Genesis: The Beginning of Desire

by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

An intellectually stimulating and personally uplifting exploration of Genesis. the Beginning of Desire breathes new life into the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Rachel, and Joseph. Zornberg brings biblical, midrashic, and literary sources together, weaving them into a seamless tapestry and illuminating the tensions that grip human beings as they search for and encounter God.

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

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I've read in years, and easily the best biblical commentary I've read in my life. Zornberg writes in an approachable manner that clearly shows her immense breadth knowledge while at the same time remaining spiritual. I have read a number of commentaries cover to cover, I'm just that kind of person. I've never read anything like this.

Broken down into the traditional weekly readings from Bereshit/Genesis, Zornberg takes the reader on a journey through the stories you likely know, but not in this way. Her discussion brings in everything from Talmudic sources to Kafka to Freud to Rashi to Dickens to the Zohar to a number of television shows and so much more. Zornberg plays with phrases from other parts of Torah to show parallel meanings, shows her reader the beauty of shever/sever--brokenness/hope, and teaches the importance of negating the negative. If you are even remotely interested in understanding Genesis in depth, and especially if you happen to be a scholar and think you have a fair grasp of the text: this book may be just the thing to make you question everything you know, and make you fall in love with it all over again.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book you must relax with and take in slowly, lovingly. Any brief characterization of this exploration of Jewish tradition would probably be oversimplifying, but I'll risk that and say that it's a view of Jewish myth and history as an existential search for peace in a fractured world. Zornberg applies her dual expertise--a deep knowledge of Talmudic scholarship and a love of the vast European literary and philosophical tradition--to making sense of the very messy lives of the characters in the book of Genesis. As a Jewish scholar, she flits about the texts of the ages freely, seeing it as an infinite world in which to wander. And to those reviewers who found the book hard to follow--yes, if you're not used to psychological and metaphysical explorations, the twists and turns are difficult and there were many passages that I reread four or five times. But an understanding of things that lie beyond simple rationality is a struggle to achieve, and if you can make it to the end, Zornberg describes even that.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much of this went over my head, but it was undoubtedly brilliant. I ended up reading it, one chapter a week aligned with the parsha of the week. I know the stories of Genesis probably as well as I know any parts of the Torah, but the depth of understanding here, bringing in references from the broadest range of sources, whether biblical or literary was astonishing and revelatory.

I think I probably need something a little more accessible, but this was a wild ride which has made me excited to keep up the project.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

no words. read this

• Mode of inquiry is closer to the rhetorical than the methodological–ambition is to discover what can be said; more concerned with finding than proving, is more speculative than analytical, more heuristic than polemical.
• I expect that readers from different backgrounds, “eavesdropping” on these meditations, in their written form, will find different parts of the book either strange or familiar.
• She is listening for the meta-messages of the text.
• My assumption is that the narrative block that constitutes a Parsha (a section of Torah read during service) has thematic integrity, that the midrash is concerned to draw out the implicit dynamics of the biblical narrative, and to limn the internal tensions that continue, to our own day, to trouble and animate human beings.
• Assumptions
 1. The sources I refer to set up a field of tension and mutual illumination with the biblical text. I am not looking simply to elucidate either what the Bible “really means” or what moral or homiletical uses can be made of the biblical narrative. I am looking to loosen the fixities, the ossifications of preconceived readings. To do this, a dialectical hermeneutic is essential; an opening of the ear, eye, and heart to a text that reflects back the dilemmas and paradoxes of the world of the reader. Dialectic of strangeness and familiarity: if life feels strange, the Bible is familiar and guides us. And vice versa.
 2. The cycle of desire is present in all dimensions of life, intellectual, interpretive, as well as overtly emotional. The reader needs most of all the animation of desire, which is generated, paradoxically, by the experience of “not to have”
• Wallace Stevens’ poem: “And not to have is the beginning of desire”
 3. The Torah text that seems so plainly “there” can be approached only by the strenuous and imaginative “making” of the reader. Interest in the Torah made in the mind of the reader.
• This is not reading INTO the Torah. It is a little eisegetical though.
• Like Moses being tasked with God (who is ashamed) to tell Aaron he must die. Moses approaches his brother, says he’s missing a word fro Genesis and the two must find it. Devar Torah–the word. Moses interrogated the text of Genesis by bringing it into the closest confrontation with the lives of Aaron and himself. Such a reading — initiated and guided by Moses (our Teacher, as he is commonly named) — is not a matter of reading personal concerns into the text. Rather, it is a responsive summons to the meanings inherent within the text, that await the “hearing” reader.
• The experience of highest tension, between immanence and transcendence, between the limits of human experience and the “signals of transcendence” that are secreted within these limits, is what draws me in the biblical texts and in the midrashic and later versions of those texts. The interpretive act becomes similar to the creative act.
• 1. Bereshit: The Pivoting Point
• Bereshit bara Elohim. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.
• Rashi, the foremost of the traditional commentators on the Torah text, begins his great work with: “This text says nothing but “explain me!”--there is mystery here. The opening sequence is clear but it tells us nothing about beginnings, nothing about sequence, means little more than “when God created heaven and earth…”
• Syntax
 Bereshit is in constructive: in the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth.
 The water in v 2 had no account of creation–was already there when 1:1 begins.
 Rashi names: ““The text does not reveal anything regarding the sequential order of creation.”
 Gaps, the unexplained.
• Primal disintegrations
 Six days God continues on speaking, seeing, naming.
 The act of havdalah is central–separation.
 The first day has only primordial unity, it is called one day and not first day because firstness has no relevance.
 Angels created on second day suggests many-ness of viewpoints, according to Rashi. God tells angels that he needs to put a likeness not only in heaven (thats them) but in earth too so there is no jealously in lower world
 The near-heretical “us” of creation (let us make…) therefore shows that havdalah, SEPARATION (SACRIFICE), specialization, formation of difference and opposition–is achieved at some sacrifice.
 With division begins alienation, conflict, and yet, paradoxically, a new notion of divine sovereignty. In this new perspective, God is recognized as King only by that being who is most radically separated from Him. Man, created on the sixth day, is foreshadowed by the splittings and
• Nature comes into Being
 God’s word achieves his will, with the word yehi, let there be.
 Rashi defines being as “finding one place to stand in.”
 He talks about the jelling process, everything firms up from a primary fluid stage, followed by the transformative thrill of God’s word. There is a firming, a finding of proper place, a new density and rigor. The effect of God’s word is CONSTRAINT
• The belfry daydream
 Can the six days of creation be the six major classes of reality (Kenneth Burke thinks so)
 Man seems to culminate these categories, dominating even those realities he cannot physically control (those that don’t share his habitat)
 Those that do share his habitat–animal life on earth– are called CRAWLING (romesset) This is unwilled, unindividuated movement. Creatures wheel and swerve in crowds. It is as though Man is conceived of as towering physically over all animal life
 This conception, which is inherent in the blessing of domination, is figured by an image of verticality. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of art, writes of what he calls “belfry daydreams,” in which one watches others “running about...irrationally, like ants . . . the size of flies.” This is a “dream of high solitude”; the dreamer enjoys “an impression of domination at little cost. . . .
 The insistence of the Creation narrative on man as vertical comes in the context of HORIZONTAL SPREAD (“Be fertile and increase, fill the earth”)
 This might be read against pack phenomenon: the pack cannot grow, despite its fevered desire to be more. The animal faculty of increase
 Here connects increase and domination: we want to spread
• The vertical and the horizontal
 The paradox of the human: to live on the vertical and the horizontal, to transform himself into a creature preoccupied with proliferation and at the same time to rule, to conquer.
 Rule ve-yirdu can mean, after all, both RULE AND DESCENT.
 This radical tension must be contained
 To breed and to crawl, these are the acts of the sheretz (the non-crawling Man that does still crawl) There is violence and guilt here.
• Greatness and procreativeness
 Paradox of vertical and horizontal re-appears as Genesis calls two things great in creation: light and sea monsters. One light is named great at the expense of the other (two cannot be great, midrash says, and so the moon is told to diminish itself, and so it becomes capable of waning. Moon accepts role of contingency, mutability, and proliferation). And though sea monsters are plural, they must be a castrated male and his mate otherwise they’d have killed us all. Problematizing greatness.
• The problem of man
 Rashi says God created man in plurality, that is, made him first with two faces and separated them. God wanted an androgynous being
 To have a ben zug, an equivalent Other, with whom one must reckon, who limits the grandeur of one’s solitude, with whom one speaks and struggles and brings offspring into the world —all this is the very definition of the not Godly, the not great. One who has a ben zug is yoked to contingency, lives on the horizontal plane, whose blessing and imperative is increase.
 All but God must have a ben zug (midrash says even the Sabbath was lonely with the other days pairing up so God gave it Israel)
 The splitting-off of man is, however, achieved not by the pure word of God. This remains “private,” a reminder to the reader that God’s original idea of the human good has not yet been implemented. It is achieved only when man himself comes to recognize the pains of solitude.
 God sets aside His original vision, creates man alone and great, complete in himself —a plausible version of the human reality, but one that will be undermined by the restless experience of “‘he could not find a fitting help” (literal translation of lo matza). “Not to find” is the purpose of man’s lone creation. He knows in his pain and searching both that “For my sake the whole world was created’! — he dreams of belfries, and of “monuments of unaging intellect” — and that his humanity requires the “sensual mu- sic’? of horizontal relationship, the fusing and parting, the changing reflections of face meeting face.
 Man is locked in the tension of the vertical and the horizontal, then, the upper worlds and the lower worlds. SUMMARY CHAPTER TBH
• Dust
 Vayyitzer (of two dusts)–God formed man from dust. THe dust us from the four corners of the world AND from Jerusalem, per Rashi. He will be accepted for burial in whatever part of the globe he dies, but there is one burial site that remembers him (Jerusalem)
 The difficulty of man’s situation is focused here: tension between space that is sacred–the only real and really existing space–and all other space
 Origins in the dust of the many and the one, at once.
• The hands of God
 This creation departs from others where God uses speech alone. Here he’s like a baker. Ba-yadayim–by his hands
 There is an imagining here that cannot be glibly dismissed under the rubric of anthropomorphism. What does it mean, to be created by the hands of God, rather than by His word— (“ ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water’”)? Man comes to be differently, it seems.
 FRANKENSTEIN NATURE
• Ambiguities of independence
 The lord regrets, va-yenachem, and so wants a flood. THis is an organic outgrowth of the imagery of the artist, who projects but cannot control this one part of his work that is made
 When Adam sins, God’s response, according to the midrash, is not verbal; rather “He laid His hand upon him and diminished him.” *” God “mourns for the loss of the work of His hands.”
• Standing upright
 Like the child, like the vessel, he must find a space of separateness, in order to be; but to separate from God is to cut the ground of being from under his feet. For however one understands the nature of the sin that turns Adam and Eve out of Eden, its effect is to undermine their standing in the world. The tension between the vertical and the horizontal was once successfully accommodated by Adam and Eve. They could hold their ground in the presence of God. This, essentially, is the meaning of being—kiyyum: to rise up (la-koom), to be tall (koma zekufa) in the presence of God. To be banished from the Garden is to lose a particular standing ground.
 Adam’s first experience had been when God stood him on his legs
 This standing though must be met with Adam’s surrendering. He must pursue a different kind of ruling posture–an amidah, a solid reality on which to base his life.
• Suspension of being
 Yet adam fails to stand… And so his stature is diminished.
 God’s punishment is a mercy exile (he doesn’t kill him as he promised)
 Man sets off on a journey in which no form of solid assurance of reality and sanity accompanies him.
• The world decomposed and recomposed
 Later, Israel will create the world simply by finding a place to stand at Sinai. The people at Sinai affirm their ability to stand face to face with God.
 One cannot stand at all if one does not tremble at his presence
• The experiment in form
 To stand in the presence of God is not, then, to be static: it is a kind of dance, invisible to the naked eye. Neither rigidity nor chaos is God’s desire of man. What He desires is the human response of transformation.
 God chooses to inhabit the form of a father disappointed.
 So why create man at all? He had the foreknowledge to see the frustration of the project
• A: the price paid for a tzaddik–a righteous man–is creation
• To consummate creation with a free-standing tzaddik—that always was the point of the enterprise.
• 2. Noah: Kindness and Ecstasy
• The collapse of God’s project
 God’s decision to “blot out” the whole of creation follows on an account of births and deaths over ten generations, culminating in the birth and naming of Noah. The central event of each generation is the birth of the significant heir; the father’s years are numbered before and after this pivotal act of propagation. Intense expectation builds up, therefore, in this objective account of numbers and names,
 His name derived from y’naḥamenu (relief) which is similar too to noaḥ, meaning rest.
 Chapter 6 begins with the cryptic description of the sexual relations of the “divine beings” with the “daughters of men” — including reference to the Nephilim, giants, heroes, men of renown. Only at this point does God, it seems, reenter a drama of sexuality, procreation, and death in which human beings have been evolving their own destiny without comment from or dialogue with their creator.
 Even the function of creating man in His image has been taken over, apparently, by man himself: “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. . . . When Adam had lived 130 years, he begot a son in his likeness after his image.” Man replicating himself replicates the divine image–but it’s distorted. Theres so much evil!
 God plans to blot out, emḥeh to dissolve him with water (the dust adamah relation stays). God puns the word neḥama–REGRET
 “And Noah found favor with the Lord” (6:8). Noah matza hen—the words noah and hen form a palindrome, suggesting a subversive relation between the man and the “favor” he finds, the grace with which God sees him.
• The choice of Noah
 Noah is spared from the choice to “end all flesh with earth” because he is different. Buber notes he’s the first human to be described by any epithet–he is “a righteous man; blameless in his age”
 Yet midrash wonders if he’s chosen not because he’s different but because he found favor, undeserved. He’s not perfectly righteous after all, only righteous compared to his age. It’s all Grace of God, nothing of intrinsic merit in Noah
 There is no clear ethical underpinning in God’s decision. He is essentially included in God’s “regret,” nehama. Only love can invert Noah into ben —an object of beauty: “you I have seen as righteous before Me”
 If Noah is not a tzaddik, then, what’s the ethical statement of the flood narrative?
• Midrash suggests theres different form of retribution before Sinai is given--the giving of Torah marks turning point in God’s relation with humanity. Now, every man is treated after his deserts; previously, God’s dealings with mankind were summary and rough-hewn.
• Why would post-sinai need to read the flood then?
• A: we read to acquire power. Radical questions of evil must be confronted in the narrative in ways no longer relevant.
• The theological question
 Flood elsewhere becomes epicenter of questioning about God’s ways with mankind. The flood remains a live issue. Moses deals with it even.
 History must be read for the sake of the present.
 Esp when that history holds theological question of God’s relation with mankind.
 Shetef, flood, evinces andralamousia, summary mass execution. The shetef model has a cruel, undiscriminating God, and noah’s survival exists only for the sake of progenity.
 Shetef (model of summary mass execution) appears here, then with Avimelekh and Sarah, wherein the king re-affirms the absurdity of God’s relations with mankind.
• The Shetef image: lacking curiosity, rachness, sweeping flood, denoting quantity of water and force that leaves nothing intact. The water has the effect of dissolving (mahah)
• The return to wateriness is a return to speechlessness (Babel is a Shetef). A total oceanic acquiescence to God’s power
• The “rebellion” of the generation around the Flood can be understood as a failure to speak, to communicate with God—or, indeed, with each other.

[David]

I heard an ON BEING podcast with Avivah Gottleib Zornberg and was impressed with her breadth of knowledge of midrash. In her book, she starts with Rashi as any traditional commentator would but also weaves in more modern understandings of Torah stories which makes her commentary and interpretation, for the most part, engaging.

Her approach to guiding the reader through the first book of the Torah, Genesis, also is reflected in how she views Rashi's commentary. "...Rashi usually writes in such a multivalent way, transforming the reader's comprehension of the biblical text, even in his most- apparently- fantastic citations from the midrash. His commentary works as a dreamtext, suggesting many alternatives- but not exclusive- facets of reality." (p. xiv) Zornberg opts to allow her imagination to read between the lines and cites midrash to fill in the gaps that are all over Torah stories. But she is very clear what is textual and what is her own interpretation.

I took the most from her juxtaposing the varying complexities that are in the stories. For example, she expands on the typical Rabbinic emphasis of Abraham's kindness and contrasts it with G-d's seemingly very cruel test for him to slaughter Isaac. So the Patriarch who is the archetype of kindness and generosity is asked to do something quite cruel. Similarly she highlights how Jacob tricked his father into blessing him, instead of Esav, and was then similarly tricked into marrying Leah and Rachel, when he really intended just to marry Rachel.

She of course finds many lessons within the text. In the story about the creation of Eve as a partner for Adam, Zornberg compares and contrasts our human perspective to the unique character of G-d's perspective. "To have a ben zug, an equivalent Other, with whom one must reckon, who limits the grandeur of one's solitude, with whom one speaks struggles and brings offspring into the world- all this is the very dfinition of the not G-dly, the not great. One has a ben zug is yoked to contingency, lives on the horizontal plane, whose blessing and imperative is increase." (p. 15) While, G-d on the other hand does not deal with the same contingencies and relationships to others.

On the other hand there are aspects that people can try to emulate G-d like with hesed (kindness). "In the world of hesed (as distinct from mishpat [law], in which man acts out of necessity or obedience, and in that sense is not G-d-like), man is truly in his element; he acts spontaneously and naturally, and 'walks in the ways of G-d' by acting of his own accord, of his own free will and unforced consciousness (me-atzmo me-retzono umeda'ato)." (p. 108) So when we act from the kindness of our heart we are emulating G-d.

Although at times Zornberg waxed poetic a little too much and belabored some points with too many outside sources she developed some fascinating incites into Genesis. It seemed very much like an Open Orthodox interpretation since she leaned most heavily on traditional sources but augmented with the modern.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This provides extra-biblical Jewish commentary on the book of Genesis. Extremely insightful and scholarly.

As a Christian, I'd never been exposed to the Midrash or Jewish mystical sources. It caused me to dust off my copy of Strong's and examine several modern literal translations in order to check the verity and plausibility of the Jewish commentators, like Rashi.

As a result, the Bible has become illuminated. I now see broader, meta-messages in the text. Preconceived, narrow interpretations are now open to a more heart-felt reading that fully relates to the paradoxes and dilemnas of the human condition.

Not easy reading, but well worth the effort...

[Mindy Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blew my mind. The innovative ‘drash I didn’t know I was waiting for. I’ll definitely be reading more by this author. And I’ll be re-reading sections of this book for years to come.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this a long time ago, forgot to review it, or perhaps postponed it, because this book is difficult to review. I have a hard time recapturing what I learned, or what struck me.

Now, looking back, skipping through the pages, I think what struck me most is the complex picture she paints of Joseph. I'm more used to him being portrayed as either an innocent victim, or else as a conceited know-it-all. Here he is much more complex than that. And the tension between him and the brothers is never resolved, but explained as fundamental.

I did enjoy this book, it is very interesting to read through the Bible with so much extra background and psychological insight. But this book is much more difficult to read than "biblical unconsciousness", and I would not recommend this, unless you really like difficult books.

[Nico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek! I started reading this two years ago, and, although I found it very interesting, had trouble staying engaged and ended up taking a break from it. This past October, at the beginning of the Torah reading cycle, I decided to begin anew, reading one chapter a week with its corresponding parashah. Zornberg masterfully weaves together midrash, literature, and Biblical exegesis in one of the most thought-provoking commentaries I have read thus far. It's given me several fascinating perspectives through my reading of Bereshit, and I plan to return to Zornberg in the future.

[Sara Laor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm conflicted about this book. It's very profound and has taught me many new ways of reading some Torah text. However, the Talmudic "pilpulims," andcient and modern, end up being a very exhaustive proposition.

[Bonnie Buckner · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is AMAZING! This book is one of the best Torah commentaries I've read. She is also amazing to hear speak.

[John Adams · Rating 2 out of 5]

An occasionally interesting but dense isegesis on the narratives in Genesis.

[Matthew Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to understand but a lot of great ideas and connections

[Chesna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was rewarding, but really tough to get through. Read it slowly.

[Itai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a master teacher! I saw her speak in Portland one spring after reading several of her books.

http://www.torahinmotion.org/spkrs_cr...

Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg was born in London in 1944 and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. Her father was Dayyan Dr. Wolf Gottlieb, Av Beth Din (Head of the Rabbinical Court) of Glasgow; he was also her most important teacher. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge University, and has studied at Gateshead Seminary and the Jerusalem Michlala. She taught English Literature at the Hebrew University from 1969 to 1976. Since 1980, she has taught Torah to classes in Jerusalem, at Matan, Lindenbaum, Pardes, and the Jerusalem College for Adults. She has lectured widely in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.

Her first book, 'Genesis: the Beginning of Desire' was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1995. It won the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction, 1995. It appeared in paperback, published by Doubleday, in 1996.

Other publications include two essays: 'The Concealed Alternative,' in Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, ed. Judith A.Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer (Ballantine); and 'Cries and Whispers: The Death of Sarah,' in Beginning Anew : A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days ed. Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer (Simon & Schuster).

Her book The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus was published by Doubleday (February 2001). Paperback (November 2002).

She holds a Visiting Lectureship at The London School of Jewish Studies.

Dr. Zornberg appeared on Bill Moyers' PBS programme, Genesis: a living conversation.

She is married to Eric Zornberg and they have three children.

[E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three years ago I checked out from the public library her book on Exodus and skimmed it for use in my Exodus sermon series. This year, coming round to Genesis again in the lectionary, I ordered this volume because I wanted some new approaches to Genesis, having used commentaries by Armstrong and Brueggemann to structure previous sermons series.

Though this volume was not as amazing to me as the one on Exodus, I still find her readings fascinatingly multi-layered. She opens up the breadth of the Jewish midrashic tradition, reads from a perspective deeply influence by psychoanalysis, and connects with the rich literary tradition of the West.

And through her I have encountered surprising readings. For instance, this year I made much of the idea that in Jacob's dream he learns that his body is the holy ground.

The book ends beautifully. I plan to post that over on my blog.

[Jenifer Nech · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book during Torah Study of Genesis. My Talmud teacher, Samara Schwartz recommended this author. What a wonderful book and very enlightening for a person who is studying Torah. I am now starting her book on Exodus. Difficult at times, over my head, very good and I guess I could call it 'brain calisthenics"

[Evans McGowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb, poetic yet very grounded discussion of Genesis and all its interwoven themes. great introduction and use to midrash.

[Seana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discovering Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg was the most important thing I got out of watching Bill Moyers' show on Genesis. She has an amazing mind.

[Cindy Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb, riveting, a must-read

This is a once in a lifetime book. Deep, profound and wise. It is an unqualified spiritual masterpiece. Highly recommended!

[Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mlm

[Josh Fisher]

Equal parts brilliant and confounding. Good, but mileage will definitely vary

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant theologian!