Elul Day 19

Dear Elul Writers,

All of the focus this summer on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey reminded me of a piece of literary criticism that I read a lifetime ago during my first year as an undergraduate at NYU. How many essays was I assigned during my time as a college student that I can call to mind so fully? Surely, no more than I can count on my hands. Yet, for whatever reason, the analysis of Erich Auerbach in his chapter Odysseus’ Scar captured my imagination then and has stuck in my brain since. 

I will spare you all the details (or will I?), but the basic argument is that there is a fundamental difference between the Homeric storytelling style epitomized in The Odyssey and the ways in which narratives unfold in the Torah. The Homeric style has a tendency “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations.” Which is to say, things are made clear, they are explained, backstories are given, all is on the surface. This is contrasted, in particular, with the sparse, mysterious and dreamlike telling of Akeidat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac story from Bereishit 22. While we are told by the narrator that Abraham’s journey to sacrifice his son happens over three days, that hardly helps the reader decipher the chronology of the episode. Auerbach writes:

Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days!

I can only assume that reading this as an 18 year-old, my mind was blown. An old Bible story, something that I had encountered in Hebrew school and on Rosh Hashanah, was being cracked open like a geode to expose its marvelous core. A critical thinker was turning his attention to a story that I’d thought of as ancient, confusing, even problematic. The strangeness, the dimly-lit nature of the tale, the mystery– these weren’t defects, but were evidence of a literary style that invited interpretation and grappling. The author uses the term “fraught with background,” to contrast the storytelling techniques of the Torah with the foreground-centered story telling of the Homeric epics. To this day, I sometimes find myself whispering “fraught with background” to myself.

Prompt

Maybe it’s because I’m a Jew, but I feel like the world that I live in is much more like the Torah than The Odyssey. Things are often not clear; people’s motivations are a mystery to us (even our own motivations can feel murky). Episodes in our lives can feel dim, dreamlike, ripe for interpretation and meaning-making. Today I invite you to consider an experience from this past year that can be explicated, retold or mined for meaning. Is it possible to focus in on the background, the proverbial mountain in the distance or ram in the thicket that you might have missed the first time around?

Bivracha,
Jordan