Suffering Religion

Suffering Religion Suffering besets us in diverse ways. Is any speaking about suffering too complicit with suffering? ...

Author: Robert Gibbs

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Suffering Religion

Suffering besets us in diverse ways. Is any speaking about suffering too complicit with suffering? Is it the task of religion to justify our pain, or even to deny it? Or does religion offer images, theories and practices that understand God to suffer with humanity? Does God choose to suffer? Can theology arm us to resist suffering? In a diverse and innovative selection of new essays by cutting-edge theologians, scholars of religion, and philosophers, Suffering Religion examines one of the most primitive but challenging questions to define human experience— why do we suffer? As a theme uniting very different religious and cultural traditions, the problem of suffering addresses issues of passivity, the vulnerability of embodiment, the generosity of love and the complexity of gendered desire. Interdisciplinary studies bring different kinds of interpretations to meet and enrich each other. Can the notion of goodness retain meaning in the face of real affliction, or is pain itself in conflict with meaning? Themes covered include: • • • • • •

philosophy’s own failure to treat suffering seriously, with special reference to the Jewish tradition; Martin Buber’s celebrated interpretations of scriptural suffering; suffering in Kristevan psychoanalysis, focusing on the Christian theology of the cross; the pain of childbirth in a home setting as a religiously significant choice; God’s primal suffering in the kabbalistic tradition; incarnation as a gracious willingness to suffer.

With contributions by the editors and Graham Ward, Pamela E. Klassen, Steven Kepnes, and Cleo McNelly Kearns, Suffering Religion brings together the most exciting and provocative new discourses in a significant but often neglected field of study. Robert Gibbs is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and the author of Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities (2000). Elliot R. Wolfson is the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Director of the Program in Religious Studies at New York University. He has written extensively on Jewish mysticism, and has won American Academy of Religion and National Jewish Book awards for Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994).

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Suffering Religion

Edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Selection and editorial matter © 2002 Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson Individual contributions © individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguingin PublicationData A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Suffering religion / edited by Robert Gibbs & Elliot R. Wolfson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–415–26611–4 (hbk) — ISBN 0–415–26612–2 (pbk.) 1. Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Suffering—Religious aspects— Judaism. I. Gibbs, Robert, 1958– II. Wolfson, Elliot R. BT732.7.S84 2002 291.2′118—dc21 ISBN 0-203-16598-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26060-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–26611–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–26612–2 (pbk)

2001058876

Contents

Contributors Introduction: the study of religion

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ROBERT GIBBS AND ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

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Unjustifiable suffering

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ROBERT GIBBS

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Rereading Job as textual theodicy

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STEVEN KEPNES

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Suffering in theory

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CLEO McNELLY KEARNS

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The scandal of pain in childbirth

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PAMELA E. KLASSEN

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Divine suffering and the hermeneutics of reading: philosophical reflections on Lurianic mythology

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ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

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Suffering and incarnation

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GRAHAM WARD

Epilogue: theology and religious studies

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ROBERT GIBBS AND ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

Index

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Contributors

Cleo McNelly Kearns writes on theology, literature and literary theory. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton. She is the author of T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: a study in poetry and belief (1987) and has contributed essays on theological implications of postmodern critical theory to many periodicals and anthologies. She is working on a book on the figure of the Virgin Mary in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Steven Kepnes is the William Finard Chair of Jewish Studies at Colgate University. He is the author of Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues In Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (with Peter Ochs and Robert Gibbs), Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age, and The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology. He is the former editor of the Judaism section of Religious Studies Review and currently serves as the co-chair of the Society of Textual Reasoning and co-editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning. Pamela E. Klassen is Assistant Professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women (1994) and Blessed Events; Religion and Home Birth in America (2001). Graham Ward is Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (1995) and Cities of God (2000) and is editor of the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (2001).

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Introduction

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Introduction The study of religion Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson

Responding to suffering To live in our time is to endure images and stories of horrifying suffering. Sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes catastrophic, sometimes unimaginable —our world almost deadens us with the suffering of humanity. It is no special virtue that leads scholars to reflect on such suffering: one can easily see that suffering demands responses, and that those who receive that demand as calling for interpretation, for understanding, for a search for meaning, will turn their minds to the pains endured by others. Underneath a vast range of academic inquiry today is a serious, if veiled, struggle to respond to the unprecedented suffering of the twentieth century. Much of medical science, of the social sciences, and of the humanities responds to human suffering, and indeed, often responds to the specific historical atrocities of our times. Who can study almost any facet of human culture and not sense the shadow of the widespread and organized violence of our recent past? We are scholars in order to resist suffering and violence and to respond for the suffering that has occurred and that threatens us still. Yet in this shared context, the study of religion seems to have a distinctive engagement with suffering, for religions have explored suffering with a specific intensity and respect. To focus on religion is not to claim a higher level of personal responsiveness to suffering, but rather to claim a privilege for the field in which we work. That privilege is not exclusive (other fields of inquiry are also valuable and valid), but appears in the first instance as a quite blunt claim: religions have often taken suffering seriously and have explored the very task of how to respond to suffering. They provide practices and interpretations that explore why suffering besets humanity and how we are to respond to suffering. Of course, there are religions that deny the reality of suffering, and even more there are interpreters of religion who might claim to discern such denial, but

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Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson

even in denying the reality of suffering, religions often dignify it and make their central theme the question of how to bear the burden of our perceived suffering. We need to insist that this initial privilege, of attending to suffering, will in the course of this book be subject to careful elaboration and revision. And we need as well immediately to register the suspicion that we have displayed in the ambiguity of the title. For some, religion has indeed taken suffering seriously—by justifying it! Religion is not a consolation but an opiate, an ideology that prevents us from challenging suffering and redeeming the world. In such cases, humanity seems to suffer religion—religion itself is one of the ills, or perhaps the greatest ill, that we suffer from, for it saps us of the perception and the desire to put an end to suffering. For others, however, religion finds meaning in our suffering, helping guide us to understand and to respond for our suffering and that of others. Religion receives its assignment from human suffering. A guiding concern for our work in this book is to see how religion survives in this ambiguity—in what ways religions can avoid serving as ideology. Our attention to religion, then, is refracted through a concern not to deny suffering and a fear that acknowledging or “understanding” suffering will lead to a failure to alleviate suffering. And if we do not have special personal merit for struggling in this task, we do present a set of essays here that openly and seriously grapple with that task. The general task, responding to suffering, is widely shared; the specific field in which we do our work, the study of religion, has a privileged attention to suffering; and the authors here assembled work out of genuine commitment to the task.

Contents Several of these essays were originally delivered at a session of the American Academy of Religion meeting in November 1997. We, the editors, had solicited the original essays and, following the session, decided to expand the volume slightly and revise our own contributions. Before we explore the ways that the essays in this book both multiply views of religion and then intersect, a brief account of the contents of the volume is in order. The first essay, “Unjustifiable suffering,” is by Robert Gibbs. He writes commentaries on texts by Jewish philosophers that criticize philosophy’s own failure to take suffering seriously enough. Juxtaposing Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, Gibbs explores ways in which Jewish traditions reorient philosophical discourse, in order to take suffering more seriously. The essay then focuses on the question whether even a religious philosophical account of suffering must not repeat the failure of general philosophy and so co-opt suffering.

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Steven Kepnes writes “Rereading Job as textual theodicy,” which examines how Martin Buber develops a way of interpreting Hebrew biblical texts in relation to the interpreters’ own existential suffering. That suffering is experienced as a rent in the heart of the world that no longer tolerates an integral logical relation to suffering. Thus Buber, in Kepnes’ reading, produces a complex set of readings of Job, offering no single perspective, but rather depending on the dialogue of the different ways of reading and responding to suffering. Kepnes’ essay engages the multiple readings of a Hebrew biblical text, in imitation of rabbinic interpretation, and in our context, Buber exemplifies a Jewish struggle to respond to contemporary suffering by recourse to traditional religious texts. Cleo McNelly Kearns’s essay, “Suffering in theory,” explores Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretation of suffering, focusing on abjection as the suffering that contests the possibility of being an “I.” Kearns explores a Christian theology of the cross, looking to Luther and reinterpreting Paul’s Epistles, to see the justification of the sufferer but not of the suffering. Her essay explores the problems of representation of suffering in art, particularly of the body of Christ on the cross. She concludes with reflections by Kristeva on the cult of Mary and childbirth. Kearns hears in Kristeva’s lyric of childbearing a counterpoint to a theory of suffering, layering and juxtaposing abject pain and abstract theoretical reflection. Pamela E. Klassen contributes “The scandal of pain in childbirth.” Based on her own anthropological research on mothers who chose to give birth at home, the essay examines the range of religious interpretations those mothers gave of their own pain. Klassen interprets interviews with mothers who describe the wondrous and painful experiences of giving birth. Diverse religious traditions inform their own interpretations of their pain, but these women shared the choice to bear the pain of labor and delivery removed from the medicalized context of hospitals. Klassen discusses the politics and the traditions for alleviating and for interpreting birthing pain. But this essay then offers a view of the intense embodiment of pain, interpreted as religious suffering, and indeed, as the most profound joy. The place of pain in bearing another in the labor of procreation challenges us to think of the empowering of such suffering. Elliot R. Wolfson wrote “Divine suffering and the hermeneutics of reading: philosophical reflections on Lurianic mythology” for this volume. Wolfson examines a set of kabbalistic texts which portray the primal suffering of God in creating God’s self prior to creating the world. He frames this discussion with a sketch of the rabbinic ambivalence about portraying God suffering. At the center of the essay, moreover, is

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a complex account of the production of gender difference in God, a production that involves both a great desire and great suffering, and also, in Wolfson’s careful presentation, a critical impotence of the masculine side to encounter the feminine side as such. Texts that are highly figurative and at the same time richly sexual display the construction of a suffering in God that is linked to a need for creation, to finding an other that can limit and contain God. The essay concludes, however, with a reflection on how God’s writing and human reading translate this complex relation of desire, suffering, and creation in the realm of religious practice itself. The ethics of reading then takes on a role in the creative suffering of God. Graham Ward contributes the final essay, “Suffering and incarnation.” Ward interprets New Testament texts to discern the rich connection of fullness and emptying in God. His essay confronts a range of contemporary thinkers who focus on incompleteness and emptying, in order to discern the way in which a theological view of suffering would depend on an excess of joy. Within a theological context, Ward seeks a way to exceed an interpretation of suffering that limits God’s suffering as exclusively limited to compassion with human suffering, and to hold back from a view that God’s suffering has simply abolished all real suffering, and thus justified all apparent suffering. Instead, Trinitarian theology offers a glimpse of how God suffers in God’s self. Moreover, the incarnation of God then becomes a taking on of suffering out of love, and as such is intimately linked, again, to the work of creation.

Diversity of approaches From these brief descriptions, it is easy to see how the essays collected in this book diverge. At a concrete level, as you read them you will see different kinds of texts being interpreted. Gibbs’s essay is almost exclusively devoted to philosophical or theoretical texts; Klassen’s to the concrete testimony of believing religious mothers. Ward works most closely with New Testament texts, but also engages some contemporary theory, while Kepnes works with Hebrew Scriptures through the interpretations of Buber. Wolfson explores medieval Jewish mystical texts with due historical references and care. And Kearns interprets both New Testament texts and the theoretical (and lyrical) texts of Kristeva. At one level, it is a fairly trivial claim that scholars write about some sort of texts. But when you consider the diversity of the kinds of texts under consideration, and you also notice that no one simply argues a position on the basis of some naked modernist kind of reason, then something of note appears: the study of religion is not the work of pure construction, but requires close engagement with some kind of textual resource.

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Of course, this only begs the more important question: which textual resources shall we use? And that question leads to a significant claim for the work: the different kinds of texts are linked to different theories of religion. If we began this introduction by emphasizing the specificity of the field of inquiry (religious interpretations of suffering), we now must freely admit that there is a vital diversity of views of that field. Indeed, the juxtaposition of those diverse views is one of the major goals of this book—and helps to define the work of the study of religion. If each of us writes with a specific text base, it reflects our insight into a specific way of determining what religion is. In the best case, none of us is making a simple, essential and exclusive claim, but rather one that recognizes that other ways of studying religion will bring other important insights to our shared field. Hence, when Gibbs writes about the tension between Jewish philosophy and philosophy in general, he is attuned to the challenge of framing religion as a philosophical topic. The questions about how to think about religion, how to frame concepts that will do justice to the specificity of religious communities and religious textual traditions, and in the case of this essay, how to give a philosophical response to suffering, offer one view of religion. When Ward focuses on New Testament texts, he is claiming that the interpretation of Christian Scriptures is the key vantage point for interpreting our experiences of suffering and the work of religion in living out the reality of Christian redemption. In contrast to both of these views of religion is one that arises in Klassen’s essay, where anthropological exploration of the home-birthing mothers’ experience offers a privileged view of religion. Neither the struggle with philosophical concepts nor the scriptural theologians’ work, but the task of interpreting and interrogating the self-interpretations of these believing and practicing women (for their religious practice is bearing children) defines religion. Alternatively, Wolfson interprets historical mystical texts, not for the sake of antiquary curiosity, but to explore religious possibilities for interpreting suffering. Such texts veil both the religious experience of their authors and communities and their own philosophical framework. But for Wolfson, this discretion is not a merely historical phenomenon, but is rather part of the path of religion. As for Kepnes and Kearns, each locates the study of religion in the interface of contemporary thinkers and traditional texts. Kepnes explores the relation of Buber’s text as an interpretation of Hebrew Scripture, illuminating an existential hermeneutic as the key to studying religion, while Kearns focuses on a psychoanalytic interpretation of religion, through Kristeva’s work, attuned to both the psychological dynamics in abjection and the challenge of offering a theoretical description of such suffering. Fortunately, the task of this book is not to produce a unified theory of religion, or of the study of religion. Because the essays contribute

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different angles or different registers of discourse, they invite you to diversify your concept of what religion is or what the study of religion deals with. There are other theories not well represented here; there are other bodies of texts not under consideration here, but at least in this set of essays, we can continue the interdisciplinary mode of inquiry. And there is a vital corollary here: just as religion requires diverse kinds of study, so we learn here that suffering is not one simple or integral event. Poverty, death, abjection, birth, emptying, confinement, survival, creation, and more appear here as the suffering to which we respond. Each essay presents a particular view of what suffering is, often implicitly claiming to have a special or even primary kind of suffering in view, but as a book there is no single claim.

Hesitation at justifying suffering Given the diversity of our theories of religion, our texts for interpretation, and even our sense of what suffering is, it is worth a few more moments here to introduce the book in relation to some of the shared affinities that help make the book a kind of conversation. Without devoting too much time to “connecting the dots,” we can identify motifs that recur in different sets of the essays. Their interest is not merely the overlap, but rather the discovery that some themes have a rich ability to offer insight in different approaches. Thus in this introduction, we want to identify and offer preliminary accounts of why these different motifs seem particularly appropriate in an interdisciplinary book. The first motif is the self-doubt of our efforts to provide significant interpretation of suffering: will they serve ultimately to justify suffering? This theme is of central concern in Gibbs’s essay, but also provides a boundary for the work of Kearns, Kepnes, and Ward especially. The hazard pervades and threatens the very purpose of the thinking in this book—for if taking suffering seriously leads to a neutralizing of our responsibilities, if interpreting sensitively and writing clearly makes suffering acceptable, then the response to suffering becomes compliance. Perhaps the key distinction will be to notice the asymmetry between justifying someone else’s suffering and finding meaning in my own. But even the discovery of my own suffering as redeemed in its benefits for others is trailed by a suspicion of a cruelty to myself. To put a name to suffering, in order to respond to it, is to run a risk of justifying it. But we each name it and address and interpret suffering because no response is worse than a good response. The self-reflection on our ways of talking about suffering is a recurring theme in the book, not only at the level of what we are saying, but more significantly, in terms of how we address others, and in the very practices of writing, reading, and speaking. What

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Kearns identifies as “speaking well” is not so much a question of the content of what we say, but a set of practices that disrupt the solidity and univocity of a clear theory of suffering. Hence, we have commentaries, interpretations of commentaries, confrontations, extensive notes, and the insertion of testimonies in these various essays—all practicing a caution that reflects the risk of justifying suffering when the task is response to suffering.

Suffering God/suffering people Because religion concerns the relations of people with God, it is not surprising that much of the discussion in this book addresses the role of God in human suffering. Perhaps it is ironic, but the most familiar “problem”—why does God let good people suffer?—is the focus of only one essay, Kepnes’, where even that question requires a fracturing of the logical approach of excluded middles, finding abstract solutions at the expense of addressing the sufferer. That splitting of views points toward the very dispersal of suffering that occurs in this book. Were this book entitled Suffering Ethics, we would expect that even the theological dimension would ultimately be translated into a question about helping others or resisting suffering among people. What seems more significant is that religion offers images and theories, and indeed practices, that understand God as suffering with humanity. God’s solidarity and compassion is a key theme in much religious life. It is hard not to think immediately of Christianity with Christ dying on the cross for our sins, or indeed, of God as Shekinah going into exile with the Jews. If the true God can take on suffering for the sake of human beings, then clearly the human suffering is elevated and taken seriously. Indeed, some sorts of theological exploration seem constituted just for the sake of making sense of human suffering with recourse to the more transcendent and pure qualities of God. This book, however, crosses a significant line, for it explores arguments that God suffers in God’s self, without reference to human suffering at all. This pure, internal suffering appears both in Ward’s discussion of the Trinity and through Wolfson’s account of kabbalist theogeny. It is not far from Kearns’s account of Marian spirituality. What is at stake in such a hypostasization of suffering? If the notions and practices that celebrate God’s compassionate suffering lead directly to ethical and spiritual insight into human suffering, does the discovery of suffering within God lead away from the human? Or is there a discovery of a rich internal suffering, a suffering that relates to a fullness and its own articulation? If God suffers in order to create, then perhaps the human suffering that is not a mark of persecution or warfare, of hatred and sin, but is

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rather the pain of writing and creativity, can be dignified and understood better. Even in fullness there is a desire for an emptying, a taking on of suffering. The relation of God’s suffering and human suffering opens in surprising ways in this book—perhaps because of the new gaping chasms we have beheld, but in any case to raise the possibility of thinking of a suffering that precedes the interaction of God with humanity.

Love and desire Because suffering is linked both etymologically and conceptually with passion, it is no surprise to find that human passions are an ongoing theme of the essays. At the center of that theme are a series of reflections on love and suffering. Of course, one can say that one suffers in love or even for love. One can simply say one suffers love. And the generosity of love, that gives beyond our own limits, can allow one to endure suffering, for the sake of love. But what emerges in several essays here is the way that there is a suffering that love not only bears but also that love solicits. Klassen writes about mothers who take on pain in love and often thankfulness in order to bear children. They interpret their own choices in terms of religious love. For Ward, the very fullness of God’s love is a love that also suffers. He writes about the wounding of love as a double genitive, and explores how God’s fullness allows for the differentiation that takes the form of suffering love. Not in any way solipsistic or egotistical, love seems to suffer here in itself, and not only in its relation to an other. But then desire seems to shed much of its self-centeredness when the suffering of desire is explored. While Wolfson refers briefly to love, he focuses extensively on desire. In his mystical texts, desire itself is a suffering in the yearning for an other, indeed, for a limit to desire. The complexity of his work displays the inability of the kabbalists to maintain the independence of their other, and so the recapturing of the desire for the other under the control of the one who desires. But Wolfson also articulates that very move, and in so doing discovers the way desire not only suffers, but seeks a suffering from meeting an other. If in this book love expands beyond a compassion for another’s suffering, then desire also is reoriented here from an action of the self, to a suffering in seeking another.

Gender of suffering The struggle in relation to another leads also to a pervasive theme of many essays: the gendering of suffering, and of course its flip side the suffering of gender. To continue with Wolfson’s essay, it is the masculine

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which is seeking the feminine in order to find its limit. Given the widely recognized structure of the sefirot, as a gendered imaginal divinity, Wolfson’s work explores the very origin of the gender split—again not in human beings, but in God prior to creation. Not only is there desire that suffers in seeking its limit, which itself will be a further kind of suffering, but all of this complexity is played out in highly sexual gendered imagery. Moreover, the divine androgyne suffers in its gender plurality and in the production of its gender—and by some veiled analogy, so too human beings suffer to become gendered and suffer in their gender, too. Indeed, Wolfson’s essay finds gender to be the primary locus of suffering, and not only at the hands of another, but precisely in the desire within each, which even as desire for another, transforms the relation of one to itself. The theogenic images, as veiled sexual relations, offer dramatic accounts of the suffering within the masculine, suffering that is not innocent in relation to a feminine other, but is not itself caused by another. In a fascinating alternative motion, we find Klassen and Kearns, looking at the suffering of maternity, the suffering that is enacted bodily. Klassen does notice the suffering of women in their prescribed roles, achieved by the medicalization of childbirth. Under almost exclusively male doctors, women lost the agency to bear their own children. But her work is precisely where the model of agency meets a boundary, where the birthing mother bears a child painfully, and not within her own control. The choice to be awake, in pain, at home, offers a complex model of the feminine. Such a choice is only available to women (although the role of male partners, of fathers, is not neglected either by the mothers nor by Klassen in her essay), and so the religious experience of childbirth can be witnessed by men and by other children, but it is undergone exclusively by women. Again, no other (no man) is the cause of the pain, but the choice to bear pain and to find in such pain a religious suffering, is a specifically gendered decision—and it lies at the heart of the feminine gender. Like Wolfson, Klassen both reveres the religious testimonies, but also maintains a marked distance, particularly from the potentially oppressive applications of such gendered suffering.

Procreative suffering And through these inquiries into gender, we arrive at a final motif in this book: the suffering of procreation. Much religious thought, and indeed, much of the response to suffering has focused on the suffering of dying. From the first text in Gibbs’s essay, by Rosenzweig, we are alerted to the tendency of thought to flinch before the anxiety in the face of

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death. Much of the twentieth century’s thought was devoted to thinking about death more seriously, and so facing the suffering in the face of death. One could, moreover, face that suffering in relation to Christ on the cross, as Kearns discusses. What is all the more fascinating, then, is a series of reflections here on the suffering of birth, and indeed, of bearing others. At first glance, birthing is unmistakably embodied and gendered. And perhaps the key to maintaining a sufficiently embodied notion of suffering is to return to birthing. It may well be that death is neither gendered nor, ironically, adequately embodied—for it does not seem to require a living body to the same degree as birth does. While Kearns and Klassen can directly engage birth, other contributors, particularly Kepnes, Wolfson, and Ward come at the question of procreation in relation to God’s own creativity in creating the world. Moreover, the latter two interpret the creation of the world in relation to the prior creating of God’s own self by God. In a different religious space, we might find all of these arenas marked by the absence of all suffering. Like the hospitalized and medicated mothers, God, too, could create and indeed take shape while feeling no pain. One could take a small step beyond that all-happy environment, and make pain and suffering a mere distraction and simple privation. The suffering of birthing pains, like that of God in creative action, is epiphenomenal and ultimately meaningless. But what happens in the essays collected here is a serious inquiry into the constitutive role of suffering in creating. Moreover, the creation (both God’s self and the creature) bears signs of suffering, too. And one can ask after the child, whether the love that bore the suffering of bearing the child does not so much blemish the child as embody and enliven the child. For, as Ward would note, incarnation is neither a resignation to suffering nor an abstaining from suffering, but a fullness that can take on suffering. Between the extremes of procreating in the body of the mother and the creating of God’s own self lies the creativity of the human artist. The creative individual is yet embodied, and indeed makes further corporeal artwork—even then that is the poetry written or sung to others. If it is an almost trite thought to compare that creative process to childbirth (and one that often occludes the embodiment and the suffering of birthing), still, in the context of this book we can indeed drag over from both the divine side and the birthing mothers some new insights into human artistic creativity. Again, at the outset, Gibbs will sketch a tragicomic view of art, as a way to bear suffering. It is less clear whether art is possible without suffering, and whether there is perhaps a generosity of spirit that can embrace suffering in order to display suffering for others. When Kearns writes of abjection, she finds the suffering that robs the “I” of its voice, but she then finds a strange representational capacity

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in theory, in thinking. Kristeva pairs the suffering of birthing with the theorizing about suffering, and Kearns notices that the two counterpoint each other in an exploration of representation. Few themes are more obvious in Wolfson’s work than the tension of representing God’s imaginal body—a tension which appears in the essay here not merely to be represented as suffering but whose very representing itself arises in suffering. Thus the creativity of writing, of thinking, and as Wolfson notices, of reading, all share in the suffering of procreation. With this insight we come to the point where the hermeneutics of suffering and the suffering of hermeneutics merge. In writing, as in reading, one delimits one’s option vis-à-vis the text, the other that demarcates the boundary of self in the withholding of extending forward. To name the other in the other’s unnameability, to call upon the other in the other’s ineffability, is the burden and blessing of suffering for and with the other, to discern the beauty that suffering insufferably projects. Suffering thus assumes both ethical and esthetic pre-eminence; indeed, the two threads are not easily disentangled. In this regard, we embrace a poetics of suffering. We do well to recall the sage words of Paul Celan, one of the greatest witnesses to suffering in the twentieth century. The poem, Celan acknowledged, is lonely, underway, writ from the depths of longing and lingering. But this very loneliness bespeaks the fact that the poet speaks always in the cause of the other, perhaps even the wholly other, a transcendence that is present only in its absence. The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it. For the poem making toward an Other, it needs this Other, each thing, each human being is a form of this Other.1 In the composition of the poem, the poet embraces the mystery of encounter in the encounter of mystery. In response to suffering, there is naught but the poetic gesture, for the poem opens the space of delimitation, writing absence in the absence of writing, sheltering the irredeemable in the silence of speech. From the poet we learn there is no way but to suffer the suffering, to bear the pain of facing the effaced. In this suffering, we find the bearing of our way. SHREIB DICH NICHT zwischen die Welten, komm auf gegen der Bedeutungen Vielfalt, vertrau der Tränenspur und lerne leben.

DON’T WRITE YOURSELF in between worlds, rise up against multiple meanings, trust the trail of tears and learn to live.2

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Notes 1 Paul Celan, “The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 409. 2 Ibid., pp. 388–9.


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Unjustifiable suffering Robert Gibbs

I wish to occupy a dangerous place, the place of accuser of philosophy and defender of sufferers. I wish to defend those who suffer from philosophical justification of their suffering. The task, however, must reach beyond that defense to relief and consolation of the sufferer. Such a task disturbs the practice of an academic essay, but accentuates the question of why we write and think. In a cursory comparison of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), and Emmanuel Levinas (1905–95), we will find each of them positioning themselves against philosophy, in the honor of sufferers. In the first part of this essay, I will articulate the nature of each one’s objection against thought, in particular philosophical thought. But in the second part, I will return to the risks in their writings and their disparate calls to actions. That we can discern a tradition of modern Jewish thought on suffering is a central claim that I and others have raised. Indeed, we have argued that postmodern Jewish thought must make suffering the primary concern for thinking. This tradition, however, stands in ambiguous relation to philosophy and to the possibility of philosophy. I must also pause to explain the composition of this text. This paper was delivered orally three years ago, and at that presentation I handed out a photocopied sheet with the short passages I examined. For the written format, I use a commentary composition. On the left side of the page you will see passages by the various authors, retranslated by me and broken up into chunks. These passages are numbered consecutively (1, 2, 3 . . . ) and the chunks of a given passage are lettered consecutively (a, b, c . . . ). I call these passages the pretexts of the paper. My commentary surrounds the pretexts. At the bottom of the page are citations to secondary sources and also some parallel passages from the

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authors, creating a kind of hypertext or, for the talmudically minded, masoret ha-shas.1 The compositional tradition for the page I am drawing on is talmudic (but also shared with medieval and early modern Christian texts). My argument is not simply a history of ideas, but is rather a thematic set of claims about suffering and thought. Thus the commentary (and not the integrity of a larger pretext) governs the essay—and in this I break with what one might have expected from premodern commentary. Rabbinic texts themselves, however, follow principles of argument and discourse that prize anachronism and discontinuity for the sake of a logic that refuses treatise format. Those texts inspire me and have charged me to compose articles, chapters, and recently a whole book in this compositional style. One of the central themes of my work is that the reader becomes responsible for the text while the writer must hold open the vulnerability of a text for its reader, and thus I display the practices of my own reading in order to write in such a way that I can set my readers free to read for themselves, against my reading. The pretexts themselves solicit interpretation, but my commentary is meant to allow my readers to be solicited by the pretexts. Both Peter Ochs and Elliot R. Wolfson, colleagues of mine in quite different fields of Jewish Studies, have explored how a text suffers, and how our interpretations are attempts to address the suffering of the text.2 The performance of this essay itself reflects responsibilities for relieving that suffering and for consoling the texts

1 I use the following abbreviations to refer to texts by the three authors. I have retranslated all passages, citing in parentheses first the original language, and then for convenience’s sake the normal English translation: “Rosenzweig” refers to Der Stern der Erlösung, in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Translated by William W. Hallo as The Star of Redemption (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). “Cohen RR” refers to Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, reprint of 2nd edn, 1928 (Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1988). Translated by Simon Kaplan as Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1971). “Levinas US” refers to “La Souffrance Inutile,” in Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-àl’autre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991). Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav as “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). “Levinas OTB” refers to Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’Essence (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). Translated by Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). 2 Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).


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and by commenting even though those responsibilities are only tacit in the essay. While the essay can develop the indexicality of discourse about suffering, the esthetics of such discourse and the cultural critique involved, it stops short of the place of its own commentary composition.

I

Justified suffering

I begin with Franz Rosenzweig, in his The Star of Redemption. Begun in the trenches of the First World War and written after it, The Star accuses old philosophy of a blindness to the human suffering in the fear of death. There is a recourse to the soldier’s experience of anxiety, discovering that I want to live and that my own death is really something. Philosophy chose to divert us from facing that fear by denying that death was real. His book begins: Philosophy appears here as the (1a) Rosenzweig (3/3) From death, knowledge of the all, as a totality. from the fear of death all knowRosenzweig’s discovery is that the deledge of the All arises. Philosophy dares to jettison the anxiety of sire to know-it-all is a flight from death, the earthly, to take from death its or more significantly from the fear of poison thorn, from Hades its pes- death. This etiology could be compared tilential stench. Everything mortal with Freud’s war writings and scoops lives in this anxiety of death, each Heidegger by over five years—anxiety, new birth adds to the anxiety for one new reason, because it adds or rather, the evasion of anxiety, instito the mortal. Without ceasing, the gates not merely a distractive interest in womb of the indefatigable earth knowing (so as not to be in angst), but bears a new mortal and each is further, a drive for totalizing knowledge. bound to die, and each waits with Philosophy arises in order to jettison fear and trembling for the day of the anxiety of the earthly—to deits journey into the dark. nature death, or at least, to help remove the sting of death, which is not the decay of the corpse after death, nor even the moment of death itself, but—of course—the anxiety, the fear of death. We would be rid of the suffering that precedes death, the suffering of anxiety about our death. The passion of death is not in the moment of becoming dead, but is the way of living with this anxiety. For a mortal, to be alive is to live in this anxiety. Rosenzweig gives his account of the continuous upsurge of anxiety. Each new birth brings the promise of another death, and so adds to the anxiety, because a mortal lives in the fear of its coming death. For each new mortal is under a death sentence (bound to die) and must live in fear and trembling for the death. Philosophy arises to give the lie to this anxiety by positing that death is nothing: or at least nothing to fear. It offered the myth of the immortal soul that will survive the death of the body. Rosenzweig’s images of the

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(1b) But philosophy belies these anxieties of the earth. It snatches over the grave which the foot discloses with every step. It lets the body fall into the abyss but the free soul float away over it. That the anxiety of death knows nothing of such a separation of body and soul, that it bellows I, I . . . and wants to hear nothing of this diversion of anxiety onto a mere “body”—why should that bother philosophy?

earthly, opening the grave with every step, dreading the moment of burial, of returning to dirt, echo the Hebrew Adam, the earthling. To walk on the earth is to walk in the anxiety of death. Philosophy’s “solution” is to deny the dirty, to drop the body into the abyss and leave the self as soul to float away. But the anxiety resides not in the part that is dirt, but in me: I will die, not just my body. Philosophy’s ruse is to deny my death—including the death of the philosopher. By denying death, it removes the anxiety. But even that ruse would fail, if only philosophy listened to the anxiety of the mortals. Rosenzweig continues in this passage to discuss the men become mud in the trenches of World War I, but even as they are inserted into the dirt, their anxiety does not concern their bodies alone—rather it screams out for the “I,” who fears to die, who wants to live. The extreme corporeality of their war deaths unmasked the diversion of separating body and soul. While Rosenzweig will later open the door to a non-totalizing reasoning, to a thinking that can accommodate the particularity of death, he does interpret the whole history of Western philosophy as emerging from this fundamental avoidance of this profound anxiety of death and the desire to live in the world. Compelled by a fear it could not dignify or interpret Philosophy chose totalizing thought. The logical move is so simple that it (2a) Rosenzweig (5/5) In so far as was plausible. Make death into a one philosophy denied the dark pre- and universal nothing, and then one supposition of every living thing, can know everything (because death is namely that it would not allow not part of that). What you know you death to count as something, but made it into nothing, it con- need not fear, and if you know everystructed for itself the appearance thing, then you need not fear what you of presuppositionlessness. Because know and you need not fear what you now all knowledge of totality has don’t know (because it is not). But as its presupposition—nothing. what strikes a philosopher here is the Prior to the one and universal knowledge of totality is only the transposition of clear values in the philosophical tradition (presupposione and universal nothing. tionlessness, universality, knowledge of totality), in a narrative where they serve as ways of denying the dark presupposition of every living thing. To flee from the anxiety of death, philosophy undertook a slight diversion: to know everything. The grand systems of philosophy arise in flight from anxiety.


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The thirst for rising beyond presuppositions (Plato’s anhupotheton) is itself a repression formation of the most difficult and basic passion: the passion of anxiety for death. But that anxiety in Rosenzweig singles me out, and to deny it only required a bait and switch: that death became an empty, universal nothing, a death that no one need be anxious of. Philosophy runs from anxiety, or (2b) If philosophy did not want to sticks its head in the sand. That stop its ears from the scream of anxious humanity, then it would is, it pretends that death is not plural have had to proceed—and con- and that anxiety is not real, refusing to sciously proceed thus—: that the listen, refusing to think about anxiety. nothing of death is a something, But like the ostrich, pretending cannot that each new death-nothing is a remove the danger—and perhaps this new, an ever new fearful something that neither talking nor keep- in the sand is the image of the head ing silent can do away with. And (the thinker) returning to the ground, in place of this one and universal the burial of philosophy. But more nothing, that sticks its head in the important than its failure is the task sand before the scream of the that Rosenzweig sets. Anxiety has a death anxiety, that would proceed only from the one and universal discourse: the scream. The scream cancognition, it would have had to not be resolved into speech or silence. have the courage to listen to each To listen to it is to find thought descream and to not close its eyes livered over to the individual person in before the gruesome actuality. dread of death. Each has anxiety for The nothing is not nothing, it is itself. Death itself is thousands of deaths. something. But universality obscures the suffering of each in the suffering of all—which is not even suffering for all because it is linked to that denial of death. Rosenzweig understands post-Hegelian philosophy to struggle to heed this scream of anxiety. It bears the task of recognizing this extra-totality of the self, whether Kierkegaard’s or Nietzsche’s. In an interesting presage of Heidegger, Rosenzweig constructs a defiant self who is authentic precisely in relation to his own death. But the limitations of Idealism and its totality recur throughout The Star, always deaf to the cries of people, blind to their suffering in the face of death. Having set forth the motive for thinking the all, Rosenzweig later sets out its logic, with its necessary emanations and necessary sublimations, its generation of what is and its demand to surrender one’s particularity in ever higher rationalization. Philosophy thus deals with suffering by disregarding the particularity of the sufferer, whose suffering arises not merely through her circumstance, but also through anxiety, ultimately mortal anxiety. To think in this totalizing way is to protect oneself from that anxiety, but also to disavow responsibility for one’s own thinking. The turning away from anxiety is, therefore, a turning away from the responsibility of the one who thinks.

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If we now turn to Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig’s teacher, we find a remarkably parallel and different account of suffering and of the philosophical blindness to it. Cohen, the founder of the Marburg Neo-Kantian school, was a champion of rationality, especially of rational ethics. In his last work, however, he turns to Jewish religious sources to make good some incompleteness of rational ethics. The integration of this new material is extremely complex, and Cohen insists that it still preserves the rationality of both ethics and religion. Hence, whatever the limitations of philosophy to pay attention to suffering, the excess from Jewish sources will neither contradict nor even compromise the purity of rational ethics. Still, like his student, Cohen had found that there is a kind of human suffering that philosophy did not know. For Cohen that is the suffering of poverty. Our interest is the limitation of philosophy itself to recognize the poor person as my responsibility. In ethics the individual appears under the categories of the state and the universality of a world federation of states. It assigns responsibilities to the individual through locating the individual within a totality. But the particularity that rational religion seeks allows for a plurality and a difference between I and you. In his introduction to the Religion of Reason we find a problem that foreshadows Rosenzweig’s Star: The logical problem is the recogni(3a) Cohen RR (17/15) Does it lie tion of the specificity of the other perin the competence of ethics, is it son, the “you.” In his Ethics of the Pure within its method, to make the discovery of the “you”? Can it Will, Cohen had produced a “you.” enter into this classification of Indeed, Buber’s account of I–you owes individuals according to its con- most of its logic to that account. Thus cepts of the human, of humanity? the rhetorical questions does it, can Does it have the methodical means it, mustn’t it are not as foreclosed to establish it, even if its end point is only the totality (Allheit), as one might expect. Ethics had indeed which is fulfilled only in human- discovered the you. But which ity? Mustn’t it suppose in the task “you”? The logic of Cohen’s system of such a division and gradation, pursued an all-ness (Allheit) that was and generally in the problem of constructed toward unity. The plurality plurality of human beings, an aberration from its unifying goal of of people was subordinated to a unity, not merely logically but also ethically: totality?3 3 Hermann Cohen, Ethik des Reinen Willens (77–8), 2nd edn (B. Cassirer: 1907). The apparent contradiction is overcome because this plurality is not plurality but totality. Totality here has no contrast with unity but rather to specificity, which belongs exactly to plurality. Totality is itself the highest unity that ethics can claim. The ethical individual should not remain a particular specific, but the power of totality, by which it is classified, should elevate it to the unity of the moral individual.


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a vision of world peace and universal justice. The “you” of that totality was determined through the state and its specificity was generated from the all-inclusive categories above it. It recognized the “you” of legal contracts and of co-operation, but not as bearing the other’s specificity. Indeed, from the perspective of the Ethics, any interest in the specificity of other people would seem to be an aberration from its unifying goal of totality. The logic of philosophical ethics must suspect a fascination with specificity, even of the other person. Cohen then restates the logical prob(3b) One cannot object that lem for ethics. Of course ethics is conethics, in so far as it has human cerned to account for the plurality and beings in the history of the human race as its task, ineluctably also distinctions among human beings. It must make the plurality of human bears this task because its pursuit of beings and their classification its totality requires an account of the task. Because this objection would history of the human race: it is not be settled in that the task is inmerely a description of binding norms, deed acknowledged, but its solution first follows from totality, and but also needs an historiography in thus also only in conformity with relation to the goal of human unity— this totality. The question always humanity. But just because the task remains if the plurality of human is determined from the totality, the beings does not nonetheless raise specificity of others can be had only questions that cannot at all be solved on the grounding concept in conformity with this totality. of totality. And this question be- In the Ethics, Cohen had accepted the comes pressing in relation to the interpretation of a totality produced problem of the “you,” even if it through a rational generation by means would have liked to remain veiled of ideas. But now beyond that project in that of the “he.” of classification through totality, there is a further concern. Are there not questions that cannot be approached, cannot at all be solved, from this concept of totality? Totality acts as the grounding concept for ethics. The specificity of the other person, who now will shed the cloak of “he” to appear as the problematic

Rosenzweig (158/142) . . . the self surrenders to a universal. In the concept of surrender we have the counterpart to the concept of generation. The latter governs the way from universal to particular, the way down; the former governs the way from particular to universal, the way up. The two together, generation and surrender, close the idealistic world as a whole. The way up begins with that original surrender of the “maxim” of one’s own will—and what else is that than B=B!—to the principle of a universal legislation—and what else is that than B=A! This now goes on and on, because as soon as the final principle of a universal legislation is reached, and is admitted again into the “maxim of one’s own will,” the power of the idealistic surrender must again prove itself by again becoming the principle of a universal legislation. In this way the surrender to ever higher communities, ever more inclusive universality of life renders itself the universal . . .

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“you,” exceeds the reach of this philosophical concept of totality. In the Ethics, Cohen had moved from “he” to “you”—from an objective other to a companion or co-worker, to whom one addresses oneself. But now specificity gains a deeper impulse, as once again the other becomes the one I address and face—and as such eludes not only the objectivizing discourse about “him,” but also raises problems beyond the power of the concept of totality. The complexity of Cohen’s position requires a bit more explanation. Because both the religion and the ethics under consideration are rational, he fears that concern with the “you” will import something irrational, something unintelligible and perhaps fanatical into the system. Hence the recourse to an alternative relation to plurality has to be justified as still rational and not preferential nor particularistic. Now Cohen wants to say that the “you” of Ethics is not “you” enough, not the “you” with whom I am obliged to suffer. That near-one from the Ethics can become an underling, someone who is inferior to me. The new “you” is to be a co-human, someone who is with me, not just near me. To be with-me requires that I suffer with him, or have compassion (Mitleid). For Cohen, this is not simply a passive experience of pity but is rather an active, rational process of recognizing him as my responsibility. Indeed, I become a person myself only in relation to this other person. The relation between me and the other is structured around overcoming a discrepancy: the other suffers, and I have to learn how to suffer with her. For Cohen the essential form of human suffering is poverty. This suffering, moreover, is not merely my anxiety about death. Rather, it is physical, too. Poverty arises through an economic discrepancy between me and the other, but that gap also signals the crisis of the community and of the totalizing concepts that arise in ethics itself. Cohen arrives at suffering from poverty. The other, as “you,” as suffering (4a) Cohen RR (157–8/135–6) The objectification of evil in poverty because of poverty, will be the specificity has led us to suffering. . . . Suffer- that philosophical ethics cannot know. ing is an actual feeling, that is, not For our purposes, however, we see that only a social fact, that is reflected poverty is the objectification of in poverty; rather it is laid hold of evil—it is the problem of society, and and must be grasped as a prevalent fact of consciousness, as one indeed, the religious problem par excelthat fills the whole human con- lence. Suffering, however, is not merely sciousness and has a role in deter- a reflection of society’s failure, it is mining all other proceedings and the dominant fact of consciousness. activities. Thus its objectification Cohen understands the economic dismay not be effaced; the suffering of poverty must always remain the parity to have a role in every experiproblem—the religious but not the ence and every activity we do. Poverty and its suffering, like Rosenzweig’s metaphysical problem. . . .


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anxiety of death guiding every step of life, pervades our consciousness and our actions. Of course it is a feeling, but it dominates our lives. And so, Cohen insists that we are not to let this suffering be effaced. This is the problem that religion must always face. Cohen’s aside about it not being a metaphysical problem is linked to his understanding that when understood as battles with the devil, or even questions about death, the promise of personal afterlife, evil, and suffering are not relevant for rational religion. He takes a stand for the human social relations and not the supernatural/metaphysical issues as the concern of religion. Cohen explores the specific nature (4b) A new factor of consciousness of human suffering, distinguishing it has been unveiled: the suffering as human (not metaphysical and not of the human soul, of the human animal). As not the suffering of angels, spirit. This suffering, like everything psychical, is not altogether it is linked to the physical, linked in detached from the physical. Suf- PAIN. Cohen’s account of rational ethics fering is also pain. But spiritual and religion does connect to the body. suffering is not the pain of the But he quickly distinguishes human pain animal, because the animal has from animal pain, because human pain no sociality. . . . Only the social suffering is a spiritual suffering. is social. The homeless are in pain beAll complexes of consciousness cause we don’t take care of them, we up through cognition now are don’t make a society where people brought by it into co-operation. do not need to freeze and starve on This is the great meaning of social the streets. The physicality of pain is suffering: that the whole cultural consciousness is transferred for refracted through sociality—a claim that Levinas will also explore below. The compassion. spiritual nature of this suffering, that it reaches to the religious dimension, arises through the social nature. The implications, however, are staggering. All of consciousness is implicated and impressed by poverty as social and spiritual suffering. Even cognition is involved. And cultural consciousness is now reoriented to suffer with (Mitleid, com-passio) the poor. Culture and consciousness must address poverty, and are implicated in its existence. The question then is what are the implications of the logics of totality and plurality on the social differentiation of I and you. Philosophy’s failure to produce a difference between I and you is bound to a fundamental tendency to cultivate an indifference to these differences. That is, the motive for rational, totalizing ethics seems to be indifference, bordering on stoic apathy. The philosophical reason of totality seems to specialize in the radical indifference to both my interests and those of others. The social and material suffering of the poor, however, requires from me the rational affect called compassion. Not only stoicism, but philosophy in general is unable to mount the critique of a society that produces these poor. Philosophy lacks the sharp edge that prophetic

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(4c) And therefore the stoic apathy is completely inadmissible and its ethic excluded, because it would include the renunciation of all culture. Poverty cannot be indifferent to me, because it is the emergency of culture, and because the true morality is called into question by it. It is incomparable with physical suffering, because this is only individual and subjective, while the social suffering is not only a suffering of the great majority, but qualitatively makes evident the nadir of the culture.

discourses, like Amos’ or Isaiah’s, develop: the concern with those who suffer as representatives of the failure of society. Cohen here speaks of poverty as the emergency of culture, making it the fulcrum for the criticism of culture and even of morality. Philosophical indifference is an abandonment of the task of criticism, but also an abandonment of culture as such. For the task of economic justice, the relief of the suffering of poverty, defines culture for Cohen. Hence poverty is the emergency and the revelation of the nadir of culture. This specific suffering, which philosophy has not known, is the call for criticism of culture and morality. What is striking here is just how little Cohen’s own work focused on poverty and its suffering. In his system of philosophy there was a call for socialism; there was even a treatment of poverty and another of compassion in his esthetics, but this keen sense that poverty is the crisis of culture arises only in his writings at the time of World War I. When we now move to our third author, Levinas, we have yet another account of philosophy’s failure to heed suffering. Levinas is concerned with suffering in various guises, including physical pain. The task of philosophy, however, seems to be an accomplice with theology in justifying suffering, particularly the suffering of another person. His essay called “Useless Suffering” alerts us to the tendency to justify suffering, to make it serve some purpose. The violence of such justification offers a rational account that legitimates the other person’s suffering. Levinas claims that the Western tradition (and he does not distinguish here between a main line in religious thought and the philosophers) sought a theodicy of some sort, an account that could find a reason for what seemed unintelligible. The question is raised in a general context of justifying the pain inflicted by people on each other. Political violence, domestic and foreign, seems to bespeak, beyond the social uses of pain, a more troubling and profound ill will, even wickedness. This scandal is not “natural pain or calamity,” but rather the cruelty of people to each other. The philosophical solution to this violence has been to justify it by recourse to a metaphysical order. That order justifies the palpable and visible pain in our world by recourse to a supernatural goodness, to some sort of higher level of ethics and goodness which is not accessible here and now. Present suffering for eternal goodness. The task of such a justification of pain is precisely philosophical. It is the heritage of western humanity

Unjustifiable suffering (5a) Levinas US (113/95–6) Western humanity has nonetheless sought the meaning of this scandal, in invoking the meaning proper to a metaphysical order, an ethic that is invisible in the immediate teachings of the moral conscience. A kingdom of transcendent ends, willed by a benevolent wisdom, by the absolute goodness of a God defined in some way, by that supernatural goodness, or widespread goodness, invisible in nature and in history, where it would command the paths, though obviously painful but leading to the Good.

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—not exclusively philosophical, but also theological. It depends on a certain sort of God who anchors an ethics that defies the immediate teachings of the moral conscience. The teleological line of argument runs to the invisible at the expense of ethics and with the cost of pain. This is not an enigmatic theology, but a very ontotheology; with all the goodness existing in a realm beyond our world, redeeming or at least justifying our world by this hinterworld. The task is theodicy, justifying God’s ways to humanity, but the presumption is that another’s pain can be (5b) Pain, henceforth, meaningful, subordinated in one way or an- made meaningful. The drama that has other to the metaphysical finality its end in a world beyond justifies not envisaged by faith or by belief in God, but rather another’s pain. The progress. Beliefs presupposed by belief in a totalizing narrative (call it theodicy. That is the grand idea religious faith, or secular belief in necessary for the interior peace of souls in our tried world. It is called progress) makes suffering justified by to make suffering here below com- recourse to a metaphysical end or prehensible. goal. But this kind of totalizing narrative may not only make sense of pain by seeing it as part of a larger picture, but may have recourse to a dialectic of progress that requires war, violence, and economic depression—that is, the negative may not be merely subordinated to a whole, but may be totalized and sublimated in a teleological drama. the grand idea allows us to have some comfort in our tried world. The suffering here is a trial, but the other world, even if only the promise of progress here, offers an explanation of suffering. It is for the sake of that transcendent Good. This narrative form, including one strand of Jewish tradition that understood exile as punishment for sin, has come crashing to a close in this century. Levinas refers here to the Shoah, and also to other genocidal violence. While Cohen referred “only” to the horror of systemic suffering of poverty, and Rosenzweig reflected on the slaughter of World War I, Levinas notes how the very idea of finding a meaning in the suffering of innocent children, of millions in barbarism untold, is not only repugnant but concludes any possibility for theodicy. Levinas, however, explores the crisis of discourse—the discourse of theodicy. The end of theodicy is required in this century because the

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(6a) Levinas US (116/98–9) But does not this end of theodicy, which is imposed before the trial beyond measure of the century, reveal at the same time, in a more general way, the unjustifiable character of the suffering of the other man, the scandal which would occur by my justifying the suffering of my neighbor?

trial became beyond measure. The project of explaining and justifying suffering in this world by a metaphysical order, a good beyond the world with an order that compensates for suffering, is now impossible. But this end also reveals something more challenging and damning of the philosophical tradition: the scandal not of causing another pain but rather of justifying the suffering of my neighbor. When theodicy and its master narrative becomes impossible, we discover that the justification of my neighbor’s suffering is a scandal: perhaps the more profound violence. We have then a definition of suf(6b) So that the very phenomenon fering as phenomenon: the other of suffering in its uselessness is, in principle, the other person’s person’s pain. We should see here that pain. For an ethical sensibility— Levinas is not denying that I might sufconfirmed in the inhumanity of our fer, too, but suffering is useless in the times against that inhumanity— specific sense that my neighbor’s pain is the justification of the neighbor’s not to be interpreted as having some pain is certainly the source of all use. (An interesting contrast lies here immorality. with Primo Levi’s essay “Useless Violence”—with approximately the same conclusion.4) Suffering not to be given a use, not to be rendered instrumental, is the other person’s pain. This further implies that the asymmetry in Cohen between I and you, where you are the poor with whom I should make myself suffer, is now carried into a formal asymmetry. My suffering is not like your suffering, or rather not like my neighbor’s suffering, not like the suffering indeed of another person. Suffering must be located in an asymmetrical field of relations between I and another. But the final sentence here exposes the power of justification. Levinas claims for us a specific ethical sensibility: because of the inhumanity of this century (including the Gulag, the bomb, Sarajevo (twice), Cambodia, and the trenches) we stand confirmed against our times, against the violence and terror. Such a sensibility animates not only Levinas’ work, but that of so many others. That sensibility, however, not only recognizes the immorality of causing others pain, but also the immorality of the justification of the neighbor’s pain; but still more it recognizes that justification as the source of all immorality. Immorality arises not because of greed

4 Primo, Levi “Useless Violence,” in The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1988), pp. 105–26.


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and malice alone, but because of the “good conscience” that justifies my neighbor’s pain. If he deserves it, then I can let it happen even when I don’t perpetrate it. Only that justification makes immorality possible. Theodicy, certainly, is to blame, but even more limited reasonings that justify my neighbor’s pain are not merely immoral, but are the source of suffering. Philosophy here takes the place as the source, and not merely accomplice, of suffering. Each of the three thinkers accuses philosophical thinking. Rosenzweig offers the clearest motivation in the account of denying the anxiety about my death. Cohen emphasizes the indifference that is deaf to the critique of culture. And Levinas understands the theodical drive to be defining for Western thought. While Rosenzweig emphasizes the crisis of anxiety for my own death, both Cohen and Levinas are more concerned with philosophy’s inability to take another person’s suffering seriously. The fault of philosophy, in each case, is not accidental but intrinsic to the logical operations of thought. Indeed, starting historically with Cohen, we can see subtle variations on the problem of totality understanding particularities, especially asymmetrical particularity (where you are not the same as I, and indeed, are worse off). The stakes in this logical problem are cashed out, therefore, in an inability to recognize my suffering or yours or ultimately to produce your suffering by offering justification for it. The consequences of philosophy’s failure are worked through socially.

II Unjustifiable suffering? But a question remains that is far from simple: to what extent can we make sense of this accusation itself? Can we alter philosophy or alter the terrain from which we view philosophy in order to give suffering its due? If philosophy is totalizing, are these three thinkers immune from their own accusation? Can one defend suffering without providing the justification of it? I will begin a second round of reflections with Levinas because I think he provides the most telling interpretation of the problems of discourse about suffering. The asymmetry of discourse means that what I should do in speaking is not identical to what I should do in listening. To justify the other’s suffering, therefore, is different from justifying my own. Indeed, Levinas suggests that if I can suffer for the other, relieving her pain, her fear, her hunger, and so on, then my suffering may have meaning. But conversely, I cannot propose that she suffer for me, or even that what she is suffering now will ultimately be good for all of us. Indeed, Levinas often comments that such preaching about others’ suffering is anathema to ethics.

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When we begin to explore the discourse that says my suffering can have meaning, but the others’ is useless, we run into the recurring problem of asymmetry: that the discourse about asymmetry is symmetrical. The signs, as referring to a signified, are available to anyone and seem to require that the reader, the other, take the “I” position and view himself as obliged. Can I successfully claim that there is an asymmetry of uselessness in suffering? While the other’s suffering is unjusti(7) Levinas US (116/99) In sufferfiable, Levinas finds in my own suffering, to be accused is without a doubt the very recurrence of the ing an accusation that determines my me to itself. It is perhaps thus that relation to myself (the very recurthe for-the-other—the most right rence). In other works, the dynamics relation to the other person—is the of my being bound for the other is a most profound adventure of subtopic for extensive discussion. Here we jectivity, its ultimate intimacy. But that intimacy can only be dis- have only the conclusion: that if my sufcretely. It could not give itself as fering is for-the-other, it produces an example nor narrate itself as the most important and ethical relations edifying discourse. It could not within me. Unlike theodicy that ignores be made a sermon without being the moral conscience, suffering for the perverted. other transforms the most intimate relations of my subjectivity. Levinas understands subjectivity itself as a relation with others and not a closed self-relation. Whatever the complex dynamics of this internal passivity in relation to the other, what strikes us here is that it must be discrete. I may not make it a moral theme in any of three ways: (1) as moral example, (2) as a story for edification, or (3) as a sermon. This claim must strike as odd each reader of Levinas and will certainly surprise my readers here. Levinas is keenly aware of the moralistic impulse—an impulse that arises because of what he called our ethical sensibility. While one might imagine a moralistic discourse about not justifying others’ suffering, the discourse that explores how I become myself by suffering for the other is all the more tricky, courting possible violence and deception. For Levinas does not opt for the “no suffering is meaningful” position. He recognizes an asymmetry by which my suffering can be meaningful, and indeed can be the source of meaning for me. But how can we articulate that meaningfulness without making the immoral justification of another’s suffering? One choice that is here foreclosed is moralistic discourse. I am not the example for other, the hero of a narrative of suffering, nor the topic for a sermon, because in each case the relation to the listener or reader would be to persuade him that his suffering is justified by belonging to a genus, or by a narrative sequence. To preach such a “moral teaching” is to become again the source of immorality. To clarify how discourse can reveal the justification of my suffering without preaching the moral that the other person must also suffer for


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me, I will take recourse to two quite technical passages from Otherwise than Being. The first explains the performance of this discourse as witness; the second offers an interpretation of his discourse as quasihagiographic. In both cases, the topic is the announcement that I am responsible to suffer for the other, and the question is how to say that. Frequently Levinas focuses on the (8a) Levinas OTB (190/149) A sign statement “here am i,” repeated in the of this signification itself, given to the other, the “here am I” signi- Bible by Abraham, Moses, and others. fies me in the name of God at the It is the utterance that bestows me to service of the men who look at me, the other whom I address, announcing having nothing to identify myself to another person my responsibility for with except the sound of my voice that other person. It is a saying of my or the shape of my gesture—the assignment for the other. For Levinas saying itself. saying is a technical term that contrasts with the said—the words said or the content of discourse. Saying is the pragmatic dimension of signifying, the relation of holding open the speaker’s exposure. The saying of my responsibility does not transform the speaker into a subject. “I” still have nothing to identify myself with. What I am is simply this saying itself—a responsibility for another. That relation, however, also involves two others. These relations are somewhat unusual. (1) I articulate my assignment in the name of god. For Levinas, God is not present as an addressee of my speaking, and even less as a speaker in God’s own voice. God has a specific kind of absence in discourse, but for our purposes we can recognize that God’s absence indicates the infinity of responsibility I have for the other person. (2) The other others are the men who look at me, and my relation to them is service. I have only the relation to myself that arises in my saying to the others that I am at their service, in God’s name. Such a set of relations does not propose a general rule about serving others, nor can I stipulate how each other person is to become such an “I” —because there is no ontic or ontological condition for becoming the speaker of “here am I.” The self-relation is opposed to self(8b) This recurrence is altogether consciousness, where I make my own opposed to the return to the self the other that I become aware of. Sayof self-consciousness. It is sincerity, ing is a being for the other as what I pouring out of the self, “extradition” of the self to the neighbor. “am,” while self-consciousness is a way Witness is humility and avowal, it for the other to be for my consciousness. Hence saying is a risking of myself, is made before all theology; . . .5 5 Levinas OTB (186/146) “Here I am” as witness of the Infinite, but as witness which does not thematize that to which it witnesses and whose truth is not the truth of representation, nor of evidence. There is nothing being witnessed—unique structure, exception to the rules of being, irreducible to representation—except the Infinite. The Infinite does not appear

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where what is risked is just this announcement (sincerity). Hence to say my responsibility to the other is to announce the superiority of the other, the authority of the other: humility. Witness is avowal, the promise to the other in the name of God. But Levinas is exploring the pragmatics that precede theology, the mode of discourse that commits me for the other as the origin of a thematic treatment of God. Our interest, moreover, is in the suffering, or rather the possibility of a discourse about suffering, about responsibility as suffering. Levinas’ account of witness offers us a way of understanding how discourse can avoid the reciprocity that generalizes over my position as speaker and sufferer. Perhaps it is no surprise, but saying (9) Levinas OTB (61/47) The act is the supreme passivity. The concern “of saying” will have been introwith saying lands us in the very heart duced here from the start as the supreme passivity of exposure to of suffering or passion. While Levinas Another Person, which is precisely does describe the exposure to woundthe responsibility for the free initia- ing and physical suffering, the passivity tives of the other. Whence the in saying is the responsibility for what “inversion” of intentionality which, other people do. In the deepest analyfor its part, always preserves before deeds accomplished enough sis, to be exposed to another person is presence of mind to assume to be responsible not just for what I do, them. Whence the abandon of the nor to be vulnerable to what she may sovereign and active subjectivity, do to me, but is to be responsible for of undeclined selfconsciousness, the other’s deeds—even or perhaps as the subject in the nominative form in apophansis. Whence, in especially because I am not the cause the subjectivity’s relationship with of those deeds. Here again is the rethe other person, which we are currence, the deepest subjectivity we here striving to describe, a quasi- saw in the last quotation. If we are hagiographic style that wishes to saying this vulnerability, then there are be neither a sermon nor the confrom this responsibility three linked fession of a “beautiful soul.”6 results of this responsibility: (1) the inversion of intentionality, (2) the loss of the subject as agent, and (3) the style that is almost hagiography. To be responsible for the other (and to announce it in saying it), will mean that phenomenological to the one who witnesses it. This is, on the contrary, the witnessing that belongs to the glory of the Infinite. It is by the voice of the witness that the glory of the Infinite is glorified. 6 Levinas OTB (64/50) Saying, the most passive passivity, is inseparable from patience and pain, even if it can take refuge in the Said, in finding again in a wound the caress in which pain arises, and then the contact, and beyond it the knowing of a hardness or a softness, a heat or a cold, and then the thematization. Of itself Saying is the meaning of patience and of pain. In Saying suffering signifies in the form of giving, even if the price of signification is that the subject run the risk of suffering without reason. If the subject did not run this risk, pain would lose its very painfulness. Signification, as the one-forthe-other in passivity, where the other is not assumed by the one, presupposes the possibility of pure non-sense invading and threatening signification.


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analysis of intentionality gets a remarkable twist: the other’s intention becomes mine, as I am responsible for her deeds. It follows that the modern ontology of the subject is impossible, because it makes me sovereign of myself and self-responsible only. Levinas registers this change by noting that the “I” will now have to appear in guises other than the subject of a sentence (nominative). Indeed, “I” am now replaced by “me,” as what the other does to me is now my responsibility. But finally, in order to describe this inversion and declination of position, Levinas crafts an unusual style. Like our previous text, it is not inclined to be a sermon. Nor is it intended as the “beautiful soul” of Hegel’s and Kant’s philosophy—the person who is trapped in a private world of good intentions. The style is, rather, quasi-hagiographic. Here a brief reference to Edith Wyschogrod’s book called Saints and Postmodernism would help us see that saints’ lives are not meant to be exemplary.7 The saint is not so much an example to imitate as an excessively good person, willing to suffer and inciting us to take on others’ suffering as well. The narrativity of hagiography is not the theodicy of the tradition, because the excessive goodness cannot serve as an end that justifies another’s suffering, nor is the narrative a redemption of the suffering but rather a redemption by suffering. Suffering for the other may indeed redeem the violence of suffering by the other—or so Levinas argues. But, and this frustrates so many readers of Levinas, this hagiographic quality makes for bad moralism. How could one ever apply these descriptions? They are so extreme (responsible even for my persecutors!) that they seem to lack all necessary respect for myself and my rights. They then threaten to become, through reciprocity, very dangerous messages for others. It is just that sort of move and “application” that hagiographic discourse thwarts. It is, I suspect, a kind of inversion of the standard analytic philosophical preference for banal examples. They seek usages that are unfettered by specificity and moral flavor in order to isolate the most universal and fundamental characteristics of discourse. Levinas seeks the most extreme and indexical usage to isolate the asymmetry of his claims about responsibility in discourse. The more extreme the saints’ suffering, the less it appears as example or as a lesson for others—although it may inspire others (not to become saints, however). These indexical problems in Levinas are at the edge of the general problem for they attempt to define a discourse that makes suffering originary and not merely an epiphenomenon or an obstacle to be overcome by generalizing progress. That is, the concern for individuality and suffering requires a discourse that can maintain the particularity of both my responsibility for suffering and the non-generalizable suffering of the other person. 7 Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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Robert Gibbs

But if we circle back now to Rosenzweig, we find not only a shift in discourse from Philosophy to what we would call postmodern philosophy (or at least post-Hegelian philosophy). For beyond an interlude with Nietzsche–Kierkegaard–Heidegger, we are called to a New Thinking that brings philosophy and theology into conversation. Brought to a crisis in thinking by recourse to what cannot be brought under the totality, philosophy cannot on its own provide a fitting response to the anxiety before death. Theology and philosophy will have to join together, says Rosenzweig, to find truth. Moreover, while Rosenzweig has recourse to a rich analysis of discourse, focusing on the speech acts performed by lovers in dialogue and communities singing together, ultimately Rosenzweig shifts to liturgy and the study of social gesture for his medium of analysis. A sociology of public performance and shared calendars offers the best response to the anxiety in facing death. The analysis in Part III of The Star offers complex discussions of both Judaism and Christianity as ways of redemption. In the interpretation of Christianity we find Rosenzweig’s fullest treatment of suffering in The Star. Art figures or configures our suffering and consoles us without dissolving the particularity of suffering. Though Christian art, especially the cross, provides a way for suffering to be shared, art in general provides the fundamental way for each to bear the particular suffering, the suffering Rosenzweig discovered at the outset of his book. Suffering made particular in the anxi(10a) Rosenzweig (419/376–7) Art overcomes only by structuring ety for death is not to be denied (the suffering, not by denying it. The familiar philosophical route). Instead, artist knows himself as he to art enters here to structure it. The whom it is given to say what he esthetics of Rosenzweig requires particusuffers. The muteness of the first lar people, artists though not élites, who human is also in his self. He tries neither to keep the suffering silent recognize the possibility to say what nor to scream it out: he represents he suffers. Our interest in this pas[darstellen] it. In his representation sage is not only what art can do, but he reconciles the contradiction, precisely how art can say, in Levinas’ that he himself is there and the sense of the term: how it can witness to suffering also is there; he reconciles it, without doing the least suffering without justifying the suffering of the audience. Its task is, precisely, debasement of it. to represent the artist’s own suffering. Hence it is rendered mute: it is not a scream nor a keeping silent, but a representation (Darstellung). Unlike first-person discourse in language, art uses representation with a certain ease. The contradiction it performs is between the artist’s continued existence and the suffering, a contradiction that language faces in witnessing as a contrast between the speaker’s particularity and the announcement of the saying. Remarkably, art reconciles this contradiction. The artist lets suffering appear


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as suffering without debasing it, which must surely mean for Rosenzweig without dissolving its particularity into the class of sufferers. The indexicality of the artist (is there) is represented in representing his suffering. The reconciliation does not need a teleology beyond the artwork. Thus Rosenzweig preserves suffer(10b) The content of all art is ing but also allows art to overcome it, “tragic,” the representation of suffering; even comedy lives on this returning to a Platonic aside from the compassion for the ever existing Symposium. For while Plato allowed poverty and neediness of existence. that the consummate artist would have Art is tragic in its content, as in its to be both comedian and tragedian, form; all art is comic and even in what might well be a veiled reference the most ghastly is depicted with a certain romantic-ironic ease. to his own dialogues, Rosenzweig justiArt as representation is that which fies Plato by claiming that all art is both is tragic and comic in one. And tragic and comic. The content is always the great representer is actually, suffering (suffering is there), and yet the as it was treated in the dawn at form is comic—by which I think he Agathon’s victory symposium, at means the performance of the artist in once comedian and tragedian.8 the artwork. The contradiction between the suffering and the survival of the artist gives art a comic turn. But even comedy depends on the poverty of existence [DASEIN]. The overlap with Cohen is implicit here, because it was in Cohen’s Aesthetics that the ugly could be represented as good and worthy of love. An esthetic line stretches from Plato (love as daughter of poverty and resource) through Cohen concerned with suffering and esthetics of the ugly to Rosenzweig forcing the contradiction between the artist and suffering. The representation of suffering then (10c) This Janus face of art, that aggravates our suffering. Again, it aggravates the suffering of life Rosenzweig here is speaking of the inand at the same time helps people to bear it, allows it to accompany dexed artist, the suffering of the one us through life. It teaches us to who makes art, who represents sufferovercome without forgetting. Be- ing. But unlike the deceptions of phicause a person is not to forget, but losophy, art allows us to bear it, to shall remember everything inside. gain comic perspective from our own A person shall bear suffering and survival of our suffering. Life is not only shall be consoled. 8 Plato Symposium 223d. The main point, he said, was that Socrates forced them to agree that the same man would know how to create comedy and tragedy, and that the tragic poet by skill might also be the comic poet. Cohen Aesthetik des reinen Gefühls, II, 386 (B. Cassirer: Berlin, 1912). This ugliness creates not only in its negative contradiction to the normal formality; it draws forth the task as moral spirit for the universal problem of the human. This task is common for all people. And with it, the ugly has its inestimable portion in the idea of humanity. . . . Now a genuine compassion is posited.

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the dragging our feet before our descent into the grave; it also is the artistic overcoming of suffering. The opposite of art here is forgetting. Rosenzweig proposes an esthetics of remembrance, where suffering is held inside and preserved. The imperative not to forget arises in relation to my particularity, which art can preserve and cultivate, not through cultivating suffering, but through internalizing it by representing it. Our lives are an overcoming of suffering, but in that a preservation of suffering. It would be a gross misrepresentation of Rosenzweig to limit his work to this esthetic high point. For Christianity socializes this suffering and this esthetics, allowing each person to enter a common way by bearing her own cross. The promise of redemption is not merely private, but extends to a community that welcomes each individually and redeems through performative participation in art (architecture, singing, dancing, and so on). Moreover, Judaism represents for Rosenzweig a quite different form of community, one that suspends national politics and at the same time offers a completion of esthetics. Suffering returns in both communities as communal suffering, and indeed as configuring Divine suffering in relation to human suffering. But this essay faces a limited task. Can Rosenzweig offer an attack on philosophy’s incapacity to face the suffering in anxiety before death that can avoid in its own performance a repetition of philosophy’s blindness? This account of art and its tragicomic representation would produce a somewhat unusual reading of The Star. It must be viewed as representing the contradiction in Rosenzweig’s suffering and existence and will require an esthetic reading. This is not the place to present a full account of how we might read The Star as a kind of artwork, but it points toward what Rosenzweig regards as the power of art to configure suffering.9 Thought, in its totalizing mode, fails to take my own anxiety seriously, but art can represent my suffering for others. The power of art to represent and so hold in memory what cannot be recognized in a totalizing logic emerges in a discourse that itself depicts suffering. The Star itself depicts a figure, the human face as the Star of David. Its own interest in both architecture and in figure is not accidental, but pushes Rosenzweig’s own discourse away from totalizing logic and away from linguistic discourse in general. If we then turn to Cohen’s work, we find yet a third way of grasping the excess or suffering. Rhetorically, Cohen is in the most vulnerable

9 Cf. Alan Udoff’s “Rosenzweig’s Heidegger Reception and the re-Origination of Jewish Thinking,” in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1988).


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position, as his desire to make religion rational enough to co-ordinate with rational ethics leads him to frame a discourse which verges on what would be indistinguishable from philosophy and hence blind to suffering. Clearly, his rhetoric needs at least a reflection upon the problems of discourse and asymmetry from Levinas. But there is something missing from both Rosenzweig and Levinas, and that is the keenness of the social, systemic dimension of suffering, represented in Cohen by the demand to understand human suffering as economic poverty. The description of suffering as pov(11a) Cohen RR (169–70/146– erty forces Cohen to bind the discourse 7) Poverty is an economic found- about poverty to economics. This is an ing concept. The suffering of pov- interesting two-way street, for it implies erty therefore arises within the human moral condition and in rendering suffering economical, as well connection with economic science. as forcing economics to face issues of The compassion of person to poverty and human suffering. The latter person must also be something would occupy quite a different paper, originary. The correlation from and is, alas, only briefly presented within person to person proves its prinCohen’s works in his espousal of cipal force. . . . democratic socialism—without, I would argue, sufficient attention to the economic basis of such a position. But the first part of the relation is extremely relevant for us. I do not think that the concept of an economy of the passions is uncommon in contemporary discourse, but it is yet more important to recognize that there is an economic dimension to human suffering. The simple implication is that we cannot frame an adequate account of the passions independent of economic science. What is missing in Rosenzweig and even in Levinas’ account of suffering, is the way that economics is an essential aspect of any account of suffering. Cohen’s own ethics of compassion, of suffering with an other person, arises through the economic concept of the other’s suffering. Religion is originarily economic, and responsible sociality originates in facing economic suffering. The religious discourse about compassion and suffering requires the dimensions of economics and cultural critique. Tragedy, as the content of art, is not quite adequate. The equilibrium of cultural representation is disturbed by poverty: economics thus moves deeper than esthetics— all in the service of a religious attention to suffering. But anthropology, too, will have to move to take suffering seriously. What a human is is this suffering: that is, this economic suffering opens a social dimension of suffering that goes beyond tragedy and beyond what is configured in artistic representation. Cohen is clear that he is not presenting some Schopenhauerian metaphysical pessimism, but rather personifies the suffering. While both Rosenzweig and Levinas might claim that personification is still too general, failing to take the specificity of the sufferer

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(11b) In this insight suffering has revealed itself as it were to be the essence of the human. That essence is not the body that suffers and hungers, but the human problem and cultural consciousness is ripped out of its whole equilibrium. This suffering goes beyond all the suffering of tragedy. If you would know what a human is, then know his suffering. This is no longer a metaphysics of pessimism, rather, on the basis of the social insight the poor of humanity is personified. And thus everything begins, the human itself begins with this social love, this social compassion with the poor. . . .

into account, Cohen positions himself against metaphysical suffering in order to make suffering concrete and, as concrete, human. Indeed, his question about specificity would be that without an economic analysis of suffering poverty, the uniqueness of each will resist the social analysis necessary to display the truth about suffering. Cohen’s claim, remarkably, is that the human itself has its origin in the social love, the compassion, the suffering with the suffering of poverty. As strong as Levinas’ claim was that immorality has its source in justifying another’s suffering, so strong, too is the claim that the essence of the human is not merely social, and not merely produced by a religious concept of compassion, but is in relation to the economic suffering of poverty. In all three thinkers the fear of totalizing logic arises with a certain kind of politics, a politics that has dominated this century and much of the history of the West. That politics is oblivious to the death of its young in barbaric wars. It totalizes over its own violence, and justifies the misery it metes out. Cohen, as a political thinker, subscribes to totalizing thinking, holding out a hope for confederation in a quasimessianic context. But as a religious thinker he discovers a different discourse to address the suffering within the society. He advocates a democratic socialism in order to remedy their suffering. His resistance to Rosenzweig’s esthetics would be that social action and economic theory are needed to face human suffering. His resistance to Levinas would be that Levinas’ “other person” cannot appear within the economic systems and so the other’s suffering cannot act as a critique of this society, but only of society in general. In short, Cohen would insist upon a measuring and counting the other’s suffering and the suffering of other others in order to frame a social response to material suffering. This essay arrives, then, at a moment of crisis. In its own way, the thinking through of the “tradition” of these three thinkers pushes on toward some sort of fourth position: a position in which the various strengths of each could offset incompleteness in each other. But at just this moment the initial suspicions of philosophical theories of suffering threaten this essay itself. Because philosophy as totalizing discourse dissolves or ignores the other person’s suffering, the ethical task for philosophy appears in different guises for these three thinkers. One can


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imagine each insisting on his own emphasis: Rosenzweig on the anxiety before death; Levinas on the other’s useless suffering; and Cohen on the poverty of the other as a critique of society. Rosenzweig expects our thinking to offer consolation and redemption of suffering; Levinas calls for philosophy as prophetic witness to my suffering undergone for others; and Cohen requires philosophy to contribute to recasting the economic relations in society. My temptation is to say that philosophy must do all three things. We are not only trying to speak today against the tradition of philosophy for refusing to heed suffering, we are also struggling to understand what is required of us in reading in order to reframe the task of philosophy. Whether it is a task for art or a task for social action (or both) the tasks before us are not only to frame a better theory, even a theory that might witness without betrayal of the poor. Rather, our task is to witness to our responsibilities, to our more basic tasks to relieve suffering and console the sufferers. If one says that philosophy as such happens as discourse, and so has its task in the prophetic witness (the interpretation of what responsible discourse does), then one could also say that discourse as such can itself become both consolation and social critique. While we may want to show some caution in thinking that philosophy can do so much, we must also dare to ask more of it than theory alone. It is this need for thinking to go beyond thinking about thinking, for philosophy to become more even than a saying of the saying, that calls to us in the other’s suffering.

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2

Steven Kepnes

Rereading Job as textual theodicy Steven Kepnes

You surely have read Job? Read him, read him over and over again . . . (S. Kierkegaard)1

The suffering of the innocent poses the most significant theological challenge to the monotheistic traditions in general and to Judaism in particular. Judaism proclaims that God rewards the righteous and punishes the sinner. Judaism assures us that God is an agent and guarantor of justice in the world. In the face of these claims, the suffering human body cries out for alleviation and healing from her pain and also for answers as to why she must suffer. The suffering body necessarily entails a suffering mind, a mind that is full of questions. Why me? What is the meaning of my pain? What did I do to deserve this suffering? How can I understand this suffering in relation to the proclamations of goodness, caring, and power that are made for my God? Certainly, the most penetrating and profound thought which we have about suffering in the monotheistic traditions is found in the book of Job. With Job, abstract reflection on God, evil, justice, and human suffering receives a concrete case, an immediate human voice, and probing interpretations. Job emerges as the most subtle and complex of theodicies which accomplishes the ultimate goal of theodicy, to embrace justice and hope out of the situation of despair. Such is the honesty and integrity of the figure of Job and the poetic and theological grace of the text that every age has claimed Job as their own and countless interpreters have risen up to unlock the secret of the text. This essay is thus not unique in its attempt to argue for the relevance of Job for contemporary Jewish theological reflection. But given that every generation has its unique problems and opportunities, what we see and admire in Job will necessarily be different than what others before us have perceived. In this essay I wish to follow up a hint in

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 37 Martin Buber’s interpretation of Job which renders the text particularly applicable to contemporary attempts to return to the primal texts of Judaism to fashion textual responses to Jewish philosophical and theological problems. The hint which Buber provides to us is a suggestion he makes that Job provides us with not just one or two responses to suffering, but four.2 These four responses are not stated philosophically, but rather, are personified in four figures: Job’s wife, his friends, Job himself, and God. They represent highly varied views which find the meaning of Job’s suffering alternatively in an unjust God, in a sinful Job, in a rupture or “rent” in the universe, and in Job’s very power to withstand his suffering. The dialogue of these figures on these different views then provide the book of Job with what Buber calls a “great inner dialectic” (OTB: 189). Where Buber presents the four views in a kind of progression I follow the recent Jewish philosophical movement called “Textual Reasoning”3 and suggest that the efficacy of Job as a work of theodicy is increased if the four positions are suspended in a dialogue which is not hierarchically ordered or resolved. When four positions are kept in play together I believe that Job can be seen not only as a model for dialogic textual reasoning but as a work of theodicy that retains its relevance to address even the radical forms of human suffering which we have seen in the century which has just passed.

Theodicy and anti-theodicy The suffering of the innocent is certainly not a unique and specialized problem for Judaism. Before we get to Job, the Hebrew Bible provides us with countless examples of innocent suffering—from the murder of Abel, to the binding of Isaac, to the slavery of the Israelite people in Egypt. In each case the Torah provides some justification for the suffering which gives it a redemptive meaning. Thus we have God’s statement in Exodus: “I have sent you out [to slavery] so that I may bring you in [to the promised land and to relation to me].” Yet even with its elaborate theodic justifications, Judaism appeared to many to be caught “flat-footed” in the face of the Holocaust in the century which has just passed. Most of the “meanings” that the tradition provides for suffering simply fail to face up to the enormity and extent of the human killing involved and the utterly cruel technological means that were used to implement the killings. As Irving Greenberg has said, there is no redemptive meaning that can be given for the death of one and a half million innocent children.4 Richard Rubenstein threw down the theological gauntlet in his famous 1966 book, After Auschwitz, with his syllogistic formulation of the problem.

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Steven Kepnes If I believed in God as the omnipotent author of the historical drama and Israel as His Chosen People, I had to accept [the] conclusion that it was God’s will that Hitler committed six million Jews to slaughter. I could not possibly believe in such a God nor could I believe in Israel as the chosen people of God after Auschwitz.5

Zachary Braiterman, in his penetrating study (God) After Auschwitz, has coined the term “anti-theodicy” to refer to a trend in much postHolocaust theology. Braiterman defines anti-theodicy as “the refusal to justify, explain, or accept as somehow meaningful the relationship between God and suffering.”6 The term “anti-theodicy” is extremely helpful because it allows us to perceive a form of post-Holocaust theology which is not merely occasional and sporadic but systematically developed. Braiterman’s book shows that anti-theodicy goes well beyond the narrow purview of contemporary Jewish theology and finds articulate representatives in not only postmodern philosophy and literature but also in contemporary film, painting, and popular culture. Maurice Blanchot sums up the aim of these contemporary art forms as seeking to give expression to “a neuter existence, null, without limit, sordid absence, a suffocating condensation . . . where being perpetuates itself as nothingness.”7 One can readily understand how the Shoah brings such nihilism in its wake. After all, there are no good and final answers that can be given to the radical challenges posed by the suffering which innocent Jews and others experienced in the Shoah. The appeal of anti-theodicy is its honest and stubborn sticking to the real experience of human suffering in the Shoah and to the dire implications for Judaism, Christianity, and Western culture that this suffering entails. In addition to this, anti-theodicy has an ethical intent. By refusing to grant human suffering any redemptive meaning, advocates of anti-theodicy mean to declare their absolute opposition to human suffering and to marshal energy to combating instead of justifying suffering. Yet at the same time that I say that anti-theodicy sticks to the experience of sufferers in the Shoah there is another sense in which it seems to miss the actual experience of Holocaust sufferers. Wiesel made this point in commenting on Rubinstein’s view that after Auschwitz he considered the traditional monotheistic God to be dead. “How strange,” Wiesel stated, “that the philosophy denying God came not from the survivors. Those who came out with the so-called God is Dead theology, not one of them had been in Auschwitz.”8 Although one could probably find individuals that contradict Wiesel’s statement, I take Wiesel to be referring to an artificial distance and abstraction which one sees in the advocates of anti-theodicy. I call this an ‘artificial’ distance because I

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 39 believe that temporal and spatial distance from suffering may very well be necessary to allow profound thinking about suffering. But anti-theodicy appears as an artificial distance because it is the distance which results from abstract thought and syllogisms of the Rubinsteinian sort. If I believe X, I must believe Y. I cannot believe Y, therefore I go back and deny X. Anti-theodicy issues from the peculiar Western logic of non-contradiction which establishes dichotomies. Dichotomous thinking produces the contraries Good God/Evil Human, Good Human/Evil God, Theodicy/ Anti-theodicy and forces one to choose among them. Indeed, most conceptual approaches to the problem of unjust suffering begin with the contradiction of a good, providential, and powerful God and an innocent sufferer and attempt to avoid the contradiction by either lessening God’s goodness or power or compromising the innocence of the sufferer. Most premodern Jewish theologians take the latter strategy and most modern theologians take the former approach. This avoids the logical contradiction but fails to respond to the human being who is actually experiencing the suffering. One can understand the dangers of justification for human suffering, but to declare, unequivocally, that there is no meaning to suffering for sufferers can lead them to despair and deprive them of hope. Although it may be true that suffering has no good meaning there certainly are meaningful responses to suffering. Thus, I would suggest that although anti-theodicy has much to recommend it, it is only really productive theologically and existentially when it is put in relation to theodicy. Here is where a multi-genre text such as the book of Job which includes plot, character, monologue, dialogue, and poetry fills the clumsy gaps in conceptual thought to respond to suffering not primarily as a logical problem but as an ethical problem, as a religious problem, and, essentially, as a human problem. These latter concerns suggest that the questions which theodicy must address are not only logical but existential: what is the meaning of my suffering? How do I cope with my suffering? How do I maintain faith in God? How do I continue to believe in and fight for justice? And how can I hope for a future in which children can be brought into a world without the threat of genocide? These, precisely, are the manifold questions that the book of Job attempts to develop responses to.

Job, our contemporary Although Buber attempts to date the book of Job to the period of the Babylonian exile, it is quite obvious that he regards Job, as Elie Wiesel has put it, as “our contemporary.”9 Job asks “the question of the generation,” the question “which has persisted ever since” (OTB: 189):

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“Why do we suffer what we suffer?” (OTB: 189). Buber is clear that the epic quality, profundity, and clarity of the text elevate Job’s questioning beyond himself. “When the sufferer complains, ‘He breaks me around, and I am gone’ (19:10),10 this seems no longer the complaint of a single person . . . [but] the fruit of supra-personal sufferings” (OTB: 189). Clearly this suffering extends to Job’s generation of the exile, but Buber is also suggesting that this suffering and the questions it raises go beyond even the exile to retain their contemporary relevance as well. Since the issue of the suffering of the innocent pervades Buber’s later writings and the issue was a particular focus of his biblical writings, we might well ask why? Certainly, Buber’s own experience living in Nazi Germany and seeing his life-work for a Jewish renewal and for dialogue between Christians and Jews collapse was a factor. In addition, his personal losses and expulsion in 1938 from Germany and the collective suffering of fellow German Jews and other European Jews in the Shoah affected him deeply. Indeed, though Buber rarely commented explicitly on the Shoah I have argued in The Text as Thou11 that his biblical writings on suffering constitute an implicit response to the Shoah. This strategy of responding to the suffering of his generation through the texts of the Bible was a brilliant one for it not only provided Buber with rich resources with which to respond to the destruction of European Jewry, but allowed him to make an important statement about continuity of Jewish textual traditions as that very continuity was being severely threatened. I also believe that the distance from the present moment of suffering which the ancient text of Job provides allowed Buber to find a vehicle to address not only the suffering of his generation but his own suffering. The book of Job becomes a template upon which Buber can project the painful experience of his generation and methodically contemplate the various avenues of theodicy without being blinded or overwhelmed by the suffering in front of him. This kind of distance which the ancient narrative of Job provides is a friendly human form of abstraction from the terror of the present moment of pain. Buber has referred to the interpretation which results from this kind of “meeting” between the biblical text and the present moment as “existential exegesis.”12 Existential exegesis occurs out of an interpretive encounter through which the text becomes a Thou. Here, the distant and ancient text aligns itself with the soul of the interpreter so that he realizes that it is his life “that is being addressed.”13 Here Buber suggests “the cry transmitted to us by scripture becomes our own cry.”14 For Buber, existential exegesis allows the previously foreign Scripture to become an intimate voice capable of addressing our “own secrets” (OTB: 6). We will now attempt to unlock the power of the book of Job by looking at the four responses to suffering which the book contains.

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Theodic response #1: “Curse God and die” The prologue to the book of Job introduces us to timeless, mythic, almost fairy-tale scenarios. “There was a man in the land of Uz named Job. That man was blameless (tam) and upright” (1:1). “One day the divine beings presented themselves before God (1:6a) . . . And Satan came also among them” (1955: 1:6b). God, Satan, Job, are simply drawn one-dimensional characters. God is regal, distant, and dispassionate and Job is saintly, emotionless, and largely silent. The stylist’s use of simple, formulaic descriptions and repetitions of phrases and scenes (compare 1:6–22 and 2:1–10) suggest that we are being presented not with reallife events and characters but, as the text itself suggests (1955: 29), with a parable designed to deliver a message. The contrast between the simple style of the prologue and the complex poetry of the rest of the text (Chapters 3–41) has led some to suggest dual authorship for the book of Job. Yet Buber argues that the book should be taken as a whole and he uses the stylistic differences to complicate and multiply the hermeneutical possibilities in interpreting the text. For if the prologue is stylistically simple, the book as a whole becomes so much more complex when the prologue is placed alongside the body of the text. It allows us to ask the question for example, why is Job so quiet in the prologue and at the end (Chapter 42) and so loquacious in the middle of the text? Why are the friends so compassionate in the prologue yet so cruel and insensitive later? The prologue, I would suggest, gives the text its massive scope, its epic quality. The prologue suggests that the questions that the text will address are the great questions, the timeless questions, which even with Job’s answers will continue to be asked. Indeed, I would further offer that it is the genius of the text of Job to at once bring us to the particular moment of human suffering, which, as we see in Chapters 3–41, is time and locale-bound, and at the same time universal to all human beings. Buber tells us that what sets up the true drama of the book of Job is the Leitwort 15 or leading word hinam, for nothing. Satan says that Job worships God gratuitously, for nothing (1:9), without real faith. And even though God knows this is not true (2:4) he allows Satan to make Job suffer. Thus Job suffers, hinam (2:4), for nothing, gratuitously, for no good reason. So the question of the book of Job is not only why the innocent suffer for nothing but also how this suffering is “compatible with God.” As Buber puts it: If it is all “for nothing” “why does God make me suffer these things?” (OTB: 189). The prologue quickly introduces us into the wonderful family routine of Job’s seven sons and three daughters. Such was their closeness that they would take turns visiting one another’s homes, enjoying food and

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drink provided by the family riches with the blessings of their father. We see Job dutifully attempting to preserve the good fortune by rising early to make offerings from his bountiful flocks to God. Then, “one day as his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their eldest brother a messenger came to Job” (1:13). The messenger breaks the picture of familial harmony with these words of bad tidings. “The oxen were plowing and the she-asses were grazing alongside them when Sabeans attacked them and carried them off, and put the boys to the sword; I alone have escaped to tell you” (1:14–15). This messenger is followed swiftly by two more, each of whom arrives while the last was speaking, and one by one they describe the destruction of all of Job’s thousands of oxens, asses, sheep, and camels—his entire material riches. Before the last leaves, a fourth messenger arrives to bring the most devastating news, the death of his ten children. And since each of the children have homes of their own, we can assume that daughters- and sons-inlaw and many grandchildren are also included. Each time Job receives the bad news with the eerie words of the messenger: “I alone have escaped to tell you.” How swiftly Job’s fate changes! In an instant, all that has made Job feel blessed is taken from him. The swiftness of his change in fortune and the formulaic manner in which we hear it at once makes it appear unreal and, at the same time, realistically portrays the fact that very often human tragedy does come about this quickly. One’s life appears to be rolling along wonderfully from accomplishment to success to accomplishment and then, in an instant, the accident occurs, natural disaster strikes, or the gang arrives, the town is surrounded, and then, everything changes. So Job is left with only his messengers of ill tidings and himself. But how does he respond? Naked came I out of my mother’s womb. And naked shall I return there; The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord. (1:21) The stark beauty and simple truth of these words lift Job out of the simple folk story and carry his answer straight to the heart of the reader. After all, does God owe us a life of endless good fortune? Is our wealth, our good fortune, and any human accomplishment something that we earn the right to have eternally? Is there any assurance that our children come with the guarantee of health and long life? God creates and gives life as an utter free gift. When we receive, do we have any right to make demands about the form and longevity of the gift that is given? And since life is given by God who owns life, can it not be taken back by God

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 43 at His discretion? If we rightly bless God when He gives, should we not bless that same God when He takes away? Job’s clarity in the moment of loss is truly astonishing. But the losses do not end with his children. Satan wants to test Job further by besetting him with disease. And the Lord said unto Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand” (1955: 2:6). So Job’s body is covered with boils. The text provides us with this cruel and ignoble image of the once proud and righteous Job. “And he took a potsherd to scrape himself and he sat among the ashes” (1955: 2:8). Now his wife enters. She, too, uses the word that Job used after his first series of losses, the word barakh, to bless. But in her use, the word means its opposite—“Barakh elohim v’moot,” (2:9) she says: “Curse God and die.” When Job’s wife appears in the narrative, a new perspective is brought to Job’s suffering. After all, Job’s losses are also her losses. We hear frightfully little about her reaction. But her brief words suggest that she sees something that Job has not seen. Perhaps it was the formulaic and repetitive way in which the losses came, the four messengers, the same entrance. Perhaps it was the identical last words that tipped her off. However it occurred to her, Job’s wife came to the conclusion that God was in collusion with Satan, that Job’s (and her) losses were not the innocent result of God taking away after giving. The family losses came not only “for nothing” but out of evil intent. Job’s wife saw that God was toying with Job, like a child poking a sharp stick at a small animal he has captured. With Job’s wife’s perspective, we look back at his words to Satan—“he is in your hand”—with disgust. How could God place the innocent and good Job in the hands of Satan? What kind of a God is this who places the world in the hands of Satan and does nothing while innocent daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers are killed and a righteous man is beset with sores and made to sit in ashes? From the perspective of Job’s wife, the suffering of the innocent has one clear meaning: God is unjust. God is unjust and because of this life on earth is intolerable. For if the God of the universe is unjust there is no exit save death. “Curse God and die” is the nihilistic yet utterly understandable response to a God and a world in which the innocent suffer. Job, of course, does not initially accept his wife’s conclusion. He shrugs her off and “does not sin with his lips” (1955: 2:10). But his wife’s words do slowly seep into his consciousness. And they soon emerge in Job’s protest against God. Job’s wife’s condemning words against God, in fact, ring throughout the text and they echo particularly loudly at the end of the book, when God finally emerges from the whirlwind and appears to be so arrogant and insensitive to Job’s suffering. Indeed, the simple fact is that the suffering of the innocent, whether at the level of the individual or at the broader level of the suffering of the collective, make us believe that God is unjust.

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In the face of this conclusion, the prologue rightfully ends. “None spoke a word.” In the face of God’s injustice humans become silent.

Theodic response #2: “Will God pervert the right? Will the Almighty pervert justice?” The next view of the suffering of the innocent is presented by Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildad, Shuhite, Zophar, and later, Elihu. The friends seek to maintain God’s justice but, like the philosophers, they must do this at the expense of Job’s and his children’s righteousness. Although the friends do not address Job’s wife directly, they implicitly comment on her position. The friends serve to remind us, the readers, that Israel’s life is not lived in a cold vacuum in which God gives and takes life at his whim. Rather, a relationship has been established, there is a brit, a covenant between God and Israel. Promises have been made by God to sustain Israel and Israel, in turn, is expected to live up to certain obligations. Deuteronomy, Chapter 11, establishes a system of rewards and punishments for fulfilling or violating these obligations. In light of this, the friends, according to Buber, follow “the assertion of an all-embracing empirical connection between sin and punishment” (OTB: 191). In Bildad’s words: “Will God pervert the right? Will the Almighty pervert justice? If your sons sinned against Him, He dispatched them for their transgression” (8:3–5). Suffering is punishment; and since Job suffers, he must have sinned as well. Thus Eliphaz turns on Job: “You know that your wickedness is great. And that your iniquities have no limit” (22:5). The friends offer other explanations for Job’s suffering as well. They see it as a form of discipline (5:17) or instruction (22:22). Either this, or they retreat into an argument that God’s ways lie beyond human comprehension. So Eliphaz says God’s “deeds . . . cannot be fathomed” (5:9) and Eliahu says “Behold God is Great, Beyond our Knowledge” (1955: 36:26). Job admits that he is fallible; he is human and therefore sins. But the severity of punishment is incommensurate with his crimes. The friends miss this, they are blind to the extent of Job’s suffering. They are “mischievous comforters” (16:2) who make it more and not less difficult for Job to endure his pain. They extol God and mouth platitudes about justice which continually miss the severity of Job’s suffering. Like passive bystanders to the suffering of the innocent, the friends are mainly concerned with providing quick rationalizations for Job’s plight that will allow them to dismiss their own responsibility to help him. The friends’ justifications protect their wish to believe that the world follows the order of retributive justice. God is just and in control; and thus those who suffer deserve their plight and those who thrive and succeed deserve their success. That the response of the friends to suffering is weak is

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 45 made crystal clear at the end of the text when God declares that they “have not spoken the truth about me” (42:7). Yet before we dismiss their arguments, we must recognize that the friends express a position that is fundamental to Judaism—that God is powerful and just and assures that the evil are punished and the righteous rewarded. Indeed, this basic belief provides the foundation of hope for the ultimate victory of justice in a world in which the innocent suffer. That God is just means that despite the present situation of injustice, the sufferer can hope for a redeemed situation which reverses the present condition. The fact that God is powerful gives the sufferer hope that she will be redeemed from her position of powerlessness. Why is the present situation so bad? How will the sufferer be redeemed? At this point the friends enter to declare that the ways of God are “beyond our knowledge.” Indeed, this is another version of the position that suffering has no meaning. It does not make sense to the sufferer; but through faith in God’s power and justice the sufferer knows that her suffering will be overcome.

Theodic response #3: The rent in the heart of the world The third view of suffering is that which emerges from the experience of Job’s pain and is marked by profound complaint, questioning, and protest. This view begins with the first-person voice of the sufferer. I have already noted the contrast between the silent Job of the prologue and the talkative Job of Chapters 3–41. This contrast is hinted at in the text itself as Chapter 3 begins. “Job began to speak and cursed the day of his birth, Job spoke up and said . . .” [my underlining]. The Hebrew uses four different verbs of human speaking and thus is suggestive of what Job himself tells us: “I will not speak with restraint” (7:11). Indeed, Job’s power and the strength of the book as a resource to address human suffering lies in Job’s decision to throw off restraint and give voice to his suffering. Thus he begins. Perish the day on which I was born, And the night it was announced . . . May obscurity carry off that night May it not be counted among the days of the year . . . Why did I not die at birth, Expire as I came forth from the womb? . . . Why does he give light to the sufferer And life to the bitter in spirit? My groaning serves as my bread; My roaring pours forth as water. (3:1–24)

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Here the dispassionate, silent, and saintly Job of the prologue opens up to his own human suffering and poetically bears witness to it for himself and others. One hesitates to use the expression “poetry” for fear of rendering Job’s suffering beautiful. But as Buber has said, we would have to search long and far in world literature to find human suffering expressed so simply and profoundly (OTB: 188). Job does not literally follow his wife’s advice and curse God; instead, he takes his clear and honest anger and curses the day of his birth and the very fact of his birth. The desire to be rid of life, to be rendered into oblivion, and no longer to feel the physical and emotional pain is palpable. Job’s very continued existence is suffering to him. His food is his own groaning, his outcry water which cannot quench his desire to be drowned: “would that God consented to crush me” (6:8). Thus Job gives voice to his pain, his despair, and his anger in speech after speech. Job’s self-description chronicles his physical depravity and the cruel social consequences of his tragedy and sickness. “The neck of my tunic fits my waste” (30:18); “My flesh is covered with maggots and clods of earth, my skin is rotten and festering” (7:5). His friends read his sickness as a sign of sin, his relatives abandon him, his former servants ignore him, he is even “repulsive to his wife” (19:17). Job cannot help but contrast the reaction of young and old to him with his current state of affliction. Then “young men saw me and hid, Elders rose and stood; Nobles held back their words” (29:9) “. . . and waited for my counsel” (29:21). Now his friends regard his words as “idle prattle” (11:3); the elders ignore him and the young mock him and spit on him; he is the “butt of their gibes” (30:9). Job’s dignity has “vanished like a cloud” (30:15); he is full of shame (10:15). The condemnation of “the people” (12:2) and the assault on his sense of dignity and pride compound Job’s physical maladies with more suffering. No wonder that his friends grew tired and moved from their respectful and compassionate silence in the prologue to arguing with Job and making apologies for God. The melancholy is difficult enough to hear, but added to it is Job’s rage. First toward the day of his birth, then toward his friends, then toward God, Job expresses the “bitterness of his soul” (10:1). But it is obvious that this expression has a cathartic and curative dimension to it. Where the friends believe that Job’s anger will “tear him to pieces” (18:4) and seek to silence it, the expression of Job’s anger is actually a key to allowing him to cope with his suffering. It contributes to his ability to preserve his integrity despite his appearance, his pain, his shame, and the universal disgust he evokes in the world. For it is clear to Job, if to no one else, that he is the same person now as he was before and he clings to that self-perception despite the change which others perceive. Thus Job stands alone, by himself, still the honest and righteous tam supported by himself and his thoughts alone as his only advocates (1955:

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 47 16:20). And these thoughts still sing clear as the courageous voice of the innocent victim. Until I die I will maintain my integrity. I persist in my righteousness and will not yield; I shall be free of reproach as long as I live. (27:5–6) Job and God And what of God with whom Job insists on arguing? What does Job want from God? Despite his ignorance of the wager which God makes with Satan, Job clearly places the blame on God for his fate: “The arrows of the almighty are in me; My spirit absorbs their poison” (6:4). Job’s attitude toward God is complex and contradictory. He feels alternatively harassed and suffocated by God’s wrath (30:21) and utterly abandoned and hidden from him (30:20; 23:6). At first Job responds with bitter anger at God, but then, slowly, his emotional response turns more intellectual. For he loses not only his family and friends, and wealth, health, and social standing; Job has lost his intellectual bearings. His world-view has been shattered; the center of his universe, God, no longer appears trustworthy. This is another form of suffering for Job, a deep metaphysical suffering in his thought. Job knows that he is not only innocent but that he has done everything that his ethical traditions have asked of him. He has fed the hungry, clothed the poor, supported the orphan, and lodged the wayfarer (31). Why must he suffer like a scoundrel? Job’s actions invite comparison to the actions of God, who comes out lacking. Why does not God act toward Job as he, Job, has acted toward the innocent sufferer? Nothing makes sense to Job. As he looks at the world he sees that it is not only he that has been abandoned but so have other innocent victims. Thus, in a very profound way, Job questions God and Humanity. Why are times for judgment not reserved by the [Almighty] Shaddai. Even those close to him cannot foresee His actions. People remove boundary stones; They carry off flocks and pasture them; They lead away the donkeys of the fatherless . . . They chase the needy off the roads. . . . They snatch the fatherless infant from the breast . . . The souls of the dying cry out Yet God does not regard it as a reproach. . . . For all of them morning is darkness. (24:1–17)

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Life has become chaotic, wrong has become right, day night, injustice justice, and where is God, why does he not act? This litany of offenses against justice describes a world turned upside-down, a world of no boundaries where everything is permissible. Job seeks a hearing before God, a moment in God’s court, where he can plead his case, prove his innocence and be acquitted. He simultaneously knows that he cannot win his suit (9:2) yet insists on articulating it and thus shows that he never gives up on God and his justice. Job stands confronted by what Buber calls the “rent at the heart of the world” (OTB: 191) and a host of contradictions which he has no choice but to embrace. Job had believed God to be just and man’s duty to walk in His ways. But it is no longer possible for one who has been smitten with such sufferings to think God just. . . . In spite of this Job’s belief in justice is not broken down. But he is no longer able to have a single faith in God and in justice. . . . He believes now in justice in spite of believing in God, and he believes in God in spite of believing in justice. But he cannot forego his claim that they will again be united somewhere, sometime, although he has no idea in his mind how this will be achieved. (OTB: 192) Since Job continues to believe in justice in spite of an unjust God, and in God in spite of his belief in justice he no longer can have a “single faith” and asserts a “dual faith” or what we could call a “rent” theology. This is a theology of contradiction summarized by Job’s immortalized words: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (13:15). It is a theology “in spite of” God for the sake of God, a theology of justice and right in spite of the fact that God has taken away what is just and right. Four times in a single page Buber repeats the words “in spite of” and if we follow Dan Avnon’s method in interpreting Buber this must be taken as significant.16 Buber is suggesting that Job’s is a theology “in spite of” logic that is nevertheless true. It is true because it is the truth of the “living God.” And because of its truth Job cannot deny it. This theology is said as only the sufferer become poet or the poet giving voice to the sufferer could. As God lives who has taken away my right And the Almighty who has dealt bitterly with me, All the while my breath is in me, And the spirit of God is in my nostrils, Surely my lips shall not speak unrighteousness . . . , Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. . . .

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 49 For what is the hope of the godless Though he get him gain, When God takes away his soul Will God hear his cry? (27:1–9) What a host of contradictions! A living God who “takes away what is right.” An Almighty who “deals bitterly” with a good man who declares that the spirit of this same God of unrighteousness is within him and therefore this man surely can only speak righteously!! So that he then declares that God only abandons the unrighteous and does not abandon the righteous. Even though the righteous man himself has been abandoned by God, he clings to hope in God’s righteousness. At this point, Job has clearly arrived at a different understanding of God, justice, and the role of humans in bringing justice to the world. Although he still voices nostalgia for his former simple faith in a God who “watched over” (29:2) him and guided his way like a light shining over his head (29:3), his bitter experience has educated him with a “source of understanding” (28:12). Job realizes that it is all far more complicated than he had originally thought. For Job, too, had naïvely assumed, like his friends, that the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. His experience brought him to contemplate the reverse: that the evil are rewarded and the good punished, but as an ish tam he could not hold to that nihilistic proposition. Job readily sees that to give up hope, to declare the wicked the victor, to renounce God’s power is, indeed, “nonsense” (27:12). Job knows that “the evil man’s portion from God” (27:13) is, finally, “a plague.” But when and how his recompense is received is a mystery beyond him and can not be predicted by him. Similarly, the righteous will “share the silver” (27:17) reward, but how and when they receive it is also a mystery. Thus Job’s poetic witness to his suffering and his rent theodicy of contradiction and protest ends at the edge of a mystery. The response of Job to his suffering pits the nihilistic position of his wife against the position of his friends without any resolution. Its power derives from this tension which is philosophically impossible yet existentially and humanly true. Yet living with this “absurd duality,” as true as it is, does not relieve Job from his suffering. Giving witness to his suffering and anger and articulating the rent at the heart of the universe does have a cathartic effect for the sufferer, but it does not provide any answers. So Job’s response to his suffering, like those of his wife and friends, is incomplete. It leaves Job with the request for some kind of a resolution, some kind of solace, which he can only get from God. “From the burden of this double yet single matter Job is able to take away nothing, he

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cannot lighten his death. He can only be asked to be confronted with God” (OTB: 193).

Theodic response #4: God’s distributive justice The basis for Job’s hope and the ground for redemption is, of course, contact with God. So that where Job first only wanted to have his case heard, Buber suggests, Job is moved to a more profound desire no longer to be heard and to hear, but to simply “see” God and re-experience God’s presence. “He can only ask to be confronted with God. ‘Oh that one would hear me!’ ” (31:35) . . . As his motive he declares that he wants to reason with the deity (13:3); he knows he will carry his point (18). In the last instance, however, he merely means by this that God will again become present to him. “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” (23:3; OTB: 193). Thus God’s “answer” to Job does not come in resolving the intellectual contradictions and repairing the “rent” in the world in which Job is caught. Indeed, when God appears, He frustrates the intellectual question. “Thou can not understand the secret of anything or being in the world, how much less the secret of man’s fate” (OTB: 194). The answer comes in the appearance of God to Job alone. But when God does appear to him, Job compares his first youthful knowledge of God to “hearing” and the second to “seeing” directly. For Buber the crucial turning point of the book of Job lies in this seeing. “The abyss is bridged the moment [ Job] ‘sees,’ (42:6) is permitted to see again” (OTB: 195). This is why when God appears and speaks out of the “tempest” (38:1) Job ceases to pose his questions and “repents in dust and ashes” (42:6). Job’s answer is God’s appearance and the reason for hope that it brings. “The true answer that Job receives is God’s appearance only, only this, that distance turns into nearness, that ‘his eye sees Him,’ (42:5) that he knows Him again.”17 It is crucial for us to note the form in which God appears. God discloses himself out of the winds of nature and as the God of creation. God is revealed as the one “who laid the foundations of the earth,” who “shut up the seas . . . , made the cloud . . . , caused the dayspring to know its place” (38:4–12). This is the God whose “glory,” the psalmist says, is declared by the heavens and earth. God appears to Job as God of creation and nature and not God of history who “brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt.” The God of creation does not intervene in history to repair its injustices. This God does not erase the pain and cruelty of human suffering. “Nothing is explained, nothing adjusted; wrong has not become right, nor cruelty kindness. Nothing has happened but that man again hears God’s address. The mystery has remained unsolved.”18 This means that the answer to Job is the answer of Job’s life and the life

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 51 of the natural world which still exists around him. Each living thing in its form and shape, the world as it was before Job’s suffering, remains like the great seas that continually wash the shore, as Job’s source of healing. Yet still Buber suggests, this God, creator and ruler of nature, is not without justice. The speech [of God] declares in the ears of man, struggling for justice, another justice than his own, a divine justice. Not the divine justice, which remains hidden, but a divine justice, namely that manifest in creation. The creation of the world is justice, not a recompensing and compensating justice, but a distributing, a giving justice. (OTB: 195) Now Job’s initial formulation of God’s creation of life as a blessing (2:21) is reformulated by Buber as “distributing justice.” Buber explains further. God, the creator, bestows upon each what belongs to him, upon each thing and being, as far as He allows it to become entirely itself. . . . He cuts the dimension of this thing or being out of “all,” giving it its fixed measure, the limit appropriate to this gift. (OTB: 195) Thus the answer to Job’s quest for human justice, to “give everyone his due,” is divine distributive justice which “gives to everyone what he is” (OTB: 195). Through God’s distributive justice, Buber suggests, Job is affirmed as who he is in his unique and full dimension as ish tam. What this means is that Job is affirmed by God not only in his simplicity and righteousness, but in his voice of witness to his suffering and to the suffering of innocent others as well. In addition, Job is affirmed in his protest against suffering and even in his arguments and revolt against God! God justifies and vindicates not His own actions but those of Job. God condemns the friends who have failed to “speak rightly” (42:7) about Him. Thus the meaning of this term “distributive justice” seems to be something like: “We get what we can handle.” God made Job potentially a person who was capable of withstanding great suffering. His suffering was therefore the just distribution of that which he was made for. Job’s suffering, is then, something of a test, like Abraham’s Akedah. Like Abraham, who Buber calls “the seer” who is seen by God, Job asks to see God and is also seen by God. The meaning of “being seen” by God is to be tested. “God sees Abraham and tests him by seeing him as the righteous and ‘whole’ man who walks before his God.”19 In “seeing” God, Job comes to see his suffering, then, as the measure of his righteousness,

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of his wholeness and of the fulfillment of his potential as an ish tam. Thus God refers to Job as he referred to Abraham and his other true neviim or prophets, as his “eved,” his servant (42:7). God’s view of Job’s suffering helps Job to understand his suffering. It reminds Job of what he himself said when he first learned of his losses, that life and the created world is God’s gift and that, despite all his losses, Job, himself, is alive and is surrounded by the world of creation which surges forth in life. More pointedly, however in Buber’s view, Job comes to see his suffering as a test of his character as a righteous man. God’s view preserves both God’s justice and Job’s goodness. It helps Job to cope with his suffering by boosting his pride and presenting him as an agent of God in the world. Job emerges as a spiritual warrior, a courageous hero, able to withstand great pain for the sake of God and his own integrity. This type of justification for innocent suffering has a long history in Judaism which culminates in the tradition of Kiddush Hashem or martyrdom. One cannot deny the power of this justification for suffering both psychologically and theologically. Suffering as a test from God and suffering as a way to serve God and fulfill spiritual potential provides meaning for suffering that both makes sense of pain and allows people to cope with their pain. But by suggesting that we see this fourth response to suffering as just another response and not the final culminating one I mean to allow us to place it in dialogue with the other three views and to question it. Why must the innocent and the good be rewarded with pain? Why is the ability to endure suffering the mark of the eved Hashem, the servant of God? When God appears out of the tempest to the frail, sick, and demoralized Job, why must he appear with such bravado, arrogance, and force? Who is this that darkens counsel, Speaking without knowledge? Girds your loins like a man; I will ask and you will inform me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? (38:2, 3) At this point in the text, one might certainly expect God to be more compassionate and sensitive to the beaten-down Job. Although Buber presents Job as the heroic recipient of God’s distributing justice, the text shows him to be much more passive and resigned. “See I am of small worth; what can I answer you? I clap my hand to my mouth. I have spoken once and will not reply; Twice and will do so no more” (40:4). If Job had the strength, he might just as well have responded with the words of his wife and cursed God and prepared himself to die. Short of this he might, at

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 53 least, have continued his mode of protest.20 Yet he does not, instead, he “recants and relents,” explaining that he is “but dust and ashes” (42:6). Indeed, it is because the noble and proud Job does recant that Buber believes that God has provided him with an actual answer and not just a powerful rebuke which silences him. Clearly, however, God’s response to Job does not provide a final answer to the question of why the innocent Job and the innocent throughout history must suffer. Indeed, Buber himself makes this point obvious in the one of the very few times in his writings when he explicitly addresses the theological challenges which are raised by the Shoah. Job and the Shoah At end of his 1951 essay, “The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth,” in which he has celebrated the Bible as a record of the dialogue between humans and God, Buber asks whether this dialogue is still possible “in a time in which there is an Auschwtiz.”21 Buber is honest about the rupture. “The estrangement has become too cruel, the hiddenness too deep.”22 He then refers to Job and suggests that we look not to the Job who relents in the face of God but to the Job for whom God is distant and hidden, the Job of protest. This is the Job who “charges that the ‘cruel’ God (30:21) has ‘removed his right’ from him (27:2) and thus that the judge of all the earth acts against justice.”23 Buber then turns to his readers and includes himself by referring to “We . . . who have not got over what happened and will not get over it.” To this group he offers the following Joban response. Do we stand overcome by the hidden face of God like the tragic hero of the Greeks before faceless fate? No, rather even now we contend, we too, with God, even with Him, the Lord of Being, whom we once, we here, chose for our Lord. We do not put up with earthly being; we struggle for its redemption, and struggling we appeal to the help of our Lord, who is again and still a hiding one. In such a state we await His voice, whether it comes out of the storm or out of a stillness that follows it. Though his coming appearance resemble no earlier one, we shall recognize again our cruel and merciful Lord.24 Clearly the Job of protest has become a model for a theodicy of the Shoah. Buber demands that we not give up on God but “contend” with Him who Buber calls “cruel” before “merciful.” But a new element appears in this quotation that goes beyond the suffering and victimized Job of protest. This appears most notably in the demand that we become agents of justice and redemption in the world. This characteristic, I would

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suggest, is not seen in the Job of protest but emerges only after God has appeared to Job. For it is only after God has appeared to Job and distributed his “justice” to him that Job is able to take his focus off his own pain and turn to his friends and “pray for them.” But how do “we” qualify for this status?—the status of ones who not only protest but receive God’s distributive justice? We qualify for this status because we received the gift of life and enjoy the fruits of the created world. For reasons we do not totally understand, we survived the Shoah. In fact, most of “us” who are alive today belong not to Buber’s generation of the destruction, but to the generation after. We bear closer resemblance to Job’s second restored family than to the lost ones. Buber hints that he is addressing “us” as well when he refers to the location from which we take our stand toward God and the world. This is the place where “we once, we here, chose our Lord.” This, of course, is the land of Israel. Thus Buber suggests that after the Shoah and in a time in which there is a restored Jewish commonwealth, we are no longer a passive chosen people but an active choosing people. As a choosing people who experienced the ultimate in passive victimization and survived and built new families and returned to our land, we cannot only hold to the status of the victimized Job of protest, but must recognize our power and our blessings. It is indeed incumbent upon us to become active agents of God’s justice and redemption in the world. After the Shoah we see the dangers of nihilism, of giving up on God or looking away from the pain and suffering of others. With Job’s friends we clearly see the scale of justice but with Job we know that it is our and not God’s responsibility to ensure that justice prevails in the world. God has distributed the blessings of life and power to us. It is our responsibility and challenge and God’s test for us to be God’s agents, to live up to our potential and ensure the end to human suffering and thereby make way for the recognition of the Lord.

Notes 1 Søren Kierkegaard, “Repetition,” in Fear and Trembling/Repetition, edited and translated by H. Hong and E. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 204. 2 Buber’s main writing on Job is found in The Prophetic Faith (1942) (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 188–202, recently published as “Job” in Buber, On the Bible, edited by Nahum Glatzer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). We will supply references from the latter publication by using parentheses after quotations and the designation OTB. 3 Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs, Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). See also the Textual Reasoning website www.bu.edu/mzank/ Textual_Reasoning/ and the chatline at [email protected]/.

Rereading Job as textual theodicy 55 4 Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, edited by Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1977), p. 23. 5 Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1966), p. 46. 6 Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 31. 7 Ibid., as quoted p. 171. 8 Elie Wiesel, “An Exchange,” in John Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 364. 9 Elie Wiesel, “Job: Our Contemporary,” in Messengers of God (New York: Random House, 1976). 10 Quotations from the book of Job are taken from the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible, TANAKH (Philadelphia) unless preceded by 1955 to refer to the 1955 Jewish Publication Society translation (Philadelphia). 11 Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), ch. 7. 12 Martin Buber, Good and Evil (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 6. 13 Martin Buber, “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” in On the Bible, p. 11. 14 “The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth,” (1951) in On Judaism, edited by Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 224. 15 For a full discussion of Buber’s concept of leitworte see Kepnes, The Text as Thou, ch. 3. 16 Dan Avnon, Martin Buber, The Hidden Dialogue (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), ch. 3. 17 Buber, “Dialogue Between Heaven,” p. 224. 18 Ibid. 19 Martin Buber, “Abraham the Seer,” in On the Bible, p. 42. 20 This is the response that Wiesel argues forcefully for at the end of his essay “Job, our Contemporary,” in Messengers of God. 21 Ibid. “Dialogue Between Heaven,” p. 224. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 225.

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Suffering in theory Cleo McNelly Kearns

The phrase “suffering in theory” carries, of course, its own irony. To speak of suffering, as theory tends to do, in the abstract and from a comfortable place in the groves of academe, is in many respects both ethically dubious and rhetorically risky. Not only do pontifications on such a topic seem frivolous in comparison with their subject matter, they also run the risk of diverting attention from more direct interventions and from the difficulties of those who put themselves in far more danger in the attempt to bear witness to pain. Beneath these lofty considerations, moreover, there lie deeper and more uneasy, if rather more subacute problems. For those who speak of suffering, even at a distance, also run the risk of experiencing something of the painful affect to which they intend merely to allude. Suffering is in some respects highly contagious, and it can at times be caught, so to speak, simply by entering its sphere. No matter how well they seem to be protected, those who speak of suffering “in theory” often approach a point where distinctions between analytic observer and victim break down, and where they, too, are exposed to discomfiture if not distress. These ethical ambiguities haunt the discourse of those who try to speak theoretically about the pain of others, and they sometimes rise to the surface in ways that can be extremely uncomfortable. In the face of what we so often want to call “the real thing,” theory itself, with its accompanying posture of mastery and abstraction, can become abashed or discountenanced. At the 1997 conference on “Religion and Postmodernism” at Villanova, for instance, a mother distressed about her son’s growing depression and anomie, which seemed to her related to the kinds of philosophy to which he was being exposed at university, took the microphone to express her pain at the apparent insouciance of the speakers to the potential effect of what seemed to her their casual assumptions of nihilism. Her attempt at intervention left a wide wake of embarrassment behind—and prompted, in part, this paper—but the

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widespread mortification so paralyzed the other participants on the occasion that they fell short of any immediate response that would usefully address either her issue or her nerve in raising it.1 The incident did, however, demonstrate the power of “real” suffering to halt, if only for a moment, the smooth flow of speculation, and it silenced even those who were fully committed to the pertinence of their work to her situation and to the ethical importance of the academic decorum that allowed that pertinence to emerge only indirectly. Faced with the reality of suffering, then, to speak about it theoretically seems only a step less ethically dubious than to maintain a judicious and temporizing silence. Certainly, such speech is only very rarely the major intervention the theorist would like it to be, and very rarely does it bring true healing in its wake. Nonetheless, many if not most of us feel an obligation to speak, albeit in so compromised a discourse. After all, even the most engaged and immediate moments of witness to pain need both self-awareness and direction to be effective, and these needs make theorizing inevitable, and perhaps even, in its own way, useful. Furthermore, while the potential embarrassments of those who have undertaken theoretical discourse in the face of suffering may pale before the deeper forms of pain they hope to address, these embarrassments can also provide the occasion for a practice of self-reflection that is not without importance to that pain. We may at least attempt a sharper diagnosis, a more extensive heuristic of the problem of suffering by looking at that problem as reflected in our own meta-language, however distorted and distanced that reflection may be. As Robert Gibbs has noted,2 self-critiques of the problems of theorizing suffering are not lacking, especially in twentieth-century ethics and politics, and they raise important problems and offer strong precedents to follow. Franz Rosenzweig, Herman Cohen, and Emmanuel Levinas are figures that come to mind immediately, in part because the suffering with which each deals is shadowed by the Holocaust, which has become the exemplar or structuring template of individual and collective pain in our time. In his study of these three philosophers, Gibbs discusses the uneasiness each of them feels about his own speculations on suffering, the anxiety generated by a pervasive sense of the possibility of bad faith, or at least of questionable authority, before the intractable problem of deliberate and willed mass destruction and human cruelty. Each of these figures sense something missing in his own discourse and attempts in some way to supply the lack. Gibbs summarizes what for most is the missing element succinctly: “what ethics cannot achieve,” he says, “is a rational and compassionate affect,”3 and what ethical philosophy fails to specify is what is required of us in entertaining it. In Gibbs’s view, theoretical discourse of suffering itself needs to be responsible for generating,

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or creating the conditions to generate, the kind of emotional response and practical intervention for which its catastrophic subject matter calls out. Gibbs points out that Rosenzweig, Cohen, and Levinas each consider resources outside the discourse of theory in search of such an affect and response, usually in the domains of art, religion, and politics, taken either severally or together. Rosenzweig, for instance, turns to liturgy and literature as sources of consolation and empowerment for the alleviation of suffering. Cohen looks to economic and political analysis fueled by the prophetic witness and the call for social justice. Each hopes in seeking these recourses to supply a lacking dimension of affect and practice in his work, a dimension philosophy can indicate but not supply. Levinas is aware of the problem these extensions of philosophical discourse are designed to overcome, but he challenges their adequacy, at least as automatic palliatives. For him, art, religion, and politics all tend toward apologetic, and have their own forms of blindness vis-à-vis the suffering other. To rationalize and estheticize suffering as these stances often do, or to co-opt it for a political platform, is to add insult to injury, and to look beyond the victim rather than into the face of his or her immediate needs.4 Levinas then, as Gibbs reminds us, stresses the uneasy impotence of all such theoretical recourses before the appeal of the suffering other, which should rather arouse an ever-deepening practice of immediate recognition and obligation prior to any religious, esthetic, or political prospects or consolations. Levinas wants to discountenance any schema, however beautiful, pious, or progressive, that might seem to justify the unjustifiable, or suggest that it be transcended in some estheticized alternative world, putative heavenly kingdom and/or future utopia. Furthermore, he argues, before the artist, the prophet, and the political philosopher can even begin to deal with suffering, he or she must confront a fundamental asymmetry, the asymmetry between his or her own comparatively privileged position as witness and the situation of the suffering victim. The witness, whether artist, prophet, or politician is, after all, at least for the moment, capable of speech, perspective, and distance. The victim can only cry out in pain, or stare blindly out from the crowd. For Levinas, the face of that abject other obligates more fundamentally than any words, stances, or fantasies of redemption can address, and it requires a far more immediate call and response. Gibbs wishes—rightly I think—to return to the functions of art, religion, and politics in the discourse of suffering, but with an awareness sharpened by Levinas’ critique; that is, he wishes to call upon the resources of these domains while bearing in mind the danger of an unduly sanguine view of their potential. To do so, however, requires a somewhat more extended and analytic consideration of language, esthetics, and cultural

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traditions particularly with respect to art, than any of these figures can supply. To this consideration, I would argue, the work of Julia Kristeva has much to offer, for not only does she make an effective address to suffering the explicit focus and criterion of her work, but she also brings to bear on that discourse a strong sense of the powers and constraints of language, a highly developed aesthetic, and an informed respect for religious traditions. The issue of appropriate affect, of what is required of us in speaking of suffering is never far from Kristeva’s mind, and if her own theoretical discourse seems at times arid or baroque, it never fails to turn on itself in order to re-engage with this issue at individual and collective levels alike. Kristeva begins her approach to the question of suffering by seeking to render more apparent the awareness of suffering within theory, as well as that beyond its purview, and by drawing analytic attention to the anxiety that underlies both the experience of the sufferer and that of the speaker who hopes to address that pain. It is to the hidden suffering of the latter that Kristeva speaks when she says, in the course of a series of lectures on psychoanalysis and faith, in the scope of our discussion . . . is hidden perhaps not only the suffering of some personal malaise or anxiety, but the suffering of rationalism, and even of religious discourse, themselves. Let’s try simply to attend to this suffering and to open our ears to another meaning [un autre sens].5 The approach here is psychoanalytic, to be sure, but it is a psychoanalysis informed by profound respect for the pain of theoretical, political, and religious discourses and a profound sense of the linguistic and aesthetic issues at stake in representing and addressing that pain. As much of Kristeva’s foundational work in linguistics and psychology argues, the recognition of this alienation, or “suffering in theory,” depends on an awareness of the disturbances of symbolic communication itself. In order to function, languages of all kinds depend upon an abstraction from the immediate, the body, the comforts of self-identity. The pain of alienation inherent in this distancing is intensified in the second-order abstraction of philosophical and theoretical discourse, and it is intensified yet again when this second-order discourse meets its own other in the form of a strained silence or a direct expression of physical or mental pain. Such abstract discourse is very far both from appropriate affect and from an ability to elicit response. For linguistic communication to be effective as well as meaningful, that gap has to be made up; that is to say the rational, or what Kristeva would call—somewhat confusingly for an Anglophone audience—the symbolic level of language, must be rerooted

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in its matrix of bodily, emotive, and sensational experience, which she could call the semiotic level. Awareness of the sacrifices language entails, and of all it must recoup, is partly what makes speech supple, effective, full of pathos. With this recognition comes a sense not only of the rational line of discourse, but of the body and breath which support and sometimes undercut it, their energies, their dangers, and their transience. Without it, the discourse of and about suffering persons is restricted and constricted, limited either to a humble and/or complicit silence, or to their equally unsatisfying alternatives—the merely discursive, the hortatory, or prescriptive. For Kristeva, the fundamental requirement in addressing and speaking this suffering, prior even to the necessity for artistic representation, prophetic witness, and political action (all of which she would stipulate), is attention, attention to the unique, yet binding cry of distress that eventually breaks through the smooth surface of every serious discourse of mastery. This attention goes beyond the nervous awareness, the spontaneous attraction-and-repulsion we usually accord suffering that comes into our environment. Rather it is a schooled, self-aware, patient, and directed cultivation of what she calls the practice of “analytic listening.” This listening attends not only to the rational or even to the face of the other in isolation, but to their common matrix in another way of signifying, un autre sens. It is the bodily and spiritual awareness of that “other sense” that enables a speaker to recognize not only the commonality of suffering with others, but the precise, articulate, and moving web of language that both distinguishes them and holds them together in that commonality. Kristeva’s work gives a voice and with it a particularity to the face of the suffering other in Levinas, and with that voice and particularity come new potentials of address and amelioration. We may note in this respect that while Levinas’ appreciation of the asymmetry between the theorist or speaker about suffering and its victim is both appropriate and acute, the speaker is seldom if ever assumed to be a sufferer in this asymmetry. There is a tacit assumption that seems to be saying something like “philosophers have merely sought to speak about suffering; others actually undergo it.” Some such view underlies the wry smiles of complicity elicited by such phrases as “suffering in theory,” which convey a sense of the speaker’s exemption from distress. Everyone suffers here but you and me, “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère” (Baudelaire). Kristeva, however, would want to read this self-abnegating line of thought with a third ear, as the sign not of an invincible irony, hypocrisy, or philosophical mise en abyme, but of a prior repression, a kind of suffering in itself. Cannot the apparent aporia, the putative bad faith entailed by the notion of “suffering in theory,” she would want to ask, mask a suffering

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closer to home, the suffering of the speaking subject, rather than the mute (or screaming) object? In other words, what if it is the speaker’s poverty, the speaker’s physical pain, deprivation, isolation, inarticulate cry, that is at stake, not instead of but inextricably linked to that of the victimized other? This question has the power to destabilize, though not to displace, the Levinasian asymmetry, for it implies that the confrontation, the face-to-face stance of theory vis-à-vis the suffering other, might yield strangely at times to the side-by-side, generating the possibility for solidarity as well as complicity in distress. To do its work, then, theoretical discourse might attend not only to the unique features of each form and instance of suffering, but to its own pain, the pain of a verbal inadequacy and alienation which can never be entirely overcome at the rational level. As we have seen, awareness of this and other forms of hidden suffering is achieved for Kristeva by an informed attention to what she calls the semiotic as well as the symbolic levels of discourse, to the bodily rhythms, pulses, puns, breathings, coughings, cryings, screams, and whispers that form the under and overtones of rational speech. She calls this practice “analytic listening.” The term points to its base in the psychoanalytic situation, but Kristeva’s practice does not rest there. Rather, it extends this listening outward beyond the individual to social forms of suffering as well, yet always with full attention to those marginalized by “rational” discourse, to the poor in spirit, as well as the poor in body. It is here that her engagement with arts, religion, and politics begins, and it bears repeatedly on this subject, which is the suffering in language, and in its silences and gaps. Analytic listening of this kind, however, is not always either easy or risk-free, for it entails a certain openness to what we might call the contagion of suffering. Even at the sheer level of bodily identification, the sight and sound of suffering can produce a range of reactions from a change in breathing pattern through a range of sympathetic illnesses and pains to the sudden cardiac arrest of profound shock. At the social and political levels too, suffering can breed. Contact with poverty makes more poverty, as one family’s savings evaporate before a neighbor’s need; help to the exiled rebel brings self-exile in its wake. Furthermore, none of these forms of contact is a priori ethical or even stable, for each of them can modulate from solidarity to complicity very quickly depending on variables that are without the control of the one who offers aid. What if the consolation by the bedside leads to the spread of the disease? What if the help to the rebel lights the fuse of the bomb? It is this contagious quality of suffering that troubles our movement toward the sufferer by repressing our equally necessary movement away; it freezes our blood and traps the words of comfort in our throat. For Kristeva,

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coping with this contagion involves first of all the recognition of its powers; what she calls, in one of her most important books, the “powers of horror.”6 The specific form of horror she analyzes here is the horror of abjection, the collapse of subjectivity and human dignity into utter helplessness, self-eradication, and abandonment before the force of Another. This force can seem so total, so potentially death-dealing that it annihilates any possibility of resistance from the start. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva approaches the issue of suffering by means of an attempt to understand this complex phenomenon of abjection first synchronically, as a structure in the psyche, and then diachronically, as marking several stages in the history of religion, art, and to some extent, politics in the West. Her definition of abjection is intended to be evocative as well as precise. Abjection is, in her words, a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which . . . now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. . . . [T]he edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. . . . The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery . . . “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. . . . [But] I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself . . .7 The matrix of this definition lies in extreme states met within a therapeutic context, and there is a technical meaning that is important to Kristeva’s concept but does not exhaust it. For abjection has a truly liminal function in Kristeva’s view; it is a way of designating what lies at the boundary of analysis, as well as what falls within its purview: all that is truly anti- or ante-conceptual: queasy, unnerving, and destabilizing, right at the edge of the unbearable and constituting at base the utmost state of suffering we can bring ourselves to imagine. Abjection is the most horrific of all human experiences, as horrific—perhaps even, for reasons we shall have to try to understand, more horrific—to witness as to undergo. It embodies suffering in its most contagious and disturbing form, the form in which that suffering destroys human dignity, subjectivity, and the possibility of effective speech all at once and in every direction. Like sin in biblical theologies (a parallel to which we must return), abjection is that which precedes or founds the establishment of a secure subject–object distinction, and hence it is an abyss into which one can fall whenever that distinction is troubled or threatened. Once so fallen, the subject is no longer able either to challenge or to integrate into the

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violences of the system it confronts; it loses identity, gender, speech, dignity, and distinction—all interrelated functions in Kristeva’s view. Psychoanalytically, abjection is an abreaction or breakthrough of a primitive terror and passive relapse into an already existing experience of objectification or reduction to pure filth, a defilement prior to the distinction between moral and ritual impurity, self and other, parent and me. In abjection, the suffering other already dwells within me, indeed it helps to constitute the “me” that is “me.” What Kristeva calls the “discomfort, unease, dizziness” of abjection stems from an ambiguity that is fundamental to the confrontation with alterity at any level. As she says, I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be “me.” Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. 8 Kristeva captures well the dangers of confronting this otherness, pointing out that witnessing abjection before the other in abjection troubles our own sense of self as well, which is in part constituted by interaction with that other. To witness abjection is then often to become oneself abject and ethically disenabled, reduced to the babble of inarticulate repulsion. Here the issue is not only our willingness to embrace the suffering victim or see the victim’s face, but also the equal and opposite fear of our own inability to separate from that other long enough to live in ourselves in order to seek remedy. The abject, above all when it appears in the form of the suffering body of the other, “show[s] me,” as Kristeva puts is, “what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”9 And there, in the negative space created by that initial repulsion, “I” come to be. The moral and psychological ambiguity of this thrusting away and “coming to be” in the midst of abjection underlies much of the ambivalence theoreticians feel about their own address to suffering, but it is only in confronting this horror and enduring its ordeals that any speaker can achieve both the power and the pathos needed to make that address effective. Kristeva seeks precedents for this confrontation in the history of Western religious culture and art. She distinguishes three stances toward the abject in religious history: a Jewish stance involving ritual purification, a Greek one involving purification plus moral culpability, and a Christian one involving purification, moral culpability, and a subjective element of intention. Each of these cultural and religious constructs handles abjection in its own way, but as a set they describe a progressive internalizing of the abject, an increasing sense of intentional pollution

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which creates more and more extreme psychic states and efforts at restabilization. This intensification produces, for Kristeva, what she would call the modem psyche, tortured, self-abnegating, often paralyzed, but capable of producing work in which the address to suffering is at once more subjective and in some ways perhaps more fully engaged than in previous times. To be sure, this schema relies on a rather reductive view of all three religions and, even more problematically, on a dialectic that tells more about Kristeva’s inability to emerge from the shadow of Hegel than it does about cultural and religious history. Kristeva’s view of Judaism here, for instance, is so locked in a binary between Christian notions of law and grace as to seem naïve, if not biased, and her treatment of Christianity lapses all too frequently into the psychoanalytic— reductions she elsewhere makes notable efforts to avoid. Regarded as a synchronic rather than a diachronic schema, however, Kristeva’s work offers a religious wisdom here deeper than the discursive level of her argument quite indicates. Never is this wisdom more evident than when she sketches a productive and ameliorating stance toward abjection she calls “joying in the truth of self-division.” This stance involves two great and linked recognitions or affirmations, twin poles that, for Kristeva, structure every effective discursive practice: the recognition of mortality and the affirmation of effective speech. In one of her more pregnant formulations, Kristeva says, The border between abjection and the sacred, between desire and knowledge, between death and society, can be faced squarely, uttered without sham innocence or modest self-effacement, provided one sees in it an incidence of man’s particularity as mortal and speaking.10 For Kristeva, then, saving or healing speech consists in being able to say, with some semblance of significance, both “I am mortal” and “I am speaking.” The recognition of mortality entails an awareness of the limit toward which every life moves and the bedrock of common pain on which identity is constructed; the recognition of effective speech entails an active awareness of the unique position of the individual in the midst of that suffering and of the power of the web of language to support his or her identity even in the midst of that pain.11 Listening to suffering is, then, for Kristeva, only part of the process of alleviation. Its necessary complement is speaking that suffering, articulating it, and making it understood. The double braid of this kind of bodily charged speech can offer the possibility of a certain jouissance, “joying in the truth of self-division” even in the midst of suffering.

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The point that acknowledgment of our own unique confrontation with mortality and speech must be implicated in any address to suffering is, of course, not original with Kristeva; and it is more fully developed by a long line of philosophers stretching from Heidegger through Rosenzweig and Levinas to Derrida. It has analogues, as well, in Luther’s famous dictum sum simul justus et peccator—I am at once a sinner and justified— which adds to the paradox the dimension of sin and guilt in abjection, coupled with extreme jouissance in its acknowledgment, which philosophy so often elides. Kristeva’s particular contribution to this line of thought lies in the insistence that this recognition of mortality and singularity must be very closely tied not only to the sheer act of speaking but especially to the act of speaking well. In that act, Kristeva reminds us, suffering is already implicit, for in effective speech lies sacrifice—if nothing else, the sacrifice of an imaginary seamless unity with experience unbroken by distinctions, separations, or differences. Speaking well then entails articulation, and articulation entails distinction, the sometimes violent distinction of what Kristeva calls the thetic cut. At the same time, however, speech that has passed through this cut must turn again to reaffirm its connection with the body, the emotions, the image repertoire, and the rhythms of temporal and communal life; it must reconnect with appropriate affect in order to signify. It must also be able to acknowledge and enact its own limits, in direct action, in recognition of the right of response and eventually in silence. To speak well is to recognize mortality as well as power. Though she does not use the terms, Kristeva evinces here a profound and traditionally European sense of the function of all that the ancients comprised under the rubric of rhetoric, with its constituent elements of proper ethos and pathos. Appropriate pathos, according to the classical treatises on speaking well, requires energy, verbal skill, psychic investment, and wisdom, which is recognition of limits. Appropriate ethos, a related function, requires the ability to summon into play a whole matrix of values shared by speaker and audience alike in order to move both together to appropriate action and response. When present, effective ethos and pathos provide the force which draws the speaker further and further into effective solidarity with suffering even as he or she makes it the object of analysis; when absent, they render speech sterile and its impact nul and void, to the speaker’s own cost as well as that of others. The powers of rhetoric, of strong ethos and pathos, are then social as well as material, spiritual as well as rational, aesthetic as well as truthful, and they depend not only on reason and power but on deeply rooted, highly developed, and widely dispersed cultural, political, and religious values. It is here, I think, in her emphasis on speaking well that Kristeva’s

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work most strongly speaks to Gibbs’s argument, for speaking well is very much a matter of appropriate affect and of responsibility for the discursive practice that flows from one’s speaking. The kind of eloquence for which Kristeva calls with respect to suffering entails bringing into play art, religion, and politics not as mere supplements in the ornamental sense, but as an organic element of the project. This organic connection is implicit in Kristeva’s approach because the affirmations “I am mortal” and “I am speaking” must function not only as recognitions of human limit and power, but as occasions for rhetorical performance, and this in the context of the religious, esthetic, and political matrices from which they have emerged. Kristeva, like Rosenzweig, would call for a reconsideration of religious and even theological resources in the discourse of suffering, but she would understand religion less as a set of doctrinal formations or even of liturgical practices alone than as a cultural theory and practice offering communal and psychically supportive modalities for recognizing limit and handling abjection and pain. Indeed, it is in religion, and specifically in sacramental religion, it could be argued, that the supreme examples of effective address to suffering in the Western tradition may be found. Here we see semiotic and symbolic, material and spiritual levels of signification coming together, thus achieving at once the recognitions of and the endurance through suffering, abjection, and death.12 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva cites as a prime example of such performance a rather extreme and theatrical form of Christian piety involving a conspicuous public embrace of abjection. This embrace is particularly distressing to witness, partly because it is as morally and aesthetically “queasy,” to use Kristeva’s word, as it is analytically unstable. She cites as a case in point the famous dictum of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, “I am nothing, I am abject,” a conspicuous feature of her intense and disturbing spirituality. Though Kristeva does not fully make the point, such positions and performances are threatening because the abjection in them is uncontrolled and contagious, conditioned as it is by a sort of rhetorical ineptitude, an inability to “speak well,” the stance being struck or to recognize the appropriate limits or constraints of time, context, and mortality which condition this speech. Elizabeth’s is probably exactly the sort of excess of Christian piety and rhetoric that so exasperated Nietzsche and led him famously to expostulate that “to breed out of mankind a self-contradiction, an art of self-defilement, a will to lie at any cost, a revulsion, a scorn for all good and upright instincts,” as Christianity seemed to him to do, led only to “the immortal defiling of mankind.” Nietzsche here brings to bear his own powers of rhetoric to attempt to master the abjection he detects in Christianity, a mastery fueled by the very queasiness it violently abjects

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and which seemed to him contagious to the point of danger. A true sense of suffering loses out on both sides of this violent oscillation, because the expression of abjection in the discourse Elizabeth represents on the one hand and that of Nietzsche on the other is insufficiently tempered by language capable of both ethos and pathos, and of drawing on the resources and limitations of the semiotic and the symbolic at once. Neither Nietzsche nor Queen Elizabeth can “joy in the truth of self-division” in quite Kristeva’s sense. For a rather more mainstream model of the confrontation with abjection and suffering in Western religious discourse, we may turn again to Luther, who offers one of the major interventions on suffering in Christian tradition. Luther deals with suffering by means of a participatory work of the imagination he calls the theology of the cross. This spiritual practice entails regarding and speaking of suffering, particularly the public suffering of crucifixion, as in itself a healing modality not only in the life of Jesus but in the life of the believer as well. Suffering endured in the light of Christ, that is, through a form of identification rather than confrontation, can be redemptive and even glorious in this view. As Paul’s letter to the Romans puts it: We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Rom. 5:2–5) The theology of the cross as derived from this and other scriptures suggests that there is a way of speaking suffering in the midst of suffering, a way of traversing it, so to speak. This traverse depends, however, on establishing a connection between abjection and the biblical concept of sin, a concept which entails both pollution and moral guilt. “The sting of death is sin,” in the biblical phrase. Although this connection may tend toward the kind of apologetic Levinas wishes to warn against, it has advantages for the speech of suffering, for it brings into the discussion both a collective dimension to the problem—for sin is in part a collective condition—and a subject-sustaining one. This sustaining is effected precisely by linking the abject subject with the name of the Other in a way that both throws the abjection into relief and establishes contact with it. As the Pauline letter to the Colossians puts it, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church”

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(Col. 1:24). It is from this context that Luther enunciates the dictum simul justus et peccator noted above. This religious discourse may sustain identity because, as the more rigorous forms of the theology of the cross have insisted all along, it is not the suffering that is justified or made productive here, but the sufferer, not the experience of abjection but the subject of that experience. According to the theology of the cross, to be justified and redeemed, as Job himself is justified and redeemed, is not to be excused from the tribunal which deals with sin but to have triumphed within it, to have endured a trial and spoken well—which includes a recognition of abjection and of the limits of speech—within it, and thus to have moved beyond its initial charge. There is, then, in this theology, a potential transformation of suffering in the temporal dimension, in the sense that it can be changed from within—by the very act of recognizing the mortality to which it so painfully draws attention, and yet embracing, witnessing, and speaking back to it.13 This transformation is effected by a linking of the abject subject with the name of the Other, a linking in which, however, the subject is upheld not by righteous distance from his or her suffering, nor by stoic self-sufficiency, nor by counter-charge, nor even by confession, but rather by the gift of the Spirit. Simul justus et peccator, “I am both a sinner and justified,” captures this gift of dignity bestowed by the Holy Spirit in this sense, an epithet in which Luther indeed “joys in the truth of selfdivision” in an extremely transgressive way, sinner and justified, abject and upheld, in one and the same breath. Art, and especially religious art, is necessary to this stance, argues Kristeva, because it does not repress or attempt to cleanse or purge the abjection, but works with it, allowing its power—the power of horror— to contribute to the whole. In art, especially in the Christian West, the loathsome, the rejected, the decaying, and the despised, all that is not quite me and not quite other, all that confronts me as overwhelming before I know where I am, all that is particulate and disseminative, can be present together in, around, and beneath the great and fragile unities of purity, identity, and transcendence. The willingness of some traditions of Christianity to display prominently the suffering body of Christ on the cross in its sacred space is, for Kristeva, a prime example of this cultivation of abject work in action. Indeed, a speaking mortality and mortal speech are the pre-eminent qualities Kristeva perceives in much of the art of the West, the simultaneous sense of a transient and fragile being who represents the suffering of all creatures, yet from which emerges a unique form of expression of that suffering, a very particular human cry of dereliction requiring a very human practical response. Here again she is very close to Rosenzweig’s

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understanding of the role of art and liturgy in the approach to the sufferer, as aids or supplements to rational analysis in the evolution through trial of an effective subject, one capable of articulating and addressing his or her own suffering and that of others as well. Religion and art are, then, for Kristeva the great resources for abject work, and it is on these that any speaker must draw in the effort to generate appropriate affect and ethical response. To speak of art and religion in this way, however, can lead to precisely the sort of apologetic to which Levinas objects; intending to make suffering productive, we may make it seem warranted. If such theoretical recuperations ring hollow, however—and face-to-face with the suffering they must to some extent ring hollow—it is also because to speak thus only at the theoretical level, to speak without art or religion, is to lose, even when speaking about them, the pathos and obligations such address must carry to have meaning. It is to privilege the symbolic over the semiotic, to emphasize language on only one side of the thetic cut, with the consequent academic aridity and offense to the moral sense such alienation often brings in its train. At a certain point, then, both Rosenzweig and Kristeva acknowledge that to speak about suffering in meta-language, while necessary, is not sufficient to meet its ethical obligations. Mere theoretical considerations at the symbolic level, even when devoted to promoting a perfectly sympathetic and ameliorative art and religion, will always sound cheap precisely because they are theoretical. The only way to restore a lost pathos and ethos to theory is to attempt, however lamely, to embed it in a matrix from which it can be alimented; the matrix of eloquence and artful speech. Hence Rosenzweig, Gibbs reminds us, undertakes to write his Star as an aesthetic text, and hence, too, Kristeva embarks upon “Stabat Mater,” a remarkable experiment in impressionistic prose about the suffering entailed in childbirth and childrearing. “Stabat Mater” was first published in 1977 in Tel quel as “Hérétique de l’amour.”14 Here, in terms which range from Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetype through social and cultural history to theological speculation and musical allusion, Kristeva joys in the truth of a literal self-division, the act of giving birth. The text is written in two columns, one—the right—a primarily theoretical exploration of the cult of the virgin mother in Christianity, its social and psychological functions, and the other—the left—primarily a lyric meditation on childbirth and early nurture. At times, however, these modalities cross over, with passages of sheer expressionism on the more abstract and symbolically oriented right-hand column, and passages of high theory in the more semiotically oriented left. In doing so, Kristeva produces one of her most powerful texts, powerful not because it leaves theory behind—it does not—but because it seeks to hear and to speak, in terms which are not confined

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to a hyper-rationalized stance, the suffering within that theory as it confronts its own suffering other, the infant or unspeaking (Latin: infans) mother and child. The theoretical question this text seeks to answer is the question of the function of the Virgin Mary: what is there, Kristeva asks, in this figure as constructed by Western Christianity, that “reduces social anguish,” that gratifies both a male being and a female one in such a way that “a commonality of the sexes is set up, beyond and in spite of”—as she somewhat tendentiously puts it—“their glaring incompatibility and permanent warfare?” And more sharply, why do such doctrines as the Assumption of the Virgin (into heaven without passing through the gate of death) find their apotheosis in times of cultural upheaval and trauma? “What death anguish,” Kristeva asks, “was [this doctrine and its cultus, promulgated by the Vatican in 1950] intended to soothe after the conclusion of the deadliest of wars?”15 Kristeva’s answer is provisional and speculative and entails the delimiting of a structure in which sexuality and death are together sublated in the cult of Mary in ways that go beyond both Freudian and Jungian parameters, and beyond the rather reductive feminist social and political analysis given by her major source, Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex.16 Mary, Kristeva argues, serves as a pointer to the continuing species-being that underlies all symbolic discourse, and yet she keeps her devotees from relapsing into the cult of the mother goddess, negotiating female paranoia and the fantasy of retreat into a female world both by validating that world and by expressing its symbiotic interdependence with the male. This double stance continually breaks forth in the form of song, producing over and over those images of madonnas and those versions of the Stabat Mater and other musical devotions that form so major a part of the corpus of the Western religious arts. Kristeva’s theoretical position, however, is not only somewhat tentative and perhaps not intended to be taken literally; it is also only half of the double braid of her text. Next to it on the page is a direct expression of the suffering of maternity, performed, however, for what must be among the first times in literary history, from the subject position. “My body is no longer mine,” the bold-face counter-text reads, “it doubles up, suffers, bleeds, catches cold, puts its teeth in, slobbers, coughs, is covered with pimples, and it laughs.” As the left-hand braid goes on: But the pain, its pain—it comes from inside, never remains apart, other, it inflames me at once, without a second’s respite. As if that was what I had given birth to and, not willing to part from me, insisted on coming back, dwelled in me permanently. One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain; the child represents it and

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henceforth it settles in, it is continuous. Obviously you may close your eyes, cover up your ears, teach courses, run errands, tidy by the house, think about objects, subjects. But a mother is always branded by pain, she yields to it. “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too . . .”17 In writing in this way, Kristeva draws upon a highly modern aesthetic, one that foregoes the cathartic and climactic discharges of mimesis— Aristotle’s famous purgation of pity and terror through representation —for a more performative and participatory form of dramatization, a verbal stream of consciousness technique that draws upon a wide range of semiotic as well as symbolic modalities and is disseminated beyond the frame of classic norms. It is an aesthetic whose lines of development and psychological and social functions she herself traced in her earlier Revolution in Poetic Language,18 but which she here puts into practice as an intervention into theoretical discourse at once illustrative and enactive. While it has analogies to what for a time was called écriture feminine in feminist literary criticism, this way of speaking is sustained and accompanied by, is indeed dependent upon, its own stylistic Other, the formal, abstract discourse of theory—easy to caricature as “masculine” but in fact far more problematically gender-neutral—which accompanies it upon the other side of the page. The two are mutually dependent, one speaking about suffering in theory, and one enacting that suffering from the subject position, both together tearing the text in half. The result is a way of speaking that seeks to achieve both distance from and contact with suffering, a gesture at once of solidarity and analysis, participation and delimitation. Here in a sense the abstract language of theory and philosophical speculation is itself subjected to the very process called for in Luther’s theologia crucis, a process of breaking apart and refiguring in which old meanings are broken down and new ones generated. To address suffering in this way, that language is forced go beyond its own apparent terms, to undergo itself a kind of crucifixion, descending into the abject, the impure, the hybrid, the weak, the very material of bodily rhythms, sounds, and emissions which it seems constructed to repress. And yet in this process, where effective, theory is not simply racked, it is also upheld. Having undergone its own trial by fire, theory can, sometimes at least, do a kind of justice to its object, creating, beyond distance and contagion, a discursive space in which victim and witness are not opposed, but speak together of pain in solidarity before the Other that renders them abject, and yet from whose Spirit may be wrested a position that can do justice both to mortality and to speech.

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Notes 1 I am indebted to Amy Hollywood and Ellen Armour for an illuminating conversation about the ethical and social issues raised on that occasion. 2 Robert Gibbs’s paper in this volume, p. 13. 3 From an unpublished manuscript of Robert Gibbs. 4 Ibid., p. 24. 5 Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 10. 6 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 7 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 8 Ibid., p. 10. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 88. 11 Once again, there is potential scandal here, because to speak of the joy of suffering in the face of the suffering other is to skate on thin ice indeed. Some of this scandal may be ameliorated by the recognition that Kristeva is deploying the term joie here in the theoretical sense of the untranslatable French term jouissance, which is an experience of extreme sensation that dissolves the line between pleasure and pain, making this binary seem secondary. Nonetheless, there is a problem here, one thoroughly canvassed in Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), which offers, among other things, a cogent critique of Kristeva’s position on abjection in Powers of Horror as celebrating and mystifying the very collapse into abjection she seeks to analyze, if not amend. 12 I have argued this more fully elsewhere, in an essay in Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, edited by M. Kim, S. St. Ville and S. Simonaitis (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 13 This point is put forward, though not fully developed, in Douglas John Hall’s God and Human Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsberg Publishing, 1986), a current restatement of the theology of the cross. He cites Genesis 50:20: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” 14 Cited here from Toril Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 160–86. 15 Ibid., p. 163. 16 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976. 17 Stabat Mater, The Kristeva Reader, p. 167. 18 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). See Martha J. Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on women and violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) for a direct engagement between Kristevan theory and specific terms of suffering.


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The scandal of pain in childbirth1 Pamela E. Klassen

In an age of anesthesia, choosing to experience avoidable pain challenges convictions about what it is to be human and humane. Voluntary pain —a practice with long religious pedigrees—also provokes questions about the meaning of suffering. In the context of the broader theme of “suffering religion” I address a very particular kind of pain that is now voluntary, at least in North America: the pain of childbirth. In contemporary North America, experiencing the pain of childbirth is more than a simple choice; women who wish to give birth without pain-relieving drugs must often contend with medical authorities, family, and friends who advise them to do otherwise. By considering how and whether childbirth pain fits within the purview of suffering, I explore the vexed relationships among gender, religion, and pain. I suggest that contemporary North American women who choose to undergo the sensations of vaginal childbirth often turn to religious resources to make sense of their pain in a culture that would rather they deny it.2 As an anthropologist of religion my primary sources for this paper are the practices and reflections of childbearing women. My fieldwork, conducted in the north-eastern United States in the late 1990s, specifically focused on women who gave birth at home, usually with midwives in attendance. My research involved several avenues of approach, including attending midwifery clinics and study groups, attending one birth at the woman’s request, and interviewing forty-five home-birthing women. The women I met ranged across a religious landscape that included Orthodox Jews, Old Order Amish, traditional Catholics, Pentecostal Christians, Christian Scientists, liberal Jews and Christians, and those who had adopted newer traditions like Goddess spirituality or various blends of New Age spiritualities. They were mostly middle class and mostly Euro-American.3 Childbirth, in most of these women’s interpretations, was not best described as an ordeal of suffering, but instead, was an embodied, painful,

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and privileged human experience. Furthermore, I found that in choosing to experience the pain of childbirth at home—a setting where anesthesia is not available, but other modes of pain relief are, such as human touch and warm water—these women often turned to religious interpretations to describe and make sense of the sensations of childbirth.4 In what follows I explore what this voluntary pain and this positive evaluation of childbirth reveal about the connections between religion and suffering in contemporary America. Home-birthing women’s commitment to experience the avoidable pain of childbirth in a culture that is generally pain-averse generates a combination of condemnation and awe from several quarters. This is perhaps not surprising in a world where, in the words of anthropologist Talal Asad, “the infliction of physical pain [has] now become scandalous.”5 According to Asad, the religiously motivated pain of the ascetic or martyr is now seen as a premodern oddity that evokes moral condemnation. Pain is destructive to the human subject in this view, and when it can be done away with, it should be. Though it is unclear just who inflicts pain in the case of childbirth, for home-birthing women in North America the scandal of pain in uncomplicated childbirth is its denial and erasure through drugs, and the concomitant erasure of the subjectivity that the embodied experience of childbirth can potentially cultivate. Simone, a labor and delivery nurse turned Presbyterian seminary student, described this subjectivity with particular eloquence. Simone was among the five or so liberal, feminist Christians in my study.6 Her evocative interpretation of the pain of childbirth drew from her religious tradition and from her personal experiences of giving birth twice with the help of midwives—the first time in a hospital and the second time at home. Describing birth as a process of “sliding around” between pain and pleasure, Simone gave the pangs of childbirth an explicitly theological meaning: I remember, in labor with [my first daughter]: “I’m standing in the face of God.” I mean, “I am creating,” in a way that was more immediate and intense than anything I’ve ever experienced. And it was wonderful, and it was awful also. And I think that when you read Scripture that talks about, in such traditional language, the fear of God was among them, and you know, they trembled at his awesome terribleness, and all of these words that are actually negative, and frightening, and it’s because they don’t have other language to explain what they feel in the face of the divine. And so to me, that’s sort of the pain, is the coming up against something so much more divine than anything—any other experience.


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As part of a larger alternative childbirth movement that has worked towards decreasing drug use in both the home and hospital, Simone and other home-birthing women have tried to reclaim childbirth pain as a source of meaning, instead of viewing it as something to be avoided. In the process, they often make recourse to religiously inflected language that describes newfound knowledge of self, and sometimes tells of renewed or novel intimacy with deities and loved ones. Their experiences and interpretations of pain bring forth important questions about the relationship between agency and pain, especially in terms of the pain of childbirth, so intensely infused with a long history of gendered, religious meanings.

Pain, suffering, and agency Before turning to these women’s narratives in more detail, I want to sort out some key terms for my analysis, namely, what I mean by pain, suffering, and agency. For my purposes here, I use pain in the sense of an uncomfortable, or even agonizing, bodily sensation, but one that is at the “intersection of biology and culture”7 (as probably all bodily sensations are). In this paper I consider pain to be open to interpretation, though not necessarily invested with moral undertones. Suffering, on the other hand, does seem to convey a moral evaluation of sorts, for three possible reasons. One, suffering implies a certain consciousness of pain —a kind of delayed, second-order reflection on the bodily experience. Two, suffering conveys a greater potential for agency than pain: one may suffer, endure, or bear pain, often (but not necessarily) for a greater cause than oneself. Finally, there is a long history in many religious traditions of interpreting suffering in theological and communal terms, at times positing a connection between suffering and heavenly reward for a group or individual, and other times emphasizing its meaninglessness.8 Within this understanding of suffering the act of bearing children would seem to be an apt example of enduring pain on behalf of another, but the blurred boundaries between mother and baby in pregnancy and childbirth complicate the neat division between self and other, collapsing conventional boundaries of identity, at least temporarily. Agency, seemingly perched at the juncture between pain and suffering as I am discussing them here, is a similarly tricky concept. A central category in much anthropological writing of late, agency is a concept that, like pain and suffering, has a beguiling obviousness to it, but that requires more focused critical attention. Again, to cite Talal Asad writing in another context, That the human body has a changing life largely inaccessible to itself, that in various ways its behavior depends on unconscious routine

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Pamela E. Klassen and habit, that emotion, though necessary to every kind of reasoning, may render the ownership of actions a matter of conflicting descriptions—all of this problematizes both the intentionalist claim that the embodied subject is essentially engaged in resisting power or becoming more powerful, as well as the connected claim that the moral agent must always bear individual responsibility for her act. It also problematizes the larger assumption that agency must be defined, in the final analysis, by a historical future of universal emancipation from suffering.9

The changing life—or lives—of the pregnant and birthing body are, to borrow from Asad, largely inaccessible, although increasingly less so with the burgeoning of reproductive technologies. Part of what homebirthing women seek in choosing a less medicalized approach to birth is a preservation of this inaccessibility—what in some cases is labeled the “animality” of birth, in both positive and derogatory ways. Ironically, in light of Asad’s contention, these women must choose to retain the unconscious body—they forgo emancipation from the suffering of birth for the sake of their babies and themselves. This willed experience of pain shades into asceticism in a culture where pain-relieving drugs are the dominant strategy for dealing with the pains of childbirth.10 The agency within this willed pain, however, is complicated in the context of childbirth, since the event of childbirth is peculiarly involuntary—the pace and process of birth are largely unpredictable, despite how well a woman prepares herself. Though to give birth is an increasingly intentional act for middle-class women in North America due to improved access to birth control and abortion, home-birthing women downplay intentionality in the actual process of birth.11 Instead, they seek to allow the involuntary contractions of the birthing body to do their work with the least amount of intervention possible.

The politics and pain of birth Home birth is a contested practice in the contemporary U.S., where very few certified nurse-midwives (those who are trained in nursing and midwifery) and fewer doctors attend home births. Direct-entry midwives (those who are not nurses and are trained in midwifery schools and by apprenticeship) are the majority of care providers for home-birthing women, and are considered to be either illegal or alegal in many states (as was the case in one of the the states in which I did my fieldwork).12 In this hostile, or at least controversial, environment, those critical of home birth argue that it is unsafe and that a woman who chooses it is acting irresponsibly or selfishly.13 As one scholar put it, “A woman’s interest in


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an aesthetically pleasing or emotionally satisfying birth should not be satisfied at the expense of the child’s safety.”14 In this view, giving birth in the hospital with the latest in obstetrical technology at hand is the only responsible choice. Given these contexts, choosing to give birth at home is often a substantial financial commitment for a woman since insurance often does not cover the costs, and a significant personal commitment given the strong possibilities of family, community, or even legal censure. As such, women’s decisions to give birth at home often stem out of more broadly based yet deeply held convictions about who should control their bodies and what their bodies can teach them. These convictions are often explicitly rooted in religious traditions and political stances that contain prescriptions for appropriate gender roles ranging from wifely submission to feminist empowerment. The birthing body is thus a site for quite self-conscious meaningmaking in the case of home birth. As such, the pain of childbirth is a most pressing resource that allows for a variety of interpretations, while confounding some common scholarly approaches to pain. Scholarly treatises on pain seem often to share a fundamental position: pain is a private and lonely experience of the individual.15 Unlike the more general descriptions of pain offered by some scholars, for these home-birthing women the pain of childbirth was not a sensation that obliterated pleasure or severed connection to other human beings. Instead, many of these women understood the pain of childbirth to have opened them to connection with others, and even in some cases to have brought multiple forms of pleasure. For some, childbirth pain sparked visionary experiences. In her work on “the body in pain,” Elaine Scarry suggested that pain was inherently isolating because of its inexpressibility. According to Scarry, “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”16 One of the quandaries arising from the inability to share pain, in Scarry’s interpretation, is that for the sufferer pain produces certainty—one is sure of one’s pain—but for the observer, pain produces doubt—is that person really in such pain? Though Scarry did not discuss childbirth pain in her declaration of pain’s unsharable nature, she did make recourse to childbirth to describe the creativity that she argued stemmed from the vulnerability and pain of the body.17 In keeping with Scarry, many home-birthing women understand childbirth and its pain as a meaning-making process leading to multiple kinds of creation that transform the birthing woman, as Simone so boldly stated. The pain of childbirth as interpreted by laboring women, however, does not necessarily fit Scarry’s description of pain, in that it is not always considered

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unsharable or provoking of skepticism. Even before these women began the creative process of “telling a story”18 of their pain, they felt they shared it with other human beings and deities. A reading of Scarry thus provokes the question of what, if anything, makes the pain of childbirth different from other kinds of pain? Some of the difference lies in the “rhythm” of childbirth pain—wavelike and with a determined end. As well, childbirth pain is not necessarily the obliterating pain that Scarry describes both because of its usually joyful purpose and because it can evoke communication that is wordless— whether between a woman and another person, or a woman and her god. Home-birthing women’s reintroduction of explicitly religious language to describe childbirth takes place in a biomedical culture that has largely foresworn a long history of giving religious meaning to childbirth pain. The act of assigning meaning to childbirth pain aligns home-birthing women with nineteenth-century clergy and doctors who linked childbirth pain to biblical injunctions about women’s suffering, while distancing them from early-twentieth-century feminist birth activists who sought to avoid pain altogether in the drugged amnesia of “twilight sleep.”19 Nineteenth-century arguments, whether for or against anesthesia, drew on the notion that pain (and its overcoming) held profound meanings that could not be explained by merely documenting a physical process of muscles and nerves. Late-twentieth-century discourses of alternative childbirth, shaped by feminism in multiple ways, echo this valuing of pain as a source of meaning.20 While the language is not always so explicitly theological, in contemporary home-birthing women’s accounts childbirth pain is often invested with the power to grant women understanding of their gods, their intimate relationships, and themselves. Furthermore, in seeking new ways to talk of the pain of childbirth, these women find it difficult to draw a distinct line between pain and pleasure. In what follows, I turn to home-birthing women’s stories of pain, pleasure, and relationship to assert that for these women childbirth pain is a source of physical creation and religious reflection. I further suggest that such pain can become a form of what historian Caroline Walker Bynum called the “generativity” of suffering.21 For many reasons, including feminist ones, thinking of suffering as generative is an admittedly ambivalent and potentially dangerous step. This is especially so if the idea of generative suffering is used not to make sense of one’s own suffering but to justify another’s, in what Robert Gibbs calls the “asymmetry of suffering.” Citing Levinas, Gibbs describes this asymmetry as “the scandal which would occur by my justifying my neighbor’s suffering.”22 The scandal of pain for the critics of home birth, however, is not that it is suffering justified by another, but that it is avoidable pain


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generally conceived as useless suffering by a biomedically shaped culture with the tools to eradicate it. Some women’s insistence to interpret the sensations of childbirth as generative suffering, not scandalous pain, is what I trace here.

Stories of pain and pleasure Among the women in my study, giving birth without drugs was one of the foremost reasons they chose home as the site for birthing—without the possibility of an epidural or a dose of demerol in the home environment, the temptation to turn to drugs in the midst of intense pain was obviated. Often, the primary reason women I spoke with gave for choosing an unmedicated birth was a desire to keep the baby free from the influence of drugs, since all drugs cross the placenta, and can have a variety of effects, including reducing oxygen to the baby, interfering with the establishment of breastfeeding, and potentially causing brain damage.23 A second, and sometimes equally important, reason for foregoing drugs during birth rested in the desire of some women to experience fully the sensations of birthing. For these women, pain also held more profound meanings that connected them with a power they felt only came through birth. Though all of the women in my study felt pain was an unavoidable part of giving birth, they held different interpretations of the meaning of this pain. Some considered the pain as something one simply had to endure (especially the Amish women), others saw it as something to surmount, often through spiritual resources (especially the Christian Scientists). For others, birthing ran currents of pleasure through their entire body, a sensation which some compared to orgasm.24 In this paper, I focus mainly on this last group—those who exulted in birth. After discussing this approach to the sensations of childbirth, I then examine a very common theme within the women’s stories: being supported by family members and friends in the midst of childbirth pain brings a woman into deeper intimacy with the people she loves. In the stories I was told, these people included husbands, midwives, adolescent daughters, young sons, and the newborn baby her or himself. In some cases, this deepening intimacy extended to include deities of one kind or another. Marianne Martin, a traditional Catholic and veterinarian, was a woman who sought to endure the pain of childbirth, but who also felt some pleasure in the process.25 Both her endurance and her pleasure were tied into a sense of childbirth as a particularly spiritually charged time. Marianne, 38, had her first baby by emergency Cesarian section, and her last two babies at home with direct-entry midwives. Marianne connected her endurance to explicitly religious resources:

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Pamela E. Klassen At the beginning of [my daughter’s] labor, I remember I was starting to feel pain with contractions. I had never had a vaginal birth, so I was afraid. Kind of like “I hope it works out.” But I remember [my midwife], once I started feeling pain—they were in the kitchen, and I said: “I’m starting to feel pain. Is there something I should be doing? Like should I do some positions?” She says, “No, that’s part of it.” [My midwife] said, “The more pain you feel, the more effective your contractions are becoming, and the more your labor is progressing. So that’s normal.” So I said, “Okay, that’s cool. I’ll do it. I’ll deal with it then.” So then I just prayed. I just pictured Jesus on the cross, and I said, “You put up with a lot of pain on the cross and let me offer my pain up with yours and help me to endure it.” So it wasn’t really an official prayer, it was just like a little prayer.

Offering her pain in an improvised prayer alongside that of Jesus helped Marianne to feel that her pain had meaning beyond that of birthing her baby. Marianne further extended her understanding of what she called the “good meaning of suffering” by saying that in her second home birth she was “offering up my pain to make it useful [for] . . . the souls in purgatory, people that I know have died, and other people in the world that need help.” In Marianne’s interpretation, the good suffering of birth makes a woman a companion to the crucified Jesus in bringing compromised souls everlasting life—not an insignificant task for someone who believes in a theology of redemptive suffering. Echoing the birth imagery of earlier women mystics in her Catholic tradition, but with a twist, Marianne transformed her real birthing body into a metaphorical site of passion.26 Just as a medieval woman mystic found unparalleled pleasure in the midst of her suffering so too did Marianne find that with her embrace of pain came sensations she considered pleasurable. She described her second baby’s birth this way: With her, she never went through the thing where they crown, and they tip their heads, their head comes out, and their body comes out. She came out in a swoosh of water. It was so neat. I felt her little fingers and her little toes coming right through my birth canal. I could feel everything because it was so—I guess because it wasn’t slow, you know, move-stop, move-stop, move-stop. It was like a smooth, sudden motion, and it just felt like blup-blup-blup, like I felt the whole thing come out.


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Though she had to endure pain before her daughter finally was born, for Marianne, simultaneously feeling her own body and her daughter’s in that last moment before the baby left her womb was a delight that she continued to hold clear in her memory. As such, Marianne’s experience crossed the blurry line between women who “endure” and “exult in” the pains of birth. The notion that within pain can be pleasure is a difficult and pervasive problem in human experience generally, and within feminist theory more specifically. Though not all home-birthing women would share Marianne’s understanding or experience of the value and even pleasure in pain, many would assert that in enduring the pain of birth, a woman can bring forth a healthier baby, learn more about herself in the process, and be readier to engage in the pleasures of meeting her baby face-to-face. As Marianne showed when she spoke of feeling her daughter’s tiny fingers leaving her birth canal, women who sought to endure pain were sometimes the same ones who found giving birth to be pleasurable. Though none of the women I interviewed experienced childbirth as solely a pleasurable sensation, many, in struggling to find language to describe the bodily experience of birth, tried to infuse the word pain with positive connotations, or with pleasure itself. Nell Reid, 37 and mother of two, attends a United Methodist church, as well as “spiritual growth” workshops together with her husband. Nell acknowledged that the contractions during her births did hurt at times, but pain was not the word she preferred to describe her experience. Instead, she described the sensations of birth as “intense.” In addition to shaping her experience by changing the language she used to describe labor, Nell tried to deal with the intensity of birth by layering on top of the contractions an affirmation suggested to her by her sister-in-law: “God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle. You’ll only get as much as you can handle, and it’s just one contraction.” Even though the God of her affirmation gave her so much that she decided to go to the hospital near the end of her first birth, after a second, successful home birth, Nell felt her births were best encapsulated not by pain, but by “exhilaration.” Another woman, Carrie Ryan, a 36-year-old charismatic Christian, sought to redefine the sensation of childbirth not in terms of the presence of pleasure but in terms of the absence of pain. Carrie was convinced that painless childbirth was possible, even though she had not experienced it herself. Carrie had given birth at home to four children with the help of direct-entry midwives. Her first two births occurred prior to her being “saved” and her last two afterwards. Part of her confidence in painless birth stemmed from her reading of the Bible, specifically the passage Isaiah 53:4, 5 which states of (what many Christians read as) the

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messiah: “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”27 As well, Carrie understood Galatians 3:13, which reads, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” to be further evidence of the possibility of painless childbirth. More tangible evidence of a religiously inspired painless childbirth for Carrie was the birth story of her friend, who had given birth to her first child under hypnosis, but then was born again and realized that hypnosis “was no longer an option for her any longer, [because] she knew it clearly violated her understanding of the Word of God.” As Carrie told me, her friend “started daily speaking the Word over her body,” namely Isaiah 53:4, 5 and Galatians 3:13: “Every single day, many times during the day, she would speak that, and then she birthed without pain.” While Carrie was convinced that these daily recitations worked for her friend, and she tried them herself, Carrie felt that the pain she experienced during her “unsaved” births kept her from having sufficient faith to birth without pain.28 Despite the fact that her births turned out differently, Carrie hopefully affirmed, “I believe that as somebody renews their mind, that as they grow in the things of God, that [painless childbirth] is absolutely a possibility.” The self-recrimination that Carrie verged on in describing her lack of faith shows one of the potential dangers in attributing potent meanings to pain: if one’s body does not “line up” with one’s faith (as Carrie put it), then is one to feel failure? When such deeply held beliefs are tied to surmounting pain, is a woman shamed if she screams out in pain, or as Christian Scientist Judy Woodman put it, “the body screams so loudly” that the mind just cannot control it? These vexing questions are always on the shadow side of finding meaning in pain or the absence of pain. As Carrie showed in her honest appraisal of childbirth pain, the ability to redefine pain was put to one of its greatest tests in childbirth. Alison Lindt-Marliss, 40 and the mother of three children whom she home-schools, spoke most ardently about the pleasure of childbirth. Alison grew up a Catholic, married a Jewish man, and was beginning to attend a Reform synagogue more regularly at the insistence of her adolescent daughter. She described the birth of her second child (her first home birth) with recourse to Michel Odent’s Birth Reborn:29 Basically, once I was dilated, there was just a pause, and then he was born. I pushed twice, and it was a sensation that was so powerful, my whole body was tingling, and it was a very sensual experience to me. Michel Odent describes that, it’s almost like an orgasm, but not sexual. I don’t know how you do it, but it’s just like, “waah!” And right after he was born, I said, “I’ve got to do that again.” I didn’t want another child or anything at that time, but I just went, “I have


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to do this again.” It was so powerful. He came out, he shot out, and I was squatting like this, and I had [one midwife] in front of me at that time, and [the other midwife] got behind me, and she said she really had to hustle to catch that baby. Alison differentiated the sensuality of her experience from sexuality as she tried to find a way to speak of the pleasures of childbirth. In her dissatisfaction with the language of orgasm or sexuality, Alison’s struggle to find the right words evokes Luce Irigaray’s notion of female pleasure as jouissance: “a passage or a bridge between what is most earthly and what is most celestial.”30 Generating jouissance through childbirth is a radical act, especially within a culture of male-centered sexuality that has divorced maternal and religious aspects of the body from its eroticism. With similar reservations over its aptness, Olivia Eldrich, a secular Jewish woman with New Age interests, also referred to the pleasure of orgasm to describe the pain of childbirth: [The pain] just was everything. It was deep, it was very deep. It was almost like an orgasm, where you don’t feel anything, except at the moment. And I wish it were as pleasurable [laughs] . . . I would sort of, between contractions, kind of slip away into another dimension, and I kind of would feel them knocking at the door again, the contractions, and I thought—is this really going to be a contraction? . . . It was the same pattern as an orgasm. You’re kind of catching, and then you’re really catching on, but then maybe this one is not going to be as bad, but oh, here it comes a little harder. But you don’t remember—the feeling doesn’t come back in your mental recollection of it, thank God. Remembering her daughter’s birth Olivia filtered the sensation of pain through the sensuality of orgasm and the intimacy of smell: “I remember the smell of [my daughter’s] birth. It smelled like the earth and the ocean, and hot pretzels [laughs]. Salt . . . it was great.” The somewhat ambivalent mingling of sensuality, sexuality, and pain in childbirth can take on religious significance for women who ponder the creativity inherent in giving birth, as American poet Sharon Olds does in her poem “The Moment when Two Worlds Meet:” . . . that is the center of life, that moment when the juiced bluish sphere of the baby is sliding between the two worlds, wet, like sex, it is sex, it is my life opening back and back . . .31

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The meeting of two worlds in childbirth, in the form of the baby who is both of the mother and of the world, can be a powerfully transforming time for a woman, and one filled with sometimes contradictory sensations of pleasure, pain, sexuality, and relief.32 Sharon Olds’ poetic words find a remarkable parallel in Simone Taylor’s description of “sliding” between pain and pleasure. Simone, the former nurse and now seminary student whom I quoted earlier, is the daughter of a scientist father. A self-described feminist, Simone partly turned to biology to understand the significance of birth pain, but ultimately relied on her mother’s more theological explanation to make sense of the pain: [my mother’s] feeling is, we were made to do this work, and it’s not easy, and it’s inherently painful, and it’s part of the—pain and pleasure are a continuum, and without the pain, there would not be the pleasure, we wouldn’t have a place to slide around, and that this is just an intense experience of pain. It’s also an intense experience of pleasure, and joy and hope. And so theologically, I think I would look at the pain, if I was being really pressed to look at it positively, which is a good thing to do, I would say that the pain is part of the glory, or the tremendous mystery of life. And that if anything, it’s kind of a privilege to stand so close to such an incredible miracle. And that there’s pain involved because it’s such a tremendous event, that it’s like, it’s like living in a different dimension briefly. And that it’s a painful process, because it’s like two worlds colliding. Simone drew from biblical sources to meld the agony of pain with the ecstasy of creation, making birth a visionary—perhaps mystical— experience for her. Though Simone recalled feeling such visionary highs during her midwife-attended hospital birth four years ago, a few weeks after her second birth, this time at home, she recalled feeling somewhat more “earthbound.” Meg Alexander, 37 and mother of two, who was in the process from switching from a Presbyterian to a Unitarian church, had an experience opposite to Simone’s. Meg’s second birth had taken place at home three years earlier, and followed a traumatic first birth in hospital by Cesarian section: [My home birth] was the most rewarding hard work. It was so satisfying. The pain—people judge things on the amount of pain, they’re totally disregarding a lot of other things that are going on at the same time. I experienced tremendous pain after the Cesarian. But it was a hundred times worse because there was no one there to share it with me, no one. I was alone in recovery. No one was telling me what


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was happening. I had no idea what was happening, or why. I thought for sure I was dying. And it was pain caused because somebody had cut me open. And because somebody had ripped my baby away from me. And there was just nothing good about that kind of pain. And no support, no explanation, nothing. It was just pain by itself, pain. But this pain, it was like, oh! Poets—I read poetry describing that feeling at that moment. I can remember how she put it, something like, “the universe giving its whole to you.” And you feel like the universe is moving through you, and if you just let it, and trust it. And you’re only a human being, so if it breaks you, it breaks you. But what’s more important is if you let that move through you. You know you watch this cyberspace, and Deep Space Nine, my son likes to watch that. You know it’s awesome watching that spaceship travel through space, you like to imagine that’s like the speed of light? Well, that’s pretty awesome but it’s just as awesome to feel labor passing through your body. And it’s the same thing. You know, it’s the universe. You may not see—it’s not outer space with all the stars, but it’s human beings creating life. It’s a different thing but it’s the same thing. It’s the universe right through your body. And at that moment that’s what I felt like, I felt like, and I knew, that this is a really miraculous thing that is happening to me, and I don’t care how much it hurts, because this is a once in a lifetime thing. And I just felt so honored to be able to feel that. Poetry, “Star Trek,” and embodied memory conjoined in Meg’s description of how the pain of childbirth without drugs propelled her to an expansive, if not transcendent, feeling of being an honored participant in a miracle, poised between the earthly and the celestial. Like Simone and Meg, Christina Upton also felt that giving birth was a privileged human experience. A veterinarian who grew up Lutheran, married an Orthodox Jew, and now attends a Reconstructionist synagogue with her family, Christina drew a direct link between the pain of birth and a distinctly female empowerment: Birth pain is the most intense pain I’ve ever felt. It makes you cry, it makes you feel like you’re going to die, but the moment the baby’s out, it’s ecstasy. It’s like you hit a peak, you hit a valley, the most intense peaks and valleys of life were all right there in those moments of birth, and it’s very empowering. It makes you feel so wonderful, and there’s nothing greater. You have such an array of emotions with your birth—joy and sorrow and anger and pain and frustration and it’s very . . . it’s wonderful. I guess that’s how I would describe it. But birth pain is empowering, it makes you feel so good about yourself.

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Christina asserted that allowing the pain “to motivate your body to give birth to this child” gave her a sense of being connected both to “the cycle of life” and to God. For all of these women who experienced the pleasure and empowerment of giving birth, being surrounded by supportive midwives, family, and friends was part of what transformed the pain of birth and allowed them to “trust it,” in Meg’s words. The privilege of giving birth, for these middle-class women at least, was also undergirded by a medical system that they could count on to help them should they need it, a fact they all acknowledged. Electing unmedicated childbirth in a home that a woman finds comforting and safe while surrounded by caregivers she trusts (and can afford to pay) is a choice that is shaped by other experiences of pain that may not provide the same rewards as childbirth. If a woman lives with pain in the rest of her life, whether caused by biology, racism, or economic hardship, celebrating the pain of childbirth may not seem a path to personal fulfillment. As Emily Martin observed of her research, “middle class women . . . commonly said that they were seeking an aesthetically beautiful or spiritual experience of birth. In contrast, working-class women emphasize more often what they see as the substantial reality of birth: its extreme pain.”33 Like all interpretation, interpreting pain is a socially located practice, in both systemic and more intimate ways. I turn now to those more intimate spheres, where, in these women’s stories of birth, their relationships transformed the pain they experienced in a solitary body from a private agony to a shared suffering.

Pain and relationship The majority of women considered their husbands to be their greatest supporters in the midst of labor—they did not consider their husbands skeptics, and even in some cases considered them participants in the pain. For some women, being in constant physical touch with their husbands—often to the exclusion of verbal contact—was necessary to endure the pain of contractions. Often a woman spoke of prearranged plans for the husband to catch the baby being waylaid since she could not bear for her husband to move from the position in which he supported her—as she reclined into his lap, hung her arms around his shoulders as they stood, or even, in one case, as he held her aloft from under the arms. The pain of labor was literally shared through bodies, as men emerged from their roles as supporters with sore muscles and aching backs. Alison Lindt-Marliss, who earlier used the language of orgasm to describe her second birth, asserted that the people who surrounded her as she gave birth precluded the need for drugs. Alison felt that drugs took


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away from the possibility of sharing pain and of others having faith in a woman’s ability to birth: I realized that when . . . people are saying, “oh, here have an episiotomy, or here, have this drug,” they’re saying that instead of saying, “here, I’ll rub your back through this contraction, here, I’ll do this for you.” So they’re giving you a substitute of the care, of the nurturing. They’re giving you a machine, or a drug, instead of their love. And the women that I had with me, and my husband, and some friends, I knew would just give me the love. And that’s what you need: somebody going, “you’re doing a great job Alison.” That’s what they did: “You’re doing a great job. One more contraction, you can do it. Anyone can do one more contraction.” As opposed to the nurses going, “She’s not getting anywhere, doctor.” [laughs] Who can birth under those circumstances? Sure, give me the drug. Obviously, I can’t do it. But the midwife’s going, “You’re doing great, you’re going to see that baby soon. You’re opening up.” It’s a whole different atmosphere. Alison felt that of all the people at her birth, her husband was especially capable of sharing her pain. Alison described her relationship with her husband during her third birth: I felt so connected to him. We were so much in love. I remember, because [this baby] was the last, I felt like one, I felt we were united. We were birthing this baby together. He was holding me up, he was like a tree . . . that image of him as the tree, and I was just holding on to him and bringing this new life. It enhanced our relationship, very much. We have a good relationship anyway, but it was just such a bond. It’s one of those over-used words today, but the connection was so intense and deep—very powerful, that he was just there with me the whole time. Alison, a self-described feminist, felt childbirth was a particularly “spiritual” time that strengthened the mutuality of her relationship with her husband.34 From a different and more explicitly religious perspective Pentecostal Carrie Ryan voiced a similarly evocative image of the support she felt she received from her husband during childbirth: [My husband] was wonderful. He was so supportive, he was there to encourage me, to speak life to me, to hold me when I wanted to be held, to just be there. To pray for me, when I got to the point

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Pamela E. Klassen where I could just literally no longer pray myself. He was just praying, and putting his lips right to my ear and just speaking the Word of God to me to keep me encouraged. I said to him afterwards— I get teary-eyed when I think about it—but one time he came into the shower and it was literally Jesus with skin on. He just stood there, and it was Christ. I know He dwells in me, and I know He’s omnipresent. I know He’s there, I know that the presence of God was there, I knew that, but it was literally like having Him in bodily form, standing right next to me, and it was just strengthening at that time when you really need it.

Not only did Carrie hear the words of her husband’s prayer, she also envisioned him as the embodiment of Christ—she turned metaphor into presence. Earlier in our conversation, Carrie had paralleled her experience of birth to God’s experience of separation from his son on the cross—seeing her husband as Jesus with skin on, Carrie drew her husband into an expiatory drama in which he shared her pain in what for her, were real and tangible ways. The notion that her husband could tangibly affect her bodily experience of pain was also shared by Carrie’s fellow charismatic Christian Janet Stein. In Janet’s experience, her husband’s prayers have taken away her pain. She described her experience of being healed of pain by his prayer during her birth and an earlier miscarriage. In her words: “He prayed, and I don’t know how fast, whether it was minutes, or it was within the hour: no more pain.” According to Janet, the power her husband has to alleviate her pain stems in part from love, as Alison also asserted in the context of her birth. For Janet, however, her husband’s power also emerges from his position as the “head” of his wife. Whereas Janet’s and Carrie’s experiences of their husbands’ ability to share in, if not remove, their pain were tied into models of marital hierarchy, Alison’s experience was based in a model of mutuality. For all three women, the presence of their husbands, whether in the flesh or through prayer, evoked a change in their bodies, transforming their pain into connection. While for many women going through the pain of giving birth at home strengthened their connections to their husbands (and for some, gave their husbands new respect for them), for others giving birth underscored their individuality, whether in the form of aloneness or independence. For women with male partners, men are always a part of birth either by their absence or their presence. Relationships to husbands were not the only conduits for changing pain into connection. Ties to midwives, children, and deities were also mediums for the transformation of pain, and often in unexpected ways. For example,


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Christina Upton, the veterinarian now attending a Reconstructionist synagogue, found herself calling on Jesus in the midst of the most “excruciating pain:” I kept crying out, “Jesus, give me strength. Jesus, help me get this baby out.” I used Jesus a lot. I grew up in it. I would say I am a Christian and do talk about Jesus a lot. Even though I am not sure where I stand in terms of my relationship with Jesus right now, it was so much ingrained in me and so much a part of me, I think that Jesus was there with me and he was helping me give birth. For Christina, calling on Jesus in the rest of her life was not always an act of piety, however, since “I might swear sometimes and take the Lord’s name in vain. I grew up with that, too!” But this entreaty to Jesus was different: “this was just crying out for help, and my Christian roots are deep. They’re ingrained. I have a Hebrew husband, but I still feel that deep tug of Christianity.” The depth of her religious roots were plumbed in the midst of birth in part because of the depth of the pain. Christina offered a frank appraisal: I liked the pain least, the excruciating pain of that last, of the final moments, it’s terrible and I liked that least. But on the flip side of that, if I didn’t know that depth of pain, I wouldn’t have known that depth of joy either. It’s part of life. Finding intense joy and developing a strong bond with another was part of Joanna Katz’s experience of childbirth pain as well. Joanna, a Reform Jew and mother of four, told a particularly moving story about Adrienne, her oldest daughter, at the home birth of her last child: when I was really in pain and I was trying to hang on to my bed, and get up and get down, and squat, and just try to get through the contractions, my oldest daughter got really upset. And she went out of the room, because she kept coming up to check on me, and ask if I needed anything. And I kept saying, “No, I don’t need anything. I’m just really not feeling well and I’m really in pain.” And she went and she sat down on our stairs, on the top of our stairs, and she started to cry. And she was really upset. And I didn’t know any of this until afterwards. And the midwife and Elise told me. And Elise went over and checked her. Elise was our birth coach—birth assistant—she helped with our kids. And she sat down with Adrienne, and she said, “You know, mommy’s going to be O.K. This will pass. It takes a while, but . . . this

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Pamela E. Klassen is the end, this is the beginning of the end. And I know you’re really upset, do you want to talk about it?” And Adrienne said no. Because Adrienne’s not a very verbal child. She’s a very quiet, sedate child. And she’s fairly mature for her age. And she just sat down and she said, “I just need to be here right now. And I’m upset but I’ll be O.K.” And they said, “You know you can be strong for yourself as well as for mom. And I know you’re upset, but you also know, trust me, if you need to cry, it’s O.K.” And Elise said, “With that, she got up, she pulled herself together.” She said, “I’ll be fine.” She got up and came in and held my hand through the rest of my labor. She sat there and did not let go of it. And I squeezed her hand so tight. I kept joking, “Oh, Adrienne, I’m going to break your fingers!” Because I mean I was squeezing her hand so tight, it was really incredible. And she just got this inner strength, that to me was amazing, just amazing. And she did not leave my bedside. And she was brushing my hair. Like a mother would do to a child. She was just stroking my head, and just holding my hand, and saying, “It’s O.K. mom, its almost over. The midwife’s here, we’re all here with you. And it’s going to be over soon.” And even when the other kids were getting excited when I started to push her out, and they started to see the head crown and stuff, she just sat there and she just held onto me, so tight. And it was just an incredible bonding between me and Adrienne.

Several women echoed Joanna’s story of the bonding that she felt with her daughter as a result of her last baby’s birth. One woman described her 9-year-old daughter, who helped the midwives catch the baby, as the “best natural support person . . . Every once in a while she would ask if there’s anything that she could do, in such a sweet, kind, loving way. You felt the love just pour.” As with women’s descriptions of their husbands as trees or Christ, in talking of their children women described their emotions as tangible entities, “pouring” forth in the intensely physical context of birth. Their stories suggest that childbirth pain, in part because of its short duration and usually happy outcome but also due to its physical and emotional depths, can act as a chrysalis in which the scandal of pain becomes the intensifying of relationship.

Pain and power The generally positive interpretations home-birthing women gave to their pain suggest some difficult questions. Does suffering childbirth pain in the age of anesthesia suggest unnecessary martyrdom or a spiritualizing of


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suffering? Do problematically essentialized views of women’s childbearing role lie beneath the view of pain as empowering? Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a Reconstructionist Jew and Hebrew Bible scholar asserted that, contrary to spiritualizing suffering, experiencing the pain of birth “prevents people from totally spiritualizing the birth and the baby.”35 She continued: “the pain brings women more fully into their bodies, ready to feel both the effort and the ecstasy with all their being.”36 Jeannine Parvati Baker, a self-described “shamanic midwife,” endorsed the ecstasy of childbirth even more heartily, declaring that “all those years of orgasms” were good practice for birthing her baby. For Parvati Baker, the kind of ecstasy childbirth engenders has religious parallels, or is religious itself, as she asserts when describing the act of pushing her baby “down into that space just before orgasm when we women know how God must have felt creating this planet.”37 Other authors are less convinced. A more guarded voice is that of pain specialist Dr. Ronald Melzack, who concluded that labor pain was one of the most severe types of pain, but that the severity differed among individuals.38 Taking her cue from Melzack, and probably oblivious to Parvati Baker, scholar Mary S. Sheridan claimed that “totally unmedicated or pain-free parturition, a vogue now generally over, is unrealistic.” She added: “ ‘natural childbirth’ fits well into a culture that prizes stoicism and is ambivalent about the reality and meaning of women’s pain.”39 For Sheridan, the problem with labor pain in contemporary America is that there is not enough provision of anesthesia for birthing women because of gendered dismissals of women’s pain, quite the opposite of a home-birth view of medicated birth. A similar response to the “vogue” of unmedicated birth in the popular birth advice book What to Expect when You’re Expecting advised women that childbirth was “not supposed to be a trial by ordeal or a test of bravery, strength, or endurance.” The “enlightened” view, according to these authors, would recognize that “wanting relief from excruciating pain is natural.”40 In another vein, some feminists have argued that unmedicated birth is a sexist construct that acts as “a means of underpinning women’s subjection to their biology, and of denying them freedom to reject it or overcome it through the medical means available.”41 Similarly, in Gyn/ecology, Mary Daly affirmed Kathleen Barry’s statement: “Natural childbirth as we know it now, is nothing more than a romanticized means of helping women to better adjust to the abnormal and intensely painful delivery process mandated by men.”42 While not directly addressing childbirth, some feminist theologians have criticized what they see more generally as a spiritualization of women’s suffering. Two Christian feminist theologians, Beverly Harrison and Carter Heyward argued that “pain—the deprivation of sensual pleasure”

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has deep roots as a “foundation of Christian faith,” so much so that “to be Christian was to accept or even to seek pain.”43 Furthermore, they argued, the confluence between pain and pleasure found in Christianity’s “patriarchal heterosexism” and especially in erotic relations, has meant that “women have no body rights, no moral claim to our bodies as self-possessed. . . . Women in Christianity are meant to live for others.”44 In this view, a woman fusing her labor pains with the suffering of Christ on the cross could be read as one more example of female submission to patriarchal Christian sadomasochism. But is it? Within interpretations of pain lie notions of gender—whether women are seen as in greater need of anesthesia because of their weak constitutions or more productively going through the pain to make them better mothers.45 Women seeking unmedicated birth today, however, have often proclaimed experiencing their pain as an act in defiance of medical authority, though not necessarily male authority more generally. They view giving birth as an act imbued with a kind of embodied agency not entirely contained in the notion of the rational human subject who chooses to act in particular, albeit cultured, ways. Their birthing bodies, as bridges between the earthly and celestial, are not entirely of their own making. Part of these women’s defiance toward medical authority is rooted in assertions of the “difference” of birth pain and women’s agency as childbearers, as Pentecostal Carrie Ryan described: Well, [the pain is] something that builds to a crescendo, and then it’s totally gone, it’s completely gone. It’s not like a wound, where you’ll feel the initial pain of it, and then you’ll feel an ache or throbbing thereafter. When the body’s done birthing, it’s gone. I really don’t know how otherwise to describe it. It’s intense, but it’s not anything that I thought that I would pass out from or lose consciousness because of, you know, when people are really wounded. I didn’t see it as a—like where you’re injured and it’s not a good thing, if you’re cut or something breaks in your body. This wasn’t anything like that. And . . . no matter what I thought about it, it was going to happen. And it was just a matter of realizing and keeping my mind on the fact that I was experiencing my body doing what it was designed to do, and opening up and allowing this life to come out, to come forth. Focusing on her sense of the “rightness” of the process of birth, while also actively “opening up and allowing” her baby to emerge meant that Carrie positioned herself relative to the pain in an accepting way, that she felt made not only the birth, but her recovery less arduous.


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Visionary pain In Carrie’s Christian tradition, life-bringing pain has its roots in the cross —that she has access to such narratives in which to place her experience helped her in some ways to bear the pain. Carrie’s meaning-making aligns with scholar David Morris’s argument that there is more meaning to pain than the medical model has traditionally allowed.46 Carrie’s understanding of pain, along with those of many other home-birthing women—Christians, Jews, spiritual feminists—could be characterized, in Morris’s terms, as “visionary pain,” or pain which has an “otherworldliness [that] serves as an implicit critique of worldly power.”47 The worldly power that home-birthing women critique most unanimously is the medicalization of childbirth—some extend this to a critique of sexism, others most emphatically do not. Taking their place alongside Morris’s exemplars of visionary pain like medieval women mystics and Romantic poets, many home-birthing women would assent to Morris’s depiction: “Pain, especially when mixed inseparably with love and beauty, takes us out of our depth. It draws us toward a higher level of experience in which conventional falsehoods and evasions drop away.”48 As homebirther Nina Holly opined from her New Age perspective: “I don’t see a lot of people who are really living their destiny in their lives, they’re just kind of like plodding along, afraid to look pain in the face.” According to Nina, without confronting pain, particularly in terms of childbirth, self-deception reigns. Visionary pain, however, does not eliminate conventional falsehoods and evasions, but instead sets rival constructions of reality in their place. For example, birthing without drugs revalues a form of women’s power denigrated in the wider society, many women argued. Joanna Katz averred that despite its trials, birth is a distinctly empowering act for women, since “it’s something that a man could never do.” Claiming power via the endurance and strength it takes to give birth may seem like a dangerously essentialized view of female power, especially since not all women give birth. But this claim can also function as an inversion of a cultural emphasis on men’s strength and women’s passivity. The rigors of birth in these women’s experiences seemed not to accentuate female submission, but to evoke female power. Visionary pain—a construction of pain that crosses between ecstasy and agony with political undertones is perhaps an apt way to describe an aspect of the goal, if not experience of home birth. Simone, who earlier articulated a confluence between pain and pleasure, asserted that she was “not into glorifying pain, and I don’t think that it’s a sign of our sinfulness.” Simone’s meaning-making with her pain sounded less like masochism and more like the “self-possessed” body that Harrison and

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Heyward advocated. “I am creating,” Simone asserted, not entirely alone but in concert with her God. What turns pain into “creative possibility” in the words of one writer, is a resistance to “giv[ing] suffering final power.”49 For Simone, childbirth pain was not the end, but the means to find oneself at the powerful space where “two worlds collide.” Perhaps in contemporary America, where women are taught to be observers and critics of their own bodies from the outside, the pain of childbirth puts women back in their bodies. In this specific context, the counter-cultural force of pain holds an empowering, and for some, salvific dimension.50 They celebrate their bodies as sites of creation and jouissance, instead of fearing them as sites of danger and toxicity.51 The positive valuing of childbirth as a “privileged” human experience includes a counter-cultural valuing of a particular kind of painful embodiment. It runs against dominant perspectives that pain and bodiliness need to be controlled by people invested with agency. Any control of the flesh will remain elusive as long as suffering and ultimately death are beyond human control. In the words of Caroline Walker Bynum, For unless we conquer death, suffering must always be a reminder of it—a foretaste of our own death and of the loss of those we love. Unless we conquer death, fertility (however frightening it may be) will be necessary for our survival: new life, issuing from women’s bodies, will be our collective immortality. Bynum goes on to assert that: “our culture may finally need something of the medieval sense, reflected so clearly in the use of birthing and nursing as symbols for salvation, that generativity and suffering can be synonymous.”52 Many home-birthing women are working towards such a coupling, by insisting that giving birth can involve a kind of subjectivity and agency for women that arises in part from the embodied experience of pain and the narratives framed to tell of such experiences. I would also add that their sense of the spiritual or religious qualities of birth is tied to Bynum’s insight about the collective immortality offered via childbirth: giving birth is creativity on a scale that seems to invite religious language from the perspective of many childbearing women. These women make religious meaning from the pain of childbirth not only as Reform Jews, traditional Catholics, or lapsed Lutherans, but also as women giving birth. When Reform Jew Joanna Katz spoke of birth as something a man could never do, she positioned herself as a woman in a collectivity of women, and did not understand her suffering, at that moment, as particularly Jewish. Similarly, when former Lutheran-cumReconstructionist Jew Christina Upton spoke of the empowering pain of birth that tied her to God and the cycle of life, she spoke of birth as a


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religious experience not necessarily tethered to official denominational identities. I am not arguing that these women’s religious affiliations are irrelevant to the ways they make religious meaning from the pain of childbirth. Instead, I am asserting that the profoundly physical pain of childbirth, as something only women (but not all women) undergo, offers a chance for religious encounter and reflection that shifts among multiple sources of identity, including memories of the religion of one’s childhood, a sense of solidarity with women as a group, and the sensations of the sexual, sensual body. These women’s revaluation of childbirth pain as a particularly potent channel of connection between themselves and others—babies, partners, and deities—might be and is viewed with suspicion from some feminist angles.53 However, seeing childbirth pain through a different lens than that of women as victims to biology or patriarchy is an important endeavor. By embracing childbirth pain as part of the process of giving birth to healthy babies, as a path to self-knowledge, and as a conduit for connection with a variety of others, home-birthing women question the scandal of pain in their culture, while emphasizing a particular form of generative suffering —suffering that calls for them to endure pain on behalf of another and for themselves. In making sense of this suffering they draw from a range of notions including religious concepts of redemption, feminist ideas of empowerment, and physiological understandings of the negative effects of drugs coursing through a newborn’s body. They make their decisions to embrace pain as women with the privileged option to avoid it. They become contemporary ascetics committed not so much to worshipping God through bodily mortification, but to a discipline of childbirth that prompts them to venerate their birthing bodies as sites of joy, pain, and creation.

Notes 1 This paper is a revision and further development of two of my previous publications: “Sliding Around between Pain and Pleasure: Home Birth and Visionary Pain,” Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 19 (1, 1998): 45–68 and Chapter 7 of Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For their helpful comments on this version, I thank Lauren Berlant, Robert Gibbs, John Marshall, Andrea Most, and the participants of the “Critical Research in Gender and Health” seminar at the Centre for Research in Women’s Health, University of Toronto. 2 See Carol Sakala, “Content of Care by Independent Midwives: Assistance with Pain in Labor and Birth,” Social Science and Medicine 26 (11, 1988): 1141–58, especially the appendix, “Medical Care System Approaches to Pain in Labor and Birth.” In another example of the pressure to deny the sensations of vaginal childbirth, see the comments of the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on the virtues of elective Cesarian

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3

4

5 6

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Pamela E. Klassen section even for uncomplicated births as a way, among other things, to avoid post-partum maternal incontinence and to enhance women’s autonomy: W.B. Harer, “Patient Choice Cesarean,” ACOG Clinical Review, 5 (2, 2000): 1–3. Two of the forty-five women were African-American and one was Hispanic. Several women held advanced degrees, and most had at least some college education. All but one of the women had planned to give birth at home. Of the eighty planned home births among the forty-five women, the birth attendants divided evenly between direct-entry midwives and certified nursemidwives, with another two births being attended by doctors, and three women giving birth unassisted by any professional caregiver. The women and their male partners spanned a range of occupations and incomes, but for the most part they were middle class. More than three-quarters of the women cared for their children at home, and about a third of these women also worked part-time at jobs that ranged from assisting in their husband’s chiropractic office to being veterinarians. Six women had full-time employment, all in professional occupations like teaching, nursing, ministry, or chiropractic. I have given pseudonyms to all the women I quote in this article. Although my focus here is on home-birthing women, women choosing to give birth in the hospital have also turned to religious resources, with greater and lesser degrees of success. See Leonie Caldecott, “Inner Anatomy of a Birth,” in Sex and God: Some Varieties of Women’s Religious Experience, edited by Linda Hurcombe (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 147–60; Lori Hope Lefkowitz, “Sacred Screaming: Childbirth in Judaism,” in Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones, edited by Debra Orenstein (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1994), pp. 5–15; Kari Sandhaas, “Birth, Choice, and the Abuse of the Sacred: A Personal Story of Resistance,” Daughters of Sarah 18 (4, 1992): 8 –11; and Susan Starr Sered, “Childbirth as a Religious Experience? Voices from an Israeli Hospital,” Journal for the Feminist Study of Religion 7 (2, 1991): 7–18. Talal Asad, “On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment,” in Social Suffering, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 290. I say “five or so” because the religious affiliations of these women were not always clearly defined, lending a suppleness to their religious identities. For example, a woman who had grown up Catholic but now practiced a “homebased” religion might also fit within the category of “liberal, feminist Christian” but with some tension around the tie to Christianity. In another example, Christina Upton, who I quote later in the essay, might also fit in this category as a woman who grew up Lutheran and still considers herself Christian in some way, but who attends a Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue with her formerly Orthodox Jewish husband and their three Jewish children. Gillian A. Bendelow and Simon J. Williams, “Natural for Women, Abnormal for Men: Beliefs about Pain and Gender,” in The Body in Everyday Life, edited by Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 199. For a discussion of various interpretations of suffering in Jewish and Christian traditions see Leora Batnitzky, “On the Suffering of God’s Chosen: Christian Views in Jewish Terms,” in Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 203–20; Robert Gibbs, “Suspicions of Suffering,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, pp. 221–9.


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9 Talal Asad, “Agency and Pain: An Exploration,” Culture and Religion, 1 (1, 2000): 32–3. 10 According to Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent, in the 1990s, “98 percent of American women give birth in hospitals; in many hospitals, 80 percent receive epidural anesthesia.” There are also other anesthetics, besides epidurals, used to alleviate or remove the pain of childbirth. Robbie E. DavisFloyd and Carolyn F. Sargent (eds), Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-cultural Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 11. For more on biomedical approaches to childbirth pain see Robbie Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 99–102. 11 As Janet Gallagher argued, in the last forty years in North America “pregnancy and birth became, at least for the medically advantaged, a chosen and cherished experience.” Janet Gallagher, “Collective Bad Faith: ‘Protecting the Fetus,’ ” in Reproduction, Ethics, and the Law: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Joan C. Callahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 349. 12 The most comprehensive source for understanding the history and current situation of midwifery in North America is Judith Pence Rooks, Midwifery and Childbirth in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). 13 For example, see the interview with Dr. Yvonne Thornton and midwife Ina May Gaskin on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation, on March 31, 1999. 14 John A. Robertson quoted in Christine Overall, Ethics and Human Reproduction: A Feminist Analysis (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 98. 15 See, for example, David Bakan, Disease, Pain, & Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 67; Joseph Fichter, Religion and Pain: The Spiritual Dimensions of Health Care (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 30; Mary Sheridan, Pain in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), p. 3. In his discussion, Bakan argues that “one of the major psychological uses of Christianity has been to overcome the essential loneliness and privacy of pain” (p. 67). 16 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4. 17 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 188–9. I was aided in my reading of Scarry by David B. Morris, “How to Read The Body in Pain,” Literature and Medicine 6 (1987): 139–55. 18 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 3. 19 See Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Margarete Sandelowski, Pain, Pleasure, and American Childbirth: From the Twilight Sleep to the Read Method, 1914–1960 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 10; Judith Walzer Leavitt, “Birthing and Anaesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep,” Signs 6 (1980): 164. 20 For another perspective on the meanings of pain from a clinical and religious perspective see David Clark, “ ‘Total Pain,’ Disciplinary Power and the Body in the Work of Cicely Saunders, 1958–1967,” Social Science and Medicine, 49 (1999): 727–36. 21 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987), p. 301. 22 Robert Gibbs, “Suspicions of Suffering,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, p. 225.

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23 Yvonne Brackbill, Karen McManus, and Lynn Woodward, Medication in Maternity: Infant Exposure and Maternal Information, International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, Monograph Series, Number 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), p. 109; Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, p. 99. In a study of 602 women who gave birth in hospitals, birth centers, and homes, Brackbill, McManus, and Woodward found that compared to the other two groups, the home-birthing women were significantly better informed about drugs used in pregnancy and childbirth and consumed less of them, Medication in Maternity, p. 127. 24 Pain specialist Dr. Ronald Melzack concluded that labor pain was one of the most severe types of pain, but that the severity differed among individuals. Melzack in Sheridan, Pain in America, p. 109. Contrast this with Jeannine Parvati-Baker’s claim that “all those years of orgasms” were good practice for birthing her baby. Parvati-Baker in Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, p. 71. 25 By traditional Catholic, I mean one who attends a church that offers the mass in Latin, and is overtly critical of the reforms of Vatican II. For more on Catholic traditionalism, see William D. Dinges “ ‘We Are What You Were’: Roman Catholic Traditionalism in America,” in Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America, edited by R. Scott Appleby and Mary Jo Weaver (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 241–69. 26 On medieval women mystics’ use of birthing imagery to describe their suffering, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 300. 27 This is the NRSV translation. It was Carrie’s understanding that in the original Hebrew the word was not “infirmities” but “pains.” The messianic character of the figure in Isaiah 53 is a matter of debate for scholars, but not for charismatic Christians. 28 Though she did not birth entirely without pain, Carrie does attribute the painless nature of the crowning of her baby’s head to God. 29 Michel Odent, Birth Reborn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 30 Luce Irigaray, “Women-Amongst-Themselves: Creating a Woman-to-Woman Sociality,” in The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 190. 31 Sharon Olds, “The Moment when Two Worlds Meet,” in Mother Journeys: Feminist Write about Mothering, edited by Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, and Amy Sheldon (Minneapolis: Spinsters’ Ink, 1994), p. 47. 32 For a discussion of how hospital birth has desexualized birth and more testimonies to birth as a sexual experience see Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, pp. 69–71. 33 Emily Martin, “The Ideology of Reproduction: The Reproduction of Ideology,” in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 309. For other analyses of the relation between social location and interpretations of childbirth see Maria Zadoroznyj, “Social Class, Social Selves and Social Control in Childbirth,” Sociology of Health and Illness 21 (3, 1999): 267–89; Carolyn Sargent and Nancy Stark, “Childbirth Education and Childbirth Models: Parental Perspectives on Control, Anesthesia, and Technological Intervention in the Birth Process,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3 (1, 1989): 36–51, and Ellen Lazarus, “What do Women Want? Issues of Choice, Control, and Class in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8 (1, 1994): 25– 46.


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34 None of the women I interviewed had women partners. There is little analysis explicitly regarding the experience of childbirth for lesbians, but on lesbian motherhood see Ellen Lewin, “On the Outside Looking In: The Politics of Lesbian Motherhood,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 103–21. On childbirth, see Deborah Goleman Wolf, “Lesbian Childbirth and Artificial Insemination: A Wave of the Future,” in Anthropology of Human Birth, edited by Margarita Artschwager Kay (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1982), pp. 321–40. 35 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Motherprayer: The Pregnant Woman’s Spiritual Companion (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), p. 190. 36 Frymer-Kensky, Motherprayer, p. 190. 37 Parvati Baker in Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, p. 71. 38 Sheridan, Pain in America, p. 109. 39 Ibid. 40 Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Workman, 1991), pp. 232, 227. 41 Marina Warner makes this comment in her discussion of the Virgin Mary’s milk, and was writing specifically of “Christian affirmations” of “natural” childbirth and breastfeeding. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1976), pp. 204–5. 42 Kathleen Barry in Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press 1990), p. 285. 43 Beverly Wildung Harrison and Carter Heyward, “Pain and Pleasure: Avoiding the Confusions of Christian Tradition in Feminist Theory,” in Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, edited by James B. Nelson and Sandra P. Longfellow (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1984), p. 134, emphasis in original. 44 Harrison and Heyward, “Pain and Pleasure,” p. 138, emphasis in original. 45 Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering, 186; Sandelowski, Pain, Pleasure, and American Childbirth, p. 114. Pernick also showed how race and class affected the use of anesthesia, with doctors generally thinking that lower-class and nonEuropean people were better able to handle pain and in less need of anesthesia. See also Robert Orsi’s work on Catholic women’s devotions to St. Jude, in which he suggested “the discourse on pain was gendered: to suffer pain well— which meant cheerfully, silently, submissively—was to suffer like a woman; conversely, the good woman had the same character as the person-in-pain,” Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 165. 46 David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 12, 143. 47 Morris, The Culture of Pain, p. 138. 48 Ibid., p. 208. 49 Pamela A. Smith, “Chronic Pain and Creative Possibility: A Psychological Phenomenon Confronts Theologies of Suffering,” in Broken and Whole: Essays on Religion and the Body, edited by Maureen A. Tilley and Susan A. Ross (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993), p. 179. 50 I am grateful to Karen McCarthy Brown for this insight. 51 On women’s pregnant and birthing bodies being considered toxic environments, and the corollary antagonism set up between the fetus and the mother,

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see Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Gallagher, “Collective Bad Faith: ‘Protecting the Fetus.’ ” 52 Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, p. 301. 53 For example, see Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20.

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Divine suffering and the hermeneutics of reading Philosophical reflections on Lurianic mythology Elliot R. Wolfson

For Marcia Gott, das lasen wir, ist ein Teil und ein zweiter, zerstreuter: im Tod all der Gemähten wächst er sich zu. (Paul Celan)1

Divine pathos and the suffering of Israel A God who suffers, one might protest, is not the God that devout Jews have worshiped through the ages, the God to whom they have turned repeatedly in their own suffering. Yet, biblical and post-biblical sources are replete with expressions of God’s sharing in the torment of Israel. In the celebrated language of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the uniqueness of prophetic theology is linked to divine pathos, symbolically portrayed in the image of the father partaking of the affliction of the son. The participation of God in Israel’s agony, according to Heschel, transforms the latter as the suffering serves not only as chastisement for transgressions but bears the birth pangs of salvation for Israel and the nations of the world.2 This is surely no small matter, but the suffering of God affirmed in this notion of pathos is, as Heschel himself notes, always a relative state in contrast to the passion that denotes the personal and private suffering that occurs within the life of the deity.3 Heschel’s use of the term “pathos” as opposed to “passion” is meant to convey that in the biblical sources God’s suffering is a correlative phenomenon, for it is always in response to the suffering of the other.4 The imaginal depictions of God in the liturgy and literature composed respectively by poets and rabbis over time, still in great measure the

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platform for flights of devotional fancy in contemporary Jewish circles, have repeated the theme of vicarious suffering on the part of God, but they have not offered much evidence for the motif of a God of passion who suffers his own being. This reticence may be explained in several ways. One may surmise that the notion of expiatory suffering5 has been an impediment to the imaginary portrayal of a suffering God since the notion of a sinful deity is, prima facie, antithetical to the prophetic spirit and much of rabbinic Judaism that followed in its course.6 It is also possible that the portrayal of the suffering messiah by early Christian interpreters (exegetically based in part on the motif of the suffering servant in Isaiah 52:13–53:12)7 and the further identification of messiah as the incarnation of the divine, which commanded more and more attention as the history of Christianity evolved, contributed to the reluctance on the part of ancient rabbis and poets to elaborate the myth of a God who suffers, a hesitation that was enhanced and challenged through the Middle Ages to the modern period.8 The Theophaschite formula that “one of the Trinity suffered” expressed a central aspect of the doctrine of Incarnation. God, or more precisely the divine word, assumes human nature and in so doing participates in the mortal being’s capacity for suffering. The incarnate Son suffers with and for the sake of humanity, but faith in Jesus necessitates (as Pope John Paul II already observed) that one share in the salvific sufferings of Christ.9 As the anonymous author of the letter of Peter to Philip, a Christian gnostic work likely composed in the second or third century ce, expressed the matter, And a remark was made concerning the Lord. It was said, “If he, our Lord, suffered, then how much (must) we (suffer)?” Peter answered saying, “He suffered on (our) behalf, and it is necessary for us too to suffer because of our smallness.” Then a voice came to them saying, “I have told you many times: It is necessary for you to suffer.”10 In the continuation of this text, the suffering of Jesus is related more specifically to his incarnation in a human body and the consequent crucifixion on a tree and burial in a tomb.11 It is necessary to suffer on behalf of Christ for he suffered for the sake of humanity.12 The distinctively gnostic turn to the Christological truth is related to the surmise that Jesus inhabits a body because of the seed that was cast aside from the divine pleroma on account of the desire of the mother (identified in parallel texts as Sophia) to produce aeons without the consent of the father or the spirit.13 Inasmuch as Jesus belongs to the realm of light, he is a “stranger” to the suffering induced by material embodiment. In emulation of Jesus, the disciples are described as “ones who have suffered through the transgression of the mother.”14 Underlying the gnostic teaching is a

Divine suffering 103 premise that lies at the heart of Christian faith and piety: incorporation into the body of Christ involves the willingness to be broken, to suffer for the sake of bringing salvation to the world, to endure the passion. Through the mystery of the incarnation Jesus raises the suffering of humanity to a level of redemption.15 An interesting text to be considered in this light is the rabbinic narrative about the symbolic intent of the earthquake, a discussion that is framed in terms of an exegetical debate regarding the meaning of the term zeva’ot in the mishnaic ruling (Berakhot 9:1).16 The talmudic account records that the necromancer disclosed to Rav Qatina that the quake of the earth arises from the two tears that God weeps as he contemplates the lot of his people Israel who dwell in pain among the nations of the world. Rav Qatina summarily rejects this explanation, an action that is subject to two interpretations, one overt and the other implicit: on the surface, he raised his objection on exegetical grounds. But, according to the reason that is not explicitly acknowledged, he did not want the masses to follow the necromancer. In the continuation of the text, several “acceptable” interpretations of the earthquake are given: Rav Qatina himself notes that the earthquake is a sign that marks the clapping of God’s hands to exact vengeance (according to Ezek. 21:22); R. Natan explains that the earthquake is an expression of God’s sighing, which is also depicted as an avenging act (on the basis of Ezek. 5:13); the rabbis say the earthquake signifies that God is kicking in heaven to avenge the injustice of the nations against Israel (Jer. 25:30 is cited); and, finally, R. Aha bar Jacob explains that the quaking of the earth indicates that God presses his feet together (doBeq ’et raglav) beneath the throne of glory, a view supported by the description of the heavens as a throne in Isaiah 66:1. An extended discussion of the different approaches exemplified in the talmudic narrative to render the symbolic meaning of the earthquake is surely warranted. In this study, however, the hermeneutical goal must be far less ambitious. Two observations are important for my present focus. First, the view of the necromancer is cast aside by Rav Qatina and, second, the talmudic redactor records various explanations, quite daring in and of themselves in their portrayal of gestures of divine retribution,17 but none presupposing that God suffers. One is encouraged to think of the earthquake as a mark of God’s vindictiveness, an idea that is readily supported by the citation of scriptural verses, but one is dissuaded from supposing that it refers to God’s weeping on behalf of Israel. But why is a mythic image that articulates the suffering of God in response to Israel’s suffering so steadfastly rejected?18 To ask the question from another vantage point, why attribute the ostensibly acceptable theological image of divine pathos to the necromancer, one who clearly is positioned outside the fold of those who are considered ritually fit and proper?19 The

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perplexity of the response attributed to Rav Qafina is intensified when one considers that there are a number of passages in rabbinic literature that describe God as weeping over the destroyed Temple and lamenting the wretched state of Israel.20 Indeed, the notion of God who suffers on account of the sufferings of Israel is repeatedly affirmed in rabbinic writings as a pivotal tenet of Jewish faith.21 The significance of this motif is accentuated by the exegetical boldness that turned the description of the “pavement of sapphire” (livnat ha-sappir) beneath the feet of God (Exod. 24:10) into bricks (levenim), the object that symbolizes the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt (Exod. 5:7, 8, 16, 18). The midrashic wordplay textually anchors the idea that “whenever Israel is enslaved the Shekhinah, as it were, is enslaved with them.”22 God shares in the hardship of Israel, an idea drawn from and supported by the verse “In all their affliction he was afflicted” (Isa. 63:9).23 Along similar lines, another tradition (attested in a number of redactional settings) reports that when God descended from his heavenly abode to deliver the children of Israel out of the hand of the Egyptians (Exod. 3:8), he came to dwell in the thornbush, an emblem of “grief and distress” since it is “full of thorns and thistles.” God’s exchanging his celestial abode for the thornbush signifies his desire to share in the misery of Israel, an idea supported exegetically by the aforecited verse from Isaiah as well as by the verse “I will be with him in distress” (Ps. 91:15).24 According to the image of another aggadic formulation, Israel and God are compared to twins, for if one has pain the other feels it.25 In some rabbinic texts, God is portrayed as suffering not only on behalf of the community of Israel, but even for the sake of an individual who has been afflicted,26 but it is clearly the sharing in Israel’s communal torment that is the salient feature of divine pathos in rabbinic sources. The empathetic suffering binds together God and Israel to the point that the anguish of one is indistinguishable from that of the other. The sentiment is well captured in an anonymous poem written for the liturgy of Hoshannah Rabbah, ’om ’ani Bomah, which describes the fate of Israel in relationship to God. In one stanza, we read sovelet sivlakh / ‘aniyyah so‘arah, “she endures your suffering / unhappy and stormtossed.”27 The nature of God’s suffering in the first part of the verse is not delineated, but one may surmise from the second part that it is related to the hardship of Israel in exile, which is expressed in poetic images culled from Isaiah 54:11. Indeed, the very next line in the poem describes Israel metaphorically as sacrificial sheep, Do’n qodashim (based on Ezek. 36:38),28 who are redeemed by Toviyyah, literally the “goodness of the Lord,” but a cryptic allusion to Moses.29 It stands to reason that the portrayal of Israel as sacrificial sheep redeemed from Egypt by Moses sheds light on the nature of God’s suffering. That is, God’s suffering is

Divine suffering 105 proportionate to the suffering of Israel. In the very beginning of the poem, Israel is described as “exiled and disdained,” golah we-Durah (Isa. 49:21), “murdered on your account / considered as slaughtered sheep,” ha-harugah ‘aleikha / we-neBshevet ke-Do’n tivBah (based on Ps. 44:23). Reflecting a tone especially appropriate to the experience of many Jews in medieval Europe,30 the poet here relates that Israel’s devotion to God requires of her to endure the fate of a martyr, and, reciprocally, God bears the burden of Israel’s bereavement. It lies beyond the scope of this study to delve more deeply into the topic of divine suffering in rabbinic texts. However, as an introduction to my analysis of this motif in a selection of kabbalistic material, it is important to note that classical rabbinic sources (as attested by the remark of Rav Qatina) demonstrate ambivalence with respect to this matter. The ambivalence is all the more remarkable given the fact that divine suffering was clearly understood by rabbinic sages to be a scriptural belief.31 One might argue that the ambivalence could be resolved if one were to pay closer attention to the historical-literary context of the composition and/or redaction of the relevant material. Needless to say, I do not shun the form critical approach to the study of rabbinic texts, yet I do not think that this is the only or even the best way to tackle the issue at hand. A reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the extant rabbinic corpus is that in spite of recognizing the power of the myth of a God who suffers in relationship to the suffering of Israel, some rabbis understood that encouraging Jews to think of their God in this way is a theological proposition fraught with peril. The potentially dangerous, perhaps even heretical, implication of this idea is well expressed in the statement attributed to R. Aqiva regarding the suffering of God: “Were it not expressly written in Scripture, it would be impossible to say it. Israel said before God, as it were, ‘You have redeemed yourself.’ ”32 Apparently, the notion of God’s suffering vicariously in Israel’s suffering, and the consequent reversal of roles such that the redeemer is in need of redemption, was so radical that Aqiva felt compelled to justify its articulation by emphasizing that it is an idea explicitly affirmed in Scripture.33 In this redactional setting, what is preserved as Aqiva’s dictum is transmitted together with the tradition that the Shekhinah, the divine presence, accompanies the Jewish nation into exile.34 It may be deduced from other rabbinic sources that Aqiva is not the author of this tradition. What is critical, however, is that the dictum attributed to Aqiva accords well with and reaffirms the notion of the immanence and providential care of God over Israel, which is precisely the rationale of the redactor of this passage. The implication of the statement attributed to Aqiva is stated more explicitly in a later midrashic collection:

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Elliot R. Wolfson R. Abbahu said, “Every salvation that comes to Israel belongs to the Holy One, blessed be he, as it says ‘I will be with him in distress etc. I will show him my salvation’ (Ps. 91:15–16). The Israelites said, “Master of the world, since you said ‘I will be with him in distress,’ then ‘deliver with your right hand and answer me’ (ibid., 60:7), for if you answer us, the salvation is yours, as it says ‘Come to our salvation’ (ibid. 80:3).” . . . R. Berekhyah the Priest, son of Rabbi, said, “See what is written, ‘Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion, raise a shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king is coming to you, he is righteous and redeemed’ (Zech. 9:9). It is not written here ‘he is righteous and a redeemer’ (Daddiq u-moshi‘a), but ‘he is righteous and redeemed’ (Daddiq we-nosha‘). Thus it says ‘Proclaim to the daughter of Zion, the one who shall redeem you is coming’ (Isa. 62:11). It is not written here ‘your redeemer’ (moshi‘ekh) but ‘the one who shall redeem’ (yish‘ekh), as it were, he is redeemed (nosha‘).” R. Meir said, “‘Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians’ (Exod. 14:30). It is written here ‘he will be delivered’ (wa-yiwwasha‘),35 he is redeemed, as it were, with Israel. Whenever Israel is redeemed, it is as if he were redeemed.”36

The trope of God sharing in the suffering of Israel logically gave way to the idea that God participates in the alleviation of that suffering. Even the mythopoeic symbol must have its logic: if God is exiled with the people of Israel, he must be liberated with them as well. Every act of redemption, therefore, entails that the savior himself has to be saved.37 To cite another relevant midrashic pericope: Another explanation: “For soon my salvation shall come” (Isa. 56:1): It does not say “For soon your salvation shall come,” but rather “my salvation,” may his name be blessed. Had the matter not been written it could not have been uttered. The Holy One, blessed be he, said to Israel, “If you do not have the merit, I will do it for my sake, as it were, for all the days that you are in distress I will be with you, as it is said ‘I will be with him in distress’ (Ps. 91:15). I will redeem myself (’ani go’el le-‘aDmi) as it is said ‘He saw that there was no man, he gazed long [but no one intervened. Then his own arm won him triumph, his victorious right hand supported him]’ (Isa. 59:16).” Similarly, it says “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion, raise a shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king is coming to you, he is righteous and redeemed” (Zech. 9:9). It does not say here “redeemer” (moshi‘a) but “redeemed” (nosha‘). That is, even if you do not have any deeds, the Holy One, blessed be he, will do it for his own sake as it says “For soon my salvation shall come.”38

Divine suffering 107 The force of the theological myth of a God who redeems himself by redeeming Israel is poignantly conveyed by one of the earliest Palestinian poets, Eleazar Kallir, ke-hosha‘ta ’elim be-lud ‘immakh / be-De’tekha leyesha‘ ‘ammakh / ke-hosha‘ta goy we’lohim / derushim le-yesha‘ ’elohim, “As you saved the terebinths in Lud together with you / when you went out for the sake of the deliverance of your people / As you saved the nation and God / requiring the salvation of God.”39 In consonance with the motif articulated by the rabbis, the poet describes God’s act of redeeming the Israelites (compared metaphorically to terebinths on the basis of Isa. 61:3) from Egypt (referred to as Lud on the basis of Gen. 10:13), as a redemption of himself. When God goes forth to deliver the people of Israel from bondage, both God and the people are redeemed (expressed in terms of 2 Sam. 7:23). The salvation of God mentioned in Scripture, yesha‘ ’elohim (Ps. 50:23), is thus applied concomitantly to God and to the Jews. Reiterating this theme towards the end of the poem through the words of Isaiah 43:14, Kallir writes, ke-hosha‘ta qehillot bavelah shilaBta / raBum le-ma‘anam shulaBta, “As you saved the communities you sent to Babylon / compassionate on their behalf you were sent.”40 Given the significance in rabbinic thought of the motif of God’s suffering together with Israel, and the concomitant theme of God’s mutual salvation with Israel, it is all the more noteworthy that there was a lingering fear that the description of God in these terms was considered theologically problematic as we have seen in the talmudic passage wherein the ostensibly valid explanation of the earthquake in terms of God’s weeping is cast aside as the misguided opinion of one proficient in the illicit art of necromancy. It is possible that in this text an older suspicion was intensified and rendered more urgent by the appropriation and application of the prophetic motif by nascent Christianity. For the purposes of this analysis it is not necessary that we resolve the matter. What is essential is that we recognize the contradictory nature of the evidence elicited from rabbinic sources regarding the viability of speaking about a suffering God who must be redeemed.41 In spite of the theological peril in employing this image, it exerted a profound impact on subsequent generations.42 Indeed, for some rabbinic figures, Israel’s unique historical destiny was thought to be anchored in this imaginary dramatization. Against this background we must have a look at the audacious evolution of this theme in kabbalistic sources.

Delimiting the unlimited/without the other within To set the theme of God’s suffering in kabbalistic theosophy in an appropriate conceptual framework, it is necessary to begin with a few general

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remarks regarding the approach to the problem of evil, a theme that has been well studied in twentieth-century scholarship on the history of the kabbalah.43 In an effort to preclude the positing of metaphysical dualism, kabbalists eschewed the notion of evil as an autonomous power struggling indiscriminately against the good, primal darkness pitted against the equally primal light. Conversely, kabbalists have been keenly aware of the reality of evil as a potent force in human experience, and thus for the most part they did not explain misfortune merely as the absence of good. There are dark, sinister powers hovering in the atmosphere that afflict the lives of human beings. As expressed by several kabbalists in thirteenth-century Spain, particularly in the region of Castile toward the latter part of the century, these powers are related to the “other side,” siFra’ ’aBra’, a realm of impurity that corresponds to and derives from the realm of purity, the ten sefirot, which are depicted in various symbolic forms. From a relatively early period evil was thought by kabbalists to have had its ontological root in the nature of the divine. More specifically, evil is aligned with the quality of judgment, which is limitation and restriction, attributes that are associated as well with the feminine or left side of the divine pleroma. The seemingly contradictory perspectives, evil as part of the divine and evil as the force that opposes God, have coexisted in the minds of kabbalists for many generations. More than coexistence: the hearing of the tradition necessitates affirming the convergence of these opposing viewpoints: evil is part of the divine because evil is opposed to the divine, that is, evil can only be part of God as that which is other than God.44 The point of convergence lies in the account of origins that must always begin with a doubling of perspective. A variety of different explanations have been offered to explain more precisely the origin of evil within the Godhead. Perhaps this conception should be traced to an archaic mythical portrait of a struggle within God between good and evil, light and dark, right and left.45 It is also likely—at least in the expression of the idea in medieval kabbalistic sources—that the struggle should be understood in gendered terms as the conflict between male and female, a point to which I shall return at a later stage of this analysis. For the moment what concerns me is the metaphysical implication of the mythical complex attested in kabbalistic sources from an early period. I refer to the assumption that evil as the opposite of good arises as a consequence of the necessary transition from the unlimited to the limited, the emanation of ten sefirot from the darkness that extends infinitely, ‘ad ’ein sof, and the consequent concatenation of worlds from these gradations.46 The chain of being unfolds as a delimiting of the will that is infinite, the demarcation of thought that is boundless.47 The sefirot

Divine suffering 109 collectively express the “finite force of unlimited power,” koaB bi-gevul mi-beli gevul, according to the locution of the thirteenth-century kabbalist Azriel of Gerona.48 That which is no/thing comprises all things—and thus “there is nothing outside of it” (to use another expression of Azriel)49 —for how could there be nothing outside that which is no/thing? But, if there is to be something outside no/thing, a being-otherwise-than-being, that which has no limit must assume limit. In assuming this limit, the nameless responds to the name, YHWH, which is the mystical essence of Torah, the underlying garment of exposure. Every manifestation of the name is concealment, for if it were not concealed, how could it be revealed? Previously, I noted that kabbalists eschewed the notion that evil is the absence of good and not a vital force on its own. There is, however, some merit in viewing the kabbalistic approach in light of the remark of Maimonides that all evils are privations. It is useful to recall Maimonides’ exact language: Rather all His acts, may He be exalted, are an absolute good; for He only produces being, and all being is good. On the other hand, all the evils are privations with which an act is only connected in the way we have explained: namely, through the fact that God has brought matter into existence provided with the nature it has— namely, a nature that consists in matter always being a concomitant of privation, as is known. Hence it is the cause of all passing-away and of all evil. Accordingly, the true reality of the act of God in its entirety is the good, for the good is being.50 The kabbalists might have formulated matters differently, but they share the belief that evil is linked to privation, and the latter is a necessary consequence of the transition from the limitless infinite to that which has limit. From the theosophic perspective, then, the divine impulse to pro/create betokens a setting of boundary to that which is boundless, a carving of space from nothing, an issuing of light from darkness, the exercise of judgment in a domain of pure mercy. The ontological principle is articulated in some of the earliest kabbalistic sources. For example, Ezra of Gerona, the older colleague of Azriel, comments on the description of God’s creative activity in the verse “He sets bounds for darkness” (Job 28:3): It is known that darkness is nothingness and it is not possible to say with respect to it in any manner ‘formation’ (yeDirah) but only ‘creation’ (beri’ah), and [the word] ‘creation’ itself suggests that he

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Elliot R. Wolfson selected (borer) out from the darkness, which has no limit or end, another principle and another emanation. In saying ‘He sets bounds for darkness’ what is intended is that he created a boundary from the darkness and he gave it an end and a purpose.51

The initial act of emanation of light, signified by the term “creation,” beri’ah, is interpreted as the setting of boundary to the darkness that has no limit.52 This berur, the process of selection/clarification, is an expression of divine judgment, the feminine creative potency, which is related in a subsequent phase of the unfolding to the strength to bear progeny from the womb. Binah, the third sefirah, is symbolically represented by the mythic image of the divine mother, the quality of discernment, analysis, judging one from the other. The opening of the womb to give birth is depicted as a form of berur, separating wheat from chaff, a winnowing of spirit into breath. To give rise to the other, the unlimited must be delimited, but the unlimited cannot be delimited unless the delimited is unlimited. Alternatively expressed, the disclosure of God’s being in ten emanations is a concealment of that being, but precisely through the concealment is that being disclosed.53 The sefirot are symbolic prisms that shimmer in the dark light of illumined darkness. I assume this statement applies equally to kabbalists who adopted the essentialist or the instrumentalist perspective on the nature of the sefirot. That is, even for kabbalists like Menabem Recanafi or the anonymous author of Tiqqunei Zohar who maintained that the sefirot are vessels (kelim) rather than the divine essence (‘aDmut), the paradoxical confluence of concealment and disclosure would still apply.54 The sefirot may be vessels, but if they reveal the infinite light they must do so by concealing it. Although this principle is operative in the thought of kabbalists from an early period, it is formulated most succinctly by various sixteenthcentury kabbalists. For instance, in the rendering of Solomon Alkabets, ha-hester hu’ sibbat ha-hitgalut we-ha-hitgalut hu’ sibbat ha-hester, “concealment is the cause of disclosure and disclosure the cause of concealment.”55 That is, the gradual condensation of light through the successive emanations is a concealment of that light, but the concealment is precisely what occasions the exposure. What is at stake here is not merely the concurrent affirmation of opposites, but rather the identification of opposites as the same. In a second passage, Alkabets notes the coinidentia oppositorum when he writes ha-gilluy hu’ he‘lem we-ha-he‘lem hu’ gilluy, “disclosure is concealment and concealment disclosure.”56 Alkabets labels this insight the “secret of inversion,” sod ha-hithappekhut, which he relates exegetically to the description of the sefirot in Sefer YeDirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end” (1:7):

Divine suffering 111 It is known that concealment is disclosure and disclosure concealment (ha-he‘lem hu’ gilluy we-ha-gilluy hu’ he‘lem). The explanation of this is that on account of the abundance of luminosity and clarity within it the supernal light is not comprehended at all but it is hidden from every eye . . . and for the sake of governance of the worlds it was necessary for him to impart some reality so that something, however minuscule, will be comprehended from this light. For this reason there was the dissemination (hitpashFut), for by means of the dissemination of this emanation this light was thickened and sweetened in a manner that it may be comprehended and through which one may conduct oneself.57 The supernal light of Ein-Sof, which Alkabets identifies as darkness, is condensed through the emanation of the sefirot so that gradually something of it may be comprehended. The undifferentiated unity of Ein-Sof splinters into polar opposites engendered as male and female and positioned as right and left. It is helpful to heed the summary account of the theosophic teaching offered by the fifteenth-century Italian kabbalist, Judah aayyat: The emanation is in the image of an androgyne, receiving and bestowing . . . and this matter is alluded to in the verse “He sets bounds for darkness” (Job 28:3), that is, he gave dimension and measurement to the darkness, which is the great light according to the truth, to create by means of it things that have a limit.58 The limit that emerges in the emanative process is imaged androgynously as the feminine receiving and the masculine bestowing. A particularly lucid account of the erotic nature of the ontological assumption is offered in the commentary on the opening passage in Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta, the “Book of Concealment,”59 one of the most recondite textual units found in the zoharic anthology, that was in all likelihood penned in the sixteenth century by Isaac Luria: 60 “Before there was a balance they did not gaze upon one another’s face,” 61 since the feminine of Ze‘eir ’Anpin emerged from behind him, their faces did not gaze upon one another; even though it emerged, it was attached to his side as one. Similarly above, before ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ was arrayed in the likeness of male and female, there was no balance, there was no father and mother facing one another, for the father is pure mercy and the mother pure judgment, and thus the one turned one way and the other the other way. In any case, the essence of the gazing of the faces upon one another

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Luria depicts the emanative process by utilizing the technical terms applied to different configurations (parDufim) of the divine, especially in the ’Idrot sections of zoharic literature.63 ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’, the “holy ancient one,” refers to the highest of the parDufim, which corresponds to the first of the sefirot, Keter, and Ze‘eir ’Anpin, the “small-faced countenance,” which corresponds to either the second to the ninth sefirot, Aokhmah to Yesod, or to the sixth sefirah, Tif’eret. Everything must be set in the balance of male and female if anything is to exist since all being will come forth from the heterosexual union that is depicted in the image of one facing the other. Consequently, ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ is embellished in the likeness of the balance of Aokhmah, the merciful father, and Binah, the judgmental mother;64 similarly, Ze‘eir ’Anpin is paired with his feminine counterpart (nuqba’).65 Significantly, Luria notes at the end of the passage that the essence of the face-to-face gazing involves the two configurations, ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ and Ze‘eir ’Anpin, which are both gendered as male. The male-to-male gazing is an image based on several passages in zoharic literature, particularly the ’Idrot, wherein the time of mercy (‘et raDon) is said to occur when the face (or, more specifically, the forehead, which is identified as the will) of ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ illumines Ze‘eir ’Anpin.66 I will refrain from discussing this suggestive imagery in the detailed manner that it requires. What is necessary to point out is that Luria has well expressed a rudimentary idea that has informed the theosophic symbolism expressed by kabbalists from an early period: the sefirotic emanations reveal the luminous darkness of Ein-Sof in the double image of the masculine bestowing and the feminine receiving. This revealing, however, is concomitantly a concealing, for the unlimited cannot be limited and remain unlimited. The matter can be thought in anthropomorphic terms as well. The sefirot are envisioned in the imagination through the poetic prism of a human form, the androgynous image of primal Adam.67 Are we to presume, however, that God possesses a body of flesh and blood? No, the body attributed to the divine is imaginal in nature; it takes shape in the heart of the visionary. As Alkabets himself puts it in another context, the physical limbs of Adam allude to the supernal sefirot, but this does not imply that the sefirot are corporeal, “for they are all spiritual and within them is the pure and holy divinity, hidden and revealed, concealed and visible.”68 The somatic form attributed to the sefirot serves both as the screen through which the divine is seen and behind which the divine remains hidden. The face of God that is concealed (ne‘elam) is not only not separate from the face of God that is revealed (nigleh), but in a manner the concealed face is

Divine suffering 113 precisely what is revealed. In the exposure of light, the light is shrouded; in the uncovering of the secret, the secret is re/covered. The dialectic expressed by Alkabets is repeated by his student, Moses Cordovero, whose formulation resonates with a statement of the eleventhcentury Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna in the Aayy ibn Yaqzan.69 Reflecting on an expression in the celebrated passage from Tiqqunei Zohar, the PetaB ’Eliyahu, where it is stated that Ein-Sof is concealed in the sefirot,70 Cordovero writes: For the emanation is the cause of the revelation of the one who emanates, and thus it also says “he is called by them,” for he has no name or place by which to be called or to be spoken except through his actions, and this is the cause of his revelation. Similarly, this is the cause of his occultation and his concealment so that his divinity will not be revealed except to those who are worthy. There are screens that separate him from the lower entities. This is [the import of the statement that] disclosure is the cause of occultation and occultation the cause of disclosure (ha-hitgalut sibbat ha-he‘lem weha-he‘lem sibbat ha-hitgalut).71 The ontological intertwining of concealment and disclosure is here related to the political distinction between the élite to whom the secrets are revealed and the masses from whom they are withheld. The path begins from and leads back to the point of identifying opposites. God is exposed by being covered up; to be seen the divine must be invisible. The rendering of God in engendered terms, which is inextricably linked to the problem of language and it binary constructions,72 is the lens through which the psyche projects its image on the theological screen. To cite again from the aforementioned commentary on Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta’ reflecting on the zoharic depiction of the sefirot as garments (levushin), Luria wrote: He arrayed these garments to be garbed in them and to be concealed in them, and concealment is the cause of disclosure (ha-he‘lem hu’ sibbat ha-gilluy), for they cannot comprehend him nor can they derive pleasure from his light except through these garments.73 In a second passage from this composition, Luria writes that “he conceals the great light so that something of it may be revealed, for concealment is disclosure and disclosure is concealment (ha-he‘lem hu’ ha-gilluy we-ha-gilluy hu’ ha-he‘lem).”74 Similarly, commenting on another zoharic passage, Luria put it, “Every arrayal (tiqqun) is the secret of investiture (sod hitlabshut), for the concealment is the disclosure (ha-he‘lem hu’

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ha-gilluy).”75 Divine light is exposed in the veil of the sefirotic emanations. The latter manifest that light because they hide that light. The logic here is one of reversal, the thing is what it is because it is its opposite. Tiqqun is synonymous with hitlabshut; God is adorned with garments that unmask the light by masking it. As aayyim Vital expresses the matter in another text, a relatively brief sermon on the world of emanation, Derush ‘al ‘Olam ha-’ADilut: When the supernal emanator wanted to create this world, which is physical, he constricted his presence . . . for previously Ein-Sof filled everything. For it is known that even the inanimate stone would not exist at all if it did not have an illumination from the blessed one and it would decay, for the illumination of the blessed one is garbed in garment after garment.76 Subsequently, I shall discuss the theme of DimDum at length, but for the present it is sufficient to note that Vital portrays the chain of being as a successive series of divine adornments that originates in the primordial act of constriction, DimDum, the withdrawal of light to illumine darkness. The light of the Infinite, ’or ’ein sof, is cloaked in each of these garments and consequently they reveal the light by concealing the light. One endowed with mystical insight perceives that revelation and concealment are not opposites. The light is revealed only because it is concealed, but it is concealed only because it is revealed. In the succinct formulation of Joseph ibn eabul, a disciple of Luria in Safed who committed to writing the esoteric teachings of his master,77 “As light spreads forth it is diminished.”78 One would expect the spreading forth of the light to entail expansion, but in fact the paradox is that the dissemination of light is a diminution of light; to expand is to constrict. As ibn eabul puts it in another passage, reflecting the formulation that was utilized by various kabbalists in sixteenth-century Safed, “The light of the emanator is garbed in the vessels so that he may govern and the worlds can derive pleasure from his light, for concealment is the cause of disclosure (sibbat hagilluy hu’ ha-he‘lem).”79 Tiqqun consists precisely of garbing the light so that it may be revealed to others who derive pleasure from it.80 The concomitant hiding and disclosure of the darkened light of EinSof in the illumined darkness of the sefirot is also expressed by sixteenthcentury kabbalists as the dialectic of expansion and withdrawing, hitpashFut and histalqut.81 Gershom Scholem referred to these principles as the “two tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow” that continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and

Divine suffering 115 the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation.82 I agree with Scholem’s assessment that the two phases of divine activity cannot be conceived in isolation from one another, but I would go one step further by noting that the kabbalistic conception embraces the paradox that hitpashFut and histalqut are not antinomies in the cosmological process; on the contrary, extending forward is drawing back and drawing back extending forward. Translated grammatologically, every affirmation applied to God is negation, for what can one say about the unsayable other than what is left unsaid? The apophatic and kataphatic poles are not mutually exclusive; in the depth of mystical insight, to assert something of God is to deny precisely that which is asserted; speaking is a manner of not speaking.83 The sefirot may be viewed as well as semiotic prisms through which the ineffable concealment of the divine is spoken in its secrecy. The matter can also be expressed in temporal terms: the interval of duration that is experienced as ontically real is the present, but the present is real only as that which in the future will not be except as that which is past. Time entails the paradox of the present that comes eternally because it has eternally been.84 To be novel, therefore, the moment must be ancient, for only what is old can be new. Memory and expectation merge in the fullness of the present experienced as the past that perpetually is yet to come. Just as concealment is disclosure and negation affirmation, what is not persists because it is. In kabbalistic theosophy, therefore, being, time, and language are inextricably bound together by the duplicity of the (un)showing that reveals what is hidden. In becoming visible, the Infinite is concealed; in becoming audible, the ineffable is muted; in becoming calculable, the unlimited is delimited. As Rosenzweig put it in the Star of Redemption, creation entails dying on the part of God.85 Rosenzweig formulated, whether intentionally or not,86 a philosophical principle that well captures the conceptual premise underlying a basic myth that shaped kabbalistic ontology: all that exists in the various realms of existence, which are eventually referred to as the four worlds of emanation (’aDilut), creation (beri’ah), formation (yeDirah), and making (‘asiyah), may be viewed as manifestations of the hidden truth of God’s being. To focus on the first of these worlds, the pleroma of divine emanations, ‘olam ha-’asilut, we might say that light arises as a consequence of the delimitation of infinite darkness in ten luminous emanations (sefirot), the mathematical/ semiotic ciphers for all that exists in the universe.87 We can thus speak of emanation as withholding, expansion into light as withdrawing from darkness, coming into presence as retreating from absence, the manifest

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God revealed in the masking of the hidden God.88 In the first of three lectures he offered at the Jüdische Freies Lehrhaus in Berlin in 1922, Rosenzweig put the matter as follows: “God contradicts Himself with His world, His eternity with time. This self-contradiction is the Creation.”89 The death of God or God’s self-contradiction is what I shall identify in kabbalistic cosmological myth as the primal suffering in the heart of God’s being. This suffering is not only the empathetic suffering of God occasioned by the trials and tribulations of the nation of Israel in history. Surely, kabbalists affirm the latter as well, as is attested especially by the intensified use of the rabbinic theme of Shekhinah accompanying the Jewish people in exile. In kabbalistic literature, the exile of Shekhinah together with the people of Israel signifies the separation of the holy king and queen, a fissure in God that results in the diminution and affliction of Shekhinah, the feminine potency.90 The exile of Shekhinah is also portrayed in kabbalistic texts indebted to the zoharic tradition as the subjugation of holiness by the demonic force. The Shekhinah is oppressed, which is often expressed by the biblical idiom of the feet of the estranged woman having descended to death (Prov. 5:5), under the duress of the stranger’s intrusion, the penetration of the other side, Samael inseminating Eve, an illicit crossing of boundary.91 The exile of Shekhinah in kabbalistic symbolism alludes, therefore, to an abysmal suffering, a suffering at the core of the divine being that ensues from a rupture within God that results in a severing of left and right, female and male. From the kabbalistic perspective, the exile of Shekhinah assumes metaphysical significance related to the imprisonment of the divine in the demonic powers. An interesting formulation of this motif is offered by Meir ibn Gabbai when he notes that the Shekhinah is garbed in the ten lower crowns during the six days of the week to establish “his kingship shall rule over everything” (Ps. 103:19), and to establish “God is king over the nations” (ibid. 47:9), and this is the secret of “In all their affliction he was afflicted” (Isa. 63:9), and it is written “I will be with him in distress” (Ps. 91:15), in the secret of when they were exiled to Egypt the Shekhinah was with them in order to protect his children.92 The scriptural assertions of God’s power extending to all nations necessitates the mythic drama of the exile of Shekhinah, which is interpreted as the investiture of the divine in forces of impurity and evil. In this study, I shall focus on this abysmal suffering, the suffering at the ground that renders possible existence outside the one that comprises everything within itself in non-differentiated oneness. To be sure, these two kinds of suffering are not unrelated, for delimitation is an act of judgment that

Divine suffering 117 initiates the separation of the feminine left and masculine right in her desire to extend forward, to overflow with the fruit of her yield, the condition of ecstasy as a standing-out (ek/stasis), be/coming other. In a prior stage of the emanative process, indeed in what may be envisioned as the beginning of that which has no end, which is fulfilled in the end that has no beginning, God suffers the othering of self requisite for the self to become other.

Suffering and the jouissance of becoming-other In this section, I will explore the trope of divine suffering in more detail as it relates to the kabbalistic idea of DimDum, the primordial act of contraction and withdrawal of light that allows for the emanation of different worlds out of the ineffable darkness of Ein-Sof, an idea briefly alluded to in thirteenth-century texts and more fully developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.93 In a previous study, I focused on the connection between the Lurianic motif of DimDum and the act of writing underlying the erotic myth of divines autogenesis (related in particular to the motif of sha‘ashu‘a, the primal delight of both a sexual and an intellectual nature94) that I traced to kabbalistic sources from an earlier period.95 I will not rehearse all my arguments here, but let me offer the salient points of the discussion as this will be critical to understanding my thesis concerning the portrayal of reading as a hermeneutical activity that alleviates the suffering experienced by God in the creative process of writing. The myth of DimDum conveys the paradoxical idea of self-limitation on the part of that which has no limit. The Infinite, which fills all space, withdraws from itself to create a space within itself from which it is vacated. The presence of Ein-Sof in that space is predicated on the absence of Ein-Sof from that very space. The paradoxical nature of DimDum, the withdrawal of the Infinite from itself into itself, presumes, therefore, that Ein-Sof is both present in and absent from the space (Balal) from which it vacates; indeed, Ein-Sof is present in the space because it is absent, for if it were not absent it could not be present. The effluence of light from darkness is concurrently a condensation of light. The light overflows because it has been constricted. Kabbalists expand the older biblical and rabbinic theme that the world is created and persists on account of the attribute of mercy, which they identify as the masculine potency of grace, but grace issues forth only in response to the female will to contain that which overflows, the attribute of din, judgment, gevurah, power, or paBad, fear. The masculine impulse to project is dialectically intertwined with the feminine urge to receive. Symbolically, this is expressed in the image of the left stimulating the right, the “secret of caressing” (sod ha-Bibbuq)96

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or the “arousal of the left” (hit‘orerut ha-semo’l), which is often linked exegetically to the verse “His left hand was under my head, his right arm embraced me” (Song of Songs 2:6).97 The female capacity to contain excites the male desire to discharge, and thus it can be said that eros is induced by the feminine side of judgment, a theme that is expressed as well by the image of the female waters (mayyin nuqbin) stimulating the male waters (mayyin dukhrin).98 It is critical from the kabbalists’ vantage point that the sexual excitement begin from the woman. According to one zoharic passage, when the female arouses desire in the male, then she is filled from the right side of mercy, but when the male arouses desire in the female, she is on the left side of judgment.99 The task of sexual arousal is thus ascribed ideally to the female, but the ultimate purpose of the arousal and consequent coitus is to ameliorate the feminine quality of judgment in the masculine quality of mercy. The entire process of emanation that ensues from Ein-Sof may be viewed in precisely these terms. As Luria explains the zoharic image of the “book weighed on the balance” (sifra’ de-shaqil be-matqela’), which describes the “book of concealment” (sifra’ di-Deni‘uta’), The emanator must be arrayed in masculine and feminine so that all of the emanation will unfold in this manner, and the judgments will be sweetened in mercy, for the male is mercy and the female judgment as is known.100 The manifestation of that which has no limit requires the feminine constriction that prompts the elongation of the masculine even though the ultimate purpose of the heterosexual mating is the transvaluation of judgment into mercy, which may also be understood as the transformation of the female into male.101 The myth of DimDum in Lurianic kabbalah can be understood from this gender perspective. As Luria himself put the matter in his commentary to the zoharic passage be-reish hurmanuta’ de-malka’ (Zohar 1:15a), “Prior to the emanation he and his name were one, and he filled the place of all the worlds.”102 Before the emanation of light from Ein-Sof the ontic status of the latter is described by Luria in terms of the well-known dictum from an older midrashic collection, Pirqei Rabbi ’Eli‘ezer, that God and his name were one. As a consequence of the will to create, however, the name and the divine become distinguishable and thus the process of delimitation is related to the image of Ein-Sof donning the ineffable name, YHWH, the garment through which the light of God is concomitantly revealed and concealed. Putting on the garment of the name symbolically signifies the phallic impetus to bestow incited by the feminine quality to contain.103 The point is well expressed by ibn eabul:

Divine suffering 119 The worlds in which he is garbed are called “his name,” and if we contemplate the matter we will find that the blessed One is called by his name, that is, the Tetragrammaton as is known, for all is one in relation to the Tetragrammaton. “And the Lord is in his holy abode” (Hab. 2:20), for Malkhut, which is the garment, becomes the soul for all the worlds . . . and all of these worlds and Malkhut were contained in the supernal world in ’Abba’ and ’Imma’, and thus all were contained in Keter and in the containment of Ein-Sof, blessed be his name. All the worlds were swallowed up in it, for naught but it was discernible. His name indicates a minimal disclosure, and it is the aspect of judgment, but his essence is entirely mercy, and everything was a complete unity, and all was Ein-Sof, blessed be his name.104 To ascribe a name to Ein-Sof is to impose a limit upon the limitless. This is the symbolic import of ibn eabul’s identification of the name as Malkhut, “kingship,” which is the “holy abode” wherein the infinite dwells. Malkhut is one of the standard titles attributed to the last of the ten sefirotic emanations, which is generally depicted in her femininity as the receptacle that receives the overflow from the upper emanations. In this context, however, ibn eabul is speaking about the supernal root of Malkhut in the highest aspect of the divine, the attribute of judgment in Keter that makes possible the disclosure of the infinite light, which is characterized as unmitigated mercy.105 I note, parenthetically, that given the standard correlation of mercy and masculinity, on one hand, and judgment and femininity, on the other, it is valid to conclude that the remark that God’s essence was “entirely mercy” implies that this essence should be gendered as exclusively male. Just as there may be a right without any corresponding left, so there may be masculine without any corresponding feminine. Even so we must recognize the feminine potency contained in the masculine, the aspect of judgment in that which is entirely mercy, and thus we must speak of the highest manifestation of the infinite essence of God as the male that comprises the female as part of himself and not as an autonomous force. Ibn eabul relates to this notion in the following exegesis of the critical verse “These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom” (Gen. 36:31): Here it is not a definite place, but rather “who reigned,” for everything is in the aspect of judgment, which is the aspect of Malkhut in that great configuration (parDuf ha-gadol), and since it is a hidden place, it was not explained.106 This idea is expressed as well in the theosophic works of Vital. I shall return to this below, but what needs to be emphasized here is that implicit

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in ibn eabul’s remarks is the assumption that DimDum involved the feminine attribute of judgment contained clandestinely in the infinite mercy of the Godhead, which must be gendered as completely male. The point is made explicitly and emphatically by ibn eabul in the continuation of this text: The light of Ein-Sof filled everything, and when it arose in his simple will to emanate and to create the worlds that he made, he constricted his light . . . and there remained an empty space in the measure in which the [four worlds of ] emanation, creation, formation, and making emerged. His light was removed from his four dimensions, and there remained in that space only a trace of the light (roshem ha-’or) . . . and what caused [the light] to be withdrawn was the potency of judgment, for the root of all that which is below must be above in absolute mercy.107 This element of the feminine is associated with the divine name, for the latter is the garment that encircles and thereby gives measure to that which has no limit and no boundary, the infinite power of God’s compassion.108 Let me rephrase the main points of this intricate presentation: the primordial act of withdrawal of light is an expression of divine judgment, which is contained within the gradation described as complete mercy. Implied in the seemingly paradoxical ascription of judgment to the potency that is described as entirely merciful is the engendering androcentric myth of kabbalistic theosophy, which I have identified as the androgynous male, that is, the male that includes the female, an idea suggested to kabbalists by the conception of the creation of man and woman in the second chapter of Genesis.109 As a result of DimDum the forces of judgment coalesce so that they may be expelled from the economy of the divine prior to the emanation of the world of sefirot and the coming-into-being of the other three worlds, which are correlated with the four letters of the divine name. This name is described further as the garment in which the infinite light is garbed. In being so garbed, the light is present in the place where it appears to be absent. This absence is associated with the attribute of judgment, that is, the occluding of light. However, even in the absence of light there is an admixture of judgment and mercy. When all of the forces of judgment are gathered together, it coalesces in one place, and on account of it the light of Ein-Sof, blessed be he, is withdrawn. There remains there a trace (reshimu) of light with the power of judgment, which is the root of the strong judgment, and all of the trace and the judgment are mixed together, and

Divine suffering 121 as soon as the mercy is withdrawn the judgment is revealed. Since the trace is only a vestige (roshem), it belongs to judgment, and it is mixed together with it.110 In an effort to articulate the meaning of this process, ibn eabul refers as well to the letter yod, which is identified as the line-of-measure (qaw ha-middah),111 that enters into the primordial space of withdrawal/ containment and interacts with the trace left therein in order to purify the admixture so that the forces of mercy and judgment would be separated, the former taking the shape of light and the latter that of vessels that hold the light, even though they are themselves a form of light.112 The process is described in slightly different language in ibn eabul’s treatise on the creation of the world, Kawwanat Beri’at ha-‘Olam. According to that text, the light of the emanator illumines the vessel that is created as a consequence of the withdrawal of the light. The encompassing light (’or maqif ) that is above the vessel has no limit, whereas the inner light (’or penimi) that is inside the vessel is constricted by boundary. From the point inside the vessel, which is compared to the seminal seed (tippah ha-zera‘it), there emanates ten points corresponding to the ten sefirot from Keter to Malkhut.113 The lower seven sefirot are identified as the seven kings of Edom who perished (Gen. 36:31–9) for none of these emanations were strong enough to contain the effluence of light.114 What is of especial interest to our discussion is the account of the final stage of this process: When the light reached Yesod, it received the light for two activities, one portion for its own sake and another portion for the sake of Malkhut, and the portion that it received for its own sake, so that it would be great, it could not bear and it was abolished, and the portion that it received for the sake of Malkhut remained in him and it was not abolished, and this is the secret of “the son of Jesse is living on earth” (1 Sam. 20:31), and Yesod is called “living.” When the vessel of Yesod was broken the light was revealed and it came forcibly to Malkhut and she, too, was broken but not entirely like the first ones, and thus she was made into a configuration (parDuf ) after the rectification. Had the light come to Malkhut by way of the channel, she would not have been broken. . . . This is the secret of “thus it arose in thought,”115 the secret of “he created worlds and destroyed them,”116 the secret of the “world of chaos,” the “world of points,” and the secret of the kings who reigned and died.117 The primordial act of withdrawal must thus be seen as a catharsis of the forces of judgment, which are identified variously as the “kings of

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Edom,” the “world of chaos,” or the “world of points,” a purging of the impure dross from God’s thought that is also depicted as the shattering of the vessels from the overpowering effluence of the light. The reconfiguration of light after the fracture occurs in the last of the lower seven vessels, which corresponds to Malkhut, the element of the divine that receives the light from the vessel that corresponds to Yesod. The light that is rectified assumes the form of the five countenances (parDufim), ’Arikh ’Anpin, ’Abba’, ’Imma’, Ze‘eir ’Anpin, and Nuqba’, which are contained in the four letters of the name, YHWH.118 The tiqqun, therefore, consists of Ein-Sof donning the garment of the name, which comprises the five manifestations that collectively express the ameliorated attribute of judgment in the form of divine kingship (Malkhut), the last of the kings (melakhim). In his commentary on the ’Idra’ Rabba’, ibn eabul depicts the rectification of the feminine in the following terms: “Prior to the tiqqun she was in the secret of the point (nequddah) and by means of the tiqqun he engraved her in the secret of the female (neqevah).”119 The word neqevah is related etymologically to the verb naqav, to perforate, to pierce, to hollow. The tiqqun of the female occurs, therefore, when the male engraves the point and thereby transforms it into a hole to receive the semen. The preparation of the female receptacle is prior to all other acts of divine creativity. It is in this sense that the feminine aspect of Malkhut is identified as the chaos that comes before all other things, the green line that surrounds the world, the secret of the shell that precedes the fruit.120 The feminine does not antecede the masculine in an ontological sense, for ontologically the female is part of and hence succeeds the male. The precedence of the female, expressed most poignantly by the image of the shell before the fruit, conveys the notion that the Infinite must be purged of the force of judgment. This motif is expressed as well in terms of the letters of the Tetragrammaton: the first letter to emerge is the last letter of the name, the final he’, which symbolically represents Malkhut. The attribution of this letter signifies as well the demiurgical role assigned to Malkhut, a role that does not come to fruition since she desires to procreate without an appropriate male partner. Vital, arguably Luria’s most influential disciple, does not explicitly embrace this version of DimDum in his major theosophic works; however, a reconsideration of his depiction of this process, both in the standard published works and in material that has more recently seen the light of day, indicates that he, too, accepted the esoteric interpretation, and thus the older attempts to contrast Vital and ibn eabul on this score need to be modified.121 According to Vital’s presentation, Ein-Sof contracts itself into a midpoint in which the light is contained, and by contracting the light into this point a vacuum is created that surrounds the point. The

Divine suffering 123 contraction occurs in such a way that the empty space is to be visualized in the shape of the circle encompassing the point of light set in the middle.122 To decode the intended meaning of the symbolism, one must bear in mind that the geometric image of the midpoint in classical kabbalistic sources (including, most importantly, zoharic literature) relates to the phallicization of the feminine. In a previous study, I focused on the utilization of this symbolism in the context of describing the Shekhinah as the queen that unites with the king on the Sabbath.123 Specifically, as a result of the sacred union that occurs on the eve of Sabbath, the feminine Shekhinah is transformed into an aspect of the male, which is depicted in the image of the point in the center of the circle. This image relates to her ability to overflow to the world in blessing. Anatomically, the image can be said to symbolize the womb or the cervix, both of which are interpreted by kabbalists (in line with the prevailing attitude in medieval medicine) as the part of the woman’s body that corresponds to the phallus.124 In so far as the phallus is interpreted by kabbalists as the site on the male body that bears the signification of the divine name,125 it makes sense that the instrument of reproduction, the womb, would be assigned the same qualities in the body of the woman. This, I suspect, is the hidden significance of the symbol of the midpoint whence all other links in the chain of being are said to emerge, the aspect of the feminine in the Infinite that is endowed with creative potency by assuming the nature of the male. Vital elsewhere designates this quality of the feminine as malkhut she-be-malkhut, the “kingship within kingship,” that is, the attribute of Malkhut, which is the lowest gradation in Ein-Sof, that receives from the totality of everything above it and emanates the attribute of Keter, which is the supernal gradation that contains the root of all that which is emanated.126 The feminine is thus related in the first instance to the empty space that comes to be as a result of the withdrawal of divine light. Surely there is no more graphic image to express the idea that the principal role of the feminine is to be the vessel that contains the seed/breath of the male. The holding-in that initiates the extending-forward can be explained as the desire of the male to procreate, to implant, to lay the seed in the ground. In the primal stage of divine becoming, however, there is no polarity of opposites, no separation of female from male. This does not imply that within the infinity of the Godhead there is an erasure of gender distinctions. As surprising as it might seem to contemporary minds, kabbalists presume the existence of an aspect of the divine that is completely masculine or entirely on the right side. Thus, based on older texts, including some key zoharic passages, Vital reminds the reader frequently in his writings that in the supreme manifestation of God (referred to variously as Keter, ‘Arikh ’Anpin, or ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’) there is

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no left in opposition to right, no female that complements the male.127 Contrary to what common sense might dictate, there can be a right without a corresponding left and a male without a counterpart female. One passage, in particular, is noteworthy for in that context this idea is linked to what is referred to as the first copulation (ziwwug ri’shon) in a phase within the divine wherein there is no female that stands over and against the male. In Vital’s own words: Indeed, in the first time of the first copulation, the male was aroused by himself (nit‘orer ha-zakhar me-‘aDmo) without arousal of the feminine, and there arose in him the will and the desire to copulate (raDon we-ta’awah lehizdawweg) even though as of yet there was no aspect of the female waters. Therefore, this copulation is very hidden and it was not in the aspect of the intercourse of his genitalia128 with her genitalia, for the feminine was still not created in the world. If this so, with whom would there be copulation when the world was created? Therefore, this first copulation was in the supernal will, thought, the upper brain, in the secret of the supernal will that is entirely masculine and without any mark of the feminine, and understand this.129 Since the feminine is not yet separated from the masculine in the uppermost aspect of the Godhead, the first copulation cannot be understood in heterosexual terms; there is no female “other” to arouse the male through the feminine waters (the orgiastic fluids of the woman) and to receive his seed. The first copulation, therefore, is not an act of intercourse at all but the autoerotic arousal of the male, nit‘orer ha-zakhar me-‘aDmo, a theme that is expressed in other Lurianic texts (primarily from the school of Israel Sarug) by the image of sha‘ashu‘a, the delight that God experiences with himself before creation in the eros of selfcontemplation.130 The motif is expressed as follows in Luria’s commentary on Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta’: This delight (sha‘ashu‘a) is for the sake of the copulation (ziwwug), to bring forth the masculine waters from above to below, for just as there is delight in the souls of the righteous below in relation to the feminine waters so there must be delight in which to take pleasure and to bring forth the masculine waters in the secret of the wine that gladdens, and from our flesh we see that the joy and delight increases the desire.131 In so far as the highest aspect of the Godhead is depicted as purely masculine, it follows that the desire to copulate and thereby unite with

Divine suffering 125 the other arises from male autoeroticism. The impetus for arousal in the male’s desire to project is depicted in the overtly sexual image of the masculine waters, the seminal issue. This desire necessitates the othering of the one, a division of the male androgyne into the masculine potency that overflows and the feminine potency that receives.132 Just as in the lower plane of being the righteous souls stimulate (and, according to some passages, even constitute) the feminine waters that arouse the male to unite with the female,133 so in the upper plane there is sexual arousal in the form of the masculine waters overflowing from above to below. In the supreme gradation of the divine there is no feminine that stands apart from the masculine, but we still can, indeed must, speak of the feminine incorporated in the masculine.134 As Vital puts it in one passage, The aspect of male and female does not signify the complete unity as when there is one male alone. Thus we find in the Zohar, in the ’Idra’ of Naso’ and of Ha’azinu,135 that the aspect of the male and female is only from ’Abba’ and ’Imma’ and below, but above in ‘Atiq Yomin and ’Arikh ’Anpin there is no aspect of male and female. . . . Therefore, within it there is no aspect of male and female as two complete and distinct configurations (parDufin gemurim nifradim). Indeed, the masculine and feminine within it are contained in one configuration alone, for the aspect of the masculine, which is the Tetragrammaton in the numerical value of forty-five,136 stands on the right side of ’Arikh, and the Tetragrammaton with the numerical value of fifty-two137 that is within it is the aspect of the feminine that stands on the left. . . . The entire right side of ’Arikh is called masculine and the entire left side is called feminine. However, since everything is one configuration alone, it thus says in the book of the Zohar that regarding Keter it is said “See, then, that I, I am he; there is no god beside me” (Deut. 32:39), for he is one without a second with him, and he has no feminine.138 In the uppermost configuration of the divine, designated as ‘Atiq Yomin and ’Arikh ’Anpin, there is no division into distinct masculine and feminine configurations. Even though there is no autonomous female that stands over and against the male, we can speak of masculine and feminine aspects, which are signified respectively by the two permutations of the Tetragrammaton, the name of forty-five and that of fifty-two, that stand on the right and the left. The androcentric bias is expressed at the conclusion of the passage wherein Vital interprets the monotheistic proclamation “there is no god beside me” as a reference to the theosophic claim that Keter, the first of the sefirot, has no feminine other.

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Significantly, the lack of gender polarity is not expressed as the female that has no male but only as the male that has no female. In a number of texts, the feminine that is contained in the masculine is identified more specifically as the corona of the phallus, ‘aFeret yesod.139 One text, in particular, worthy of note is Vital’s interpretation of a striking image in the ’Idra’ ZuFa’ section of zoharic literature wherein the highest configuration of the divine is depicted as the head that comprises three heads that are engraved within one another, the “head that is no head” (reisha’ de-lav reisha’), the “holy ancient one” (‘atiqa’ qadisha’), and “hidden wisdom” (Bokhmah setima’ah).140 According to Vital’s interpretation, Ein-Sof is garbed in the ten sefirot of the world of emanation, which are comprised in the three heads or, more precisely, the first two heads insofar as the third head is treated as the aspect of wisdom in the second head. Nine sefirot from Keter to Yesod constitute the second head, which is called ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ or ’Arikh ’Anpin. The sefirah of Malkhut is not counted independently because she is comprised within Yesod in the form of the corona. Above the nine emanations of ’Arikh ’Anpin is the tenth sefirah, the aspect that is called the “supernal head” (ro’sh ha-‘elyon), ‘Atiq Yomin, the “ancient of days.” In contrast to the nine sefirot of ’Arikh ’Anpin, which are characterized as exclusively male (the feminine potency identified as the corona of the phallus), the tenth sefirah, the “head that is no head,” is labeled the “feminine of the ancient of days,” nuqba’ de-‘atiq yomin. But what is the nature of this femininity? Is the first manifestation in the chain of being in which the Infinite is delimited an actual feminine form? It seems to me that the answer to this question is decidedly negative. The “feminine of the ancient of days” is not an autonomous female configuration but the crowning part of the male, which is identified as the corona of the phallic potency of the head that is no head. In the conclusion of this passage, Vital briefly alludes to a fundamental tenet of Lurianic kabbalah concerning the symmetry between beginning and end. I shall return to this root further on, but suffice it here to note that just as in the beginning the aspect of the feminine is configured as the crown atop the head of the male, so in the end Malkhut would be uplifted and restored to her posture as the “crown on the head of the righteous.”141 In the most primordial aspect of the divine, which would have full reign in the messianic era, the logic of correlation gives way to a textual reasoning that defies the necessity to posit a female ontologically distinct from the male. The sexual play by which the male deity amuses himself is linked explicitly to the corona, which is the feminine aspect of the male, in the following passage from ibn eabul, commenting on the expression “when it arose in his will to create the Torah:”142

Divine suffering 127 The explanation of “it arose in his will” is that all the reality of the worlds were made by way of grace without female waters, and thus it says “it arose in his will,” for his light emanates below, but when it returns and rises above to be contained in his source, it arouses him to overflow . . . for the light in his corona (‘aFarah) becomes for him the female waters to arouse all the reality of the worlds.143 In the absence of a discrete feminine persona to serve as the impetus for the male to ejaculate the seminal issue, it is necessary for the male to incite himself to overflow. The corona of the phallus thus functions as the feminine waters that stimulate the male. The arousal of the male to discharge seed in the emanation of light is the theosophic mystery of the traditional idiom of a thought arising in the will of God.144 The implication of the symbol of ‘aFeret yesod is that the membrum virile is the ontic source for both masculinity and femininity. The ontological problem of the feminine is resolved, therefore, by locating the ultimate source for the female other in the phallic potency itself.145 In one passage, Vital describes the origin of the feminine in the corona of the phallus and its subsequent development into an autonomous personification: With this you can understand that Malkhut is called by various names and they are all true, for Malkhut has several roots (shorashim) in accord with the change in time (hishtannut ha-zeman). Thus do not wonder that Malkhut is the corona of the phallus (‘aFeret hayesod) that is in man or how she is the female of a man (ha-nuqba’ shel ha-’adam). The matter is a great secret for with respect to every holiness the first root is not removed from there. Therefore the place of Malkhut was first in the root that is the corona of the phallus, and afterwards when she grew she was removed from there and she expanded bit by bit until she became a complete configuration (parDuf gamur), and she was face-to-face with Ze‘eir ’Anpin.146 The productivity of the female depends on a masculine—and ultimately phallic—transformation. This is occasioned by the return of a trace of the light of Ein-Sof into the space from which it vacated its light. This process results in the condensation of the midpoint, which must be decoded as the phallic element of the feminine out of which all worlds were to emerge. As Vital puts it in his brief sermon on creation, The Holy One, blessed be he, constricted himself in the creation of the world, for the world could not make use of the resplendent light, and he emanated from it a spark of one point, and the light

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The symbolic depiction of the center-point as the letter yod alludes to the process of phallicization to which I have referred, for that letter is the sign of the covenant incised on the circumcised flesh. The attribution of the phallic sign to the female potency underscores the gender transformation of the feminine, which may also be expressed as the transmutation of the signified into a signifier. The implicit meaning of Vital’s remarks is made even more explicit in a second text that was only recently published from manuscript. In an effort to represent the act of DimDum in metaphorical terms, Vital refers to the process of placing a stone in a body of water. Just as the water is removed from the place where the stone falls but it is not destroyed completely, so in the case of the light that is withdrawn. I will cite the relevant passage in full: In this manner was the contraction of the light that gathered above as the place remained vacant. Then all the coarseness and thickness of the judgment that was in the light of Ein-Sof as a drop in the great ocean is clarified and separated, and it descends and is gathered in that vacated space, and an amorphous mass (golem) is made from the coarseness and thickness of the aforementioned power of judgment. This amorphous mass is surrounded by the light of Ein-Sof from above, below, and the four sides, and from this amorphous mass there emanated the four worlds. In his simple will to actualize his intention, the supernal emanator returned and caused a little of the light, which he withdrew at first, to go down upon the amorphous mass, but not all of it. Thus only a small portion of it went down, and this is the yod, in the manner of the shell preceding the kernel.148 The reference to the shell is explicable in terms of what Rashbi said that this is the core in relation to that and this is the shell in relation to that.149 That is, from the thickness and density of the power of judgment the mass is produced and from that the vessels are made afterward, and this is the secret of the land of Edom.150 From the above citation it is clear that Vital, much as ibn eabul, maintained that the primary act of constriction is an expression of divine judgment whence emerges the amorphous mass that occupies the space created by the withdrawal of the light. Significantly, Vital refers to this mass as the “land of Edom.” Following earlier aggadic sources, kabbalists

Divine suffering 129 identified Edom as Christianity, or more specifically Roman Catholicism. In zoharic literature, this association takes on added importance since Edom represents the demonic force that parallels the divine.151 Vital’s appropriation of this symbolism and his application of it to the amorphous mass suggests that, in his view, that which first comes to be in the empty space is the foundation of the demonic force, the shell that precedes the kernel, Esau before Jacob. It is evident, moreover, that this mass is gendered as female; indeed, it assumes the character of prime matter, which is associated with the feminine in medieval philosophical sources.152 The light that streams back into the empty space to illuminate the mass is the letter yod, which symbolizes the phallic potency that alone can purify the feminine judgment of its demonic nature. The initial catharsis, therefore, involved the removal of the impure feminine from the economy of the masculine Godhead by the striking of the phallic sign against the primordial mass of formless matter.153 As Vital put it another context, “These are the kings who ruled in the land of Edom” (Gen. 36:31), for when they emerged he immediately began to purify the aspect of these kings to produce the aspect of the feminine in relation to him. . . . Thus you will understand why the aspect of the feminine is always judgments (dinin), for her root is in the aspect of the kings who died, and consequently they are called kings (melakhim) from the word malkhut.154 Reiterating this theme elsewhere, Vital writes that the “aspect of the feminine is the judgments, as is known, for she is from the purification (berur) of the kings.”155 Underlying the zoharic myth of the Edomite kings, who symbolize the forces of impurity within the Godhead, is the ontological problem of the feminine.156 The death of the kings is interpreted symbolically as tiqqun ha-nuqba’, the amelioration of the feminine quality of judgmental restriction. That these kings arose first in the mind of God is a way of expressing the idea that the shell precedes the kernel, but it also signifies that the stimulation for the masculine potency to extend is initiated by the female potency to contain. An allusion to this dimension of the myth is found in the statement that “there is no copulation without the female waters and thus he at first brought forth the female waters for the sake of the copulation.”157 This, I suggest, must be taken as the esoteric intent of Vital’s version of the myth of DimDum. In this connection, it is instructive to note that in the printed version of ‘ED Aayyim, there is a parenthetical note marked as mahadura’ batra’ah, the “second edition,” which reads as follows: “The matter of this DimDum is to reveal the source of judgments in order to place the attribute of judgment afterwards in the

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worlds, and this potency is called boDina’ de-qardinuta’.”158 The purpose of the initial withdrawal of light was to crystallize the latent forces of judgment within the Infinite to form the bosina’ de-qardinuta’, the hardened flame, which serves as the instrument of judgment that gives shape and measure to the emanations that proceed from Ein-Sof.159 It is instructive to consider the depiction of catharsis within the divine offered by Luria in his commentary on Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta’. Luria identifies the first seven of the eight kings of Edom mentioned in Scripture (Gen. 36:31–8) as supernal sons that derive from Binah, for they are all entirely judgment and they have no attachment or source in ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’, and they died. And these are the sparks that have no substance, and these sparks were thrown by the hardened flame,160 which is the source of judgments, that was hidden in the entrails of the Mother, which is Binah, for judgments are aroused from her. . . . The matter is that ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ had to delay its arrayments until these sparks emerged, for they are harsh judgments in which are mixed the shells, and the refuse was separated from them, and that which could be ameliorated was ameliorated, and the shell remained below, to separate the holy and the profane.161 The ontic source of the Edomite kings is the boDina’ de-qardinuta’, the phallic flame that is located in Binah, the divine mother and source of judgment. Antecedent to the elimination of these harsh judgments, which are not attached to ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’, there was no sexual mating between masculine and feminine, no face-to-face gazing. However, once ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ was purged of these forces, and the holy was separated from the profane, the last of the eight kings of Edom emerged together with his feminine counterpart, Hadar and Mehefabel (Gen. 36:39). “Therefore, all the kings that reigned in Edom, the place wherein judgments exist, were abolished until the last king and his wife came, male and female, judgment and mercy, and they were ameliorated together.”162 Given the balance of male and female present in the eighth of the kings, it is possible to view Hadar as the king that rectifies the aspect of the feminine of the prior seven kings, a point that is made explicitly by Vital in the following passage: Thus the new light of the [name with the numerical value of ] fortyfive that comes forth from the forehead . . . is the secret of the eighth king . . . who is called Hadar concerning whom no death is mentioned in the Torah, for he did not die like the others. On the contrary, he rectifies and establishes the seven primordial kings that preceded him who died.163

Divine suffering 131 The symbolic intent of this rectification is made clear from the statement of Vital that Hadar corresponds to “Yesod that comprises male and female, which is the crown that is in him.”164 The feminine quality of judgment is rectified when the female is constituted as a part of the phallus in the form of the corona that is exposed in the rite of circumcision. The last of the Edomite kings thus points to the covenant that marks the unique status of the Israelite male. The contextualization of the feminine in the corona signifies the othering of the other, the crossing of boundary that transforms Edom, the male without a female, into Adam, the androgynous union of male and female. Significantly, the locus of that androgyny is in the circumcised Jewish penis. In a similar vein, ibn eabul remarked that the eighth of the Edomite kings, Hadar, is linked to the permutation of the name that equals fortyfive, which is said to arise from the combination of the name that equals sixty-three and the name that equals seventy-two. The number forty-five is also the numerical value of the word ’adam, which denotes that within Hadar “was the aspect of male and female, which are the mercies and judgments, but the judgments have no disclosure, for the mercies overpowered them, and it was called mercy in its entirety, and this is Adam.”165 Hadar, which corresponds to the phallic potency of Yesod, is the perfect embodiment of the male androgyne, for the female is contained in the male. In yet another text of Vital, the death of the Edomite kings is mythicized as the sin of spilling seed in vain, for they were males without female partners to receive the seminal discharge. “The arms of his hands were spread out” (Gen. 49:24), this refers to the secret of ten drops that were cast out from between the nails,166 as is mentioned in tiqqun 69,167 as is known . . . for they are themselves the aspect of the kings, or the nullification of the kings (biFFul ha-melakhim) was on account of the fact that Adam was not yet arrayed as one, male and female. This is the secret of the seminal drops of Joseph that were discharged without a female, but from the male alone. And these are the ten martyrs of royalty (‘asarah harugei melukhah). Contemplate the word melukhah, for they were verily the seven kings (melakhim) whose vessels and bodies were broken. The reason was also because they were without the arrayment (tiqqun) of male and female, until Hadar, the eighth king, came, and then they were arrayed.168 In the kabbalistic teaching attributed to Luria, the act of spilling semen is linked to the primal iniquity of Adam that set history into motion, an offense that is not fully rectified except by the coming of the messiah.169

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Although the language of transgression is not used to characterize the primal activity of Ein-Sof before the emanation of the parDufim—on the contrary, the metaphors used depict the erotic gratification of selfcontemplation—it is reasonable to conclude that this analogy is indeed an appropriate way to account for the originary act that results in the emanation of being outside the abundant emptiness of the empty abundance. That is, the primal activity in the Godhead that gave way to the construction of the kings of Edom is autoerotic in nature. The possibility of existence outside the all-encompassing plenitude of the one, which may be expressed as the coming-into-being of the feminine as a discrete force, is dependent on this activity. Just as the othering of the infinite that has no other results in the breaking of vessels, so in the case of Adam there is an overstepping of boundary set in motion by autoerotic rapture. By a psychical inversion typical of an androcentric standpoint, the male desire to ejaculate without a female receptacle is transposed so that the evil is associated more specifically with the woman. That is, the male who ejaculates without a female is transvalued as feminine and the mercy associated with the seminal overflow is transposed into an act of judgment.170 In zoharic literature, the primordial kings are portrayed in images that convey emasculation and sterility. The hermeneutical extension of these images to include the impulse to masturbate reflects the peculiar understanding of male sexuality proffered in Lurianic kabbalah. The extent of the misogyny is brought into sharp relief for man’s casting semen without a woman to receive it is understood as a transgressive act that symbolically feminizes the male. The point is elucidated in the following passage: These kings arose in the secret of the female waters for their existence from the beginning was in the secret of ruddiness, for they are the drop of the female. And thus they are called kings (melakhim) for they came forth in that malkhut, which is the land of Edom, female waters without a masculine.171 The kings of Edom are valenced as female, for they are a manifestation of judgment, symbolized by the color red, which is also related to the menstrual flow of women, the epitome of pollution.172 The first seven of the eight kings mentioned in Scripture have no female counterparts. Kings without queens are transfigured into queens without kings, or, in the language of the aforecited passage, female waters without a masculine. In a state of harmony, the female waters incite the male waters to overflow so that male and female will be united and the latter will be amended by the former. By contrast, preceding the emanation of the androgynous sefirot, the ontic situation is one wherein the female waters have no

Divine suffering 133 corresponding male waters, a situation that is depicted by the image of kings who have no queens. Without the feminine receptacle to receive the seed the kings cannot actualize their masculinity and they are thus valorized as emasculated beings, kings whose (phallic) weapons are not to be found, which results in the destruction of the (feminine) earth.173 The death of the kings symbolizes the purification of the unbalanced judgment to produce Malkhut, the aspect of the female that will be balanced by the masculine quality of mercy. The ultimate purpose of the divine catharsis is to purify the feminine aspect of the divine, but the purification is attained only when the feminine is restored to the male, when the other is obliterated in the identity of sameness. As I noted above, ’Arikh ’Anpin, the first of the configurations to take shape as part of the tiqqun after the withdrawal of light, is depicted as being purely masculine. With regard to this matter, Vital followed the position articulated in zoharic literature, especially in the ’Idrot sections, according to which the highest aspect of God is characterized as being right without left, male without female.174 As Vital expressed it in one passage, In ’Arikh ’Anpin, there are only nine sefirot and there is no mention of the aspect of Malkhut. However, the phallus (yesod) that is in him is comprised of the secret of male and female in the image of the date-palm that contains male and female.175 In the uppermost manifestation of the divine, the feminine is contained in the phallic gradation, which is compared to the date-palm, long thought in rabbinic lore to be androgynous in nature.176 It is instructive that this precise image of androgyny is used to describe the eighth of the primordial kings of Edom. Moreover, there is perfect symmetry between beginning and end, for the messianic era is similarly described as a state wherein Malkhut is integrated in the masculine in the idealized form of the corona of the phallus, the disclosed sign of the covenant. Alternatively expressed, the protological assumption concerning the originary positioning of the female atop the male parallels the eschatological vision of the restoration of the female to the male. In the intermediate state of exile, there is a rupture of the male androgyne, which is manifest in the positing of two seemingly distinct personifications of the divine, male and female. The theurgical task, primarily assigned to Jewish men, who traditionally bear the yoke of the commandments in a manner that is not commensurate to Jewish women, is to unite male and female. In this dramatic role, the kabbalist assumes the posture of the feminine waters that stimulate the activity above so that the divine efflux issues forth from the supernal channel and overflows to the feminine receptacle.

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But the final goal of rectification is to restore the female to the male, a restoration that is most poignantly conveyed by kabbalists through the ages in the image of the crown.177 The intent of this symbol is well captured by the eighteenth-century kabbalist, Moses aayyim Luzzaffo. Commenting on the verse “For they will bestow on you length of days, years of life and well-being” (Prov. 3:2), Luzzaffo writes: For surely all throughout the time of exile the great rectifications (tiqqunim gedolim) go forth and are summoned for the time of the redemption, which is accomplished through the power of ’Arikh ’Anpin—the supernal mystery, and then all the feminine forces (nuqvin), which are in the aspect of Malkhut exclusively, will be in the aspect of the crown of kingship (keter malkhut).178 The symbol of the crown of kingship imparts that the feminine potency (malkhut) ascends to and surrounds the masculine (keter) in a manner that mimics the state of affairs prior to the bifurcation of the male androgyne. The eschatological restoration of the feminine to the phallus marks the final obliteration of the evil force and the restitution of the world to a primeval state of chaos, a time that is marked by the overturning of the table, expressed often in kabbalistic literature by the prophetic dictum, “the female surrounds the male,” neqevah tesovev gever (Jer. 31:21).179 The primary act of DimDum, therefore, is not only an expression of divine judgment, but an act that results in the crystallization of the demonic potency as a quasi-autonomous force, the emergence of alterity in the undifferentiated ipseity of the Infinite. As scholars have duly noted, the esoteric intent of the Lurianic myth of dimdum is the idea of catharsis of evil from the Godhead, an idea well attested in older kabbalistic texts, but especially important to Luria and his colleagues in the development of zoharic cosmology. I would add that this process has to be understood in gender terms as the othering of Ein-Sof, which presumably has no other since it encompasses everything in the undivided unity of itself, to create the feminine other. The citation on the part of Lurianic kabbalists in their attempts to explicate the myth of DimDum of the rabbinic dictum that God constricted the Shekhinah between the two poles of the ark is not merely rhetorical.180 On the contrary, DimDum is an act of judgment by means of which the concealed becomes manifest and the unlimited delimited in the aspect of the feminine that is separated from the masculine. The point is succinctly expressed by Immanuel aai Ricchi, “the explanation of DimDum is that it is the secret of judgment, the root of the feminine.”181 Just as the older aggadic motif concerns constricting the presence of God in a specified place, so the elaborate mythical teaching of Lurianic kabbalists relates to the philosophical problem of locating

Divine suffering 135 what is boundless in a determinate space. No exact word for suffering is applied to God in the act of self-contraction, but it seems that the myth of DimDum involves precisely such a notion. The goal of divine withdrawal is to create the space wherein the forces of judgment coalesce to form the amorphous mass, the demonic potency. Catharsis implies an alleviation of the stress indicative more generally of a condition of suffering. God suffers, according to this myth, not on account of Israel’s travails in history; the suffering is related to an intrinsic flaw in God’s being. The exercise of judgment is the creative act that encompasses both the suffering of God and its alleviation, the expulsion of the shell prior to the emergence of the core. Being, one might say, ensues from the elimination of waste from Ein-Sof. Perhaps the deepest psychological insight offered in Lurianic theosophy is that autogenesis, the process of individuation within the divine, unfolds through suffering, which is understood more specifically as the othering of oneself that results from the desire to expand, which is predicated in turn on the need to be contained. Hence, the feminine has priority over the masculine, for the desire to expand is inconceivable without the need to be contained. However, even the need to be contained must be viewed from the perspective of the desire to expand. This is another example of the phallocentric orientation in which kabbalistic symbolism is suffused.

Divine inscription and the suffering of Eros The dynamic of which I have spoken is further elucidated when we consider that the primal withdrawal of the light of Ein-Sof to create a vacuum is also envisioned by Lurianic kabbalists as an act of inscription or engraving, for the latter, too, involves removing material or making a space by hollowing out the surface upon which letters or shapes are engraved. As one might expect from a body of thought produced exclusively by men, writing is viewed in kabbalistic sources as a decidedly phallic act, for the pen or stylus is the phallus in relation to the surface upon which the inscription is made, which is the feminine. The phallic projection of writing is propelled by the act of limitation. That is, it is the desire for the other that serves as that which delimits the projection, which is, in the final analysis, that which propels the projection as well. If not for this delimitation, then writing could not take place, for it is essential to writing that specific shapes of letters and words are formed on some kind of material surface. To write is to mark, to mark to demarcate, to demarcate to delimit by measure and boundary. From this vantage point the divine writing stems from the suffering that lies at the core of God’s being. If God did not suffer, there would be no impetus to differentiate. The book that is God’s name originates in the anguish of

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the need to be called by the other. To be called by the name is to suffer being limited by the calling of that name. With respect to Ein-Sof, the calling of the ineffable name is simultaneously a moment of inscription, the writing of the name that cannot be erased, for the God who writes is the God who is written. The delimitation of the Infinite can be expressed, therefore, in terms of the textualization of God, i.e., God’s becoming concretely manifest in the form of Torah, a process that is referred to by Sarug and those who followed the path of his thinking as the secret of the garment (sod hamalbush) created from the folding of the light of the Infinite upon itself. The malbush is the crease, the fold within which the letters, which arose as a consequence of the primordial amusement (sha‘ashu‘a) of Ein-Sof, break forth.182 While there are obviously important differences between various disciples of Luria with respect to esoteric matters—indeed there is a tradition that the master himself encouraged his disciples to interpret his teachings from multiple perspectives183—there is nevertheless a common element that relates to the paradoxical demarcation of the Infinite, the darkening of the boundless light. The delimitation is an act of circumscription, a drawing of a circle to situate Ein-Sof within a fixed space. From the kabbalistic perspective the matter may also be formulated as the act of writing, the setting of that which exceeds boundary within the borders of the text. But what is the text? Torah, which is YHWH, the ineffable name. The first of the letters of this name, the letter that comprises all the other letters, is the yod, the primordial point that breaks through the aura of the infinite light of Ein-Sof.184 In this point all things are contained and thus the point exceeds all points. Divine inscription, therefore, bespeaks the paradox of delimiting the limitless in the limited that is limitless. Black fire upon white fire, as the rabbis of old described the Torah that preceded the creation of the world.185 The garbing of the nameless in the name may be thus conceived as the textualization of the divine body, but this presumes the exile of the word as it moves from silence to speech.186 The initial act of God’s becoming is conscription, the writing of Torah, the enfolding of the name, that sets boundary and in so doing causes otherness, difference, the condition that concurrently makes relationship and distance possible. In postmodernist language, writing “inscribes the disappearance of the transcendental signified,” and thus “scripture embodies and enacts the death of God, even as the death of God opens and releases writing.”187 This notion of suffering can be extended from the activity of writing to the realm of hermeneutics. Human reading mimics divine writing, the act of limitation that ensues from the desire to overflow. The creativity of the interpretative task similarly involves the imposition of a limit upon that which is potentially without limit. Just as God suffers in delimiting

Divine suffering 137 himself by donning the garment of his name, which is the Torah, so the reader must constrict the interpretive gaze to be cloaked by the limitations of a particular hermeneutical perspective, while discerning all the while that this perspective is but one of multiple possible readings. If we accept the postmodern insistence on the indeterminacy of meaning, to some degree buttressed by the polysemy attested in classical rabbinic hermeneutics, then we want to avoid positing a univocal reading of any given text. Indeed, what transforms the book into text is the possibility of multiple readings. To proffer a particular reading, therefore, is to follow one path of interpretation to the exclusion of the others all the while acknowledging that others are equally valid.188 This we may call the dissimilitude of reading, which betokens the suffering of our lot as human readers, a suffering that leaves us no choice but to open the text again and again. Suffering is justified by the never-ending task of interpreting the word revealed anew in each listening.189 “One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard” (Ps. 62:12). Why does one not hear the first time God speaks? In the first hearing, apparently, there is no listening; to listen one must hear a second time. The second hearing comes by way of reading the word previously spoken. The complex interplay of text and reader requires the recognition of the mutual relationship between the two that precludes complete identification or diametric opposition. The text is not simply what the reader says nor is the reader merely reflecting what the text says. Interpretation arises from the confrontation of text and reader, which results in the concomitant bestowal and elicitation of meaning. In this sense, the hermeneutical process can be viewed as an emulation of the suffering of God that results in the constriction of limitless light into the form of the letters of Torah, the garment that veils the Infinite in its unveiling. Reading, therefore, can be portrayed as a re-enactment of circumcision, an act of de/cision that binds the Jew into a covenantal relationship with the God of Israel. The matter has been well expressed as the transition from “sexual circumcision” to “textual circumcision” by Marc-Alain Ouaknin: The first task of the reader is to produce cuts, cutting a space or void between the letters to form words, between certain words to produce sentences, between certain sentences to close and open new paragraphs, and finally, between paragraphs to produce books. This cesura, this introduction of the void into the body of the text, is an event that heralds the entry of meaning into the world. This is the inaugural cut that symbolically ties in with the moment when the male child is introduced into the community—the circumcision. . . . It is a circumcision of the text, but also the circumcision of God revealing Himself as text.190

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There is no easy way around the fact that in rabbinic tradition (in its multiple faces) circumcision has been understood as a decision that delimits the Jew’s possibilities vis-à-vis the nations, a decision that circumscribes the Jew in opposition to the other without and the other within, the non-Jew and Jewish women.191 I wish not to reinscribe the phallocentrism of this trope, but only to convey the sense in which reading/writing persists as delimiting expansion and contracting projection. From this vantage point, I appropriate the traditional sign of circumcision to mark the hermeneutical cut, mindful of the fact that we will need an expansive notion of circumcision to undo the phallocentric knot of the tradition.192 Demarcating that which is set in opposition to the other even while providing the bridge to join the other—that is the way of the writer. Edmond Jabès has reminded us frequently that the fate of the Jew is intrinsically related to that of the writer.193 On this matter, Jabès seems uncannily attuned to the esoteric gnosis of kabbalah: the act of writing allows the Jew to participate in the suffering God endures in his donning the ineffable name. In suffering the inscription of erasure,194 God is absent from the very name in which he is present. “A man of writing is a man of the four letters which form the unpronounceable Name. God is absent through His name. Writing means taking on God’s absence through each of the four.”195 The fate of the writer is inseparable from the fate of the reader. As the writer creates from the depths of suffering, so the reader reads from that very depth, where absence and presence are indistinguishable. Absence is present in the measure that presence is absent. “Absence within presence, presence within absence. Seeing is God’s superb challenge which man in his pride accepts in order to be His equal.”196 The reader becomes a writer, for reading opens the sealed book and demands inscription of the text. “Isn’t every true reader a potential writer, a ‘rabbi’ rooted in the book?”197 But just as the reader is a potential writer, so the writer is a potential reader. However, facing the text, the writer is in the same position as the eventual reader, the text always opening up to the degree that we are able to read it. It is each time the text of our reading, that is to say, a new text. The writer writes himself in reading, the reader reads himself in what is written.198 In suffering, the Jew exemplifies the ontic status of the rabbinic reader who is at the same time author of the text that is subject to interpretation. Reading Jabès backward into kabbalistic texts, one could say that through reading the Jew participates in God’s suffering as writer. The

Divine suffering 139 event of reading affords one the opportunity to partake of the creative process. As the matter is boldly expressed in one zoharic passage: “Every word of Torah that is innovated by one engaged in Torah creates a firmament.”199 As divine creativity ensues from the death of God, so each act of writing/reading is an assertion that is negation, a homecoming that is exile. Again, to quote Jabès, being Jewish means exiling yourself in the word and, at the same time, weeping for your exile. The return to the book is a return to forgotten sites. God’s heritage could only be handed on in the death He ushered in.200 The ultimate meaning of the suffering implied in an ethics of reading lies in this sharing in divine creation. As reader of the consecrated texts, the Jew not only augments the created world, but s/he assists in the creation of God. This is the intent of the aforementioned passage from the zoharic corpus: the new heavens created by the innovative words of Torah study refer to the eschatological vision of a novel future and a new creation of heaven and earth. When the eschatological background of this passage is properly understood, then we grasp that the creating of new heavens through reading is endowed with soteriological value.201 Indeed, it is not possible to separate the creative and redemptive elements. The suffering of reading imparts to the Jew the task of redeeming those who are isolated in their mutual suffering. To redeem God from suffering as writer is the task of the Jew as reader, for by reading the Jew writes and thereby affords God an opportunity to rest. On Sabbath, according to traditional Jewish law, it is forbidden to write,202 but it is a sacred duty to read.

Notes 1

God, so we read, is a part and a second, a scattered one: in the death of all those mown down he grows himself whole. (Poems of Paul Celan, translated by M. Hamburger (New York, 1995), p. 165)

2 A.J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York, 1962), pp. 109–15, 148–51, 177– 86, 221–67. For discussion of divine pathos in Heschel’s thought, see J.C. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York, 1985), pp. 130–5. The positive valence that Heschel accords to the suffering of Israel in its messianic mission can be fruitfully compared to the following remark in the Hasidic work of his ancestor and

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Elliot R. Wolfson namesake, Abraham Joshua Heschel of Opatow, ’Ohev Yisra’el (Zithomir, 1863), 23c–d, which is presented as an interpretation of an aggadic passage in Babylonian Talmud, Pesabim 56a: This is the explanation of the dictum of the sages, blessed be their memory, that Jacob our father, may peace be upon him, desired to reveal the end of days, that is, he wanted to teach his sons the holy unifications so that they would not have to endure the burden of exile, but rather it would be immediately like it would be in the end of days. Then the Shekhinah departed from him, for the will of the Creator of all worlds, may he and his glorious and awesome name be blessed, is that the holy ascent will be precisely through receiving the burden of exile and enduring the sufferings in love, and it will be through the purification of the holy sparks by the exile, afflictions, and sufferings, and through self-sacrifice in the sanctification of his name, blessed be he.

Needless to say, the Apter rebbe affirmed the standard idea that the suffering of Israel in exile is primarily for the sake of the Shekhinah. For example, see ibid., 26b. 3 Heschel, The Prophets, p. 321. This crucial point seems to be missed by contemporary Christian process theologians who use Heschel’s notion of divine pathos to anchor the Christological idea of the suffering messiah/ son of God in the Jewish tradition. For instance, see D. Ngien, “The God Who Suffers,” Christianity Today (February 3, 1997): 1–7. As it happens, Heschel’s explication of the motif of the exile of Shekhinah betrays a reluctance on his part to accept in full the ontological underpinning of this poetic symbol. See A.J. Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in East Europe (New York, 1950), p. 72: “Even the Shekhinah itself, the Divine Indwelling, is in exile, God is involved, so to speak, in the tragic sense of this world; the Shekhinah ‘lies in dust.’ ” Following the longstanding kabbalistic tradition, especially as it is reflected through the prism of Beshtian Hasidism, Heschel emphasizes that the function and value of human prayer is related to the exile of Shekhinah. For example, see A.J. Heschel, “On Prayer,” Conservative Judaism 25 (1970): 7: “I pray because God, the Shekhinah, is an outcast. I pray because God is in exile, because we all aspire to blur all signs of His presence in the present or in the past.” The task of prayer is to hallow time so that God can find an adequate home in the world. To speak meaningfully of the exile of the Shekhinah, therefore, is to put the focus on the human end since the divine presence is obfuscated by human transgression. 4 See T.E. Freitheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia, 1984), which argues that the anthropomorphic metaphors of God in the Old Testament suggest that God is present in the world in a relationship of reciprocity and as a consequence of that relationship God is vulnerable. This vulnerability constitutes divine suffering. The threefold schema offered by Freitheim is that (1) God suffers because of Israel’s rejection of God as Lord; (2) God suffers with the people who are suffering; and (3) God suffers for the people. 5 On models of punitive and non-punitive suffering in biblical and postbiblical Jewish literature, see H. Wheeler Robinson, Suffering Human and

Divine suffering 141 Divine (New York, 1939), pp. 31–48; F. Lindström, Suffering and Sin: Interpretations of Illness in the Individual Complaint Psalms (Stockholm, 1994); N. Clayton Croy, Endurance in Suffering: Hebrew 12.1–13 in Its Rhetorical, Religious, and Philosophical Context (Cambridge and New York, 1998), pp. 83–133. On the theodicy of suffering, with special reference to the concept of redemption in Deutero-Isaiah, see C.R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (London, 1956); S. Sekine, Transcendency and Symbols in the Old Testament: A Genealogy of the Hermeneutical Experiences (Berlin and New York, 1999), pp. 284–339. On the centrality of suffering in the life of piety, see the comment in 2 Baruch 52:6, “And concerning the righteous ones, what will they do now? Enjoy yourselves in the suffering which you suffer now.” On suffering as a way to improve one’s faith in and response to God, see A. Lichtenstein, “The Duties of the Heart and Response to Suffering,” in Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering, edited by S. Carmy (Northvale, New Jersey, 1999), pp. 21–61, and the essay in the same volume by S. Carmy, “ ‘Tell Them I’ve Had a Good Enough Life,’ ” pp. 97–153. In this connection, it is of interest to consider the remark of C. Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 104: As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable. 6 See, for example, Sifrei on Deuteronomy, edited by L. Finkelstein (New York, 1969), sec. 32, pp. 56–7: A person should be more joyous about suffering than about beneficence, for if a person enjoys beneficence all the days of his life the sin in his hand will not be forgiven. How will he be forgiven? Through suffering. . . . R. Nehemiah said, “Sufferings are cherished for just as sacrifices are desirable so sufferings are desirable. With respect to sacrifices it says ‘that it may be acceptable in his behalf’ (Lev. 1:4) and with respect to sufferings it says ‘they atone for their iniquity’ (ibid. 26:43). Moreover, sufferings are more desirable than sacrifices for sacrifices relate to money and sufferings to the body, and thus it says ‘all that a man has he will give up for his life’ (Job 2:4).” See also Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 3 vols, edited and translated by J.Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia, 1933), 2:278–80; Midrash Tehillim, edited by S. Buber (Vilna, 1891), 94:2, pp. 417–18; 118:16, p. 486; Midrash TanBuma’ (Jerusalem, 1972), Yitro, 16, p. 324. In Seder Eliahu Rabba, edited by M. Friedmann (Vienna, 1904), ch. 21, p. 117, the breaking of the tablets on the part of Moses occasioned the divine decree that the Jewish people would have to study Torah from pain, suffering, and distress, and on account of that endurance they would merit reward in the messianic era. For discussion of the different approaches to suffering in rabbinic thought, see Y. Elman, “The Suffering of the Righteous in Palestinian and Babylonian Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80 (1990): 315–39; D. Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York and Oxford, 1995).

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7 See J.F.A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge and New York, 1996), pp. 21, 46–7, 88–94, 102–3. Also relevant here is the portrayal of Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice by early Christians, which entails another dimension of suffering attributed to the divine. See J.D.G. Dunn, “Paul’s Understanding of the Death of Jesus as Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology, edited by S.W. Sykes (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 35–56, and A.N. Chester, “Hebrews: The Final Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice and Redemption, pp. 57–72. For a challenge to the image of Jesus as a paradigm of martyrdom or self-renunciation, see Croy, Endurance in Suffering, pp. 70–6, 167–92. 8 This is not to say that rabbis were not interested in the topic of messianic suffering. For a recent discussion of this theme, see M. Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1998), pp. 73–85. My point is, rather, that the theme of divine suffering is treated with extreme caution in rabbinic sources. In some measure, the repeated emphasis on the suffering of Israel theologically takes the place of the notion of the suffering Christ. On the necessary suffering of Israel, see, in particular, the statement attributed to R. Yobanan in Babylonian Talmud, Menabot 53b. Interestingly, the notion that Israel’s existence is preserved on account of the hatred of the nations is affirmed by Spinoza in his Theological-Political Tractatus. See Y.H. Yerushalmi, “Remarks of Spinoza on the Existence of the Jewish People,” Proceedings of the National Israeli Academy of the Sciences 6 (1983): 171–213, esp. 178–9. 9 Robinson, Suffering Human and Divine, pp. 139–84. On the nexus between divine suffering and trinitarian relationality, see M.A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford, 1998), pp. 151–86. 10 The Nag Hammadi Library in English, revised edition (San Francisco, 1992), p. 436. 11 For references to the suffering of the savior in select Gnostic texts, see M. Franzmann, Jesus in the Nag Hammadi Writings (Edinburgh, 1996), Index, s.v., Jesus, suffering. 12 The point is epitomized in the remark of Felicitas in the Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, as cited in B. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York, 1991), p. 82: “What I am suffering now, I suffer by myself. But then another will be inside me who will suffer for me, just as I shall be suffering for him.” McGinn duly notes the mystical side of this ideal of martyrdom, which has been so informative in the spiritual history of Christianity. 13 Ireneaus, Adversus haereses 1.1.2. For discussion of this theme as it is expressed especially in the Apocryphon of John, see J.J. Buckley, Female Fault and Fulfilment in Gnosticism (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), pp. 43–8. See also R. Smith, “Sex Education in Gnostic Schools,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, edited by K. King (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 349–50. As Smith notes, a version of the myth of the willful attempt of Sophia at self-generation is found in Valentinian and Sethian gnostic tradition. 14 Nag Hammadi Library in English, p. 436. 15 D.J. Melling, “Suffering and Sanctification in Christianity,” in Religion, Health, and Suffering, edited by J.R. Hinnells and R. Porter (London and New York, 1999), pp. 46–64, esp. 54–5. On the image of the suffering

Divine suffering 143 Jesus as a model for martyrdom, see A.J. Droge and J.D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (New York, 1992), pp. 119–26, 151–3. For a well-nuanced discussion of the depiction of Christians in the early Roman Empire as a community of sufferers, see J. Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London and New York, 1995). Especially insightful is the recognition of the empowering nature of suffering, which is expressed in acts of martyrdom (pp. 104–23). The image of the suffering Jesus, and the consequent effacing of the boundaries between human and divine, persisted in medieval artistic, literary, and devotional sources. For a representative study, see E.M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1997). 16 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 59a. See also Midrash ha-Gadol on Exodus, edited by M. Margulies ( Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 147–9. For extensive discussion, see Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, pp. 22–40. 17 On the nexus between the physical phenomenon of the earthquake and divine judgment, see the description of the opening of the sixth of the seven seals in Rev. 6:12–16. 18 It is of interest to note the reworking of the talmudic passage in Zohar 1:4a. In that context, the “master of wings,” i.e., the angel Metatron, takes an oath regarding the fact that he has heard from behind the curtain that the king each day remembers the hind that is dwelling in the dust, and in that moment he kicks in the 390 heavens and all of them tremble and shake before him, and he sheds tears on account of this, and there boiling tears fall like fire into the great sea.

19 20

21

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The author of this zoharic passage relates both God’s kicking and his weeping to the anguish he feels about the suffering of the Shekhinah, which is compared to the hind that is pushed down to the ground. Necromancy is prohibited by the priestly code (Lev. 20:27) and reiterated in the deuteronomic law (Deut. 18:11). P. Kuhn, Gottes Selbstniedrigung in der Theologie der Rabbinen (Munich, 1968); idem, Gottes Trauer und Klage in der rabbinischen Uberlieferung (Leiden, 1978). I note, parenthetically, that these passages were utilized in the Karaite polemic against the anthropomorphic portrait of God found in rabbinic sources. See, for instance, L. Nemoy, “Al-Qirqisani’s Account of the Jewish Sects and Christianity,” Hebrew Union College Annual 7 (1930): 352; T. Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse: Ibn Hazm on Jewish and Christian Scriptures (Atlanta, 1998), pp. 37, 66–7, 89–90. For a list of relevant sources, see L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1968), 6:26 n. 150. In the conclusion of this note, Ginzberg alludes to the conceptual similarity between the rabbinic passages that affirm God’s suffering and the later kabbalistic idea of the exile of the Shekhinah. For a more recent attempt to interpret the midrashic theme of divine suffering and kabbalistic theosophy, see M. Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven and London, 1988), pp. 225–7. The specific text to which Idel refers is cited in the following note. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 1:113. On the exegetical connection between the pavement of sapphire (livnat sappir) and the bricks of slavery (levenim), see also Palestinian Talmud, Sukkah 4:4, 54c; Leviticus Rabbah, edited by

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Elliot R. Wolfson M. Margulies (New York and Jerusalem, 1993), 23:8, pp. 437–8; Canticles Rabbah, edited by S. Dunsky (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, 1980), 4:17, pp. 114–15. See Midrash TanBuma’, edited by S. Buber (Vilna, 1885), ’Abarei Mot, 13, 34b: “When Israel is in distress he is with them, as it were, for thus it is written ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted’ (Isa. 63:9).” Pirqei Rabbi ’Eli‘ezer (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 40, 94a; Exodus Rabbah 1:8, 30:24; Midrash TanBuma’, Shemot, 14. Exodus Rabbah 2:5. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 6:5; Babylonian Talmud, aagigah 15b; Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael, 1:113–14. MaBzor Sukkot Shemini ‘ADeret we-SimBat Torah, edited by D. Goldschmidt (Jerusalem, 1981), p. 176. Consider the utilization of this motif in Zohar 2:119b (Ra‘aya’ Meheimna’): Praiseworthy is the holy nation for they are called the flock of the holy One, blessed be he, for they sacrifice themselves as sacrifices before him as it says “It is for your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (Ps. 44:23).

29 Leviticus Rabbah 1:1, p. 11. I have followed Goldschmidt’s explanation of this part of the poem; see MaBzor Sukkot Shemini ‘ADeret we-SimBat Torah, p. 176 n. 9. 30 This is not to say that that the idea of Israel sacrificing itself on behalf of God, especially through commitment to the commandments, is foreign to rabbinic sources in the formative period. On the contrary, such a view is affirmed in classical rabbinic texts. See, for example, Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 2:247; Leviticus Rabbah 32:1, 735–6. And see especially Ecclesiastes Rabbah 3:22 where the righteous of Israel are said to be willing to die for God like animals go to slaughter. My point is, however, that the ideal of sanctification of the name, qiddush ha-shem, became more prominent and actualized in the Middle Ages by the force of the exigencies of history. On martyrdom in the rabbinic period, see S. Lieberman, “The Martyrs of Caesarea,” Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves 7 (1939–1944): 395–446; M.D. Herr, “Persecutions and Martyrdom in Hadrian’s Days,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 23 (1972): 85–125; S. Safrai, “Qiddush ha-Shem in the Teachings of the Tannaim,” Zion 43 (1979): 28– 42 (in Hebrew); A. Oppenheimer, “Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom in the Wake of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion,” in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, edited by I.M. Gafni and A. Ravitzky (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 85–97 (in Hebrew); A. Cohen, “Towards an Erotics of Martyrdom,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7 (1998): 227– 56. On the willingness to die as an expression of one’s love for God as a rabbinic ideal, see D. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990), pp. 122–6; idem, “Interpretation and Fact—On the Historical Investigation of Rabbinic Literature,” in Saul Lieberman Memorial Volume, edited by S. Friedman (New York and Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 105–17, esp. 110–16 (in Hebrew). On the ideal of martyrdom as it evolved in the Jewish medieval context, see A. Grossman, “The Roots of Sanctification of the Name in the Older Ashkenaz,” in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, edited by


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I.M. Gafni and A. Ravitzky (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 99–130 (in Hebrew); S. Goldin, “The Socialization for Qiddush ha-Shem among Medieval Jews,” Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997): 117–38; S. Shepkaru, “From After Death to Afterlife: Martyrdom and Its Recompense,” AJS Review 24 (1999): 1–44. For more specific studies related to the experience of Ashkenazi Jews and the Crusades, see R. Chazan, “The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles,” Revue des études juives 133 (1974): 235–54; idem, “The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles: Further Reflections,” AJS Review 3 (1978): 79–98; idem, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987); idem, “The Facticity of Medieval Narrative: A Case Study of the Hebrew First Crusade Narratives,” AJS Review 16 (1992): 31–56; I.G. Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusading Riots,” Prooftext 2 (1982): 40–52; idem, “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, edited by M. Fishbane (Albany, 1993), pp. 255–79; G.D. Cohen, “The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and the Ashkenazic Tradition,” in MinBah le-NaBum: Biblical and Other Studies Presented to Nahum M. Sarna in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by M. Brettler and M. Fishbane (Sheffield, 1993), pp. 36–53; J. Cohen, “The ‘Persecutions of 1096’—From Martyrdom to Martyrology: The Sociocultural Context of the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles,” Zion 59 (1994): 169–208 (in Hebrew); and E.R. Wolfson, “Martyrdom, Eroticism, and Asceticism in Twelfth-Century Ashkenazi Piety,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by M.A. Signer and J.H. Van Engen (Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 171–220. In the relevant rabbinic sources, the biblical proof-texts to support the notion of God’s suffering on behalf of Israel are Isa. 63:9 and Ps. 91:15. Needless to say, other scriptural verses express the idea of God who suffers for the sake of Israel (for example, in Jeremiah and Hosea), but I have noted the ones that are most frequently cited by rabbinic exegetes. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, 1:114–15 (I have slightly modified Lauterbach’s translation). The traditions concerning the suffering of God should be viewed in the larger context of Aqiva’s eschatological understanding of human suffering. That is, just as the righteous have to suffer in this world to earn the appropriate reward in the next world, so God must suffer in this world until the people of Israel receive their just recompense in the messianic era. See E.P. Sanders, “Rabbi Akiba’s View of Suffering,” Jewish Quarterly Review 63 (1972–3): 332–51; Kraemer, Responses to Suffering, pp. 87, 111–13, 169–70. For a recent study of this hermeneutical formula in rabbinic midrashim, see M. Halbertal, “If It Were Not a Written Verse It Could Not Be Said,” Tarbiz 68 (1998): 39–59 (in Hebrew). The dictum of Aqiva is discussed by Halbertal on pp. 46–7. See Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 29a; J. Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature (London, 1912), pp. 127–8; N.J. Cohen, “Shekhinta ba-Galuta: A Midrashic Response to Destruction and Persecution,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 13 (1982): 147–59, esp. 150–3. It is of interest to note that in Midrash Tehillim, edited by S. Buber (Vilna, 1891), 13:4, p. 111, R. Abbahu remarks that the words “my heart will exult in your deliverance” (Ps. 13:6) is “one of the difficult verses” because it presumes that the “salvation of the Holy One, blessed be he, is the salvation of

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Elliot R. Wolfson Israel.” The difficulty obviously relates to the notion that God’s redemption is dependent on the redemption of Israel. In spite of the theological danger to divine autonomy and omnipotence posed by this idea, it cannot be rejected since it is expressed explicitly in Scripture, at least according to the rabbinic reading. That is, the masoretic text, which is read as wa-yosha‘, “he redeemed,” can also be vocalized as wa-yiwwasha‘, “he will be redeemed.” TanBuma’, ’Abarei Mot, 12. One may detect here echoes of or resonances to the gnostic myth of the redeemed redeemer, although there are obvious differences as well. See H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston, 1963), pp. 127–8; K. Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (New York, 1983), pp. 121–2. Exodus Rabbah 30:24. MaBzor Sukkot Shemini ‘ADeret we-SimBat Torah, p. 181. Ibid., p. 182. Consider, for example, the narrative retelling of the exodus from Egypt in the traditional Passover Haggadah. The motif of God suffering on behalf of Israel, let alone for himself, is not embraced at all. In line with the scriptural account, the emphasis is placed on God’s grace and power in delivering Israel from a wretched state of affairs rather than on a vicarious anguish that narrows the gap between the divine and human. The approach is epitomized in the liturgical poem, ’atah ga’alta, “You have Redeemed,” which is included in the Siddur R. Saadja Gaon, edited by I. Davidson, S. Assaf, and B.I. Joel (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 144–5. For recent analysis of the poem, see S. Safrai and Z. Safrai, Haggadah of the Sages: The Passover Haggadah (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 86–7 (in Hebrew). Numerous texts could be cited but I mention here one example that I recently came across. In his explanation of the wicked one of the four sons mentioned in the Passover seder, Jacob ben Isaac Horovitz, a scion of the family of Isaiah ben Abraham Horovitz, author of the highly influential Shenei LuBot ha-Berit, explains his heresy as a rejection of the idea of the Shekhinah accompanying the people in exile. See Haggadah shel PesaB ‘im Shenei Be’urim MiFa‘emei YiDBaq we-Haggadat Ya‘aqov (Bilgoraj, 1929), p. 40. The suffering of God is thus elevated to a dogma that helps one distinguish between piety and heresy. On the tension between the monistic and dualistic approaches to the problem of evil in kabbalistic symbolism, see I. Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, translated by D. Goldstein (Oxford, 1989), pp. 447–546; G. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, translated by J. Neugroschel, edited and revised by J. Chipman (New York, 1991), pp. 56–87. See also M. aallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, translated by R. Bar-Ilan and O. Wiskind-Elper (Albany, 1999), pp. 167– 82. The attempt to affirm the ostensibly opposing standpoints as being concomitantly true stands in marked distinction to the approach of other scholars, particularly Scholem and Tishby (see previous note for references), who viewed the two positions as mutually exclusive. The view I am attributing to the kabbalists resembles the insight of Schelling expressed in his Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) that the first step in God’s revealing himself is excluding “that which is dark and unconscious from himself.” The unsconscious part, which is expelled from the divine

Divine suffering 147 economy in opposition to the consciously existent God, is the element “within God” that “is not God himself,” that is, a stratum that is distinct but not separable from him. See W. Marx, The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom, translated by T. Nenon (Bloomington, 1984), p. 69. 45 For one such attempt to reconstruct the origin of this mythical notion, which in part bridges the presumed gap between rabbinic and kabbalistic texts, see M. Idel, “The Evil Thought of the Deity,” Tarbiz 49 (1980): 356– 64 (in Hebrew). For an independent investigation of the problem of evil in kabbalistic symbolism from a metaphysical perspective, see A. Farber, “ ‘The Shell Precedes the Fruit’—On the Question of the Origin of Metaphysical Evil in Early Kabbalistic Thought,” in Myth and Judaism, edited by H. Pedayah ( Jerusalem, 1996), pp. 118– 42 (in Hebrew). 46 For a theological analysis of divine suffering from the perspective of God freely choosing to limit himself to be in this world of change, see P.S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (New York and Oxford, 1992). 47 I readily acknowledge the difference between the mythical-symbolic presentation of ideas and the corresponding philosophical depiction. However, contra Scholem, I do not think that in the mind of medieval kabbalists these are radically distinct cognitive processes. See, for instance, G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by R. Manheim (New York, 1965), p. 96: The discursive thinking of the Kabbalists is a kind of asymptotic process: the conceptual formulations are an attempt to provide an approximate philosophical interpretation of inexhaustible symbolic images, to interpret these images as abbreviations for conceptual series. The obvious failure of such attempts shows that images and symbols are nothing of the sort.

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My own inclination is to see the discursive and symbolic modes functioning in a more harmonious or synthetic way. For a more elaborate discussion of this matter, see E.R. Wolfson, “Hebraic and Hellenic Conceptions of Wisdom in Sefer ha-Bahir,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 147–76, esp. 151–6. Perush ‘Eser Sefirot, in Meir ibn Gabbai, Derekh ’Emunah (Warsaw, 1890), 2d. For discussion of this passage, see E.R. Wolfson, “Negative Theology and Positive Assertion in the Early Kabbalah,” Da‘at, 32–33 (1994): xi–xii. See G. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky and translated by A. Arkush (Princeton, 1987), p. 438 n. 170. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, translated by S. Pines (Chicago, 1963), III.10, p. 440. Kitvei Ramban, edited by H.D. Chavel (Jerusalem, 1964), 2:482. In part, the kabbalistic exegesis of the term beri’ah is related to the philosophical claim that, according to the tradition, the word bara’ in Scripture signifies the bringing into existence out of non-existence. See Maimonides, Guide, II.30, p. 358; III.10, p. 438. The matter is explored in detail in E.R. Wolfson, “Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, edited by E.R. Wolfson (New York and London, 1999), pp. 113–54. For discussion of these two approaches to the nature of the sefirot, see G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 101–2; E. Gottlieb, Studies

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Elliot R. Wolfson in Kabbala Literature, edited by J. Hacker (Tel Aviv, 1976), pp. 293–315 (in Hebrew); Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 247–9; M. Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven and London, 1988), pp. 137– 44; idem, R. Menahem Recanati: The Kabbalist (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1998), pp. 175–214 (in Hebrew); M. aallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, translated by R. Bar-Ilan and O. Wiskind-Elper (Albany, 1999), pp. 159– 66. Although previous scholars have noted that in the theosophic symbolism of the kabbalists there is no duality between the hidden and revealed God, the point that I have raised concerning the paradoxical confluence of concealment and disclosure has not been sufficiently heeded. LiqquFei Haqdamot le-Aokhmat ha-Qabbalah, MS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1663, fol. 172b. Many of the passages that affirm this dialectical principle in Alkabets and Cordovero have been cited and discussed by J. Ben-Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (Jerusalem, 1965), pp. 95–100 (in Hebrew). LiqquFei Haqdamot le-Aokhmat ha-Qabbalah, MS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1663, fol. 174a. Ibid., fols 175a–b, cited in Ben-Shlomo, Mystical Theology, pp. 268–9. For a fuller discussion of the emanation of the sefirot from the inscrutable darkness of Ein-Sof in the thought of Alkabets, see B. Sack, “The Mystical Theology of Solomon Alkabez,” Ph.D. thesis, Brandeis University, 1977, pp. 29–33. For a different explanation of sod ha-hithappekhut in Alkabets, see B. Huss, Sockets of Fine Gold: The Kabbalah of Rabbi Shim‘on Ibn Lavi (Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 124–5 (in Hebrew). Ma‘arekhet ha-’Elohut (Mantua, 1558), 8b. This passage is cited in the context of elucidating the view of Alkabets by Sack, “Mystical Theology,” pp. 29–30. The passage from Alkabets should also be compared to the account of the androgynous nature of Adam in Simeon Labi, Ketem Paz (Jerusalem, 1981; reprint Djerba, 1940), 1:27c–d. I have analyzed this text in detail in “Gender and Heresy in the Study of Kabbalah,” to be published in Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 6 (2002). In “Occultation of the Feminine,” p. 118, I suggested that the locution sifra’ di-Deni‘uta’, the “book of concealment,” captures the paradoxical nature of secrecy and thus should be rendered as the “book that conceals the secret that it reveals.” G. Scholem, “Authentic Kabbalistic Writings of the Ari,” Qiryat Sefer 19 (1943): 184–99 (in Hebrew); idem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1956), p. 254; idem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 421. I do not agree with Scholem’s assumption that this work of Luria does not reflect anything of the kabbalistic teachings that he later expounded. In my judgment, this is an overly determined diachronic approach to the life of Luria, rendering too simplistic the division between the earlier and later stages of his thought. In this relatively early document, there are clear allusions to themes that are expanded in the later phase. Zohar 2:176b. On the image of the scales (matqela’) in this section of zoharic literature, see Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 276–7; Y. Liebes, Sections of the Zohar Lexicon (Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 329–30 (in Hebrew); idem, Studies in the Zohar, translated by A. Schwartz, S. Nakache, and P. Peli (Albany, 1993) p. 70; idem, “Zohar and Eros,” Alpayyim 9 (1994): 78–9 (in Hebrew); E.R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany, 1995), pp. 63–4, 180 nn. 119–22.

Divine suffering 149 62 Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi (Jerusalem, 1898), 22b. 63 Regarding this technical zoharic terminology, especially as it evolved in Lurianic kabbalah, see Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 269–271. 64 To be more precise, Luria assigns a gender character to the three heads that express the being of ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’, an idea found in Zohar 3:288a–b (’Idra’ ZuFa’). The lowest of the three heads, the “hidden wisdom,” hokhmah setima’ah, is female in relation to the second of the heads, ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ or the supernal crown, which is male. The first head, which is paradoxically designated the “head that is no head,” reisha’ de-lav resiha’, is seemingly beyond gender polarity. Even though there is a distinction between masculine and feminine with respect to this highest aspect of the divine, Luria follows the zoharic language (Zohar 3:290a) when he refers to this stage as the “place wherein the male and female are comprised within one another” (’atar de-’itkalilu dakhar we-nuqba’). The highest of heads, the head that is no head, which is also designated Ein-Sof, is presumably even beyond the containment of male and female. See Sha‘ar Ma’amarei Rashbi, 22a. 65 Luria’s explanation of the zoharic symbolism is reiterated by Joseph ibn eabul in his “Commentary on ’Idra’ Raba’,” edited by I. Weinstock, Temirin: Texts and Studies in Kabbala and Hasidism, edited by I. Weinstock, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1981), p. 132 (in Hebrew): The Keter of ’Arikh, which is the second head, is called ‘Atiqa’ de‘Atiqin, to allude that even though it is one of the emanated beings it has no connection to the emanated beings, and the worlds could not have been created, formed, or made by means of him, but only through ’Abba’ and ’Imma’, Ze‘eir and his Nuqba’. And even ’Abba’ and ’Imma’ could not receive from him except by means of his arrayments that were arrayed, as is known. 66 See Zohar 3:16a, 129a, 136b, 288b, 293a. This theme is reflected as well in the hymn that Luria composed for the third Sabbath meal, which celebrates the union of these two aspects of God. See Y. Liebes, “The Poems for the Meals of Sabbath Composed by the Holy Ari,” Molad 4 (1972): 554–5 (in Hebrew). 67 I have explored this process in great detail in Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, 1994), pp. 270–325. 68 Berit ha-Levi (Lemberg, 1863), 1b. 69 The impact of Alkabets on Cordovero and the earlier source of Avicenna for the maxim that the “disclosure is the cause of concealment and concealment the cause of disclosure” are noted by B. Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Jerusalem, 1995), p. 57 n. 2 (in Hebrew). See ibid., pp. 14, 169, 256 n. 43. 70 Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by R. Margaliot (Jerusalem, 1978), sec. 1, 17a. 71 Pardes Rimmon (Jerusalem, 1962), 4:10, 23c. See also Moses Cordovero, Zohar ‘im Perush ’Or Yaqar, vol. 11 (Jerusalem, 1981), p. 349: Aokhmah is garbed in Binah to actualize this light below in the sefirot . . . and this garment is the cause of the disclosure for the lower beings could not endure it except through its being garbed, and this garment is what causes the light to be concealed. . . . The matter is like the light

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See also commentary on the beginning of Zohar 1:15a from the section of Cordovero’s Shi‘ur Qomah published by Sack, Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, p. 328: “As a consequence of their being revealed they are concealed.” The dialectic of concealment and disclosure in the thought of Cordovero has been duly noted by scholars. See reference to Ben-Shlomo above in n. 55, and Sack in n. 57. I am working on a more extensive discussion of this matter in what will be the first chapter of the monograph tentatively entitled Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 22c. Regarding the dialectic of concealment and disclosure in different stages of Luria’s thought, see R. Meroz, “Redemption in the Lurianic Teaching,” Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University, 1988, pp. 105–6 (in Hebrew). On the image of the garment applied to the sefirot in order to express the manner in which these emanations concomitantly reveal and conceal the light, see the anonymous text published by R. Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” in Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb, edited by M. Oron and A. Goldreich (Jerusalem, 1994), p. 332 (in Hebrew). Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 23a. Ibid., 6c. LiqquFim Aadashim, edited by D. Touitou (Jerusalem, 1985), p. 17. For recent discussion of this kabbalist, see R. Meroz, “Faithful Transmission versus Innovation: Luria and his Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After, edited by P. Schäfer and J. Dan (Tübingen, 1993), pp. 270–1. “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 133. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 141. See, for instance, aayyim Vital, ‘ED Aayyim (Jerusalem, 1910), 7:2, 31a. The most comprehensive treatise on the ontological principles of hitpashFut and histalqut is Leshem Shevu wa-’ABlemah: Sefer ha-Kelalim (Jerusalem, 1924) by the nineteenth-century Lithuanian kabbalist, Solomon Eliashov. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 263. See idem, Kabbalah, p. 75. Much has been said about what cannot be said. For a relatively recent analysis that is both textually thick and methodologically rich, see M.A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London, 1994). The relationship of ontology, temporality, and language in kabbalistic theosophy is a matter that I will explore in greater detail in a separate study. For the time being, see E.R. Wolfson, “From Sealed Book to Open Text: Time, Memory, and Narrativity in Kabbalistic Hermeneutics,” in Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age, edited by S. Kepnes (New York and London, 1996), pp. 145–78, esp. 162–4; idem, “Fore/giveness On the Way: Nesting in the Womb of Response,” Graven Images 4 (1998): 155–6, 165–6 n. 11; and idem, “The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse,” in God’s Voice From the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by S. Magid (Albany, 2002), pp. 103–54.

Divine suffering 151 85 See F. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by W.W. Hallo (Boston, 1972), p. 157, and discussion in E.R. Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology 4 (1997): 39–81, esp. 74–6. In this context, it is also relevant to recall the remark of E. Jabès, The Book of Questions, vol. 2, translated by R. Waldrop (Hanover and London, 1991), p. 35: “God is before and after God. God died in creating, in creating Himself, that is to say in multiplying His death. Creation consecrates God and man and, hence, their void” (author’s emphasis). 86 A number of scholars have discussed the affinities between theosophic kabbalah and Rosenzweig’s philosophy of experience. For references, see Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced,” p. 65 n. 125. To the references cited there, see also W.Z. Harvey, “How Much Kabbalah in the Star of Redemption?” Immanuel 21 (1987): 128–34. 87 The resemblance between Rosenzweig’s neue Denken and kabbalistic theosophy may have been due to the influence of Schelling who presumably picked up kabbalistic elements through the work of Franz Baader, Johann Georg Hamann, and Jakob Böhme. One of the more important kabbalistic ideas expressed by Böhme is the notion that the emergence of God from the undifferentiated non-being (das Nichts) of the primordial Abyss (Ungrund) into differentiated actuality requires a division of the will (Schiedlichkeit des Willens) that eventuates in a confrontation of opposites. See E.A. Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany, 1994), pp. 69–75. On the possibility that Schelling’s conception owes something to the kabbalistic notion of creation as a movement of language, see A. Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London and New York, 1993), pp. 116–17. Also relevant to this discussion is the mystical idea of God’s contraction into a self-differentiated being as the first act of creation in Schelling’s philosophy. For the possible kabbalistic influence in this matter, see C. Schulte, “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” Iyyun 41 (1992): 21– 40. Another important source for Schelling that might explain some of his kabbalistic inclinations is the theosophic thought of Emmanuel Swedenborg. For an extensive analysis of this relationship see F. Horn, Schelling and Swedenborg: Mysticism and German Idealism, translated by G.F. Dole (West Chester, 1997). 88 It is of interest to consider the account of kabbalistic theosophy given by E. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith (New York, 1999), pp. 62–3: The new idea of the infinite signifies precisely its compatibility with determination, as later, in the Kabbala, the Ein-Sof, the infinite God, “buried in the depths of his negativity,” i.e., refractory to attributes, manifests himself in the attributes called sefirot, without degrading himself in that emanation, since that delimitation is also understood as an event at the heart of his hiddenness. In this brief remark, Levinas demonstrates that he well understood the dialectic of concealment and disclosure, expansion and withdrawal, that characterizes the kabbalists’ approach to the relationship of the Infinite to the sefirotic emanations.

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89 F. Rosenzweig, God, Man, and World: Lectures and Essays, translated by B.E. Galli (Syracuse, 1998), p. 49. 90 Zohar 1:181a–b. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 232, correctly interprets the zoharic notion of the exile of the Shekhinah in terms of what he calls the “mysterious fissure,” the separation of the masculine and the feminine, the Holy One and the Shekhinah. Curiously, however, he notes that this fissure is “not indeed in the substance of Divinity but in its life and action.” I find this distinction problematic for the main body of zoharic literature in so far as in these texts an essentialist perspective on the nature of the sefirotic emanations is adopted. The separation of male and female, the rupturing of the containment of the male in the female and of the female in the male, relates to the substance of God, at least according to one interpretive stance expressed in zoharic literature, for the sefirot are the essence of the divine. In other strands of zoharic literature, the sefirot are viewed instrumentally. This perspective may accord with Scholem’s notion that the fissure relates only to God’s “life and action.” Scholem conflates the two interpretive possibilities and opts to explain the former in terms of the latter. In so doing, he misses the thrust of the ontological perspective implicit in the essentialist perspective. From this vantage point, so influential in the subsequent evolution of kabbalistic symbolism, how can one distinguish between the “substance of God” and his “life and action”? See, however, Scholem, Major Trends, p. 275. In discussing the exile of Shekhinah in sixteenthcentury Lurianic kabbalah, Scholem notes that this “is not a metaphor,” but “a genuine symbol of the ‘broken’ state of things in the realm of the divine potentialities.” Here he seems to have hit the mark for Lurianic kabbalah, but I would apply his formulation to zoharic symbolism as well. See references in following note. Significantly, the rabbinic notion of God’s suffering with Israel is affirmed in what is still considered by scholars to be the earliest kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir. See D. Abrams, The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts (Los Angeles, 1994), sec. 45, p. 143 (in Hebrew); see also sec. 73, p. 163. On the need for those who want to be worthy of the true life of Torah to suffer misfortune with love, see sec. 100, p. 185. This is based on earlier rabbinic dicta that emphasize the need for a person to accept and to make a blessing over good and bad as equal expressions of God’s justice. See Mishnah, Berakhot 9:2, 5, and discussion in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 60b. 91 See Zohar 1:36a, 84b–85a, 202b–203a; 2:189a; 3:45b, 74a–b, 114a–b, 197b, 216b, 219b, 297b. Many of these passages are cited or paraphrased in Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 382–5. 92 Meir ibn Gabbai, Tola‘at Ya‘aqov (Jerusalem, 1996), p. 96. 93 See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 260–5; idem, Kabbalah, pp. 129–35; M. Idel, “On the Concept Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 59–112 (in Hebrew); Sack, Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, pp. 57–82. 94 On the connection between DimDum and sha‘ashu‘a, see Immanuel aai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Amsterdam, 1542), 5b: “This is the secret of the constriction (sod ha-DimDum) for they compared him to a person taking delight (’adam ha-mishta‘ashe‘a), and by means of this he constricted himself.” The identification of sha‘ahsua and DimDum is made explicitly by Abraham Cohen Herrera, Puerta del Cielo, edición, estudio y notas de Kenneth Krabbenhoft (Madrid, 1987), 7:10, p. 196, and the corresponding passage

Divine suffering 153 in the Hebrew translation Sha‘ar ha-Shamayim (Amsterdam, 1655), 5:10, 53b. 95 Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 49–78, esp. 69–72, and reference to other scholarly discussions given on pp. 191–2 n. 180. To the sources cited there, see also Liebes, “Zohar and Eros,” p. 81; Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” p. 315. 96 See, for instance, Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 30a: Prior to the copulation there is caressing and kissing, and the caressing is when the male holds on to her from her place, which is beneath Yesod, and elevates her between his arms until Binah, for he is close to her arms, and he places his left beneath her head in the secret of the wine that gladdens, which comes from Binah to arouse the copulation . . . for there is no arousal to copulate except from the left that comes from Binah in the secret of the wine that gladdens.

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

For an extended discussion regarding the contrast between kissing as the “spiritual copulation” (ziwwug ruBani) and the “physical copulation” (ziwwug gashmi) of the genitals, see Sha‘ar ha-Pesuqim (Jerusalem, 1912), 10d–12a. Zohar 1:133a, 151a, 244a, 245a; 2:30a, 238b; 3:26a, 148b, 178b. See Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 110–15. Zohar 3:45a–b. Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 22b. See Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 92–8. Scholem, “Authentic Kabbalistic Writings,” p. 197. The phallic implications of the motif of garbing in Lurianic kabbalah confirms my insight regarding the symbol of the garment in much earlier Jewish mystical texts. See Through a Speculum That Shines, p. 93 n. 84. Derush AefDi Bah, in SimBat Kohen (Jerusalem, 1978), 1a. The point is explicated lucidly by Baruch Ashlag in the discourses that he composed on the basis of the teachings of his father, Yehuda Ashlag, printed as Shelabei ha-Sullam (Benei Beraq, 2000), vol. 1, p. 200: The desire to receive is called by the name malkhut, as it is known that the vessel to receive the lights is called by the name malkhut. As we learn, with regard to this Malkhut there was withdrawal (DimDum) and concealment (hester), for from the perspective of the desire to receive for herself, Malkhut remains without light. When the desire for the sake of overflowing can be bestowed upon her, in that measure, the withdrawal and concealment are removed. Barring this, Malkhut is called the space that is devoid of light.

106 107 108 109

“Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 141. Derush AefDi Bah, 1c. “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 139. This matter has been central to my work on gender construction in kabbalistic texts. For an early formulation of the hermeneutical principle that has informed my work, see E.R. Wolfson, “Woman—The Feminine As Other in Theosophic Kabbalah: Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions

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of Jewish Culture and Identity, edited by L. Silberstein and R. Cohn (New York, 1994), pp. 166–204. 110 Derush AefDi Bah, 1d. Similar language is employed by Luria himself in his commentary on the opening passage of Zohar 1:15a. See Scholem, “Authentic Kabbalistic Writings of the Ari,” p. 197. 111 On the theosophic symbol of the qaw ha-middah, which is derived from Jeremiah 31:39, see Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 271–2; Liebes, Zohar Lexicon, p. 146; Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 180–1 n. 124. 112 The philosophical implications of the formation of the vessel in the primordial space that arose as a consequence of the withdrawal of the light in Lurianic kabbalah is well captured in Martin Heidegger’s account of the “openness of the open” in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1999), p. 237: But the open, which hides itself and in which beings . . . always stand, is in fact something like a hollow medium, e.g., that of a jug. But here we recognize that it is not a random emptiness that is merely enclosed by the walls and left unfilled by “things,” but the other way around: the hollow medium is the determining framing that sustains the walling of the walls and their edges. These are merely the efflux of that originary open which lets its openness hold sway by calling forth such a walling (the form of the container) around and unto itself. In this way the essential swaying of the open radiates back into the enclosure. The vessel in Lurianic kabbalah is similarly characterized as the openness that encloses or the enclosure that opens, the clearing wherein the concealing is unconcealed and the unconcealing concealed. See Contributions to Philosophy, p. 245, where Heidegger depicts truth as the “clearing of sheltering-concealing.” And see p. 262: “The origin brings itself into its open only in and through the occurrence of sheltering truth in accord with the path of sheltering that is in each case necessary.” On the clearing, which is also called the “lighting center” that encircles everything like the Nothing that is not known, as the concealment wherein all things are revealed, see idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter (New York, 1971), p. 53: And yet—beyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is still something that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. . . . Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere of what is lighted. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presence in that it always withholds itself at the same time in a concealedness. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. 113 MS New York, Columbia University x893/m6862, fol. 392a. Ibn eabul’s description of the seminal seed, which comprises ten points that correspond to the ten sefirot, is reminiscent of the account of the seed that issues forth from Ein-Sof, and which is compared to a yod, according to the anonymous


114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126

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text in Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” p. 327, and see her analysis on pp. 314–15. See also ibn eabul, “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 135. MS New York, Columbia University x893/m6862, fol. 392b. The exact phrase occurs in Babylonian Talmud, Menabot 29b, but the more appropriate reference is probably Genesis Rabbah 1:4, ed. J. Theodor and C. Albeck (Jerusalem, 1965), p. 6, where mention is made of the six things that preceded the creation of the world, three of them created and three of them arose in thought. Genesis Rabbah 3:7, p. 23. MS New York, Columbia University x893/m6862, fol. 392b. Ibid., fol. 393a. “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 134. Ibid., p. 138. See Scholem, “Authentic Writings,” p. 195; idem, Major Trends, pp. 254, 263, 411 n. 55; I. Tishby, The Doctrine of Evil and the ‘Kelippah’ in Lurianic Kabbalism (Jerusalem, 1942), pp. 22, 24–7, 57–8 (in Hebrew). According to Scholem, Vital deliberately concealed the true teaching of Luria concerning DimDum and the catharsis of the force of unbalanced judgment from the economy of the divine. The notion that Vital intentionally hid Luria’s teachings was already proffered by Meir Poppers, Zohar ha-Raqia‘ (Korets, 1785), 20b. ‘ED Aayyim 1:2, 11c–d; Sha‘ar ha-Haqdamot (Jerusalem, 1879), 6b–c; Mavo’ She‘arim (Jerusalem, 1904), pt. 1, 1:1, 1a–b. E.R. Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 301– 44, esp. 317–22. D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, translated by M. Adamson (Princeton, 1988), pp. 36–7. See E.R. Wolfson, “Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 78 (1987): 77–112. ‘ED Aayyim, 42:1, 89b–c. See, however, ibid., 9:8, 47a, where malkhut shebe-malkhut is associated with the seven kings of Edom who died. A different meaning seems to be implied in ibid., 35:2, 52a. In Sha‘arei Qedushah (Jerusalem, 1983), III.1, p. 73, Vital applies the expression malkhut shebe-malkhut to the principle of corporeality in being, “the foundation of the dust, vessel, and amorphous matter for the world in its entirety,” yesod ha-‘afar keli we-golam lekhol ha-‘olam kullo. The association of the centerpoint and the attribute of Malkhut within Ein-Sof was already noted by Y. Jacobson, “The Aspect of the Feminine in the Lurianic Kabbalah,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After, p. 246, although the phallic nature of this symbolism escaped his attention. While I agree with Jacobson that DimDum must be connected with the construction of the feminine as a creative potency, I cannot agree with his effort to distinguish this sharply from the cathartic process. In my judgment, the feminine assumes the role of creator precisely as a result of the catharsis, which is a purification of the feminine potency. Alternatively expressed, this purification entails the phallic transformation of the feminine from a demonic to a demiurgic potency. Vital, ‘ED Aayyim, 6:5, 28a; 39:2, 67d (cited below at n. 129); idem, Sha‘ar ha-Haqdamot, 1:2, 29c; idem, Mavo’ She‘arim, pt. 3, 2:12, 28a; idem, Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 58b (cited below at n. 175); LiqquFim Aadashim,

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pp. 22–3, 63–4; idem, Sha‘ar ha-Gilgulim (Jerusalem, 1903), sec. 31, 32a and parallel in idem, Sefer ha-Aezyonot, edited by A. Eshkoli (Jerusalem, 1954), pp. 185–6. I have had the occasion to discuss some of these texts in greater detail in “Beyond Good and Evil: Hypernomianism and Transmorality in the Kabbalistic Tradition,” in Crossing Boundaries: Ethics, Antinomianism and the History of Mysticism, edited by J. Kripal and W. Barnard (New York and London, 2002). It is of interest to note that in the commentary of Luria on Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta’, in Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 22a, gender polarity is attributed to ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ who is said to be “arrayed in the hidden wisdom (Bokhmata’ setima’ah) that is within it in the manner of male and female.” In the continuation of this text, the division of gender is related more specifically to the thirteen attributes of mercy contained within the uppermost aspect of God, ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’, six of the attributes are described as masculine and the other six as feminine. It must be noted that in ‘ED Aayyim, 42:1, 89b–c, Vital describes Keter as the primal chaos (tohu) or hylic matter that is the median between the emanator (Ein-Sof) and that which is emanated (sefirot). This description suggests a feminine portrayal of Keter. 128 The word I have translated as “genitals” is yesod, literally, “foundation.” The choice of this term should be obvious: the genitalia engender offspring since it is through them that procreation and begetting is effected. They are thus both appropriately referred to as yesod. See, in particular, ‘ED Aayyim, 1:5, 14c: Furthermore, you must know that the aspect of Malkhut in each and every configuration (parDuf ) of these five configurations is in this manner, if Malkhut is in a male configuration, such as ’Abba’ and Ze‘eir ’Anpin, the Malkhut that is in him is in the aspect of the crown (‘aFarah) on the righteous who is called Yesod . . . and if Malkhut is in the female configuration, such as ’Ima’ and Nuqba’ di-Ze‘eir ’Anpin, the Malkhut that is in her is also in the aspect of the crown of Yesod (‘aFeret yesod) that is in her, for her the foundation (yesod) that is in her is the womb (reBem) and the crown that is in it is the aspect of the flesh of the apple (besar ha-tapuaB) that is over it, which is called in the words of the sages, blessed be their memory, the lower abdomen. And in Mavo’ She‘arim, pt. 6, 1:8, 54a: Just as a male has Yesod and Malkhut, and they are the male organ and the head of the body (’ever ro’sh gewiyyah), which is Yesod, and upon its head is the corona like a elevated wall of flesh at the end of the penis, and this is the aspect of Malkhut in the male, so the woman has an inner chamber within which is the womb, and this chamber is called her Yesod, and in the opening of this chamber is a wall of elevated flesh, which is called in the Gemara the lower abdomen, and this is the flesh that protrudes in between the two thighs in the opening of Yesod, and this is the Malkhut in the feminine. On the androgynous nature of Yesod, see also aayyim Vital, Sha‘ar haKawwanot (Jerusalem, 1963), 18d, 105c; idem, Peri ‘ED Aayyim (Jerusalem, 1970), p. 158; ‘ED Aayyim, 34:2, 46b–c. 129 ‘ED Aayyim, 39:2, 67d.

Divine suffering 157 130 Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 69–72. See above, n. 94. Regarding Sarug and his school, see the recent studies by R. Meroz, “R. Yisrael Sarug— Luria’s Disciple: A Research Controversy Reconsidered,” Da‘at 28 (1992): 41–50 (in Hebrew) and idem, “Contrasting Opinions Among the Founders of R. Israel Saruq’s School,” in Expérience et écriture mystiques dans les religions du Livre, edited by P.B. Fenton and R. Goetschel (Leiden, 2000), pp. 191–202. 131 Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 29b. 132 Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” p. 315, raises the possibility that the attribution of sha‘ashu‘a to Ein-Sof may suggest an androgynous nature. My own interpretation concurs with this suggestion, although I have utilized the expression “male androgyne” to capture the autoerotic quality of the sexual act that mythically accounts for the division of the indivisible Infinite into the polarity of male and female. See Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 69–70. Jacobson, “Aspect of the Feminine,” p. 242, suggests that we can say either that Ein-Sof is not male or female or that it comprises both a feminine and a masculine aspect. 133 See E.R. Wolfson, “Eunuchs Who Keep the Sabbath: Becoming Male and the Ascetic Ideal in Thirteenth-century Jewish Mysticism,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, edited by J.J. Cohen and B. Wheeler (New York, 1997), pp. 166–7. 134 Consider the following comment in the compilation of Nathan of Gaza, LiqquFei Raza’ de-Malka’ Qadisha’, MS New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 1549, fol. 1b: Furthermore, we must ask, it is known to us that no configuration (parDuf ) comes to be except from male and female, so how can it be said that ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ has no female and that Ein-Sof also has no female? We must respond that in truth there is no female there in actuality, but there is a female in potentiality . . . and with respect to Ein-Sof as well there is no [female] in actuality but the aspect of the female is connected there to the point that we do not mention her for everything is one. 135 Zohar 3:129a; and see ‘ED Aayyim 13:13, 68c. 136 That is, the numerical value of the letters of the Tetragrammaton, when it is spelled as ywd he’ waw he’, is forty-five (10+6+4+5+1+6+1+6+5+1), which signifies the masculine aspect of mercy. 137 That is, the numerical value of the letters of the Tetragrammaton, when it is spelled as ywd hh ww hh, is fifty-two (10+6+4+5+5+6+6+5+5). This signifies the feminine aspect of judgment. 138 Sha‘ar ha-Haqdamot, 1:2, 29c. 139 See Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 85–92. 140 Zohar 3:288a–b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, p. 297. See above, n. 64. 141 ‘ED Aayyim, 13:2, 60b–d. See the depiction of Malkhut in ibid., 34:2, 46c, as the crown (‘aFarah) in the time of the reign of the Edomite kings, that is, prior to the tiqqun that resulted in the configuration of Malkhut as a feminine potency, the “earth,” which is the vessel to receive the seminal discharge. See the account of the androgynous nature of the eighth king, Hadar, who corresponds to Yesod in ibid., 10:3, 48d. Compare the passage of Moses Jonah translated in Wolfson, Circle in the Square, p. 231 n. 198.

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142 I have not found this exact formulation in the Zohar. The closest passage to this citation is the reworking of the aggadic motif that when it arose in God’s will to create the world, he took counsel with the Torah. See Zohar 3:61b. 143 “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 142. 144 To be more precise, the rabbinic expression is “thus it arose in thought,” kakh ‘alah ba-maBshavah. See Babylonian Talmud, Menabot 29b; Ketuvot 8a. 145 See, for instance, the following passage in Luria’s commentary on Sifra’ diCeni‘uta in Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 28c: Yesod is male and it is not from the side of Binah for she is female. . . . Nevertheless, the supernal point of Zion that is in Binah is in him even though it is not discernible. Accordingly, within him the potency of femininity is hidden and the potency of masculinity revealed . . . and these two aspects are Joseph and Benjamin, the one is the female waters . . . and the other the male waters in the secret of Joseph the righteous, he is above and he is below, he enters and exits, he enters to bestow the male waters and he exits to take out the female waters corresponding to the male waters, and this is so every time there is copulation.

146 147 148 149 150 151

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The translation and interpretation of this passage are slightly different from what I presented in Circle of the Square, p. 106. ‘ED Aayyim, 35:1, 50c–d. LiqquFim Aadashim, p. 47. Zohar 2:108b. Zohar 1:20a. LiqquFim Aadashim, pp. 17–18. See E.R. Wolfson, “Re/membering the Covenant: Memory, Forgetfulness, and History in the Zohar,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by E. Carlebach, D.S. Myers, and J. Efron (Hanover and London, 1998), pp. 214– 46. See S.P. Allen, “Plato, Aristotle and the Concept of Woman in Early Jewish Philosophy,” Florilegium 9 (1987): 89–111; S. Klein-Braslavy, Maimonides’ Interpretation of the Adam Stories in Genesis: A Study in Maimonides Anthropology (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 193–208 (in Hebrew); I. DobbsWeinstein, “Matter as Creature and Matter as the Source of Evil: Maimonides and Aquinas,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by L.E. Goodman (Albany, 1992), pp. 217–35. For a different approach to the status of the woman in Maimonidean thought, see A. Melamed, “Maimonides on Women: Formless Matter or Potential Prophet?” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, edited by A.L. Ivry, E.R. Wolfson, and A. Arkush (Australia, 1998), pp. 99–134. On the myth of the death of the Edomite kings and the imperfect configuration of the feminine, see Jacobson, “Aspect of the Feminine,” pp. 249–51. Regarding this mythical idea, see also Scholem, Major Trends, p. 266; Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, pp. 65–7; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 276–7, 289–90; idem, Doctrine of Evil and the “Kelippah,” pp. 28–34, 37–8; Meroz, “Redemption in the Lurianic Teaching,” pp. 128–51. ‘ED Aayyim 10:3, 48d– 49b. On the nexus between the Edomite kings, divine judgment, and the aspect of the feminine, see ibid., 39:1, 65b. Sha‘ar ha-Haqdamot, 1:2, 29c.

Divine suffering 159 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

167

168 169

170

171 172 173

174 175

Wolfson, “Woman—The Feminine As Other,” pp. 168–9. Mavo’ She‘arim, pt 2, 3:1, 11d. ‘Es Hayyim, 1:2, 11d. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 276–7; Liebes, Zohar Lexicon, pp. 145–51, 161–4; idem, “Zohar and Eros,” p. 80; Wolfson, “Woman— The Feminine as Other,” pp. 179–82; idem, Circle in the Square, pp. 60–9. The image is derived from Zohar 2:254b to which Luria explicitly refers. Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 22b. Ibid. ‘ED Aayyim, 10:3, 48d. See also Sha‘ar ha-Haqdamot, 28d. ‘ED Aayyim, 10:3,48d. On the identification of Hadar and Yesod, see ibid., 9:8, 47a; 12:4, 51c. “Commentary on ’Idra’ Rabba’,” p. 140. According to the interpretation of “The arms of his hands were spread out” (Gen. 49:24) attributed to R. Isaac in Genesis Rabbah 87:7, p. 1072: “his seed was dispersed and it went out by way of his nails.” From the exegetical context, it would appear that the nails refer to the fingers. For a later discussion regarding whether this refer to the hands or to the feet, see ‘ED Aayyim, 15:2, 33b–c. Tiqqunei Zohar 69, 110a. In that context, a link is established between the ten seminal drops discharged by Joseph through his nails and the ten martyrs, the ‘asurah harugei malkhut. For the development of this motif in the Lurianic sources, see Meroz, “Redemption in the Lurianic Teaching,” pp. 257–61. ‘ED Aayyim 8:3, 37b. See, for instance, the extended discussion of this matter in Sha‘ar ha-Pesuqim, 20c–21b. For references to other scholarly treatments, see E.R. Wolfson, “The Engenderment of Messianic Politics: Symbolic Significance of Sabbatai cevi’s Coronation,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, edited by P. Schäfer and M.R. Cohen (Leiden, 1998), p. 239 n. 122. This is not to deny that one also finds in kabbalistic sources the belief that spilling seed in vain creates a blemish above in the female aspect of God. My point is that the man who so transgresses is transvalued as feminine or castrated. MS London, British Museum 10627, fol. 64b. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 1358–9; S.F. Koren, “ ‘The Woman from whom God Wanders’: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1999, pp. 146–282. Jacobson, “Aspect of the Feminine,” pp. 250–5, suggests that the reason why no wife is mentioned in the case of the first seven kings is “not because they were male, but because their fertile femininity was actualized only after their revival and reconstruction.” In fact, the Edomite kings are emasculated males and thus they are symbolically equivalent to females without male partners. The underlying issue in this myth is not feminine fertility but rather masculine virility. See above at n. 134. Sha‘ar Ma’amerei Rashbi, 58b. For other references, see above, n. 141. See MS Columbia X8931, fol. 396b, where ibn eabul describes the aspect of Malkhut in ’Abba’ as the “corona of the phallus (ha-‘aFarah shel ha-yesod), the secret of circumcision and the uncovering.”

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176 Babylonian Talmud, Pesabim 56a. 177 This aspect of kabbalistic teaching, reflected analytically in my work, is missed in the critical remark of M. Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven and London, 1998), p. 230, that an analysis of the midnight ritual of tiqqun Badot makes it difficult to “corroborate” my view of kabbalah as a “phallocentric lore.” Idel bases his conclusion on the fact that the documents pertaining to this rite do not mention the task of integrating the female into the male, let alone a restoration of the feminine to the phallus. The response to this criticism is obvious: in so far as tiqqun BaDot relates to the first phase of redemption, which requires a repairing of the male and female, it makes perfectly good sense that the symbolism of phallic restoration, which is appropriate to the second phase of redemption, is not mentioned. The final tiqqun involves the full force of the phallocentric orientation of the kabbalistic symbolism, although it must be said that even the heterosexual imagery of the first phase, predicated on maintaining the apparent autonomy of male and female personifications, is phallocentric in its orientation when one properly analyzes the matter from a more nuanced theoretical perspective. See Wolfson, “Re/membering the Covenant,” pp. 226–31. 178 ’ODerot RamBal, edited by H. Friedlander (Bene Beraq, 1986), p. 180. See E.R. Wolfson, “Tiqqun ha-Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Luzzatto,” History of Religions 36 (1997): 322–32. See also text from Luzzatto’s ’Adir ba-Marom cited in E.R. Wolfson, “Constructions of the Shekhinah in the Messianic Theosophy of Abraham Cardoso With an Annotated Edition of Derush ha-Shekhinah,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 3 (1998): 71–2 n. 180. 179 See ‘ED Aayyim 9:8, 47a; 44:6, 100b. The textual attestations to this exegetical grounding of the ontological claim regarding the female surrounding the male in the posture of the crown (‘aFarah) or encompassing light (’or maqif ) are numerous. I will cite and analyze some of the relevant passages elsewhere. 180 TanBuma’, Wayaqqhel 7; see LiqquFim Aadashim, p. 17. 181 Yosher Levav, 5b. 182 See, in particular, the language of the text published by R. Meroz, “An Anonymous Commentary on Idra Rabba by a Member of the Saruq School,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 12 (1996): 353 (in Hebrew). The explicit use of the image of DimDum in conjunction with the doctrine of malbush is found in the recently published Derush ha-Malbush we-haCimDum (Jerusalem, 2001), p. 9: “When the light of the blessed One is contracted (nitDamDem), from the trace (reshimu) of it a garment (malbush) is made, so that the garment will be a place that is empty and not empty.” 183 The Toledoth ha-Ari and Luria’s “Manner of Life” (Hanhagoth), edited by M. Benayahu (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 164 (in Hebrew). On the liberal approach of Luria, which inspired innovative interpretations of his teachings, see Meroz, “Faithful Transmission,” p. 266. This should be contrasted with the view expressed by Scholem, Major Trends, p. 254, that the common elements in the versions offered by Vital and ibn eabul “may be safely regarded as the authentic Lurianic doctrine.” I do not think the material lends itself to this assumption. It is more in tune with the nature of these texts to say that the authentic doctrines could be interpreted in multiple ways. 184 See text in Meroz, “Anonymous Commentary,” p. 353.

Divine suffering 161 185 See B. Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, translated by S. Rendall (Berkeley, 1998). 186 In Sha‘ar RuaB ha-Qodesh (Jerusalem, 1868), 6a, aayyim Vital writes, “Know that from the day that the Torah was burnt, as is known, by means of the nations of the world as a result of our abundant transgressions, all of its powers and secrets were transmitted to the shells.” In this passage, Vital is not speaking about the emanative scheme in the highest aspect of the divine. Nonetheless, the suffering that he attributes to Torah as a consequence of Israel’s sins, which led to the destruction of Torah as the unique possession of the Jews, is instructive. The Torah itself is subject to the mystery of exile. This expression sod galut ha-torah, the “mystery of the exile of Torah,” is used by Moses Shoham, Seraf Peri ‘ED Aayyim (Chernowitz, 1866), 72a, in reference to the aforecited passage of Vital. 187 M.C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago and London, 1984), pp. 105–6. 188 For an engaging and sensitive account of the postmodern hermeneutical condition, see W. Watson, The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism (Albany, 1985). 189 On the view of reading as a response to human suffering, see the insightful remarks of P. Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 254 and 313. 190 M.-A. Ouaknin, Mysteries of the Kabbalah, translated by J. Bacon (New York, 2000), pp. 320–1. The textual circumcision of God is an alternative expression of the kabbalistic doctrine of the incarnation; see Ouaknin, Mysteries of the Kabbalah, p. 381. 191 See my study cited above, n. 123. 192 These remarks reflect the critical observation on this part of the essay offered by Charlotte E. Fonrobert when I presented this study at Stanford University, March 12, 2001. I have not done full justice to Fonrobert’s remarks, but I have tried to deal briefly with the main part of her claim. 193 See S.A. Handelman, “ ‘Torments of an Ancient World’: Edmond Jabès and the Rabbinic Tradition,” in The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès (Lincoln and London, 1985), pp. 55–91. 194 Jabès, Book of Questions, vol. 2, p. 188: “Thus God erased Himself in the Other who is erased.” The matter can also be expressed in terms of the dialectic of disclosure and concealment. See ibid., p. 160: “God dies with us wherever He shows Himself.” 195 Ibid., p. 250. 196 Ibid., p. 230. 197 From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, translated by R. Waldrop, introductory essay by R. Stamelman (Hanover and London, 1991), p. 24. Alternatively, Jabès expresses the opinion that writing is dependent on reading. See, for example, Book of Questions, vol. 2, p. 150: All writing invites to an anterior reading of the world which the word urges and which we pursue to the limits of faded memory. We can only write what we have been able to read. It is an infinitesimal part of the universe to be told. 198 E. Jabès, The Book of Margins, translated by R. Waldrop (Chicago and London, 1993), p. 124.

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199 Zohar 1:4b. 200 Jabès, Book of Questions, vol. 2, p. 143. 201 In fairness it must be said that writing, too, is also assigned with theurgical and redemptive significance in kabbalistic sources, related especially to joining the male and female. See, for instance, the passage in the text published by Meroz, “Anonymous Commentary,” p. 357: The rectification (tiqqun) is necessary in the world of doing (‘olam ha‘asiyyah), that is, writing with a pen. Therefore, every expert student and one who repents, and even the one who is completely righteous, needs [to write] with a pen something from the principles of Torah, and by means of this the world of doing will be rectified, and the female waters will be rectified so that the male waters will be rectified. For other examples of the theurgic role assigned to writing, see Wolfson, Circle in the Square, pp. 74–8. 202 Mishnah, Shabbat 12:3–5.

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6

Suffering and incarnation Graham Ward

The concern of this essay lies with a comparison and, ultimately, a confrontation between two cultures: the secular and the Christian with respect to the character and economies of pain and pleasure, suffering, sacrifice, and satisfaction.1 We need to begin with the corporeal, since it is the body which registers suffering, and it is the theological nature of embodiment itself which is the concern of incarnation. Suffering is a mode of embodied experience: a theological account then of suffering must concern itself with what it means to be a soul enfleshed. The character of bodily experience is registered according to a pain–pleasure calculus. Those of us who are academics spend much of our time, I suggest, experiencing the extremes of neither. Perhaps most people, indeed, only take account of their embodiment when the body demands account to be taken because its experiences register the intensity of suffering or the delights of bliss. But in beginning with the corporeal let me emphasis what I am not doing. First, I am not suggesting a mind–body dualism—there are intellectual pleasures (as Kantian aesthetics and the joy of reading evidence) and there is intellectual pain (as existentialism emphasized and psychiatry treats). To draw upon a distinction St. Paul makes, and which we will return to later, perhaps most of us inhabit the body (soma) rather than the flesh (sarx) or the symbolics of embodiment rather than its sensate materiality. The reason for this lies in the difficulty of registering sensation as such. That is, most of the time we experience our body’s sensations through cultural prisms and personal expectations. The raw givenness of the body and its experiences are already encoded. Judith Butler neatly sums this up in her book Bodies That Matter through a play on the word “matter” as it refers to both materiality and something of significance. That which is matter already matters, is already caught up in the exchanges of signification.2 The soul enfleshed (where soul has much wider

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connotations than just the mind’s cognition), the only “body” we know, sublates any mind–body dualism. Second, I do not wish to suggest that there is a spectrum with pain at one pole and pleasure at another. Since early modernity, the Protestant awareness of the transcendence of the divine beyond human reasoning, accounts of peering into the infinite reaches of the heavens, and aesthetic descriptions of the sublime have each appealed to experiences which are simultaneously both painful and consummately beatific.3 The mystic’s cry of ecstasy,4 the mathematician’s speechless awe at the dark spaces between the stars,5 the exquisite intellectual confusion as the experience of what is beautiful sheers towards the edge of the tremendum6—each testify to experiences that exceed the neat categorization, the twin-poled spectrum, of pain and pleasure. Though it does seem to me, and we will return to this in the last section of the essay, that to conflate suffering and bliss can also be a sign of decadence announcing a sado-masochistic culture.

Contemporary pain and pleasure For some time now, at least since the 1960s and 1970s (though its roots lie in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit), intellectual debates concerned with the economies of desire—whether in Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, Foucault, or gihek—have been oriented around the notion of jouissance. Suffering constitutes itself as the lack or absence of jouissance. Bliss, as one translation, is the ultimate human goal. With Lacan and gihek the lack itself is pleasurable. They would argue that what we desire is not the fulfillment of our desire, but the desiring itself, the prolongation of desire. To attain our desire would collapse the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. The extended game of hunt the slipper would come to an end. Desire only operates if there remains an objet petit a, a hole, a gap, a void, a loss that can never (and must never) be fully negotiated or filled. And so we fetishize—turn the hole itself into what we desire: “in fetishism we simply make the cause of desire directly into our object of desire.”7 But since the hole itself cannot be negotiated then objects substitute for and veil this ultimate void. Bliss then is endlessly deferred yet remains the telos and organizing point for any local and ephemeral construction of the meaning of embodiment. Lacan (and gihek) develop into a sacrificial logic the system of compensations and substitutions which Freud increasingly recognized as symptomatic of the way the libidinal drive operated alongside the death drive in the economy of desire. Civilization, for Freud, is founded upon its profound and ineliminable discontent. In this sacrificial logic we are caught up in a denial of what we most want and produce substitutionary

Suffering and incarnation 165 forms, objects, laws, empty symbols for that which is unsubstitutional. And so we deny, sometimes even murder, what we most value, in order to maintain our fantasies about it.8 There takes place here a renunciation in the form of a negation of negation. It is this sacrificial logic that I wish to examine. It finds similar forms in other poststructuralist discourses. Derrida’s accounts of the economy of the sign, the economy of différance and the logic of the supplement, is also a sacrificial economy. In his essay “How to Avoid Speaking” (comment ne pas parler), he coins the word “denegation” (dénégation) or the negation of negation, to describe the effects of différance in discourses of negative theology. Writing in the interstices between the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament and Kierkegaard’s reading of the story in Fear and Trembling, Derrida emphasizes, The trembling of Fear and Trembling is, or so it seems, the very experience of sacrifice . . . in the sense that sacrifice supposes the putting to death of the unique in terms of its being unique, irreplaceable, and most precious. It also therefore refers to the impossibility of substitution, the unsubstitutional; and then also to the substitution of an animal for man; and finally, especially this, it refers to what links the sacred to sacrifice and sacrifice to secrecy . . . Abraham . . . speaks and doesn’t speak. . . . He speaks in order not to say anything about the essential thing he must keep secret. Speaking in order not to say anything is always the best technique for keeping a secret.9 Speaking in order not to say is the work of différance such that deconstruction produces a specific kind of syntax: in The Gift of Death it is “religion without religion;” in The Politics of Friendship it is “community without community” and “friendship without friendship;” elsewhere it is “justice without justice.” The syntagma of this sacrificial economy, which keeps concealed what it most wishes to say, is “X without X.”10 It conceals a continual wounding presented as a perpetual kenosis, the kenosis of discourse.11 The sign is always involved in a diremption of meaning as it differs and defers in its logic of sacrificial substitution and supplementation. It is this which brings différance into a relation with negative theology (a saying which cannot say). The sign yields up its significance in what Derrida terms a serierasure. But what governs the yielding is the logocentric promise, the call to come, an eschatology which can never arrive, can never be allowed to arrive. Suffering, sacrifice, and satisfaction are intrinsic to the economy of the sign.

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Graham Ward Every time there is “jouissance” (but the “there is” of this event is in itself extremely enigmatic), there are “deconstruction”. Effective deconstruction. Deconstruction perhaps has the effect, if not the mission, of liberating forbidden jouissance. That’s what has to be taken on board. It is perhaps this jouissance which most irritates the all-out adversaries of “deconstruction”.12

But this is “jouissance without jouissance,” for deconstruction cannot deliver the delay its describes. Thus, a culture is produced which is fundamentally sadomasochistic: it cannot allow itself to enjoy what it most profoundly wants. Derrida composes a scenario: What I thus engage in the double constraint of a double bind is not only myself, nor my own desire, but the other, the Messiah or the god himself. As if I were calling someone—for example, on the telephone—saying to him or her, in sum: I don’t want you to wait for my call and become forever dependent upon it; go out on the town, be free not to answer. And to prove it, the next time I call you, don’t answer, or I won’t see you again. If you answer my call, it’s all over.13 Michel de Certeau and Emmanuel Levinas, in their different models of selfhood with respect to the other, portray the sacrificial logic in terms of an endless journeying into exile (Certeau)14 or the position of always being accused by the other (Levinas).15 For both, the self can never be at rest. It must always suffer displacement by the other, always undergo a passion. The displacement and suffering is given, in both their accounts, an ethical coloring, for it is constituted in and by a Good beyond being (Levinas) or the utopic horizon of union with the One (Certeau’s “white ecstasy”).16 The suffering is inseparable from accounts of desire, jouissance and substitution.17 With various modulations each of these discourses operates a sacrificial logic in which love is not-having (Cixous’s formulation).18 The suffering, the sacrifice, the kenosis is both necessary and unavoidable for it is intrinsic to the economy itself. But unlike Hegel’s dialectic, the negative moment is not appropriated and welded firmly both into the providential chain of time and the constitution of the subject. The negative moment remains unappropriated, unsublated, impossible to redeem because forever endlessly repeated. Furthermore, because bound to a construal of time as a series of discrete units, each negative moment is utterly singular and utterly arbitrary in so far as the moment is infinitely reiterated to the point that difference between moments becomes a matter of indifference (rendering the utterly singular moment identical and

Suffering and incarnation 167 identically repeated). All suffering is both the same and yet singular; renunciation and sacrifice are both universal (in form) and particular. The relation of this operative negativity to the utopic horizon which governs it ( jouissance in its various guises) is contradictory rather than paradoxical. It governs the suffering as its antithesis, not its telos. An infinite distance, a distance without analogy or participation, is opened constituting the other as absolutely other. In Derrida’s word “tout autre est tout autre.”19 As such the dreams of the bliss of union intensify the suffering in the way that Sisyphus is tormented by seeing the goal for which he strives while also knowing it can never be attained. Or, to employ another Greek myth, jouissance is the grapes held out to the thirsting Tantalus. And so one is led to ask what the sacrifice achieves in this infinite postponement of pleasure. As an operation, which is no longer governed by a single or a simple agency (for the poststructural subject is profoundly aporetic), it is required by and maintains the possibility of the economy. It is immanent to the economy but unassimilable to it. It resolves nothing with respect to that economy, only fissures it with the aneconomic trauma which allows the economy to proceed. What it produces, and continually reproduces then, is the economy itself: the endless production of pseudo-objects. This economy of sacrifice is fundamental to capitalism itself. For it sustains growth, limitless productivity, which is capitalism’s profoundly secular fantasy. It repeats, in a socio-psychological, semiotic, and ethical key our various monetary projects in which we deny present delights by investing for greater delights in the future (wherein the pleasures we deny ourselves are only utilized by investment banks to further develop market forces). Sacrifice as enjoying one’s own suffering, in this immanent economy of desire, sustains current developments in globalism (and current illusions that such globalism is liberal and democratic).

Christian pain and pleasure What role does suffering play in the economy of Christian redemption? What of its own sacrificial logic? I suggest we need to make a distinction between sacrificial suffering (as kenosis and passion), which undoes the economics of sin through a therapy of desire, and the suffering which is a consequence and a perpetuation of sin, which undoes the orders of grace that sustain creation in its being. Of course, this distinction is a theological one, maintained by faith and established by eschatological judgment. Living in media res, as Augustine reminds us, “ignorance is unavoidable—and yet the exigencies of human society make judgement also unavoidable.”20 Nevertheless, the distinction is important for it marks out a place for suffering as a passion written into creation (the first

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incarnation of the divine). That cryptic verse from the Book of Revelation announces that Christ was the Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” (13:8). Creation, then, issues from a certain kenotic giving, a logic of sacrifice that always made possible the passion of Jesus Christ on the Cross, the slaying of the Lamb. The Cross becomes the place where the two forms of suffering—the sacrificial and that which is a consequence of sin—meet. Jesus is both the obedient lamb given on behalf of sinful human beings and the suffering victim of the disrupted orders of creation brought about by the lust to dominate. The kenotic abandonment assuages and reorientates the powers of disintegration, establishing grace as the principle of nature. But prior to the Fall, to sin, and judgment which installed suffering (and death) as a consequence of disobedience, prior to the judgement on Eve (“I will increase your labour and your groaning,” Gen. 3:16) and the judgment on Adam (“You shall gain your food by the sweat of your brow,” Gen. 3:19) there was a foundational giving which cost. We will return to the nature of this primordial suffering later. Evidently it concerns the divine economy with respect both to its internal relations and creation. For the moment I wish to point out how this logic of sacrifice operates in respect of divine history or Heilsgeschichte. For it is that which reveals itself as flesh and history, recorded in the Scriptures, which, for Christians, stakes out the limits and possibilities for theological speculation. And it is in that revelation of God made flesh that the relationship between suffering and incarnation, the mystery of that relationship, can be apprehended. The suffering that marks the incarnation is figured early in the Gospel narrative of Luke in scenes and tropes of wounding and scarification. John the Baptist’s circumcision is reiterated in the circumcision of Christ (1:59 and 2:21) and the prophesied rejection of Christ by the world is followed by an oracle to Mary that “a sword shall pierce your heart also” (2:35). The circumcision was interpreted by the early Church Fathers as a first bloodletting foreshadowing the sacrifice on the Cross. That suffering was also a glorification, for the detail that it took place on the eighth day was traditionally interpreted as a reference to the eschatological day of judgment; the day following the final and consummating Sabbath when the dead rise with new bodies to dwell eternally in the kingdom of light. This paradoxical nature of suffering and glorification is echoed throughout the New Testament. We will meet it in the Pauline Epistles, and in the Gospel of John Christ on the Cross is portrayed as both the ultimate victim and the exalted ensign for the healing of the nations. In the Book of Revelation the Lamb worshipped and adored, the disseminator of light throughout the Eternal City, remains a Lamb that is slain.

Suffering and incarnation 169 The scenes and tropes of scarification in those opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel focus on other acts of violence with which the incarnation is announced and brought about: the sacrificial offering made by Zechariah the Priest (1:10), the offering of doves or pigeons at the Presentation of Christ (2:24), the terror struck in Zechariah, Mary, and the shepherds at the visitation of the angel(s), the striking dumb of Zechariah “because you have not believed me” (1:20). The suffering of incarnation is registered somatically and psychologically in the flesh of those called to play a part in its human manifestation. The incarnation of Christ intensifies the experience of embodiment through the sufferings it engenders, just as—in an unfolding of the same logic—it is the experience of suffering which most deeply draws the believer to prayer (in the garden of Gethsemane, in the upper room following the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, in Paul’s imprisonment). In suffering the soul is recognized at the surface of the body; the ensoulment of the body is most exposed.21 With the darkest nights of the soul, in which is evident the inseparability of consciousness, subconsciousness, and the sensitivities of the flesh, come the profoundest awareness of participation in the divine. There is no deliverance from suffering promised in the New Testament before the messianic return: He will dwell among them and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes; there shall be an end to death, and to mourning and crying and pain; for the old order has passed away. (Rev. 21:3–4) In fact, in his Epistle to the Colossians, Paul cryptically remarks that he rejoices to suffer for the Church at Colossi because “This is my way of helping to complete, in my poor human flesh, the full tale of Christ’s afflictions still to be endured, for the sake of his body which is the church” (1:24). This is a well-wrought translation, but it filters out some of the syntactic and semantic complexity of Paul’s Greek. A close, more literal translation would read: Now I rejoice in suffering [en tois pathe¯ masin] on your behalf and fill up in turn [antanaplero¯] things lacking of the afflictions [thlipseo¯n] of Christ in my flesh [sarxi] on behalf of his body [so¯matos] which is the church. The Greek gives emphasis to three interrelated themes. First, it builds upon and develops spatial figurations which preoccupy Paul through this letter and (possibly) his letter to the Ephesians. Throughout the letter

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Paul draws attention to Christ as a cosmic space filled with all the riches and treasures of wisdom and knowledge (2:3), speaking repeatedly of Christians as living en Christo¯ or en auto¯, employing a locative use of the dative. All things upon earth and in heaven are reconciled “in the body of his flesh [en to so¯mati te¯ s sarxos autou]” (1:22). Second, the Greek emphasizes the interdependency of bodies and flesh such that there is a series of co-activities between the individual believer and the body of Christ as both the church and the person of Christ. Later in the letter Paul will talk about being co-buried [suntaphentes], co-raised [sune¯ gerthe¯ te], and co-quickened [sunezo¯opoie¯ sen] in Christ (2:12–13) such that there is an economy for growth and expansion through “the operation of him operating in me in power [te¯ n energeian autou te¯ n energoumene¯ n en emoi en dunamei].” The prose borders on poetry, as alliterative and assonantal effects resonate within an iterative litany. Paul’s flesh (sarx) participates in an unfolding and outworking of Christ’s body (soma), just as Jesus Christ’s own flesh opens up to enfold all things in earth and heaven in one body. Third, the verse picks up a rich and profound play on the verb pleroo and the noun pleroma. The verb pleroo¯ stands as the opposite to the important word for Christ’s descent from God in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, kenoo¯—to empty, to pour out.22 There Paul exhorts believers to Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born like other human beings. (2:5) The economics of emptying that governed the incarnation are now reversed. The lack that kenosis brought about is now being satisfied. There is a filling and a fulfilling, not only of Christ but of each believer with respect to Christ. Paul works and prays for the Colossians that “you may be filled [plero¯the¯ te] with the full knowledge of the will of him in all wisdom and spiritual understanding [en pase¯ sophia kai sunesei pneumatike¯ ]” (1:9). The ple¯ ro¯ma is presented as the glory or the wisdom of God filling a space, defining a certain sacred spatiality like the Shekinah in the tabernacle in the wilderness. Earlier in the letter Paul writes that in Christ “all the fullness [pan to ple¯ ro¯ma]” dwells (1:19). Later in the letter he writes that “in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily [to ple¯ ro¯ma te¯ s theote¯ tos so¯matiko¯s] and you are in him having been filled [pepleromenoi]” (2:9–10). In the verse following 1:24 he presents himself as the minister according to God’s economic handling (oikonomian) “to fulfil the word of God [ple¯ ro¯sa ton logon tou theou]” (1:25) for the Colossians.

Suffering and incarnation 171 Here in 1:24 antanaple¯ ro¯ is utterly distinctive. Found only at this point in the New Testament, it combines ana-ple¯ ro¯ (to fill up to the brim, to make up, supply, satisfy, and fulfill) with the prefix of anti. As J.B. Lightfoot pointed out back in 1876, if Paul’s meaning was simply to fill up then the prefix is redundant.23 With the prefix a self-reflexivity is announced. Twice in the verse the word “on behalf of” (uper) is employed: Paul suffers on behalf of the Colossians and on behalf on the body of Christ as the Church. His suffering in the flesh is filling what remains of the afflictions of Christ as Christ suffered on behalf of him in his own flesh. Jesus Christ as flesh (sarx) is no longer: “even though we once knew Christ from the human point of view, we know him no longer in that way,” Paul tells the church at Corinth (II Corinthians 5:16). There remains the body of Christ as the Church composed of the flesh (sarx) of believers like Paul. Paul’s suffering is, then, an extension of and a participation in the suffering of Christ. Now, on one level this is living imitatio Christi—the Church suffers persecution as Christ suffered persecution. But, considered in the light of the three emphases we have been outlining—Christ as a cosmic and spiritual space in which the operation of a divine economy of “filling” engages and makes itself manifest through the embodiment of those believers composing the body of Christ—then we have to ask what the relationship is between suffering and glorification, affliction and fulfillment. For the filling is an activity described both in terms of suffering and full knowledge, wisdom and spiritual understanding. And it is an activity that not only builds up, but defines the operation of the divine with respect to the body of Christ. A suffering inseparable from the incarnation of Christ is experienced in believers as a suffering inseparable from coming to the fullness of the stature of Christ or “being renewed in the full knowledge according to the image of the creator” (3:10). Paul’s writing is a theological reflection of the economics of divine power with respect to embodiment in Christ. It is a reflection upon divinity as it manifests itself in the concrete historicity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. It is not speculative in the sense of conceiving operations in the Godhead on the basis of which earthly events might be explained. Rather he develops and unfolds the logic of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, examining the space that has been opened up “in the body of his flesh through his death” (1:22). This is not, then, an example of deipassionism in the sense of God suffering with humankind—the suffering of God described by Moltmann, for example. One recalls how Moltmann reads Elie Wiesel’s account of the hanging of a child in the German concentration camp. Wiesel observes how the question of where God is was raised by Jewish onlookers. Moltmann examines this question and

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Wiesel’s own response, in terms of God being in the very suffering of the child. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn men to indifference. . . . Does the Shekinah, which wanders with Israel through the dust of the streets and hangs on the gallows in Auschwitz, suffer in the God who holds the ends of the earth in his hand? In that case not only would suffering affect God’s pathos externally, so that it might be said that God himself suffers at the human history of injustice and force, but suffering would be the history in the midst of God himself.24 God here suffers with us such that the negative moment is taken up into God in the eschatological coming of the kingdom. Moltmann’s theology, endorsing a certain interpretation of Hegel’s, radicalizes God being with us, compromising God’s transcendence. Balthasar’s account of Christ’s descent into hell, and into solidarity with the most profound alienation from God the Father, retains the transcendent and impassable source, opening wide the difference between the Father and the Son, the Trinitarian processions. In the silence of Holy Saturday God is extended to the point where even that which is most remote from the Godhead is incorporated. The depths of abjection are plumbed and God is found there. “The Redeemer showed himself therefore as the only one who, going beyond the general experience of death, was able to measure the depths of that abyss.”25 Through Christ’s suffering there is redemption, but once redemption has been achieved— the extreme boundaries of hell encompassed—then all is reconciled. “Hell is the product of redemption,” Balthasar informs us.26 Subsequent suffering is not really suffering at all, objectively speaking. For the victory has been won in Christ through the events of those three days (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday): Inasmuch as the Son travels across the chaos in virtue of the mission received from the Father, he is, objectively speaking, whilst in the midst of the darkness of what is contrary to God, in “paradise”, and the image of triumph may well express this.27 But Paul’s account views things differently: subsequent suffering is not epiphenomenal (which Balthasar’s account may seem to render it). It participates in a true and ongoing suffering; a true and ongoing passion located in the very Godhead itself. Following this interpretation of Paul

Suffering and incarnation 173 we can conclude that there is a suffering which is meaningless because it has no part in redemption. This is a suffering which rejects and fights against redemption. It has no truth, no existence in Augustine’s ontology of goodness, because it is privative—it deprives and strips creation of its orders of being, its treasures of wisdom. Suffering which is a consequence and promulgation of sin can find no place in the ple¯ ro¯ma. And only ple¯ ro¯ma gives space, provides a dwelling. But there is a suffering which is meaningful because it is a continuation, a fleshing out, and a completing of the suffering of Christ. In several places Gregory of Nyssa will speak of this suffering as the wounding of love (a double genitive). The suffering issues from the experience of the agony of distance which is installed by difference (between the Bride of Christ and the Christ himself) and discerned by love. The agony is the very laboring of love whereby “the soul grows by its constant participation in that which transcends it.”28 Nyssa takes up a theological account of circumcision to describe this movement: “Here, too, man is circumcised, and yet he remains whole and entire and suffers no mutilation in his material nature.”29 The question raised here, with respect to the sado-masochistic economy of desire informing postmodern secularity, is where does the difference lie? For the internalization of a pleasurable pain is common to both. For the moment let us allow that question to hang and draw, while I emphasize, again, that only God can discern and distinguish what is true suffering, and therefore what is being outlined here is not a theodicy, nor the grounds for providing theological rationales for human tragedies. Enlightenment theodicies preempt (and therefore in an act of hubris usurp) eschatological judgment. There is a “filling up” and therefore an end, when “Christ is all and in all [panta kai en pasin Christos],” but that “filling up” is not yet concluded and we remain caught between contingent knowledges and truth; intuition, ignorance, and hope. If kenosis and completion, emptying and filling, are not two opposite, but two complementary operations of the divine, like breathing out in order to breathe in, then there is no lack, absence, or vacuum as such. Both movements are associated with a suffering that simultaneously glorifies. The self-emptying of Christ reaches its nadir in death only to be reversed in a final coronation: “Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed upon him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Phil. 2:9–10). The “filling up in turn” (antanaple¯ ro¯ ) also involves “being empowered [dunamoumenoi] according to the might of His glory for all endurance and long-suffering with joy [eis pasan hupomone¯ n kai makrothumian meta charas]” (Col. 1:11). This leads us to the heart of a theological mystery: what it is that constitutes the intradivine passion. That the passion is the basis for the economy

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of kenoo¯ and plero¯ and that this economy opens up a space for divine redemptive activity with respect to creation is evident. It is also evident that this passion is grounded in Trinitarian relations. Paul, in his Letter to the Colossians, mainly treats of the relationship between Christ and the Godhead, but the content and dynamic of that relationship he expresses in terms of wisdom, knowledge, glory, and energia. There is much debate between and among New Testament scholars and dogmatic theologians over how developed Trinitarian thinking is within the New Testament. Nevertheless it would appear to be true that the passion that is the basis for the economy of kenoo¯ and plero¯—with respect to the glorification of all things created—is an intradivine passion that Christians have understood in terms of the differences-in-relation, the differences-in-identity between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The suffering comes by, through, and with the infinite capacity for selfexposition. Taking up the double nature of the genitive in “the wounding of love,” another way of putting this would be to say that the wounding is intrinsic to the operation of love not only between the Bride and the Bridegroom, the Church and Christ, but between the Persons of the Trinity. This is not an account of the self divided from itself—God is one in substance—nor is this an account of the sovereignty of the Father splitting to constitute the Son. The suffering does not issue from any subordination. Father, Son, and Spirit are co-constituted; the selfexposition is eternal. But the very equality-in-difference-of-one-substance expresses the creative tensions of loving communion. The primordial suffering, then, is within the Godhead itself and is given expression in the very act of creation so that a certain suffering is endemic to incarnate living, a suffering that always made possible the sacrifice on the Cross. Let us explore this a little further, for we are coming dangerously close to a theological justification for suffering. We need to explore, as Nyssa does, the nature of this suffering as it adheres to the very act of loving and seeks not the possession but the glorification of the other. We need to explore the economy of that loving which incarnates the very logic of sacrifice as the endless giving (which is also a giving-up, a kenosis) and the endless reception (which is also an opening up towards the other in order to be filled). The suffering and sacrifice which is born of and borne by passion is the very risk and labor of love; a love which is profoundly erotic and, to employ a queer theory term, genderfucking.30 It is a suffering engendered by and vouchsafing difference; first Trinitarian difference, subsequently, ontological difference between the uncreated Godhead and creation, and finally sexual difference as that which pertains most closely to human embodiment. Augustine describes time in creation in spatial terms, as distentio, and distentio bears the connotations of swelling, of a space that is the product of a wounding: a wounding in and of

Suffering and incarnation 175 love. The primordial suffering is the suffering of loving and being loved. Incarnating the divine—which is the nature of all things “because in him [oti en auto] were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16)—is inseparable, then, from a passion, a suffering whereby we bear fruit, grow (1:6) and glorify even as we are glorified.

The confrontation With this in mind let us now return to the point from which we began: the contemporary sacrificial economies of deferred jouissance. The profound difference between the Christian economy I have been outlining (and constructing) and postmodern accounts of the negation of negation lies in the perennial suffering and sacrifices of love as not having (in the contemporary accounts) and the eternal suffering intrinsic to the plenitude of love itself (the Christian account). The agonistic pleasure of enduring the undecidable (Derrida)31 is akin to being suspended on the brink of orgasm without being allowed the final release of coming. This is the quintessential sado-masochistic ecstasy: which, in truth, announces a certain stasis, even paralysis. In contrast, the closing lines of the New Testament resound with the call for messianic arrival: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come.’ . . . He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:17, 20). The Christian always seeks that coming, not to prolong its arrival, but in the belief that proclaiming that coming is itself ushering in its fulfillment. gihek, in a remarkable analysis of the Christian economy of charity (which he compares with Lacan’s later shift “from the ‘masculine’ logic of the Law and its constitutive exception towards the ‘feminine’ logic in which there is no exception”),32 writes about its “subversive core.”33 In a reading of Paul’s two letters to the Church at Corinth, he articulates how Christian love “unplugs itself” from its cultural context, its organic community, and so disturbs the balance of the All, the integration into the One. “Christianity is the miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of the One-All; it is the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely throws the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails.”34 Closely reading the famous hymn to agape in I Corinthians 13, gihek writes: the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love I am “something”—in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is

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Graham Ward capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge.35

I remain troubled by the language of nothingness and lack, and I am convinced this is a move by gihek beyond Lacan, but two main points about the Christian economy of desire are sharpened here. First, this passage captures much of what I have been arguing for in terms of the agony of difference constituted by love itself. As such, the Person of the Spirit holds open to creation the love between the Father and the Son, which challenges our understandings of what is intended by words like “imperfection” and “incompletion.” Creation too groans in its distinction and its love. Only in the constitution of difference itself can there be enjoyment of the other as other—where enjoyment implies active interest, participation without sublation. This is an altogether different account from the sado-masochistic suffering of love as not-having, of enjoying one’s own traumatic symptoms. To delight in the suffering of ambivalence that dare not hope for resolution, is to remain within what gihek calls “the balanced circuit of the universe.” For this delight has no future; deferral does not open a future, it only prolongs the present. And what desire desires, in these contemporary accounts of sacrifice and pleasure, is deferral. The logic of sacrifice to appease the terrible ire of whimsical gods is internalized, and appeasement becomes appraisal of situational ambivalence and insecurity. Sacrifice no longer wards off the arbitrary violences of a sadistic deity, but rather finds sado-masochistic pleasure in always only being compromised and ruptured.36 Second, the Christian account of suffering is not one installed by the suspension of the semantic by the semiotic. gihek seems to suggest this himself in his analysis of love and knowledge. Not-knowing is not enduring of the undecidable. The knowing-in-part reaches beyond itself, so that time, spirit, and materiality are all distended. There is a surpassing of what is understood in the understanding that is granted.37 There is here an overcoming of the instrumentality of reason, whereas it is the sheer inability of the reason to be as instrumental as it might wish which creates the lag and deferral which announces différance. It is the very construal of reasoning as instrumental that invokes the aporetic, the undecideable. Of course, with some irony, Foucault laid the blame for sadomasochism (in which he also delighted and deemed creative) at the feet of Christian pastoral practices, technologies of subjectivity honed and devised from Christianity’s inception.38 He was developing here Freud’s

Suffering and incarnation 177 concept of moral masochism as an unexpungeable and unconscious sense of guilt. But “genealogy” is a tool of polemic and resistance, not always alert to the subtleties of historical specificity. The Christian economy of suffering and incarnation sketched here is not sado-masochistic for two reasons: First, it does not view difference as rupture and therefore it does not install a (non)-foundational violence (the tout autre) as the principle for its momentum; a violence which is either projected (sadism) or introjected (masochism). Second, the economy of its desire is not locked into love as not-having. Rather love is continually extended beyond itself and, in and through that extension, receives itself back from the other as a non-identical repetition. Love construed as having or not-having is a commodified product. It is something one possesses or doesn’t possess. It is part of an exchange between object and subject positions. But love in the Christian economy is an action not an object. It cannot be lost or found, absent or present. It constitutes the very space within which all operations in heaven and upon earth take place. The positions of persons are both constituted and dissolved. The linearity and syntax of Indo-European languages barely allow access to the mystery of Trinitarian persons and processions; where one ends and another begins. As such suffering and sacrifice are not distinct moments, keno¯o is also and simultaneously pler¯o. The wounds of love are the openings of grace. Again, I repeat, this is a theological account of suffering and incarnation. There are myriad historical accounts of suffering and numerous philosophical, psychological, and sociological analyses. The burden of my argument is that the incarnational view of creation profoundly relates the theological and the historical—bearing both forward (in a hope that, in being ineradicable, is all the more painful to endure) towards an eschatological discernment. But the method of my argument is confrontational, not simply analytical. And the Christian theological nature of that confrontation is important, for, as gihek himself observes, Christianity has a “subversive core,” a radicality inseparable from its orthodoxy. What the confrontation suggests is that the sado-masochistic economies of desire, profoundly at work in contemporary culture, are pathological. They are destructive of what is most necessary for our well-being and cosmic flourishing. Surely the economy of incarnate love offers greater resources for social transformation, amelioration. Surely to persist in enjoying the symptoms of a cultural neurosis (which is transcultural in so far as it constitutes the economy of desire operating in global capitalism) is a decadence few can afford at the peril of us all. We need to practice an art of living in the name of a transcendental hope which breaks free of the vicious circularities of the same; to learn about good formations of the soul which produce those places which operate a logic that counters the sado-masochistic economy. We need to defend

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the legacies of those theological traditions which teach us the proper labor of our loving.

Notes 1 I also need to clarify here that the relationship between these cultures is complex, not oppositional or even dialectical. The character of Christianity today cannot be extracted from its cultural context. Christianity, though rooted in all its various previous forms and traditions, is conceived in the cultural terms available, the cultural terms which maintain its current relevance and render it comprehensible (and believable) in contemporary society. 2 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993). 3 See my essay “Language and Silence,” in Apophasis, edited by Oliver Davis and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Milbank “Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent,” in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by Paul Heelas (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 258–84. 4 See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 5 See J.V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 7 Slavoj gihek, The Fragile Absolute—or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 21. 8 See gihek on the relationship between Clara and Robert Schumann in Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 66–7, 192–212. 9 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 58–9. 10 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 47. 11 See Derrida On the Name, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 50–60. 12 “An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 56. 13 Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 174. 14 See de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 299. 15 See Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de L’Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1974), pp. 206–19. 16 See de Certeau “White Ecstasy,” translated by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and Catriona Hanley, in The Postmodern God, edited by Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 155–8. 17 For Levinas see Autrement qu’être, pp. 116–20, 156–205. 18 See Cixous “ ‘The Egg and the Chicken’: Love as Not Having,” in Reading Clarice Lispector, translated by Verena Andermatt Conley (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 98–122. Cixous describes two types of love as not-having—a masculine economy of renunciation and a feminine

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economy of enjoying that which is always excessive to possession. Lacan himself drew attention to two economies of desire in his later work, notably Seminar XX: Encore; see gihek, The Fragile Absolute, pp. 144–8 for an important reading of this shift in Lacan for Christian construals of “charity.” Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 82–115. De Civitate Dei, XIX.6. This should alert us to other possible readings of Christian asceticism: the putting to death of the fleshly desires in order to focus on the soul’s perfection need not entail a body/soul dualism. This would be gnostic. Christian ascetic practices intensify the experience of the body and it is in that intensification that the soul is rendered most visible, most engaged. In a highly insightful and technical article on the great kenotic hymn or Carmen Christi in Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:5–11), by the New Testament scholar C.F.D. Moule, the point is made that “what is styled kenosis is, itself, the height of plerosis: the most divine thing to give rather than to get” (“Further Reflections on Philippians 2:5–11,” in W.W. Groque and R.P. Martin (eds), Apostolic History and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 273). I am attempting to develop this insight theologically, while avoiding some of the neater ethical pronouncements “to give rather than to get” that Moule makes upon its basis. J.B. Lightfoot, Epistle to the Colossians (London: Macmillan, 1876), pp. 164–5. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (London: SCM, 1974), pp. 273–4. Hans Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, translated by A. Nichols (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1990), p. 168. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 176. Nyssa’s Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, in Herbert Musurillo, S.J. (ed.), From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), p. 190. Ibid., p. 193. See Stephen Whittle, “Gender Fucking of Fucking Gender: Current Cultural Contributions to Theories of Gender Blending,” pp. 196–214. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 123. gihek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 116. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 121. The italics are gihek’s. Ibid., p. 147. The italics are gihek’s. Freud recognized the strong association between sadism and masochism. It was the same instinct, the death instinct, operating by either projecting or introjecting violence. Furthermore, in his 1924 essay “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” having distinguished erotogenic, feminine, and moral forms of masochism, he pointed to the relationships between masochism and impotence, the masturbatory act of finding sexual satisfaction in oneself and infantile life, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 159–70. That the surpassing of understanding takes place in what is understood, if only partially, is fundamental. It is too easy, and my own work has not always avoided this ease, to counter postmodern economies of lack with theological economies of excess. The surpassing of the understanding is not

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an entry into the mystical sublime, white ecstasy. The surpassing of the understanding is where what is understood by mind and eye intimates a divine depth intuited by what Gregory of Nyssa would call “the spiritual senses”. 38 Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981.

Epilogue 181

Epilogue Theology and religious studies Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson

This book is not an integral whole. There are various cracks and faultlines that would prevent any effort to make of it a system or even a systematic reflection. We indicated many of the kinds of diversity in the Introduction, and you have now undergone the very differentiation and altering perspectives of which we wrote. There is, however, one specific distinction that needs some attention at the conclusion of the book: the question of theology in relation to religious studies. That question could arise from the academic landscape of our authors: some are appointed in religious studies, others in theology faculties. We have little interest to rehearse the development of our contemporary landscape, with its often polemical and usually polarized debates about the proper study of religion in the university. This political matter is not trivial: for not only the lives of individual scholars but also the dissemination of different ways of thinking and writing about religion have been controlled and stymied by the polemical struggles. There is, however, a deeper and more resonant set of issues about the study of religion and the place of theology—the questions of individual faith, and ultimately of corporate practice and belief. On the one hand, one could easily recall the position that faith in God makes possible a kind of insight into not only God, but also Scriptures and also religion as a social reality. One could then contrast that with the need for disinterested rational inquiry, and the battle could begin again. Surely the stance of the thinker and writer has important consequences for how religion will appear and what will count as significant in interpreting religion. Similarly, one could argue less individualistically, and notice that theology is the articulation of the belief of a community, and so it is embedded in social practices and liturgical traditions—that much of what would count as insight depends on affiliation and communication in a community. And one could then raise the question as a sociologist or anthropologist, whether the social functions of religion are not ultimately

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more apparent in the careful study of religion in a state of suspended belief. Here we rehearse not the concrete politics of the debate, but at least part of the conceptual and methodological divide that articulates much of that history in the academy. But at the end of this book, the question of whether an individual author believes in God, or even belongs to a specific religious community seems to offer remarkably little insight into the work of responding to suffering that incites this book. The contrast seems too sharp and to miss the complex relation in each essay between theology and religious study. Were the older battles between those who discount and reduce religion and those who understand it as the deepest truth of human existence, then we quickly see that all of the authors are facing different kinds of contrasts, and perhaps, battles too. None of these essays looks away from religion or indeed looks down on religion, and particularly not on the questions about God and God’s relation with humanity. Yet, several of these essays would not easily belong in theology—indeed, even the essays that are expressly theological might run afoul of many disciplinary police in the theological faculties. Perhaps the problem is somewhat misgrasped, and in response to that supposition, we wish to take a few more minutes and pages to see if we can revise our views of the relations between theology and religious studies. The essays in this book invite such a revision, in the first instance because they make the question of how to write about suffering itself a theme. From Ward’s discussion of confrontation between a wideranging set of postmodern theories and a properly theological discourse, through Wolfson’s discussion of suffering in writing and reading, to Kearns’s discussion of contagion and lyric abjection, to Gibbs’s account of the discretion required to develop any theme of suffering for another, the authors struggled with the question of how to address suffering. This discussion did not resemble a prolegomenon on the role of theology in the life of the Church, but it also did not represent a scientist’s a priori clarification of method. Instead, our questioning not only concerned the political placement of our work, but rather the role of suffering itself, and hence the role of religion, too, within our work. The respect for suffering and the effort to discern the ways religion figures in responses to suffering color the tone and approach of the diverse essays. To abuse religion or mechanically to reduce it would yield no help in exploring the responses to suffering. But in opposition, to be complacent in the claim to account for suffering, particularly in a theological register, would be to fail to respect the sufferers and their suffering. The need for a close engagement with religious texts guides the work of each author, but the fear of belittling suffering is also a constant concern in our work.

Epilogue 183 Thus we framed not a single theory of discourse, nor fundamentally a set of theories about the adequacy of discourse to name and describe suffering—rather we struggled with the risks in writing about suffering, and explored religious texts with significant respect. Such concern for religion, however, did not focus on the concrete communities of our discourse, for we write this book for the academy, for colleagues, and for students, presuming neither their affiliation with particular denominations, nor their rejection of all communal religion. Discourse open to any reader, opening itself to diverse interpreters—the essays here focus neither on the specific religious origin of the authors nor any fixed religious destination. The struggle with writing about suffering and about religion, then, deepens our interpretation of suffering and religion themselves, and makes writing and thinking about suffering itself a matter of ethics and response. And so, we wish to offer yet a third interpretation of the title of the volume. In the Introduction we distinguished the possible reading which sees humanity as suffering from religion, as though religion were something we had to bear and which deadened our minds and our wills to the task of resisting suffering. We also claimed that religion was about suffering: that religion addressed suffering and in taking it seriously, offered resources for responding to suffering. In this epilogue, however, we wish to frame a third option: that we are dealing with the suffering of religion, that religion itself suffers—and in keeping with the ambiguities of suffering, this suffering of religion itself arises not only from an attack upon religion, from violence against religion, but arises from within religion itself. That is, religion suffers as part of its vocation, as part of its fullness and its role in our ways. This vulnerability and openness is specifically located in the relation to our minds, to the struggle to interpret and so to understand religion itself. In other contexts, someone might claim that the persecution of one religion by another or the attacks on religion by atheist revolutionaries are the way that religion suffers. But in the context of this book, we have a deeper dimension of its suffering—for our inquiries have explored the ways that religion responds and figures suffering. Such responses and interpretations are not ways of protecting some independent realm, some castle whose ramparts would be manned by dogmatic theology. On the contrary, the solicitation of studying, questioning, reinterpreting, and reflecting how religion responds to suffering belongs to the life of religion, and to that of religious communities and traditions. To be more concrete, the essays in this book negotiate this openness of religions to inquiry by their practices of interpretation. The clearest formulation occurs in Kepnes’ account of anti-theodicy. For Kepnes recognizes that thought must take some distance from the suffering of the

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victims in order to frame a response and to understand the depth of the suffering. That taking distance, however, also runs the risk of fleeing suffering. The anti-theodicians take recourse in a clear-cut logical thinking, but one which abandons the sufferers for the sake of framing a clear theory. Caught in logical excluded middles, the very brokenness that suffering produces is reduced to irreconcilable extremes. Kepnes justifies a taking distance but also a thinking that respects the breaking of the heart and of the mind as part of what religion addresses and even part of its response. Thus the essays, for the most part, do not simply stay with suffering, but think about it, and yet struggle to avoid the sterile abstraction of a certain kind of philosophical or theological thinking. Kearns demonstrates this even more emphatically, when she looks at Kristeva’s need to double her own discourse. The abject cannot speak, cannot theorize. But in addition to witnessing to abjection, Kristeva also does theorize. The two moments are juxtaposed, and the religious significance of suffering arises in this tension. Last, when we consider the anthropological interpretations of Klassen, we come to the very crux of the matter. Clearly she cannot simply accept the claims and views of her interviewees. But she learns from them, respects their interpretations of their home-birthing, and indeed, discerns through their comments specifically helpful ways of interpreting suffering religion. To take both suffering and religion seriously requires a listening and a reflection that occupies a specific distance and intimacy with the mothers. Because they represent different communities and different personal relations of faith, Klassen cannot identify with all of them in any integral way. But in order to conduct her work, she must not only respect them, but stand in some important solidarity with their experiences and their interpretations. Like some of the other authors in the book, Klassen does not take any confessional (or anti-confessional stance), and she does make clear if discrete criticisms of some religious interpretations of birth, but her task is best understood as a kind of criticism from nearness. She can teach us only by coming very close to the women she studies. This anthropological approach is reflected in several other essays, but in different registers. The nearness that governs so much of the textual work offers rich insight but also deep and important criticism. If we then consider what the task of theology reflected by this book would be, we see that it, too, thinks with a vulnerability in relation to suffering. Like much of recent postmodern and radical theology, it would contest the exclusion of God and of theology from the study of religion. More significantly, however, theology would also be a textual interpretive practice, working closely with traditional revealed texts. Such interaction, moreover, would be part of a living tradition: there are new ways of reading the traditional texts which allow new things to be heard. This

Epilogue 185 renewing listening and reading is what makes theological discourse more than repetition or sheer defense. Listening both to the traditional texts and to those who ask today arises precisely through the diverse ways of responding to suffering. Finally, the essays here do not stake out authority, nor assert a dogmatic theological vantage point. This is not Church or Synagogue theology in the sense of thinking that requires and depends on authorization. There may well be places for such public and dogmatic theology, but the essays here aspire to respond in a way that has already been opened by suffering itself. Called to think, the theological work in this book dwells in the multiple hesitations about suffering and betraying the sufferers. Theology, in this mode, need not be lukewarm or mild—for the suffering of our age requires vigorous, trenchant, and bold response. And the theological work in this book strives to perform those tasks, but to think from the site of religion that suffers is to think amidst the exposure for others. A last word: despite the displacement of a strict polemical opposition of religious studies and theology, this epilogue, as this book, is not an effort to homogenize the different authors and their positions. The contrasts that animate our various essays are valued in their capacity to accentuate what each writer individually is trying to do. The contrasts here, for instance, of Jews and Christians, are not to be resolved in a quick closing word. But by retaining the differences, the book enables readers to locate not only the authors’ but also the readers’ own perspectives, including those that lie outside the specificities of the book (Muslims, Buddhists, etc.). Similarly, the tension between theology and religious study is reconfigured here, but not dissolved in a common soup. The oppositions are different from what they have historically been, but they remain, and are worthy of careful elaboration and even of critical judgment. Such a task lies beyond this book and clearly beyond this epilogue. Instead, we pause at the conclusion here, only to note that Suffering Religion must accept at least the three different meanings described here, and that the richness and value of religion extends beyond its subject matter, to the possibility of its own vulnerability in the academy, to the way that the study of religion and of theology can also respond to the suffering of religion.

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Index 187

Index

Abbahu, R. 106 Abel 37 abjection 62–71, 184 Abraham 51–2, 165 absence, presence and 138 Adam 112, 131, 132, 168 affect 57–9 agency: childbirth and women’s 92; of God’s distributive justice 53–4; pain, suffering and 75–6 Aha bar Jacob, R. 103 alienation 59 Alkabets, Solomon 110–11, 112–13 alternative childbirth movement 75, 78, 91 amorphous mass 128–9 analytic listening 60–1 androgynous male 120, 131–5 anesthesia 78, 79, 86–7, 91 anger 45–50 animality of birth 76 anti-theodicy 37–9, 183–4 anxiety of death 15–17 Aqiva, R. 105 ’Arikh ’Anpin (‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’) 112, 125, 126, 130, 133 art 10–11, 58; abjection 68–71; unjustifiable suffering 30–2 artificial distance 38–9 Asad, T. 74, 75–6 Assumption of the Virgin 70 asymmetry 24–5, 25–6, 58, 60, 78 ‘Atiq Yomin 125, 126 ‘Atiqa’ Qadisha’ (’Arikh’Anpin) 112, 125, 126, 130, 133

attention 60 Augustine, St 167, 174 autoeroticism 124–7, 131–3 autogenesis 135 Avicenna 113 Avnon, D. 48 awe 74, 85, 164 Azriel of Gerona 109 Balthasar 172 Barry, K. 91 Berekhyah the Priest, R. 106 Bildad 44–5 Binah 110, 130 Blanchot, M. 38 bliss 164 body: God 112; suffering and incarnation 4, 163–80 boDina’ de-qardinuta 130 Braiterman, Z. 38 bricks of slavery 104 Buber, M. 3, 36–7, 41, 44, 46; God’s distributive justice 50–3; Job as contemporary 39–40; rent at the heart of the world 48; Shoah 53–4 Butler, J. 163 Bynum, C.W. 78, 94 capitalism 167 caressing 117–18 catharsis 130–5 Celan, Paul 11, 101 Certeau, M. de 166

188

Index

childbirth 3, 9, 73–100, 184; Kristeva 69–71; pain and power 90–2; pain and relationship 79, 86–90, 94–5; politics and pain of 76–9; stories of pain and pleasure 79–86; visionary pain 84, 93–5 Christianity: comparison with secular postmodernism and deferred jouissance 175–7; Kristeva on abjection 63–4, 66, 68; pain and pleasure 91–2, 167–75; Rosenzweig on art and suffering in 30–2; subversive core 175–6, 177; see also Jesus Christ circumcision 137–8, 168, 173 Cixous, H. 166 class 86 Cohen, Hermann 13, 25, 32–5, 57–8; philosophy’s indifference to poverty 18–22 collective immortality 94–5 comedy, and tragedy 31 coming 175 compassion 20, 21, 33–4 complaint 45–50 concealment, disclosure and 110–15 consciousness 20–1 contagion of suffering 61–2 Cordovero, Moses 113 corona of the phallus 126–7, 131 creation 109–10, 138–9; God as creator and distributive justice 50–1; primal suffering of God 3–4, 10, 107–35; of the world 10, 121–2, 127–9 creativity 10–11; childbirth and 83–4, 93–4 cross 168; theology of the cross 67–8 crown 134 culture 21–2 “curse God and die” 41–4 Daly, M. 91 daughters 89–90 death 9–10, 94; anxiety 15–17; of God 115–16; mortality and speech 64–9 deconstruction 165–7 deferred jouissance 164–7, 175–8 defiant self 17 delimitation of the unlimited 107–17, 135–6

democratic socialism 33, 34 denegation 165–7, 175–8 Derrida, J. 165–6, 167 desire 8; suffering and incarnation 164–78 dichotomous thinking 39 difference 165, 174–5, 176 direct-entry midwives 76 disclosure, concealment and 110–15 dissimilitude of reading 137 distance, artificial 38–9 distributive justice 50–4 diversity 4–6 divine suffering 3–4, 7–8, 101–62, 168; delimiting the unlimited 107–17, 135–6; divine inscription and suffering of Eros 135–9; divine pathos and suffering of Israel 101–7; and incarnation 171–5; jouissance of becoming-other 117–35 drugs, and childbirth 78, 79, 86–7, 91 dual faith 48–9 earthquake 103 economics 33–4 ecstasy 164; childbirth and 91 Edom 128–9 Edomite kings 119, 121, 129–33 Egypt, Israel’s exile in 37, 104–7, 116 Ein-Sof 111–16, 117–23, 126, 127–8, 134–5 Elihu 44–5 Eliphaz 44–5 Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary 66, 67 eloquence 65–7 emanations (sefirot) 108–16, 121, 126 emasculation 132–3 emotional response 57–9 empowerment 85–6, 93 emptying and filling 170–1, 173–5, 175–7 enslavement of Israel 37, 104–7, 116 ethical sensibility 24 ethics 18–22 ethos, and pathos 65–6 Eve 168

Index 189 evil: God’s justice and 49; objectification of poverty as 20–1; origin in Godhead 108–9 exile 139; Israel in Egypt 37, 104–7, 116 existence, realms of 115 existential exegesis 40 expansion, and withdrawing 114–15 expiatory suffering 102 Ezra of Gerona 109–10 face-to-face gazing 111–12 feminine of the ancient of days 126 fetishism 164 filling and emptying 170–1, 173–5, 175–6 first copulation 124 flesh 163, 170–1 forgetting 31–2 Foucault, M. 176–7 Freud, S. 164, 176 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva 91 garments, sefirot as 113–14 gender 8–9, 92; production of gender difference in God 4, 9, 111–12, 117–35 generation, surrender and 19 generativity 78–9, 94–5 genocidal violence 23 Gibbs, R. 57, 78 glorification 168, 173–4 gnosticism 102 God: anti-theodicy 37–9; creation of God’s own self 3–4, 10, 107–39; death of (self-contradiction) 115–16; divine suffering see divine suffering; distributive justice 50–4; ineffable name 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 136, 138; Job and 41–54; perversion of justice by 44–5; unjust 41–4 good: and evil 49; supernatural goodness 22–3 grace 117 grand idea 23 Greek religious history 63–4 Greenberg, I. 37 Hadar 130–1 hagiography 29 Harrison, B. 91–2 Hayyat, J. 111

Hegel, G.W.F. 64, 164 hell 172 “here am I” 27 hermeneutics 11, 136–9 Heschel, A.J. 101 Heyward, C. 91–2 histalqut 114–15 hitpashFut 114–15 Holocaust 37–8, 40, 53–4, 57 Holy Spirit 68, 174 home births see childbirth husbands 86, 87–8 ibn Gabbai, Meir 116 ibn Tabul, Joseph 114, 118–22, 126–7, 131 immorality 24–5 incarnation 4, 102–3, 163–80; Christian pain and pleasure 167–75; comparison of Christian and secular accounts 175–8; postmodern secularism 164–7 incompletion 175–6 indifference, philosophical 21–2 ineffable name 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 136, 138 injustice, God’s 41–4 inscription, divine 135–9 integrity 46–7 intentionality: childbirth and 76; inversion of 28–9 intimacy 79, 86–90, 94–5 inversion, secret of 110–11 Irigaray, L. 83 Isaac 37, 165 isolation, pain and 77 Israel 44; divine pathos and suffering of 101–7; enslavement of 37, 104–7, 116 Jabès, E. 138–9 Jesus Christ 88, 89, 174; incarnation 168, 169, 170, 171, 172–3; incarnation and divine suffering 102–3; see also Christianity Job 3, 36–55; “curse God and die” response 41–4; God’s distributive justice 50–4; and God’s perversion of justice 44–5; our contemporary 39–40; “rent in the heart of the world” response 45–50; and the Shoah 53–4

190

Index

John the Baptist 168 John Paul II, Pope 102 Joseph 131 jouissance 64–5, 83; divine suffering and jouissance of becoming-other 117–35; incarnation and deferred jouissance 164–7, 175–8 Judaism: abjection 63–4; God and justice 36, 45; Holocaust 37–8, 40, 53–4, 57; and innocent suffering 37, 52; kabbalistic texts and primal suffering of God 107–39; rabbinic texts 101–7; and unjustifiable suffering 2, 13, 32 judgment 108, 110; creation of God 118–22, 129–35 justice 48–9; agents of justice and redemption 53–4; God’s distributive justice 50–4; perversion of by God 44–5 justification 39; hesitation at justifying suffering 6–7; philosophy and 2, 13–35; suffering as test of character 52; theology of the cross 68 kabbalistic texts 107–39 Kallir, Eleazar 107 kenosis 165, 170–1, 173–5 Kierkegaard, S. 165 knowledge 176 Kristeva, Julia 3, 59–71, 184 Lacan, J. 164 language 115; suffering in theory 59–61, 64–9; see also speech Levi, Primo 24 Levinas, Emmanuel 13, 34, 35, 57–8, 166; other’s suffering 22–5, 25–9, 58 light, divine 111–16, 117–23, 126, 127–8, 134–5 Lightfoot, J.B. 171 listening, analytic 60–1 love 8; childbirth pain and 87, 88; incarnation and suffering 166, 173–5, 175–8 Luria, Isaac 113–14, 124, 136; catharsis 130, 134; emanative process 111–12, 118

Luther, M. 65, 67–8 Luzzatto, M.H. 134 Maimonides 109 Malkhut 119, 121–2, 123, 126, 127, 132–3 malkhut she-be-malkhut 123 Martin, E. 86 martyrdom 52 Mary, St 69–70, 168, 169 maternity, suffering of 70–1 matter 163 meaning 39; pain in childbirth 77–8, 79 medical authority, defiance of 92 medicalization of childbirth 76–7, 93 Mehetabel 130 Meir, R. 106 Melzack, R. 91 mercy 117–21 messianic arrival 175 metaphysical order 22–3 midpoint 122–3, 127–8 midwives 76 Moltmann, J. 171–2 moralistic impulse 26 Morris, D. 93 mortality see death Moses 104 name, ineffable 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 136, 138 Natan, R. 103 natural childbirth movement 91 natural world 50–1 necromancer 103 negation of negation 165–7, 175–8 Nietzsche, F. 66–7 Nyssa, Gregory of 173 objectification of evil 20–1 Odent, Michel 82 Olds, Sharon 83 ’om ’ani Bomah 104 orgasm 79, 83 other: abjection and 63; Cohen, poverty and 18–22; divine suffering and jouissance of becoming-other 117–35; Levinas and suffering of 22–5, 25–9, 58 Ouaknin, M.-A. 137

Index 191 pain 21; in childbirth 3, 73–100; Levinas and other’s pain 22–5; and pleasure in Christianity and secularism 163–80; and politics of birth 76–9; and power 90–2; and relationship 79, 86–90, 94–5; stories of pleasure and pain 79–86; suffering, agency and 75–6; visionary 84, 93–5 painless birth 81–2 Parvati Baker, Jeannine 91 passion 167–8 pathos 65–6; divine pathos and the suffering of Israel 101–7 Paul, St 67, 163, 169–71, 172 pavement of sapphire 104 performance 66 personification 33–4 Peter’s letter to Philip 102 phallicization of the feminine 123–35 philosophy 2, 13–35 piety 66 Plato 31 pleasure: and pain in childbirth 77, 79–86; and pain in Christianity and secularism 163–80 poetics of suffering 11 politics 34, 58; and pain of birth 76–9 postmodern secularism 164–7; and Christian economy of suffering 175–8 poverty 20–2, 33–4 power 93; empowerment 85–6, 93; pain and 90–2 prayer 80 presence, and absence 138 procreative suffering 9–11; see also childbirth protest 53–4; Job 45–50 psychoanalysis 59 punishment 44–5, 49 purification 63–4 Qatina, Rav 103–4 quasi-hagiography 28–9 questioning 45–50 rabbinic texts 101–7 rational ethics 18–22 reading 136–9 Recanati, Menahem 110

reconciliation of contradiction 30–1 rectification of the feminine 121–35 redemption 29, 32, 80, 172–3; agents of justice and redemption 53–4; divine suffering 103, 105–7 relationship 79, 86–90, 94–5 religion: about suffering 2, 183; humanity suffering from religion 2, 183; suffering of 183–5; theology and religious studies 181–5 remembrance 31–2 rent in the heart of the world 45–50 rent theology 48–9 representation 30–2 responding to suffering 1–2 responsibility 28–9 reward, punishment and 49 rhetoric 65–7 Ricchi, I.H. 134 Rosenzweig, Franz 13, 25, 34, 35, 57–8, 69; anxiety and death 15–17; art and representation of suffering 30–2; death of God 115–16 Rubinstein, R. 37–8 sacrifice 65; comparison of Christianity and secularism 175–8; Israel as sacrificial sheep 104–5; pain and pleasure in Christianity 167–75; postmodern secularism 164–7 sado-masochism 175, 176–7 saints 29 salvation 103, 105–7 Sarug, Israel 124, 136 Satan 41, 43 Scarry, E. 77–8 Scholem, G. 114–15 scream of anxiety 17 secret of inversion 110–11 sefirot 108–16, 121, 126 self-consciousness 27–8 self-contradiction, God’s 115–16 self-exposition 174 semen, spilling of 131–3 sensation 163 servant of God 51–3 sexual arousal 118 sexuality, childbirth and 82–4 sha‘ashu‘a 117, 124

192

Index

Shekhinah (divine presence) 104, 105, 116, 123 Sheridan, M.S. 91 Shoah 37–8, 40, 53–4, 57 Sifra’ di-Ceni‘uta (“Book of Concealment”) 111–12, 113–14 DimDum 114, 117–35 sin: abjection and 67–8; punishment and 44–5; suffering as consequence and perpetuation of 167–8 Sisyphus 167 social dimension of suffering 21–2, 33–4 social location 86 socialism 33, 34 Sophia 102 specificity 18–20, 33–4 speech: Kristeva, speech and mortality 64–9; responsibility for the other 27–8; secrecy and sacrifice 165; see also language spiritualization of suffering 90–2 stoic apathy 21–2 subjectivity 26–9, 74 substitution 164–5 suffering: humanity suffering from religion 2, 183; of religion 183–5; religion about suffering 2, 183; responding to 1–2 supernatural goodness 22–3 supreme passivity 28 surrender 19 symbolic communication 59–60 Tantalus 167 ten martyrs 131 test of character 51–3 Tetragrammaton 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 136, 138 textual circumcision 137 Textual Reasoning 37 textual resources 4–5 textualization of God 135–6 theodicy 22–5; anti-theodicy 37–9, 183–4; Job 36–55

theology: and religious studies 181–5 theology of the cross 67–8 thornbush 104 time 115 tiqqun 113–14, 122 Torah 136 totality 18–20 totalizing thought 16–17, 34 tragedy, and comedy 31 transformation of suffering 68 Trinitarian relations 174 universal legislation 19 unjustifiable suffering 25–35 unlimited, delimitation of the 107–17, 135–6 vessel 121–2 virgin mother, cult of 69–70 visionary pain 84, 93–5 Vital, Hayyim 114, 122–4, 125–6, 127–30, 130–1, 133 voluntary pain 3, 73–100 Warner, M. 70 What to Expect When You’re Expecting 91 Wiesel, Elie 38, 39, 171–2 withdrawal of light (DimDum) 114, 117–35 withdrawing and expansion 114–15 witness 27–8, 58 womb 123 wounding of love 173–5 writing 135–9 Wyschogrod, E. 29 Yesod 121–2, 131 yod 128, 129, 136 Zechariah 169 Ze‘eir ’Anpin 112 gihek, S. 164, 175–6, 177 Zophar 44–5

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