Dancing with Esau

DANCING WITH ESAU Martin Samuel Cohen On to the journey.... —Esau Table of Contents Preface Kings N.N. The Worst Man Lepers Silent Man with Bells Jews with Horns Letter from Enochville White Man Sweating Dancing with Esau The Bible as Text and Context Bibliographical Notes Preface An incredibly large number of people are mentioned in the pages of the Bible. Some, like Pildash, Azmavet the Barḥumite, and Buzi (respectively, a son of Abraham’s brother Naḥor, one of King David’s warriors, and the father of the prophet Ezekiel) are mere names to us after all these centuries, unfamiliar designations of almost entirely forgotten people of far more interest to devotees of crossword puzzles than to serious students of religion. This book is not about those paragons of antique obscurity, however interesting it might be to speculate about who they really may have been and what they might have offered us had some ancient scribe only bothered to bequeath us more than their names. Others, like King Jehu’s officer Bidkar or King Ahasuerus’ advisor Memucan are, to say the most, minor players whose claims to literary immortality rest on a single event in which they played a role of unforgotten, if brief, consequence. As interesting as many of the stories in which these obscure personalities appear may be, this book is not about them either. Still others—the Moseses and Isaiahs and Deborahs—are the famous men and women whose exploits are the meat and potatoes of the biblical narrative: famous even in the context of the stories that tell us of them and not merely ex post facto, their renown has historically derived both from their situational importance in the stories in which they appear and also from the sense—one of the few basic assumptions about the Bible truly held in common by Jews and Christians—that the details of their lives and careers are meant to inspire us to accept them as our own spiritual role models. There are countless books that purport to help their readers access the biblical data about these individuals and then to use that information to enhance their own piety, but this book isn’t one of them. Nor will reading any of them ever take the place of a slow, serious reading of the biblical text. This book, then, is about a fourth category of biblical personality, one little written about and rarely singled out for special attention. The people in this category are better known than the obscure and slightly less obscure people in the i first two categories, but nowhere nearly as well known as the famous personalities in the third. They are members of the supporting cast of characters, the background players against whose actions and activities the larger stories of Scripture play themselves out. They are not generally held up as serious spiritual role models, however. Indeed, if anything, most of the people I intend to write about in this book are disliked, dismissed, or held in mild (or not so mild) contempt by the biblical authors who tell their stories. These are the Cains, the Ishmaels and the Esaus, the Jeroboams and the Nebuchadnezzars, the people the Bible specifically does not want its readers to like or to be like or to think like. They are the less-than-perfect people whose imperfections inevitably—or, in at least some cases, perhaps not inevitably—doom them to bear reputations sullied more by the narrators who tell their stories than by the actual details of the stories told. In their own way, though, it is these supporting actors and actresses that are the everyman and everywoman of the biblical narrative and, as such, the real role models for latter-day readers attempting to use the biblical text as a framework for their own spiritual development. They are the greedy, the stingy, and the cruel. The meanspirited and the larcenous. The weak of faith and the lazy, the angry and the embittered, the seditious and the arrogant. They are the people your rabbi or your priest or your minister warned you over and over not to be like...but they were probably also the characters in those Saturday or Sunday sermons who spoke the most clearly to you, the ones who made you catch your breath for just a moment and say, just to yourself: “Hmmm, the person in that story is a lot more like me than I should feel comfortable admitting....” To say that the Bible rests at the core of the religious lives of both Jews and Christians is to state a commonplace idea that by its very familiarity encourages us to view it as a slogan rather than as a challenge to say precisely what it means. For most readers, the majority of people I have chosen to write about will be familiar only as names recalled faintly from one or another vaguely remembered story. Still, even despite their obscurity, these are the men and women of the Hebrew Bible who speak the most directly to me, the personalities in whom I see more than a little of myself, in whose quirks and foibles, in whose baser qualities and errors of judgement, in whose faithlessness and proclivity towards violence, arrogance, and obstinacy I see myself most clearly mirrored. I present these ii essays, therefore, not as sermons or as exercises in literary rebuke, but simply as a suggestion as to how one might go about using the biblical text as a road towards God and, particularly, towards the kind of intimate, ongoing sense of God’s enduring presence within one’s personal and private ambit that Jews (or at least a certain sub-category of Jewish people) have come to call d’veikut and which I have come to believe must be the ultimate end goal of all honest religious endeavor. In this book, references to the traditional Jewish commentators on the biblical text are mostly made according to the acronyms by which they are known in the Jewish world. Rashi stands for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzḥaki of Troyes (1040-1105), the most famous of all Jewish commentators on the Bible. Radak is Rabbi David Kimḥi of Narbonne (1157-1236), one of the most prominent Provençal rabbis and authors. Ramban is Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman (1194-1270), also called Naḥmanides, one of the most important Spanish commentators on Bible and Talmud and a major kabbalist in his own right. I have used the letter h with a dot which has roughly the same sound as ,ח beneath it to represent the Hebrew letter the ch at the end of Bach. The names of biblical personalities that have a form familiar to English-speaking readers are mostly presented in those forms. Other names are presented in English transliteration of their Hebrew originals. A number of the chapters in this book appeared in slightly different form in the quarterly journal, Conservative Judaism. iii Kings There are almost a dozen different kings of Egypt mentioned in the Bible either by name or not by name, but the three pharaohs of the Exodus story are the ones that interest me the most. Shadowy even in the stories that feature them, they have no names—or rather, they are presented namelessly in Scripture—and with hardly any supporting cast or background information: neither the pharaoh who welcomed Jacob to Egypt nor the pharaoh who enslaved his—Jacob’s— descendants nor the pharaoh whom God eventually drowned in the sea is described in any physical detail or assigned any specific age in the biblical text. No mention is made of any parents, wives or (with the exception of the daughter of one of them and the son of another) children. No attempt is made to suggest how they dressed or what kind of palaces they inhabited. Nor are the portraits drawn of their character anything more, really, than caricatures. And neither is any reference made to the kind of gods they worshipped or to the fervor with which they worshipped them. Still, colorless nonentities or not, they are central figures in the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, key players who simply cannot be ignored if the story is to have any texture at all. To make things clearer, I’ll call them Pharaoh Number One, Pharaoh Number Two and Pharaoh Number Three. The first one—Pharaoh Number One—is the one who elevated Joseph to power and welcomed his—Joseph’s—father and brethren to Goshen. The librarian would have been more respectful, but the truth is that the story that features him depicts him as a bit of a Baby Huey type: an enormously powerful child who, for all his immense authority, behaves arbitrarily and childishly and who is pleased— indeed, thrilled—when Joseph unexpectedly appears on the scene to relieve him of the awful authority that destiny has somehow thrust upon his soft shoulders. Indeed, when Number One liberates his butler and his baker from prison and then whimsically restores the one to his duties, but beheads the other and sticks his head on a pole so birds can pick the rotting flesh off his exposed skull, Scripture 1 merely records the event without comment as though this were a normal way for a grown man to amuse himself. And when the thirty-year old Joseph tells him, almost offhandedly, that there is a God in heaven who can interpret dreams (and who can, therefore, see to the welfare of earthly kings) and Pharaoh, delighted, embraces the idea, he—Pharaoh—hardly seems to notice that he is shucking off a millennium—at least—of Egyptian religious thinking to adopt the imported faith of a man he has known for about twenty minutes.

Load more