The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious [Hardcover]

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2009

From one of the most innovative and acclaimed biblical commentators at work today, here is a revolutionary analysis of the intersection between religion and psychoanalysis in the stories of the men and women of the Bible.

For centuries scholars and rabbis have wrestled with the biblical narrative, attempting to answer the questions that arise from a plain reading of the text. In The Murmuring Deep, Avivah Zornberg informs her literary analysis of the text with concepts drawn from Freud, Winnicott, Laplanche, and other psychoanalytic thinkers to give us a new understanding of the desires and motivations of the men and women whose stories form the basis of the Bible. Through close readings of the biblical and midrashic texts, Zornberg makes a powerful argument for the idea that the creators of the midrashic commentary, the med­ieval rabbinic commentators, and the Hassidic commentators were themselves on some level aware of the complex interplay between conscious and unconscious levels of experience and used this knowledge in their interpretations.

In her analysis of the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Abraham, Rebecca, Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Ruth, and Esther–how they communicated with the world around them, with God, and with the various parts of their selves–Zornberg offers fascinating insights into the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness. In discussing why God has to “seduce” Adam into entering the Garden of Eden or why Jonah thinks he can hide from God by getting on a ship, Zornberg enhances our appreciation of the Bible as the foundational text in our quest to understand what it means to be human.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1939, just before he died, Freud published Moses and Monotheism, his last creative effort. He applied psychoanalytic insights to the story of Moses. Using a somewhat similar approach, augmented by her skills in literary analysis, Zornberg (The Beginning of Desire), a Jerusalem resident and biblical scholar with a Cambridge Ph.D. in English literature, looks at several figures from the Bible, including Adam, Eve, Noah, Jonah, Esther, Abraham, Rebecca, Isaac, Joseph and Ruth. Unfortunately, Zornberg lacks Freud's ability to write clearly, so her text is dense and studded with such odd words as facticity, dysprovidential, conversive, transferential, problematizes, futural, asymbolia and performative. Also, she displays her impressive erudition by quoting obscure Talmudic, psychological and literary sources. The result is a hard-to-read treatise that will be of interest only to a small group of academics. (Mar.)
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Review

In Praise of The Murmuring Deep

“In Zornberg's brilliant new work, we have a heroic reconstruction of the rabbinic canon in ways that seek to make it relevant to contemporary readers, allowing them to use their education to incorporate Jewish texts into their actual lives. By opening up the midrashic traditions, Zornberg has given us the freedom to open up the book of our own psychological lives and to understand how the ancient traditions illuminate who we are and what we can become. If education is the very core value of Judaism, it is by reading books like The Murmuring Deep that we can fulfill the precept of Torah study. Avivah Zornberg has permitted us to witness the greatness of the Jewish sages in a freshly creative and intensely dynamic way. The path of such understanding is not simply to allow us to be more religious, but also to better assert our human ethicality and our place in this vast and complex universe.”
–Tikkun

“Avivah Zornberg tries to lay bare the process by which biblical characters act as they do, and she shows the ways in which the bible employs not just the intelligible, well-ordered language of conscious speech but also the elusive idiom of the unconscious. [The text] becomes in Dr. Zornberg’ s hands, yet again, a work of mystery.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“Zornberg renews the biblical texts in ways that make her the foremost scholar of the Hebrew Bible for readers who seek not only intellectual and creative achievement (which her book offers in abundance), but also that rare sensibility capable of explaining, exploring and deepening our sense of what it means to be a human being of faith in a world as fractured and fragmentary as ours. . . . She ranges widely among Jewish sources from the ancient, medieval and modern periods; from classic works of psychoanalysis by Freud and Winnicott to more recent interventions by Julia Kristeva, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas; from literary critics Frank Kermode and D.A. Miller to the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell; from Henry James and Eliot to Paul Celan and Marguerite Duras. The book, however, does not flit between these sources. Zornberg builds a framework from these thinkers and writers, one that gives form and heft to her conceptions of the biblical drama, often illuminating these sources as she goes. . . . A most luminous study.”
–Ilana Blumberg, The Forward

“The effect of each chapter is a humble display of quoted erudition. The art of these readings, like that of collage-making or quilting, resides in the unique coherence of the final assemblage. . . . The trusting reader is rewarded with that deeper, more vivid experience of life that comes from confronting the existential, traumatized self and from finding consolation in the Torah’s prolific elusive meanings.”
–Lilith Magazine


The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

“Zornberg brings a brilliant mastery of psychology, literature–and Judaism–to bear on the Bible . . . This is an extraordinary book.”
–The Jerusalem Report

“Not only is Zornberg’ s book leagues removed from popular trivializations, it also does what all successful midrash is meant to do: open up new perspectives on ancient texts.”
–Commonweal

“More than a book. It is a genre unto itself, brilliantly overcoming the deficiencies of other approaches. There is no doubt that Zornberg’s work deserves to be the most widely read book on [the] Bible in years, perhaps decades.”
–Jewish Exponent

The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus

“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

“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 sophistication of her presentation.”
–Tikkun

“What is exciting about Zornberg’s work is not solely her use of varied sources, but her objective in their use. [The] ‘discovery of how life and text inform each other’ animates us in our own study . . . So great is her love of, reverence for, and belief in Torah, it is contagious.”
–The Catholic Worker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Schocken (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805242473
• ISBN-13: 978-0805242478
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #229,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic and must read, April 1, 2009

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (Hardcover)

THE MURMURING DEEP


The great works of Life and Literature are those which are read and reread generation by generation. On occasion the dialogue between the generations takes a dramatic turn and a new way and world are opened up. This is what happens for many readers when they are given the interpretative investigations of Biblical Literature by Avivah Zornberg. In her readings of the texts there are whole new worlds of suggestion and surprise which yoke together what might at first seem the most unlikely and contradictory sources and worlds.



In her previous two book explorations of the Biblical text Avivah Zornberg made use of the traditional framework of weekly Torah (Parsha) readings. In this volume she develops her reading through focusing on and elaborating the stories of individual personalities. She does this with her now familiar yet still strikingly original method of combining traditional Jewish religious sources with challenging contemporary psychoanalytical, anthropological, and most movingly , literary sources.



In the course of this she reveals hidden unconscious meanings, depths in the text which even the most experienced reader will often be startled and inspired by. Zornberg is capable of both great profundity and great poetic feeling. Her associative readings not simply inspire but they are capable of moving us personally, speaking to our own present psychological and emotional situation. It is her capacity to read and inspire the Soul which I believe has more than anything else given her the great following she has among those who seriously read and study Biblical texts.



The twelve essays in this volume are divided into three sections, The first focuses on relations `Between God and Self' (Seduced into Eden: The Beginning of Desire (Adam) Despondent Intoxication( Noah) Jonah:A Fantasy of Flight) Esther "Mere Anarchy is Loosed upon the World.) The second focuses on `The Stranger Within' ( In the Vale of Soul- Making Abraham's Journey) Abraham Bound and Unbound: The Akedah) Her own Foreigner Rebecca's Pregnancy ) Blindness and Blessing: Isaac Trembles Twice) The third focuses on relations Between Self and Other (And I Did Not Know.. The Secret of Prayer) The Pit and the Rope Recovering Joseph) `What if Joseph Hates Us? Closing the `Book) (Law and Narrative in the Book of Ruth).



In the first section of the work she describes what she calls `complex issues of communication' involving `the human desire to know and control the Other, to evade uncertainty and affirm mastery.''But acknowledging God means acknowledging the Other within oneself, as well as the enigmatic human other.' In the second section `Abraham, Isaac and Rebecca live through moments when consciousness brushes against its limits.' In the third section `Jacob, Joseph and Ruth seek to affirm connections with others across minefields of betrayal and abjection.'



Each of the chapters is a challenge and demands not simply reading, but rereading for full understanding. This is not a book to be read through as a whole swiftly but rather to be taken chapter by chapter and then reread again. In this sense it mirrors the whole Midrashic interpretative - literature choice selections of which it so richly incorporates. It is not necessary to agree with each of the interpretations but rather to open oneself to them, be challenged by them, learn from them, argue with them perhaps, and also be inspired by them.



Like the Yaakov whose vale of struggle for soul- making she so tellingly depicts Zornberg gives us a sense of struggling for meaning line- by- line, of trying to find and make in each sentence a kind of meaning which will resonate in more than one dimension for its readers.

This work is a classic will be required reading for all future scholars of Biblical interpretation. As importantly perhaps, it will serve for the general reader a vitally interesting exploration of the human condition.
A truly must read.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking, June 7, 2009

By 

L. Leeder (Newton Centre, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (Hardcover)

Anyone who has sat in on Dr. Avivah Zorenberg's classes will appreciate and enjoy this latest book. Organized by themes of communication both internal and external, Dr. Zorenberg combines classic literature, Midrashic interpretation and psychology to create a complete and complex picture of the heritage created by the forefathers, and places it in a thoroughly modern and engaging context.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, April 26, 2009

By 

ghostcat - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (Hardcover)

Zornberg has moved to a new level: These concise essays overflow with profound psychological and religious insight, interpretative virtuosity and human depth