Tag: Torah

The Divine Telepathy Game – A Jewish Project

David Porush

When you try to read a perfect text it becomes a religious experience

“God always likes to veil his symbols a little bit, being among His other attributes, the perfect literary artist.” – Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny1

Telepathy: Why we read

Every time we read, we play a game of telepathy. The author uses words to get what was in his or her head into ours.  My wife wrote “eggs” on the grocery list. If I pick up eggs, not brussel sprouts, I won the game. 

Literature, the kind of stuff you read in university classes, is intentionally more complicated. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) set the standard for impenetrability. It had 433 footnotes just to explain the allusions. Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Miracle for Breakfast” (1937) or W.H. Auden’s “Paysage Moralisé”(1933) – both complicated poems called “sestinas” – or Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1923) had even tighter weaves of word play within themselves, greater gravity, pound for pound, than Eliot’s. Words attain multiple meanings and the poet uses symbols, sound, repetition, cadence and any number of  hundreds of well-known ways to play with words (called “rhetorical devices”) to draw connections within and across the text, creating webs of interpenetrating meanings. All these seem to defeat the telepathic purpose of writing. At least, they make it much darn harder to get a clear telepathic message.

The job of the teacher is to get the class to appreciate the purpose of a literary text beyond just telling great stories. We read authors precisely because they didn’t try to be perfectly clear. It’s the varsity version of the telepathy game. The ambiguities and tricks leave us trying to get answers. What was she thinking? Stevens wrote another dense poem,  “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” that both describes and illustrates what a great work of literature does.  As the title says, however, even this master poet could only scribble “notes” that gesture “toward” what a “supreme fiction” could do. Stevens is telling us that the supreme fiction is transcendent, unattainable. A reader could find traces and glimpses and perhaps whole sublime works that transport them briefly to divine inspiration,

but there are no humanly attainable “supreme fictions.” We can only try to write one before a keen sense of the limitations of our own mortality bring us back to earth. It’s an asymptote, a point that the word artist always approaches but never reaches, an aspiration:

. 

Imagine a Perfect Text

Now imagine a perfect author, perfect in the scientific sense: he or she completely comprehends the universe and everything in it, all its laws and interactions down to the quantum level and across its massive, wheeling galaxies in a 19 billion light years expanse, knows the past, present and future, in one integrated whole, an incarnation of science’s god, a Grand Unified Theory.  Imagine that the author is also perfect in the active, creative sense, continually exercising every super-power: shaping time, space and matter, reading every mind in the universe all at once, weaving together all the events in that vast universe in every instant always.

Now imagine this perfect author took time out from a busy schedule to compose a perfect literary text. I don’t mean perfect as in “perfectly clear” – that would take the mystery and fun out of it and reduce it to computer code. Perfect in the literary sense, like the hardest poem you ever had to read for literature class: dense, almost impenetrably thick with meaning. Every word has a purpose and has infinite depths of possible meaning and resonates with every other word. Every line interpenetrates and colors every other line, changing how we understand what we just read and will read next. A perfect poem is like a hologram, where every word or phrase contains an aspect of the whole. When Adrienne Rich writes a poem that begins

Night-life.

and ends 

…the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps

like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner2

She wants the lines to speak to each other and to the dozens of lines between. She wants the poem to change what we feel about darkness, sleep and night. When she uses the word “conceived” in the middle of the poem, we know she means both “having a thought” and “giving birth” and “creating” (including creating the poem we are reading) all at the same time. That’s what poems do. Mean more than one thing at the same time. It’s the opposite of computer code or a grocery list where if something is ambiguous it fails.  

In a perfect fiction,  the story would be perfectly plotted, more tightly wrought than the best thriller or detective story ever. It would have an intriguing beginning, complicated middle and fulfilling end like other fictions. It would be filled with clues, casual incidents, remarks, and symbolic objects. Even the setting and clothes are metaphorical, lambent with meaning, shadowing events ahead and echoing back, creating a hidden order that defies temporal logic. Chekhov’s gun in Act I must go off before the curtain closes. Is Hemingway’s old man just a simple fisherman? Is the sea only water? Are the “lions” he dreams in the end only wild felines? Why is the sole survivor of the last line in  “Moby Dick” named “Ishmael” in the first line? Again, we re-understand the first line through the last. Everything creates a context for everything else. Nothing is wasted. Pages fold over onto each other like a giant accordion. Imagine what a perfect author, who sees yesterday and tomorrow as unfoldings from a single principle, would do with time in a plot.

Imagine how much more difficult – and intriguing and tantalizing and rewarding –  this interpretation game, this literature class, would be if the author was perfect? Imagine how much more urgent it would be if you thought the author was real (really perfect) and had all those powers (like creating the universe and everything in it every second everywhere for all eternity, not to mention your own personal destiny and soul). 

The Jewish Project

Jews have been playing this game since Moses wrote the Five Books of the Scripture. In fact, it is the premise of Jewish faith.  Traditional Jews believe that an omniscient, all-powerful God announced a supreme, transcendent text in front of the entire Israelite nation at Sinai. The text testifies to their collective revelation, the first and only time many thousands of people swear to a simultaneous transcendent experience. Since this event would be impossible to falsify (imagine getting three people to agree to testify to the same thing, let alone hundreds of thousands of disputatious Jews), it is their job to figure out what the message was. Herman Wouk called this author “the perfect literary artist.” Jews who believe that God is the source of the words in the Torah are literally trying to read a depthless, alien, and supernal Mind. Playing the telepathy game is one of the pillars of Judaism. Jews have been playing it for a long time with great urgency.

When Jews read the Bible they assume that God is the Author, or at least He dictated it. When the Israelites, newly freed from slavery in Egypt, were confounded by God’s awesome voice from atop Sinai, they begged their leader Moses to translate the message in comprehensible form. So Moses spent forty days on two different occasions listening to the perfect author and transcribing (some of) the words God spoke to him using a new, incredibly potent invention, the alphabet. It was finite, but had infinite potential: a miraculous communications technology.

Jews know their interpretation of the original transmission is imperfect because they know the author’s mind is by definition ineffable in its vast infinity and superpowers. As a result, the Five Books of Moses have given rise to 3,000 years and millions of words of interpretation. What was He trying to say to us? Each commentary feeds on the original text and on the interpretations that preceded it creating  layers of reference and authority and cross-talk. They aren’t like geologic strata frozen into stony stasis, but a dynamic hypertextual broadcast of many-to-many across time and space. When it’s your turn to try, you are humbled by the mighty river.  Literally every verse, every word, every letter – even the jots and dots and scribal variations, even the spaces between words – have been already subjected to intense scrutiny by folks who were very dedicated and very smart, some of them writing thousands of years ago. 

On the other hand, as mortals try to read and understand the Godmind’s intentions for this text,  they have help. After all, the game would be pretty unfair (and useless) if it was written in a completely alien tongue. The very first chapter of the text tells us that the Author endowed us with the operating system, a bit of Himself to ensure that at least some of what’s in the text would be readable, the ability to read and the desire, sometimes an overwhelming urgency, a passion, to open hailing frequencies with Him through the text. Lightning strikes with sudden illumination and an electric rush of feeling. You see transcendent unity, or a piece of it. You’ve made telepathic contact.  Call this gleaming pathway of potential understanding “soul” or “consciousness.”

The Longest Game

This game of interpreting a text composed by a perfect author – telepathy with a divine mind –  is the longest continuous game of its kind in human history. It begins in the 14th c BCE with the invention of writing and its adoption by a nation of liberated slaves. By all archeological evidence, the phonetic alphabet was only invented once in the 14th century bce in the South Sinai). The Five Books of Moses is also what literary scholars call a “self-reflexive” text: it is aware of its own existence as a written text. In other words it’s an autobiography. It tells us about how it came to be written. If you read between the lines of the Hebrew text, it also tells the story of how the Israelites got the phonetic alphabet and became literate. In any case, it’s the first document in the history of the world to be written in it. It’s still a bestseller.

 It explains how God created the world, then humans, and then selected the Hebrew ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah and the Children of Jacob (Israel) to carry the message of God’s oneness and reality. It promises the newly freed slaves the unimaginable: a nation of their own. It gives them a utopian vision of order and humanity – laws  for how to behave in that nation, once they get there, not only how to treat their God and each other but how to treat themselves, how to tame and take responsibility for their own thoughts and intentions. In other words for the first time in history we have a document of the interior universe of human experience, subjectivity. It puts people on the hook for the interior reality of other souls. Everyone has one.  Imagine a nation built on this monumental recognition.

Forty years wandering the deserts scours off the slavish dependency of the original generation that came out of Egypt. It refines them, rehearses them in the art of governing and protecting themselves collectively. It makes them hungry and determined and practiced as a terrifying military force. They descend onto the land of Canaan under Moses and then his successor, Joshua, Moses’ chosen successor, and they conquer it. They establish their new social experiment, ancient Israel, whose system of laws design a utopia before they even have the land. It is first ruled by prophets and then by kings. Ancient Israel holds onto a kingdom with the Torah as its constitution on and off for several centuries. Like other nations, they are distinguished by glorious achievements but also riven by scandal, failed kings and faltering faith in their original charter. The Babylonians conquer and decimate a weakened Israel in 586 BCE and carry most surviving Jews into captivity. They give the Israelites permission to return to their nation a few decades years later.  Many do, many don’t. The Israelites build a Second Temple in the fifth century BCE and again hold onto their kingdom. Conquest by war, sectarian divisions and cultural assimilation especially to the gleaming modernity of their Greek conquerors weaken it on and off, until the Romans send them into the diaspora in 70 CE, an exile that defined Jews until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 by the UN.

I repeat the story of the Bible and history of the Jews because from the time when Moses writes down his Five Books, with its laws and legends from a divine author, the text binds the Israelite nation together. Even when the disruptions of history and politics, dispersion, persecution and holocausts rob them of every other constant, including  a country of their own, the one thing every other people needed (up until the twentieth century) to maintain their identity over any significant time, It gives them a continuous identity, and still does. Commentaries then become their own central texts, as scholars and rabbis debate their application of the Torah’s laws to dozens of circumstances where the Jews live as guests. Jews enshrine these texts, too, a tradition of debate and commentary called the Mishnah, Gemorah (together, the Talmud) through 500 CE. More written commentaries (by the Geonim in Babylonia) spring up from 800-1000 CE and these, too, are folded into the tradition.  The most famous commentators on the whole tradition, Rashi, Rambam and Ramban write in the 11th and 12th centuries all across Spain, France, Italy and Northern Africa, and their work is also folded into the Great Telepathy Game. Jews in every language and country where they lived continue to add hundreds of thousands of pages of additional commentary. Through the Medieval period when Western culture was stagnating, geniuses continue to write and correspond with each other, debating every nuance with the intensity and uncertainty that the original (according to the rules of the game transcendently authored, quasi-impenetrable but perfect text) demands.

Why play this game?

Maybe  you cannot persuade yourself that the Five Books of Moses comes down to this century in the way that Jews say it did. And maybe you cannot persuade yourself that the interpretation of that text has any authority, let alone divine authority. But just playing the interpretation game this way- to acting as if you believe – has at least three mind-bending virtues and benefits. 

For one you will be investing yourself into a refined version of one of the best things a mind can do with itself:  philosophy in its purest form. You’ll be taking a philosophical position – like putting on a uniform to take the playing field – in good faith, so to speak. The whole idea is based on acting as if you believe in an irrational axiom – an unprovable assertion, like why nine innings makes a game and three strikes makes an out – such as “the universe is perfectly rational.” Now build a world of self-consistent thought out of it – say, mathematics. 

If you’re an enlightened 21st century modernist, you are likely to wave off the entire Jewish believing tradition and its arcane rituals and practices, not to mention the six billion people in the world who have religious beliefs – as mere foolish superstition. But superstition is a funny word.  Philosopher Jacques Derrida brilliantly exposes the foundations of all sciences and philosophies in “superstition.” He plays on the Greek root of the word – “to stand apart or above” – to show  how all great attempts to make order of the unknowable cosmos, including science itself, requires an assumption that one fundamental unprovable axiom is true.3 It’s tantamount to a leap of faith.  In other words, even physics requires a metaphysics at its core. Derrida suggests that if you dig deeply enough, your secular beliefs in a deterministic accidental cosmos as science suggests it is, is also founded on a superstition. 

Secondly, you will be practicing the most important form of self-liberation, which is freedom from ideology. Ideology is toxic to pure interpretation. It poisons our ability to hear what the author is trying to say, to see reality as it is. It’s a noisy monologue in our heads that interferes with the signal. I’ve seen it at work in the literature classroom or even in discussing almost anything political with anybody. Ideology makes you listen for preconceived notions about the intentions of the author. It doesn’t give the author a chance to bring their own point of view. When we read or view or listen to anything created by somebody else we unavoidably bring our assumptions, prejudices, firmly-held beliefs and biases. Can’t read Shakespeare because he was a sexist.  Can’t read Twain because he uses the ‘n’ word. Can’t read the Bible because it’s violent and filled with immorality. Or it’s made up by craven politicos and priests forging a narrative that will maintain their power.

If we have an ideology, we want the text to confirm or deny that ideology. You want everything to fit your view of the universe.  Of course. That’s also what it means to have a mind. Conception is another word for preconception. If you don’t have a preconceived idea about how everything works, you can’t survive. We’re looking to prove something.  You’re either for us or against us.  This is true of every artefact, whether a written text, a movie, a virtual reality game, a painting in a museum or the fantastic immersively virtual multimedia product of an AI or some future quantum mind we haven’t yet invented. By positing the perfect author of a perfect if inscrutable text you get to place aside your assumptions, at least while you’re on the playing field. Try it. It’s liberating.  And I don’t think ChatGPT can do it very well.

In other words, playing The Game is a very humanizing act. That’s the third fruit of playing it.  You get to be fully human. As you play it, you have to pretend you believe in something on faith. The word for it is deluded – from the Latin for ludere – gaming – and de – down. Of course we read it as a form of deprecation, to be diminished by false belief.  But we can re-appropriate the word for something positive: down here, in material mortality, all we get to do is play at the true reality, which is transcendent and supernal. To live is to be superstitious. Everyone chooses their delusions. Some just can’t admit they’re deluded.  

By playing the Telepathy Game you have the opportunity to take a place to stand apart or above the medium of ideas that you swim in like a fish, without hardly being aware of it, let alone challenging its reality. You can jump out of your bowl – your channel – to see what makes us all human.

 Finally, if you believe its Author is who He says He is, this is the most important game in the world. Its purpose is nothing less than to teach you how to live meaningfully, integrated with and acknowledging the creative integrity of an entire cosmos where everything is connected to each other and originates – derives its dynamism – from one source. The text tells you how to do it, yes, but it also shows you why. At the same time, by its perfection of making meaning through complexity, it exemplifies this true order in the universe. Only a supernal mind could have written the Torah and our every act of reading it in good faith awakens the spirit with a telepathic jolt.


ENDNOTES

  1. Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1951) p. 90

2. “Adrienne Rich, “The Origins and History of Consciousness,” Dreams of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977

3. See the transcript of an  interview with Jacques Derrida in 1980 in Tellez, F., & Mazzoldi, B. (2007). “The Pocket‐Size Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Inquiry, 33(2), 362–388. https://doi.org/10.1086/511498

What is a Jew?

David Porush

Last week, President Trump extended Title VI protections to Jews – alongside other students of race, color or national origin – on campuses that receive federal funding. This kicked off what the media called “a firestorm.”  It was actually two controversies for the price of one. First, do Title VI rules restrict freedom of speech. Ironically, this became a problem only when Trump protected Jews, even though it’s a 1964 ruling. Second, are Jews like the other protected classes? How so? What are Jews, exactly?

Are we a race, a nation, an ethnic group, an extended family, a religion, or just a bunch of folks who like bagels and lox? All of these fit some Jews, but none fit all Jews, so what is going on? Even Jews debate it all the time. Continue reading “What is a Jew?” →

Hearing vs Reading the Bible

David Porush4 Comments

The play between orality and literacy in Jethro

When did the Israelites become literate?

If you piece the clues together, the Torah tells us pretty clearly that Moses received the alphabet from God on Sinai.  It happens during the same sequence of revelations that begin with the burning bush and the revelation of God’s Name during their first encounter. God tells Moses to return to Egypt and instruct the elders of Israel in “the signs” or “ the letters” that God shows him.  Moses quails at his assignment.

But don’t worry, God reassures him, “If they don’t heed the voice of the first sign, they will listen to the voice of the last sign.”

The Aleph Tav
The first and last signs in Hebrew.

The first and last signs might refer to the silent conjuror’s tricks that God has just shown Moses:  a rod turns into a snake and Moses’ hand turns leprous and back again.

But more sensibly, the “voice of the signs” refers to  the core breakthrough that made the phonetic alphabet a monumentally disruptive invention: signs, instead of being pictures for words as in hieroglyphics, are instructions for the voice to make sounds, like musical notes. The first and last symbols refer to the aleph and the tav, the beginning, the whole of this new invention.  God is telling Moses: show the Israelites back in Egypt this new explosive technology, these letters, and with them you shall set them free. Continue reading “Hearing vs Reading the Bible” →

Chukat and Water: The Gift of the Desert

David Porush4 Comments

In memory of my father, Avraham ben Shlomo Zalman, Z”L“

The chapter of the Torah called Chukat [“Statutes”][1] seems like it’s disastrous, filled with confusion, Screen Shot 2016-07-17 at 8.47.34 PMcontradiction, and despair. It begins with a brain-bending formula for purification – the red heifer – which no one has convincingly explained. It is followed by calamity after calamity.  Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, two of the greatest prophets, die. This is a national tragedy for the Israelites but an inconceivably painful personal loss for Moses. I have one brother and one sister. I can only imagine what Moses felt. Yet, his grief isn’t even mentioned, maybe because the story has to move on to a lot more dismal news.

When Miriam dies, the well which sustained Israel in their forty years of wandering in the desert dries up. Unbelievably, after all this time, the people panic and protest and moan again for Egypt just as they did after, among others, the incidents of the Golden Calf, the manna, the spies, and Korach’s rebellion:

Why have you brought the LORD’s congregation into this wilderness for us and our beasts to die there?

Moses and Aaron again fall on their faces and appeal to G-d, Who says

“You and your brother Aaron take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. Thus you shall produce water for them from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their beasts.”

Moses took the rod from before the LORD, as He had commanded him. Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation in front of the rock; and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?” And Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod. Out came copious water, and the community and their beasts drank.

But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.”[2]

Seems like the horrible punishment of Moses is disproportionate to his petty infraction, right?

Wait, there’s more! The Israelites then look for access to the Promised Land through the Edomites, the Amalekites, Sihon, and Moab, but they are met at every turn with opposition and refusal. The Kings of Sihon and Arad even wage war against them.

Then poisonous snakes arise out of nowhere to attack and kill the Israelites for their lack of faith.

In short, from start to finish, Chukat looks like it’s going to be a hard and dispiriting slog through the wasteland. After decades of wandering, they are now besieged by enemies, plagued by rebellion, tortured by despair and grief, and perhaps worst of all, confounded by God’s incomprehensible Torah, filled as it is with commandments like the red heifer, they cower and yearn for Egypt. More than any other parsha, Chukat communicates the despair and pessimism of the desert, at least in its opening scenes.

The Countercurrent

But if we look closely at Chukat, there is a counter-theme which courses and babbles and carves a redemptive streambed through the story, revealing a hidden depth and a surprising counter-narrative. Chukat is like the rock Moshe strikes for water. Mayim, is mentioned 22 times in the course of the parsha. The section of the red heifer tells us to bathe, cleanse, wash, sprinkle, and dip. There are wells, rivers, brooks, springs, tributaries, and wadis. As if to identify the Israelites with water, when Moses begs the kings of Edom and Sihon for peaceful passage through their territories, he promises them that neither the Israelites nor their cattle will drink their water. The chapter ends with the Children of Israel poised within view of the salvation for which they have thirsted for forty years, at the east bank of the Jordan River.

Further, this is in stark contrast to the parched chapters directly before and after, Korach and Balak. Korach[3]is a desperate, parched story.  The symbol of that parsha is fire: Aaron shows his superiority to Korach and all of his followers with a test of all their individual firepans against his; when they lose, earth belches fire and swallows the leader of the rebellion and 250 of his followers “and all their households.” Aaron is commanded to expiate Israel and stop the plague that broke out among them and he rushes to perform the offering of incense on his firepan; plague kills 14,500 more of Korach’s followers. Korach’s rebellion burns with the heat of a mob, and it mentions water zero times.

The parsha following Chukat, Balak, mentions water only three times, and then only in one sentence (during Bilam’s extended blessing of Israel).

Why are the floodgates suddenly opened in Chukat? Why here, in this desperate passage?

The key is Miriam’s death. The sages famously tell us Miriam’s name comes from “mar” – bitter, but any schoolchild can see it is closer to the word for water – mayim, and the kabbalists agree.[4]  After all, her entire story is bound up with water. She follows her brother Moses as an infant in his basket down the Nile, making sure he is picked up by the princess of Egypt and cared for by his own mother, Yocheved. When the Israelites make it safely across the Red Sea and pharaoh’s army is drowned, she leads the women out of the camp with timbrels to sing the “Song of the Sea.” In the desert, a well of water miraculously follows the Israelites, sustaining them for most of the forty years. This is Miriam’s Well, because it is in her merit that it exists. When she is stricken with leprosy for gossiping about Moses’ divorce, the entire camp of Israel stops to wait seven days for her, both honoring her and waiting for her well to be ready to move. When she dies (recounted in this parsha), the well dries up, which leads to the events that follow.

So which is it? Is Chukat a dispiriting narrative of defeat, death, and despair? Or is it a tale of thirst slaked and pilgrims rewarded? Is it meant to afflict us with the feeling of wandering a desolated wasteland, never learning our lessons, always panicking and losing heart, or is it fertile with flowing waters, mayim chaim, the ‘living water’ of sustenance and hope, as the Torah calls it here?

The answer of course is both, but if we read the calculus of themes correctly, I believe the Torah tells us – even commands us with the force of a transcendent and mystifying statute – to trust in and celebrate the water of life. Or, no pun intended, to see the cup at least as half full, if not overrunning, with life. And to prove the point, the end of the parsha concludes with a vigorous new generation of Israelites defeating Sihon and occupying their lands. Then they conquer Og, King of Bashan – the Talmud tells us they were descendants of the aboriginal race of giants, a fitting contrast and rectification for the cowardice of the spies who first scouted out the Promised Land and saw only giants – and occupy their lands. The tide has turned and the conquest of the Promised Land is about to begin.

The 614th Commandment?

Towards the end of Chukat, the Jews celebrate water by breaking into song for the second time in the Torah, presumably by a well in the lands they newly occupy.

“Gather the people together and I will give them water.

Then Israel sang this song:

Spring up, O well,

sing ye unto it.

The princes dug the well,

the nobles of the people dug it,

by the direction of the Lawgiver,

with their rods.

And from the desert it is a gift.[5]

On the one hand, this hearkens back to Miriam’s “Song of the Sea” and puts a nice exclamation point on the theme of water in Chukat, giving it coherence and a sense of resolution. On the other hand, the Torah uses the imperative: “Sing, O Israel”!  Although this isn’t one of the 613 commandments (mitzvot), perhaps it should be the 614th, or maybe the 0th, because it is the premise for all the others. Praising water is itself a kind of chok, as the song seems to hint. Rambam, Bachya Asher  and others say the origin of the word chok is from chukikah – engraved in rock, like a picture.[6] The princes “dig the well” with their “rods.” Is it a metaphor for the luchot habrit – the two tablets engraved in stone that Moses brings down from Sinai? Is it meant to evoke the entire Torah itself, an impenetrable text that nonetheless brings forth waters of redemption? The “princes” … are they the Torah scholars inscribing the stony text with their pens, bringing forth water of wisdom from rocky, impenetrable sources beyond rationality? The red heifer formula dissolves the clear line between the tamei (contamination) of death and tahor (purity) of life, and water plays an essential role in the opaque ritual (along with fire). But the line between life and death isn’t a solid barrier, to be overcome by a mechanical ritual. It is a flow overspilling fixed boundaries and categories, working back into life to contaminate it. It can only be washed away by a torrent of paradoxes that dissolves the levee of those logical, mechanical boundaries. In some measure, all of Torah’s commandments have a mystical source beyond comprehension; they are all chukat.

Watering Our Internal Desert

Life is filled with want and strife and contradiction. We fail ourselves and those we’re responsible for. We flare in anger when quiet patience will do. Babies wail. Wells dry up. Enemies block the paths to quench our thirst and reach our goals. We try to get by, but nations wage war on us. Danger, like poison snakes, emerge out of nowhere to torment us. Innocents and great people and loved ones die. Though we try to keep the faith, how can we when we can’t even comprehend the rules for doing so? Even miraculous manna and well water turn to dust in our mouths when we’re afraid. The world is senseless and violent. We are bound to lose heart, even as we near the end of our journey. We find it impossible to believe in promises and miracles when our raw material survival is threatened. We are bound to cry to return to our spiritual Egypt where we might have been slaves but our bodies were provided for. If God is so wonderful and perfect, why did He even invent suffering and death, let alone lead us into the desert of history where hundreds, thousands, millions of Jews are slaughtered in every chapter of our wandering?

Chukat prescribes the cure to this nihilism and despair. It commands us to sing our joy and celebrate water even in the most parched desert. Water is the very gift of the desert, its special miracle, first through Miriam, then Moses. Though we are left poised in suspense near the end of our journey, on the expectant side of the River Jordan, there it is, the water of life, promise, and redemption. And here we are alive against all odds, ready. It’s still too early to have lost all hope.

Moses himself exemplifies this lesson.[7] At the end of his turbulent life, 120 years old, you would think he would be reconciled, even ready, to succumb to death. If anyone has earned the right to rest from stony conflict and dismay and disappointment, he has. Yet he is still defiant, thirsty for more, and begs God for more life.

L’mayim chaim!

* Although this one, by Reb Aaron Benjamin, is the best I’ve ever heard: http://www.weeklysugya.com/ <—- Click on July 7, 2019 podcast in list.

ENDNOTES

Thanks to my extended chavrusa, especially Ron Kardos, Marcos Frid, and Michael Wulfsohn for their suggestions, edits, and corrections. Mistakes are still all my own.

[1] Numbers 19:1-22:1

[2] Numbers 20:7-12.

As to this punishment, Ramban explains that G-d doesn’t punish Moses because he was angry and struck the rock instead of talking to it – the conventional explanation that Maimonides offered – it was because Moses didn’t remember to attribute the miracle to G-d, didn’t “affirm His sanctity,” in front of the congregation. Instead Moses made it seem like he an Aaron were performing the miracle, a much graver violation: “Shall we get water for you out of this rock?”

[3] Numbers 16:1-18:32

[4] See this discussion by Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin of the kabbalistic interpretation and gematria values of her name include “mar” raindrops + yam [sea]: she is the source of so many raindrops they amass to a sea. Another is the tradition that if you go to the same well, any well, on the evening after Shabbat, you will be blessed because Miriam’s well connects all the wells in the world. https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/video_cdo/aid/3557353/jewish/Inside-the-Name-Miriam.htm

[5] Num 21:16-18

[6] From Rabbeinu Bachya commentary to 19:3 “Still, the principal meaning of the word חק is derived from the word חקיקה, something that is “indelibly engraved in a rock,” like a picture. G’d hinted to the Children of Israel that their image is indelibly engraved in the celestial regions. In other words, seeing there are no rocks to inscribe things on in the celestial regions, the word חקיקה is a simile for immutable concepts, as basic to G’d’s legislation as if their counterpart had been engraved in rock in our terrestrial universe

[7] According to the Rabbinic tradition (Midrash On the Death of Moses, Petirat Moshe)

Literature, Letterature, Liturgy

David Porush3 Comments

When the Hebrew Bible was first transcribed, the Jews used the newly-invented alphabet to write it. No matter whether you believe it was simply the Ten Commandments or the entire Five Books written in fire on stone by the Finger of God that Moses brought down from Sinai, or even if its core was fabricated by a bunch of authors in the 13th-8th centuries BCE, the medium must have been the alphabet.

Screen Shot 2016-07-07 at 6.20.09 PMEarliest archeological evidence, like the stone idol from Serabit el-Khadem, places the origin of the alphabet in the South Sinai (!) about sixty miles north of Mount Sinai, around the 15th-14th C BCE (!), just when tradition places the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt.

Hebrew for about four centuries after remained a primitive alphabet, lacking vowels, or spaces between words, or punctuation of any kind. It was scrawled boustrophedon – as the ox plows the field – that is, left to right until the end of the line, then right to left, and so on.

In short, the Torah that Moses brought to the Children of Israel was one long, breathless, written word. It awaited an oral enunciation to  place the cuts between words and determine their meaning.

To quickly illustrate this, how would you read the following letters?

nthbgnnggdcrtdthhvnndthrth

It would take some puzzling and context and familiarity to recognize this as

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

But lacking complete authority and assurance – nothing short of playing telepathy with the author – any reading would admit of several competing interpretations, including some that may seem at first nonsensical but may hide lurking messages if you stare at them too long:

In the big, no-nagged court doth have nine, death, or thee.

Hebrew readers to this day read texts without vowels and have to disambiguate individual words either by familiarity, or context, or memorizing them with the aid of another text with vowels. Consider the word in Hebrew דבר – DBR.  The consonants could mean dvar (word), dever (plague), davar (thing), daber (speak), dibbur (speech), and others besides.

In short, individual words in Hebrew invite – even demand – that the reader play this puzzling game. This is the sort of game literature students encounter when they have to interpret opaque or dense poetry (John Donne’s works are my favorite) or literature filled with word play and deliberate punning, like Joyce’s Ulysses.

Not-yet-words

But because Hebrew words lack vowels, they are something denser. Let’s call them not -yet-words. Words are instructions for speech like musical notes, cues for sound. Consonants are the hard sounds stuck in the mouth that await the explosive of a vowel to be pronounced. Try to pronounce ‘T’. All you have is the instruction for placing the tongue at the top of the mouth, behind the upper teeth, waiting for a vowel for it to burst forth.

All words in Hebrew without vowels are to some extent not-yet-words, lambent with meanings that are always becoming, emergent, not-yet-utterable. If so, then all Hebrew texts written without vowels – even a grocery list (see A Canticle for Liebowitz, for instance) – are a form of literarature, one might even say poetry: difficult, opaque, demanding interpretations.

Compared to the ideal of clarity we inherited from the Greeks, who perfected the alphabet by adding vowels, Hebrew without vowels is a hopeless muddle. The eminent Yale scholar of the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, Eric Havelock, declared that the ancient Hebrews could not hope to create a true (read “Greek”) literature. His libel was meant to be huffy Brit prejudice, but he was right, though for the wrong reasons. He assumed that the primitiveness of the Hebrew mind, its theocratic social organization, and the impoverishment of its alphabetic script, could not conceive the elevated thinking, clarity, and expressiveness of classical Greek.

On the contrary. The essence of the early Hebrew script generates complexity, the play of multiple meanings, divine punning. Hebrew is already a form of high literature, inviting interpretation of almost every word. Indeed, the question What is literary? makes no sense as we try to apply a Greek understanding to a Hebrew communications technology and textuality. We need a whole new word for the kind of discourse engendered by these letters which form words that are never-quite-words.

Letterature… and prayer

In reading Hebrew, I propose that we are perpetually reading a kind of letterature. Sense is suspended between our decoding of the letter and our reading of the word. We shuttle back and forth in interpretive tension attempting, often vainly, to be sure of the intended meaning. This is really literary reading tending not towards clarity but dyslexia. As Amos Oz quipped, “There is no word in Hebrew for fiction.” I think he meant because anything written in Hebrew comes with this fictive suspense always already lambent in the very medium – a defective script missing vowels.

Perhaps we can extend this lesson of reading in Hebrew to an aspect of all reading. The truth value of any text is suspended between the ever-threatening catastrophe of  ever-promulgating interpretations that at the first reading defeats the illusion of telepathy – clearly understanding what’s in the Mind of the Author, but at another opens hailing frequencies to a very animated and dynamic metaphysical and cognitive plane.

I don’t know about how you take your literature (or should I say, how your literature takes you), but this sure feels how I take and am seized by mine, in all its debilitating pleasure and transporting joy. A good poem or a dense novel exiles us for a time to an inward realm. We read and get lost somewhere in the wilderness between multiple competing possibles and mutually-enriching meanings. If we linger there long enough and if we climb the mountain, then perhaps revelation will come.

Reading Hebrew thus becomes the Ur-type of literary reading: a devotional, a form of prayer, and the engagement with its letterature a form of liturgy.