Joe Wolfson
It’s 1944 and Erich Auerbach, a German Jewish refugee in Istanbul, sits down to write what will become one of the most influential works of 20th century literary criticism.
His goal is nothing less than to chart the history of how western literature has described reality over the previous 3,000 years.
So where to start? With a comparison and contrast of what he considered to be the two great original stories of the West – the Homeric tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Hebrew Bible.
Thus was born ‘Odysseus’ Scar’ – the first chapter of Auerbach’s great work Mimesis.[1] It takes the form of a side-by-side consideration of the story in the Odyssey of how the young Odysseus received his scar with the Akeida – God’s command of Avraham to offer up his son Yitzchak on Mount Moriah. In Auerbach’s reading, not only do Homer and the Bible have fundamentally different approaches to describing reality, but the literary difference is reflective of a deeper opposition about the nature of a meaningful human life.
Over the last few years, I have come to believe that,whether or not Auerbach realized it, he was giving a profound description of the concept of teshuva and of the Torah’s understanding of what it means to be human – understandings whose fundamental novelty is sharpened by comparison to the works of Homer.
Given that the Odyssey is enjoying a renaissance in popularity due to Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster and that the Yamim Nora’im are upon us with their themes of teshuva and human existence – it seems to be a particularly appropriate time to revisit Auerbach’s insights.
Two Stories & Two Ways Of Encountering Reality
Following the Trojan War, Odysseus eventually returns home to Ithaca after numerous adventures. His wife Penelope, whom he had left twenty years earlier when he set out on his journey, is surrounded by suitors – each trying to convince her that her husband is dead and that she should marry them. Rather than announce his return, Odysseus disguises himself as an old beggar so that he can observe whether or not his wife will remain faithful. His old housekeeper Euryclea, who has known him since he was a child, bathes the weary stranger’s legs. She does not recognize him at first but upon touching the scar on his leg gasps and lets go of his foot which falls into the bowl causing the water to spill over- only one man has such a scar and this must be her master! Before she can cry out in joy, Odysseus grabs her tightly and warns her not to reveal his identity to Penelope and the others.
But how did Odysseus get this scar? The story breaks off for an extremely lengthy filling-in of the backstory. On a hunting trip as a boy while visiting his grandfather, the young Odysseus runs ahead of the older men pursuing the boar. The two face off against each other. The boar lunges at Odysseus and gores his leg but the lad gets his spear in and kills the beast. The older men arrive and discover the wounded boy and the dead animal and carry Odysseus back in triumph. The scene is narrated at such great length that only after 77 (!) verses do we return to the action many years later as the old housemaid discovers this scar and what it must mean.
Such a lengthy tangent to explain a detail is nothing remarkable in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Auerbach stresses that the Homeric epics skip nothing. Every detail is accounted for and explained. Characters speak at great length to one another, even in the midst of battle, to share their emotions and opinions. If there is no one to speak to they share their innermost feelings with the reader. If a god arrives, we are told where he or she has been previously. In the story of how Odysseus received his scar, we are told how the light played between the trees, how the boar looked and sounded. No background is left unexplained and every tangent merits a thick description.
What a difference with the world of the Tanakh! In the story of the Akeida, Auerbach stresses how many crucial details are withheld from the reader. We are not told why God tests Avraham. We are not told how Avraham feels about it or whether he informs Sarah about it. We are certainly not told what the characters look like, where they are, or even told how old Yitzchak is. To ponder for a moment that last question of Yitzchak’s age – undoubtedly the challenges that the story raises vary dramatically depending on whether Yitzchak is a small child or a grown adult, and yet the Torah’s text leaves us in the dark.
This phenomenon of what Meir Sternberg will later call the Tanakh’s ‘gapped text’[2] is recognizable to any traditional Jewish reader of the Torah. In fact, it is exactly the gaps that create the opening for midrash to insert itself – answering the questions that the verses leave open, imagining for instance that it is Sarah’s horrified response to the Akeida that causes her death, which is related in the very next chapter (Tanchuma and others).
Homer’s text is rich and full. Splendid speeches and rich backstories accompany the action. By contrast, the Tanakh’s extreme economy withholds almost every non-essential detail. Does this mean that the Torah’s stories are the poorer for it, that what its stories lack in word count they also lack in depth? If anything, Auerbach’s argument leads us to the opposite conclusion. Precisely because the Torah’s text does not tell us whether Yitzchak is 3 or if he is 37, both options are possibilities. By withholding crucial details, the reader is forced to insert themselves into the text and consider the different possibilities, giving life to both options.
Auerbach, an assimilated Jew, wrote Odysseus’ Scar as a piece of literary criticism, not as a religious or Torah text. And yet his argument can be of immense value to traditional readers of Torah.
“One is the word of God, yet two things I have heard,” says David HaMelech in Tehillim 62:12, and continues, ‘this is the greatness of God.’[3] Hazal saw this verse as capturing the experience of reading Torah. Expanding upon it, they said “a single verse is given several explanations.… The House of Rebbi Yishmael taught: ‘As the hammer splits the rock’ (Yirmiyahu 23:29), just as the hammer smashes the rock into several shards – so too a single verse is explained in several ways.” (Sanhedrin 34a)
Auerbach’s piece can be considered to be a meditation on this verse from psalms and its Talmudic commentary: that a single text is heard in multiple ways, and that this is the greatness of God. It would not be possible to write a work of midrash on the Odyssey. The questions have already been answered in the text. Yet the Torah’s text forces the reader to probe the ambiguities and gaps and come up with their own answers.
In the 12th century, the great Biblical commentator Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam) famously wrote that his grandfather Rashi had admitted to him that, if he lived another lifetime, he would need to write new commentaries on the Torah lefi ha-peshatot ha-mithadshim be-khol yom “according to the interpretations which are renewed each day.” (Rashbam to Bereishit 37:2).
That each day and year has its own unique Torah commentaries to be produced is a cornerstone of Jewish faith – “there is no beit midrash without hiddush” (Hagiga 3a). Auerbach’s essay allows us to understand that there need be nothing mystical about this claim. Although he may not have been familiar with Abaye and Rashbam, his sense of the Torah text as gapped, as holding back critical information that the reader must themselves answer, is what gives the Torah’s stories the psychological depth that the Odyssey lacks and allows for the possibility of endless chiddush, of davar acher. Another possibility always exists.
Teshuva As The Pendulum Swing Of A Human Life
These gaps and ambiguities that are built into the Torah’s texts – the questions that we are left wondering about – lay the groundwork for what will be Auerbach’s deeper claim: that the great characters of the Tanakh are fundamentally different in kind from the Homeric heroes. This claim will be the one that I believe gets at the heart of teshuva.
The characters of the Odyssey and the Iliad arrive on the scene fully formed. They are warriors and leaders and poets and lovers – they give long speeches, declaring their innermost thoughts, they live lives of adventure and danger and heroism – but, Auerbach argues, they undergo no personal development.[4] In fact, they frequently appear to be of an age fixed from the very start.
The contrast, Auerbach stresses, to the Biblical heroes is profound:
‘Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!—between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Hebrew Bible presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples’ (17)
The idea of formation, of development over time, is key here. That it is only over the course of a rich and varied life with its challenges and triumphs that that a character is fully developed and revealed. The journey is key. Not for nothing does Avraham – the paradigmatic ba’al teshuva of Jewish tradition – live his life between the two commands of lech lecha. His life and growth is bookended with the journeys that God instructs him to undertake – first the journey to Canaan (Bereishit 12) and finally the journey to Har Ha-Moriah (Bereishit 22). Moreover, Hazal saw a great multitude of tests as resting at the heart of Avraham’s story. The tests along the journey bring out the character that we will eventually know as Avraham Avinu. If he had been fully formed from the start there would be little value in telling the story and less still to learn from it.
If Auerbach’s claim about Odysseus’ lack of development is true – that he is identical upon his return to who he was when he set out twenty years earlier – then perhaps it is Avraham’s journey that should more correctly be described as an odyssey, for it contains not only an external wandering but also an inner movement and journey that is lacking in the Greek legend.
What can be said about the nature of the journeys of Biblical characters? What features do they have in common? Auerbach writes:
There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is almost superhuman and an image of God’s greatness. (18)
Humiliation and elevation. The journeys that great characters of the Tanakh undertake are not simply ones of outward adventure, but ones of emotional and psychological extremes. The shame of loneliness, failure and embarrassment, the sense of being cast out, on the one hand. The sense of return, restoration, rebuilding, of being supported by God and people, on the other.
Towards the end of the essay, Auerbach strikes a tone that is less “detached literary critic” and more “teacher profoundly moved by the religious meaning of the text for his audience”:
The reader clearly feels how the extent of the pendulum’s swing is connected with the intensity of the personal history—precisely the most extreme circumstances, in which we are immeasurably forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if we survive them, a personal stamp which is recognized as the product of a rich existence, a rich development. (ibid.)
Speaking in the first person plural – ‘we,’ all readers of Tanakh, see ourselves in the pendulum swing between humiliation and elevation that Adam, Avraham and all the others undergo – a pendulum swing which Auerbach claims ‘is so much wider than that of the Homeric heroes.’
‘Each one of us is banished from Gan Eden, and each one of us experiences the flood,’ sings Hanan Ben Ari. We dream like Yosef and like him we are thrown into the pit. The circle turns. And like David we turn it into a song of praise.
The Jewish sense of being and becoming – of what we can make of ourselves over the course of a lifetime, not despite the setbacks but because of them, is intimately tied to our people’s original stories. We, too, inhabit the pendulum swing, and we strive to make meaning out of the intensity of our experiences.
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I have long felt that the many attempts to define or even translate the concept of teshuva end up limiting and diminishing the power and depth of the idea.
Perhaps we should think of teshuva as the story of our lives. Lives lived with an awareness and scrutiny of our own development, on the journey to and from God, to and from ourselves, on the pendulum swing from elevation to humiliation and back again. We must not be the same people at the end of the journey as we were at the start – we must not experience the Odyssey of our own lives as Odysseus experienced his – returning to our own Ithaca the same as we were when we left. The Torah demands more of us.
It is for this reason I would like to suggest that the tefillot and Torah readings of the Yamim Nora’im are filled not with formulas and definitions but with stories. We read of the expulsion of Yishmael and the binding of Yitzchak on Rosh Hashanah and of Yonah on Yom Kippur. We inhabit the pain of childlessness felt by Sarah and Hannah and the fragility of Noah and his family surrounded by hostile waters.
These days of awe are designed for us to situate our own stories within the frameworks and themes of the great heroes of the Tanakh who undertook their own journeys, as unsure of the destination as we are of our own – but who turned to God with pleas for clarity and illumination about where they were on the maps of their own lives.
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Auerbach was an assimilated German Jew, and according to a number of sources ambivalent about his own Jewish identity. He was a literary scholar and not a rabbi.
But as the flames of World War II and the Shoah engulfed the Europe that he had fled, perhaps his choice to place the story of the Akeidah – the classic motif of Jewish martyrdom – at the heart of his great work was not a coincidence, but rather his own subtle way of situating his own story within that of his people’s history.
[1] Mimesis: The Representation Of Reality In Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach. Written in Istanbul between 1942 and 1945, published in 1946. Translated from the German by Willard R. Trask and first published in English by Princeton University Press in 1953. Citations are from the 1991 edition.
[2] Meir Sternberg, The Poetics Of Biblical Narrative, Indiana University Press, 1985, chs.6-8. See also Robert Alter, The Art Of Biblical Narrative, New York: Basic Books, 1981, ch.1.
[3] Translations, unless noted, are my own.
[4] One could, of course, disagree with this assertion and claim that Odysseus and the other Homeric heroes do indeed undergo development. Nevertheless, for our purposes, we are interested in how Auerbach’s understanding of the Odyssey sharpened his insights into the nature of Tanakh. These insights stand independently of whether or not he was correct in his analysis of the Odyssey.
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