How Best to Tell the Story?

Since I am so besotted by Avivah Zornberg, Scotch-Israeli master of midrash, and her insights into the Book of Exodus, I decided to expand on last week’s post. (As a quick reminder, midrash is the Jewish practice of deeply reading sacred texts again and again to uncover ever-changing and new sacred and intellectual layers of meaning for our lives.)  Zornberg, is a female master of the midrash, and I think this is an important factor in how she in particular enriches our understanding of an Old Testament story underpinning so much of the Easter season.

As we pick up the story again, Moses is still speaking to God in the burning bush. He asks God: “Whom should I tell them I saw?” For those of us who cannot help but bristle when God is given a male identity and referred to with masculine pronouns and who react especially strongly when this practice is defended using the word “tradition”, Zornberg gives us something other than the traditional English translation of the answer as “I am who I am.”

In the spirit of midrash, she goes back to the original language: “It’s ‘Ehyeh asher ehveh’ and, literally, it just means “I will be who I will be” … God is saying: I’m not giving you a handle. You want a handle of some kind to hold on. … Instead, God actually answers: I am the very principle of becoming, of allowing the possible to happen.” (Emphasis mine)

One of those possibilities allowed to happen is the full inclusion of all of us in the concept of God and in the fulfillment of what so many of us see as our sacred mission inside and outside the Church. A “God becoming” rather than static calls out to us to be the same.

Zornberg goes on to make a further case for full inclusion as she illuminates how all of us are asked to participate not only in relating the Exodus story but infusing it with the new life so that our story is as much in a state of constantly “becoming” as God is and we are:

“’What really happened in Egypt?’ becomes a less important question than, ‘How best to tell the story? Where to begin? What in the master story speaks to one and therefore makes one speak?’”… All this is happening so that you shall tell the story. It’s so upside-down, you might say. Since it’s happened, all right, tell the story. Make sure people remember it.

But that’s not the point. It’s not telling the story so as to remember what happened. It happened so as to be the stimulus for a meaningful story, and the stories will develop and change through time. And perhaps in the end, or along the way, you might find yourself telling a better story than what is actually written in the text — so long as there is some connection. So that what you have, for instance, on the Seder night, on Passover, is basically the commandment to tell the story of the Exodus, which doesn’t mean reading the Bible. … There is a fixed text, but it’s supposed to be just a kind of opener for the proliferation of more ideas and more attempts to tell the story in a way that will come closer to what can really affect us.”

I see the Church as well as its traditions, rituals, proclamations, and practices as the “fixed text” needing such opening and expansion. Someone characterized a group of us “progressive Catholics” as having moved away from the Church. Another gently corrected her saying, “No, we’re taking the Church with us.” From my experience, that is exactly what small Eucharistic communities, faith groups, and liturgies led by women, other gendered, married priests, or just the faithful gathered together are doing. The ones I attend have liturgies in which the people there, not just the presider (if there is one), reflect on what has been presented with their own stories and insights. And, in that way, we keep moving and becoming.

Zornberg adds an “amen” to these thoughts through her discussion of the part in the Seder when four different kinds of children are invited to ask questions. The wise child is, of course, the model questioner, but even the wicked child at least provokes with his question. The greatest problem, Zornberg says, is the child who does not know how to ask a question at all:

I think in the Jewish tradition there is a sense that everything gets moving as a result of a problem, a question. That’s how, if you talk about arousal, then that’s what arouses. As soon as you’ve got — even if you want to call it a complaint, even if it’s a rather querulous question, it’s still better than no question, because it pushes at the limits of the sort of silent conspiracy of the way things have to be. It forces some kind of attempt to make sense of things….

And what you have to do with the one who doesn’t know how to ask is — it’s put very beautifully: “v’at p’tach lo” — “you,” feminine; it’s put in the feminine form — you open up for him. You try to stimulate him. You put things in such a way that perhaps that will wake him up. So the emphasis, I think, the whole direction, is on opening up, opening what’s closed.

The ”you” who opens things up is feminine – Yes!

To that thought, Avivah Zornberg adds her own “Yes”:

The stories remain powerful as written. And then there is all the amazing cargo of hidden stories that emerges in the midrashic traditions, and then there is the invitation to the participants to tell their own stories and to ask their own questions and to elaborate further. So there is this sense of infinite elaboration.

And I have a final “Yes”, too, based on a snippet of poetry from Wallace Stevens, the last line of which she used for the title of her book:

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends

On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come.

— Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Canto IV of “It Must Change”