples.

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19. Gershom Scholem, Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in Kabbalah (New York: Schocken, 1991), 21. 20. Song of Songs Rabbah (1:1). 21. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 111. 22. Michael Fishbane, “Anthological Midrash and Cultural Paideia: The Case Mashal of Songs Rabba 1.2,” in Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century, eds. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 35. 23. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 111. 24. Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 14–15. I would suggest the figures of speech that best describe the connections described here are metonymy and synecdoche rather than Fishbane’s terms, metaphor and simile. 25. Fishbane, The Kiss of God, 19. 26. Plato, Symposium, in Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, eds. Eric H. Warmington and Philip G. Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1956), 98. 27. Plato, Symposium, 106. 28. Plato, Symposium, 106. 29. Eliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University, 2005), 315. 30. Eliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 315. 31. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 41. The Palestinian Tannaim were authors of the Mishnah who lived in Northern Palestine during the first two hundred years CE. 32. Daniel Abrams, “The Virgin Mary as the Moon that Lacks the Sun—A Zoharic Illumination Against the Veneration of Mary,” Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 21 (2010): 13, 18. Ellen Haskell references Abrams’s comments and investigates the occurrence of Kabbalistic references to Jesus’s barrenness and lack of sexual completion, which the Kabbalist saw as defective, in Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50. 33. Edmée Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: A Study in Biblical Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173. See also David Stahl, who points out just how onerous is the punishment for celibacy. Rabbi Fields, in A Torah Commentary for Our Times, explains that “Commentators disagree on the role of the nazarite in Jewish tradition. Nine chapters and sixty sections of the Mishnah and one hundred and thirty pages of the Gemarah in the Talmud present varying and contradictory views on the subject.” Some sages praise nazarites while others denounce them. Moses Maimonides in his Mishnah Torah opposes the choice of abstinence and self-denial. “Our tradition,” argues Maimonides, “forbids us from denying to ourselves any of the joys permitted by Torah” (Mishnah Torah, Deut. 3:1). 34. 1 Sam 28:19, 1 Sam 31:4, and 2 Sam 21:12. Whether the death of Saul was a permitted suicide has come under considerable debate. See Goldstein, who, using three medieval commentators, Mevasser b. Nissi Ha Bavli, Saadia Gaon, and R. David Kimi, delves into questions about the appropriateness of his actions. The public humiliation and extreme duress he faced are some of the reasons why Saul’s



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suicide is generally considered acceptable. See Sidney Goldstein, Suicide in Rabbinic Literature (New York: Ktav, 1989), 11–12, 22–24. See also Chronicles of Jerahmeel (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1899), sections IX, XII. archive.org/stream/chroniclesofjera00elea/chroniclesofjera00elea_djvu.txt. 35. 1 Sam 31:5. 36. Hayim Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100–400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 148. The honor of martyrdom gripped the early Christian world during the time of its greatest persecution. Writing about the same time, the North African Christian patristic, Augustine (354–430 CE), attacked a radical Christian group that espoused martyrdom as a sign of piety. His influential polemic linked “Thou shalt not kill” to include suicide, the killing of oneself. According to Augustine, killing oneself is a sin worse than any that can be avoided by it. Augustine recognizes the desire to achieve peace that he concludes suicide wrongly promises, but he argues that the faulty thinking behind suicide denies the goodness of divine creation. Aurelius Augustine, The City of God, vol 1, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1871, Project Gutenberg, 2014), 31. www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/45304​/45304​-h​/45304​-h​.htm. Writing nine hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas concurred with Augustine’s opinion, thereby solidifying the Church’s position. See James T. Clemons, What Does the Bible Say about Suicide? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 78, 80, 84. 37. Lapin, Rabbis as Romans, 148. 38. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews or the History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, in Josephus: The Complete Works, trans. William Whiston (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), 919. 39. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 922. 40. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 786. 41. Gerson D. Cohen, Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Prior to Sabbethai Zevi) (New York: Leo Baeck Institute 1967), 35. 42. BT Gittin 57b. 43. Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 76. 44. Moses Maimonides, “The Epistle on Martyrdom,” in Epistles of Maimonides: Crises and Leadership, trans. Abraham Halkin, discussions by David Hartman (New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1993), 31. 45. Hartman, in Maimonides’s “Epistle on Martyrdom,” 47. 46. For information on the development and details of the imagined world-to-come, see Saul Lieberman, “Some Aspects of After Life in Early Rabbinic Literature,” Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), 235–72. 47. Marc B. Shapiro, “Suicide and the World to Come,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 18, no. 2 (1993): 262. 48. Genesis Rabbah, trans. Dr. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (New York: Soncino, 1993), 34:13. 49. The Tractate Semachot, addressing Aveilut (laws of death and mourning), is part of a series of small Mishnaic tractates, the Misechtot Kitanot, which includes the earliest rabbinic teachings, or the Tannaitic (those written 10–210 CE), and also later

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writings. It is thought to have been written down in the ninth century, but scholars dispute the dates. According to Dov Zlotnick, translator and annotator of Semachot, contemporary scholarship tends to place this tractate in the eighth century, at least two centuries after the closing of the Babylonian Talmud. However, Zlotnick argues that it is written during the time of the Tannaitic rabbis, at the very beginning of the third century, the earliest Talmudic period. See The Tractate “Mourning” (Semahot): Regulations Relating to Death, Burial, and Mourning, trans. Dov Zlotnick (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 4, 9. See also Sidney Goldstein, Suicide in Rabbinic Literature (New York: Ktav, 1989), 55. See also “Sin,” in Jewish Encyclopedia, 1135. 50. As proof of intentionality, Maimonides points to the mood, and Nachmanides points to the note. See Goldstein, Suicide, 19. Maimonides confirms that in the case of no witnesses, the individual is presumed to have taken his life unwittingly. See Goldstein, Suicide, 21.

Chapter 3

From Hekhalot to Kabbalah Accessing the Body of God

Said Rabbi Akiva: He is like us, as it were, but He is greater than all; and His very glory is that He is concealed from us . . . He Himself . . . is like the sun, like the moon, like the stars, like a human face . . . And His face, His visage, has the semblance of the spirit the image of the soul, which no creature can apprehend. Hekhalot Zutarti (25–26)1

The previous chapter describes how rabbis developed rules about maintaining the presence of the sacred in everyday life and the importance of choosing life instead of death when possible. In addition to their focus on behavior in this life, rabbis were conjecturing about the afterlife. They imagined a journey human beings would take after death to be either rewarded with eternal life or punished for their behavior on earth.2 Rabbis were also conjecturing about another kind of journey to God, one that could occur during earthly life. Although the mystical journey was first expressed as a journey of no return, through the centuries rabbis conceived of such a journey as accessible to those who believed in the possibility and who were willing to undertake the requisite preparation. Generally, this new dimension of Judaism came to be called Jewish mysticism. Beginning in about 200 BCE through 1000 CE, this experience of divine communion developed in many forms. The discussion that follows offers three of those traditions, each discussed with a characteristic literary example. The first such mystical tradition, known as Merkavah, or Chariot, mysticism, 69

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focused on the Divine Chariot that journeyed to the supernal realm. The second tradition, Hekhalot, or Palace, mysticism, included Merkavah mysticism. The third tradition, Kabbalah mysticism, developed out of the earlier two in the twelfth century and continues as a robust practice to this day. This chapter will explore how the boundaries ultimately blurred between the understanding of the Jewish God as transcendent and the understanding of God as also immanent, at once distant and near, separate from earthly creation and at one with that creation.3 Jewish mysticism is a broad term that covers many human experiences, including changes in states of consciousness, extreme emotional responses, and access to fresh insights about reality.4 Often these experiences are associated with theological knowledge, ideas about redemption and salvation, and access to ultimate truth. In the discussion that follows, I will present imaginative ways rabbis began to introduce ideas about a knowable God who cares about his people, about the visualization of God, and about experiencing the divine presence. The Jewish mystical tradition began in full force after the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132 CE and its messianic promise.5 Jews had every right to believe that God had abandoned them.6 The Roman conquest of Jerusalem dispersed Jews throughout the Roman Empire, an environment where Hellenistic poetics, values, and philosophies dominated the culture. With Constantine’s adoption of Christianity in the early fourth century as the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Jewish diaspora became a beleaguered minority, no longer recognized as an ancient religious entity as it had been during prior Roman rule. Judaism was seen as a threat to a burgeoning and ever more powerful Christian religion and interests. Christianity was defining itself against Jewish traditions and asserting its social, political, and ecclesiastical power. Rabbis argued and struggled against the emerging Christian hegemony by developing what became known as rabbinic Judaism, a tradition whose arguments and struggles for clarity are documented in the Talmud.7 The other tradition that developed simultaneously with the Talmud was a uniquely Jewish mysticism. On the one hand, the many works in the tradition of Jewish mysticism configure both a caring and a punishing God who demonstrates deeply human psychology, physicality, and radical attention to and interaction with human earthly behavior. On the other hand, generally, works of Jewish mysticism did not include apocalyptic, utopic, or other imaginative aspirations that avoid focus on earthly life, nor did they promise a messiah or endorse sorcery or magic. They did not adhere to a mind-body dualism or a desire to permanently escape earthly life.8 Instead, such works attempted to bring more immediacy, comfort, and trust of God into the everyday human experience. The Jewish mystical tradition developed to include the concept of a pantheistic or monist God who works through emanations where the finite world flows from the

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infinite, and an immanent God who is also transcendent, where God is conceived as both distant and everywhere, ideas further explored below.9 Finally, the tradition developed in sophistication and popularity through the centuries so that today, in the twenty-first century, many meditative and spiritual practices are thought to have their origins in these early developments of Jewish mysticism. The following is a discussion, first of Merkavah mysticism, followed by Hekhalot mysticism, which includes the Merkavah tradition, an intertextual interlinking of the Song of Songs and the Hekhalot mystical tradition, followed by an introduction to the later mystical tradition, Kabbalah. All of these traditions express ways to experience divine presence, or kavvanah. MERKAVAH MYSTICISM AND SONG OF SONGS: INTERTEXTUAL READING The idea of a mystical journey to the supernal realm is suggested in the Hebrew Bible at several points. Such a journey was thought to proceed from earth to a location where God could be seen, experienced face-to-face, heard, and thereby better known. Details about the journey itself, the destination of the supernal realm, and the sight of God developed with greater and greater clarity as the tradition developed. The earliest suggestion of a journey to the divine realm occurs in Genesis 5:24, where “Hanokh [Enoch] walked in accord with God, / then he was no more, / for God had taken him.” This passage came to be understood as a journey of no return, as the Hebrew verb to take (lakach or ‫ )לקח‬here indicates death. Enoch’s journey to the divine realm became a point of departure for centuries of imaginative works, and Ezekiel’s vision added to its richness. Merkavah mysticism, short for ma’aseh merkavah (Work of the Chariot), springs out of the prophetic book of Ezekiel 1:20–28. In that book, Ezekiel rises to the supernal realm and does not die: Whithersoever the spirit was to go, as the spirit was to go thither, so they went; and the wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.  . . . Above the expanse over their heads was the semblance of a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and on top, upon this semblance of a throne, there was the semblance of a human form. . . . Like the appearance of the bow which shines in the clouds on a day of rain, such was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. That was the appearance of the semblance of the Presence of the LORD. When I beheld it, I flung myself down on my face. And I heard the voice of someone speaking.

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This vision relates to experiencing the God of Israel seated on his chariot-throne (Merkavah). The Merkavah tradition introduces “mystical speculations concerning the divine Chariot (Ezek. 1, 10) and . . . the esoteric tradition pertaining to the mysteries of the divine world.”10 Such visions, described as mysteries, became more detailed as Jewish mysticism developed. Included in these mystical speculations is the experience of being with God as a salvific experience as in Isaiah 6:7–8: “Now that this has touched your lips, / Your guilt shall depart, and your sin be purged away.” By referencing Isaiah, Jewish mysticism envisions redemption as a possible outcome of a mystical journey. Another outcome of the mystical journey, the promise of messianic times, eventually entered the mystical mythology as an important development. This promise first occurs in the Book of Daniel, in which Daniel journeys to the supernal realm and bears witness as God designates the son of man to rule as eternal king and serve as the Messiah (Dan. 7:13). The mystical journey, then, might include, as it did for Daniel, witnessing a divine promise of an earthly messiah to liberate humanity from its misery. Merkavah mysticism visualized the supernal realm, the throne of God, and attending angels. The mystical journey itself was imagined as an esoteric practice, reserved for the few prepared to accept its consequences. Yet, the imagined journey could be used for sermonizing or “speculation in a homiletical manner.”11 The number of stories, prayers, and texts in the Merkavah tradition grew and eventually became known by many. As discussed above, their appearance on incantation bowls popular in Babylonia in the fifth and sixth centuries testifies to the spreading awareness of the mystical tradition and their importance in theurgic and magical practices. The relevance of these mystical prayers by late antiquity served to enhance and diversify rather than replace traditional Jewish customs and rituals. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Akiva promoted Song of Songs as essential to understanding the Torah and other sacred Jewish texts.12 He and other early rabbis, as well as Christian biblical interpreters, turned to the strategy introduced by the early first-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo—allegory. In the Christian tradition, the figure of the loving maiden is identified as the followers of Jesus in the form of the Church and the king is Jesus Christ.13 In the Jewish tradition, the loving maiden is the people of Israel and the king is God. A dramatic difference between these traditions lies in the interaction between the earthly and supernal characters. The Christian interpretation suggests eroticism in heaven, promising a departure from earthly ills, and the Jewish interpretation places the eroticism on earth, between God and his people, promising earthly love. At the time of the writing and development of the earliest texts of Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism, and the later texts of Kabbalah, Jews

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lived in unwelcoming environments. First, as Christianity grew and dominated the Roman Empire, then during the Crusades, and later into the late medieval period, Jews did not move freely; their communities were not safe; their environment was not supported; and their aspirations were not nourished. They needed their image of God to be virile, strong, and desirable. The portrait of God in the Book of Daniel (as “Ancient of Days” 7:13) did not suffice to inspire hope that the future could bring an easier, richer life. Rabbi Akiva adopted an alternative to this Jewish portrait of God. This God, as conceived of in all the works of Jewish mysticism, is erotic, virile, desirable, strong, and active; he shows compassion to the Israelite people and is accessible to all. This concept of divine power is the lens through which Jewish mystical practitioners, both esoteric and lay, came to understand God. Instead of taking the message to the afterlife and the heavenly realm, Rabbi Akiva and others brought the king and the maiden down to earth in bed with one another. This shows that seduction, sexuality, desire, and the erotic are universal, powerful, and irrevocable forces, and the rabbis invoke the power of these bodily forces to explain the connection between the human and divine realms. The rabbis communicated that power through works that interweave the erotic relationship in the Song of Songs with God’s activity at the Sea of Reeds, a strategy today referred to as intertextuality, robustly actualized in the texts of Merkavah and Kabbalah mysticism. By connecting the passion expressed between the maiden and the king in Song of Songs to various other works of Jewish mysticism, the Merkavah tradition embraced an intertextual and allegorical reading of the passion of God and his people. Scholem explains that phrases from Song of Songs appear in the fragments of the surviving texts of Merkavah mysticism literature. Here, Scholem identifies the intertextual work of verses 5:10–16 of Song of Songs, found in Shi’ur Qomah fragments, that establish the virility, desirability, and power of God: My beloved is white and ruddy, Pre-eminent above ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, His locks are curled And black as a raven. His eyes are like doves Beside the water-brooks; Washed with milk. And fitly set. His cheeks are a bed of spices. As banks of sweet herbs; His lips are as lilies, Dropping with flowing myrrh.

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His hands are as rods of gold Set with beryl His body is as ivory Overlaid with sapphires. His legs are as pillars of marble. Set upon sockets of fine gold.14

This desirable, virile, and youthful male body described in Song of Songs becomes the virile, desirable, and youthful body of God to first- and second-century rabbis. As noted in the previous chapter, Boyarin suggests that Song of Songs in the hands of these rabbis and their strategy of intertextuality infuses texts with visceral, rather than abstract, meaning.15 God’s compassion, responsiveness, and proximity appears in the Merkavah mystical prayers tradition enhanced by the use of Song of Songs. This combination of journey to the supernal realm and the use of Song of Songs came to be an integral part of Hekhalot mysticism, a phase of Jewish mysticism that builds on the Merkavah tradition. HEKHALOT MYSTICISM: THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC GOD OF THE SHI’UR QOMAH The Hekhalot mystical tradition developed out of earlier mystical traditions, including Merkavah, and came to be the overarching term for all expressions of early Jewish mysticism. As Rachel Elior explains, the term Hekhalot was derived from heikhal, the biblical name for the Temple in Jerusalem; also a heavenly sanctuary or visionary sanctuary in biblical prophecy and poetry. The plural heikhalot refers to the seven heavenly sanctuaries in the priestly mystical writings. Heikhalot literature is mystical literature from the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud (2nd–5th centuries CE) which discusses the heavenly and angelic world as reflected in seven heavenly sanctuaries and in Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot.16

Works described as belonging to the Hekhalot tradition include not only accounts of mystical journeys but encounters with angels, conversation between the angels and God, and references to the Song of Songs. The Hekhalot image of the supernal realm included an anthropomorphic description of God using human measurements. An example par excellence of this image is in the Shi’ur Qomah,17 a liturgy that incorporates both Merkavah and Hekhalot imagery of the journey to the supernal realm and that supernal realm itself. The Shi’ur Qomah eventually became a theurgic text in the Hekhalot tradition and is both read by practitioners as prayer and used to

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call upon God for earthly assistance.18 The Shi’ur Qomah, as discussed here, serves to demonstrate Jewish mysticism’s creativity, intertextuality, and communicative potency. The Shi’ur Qomah is a potent testimony to the human desire to know God. David J. Halperin insists that its anthropomorphic vision of God is the underlying theme of the Hekhalot tradition: God of the Hekhalot, shamelessly anthropomorphic, hugs and kisses the image of Jacob’s face, embraces with radiant face the youth who enters beneath his throne. Not only is he not transcendent; with the youth’s appearance, he is not even unique. Human nature has infiltrated heaven. Human invasion is now thinkable. This is the underlying theme of the Hekhalot.19

This knowable God could be seen as comforting, albeit not to everyone. As Joseph Dan observes, the Shi’ur Qomah is “one of the most radical expressions in Hebrew literature of an anthropomorphic concept of God, and it caused great embarrassment to medieval Jewish thinkers who had to explain how it was possible that the authors of the Mishnah could have produced such a seemingly crude, anthropomorphic work.”20 In spite of these more rationally inclined medieval Jewish thinkers, anthropomorphic descriptions of God came to be an integral part of the Jewish imagination. A theophany, or visualization of God, the Shi’ur Qomah is one of the earliest of several rabbinic writings in a tradition that details the astronomical measurements of the parts of God’s body.21 As Scholem points out, “Shiur Komah speculation is already to be found in the earliest Hekhaloth texts.”22 These measurements are humanly proportional, describing in unfathomable terms the size of the Deity.23 Idel identifies the Shi’ur Qomah as participating in a tradition of “talmudic-midrashic texts” that emphasize God’s greatness, “provid[e] precise statistics concerning the size of the divine limbs, [and elaborate] upon the conception of God as power.”24 Because the Shi’ur Qomah emphasizes the virility, potency, and power of God, it provides an alternative to depictions of God as old, sedentary, and disengaged, such as those in the Book of Daniel. The body of God as described in the Shi’ur Qomah resembles the human body in proportions if not size. As Scholem points out, “Enormous measurements are given for the size of the Creator and for the length of each limb. As if this were not enough, unintelligible combinations of letters are given to indicate the secret name of each part.”25 These measurements exceed the human imagination and suggest either absurdity or cosmic potential, depending on the reader:

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From the place of the seat of His glory and up (is a distance o) 1,180,000,000 parasangs. From the place of the seat of his glory and down (is a distance of) 1,180,000,000 parasangs. His height is 2,300,000,000 parasangs. From the right arm (across) until the left arm is 770,000,000 parasangs. And from the right eyeball until the left eyeball (is a distance of) 300,000,000 parasangs. The skull of His head is 3,000,003 and a third (parasangs.) the crown of His head is 600,000 (parasangs), corresponding to the 600,000 Israelite minions. Thus is He called the Great, mighty and awesome God. . . . Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom forever.26

Martin Samuel Cohen explains that many of these numbers come from Midrashic numerology. For example, “the size of the crown is 600000. . . . [and] is said in the text itself to derive from the number of Israelites who fled Egypt.”27 Thus, the Shi’ur Qomah takes biblical references to numbers, names of God, and imagery, such as those in the Song of Songs, to convey a powerful mystical experience. Another selection from the Shi’ur Qomah indicates compassion for humanity in the supernal realm and provides a portrait of God fulfilling all the attributes of a loving father who cares for each of his children, especially when they are hurt. The Shi’ur Qomah suggests that the cosmic size of God is dwarfed by the love God has for His people. In fact, this God cares more for his earthly creations than his heavenly angels, as expressed in the following passage: God is close to the brokenhearted [Ps. 34:19]: [This is so because] all the broken hearted are dear to the Holy One, blessed be He, more than the ministering angels, for these ministering angels are [not near to Him at all but rather are] at a distance from the Shekhinah [divine earthly presence].28

Here, the Shekhinah represents the Jewish people living, suffering, and hoping for redemption: The theophany here is that of a caring God, yet one that is still remote. This is a God that has not yet, as it would in later Kabbalistic lore, reached a state of radical immanence. The Shi’ur Qomah has also come to be understood as a theurgical work and has served variously as a guide to praising God, a means to gain esoteric knowledge, an avenue to access the presence of the God, and a way to influence the supernal realm. Practitioners of esoteric prayers who sought the mystical experience could influence the outcome of divine action on earth through intense prayer. As Cohen explains, The Shi’ur Qomah can be read as a “scientific” proof of the validity of anthropomorphism; the author confirms the humanoid form of the godhead by stating that he himself, speaking through the mouths of his spokesmen, Rabbis Aqiba,

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Ishmael and Nathan, visited the highest heaven and gazed on the godhead. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong trend of theurgy in the Shi’ur Qomah. . . . It seems . . . that the Shi’ur Qomah was composed as a mystic meditation (incantation would be, perhaps, too strong a term) on the Deity, the recitation of which was meant to yield practical physical and metaphysical results.29

Here, Cohen suggests the possibility that the Shi’ur Qomah came to be used for theurgic purposes, or magic, as practitioners were enjoined to repeat a prayer daily “in order to acquire a long life and a portion of the world to come.”30 One such prayer is found etched on the apparently popular and religiously inspired Aramaic bowls found in digs dating from fifth- and sixth-century Babylonia.31 Although traditional customs and rituals dominated the religious life of this period, research and artifacts, such as these bowls, have shown that a belief in the theurgical nature of some texts also existed. KABBALAH AND GOD’S DYNAMIC ATTRIBUTES: FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO IMMANENCE A great conceptual shift occurred from the traditions of Merkavah and Hekhalot to Kabbalah mysticism: the idea of God as transcendent, distant, and only available to a few through esoteric practice gave way to a God who is immanent and knowable. In the Kabbalah mystical tradition, the inside of God literally explodes into the universe, and the resulting explosion must be contained, filtered, and prepared for the creation of life on earth. The mythic Kabbalah narrative described below shows the literal brilliance of creation expressed in terms of the human body and understood in terms of emotional, psychological, and ethical divine motivation. With this introduction to the Jewish mystical tradition of God as a being with an internal life, the internal life of humans took on an important, even essential role, in Jewish literary illumination. The radical shift from temple and later private ritual practice to exploring the mystical experience prompted practitioners to preserve the esoteric nature of the mystical journey by honoring a voluntary secrecy. The well-known anecdote referred to as the Pardes (orchard or garden) tells of four rabbis who attempted to journey to the supernal realm and of whom only one came back alive with his sanity and his morality as a Jew—Rabbi Akiva. Stories developed around these rabbis who attempted the journey and the one, Rabbi Akiva, who returned: The Sages taught: Four entered the orchard [pardes], i.e., dealt with the loftiest secrets of Torah, and they are as follows: Ben Azzai; and ben Zoma; Aḥer, the

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other, a name for Elisha ben Avuya; and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva, the senior among them, . . . The Gemara proceeds to relate what happened to each of them: Ben Azzai glimpsed at the Divine Presence and died. . . . Ben Zoma glimpsed at the Divine Presence and was harmed, i.e., he lost his mind. . . . Aḥer chopped down the shoots of saplings. In other words, he became a heretic. Rabbi Akiva came out safely.32

This legend, said to have been written in the Mishnaic or earliest period of the Talmud in the first century CE, narrates a cautionary tale to neophytes who might attempt a journey to the supernal realm to see God. As awareness of the developing mystical tradition grew and generated criticism, rabbis began to use other means of maintaining secrecy. Thus, while the first texts of Hekhalot mysticism were written in Hebrew, later texts, which came to be known as Kabbalah, were written in Aramaic, a language unknown to most, supplanting Hebrew as the language of religious speculation. Charles Mopsik explains: The use of Aramaic anticipated averting the risk relating to the direct, and therefore dangerous confrontation with the religious ideas of traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Concepts as central as the unity of God, His omnipotence, His transcendence, His formlessness, and His revelation through the course of history could only be weakened by the Kabbalists’ theosophy and theurgy had they been overly exposed to the masses. The language in which their most audacious and explicit writings were composed, the specific Aramaic that they took up for their own purpose, served to conceal, at the very same time that it partially unveiled, their innovative elaborations. . . . Aramaic provided a linguistic shield behind whose shelter the medieval Kabbalists freely constructed and exposed a theosophical system that was, at the one and the same time, both faithful to the religious teaching of the community and a radical break with its accepted interpretation, namely monotheism in its Aristotelian form, which permeated Western Europe at that time.33

Kabbalah mysticism represented a radical shift in the development of Jewish theology. Instead of the strict maintenance of God as distant and unknowable in traditional practice, or knowable to only an initiated few in the esoteric mystical tradition, Kabbalah introduced a God who is immanent and knowable to all and validated the internal, spiritual journey of the individual. By portraying God as having an internal life, Kabbalah validated the various aspects of internal human life: conflicts, strengths, compassion, justice, and eroticism. The Kabbalah tradition explained creation, human beings as God’s replicas on earth, the presence of good and evil in the world, interaction between humanity and God, divine powers and action, and, in some versions, the

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theurgic ability to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Its emphasis was on building a close relationship with God, not rewarding or punishing the believer. The Kabbalistic portrait of creation implies no sense of a lesser or sullied state of earthly materiality. Betty Rojtman explains that the Kabbalist view presents divinity in all aspects of human nature without a sense of a fallen humanity: It affirms the metaphysical possibility of covenant between the Creator and his universe, between the infinite of the celestial radiation and the limits of the receptacle [human world] absorption. On the moral level, it achieves the sanctification of the creature, conceived as an inalienable presence of the spiritual in human nature, as a spiritual trace in Nature, the emergence, the unveiling of the superior sphere in the inferior sphere.34

As Rojtman suggests, Kabbalah mysticism provided a language for the visualization and the experience of humanity and nature being connected to God the creator. The similarity between God and his creations imbues creation with divinity, spirituality, and sacredness different only in degree, not kind, from God. There are several versions of the Kabbalah tradition that often overlap. The theosophical or visualization tradition, which focuses on the description of God; the ecstatic, which focuses on the experience of divine presence; and the theurgic, which seeks to influence specific personal and social events, including the arrival of the Messiah.35 The implications of this last version of Kabbalah will become clear in the next chapter with the discussion of the messianic movement led by Sabbatai Zvi. However, a practitioner could experience all three of these forms, such that the coming of an earthly Messiah might be hastened by a mystical journey to the supernal realm. The theosophical Kabbalist tradition advances in stages from antiquity to the present day. The Sefer Yetzirah introduces the visualization of God’s attributes and describes them as having ten essential numbers: These are the ten spheres of existence out of nothing. From the spirit of the living God emanated air, from the air, water, from the water, fire or ether, from the ether, the height and the depth, the East and West, the North and South.36

The Sefer Yetzirah thus elaborates on the number ten as a sacred numerology of creation, as it describes both God and the act of creation in words and numbers and has been called the most important work since the Talmud in the development of Jewish thought.37 It launches a systematic Jewish imaginative visualization of God that builds on biblical references to form a concept expressible in literary, narrative, and oral form.

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Another significant text in the Kabbalist tradition, the Bahir, emerged between the tenth and twelfth century in Spain. This text develops the Sefer Yetzirah’s concept of the ten numerological dimensions of God and creation. The following verses demonstrate the Bahir’s insight on the mystical significance of biblical verses. This selection refers to the biblical verse Leviticus 9:22, when Aaron raises his hands to bless the people: Why are the hands lifted when they are blessed in this manner? It is because the hands have ten fingers, alluding to the Ten Sefirot with which heaven and earth were sealed. . . . Why are they called Sephirot? Because it is written (Psalm 19:2), “The heavens declare the glory of God.”38

By designating finite numbers to the infinite reality of God, the Bahir continues the tradition of the Sefer Yetzirah in describing human/divine identity, acts, and relationships through the vehicle of human language. The Bahir suggests several concepts in a concise fashion that are developed in later expressions of Jewish mysticism. One of these concepts is that light preexists creation. Section 25 of the Bahir reads: Rabbi Berachiah said: What is the meaning of the verse (Genesis 1:3), “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”? Why does the verse not say, “And it was so”? What is this like? A king had a beautiful object. He put it away until he had a place for it, and then he put it there. It is therefore written, “Let there be light, and there was light.” This indicates that it already existed.39

Here, the Bahir introduces several elements developed robustly by later Kabbalists.40 Light is the symbol that alludes to the property that brings the universe into being. Thus, light is different than God, who uses light to create the universe. Light is thought of as being contained by God in vessels until the moment of creation. In the Bahir, section 54, a window is described as maintaining an appropriate separation between God and what He creates. The importance of the window is manifold. The window allows God and humanity to see one another, yet be separate; to be independent from one another, yet to be able to call for attention as needed.41 This need for God to remove Himself from what is created represents another powerful concept introduced by the Bahir, the contraction of God at the moment of creation. The concept of the contraction of God to explain the presence of the finite within the infinite addresses the reality that God would overwhelm His

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creation if His power were not contained in some way. The Bahir also introduces the formation of a primal man at the moment of creation, indicating that he is an architectural copy from the blueprint of God. The Bahir reads: It is written (Genesis 9:6), “for in the form of God He made man.” It is likewise written (Genesis 1:27), “In the form of God He made Him, male and female He made them.”42

Thus, although the Bahir only provides a skeletal language to explain cosmic reality, many concepts introduced in the Bahir persist in the mystical imagination including the following: ten Sefirot as attributes of God, the contraction of God’s presence to allow for finite reality at the moment of creation, and the creation of a primal man configured after God. In the thirteenth century, the voluminous text the Zohar also appeared in Spain, building on earlier texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir, and served in its turn as an additional foundation to the mystical traditions. Published by Moses de León, the Zohar “offered the first totally comprehensive mystical theology of Judaism. Its influence was enormous.”43 The Zohar documents the fictional meeting of several rabbinic sages who reflect upon biblical verses, their mystical interpretations, and cultural implications. The Zohar provides numerous embellishments of the mythic activity between the supernal and human realms. While the Shi’ur Qomah portrayed the body of cosmic divinity with proportional, if gargantuan, human measurements, the Kabbalistic portrait of God in the Zohar was less concerned with divine measurements and instead emphasized the emotional, cognitive, and dynamic attributes of God. These attributes appear in the schema of the Sefirot (see figure 1), where “the Divine life is expressed in ten steps or levels, which both conceal and reveal Him. It flows out and animates Creation. . . . As the divine life reveals itself—that is, becomes manifest through its actions on the various levels of divine emanation.”44 The ten Sefirot are generally understood as divine aspects, both idiosyncratic and anthropomorphic. They serve to describe divine nature and portray the complexity of that nature often hidden from human understanding. These aspects also capture the dynamic interaction and collaboration between the earthly human and supernal divine realms. In Scholem’s concise description: They are the ten stages of the inner world, through which God descends from the inmost recesses down to His revelation in the Shekhinah [divine earthly presence]. . . . The Biblical word that man was created in the image of God means two things to the Kabbalist: first, that the power of the Sephiroth, the paradigm of divine life, exists and is active also in man. Secondly, that the world of the Sephiroth, that is to say the world of God the Creator, is capable of being visualized under the image of man the created.45

Figure 3.1. Road to the Sephirot. Source: Created by Rabbi Jordania Goldberg.

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This visualization of the supernal realm produces a dynamic portrait of God, who responds to human activity and offers the specific gateway through which God enters and intervenes in the earthly realm. The connection between the earthly and supernal realms occurs at the base of the configuration of the ten Sefirot, called Yesod and generally gendered male, that opens to the earthly realm of divine presence represented by the Shekinah, generally gendered female. The visualization of the presence of God overflowing into the earthly realm is visualized as sexual intercourse between Yesod and Shekinah. Steven T. Katz notes the transparent references to human anatomy that emphasize that the point of visualizing the divine realm is to instruct human beings how to copy divine behavior.46 Human intimate activity is also radically linked to the balance in the universe. Here, Roy Rosenberg explains how the relationship between the human and divine experiences of holiness, according to the Zohar, enters into daily human life: The Zohar teaches that wrath and harsh judgment may also be mitigated by sexual union of the King with his Shekinah. In no other classic religious text is sexuality surrounded with such an aura of holiness. It has its purely spiritual aspect, but the Zohar understands the supernal union to have its genital aspect as well. It teaches that God Himself, as well as man and woman on earth, are incomplete and imperfect until they unite in this holiest of relationships. Thereby does the Kindness of the male, deriving ultimately from the Ancient One, enter into the female and it was in her, as Rabbi Simeon said just before his death, that “the Lord commanded the blessing, life forevermore.”47

The arrangement of the Sefirot reflects this relationship by copying the architecture of the male body with the phallus positioned as the Yesod, enabling intercourse with the feminine Shekhinah. In the Kabbalistic imagination, God comes into the Shekhinah as a sexual act and a sign of radical intimacy. In this erotic vein, the Hebrew word for cleave (‫ דבק‬or devekut) is often used to describe how humanity seeks to discover God and achieve a sense of closeness with God. For example, in Genesis 2:24, a “man cleaves to his wife” and, in Jeremiah 13:11, “I caused to cleave unto me the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah, saith the Lord.” The term has both emotional and physical meaning as Melila Hellner-Eshed explains: “In the Zohar’s language of mystical experience, devekut signifies the union of the soul with the blessed Holy One, and it is in fact a description of sexual union.”48 Building on the language and literary suggestiveness in the Bible, Kabbalah mysticism develops erotic imagery as an expression of the yearning for the divine presence. Furthermore, in an imaginative, gender-bending leap, Kabbalah mysticism sees circumcision as not only essential for a man to be identified as a Jew but

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also a feminization that enables him to have intercourse with the divine Yesod or phallus.49 Here, in the 2004 translation of the Zohar by Daniel C. Matt, the Shekinah becomes a bride who is called God and who benefits from the work of “the hands” of Heaven or the sexual prowess of a circumcised Yesod or male in a holy union of heaven and earth: Rabbi Shim’on opened, saying, “Heaven declares the glory of God . . . (Psalms 19:2) . . . The glory of God—Glory of the Bride, who is called God . . . Then at the moment when Heaven enters the canopy, coming to illumine Her . . . The sky proclaims the work of His hands (Psalms 19:2) This is the covenant sealed in a man’s flesh.”50

Thus, the Kabbalah tradition incorporates imagery of the body that imbues everyday acts, such as conjugal married life, with creative divine energy, the very premise of which is theurgic, for divine and human fulfillment. Thus, the passion of the maiden and the king in Song of Songs reflects the passion of God for his people and the satisfactory outcome when believers act according to divine expectations and facilitate and invite divine presence. Other books of the Zohar, such as the Lesser Holy Assembly, also link the union of God and the Shekhinah to the sexual union of husband and wife causing cosmic joy and the joy of the Sabbath in the home: Moreover, when the male couples with the female they actually become one body, and all the worlds are joyful because they receive blessing from the complete body. This is the secret contained in the verse (Exod. 20:11), “Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it,” for on it are all things found to constitute the one complete body, the Matrona cleaving to the King to form one body.51

Ultimately, in the Kabbalist imagination, the conjoining of the Yesod, or the lowest Sefirot of the ten, with the Shekinah, or the divine earthly presence, creates a union that enables the beneficence of God on earth. This cosmic union, gendered male and female, is to be mirrored in the bedroom between a man and woman joined in wedlock, as a form of Imitatio Dei (see previous chapter). In the sixteenth century, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed developed what became known as Lurianic Kabbalah mysticism for his messianic vision. Lurianic Kabbalah is not militant or ascetic but “oriented toward the Apocalypse, adhering to a mystic worldview that seeks the repair of the world in a cosmic sense.”52 Lurianic Kabbalah understands the universe as broken because of God’s initial contraction (tsimtsum), and the Messiah’s success depends on the efforts of each Jew to repair the universe (tikkun).53 Among the Kabbalist tenets that Luria developed is an eschatology that sees the disasters that

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befall Jews not as punishment but as cosmological birth pangs announcing the Messiah.54 Luria joined the esoteric experience with strict observance of Jewish law in order to create a world order that would hasten the arrival of the Messiah. The mystics who created the rich anthropomorphic literature sampled above rejected the apophatic or negative theological approach to God as transcendent and unknowable. The tradition of Jewish mysticism that went from an esoteric to a popularly embraced tradition is testimony to the compelling nature of this strategy that helps humanity experience the kavvanah of the presence of God. In addition to devequt, or maintaining a connection to God, the mystical tradition of Rabbi Isaac Luria promised messianic redemption. The world could hasten the arrival of a messiah if it only prayed enough and strictly followed the prescribed religious rituals that included describing the attributes of God. As Cohen notes, “describing intimate physical details or names of God in a theurgic [magical] context is ancient and welldocumented.”55 Thus, one branch of Jewish Mysticism helped to produce the massive messianic movement headed by Sabbatai Zvi in response to promises of earthly redemption. This failed messianic movement will be discussed in the next chapter. CONCLUSION The pushback that the anthropomorphic god of Jewish mysticism has received and continues to receive over the centuries is undeniable: The Sages were acquainted not only with the deviant priestly traditions relating to internal disputes over hegemony and ritual matters, but also with various priestly traditions of varying antiquity relating to the Temple and the Merkavah, shiur komah and ma’aseh bereshit [work of creation], Ezekiel and the Song of Songs—all of which mainstream rabbinic tradition preferred to circumscribe if not to suppress completely.56

Nevertheless, while there existed a rabbinic resistance to God as anthropos, the two strains within the rabbinic tradition, the Jewish mystical and the traditional rabbinic, seem to have coexisted, both having vibrancy and longevity, lasting through much of the medieval period and, in many quarters, to today. The mystical traditions of Hekhalot and Kabbalah reveal God in the material, cosmic world that includes an inner life, even a psychologized life, of both God and humanity. The individual human being plays an essential role in that balance. By honoring God through ritual and other customs, human beings sustain cosmic balance, and the intimacy of a married couple, whether

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for procreation or to sustain a fulfilling relationship, is essential to a positive cosmic outcome. The body, then, is not sinful, fallen, or considered in any way an encumberment to the soul. Rather, the two function together to enable a fulfilling life. Upon death, according to later Kabbalah, the body lives with the soul. Eighteenth-century mystic Rabbi Moses Hayim Luzzatto explains that “The truth is that all things converge toward [the body] that it may be the sole agent of free choice. Indeed even the soul can have no free will apart from [the body]. . . .”57 This expression of evolving theological beliefs through a radical anthropomorphic divine portrait is in notable contrast to the earlier theological belief that God is transcendent, unknowable, and distant. NOTES 1. Qtd. in Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), viii. See also Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken: 1991), 21. 2. See Saul Lieberman, “Some Aspects of After Life in Early Rabbinic Literature,” in Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), 270, where Lieberman reviews many opinions about the imagined afterlife. 3. Arthur Green calls this development within Jewish Mysticism “mystical panentheism.” See his Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 205. 4. Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in Zohar, trans. Nathan Wolski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 20–22. 5. Richard A. Horsley, “Popular Messianic Movements around the Time of Jesus,” in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 103. According to Horsley, the Bar Kokhba Revolt is considered by scholarly consensus to have been a messianic movement. Rabbi Akiva, as I noted in chapter 2, believed that Bar Kokhba was the Messiah, come to deliver the beleaguered Jews from Roman oppression. Actual documents of Bar Kokhba were found hidden in a cave near Masada and testify to the hidden life during the period of Herodian persecution. See Saul Lieberman, “The Importance of the Bar-Kokhba Letters for Jewish History and Literature,” in Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), 208–9. In chapter 4, I discuss another failed messiah, Sabbatai Zvi. 6. A dispute exists about whether the mystical tradition and the works associated with its expression developed at this early period, prior to and during the first and second centuries CE, or whether they were post-Talmudic. For a summary of that dispute, see Philip S. Alexander, “Mysticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 707.

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7. Pharisees were not associated with Second Temple priesthood and opposed the priesthood for several reasons. One reason is that Pharisees espoused an oral law that mitigated the harsher biblical law to make everyday observance possible. Ultimately, the Pharisees formed the foundation of rabbinic Judaism as discussed in the previous chapter. On the Pharisaic launch of the mystical tradition before the destruction of the Second Temple, see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1961), 42. 8. While dualism is often used to distinguish a dramatic rejection of the body in the interests of an ascetic experience of state-of-being, Lawrence Fine notes that the dualism is more nuanced than a simple binary would suggest in “Purifying the Body in the Name of the Soul: The Problem of the Body in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 117. 9. A monistic or pantheistic view of the cosmos suggesting divine immanence would not align with the traditional understanding of God. Monism, the oneness of all the universe including divine and human, identifies polytheistic religions and Hindu views. 10. Elior, The Three Temples, 266. 11. Joseph Dan, “The Religious Experience of the Merkava,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 296. 12. The Song of Songs is traditionally considered to be either a First Temple (approximately 1000–600 BCE) text or one that was codified early in the Second Temple (600 BCE–70 CE) period. 13. The earliest Church father identified with allegorical readings of the Song of Songs is Origen. See Origen: The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (New York: Newman, 1956). 14. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 22–23. 15. Daniel Boyarin, The Song of Songs, Lock or Key, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98. 16. Elior, The Three Temples, 266. 17. Because the English spelling varies, I have adopted Shi’ur Qomah unless the quote specifically uses Shi’ur Komah. My choice of spelling for the work comes from Martin Samuel Cohen, whose translation into English and whose annotations completed in 1983 have been the most thorough that I have found. 18. Although many works discuss Shi’ur Qomah, only that of Cohen is dedicated to the epic specifically. Cohen explains that his translation is based on a version preserved as part of the Sefer Haqqomah, 1791 Oxford Manuscript, FF. 58–70. Cohen lists the almost fifty manuscripts dating from 1102 that he has consulted. He also explains that elements of the epic appear in many works through the centuries. See Martin Samuel Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 5. 19. David J. Halperin, Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübengin: J. B. C. Hohr, 1988), 407. See also Naomi Janowitz on accusations about radical anthropomorphism in Jewish traditions in “God’s Body: The

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Theological and Ritual Roles,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 183–202. 20. Dan, “The Religious Experience,” 296. 21. Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 405. In Cohen’s work, The Shi’ur Qomah, he reviews in detail the many scholars who have attempted to date the epic. One of the problems he points out in this effort is the relatively late date of a manuscript sources, 30. 22. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 21. 23. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah, 106–7. Cohen writes, “What is more interesting is to note that they [numbers describing the size of the godhead] suggest more or less normal human body proportions, and specifically a sort of symmetry or equilibrium which is, possibly, meant to suggest the perfection of the even-tempered Deity.” 24. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 153. 25. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 23. 26. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah 22–23. “Weights and Measures,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 32, suggests that one parasang is eight thousand forearms. A parasang is also explained as four miles. See “Weights and Measures: Redirected from PARSA,” in Jewish Encyclopedia. Accessed June 12, 2022. www​.jewishencyclopedia​.com​/articles​/11918​-parsa. 27. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah, 107. 28. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah, 55. 29. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah, 68–69. 30. Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah, 67. Prayers naming Metatron appear on Aramaic incantation bowls that appear in Babylonia in the fifth and sixth centuries, roughly the time of Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian, and Pagan communities. See Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls Volume One, eds. Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford, and Siam Bhayro (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1. 31. For a sample of some of the work being done on this subject, see Alexander W. Marcus and Jason S. Mokhtarian, The Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Their Late Antique Jewish Contexts. (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies [forthcoming]); Mika Ahuvia, “The Spatial and Social Dynamics of Jewish Babylonian Incantation Bowls,” in Placing Ancient Texts: The Ritual and Rhetorical Use of Space, eds. Mika Ahuvia and Alexander Kocar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 227–52. Michael G. Morony “Religion and the Aramaic Incantation Bowls,” Religion Compass 1, no. 4 (2007), 414–29. 32. Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 14b, Sefaria. Accessed July 10, 2022. www​.sefaria​.org. 33. Charles Mopsik, “Late Judeo-Aramaic: The Language of Theosophic Kabbalah,” trans. Ariel Klein, Aramaic Studies 4, no. 1 (2006): 23. 34. Betty Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 87.

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35. See Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 39–40; Idel, Kabbalah, xi–xvi, 157–59. 36. Sefer Yetzirah 1, Sefaria. Accessed July 10, 2022. www​.sefaria​.org. 37. Introduction to Sefer Yetzirah, Sefaria, Accessed July 10, 2022. www​.sefaria​.org. 38. The Bahir (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1989), 46–47. 39. The Bahir, 10. 40. As it would be later developed in Lurianic Kabbalah, the use of light, as distinguished from God’s essence, is a metaphor for God’s power to create the world. Before creation, the existing light is contained in vessels. To allow for creation, God breaks the vessels. So as not to overwhelm His creation, God removes all but one thread of light, which then becomes the world. At that moment, all of creation takes the shape of a primal human being, Adam Kadman, as image of God. God’s contraction, or Tsimtsum, at the moment of creation allows for the finite to exist with the infinite. 41. Aryeh Kaplan, “Commentary on Bahir,” in The Bahir (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1989), xxiii, 20. 42. The Bahir, 65–66. 43. Alexander, “Mysticism,” 713. 44. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 39. Idel, Kabbalah, 40. The concept of the soul enters the discourse of Kabbalah via Plato. As our discussion shows, however, dominant Jewish discourse, regardless of the genre, does not place body and soul in a hierarchical relationship as the Platonic paradigm does. 45. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends, 214–15. The names, with slightly more detail, of the Sefirot are: 1) Kether Elyon, the “supreme crown” of God; 2) Hokhmah, the “wisdom” or primordial idea of God; 3) Binah, the “intelligence” of God; 4) Hesed, the “love” or mercy of God; 5) Gevurah or Din, the “power” of God, chiefly manifested as the power of stern judgment and punishment; 6) Rachamim, the “compassion” of God, which mediates the two preceding Sefirot; the name Tifereth, “beauty,” is used only rarely; 7) Netsah, the “lasting endurance” of God; 8) Hod, the “majesty” of God; 9) Yesod, the “basis” or “foundation” of all active forces in God; 10) Malkhuth, the “kingdom” of God, usually described in the Zohar as the Keneseth Israel, the mystical archetype of Israel’s community, or as the Shekhinah. See Scholem, Major Trends, 213. 46. Steven T. Katz, Mysticism and the Interpretation of Sacred Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 29. 47. The Anatomy of God: The Book of Concealment, The Great Holy Assembly and The Lesser Holy Assembly of the Zohar with The Assembly of the Tabernacle, trans. Roy A. Rosenberg (New York: Ktav, 1973), 11. For a discussion of the multiple female roles the Shekinah serves, see David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic, 1992), 112. 48. Helner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden, 295. See also the discussion of the terms kavod, kavvanah, and devequt in my introduction. 49. Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden, 292–93.

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50. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, vol. 1, trans. Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 53–54. 51. Rosenberg, The Anatomy of God, 177. 52. Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125. 53. Lenowitz, Jewish Messiahs, 128. 54. Lenowitz, Jewish Messiahs, 126. 55. Cohen, Shi’ur Qomah, 70. 56. Elior, The Three Temples, 12–13. 57. Charles Mopsik, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, eds. M. Feher, R. Naddaff, and N. Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 65.

Chapter 4

Wonder and the Jewish Enlightenment False Messiahs, Philosophers, and Social Justice

My discussion of Jewish literary illumination in the previous chapter focused on mystical texts and experiences that include engagement with divinity. The crowning achievement of this engagement is kavod, the “boundless emotional and spiritual energy produced by a sense of proximity to God,”1 With the advent of the Enlightenment,2 for many, the experiences named wonder and the sublime took the place of, or at the very least enhanced, what had heretofore been the experience of proximity to God. Wonder and the sublime were discovered and expressed through the arts, intellectual life, and appreciation of the natural environment. Both traditions developed in important ways at the dawn of modernity. On the one hand, a massive messianic movement grew out of existing Jewish communities that had adopted mystical beliefs. And, on the other, in a radically different trajectory, Jewish intellectual life emerged in urban settings.3 These two trajectories fostered the emergence of two significant figures in Jewish culture: Sabbatai Zvi, who promised a messianic age in exchange for faith in his divinity, and the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who voiced Jewish human rights as social justice.4 These starkly different leaders attracted differing Jewish demographics. The messianic movement of Sabbatai Zvi attracted rural Jewish communities that had grown accustomed to the marginalization and persecutions of forced ghetto life. The Enlightenment aspirations expressed by Mendelssohn attracted the intellectual Jew, privileged to belong to the urban German salons of philosophers and playwrights. In the world that produced Sabbatai Zvi, religion comprised every element of life. His appeal built on traditions in the communal world of the shtetl (small villages to which Jews were assigned 91

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by their political rulers), trust in rabbinic communal leaders, and observance of Jewish communal rituals.5 In the urban world of Mendelssohn, which emerged in other parts of Europe at virtually the same time, a philosophical understanding of human existence replaced religious understanding and practices. Instead of trust in divine intervention to bring earthly salvation, humanity was expected to initiate social justice. In this chapter, I will first review some history of the Jewish experience during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to establish the diverse ways in which Jewish ideas about salvation developed, one utopic, one earthly. The first focus will be on the utopic salvation promised by Sabbatai Zvi that attracted millions of followers, who, even after his conversion to Islam,6 continued to believe in his message. The second focus will be on a shift in Jewish hopes of salvation from a messianic vision to a vision of social justice. This second focus will look at the work of Moses Mendelssohn, who espoused a Judaism focused on social justice, and his colleague Gotthold Lessing, whose play Nathan the Wise voiced ideas about social justice, religious tolerance, and human responsibility. A SHORT HISTORY OF JEWISH EXPERIENCE ON THE EVE OF MODERNITY By the early sixteenth century, the Reformation of the Catholic church marked what is generally accepted as the historical shift from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The period continued medieval efforts to isolate Jews from mainstream society. In the early fifteenth century, Germany created ghettos in its urban centers, and by the sixteenth century, Italy had also done so. Nationally instituted legal restrictions and penalties across Europe, Russia, and England kept Jews isolated from the general population. High taxes, lack of protection against lenders, accusations of ritual murder and desecration, banishments, extortion, wealth and property seizures, forced conversions, and sudden violence kept the Jewish community in a perpetual state of imbalance. By the early seventeenth century, the Thirty Years War, largely a religious war, arguably resulted in the death of 20 to 30 percent of Europe’s population. Amid these political and religious vicissitudes, many Jewish communities served as scapegoats, while the role of Jews as wartime suppliers improved the lot of others.7 Another defining catastrophe for Jewish communities occurred in the mid-seventeenth century with the Chmielnicki Massacres (1648–1649), led by the infamous Cossacks, which terrorized hundreds of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and brought total devastation to about three hundred of these communities. According to recent estimates, between forty thousand



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and fifty thousand Jews died—about 20 to 25 percent of the Jewish population at the time. Jews fled to Western Europe, most notably Germany.8 Centuries of isolation and persecution, in both rural and urban settings, created an environment that encouraged self-sufficiency and close familial, communal, educational, and religious ties.9 A diverse Jewish cultural life emerged that included legend, myth, scholarly debate, and inspirational and instructional expression in both oral and written religious and secular traditions. Scholarly and religious life centered around the study of the Tanakh, the Talmud, and contemporaneous rabbinic judgments, which contributed to intellectual acumen among the Jewish community. In order to participate in a community, a Jew needed to read, learn a myriad of detailed traditions and practices, and participate in the communal institutions. Finally, by the end of the seventeenth century, some urban Jews became more integrated in the commercial and social life of their host countries. Although ghetto restrictions banned their access to the infrastructure of Christian communal life, including educational and social activities, Jews were allowed to serve as peddlers within and between Christian communities. Many Jews traveled outside the institutional walls of Judaism’s core synagogue life and traditional communal rituals, whether through Spain, France, England, Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy, or the Ottoman Empire. Because Jews moved through these areas, due to commerce, evictions, and worse, their ideas moved with them. Layperson and rabbi alike had occasion to travel, whether to earn a living as a peddler, to visit the Holy Land, or to seek out coreligionists.10 In exceptional cases, philosophical exchanges of Jewish community leaders with religious, philosophical, or political leaders of the host state occurred. MESSIANISM AND RELIGIOUS WONDER: DASHED HOPES AND THE FALSE MESSIAH SABBATAI ZVI As earlier chapters have demonstrated, traditional rabbinic writings argue against messianic, apocalyptic, and utopic visions and rhetoric that distract from a focus on earthly life. Accordingly, Jewish rabbinic tradition became focused on laws governing communal life rather than escape offered by salvific dreams of an afterlife or preoccupation with spiritual life. These laws, developed and transcribed in the Talmud, were adopted by Jewish communities across Europe and helped to maintain a Jewish identity. On the other hand, Jewish mysticism also developed as a spiritual practice, first for a few rabbis and later for whole communities. Jewish mysticism offered the experience of kavod through special prayers that focused on the spiritual rather than communal life. The Tanakh and the rabbinic Talmudic tradition emphasized

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the communal nature of religious practice, resisting the esoteric nature of mysticism as a threat to communal Judaism. While what is commonly called rabbinic Judaism resisted mysticism with its apocalyptic and messianic elements, Gershom Scholem points out that Jewish messianism and apocalyptic beliefs are age-old aspects of the religion and remarks that “It has been one of the strangest errors of the modern Wissenschaft des Judentums [the German scholarly tradition begun in the early nineteen century]11 to deny the continuity of Jewish apocalypticism.”12 In fact, both apocalypticism and messianism have been a part of the Jewish experience from the earliest recorded texts. For example, the Book of Daniel, written in the second century BCE, tells the story of the end of times,13 and messiahs are suggested in Exodus 3:10, when God says to Moses “So now go / for I send you to Pharaoh— / bring my people, the Children of Israel, out of Egypt!” and 1 Samuel 16:13, when God selects David to possess the divine spirit, and he becomes an earthly representative of God, in essence a messiah. A recurring narrative of apocalypse followed by a messiah who suffers to redeem humankind is also an ancient notion. According to Richard A. Freund, “The motif of the redemptive messiah suffering to save mankind enters into the Jewish imagination” via Greek Stoic philosophy.14 Messianic narratives threaded their way through the ranks of rabbinic Judaism over time and grew in intensity after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. A most notable example is Rabbi Akiva, the martyr, who acknowledged his messianic beliefs and placed his tragic messianic hope in the failed Simeon bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 132 CE.15 By the early seventeenth century, the stage for the arrival of another messianic hopeful was set. At the same time as communal practices of Kabbalah without a messianic element developed, some communities developed a form of Kabbalah that moved from purely mystical practices of prayer to a set of tenets that included the apocalyptic and messianic aspirations against which many rabbinic and Jewish philosophic voices had warned. Despair fed the fire of hope for a messianic time, and Sabbatai Zvi (1626–1676), born in Smyrna (Izmir today), Turkey, responded to the call.16 His message of salvation spread like wildfire throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, fueled by the desperation of many Jews in these areas. Communities of all kinds were taken by the power of Zvi’s movement. The desperate communities of Northern Morocco, the up-and-coming communities of the Middle Eastern Ottoman Empire, the solid communities of Constantinople, Salonika (Greece), Leghorn (Italy), Amsterdam, and Hamburg all experienced its messianic force. Rich and poor, rabbis and parishioners, peddlers and businessmen, bequeathed their earthly possessions to the messianic movement. Whole communities instituted ascetic practices, penitential prayer, and additional study of the holy books.17



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Much can be learned about Zvi from the testimony of Rabbi Leib ben Ozer, written not long after Zvi died, ten years after his conversion to Islam. According to Harris Lenowitz, ben Ozer’s testimony is believable because he was neither a follower nor a critic of Zvi, he documented his reports with close attention to detail, and he acknowledged when he lacked confirming evidence. In one report, ben Ozer details the account made by Zvi’s loyal follower and interpreter Nathan the prophet, who first identified Zvi as the Messiah and who accompanied him as he spread his messianic message throughout Europe. Nathan explains how the Holy Spirit from God enabled Zvi to attain redemption for his generation, suffering exile and torture to atone for all of Israel. He continues, describing the second resurrection that would include all the faithful: “The resurrection of the dead will take place in the Land of Israel for the righteous buried there, and the evil will be cast out of the land and will not rise until the general resurrection, after forty years, when all the dead outside the Land of Israel will rise.” Ben Ozer’s report is characteristic of Jewish eschatology and messianic aspirations, in which the culmination of apocalyptic judgment results in a utopic vision of life on earth. In another report, ben Ozer expresses his disbelief that so many became enthralled by what turned out to be the false messianic claims of Zvi. Yet, just as he shares his disbelief, he attests to one of many miraculous events. Ben Ozer reports that, in the month of Tevet 1665, in places as removed as Izmir, Constantinople, Adrianopole, and Salonika, thousands of people, including little children, prophesied in the holy tongue and the language of the Zohar without ever having known a word of either, spoke secrets of the Kabbalah, and proclaimed: The reign of Shabtai Zvi, our lord, our king, our messiah, has been revealed in Heaven and Earth and he has received the crown of the kingship of Heaven. . . . And wherever you went you heard nothing but that Mr. So-and-so had become a prophet and that Miss So-and-so had become a prophetess; and here there was a company of prophets, some prophesying in one way and others in another way, but the sum of the matter was always that Shabtai Zvi was the messiah and our righteous redeemer. Now, a man might think that all this was trickery and some people created themselves prophets. Not so!18

At the height of this frenzy, Zvi was eventually discredited. He was excommunicated by the Polish rabbis, fled to Turkey, and was arrested by Ottoman authorities for causing disruption. In 1666, when given the option to die or to convert to Islam, Zvi converted. Even with the apostasy of Zvi, his messianic movement exerted considerable influence on the state of Jewish religious institutions. Change had been in the air for a long time. The frenzy of messianic hopes had linked otherwise

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isolated rural Jewish communities to each other and to some urban Jews. The larger movement threatened the very nature of the relationship between the rabbi and his local flock. Also, by the end of the medieval period, with the invention of the printing press, literacy spread among the lay population and democratized learning in the ghetto.19 No longer was the rabbi the sole center of learning and education. The end of the seventeenth century saw the rabbinic power challenged and diminished. The winds of change blew not only from within isolated rural communities and urban ghettos but outside the ghetto walls, where the opportunity for Jewish involvement with host communities in commerce, education, and the Enlightenment philosophical project was now possible. With the end of the persecutions of the late Renaissance and the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century dawned on a promising future for Jews in Europe. The ghetto was still a part of reality, but the ghetto walls had become more porous. MOSES MENDELSSOHN, GOTTHOLM LESSING, AND THE WONDER OF SOCIAL JUSTICE We have seen the concept of wonder, known as kavod in its religious context, as the practice of Jewish mysticism morphed into the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zvi. The concept of wonder takes a different trajectory in the sophisticated German salons of the educated and privileged, where wonder was unhinged from its religious context. While Enlightenment philosophers considered wonder, as did religious practitioners, as a universal intuitive human experience, they saw wonder occurring without a connection to God, or kavannah. Philosophic treatises about wonder describe intuitive experiences triggered while witnessing a disaster, hearing magnificent theatrical lines, or learning of a heroic deed. In such accounts the experience of wonder is triggered by the sublime. As Jean-François Lyotard explains, “Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe this contradictory feeling— pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression—was [given] the name of the sublime.”20 In Berlin, Mendelssohn, a practicing Jew, represented the hope for a different kind of future for Jews. At a time when Europe began considering and finally enacting Jewish emancipation, Mendelssohn regularly associated with Christian friends and was included in the salons and gatherings of the elite.21 At the same time, Mendelssohn stood within his Jewish milieu with its synagogues, mystical and messianic traditions, revealed religion, commandments, communal life, rabbis, love of education, and ghettos. Like many of his Enlightenment colleagues in philosophy, he never abandoned his religious beliefs. He just did not talk about them in his philosophical writings until he



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wrote “Jerusalem,” and other later writings, to defend his fellow Jews against the anti-Semitism that persisted in keeping the Jews separated from society and vulnerable to its whims. Mendelssohn worked at the crossroads of philosophic and aesthetic discourse in eighteenth-century Europe. In his comprehensive discussion of Mendelssohn, L’esthetique de Moses Mendelssohn, Jean-Paul Meier argues that Mendelssohn’s treatise on the sublime represents a modest work of pure aesthetics that sustains his discussion of the arts and the psychological and emotional responses they inspire without a disproportionate emphasis on morality, teleology, faith, or education.22 In his work on the sublime, Mendelssohn joins the rich history of philosophical writings about sublime works of art by Longinus, Edmund Burke, Robert Lowth, and others.23 What differs, however, in his discussion of phenomena that produce the sublime, is that Mendelssohn begins with the works of creation attributed to God. For Mendelssohn, divine creation is the standard by which all human works are measured: Each thing that is or appears immense as far as the degree of its perfection is concerned is called sublime. God is called “the most sublime being.” A truth is said to be “sublime” if it concerns a quite perfect or complete entity such as God, the universe, the human soul and if it is of immense use to the human race or its discovery would require a great genius.

In the fine arts and sciences, the sensuously perfect representation of something immense will be enormous, strong, or sublime depending upon whether the magnitude concerns an extension and number, a degree of power, or, in particular, a degree of perfection. The sentiment produced by the sublime is a composite one. The magnitude captures our attention, and since it is the magnitude of a perfection, the soul enjoys latching on to this object so that all adjoining concepts in the soul are obscured. The immensity arouses a sweet shudder that rushes through every fiber of our being, and the multiplicity prevents our satiation, giving wings to the imagination to press further and further without stopping. All these sentiments blend together in the soul, flowing into one another, and become a single phenomenon which we call awe. Accordingly, if one wanted to describe the sublime in terms of its effect, then one could say: “It is something sensuously perfect in art, capable of inspiring awe.”24 Thus, Mendelssohn brings wonder outside its theological context alone and represents it as a sensual experience. Mendelssohn describes the visceral experience of wonder in a universal manner, without attachment to a specific religious or world view. In so doing, Mendelssohn joins philosophical language that examines the

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human experience from the inside out, reminiscent of the anthropomorphized portraits of the sefirot or descriptions of the internal life of God. After his discussion of the sublime nature of divine creation, Mendelssohn moves on to discuss human works that achieve an analogous human reaction of wonder, those that depict a hero who rises to achieve elevated, yet unexpected, moral behavior. This hero is not grandiose but rather humble, letting his superior deeds speak for themselves: Sublime sensibilities or the heroic which, as we noted above, constitute a subgroup of the sublime of the first type, consists in the sort of perfections of the powers of desire that inspires awe. If the hero is introduced speaking for himself and voicing such sensibilities, he must express himself as briefly and in as unadorned a fashion as possible. A great soul expresses its sensibilities uprightly and emphatically, but not bombastically.25

In this discussion of the heroic, Mendelssohn suggests the type of heroism that would play a critical part in his future collaborations with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. For Mendelssohn, action is at the heart of social justice, and to achieve a world that has more freedom, citizens must be moved to act. According to Mendelssohn, neither faith nor miracles have a part in the Jewish world, only the law transmitted through the Bible.26 He acknowledges that miracles are reported to support the gift of the laws, but he also maintains the triviality of miracles.27 While miracles may carry temporary weight as proof for skeptics of a divine act, miracles cannot be repeated over the centuries to impress further cynics. Thus, “Miracles and extraordinary signs, according to Judaism, are no proofs for or against the eternal verities [that can be demonstrated by reason].”28 Miracles are to be looked at with a healthy suspicion, even if, on occasion, they occurred.29 As Mendelssohn writes in his political and philosophical work, “On Miracles” (1770): Miracles are delusions and were termed “delusions” by Moses himself. . . . According to the teachings of our religion, any belief in miracles must itself be founded on law and not on subjective conviction. . . . When someone attempts to impose upon us, by logic, the belief that miracles are conclusive evidence of truth or when someone, out of an unlimited trust in the infallible proof of miracles, wishes to annul our law and to replace it with a new one, we shall be justified in falling back upon our disbelief.30

In his diatribes against belief in miracles, Mendelssohn argues against Christian doctrine that “consider miracles to be an infallible criterion of truth,”31 and asserts that miracles serve only to distract from worldly responsibility.



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Mendelssohn had reason to rail against the promise of miracles and faith, because he saw the cruelty visited upon the Jews justified by a belief in miracles and faith espoused by Christian persecutors. In “On Tolerance” (1784), Mendelssohn indicts Christendom for its persecution of the Jews: It is a strange experience to observe the different forms which prejudice has assumed through the ages in order to oppress us and frustrate our civil emancipation. In former times, rife with superstition, it was sacred things that we were said to defile wantonly; crucifixes that we stabbed and caused to bleed; children whom we secretly circumcised and mutilated to feast our eyes on their tortures; Christian blood that we used for Passover; wells that we poisoned; heresy, intractability, witchcraft, the practice of fiendish magic—these were the things of which we were accused, for which we were martyred, robbed of our property, and driven into exile, if not actually slain. . . . Today the zeal to convert us has abated. Now we are completely neglected. We continue to be barred from the arts, the sciences, the useful trades and occupations of mankind; every avenue to improvement is blocked, while our alleged lack of refinement is used as a pretext for our further oppression.32

In this crying out for social justice, Mendelssohn uses his notoriety to amplify the voice of persecuted Jews. His words reflect a reality for most European Jews that would not be otherwise until Napoleon announced citizenship for the Jews. Mendelssohn asserts the importance of tolerance when he writes, “Let every man who does not disturb the public welfare, who obeys the law, acts righteously toward you and his fellow men be allowed to speak as he thinks, to pray to God after may find it.”33 His sentiments form the rhetoric that would be voiced by the hero of the play Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Lessing. Lessing, Mendelssohn’s friend and colleague of thirty years,34 shared an interest in social justice. Focusing on works of art that promote ethical action, Lessing is famous for his philosophical work Laocoön, which compares diverse mediums of art and their various effects on the viewer. Lessing’s central point of discussion is a massive marble statue that depicts the hero Laocoön, who tried to warn his fellow Trojans of impending death. The sculpture depicts his reaction as two snakes sent by Athena attack him and his sons. Cecilia Sjöholm explains that “In this text, the human body has a central place, and Lessing’s investigation into the signification of the Laocoön can be formulated as the question: How does the embodied mind respond to the image of a human body?”35 The psychic and physical pain the statue displays through the tortured muscles of the body, with its anguished heroic face turned to watch the death of his two young sons, draws the viewer into

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the event. According to Sjöholm, Lessing included this work of art as a robust tool to educate, motivate, and model his philosophy: To Lessing the question of affects has to do with corporeality, both the embodiment of the viewer and the way in which the body is depicted or invoked in a work of art. In this way, he forebodes contemporary discussions on affects and corporeality. Affects, to Lessing, are a primary motive in the mimesis of art. It is something that you both see and experience.36

As Lessing writes in Laocoön, “pity is the sole aim of the tragic stage,”37 and his interest was in the power of art to motivate viewers to action and communicate high moral values. According to Bruce Rosenstock, Lessing’s goal, in his play Nathan the Wise and his relationship with Moses Mendelssohn, was to improve the German culture’s religious tolerance and promote reasoned approaches to political problems.38 Lessing’s engagement with the arts as a vehicle for moral purpose drove him to the theater, and he wrote several plays about the plight of Jews. For Lessing and Mendelssohn, tragedy performed in the popular theater provided opportunities to teach social justice. By showing a hero’s deeds that challenged the injustice of the times and struggled to rise above hate, playwrights could imbue theater with an ethical standard.39 As Aristotle opines, in Poetics, about the power of theater to communicate moral values, “It is a pleasant spectacle for the gods . . . to see a virtuous soul wrestle with fate, to see him surrender everything to it but his virtue.”40 Theater, in the age of German Enlightenment, was based on a rational concept of the universe where evil is punished and good is rewarded, or, if the good suffer, it is for moral improvement.41 However, Lessing wrote plays that “maintain[ed] virtue in its old position of dominant interest . . . to make virtue attractive and irresistible . . . [in] the brave and magnanimous way [his] characters meet and accept their misfortune.”42 The virtues that both Mendelssohn and Lessing advocated in their work is tolerance, inclusivity, and healing both of the individual and the community. Both men saw a sense of wonder in the heroic figure whose courage in the face of misfortune does not hinder him from performing in a righteous manner. Intertwined with Mendelssohn and Lessing’s view of history is a shared belief in human responsibility.43 For both men, humanity is responsible for personal and social well-being, and both individuals and societies have a responsibility to improve their abilities and experience the pleasures of life. To neglect those pleasures is to make ourselves miserable and to neglect divine intent. Thus, individuals must fight for justice.44 Like Mendelssohn, Lessing critiques the Enlightenment project of envisioning a universal, natural religion, ostensibly based on reason. They both



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saw the hypocrisy of the claim that if everyone had the same religion, religious conflict would not exist. In response to this Enlightenment vision, Lessing wrote two plays suggested by his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn, The Jews: A Comedy in One Act (1749) and Nathan the Wise: A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts (1779).45 In Nathan the Wise, on the one hand, Lessing acknowledges that consolidating religions would be an ideal solution to the age-old problems created by religious diversity and hatred bred by religious doctrine. On the other hand, Lessing insists that the historical moment had not yet arrived, and the particularity of each religion was still important. This concurs with Mendelssohn’s assessment on combining religions. He writes in “Jerusalem,” “They tell you that a union of religions is the shortest way to that brotherly love and tolerance you kindhearted people so earnestly desire. . . . Our most precious possession—the freedom to think—will be lost if you listen to their counsel. For the sake of your happiness as well as ours, remember that a union of faiths is not tolerance. It is the very opposite.”46 Lessing, like Mendelssohn, saw the limitations of the Enlightenment and rationality and the historic terror that can occur in the name of rationality. For Mendelssohn, Nathan the Wise represented an example of the ultimate in the sublime, inspiring a sense of wonder at its greatest.47 According to Mendelssohn, whose praise was unrestrained, the play inspires the intuitive experience of the ineffable, of the infinite, of God, and the denouement itself is an event of social justice, in which otherwise estranged characters become a family. Nathan’s heroic efforts set a standard of inclusivity that does not erase individual identity or confessional practice but rather creates a wonderous social network. After Crusaders slaughter his wife and seven sons, Nathan only wants to kill Christians, but a chance meeting brings an orphaned Christian baby girl to his doorstep. Overcome with compassion, Nathan decides to adopt the child, a gesture that also helps him heal from his devastating loss. In a convergence that represents a nation where all faiths enjoy equal participation, it turns out that, unbeknownst to Nathan, a Jew who took in what he thought was an orphaned Christian, he has raised the niece of the sultan, the daughter of his slain brother, whose twin is among the Knights Templar. Nathan the Wise takes place in Jerusalem in 1192. During that year, the historical, final battle of the Third Crusade between Sultan Saladin and England’s King Richard the Lionhearted ended. The Ayyubid Empire had withstood decades of failed attempts to regain a piece of the Holy Land for Christianity. By 1192, after years of military engagements, both empires and both leaders were facing internal political and financial challenges and had suffered bouts of illness. Yet, even with the ongoing conflict, negotiations continued in such a regular manner that the opponents, both leaders and soldiers, had gotten to know one another. Both leaders were admired. Richard’s

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celebrity and bravery were legendary, and Saladin had brought prosperity and intellectualism to his empire. While a treaty between these opponents ended Christian aspirations for control of Jerusalem, it allowed for pilgrimages to visit the holy sites.48 Saladin went down as a hero in Muslim history for liberating Jerusalem from its Christian crusader occupation after almost one hundred years. The historical moment of Nathan the Wise was highly relevant to the contemporary German world of Lessing and Mendelssohn. At the time of the play’s setting, Jerusalem and the entire region of the Levant was home to Jews, Christians, and the dominant population of Muslims. A cosmopolitan energy, if not affection, existed among the representatives of each religion. The Christians there were led by Patriarch Heraclius, who represented the Pope, and the Knights Templar, who were both combatants and pilgrims and served as a powerful military and cultural presence. The Muslim Empire retained cordial relationships with Jews even as European nations were persecuting them. Thus, the mix of both historical and fictional representatives of the Abrahamic faiths in Nathan the Wise and their interaction onstage represented not only the Jerusalem of 1192 depicted in the play but the experience of Jews at the time Lessing wrote the play. The wonder of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise is the wonder that Mendelssohn describes in “Jerusalem.” While Mendelssohn had every reason to decry the conditions of the Jewish people who had suffered for centuries under persecution in Christian lands, he depicts a world where people, regardless of race, creed, and color, live together in peace and mutual respect of difference. Similarly, the topic of Nathan the Wise is the complicated economic, social, religious, and political web in which all the characters find themselves, forcing them to dismiss superstitions and prejudices.49 Nathan the Wise reflects doubt and skepticism about the finality of truth, insisting that truth depends on many elements, including the situation and identity of each seeker of truth. As Nathan says, “Maybe the truth is a just a coin whose value’s weighed and stamped upon it underneath the portrait of a king.”50 Reflecting the sentiments of more polemical work, Lessing’s play calls for religious tolerance and for accepting the humanity of each person. At the same time, the play offers a compelling human story that feels as relevant today as in the eighteenth century when it was written.51 Various dialogues in Nathan the Wise explore issues of religious differences and building trust among members of disparate religious beliefs. For example, in the dialogue between Rachel, Rachel’s housekeeper, Daya, and Nathan, the question of angels arises. Daya, the Christian, insists that an angel, not a human being, has saved Rachel. Nathan rails against her calling a man an angel, and his argument rests on the importance of earthly deeds, heroic acts, and building relationships:



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DAYA: Her best [fantasy] is that he wasn’t a real Templar at all, but an angel. You know since she was a child, she imagined angels watching over her. This one emerged from his shimmering cloud into the earthly form of a Templar in the heart of the fire. Don’t smile. You know there’s not a Jew, Christian or Muslim who doesn’t secretly believe in angels. . . . NATHAN: God rewards the good we do on earth on earth as well. And you must learn this: dreams are easy, deeds are hard. Imagine angels all you like but let them inspire you to action, not distract you from it.52

Nathan’s words echo the spirit of Mendelssohn as expressed in his “Jerusalem.” Judaism is a rational religion that does not rely on faith, superstitions, or divine acts to accomplish the fulfillment of earthy responsibilities to humanity. Nathan’s words also reflect the spirit of Jewish literary illumination. They are part of a compelling human story, filled with the irony of conflicting religious, political, and personal entanglements. Yet, human agency must attempt to overcome even the worst, as does Nathan the Wise, who brings humanity and dignity to his own tragedy by showing compassion to the Christian orphan. Each Abrahamic religion—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—receives some critique in the play. In the following dialogue, for example, a Christian Templar who barely escaped death at the hands of his Muslim captors critiques Judaism: NATHAN: Men like us, the ones who are good enough, we spring up all over in thick clumps. So we must learn how to muddle through, how not to rub against each other, because no one of us has the earth to himself. TEMPLAR: Fine words. But which nation was the first to set itself apart? To say “We are the Chosen People.” Well, Nathan? This may not be grounds for hatred, I admit, but can’t I still condemn you for your pride? The pride with which you have infected Christian and Muslim alike, to say My God Alone is Right? . . . the blind are in love with their blindness. . . . NATHAN: No. Now I will cling to you and never let you leave. We will, we must be friends.53

Here, Lessing dramatizes the ability of friendship to break the bonds of prejudice, stereotyping, and ultimately persecution. The demonization of a minority has long been a tool of racism, and humanizing the Other is the antidote, an idea introduced by Lessing in the play and shared by Mendelssohn, both of whom embraced the optimism of the Enlightenment and the hopes for a world improved by the application of reason to the problems of humanity.

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When thanking the Christian Templar who saved the life of his adopted daughter, Nathan cries out “This is a man!” And when the Templar responds, “We must be friends!” the wonder of something beyond our sensible natures explodes through.54 While the Christian patriarch is ready to burn Nathan alive because Nathan raised his adoptive daughter as a Jew, this Templar becomes a friend, and, by the end of the play, the Jew Nathan, the Christian Templar, and the Muslim sultan all find their human connection and vow accord, showing that diversity need not bring cruelty but can instead foster friendship. Such is wonder for Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing. CONCLUSION The early modern period brought many changes, challenges, and opportunities to Jewish communities throughout Europe. Most Jews remained in their shtetls in communities held together by their rabbis and Jewish observances as well as national laws that prohibited Jews from mingling with mainstream society. Life was precarious but sustainable. Yet two important movements signaled the eventual disruption of rabbinic control over these communities. One offered a messianic promise that failed, and many Jews had left their stable communities to follow that promise. They had experienced a mobility never before envisioned, leaving their shtetls, rabbis, and familiar communities to follow a dream. The other movement provided hope for a better life built around education, independence from insular shtetl life, and stimulation from the robust cultural life of Western Europe. NOTES 1. See the introduction to this book for the discussion of the religious terms of kavod, kavvanah, and devequt, referring to divine energy, the experience of that energy, and the attachment to that energy. 2. The term “Haskalah” is often used by Jewish studies scholars to refer to the Jewish Enlightenment. 3. Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, eds. Daniel Frank and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 1997), 461–62. See also Lois Dubin, “The Social and Cultural Context: EighteenthCentury Enlightenment,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, 566. 4. Gratitude to Wipf and Stock Publishers for permission to use portions of the chapter “Two Sources of Wonder in Early Modern Judaism,” in Philosophy Begins in Wonder, ed. Michael Funk Decker (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 261–83.



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5. Jews and Christians lived together in shtetls and interacted daily. See Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 1, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 1–43. 6. See Cengiz Şişman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 89. Gershom Scholem reports that the apostasy or conversion to Islam was done under duress, as Zvi was told by Ottoman authorities that he had fomented rebellion and could either convert to Islam or die. See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: the Mystical Messiah, trans R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 679. 7. Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, trans. Andrea Grover (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 159–60. 8. Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, 187–88. 9. Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, 138–53. 10. Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline S. Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5. 11. A loose association of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Judaic scholars, primarily in Europe. 12. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 9. Apocalyptic tradition survives even Maimonides’s attempt at suppressing the tradition. See Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 13. 13. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Jewish Messiah (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), 27–32. Other apocalyptic works included in pseudepigrapha (works not found in the canonized Tanakh, written between 200 BCE and 200 CE) are the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Book of Baruch. 14. Richard A. Freund, “The Apocalypse according to the Rabbis: Divergent Rabbinic Views on the End of Days,” in Millennialism from the Hebrew Bible to the Present, eds. Leonard J. Greenspoon and Ronald A. Simkins (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2002), 115–16. Freund writes, “The Greek and the developing Jewish apocalyptic view of the world was both personal and communal in nature and can be indirectly linked with the Socratic and later Stoic concept of duty.” 15. Freund, “The Apocalypse,” 122. 16. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 258–59. Idel explains his disagreement with Gershom Scholem that Lurianic kabbalism created the foundation of the Sabbatean movement. He attributes other kabbalistic elements. However, he acknowledges that Lurianism was a key factor in the prophetic work of Nathan of Gaza, Zvi's prophet. See also Idel’s “Saturn and Sabbatai Tzevi: A New Approach to Sabbateanism,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, eds. Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 173–202. See Gerchom Sholem’s discussion of the Lurianic background of the Sabbatean movement in his Sabbatai Sevi, 27. 17. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 553. Scholem also describes the tension between the utopic messianic message and that of the rabbinic tradition, 10. See Moshe Idel for a discussion of “Theosophy and History,” in Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 154–55.

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18. Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 152–57. 19. Nathan Ausubel, Treasury of Jewish Folklore: Stories, Traditions, Legends, Humor, Wisdom and Folk Songs of the Jewish People (New York: Crown, 1979), xxiii. See also Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy,” 531. 20. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Sublime, ed. Simon Morley (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 30. See Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 74, where Idel identifies a long-standing tradition of forms of “mystical activity that do not include halakhic [rabbinic ritual or daily] practices” and nevertheless achieve devekut or divine closeness. Thus, the sublime suggests devekut in both its experience of wonder and its recognition of both terror and life-giving elements. 21. George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 10. 22. Jean-Paul Meier, L’esthétiques de Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), 2 vols. (Paris: Diffusion, Librairie Honoré Champion, 1978), 881–82. 23. See Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H. L. Havell. Section VII. Project Gutenberg e-book. www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/17957​/17957​-h​/17957​-h​.htm. Accessed July 10, 2022; Robert Lowth, “Passages Translated from Bishop Lowth’s Oxford Lectures on Hebrew Poetry,” in Longinus On the Sublime, trans. G. Gregory (London: Tegg & Son, 1835), 60; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, volume the first (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), 130. 24. Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime and Naïve in the Fine Sciences,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195. 25. Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime,” 204. 26. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem and Other Jewish Writings, trans. and ed. Alfred Jospe (New York: Schocken, 1969), 61. 27. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem, 65. 28. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem, 70. 29. Mendelssohn’s view of miracles here resembles that of Spinoza. 30. Mendelssohn, “On Miracles,” in Jerusalem, 131–32. 31. Mendelssohn, “On Miracles,” in Jerusalem, 130. 32. Moses Mendelssohn, “On Tolerance,” in Jerusalem, 145–46. 33. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem, 109–110. 34. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 298. 35. Cecilia Sjöholm, “Lessing’s Laocoön: Aesthetics Affects and Embodiment,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no. 46 (2013): 18. 36. Sjöholm, “Lessing’s Laocoön,” 20. 37. Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962), 29. The exact makeup of pity was a topic of philosophic discourse in the eighteenth century, a topic taken up not only by Lessing and Mendelssohn but also by



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Adam Smith, all of whom parsed Aristotle’s definition of this emotion and dramatic mechanism. Ultimately, Lessing agrees with Mendelssohn’s conclusion on the mixed emotions that pity requires. See J. G. Robertson, Lessing’s Dramatic Theory: Being an Introduction to & Commentary on His Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Bronx: Benjamin Blom, 1965), 361; Gotthold Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy (New York: Dover, 1962), 178–79; and Michel M. Chemers, “The Legacy of Hamburg Dramaturgy,” in The Hamburg Dramaturgy by G. E. Lessing: A New and Complete Annotated Translation, trans. Wendy Arons, Sara Figal, and Natalya Baldyga (London: Routledge, 2018), 24. 38. Bruce Rosenstock, trans. and intro., Moses Mendelssohn: Last Works (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), x. 39. F. J. Lamport, Lessing and the Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 152. 40. Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime and Naïve,” in Philosophical Writings, 199. 41. See Robert R. Heitner, German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment: A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724–1768 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). 42. Heitner, German Tragedy, 176, 178–79. The Lessing German tradition comes after the German Baroque theater, about which Walter Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998). 43. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem, 92. 44. Gershom Scholem and Sander Gilman indict Mendelssohn for creating a sense of confidence in the Enlightenment and the Haskalah iteration of the Enlightenment emancipation efforts, calling Mendelssohn an assimilationist who repudiated Judaism in order to ingratiate himself with German elite society. Ned Curthoys, “A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise,” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 1 (2010): 78–79. 45. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Nathan the Wise, in Nathan the Wise, Minna Von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Continuum, 1991), 137, 173. See also Two Jewish Plays: The Jews: A Comedy; Nathan the Wise, trans. Noel Clark (London: Oberon, 2002). 46. Mendelssohn, “Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem, 107, 109. 47. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 578. 48. Jonathan Phillips, The Life and Legend of Sultan Saladin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 294–96. 49. See Manuel Clemens, “How Not to Become Tolerant: Habitus and Affects in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise,” Arcadia 56, no. 2 (2021): 205. See also Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 13. Batnitzky attributes the invention of Judaism as a religion to Mendelssohn and his work “Jerusalem.” 50. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, trans. Edward Kemp (London: Nick Hern, 2003), 55. 51. Ned Curthoys, “A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise,” Comparative Literature Studies 47, no. 1 (2010): 90.

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52. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 22, 25. 53. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 44–45, 54. Lessing, Two Jewish Plays, 102.

Chapter 5

Twenty-First-Century Narratives of Jewish Identity The Schlemiel and the Messianic in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark

The previous chapter focused on the two trajectories of Jewish life at the dawn of modernity. One trajectory appeals to the mystical human experience and the promise of messianic redemption to solve earthly misery.1 The other trajectory appeals to reason’s ability to solve this-world problems. Twenty-first-century Jewish culture also shares in these two traditions, one messianic, the other earthbound. On the one hand, an apocalyptic-redemptive narrative prevalent among many diasporic United States Jews is that the creation of the State of Israel served as a messianic redemption after the Shoah, or Holocaust. Rather than strict observance of Jewish law and communal religious life as the center of their identity, many diasporic Jews define their identity by these two historic events and the redemptive narrative that connects them. On the other hand, many Jews do not see the Shoah-to-Israel narrative arc as self-defining but rather see the abilities of Jews to survive the millennia as a distinct religion, worldview, and culture through periods of persecution and waxing and waning freedom as foundational to their identity. Two contemporary Jewish authors critique the apocalyptic-redemptive narrative in their novels: Michael Chabon, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss, in Forest Dark.2 The Shoah is only a backdrop for the Chabon narrative and is largely hidden in Krauss’s. Using parody, Chabon and Krauss critique the State of Israel as a messianic solution to either collective or individual salvation. They poke fun at the contemporary culture of diasporic Jews 109

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living in the United States who see Israel as a holy shrine, largely beyond critique. Through their storytelling, their willingness to show the incongruity of reality and dreams, and their refusal to find solace in messianic promises, both Chabon and Krauss continue a long-standing Jewish tradition of focus on present-day realities of challenges, joys, and survival. Crisis launches both novels. In Chabon’s novel of alternative history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a lesser Shoah occurs with two million slaughtered instead of the historical six million, and Israel loses the war of independence.3 The United States government grants Jews seeking asylum sixty years’ grace in the Alaskan region of Sitka. The story begins as this period of grace ends. Narrator and detective Meyer Landsman reflects on the catastrophe that awaits the messianic plans of the orthodox rabbi, or rebbe, to move the entire orthodox community to Israel. In Nicole Krauss’s braided story of parallel lives, Forest Dark, writer’s block plagues the fictionalized author, and a death wish consumes Jules Epstein, an elderly, wealthy businessman. The story begins as the writer Nicole escapes her family life for Israel to recharge her creative juices, and the elderly man plans for redemption by killing himself in Israel. At the start of the novels, three out of the four main characters, the rebbe, Nicole, and Epstein, look to Israel for personal redemption. By the end, only two out of the four, the rebbe and Epstein, hold that dream. From the start, Chabon’s Landsman voices his sardonic estimation of those quixotic redemptive dreams. THE SHOAH AND ISRAEL AS APOCALYPTICREDEMPTIVE NARRATIVE Viewing the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel as a journey from catastrophe to redemption suggests the satisfying fulfillment and moral clarity of good triumphing over evil and hopes fulfilled that mark messianic dreams.4 Yet, three generations after these monumental events, Chabon and Krauss testify to a Jewish existential reality that does not fit into this triumphal narrative. The geographic compass in their novels may point to Israel, but the moral compass tells another story about the loss of the emotional binaries and moral clarity of the narrative that begins with the Shoah and arrives at the State of Israel and the loss of these two touchstones as defining essences for Jewish identity. Both novels use parody and the comedic archetype of the schlemiel to express their rejection of the triumphal narrative and assert the existential Jewish historical narrative of perpetual ambiguity and liminality, the narrative of Jews who find themselves perpetually in troubled waters. In creating the possibility of a new vision for Jewish identity, Chabon and Krauss dismantle the salvific narrative arc. The link between Shoah as

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ultimate dystopia and the creation of the State of Israel as a complementary utopic vision and messianic fulfillment has served as a staple of Jewish identity.5 Gershom Scholem explains the link between these two poles as often understood in the Jewish imagination: “The catastrophic nature of redemption as a decisive characteristic of every such apocalypticism, which is then complemented by the utopian view of the content of realized redemption.”6 The conundrum presented by the loss of a fulfillment narrative to explain history, as suggested in these two novels, also questions the biblical Exodus narrative as a fulfillment narrative and the ultimate, perhaps even defining, redemptive narrative of the Jewish people. These two novels radically reinterpret the Exodus story as one that underlines the perpetual liminality of the Jew. For Chabon and Krauss, while God helped the Israelites exit Egypt, the trip through the desert was long and the promised land far from milk and honey. What lies at the foundation of the Chabon and Krauss stories is the story of the schlemiel, a comedic Jewish archetype, a person acting foolishly or ineptly. The stock character of the schlemiel serves at the altar of Jewish liminality, expressing unfortunate but inevitable intersections of identity, history, and geography and offering parody to soften the blow of trampled dreams.7 In The Joys of Yinglish, Leo Rosten calls the schlemiel a social misfit.8 The schlemiel underscores the feeling that the Jew is not chosen by God but by history.9 The portrait, both of individual and collective schlemiels, allows us to laugh through our tears. As a result, the schlemiel is a profoundly ironic archetype, representing the gap in life between the ought and the is, or what should be and the reality that must be faced in a practical fashion. The schlemiel allows us to laugh at ourselves and to make ready for a new beginning. TRAMPLING SHIBBOLETHS Chabon and Krauss tell us that the dream of the triumphal narrative is but a shibboleth, a vision that is neither realistic nor helpful. Both novels dismantle three shibboleths associated with Jewish identity beginning in the early 1930s with the rise of the Nazis: the Shoah, the creation of the State of Israel, and the triumphal historical narrative arc that links these two historical realities. Literary scholarship has tended to group authors writing about the Shoah as generational. First-generation authors are the survivors of the Shoah, those who survived the camps, lost their parents and grandparents, and lived to have children. Those children, called second-generation authors, write about their pain at being raised by parents who never had a chance to learn how to be parents.10 Their children, called third-generation authors, often write about the intergenerational passage of trauma. They also write, as do the authors I

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focus on in this chapter, about the misplaced centrality of the Shoah as defining Jewish identity. Philip Roth anticipated this third-generation approach. Emily Miller Budick describes Roth’s critique of the “Jewish community’s fascination with the Holocaust” as one that “interrogates the community’s Holocaust inflected script of itself.”11 This position also suggests a growing malaise about linking the Shoah to Israel. As Gulie Ne’eman Arad writes, “Locating a place for the Shoah in Israel’s national narrative proved complicated and controversial from the beginning. However, only in recent years has the placement and displacement, centrality and marginality, and use and misuse of the Shoah been subjected to critical analysis.”12 While the Shoah may not be central to the narrative of third-generation authors, it serves as a dark catalyst that performs alchemy on the narrative itself and then disappears. Narratives of third-generation authors are attuned to anxieties “that history will repeat itself” and “like Lot’s wife, we cannot help but look back, both drawn to and arrested by the influence of that which we most desire to flee.”13 The pain and trauma of the Shoah appears like a trace, a ghost, almost as though it exists in the DNA of the authors. Like the loss of the Shoah, the existence of the State of Israel as a defining touchstone of Jewish identity has also diminished. Whether caused by the simple passing of time or the geographic remove from the horrific events, or perhaps even a greater wisdom, many Jews assert that neither the Shoah nor the creation of the State of Israel serve to define Jewish identity.14 Whatever the cause, a clear new narrative is emerging that challenges entrenched conceptions of Jewish identity. With freedom coming from many directions, third-generation authors interrogate the State of Israel in a variety of ways, but, salient to this discussion, Chabon and Krauss interrogate it as messianic fulfillment, whether for the individual or for the community of believers, Jew or non-Jew. By dismantling the shibboleths through their parodic aplomb, Chabon and Krauss clear the way to portray a Jewish experience that reflects one closer to reality: the permanent liminality of the Jew. Vincenzo Vitiello explains that “The desert is not a period of trial, but a destiny. It is the permanent condition of the Jewish people.”15 The desert, whether considered the desert of the forty years of the biblical Exodus or the metaphorical desert of permanent liminality, is characteristic of one of the dimensions of Jewish ontology. Other dimensions of this ontology are addressed in the following section, suggesting the robust set of literary strategies that Chabon and Krauss use to add complexity and richness to what might be considered a rather dismal horizon and a stereotyped archetype.

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CONNECTING LIMINALITY, PARODY, AND SCHLEMIELS Chabon and Krauss differ from the acerbic authorial voice of Roth and offer nuance to the Vitiello mantra about the perpetual itinerancy of the Jew. The stylistic strategies of these twenty-first-century authors are more self-reflexive, compassionate, and reasoned. Rather than satirize the belief in the messianic, which would create a more acerbic emotional response in readers, they frame Jewish life as one that perpetually exists in a liminal state, always facing challenges and adapting to change. Both authors juxtapose two types of response to the challenges, with one character representing a more reasoned approach and another the false messianic approach. By framing the schlemiel character as representing the more reasoned and condoned approach, this approach becomes a sign of the ultimate viability and survival of the Jewish people. With the trampling of shibboleths comes a commensurate angst resulting from the loss of a closed narrative—that is, a narrative that moves in a satisfying progression from evil to good and from abjection to empowerment. This old/new narrative can best be described as occupying a space of ambiguity. Lack of clarity, likelihood of change, and threats to the status quo all produce angst, which aligns with liminality. Exposition in both novels sets up a backdrop of radical liminality. In the Chabon novel, the Jewish community faces expulsion from their temporary Alaskan refuge. In that community Meyer Landsman, a detective, serving as the narrative voice, observes what he surmises is the insanity and cruelty of the messianic rebbe who heads the Verbover orthodox Jewish community. The narrator in Krauss’s novel, Nicole, sets out to Israel to find her authentic voice as a maturing author, and her character’s foil, Jules Epstein, has already disentangled himself from his materialistic American life to seek the escape of suicide, presumably sacrificing himself as a sin offering in an attempt at redemption. Like the schlemiel, the four characters are functional, even successful, human beings in their personal and professional lives who find themselves struck down by their circumstances despite their best intentions and sincere efforts. Landsman’s aplomb as a respected detective cannot solve the imminent tragedy of expulsion nor a friend’s personal tragedy. The rebbe’s messianic plans promise certain doom for the community. Nicole, accustomed to Israel as a source of inspiration, gets caught up in a failed literary venture. Epstein’s desire to buy his way to personal redemption ends in suicide. Liminal conditions occur when everyday routine, rules, and relationships no longer function to maintain the norm and even endanger sustainability. In his work on ritual and communal development, Victor Turner describes

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liminality as being between more stable conditions, whether social, economic, or physical, a state open to creativity.16 The term limen, Latin for “threshold,” emphasizes the ever-changing and even ever-threatened reality of everyday life. The ever receding promise built into the Jewish messianic dream reifies a state of permanent liminality in which the messianic moment has not arrived. This permanent state of liminality creates a searing focus on the everyday human experience, avoiding promises of fulfillment in an afterlife or reliance on divine interference in earthly happenings. Both Chabon’s alternate history and Krauss’s braided realism express this existential reality. The eternal salve to liminal angst is laughter. Laughter builds on irony, the ultimate structural conceit of disjuncture. Laughter, as Arthur Schopenhauer points out, identifies the incongruity of the situation.17 Parody mobilizes laughter to help identify situational incongruity. Thus, the readerly response to the unsuccessful aspirations of the four antiheroes, Landsman, the rebbe, Nicole, and Epstein, is often acknowledgment coupled with laughter. Aristotle notes that laughter often comes when spectators feel superior to the staged comedic action.18 Readers likely laugh in a derisive fashion as the antiheroes of both novels fall prey to their own hubris. Landsman’s resourcefulness as a detective identifies a dear friend as a murderer. The rebbe appoints his son, a drug addict, as a messiah. Nicole becomes embroiled in an Israeli conspiracy. Her foil, the suicidal Epstein, convinces himself of his Davidic lineage. The believability of their choices may engender reader compassion while the distance between their best intentions and desired results produces laughter. To help distance ourselves from crushing reality and to retain a sense of our own integrity, parodic laughter and its reflective powers enable readerly critical thought. Parody delivers the insight “[to see] evidence of storm beneath the surface of the tranquility of the everyday.”19 Parody highlights the distance between the ideal and the real, foregrounding an undeniable challenge or even threat. Bruce Zuckerman explains: Parody takes the common values and normal conventions of the tradition that are its object and twists them, usually turning them inside out—thereby making them look ridiculous and absurd. The surprise, even shock, of this effect compels readers to take a closer look at these traditional values that previously they had unquestioningly accepted as normal. Because the parody displays these values from a completely different perspective, readers see them with fresh eyes and begin to grasp what is abnormal in the “normal,” what is unconventional about the conventional.20

The parodic has a long history in Jewish literary production. The liminality that produces the parodic and its metonymic narrative archetype, the schlemiel, seem to be natural and familiar partners in the repertoire of Jewish

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humor and commentary. The linking of the parodic and the schlemiel as a tried-and-true Jewish conceit has a long, even ancient beginning. Laughter responds to many needs: to recognize the cruel nature of a situation, to acknowledge that this situation is out of the control of the individual, to appreciate the abject condition of the victim, and to understand the ambiguous nature of the situation both from the perspective of the victim and the perpetrator. While Aristotle explained that feeling a sense of superiority on the part of the spectator produces laughter, the relationship between a reader and the schlemiel retains a dignity often missing from its comedic archetypal relatives. The tradition of humor and the schlemiel continues through the millennia, even including the Shoah, the ghetto, or the concentration camp,21 and certainly through the decades of immigration and settlement in Israel. The archetypal schlemiel gives voice to the tragic Jew as pariah among the nations.22 If, as Ruth Wisse opines, the schlemiel surmounts circumstance to perform the “triumph of identity,” we enjoy the portraits of human courage and dignity in the face of desperate conditions.23 According to Max Zeldner, the schlemiel has a long history in German vernacular and Yiddish, a combination of German and Hebrew spoken by Jews living in the ghettos and shtetls of the Pale of Settlement (Eastern Europe) from medieval times to the Shoah.24 The comical stance expressed by the use of the schlemiel character is a literary strategy “to challenge the political and philosophic status quo,”25 and the term often applies to a character prone to ethical commentary.26 Thus, the schlemiel allows us to laugh at our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities while recognizing crushing realities. Self-delusion, if temporary, and self-denigration may also characterize the schlemiel, but the goal is always to provide comfort against unforgiving circumstances: Being subtle, cerebral, witty, alternately bitter or gentle, directed either internally or externally, and supremely ironic, schlemiel humor was a humor of endurance, the response of a people more inclined to battle with words than weapons, of a group as likely to mock itself as its enemies, and of people who questioned the very foundations of the universe but who were ultimately resigned to live in it.27

Despite the schlemiel’s failures, a humanism comes through that inspires empathy for this helpless character that shows no aggression but only resignation and wisdom. Yet the schlemiel succeeds in many elements of life. Chabon’s detective Landsman is admired, even honored, within his law-enforcement community, and worthy of marital love. The rebbe has created a community for the fifty-nine years in the safe haven. Nicole of the Krauss novel also succeeds both professionally and personally while her foil, the suicidal Epstein, is a

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successful businessman and family man. Yet as they cope with specific life challenges, their limitations come to the fore. We may laugh at them but feel empathy and compassion for them as representatives of the human condition. THE SCHLEMIEL IN ALASKA: THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION The work of Chabon intertwines the imaginary and the real, the personal and the political, and the whimsical and the sobering. While this Pulitzer Prize– winning and best-selling author of over two dozen books has produced works written in many genres, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is counterfactual or alternate history, a means of speculating on and reconceiving events. Gavriel Rosenfeld explains that “When the producers of alternate histories speculate on how the past might have been different, they invariably express their own highly subjective present-day hopes and fears.”28 On the one hand, the novel is situated in an alternative history where the Shoah never took place. The historical Shoah resulted in the murder of six million Jews and millions of others.29 In the novel, the Nazis kill two million Jews, and the United States government grants a safe haven in Sitka, Alaska, to the surviving Jews of Europe. Some Shoah scholars have pointed to this reduced, even if fictional, reportage of catastrophe as a disturbing narrative that feeds into the argument of Shoah deniers.30 On the other hand, in this plot-driven novel, Chabon tells the story of other fears, not Shoah trauma. What if Israel had lost the 1948 War of Independence? Although this novel’s style has been called arguably hard-boiled,31 its topics are raw: Jewish survival, false messianic plans, personal fears, and romantic love. Jews have regularly been in situations of expulsion, extreme persecution, and repression. During these moments, dreams of salvation arise and hopes for delivery from suffering by a divinely sent messiah, either in human or divine form. However, through history, those thought to be messiahs did not deliver earthly redemption and subsequently earned the moniker of false messiah. False messiahs have a long history. They appeared under the Roman oppression when many claimed “kingship” of the Jews, and none succeeded in relieving earthly disaster.32 In his monumental The Wars of the Jews (c. 75 CE), Flavius Josephus describes the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the expulsion of the Jews from the land of Israel. He rails against “false prophets” who mislead the naïve to remain and not escape the bloody consequences of Roman power.33 After the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, the Bar Kokhba Rebellion against the Romans (132–135 CE) failed. Even the honored Rabbi Akiva (50–135 CE) had declared its eponymous leader, Simeon Bar Kokhba, a messiah.34 The 1648

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Polish massacres along with other regional persecutions and kabbalistic suggestions of a messianic age produced perhaps the most famous of false messiahs, Sabbatai Svi (see previous chapter).35 Svi eventually abandoned Judaism and his Jewish acolytes altogether and converted to Islam. While none of these persecutions and genocides appears in the Chabon tale, Landsman’s wistful reflections remind us of their recurrent nature, and Israel’s loss of the War of Independence both lands Jews in Alaska and prompts their desire for messianic redemption. The Chabon Alaska alternative history does not seem too far afield from its historical trace. Such a plan was considered by the US government but ultimately failed to achieve public and political support. The Slattery Report of 1939–1940, initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, proposed populating four locations in Alaska, including Baranof Island on the Alaskan panhandle and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley just north of Anchorage, with European refugees, mostly Jews from Germany and Austria.36 The Chabon tale of alternate history begins not before the Nazi final solution for the Jews but in 1948 when Israel loses its War of Independence against its unwelcoming neighbors. The US government bequeaths an Alaskan temporary sanctuary to world Jewry. On Baranof Island’s capital, Sitka, Jews are uncharacteristically in charge of the politically independent Federal District of Sitka, but for only sixty years. When the novel begins, the termination of their haven is imminent, and Chabon describes the failure of Israel to survive and the disheartening fallout among Jews: The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabist and pan-Islamists, traditionalist and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. . . . Observant Jews around the world have not abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been tossed out of the joint three times now—in 586 BCE, in 70 CE, and with savage finality in 1948. It’s hard even for the faithful not to feel a sense of discouragement about their chances of once again getting a foot in the door.37

On the imminent January 1, the Federal District of Sitka will revert to Alaska State control. At the reversion, as it is known by the Jews, the Federal District of Sitka Police, Landsman’s employer, will also be disbanded. “Strange times to be a Jew,” Landsman frequently opines.38

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During the fifty-nine-plus years of living in this haven, two parallel Jewish political and social worlds have developed. One world is that of the Jew who can assimilate into the diverse social fabric of Alaska. This is the world where the protagonist Landsman lives. As a detective, he has worked closely with constituents from a cross section of the Alaskan population: Native tribal members, white small business owners, and his own community of law enforcement. We learn that the alcoholic Landsman has “made a mess of his marriage,”39 but his reflections express an attachment to his ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his fear of the dark. While he pushes her away, he still longs for her: “If he lets her go, he will never lie in the hollow of her breast, asleep. He will never sleep again without the help of a handful of Nembutal or the good offices of his chopped M-39.”40 When she casually touches him after three years of separation, he feels “the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips.”41 Landsman serves as the protagonist schlemiel, largely untouched by the corruption and conspiracy that surrounds him and that he unveils. His generous reflections describe the many dark sides of Sitka Jewish life: the organized crime in a Hasidic community, the reversion of Sitka back to US property, and the expulsion of the Jews. The relationship between character and context fits Wisse’s description: “The schlemiel represents the triumph of identity despite the failure of circumstances.”42 Landsman’s eloquence, wit, and profundity confirm that this is no dummy but rather a man of dignity in precarious circumstances. The other Jewish world represented in the novel is that of the fictional Verbover sect of ultraorthodox Hasidism. This version of Hasidism resembled most closely the historical Polish version founded by the famous “saint and mystic Israel Ball Shem” who died in 1760.43 Historical Hasidism combines the traditions of Jewish mysticism, messianism, and strict observance of rabbinic law and ritual, thus the name “ultraorthodox.” Communal life and devotion to a rabbinic leader, or rebbe (Yiddish for rabbi), is strong. The rebbe with his charismatic leadership style controls not only religious observance but often the social, cultural, and political activity of the community.44 Chabon parodies this strong and insular social structure with the activities of a fictional sect, the Verbovers, whose political activities become enmeshed in a web of state, national, and international intrigue. According to Chabon’s alternative history, since the 1948 federal land grant of Sitka to the Jews, the sect has laid out a planned community, staking out parcels for homes that are never built.45 The sect creates a hegemonic hierarchy controlled by a central rebbe who wields a religious and political iron hand. Religiously, the sect follows ultraorthodox customs, practicing Jewish rituals and traditions meticulously. A boundary maven measures out the city to mark boundaries that cannot be crossed during the Sabbath to maintain strict Sabbath observance known as shomer shabbos. The Verbovers adopt

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Yiddish as a lingua franca. This language had developed and flourished when Jews lived in ghettos and shtetls (small villages) in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were required to live, isolated from mainstream society, beginning in the medieval period where they remained even in the modern period. The Shoah almost wiped them all out. The Verbovers speak Yiddish with a commensurate updating of words to describe items never imagined in the Pale. For example, cell phones are called shofars, after the ram’s horn traditionally blown at the celebration of the Jewish New Year. The rebbe rules with an iron, even deadly, hand. Through trickery, corruption, and murder, he enforces compliance with the daily routine, observance of ritual, and complete cooperation. The divine or devilish (depending on your point of view) plan of the Verbover rebbe is to stage the arrival of a fabricated messiah who would justify and thereby trigger a massive relocation of the entire Verbover community to Israel. With delicious irony, this divine plan would serve the goals of many constituents: the US federal government’s interest in getting a foot onto Middle Eastern soil, tribal reservation leaders’ interest in getting rid of the Verbovers, American evangelicals’ interest in Jewish control of the holy land to hasten the parousia (second coming of Christ) as part of their millennialist vision, and the Verbover imperialist plan to control the real estate of Israel. Once arriving in Israel, the plan, funded by all parties, includes blowing up the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine in Jerusalem. That explosion would simultaneously unearth and reestablish the Second Temple, the very temple built by Herod the Great two thousand years earlier that conquering Muslim forces covered over with the Dome of the Rock. Inevitably, the plan would trigger World War III. This fabricated messianic moment requires, according to this Hasidic tradition, two important elements. One is an earthly human male recognized and accepted as messiah, the Tsaddick Ha-Dor. According to Hasidic and Kabbalist tradition, the Tsaddick Ha-Dor is a living human being who is born as the Messiah, promising earthly deliverance, and only appears once a generation.46 Another requirement for arrival of the messianic moment is the birth of a perfectly formed red heifer. The sacrifice of the red heifer is required for purification of sin (Num. 19.2, 19.9). The ashes created by the sacrificed heifer in the ritual serve, according to the Hasidic imagination, to announce the arrival of the Messiah.47 The Verbovers have been busy fulfilling both requirements. The chief rebbe has designated his uncooperative and heroin-addicted son as Tsaddik Ha-Dor. A secret farm outside Sitka raises cattle in the hopes of finding this bovine perfection. The messianic moment is imminent in the Verbover imagination. In contrast to the Verbover vision for Sitka, through the lens of Landsman’s imagination, every street name, nickname, building name, and person’s name

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of this Verbover reality delivers an ironic twist. The ever-reflective narrator muses on the insight of the antihero who understands the tragedy of the situation: “Landsman can see them all from the vantage of his powerlessness and his exile . . . parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony.”48 Landsman constantly talks about the situational ridiculousness created by the temporary Alaska homeland: “Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.”49 Like his personal trampled dreams, Landsman sees those dreams of a messianic homeland as also trampled. Using parody and the voice of the reasonable detective, Chabon critiques many contemporary Jewish expressions of devotion to messianic dreams. Included in his parody is a critique of historical Hasidism with its continuing devotion to a rebbe designated as a messiah, its eighteenth-century clothing, its use of Yiddish, and its insular life.50 To intensify the sense of parody, Chabon introduces another sect with messianic dreams equal to those of the Verbovers, that of the historical American evangelical Christian community who hope for a second coming of Jesus, a parousia, triggered by complete Jewish control of the promised land. Chabon parodies the view of Israel as beyond criticism by many Jewish Americans and US Middle East policymakers bequeathing Israel unquestioning support.51 What makes the story line clearly parodic is the denouement of the novel showing a course of action by these forces that likely would result in World War III and certain death to the messianic followers. Chabon’s topics resonate with today’s diasporic Jews. It is the responsibility of the artist as social critic to enable readers to view the paradoxes of life as it is, and Chabon fulfills that role.52 As an artist, through parody, he pokes fun at numerous paradoxes, contradictions, and ironies of everyday Jewish diasporic life. For example, many Jews associate the language of Yiddish with the past, a dead language. Yet the language continues in theater, literature, and communities, especially Hasidic and other Haredi (ultraorthodox) Jewish communities with between 500,000 and 1,000,000 native Yiddish speakers53 and hundreds of thousands speaking, reading, and writing Yiddish.54 Other diasporic Jews see ultrareligious Jews as standing in the way of modern life. Yet, Haredi Jews continue to assert a powerful hold on Israeli politics, thus creating a major rift in today’s Israel. Also, ultraorthodox diasporic communities are growing because of high birth rates while the rest of the Jewish population diminishes because of intermarriage.55 Many Jews see the shtetl as a romanticized way of life, thanks, in part, by the portrayal of the shtetl in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964).56 Yet the shtetls were annihilated by the Nazis. Many Jews are unaware that American evangelical

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Christians support the State of Israel in important diplomatic, military, and financial interests. The diverse parodies Chabon introduces suggest that these institutions, created by Jews and non-Jews alike, are not God-given but human-made and thus must be approached with discernment, not faith. Chabon paints the schlemiel character, Landsman, as representing everyman, or at least every Jew. On the one hand, he is the gullible victim of forces far greater than he can control: the power of the Verbovers, the end of the safe haven for the Jews, and even his love for Bina. On the other hand, Landsman is the voice of reason, espousing traditional rabbinic Judaism to avoid messianic dreams and to act in a responsible, compassionate fashion. He has no grandiose solution to the situation, only to recognize his liminal state and to preserve what dignity he can. As the antihero and self-aware schlemiel, Landsman comments: “Strange times to be a Jew.”57 The narrator describes Landsman’s plight as that of his fellow Jews: There is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.58

Deception, disappointment, troubles, and change are all realities a schlemiel must face. As the narrator opines, “An awful place this sea, this gulf between the Intention and the Act, that people called ‘the world.’”59 Yet, out of the situation, Landsman has realized several truths that suggest a new hopefulness in spite of the situation. One truth is his love for Bina. Another truth is his identity as a Jew. Representing the two truths combined are the “fringes,” suggesting the fringes of a Jewish prayer shawl, used for the canopy over the bride and groom during the wedding ceremony. He recognizes his identity as a Jew, even if being on the move causes the identity card to become “dog-eared.” And he understands the importance of the prayers “on the tip of their tongues” that nourish that identity. Landsman also accepts the fact that geography does not define his value as a Jew or as a human being and seems to anticipate the need to relocate with resolution, largely because of his rekindled love for Bina. He and Bina will survive. Wistful Landsman expresses the Vitiello diagnosis of the permanent status of the wandering Jew. He affirms “My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.”60 His newfound loyalty to his ex-wife could suggest that she represents the Shekinah, the female element of God who can be found immanent in our daily lives, according to mystical Kabbalist and rabbinic traditions.61 Landsman’s musings suggest compassion, hope, and love: things worth living for.

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THE SCHLEMIEL GOES TO ISRAEL: FOREST DARK As in Chabon’s novel, a dominant theme of Krauss’s Forest Dark is impending disruption. In her 2017 interview with the Guardian, Krauss provides autobiographical, narrative, and philosophical commentary that reinforces this theme while she explains her personal journey as it connects to Forest Dark: In a sense, the self is more or less an invention from beginning to end. What is more unreal, what is more a creation than the self? Why do we have such a heavy investment in knowing what is true and what isn’t true about people’s lives? Why is it even valid to make a distinction between autobiography, auto-fiction and fiction itself? What fiction doesn’t contain a deep reflection of the author’s perspective and memory and sense of the world? In the course of 16 years of writing novels, I feel like I’ve been on this steady progression toward being able to write a female voice that comes from a place of strength and intelligence, a voice that is unapologetic but also open to the reader’s empathy. So I think it’s this process of moving more and more comfortably to a place of writing naturally in a strong female voice, where I could be myself, and imagine and invent.62

Krauss understands identity construction as an ongoing process. Reflecting the sense of dynamism in the historical Nicole, the Nicole of the novel shares with the reader the choices she faces, the difficulties of abandoning previously held ideas, and a willingness to begin afresh. The moment of writing Forest Dark represents a transformative moment in Krauss’s literary life in which she abandons the Shoah as a central literary topic. Written in 2017, Forest Dark serves as a topical break with Krauss’s earlier novels. The absence of the Shoah as central to the text distinguishes this work from two of her earlier novels, A History of Love (2005) and Great House (2010). Both attest to the trauma resulting from the Shoah as passed from one generation to the next and characterize one trajectory of third-generation Shoah authors.63 Alan Berger and Asher Z. Milbauer explain: “[These novels are] paradigmatic third-generation representations of inheriting the Holocaust trauma . . . and [exemplify] images and symbols utilized by the third generation to find adequate artistic means by which the thirdgeneration artist comes to grips with the intergenerational transmission of memory within a postmodern context.”64 While the Shoah is understood and often read between the lines in Forest Dark as a reason for the angst of the characters, the Shoah as a topic does not consume the narrative. While Krauss abandons the Shoah as central literary grist in Forest Dark, she interrogates the other binary in the apocalyptic-messianic typology, the State of Israel. To develop her interrogation of the redemptive power of Israel,

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Krauss uses a “braided” formal strategy, reflecting the arguably two parallel stories it narrates. Corinne Bancroft explains this formal strategy, which Krauss uses: Braided narratives afford writers a set of strategies that help train readers to hold multiple, often incommensurate, subjectivities in our minds simultaneously, pushing us to embrace new channels of responsibility that recognize many distinct subjects. . . . [or] the space between the narratives enables a centrifugal force that reflects the characters’ own sense of isolation and separation.65

This braided narrative strategy introduces an important element in Krauss’s style, one emphasizing the lack of surety in life. Reflecting on her own work, Krauss emphasizes the interconnectedness of the two personal journeys in the Forest Dark novel: “I knew from very early on that they belonged together . . . both . . . teetering on the edge of some sort of change.”66 The first-person narrative of Nicole begins and ends with her feeling of not inhabiting her body, as existing in a multi-universe or dual-time matrix. To add to the disruption of chronological time, the narrative voice of Nicole envisions both at the beginning and end of the novel a man jumping to his death from a balcony of the Tel Aviv Hilton. The third-person narrative of protagonist Epstein progresses as a linear journey. The book begins with his planned escape/disappearance from his posh New York life to end with his choreographed suicide in Israel. The reader never knows whether the plot is a dream or a “what-if” (suggesting alternate history) reflection experienced in linear time by Nicole the protagonist. Krauss insists on a connection between the braided stories, raising the question of how the reader is to connect the two seemingly independent narratives. The parallel narratives are presented in paratactic fashion, not unlike many narratives in the Hebrew Bible episodes. No cause and effect move the intertwined plotlines forward, and yet both plot lines progress in synchronic fashion from beginning, to complication, to middle, to conclusion. The connection comes with the presentation of two choices about how to lead a life: one choice to ignore the spiritual and to focus on only the material in life, the other choice to welcome the spiritual aspect of life. Clearly welcoming the spiritual aspect of life is the choice Krauss advocates as life-giving. The refusal of the spiritual means death; embracing the spiritual gives life. Krauss’s most profound musings are expressed through the mercenary voice of a rabbi known as Klausner, who convinces Epstein of his Davidic lineage. Klausner gives the mystical Jewish explanation not only for the creation of the universe but also for the presence of good and evil, the role of humanity in maintaining the balance of the cosmos, and the agency and responsibility of each human being to fulfill divine purpose in maintaining the well-being of

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the universe. Here, the mythology of Kabbalah is summarized in Klausner’s speech to Epstein. The mythic story sweeps Epstein into the world of mysticism and provides answers, if fabricated, to his search for meaning, for explanation, and for compassion to respond to his need for existential answers about the meaning of life: Tzimtzum [is] the central concept in Kabbalah. How does the infinite—the Ein Sof [mystical representation of the divine] . . . create something finite within what is Already infinite? . . . When it arose in God’s will to create the world, He first withdrew Himself, and in the void that was left, He created the world. . . . God created Eve out of Adam’s rib. Why? Because first an empty space needed to be made in Adam to make room for the experience of another. Did you know that the meaning of Chava—Eve, in Hebrew—is experience? . . . To create man, God had to remove Himself, and one could say that the defining feature of humanity is that lack . . . the same lack is also what allows for free will. The act of breaking god’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge can be interpreted as a rejection of obedience in favor of free choice and the pursuit of autonomous knowledge.67

The mythic kabbalistic Tsimtsum is a compelling mythology embraced by many believers.68 In this narrative, Epstein is enthralled by the compelling mythic explanation of creation and the human condition. Later in the narrative, Krauss builds on another Kabbalistic idea to improve the world, tikkun, a mystical concept that implies service, charity, and compassion enabling the restoration of harmony, atonement, and redemption.69 Krauss has Klausner insist that before improving the world, the individual must focus on self-improvement: “Tikkun olam transformation of the world . . . cannot happen without tikkun ha’nefesh, our own internal transformation.”70 Both protagonists fulfill the journey to empty themselves out in the tradition of Tsimtsum and to redeem themselves in the tradition of tikkun olam: for Nicole, this means a recalibrated life in the United States; for Epstein, this means death in Israel. Both Forest Dark protagonists emerge on the cusp of dramatic life transformations. They both choose to journey to Israel for a similar reason: redemption from their dissatisfaction with life. According to Arthur Cohen, “The concept of redemption is both limited to parochial preoccupation and sufficiently expandable to encompass the hopes of the [humanity] . . . it serves the demands of hope.”71 Hope brings both protagonists to Israel, the land of family memories and religious association. For many diasporic Jews, the State of Israel serves as the messianic position in the apocalyptic-messianic typology. This nation-state not only realizes the messianic for the Jewish diaspora in the United States but also serves as the messianic salvific for individual needs: Epstein’s spiritual yearning,

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Nicole’s writer’s block. The mythology of collective and individual salvation and the redemptive collective and individual powers projected on the nation-state of Israel is reinforced in many ways, including a lifetime of Jewish liturgy and rituals, notably the Passover seder’s beloved prayer, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Both characters had relied on the shibboleth that Israel offers to fill them up with what they have presumably lost in their quest for financial and literary success as diasporic Jews. Nicole, about to turn forty years old, is in the midst of a failing marriage with the father of their two children. She goes to Israel to redeem herself as an author and a human being during a midlife crisis. At the beginning, readers are told that the trip is triggered because of writer’s block. She will be recharged, reinspired, and able to access more of her true, if lost, self by revisiting a beloved location of childhood memories, Israel’s Tel Aviv Hilton. As the novel progresses, Nicole unburdens herself of shibboleths. In one scene, she describes the “worst of all” incident of the previous year, her visit to Yad Vasham Memorial in Jerusalem commemorating the Shoah and its victims: I was presented with the photocopied papers concerning my murdered great-grandparents, along with a bag from the museum gift shop. “Go on, open it,” the director encouraged, pushing the bag into my hands. “Oh, I’ll open it later,” I suggested. “Open it now,” she commanded through a smile of gritted teeth. . . . Could the message have been any clearer if the endpapers had been printed with piles of dead children’s shoes? Back at home in New York, I tossed the notebook in the trash, but an hour later, overcome with guilt, plucked it out again.72

Nicole wishes to be “unbound” by the ties of loyalty, tradition, and previous generations.73 At this point in the narrative, Nicole, the fictional character and narrator of the novel, asserts her abandonment of the Shoah as a central topic for her literary creativity and production. The topic has become an anchor, shackling her to the past. This cathartic moment of the novel also reflects that of the author’s life. With Forest Dark, Krauss has moved away from the Shoah as figuring at the center of her creative production. Another of the many shibboleths Krauss seeks to parody and thus to unbind from her duty as author is the cherished idea that Israeli military and intelligence-gathering is superhuman and trustworthy. At one moment in the novel, a friend of the family who claims to be a member of Israel’s intelligence services proposes to Nicole what turns out to be a preposterous plan. Author Krauss has narrator Nicole believe a fabricated claim that Franz Kafka did not die in Vienna in 1924 at the age of forty but moved to Israel, where he lived a quiet, peaceful life until his death. As a rational character, the fact that Nicole

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believes the fabrication is a sign of just how much Krauss, the author, thinks that other well-meaning, otherwise rational Jews believe other fabrications of the truth that the Israeli government promotes.74 The plan unfolds as Nicole is secretly whisked away, presumably by an Israeli intelligence operative, to a remote desert cabin where she agrees to write the ending of this ostensibly final work of Kafka. The plan unravels when Nicole becomes ill, almost loses her life, and returns to her US family. The foil to Nicole’s character, Epstein, escapes to Israel for equally wishful, redemptive reasons. He feels he has squandered his life: “The truth was that he had believed in very little that he couldn’t see, and more than that, he’d had something against belief.”75 Krauss introduces the message of spiritual emptiness when we first meet Epstein in the first chapter, titled “Ayeka” (Where are you?), the word said by God when he was seeking Eve and Adam in the garden after they had eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (Gen. 3.9). As a young man, Epstein had consumed, digested, and lived the formula of the American capitalist dream, the immigrant dream, the golden dream promised to the generation that had left the pogroms of the Pale of Settlement or the Shoah of the Nazis. Now, at the age of sixty-eight years old, the words of a Polish-born Israeli poet, found in a little book his daughter had given her father, express the life Epstein had never chosen: It had overwhelmed [Epstein]. . . . At twenty-seven, he himself had been blinded by his ambition and appetite—for success, for money, for sex, for beauty, for love, for the magnitudes but also the nitty-gritty, for everything visible, smellable, palpable. What might his life have been if he had applied himself with the same intensity to the spiritual realm? Why had he closed himself off from it so completely?76

Epstein sees the fault of his ways, his belief in material redemption. After unencumbering himself of his worldly possessions in the United States, he escapes the detective efforts of his children and remains in a grimy, Tel Aviv apartment. In his final days, he is recruited into a cult that functions more like a business venture than a religious sect by convincing the gullible of their descent from King David. Finally, convinced he descends from messianic Davidic lineage, Epstein readies to assume his messianic duty. He agrees to play King David for a major movie production. Yet instead of appearing as the conquering king leading the advance of a military redemption, Epstein disappears over the horizon, apparently walking into the desert to his final disappearance and death, once again misjudging the false for the authentic. Both the corruption of the mercenary enterprise playing on lost souls and the

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imaginary world of film underline Krauss’s opinion of the hubris that Israel cultivates for hungry diasporic Jews. Krauss serves up her own self-reflections about misplaced trust in materiality and the false promise that Israel can fulfill diasporic angst. By exploring the absence of permanence, clarity, and hope, Krauss concludes that only by the very loss of faith in material beneficence and the emptying of the self of all hope can we recognize the truth and find redemption. Krauss explains that the opening lines of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1472) inspired her title. She quotes the excerpt at the end of her novel, a quote that suggests her own transformative journey and that of the narrator Nicole through hell and out: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.77

The hope had been that the journey to Israel would provide the salvific solution for Epstein’s end-of-life crisis and for Nicole’s midlife crisis. Along the way, and reminiscent of Dante in the Divine Comedy, the painful journey tramples Epstein’s material messianic dreams but provides fulfillment of spiritual ones for Nicole. While Nicole benefits from this failure and is made ready for a divine infusion, it is too late for Epstein. Here, we have the narrator’s voice Nicole who finds in midlife what had evaded Epstein all his life: [We] go on overlooking the eternal, indestructible thing inside ourselves, just as Adam and Eve fatally overlooked the Tree of Life. Go on overlooking it, even while we can’t live without the faith that it is there, always within us, its branches reaching upward and its leaves unfurling in the light. In this sense, the threshold between Paradise and this world may be illusory, and we may never have really left Paradise, Kafka suggested. In this sense, we might be there without knowing it even now.78

Both antiheroes expected that Israel would fulfill their aspirations for redemption and rejuvenation. Yet, the vision of owning a massive part of a national forest in honor of Epstein’s parents never materializes. Nicole’s writer’s block remains to the end. While, on the one hand, both plotlines end in failed dreams, on the other hand, the messages are quite different. To the end, Epstein’s materialism and grandiosity retain their stranglehold. However, Nicole has unburdened herself of at least two shibboleths, the shackles of Shoah testimony and being an apologist for Israeli redemptive powers. She is thereby liberated to pursue a life with greater personal authenticity and agency. Israel fails both protagonists, or, rather, both protagonists fail Israel.

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The novel emphasizes that Israel is a political reality filled with human citizens, not a messianic dream replete with redeemed humanity. CONCLUSION Jewish doctrine, ritual, law, and literatures have explored the concept of redemption through the millennia, and the topic has never been more relevant than it is today. In their novels, Chabon and Krauss aspire to peel away from the cultural Jewish imagination the idea that the land of Israel can serve as a redemption for the individual. Both authors seem to concur that redemption should remain a journey within the human heart. Two of their protagonists, the detective Landsman and the novelist Nicole, ultimately focus their psychic energy within. While Landsman seems bereft of any spirituality or emotional connectedness, the novel’s conclusion suggests his earthly redemption with the rekindling of his relationship with the love of his life, his ex-wife Bina. While Nicole may continue to suffer from writer’s block and a sense of alienation from her husband when she returns to her US home, she envisions a future enabled by her liberation. Both protagonists find their way into their hearts, where a spiritual vision of life awaits. The two antiheroes dependent on a messianic vision, the rebbe and Epstein, surely meet with deadly endings. Although Chabon never tells us the outcome of the rebbe’s grandiose plan, we assume the worst, and Epstein experiences his powerful epiphany too late in life to veer from his suicidal journey. Both Chabon and Krauss take a critical stance toward a universal narrative of catastrophe to redemption from the Shoah to the creation of the State of Israel. Yet both literary voices invite the question: What replaces this arc in terms of Jewish content? In other words, what does it mean to be Jewish in a manner not defined by what, according to Chabon and Krauss, feels uncomfortable, questionable, out-of-date, and—most compelling—irrelevant to the American Jewish diasporic experience? Perhaps Jonathan Boyarin expresses this angst most succinctly: “Jews are now faced with the task of fundamentally refashioning our history—rearticulating our relation both to our ancestors and to our contemporaries who call themselves Jews.”79 Chabon and Krauss suggest that an alternate trajectory or another chapter is just around the corner, waiting to be discovered by seekers of meaning, truth, and relevance. Both authors seem to be saying that the magnificence of the sacred exists within our hearts and our capacity to discover it.80 They echo the biblical wisdom: “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it? . . . No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it” (Deut. 30:12, 14).

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Knowing that the schlemiel in all of us will ultimately fail at some of our human undertakings, perhaps we can look at that failure to better prepare for another possibility. Perhaps this doing away with shibboleths enables transformations on a collective level, a new beginning. According to Jacques Derrida, “God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us. He did so not by speaking but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs, by letting the Tablets be broken.”81 Surely, according to Chabon and Krauss, the Messiah is not to be found in external realities such as the State of Israel but in the life-giving force found within us, and it is the bumbling schlemiel to whom we can look to peel away our hubris, to find the humility to look within, and to have room for that which we can control, tikkun olam, repairing not necessarily the world but the world of our own lives. NOTES 1. The belief in messianic redemption during and after times of great suffering has been a part of Jewish history for millennia. The first important surviving manuscripts expressing messianic beliefs are the Dead Sea Scrolls (300–100 BCE), preserved in the Shrine of the Book in Israel. Another well-known biblical book, the Book of Daniel (200 BCE), predicts the coming of a Son of Man (Dan. 7:13–14). Notable in Jewish messianic writings is that the Messiah is a human being who will change earthly history. However, also notable is that every major messianic movement in history ended in failure. These messianic movements did not afford the escape from whatever the cruel reality was for Jews, who had to find a way out of that cruel reality through more realistic means. 2. Gratitude to Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) for permission to adapt the article that appears as “The Schlemiel and the Messianic in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark,” MELUS 47, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 147–69. 3. The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews, including one and a half million children, and seven million others deemed undesirable. In 1949, four years after defeat of the Nazi regime and liberation from the camps, the State of Israel was admitted into the United Nations as its fifty-ninth member. 4. Shoah, a word meaning calamity in Hebrew, is a term introduced as an alternative to Holocaust to express Nazi genocide. The word Holocaust comes from the ancient Greek with an etymological meaning that includes a completely (holos) burnt (Kaustos) sacrifice to the gods. See David Patterson, “Holocaust or Shoah: The Greek Category versus Jewish Thought,” in Maven in Blue Jeans: A Festschrift in Honor of Zev Garber, ed. Steven Leonard Jacobs (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 338.

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5. Shaul Magid, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 187; Neusner, Jacob, “The Implications of the Holocaust,” Journal of Religion 53, no. 3 (1973), 296. 6. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1974), 10. 7. Sanford Pinsker, The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 21–22; Noam Gil, “The Undesired: On Nudniks in Jewish American Fiction,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2018): 328. 8. See Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yinglish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 4, where Rosten calls the schlemiel a “social misfit.” 9. Peter Antelyes, “‘Haim Afen Range’: The Jewish Indian and the Redface Western,” MELUS 34, no. 3 (2009): 33. 10. Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 35–36. 11. Emily Miller Budick, “The Holocaust in the Jewish American Literary Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, eds. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213. 12. Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “The Shoah as Israel’s Political Trope,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, eds. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 192. 13. Victoria Aarons, “Memory’s Afterimage: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Third Generation,” in Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 18. 14. See, for example, Magid, American Post-Judaism, 186–234. 15. Vincenzo Vitiello, “Desert, Ethos, Abandonment: Towards a Topology of the Religious,” in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139. 16. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 8. 17. Arthur Schopenhauer, qtd. in John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 17. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, section 1, part 5. 19. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), xvi. 20. Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44. 21. Naomi Patz, “Rescuing a Concentration Camp Comedy from Oblivion.” 2019 Conney Conference on Jewish Arts presentation, 92nd Street Y, New York, March 31, 2019. 22. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (1944): 103. 23. Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 53.

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24. Max Zeldner, “A Note on the `Schlemiel,’” The German Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1953): 115. 25. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, 3. 26. Menachem Feuer and Andrew Schmitz, “Hup! Hup! We Must Tumble: Toward an Ethical Reading of the Schlemiel,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 1 (2008): 92. 27. Ezra Greenspan, The Schlemiel Comes to America (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1983), 7. 28. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 10. 29. “Holocaust Encyclopedia,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accessed June 5, 2022. www​.encyclopedia​.ushmm​.org​/content​/en​/article​/documenting​numbers​-of​-victims​-of theholocaust-and-nazi-persecution. 30. Joost Krijnen, Holocaust Impiety in Jewish American Literature: Memory, Identity, (Post-) Postmodernism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1. 31. Andrew M. Gordon, “Alternate Histories: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” in New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching, eds. Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 86. 32. Richard A. Horsley, “Popular Messianic Movements around the Time of Jesus,” Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 86. 33. Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews [75 AD], in Josephus: The Complete Works. Trans. William Whiston (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 889. 34. “Messiah,” Encyclopaedia Judaica: Lek–Mil 11 (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), 1410. 35. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 92–93. 36. Jamie Gonzales, “Why Did Alaska Deny Asylum to Jewish Refugees during WWII?” University of Alaska Anchorage. Accessed June 6, 2022. www​.uaa​.alaska​.edu​/ news​/archive​/2014​/04​/alaska deny-asylum.wwii-jewish-refugees/. 37. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 17. 38. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 4. 39. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 5, 40. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 158. 41. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 167. 42. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, 53. 43. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1961), 325. 44. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 325, 333–34. 45. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 198. 46. Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86.

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47. Moses Maimonides, “The Epistle on Martyrdom,” in Epistles of Maimonides: Crises and Leadership, trans. Abraham Halkin (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 13–90. 48. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 198. 49. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 197. 50. Eric L. Goldstein, “The Great Wave: Eastern European Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1880–1924,” in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, ed. Marc Raphael (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 71. 51. Jewish critics of Israel include Jonathan Boyarin, Hasia Diner, and Marjorie Feld. See Alix Wall, “Daniel Boyarin: Talmudist, feminist, anti-Zionist, only-inBerkeley Orthodox Jew,” The Jewish News of Northern California, March 12, 2015, www​.jweekly​.com​/2015​/03​/12​/daniel​-boyarin​-the​-talmudist​-feminist​-anti​-zionist​ -only​ -in​ -berkeley​ -orthodo​ /. See also Hasia Diner and Marjorie N. Feld, “We’re American Jewish Historians. This Is Why We’ve Left Zionism Behind,” Haaretz, August 1, 2016. www​.haaretz​.com​/opinion​/were​-american​-jewish​-historians​-this​-is​ -why​-weve​-left​-zionism behind-1.5418935. 52. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 226. Adorno writes, “Traditional aesthetics falsely inflates what is a relation into an absolute whole or totality, thus turning harmony into a triumph over heterogeneity and an emblem of illusory positivity.” Chabon and Krauss disrupt the harmony of the shibboleths many diasporic Jews adopt and question these certainties through the use of parody. In other words, they take reality and compare it to the characters’ wishful thinking. 53. “Basic Facts,” 2. Also “YIDDISH FAQs,” Rutgers University Department of Jewish Studies. www​.jewishstudies​.rutgers​.edu​/yiddish​/102​-department​-of​-jewish​-studies​/ yiddish​ / 159​ - yiddish​ - faqs​ # :​​ ~ :​ t ext​ = It​ % 20is​ % 20estimated ​ % 20that ​ % 20there ​ , the​%20rest​%20of​%20the​%20world. Accessed June 25, 2022. 54. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 182. 55. Dovid Katz, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic, 2004), 377. 56. For a historical view of immigration and its hardships, see Eric L. Goldstein. For Sholem Aleichem’s works, see Sholem Aleichem, Some Laughter, Some Tears: Tales from the Old World and The New, trans. Curt Leviant. (Paragon, 1979). 57. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 4. 58. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 411. 59. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 226. 60. Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 368. 61. “Shekhinah.” Encyclopaedia Judaica: Red–SL 14 (Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972), 1350; Scholem, Major Trends, 229. 62. “Nicole Krauss: ‘The Self Is More or Less an Invention from Beginning to End,’” The Guardian, August 20, 2017. www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2017​/aug​/20​/ nicole​-krauss​-forest​-dark​-self​-israel​-kafka​-interview. 63. Karolyna Krasuska, “Narratives of Generationality in 21st-Century North American Jewish Literature: Krauss, Bezmozgis, Kalman.” The New Wave of Russian

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Jewish American Culture, special issue of East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016): 289. doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2016.1252903. 64. Alan L. Berger and Asher Z. Milbauer. “The Burden of Inheritance,” Shofar 31, no. 3 (2013): 64. 65. Corinne Bancroft, “The Braided Narrative,” Narrative 26, no. 3 (2018): 263, 266. 66. Erica Wagner, “Nicole Krauss: ‘The self is more or less an invention from beginning to end,’” The Guardian, August 2017. 67. Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 105–6. 68. Arthur Green, These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015), 37–8; Scholem, Major Trends, 262–63. 69. Scholem, Major Trends, 233. 70. Krauss, Forest Dark, 145. 71. Arthur Cohen, “Redemption,” in 20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, eds. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 2009), 763. 72. Krauss, Forest Dark, 77. 73. Krauss, Forest Dark, 75. 74. On a related note, Kafka was “in the air” in the Jewish and Israeli news, over a legal battle between Israel and a distant relative of Kafka that had been raging for decades as to who owned the papers of Kafka. Ultimately, ownership was assigned to the government of Israel. For more details about the legal battle, see Ruth Eglash and James McAuley, “Israel Unveils Franz Kafka’s Papers After a Legal Battle That Was, Well, Kafkaesque.” Washington Post, August 8, 2019. www​.washingtonpost​ .com​/world​/Israel​-unveils​-franz​-kafkas​-papers​-after​-a​-legal​-battle​-that​-was​-well​ -kafkaesque​/2019​/08​/08​/eed3c43e​-4789​-45f1​-9447​-f603c102f368​_story​.html. See also Hilo Glazer, “A Final Note From Kafka, a Trove of Manuscripts, and a Trial that Left an Israeli Heiress ‘Destitute,’” Haaretz, 18 Feb. 2017. www​.haaretz​.com​/ Israelnews​/2017​-02​-18​/ty​-article​-magazine​/​.premium​/a​-note​-from​-kafka​-a​-trial​-and​ -a​-destituteheiress​/0000017f​-f054​-d223​-a97f​-fddddb060000. 75. Krauss, Forest Dark, 95. 76. Krauss, Forest Dark,12. 77. Dante Alighieri qtd. in Krauss, Forest Dark, 290. 78. Krauss, Forest Dark, 268. 79. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 125. 80. Both Chabon and Krauss reflect the sentiments of Arthur Green. See Green’s Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), x, where he argues the exact point that Krauss expresses transparently and that Chabon suggests. Green bemoans the dearth of spirituality in what he observes generally as Jewish observance: “I understand religion as a set of

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tools for the purpose of cultivating interiority, the life of the spirit. By this I mean an inward journey that leads one precisely toward self-transcendence, to an awareness of the universal Self in whose presence we exist.” 81. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 1967), 87.

Chapter 6

Twenty-First-Century Epic Theater and Eclectic Choreography in Margot Mink Colbert’s Ballet TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation

Dance has always had an important role in Jewish cultural and literary texts. The Hebrew Bible contains no fewer than ten verbs that suggest dancing. Their meanings range from jump, skip, limp, dance in a circle, turnabout, pirouette, and perform a whirling dance.1 According to Mayer I. Gruber, the narrative context of these verbs verifies their meaning, whether that context is one of mourning, a wedding, observation of farm animals, or ritual and prayer, whether by priests, lay groups, or individuals. For example, at the moment of escaping the onslaught of the Egyptian horsemen at the sea in Exodus 15:20, “Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels.” In another example, Samuel 6:14 reports the jubilation of David as the Ark of the Lord is brought to the City of David: “David whirled with all his might before the lord.” First Kings 18:26 reports the priests of Ba’al unsuccessfully calling their god, “‘O Baal, answer us!’ But there was no sound and none who responded, so they performed a hopping dance about the altar.”2 Verbs that suggest dance also appear in Exodus, Judges, Jeremiah, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Talmud. These early documented appearances of dance attest to a willingness to express identity, emotion, and community through liberating movements of the body. From this early period, dance developed in global Jewish communities both in Israel and the diaspora. In her recent coedited book, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, Naomi Jackson acknowledges two traditions of dance in the twentieth century, one of Israel and one of the Jewish diaspora. 135

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Both traditions continue to produce robust scholarship, choreography, and performance as an essential way to express communal and individual Jewish identities. Jackson explains: The use of the term Jewishness signals a broad, fluid definition of the myriad ways that dance intersects with Jews, Jewish life, and Judaism within and beyond Israel. In this sense, we also do not seek a single “Yiddish,” “Hasidic,” “Yemenite,” “Sephardic,” “Mizrahi,” “Ethiopian,” and so on dance, but consider how varied ethnic, religious, and national conceptions of Jewishness relate to dancers, dance practices, and dances historically and today.3

According to this view of Jewishness and dance, the ballet TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation, by choreographer Margot Mink Colbert, fits into the tradition of dance from the experience of the diaspora. The ballet celebrates a multitude of dimensions associated with the diasporic experience: the bravery of the individual, the liberation from historical traditions, the freedom to explore a diversity of talents, skills, interests, and passions and to build an identity that is new, fresh, and invigorating. TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation tells the story of the emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, including their journey to the United States, their trials entering the country, their adjustment to the new culture, and, ultimately, finding ways to thrive. The picture that Mink Colbert paints through what can be seen as a contemporary example of epic ballet portrays both the collective story of Jewish, immigrant experience and an individual story of a historical Jewish woman, Anzia Yezierska, who lived that experience. Mink Colbert’s ballet makes several important statements about Jewish life. Through her absence of references to the Shoah and the State of Israel, Mink Colbert rejects the apocalypticmessianic narrative as defining Jewish identity. Instead, she offers a collective and universal identity that focuses on a life of departures, courage, and arrivals. For Mink Colbert, survival depends on strong cultural, social, and economic communal ties, on the love of family, and on the need for creative fulfillment. Creativity is not confined to the artist, according to Mink Colbert, but is a feature of all humans facing the existential void of an uncertain future and who possess the ability to create meaning for everyday life. In this chapter, I will briefly provide historical context for the setting of TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation and situate its central character as an individual embedded in a collective, diasporic Jewish experience. I will then turn to the ironic nature of Mink Colbert’s ballet, briefly discuss its resemblance to epic theater, and, finally, discuss how the choregraphed movements of her ballet express a complicated this-worldly human experience and



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perform the values of mutual support, family loyalty, and the essential nature of relationship durability, strength, and courage in the Jewish diaspora. FROM EMIGRATION TO TRANSFORMATION: AN INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE JEWISH EXPERIENCE TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation thrusts us into the historical realm of the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, where Jews lived in ghettos, were denied entry into mainstream Russian society, and were deprived of the privileges of education and freedom of movement. The Pale of Settlement had been instituted centuries earlier in the contested lands of Eastern Europe that have at various times been Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, or Germany. Jews lived in shtetls organized around communal life and earned their livings as farmers and tradespeople selling their produce, wares, and services to nearby Christian villages. The shtetl was at once a suffocating and secure place to live. It was far from the German urban salons where Moses Mendelssohn enjoyed intellectual conversation, access to education, and freedom of movement. Jews were distrusted, reviled, and attacked as Christ killers and cheats. They were also blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander III in 1881. Russian pogroms, “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,”4 became a regular threat to Jewish communal life. With immigration doors open, two and one-half million Jews immigrated to the United States between 1881 and 1921. However, with the Immigration Act of 1924, mass immigration from Eastern Europe became impossible. With this collective Jewish experience from emigration to transformation on US shores as a frame, Mink Colbert tells the story of Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), a writer who came from the Russian Pale of Settlement to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and into the Jewish ghetto of New York. Her immigrant story, Hungry Hearts, brought her national acclaim, earning the attention of movie producer Samuel Goldwyn. Goldwyn bought the rights to the novel and made a silent film (1922) of the same name. When Yezierska gets an offer from another movie producer to purchase the rights to her future work, she turns him down. She decides that money from a contract for all her future work would squelch her creative mission. In a move that acknowledges the limits of material success, Yezierska turns down the American dream to preserve her personal dream of artistic freedom. Like many other Jews of the period, her story begins with life in the Pale of Settlement and continues through her early struggles as a new immigrant, through the Great Depression and war, and concludes with life as an assimilated citizen at the end of the twentieth century.

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To tell Yezierska’s story, Mink Colbert combines Yezierska’s words with a multimedia approach. While a dancer performs Yezierska’s frustration at her life of poverty, loneliness, and ignorance, still photos and video clips of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, where mostly women worked for hours a day to earn meager wages, appear on the back wall.5 The dancer portraying Yezierska also performs a solo punctuated by a scream that expresses her desperation at working in the factory while attending night school. Uncharacteristic of the traditions of ballet, the scream of the dancer’s voice adds drama to Yezierska’s story, which begins with the narrator reading her words: Nu, I got to America. Ten hours I pushed a machine in a shirt-waist factory, when I was yet lucky to get work. And always my head was drying up with saving and pinching and worrying to send home a little from the little I earned. All that my face saw all day long was girls and machines—and nothing else. And even when I came already home from work, I could only talk to the girls in the working-girls’ boarding-house, or shut myself up in my dark, lonesome bedroom. No family, no friends, nobody to get me acquainted with nobody!6

The desperation expressed in these heart-wrenching words portrays what many must have felt in those early days of immigration. Yezierska’s scream also serves as a catharsis in the immigration story of millions of Jews and others alike, a story of marginalization, alienation, and hopelessness followed by a fulfilling transformation in their new country. Mink Colbert’s choreographic strategy, in keeping with Jewish literary illumination, juxtaposes scenes of collective conflict and celebration, depression and excitement, and success and failure. The mood toggles between frustration and fulfillment just as the scenes toggle between the individual story of Yezierska and the collective historical backdrop of her time. Through the presentation of Yezierska’s story, Mink Colbert’s ballet serves several functions of Jewish literary illumination, including educational, moral, and social criticism, where stories demonstrate complicated situations, show how believable individuals have made choices, and depict the success or failure of those choices. The role of the narrator is central to Mink Colbert’s educational purpose, narrating each scene with social, historic, geographic, and emotional context. The narrator reminds viewers of what those who lived the scenes suffered, celebrated, and thought. When, for example, in the Ellis Island scene, the ballet performs the anxieties, exhaustion, drive, and hopes of the aspiring immigrants, the narrator comments on how arbitrary and quick the decisions of the immigration officers were to grant or deny entry.



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During the scene, projections of photos and video clips document the poverty and desolation of shtetl life, the desolate transit of Jews in third-class steerage, and the approach to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Mink Colbert’s ballet also portrays an ethical message about a Jewish community whose members support one another. The values of love, both within friendship and courtship, sexuality, and familial care all play out through Mink Colbert’s choreography. For example, eleven out of sixteen scenes include two or more dancers engaged in collective activities: circle dancing and hopscotch in the shtetl and the streets of New York; duets of couples’ courtship, suggesting the dance halls of Manhattan with the promise of marriage and children; line dancing of the Charleston era and Broadway musicals; and the final scene with its performance of urban life jammed into a subway car. These scenes indicate, through music, montage, and movement, the growing engagement across history of Jews in American culture. Mink Colbert’s ballet also acts as a social critique. She portrays the ironic story of immigrants who saw a way out of their suffering in immigration. Some had no choice but to leave, some decided to leave willingly. Once in the United States, immigrants saw opportunities for education, mobility, high and low culture, and immersion into the greater cultural landscape. Yet, despite having the freedom to choose complete immersion into the culture, many Jews chose to maintain their Jewish identity. As in the case of Anzia Yezierska, many became social critics themselves, selectively engaging with the culture depending on what is life-giving and what life-denying. For example, Yezierska sees that the Hollywood pressures to produce a script would destroy her creative flow and turns down the offer of material success, the stereotyped measurement of American success.7 As part of its social critique, the ballet zeroes in on the commodification of the human body as a monetized object for sale or exchange. Living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mink Colbert experiences the objectification of the female body that confronts citizens every day, from billboards to signs on taxis to showroom floors. Mink Colbert rejects the monetization of the arts overall that co-opts the human body for salacious purposes and critiques the monetization of all artistic expression. While her ballet may show a collective history of Jewish emigration from Russia to the United States and assimilation into the broader cultural landscape, it also shows, through Anzia Yezierska, that an individual can assert unique identity, values, and agency to refuse elements of the dominant culture, in this case, the monetization of creativity. According to Mink Colbert, the artist’s voice must also be a critical voice, liberated from accepted norms and free to explore fresh perspectives.8

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TRANSIT(ION): EMIGRATION TRANSFORMATION AND IRONY According to Northrop Frye, irony describes a “presentation of the world” characterized by “mythical patterns of experience, the attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence.”9 Mink Colbert’s lack of closure, her resistance to idealization, and the reflective nature of her work all suggest this ironic presentation of the world. As B. Frazier writes about such a perspective, “Facing up to the contingencies of human existence is a bracing and sobering task,”10 and the overall aim of such a perspective is to prepare us to face up to a situation yet not expect the worst.11 Thus, an important job of an ironic mode is to minimize expectations of a perfect outcome. Frye further asserts that irony is, in fact, a parody of romance with its happy endings, satisfaction, and confirmation of the status quo.12 For both Frye and Mink Colbert, narratives of romance, particularly evident in dominant popular culture, with their lighthearted struggles and uncomplicated endings, must be viewed with a critical eye. In the words of Richard Rorty, Mink Colbert is an ironist whose skepticism about the status quo results in action to improve the situation.13 As an ironist, Mink Colbert does not see reality as fixed but rather porous, without closure, and open to critical investigation and challenge. Thus, her interest is to resist closure and validate life with all its ambiguities, challenges, and successes. To set the stage for an ironic unfolding of the narrative, Mink Colbert’s ballet begins with the narrator’s reading of a Gerald Stern poem, “Lucky Life.” Stern’s poem suggests the ironic conditions of life, the repetitive ups and downs, the ability to begin anew, and the beauty of life, even in its waxing and waning. Although some see irony as a dark perspective, Stern’s poem suggests finding the sacred in the pleasures of life, the equity of individual human value, and the beauty of the world. The poem portrays the whole lived experience of body, emotion, cognition, creativity, and self-reflection: Dear Waves, what will you do for me this year? . . . Will you let me rise through the fog? . . . Will you let me take long steps in the cold sand? . . . Will you still let me draw my sacred figures and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind. Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to. Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over again. Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.14



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In this statement of universal human experience, Stern also asserts his quest for an enjoyable life and an affirmation that joy comes in noticing the wonder of the everyday. Mink Colbert juxtaposes the reflective tone of Stern’s poem, which launches the performance, with humorous anecdotes that lighten the viewers’ experience of, at times, sobering historical scenes. For example, the narrator reads a selection from Sholem Aleichem in his “Letter from America to Yisrulik” as dancers pantomime a family scenario of a problem boyfriend turned problem husband: America’s a free country. You’re perfectly free to keep your opinions to yourself. You can’t even tell your own daughter what to do. Take my oldest girl, for example, Khaye, but now known as Frances. What a job I had with her! Without telling me, she fell head over heels in love and said “I do” with a good for nothing bum, a member of the Brotherhood of Pickpockets. He was a runaway from the House of Detention but told her he was a famous clothing manufacturer and realtor. The upshot was that he was a bigamist. He only had a sum total of three wives, none of them divorced. (The trouble I had till I got rid of him!) Now Frances just married a pushcart peddler and is on easy street. My other girls are single but when they get engaged, they won’t ask my permission either. . . . the only thing we miss is—home. We’re homesick something awful. My wife, Jennie (we don’t call her Blumeh anymore), doesn’t leave me alone for a minute. She keeps nagging me to take a trip back to Russia and visit our beloved dear ones in the cemetery. America’s a free country. Everyone minds his own business as he sees fit, and that’s that. Well, now that I’ve written you, pal, and told you what’s doing with me, be sure to let me know right away what’s with you and what’s going on back home. Your best pal, Jacob (formerly Yenkel).15

This letter captures the bittersweet nature of life and the affection of family on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It also captures a parodic sense of humor, a self-reflective tone that recognizes the irony of both wanting and despising the new situation and both fearing and hoping that the present struggles will deliver a more promising future.

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TRANSIT(ION): EMIGRATION TRANSFORMATION AS EPIC THEATER Instead of ignoring the historical moment, daily life, and cultural specificity or focusing on mythical and other worldly topics, TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation presents a story of historical context and social justice. The ballet also makes use of stylistic strategies of montage in staging, music, photography. A narrator relentlessly provides reflections on the historical moment, the individual experience, and the moral implications. As a result, both performers and audience stay emotionally distanced from the narrative to effectively consider the composite of social issues the ballet performs. Containing all these facets, Mink Colbert’s ballet is an example of what German playwright Bertolt Brecht championed as “epic theater.”16 Like Mink Colbert, Brecht set his theatrical action within a broad historical landscape juxtaposed with an individual story.17 In Brecht’s view, the theater had a purpose: to teach. Viewers must be made to recognize inequities, corrupt power, and human victimization. To clarify a political situation, the theater must unveil the gloss over reality, and viewers must see the norm as a construction of the powerful. In other words, reality must be defamiliarized. Brecht advocated the use of montage as a way of disrupting the viewer's understanding and presenting a historic, geographic, and cultural context. Brecht explains that “Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another.”18 All these elements communicate a diversity of perspectives, distract viewers from an immersive experience associated with entertainment, and jolt the audience out of passivity into engagement, as Brecht would suggest is the intent of epic theater.19 The resulting audience response is not to escape reality but to confront reality in a dialectic manner of student and critic of the historical and social justice issues dancers perform on stage. Thus, Mink Colbert rejects the apparent disinterest that modern and postmodern dance has in establishing a connection either to a particular human being or a particular historical moment or experience. She agrees with Jean-Claude Nancy’s incisive comment about modern and postmodern dance as “Le détachment de la representation et le detachment des codes,”20 or “the detachment of representation and the detachment of codes.” By codes, Nancy refers to festivals and rituals, and by representation, Nancy refers to choreography depicting daily life, considered broadly. In his discussion of the content of dance choreography, Nancy cautions that the content should not promulgate a nonliberating political message. He reflects what might suggest a reluctance of choreographers to portray everyday life as bourgeois, a denigrating term to describe middle-class life as only having mercenary interests.



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Mink Colbert rejects this hesitancy, arguing through her choreography, that family life, struggle to survive, and a community are what make surviving and thriving possible and a story worth telling. Her work differs notably from modern and postmodern detachment, as it is highly invested in telling a human story, here the Jewish immigrant story. Linking to specific ethnic, geographic, and historical moments bring the body into history, and the dancer is both participant and storyteller. Determined to tell this human story, Mink Colbert also challenges the content of traditionally romantic nineteenth- and twentieth-century balletic narratives, such as “La Sylphide (1832), Giselle (1841), and Swan Lake (1896), which portray love between an ethereal, unattainable woman and an idealistic, devoted man.”21 These balletic narratives portray fantasy and gender stereotyping and are irrelevant to real historical life. They immerse viewers in an escapist attitude instead of redirecting viewers to the subject of life on the ground. As an epic, Mink Colbert’s ballet calls upon us as spectators to consider events both as public and private history, objective and subjective, reasoned and emotional. The spectator becomes a critical observer, not so much sucked into the story as unsettled by the story but forced to think about the situations in which the individual characters find themselves from a thoughtful position, a position of critical distance not to be confused with the “detachment” of modern and postmodern dance.22 CHOREOGRAPHY IN TRANSIT(ION): EMIGRATION TRANSFORMATION: DIVERSITY, GRACE, AND THE BODY For Mink Colbert, the struggle to survive and thrive is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A multiplicity of life experiences makes living worthwhile: adventure, family, children, education, social activities, and celebrations. Mink Colbert’s choreography brings in that diversity. In the beginning scene, “Ellis Island,” the dancer wears loose clothing that looks worn to reflect the homelessness of the emigrant hoping to become an immigrant as he travels the sinuous line to reach the immigration enforcement officer, hoping for approval to enter the United States. The moves are also loose, suggesting fatigue, and at one point, the dancer falls on his suitcase, denoting sheer exhaustion of body and spirit. In other scenes, Mink Colbert introduces an eclectic array of dance styles, from the circle dance of the hora, always danced joyfully, whether in the Russian shtetl or a New York wedding, to ballroom of the early twentieth-century Manhattan dance halls to modernist emotional expression of Anzia’s frustration to the pantomime of Philippe Petit’s walk across the tightrope to the showgirl struts of Broadway. Nevertheless, to maintain a

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sense of the everyday, consistently absent from the choreography are the fireworks, bravura, or those 180-degree kicks dancers regularly perform in the commercialized dance choreography of Broadway or the Las Vegas Strip. Diverging from the tradition of dancers as gymnasts, Mink Colbert always choreographs dancer moves that retain a powerful control of the body in its everyday capabilities with musical phrasing that suggests the mood and historical context of the story. The choreography of Mink Colbert dismantles many a dance vocabulary only to reassemble them into a fresh, eclectic style that provides a fresh moral focus. Mink Colbert retains the integration of couples and groups dancing together, touching each other, holding each other, and lifting each other. For example, women lift women, dancers move in circles holding hands, and dancers move away and towards the embrace of one another. In the scene “Bésame” (“kiss me” in Spanish), taken from the music of the song “Bésame Mucho,”23 a solo dancer dressed to suggest the iconic Rosie the Riveter of World War II poster fame dances her dreams of companionship with perhaps a husband or boyfriend stationed overseas to fight the war. In another scene danced to “Nice Work If You Can Get It,”24 played during the duet, a couple made up of a man and a woman lift each other, both equally strong and both equally leading, as they twirl and intimately move, gracefully attuned to the bodily whims and emotive repertoire expressed through dance. In a scene about the Great Depression, dancers create a pyramid of bodies with a single performer atop, signaling the communal nature of survival of the individual. In the Mink Colbert choreographic world, the vocabulary of graceful movement performs values of mutual support, family loyalty, and the essential nature of relationship durability, strength, and courage. For Mink Colbert, choreography is analogous to life. By sheer strength, determination, and vision, the individual dominates chaos, strives to subdue the inevitable, and, on occasion, achieves a miracle. In an analogous demonstration of sheer strength, training, and will, the dancer embodies human power needed to structure time, communicate meaning, and carve space to perform earthly human attributes of courageous and determined action. To communicate the ethos of the whole human experience, the power of the individual, and the importance of the whole body in understanding the human experience, Mink Colbert turns to her primary choreographic mentor, Anthony Tudor (1908–1987). What came to be known as the Tudoresque essence emphasizes the torso, the center of bodily control (Mink Colbert, interview by author).25 Whatever the choreographic style the dancers perform, body stature retains its primary Tudoresque stance. Energy and movement come from the torso or core, the primary engine first for the legs and the feet and, lastly, the arms, head, and facial expressions.26 A Mink Colbert collaborator and dancer, Dolly Kelepecz, explains Mink Colbert’s choreographic



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instructions to dancers. As choreographer, Mink Colbert refused to communicate the intention or the emotion that dancers were supposed to portray. Mink Colbert’s mantra was “Intention [of the choreographer] is not important. Do the movement. It will do what it is supposed to do.”27 As with Tudor, the body, not isolated emotions or cognition, responds as a complete system of reality to the music and the choreographic situation.28 The vertical stature of the dancer with its torso as the center of power suggests the human fight against the uncontrolled, chthonian forces that would destroy human life. The torso is held erect, chest filled with air, and head held high. The radical verticality of the torso is a sign of strength, fighting against the gravitational pull of nature and, metaphorically, the cultural pull of the status quo. While demonstrating strength with its verticality, the torso is allowed to move with flexibility and then return to a perfect vertical position. The full body, motored by its core, represents the whole human experience, serves as a site of command and control, and functions as a site for launching empowered human action. Dancer bodies, with their endless adaptability, can still move expressively to suggest the bodily experience of a peasant or showgirl, factory worker or flapper, new immigrant or sophisticated urbanite (Mink Colbert, interview by author).29 Combining powerful stature with the performance of a multiplicity of lifestyles suggests a profoundly democratic choreographic sensibility. While Mink Colbert thinks of choreography as essentially balletic, she nevertheless is a firm critic of many balletic vocabularies and cultural values over the centuries. Thus, she has looked elsewhere to develop her vision of dance, a vision that conforms more closely to her personal values. To develop that vision, Mink Colbert embraced the mantra of another mentor, Alfred Corvino, who instructed her by saying, “You cannot express everything with ballet” (Mink Colbert, interview by author). Corvino encouraged her use of a heteroglossia of movement styles,30 and her choreography shows her eclectic proclivity: ballroom, dance hall, pantomime, musical comedy, and folk dances. Insisting that dance is a part of everyone’s life, Mink Colbert critiques classical balletic tradition for its elitism because its subject matter appealed to the rich, who could remove themselves from the trials of most of humanity with their privilege. She disdained its portrait of women as vulnerable, needing male power to (literally) be lifted away from earth, anonymous and replaceable. And, like Brecht, she refused to tell the story of fantasy over reality, and, in her words, “uninteresting, lack-luster one-dimensional and predictable character portraits.” What Mink Colbert has done, as evident in the ballet TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation, is take elements from multiple styles and repurpose them for her own aesthetic and moral vision. One overarching element of classical ballet she repurposed for her own style is grace.

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In the critical choreographic eye of Mink Colbert, the grace of the dancers’ movements has a specific balletic meaning and conveys specific cultural values. According to Selma Jeanne Cohen, who traces the concept of grace as central to the style of classical ballet: Grace makes steps appear effortless, and—as if to prove that these incredible turns and extensions are really no trouble at all—grace connects them in a seamless flow, with no stops for determined preparations, and throws in a few broderies for good measure. Any sign of the practical, of the merely utilitarian, is forbidden. The classical style may be the highest manifestation we know of the image of grace.31

According to Cohen, in the nineteenth century, grace was associated with lightness—the fluttering of a rose leaf and the flight of a butterfly. In the classical style described by Cohen, the woman is wafted from the ground by the strong male dancer who manipulates her body as though he and not her body were the engine of her strength. The dance of the nineteenth-century classical tradition and in its twentieth-century neoclassical iteration frequently requires the lifting of women dancers off the ground, as though the preferred location is not on the ground. Like this choreography that seems to prefer escaping from routine reality and worldliness, the narratives of classical ballets do not describe daily human life but rather fantasies. Grace becomes the ability to leave the ground, to be wafted away, a trope suggesting transience, vulnerability, and a transcendent perfection, not grounded human reality with its disruptions. Mink Colbert deconstructs the meaning of grace that was understood in the nineteenth-century classical balletic tradition as weakness and passivity in the female dance character, even as it took tremendous strength and skill to perform. In Mink Colbert’s choreographic imagination, grace does not suggest lightness, nor impermanence, nor the wafting away to an unearthly destination, nor immaturity, whether physical or mental, as it has in traditional ballet. To the contrary, in the Mink Colbert choreography, and as Cohen insists, grace stands for control, precision, and freedom, and only the appearance of spontaneity and ease. Mink Colbert’s balletic vocabulary rejects the fragmentation of human bodily expression, with one element of the body made more noticeable than another by extraordinary movements, for example the 180-degree leg raises or the extreme bending of a woman’s back. As a result, she rejects the twentieth-century neoclassical ballet style of George Balanchine with its understanding of grace in terms of gender hierarchy and fantasy narratives that dominated the late twentieth-century balletic imagination and box office. As dance academic Susan Foster writes, “George Balanchine seems an



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obvious inheritor of the neoclassical tradition that developed at the end of the seventeenth century. Not only does Balanchine retain the proscenium viewing arrangement, but he also makes use of the basic lexicon of bodily positions identified and codified just after the shift to the proscenium stage.”32 In such productions, male dancers lift the women dancers off the ground in climactic moments. The grand steps and dominant energy of all balletic dancers move primarily up, or vertically, rather than horizontally, suggesting a desire to leave the earth. Foster describes the neoclassical lexicon of George Balanchine as essentially pictorial, made for the proscenium stage to show off an idealized body that performs “remarkable extensions, inversions, and elevations of body parts . . . by a body . . . distinctly jointed . . . [and] radically compartmentalized.”33 Foster’s description of Balanchine’s style provides a clear picture of the choreographic style against which Mink Colbert rebelled: The dancers’ execution of the movement is equally perfect. Balanchine’s choreography requires extraordinary speed, strength, flexibility, and endurance; at the same time the performance appears effortless as if attaining a superb visual image required neither work nor strength. Women float with arched torsos, arms trailing softly behind, from one astonishing placement of the limbs to the next.34

In this neoclassical style, the body of the woman is a site for audience fetishistic desire, a form of misogyny to make the female gender less powerful, central, and nuanced. Translated into a balletic vocabulary of movement, the tradition of the disempowered women reinforces the dominance of the “weightless woman,” the “nymph with the broken back,” and the “collapsing woman” of the nineteenth-century aesthetic. According to Bram Dijkstra, the woman was: a symbol of nature and of all natural phenomena. She sat, a flower among flowers, a warm, receiving womb and body, waiting patiently for man, the very incarnation of the spirit of the rose. . . . But most often, persistently and relentlessly, she floated through the air. She floated, because to walk is to act, and to beckon a form of invitation, a way of taking charge. . . . Woman’s weightlessness was still a sign of her willing—or helpless—submission, [and] still allowed the male to remain uninvolved.35

This concept constructs women as weak, passive, as trophy and object. Mink Colbert introduces an egalitarian gender portrait in which all parts of the body of the dancer/performer are key both to the choreographer and the audience. In the hands of Mink Colbert, the victim-like status of the woman performer’s body is disrupted by the dancer as thinker, audience, and creator.36

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Mink Colbert also rejects the aspect of the modern dance vocabulary that is not graceful. For example, as Mink Colbert puts it, “Modern dance movement was specifically anti-grace in that they were committed to showing effort— gravity—struggle in their movement and choreography. When I started taking modern dance classes I was often corrected by the observation that my movement had ‘too much ballet’” (interview by author). Another attribute of the modernist choreographic tradition that Mink Colbert rejects is that a dancer’s facial expression reflects emotions in response to the narrative content of the scene. For example, an important early modernist performer also known as an expressionist dancer, Isadora Duncan, consistently imitated emotional responsiveness.37 As Foster explains: Despite dancers’ passionate actions, the choreography was not intended to reveal their actual personalities. In the intimacy of the stage setting, the dancers’ performance represented what the choreographers considered universal concerns. Human emotion assumed a central importance as subject matter. . . . the dancers clearly felt the emotions about which they were dancing. Dancers did not represent people, or even mythical or stereotypic versions of people, but rather the essential characteristics of a range of human feelings.” 38

Unlike the anti-grace and expressive modernist and expressionist style Foster describes, Mink Colbert dancers maintain a reflective approach to the roles they perform. Thus, in keeping with the Tudor and epic theater aesthetics, dancers produce meaning, intention, and emotion from their bodily entirety, not from facial expressions that reveal emotions. And from staging and narrator script, audiences learn the geography, chronological history, culture, and social issues of the scenes. Another choreographic style that Mink Colbert rejects is the postmodern style of Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), whose choreography specialized in identity-free dancer motion, devoid of narrative content and historical attachment. Susan Foster explains this objectivist choreographic style as when “dancers’ focus on the events occurring in the performance space and the composition of the movement itself direct the viewer back to the body moving in space and time. Dancers’ interactions usually emphasize the activity of moving. Men and women lift each other and touch each other as moving bodies.”39 While Mink Colbert embraces many of Cunningham’s traditions of performing the body in motion and the equitable interactivity of gender, her work is engaged in history, and her choreography confronts viewers and performers alike with the historical moment and the individual and collective response to that moment. Thus, in the tradition of Jewish literary illumination, Mink Colbert choreographs the story of the complicated human experience and its glory. As



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indicated in the ironic dimension of this tradition, the individual engages robustly with historical and cultural contexts. The choreographic process required a collaborative effort among choreographer, dancers, video archivists, and musicians, choosing between what is life-affirming and lifedenying for Mink Colbert’s creative voice. As a result of this process, Mink Colbert created a ballet uniquely her own, rejecting those traditions she found limiting and selectively embracing those that helped her express her voice as artist and human being. CONCLUSION TRANSIT(ION): Immigration, Transformation ends with a reflective scene, much like the one that introduced the ballet, suggesting the ongoing nature of life with its laughter and tears. The final scene takes us to a New York City subway, where dancers perform at Grand Central Station, suggesting that the Jew has come a long way from the shtetl to modern urban life. Yet with popular culture images projected on the back wall, a lone voice wafts through the air with the lyrics of Guy Clark’s “Immigrant Eyes,” reflecting on the journey, the trials, and the joys of immigrant life. The final refrain—much like that of “Lucky Life,” which the narrator reads at the start of the ballet—is nostalgic: Oh Ellis Island was swarming /. . . . There my father’s own father stood huddled / With the tired and hungry and scared. . . . And working hard all of his life So don’t take it for granted Cause he gave me the gift of sweet freedom And the look in his immigrant eyes.40

This familial thread of debt and gift links the generations and inspires both sadness, nostalgia, and hope. The spirit of the ballet rests on the determination that defeat is not inevitable, that persistence will bring its reward. Disagreeing with the salvific nature of suffering, Mink Colbert honors the ethos of Jewish literary illumination by putting greater creative, ritualistic, and communal emphasis on earthly joys, discoveries, and creativity along with the individual responsibility to act. Mink Colbert shows, as Walter Benjamin before her so aptly declared, that the cycle of suffering as salvation merely piles wreckage upon wreckage.41 The body is meant for pleasure, celebration, and movement to fulfill all the earthly wonders of intellect, emotion, and love. For Mink Colbert, the immigration struggles portrayed in her ballet added up to a better

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life, with education and the freedom to explore religiosity without social pressure and fear of political persecution, all unavailable in the Russia they left. The body in motion, then, has had its reward. NOTES 1. Mayer I. Gruber, “Ten Dance-Derived Expressions in the Hebrew Bible,” Biblica 3, no. 62 (1981): 329. 2. Quotes from The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 3. Naomi Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni Shapiro-Phim, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 15. 4. “Pogroms,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Museum. Accessed July 6, 2022. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/pogroms. 5. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is also infamous for a tragic fire in 1911 that killed 123 women and girls and 23 men. 6. Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts (Project Gutenberg e-book, 2012). Accessed June 8, 2022. www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/41232​/41232​-h​/41232​-h​.htm. 7. Riv-Ellen Prell, in Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender; and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), provides descriptions of the on-the-ground struggles of men and women pushing back against stereotypes to achieve a measure of subjectivity consequential agency in America. 8. According to Theodor W. Adorno, this orientation produces a text that seeks “to struggle against the repressive identification compulsion that rules the outside world . . . fashioning the relation between the whole and its parts in accordance with its needs.” See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 6. 9. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223. 10. B. Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15. 11. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 237–39. Frye refers to this denouement of the ironic structure or, as he calls it, the “Mythos of Winter,” as an ending that “presents human life in terms of largely unrelieved bondage sweetened only by the human will to do so.” 12. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 223. See also Frye’s discussion of the “Mythos of Summer: Romance” in Anatomy of Criticism, 186–206. 13. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv, 22. See also my discussion of irony in the introduction. 14. Gerald Stern. “Lucky Life,” in Lucky Life. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995), 43–45.



Twenty-First-Century Epic Theater and Eclectic Choreography

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15. Sholem Aleichem, “Letter from America to Yisrulik,” in An Exchange of Letters Between America and the Old Country, trans. Curt Leviant (Amherst, MA: Yiddish Book Center, 2019). 16. Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1974), 847. 17. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on Erwin Strittmatter’s Play Katzgraben,” in “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre: 1918–1932” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1978), 251. 18. Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre: 1918–1932,” in Brecht on Theatre, 38. 19. Bertolt Brecht, “Prologue, A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theater,” 179. 20. Mathilde Monier and Jean-Luc Nancy, Allitération: Conversations sur la Danse (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 27. 21. Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dance: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 144. 22. Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, 850. 23. “Bésame Mucho” was published in 1941 by Consuelo Velasquez. 24. “Nice Work If You Can Get It” was published in 1937 by George Gershwin, music, and Ira Gershwin, lyrics. 25. A major influence on Mink Colbert’s choreography, Tudor based his New York choreography on the Cecchetti ballet technique, a technique embraced by his two primary teachers, Marie Rambert and Margaret Craske. See Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Ballets of Antony Tudor: Studies in Psyche and Satire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11. 26. Mark B. Bliss, ed. Antony Tudor Centennial (Antony Tudor Ballet Trust: 2010), 77, 97. 27. Dolly Kelepecz, interview by author, June 8, 2022. 28. Choreographer Liz Lerman speaks about the importance of the connection of feeling and thinking as an embodied reality. See “Post-performance Talk Show with host Jennifer Edwards, scholar-in-residence,” Jacob’s Pillow, August 14, 2022, YouTube video, www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SK4o​-4​-tVZc. 29. Margot Mink Colbert, interview by author, March 15, 2014. 30. Mink Colbert, interview, March 15, 2014. 31. Selma Cohen, Next Week, Swan Lake: Reflections of Dance and Dances (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 124. Susan Leigh Foster reiterates, “[T]he movement in the Renaissance (classical) tradition is “fluid and sustained, deft and full—that avoids any excel or restraint.” See Foster, Reading Dance, 118. 32. Foster, Reading Dance, 121. 33. Foster, Reading Dance, 131. 34. Foster, Reading Dance, 16. 35. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 87.

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36. Berel Lang, Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 11. Addressing the cultural mechanics that enable misogyny, Taira Amin offers an analogous point related to the exegetical move associating women’s guile with Satan. By generalizing women into a single category, it becomes easier for exegetes to conceptualize women as a social category in abstract terms. This process of abstraction ruptures women from their humanity, dignity and, importantly, their spiritual connections with the Divine and all that is good. See “Women and Guile in the Qur’an and Tafsīr: a Close Study of Verse Q12:28,” in Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an, ed. Roberta Sterman Sabbath (Berlin: De Gruyter 2021), 191–213. 37. Foster, Reading Dance, 145. 38. Foster, Reading Dance, 145, 150. 39. Foster, Reading Dance, 76. 40. Guy Clark and Roger Murrah, “Immigrant Eyes” (Sony/ATV, 1988). 41. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.

Reflections

As I have demonstrated in this book, works of Jewish literary illumination, from the Bible to contemporary works, emphasize a this-worldliness, the body, and an avoidance of abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism. When the utopic and messianic enter the picture, history has cut these ventures down, leaving survivors to navigate earthly realities. Earthbound narratives deal with uncertainties and ambiguities, and they resist closure. Yet, these are stories that celebrate life and the living. The story of the sacred body begins with Eve and Adam leaving the Garden of Eden, continues with Sarah and Abraham leaving Ur, and comes full circle with the story of Jews leaving Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Works of Jewish literary illumination characteristically express the particularity, conflict, and ambiguities of everyday life. In response to an interviewer’s question about what being Jewish means to her, Nicole Krauss opined that it is the “ability to hold conflicting ideas without resolution, a rational skepticism, [considering the] resolution of an argument is a failure, ambiguities, and refusal to go to certainties.”1 As Krauss’s words express, narratives of Jewish literary illumination do not seek to satisfy, as in Aristotle’s view of tragedy, an audience’s need for closure, satisfaction, emotional cleansing, or catharsis. The narratives do not seek, as in Aristotle’s definition of comedy, to have the audience feel superior to the comedic subject. Neither does Jewish literary illumination seek a universal, unifying, or uniform truth. Rather, it offers portraits of the human condition that make us uncomfortable and even seem to revel in representations of the fragmentary, temporal, and disjointed nature of the human condition. Jewish literary illumination chooses to maintain a tension in depicting the human condition that comes with no promise of relief. Instead of providing a satisfying ending or a plot that relieves emotional tension, the narratives of Jewish literary illumination stretch the body and the mind with situations that seem to present more questions than answers and offer fresh and surprising conclusions. Jewish literary illumination offers no visionary escape, no utopic resolution, no alternative life, and no eternal life. As twentieth-century Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz writes: 153

154

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The Judaism of the Halakhah despises rhetoric, avoids pathos, abjures the visionary. Above all, it rejects the illusory. It does not permit a man to believe that the conditions of his existence are other than they really are. It prevents flight from one’s functions and tasks in this inferior world to an imaginary world which is all good, beautiful, and sublime.2

While this life may be inadequate, unjust, and stifling, the value of struggling against oppression, of survival, and of celebration compels action to improve rather than accept life’s inadequacies, injustices, and restrictions. The texts I have examined in this book reflect a worldview that focuses on our earthly deeds, our visions for a better earthly life, and our perpetual journey to make these visions into earthly reality. The tension of this journey breeds not awe but action. It is where infinity meets the actual. It is the sacred body. NOTES 1. Nicole Krauss, “Writing Jewish: A Discussion with Nicole Krauss and Joshua Cohen,” interview by David Kramer at The Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Columbia University, New York, April 26, 2022. 2. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 69.

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Index

Aaron, blessing, 82 King Abimelech, Abraham misrepresenting to, 40; pleading with, 40; rewarding Abraham, 40; Negev ruler, 39; Sarah and, 6 Abraham, advocating for Sodom and Gomorrah, 6, 12, 42, 36; announcement of Isaac’s birth 6, 37; fathering Isaac as not clear, 40–41; giving Sarah to pharaoh, 33, 37–38; giving Sarah to King Abimelech, 40, 48n53; honoring Isaac as his legal son, 49n61; laugh of, 34, 45n23 “Abraham begot Isaac,” suggests Abraham not Isaac’s father, 48n53 Abrahamic religions, critiqued in Nathan the Wise, 105 Abraham narrative, Sarah’s powerful role in, 39 Abrams, Daniel, sexualizing God, 60 abstraction, rupturing women from humanity and the divine, 154n36 action, social justice and, 100 Adam, Tree of Knowledge interdiction, 30; as passive, Eve as active, 29; ungendered human, 29 Adler, Rachel, pervasive male God images of Jewish tradition, 30

Adorno, Theodor: irony as critical tool, 9; texts as art works, 7 aesthetics, harmony erasing heterogeneity, 134n52 affects, Lessing and mimesis, 102 afterlife, rabbis conjecturing about, 71 Agamben, Giorgio: sacred/profane binary as artificial, 15; cultural studies lens and religion, 3 Agency, consequences of Eve’s, 31–32; identifying Eve’s, 30; of Sarah limited by interpretations, 37 Aher, becomes a heretic, 80 Rabbi Akiva, messianic beliefs in Simeon bar Kochba revolt, 88n5, 96, 118–119; poverty, 55; fulfilling marriage and, 54, 55, 65; as righteous rabbi, 55; Song of Songs, 55–56, 74; mystical journey, 79–80 Alaska alternative history, of Chabon, 119, parody of homeland, 122 Aleichem, Sholem, selection from, 143 allegorical treatment, Sarah by Philo, 37 allegory, in rabbinic writing, 18 Alter, Robert, narrative and indeterminacy, 6 alternate history, of Chabon, 119 alternative history, in Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 118 173

174

Index

American capitalist dream, Epstein in Forest Dark, 128 American culture, Jews in, 141 Amin, Taira, women’s guile and Qur’an, 154n36 androcentric narrative, of Philo, 37 androgyne, mythic division of, 29 angel, in binding of Isaac, 41 angels, Nathan the Wise and, 104–105 angst, narrative and, 115 annunciation scene, humor and irony, 39; Abraham and, 33 anthropomorphic description, God and mysticism, 76 anthropomorphic descriptions of God, Jewish imagination and, 77 anthropomorphic detail, in Genesis, 28 anthropomorphism, function of, 58 antihero, tragedy of the situation, 122 antiheroes, messianic vision and, 130; unsuccessful aspirations of, 116 apocalypse, messiah suffering for redemption and, 96 apocalypticism, Jewish experience and, 96 apocalyptic judgment, utopic vision and, 97 apocalyptic-redemptive narrative, critique of, 111; Shoah and State of Israel as, 112–113 apocalyptic tradition, Maimonides’s critique, 107n12 Aquinas, Thomas, Augustine on suicide and, 69n36 Arad, Gulie Ne’eman, 114 Aramaic, replaces Hebrew in mysticism writings, 80 Aramaic incantation bowls, Babylonia in, 90nn30–31 Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, 44n14 Aristotle, definition of pity, 109n37; laughter, 116, 117; theater and moral values, 102; tragedy and comedy, 157

artist, as social critic, 122 arts, Lessing and moral purpose, 102 Ashkenazi tradition of Franco-Germany, emphasizing purity, 62 assimilation, alternative to extinction, 62 audience, staying emotionally distanced from the narrative, 144 audience response, to confront reality, 144 Auerbach, Erich, unexpressed thoughts and feelings in Hebrew Bible, 6 Augustine, attacks martyrdom, 69n36; launches original sin concept, 44n17 autonomy, as divine’s true desire, 32 Av Hamon Goyyim, Abraham as Father of Throng of Nations, 33 Avraham: falls and laughs, 34; journeys of, 33 awe, reaction to the sublime, 99 Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), Gemara and, 52 the Bahir: mystical imagination, 83; tenth and twelfth centuries in Spain, 82; primal man, 83 Balanchine, George, neoclassical ballet style of, 148; idealized body and, 149 balletic narratives, fantasy and gender stereotyping, 145 balletic vocabulary, Mink Colbert rejection of bodily fragmentation, 148 Bancroft, Corinne, on braided narratives, 125 bar Kochba revolt, against the Romans, 96 Bar Kokhba Revolt, failure of, 72; as a messianic movement, 88n5; against the Romans failed, 118 “barren,” “essence, main part” and ‫עקר‬, 47n50 Barthes, Roland, on writerly texts, 7 beggar, as prophet Elijah, 55 Ben Azzai, glimpsed at the Divine Presence and died, 80

Index

Benjamin, Walter, on the cycle of suffering as salvation, 151; on stories producing astonishment, 4 ben Ozer, Rabbi Leib: reporting on thousands of people prophesying in the holy tongue and the language of the Zohar and spoke secrets of the Kabbalah, 97; report of characteristic of Jewish eschatology and messianic aspirations, 97; testimony of about Zvi, 97 Ben Zoma, harm and Divine Presence, 80 Berger, Alan, third-generation and Holocaust trauma, 124 “Besame” (kiss me in Spanish) scene, Rosie the Riveter in ballet and, 146 Biale, David, circumcision as “masculinization of the otherwise female shekhinah,” 46n30; on Origen and Clement of Alexandria and Song of Songs allegory, 56 Bible, multiple interpretations honored, 52 biblical verses, Bahir’s insight on the mystical significance of, 82 Bina Gelbfish, ex-wife of Landsman, 120, 130; Landsman’s love for, 123 Binah, “intelligence” of God, 91n45 binding of Isaac (Akedah), traditional rabbinic terminology and, 41 Birnbaum, David, God presenting Eve and Adam with a test, 32 blood, arch symbol of life, 13 bodily entirety, dancers producing meaning, intention, and emotion from, 150 bodily experience, as both pleasure and suffering, 51 body, avoiding contact with death, 12; critiques, 1; essential to prophecy, 46n30; living even after death, 65; living with the soul upon death, 88; not sinful, fallen, 88; surpassing to prepare for reward in heaven, 60

175

body and soul, not placed in a hierarchical relationship, 91n44 body of God, first- and second-century rabbis, 76 body of the woman, fetishistic desire in neoclassical style, 149 body stature, retaining its primary Tudoresque stance, 146 Book of Baruch, as pseudepigrapha, 107n13 Book of Daniel, Daniel as son of man to rule, 74, 96, 131n1; God as old, sedentary, and disengaged, 77 Book of Enoch, as pseudepigrapha, 107n13 Book of Jubilees, as pseudepigrapha, 107n13 bourgeois, everyday life as, 144–145 Boyarin, Daniel, Christian context, 53, 56–57; on heterogeneity, 52–53; rabbis against ascetic practices, 60; circumcision, 35; Song of Songs Rabba key to Israelite salvation, 57; Talmud and sexual intimacy, 54 Boyarin, Jonathan, on Jews in liminal moment today, 130 “braided” formal strategy, of Krauss, 125 braided stories, as parallel narratives presented in paratactic fashion, 125 Brecht, Bertolt, “epic theater” and, 144 Budick, Emily Miller, critique of contemporary Holocaust zeitgeist, 114 burial, deceased receiving an honorable, 65 Campbell, Joseph, on a “belly of the whale” moment, 31; on the hero’s journey, 44n11 Canticle [Song of Songs], as the heart of revelation, 56 carnal knowledge, in the Talmud as essential for the development of a full life, 54

176

Index

Cecchetti ballet technique, influence on Mink Colbert, 153n25 celibacy, onerous punishment for, 68n33 cell phones, called shofars, 121 Chabon, Michael, 111; alternate history of, 116; critique of messianic dreams, 122; schlemiel character, Landsman, as everyman, 123, expulsion of Jews from safe haven, 115 challenges, types of response to, 115 Chava—Eve, meaning as life experience, 126 childlessness, of Sarah as a choice, 39 Chmielnicki Massacres (1648– 1649), led by the Cossacks, terrorized hundreds of Jewish communities, 94–95 choices, depicting success or failure of, 140; represented in narratives, 125 choreographers, reluctance to portray everyday life as bourgeois, 144–145 choreographic process, requiring a collaborative effort, 151 choreographic strategy, Mink Colbert juxtaposing scenes of collective conflict and celebration, 140 choreography, life for Mink Colbert and, 145–151 Christ, Carol P., on women identified with nature, body, the material realm, 30 Christian baby girl, adopted by Nathan helping him heal, 103 Christianity, defining itself against Jewish traditions, 72 Christian mythology, placing the blame for the fall (sin) of humanity squarely on Eve’s shoulders, 44n17 Christian Patriarch, persecution of Nathan in Nathan the Jew, 106 Christian Platonism, rejection of, 53 Christians, led by Patriarch Heraclius representing the Pope, and the Knights Templar, 104

Christian Templar, saved the life of Nathan in Nathan the Jew, 106 Christ killers and cheats, Jews distrusted, reviled, and attacked as, 139 Circumcision, as sacred, 33, 35; Kabbalah mysticism, 86 classical balletic tradition, Mink Colbert critique, 147; grace and, 148; fluidity and, 153n31 “cleave,” humanity seeks God, 85 closed narrative, as satisfying, 115; lack of, 142; Mink Colbert resisting, 142 codes, detachment of, 144 Cohen, Arthur, redemption and mystical texts, 126 Cohen, Martin Samuel, numerology and God, 78, mysticism and theurgic [magical], 87 Cohen, Selma Jeanne, grace and classical ballet, 148 comical stance, schlemiel as literary strategy, 117 commodification of the human body, ballet, 141 commodity, Sarah, 37 communal institutions, seventeenth century, 95 communal Judaism, mysticism as threat, 96 communities, Zvi’s movement, 96 companionship, with God, 29 compassion, as highest virtue, 66n1; Shi’ur Qomah and supernal realm, 78 The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates (Kierkegaard), 9; ironic lenses, 20–21n31 conflict, begins with Garden of Eden, 5 Constantine Roman Emperor, adoption of Christianity, 72 contraction of God, finite within the infinite in mysticism, 82–83 corporeality, Lessing and, 102 Corvino, Alfred, Mink Colbert mentor, 147

Index

cosmic union, mirrored in conjugal bedroom, 86 cosmos, monistic or pantheistic view of divine immanence, 89n9 couples, retaining the integration of, 146 covenant, of God with Abraham, 33 covenantal agreement, between God and humanity, 20n22 Craske, Margaret, 153n25 Creation, contraction of God at, 82; Kabbalah narrative, 79, 80; stories in Genesis, 5 creativity, as a feature of all humans, 18; as a feature of all humans facing the existential void, 138 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, on intersectionality, 3 critical observer, spectator becoming, 145 critical voice, artist’s voice as, 141 cruelty, Christian persecutors, 101 cultural life of Western Europe, hope for a better life, 106 cultural studies, diversity of methodologies, 3; intersection of text and culture, 2 Cunningham, Merce, Mink Colbert rejects postmodern style of, 150 Daly, Mary, victimhood, and sinfulness of women justified by Genesis, 47n43 Dan, Joseph, Shi’ur Qomah and anthropomorphic God, 77 Dance, everyday life and, 147; role in Jewish cultural and literary texts, 137 dancer, and Ellis Island, 145 dancer bodies, diversity and, 147 dancer portraying Yezierska, performing a solo punctuated by a scream, 140 dancers, embodying human power, 146; for Mink Colbert and reflective approach, 150; circles, 146; representing range of human feelings and, 150

177

dance styles, Mink Colbert eclectic, 145 dance vocabulary, Mink Colbert dismantling of, 146 Daniélou, Alain, persecution of sexuality, 30 King David, Epstein anti-hero and, 128 David, divine spirit and, 96; jubilation and City of David, 137 Dead Sea Scrolls, expressing messianic beliefs, 131n1 Death, by choice, 60–65; refusing spiritual meaning, 125; not suicide, 65 deceased, suicide not murderer, 65 defamiliarizing, reality, 144 delusions, miracles as, 100 Derrida, Jacques, mystical narrative, 131 desert, as Jewish ontology, 114 desperation, immigration and, 140 devequt, human-divine connection, 14 dialectic, Abraham with God, 34 diasporic experience, ballet and, 138 diasporic Jews, Chabon’s topics, 122; defining their identity, 111; ultrareligious Jews and modern life, 122 diasporic United States Jews, apocalyptic-redemptive narrative of, 17 Dijkstra, Bram, floating woman, 149 Diotima, superior love in Plato Symposium, 59–60 disempowered women, performance of “weightless woman,” 149 displeasure, of Sarah with Ishmael, 39 diversity, Mink Colbert’s choreography and, 145; friendship and, 106 Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri), 129 “Divine Command Morality,” or DCM, doctrine of, 20n22 divine communion, experience of, 71 divine control, challenges to the authority and totality of, 2

178

Index

divine creation, as the standard by which all human works are measured, 99; sublime nature of, 100 divine interdiction, Eve’s rejection of as typical of heroic refusal, 31 divine powers, holding back lifedenying, 12 divine presence (kavvanah), ways to experience, 73 divine promise, that Abraham will father nations, 33 divine realm, mysticism travel to, 73 Dome of the Rock, blowing up, 121 doubts, ironists perspectives, 10 Douglas, Mary, understanding divine power, 12; ritual contagion, 14 dove, cleft of a rock and Song of Songs, 58 Duncan, Isadora, imitated emotional responsiveness, 150 Durkheim, Emile, gods as projection of reality, 22n45 earthbound narratives, dealing with uncertainties and ambiguities, 157 earthly consequence, human responsibility for, 14 earthly existence and the body, linked to the spiritual and divine, 1 earthly experience, ironic illumination, 11; knowable, 2 earthly life, stories descriptive of, 5 earthly struggles with life, focus on, 4 the ecstatic, experiencing divine presence, 81 Egyptian princess/priestess, Hagar as, 48n52 eighteenth century, dawned on a promising future for Jews in Europe, 98 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, circumcision and male submission, 35 Ein Sof [mystical representation of the divine], finite creation and, 126 Eliezer, death and liberty, 62

Elior, Rachel, Hekhalot derived from heikhal, 76 “Ellis Island” scene, Mink Colbert’s ballet, 140–14, 145 “El Shaddai,” feminine attributes of God, 45n23 Enlightenment philosophers, wonder and, 98 epic ballet, art as public and private history, 145 epic of Gilgamesh, goddess Ishtar, 6 epic theater, Mink Colbert’s ballet as, 144–145 “Epistles on Martyrdom” (Maimonides), response to rabbinic advice about martyrdom, 63–64 Epstein, redemption, 115; Israel and redemption, 128; cult scam, 128; successful capitalist, 117–118; thirdperson narrative of, 125 Eros, invoking, 59 erotic imagery, Kabbalah mysticism and, 85 eroticism, on earth love, 74; in heaven, 74 erotic passion, sacred texts and, 56 eschatology: earthly divine purpose, 21n44; suffering and Messiah, 87 ethical message, Jewish community and, 141 ethical standard, theater and, 102 evangelical Christian community, Jesus and parousia, 122 Eve, agency and particularity, 31; deceived and transgressor, 44n17; first human subject, 28–32; sexual pleasure and children, 31; as temptress, 29–30; Augustine and inferiority of, 44n17; death from disobedience, 30; ethical legacy of wisdom, 44n14; seeking sustenance, knowledge, and companionship against divine orders, 12 everyday experience, radical immersion in, 2

Index

everyday human experience, God and, 72 everyday life, Jewish literary illumination, 157; rabbinic intertextuality, 53 everydayness, Mink Colbert’s ballet and, 146 everyday sacred, Jewish literary illumination emphasizing, 16 evil, Eve and, 44n14 Exodus narrative, questioning as fulfillment narrative, 113 experience, individuality, 7; “Lucky Life,” 143 explosion, mysticism and God of, 79 Ezekiel, supernal realm, 73 false messiahs, long history of, 118 fear, portrait of fear in Song of Songs, 58 Federal District of Sitka, Jews in charge, then reverting to Alaska State control, 119 female, nekeiva and human transcendence, 28 feminine sexuality, as controlling in patriarchal terms, 30 feminist literary discursive strategies, removing the victimhood of biblical women figures, 47n43 feminist scholars, misogyny in the Talmud, 22n54 fertility, Sarah and, 37 festivals and rituals, as codes, 144 Fiddler on the Roof, portrayal of shtetl, 122 Fine, Lawrence, on dualism as nuanced, 89n8 finite, existing within the infinite, 91n40 finite numbers, infinite reality of God and, 82 First Crusades, onslaught of, 63 first-generation authors, Shoah survivors, 113

179

Fishbane, Song of Songs and human/ divine bridge, 58–59; Song of Songs Rabba and intertextuality, 57 Fonrobert, Charlotte, halakhic observances, 22n53 food, eating and purity, 15 Forest Dark (Krauss), and Krauss 111– 112; theme of disruption, 124 Foster, Susan, George Balanchine and neoclassical, 148–149; on objectivist choreographic style, 150 Frazier, Brad, contingency and Richard Rorty, 10, 142 free will, Eve and, 32 Freund, Richard A., Greek and apocalyptic, 107n14; Stoicism and apocalyptic, 96 friendship, Lessing and social justice, 105 “fringes,” Jewish wedding canopy and, 123 Frye, Northrop, on irony, 142 full body, life experience, 147 gap, between ideal and real, 10 Garden of Eden, continuation, 32 Garden of Eden story, agency and autonomy of Eve, 32 Gemara, rabbinic discussions of biblical law, 52 Genesis, male dominance, 37 Genesis Rabbah, on suicide, 64 Gerald Stern poem, “Lucky Life,” 142 Germany, urban ghettos, 94 Gevurah or Din, kabbalah and divine dynamic, 91n45 Gilman, Sander, critique of Mendelssohn, 109n4 Giselle (1841), romantic balletic narrative, 145 God, Jewish mysticism with human attributes, 35–36, 39, 40–42, 57, 67n12, 74–75, 77, 79–81; concept of 20n22, 38, 48n53, 54, 73, 75, 78–79, 82, 85, 113, 123

180

Index

gods, attributing all of reality to, 12; attributing life-affirming and lifedenying events to, 12 God’s body, measurements of the parts of, 77 God’s wrath, prophet advocate, 34 Goldwyn, Samuel, AnziaYezierska and, 139 goodness of divine creation, suicide denying, 69n36 grace, interpretation in Mink Colbert choreography, 147–148; movement, vocabulary performing values, 146 Graetz, Naomi, husband terrorizing wife, 22n52 Graybill, Rhiannon, body and prophecy, 46n30 Great Depression scene, Mink Colbert choreography, 146 Great House (Krauss), trauma and Shoah, 124 Green, Arthur, on Akiva, 56; Jewish observance lacking spirituality, 136n80; on transcendence, 22n46 Gruber, Mayer I., Hebrew Bible and dancing, 137 Hagar, Sarah and, 37 Halakhah, extreme application of, 22n52; Judaism of, 158 “halakhic” (legal) midrashic (exegetical) commentaries, Exodus through Deuteronomy, 66n3 Halperin, David J., anthropomorphism and Hekhalot tradition, 77 Handelman, Susan, rabbinic vs logos, 53 hands, ten fingers and Ten Sefirot, 82 Hanokh [Enoch], taken by God, 73 Haredi Jews, Israeli politics and, 122 Hasidism, critique of historical, 120–122 “Haskalah,” Jewish Enlightenment, 106n2 Hebraic, multiplicity of significations, 52

Hebrew Bible, male central, 30; dancing, 137; paratactic nature, 6; writerly text filled with contradictions, 7 Hebrew Bible portraits, humanity of, 27 Hegel, ironic moment, 20n24 hegemonic environment, women and oppression, 47n41 heikhalot, heavenly sanctuaries in mystical writings, 76 Hekhalot, or Palace, mysticism, included Merkavah mysticism, 72, 76–79 Hellner-Eshed, Melila, union of soul and Holy One as sexual, 85 Heraclius, Patriarch, representing the Pope, and the Knights Templar, 104 hero, attributes, 100 heroic character, in Jewish literary illumination not grand, 8 heroism, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Mendelssohn, 100, 102 Hesed, “love” and divine mercy, 91n45 historical context, presenting a story of, 144 historical suicide events, documenting, 62 A History of Love (Krauss), trauma and Shoah, 124 Hod, kabbalah and “majesty” of God, 91n45 Hokhmah, kabbalah and “wisdom” or primordial idea of God, 91n45 holiness, purity laws and, 23n58 Holocaust. See Shoah Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben), critiquing sacred and profane categories, 3 Horsley, Richard A., on the Bar Kokhba Revolt, 88n5 host communities, opportunity for Jewish involvement with, 98 hullin (literally, profaned or non-sacred) purity, focused on the individual, 15

Index

human, asserting responsibility for earthly matters, 36; God warning against eating from the Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil, 29; offering life experience to the individual, 29 human, adam, text continuing to use with the word woman, Isha, 29 human agency, attempting to overcome even the worst, 105 human autonomy, rabbis promoting, 52 human beings, challenging divine power, 12; sustaining cosmic balance by honoring God, 88 human body, experiencing states of affairs contacting death regularly, 12–13 human characters, agency and individuality, 27 human condition, portraits of, 157 human dimension, Eve as dynamic, 29 human emotions, God’s commitment to Israel and, 59 human experience, God complexity, 27; Jewish literary illumination particularity of, 7 human experiences, acknowledging multiple, 53 human figures, enmeshed in prickly relationships, 42 human functions, human responsibility and, 27 human/adam, to till the soil/adama, 28 human intimate activity, link to universe, 85 humanism, schlemiel and empathy, 117 humanitarian sensibility, Maimonides and, 64 humanity, responsibility for, 16, 102; defending against God’s cruel judgments, 34; kavvanah, 87 humankind, portrait of, 2; making in our image, 28 human responsibility, belief in by both Mendelssohn and Lessing, 102

181

humans, God promising benefits of divine approval, 35 human stories, raw parodying mythic closure, 42 human story, Mink Colbert telling of, 145 human works, wonder and, 100 humor, schlemiel tradition and, 117 humorless treatises, parody and Eve’s birth, 47n43 humorous anecdotes, dark humor, 143 Hungry Hearts (Yezierska), Samuel Goldwyn and, 139 Husband, fulfilling all his wife’s sexual needs (onah), 53; unconditional love for in the face of challenges, 55 idealization, resistance to, 142 ideal love, in Hellenistic context as without body or passions, 60 Idel, Moshe, absence of metaphysics in biblical and rabbinic Judaism, 5; critique of Gershom Scholem on Lurianic kabbalism, 107n16; protohalakhic practices, 108n20 identification compulsion, individual struggle against, 152n8 identity, of Landsman as a Jew in Chabon, 123 identity construction, as an ongoing process, 124 identity-free dancer motion, devoid of narrative content and historical attachment, 150 illumination, acknowledging irony in earthly life, 1–2 image of God, Biblical word that man was created in, 83; humankind created in, 28 imagery, Jewish literary illumination using, 5 imagery concept, as the product of a specifically Jewish mode of thought, 5

182

Index

Imitatio Dei, act of, 54; as the earthly imitation of the divine way, 14 immensity, of the sublime, 99 “Immigrant Eyes,” lyrics of Guy Clark’s reflecting on immigrant life, 151 Immigration Act of 1924, making mass immigration from Eastern Europe impossible, 139 immigration enforcement officer, USA entry approval by, 145 immigration struggles, better life and, 151–152 impurity, associated with death, 13; rituals prescribing action to remove, 14 individual, engaging robustly with historical and cultural contexts, 151; rise of the importance of, 23n59 the individual, as the site of decisionmaking about ethical choices and ritual observance, 52 individual and collective Jewish experience, from emigration to transformation, 139–141 individuality, Abraham’s assertion of, 34 individualized experience, focus on sustaining the presence of the sacred in everyday life, 15 inner life, of both God and humanity, 88 integrity, retaining a sense of our, 116 intellectual Jew, German salons and, 93 interactions, of dancers emphasizing movement, 150 intersectionality, identifying combinations of identities, 3 intertextuality, actualized in the texts of Merkavah and Kabbalah mysticism, 75 intimacy, married couple and positive cosmic outcome, 88 ironic mode, minimizes expectations of perfect outcome, 142 ironic perspective, nurturing a variety of literary strategies, 8; reveals

disguised logical or factual weakness, 9 ironic view of reality, required to deliver a parody, 11 ironists, individual and communal advancement, 10; importance of 10 irony, as epistemology not ontology, 10; laughter, 9–10; Mink Colbert’s ballet and, 142–143; essential facet of Jewish literary illumination, 8–11; Sarah’s laughter, 48n53 Isaac, birth of, 40; Rebecca and, 49n61; born after Abraham circumcised, 46n30; possible Philistine paternity, 48n53; absence after binding episode at Moriah, 42 Isaiah, God’s call, 12 Isha, word for woman, 29 Israel, in bible, 58; creation of the State of, 17; political reality, 129–130 Israelite, designation referring to the preexilic period, 18n3 Jackson, Naomi, on two traditions of dance in the twentieth century, 137–138 Jacob, intimate struggle with God, 45n24 Jameson, Fredric, on cultural systems, 3 Jankelevitch, Vladimir, on the ironic conscience and plurality in reality, 9–10 Jerusalem, as home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, 104 “Jerusalem” (Mendelssohn), defending Jews against anti-Semitism, 99; on losing the freedom to think, 103 Jew, as chosen by history, 113 “Jewish,” getting beyond the fuzziness of the term, 19n3; using the word, 18–19n3 Jewish community, perpetual state of imbalance and, 94 Jewish cultural life, seventeenth century, 95

Index

Jewish diaspora, as beleaguered minority, 72 Jewish emancipation, Europe and, 98 Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), defense of human agency, 18; wonder and, 93–106 Jewish existential reality, not fitting into a triumphal narrative, 112 Jewish experience, on the eve of modernity, 94–95; permanent liminality, 114 Jewish God, as transcendent and immanent, 72 Jewish historical narrative, perpetual ambiguity and liminality of, 112, 115 Jewish identity, courage, departures, and arrivals, 18; misplaced centrality of the Shoah, 111–131 Jewish intellectual life, emerged in urban settings, 93 Jewish life, maintaining identity, 51 Jewish liminality, schlemiel and, 113 Jewish literary illumination: characteristics, 4, 157; life-affirming sacred, 16; emphasis on the body, 1; sexuality and, 54–55; Mink Colbert’s ballet and, 140; narratives, 157; Nathan and, 105; no escape, 157–158 Jewish mystical texts, development of, 52, 72 Jewish mysticism, caring and punishing God, 72; experiences, 72; spiritual practice, 95; Judaism, 71 Jewishness, relating to dance, 138 Jewish people, sexually arousing God and, 57 Jewish rabbinic tradition, laws governing communal life central, 95 Jewish ritual law, impurity as natural, temporary, and managed through cleansing rituals, 13 Jewish rituals, focusing on embodied conditions of life, 11 Jewish survival, foundational to identity, 111

183

Jewish texts, sanctity of life as core, 4 Jewish thought, pictorial and abstract concepts, 5 Jewish tradition and reality, Chabon and Krauss, 112 Jews, Shoah to State of Israel narrative arc, 114, 128; alternate history, 120; Christianity and, 61,63, 75; persecution and immigration, 9, 106, 4, 112, 139, 141 The Jews: A Comedy in One Act (Lessing), 103 Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard), irony and doubt, 9 Josephus, Flavius, chooses Roman life, 62; destruction of Second Temple, 118; ignores Sarah, 37 journey, of Krauss and Nicole through hell and out in Forest Dark, 129 The Joys of Yinglish (Rosten), schlemiel, 113 Rabbi Judah Priest (Judah Ha-Levi), Mishnah written by, 52 Judaism, critiqued in Nathan the Wise, 105; preserved by rabbis, 51; rational religion of Mendelssohn, 105; threat to Christian interests, 72 Jules Epstein, death wish in Forest Dark and, 112; seeking the escape of suicide, 115 Justin Martyr, “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” 18 Kabbalah, God as immanent and knowable, 80; in Forest Dark, 126; messianic elements, 96; Aramaic, 80 Kabbalah mysticism: conceptual shift to, 79; today, 72; shift in Jewish theology, 80 Kabbalah tradition, incorporating imagery of the body, 86; versions of, 81 Kabbalistic portrait of God in the Zohar, divine emotional, cognitive, and dynamic attributes, 83

184

Index

Kabbalist practice, ascetic tradition in, 60 Kafka, Franz, fabricated claim about, 127–128; ownership of the papers of, 135n74 Katz, Steven T., mirroring divine behavior, 85 Kavod, divine presence, 14; proximity to God, 93; special prayers, 95 kavvanah, state of readiness for, 14 Kelepecz, Dolly, on Mink Colbert’s choreography, 146–147 Keneseth Israel, in the Zohar, 91n45 Kether Elyon, divine “supreme crown,” 91n45 Kierkegaard, Soren: accepting both a transcendent God and an immanent or natural God, 21n33; on irony overthrowing the pagan worldview, 9; setting the limits on Hegel’s wisdom, 20n24 killing oneself, Augustine about, 69n36 “kingship” of the Jews, claimed by many under Roman oppression, 118 Kingsmill, Edmee, rabbinic discouraging asceticism, 60 Klausner, giving mystical Jewish explanations, 125–126 Klawans, Jonathan, on dissatisfaction with the Temple and its priests as expressed by rabbis, 22n49; on a man having sexual contact with a menstruant, 13 knowable God, seen as comforting, 77 Krauss, Nicole, 111; abandoning the Shoah as a central literary topic, 124, 127; on being Jewish, 157; braided realism of, 116; interrogating State of Israel, 124–125; personal journey, 124 Kugel, James K., on laughter as a sign of joy, 45n26 Landsman, Meyer (Yiddish Policemen’s Union), successful, 117, 120; earthly

redemption of, 130; wandering Jew, 123; on insanity and cruelty of the messianic rebbe, 112, 115; maturing, 123; trampled dreams, 122 Laocoon (Lessing), comparing diverse mediums of art and effects on the viewer, 101; pity and the tragic stage, 102; psychic and physical pain displayed by, 101–102 Lapin, Hyim, on martyrdom, 62 La Sylphide (1832), romantic balletic narrative, 145 laugh, of Abraham signaling important shifts in mythic storytelling, 34; building on irony, 116; coming in many forms, 10; as disrespectful of power, 34; identifying the incongruity of the situation, 116; ironic view producing, 10; responding to many needs, 117; type of expressed by Abraham and Sarah, 45n26 law, any belief in miracles must be founded on, 100 laws, enforcing to avoiding contact with death, 13 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, on rejecting the illusory, 157–158 leniency, in not defining a death as a suicide allowing comfort for the living, 65 Leon, Moses de, published the Zohar, 83 Lerman, Liz, feeling and thinking in embodied reality, 153n28 Lesser Holy Assembly, Zohar and union of God with Shekhinah mirrored in sexual union of husband and wife, 86 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, critiquing the Enlightenment project, 102–103; Nathan the Wise and social justice, 17, 94; Mendelssohn and social justice, 101 L’esthetique de Moses Mendelssohn (Meier), 99

Index

“Letter from America to Yisrulik” (Aleichem), 143 Levitical rituals, as life-affirming, 16 life, blood as the archsymbol of, 13; commitment to, 64 life-affirming divine, as sacred and available for human use, 16 life-affirming divine powers, purity and, 12 life-affirming force, produced by ironic texts, 10 life-denying forces, disempowering, 2 life-denying sacred, firewall against, 16 life on earth, central to Jewish literary illumination, 12 life transformations, protagonists in Forest Dark, 126 light, as a metaphor for God’s creative power, 82, 91n40 lightness, grace associated with, 148 limen, Latin for “threshold,” 116 liminal conditions, definition 115 liminality, angst aligning with, 115; permanent state of, 116; producing the parodic, 116 literacy, democratized the ghetto, 98 literary scholarship, generational Shoah writers, 113 literary traditions, avoiding, 8 live or die, religious purity and, 61 Lonowitz, Harris, on ben Ozer’s testimony documenting his reports on Zvi, 97 loss of self, to experience God’s love, 14 love, God and Israel, 56; values and choreography, 141 loving father, God as, 78 loving maiden, as allegory in Song of Songs, 74 “Lucky Life” poem (Stern), suggesting ironic conditions of life, 142–143 Luria, Isaac, Lurianic Kabbalah mysticism and, 86 Lurianic Kabbalah, apocalypse and, 86–87

185

Lurianism, Nathan of Gaza, Zevi’s prophet, and, 107n16 Luzzatto, Rabbi Moses Hayim, the body and, 88 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, sublime and, 98 magic, Shi’ur Qomah used for, 79 magnitude, of the sublime, 99 Maimonides, Moses, survival over martyrdom, 63; opposition to abstinence and self-denial, 68n33; no suicide with no witnesses, 70n50 Maimonides’s family, chose exile to Morocco, 63; as crypto-Jew, 63 Mainz Jewry, 1096 communal martyrdom by, 63 male, called zachar, suggesting human transcendence, 28 male body, circumcision inscribing divine power onto, 35 male dancers, performing the ethereal, 149 male figures, humiliating Sarah, 34–35 males, requirement to circumcise all, 35 Malkhuth, kabbalah and “kingdom” of God, 91n45 Man, primal formation of, 83; Ish as word for individual, 29 man and woman, primal creation by splitting in half an undifferentiated being, 44n14 marble statue, depicting the hero Laocoon trying to warn his fellow Trojans of impending death, 101 marital intercourse, receiving considerable attention in the Talmud, 54 marital intimacy, imitating divine creation and pleasure, 65 martyrdom, honor of gripped the early Christian world, 69n36; sanctifying the name of God as appropriate, 63; in the Talmud, 60–65; views of persecuted Jews on, 63

186

Index

Masada, survivors dying an honorable death by killing themselves and their families, 62 materiality, Krauss’s self-reflections about misplaced trust in, 129 material redemption, Epstein’s belief in, 128 material success, turning down the offer of, 141 Matt, Daniel C., on Shekinah becoming a bride who is called God, 86 measurements, of the parts of God’s body, 77 mediator, Abraham serving as to assuage God’s wrath, 36 Meier, Jean-Paul, on Mendelssohn’s treatise on the sublime, 99 Mendelssohn, Moses: arguing against Christian doctrine “considering miracles to be an infallible criterion of truth,” 100; beginning with the works of creation attributed to God, 99; bringing wonder outside its theological context representing it as a sensual experience, 99; Enlightenment aspirations expressed by, 93; German urban salons enjoyed by, 139; joining philosophical language examining the human experience from the inside out, 99– 100; joining philosophical writings about sublime works of art, 99; never abandoned his religious beliefs, 98–99; representing the hope for a different kind of future for Jews, 98; voiced Jewish human rights as social justice, 93; work of, 17 menstruation, carried tremendous consequences for women’s communal leadership, 13 Merkavah, or Chariot, mysticism, focused on the Divine Chariot, 71–72 Merkavah mysticism: intertextual reading of Song of Songs, 73–76;

short for ma’aseh merkavah (Work of the Chariot), 73 Merkavah tradition, embraced an intertextual and allegorical reading of the passion of God and his people, 75 Mesopotamian myth, behavior of Abraham falling down and groveling before God befitting, 34 Messiah: as a human being who will change earthly history, 131n1; not to be found in external realities but in life-giving force within us, 131; theurgic ability to hasten the arrival of, 81 messiah, witnessing a divine promise of an earthly, 74 messiahs, suggested in Exodus and 1 Samuel, 96 messianic movement: grew out of existing Jewish communities, 93; of Sabbatai Zvi attracted rural Jewish communities, 93; of Zvi exerted considerable influence on the state of Jewish religious institutions, 97–98 messianic narratives, growing in intensity after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, 96 messianic promise, failure of, 106 messianic redemption, belief in as a part of Jewish history for millennia, 131n1; mystical tradition of Rabbi Isaac Luria promising, 87; solving earthly misery, 111 messianic time, despair fed the fire of hope for, 96 messianism, as part of the Jewish experience from the earliest recorded texts, 96; religious wonder and, 95–98 Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Storm), 3 metamodernist theory, recognizing lived individual humanity, 4; reintroducing everyday human experience

Index

emphasizing conceptualization of the human body as sacred, 3 Meyers, Carol, on Eve’s creation as secondary, 44n17 midrash, reading from the abstract to concrete, 57 Midrashic numerology, numbers coming from, 78 Midrashic tradition, in the Talmudic period, 67n12 Milbauer, Asher Z., on third-generation representations of inheriting the Holocaust trauma, 124 military and intelligence-gathering, of Israel as superhuman and trustworthy, 127 minimalist style, of the Hebrew Bible, 6 Mink Colbert, Margot, ballet TRANSIT(ION)): ^Emigration Transformation^, 137–152; rejecting apocalyptic-messianic narrative, 18; choreographer critiques by, 144–145, 147–149; epic theater and, 144–145. minor tractates (Masekhtot Ketanot), from the Tannaitic period dealing with topics not existing in the Mishnah, 67n14 miracles, suspicion of, 100; Mendelssohn and, 100 miracles and faith, Mendelssohn critique of, 101 Miriam, as prophet and leader, 137 Mishnah, everyday life and, 52; tannaitic period and, 66n3; part of Jerusalem (Yerushalmi) and Babylonian (Bavli) Talmuds, 66n3 misogyny, cultural mechanics enabling, 154n36 modern dance movement, specifically anti-grace, 150 modernism, emphasizing the collective experience, 4 modernity, history of Jewish experience on the eve of, 94–95

187

monetization of the arts, Mink Colbert rejects, 141 monism, identifying polytheistic religions and Hindu views, 89n9 Mopsik, Charles, on Imitatio Dei, 54; use of Aramaic in Jewish mysticism, 80 moral compass, Shoah to State of Israel narrative arc, 112 morality, “pure” and “impure” not reflecting on, 14 mother of all humanity, Eve as, 31 movement styles, Corvino and heteroglossia of, 147 Muffs, Yochanan, on ancient Israel made God its creator, 5 multiplicity, sublime and, 99 Muslim Empire, functional relationships with Jews, 104 Muslim sect, the Almohads, Jews and persecution, 63 mysteries, mysticism and, 74 mystical human experience, appealing to, 111 mystical journey, bible and, 73 mystical prayers, diversification of traditions, 74 mystical tradition, development of, 71–72, 88, 89n6 mysticism, covering many human experiences, 17; kavod, 95 mystics, rejection of apophatic or negative theology, 87 mythmaking tradition, fullness of, 67n18 mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, motivation of divine action, 6 “Mythos of Winter,” Northrop Frye and ironic structure as, 152n11 Naditu religious woman, possibility of Sarah as, 47n49 Nancy, Jean-Claude, on modern and postmodern dance as detachment, 144

188

Index

Nancy, Jean-Luc, on laughter’s visceral and spontaneous nature, 46n26 Napoleon, introduced citizenship for Jews, 101 narratives, of classical ballets not describing daily human life, 148 narratives of romance, critique of, 142 narrator, relentlessly providing reflections, 140, 144 Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatei Zvi prophet, 97, 107n16 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 17, social justice, 103–105; historical context, 103 nazarite, role of in Jewish tradition, 68n33 Nazi regime, murdered six million Jews and seven million others deemed undesirable, 131n3 Nazis, shtetls annihilated by, 122 Neusner, priestly law-code, 22n47 New York City subway scene, TRANSIT(ION): Emigraton Transformation, 151 “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” TRANSIT(ION): Emigraton Transformation, 146 Nicole (Forest Dark), agency, 112, 115, 127, 129, 130 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Birth of Tragedy, 45n25, stories antidote to loneliness, 4 Novak, William, on parody, 11 obedience, rejection of in favor of tree choice, 126 objectification, of the female body in Las Vegas, Nevada, 141 Odyssey (Homer), explaining every detail of godly adventures, 6 Okediji, Moyo, on Jewish literary illumination, 1 Okidiji, introduced metamodernism, 3 “on Miracles” (Mendelssohn), as delusions, 100

“On Tolerance” (Mendelssohn), indicting Christendom for persecution of the Jews, 101 oppression, lack of refinement as a pretext for further, 101 oral law, Pharisees work mitigated harsher biblical law, 89n7 Origen, and allegory, 56–57; Song of Songs, 89n13 the Other, humanizing as the antidote, 105 the ought, versus the is as ideal vs. real, 11 The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (Jackson), 137 Pale of Settlement (Eastern Europe), 117, 139 Palestinian Tannaim, as authors of the Mishnah, 68n31 Pandora, compared to Eve, 30 Paradox, irony as the form of, 9 Pardes (orchard or garden), telling of four rabbis attempting to journey to the supernal realm, 79 Parody, as a comedic strategy in Jewish literary illumination, 11; insight, 116 parousia (second coming of Christ), hastening, 121 Passover seder’s beloved prayer, “Next year in Jerusalem,” 127 patriarchal work, Hebrew Bible recognized as, 30 peddlers, Jews inside Christian communities, 95 Penchansky, David, critique of biblical unitary narrative, 7 performers, emotional distance and, 144 perspectives, importance of multiple, 7 phallic imagery, transmitting intensity of the biblical episode, 57 phallus, power of, 35; Yesod, and Shekhinah, 85 pharaoh, accuses and rewards Abraham, 38

Index

Pharisees, not associated with Second Temple priesthood, 89n7 Philo of Alexandria, allegory introduced by, 74; compassion, 66n1; Sarah’s importance, 37; “laughter” as “a state of joy,” 45–46n26; use of metaphor and allegory for biblical interpretation, 18; disdain for the female, 44n14 philosophical replaces theology, 94 philosophic treatises, wonder and, 98 physical threat, martyrdom or survival choice, 62 pity, makeup of, 108–109n37; requiring mixed emotions, 109n37; aim of tragic stage, 102 Plaskow, Judith, on women identified with nature, body, the material realm, 30 plays, Lessing and plight of Jews, 102; friendship with Moses Mendelssohn, 103 pleasures of life, neglecting of, 102 pogroms, persecutions of Jewish communal life, 139 political leaders, issued edicts with religious justification, 15 political situation, theater clarifying, 144 postmodernism, emphasizing the collective experience, 4 power, political use of the sacred, 3 prayers: Landsman understanding the importance of, 123; practitioners of esoteric influencing the outcome of divine action on earth, 78 prejudice, oppressing Jews and frustrating civil emancipation, 101 presence of divine, semblance of, 73 pride, infecting all religions, 105 priesthood, concentrated power in a group of men, 13 priestly law-code, purity and impurity, 22n47

189

priests, adapted biblical laws for everyday practice prior to 70 CE, 51; sacrd as political, 15 priests of Ba’al, hopping dance and, 137 princess/priestess, Sarah as, 39, 48n52 “profaning,” relationship with “using,” 16 Prometheus, Eve compared to, 32 pseudepigrapha, works included in, 107n13 purification rituals, for men, 13 purity, concept of, 12; individual decisions, 13, 61–62; Josephus critiqued, 62 Quintilian, on “irony,” 8 rabbi: priestly replacement, 14; weakened authority, 98, 106 rabbinic centers, in northern Israel and in Babylon, 52 rabbinic Judaism, documented in the Talmud, 72; Pharisees as foundation of, 89n7; resisted mysticism, 96 rabbinic literature, chronology and geography, 66n3 rabbinic tradition, connecting familiar texts, 57; incorporating eros and the (earthly) sacred, 60; two strains, 87 rabbinic traditions, debate on strict versus more lenient ones, 20n22 rabbinic works, divided into two periods, 66n3 rabbinic writings, traditional arguing messianic, apocalyptic, and utopic visions, 95 rabbis, adapting the law to maintain communal peace, 52; afterlife and, 71; marital intimacy as sacred time, 54; virginity not superior to carnal knowledge, 60; Eve, 43n5; live when possible, 63; Exodus and Song, 58 Rachel, as ideal wife, 55 Rambert, Marie, 153n25

190

Index

Rachamim, the “compassion” of God, 91n45 Rashi, on coition, 67n12; Isaac the spitting image of Abraham to silence scoffers, 37, 41, 47n47, 48n53 rationality, historic terror occurring in the name of, 103 reality, wishful thinking and, 134n52; defamiliarizing, 144; distancing ourselves from crushing, 116 reason, ability to solve this-world problems, 111; Landsman as the voice of, 123 rebbe, with charismatic leadership in Chabon, 115, 117, 120–121; Tsaddik Ha-Dor and, 121 Rebekah, Isaac and, 41–42; Sarah’s tent 42 rebellion, of Eve against predetermined destiny and authority, 30 redemption, remaining a journey within the human heart, 130; serving the demands of hope, 126 red heifer, birth of perfectly formed as announcing the messianic age, 121 Reformation of the Catholic church, early modern period and, 94 Regev, Eyal, “non priestly purity,” 15, 23n59 religare, uniting the human and divine, 16 religio, maintaining a scrupulous separation of the human and divine, 16 religious and moral law, as one and the same, 20n22 religious tolerance, Lessing’s play advocates, 104 representation, detachment of, 144 responsibility, burden coming with choice, 32 resurrection, of the dead taking place in the Land of Israel for the righteous buried there, 97 reversion, in Chabon, 119

Richard the Lionhearted, celebrity and bravery as legendary, 103–104 Ricoeur, Paul, Hellenism and Christian patristics, 52 ritual logic, designating items and experiences as sacred, 15 ritual observance, written tradition and, 51–52 ritual practice, shifting to mystical experience, 79 rituals, adapted to everyday life, 15; managing impurity, 14 road map, goal of illumination to provide, 2 Rojtman, Betty, Kabbalist rejects fallen humanity concept, 81 romance, dominant mythology of Western civilization, 8; irony as a parody of, 142 Roman conquest of Jerusalem, dispersed Jews throughout the Roman Empire, 72 Romans, persecuted Jews as part of military campaigns, 62 Rorty, Richard, on ironists, 10; Mink Colbert as ironist, 142 Rosenberg, Roy, human and divine holiness, 85 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, on producers of alternate histories, 118 Rosenstock, Bruce, on Lessing’s goal in Nathan the Wise and German religious tolerance, 102 Rosten, Leo, schlemiel a social misfit, 113 Roth, Philip, critique Jewish community Holocaust obsession, 114 Ruth, identity exemplifying intersectionality, 3 Sabbatai Zvi, converted to Islam, 97, 199; Polish rabbis and, 97; messianic movement 17, 81, 93, 96–97, 107n16 Sabbath, intercourse within marriage encouraged on, 54

Index

the sacred, gods and Roman jurists, 15; everyday use, 16; finding, 142; in hearts, 130 Sabbath observance (shomer shabbos), maintaining, 120–121 Sagi, Avi, against the doctrine of “Divine Command Morality” or DCM, 20n22 Saladin, Muslim history and, 104 Salvation, mythology of collective and individual, 127; shift in Jewish hopes of, 17 salvific experience, of being with God, 74; Chabon and Krauss dismantling, 112 Samuel, Saul and, 61 Sarah, Abraham claims as sister, 6; age no detraction, 40; divine purpose and, 37, 39, 42; denying laughing, 37, 39; as entrepreneur, negotiator, ambassador, 36–42; as an equal partner with Abraham, 39, 41; exits narrative on her own terms, 42; folded into male identity, 37, 47n45; Hagar and, 41; King Abimelech sojourn, 38–40, 48n53 Sarah/Princess, as the new name of Sarai, 34 Saul, death of as a permitted suicide, 68n34; as a hero and guiltless, 61; bible expresses no judgment against Saul for his suicide, 61; suicide of unsound mind, desolation, and hopelessness not suicide, 64 scapegoats, Jewish communities served as, 94 Schlegel, Fredrich, irony, 9, 20n24; 9; Jena Romantic movement and, 20n27 schlemiel, in Alaska, 118–123; as universal, 131; facing realities, 123 the schlemiel, in Chabon and Krauss stories, 113; as pariah, 117; Israel in Forest Dark, 124–130; Landsman as (Yiddish Policemen’s Union),

191

120; linking with the parodic, 113, 116–117 Schneider, Tammi J., no connection between Abraham and Isaac until Abraham’s finding of a proper wife for Isaac, 49n61; on Sarah, 37; on Sodom and Gomorrah as not righteous, 46n31; Sarah is afraid of Abraham, 48n57 Scholem, Gershom: apostasy and Zvi, 107n6; utopic messianic message and rabbinic tradition, 96, 107n17, 113; disagreement with Moshe Idel, 107n16; indictment of Mendelssohn, 109n44 Schopenhauer, Arthur, on laughter, 116 scream, performing catharsis, 140 second-generation authors, writing about pain at being raised by parents who never had a chance to learn how to be parents, 113 secrecy, of practitioners of the mystical journey, 79 Sefer Yetzirah, elaborating on the number ten as a sacred numerology of creation, 81; introducing the visualization of God’s attributes, 81 Sefirot, configuration of the ten, 85; copying the architecture of the male body, 85, 88, 91n45 self, emptying of all hope, 129 the self, as more or less an invention, 124 self-consciousness, of Abraham, 34 self-delusion, characterizing the schlemiel, 117 self-denigration, characterizing the schlemiel, 117 self-improvement, focusing on first, 126 self-reflective tone, recognizing the irony of both wanting and despising the new situation, 143 self-transcendence, inward journey leading toward, 136n80

192

Index

Semachot, addressing Aveilut (talmudic laws of death and mourning), 69n49; dating of, 70n49; on “No one is determined a suicide,” 64; treating the choice to die with compassion, 65 semen, release of considered a condition of impurity, 13 Sephardim tradition of Andalusia, advocating compromises as necessary to survive, 62 Sephirot, road to, 84–85 Sephiroth, power of exists and is active in man, 83 sex, man not initiating while drunk, 53 sexual activity, understood as essential, 54 sexual desire, Eve unleashing, 30 sexual imagery, aligned with divine power, 59 sexual intercourse: of Abraham with Sarah, 40; with a menstruant requiring severe consequences, 13 sexual intimacy: importance of to both spiritual and earthly life, 54; in the Talmud, 67n11 sexuality, Eve’s agency marking as positive, 31; surrounded with an aura of holiness, 85; in the Talmud, 53–60; treating as a life force within marriage, 65 sexual pleasure, requiring separation of each unit, 29 Shapiro, Marc, on punitive interpretations of suicide, 64 Shekinah, earthly realm of divine presence and, 85; female roles of, 92n47; Landsman’s ex-wife representing, 123 Shem, Israel Ball, 120 shibboleths, Chabon and Krauss disrupting the harmony of, 134n52; doing away with enabling transformations, 131; Krauss seeking to parody, 127; Nicole unburdened

herself of at least two, 129; Nicole unburdening herself of, 127; trampling, 113–114 Shi’ur Qomah, anthropomorphic God of, 76–79; became a theurgic text in the Hekhalot tradition, 76–77; intertextual work of verses of Song of Songs, 75–76 Shoah, references to, 138; as a dark catalyst, 114; in Israel’s national narrative, 114; linking to Israel, 114; alternative to Holocaust, 131n4; six million Jews and millions of others murdered, 118 shtetl, Jews seen as a romanticized way of life, 122 shtetls, Jews lived in organized around communal life, 139 sin, history of Eve introducing, 30; in a Jewish context meaning transgression, 22n50 Sitka Jewish life, Landsman (Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and dark sides of, 120 Sjoholm, Cecilia, embodied mind and image of human body in Lessing, 101–102 Slattery Report of 1939–1940, initiated by Harold L. Ickes, 119 Smith, Adam, on pity, 109n37 the snake, convincing Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 30 snake, seen as a phallic symbol and complement to the female, 31; Eve and, 30–31 social category, conceptualizing women as a, 154n36 social critique, Mink Colbert’s ballet acting as, 141 social justice, action as at the heart of, 100; event of in which estranged characters become a family, 103; hopes of salvation shifting to, 94; humanity expected to initiate, 94;

Index

Mendelssohn crying out for, 101; Moses Mendelssohn, Gottholm Lessing, wonder of, 98–106 social misfit, schlemiel as, 113, 132n8 Socrates, dialogue with Diotima, 59; used irony to get people to think, 8–9 Sodom and Gomorrah episode, when Abraham acts most admirably, 35 Soloveitchik, J.B., on the covenantal agreement requiring the egalitarian relationship suggested in a laugh, 35 Song of Songs, emotional language of, 58; as the Holy of Holies, 55; infusing texts with visceral meaning, 76; interpreting allegorically, 56; eroticism and God’s activity at the Sea of Reeds, 75 Song of Songs Rabba: comparing passion experienced by the lovers of Song of Songs with the passion between the Israelites and God, 57; illustrating rabbinic treatment of sexuality as having cosmic implications, 54–55; interweaving the Song of Songs with other portions of the Bible, 56; sheer panic of a people escaping Egyptian onslaught facing the Sea of Reeds, 58 soul, having no free will apart from [the body], 88 spiritual, ignoring to focus on only the material, 125 spiritual aspect of life, welcoming, 125 spiritual emptiness, of Epstein, 128 spirituality, dearth of in Jewish observance, 136n80 spiritual realm, Epstein closed himself off from, 128 “stages” (“existence-spheres”), of aesthetic, ethical, and religious lives, 21n33 “stammaitic layer,” of the Babylonian Talmud, 66n3

193

State of Israel, absence of references to, 138; Chabon and Krauss critiquing, 111–112; Israel as messianic fulfillment, 111, 113–114; diasporic Jews and, 126–127 Steinsaltz, Adin, on “the imaginary concept in Jewish thought,” 5 stereotypes, push back, 152n7 stories, midrash as narrative, 57; of Jewish literary illumination against the odds, 2, 3 storytelling, carrier of cultural messaging, 4 strength, demonstrating with verticality, 147 struggles, values of, 158 subjectivity, making laughter possible, 35 the sublime, discovered and expressed, 93; Mendelssohn on, 99; awe and fear 99; suggesting devekut, 108n20; wonder triggered by, 98 sublime sensibilities, as the heroic inspiring awe, 100 suffering, avoidance of profound, 65 suicide, as both a person and communal event, 61; narrowly defining, 65; Talmud and, 60–65; any other death, 64 superior love of God, Christian conception versus the rabbinic tradition, 60 supernal realm, Hekhalot image of, 76 survival, factors in Mink Colbert choreography, 138 Swan Lake (1896), as a romantic balletic narrative, 145 Sweeney, Marvin A., eschatology in history not cosmic, 12; “holy” as “sacred,” 21n44; on the snake’s advice, 31 Symposium (Plato), Phaedrus describes Eros, 59

194

Index

Talmuds, Mishnah and Gemara in, 19n4, 95; legal flexibility of, 52; sexuality, martyrdom, and suicide in, 51–65 Talmudic sources, suicides have a place in world to come, 64 Talmudic tradition, human body and, 65 Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), six suicides in, 61 tannaitic period, chronology, 66n3 Tel Aviv Hilton, as a beloved location for Nicole (Forest Dark), 127 Templar, becoming a friend of Nathan the Jew in Nathan the Wise, 106 temple, destruction of second temple necessitated the development of purity rituals for everyday use, 14 temple sanctuary, practitioners and ritual, 14 ten spheres, kabbalah and, 81 theater, German Enlightenment and social justice, 102, 144 theodicy, vindication of divine goodness and providence, 2 the theurgic, seeking to influence specific personal and social events, 81 theurgy, in the Shi’ur Qomah, 79 Third Crusade, final battle of between Sultan Saladin and England’s King Richard the Lionhearted ended, 103 third-generation authors, attuned to anxieties “that history will repeat itself,” 114, 124; interrogating the State of Israel, 114; writing about intergenerational passage of trauma, 113–114 Thirty Years War, resulted in the death of 20 to 30 percent of Europe’s population, 94 “Thou shalt not kill,” as including suicide, 69n36 tikkun, another Kabbalistic idea to improve the world, 126 tikkun olam, repairing the world of our own lives, 131

togetherness, of God and man as indispensable for the covenantal community, 35 tolerance: Lessing’s play calls for, 104; Mendelssohn asserting the importance of, 101 Torah, as a gift from God, 56; obligation to study, 55 torso, fights uncontrolled power, 147 Tosefta, 66n3 traditional values, unquestioningly accepted as normal, 116 tragedy, performed in the popular theater providing opportunities to teach social justice, 102 transactional relationship, between Sarah and Abraham, 36 transcendence, dwelling within immanence, 22n46 transgression, sin in a Jewish context meaning, 22n50 TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation ballet choreographer Margot Mink Colbert, 138; choreography in, 145–151; irony and, 142–143, 151; epic theater and, 144–145 trauma: intergenerational passage of, 113–114; of the Shoah, 114 Trebatius, Roman jurist on profane as formerly sacred or religious, 15–16 Tree of Knowledge, act of eating from, 30, 126 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, eating from, 5 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, infamous for a tragic fire in 1911, 152n5; photos and video clips of, 140 Trible, Phyllis, Eve as both theologian and translator, 31 triumphal narrative, rejection of, 112 “triumph of identity,” performing, 117 tropes, relating to the development of mankind, 21n43

Index

truth, depending on many elements, 104; Jewish literary illumination not seeking universal, 157 Tsaddick Ha-Dor, living human born as Messiah, 121 Tsar Alexander III, assassination of, 139 Tsimtsum, as compelling mythology, 126 Tudor, Anthony, based his New York choreography on the Cecchetti ballet technique, 153n25; as Mink Colbert’s primary choreographic mentor, 146 Tudoresque essence, torso as center of bodily control, 146 Turner, Victor, on liminality, 115–116 Tzimtzum, see Tsimtsum union of faiths, as not tolerance in Eureopean Enlightenment idea, 103 United States government, fictional Alaska refuge in Chabon, 112 unity of God, Kabbalists’ theosophy and theurgy, 80 universal human being, Eve as, 31 universe, as broken because of God’s initial contraction (tsimtsum), 87 Ur of the Chaldeans, Abraham emigrates from, 33 utopic salvation, Sabbatai Zvi as messiah, 17, 94 vaginal blood, loss of seed in associated with the loss of life, 13 Verbovers, fictional ultra-Orthodox sect in Chabon, 120; updated Yiddish, 121 verticality, of the torso as a sign of strength, 147 victimhood, of Sarah, 37 virginity, as an ideal, 60 virtue, advocated by both Mendelssohn and Lessing, 102; belonging to the male for Philo, 37 Vitiello, Vincenzo, desert and destiny of Jews, 114

195

Waldoks, Moshe, on parody, 11 The Wars of the Jews (Josephus), 118 weightlessness, choreography and woman as submissive, 149 White, Hayden, on tropes, 21n43 window, allowing God and humanity to see one another but yet be separate, 82 Wisse, Ruth, on the schlemiel surmounting circumstance, 117, 120 Wissenschaft des Judentums, denying the continuity of Jewish apocalypticism, 96 Wolfson, Elliot W., on asceticism, 60; insightful work on the Zohar, 46n30; on universality sought in the singularity, 7 Woman, as life or living or life experiences, chava, 29 woman/Isha, taken from Man/Ish, 29 woman performer’s body, victim-like status of disrupted by the dancer as thinker, audience, and creator, 149 women, as weak and subordinate, 30, 146, 147, 149, 154n36 women’s rights, retrieving by using Talmudic and halakhic logic, 22–23n54 wonder, discovered and expressed, 93; Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and of Mendelssohn’s “Jerusalem,” 104 worldliness, as a challenge to be faced, 5 worldly responsibility, miracles serving only to distract from, 100 world of God the Creator, capable of being visualized, 84 worldview, focusing on earthly deeds, 158 writerly texts, requiring an active readership, 7 writer’s block, of Nicole, 127, 129 writing style, honoring complexity, 52

196

Index

Yad Vasham Memorial, for Shoah in Jerusalem, 127 Yerushalmi Talmud, added the Gemara, 52 Yesod, kabbalist idea of “basis” or “foundation” of all active forces in God, 85, 86, 91n45 Yezierska, Anzia, refuses to monetize creativity, 138–139, 141; in ballet, 139 YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soil, 28; planted a garden in Eden/Land-of-Pleasure, 28 Yiddish, associating with the past as a dead language, 122; as a lingua franca in fictional Alaska (Chabon), 121

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Chabon), 111; as counterfactual or alternate history, 118; with Israel losing the war of independence, 112 Zakovitch, Yair, polemics in Hebrew Bible, 45n22 Zeldner, Max, on the schlemiel having a long history in German vernacular and Yiddish, 117 the Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir and, 83; fictional meetings in, 83; mitigating harsh judgment, 85 Zuckerman, Bruce, on parody, 11, 116 Zvi. See Sabbatai Zvi

Scripture index

HEBREW BIBLE Genesis 37 1 28 1:1 28 1:3 82 1:26–27 28 1:27 83 1:31 28 2 5, 47n43 2:4 28 2:4–8 28 2:9 29 2:21 29 2:23 29 2:24 85 3 47n43 3:6 31 3:9 12, 128 3:22–23 5 5:24 73 9:6 83 11:29 39 11:31 33 12:8 33

12:9 33 12:10–20 38 12:13 33, 38 12:15–16 38 12:17 38 12:18–19 38 13:15–18 38 17:1–5 33 17:1–16 33 17:3 33 17:17 6, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 45n26 18:1–15 40 18:12 39 18:15 48n57 18:25 36, 46n32 18:30 6 20:1 6, 48n53 20:3–5 40 20:4, 6 48n53 20:6 48n53 20:14–16 38 20:18 48n53 20:22 40 21:1–2 40 197

198

21:12 41 21:13 39 22:13 41 22:19 41 24:63–64 41 24:67 42 26:24 12 Exodus 58, 137 3:10 96 14:10 58 14:30 58 15:20 137 20:1 12 20:11 86 Leviticus 12, 14 9:22 82 15 13 15:24 13 Numbers 19:2 121 19:9 121 19:11 13 Deuteronomy 30:12, 14 130 30:14 130 Judges 137

Scripture index

1 Samuel 11:13 61 16:13 96 28:19 68n34 31:3 61 31:4 68n34 31:5 69n35 2 Samuel 6:14 137 21:12 68n34 1 Kings 18:26 137 Isaiah 6:7–8 74 Jeremiah 137 13:11 85 Ezekiel 87 1, 10 74 1:3 12 1:20–28 73 10 74 Psalms 137 19:2 82, 86 34:19 78

Scripture index

Job

199

5:10–16 75

137

Ecclesiastes

Song of Solomon

137

55–56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 87, 89n12 1:2 58 1:9 58 2:14 58 3:1–4 58

Daniel 74, 77, 96, 131n1 7:13 74, 75 7:13–14 131n1

ANCIENT NEAR EAST TEXTS Gilgamesh 6 PSEUDEPIGRAPHA Baruch 107n13 Enoch 107n13 Jubilees 107n13

15:17 45n26 Dead Sea 131n1 Scrolls

ANCIENT JEWISH WRITERS Josephus The Wars of 62, 118,   the Jews 131n33   786 69n40   922 69n39

Philo of 18n1, 37,  Alexandria 44n14, 45n26, 46n26, 66n1, 74

RABBINIC WORKS Avot D’Rabbi Natan 6 67n14

Babylonian (Bavli) 19n4, Talmud 22n52, 52, 70n49

200

Scripture index

Tanchuma Balak

Chagigah   14b

90n32

Tractate Babba Metzia   59b

8

Gittin

Tractate Hagiga   2 Bahir   Section 25   Section 54

67n12 Misechtot Kitanot 69n49 Mishnah 52, 66n3, 68n33

19n5 82, 83 82 82

  57b 69n42 Misechtot Kitanot 69n49 Tannaitic 70n49 Yadayim

Berakhot

  3:5

  32:11 54 Gemara 52 Genesis Rabbah 66n3   17:6–7 43n5   34:13 64, 69n48 Halakhah 158 Hekhalot Zutarti   25–26 71 Jerusalem (Yerushalmi) 19n4,  Talmud 20n22, 52, 66n3 Kabbalah 80 Leviticus Rabbah 66n3 Maimonides, Moses 63, 68n33, 70n50 “The Epistle on 69n44 Martyrdom”   47 69n45 Masekhtot Ketanot 67n14 Mendelssohn, Moses 93, 94 Midrash Numbers Rabbah   20:19 67n12

Mishnah Torah Deut 3:1

67n15

68n33

Forbidden Intercourse   21:12

53

Mishnaic Perkei Avot   4:22 64 Nachmanides 70n50 Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer   32, Sefaria.org 48n60 Rashi commentary on Numbers 23:10 Midrash Tanchum Toldot 1 Toledoth 1

67n12 47n47 48n53

201

Scripture index

Ruth Rabbah   2:16 53 Sabbatai Zvi 93 Sefer Yetzirah 82, 83   1 91n36 Shi’ur Qomah 77–79, 83,   (Shi’ur Komah) 89n17, 89n18 Song of Songs Rabba 54, 56, 57, 58   1:1 57, 68n20 Talmud 19n4, 22n52, 22n54, 51, 52, 53, 72, 95, 137 Gemarah 68n33

Semachot 64   2:2 64   2:3 65 Tractate Brachos   62a

54

Tractate Hagigah   5b 54 Tractate Semachot 69n49, 70n49 Tosefta 20n22, 66n3 Zohar 83, 85, 86

CHRISTIAN BIBLE 1 Timothy 2:13–14 44n17 EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITINGS Aquinas, Thomas 69n36 Augustine 69n36 City of God   14:13   vol 1

44n17 69n36

Letter   245.10 44n17 Clement of Alexandria 56

Justin Martyr “Dialogue with 18n1 Trypho the Jew” Origen 56, 57, 89n13

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Scripture index

GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE Aristotle

109n37, 117

Homer Odyssey 6

Plato Symposium 44n14, 59, 68n26 106 68nn27–28

About the Author

Roberta Sterman Sabbath is religious studies director and a visiting assistant professor in the English department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Sabbath edited Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture (Brill 2009), Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts: Readings in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an (De Gruyter 2022), and Vegas Strong: Bearing Witness 1 October 2017 (University of Nevada Press 2023). Her service includes American Academy of Religion Western Region Nevada Regional Representative and Jewish Studies Co-Chair, Society of Biblical Literature Qur’an and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspectives Steering Committee, and American Academy of Religion Comparative Studies in Religions Steering Committee. Her classes include Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Qur’an as Literature, and Hebrew Bible, Gender, and Sexuality.

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