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April 12, 2013
Delving into the unconscious
Biblical scholar explores meanings of Joseph’s dreams.
VICKY TOBIANAH
For renowned author Dr. Avivah Zornberg, learning – and writing – about Judaism comes naturally. When Zornberg was growing up in Scotland, she had the best teacher a child could ask for: her father. “He was my most important teacher of Torah,” said Zornberg, who now lives in Israel. “I learned with my father when I was young. I always loved learning Torah and Judaism.”
Zornberg was born in London, England, although she grew up in Scotland. In 1969, she moved to Israel, the place she says she always wanted to live. “After the Six Day War it was a specially good time to go,” she said. She then began teaching at various universities and institutes across Israel, when she found herself encouraged to pursue writing. “People had been trying to persuade me to write,” she said. “Once I started, I really started to enjoy it. It’s another side of self-expression.
“I liked trying to communicate ideas and concepts that are not obvious, [writing about] things that get people to go deeper in their understanding of biblical texts.”
Zornberg will be visiting Vancouver on a lecture tour later this month. The lecture, Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joseph’s Dream, will explore Joseph’s dreams and his brothers’ hatred of him, using both Jewish biblical interpretation and modern philosophy, psychology, literature and film to interpret their meanings.
Zornberg explained that what she enjoys most is discovering and writing about the biblical unconsciousness, the untold stories hidden in the Bible that are left to be discovered, and she has named the fields of psychoanalysis and narrative theory as important to her biblical understanding.
“The idea of the biblical unconsciousness means what is not said is very powerful, and it affects how people communicate with one another. It’s a very important part of how God communicated with human beings,” she told the Independent.
This is the theme that she hopes to explore during her North American tour, as she speaks at synagogues, community centres and institutes across the United States and Canada. “People are a bit afraid of the word psychoanalysis, they have all kinds of preconceptions about it,” she said. “But if you just talk in terms of listening to the words, then you can begin to become aware of all the different levels and echoes that are there. In that sense, it’s not different from how we speak to one another – only a small part of what we say is available to our consciousness, the other parts resonate and take time to be heard properly because there is so much going on.”
The core of her Vancouver lecture centres on Joseph’s dreams and their hidden messages. “Freud says in every dream there is what he calls a ‘navel of the dream,’ the place where the dream reaches out to the unknown and it’s too complicated to try and unravel that. Rashi says that the complicated part that doesn’t make immediate sense is the most interesting part – the idea that Joseph’s father, mother and brothers will come and bow down to him,” she said. “His mother is Rachel and she’s already dead so how can she bow down to [him]? This part, that doesn’t give way to common sense, is the part that bears thinking about. What is Joseph’s relationship with his mother? We have to figure out what’s being hidden here.”
This type of deep, intellectual thinking is one of the reasons her books are so popular: they diverge from the common intellectual understandings of the Bible and are not afraid to search out for the underlying messages in these familiar Jewish stories. One of her most well-known books, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconsciousness, does just that.
Delving deep into the hidden meaning of biblical texts is what drives Zornberg and what she loves to do. “It’s a lot of thinking, it’s not just me in an ivory tower,” she said. “It really is very rich, and gets richer.”
Her love of Jewish knowledge is not surprising. Her parents met in Vienna, but emigrated to England shortly before the war. “It wasn’t a bastion of Orthodox Judaism but it was a healthy, wholesome kind of world to grow up in,” she said.
From a young age, she learned extensively with her father, who shared her passion for learning. Her family lineage descends from a long list of intellectual figures. “Going back many generations, my family were rabbis and teachers,” she said. “Of course, they were all men, but nowadays, thank God, women also have access to [Jewish learning]. We’re really tremendously fortunate.”
She added, “Being a woman is almost an advantage, because the kind of people that are interesting to me are more interested in hearing from a woman because it’s relatively new.”
Zornberg said she is looking forward to visiting Vancouver and sharing her knowledge and love for Jewish learning with the community. “I’ve been teaching these things for many, many years,” she said. “It’s a lot of thinking and it gives me a lot of purpose in life.”
Zornberg’s talk, on April 22, 7:30 p.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, is sponsored by the Diamond Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at the University of British Columbia, and co-sponsored by the JCCGV. The event is free and open to the public.
Vicky Tobianah is a freelance writer and editor based in Toronto and a recent McGill University graduate. Connect with her on Twitter, @vicktob, or by e-mail to vtobianah@gmail.com.
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