About Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg:
Born in London to parents who had fled Vienna for England after the Nazi takeover of Austria, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a highly regarded Torah scholar and author. After receiving a PhD in English literature and teaching at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she left academia and entered the world of adult Jewish education, where her teaching resonated and her reputation grew. She also began to write, drawing extensively from the well-spring of her classes on the weekly Torah portion. She has written books on Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Moses. Her complex interpretive lens is both contemporary, in drawing from literary sources, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, and very traditional, in reading the Bible through the lens of classic commentaries and rabbinic midrash.
(1) I once took part in a bibliodrama workshop at a Jewish Theological Seminary rabbinical retreat. In the morning I taught Bible and rabbinics, and in the evening I joined my students for the workshop. We were asked to enter the role of a biblical character, and I chose to portray Moses in the scene where he beseeches God to allow him to cross over the river Jordan and enter the Holy Land. As I began to speak as Moses, I found myself weeping. I couldn’t help wondering why the use of the first- person form had stirred such unsuspected depths of pain. Who was speaking? I as Moses turned out to be a volatile combination. (2) The pathos of Moses’ plight had always been with me in my teaching, but never so profoundly . . . By switching to the first person, I had released a flood of grief. (3) In a sense, I was allowing myself—my I—to be read by the text. I was undergoing a harrowing transpersonal experience: exposing myself to the gaze or hearing of the text. Moses’ words were interspersed with mine; in their otherness, they were also somehow mine. (4) In this study of Moses, my I is both absent and present. However chastely I avoid using the first person, an implicit I has chosen, for example, to shine a light on W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, by way of illuminating the figure of Moses, who lived millennia before him (see chap. 1). I have allowed Austerlitz to speak for Moses. (5) This I seeks light where it can be found, even in the dark places of modern Jewish destiny. This I is affected by intimate affinities with aspects of Moses’ experience. There is a seepage between author and subject that runs both ways. In writing about Moses, I bring myself to bear on my subject. But conversely, in bringing myself to bear, I am affected by the singular presence of my subject. Alchemically, a third presence is created in the space between myself and my subject. (6) The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has eloquently described the intimate experience of reading as a meeting of voices: (7) A third subject is created in the experience of reading that is not reducible to either writer or reader. The creation of a third subject (that exists in tension with the writer and the reader as separate subjects) is the essence of the experience of reading. (8) This third subject is I-yet-not-I. Even as we speak, or read, or write, we are spoken; by history, by our own unconscious life, by the one to whom we think we speak. The encounter with another inflects my own voice. The otherness of a text, or of my own I-ness, both disturbs and seduces me. Across a threshold of susceptibility, I am touched, I undergo something that comes from the outside but evokes a profound inwardness.
(10) A biography of Moses is different from conventional biographies in that, perhaps uniquely, its source material is contained in one main text, the biblical text. But while reading this text remains a creative and even unpredictable endeavor, as I have suggested, the biographical challenge is immeasurably enriched by the existence of the “supplementary” material found in midrashic texts. (11) These texts, compiled mainly in Palestine from the third to the tenth centuries, are amplifications of the biblical narratives. Gaps are intuited, turbulences are palpated. Based on ancient reading traditions, midrash arises out of the discussions and disagreements of the House of Study; it often takes its origin in homiletical oral presentations to the community. It carries authentic, even inevitable resonances of the biblical words. I have tried to attend to these resonances, particularly in relation to what they evoke about Moses’ inner world, about the ways he is touched by history, by God’s call, and by his own quest. (12) The inner world of Moses emerges into higher relief in the final phase of his life. For it is in the last months of his life that he describes to his people, in the first person, their shared experience in the wilderness. At the heart of his apparently neutral account of experiences and divine communications already narrated, for the most part, in the third person, are moments of almost uncanny personal intensity—notably, Moses’ account in Deuteronomy 3 of his entreaty to God to allow him to cross over to the Promised Land. Moses relates to the people a moment when God refused to listen to him. This story, like a cry of unassuaged anguish, stands out from the chronicles of conquest in which it is embedded. (13) In the first person, Moses testifies to an unbearable encounter with God’s otherness. He transmits this testimony to his people; without his words, they—and we—would not know of it: “And I beseeched God at that time . . . and God would not listen to me: ‘Enough! Never speak to Me again of this thing!’” (Deut. 3:23, 25, 26). (14) Here, Moses’ I emerges at its most vulnerable—and is silenced. How do we read this? We too are wounded and silenced. This short narrative, this small disturbance in the chronicle, bears a trace of Moses’ essential being. In it is held Moses’ singularity, his truth. It stands out, conveying his unique sensibility. (15) The midrashic sages offer an oblique reading that sensitizes us to this moment of rupture; they hear its resonance at other moments in Moses’ final speeches. They hear Moses’ singular voice, his I narrating to his people a private moment of their shared past. (16) In these midrashic passages, Moses expresses his sense of abandonment by them. He reproaches them for their failure to bring him with them into the Holy Land. Their empathy, their prayers might have moved God to relent. An entirely—even shockingly—human Moses stands revealed here. Speaking in his own voice, not to God but to his people, he grieves their lack of attentiveness to him. (17) A new field of encounter opens between them, where the Israelites are called on, as human beings, to respond to Moses’ human singularity. If they had had eyes, and ears, and a heart for him, they might have tipped the balance of his fate. (18) What is striking about such midrashic narratives is the respect that they pay to Moses’ “undignified” self-presentation. Resentment, anger, complaint—these play a role in his final addresses to the people. Rather than speaking with the impersonal authority of the messenger, he lets himself be heard speaking from that threshold of susceptibility that precedes thoughtfulness. In the poignant voice of autobiography, he emerges, and pierces us. (19) This voice, amplified in the midrash, communicates Moses’ aloneness, his unknownness. Paradoxically, Moses has always been largely unknown to his people, and to us, his readers. But the sense of his opaqueness, of his hidden life, is precisely what gives him verisimilitude. An inscrutable subjectivity haunts the book of Deuteronomy, which is, in the Talmudic expression, his book. The biblical portrait of this singular figure is, of necessity, incomplete. If only because of his periods of unrecorded encounter with God, the man Moses remains enigmatic, as though he holds a secret. (20) The Sages of the midrash add lights and shadows to his portrait but, in a sense, only deepen its mystery. He resists our full understanding and therefore seems real. The biographical desire—to know him fully—constantly brushes against its own impossibility. (21) I have tried to attend to these midrashic readings of Moses’ unique being. Largely, he remains in shadow, and from these shadows his reality emerges. In this “Life of Moses,” I am compelled to complete the biblical act of creation: to trace Moses’ birth into a world of genocide, his infancy with two mothers, his youth as an Egyptian prince, his calling by God into a life in which he is to speak for God to the Israelites and for the Israelites to God. (22) This messenger, it transpires, cannot speak; or at least this is his own self-description: “I am not a man of words. . . . I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue . . . of uncircumcised lips.” Mouth, tongue, and lips become the partial objects, the organs that hold the place of his singularity. His first response to God’s call is a dual one: “Here I am!” . . . “Who am I?” (Ex. 3:4, 11). His unique life is lived in excess of any specific identity. In some sense, at least at the outset, he is prelingual and thus poignantly susceptible to the impressions of a violent world. (23) In this early state, he lives in a kind of suspended animation. Bearer of a traumatic history, he comes to enact the unconscious history of his people. Here is another paradox: at his most singular, in his speechlessness, in his unknownness, Moses functions as a living metaphor for a people in exile from itself. Or perhaps, more accurately, we may say that he exists in a metonymic relation to the people who are, at first, both his and not his. He is associated with them and comes to represent them at certain junctures of their experience. (24) From the kabbalistic perspective, Moses’ speechlessness is viewed as a case in point of a more general malaise; the galut ha-dibbur, the “exile of the word,” which is the condition of Mitzrayim—Hebrew for Egypt—with its harmonics of tzara (constriction, trouble), meitzar (narrow straits), tzirim (birth contractions). On all levels, from the metaphysical to the brutally physical, the Israelites must be redeemed from a death grip that chokes their expressive life. Yetziat Mitzrayim—the exodus from Egypt—comes to mean an impossible but essential birth from anguish. (25) The gates of Egypt are opened, but this redemption comes only b’chipazon (Deut. 16:3)—in a kind of convulsive rush. Unable to comprehend their own history, they cannot truly hear God’s message or speak their own redemption. The development of their subjectivity becomes the project of the wilderness years, of their process of receiving the Torah, which was given at Sinai. At the same time, Moses, part of them, and representing them, undergoes his own process of coming into language. (26) This revelatory process is figured in Moses’ repeated movement from the top of the mountain to its base. Ascending to the summit of Sinai, he disappears from the view of the people. Descending to its base, he transmits the messages of the divine; he speaks what he has heard. Reluctantly at first, he parts from the ineffable conversation at the summit, and reenters the human world. (27) At a critical moment in the process, when the people have been seduced by a Golden Calf, God urges him: “Go on down— Lech red!” The Talmud elaborates: “Go on down from your greatness! I gave you greatness only for the sake of Israel. Now that Israel have sinned, what are you to Me?” (28) Shockingly, God interrupts Moses’ spiritual joy, his experience of a unique “greatness” in dialogue with God. He is who he is only b’shvil yisrael—“for the sake of Israel.” He is the translator of God’s message, chosen to convey God’s words with his full self, in the full light of his face. He is to speak to and for his people. What does it mean to speak for one’s people? (29) Moses’ destiny, it emerges, is to speak in his own singular human voice. Achieving a healing relation between this voice and the divine words is the task of Sinai. The man who, according to the Zohar, has a voice but no speech (kol without dibbur), will, like the poet, reach out to his listeners, “using words to express a moan: ah-ah-ah.” Meaning comes at Sinai. But Torah is, at its heart, poetry. “And now, write for yourselves this song . . .” (Deut. 31:19). The meanings of the Torah are many; its ultimate passion is direct: (30) Forgive me this, forgive what I am saying,
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying. (31) In the end, he writes Deuteronomy, his own book. In the first person, he speaks his own unique being to and for his people. Though his relations with them remain fraught to the end, they are by now his people. Representing the traumatic history of Israel, the Moses figure will more largely come to symbolize Israel’s intellectual and spiritual energy. He becomes its soul-root; his name is given to the Messiah himself. (32) Moreover, this singular being—the singularly masculine “man Moses,” who becomes the “man of God”—discovers in himself an essentially feminine dimension. At first, this dimension is obscure to himself: he speaks with some horror of a vocation that might claim his maternal devotion (Num. 11:11–12). But as he elaborates on the fantasy of pregnancy, giving birth and suckling a child, he brings to light, however unwillingly, an acknowledgment of the human existence of the feminine. This acknowledgment, too, has a redemptive force: it opens up a universally available feminine inflection of humanity. (33) Associated with this femininity is a will to communicate, an acceptance of the human body and human relationality. Beginning in the experience of muteness and solitude, Moses moves toward a difficult and singular encounter with the singularities of his people. This too is what is implied in the mission of speaking for his people. (34) To speak for a Moses whose mission is to speak for his people is to be drawn into a particular kind of thinking. In this study, I allow myself to be provoked by Moses—to be called, challenged. Once in this role, I cannot be unchanged. I am only grateful for this gift, which attaches me to what is beyond me.
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying. (31) In the end, he writes Deuteronomy, his own book. In the first person, he speaks his own unique being to and for his people. Though his relations with them remain fraught to the end, they are by now his people. Representing the traumatic history of Israel, the Moses figure will more largely come to symbolize Israel’s intellectual and spiritual energy. He becomes its soul-root; his name is given to the Messiah himself. (32) Moreover, this singular being—the singularly masculine “man Moses,” who becomes the “man of God”—discovers in himself an essentially feminine dimension. At first, this dimension is obscure to himself: he speaks with some horror of a vocation that might claim his maternal devotion (Num. 11:11–12). But as he elaborates on the fantasy of pregnancy, giving birth and suckling a child, he brings to light, however unwillingly, an acknowledgment of the human existence of the feminine. This acknowledgment, too, has a redemptive force: it opens up a universally available feminine inflection of humanity. (33) Associated with this femininity is a will to communicate, an acceptance of the human body and human relationality. Beginning in the experience of muteness and solitude, Moses moves toward a difficult and singular encounter with the singularities of his people. This too is what is implied in the mission of speaking for his people. (34) To speak for a Moses whose mission is to speak for his people is to be drawn into a particular kind of thinking. In this study, I allow myself to be provoked by Moses—to be called, challenged. Once in this role, I cannot be unchanged. I am only grateful for this gift, which attaches me to what is beyond me.