“Moses fails to enter Canaan, not because his life is too short, but because it is a human life.” So read Franz Kafka’s diary entry on Oct. 19, 1921. The subtitle of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s new biography of Moses, “A Human Life,” is a tribute to Kafka. By casting her psychological portrait of the prophet under the auspices of the Prague writer, Zornberg ushers the reader into the sinuous, metaphysical angst of a man facing the divine and the elusive meaning of life.
A celebrated biblical scholar, keen on weaving together traditional Jewish exegesis, psychoanalysis and postmodern criticism, Zornberg always displays minute attention to the psychological subtext of the Scriptures. Her previous work, “Bewilderments,” had already captured Moses in the desert, ridden by skepticism.
Expanding her inquiry to his whole existence in this current book, she shows how Moses’ flaws and shortcomings function as a metaphor for humanity as he confronts God’s will and struggles to convey his word. Moses is a stammering leader whom God prevented from entering the Promised Land. When he glimpses that place of milk and honey shortly before his death, it only emphasizes the incompleteness of his life’s work.
Since the Jewish tradition holds Moses to be the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and even more specifically of the fourth book, Numbers, Zornberg claims to find autobiography in the biblical text. She conjures up the world of Moses as an adopted infant, his origins cloaked in silence, a Hebrew raised at the Egyptian court whose identity was revealed to him only as an adult. Zornberg sees these beginnings as the reason for his “fragmented state of being.” It is the lot of prophets to accept their task reluctantly — it is even more accurate for Moses, whose own identity as a Hebrew was fraught with uncertainty and who, as a result, could never act as a natural leader.
Zornberg’s central and boldest proposition is that Moses was “born into a world of genocide” and unconsciously “nurtured in fear.” She posits him as a survivor and examines his life in the light of abundant scholarship on memory and trauma studies. Her use of the term genocide — coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 — might be questionable or anachronistic, yet Zornberg builds on this comparison to offer an insightful dialogue between Moses, “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue,” and the poet Paul Celan. Celan’s post-Holocaust poetry tests the limit of what can be uttered, of what it means to be a witness in the wake of the catastrophe. Certain things cannot be articulated. Both the divine and the disaster exceed our faculty of representation. In “Moses,” Zornberg captures a man and prophet of melancholy. This distinct pensiveness is, in the words of another post-Holocaust writer, W.G. Sebald, “the realization of the impossibility of salvation.” Moses is, in fact, the scribe of an interminable mourning.
Bringing together copious, diverse and sometimes dissonant references (spanning Hasidic masters, George Eliot, Zizek and Beckett, among others), Zornberg gives a new tour of the life of Moses. However, she may amalgamate a bit too far, as she herself seems to imply when she quotes the philosopher Stanley Cavell: “To attribute the origin of my thoughts simply to the other, thoughts which are then, as it were, implanted in me . . . is idolatry.” And as she herself claims, “The hazard of idolatry is the wish to have an object perfectly adjusted to our needs.” The failure of the book is also its success: It could be no such object.
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