The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious

by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

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.

Genres: Judaism, Religion, Jewish, Theology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Faith

482 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 31, 2009

Reviews

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Begun around November 2011 and finished on January 11, 2015:

“Shoot for something you can barely control” – it's a line from Barry Hannah that I cling to in writing, but I’m also beginning to cling to it in reading. It took me over 3 years to read Zornberg – often I could wrestle through only a few pages in one sitting, constantly flipping to the “Notes” section to puzzle over her millions of sources. This book is really explosive in terms of its focus on departure from the ordered world—it’s high brow but pulses really with the nature of life lived in the lap of brokenness—even though it’s highly academic it’s also warm and wondrous and a companion, it seems to me, to a reader whose life is in upheaval.

It’s a very difficult book to sum up – she explores midrashic texts, the undercurrents and murmurs in biblical narratives. The cumulative effect, the world the book creates, the level of thinking and processing it requires in its integration of literary criticism, semiotics, poetry, psychoanalysis, biblical exegesis are all beyond me intellectually, yet, during some sittings with this book, Zornberg created a kind of “rough ground” for my creative work. It’s as if she invites you to write and imagine *into* the fractures of the chapters themselves, much like the way midrashic narratives operate maybe.

Zornberg encourages a stumbling in the mind (she writes, or quotes, somewhere in these 379 pages: “One cannot comprehend [stand upon] words of Torah unless one has stumbled over them”). She pushes you toward becoming nothing (in my favorite chapter on Esther), toward learning from the “unchosen bride” in Leah, toward seeing fire/loss as transfigurative in the Isaac & Abraham narrative, and always toward what is foreign inside us that resists easy closure of a messy narrative (esp. in the wonderful last chapter on the Book of Ruth).

PP 238-9: She discusses midrash as plough: a plough “turns over the sods of earth to create a newly fertile surface. The …plough tears open, enters darkness to bring to light something that had been buried…" 238: She writes: “The turning plough offers Osip Mandelstam a metaphor for the way poetry can penetrate the past:'Poetry is the plough tearing open and turning over time so that the deep layers of it, its rich black undersoil, ends up on the surface…Mankind…craves, like a ploughman, for the virgin soil of time.'"

I found the whole reading process with this book generative for my thinking and writing because of how she keeps turning and turning the familiar biblical narratives.

During some of these 3 years of dipping into this book, I was working on a piece exploring the biblical character Rizpah, a concubine of Saul who stood guard for 7 months by the bodies of her executed sons, fending off buzzard & beast. Zornberg led me into imagery of rain and dew that I tried to explore in my piece on Rizpah, which is really a meditation on grief & renewal – I am still trying to unpack her wonderful imagery and synthesis. This imagery serves as a great example of what she does throughout the book, again and again, offering genuine surprise, for me at least:

She quotes Shem Mi-Shmuel, a 19th century Hasidic master, on the image of dew: “dew rests for a moment on the grass and vanishes, evaporates. In that moment, however, it ‘arouses the inner moisture of the grass’—unlike rain, for instance, which moistens the earth and remains absorbed by it. The contrast between dew and rain he finds in the Talmud:

…“And let us know, eagerly strive to know God. His going forth is sure as the morning; and He shall come to us as the rain” (Hosea 6.3)…
“I will be as dew to Israel” (Hosea 14.6).

One verse in Hosea gives the human request for God-as-rain; another gives God’s offer of God-as-dew. God models a different sensibility of relationship. In the reading of Shem Mi-Shmuel, rain penetrates, implants itself; if God relates to Israel in this way, nothing will emerge machamat atzmam—from them, spontaneously. Dew, on the other hand, delicately touches, awakens inner vitality, and disappears. To know God as dew is to respond to a hint, like perfume; a word or two is sometimes enough. It is to respond unconsciously.”

I also pulled out a kind of scaffold of epigraphs for my work with Rizpah, and it was also a scaffold for those few years of extreme transition in my life; most of the lines are works quoted by Zornberg and they give a sense of the interdisciplinarity of the book; of course you're missing the wonderful webbing she provides around the quotations in her work, but, even so, I will share them here:

“In this spiritual process, writes William James, ‘something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy.’”

Buber in Zornberg 130: “calls the prophetic moment the one when ‘the customary soul enlarges and transfigures itself into the surprise soul…the unique being, man, is created to be a center of surprise in the universe.’”

“If you know too well how to do something, you will be less likely to fall into originality.” – Adam Phillips

“Back to the rough ground! Look and see!” – Wittgenstein

Zornberg 120, speaking of Esther, speaking of Mordecai’s sensitivity to hints: “a hint is sufficient for the wise. A word is sometimes sufficient basis for a castle in the air…one experiences [a hint] as an intimate call, its very subtlety inspiring imagination.”

And Zornberg quotes Henry James on the artist: “A kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue…it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”

Zornberg 127, quoting José Ortega: “And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like her earlier books, Gottlieb Zornberg draws on English literature, Freudian psychology, and midrash (Jewish traditional interpretation) to make novel and insightful Biblical connections. However, it is not the tour de force that was The Beginning of Desire. That book was much more coherent and the interpretations seemed far less strained.

[Kressel Housman]

I think it's time to admit that this book is just too academic in tone for me, but I feel like I *should* go back to it at some point.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

•
o In these essays I reflect on the dynamics of communication in a set of biblical narratives. Informed by psychoanalytic understanding of ucs
o 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.
o “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 tehom—incomparably richer in association. This tehom—unfathomable, void, dense with watery voices
o The speech of rupture
o 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 other’s cry?
o I read narratives of rupture and reconnection in three kinds of relationships: beween self and other, between self and God, and within the self
o How is it possible to communicate with the enigmatic and intrusive other
o Seductive messages a la Laplanche
o The internal stranger, a residue o seduction, of an inspiration beyond understanding s
o Sedution, of course, contains a traumatic element—the break-in from outside, which becomes an inner “foreign body” and now breaks out from within
o “Laplanche’s essence of the human soul…is a traumatic but unavoidable receptivity to the other. Too open, it learns forms of closure”
o Between God and Noach, or Jonah, or Esther, the human desire to know and to control the Other, to evade uncertainty and arm mastery, is enacted in many different ways. But acknowledging God means acknowledging the Other within oneself, as well as the enigmatic human other.
o Christopher Bollas writes of the need to form a relation to the “mysterious unavailability of much of our knowledge.” His concept of the “unthought known,” of “what we know but may never be able to think,” comes to mark a fundamental split between this and “what we think we know.”
o The other must be unknowable; his opaqueness makes interchange possible.
o Rashi’s MURMURING DEEP
 that’s the translation of tehom. this non- or prelinguistic sound, menacing, needing to be revoked.
 This poetic reading conveys some of the complex harmonics of tehom: the Hebrew roots hamam, hamah, hom cover meanings like humming, murmuring, cooing, groaning, tumult, music, restlessness, stirring, panic. A large register of tones and sounds and movements …
 God’s speech interrupts a primal noise
 The first creative act is therefore to create silence—it is not that silence is broken, but silence itself breaks, interrupts, the continuous murmur of the Real, thus opening up a clearing in which words can be spoken
 The murmur is the message: the backgriun hum of life—desolate, excessive, neither language nor silene
 “Tohu,” says the midrash, “refers to Adam, who became a slamah.”34 Lamah is also the Aramaic translation of tohu—Nothing.
 In this midrashic narrative, dangerous words become unspeakable, despite the fact that they are simply quotations from the Torah. In the rst midrash, the danger lies in the tohu va-vohu, in the void that the words carry with them: to speak of the rank odor of the abyss underlying Creation is to ruin the beauty of God’s work. In the second midrash, too, the notion that must be whispered contains nothingness at its core—the vertigo of tohu va-vohu
o According to the Zohar, moreover, a whisper is audible in every biblical verse where the word amar, “to say” (as opposed to dibber, “to speak”), is used.
 The whisper, then, haunts the margin between inside and outside.
 In the relationship with the unthought known—the enigmatic other, the inscrutable God, the stranger within the self—a desire is born. The other calls for meaning to be elucidated, for the intrusive murmur to resolve itself into lucid form—”Let there be light!” It asks to be named. Tehom el tehom korei—”Deep calls unto deep.” (Ps. 42:8).
 the listener, barely aware of her own internal voids, is chosen to register the yet-to-be-recorded narrative of the other.
 The abyss in the other seduces, persecutes, reveals, inspires. Whether this is God seducing Adam, or Rebecca taking the soundings of her unknown “I-ness,” or Boaz inspired to redemption by Ruth’s uncanny night beauty—a mystery is implanted, a fascinated relation to the enigma as such.
o Reticent volcano
 If the murmuring void is the ground and deep of human life, the raging re is its heart.
 Bachelard’s material imagination. Dreams different kidns of depth
 The volcanic heart of the Jewish imagination is the smoking mountain of Sinai.
 Volcano blood is human lava, intimate, reticent
 The reticent volcano holds the secret-the only secret—of immortality.
• 1. Seduced into Eden: The Beginning of desire
o Desire: the lapse in Sovereignty
 Your desire shall b for your husband, and he shall rule over you
 Desire is feminine, helpless. wordless.
 “Let us make” –god’s sovereignty has been compromised
 The breath of scandal neutralized immediately: “and he created Adam”
o Adam in the Human Image?
 Does Adam resemble us? Is Adam recognizably human?
 In his created condition, Adam is not identical to ourselves. Vast areas of the human are alien to him.
 Essential to this difference is the history of desire.
 Adam did not originate in the Garden of Eden: “God took the man and set him down in the Garden.” Transplanted
 Rashi has this taking as a captivating, a seducing
 This seduction is the first human experience—seduction by Gid. Seduction, too, is constitutive of man’s entry into language
 This seduction is the essential repressed moment of the narrative
 Why does Adam need to be s educed at all. One midrash says he anticipated the risks and failures.
 Seduction creates an awareness of previously unsuspected desire: here, God awakens in Adam a sense of unfathomed depths of self.
• Midrashic uses of the idiom of seduction abound. God seduces/ persuades Moses for seven days at the Burning Bush to accept th mission of liberating the Israelites;9 Sarah seduces/ persuades Hagar to become Abraham’s concubine10 (her persuasive words are, “Ashrayikh11—Happy are you to merit union with such a holy body!”); God instructs Moses to seduce/persuade Aaron to ascend the mountain to his death12 (“Happy are you to see your crown given to your son”). At such moments, the unacceptable is imagined as, potentially desirable; reality is reshaped by language. In most of these cases, the key word in the Torah is “take,” translated as “captivate, beguile, seduce.” God, who sometimes seduces in this way, is at other times seduced: Isaac’s prayer for Rebecca to bear children is “complied with” (nitpateh lo) by God
• Seducing and being seduced, then, are not always illegitimate; nevertheless, they retain an overtone of embarrassment.
o Alien Sexuality?
 Unself-conscious sexuality assumed to be alien to the reader
o Provoking Desire
 Naming is thus linked to sexuality by way of desire. United with his mate, he arouses another desire in the serpent, who then tempts Eve.
o The Missing Factor
 The oedipal experience is, I suggest, the significant missing factor in the humanity of Adam. More radically than his origin in the earth or his innocent nakedness, his unparented condition differentiates him from us.
 His history of desire, with its compromising eects, begins as a function of fullling God’s desire: God seduces him, God lures him to acknowledge his longing for a helpmate, God overwhelms him with sleep to collaborate with desire.
 According to one powerful midrash, Adam dreams the woman and wakes, pulsing with agitation, to the fulllment of his dream.16 His mate emerges from an unconscious state, from a slippage of mastery.
 In this resonant declaration, instead of naming her, he denes th radical dierence between his relation to her and that of all future couples: “This one, this time, is bone of my bones.”
• Only this time is my mate part of my very body. Never again will the female human being relate to her mate out of such an identity
• Not a paradigm for future couples, this is a thing of RUPTURE. never again such literal union.
o Possessing One’s Own Mind
 Clear of personal loves and hates, the human being is rapt int ranscendence.
o Desires Time
o The Provisional Self
 The provisional self is always open to questions. Unacknowledged ghosts speak through one; one may find oneself speaking beyond one’s means
 At the upper reaches, the unstable self opens to poetic inspiration or to prophecy; at the lower, there is babble and perplexity.
o A few incoherence
 Blaming eve is denying responsibility
 He does confess though: “and I ate”
 He is, in a sense, babbling. empty speech after the fall
 ON God’s first question, rashi: “God knew where he was..but he aksed this in order to enter into language with him.
 This is the discourse God desires
 Conversive VAV puts future tense into past
• The eect of this purely grammatical feature is that the time worlds of past and future drift out of their clear places. The past will not stay securely in the past; it generates a present and future that, in turn, reinvent each other and the past.
• Elaborate temporal weave
o Baffled Intensities
 Language brushes against its own limits. For Freud, this is a catastrophe; in the biblical narrative, it may constitute the very development God was provoking by His question.
 It is striking, for instance, that God does not attempt to “enter into language” with the serpent
 The banishing is a divorce. or, they are thrown back into the condition of the infant (lit. nonspeaker), who first enters the world of language—a condition that, biologically, they have never known.
 The stormy feelings of the preverbal child, cradled by tempests, now struggle for awkward expression.
 But when he does finally name her, he seems to abandon, or be abandoned by, any cogent meaning: “And Adam named his wife Eve [Chavah], for she had become mother of all life [Chai]” (Gen. 3:20). God has just declared sentence of death upon him
 In naming her in this way, he marks a passionate and ambiguous knowledge that he can express only with the baffled intensity of one who has stepped into a transformed world.
o Enigmatic Impact
 Eve has seduced Adam One effect of seduction is to move the other to speechlessness, and then into a new, dazzled language. The sheer impact that Eve has on Adam ultimately banishes them both from the Garde
 The word for seduction in
 Hebrew—pittah—derives from the root meaning “to be open wide, accessible to inuence, credulous, compliant; so, to entice, tame, persuade, open the heart, deceive.”
o The seductive chain
 Midrashic sources extol the virtues of being open to seduction— provided, of course, that the seducer is God, or the human being persuading God to compasison, or human beings moving one another to a larger defsire. Everyone, it seems, wants to be moved
o The Desire for Desire
 God must seduce, because God desires. What He desires cannot ultimately be gained by force.
 God must wait in longing, for his desire, like human desire, is for that which cannot be forced. With a strange modesty, he takes his place ampong those who desire. He enters into the force field of human language, with its intensities and its perplexities—his habitation in the lower worlds.
 Like the rain, like the evil inclination, like the woman, God is the subject of an exclusive desire.
 In each of the four biblical cases where the word teshukah—desire—is used, however, the midrash emphasizes an inversion.
 In the complex theory of Jean LAPLANCHE, every infant begins life in this way. The mother transmits messages that are beyond the infant’s comprehension. The mother herself is not aware of these unconscious messages, which lodge like foreign bodies in the mind of the infant. “The unconscious,” he writes, “… is an other thing [das Andere] in me, the repressed residue of the other person [der Andere]. It affects me as the other person affected me long ago.”
 Open to her radiance, the infant also senses her world of other desires. This traumatic excess of meaning inundates the infant, who must translate unconscious communications into a comprehensible language. What cannot yet be translated is implanted within, awaiting future retranslations.
 Beyond the two classic notions of the other—the objective, that he is “speaking from the neighboring room,” and the subjective, that he exists mainly in one’s perception, or fantasy— seduction evokes the lasting alienness of a message that has yet to be fully understood.
o The Flow of Life
 Adam twice seduced (God/Eve/Serpent) and flooded by their messages
o Arousals
 And so God, in the daring imagination of the Hasidic master, desires the complex desire of human beings for God and the godly in their tents. More than that, He waits for them to create the model of compassion that will inspire Him—and that will, in effect, create an imaginable God with whom they can engage.
• 2. Despondent Intoxication: The Flood
o Dark Residue
 Ten generations after creating the world, God destroys it
 Seth replaces Abel. Who, ow, remembers the repressed history of murder and bloodguilty, of the murderer’s strangely blurred death by archery?
o The Dance of Death
 The doleful litany of these earliest generations suggests a possible understanding of God’s original warning to Adam: “As for the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat of it, for on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die”
 Yet the biblical narrative so mutes the death theme that it seems to ratify the serpent’s provoxation: “you shall definitely not die!”
o The Itzavon Dimension
 Itzavon (toil; their p-unishment) is the discrepancy between sowing grains and vegetables, and reaping thorns and thistles. These can be made edible, thanks to human ingenuity, but they will never lose the taste of failure, of the gap between intention and reality.
 Itzavon is a consequence of eating of the Tree.
o Noach—the promise of relief?
 Against this background of discontinuity that is itzavon, there arises a strange hope for relief. This is Noach, whose birth is heralded by a name that promises consolation
 Name translates as ease, relief. Noach will bring about a return to responsive relations between man and nature; this ben will rebuild the world. (was his father a prophet or a sage in this?)
 Are we assuming Noach does this though? God does not necessarily acquiesce in human scenarios. Here, tragically, instead of relief, Noach’s life brings apocalypse. The effect of this naming is, then, ironic
o Divine anguish—creation and destruction
 Noach’s life becomes the purest expression of the gap between human design and reality. Man plans God laughs. But God, at this juncture, does not laugh.
 Theological correctness is swept aside as the Torah twice tells of a God who now regrets His earlier decision
• “He was saddened to His heart”: Rashi translates,
 Inner splitting: As though suspending His divine prerogative of omniscience, of a superordinate narrative, this God applies to His own heart the full human experience of foreshortened time, the hopeful beginning lived totally in the moment.
 the portrayal of God here plays out in almost scandalous manner the plural expressiveness with which He originally declared: “Let Us create man in our Image.”
o God’s role in the flood?
 “you wish to repudiate the work of my hands: I shall fulfill your wish” God is merely ascquiescing here. Reduced role in flood—it’s not active.
 “I am now ready to agree with those who urged me long since
 Destroying the world is, after all, a long-term consultative process
 CONTRA SOURCE THEORY: VARIOUS NAMES USED yields the effect of movement within the divine ecology from one modality of relation with the world to another.
 If sexuality is a kind of language, then the sound that arises from the world is a babble, submitting to no rules of grammar or syntax, signifying nothing. This babble sweeps away meaning and connection. The Flood, the Mabul, describes a catastrophic human movement that informs language and sexuality.
 In the event, as the flood is narrated, god is barely active. Impersonal processes inundate the world and destroy all life. God reappears only at the end to remember Noach
o The waters of Noach
 If God’s role is unclear, what are we to say of Noach?
 At first he is the almost whimsical exception to God’s sentence of total destruction.
 Without any substantial reason, God favors Noach
 At the heart of this tradition lies a specific critique of Noach. He is not accused of the crimes of his contemporaries. Instead, the charge against him is of silence. If they express themselves in babble, he is totally silent. In response to God’s speeches, he speaks not a word
 The hazards of silence. Noach is responsible for the flood, it is eternally to be known as Noach’s flood, since his silence brought it about.
• Chamas (violence) used twice to refer to withholding words where speech is necessary, just as it can refer to the violence of inappropriate language.
• The attraction—and the danger—of silence is its safety.
o A fantasy of omnipotence
 The Ark, though it was meant to generate words and transformations, thus becomes Noach’s kingdom for a year. It is, of course, not a ship, but a box (teivah). Noach is boxed up in the symbol of a failed conversation
• Conditions of that life per Midrash: no sex. no sleep.
 After he refuses to resume sexual life. Anxiety after the flood trauma? It is in silencing his sexuality that Noach has most intimately filled the place of God;
o The exile of the world
 The Ark comes to represent both survival and erotic closure. Antidote to the chaos of the corrupted world , temporary workshop in the rigors of finitude
 The relationship is a duet rather than a dialogue. But here, silence has an independent and essential function, enabling a true hearing and response.
 the exile of the WORD gathers momentum through the generations until Noach responds in silence to the destruction of the world, clings to the omnipotent illusion of his role in the Ark, and, finally, seeks refuge in intoxication.
o Despondent intoxication
 Kristeva’s Black sun articulates “noncommunicable grief” wound that never heals. This despair is the audible breakdown of speech. Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, the depressed utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill In their total immersion in the archaic and indispensable object, they repudiat

[David Campton · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first spent 6 months working my way slowly through this book I noted that I would miss it, especially given that the paper copy wasn't mine... I have subsequently purchased an electronic copy which I have once again plunged into for another 8 month swim. It is a "Murmuring Deep" in its own right - a profound commentary on various parts of the Hebrew scriptures and their associated midrashes. In it Zornberg draws on, not only the creative discourse between rabbis down through the centuries but also the insights of literature, art and crucially psychology and psychoanalysis. It has been an eye-opening and mind-stretching journey. It is an approach to the Biblical text that is almost entirely absent in Christian commentary, both from the conservative and liberal end of the spectrum. It is academically rigorous. It respects the text as a "holy" entity in its own right. Yet approaches it, spurred on by millennia of rabbinic commentary, with a creative imagination and an inspiring understanding of the human mind. As such it has personally sparked a fresh engagement with scripture and prompted my own poetic endeavours. I suspect that this will not be my last return this deep well...

[Spike Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far my favorite of her books- so deep, so thoughtful, pulling on classical commentary Plus, with a whole new way of looking at things

[Lizz Goldstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Beginnings of Desire is great, but Zornberg's commentary on Genesis in The Murmuring Deep changed my life! This is my favorite book by her.

[caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

i want to make a hadran on this not because i finished it but because of how much i’m already looking forward to rereading

[Mina Herz]

This one lands directly in your wheelhouse. It’s less about national trauma in the desert (Bewilderments) and more about the psychic undercurrents of Genesis and Exodus—the fractures, the silences, the unspoken desires.

1. Voice, silence, and fractured speech

You’re obsessed with language: where it fails, where it betrays. Zornberg turns Moses’ stammer into a lens on all biblical speech—language as rupture rather than clarity.

The “murmur” = the unconscious voice that slips through the cracks. You’d like how she treats biblical dialogue like dream material: repetitions, half-said things, what’s left unsaid.

2. Trauma, exile, and beginnings that never begin

Noah emerging into a devastated world, drunk and broken—trauma theory meets Torah. You’ll see clear parallels to your own post-sepsis reflections on survival that doesn’t restore wholeness.

Cain and Abel: the primal sibling wound, envy, violence. You’d read this as family trauma text par excellence, tied to your own childhood dynamics.

Abraham and Isaac: not “blind faith” but the abyss opened when the father is silent and the son’s subjectivity is suspended. Exactly the kind of contradiction you lean toward: metaphysical, terrifying, unresolved.

3. Disguise, doubling, identity fractures

Jacob in disguise before Isaac, stealing blessing through performance: speaks to your interest in masks, doubling, and unstable identity (legal training, writing voice, illness vs. self).

She reads these disguises psychoanalytically: desire and deception intertwined. For you, it resonates with the way you write about oscillations—between authenticity and performance, between trauma-forged truth and masks.

4. Biblical unconscious = Jewish unconscious

Zornberg doesn’t give you “Torah lessons.” She gives you Torah as uncanny, as haunted by repressed trauma and desire. This ties directly to your own idea of Jewishness as wrestling, not as stable inheritance.

The murmur in the text = the murmur in the Jewish psyche, the historical unconscious. This is where your interest in post-Holocaust intellectual Judaism, Grossman, and Babel fits perfectly.

5. Style and density

She writes like you want to: literary, psychoanalytic, Jewish-intellectual, thick with citations. It’s as close as you’ll get to a rabbinic text that feels like Nabokov crossed with Levinas.

It refuses clean resolution. She will not hand you a moral—she’ll hand you bewilderment, estrangement, and layered echoes. Exactly the kind of thing you value over “sentimental” or “cheesy” writing.

In short: Bewilderments is national trauma in the wilderness. The Murmuring Deep is private, psychic trauma—the subterranean unconscious of Genesis and Exodus. If you want the book that speaks most to your own themes (voice vs. silence, family trauma, exile, disguise, fragmentation, post-trauma survival), The Murmuring Deep is the sharper mirror.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Zornberg, this book offers twelve different inquiries into such central Biblical stories as the binding of Isaac, the dissension between Joseph and his brothers, and the dilemmas facing the Biblical heroines Esther and Ruth. The stories could be read separately, although best read in order because some stories hark back to earlier insights. My favorite chapters concerned Zornberg's uncovering of Abraham's trauma with a fiery furnace (intimated but not described in Genesis) and her explanation of how Joseph cut off resolution of his dispute with his brothers. A couple chapters--notably on Jonah, Esther, and Jacob-- were less revelatory than Zornberg's best work, circling around themes I've seen elsewhere. Her later books, stretching across entire books of the Bible, are more breath-taking. This on is still an important acquisition for those seeking an understanding of religious thought or just of human existence.

[Shemaria'S Kindle · Rating 5 out of 5]

AVG’s biblical scholarship, mastery on English, huge range of sources and comprehensive analysis of the meaning of ancient texts is stunning. This work is to be read over and over again. The vast sources cited combined with an analaytical framework which resonates in a booming way to a modern reader simply amazes.

AVG’s biblical scholarship, mastery on English, huge range of sources and comprehensive analysis of the meaning of ancient texts is stunning. This work is to be read over and over again. The vast sources cited combined with an analaytical framework which resonates in a booming way to a modern reader simply amazes. If nothing other than giving a simple roadmap to understand the relationship between Torah, Midrash and a huge variety of authors of Modernity, this is a truly essential work.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book if you're really curious about the well known biblical figures like Adam & Eve, Naoh, Abraham, Joseph, Esther, Jeremiah, and especially Jonah. This book brought humanity to these prominent figures - something I was never able to get from various christian bible study. In a typical christian bible study, they are heroes, to be modeled after, even though you can't make sense of them.

[Charles Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius Torah commentary comes in many forms. Sometimes, like Rashi or Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, complex ideas become simpler, cleaner, easier to understand. And then you have scholars like Avivah Zornberg, who come to remind you that the Torah is a vast, deep ocean and you're swimming in a teeny, tiny little piece of it.

Maybe if I read this another dozen times I'll fully understand it. In that sense, it's very much a book about Torah, is itself Torah.

[jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very stimulating!

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit: A slightly reworked review with a few extra quotes etc, now on my blog.

https://www.consideringlilies.nl/bibl...

Wonderful book. Opens up the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Esther, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Joseph and Ruth like I've never read before.

Such depth of character is brought out, by looking closely to hidden puns in the original Hebrew wording of the stories, and by all the midrashic tales that supply a colorful background. Most of these I'd never heard before. I very much enjoyed the way they were brought in to help suggest a meaning, even if it was entirely unclear to me what the status is of such texts, how much they can be believed as original or authentic or inspired.

The book deals with the biblical unconscious, also with the unconscious motivations of all the biblical persons, and made me think very much about my own unconscious.

I was most moved by the chapter on Abraham where she led us to see how much God guided Abraham to grow, and face more and more his hidden fears. Especially that chapter helped me a lot in trusting God when he leads us through difficult times.

The chapter about Esther is also a jewel, about the times when God's face is hidden. (This is apparently also the meaning of the name Esther, and God is not mentioned in that book, and other such details). On the importance of finding God precisely in his hiddenness.

The last chapter is about Ruth, my namesake. Much food for pondering there, too. Her being a Moabite stretched the boundaries, and helped inform what the law truly meant, and what charity is. I like that, wish to take that as inspiring example. But according to Dr. Avivah, she stretched the boundaries so much, that in the happy ending she could no longer be named.. All of a sudden her child becomes Noomi's child. And Ruth disappeared from the story.

Thankfully, there is an interesting midrash that supplies some more history for Ruth. However that may be, it is a wonderful chapter about doing good, in great and small things. Even taking a step back, if necessary.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zornberg is a giant!

[Shoshannah Brombacher]

Great book!!!!!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was staggered again and again by the author's insights.