On Storytelling and Interpretation

This week, it began again: the old story, the ever-renewing story, the story of beginnings, one of the most significant pieces of imaginative literature in human history. Jews throughout the world began to read the Torah, the so-called Five Books of Moses, from the beginning of the book of Genesis. There are pieces of religious literature that are older – Indian Sanskrit texts for example – but the chapters of the Torah that we read at the beginning of our annual cycle are woven deep into Western culture, secular and religious. The faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all use the images and motifs of these stories in Genesis to create structures of meaning for believers to live within.  

These narratives offer myths to live by, stories which structure our lives – even the most devoutly secular believe in, live inside, a seven day week, for example.  Even the most ardent atheist telling a story to their children will begin ‘Once upon a time…’ This is what the Book of Genesis  does when it starts ‘In the beginning…’  The Biblical world view can still structure our thinking without us even being aware of it. The repetition of the same texts allows us to live within cyclical time while the content of Genesis and what follows tells us we live within chronological time, where events unfold with a linear, forward momentum.

The storytellers of the Hebrew Bible were poets, literary artists, mythographers, weavers of words aspiring to craft a narrative in which the Israelite community could find where they belonged and why they existed and what their purpose was within the community of nations. To get their national story going they started in pre-history, with universal questions about origins, and found a narrative mode, a mythic language of symbols and images and characters, that offered meaning but also waited to be interpreted.

The need for interpretation was a necessity once they committed themselves to choosing words to build sentences. Every writer knows this. That whatever words they choose people will impose their own understanding onto them. Writers can’t control what readers will do with their words – for good or ill. (I will come back to this later).

In the first chapter of Genesis those ancient storytellers conceived of a Conceiver – they gave birth to the idea of a divine energy that gave birth to the world and everything in it, a creative force bringing into being the heavens and the earth and all of the life that it contains, including us. And they conceived of this Conceiver in their own image, as a creative force that used language, words, to bring things into being: “And God said ‘Let there be light’ – and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3). Within their mythic thinking, God speaks the universe into being.

They, the storytellers of the Hebrew Bible, only had language, words, to create something out of nothing – to create a masterpiece of narrative that would last forever – and in that act of radical imaginative daring they fashioned a God who also spoke – spoke the world into being, stage by stage, “and God said…And God said…And God said…” culminating in humanity, us, who – in a deft twist of poetic paradox – they described as being “created in the image of God” (Genesis1:27).

‘Humanity created in the image of God’ is a piece of thinking foundational to the Torah - although we might now feel the freedom to say that it works the other way round too: that we created God in our own image. The Torah is full of that: a God of compassion, kindness, mercy, but also anger, jealousy, destructiveness. The storytellers’  multidimensional image of the divine, of God, was a mirror of who they were.

So: those inspired weavers of words, creating language worlds for people to live in, projected that language-generating  gift onto the God of Genesis.  It is an inspired piece of collective storytelling, a piece of literature in which every word counts, every word is part of an elaborate structure and pattern – words appear three times, seven times – it is all woven into a magnificent tapestry in which the final act of creation is human beings. The narrators’ artistry created a sublime portrait of divine artistry. All of nature matters: sun, moon and stars, land and seas, plants and animals, birds and fish – and humanity, with its special role, the responsibility of stewardship.

So in six bejewelled paragraphs the architecture of creation is laid out, stage by majestic stage, but the forward momentum of the narrative contains as its destination something beyond humanity. In the seventh paragraph, something radically different is described – not activity but rest. A time for the breath of all life to breathe out.

And this rest, this act of ‘shabbat’, is not just blessed like other aspects of creation but something else is added: this rest, the capacity to rest, is made sacred, kadosh, holy : the word appears here for the first time in the Torah (Genesis 2:3). We often talk about life being sacred, but this opening narrative doesn’t actually say that – what is says is that the ability to stop activity, the necessity to stop speaking worlds into being, the capacity for silence – this is sacred. Within the creation myth, it is stopping that is sacred. In other parts of the Torah it is activity that is sacred, but the story begins quite differently: the sacred is what happens after all the activity has stopped.  

And then the whole story of creation is given to us from another perspective, juxtaposed with the first, like a Cubist portrait. Genesis 2:4 tells us “This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created…”  ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz  b’hibaram… And we get the whole story told from underneath as it were. The first seven paragraphs were seamless: each sentence is constructed in a continuous flow from the last, with the letter vav (‘v’) joining them up – the letter means ‘and’ - so it reads ‘and this, and then this, and then this’ .

But that unstoppable stream of narrative stops in verse 4 of Chapter 2, and the eighth paragraph of the Torah is a new beginning: ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz b’hibaram – “This is the story of the heavens and the earth when they were created” – and yes, we hear the echo of the first line of the Torah (the words ‘heavens, earth, created’ are repeated from Genesis 1:1) but in a different order; as if the storytellers are saying, okay we are going to tell you about this another way round now, not in terms of grand divine choreography but as a story told from a human perspective.

And the key word from the human perspective is that word ‘toldot’ – which means literally, ‘generations, begettings, acts of giving birth’, and this word ‘toldot’  takes on the meaning of ‘story’ and ‘history’. One generation’s narrative merges into the stories of the next generation and it adds up over the generations to become history.

So in this second telling of beginnings we find many images of fertility: a lush garden, four rivers, two mysterious trees offering knowledge and life, the imagery is grounded in water and the earth; and then, from the earth, an ‘earthling’ is formed – the play on words is in the Hebrew (adama, adam) – and the only characteristic of this creature that the storytellers choose to describe is its capacity for language: it names the creatures around it – this is the divine gift bestowed on humanity, the ability to find the words that matter.  

Our Torah storytellers were besotted with language, obsessed with language, both what it could do and the relationships it can build - but also the trouble it can cause when it fails, or fails to be honest and becomes manipulative. In the Garden of Eden everyone is suddenly talking, Adam, Eve, God, even the snake and its slippery dialogue with Eve. Dialogue becomes a generator of the story, but the absence of dialogue is also generative: Cain’s absence of words to describe his anger leads to the murder of his brother (4:8) – the text says that he speaks, but there is then a hiatus, a gap, and instead of words there is the murderous act.

You see in these early chapters of Genesis the storytellers wrestling with the power of words: too many words, the wrong words, the wrong kind of conversations, lead to the Tower of Babel. ‘This is what happens when everyone speaks the same language’ the narrators have their God say, ‘they think they can do anything’ (Genesis 11:6). The narrators are sensing here the shadow side of language - the way it can easily create a false consensus, a belief that whatever one says must be right because everyone else is saying it.

At Babel you see the storytellers describing the problematic nature of believing there is only one way of talking, one way of thinking, one way of using words; they show the hubris of that. So languages – plural - enter the Torah’s story. And once there exists this confusion of tongues, words needed to be translated, interpreted, and there’s not only one way to describe reality. And not only one way to reach heaven.

This is how the Hebrew storytellers generated the tradition Jews belong to – one where words don’t only have one meaning, where words are plastic and stretch in multiple directions, where you the reader have to do some of the work, maybe a lot of the work, to wrestle meaning out of the texts, recognising that there is no single interpretation, no final interpretation to any Biblical text, or midrashic text, or Talmudic text. Actually, to any literary text.  

The process of commentary and interpretation is the lifeblood of the people, this tradition has kept the Jewish people alive for millennia, because we have not reduced texts to single meanings, we have refused to read literally, or hardly ever literally, but we have also learned to read metaphorically, and homiletically, and symbolically, and in multiple other ways of responding with our creativity and imagination to the texts we are presented with. The greatness of Judaic culture is that it has taught the virtues of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ – interpretation is polymorphous and endless; an antidote to the totalitarianism of certainty.  It enlarges and enriches us, it broadens our horizons, it lets in more life, more light. Only dictators, fascists and authoritarians believe there is only one truth.

I feel humbled to belong to a tradition that has this relationship with words:  what they can do (when used carefully), what they can suggest, what they can create, how they can inspire - and how they can manipulate; how they can move the heart and how they can chill the heart. I enjoy trying to build words into sentences that help us think more deeply into subjects: they might challenge, entertain, stimulate, but they are always fuelled by a sense that I derive from Torah and Jewish tradition that language is a divine creation (so to speak) that we can borrow and play with and, on a good day, mould into something new. And the aim is always to enrich our experience, to give us more room to breathe in, to think with.

In the end though I know that whatever I say, everyone will hear it slightly differently, or will interpret it somewhat differently. Each of us listens through the prism of their own thoughts, beliefs, ideas, prejudices – we all do this all the time, even when we talk to each other (maybe especially when we talk to one another).  And if you read something I have written you will – I hope - have your own thoughts about it, you will project your own meanings onto it, your own associations to the words I use, sometimes you will hear it through your own preconceptions. Listening and reading is deeply subjective – ‘I thought he said this’, ’I thought he meant that’. I am not in control, ever, of how my words are heard, or read. And that is how it should be. Interpretation is always subjective and personal  and usually that is fine but sometimes, of course, it can be problematic.

I want to share with you something that happened after Yom Kippur this year because it both illustrates what I am talking about and is, I hope, instructive. I gave a sermon on Yom Kippur – it was a long day, we had the time – in which I spoke about a film I had found both thought-provoking and inspirational, Jonathan Glazer’s multiple Oscar-winning ‘The Zone of Interest’. And I used it in part to make certain points about our human capacity for denial and not wanting to see what is painful. This is a human, universal, psychological process, and we all do it. I made that clear – or thought I had made it clear. But someone who read my text online afterwards was deeply upset (and angry) about it. They felt it was ‘laced with the language of hate’, that it was ‘antisemitic’, that it ‘elevate[d] anti-Zionism to a moral imperative’, that it ‘posit[ed] that Jews have an inherent badness that must be purged’.

As someone who has spent a good part of his professional life speaking about, and working on, the benign, creative and life-affirming dimensions of Judaic culture - which has included speaking about the ways in which our vision can go into eclipse - this came as rather a surprise.

People who spoke to me afterwards – and people who read it afterwards - were rather grateful about how I’d opened up the themes I was exploring. But – self-evidently – not everyone felt that way. I don’t mind dissent, I belong to an argumentative tradition and people, and I am not in the business of putting thoughts into words with the expectation that everyone will agree with – or, God-forbid, submit to - my way of thinking.

But what I am learning is just how differently different folk can read texts. As they saw it, they reckoned that this Yom Kippur the ‘threat’ to Jews – their language - was coming not from outside the community but ‘from inside’. (The idea that the Jew is ‘the enemy within’ is of course an antisemitic trope – it began in the early Middle Ages - but I will let that pass. That’s just how their words struck me, my subjective association to the language they used to describe me).

So it is all about interpretation. Sermons and blogs are just another text. One person’s inspiration can be another person’s horror show. On the whole – there are exceptions - when I read the narratives of Torah I can feel inspired, enlivened, challenged, stimulated: they can fertilise my thinking and my imagination. When Richard Dawkins reads those same texts he is appalled, dismissive, scornful, sickened to the heart. We all read texts through the prism of our own story, our own personal ‘toldot’, history.

This experience has been sobering. As Jews begin a new cycle of Torah readings this year, I am hoping for an uplifting, inspiring, illuminating journey through the texts of my tradition, a journey which can help us glimpse new dimensions to the texts we’ve inherited and how they inform the texts of our own lives.  I am going to try not to let the prism through which I see this heritage become a prison: I don’t want to feel trapped into only seeing what I have already seen before. “Let there be light” spoke new hope into the darkness; who would want the darkness to stifle new ways of seeing?

 

[loosely based on thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 26th, 2024]