Posted January 29, 2009 from Roberta

January 29, 2009: Roberta in Israel

Roberta heard the same lecture by Dr. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg Wednesday morning instead of going to the Drama and Poetry class. (As Grandma Annie said, “With one Tuchas you can only dance at one wedding.”)

From the part of Exodus (Parashat Bo) where Moses and Aaron go before Pharoah to request that the Children of Israel leave to the enactment of the 10 plagues, she went into the intellectual/knowing that telling a story brings--that the telling of a story is transformative for the storyteller and for the listener—telling the story brings change to both. Why 10 plagues? Surely 3 would have sufficed—She thinks it makes for more drama and a better story. Another interpretation is that Pharoah has an ideological surrender—shows God’s power; written in future tense so as to provide suspense, provoke anxiety.

This is the section where God hardens Pharoah’s heart. There are lots of interpretation. One I heard is Pharoah was such a bad man that he hardened his own heart. Her explanation was that this is an expression equivalent to someone saying today that something is so stupid it’s inexplainable ie may use expression said in an exasperated manner, “God knows why he did THAT.” IE one could say that about some of our former president’s actions.

This may be more than you want to know about the study of the Hebrew Bible and remember it comes from someone who is really not a believer in God. However I find the method of study very interesting. Nothing is taken literally and everything is interpreted—and this has been going on for 2500 years or so –since the Bible was written down—and maybe before that. Nothing is true just because it is written—it has to be interpreted ie what does it really mean? What does the phrase mean? You could even ask, “what is the word?” as only consonants are written and the vowels are left out so one cluster of letters forming a word may be two to four different words depending on the context and vowels (if they were there, which they are not).

I find these methods of study in all the classes we are taking. Often I am less interested in the topic than in what people do with the topic. For example one class was about celebrating the 2nd day of each festival (I don’t). The teacher raises the question is this one 48 hour day or two 24 hour days. Then he brought up the subject of eating an egg. If it is laid on the day before the festival, you could cook it then and eat it after the festival starts; but if it was laid on the first day of the festival you could neither prepare it or eat it that day; but if the 2nd day is a separate day you could eat it on the 2nd day. But if the 2nd day is contiguous with and the same day as the first day, you could not eat it on the 2nd day. So from a little egg you can derive an entire big picture of the subject of the first and second days of festivals.

I think that this method of thinking and interpreting lends itself very well to modern secular intellectual and even artistic endeavors. Perhaps this background is why Jews are more numerus than their percentage in the general population as Nobel Prize winners, university faculty and students, doctors and lawyers. The lack of this kind of thinking ie looking at challenges from all angles made for many of Bush’s failures as president.