Life in Citations

Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture

Ruth Tsoffar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000477894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire juive

In her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture, Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like How can we explain the fascination and intense identification of Israelis with the Bible? What does it mean to live in such close proximity with the Bible, and What kind of story can such a life tell?

1 Moses’s Tragedy of Binarism and the Discourse of the Udder

Long before I read about “A land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3: 8), I had sung those very words. At the tender ages of four and five, our soft kindergarten voices filled the air, intensified by our clapping hands and stomping feet as we repeated the mantra.¹ “Eretz zavat halav, halv u-dvash…” with special sweetness we imagined the flowing white rivers and waterfalls. It was indeed a delicious song, and for many years the melody was highly popular, ever-present on the tip of every tongue—in schools, on the radio—a constant companion to the Hora, the Israeli folk circle dance,² and campfires, along with other Hebrew songs. A few years later, I learned to read it, fascinated by the biblical story, the Promised Land, and Moses and the Twelve Spies.³

In the national revolution that was Zionism, close proximity to the Hebrew language entailed more than relying on written culture; it involved an all-encompassing site of active engagement that is imagined, informed, and situated by the written word. Zionist discourse has come to embody an institution of knowledge that imbues Jewish narratives, models, and codes with vitality that is specifically attuned to a secular framework. The Bible has provided Modern Hebrew literature with the most prolific signifying scenes through which to think through contemporary Israeli culture. Such scenes have not only undergone a process of Israelization and naturalization, but they have also been presented as the embodiment of the nation’s biography within a specific timeline and collective, and necessarily selective, memory.

Crucial to articulating this new ontology of the Jewish state is, therefore, the Hebrew language, which was steeped in Zionist discourse with a mystical dimension and revolutionary momentum of its own (Kimmerling 2001). Throughout history, Jews read the Bible in Hebrew, and since the late 1800s, the story of the Hebrew language has been entwined with the historical chapter of Zionism; to write in Hebrew became a redemptive act that not only helped to inscribe the Israeli master-narrative and its native subject, the Sabra, but was also instrumental, as I mentioned earlier, in inventing the ‘new Jewish man’ of modernity (Almog 1997, 127–132; Peled 2002, 28–30). Hebrew became an ideology in and of itself, simultaneously articulating the project of Israeli nationalism while building on old semiotics and structures (Zerubavel 1995). The invention of the Sabra was just as much the creation of a new Hebrew-speaking Jewish native as it was of a trained reader of Hebrew texts. Benjamin Harshav puts it in a different order, describing Israel as ‘an ideology that created a language that forged a society that became a State’ (Harshav 1993, viii).

As it concerns milk and honey, the story of the burning bush is but one such moment that has been made available for symbolic consumption. The imaginary spectacle that accompanies this narrative was notably loaded with an a priori sense of victory in the song Mul Har Sinai (“In Front of Mount Sinai”). Written two days before the Sinai Campaign in 1956, Mul Har Sinai became the unofficial anthem for this war. It was performed by the renowned army troupe Lahakat Hanachal, and was written and composed by the two canonic contributors, Moshe Vilensky and Yechi’el Mohar, respectively. Building on the burning bush’s total inconsumability—the song was composed before the operation began, before they knew the results—further militarizes and nationalizes it as a transcendent revelatory event not only awaiting the arrival of the soldiers of the State of Israel, but also preserving the people’s flame for eternity.⁴ The song charts a cycle of return from the burning bush and Moses’s Mount Sinai to the return of Israelis to Sinai in the present. “Oh flame of God / in the eyes of the youth / oh flame of God / in the roars of engines / this day will yet be retold / my brothers / of the nation’s return to [Sinai]”.⁵

The song had immediate ramifications on the reception of this war in the public imagination. The location of the “flame of God” both in the eyes and speech of Israeli soldiers and in the roars of its engines (tanks and bulldozers alike) deifies state violence and ontologizes the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as an instrument of divine will. What is more, the song sets a dangerous precedent by asserting Jewish ownership or “right of return” over, not just Sinai, but any site of biblical importance. The crescendo of the song reintroduces the singular event of the burning bush with a heroic masculinist loudness of war and victory, as an eruption, penetrating both the physical geographical territory of Egyptian Sinai and, more mentally, the biblical myth of Moses. That “the day will yet be retold” is a taken-for-granted admission that it is the victor who controls the historical narrative, especially given that the War of Independence in 1948 was perceived as a war of the few against the many. The prolonging of the literary-historical throughline from biblical wars to the present conflict evokes a sense of absolute belonging within a centuries-long narrative of adversity and survival.

The Divine Project of Imagining

The performance for Moses through the burning bush is the ultimate spectacle of God’s appearance in Exodus, especially given the rarity of seeing any aspect of God. It is a scene of heightened affect communicated through language, sight, sound, and even smell and heat. By virtue of its divinity, it amplifies the scale of communication and the volume of meaning that the event can hold. In God’s project of imagining, language is coextensive with the visual, at the same time tying together language, land, and food. Whereas scholars have written substantially about this encounter, the focus on the connection between language and ideologies of provision remained neglected.

Before engaging concretely with the above, I wish to further contextualize the language within the narrative, highlighting its performativity with the speech act of feeding. Moses has just fled from Pharaoh, who sought to kill him upon hearing that he, Moses, killed an Egyptian man. The gender transitions in Moses’s life from the threatening, male space to protective, female space are indeed striking: Pharaoh’s decree to throw the male sons into the Nile had informed his rescue by his mother, Yocheved, his sister, Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter, who also adopted him and raised him, while his mother, Yocheved, nursed him. Once in the desert, after helping Jethro’s daughters water their flock around the well—a vital public site in the Bible for social encounters and exchanges (Scarry 1985, 189)—he married Ziporah, Jethro’s eldest, and made his temporary home in Median. Thus, in spite of being a ger, a foreigner, and against the Egyptian space of enslavement and increasing violence, Moses is thriving; he fathers his first son, and also shepherds the flock of his father-in-law (Exodus 3: 1).

It is in such a moment, in the spacious desert of seclusion, that God summons Moses, the shepherd, to this miracle of words and objects, a performance of awakening. The encounter with the divine opens a huge paradigmatic space at the intersection of sight, voice, memory, and knowledge. The revelation marks the zone of divine performative intimacy, a category of sacredness in Har Ha-‘Elohim, God’s Mountain in Chorevah. In addition to the awe-striking fear, yir’ah, that God’s presence inspires in Moses, it will also have to move him, to urgently mobilize him to go to Pharaoh and become the leader he cannot yet see in himself. The force of the event presupposes that Moses will undergo this major transformation: from the rescued individual, he will become the agent of rescuing, and he will be made from a leader of tribes into the historical leader of the Israelite nation.⁶

And I have come down to rescue it (my people) from the hand of Egypt, to bring it up from that land to a goodly and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

(Exodus 3: 8)

The pattern of repeating the target place with three attributions, “to a goodly and spacious land”, “to a land flowing with milk and honey”, and “to the place of the Canaanite”, helps to constitute unequivocally a referentiality of the land of Canaan that is deceptively literal.

“eretz zavat chalav u-dvash”⁷

A land flowing with milk and honey

Eretz, land in Hebrew, is feminine. The literal translation of the Hebrew is “a land oozing with milk and honey”, an allegorical allusion to the secretions of the female human body, which in turn is reinvested with positive, eroticized value (see Song of Songs 4: 11). The femininity, or rather, feminization of the land—zavah, in feminine—is further signified by the oozing fluidity of the milk and honey, both as female fluids and as part of a female bodily discourse (Irigary 1985). In Leviticus, a zivah, a female “oozer”, alludes to the status during the period of confinement or abstinence—from sex, for example—mandated by a woman’s ritually polluted state (Leviticus 15: 28). The word is usually associated with pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, and foul discharges. In “a land oozing with milk and honey”, the context of oozing is utterly brimming with nurturing potential. This positive investment of the female body with such erotic/nurturing potential is only accomplished via the same body’s linguistic proximity to the land and its nourishing secretions. Later, when God spells out to Moses what to tell the elders of Israel, he reiterates the expression word for word (Exodus 16–17). The concern with re-establishing the reference, as God does, in terms of the land’s “goodness”, inhabitants, and land products, is tied to the need to substantiate the project of imagining and Moses’s assignment as leader. It mediates the abstract idea of Canaan into a vivid, concrete reality, while all along making the departure from Egypt a certainty of memory.

The project of imagining, thus, starts with Moses, as a new beginning, complementing the spectacle of the burning bush. In this speech act, God establishes the performativity of the land as it “[flows] with milk and honey”. In such a system of distribution, the language is loaded with communicative responsibilities. Moses must surmount a huge obstacle of representation: how can these Israelites in the desert, who know only the hardship of Egypt, come to grips with such an abstract promise? God’s performance informs the very performance of the land when he tells Moses, who is stuck in the desert, how to start the project of imagining, how to communicate with slaves the fact that they are on the road to freedom, and to “a land flowing with milk and honey”. The text engages several temporalities: speaking to Moses, to the people, and to the eternal God of History.

But as much as the project of imagining is an abstract one, it relies heavily on the materiality of language. “Language never gives mere signs”, Walter Benjamin tells us (Benjamin 1996, 69). And the language of materiality specifically distinguishes between linguistic communication and mental communication. Objects communicate their materiality into human language beyond their immediate meaning. Benjamin uses the example of “toy”, saying that the word communicates to the player a “rhythm of play”. It is founded on the magic of language, on the notion that the word “…points to something else: its infiniteness” (Benjamin 1996, 62–63). The language of revelation, as Benjamin theorizes, is predicated on its ability

to make the relation between mind and language thoroughly unambiguous, so that the expression that is linguistically most existent (that is, most fixed) is linguistically the most rounded and definitive; in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental.

(Benjamin 1996, 66–67)

Taking “the inviolability of the word as the only and sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being that is expressed in it”, is what is meant by the concept of revelation (Ibid. 1996, 66–67). Although subjectivity plays a large part in differentiating these associations from person to person, Benjamin is more interested in the collective production of meaning in mental communication—in our case, the shared foundation of associations that the phrase “a land flowing with milk and honey” conjures up. In the world of food, such objects have an even more magical effect, alerting several registers of language, body, and imagination. Milk and honey, similarly, activate a new restoring conversation between ‘adam and ‘adamah, man and land, whereby “eating well”—good, plenty, and enough—is its staple. And it is precisely what the land is intended to represent: “eating well”.

God provides Moses, in addition to the visual magical signs—the transformation of the rod into a serpent, and of the hand into a leprous, white hand—with a language that acts, models, and continuously signifies. This coextensive speech act is sensual and provocative, intended to result in unconditional trust and mobilize Moses ...