Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg - The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious

Deep calls unto deep

Psalms 42:8

And the mountain blazed in fire to the heart of the heavens.

Deuteronomy 4:11

If we had a keen vision and a feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walks about well wadded in stupidity.

George Eliot, MIDDLEMARCH

IN THESE ESSAYS I reflect on the dynamics of communication in a set of biblical narratives. They are informed by the psychoanalytic understanding that unconscious mental processes are always at work, affecting consciousness. Communication that takes place between human beings is never exhausted by what is consciously and explicitly communicated.

In any vital encounter, much more is transacted than lies within the field of consciousness. As Hans-Georg Gadamer often remarks, we always already belong to prejudices, wishes, and interests that close us to certain truths and open us to others. The complex interplay of forgetting and remembering, the traumatic departures from our own experience, all leave traces in our movements of communion with one another.

By the same measure, they leave traces in the biblical accounts of what is transacted between people, between people and God, and between parts of the self. In this book, I am particularly interested in the ways in which the Rabbis, in midrashic and Hasidic commentary, reflect on these subtle movements of communion. In effect, my subject is the Rabbinic unconscious, both in the sense of the understandings of unconscious human life that emerge from these reflections and in the sense of the intimate fullness, complexity and conflict that resonate within these Rabbinic voices.

Deep calls unto deep (Ps. 42:8). Communication takes place between depths, abysses, the voices of many waters. The Hebrew word that is rendered by the English deep is tehomincomparably richer in association. This tehomunfathomable, void, dense with watery voicesis one metaphor I would like to explore in this introduction. The other is the volcano, also hidden, unknowable, but explosive, repressing and expressing violent energy, heated beyond human imagining. Together, these metaphors communicate the complexity of human unconscious life, the subterranean power that strains against the deceptively solid eggshell of the earths crust.

THE SPEECH OF RUPTURE

What do human beings have in common? What can we trust in addressing each other? What are the links that make the other imaginable as an interlocutor? And what is the effect of traumatic experience on this sense that communication is possible? How, indeed, does one understand traumatic experience?

If, as Cathy Caruth claims, trauma leaves a legacy of incomprehensibility, destruction and survival assume a paradoxical relation with each other. For the survivor, the one who lives past death, communication becomes both impossible and essential. Because of an impossible history, the traumatized are possessed by an experience that only belatedly they can begin to possess, to register. The gap at the very heart of memory eliminates simple knowledge and communication; it threatens a collapse of witnessing. Yet witnessing is essential, since it is only in the process of testimony that the trauma is for the first time recorded. Does the study of traumatic experience yield understandings for those who, whether with or without apparent traumatic histories, try to speak and listen to one another? Does the volcanos impacted fury become strangely reticent, in Emily Dickinsons haunting expression, holding its complex secret?

In these essays, I explore enigmas of communication as they are articulated in twelve biblical narratives, and refracted in midrashic and Hasidic readings of those narratives. At their simplest, the questions are: Can we know the other? Can we speak to the other and be heard? Can we hear the others cry? I read narratives of rupture and reconnection in three kinds of relationships: between self and other, between self and God, and within the self. The first two of these areas represent a classic Jewish understanding of the dual nature of human experience: bein adam le-chavero (lit. between man and friend) and bein adam la-makom (lit. between man and God) constitute traditional categories of responsibility, social and religious, each with its complex codes of law and sensibility. The third categorybein adam le-atzmo (between man and himself)represents a relatively modern understanding of the complexities of the self.

As Lionel Trilling points out, a new concept of the personal emerged in eighteenth century European culture: At a certain point in history men became individuals.

The private self, the true self, as Trilling shows in his masterful study, becomes more fragmented and paradoxical as the cultural ideal evolves from one of sincerity to one of authenticity. But the individual self is from the outset in an adversarial relationship with society. This tension becomes the central issue of the modern period.

In the history of Jewish thought, it was the Hasidic masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who for the first time set the issue of the true self in clear focus. Knowing oneself, maintaining communication with oneself, becomes a spiritual ideal, requiring rigorous and transformative work. By and large, however, the Hasidic commentary on the Bible sharpened and deflected the awareness of the individual self that had led an implicit life in classic exegetical sources, particularly in midrashic literature, for many hundreds of years. Moreover, the relation of self and society was not described as inherently conflictual; the three spiritual registers social, religious, introspectivewere seen as three dimensions of the same redemptive movement.