Not in God's Name (29 page)

1.
Horace,
Epodes
7, 17–20.

2.
Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb and Angela Richards,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, London, Hogarth Press, 1953, p. 250.

3.
The Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939
, London, Hogarth Press, 1970, p. 428.

4.
Sigmund Freud,
Femininity
(1933), in
Complete Psychological Works
, vol. 22, p. 123.

5.
See Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
, New York, Basic Books, 1953, p. 9.

6.
Douglas W. Mock,
More than Kin and Less than Kind: The Evolution of Family Conflict
, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

7.
Geoffrey Wigoder,
Jewish–Christian Relations since the Second World War
, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988.

8.
Rosemary Radford Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots
of Anti-Semitism
, New York, Seabury Press, 1974; Gregory Baum,
The Jews and the Gospel: A Re-Examination of the New Testament
, Westminster, MD, Newman Press, 1961; Edward H. Flannery,
The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism
, New York, Macmillan, 1965; Paul M. van Buren,
A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality
, Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1995; R. Kendall Soulen,
The God of Israel and Christian Theology
, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1996; Mary C. Boys,
Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding
, New York, Paulist Press, 2000; James Carroll,
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History
, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

9.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘Response to Rosemary Ruether’, in Eva Fleischner (ed.),
Auschwitz, Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust: Papers Given at the International Symposium on the Holocaust, Held at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, June 3 to 6, 1974
, New York, KTAV Pub. Co., 1977, pp. 97–108.

10.
Alan Edelstein,
An Unacknowledged Harmony: Philo-Semitism and the Survival of European Jewry
, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1982.

11.
Robert Satloff,
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
, New York, PublicAffairs, 2006.

12.
To be sure, there are other passages in Paul – especially Romans 11 – that suggest a more benign view of Jews and Judaism. See John Gager,
Origins of Anti-Semitism
, New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.

13.
Cyprian,
Three Books of Testimonies against the Jews
, 20; quoted in Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide
, p. 135.

14.
Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide
, p. 135.

15.
Prudentius,
Apotheosis
, 541–50; Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide
, p. 134. For more on this subject, see Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes (eds.),
The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend
, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986.

1.
Gen. 16:9–12; 17:20; 21:13, 18.

2.
A Midrash portrays the episode in terms of a conflict between God and the angels: When Ishmael was dying of thirst, the angels said to the Holy One, ‘Will you create a well of water for one whose descendants will one day refuse to give water to your children the Israelites when they are dying with thirst?’ God asked the angels: ‘What is Ishmael at
this moment: righteous or wicked?’ ‘Righteous,’ replied the angels. ‘I only judge a person,’ said God, ‘by how he is now.’ See below for the rabbinic re-reading of the entire narrative.

3.
Gen. 17:17; 18:12, 13, 15; 21:6 (twice) and 21:9. The name
Yitzchak
(‘he will laugh’) also appears seven times during this section of the narrative: Gen. 17:19, 21; 21:3, 4, 5, 8, 10. The same verb,
z-ch-k
, occurs at two other critical junctures. The first is when the two angels visit Lot in Sodom and tell him to leave. He reports their warning to his sons-in-law, ‘but his sons-in-law
thought he was joking
’ (19:14). The second occurs when Isaac – by now married – is forced by famine to go to the land of the Philistines. Afraid that the people will kill him in order to take Rebekah, he says that she is his sister. One day, Abimelech looks out of the window and sees Isaac ‘being familiar with her’ (26:8) and immediately understands that they are not brother and sister but husband and wife. The range of senses of this single word is thus very wide indeed, but its thematic centrality is unmistakable.

4.
See Umberto Cassuto,
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis
, trans. from Hebrew by Israel Abrahams, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1964.

5.
Nahmanides, Commentary to Gen. 16:6. An English translation is available in
Ramban: Commentary on the Torah
, trans. and annotated by Rabbi Dr Charles Chavel, New York, Shilo, 1971, vol. 1, p. 213.

6.
In most of the literary treatments – poems and novels – about Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, the sympathies of the writer are with Hagar and Ishmael. As Sol Liptzin puts it: ‘modern poets and novelists have been almost unanimous in their sympathy for her [Hagar] and in their condemnation of her master and mistress…In the Hagar story, our sympathy is not with Abraham but rather with the princess who became a bondwoman, the concubine who was misused by her master and mistress and then abandoned. She is at the centre of our interest, and not the patriarch…’ (Sol Liptzin,
Biblical Themes in World Literature
, Hoboken, NJ, KTAV, 1985, pp. 39, 52–3).
   Shakespeare, in
The Merchant of Venice
, sees Shylock – and by implication Jews in general – as fated to undergo an ironic role reversal. Now it is the children of Isaac and Jacob who have become outcasts in a world of ‘Hagar’s offspring’ (Act 2, sc. 5, l. 44).
   In ‘The Seed Growing Secretly’, Henry Vaughan casts Ishmael as a symbol of the Gentiles, apparently cast off, but nonetheless the eventual recipients of God’s saving grace: ‘If pious griefs Heavens joys awake / O fill his bottle! Thy childe weeps!’
   
Ishmael’s most noted literary appearance is as the narrator of Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick
, with its famous opening line, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ In his
Ishmael: A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism
(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), James Baird argues that ‘Ishmael is the overseer of every major work in [Melville’s] rliterary record’: Tom in
Typee
, Paul in
Omoo
, Taji in
Mardi
, the young sailor-heroes in
Redburn
and
White-Jacket
, the tragic hero of
Pierre
in his early life, the handsome sailor of
Billy Budd
, and so on: ‘He is Ishmael, the outcast, condemned to wander’ (pp. 92–3). For these references, see Antony Westenbroek, ‘Ishmael’, in
Genesis: The Book of Beginnings
, Oxford, Lion Classic Bible Series, 1997, pp. 91–3.
   These writers – as did post-biblical Jewish tradition – sensed the lonely dignity of Hagar and her son. The story of Isaac and Ishmael is not a tragedy, but neither is it a simple moral tale of black and white, good and evil, chosen and rejected.

7.
Jack Miles,
God: A Biography
, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, p. 406.

8.
John Milton, ‘Sonnet: On His Blindness’ (1650s).

9.
On Midrash, the classic work is Isaac Heineman,
Darkhei ha-Aggadah
[Hebrew], Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1970. For English introductions, see Michael Fishbane (ed.),
The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History
, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993;
The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998; Moshe Halbertal,
People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997; Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds.),
Midrash and Literature
, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1986; Jacob Neusner,
Judaism and the Interpretation of Scripture: Introduction to the Rabbinic Midrash
, New York, Hendrickson Publishers, 2004;
Midrash in Context: Exegesis in Formative Judaism
, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1983. On the continuity between Midrash and the Hebrew Bible itself, see Michael Fishbane’s path-breaking work,
Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel
, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985.

10.
Midrash Hagadol, Gen. 24:62; see also Genesis Rabbah 60:14.

11.
One example is the two anonymous Israelites who object when the young Moses intervenes in their dispute. The Midrash identifies them with Dathan and Aviram, the two men who subsequently objected to Moses’ leadership during the Korah rebellion many years later. On the midrashic principle, see Heineman,
Darkhei ha-Aggadah
, pp. 27–34.

12.
Midrash Tanhuma, Hayyei Sarah, 8; Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, 29.

13.
In a perceptive comment, Moshe Lichtenstein suggests that Midrash operates not on a
correspondence
theory of truth (does it match the facts?) but on a
coherence
theory (does it provide an internally consistent narrative?). M. Lichtenstein,
Tsir va-tson
[Hebrew], Alon Shvut, Israel, Yeshivat Har Etzion, 2002, p. 219.

14.
Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, 30. The work is generally dated as belonging to the eighth century, and contains references to the Umayyad dynasty of Islam.

15.
Targum Jonathan to Gen. 25:11.

1.
See, in this context, Roland Barthes’ fine essay, ‘The Struggle with the Angel’, in Roland Barthes,
Image, Music, Text
, London, Fontana, 1977, pp. 125–410. Barthes shows in detail how the narrative subverts the conventions of the folktale – as, I argue, is the case with all the counter-narratives in Genesis.

2.
Rashi, quoting Midrash, gives a fine interpretation: ‘
He was exceedingly afraid
– lest he be killed;
he was distressed
– lest he be forced to kill.’ Even killing in self-defence should occasion moral qualms, despite the fact that it is morally warranted. See the fine analysis in Everett Gendler, ‘War in the Jewish Tradition’, in Menachem Kellner (ed.),
Contemporary Jewish Ethics
, New York, Sanhedrin Press, 1978, pp. 189–210.

3.
Genesis Rabbah 77:3; 78:3.

4.
English translations tend to miss this point, which is essential to the counter-narrative. Thus, the New International Version has, ‘Please accept the present that was brought to you’; the New English Translation: ‘Please take my present that was brought to you’; the Revised Standard Version, ‘Accept, I pray you, my gift that is brought to you.’ The King James Version, however, reads, ‘Take, I pray thee, my blessing that is brought to thee.’

5.
Again the translations tend to miss the point. Thus the King James Version has, ‘because I have enough’; The New International Version, ‘I have all I need’; the New American Bible, ‘I have an abundance.’ The Hebrew original, however, makes a pointed distinction between Esau’s ‘I have much’ (
yesh li rav
) and Jacob’s ‘I have everything’ (
yesh li khol
).

6.
‘Face’ is, of course, a fundamental element of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ‘the Other’. See, among his many writings,
Alterity
and Transcendence
, trans. Michael B. Smith, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999;
Humanism of the Other
, trans. Nidra Poller, Urbana, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2003;
Of God Who Comes to Mind
, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998;
Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence
, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1981;
Proper Names
, trans. Michael B. Smith, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996;
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1979. A useful introduction is Seán Hand (ed.),
The Levinas Reader
, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989. Alain Finkielkraut’s
The Wisdom of Love
, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, is an accessible work based on Levinas’s philosophy of ‘the face’. For a discussion of Levinas’s views on otherness, see Jeffrey Bloechl (ed.),
The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas
, New York, Fordham University Press, 2000; and Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Levinas
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

7.
Thus, for example, Abraham is promised the land five times – Gen. 12:7; 13:14–18; 15:7, 18–21; 17:1–8 – and children five times – 12:2; 13:16; 15:5; 17:2, 5–6. See also David J.A. Clines,
The Theme of the Pentateuch
, Sheffield, Dept. of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield, 1978.

8.
Zohar 146b; see also Deuteronomy Rabbah 1:15.

9.
See Rashi, Commentary to Gen. 25:25.

10.
R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes explains that Midrash, using the Bible as an ethics textbook, is forced to turn its characters into clearly demarcated heroes and villains. Biblical narrative is full of nuance. There are no villains without virtues, no heroes without shortcomings. This very subtlety, however, makes it hard to use as a teaching text. See Maharatz Chajes,
Mavo ha-Aggadot
, printed at the beginning of standard editions of
Ein Yaakov
. The problem Chajes addresses is well illustrated in John Barton,
Ethics and the Old Testament
, Harrisburg, PA, Trinity Press International, 1998.

11.
As I mention in the text, René Girard calls this ‘mimetic’ desire – the desire to be like, and hence in place of, the other: ‘In the temporal plan of the system there is not a moment when those involved in the action do not see themselves separated from their rivals by formidable differences. When one of the “brothers” assumes the role of father and king, the other cannot but feel himself to be the disinherited son. That
explains why the antagonists only rarely perceive the reciprocal nature of their involvement’ (
Violence and the Sacred
, trans. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, pp. 143–68).

12.
A midrash,
Pesikta Rabbati
13, makes the same point. See Menahem Kasher, Torah Shelemah to Gen. 33:11.

13.
R. David Kimche (Radak) and R. Yosef ibn Kaspi, Commentaries to Gen. 25:23.

14.
See, for example, Gen. 29:26; 43:33; 48:14.

15.
See Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Chizkuni to Gen. 25:22; Nahmanides, Commentary to Gen. 27:4.

16.
Nahmanides, Commentary to Gen. 25:22.

17.
The readings given in this and the following chapters are not necessarily to be found in the classic Jewish exegetical literature, but that is the point: there is, I argue, a meaning below the surface that is different from the one on the surface. This approach is similar to the phrase used by Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, c. 1085–1158) in his phrase ‘the deep plain sense of Scripture’ (
omek peshuto shel mikra
); see his Commentary to Gen. 37:2.

18.
Girard,
Violence and the Sacred
, p. 169.

19.
Maimonides holds that the wrestling match took place in a vision (
The Guide for the Perplexed
, II:42). Nahmanides strongly objects: if the encounter was a vision, why did Jacob limp subsequently? (Nahmanides, Commentary to Gen. 18:1). Gersonides and Abrabanel defend Maimonides’ interpretation: it is possible for an intense psychological experience to have psychosomatic effects.

20.
There is, of course, a famous verse (Mal. 1:2–3) that seems to contradict this: ‘ “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” the Lord says. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated.” ’ This, however, refers to specific circumstances in Israel’s later history, during a period of conflict between the Israelites and the Edomites. In any case, Nahmanides and R. David Kimche (Commentaries to Gen. 29:31) point out that the word
senuah
, when contrasted with
ahuvah
(‘loved’), does not mean ‘hated’, but rather ‘loved, but loved less intensely’. That is also its meaning in Deut. 21:15.
   R. Elijah of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon), in his notes at the end of
Sa’arat Eliyahu
, translates the phrase in Malachi as ‘I hate
the subsidiary part
of Esau, but the main part – his head – is hidden next to our Father in Heaven, and that is why Jacob says, “I have seen your face and it is like seeing the face of God.” ’ This passage is developed at length by R. Abraham Isaac Kook (
Iggerot Rayah
, vol. 1, letter 112), to prove
that eventually there will be a reconciliation between Jacob and Esau, i.e. between Jews and Christians, as also between Jews and Muslims (‘the brotherly love of Esau and Jacob, of Isaac and Ishmael, will assert itself above all the confusion that the evil brought on by our bodily nature has engendered’). For an English translation, see Ben Zion Bokser,
Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems
, New York, Paulist Press, 1978, pp. 338–9.