The Particulars of Rapture

In her commentary on the book of Exodus—the stories of slavery and liberation, the burning bush, the revelation at Sinai, the golden calf, the shattering of the tablets, the building and consecration of the tabernacle—Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg weaves a magnificent tapestry of classical biblical, talmudic, and midrashic interpretations; literary allusions; and insights from the worlds of philosophy and psychology into a narrative that gives us fascinating new perspectives on the biblical themes of exodus and redemption.

“I know of no other book that presents the enormous subtleties and complexities of rabbinic biblical interpretation with such skill, intelligence, literary flair, and sheer elegance of style. Quite simply, a masterpiece.”
—The Washington Post Book World
 
“What is exciting about Zornberg’s work is not solely her use of varied sources, but her objective in their use . . . So great is her love of, reverence for, and belief in Torah, it is contagious.”
—The Catholic Worker
 
“All students of the Bible will be grateful for the opportunity to study with a teacher of such dazzling intelligence.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Zornberg is one of Jerusalem’s most exciting teachers of Torah, not only because of the subtlety of her thinking but also because of the beauty of her language and the sophistication of her presentation . . . Engaging and brilliant.”
—Tikkun

AVIVAH GOTTLIEB ZORNBERG is the author of The Begginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (and winner of the National Jewish Book Award), The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, and The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. She lectures widely in Israel, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She lives in Jerusalem.

Introduction
 
Some books cannot be taken by direct assault; they must be taken like Jericho.
—Ortega
 
Since these essays on Exodus are largely concerned with the interpretation of the narrative as it is found in midrashic sources, I would like to introduce them by offering a working definition of “midrash” and—perhaps more to the point—a personal meditation on the midrashic model for reading texts. My working definition—with all due caveats, acknowledging the essentially undefined nature of the term—would be this:
 
Midrash, derived from the root darash, “to seek out” or “to inquire,” is a term used in rabbinic literature for the interpretive study of the Bible. The word is used in two related senses: first, to refer to the results of that interpretive exegesis; and, second, to describe the literary compilations in which the original interpretations, many of them first delivered and transmitted orally, were eventually collected.
 
These essays on Exodus make extensive use of some of these midrashic collections, notably Midrash Rabbah and Midrash Tanchuma. In addition, Rashi, the great French eleventh-century commentator on the Torah, includes in his text a significant selection of midrashic interpretations; often, I refer to Rashi’s versions, where they offer interesting nuances on the orig­inal sources. Since Rashi’s commentary has been absorbed into the blood­stream of Jewish culture, his midrashic material has become a kind of “second nature” in the traditional reading of the biblical text.
 
Before turning to a more personal view of the nature of midrashic reading, some technical observations are in order. These essays are based on the literary and liturgical device of “Parshat ha-Shavua,” or “the Parsha”: the Bible is read in Synagogue in weekly sections, so as to be completed in yearly cycles. Each Parsha is titled after a significant opening word. This device constitutes a way of living Jewish time; each week is saturated, as it were, with the material of that particular biblical section. One thinks, one studies, one lives the Parsha. If one is a teacher, this process is intensified. It is as a result of years of teaching the Bible in this form that I have come to articu­late the ideas in this book.
 
Since on one level, then, this book began life as oral presentations, delivered to a wide range of students, of all ages, backgrounds, and intellectual habits, these essays remain separate attempts to engage with a particular literary unit, the Parsha of the particular week. They address themes that arise compellingly from the Torah text, often from the midrashic or other interpretations of the text. On another level, however, they flow into one another, engaging with the narrative of the Exodus as a whole, and addressing the themes of the grand narrative: redemption, revelation, betrayal, and the quest for “God in our midst.”
 
In my approach, the biblical text is not allowed to stand alone, but has its boundaries blurred by later commentaries and by a persistent intertextuality that makes it impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text. Such an approach represents perhaps the greatest difficulty for the modern reader. It continues, in a sense, the rabbinic mode of reading, where “the rabbis imagined themselves a part of the whole, participating in Torah rather than operating on it at an analytic distance . . . [I]t follows that the words of interpretation cannot be isolated in any rigorously analytical way from the words of Torah itself.”2 Elliot Wolfson articulates this reading practice: “the base text of revelation is thought to comprise within itself layers of interpretation, and the works of interpreta­tion on the biblical canon are considered revelatory in nature.”3
The blurring of boundaries between revelation and interpretation, between the written and the oral Torah, is a fundamental mode of the rabbinic imagination. In this book, I have adopted this mode. I confess to a perhaps naive sense of the naturalness of this mode. However, as I invite the reader to enter the world of midrashic reading, I would like to offer an account of my reading practice, of how I understand the midrashic enterprise.
 
Central to this enterprise is the telling of stories that fill in gaps in the written biblical text. For instance, the midrash that, in a sense, engenders this book—about women’s play with mirrors and the “secret of redemption”4—intends to explain a mysterious verse at the end of Exodus: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who thronged, who came in throngs to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (38:8). The reader is baffled: Which mirrors (the mirrors)? What is the purpose of this specific gift to the Mishkan (Tabernacle)? Why is the ex­pression tzava—to throng, to proliferate—repeated? Why is this particular copper contribution singled out from the larger mass of copper donated to the Mishkan? The midrash offers a narrative and, consequently, an interpre­tation of the enigmatic text: The women created the hosts, the throngs of Is­rael by their play with mirrors. As the midrash puts it: “It was all done with mirrors!”
 
Such a narrative spins away from the biblical text; in a sense, it seems unrooted, fantastic. Yet close study of the midrash reveals multiple skeins of connection, a network of textual roots within the language of the Bible. And—perhaps more importantly—the midrash offers an answer to a re­pressed question: How are this people to be redeemable? Can they be imag­ined as, in some sense, generating their own freedom? If we make use of the classic image of birth, must we have recourse to a forced birth, a forceps de­livery, in imagining the relations of God the “midwife” and the newborn?5 Or is there some way of catching the elusive moment of inner transformation that creates human possibility where before there was only necessity? The “secret of redemption,” as the Rabbis call it, is the real problem at the heart of this midrash.
 
While the question of “redeemability” is repressed in the biblical text, it is articulated in many midrashic sources, and it emerges significantly in Rashi’s commentary. Here, I would like to claim that this articulation of the repressed is the genius of midrashic narrative. Adopting the psychoanalytic model, I suggest that the peshat, or plain meaning of the text, functions as the conscious layer of meaning; while the midrashic stories and exegeses in­timate unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning. The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative.
 
The result is a plethora of possible stories of redemption. Some of these will be attributed to “the enemy”: they are false, adversarial narratives, Egyptian narratives, narratives of obtuse misunderstanding. These counter-narratives, the demonized expression of unthinkable thoughts, construct the official Israelite history of the Exodus as incomplete, inflated, or mythic in­vention. In chapter 3, I discuss the problem of such counter-narratives and the implications of the Rabbis’ willingness to articulate them.
 
Most significant, however, is the midrashic hospitality to the very con­cept of multiple alternative narratives. Time and time again, the magisterial biblical history of the Exodus is fractured in these midrashic versions. More­over, the biblical text itself seems to give warrant for such retellings. Several times, the Torah itself emphasizes the importance of telling the story to one’s children and grandchildren. At certain moments, this imperative to narrate the Exodus becomes the very purpose of the historical event: it happened so that you may tell it. At the heart of the liberation account, indeed, God pre­pares Moses with a story to tell a future child; this rhetorical narrative, as­tonishingly, precedes the historical narrative of liberation.
 
One might perhaps assume that these stories of the future are standard retellings of the biblical narrative. Not so: the biblical text itself includes four versions of the narrative to respond to four hypothetical questioning sons of the future.6 These become typologies of four sons, who are later characterized in the Haggadah—read each year on the night of Passover— as the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. Even in the biblical sources, where the four passages are dispersed, the difference between the four versions is remarkable. In the Haggadah, this dif­ference is presented as a psychological response to different types of child; but even the biblical text seems to offer an invitation to modulate the story to meet varying rhetorical ends.
 
If the stories of the future are to be multiple, responsive to time and place and temperament, then the midrashic narratives exemplify this diffrac­tion of the original narrative at its most radical. Essentially, I suggest, they raise both philosophical and psychological questions: about metaphysical truth and about the nature of the self. The notion that knowledge of reality is singular, absolute, static, and eternal is tested in these midrashic narratives of the foundational events in Jewish history. The midrashic versions convey a plural, contextual, constructed, and dynamic vision of reality. The “Platonic ideal” in the history of philosophy is described by Isaiah Berlin: it posits
 
...that all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only,
all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must
be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incom­patible with another—that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.7
 
As against this view, which obtained in Western philosophy till the late nineteenth century, the midrashic literature presents a heterogeneous, even— consciously and ambivalently—a heretical multiplicity of answers.8 Exodus as a narrative that consistently deploys the “omnipotence effect,” to use Meir Sternberg’s term, is significantly diffracted by the many counter-narratives that the midrash generates from within the triumphal and unequivocal mas­ter story. “What really happened in Egypt?” becomes a less important ques­tion than “How best to tell the story? Where to begin? What in the master story speaks to one and therefore makes one speak?”
 
The psychological dimension of these counter-narratives is no less cru­cial. Diffracted narratives interrogate the nature of the self. The American psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell describes one facet of the problem:
 
People often experience themselves, at any given moment, as containing or being a “self” that is complete in the present; a “sense of self” often comes with a feeling of substantiality, presence, integrity, and fullness. Yet selves change and are transformed continually over time; no version of self is fully present at any instant, and a single life is composed of many selves. An experience of self takes place necessarily in a moment of time; it fills one’s psychic space, and other, alternative versions of self fade into the background. A river can be represented in a photograph, which fixes its flow and makes it possible for it to be viewed and grasped. Yet the move­ment of the river, in its larger course, cannot be grasped in a moment. Rivers and selves, like music and narrative, take time to happen in.9
The “self ” that was liberated from Egypt—whether we consider the people as a psychological unit, or imagine an individual participant in the Ex­odus—experienced a limited, fragmentary version of events and a provisional sense of his or her own self. It is precisely through narration, by fulfilling the biblical imperative to tell the story, by the continuing interaction between parents and children, that transformed versions of self and of the meanings of liberation will be generated.
 
In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann discusses the use of narrative to experience the self in time:
 
[T]ime is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Simi­larly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time ...Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after an­other; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to them save as all bodies are, whereas narra­tion—like music—even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.10
 
Narrative needs time to do its work, to renegotiate the sense of total presence and fullness that the self craves. This, I suggest, is the core tension that the midrashic narratives express. By intimating unconscious conflicts about living in time, about the self as multiple, diffracted, discontinuous, the midrash often confronts the apparent simplicity of the biblical narrative with a more complex and nuanced notion of the self.
 
In the midrashic account of the Exodus, these conflicts come to a head in the narrative of the Golden Calf.11 Here, the dilemmas of temporality are figured in grotesque and yet inevitable form. Moses’ “lateness” in descend­ing the mountain precipitates a panic response whose shock waves spread wide and deep. In the midrashic versions, and in commentaries profoundly influenced by these versions, all the certainties of liberation, on the psycho­logical as well as the historical and philosophical planes, are destabilized. Possible demonic narratives are released that will shape the nightmares of the future. The people experience the whips and scorns of time; the melan­choly of those who do not know, in Julia Kristeva’s expression, “how to lose”; the insecurity of those who require certainty and yearn for total presence, who are, as one nineteenth-century Chasidic thinker has it, impatient with that need for prayer that is the posture of those who live within the veils of time.12
 
For the midrash to read in the biblical text such intimations of the un­conscious life of a people becomes legitimate, in view of one necessary as­sumption of the rabbinic mind: the implied author of the Torah is God. As Daniel Boyarin succinctly puts it: “This is not a theological or dogmatic claim but a semiotic one . . . If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps, repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be read ...”13 The midrashic search for multiple levels of meaning, the attempt to retrieve unconscious layers of truth, is warranted by the assump­tion that, as God’s work, the Torah encompasses all. “Turn it, and turn it, for all is in it,” says Ben Bag Bag,14 using the image of the plow turning the earth, breaking, transforming, reversing, subverting. Two thousand years later, such an image of excavation becomes the informing image in Freud’s project: to unearth the repressed life that is encrypted within the human ex­perience. The psychoanalytic project, like the midrashic one, represents a dissatisfaction with surface meanings, and a confidence that rich if disturb­ing lodes seam the earth’s depths. The activity of the plowman is not only le­gitimate but imperative: in this way, the interpreter responds to the claim of God’s text.
 
At this juncture I would like to discuss one specific example of the midrashic retrieval of unconscious traces from within the biblical narrative. By contrast with the Genesis sagas, the absence of women from the narra­tive of Exodus—and indeed from all the later books of the Bible—is quite striking. This is not, of course, a total absence. There is the opening se­quence in which women figure prominently: Jochebed, Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter, the midwives, Moses’ wife, Zipporah. All are related to the theme of birth, all are dedicated to what Vaclav Havel calls the “hidden sphere” that endangers the totalitarian structure: to the baby crying within the brick.15 Once this theme has been established within the biblical text, however, women essentially disappear. Miriam makes a brief reappearance, singing and dancing at the Red Sea, and later, in Numbers 12, she is afflicted with leprosy for maligning her brother Moses. Aside from this, there is one sig­nificant biblical moment devoted to women: in Numbers (27:1–12), the daughters of Zelofhad successfully claim a share in their father’s inheritance. A minor reference to women places them among the “wise-of-heart” who weave cloth for the Mishkan (Exod 35:25–26).
 
The omission of women from the narrative can, of course, be seen as simply that—an omission, a lack of specific interest in the feminine, which is absorbed into the larger body of the “children of Israel.” However, Rashi precedes the feminist movement by many centuries when, in an extraordi­nary midrashic comment, he excludes women from the most intense mo­ments in the biblical drama: they simply did not participate in the major rebellions of the people in the wilderness. Rashi comments on the final cen­sus of the people before entering the Holy Land:
 
“In this [census], no man survived from the original census of Moses and Aaron, when they had counted the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai” (Num 26:64): But the women were not subjected to the decree against the Spies, because they loved the Holy Land. The men said, “Let us ap­point (nitna) a leader to return to Egypt” (14:4); while the women said, “Appoint (t’na) for us a holding among our father’s brothers” (27:4). That is why the story of Zelofhad’s daughters is narrated directly after this.
 
Rashi’s point is simple but revolutionary in its implications. Taking “man” literally, he limits the destruction of a generation, in punishment for the sin of the Spies, to the males only. While all the men over twenty died in the course of the forty years’ wandering, the women survived—because, un­like the men, they loved the Land of Israel.
 
Rashi’s midrashic claim is provocative in the extreme. With barely a hint in the text to support him, he presents a startlingly asymmetrical de­mographic image of the people who entered the Holy Land, with women in the large majority. His basis in the text is the expression “No man sur­vived . . .” and the fact that the story of the daughters of Zelofhad, who were inspired by love of the Land, immediately follows: the sequence invites the reader to notice that these women and the rebels involved with the Spies use the same word (t’na/nitna) to opposite effect.
 
The compelling implication of Rashi’s comment, however, is not the de­mographic one. Rather it is that the absence of women from the text does not necessarily mean that they are assimilated into the general “children of Israel,” as the plain meaning (peshat) of the text might indicate. Women have a separate, hidden history, which is not conveyed on the surface of the text. This history is a faithful, loving, and vital one, which excludes them from the dramas of sin and punishment that constitute the narrative of the wilder­ness. Indeed, Rashi’s midrashic source includes both the major crises in the wilderness as dramas in which women were not incriminated:
 
In that generation, women would repair what men tore down. For you find that when Aaron said, “Break off your golden earrings [to make the Golden Calf],” the women refused and protested, as it is said, “The whole people broke off the golden rings from their ears” (Exod 32:3). The women did not participate in the making of the Golden Calf. Similarly, when the Spies slandered [the Holy Land], and the people complained, God issued His decree against them for saying, “We cannot go up against the people . . .” (Num 13:31). But the women were not part of that move­ment, as it is written, “No man of them survived . . .”—no man, not no woman, since it was the men who refused to enter the Holy Land, while the women approached Moses to ask for an inheritance (27:1).16
 
Women emerge as exemplary in this midrash: they repair what men have torn down, they reaffirm the value of love of the Holy Land and loyalty to the one God that men, in the rebellions of the Spies and of the Golden Calf, have eroded. This admirable history of women, however, is found only in the midrashic texts. Within the biblical narrative it is barely intimated. The implication of this is profoundly paradoxical. In the written text, the ab­sence of women would seem to imply that they are included in the large dra­mas of the Israelites in the wilderness; it is precisely in the midrash that women figure as having a separate, hidden history. In effect, the midrash makes the reader aware of a mistaken reading: all along, women have been really absent, really elsewhere. An alternative history, the midrashic history of women, would take us, at least at the most significant moments in the nar­rative, beyond the margins of the biblical account.
 
Women’s story can be seen, then, at least at certain critical junctures, as the repressed narrative of the biblical text. Midrash retains the traces of that narrative and brings it to consciousness, with marked effects on the manifest level of meaning. All the midrashic narratives about women, in­deed, can be registered in this way: the women’s mirror-play with their hus­bands in Egypt; the rich material on the experience of women at the Red Sea and on Miriam’s song/dance; Miriam’s well and its disappearance; and the strange emphasis on the female role in Korah’s rebellion.17 All construct a counter-reality to the one officially inscribed in the Torah; all expose a com­plex ferment disguised by the lucidity of the text. Like the unconscious in the psychic economy, women remain a latent presence in their very absence; they represent the “hidden sphere” which must remain hidden if it is to do its work with full power, but which must be revealed in some form if that work is to be integrated.
 
If women serve as the unconscious of the biblical story, the place where they come to light is the midrashic narrative. We have suggested that midrash articulates the unconscious of the text: the hidden narratives, al­most entirely camouflaged by the words of the Torah, emerge from the spaces, from the gaps in meaning, from the dream resonance of those words (“No man, not no woman. . .”). This tradition of reading is intensively de­veloped in a later period by the chasidic masters, who treat the midrashic texts as having, in their turn, emerged into conscious meaning, and who play with the latent meanings within and between those texts.
 
Ultimately, conscious and unconscious layers of meaning inform one another; the written and oral Torah are not separated by an impermeable wall. The conscious level alone, the written text with its plain meaning, the undifferentiated history of the Israelite people in the wilderness, would pro­vide a sterile version of the Exodus. It is the interplay of conscious and un­conscious motifs that makes for the grand narrative, which is capable of providing the matrix within which future narratives can take shape. The “particulars of rapture,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, can evolve only where
 
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.
—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”18
 
The grand narrative of the Exodus, then, must be a midrashic narrative in which the hidden, the repressed, can be at least partially witnessed. If the Exodus is to be a narrative for all times and all places, as Sefath Emeth, for example, claims,19 it must be capable of particular reincarnations through time. As in Roland Barthes’s famous example of those names of countries which cover the map in such large capitals that they become effectively in­visible, the Exodus has come to constitute the very framework of Jewish per­ception and, for that very reason, is only partially visible.
 
This metanarrative of the Exodus is the subject of a lyrical passage in R. Kook’s Olath Re’iya:
 
The Exodus was such an event as only a crudely superficial eye could read as an event that happened and ended, and that has remained as a magnificent memory in the history of Israel and in the general history of mankind. But in reality, with a penetrating consciousness, we come to re­alize that the essential event of the Exodus is one that never ceases at all. The public and manifest revelation of God’s hand in world history is an explosion of the light of the divine soul which lives and acts throughout the world and which Israel, through its greatness and training in holiness, merits to disseminate powerfully through all the habitations of darkness to all generations. The essential work of the Exodus continues to have its effect; the divine seed which achieved Israel’s redemption from Egypt is still constantly active, in the process of becoming, without interruption or disturbance.20
 
All the life of the worlds, of individuals and nations, all power of gen­eration and regeneration, can be read in the metahistory of the Exodus. For R. Kook, the first chief rabbi of the restored State of Israel, it is the organic connection between the “explosion” of particulars and the rapture of the Ex­odus that is accessible to the penetrating consciousness. The Exodus has no end and no limit. Such a view sets itself firmly against the historicizing con­sciousness, which Susan Sontag has characterized as the “predatory em­brace” of the modern period, “the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself . . . More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making.”21
 
From R. Kook’s perspective, the original liberation from Egypt partici­pates in a continuum of sunbursts: the history of man’s possibilities is not ex­hausted. Indeed, in the tradition of Chasidic thought from which he draws his inspiration, the original Exodus need not even be regarded as the over­whelming epic event that reduces all future experiences of liberation to pale replicas. Precisely the opposite dynamic may be true: the people who left Egypt were perhaps unfit for redemption, incapable of hearing God’s word in any real fullness. Their hopes in leaving the land of terror were shriveled by the cramped conditions of their nurture; they were cramped hopes, Egyp­tian-shaped hopes. Like the patient entering analysis, who can have only a distorted view of the process awaiting him, of the way in which it will expand the underlying structures of experience, the Israelites leave Egypt
 
more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved.
—William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
 
And like the analyst whose hopes for the patient are radically different from those of the patient for himself, God begins a process with His people in a stage of arrested development, a process that will lead them into fuller, unimagined life.
 
However, in this scenario, in which God’s hopes and the people’s hopes are profoundly different, there is a hidden assumption about the arrested “truer self” of Israel, the self that harks back to the foundational narratives of Genesis. Both analyst and patient share a hope for the unfolding of that truer self. But such a shared hope is at first almost invisible; only the dis­cordance is visible.
 
Intensely challenging passages in Chasidic literature tell of the devel­opment of that divine seed in history. Later narratives of the Exodus com­plete and compensate and restructure the inadequacies of the historical event as the people first lived it. Redemption is engendered by the changing stories of redemption that, with richer idiom, amplify the particulars of rap­ture.
 
Sefath Emeth, for example, addresses the unconsummated experience of the historical Exodus.22 Telling the story