The Murmuring Deep:
Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Schocken, March 2009
480 pages, $27.95
Socrates asks his audience in The Republic, “What is justice?” In his thorough way, he poses, mulls over, and discards a bevy of theories to conclude, well, just about nothing.
Instead of answers, the wisest man in the world tells a series of stories, in particular the myth of the cave, in which he suggests Truth is not what it appears to be. Justice, the teacher advised, comes from directing one’s soul toward the Good, which, as Simon Critchley has pointed out, is not a matter of knowledge but an act of love.
“Philosophy begins, then, with the questioning of certainties in the realm of knowledge and the cultivation of the love of wisdom,” Critchley writes in a witty miscellany of death called The Book of Dead Philosophers. “Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic.”
That word, “erotic,” leaps at you. Who knew syllogisms were so titillating? Yet Critchley isn’t kidding (though the book profits from the New School professor’s deadpan humor). By “erotic” he alludes to phenomena that defy rigorous systems of evidence-gathering, hypothesis, and verification. Obviously, “erotic” has other senses, too—hunger, desire, arousal, sex. Again, these are apt in describing the spirit that animates pursuits of knowledge and understanding. That spirit is, you might say, a real turn on.
Put “religion” in place of “philosophy” and you might have a viable introduction to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s ambitious, erudite, and—there’s no other word to describe its dizzying effect—psychedelic book, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. Religion, Judaism in this case, is erotic in that it’s a human institution built on non-concrete things like language, tradition, and faith. But religion also mirrors eros by manifesting a primal human urge to look into the void and make sense of it.
In a dozen chapters, Zornberg attempts to understand the void—the inchoate and “murmuring deep” of the title—by examining a handful of characters in the Torah as if they were patients in need of therapy. Using the theories and methods of psychoanalysis, borrowing from Freud and Lacan, Kristeva and Bollas, Zornberg looks at the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Esther, Joseph, and others, including God Himself, to explore the relationships between man and God, between man and man, and between man and himself. Ultimately, Zornberg tries to reveal the commonalities of being human that are buried beneath the surface in these characters’ individual psyches.
At the same time, Zornberg gives close reading to midrashic texts produced by obscure Talmudic scholars over the ages, most of them commonly known only by their initials. Perhaps the most salient outcome of The Murmuring Deep is the suggestion that psychoanalytic inquiry is an inherent trait. The writings of these biblical authorities, some anticipating Freud by centuries, sound remarkably like those of Herr Doktor.
Zornberg’s contribution to that tradition can’t be overstated. Despite its oblique method of exploration and gnarly style of exposition, The Murmuring Deep is a devout tome whose cadence is more like prayer than scholarship. On the surface of it, she broaches matters on the brink of blasphemy—as when she suggests Noah was an atheist fancying himself to be god-like. But it’s abundantly clear Zornberg seeks not just a deeper understanding of the Bible and its rich exegetical tradition, but also a clear view, relatively speaking, of that primordial essence connecting us to God and thus making us human.
She doesn’t make it easy, not for the novice of psychoanalysis or the religious layperson. A sample sentence: “The otherness of the other is undeniable.” Another: “The other is other than me because he is other than himself.” And yet another: “Each of us, singular in our own out-of-jointness, may open to the proximity of our neighbor, in his internal alienness.” That’s over the span of just six pages. There are over 440 more to go.
Zornberg’s is a Bible commentary that demands attention be paid in abundance. And why not? This is a bedrock text of human civilization that we’re talking about! And yet while attempting to dislodge spiritually illuminating gems from the many layers of otherwise worthless sedimentary gravel and stone, you encounter lucid passages, and whole chapters, asking questions previously inconceivable.
For instance, why does God “seduce” Adam into Eden? If Adam wasn’t in paradise already, where was he? Why is Abraham, in one interpretation, told by God to go forth and create himself anew? Why is the patriarch of nations compared in some commentaries to a woman? Why is it said he must forget his past and embrace his unknown future self? And why does Noah decline God’s invitation to have sex with his wife?
This last one, for clearly trashy reasons, raises an eyebrow. Why, after forty days and forty nights, does Noah pass on a night of passion okayed by the Almighty, leaving the ark “together with his sons.” Some suggest he preferred being master of his world inside the ark, where God had no say, and that sex meant reengaging the outside world, hence reawakening in himself itzavon, the despondency of being separated, thanks to Adam and Eve, from God.
Zornberg, always the analyst, goes a step further, asserting that Noah, before the Flood, wasn’t conscious of itzavon. Only after having witnessed God’s destruction of creation is he conscious of being made in God’s image. Noah is the first to become aware of the mystery within himself, Zornberg says, and of receiving the blessings of divine love.
At least she seems to be saying that. It’s often not easy to tell. What’s certain is religion, as discussed in this dreamy and exploratory accounting of the Hebrew Bible, is far from epistemic. Like Critchley’s philosophy, it’s nearly all erotic. Freud would be pleased.
John Stoehr is arts editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, City Paper.
