A sensitive reader

The Genesis of Desire, a reading of some of the best known stories of Genesis with Avivah Zornberg. Scots-born Zornberg brings a lot to her reading of the Bible, including modern psychological study coupled with a deep knowledge of the Zohar and the Midrash. The Bible via this sensitive reader begins to seem a very strange, numinous place.

On the flood story:

Ms. Zornberg: Ah, what's happening there. I mean, everything is happening. I think whatever you can read in the text is happening. What I'm interested in is the issue of language and silence, a kind of defensive silence, and the basis for this apparently very modern theme actually is in the Zohar, in the source of Kabbalah.

Ms. Tippett: That's interesting too because we never — when that story is told to children, for example, I think it's mostly children who hear the Flood story — we never reflect on the life in the ark. You get the two by two coming on and then coming out at the end.

[snip]

Ms. Zornberg: Yes, yes.

Ms. Tippett: So how does the Zohar …

Ms. Zornberg: The Zohar and Midrashic sources — first of all, how did they all eat? How did the animals eat? It's a big …

Ms. Tippett: Right [laugh].

Ms. Zornberg: Yes. I mean, all right, maybe they brought on food for the animals, but how did they get at it? So Zohar imagines very beautifully that Noah spends his whole time, morning and night, day and night, feeding the animals. That's an expression of his desire to preserve the world. And he feeds each animal according to its own timing, it's own feeding schedule, so he's really rather fully occupied feeding the world. He doesn't get a wink of sleep, again, in these Midrashic sources. He has no sexual relations with his wife and no one does. There is no sex. Even the animals on the ark, you know, don't have relations.

[snip]

Ms. Zornberg: Absolutely. And on top of that, I think precisely the things that he can't do in the ark or he mustn't do, like sexual relations, sleeping, the way he spends all his time feeding, it occurred to me that these are descriptions of God. God feeds all living beings and God doesn't sleep. He doesn't slumber nor sleep and God, of course, has no partner. So in a sense, there's a kind of omnipotence that Noah is experiencing in this prison, which is, again, very natural that, once you have deprived yourself of life and you see that in some way as an ideal and as an expression of ultimate power because you are not compromised now in any way by the messy world of talk, of communication. So to me, it's a defense mechanism and he refuses to let go of it.

On reading:

Ms. Zornberg: You know, you don't read; you study. You study the text and that implies that you don't really understand it, first off. You read it and then you read it again and then you notice things and things don't work and things don't make sense and then you're exorcised by it. And that's what I call desire, because something is not. Something that should be there is not there and that's what gets people going. That's what gets people involved and this very intimate connection between the human being and the text, between Jews and this text, is a result of that.

A transcript of the full interview with Zornberg.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Zornberg is a celebrated literary teacher of Torah. Her books include The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious and The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis.

Another, briefer interview here.

Genesis and the Genome

This recent NPR story about a debate over belief in a literal Adam and Eve raises some interesting interpretive points. While there's a longstanding basis for interpreting Genesis allegorically, some scholars say if you remove the literal Adam (and Eve), you remove Paul's interpretation of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ.

"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," [Albert] Mohler says.

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"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins

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Crumb Reviewed

Shaw points us to two reviews of R. Crumb's illustrated The Book of Genesis:

David Hajdu in the Times has a few images from the book, and David Colton in USA Today interviewed Crumb in France:

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who writes about pop culture and who has seen excerpts of the book, says Crumb is only the latest artist to bring the Bible to a new generation.

Did Paradise Lost seem quite so provocative to 17th Century England?

It might also be worth pondering Crumb's very "human" approach to Genesis in contrast with what Prof. Rogers describes as Milton's effort to be at, or before, the beginning of all poetry, all history, all time:

Milton wants to create the illusion that he's predicting, or that he's prophesying, the actions recounted in the poem, as if Milton were prophesying what of course we know to be already past. This is the strategy of retrospective anticipation. Lecture 9.

Genesis by Crumb

Milton's rendering of scenes from Genesis was bold even for its time. Now R. Crumb has decided to offer his own take -- on the entire first book of the Torah:

Crumb's new comic, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, contains all 50 chapters of Genesis and comes with a warning on its cover: "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors.

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Worthwhile Morris

In Seven Lies about Lying, Errol Morris beautifully articulates the complex play of implication and deceit in the tale of Joseph and his brothers - both the tale in Genesis, and also in a medieval rendering, and the Renaissance painting by Velazquez. The article is part two of a conversation with Ricky Jay. Part one is here.