By Emily K. Alhadeff, Associate Editor, The Jewish Sound
“The priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire.”
So wrote Wallace Stevens, the American poet whose words inspired the title of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s first book, “The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis.”
“It’s a very Jewish idea, the idea of lack,” Zornberg told The Jewish Sound as the sun descended on a Friday afternoon just before Shabbat.
Zornberg, raised in Glasgow, Scotland, the daughter of Viennese refugees, obtained her doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before focusing her intellectual energy on the Torah. Her lessons invoking literature and psychoanalysis grew in popularity among English-speaking immigrants in Jerusalem. Zornberg, a youthful 70, has become a leading Biblical commentator whose work spans the disciplines.
Zornberg spent Shabbat in Seward Park the weekend of May 16 as scholar in residence at Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath and Sephardic Bikur Holim.
“This is a speaker who could draw together a community that was fractured,” said Gigi Yellen-Kohn, referring to the political strife between the Ashkenazi Orthodox congregation and its breakaway minyan, Ohr Chadash. “There was a diverse crowd. It did achieve the goal of having people together.”
Yellen-Kohn, a BCMH board member who did most of the organizing, suggested bringing Zornberg in from Jerusalem. Zornberg’s approach to Torah study is hard to describe — it’s an experience to be felt more than a lesson to take away.
“It’s a performative thing,” Zornberg said. “It’s not something that can be summed up in a sentence. There’s no little pellet that can come out and say ‘be your best self.’”
Zornberg was heavily influenced by the Netziv, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin of Volozhin, who emphasized chiddush, the concept of looking at a text and coming up with a wholly new interpretation.
Zornberg’s growing interest in psychoanalysis began to affect her study.
“It was a refreshing way to get away from routine thoughts,” she said. “I think one of the problems of Judaism is boredom. People live very much with received ideas.”
In approaching the Book of Ruth, Zornberg was interested in her “becoming” a new person, transformed by her adoption by the Israelite people.
Ruth, who is defined throughout her eponymous book as Ruth the Moabite, “is not what she is internally. How does she become what she isn’t yet? What does it mean to become who one may be?”
Curiously, Zornberg points out, is how Ruth the outsider becomes about as central a figure for the Jewish people as one can get, as the grandmother of the future King David.
“There are midrashic sources where David recognizes her as his essential source,” she said. “This woman from the outside becomes the source…Someone from the outside gets right into the heart.”
Zornberg’s Shabbat afternoon talk connected a range of traditional sources and literary and psychoanalytic tropes to work through difficult texts in new ways. For instance, what’s going on when the spies come back from the land of Canaan with a negative report in Numbers? Why were spies necessary if God’s whole plan was to bring the Israelites there? Why did they lie? Or did they lie?
“For me, thinking about God and thinking about wholeness and oneness and the great religious absolutes, it’s been refreshing to find how much our tradition emphasizes the opposite,” that is, brokenness, Zornberg told JTNews. “Paradoxically, it’s the key to everything.”
The Ten Commandments are a perfect metaphor.
“Once they’re broken you can and you must [repair them],” she explained. “You have to make the text. You have to interpret. If you’re not interpreting, you’re not ‘oseh’ [making].”
For the past year, BCMH has been hosting guest speakers and scholars in residence while it figures out how to move forward with a rabbi search. Daniel Birk, board president of BCMH, said such events emphasize the shul’s goal of diversity.
“I call it an experience over a lecture,” he said. “You saw people really drawn to her.”
For Yellen-Kohn, and for others, it was important to bring in a female Orthodox scholar.
“In an environment that’s usually associated with a dour, male-heavy Orthodoxy, to have her literacy, and her ease of communication, and her depth of knowledge right there in the middle was a demonstration of a kind of respect for learning that transcends any of the issues that so often get discussed,” said Yellen-Kohn of Zornberg’s Q and A, held on Shabbat afternoon at a meal generally frequented by more men than women.
“I think women’s learning is a very important thing,” Zornberg said. “If a woman feels that in her, there really are opportunities to follow it up and enlarge oneself.”