"Language of the Limp and the Wound"

Yosefa Raz, The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Based on a talk given at the book event at Haifa University, May 28th 2024.

It is such an honor and pleasure to read this book, Yosefa, to think with it, to celebrate you as a beacon of ethical reading. Surely, reading ethically may seem like very little these days. Our voices are small and far apart and the the tides of nations and empires and the currents of politics and war roar with deafening resonance. But prophets and bibles, poets and scholars have played central, not peripheral, parts in the violent histories of many places, and certainly of this land too.

Yosefa’s book offers us an understanding of the part academic scholarship played and may play in such violence, even when all it seems to be doing is reading an ancient text. This book offers us a sharp critique of philology and modernist triumphalism. But most importantly, to me at least, Yosefa’s book gifts us with a reminder that bibles and prophets do not compel nationalistic, chauvinistic readings. She shows us masterfully that despite the efforts of scribes and redactors (and sometimes because these efforts are so strained) to unify prophecies into strong prophetic stances, bibles are haunted not by certainty and fervor but by doubts, stutters, passivity, and the "paradoxical power" of weakness – alternate ways of knowing and being of which we are in desperate need.

At a time when our various religious traditions and canons are entangled with narratives of hatred and self-aggrandizement, Yosefa's book is a gift that reminds us that wherever prophetic weakness is repressed, as it surely is now, it may also be rediscovered anew as an intrinsic feature of prophecy.

Yosefa charts the modernist reading traditions of “strong prophecy” in science and in poetry, and she also sketches some traditions for herself as a reader for “weak prophecy.” In this effort, she finds in some poetry a language of “pure sound fragmented and broken by history. This language of the limp and the wound,” in the painful words of Nourbese Philip, which Yosefa reads so beautifully.

I would like to add to this lineage more reading companions, other readers who search for breaks and weakness in triumphant texts. To this end, I would like to suggest some rabbinic readings, and would like to read with you a few tannaitic interpretations of prophetic poetry, the Song of the Sea. The Song of the Sea, in Exodus 15, is a triumphant song of God’s praise that Moses and the Israelites sing in the face of the sea that drowned Pharaoh’s army. It is, for the rabbis, an ideal of prophetic poetry. The homilists in the Mekhilta understand this song to be composed collectively and prophetically with the spirit of holiness (ברוח הקודש). They read it as a scene in which Moses and the entire people are like spontaneous prophets: Moses begins a line and the people in one voice finish it. The words emanate from them antiphonally and in miraculous unison.

In the first midrashim on the Song, the rabbinic homilies in the Mekhilta perform a desire to join in this prophetic poem. They weave into Exodus additional praises to God, quoted from other biblical poems in the Prophets and Psalms--and so they add their own antiphonal answers to the Mosaic opening. He says אשירה לה׳    “I will sing to the Lord” )they quote from Exodus 15:1) and the homilists reply that he is brave – and then string lines from the Psalms and Prophets.[1]

“I will sing to the Lord” – they quote again from Exodus, that he is rich, the rabbis add, stringing together verses from the Psalms and Prophets. “I will sing to the Lord” – that he is wise, “I will sing to the Lord” – that he is merciful, “I will sing to the Lord” – that he is a just judge; “I will sing to the Lord “ - that he is trustworthy; And they end with a triad “I will sing to the Lord that he is beautiful, adorned, unlike any other.”[2] These homilies, more than they are interpretations as such, are a way for the rabbis to join in the prophetic song of the sea. If Moses opened and said ״אשירה לה׳״ – “I will sing to the Lord” –then the people of Israel in the sea prophetically replied in unison ״כי גאה גאה״  “for he has triumphed gloriously.” (Exodus 15:1) The rabbis extend the song, adding stanzas to the glorification hymn, adding their own antiphonal replies to the Mosaic call for song. Perhaps this entire possibility of adding stanzas in the third century CE to an ancient scriptural song builds on the strange use of the future tense: אשירה, I will sing to the Lord. 

As the homilies continue, however, cracks and doubts emerge in the rabbinic reading. I would like to dwell on a famous example.

When they read verse 11 of the Song of the Sea ״מי כמוכה באלם ה׳״  - “who is like you O Lord among the Gods” (Exodus 15:11)– the tone changes, and one midrash says not, like Exodus: “who is like you O Lord among the Gods Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?” – but rather:

“Who is like you among the Gods” – who is like you among the mutes? Who hears the insulting debasement of his children and remains quiet?”[3]  This is a moment of profound reading that builds on a scribal crack: the strange consonantal spelling of scripture, that spells באלם, “the Gods,” without a yod/ יו״ד. The rabbis evade the polytheistic reading of the verse (who is like you among the Gods), but do so by breaking the song of praise into lament. They read not אלים  but אילם and ask:  who is more muted than you are, muter than all mutes. Ishay Rosen-Zvi saw in this verse an emergence of the rabbis’ self-consciousness, painfully aware of the distance between the scriptural song and its reading under Roman rule.[4]  Adiel Schremer pointed out that God is idealized for his own ironic self-restraint, for being the type of hero who heroically holds back on his force.[5]

With Yosefa’s book, we now have nuanced poetic language with which we may read this homily. The Rabbis were not prophets, nor singers or poets. They were strong readers. They saw reading as an opportunity to stretch out biblical scenes into their present. But in the face of scribal cracks, such as the awkward scriptural spelling of אלים without a יו״ד, they also show themselves to be fully aware of the impossibility of fully migrating into a biblical scene, and of the devastating difference between a lost, fantasized world in which God fights empires for his children, and a present one, in which he is in perfect silence, in which he can only be praised for his incomparable self-restraint. At the same time, one wonders if this melancholy over God’s self-restraint is not also ethically productive, for it is about the same incident that God exclaims, in response to the angels’ wish to sing– “My creation drowns in the sea, and you sing praise?”[6]

With Yosefa’s book we can see that ethical reading is a plane in which the delicate dichotomies of the inside and outside (of scripture) are problematized, praise and lament intertwine, the perfect imperfection of God emerges, and the melancholy over triumphalism becomes apparent. Like in Yosefa’s reading of Isaiah 6, the rabbis in the Mekhilta, wanting to join the singing antiphonal choir of the Song of the Sea, in fact interrupt it, destabilize it and crack its thin, thin ice.

Thank you for giving us your words and your wisdom Yosefa, for allowing us to weep with majestic poems of praise.  

Yael Fisch, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Hebrew Literature, teaches rabbinic and ancient Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

[1] Mekhilta RI, Shira (Beshalah) 1 (Horowitz ed., 119). See Judah Goldin, The Song at the Sea : Being a Commentary on a Commentary in Two Parts, (Philadelphia: JPS, 1990).

[2] Mekhilta RI, Shira (Beshalah) 1 (Horowitz ed., 120).

[3] Mekhilta RI, Shira (Beshalah) 8 (Horowitz ed., 142).

[4] Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Can the Homilists Cross the Sea Again? Revelation in Mekilta Shirata,” in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions About Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity, ed. George J. Brooke, Hindy Najman, and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, TBN 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 217–46.

[5] Adiel Schremer, “Midrash and History: God’s Power, the Roman Empire, and Hopes for Redemption in Tannaitic Literature,” Zion 72 (2007), 5–36. [Hebrew].

[6] See b. Sanh.  39b; Meg. 10b.