Gender and Jewish Culture

Works Cited

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_____. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Alexander, T. Desmond. “Genesis 22 and the Covenant of Circumcision.” JSOT 25 (1983): 17-22.

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Norton, 1990.

Berman, Louis A. The Akedah: The Binding of Isaac. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997.

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Caputo, John D. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.

Davidson, Robert. The Courage to Doubt. London: SCM, 1983.

Delaney, Carol. Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.

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Dennis, Trevor. “Sarah: A Woman Caught up in God’s Promises.” Sarah Laughed: Women’s Voices in the Old Testament. Nashville: Albingdon Press, 1994.

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_____. “Choreographies: Interview. Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald.” Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida. Ed. Nancy J. Holland. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.

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Fuchs, Esther. “Who is Hiding the Truth? Deceptive Women and Biblical Androcentrism.” Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship. Ed. Adela Yarbro Collins. Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1985.

_____. “The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible.” Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship. Ed. Adela Yarbro Collins. Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1985.

Gellman, Jerome I. The Fear, the Trembling, and the Fire: Kierkegaard and the Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac. Lanham, Maryland: UP of America, 1994.

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Katz, Claire Elise. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: the Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003.

Kierkegaard, Soren. “A Panegyric Upon Abraham.” Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954.

Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959-1960. trans. Dennis Porter. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1992.

Landy, Francis. “Narrative Technique and Symbolic Transactions in the Akedah.” Signs and Wonders: Biblical Texts in Literary Focus. The Society of Biblical Literature, 1989.

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Polish, David. “Akedat Yitzhak — The Binding of Isaac.” Judaism 6.1 (1975): 17-21.

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Notes

• 1) See also Hunter, A. "Father Abraham". JSOT 35 (1986): 3–27.
• 2) Many scholars point out that the discrepancy between God’s promise to make Isaac the son of a future Jewish nation and God’s demand to sacrifice him is the first paradox that Abraham must face.
• 3) See also Davidson, R. "The Courage to Doubt". London: SCM, 1983.
• 4) Some Jewish thinkers do follow Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham’s emotions as “fear and trembling.” For example, “Elie Wiesel describes the episode as ‘terrifying in content.’ Similarly, David Polish describes Abraham after he has heard God’s command that he offer up his son: ‘He is a shattered man, going almost trancelike toward a deadly act that he must carry out but with less than perfect faith. God commands, Abraham submits. There is no conversation, only the sentence of doom and the silent response’” (Berman 39–40).
• 5) See also Gellman, J. I. The Fear, the Trembling, and the Fire: Kierkegaard and the Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1994.
• 6) Alvarez suggests that in some primitive societies, the idea of self-sacrifice itself has a kind of magical quality: “it is as though [the suicide] were committed in the certain belief that the suicide himself would not really die. Instead, he is performing a magical act which will initiate a complex but equally magic ritual ending in the death of his enemy” (67)
• 7) See also Alter, R. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
• 8) In Islam, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is commemorated on the day of Haji, Islam’s holiest day. A male member of the household slaughters a ram to reenact Abraham’s story and to re-perform his obedience to God’s request. Substituting the ram for the child is seen as a sign of God’s mercy: without it, men would still be slaughtering their sons. By reenacting the story, the patriarch is channeling the divine words, thus reinforcing his patriarchal power (Delaney 181). Similarly, in Christianity, transmission of the divine word could only be performed by men (that is why only they could be priests).
• 9) In Judaism, the four-letter word for God’s name, Tetragrammaton, is ineffable. The word consists only of consonants, without any vowels. Since it is considered sacrilegious to pronounce it, the pronunciation has been forgotten (or perhaps was never there in the first place). The first letter of one of God’s pronounceable names, Adonai, is a letter that has no sound. What is pronounced is the vowel under the letter. The first, silent letter veils the existence of God in the absence of language that would name it. The other name of God, Elohim, is purposely mispronounced, Elokim, so as not to say it in vain. Because they are mispronounced or impossible to pronounce, the different names of God represent different aspects of the sacred while simultaneously concealing the true name of God, which is unknown. In other words, the sacred is above the language because only there can it conceal its secret. The absence of the signifier conceals the very absence of the signified it is meant to denote. Similarly, in Islam, neither the image of the Prophet nor that of God can be represented for fear of idolatry (to avoid praying to the image instead of to God), but also because their greatness is beyond representation. The precept veils the existence of God in the absence of an image. What is not shown becomes powerful precisely because it is not seen. Representation threatens secrecy and, thus, the very essence of the sacred. Likewise, in Christian liturgy, during the mass, what is worshipped is not the body of Christ (which is not there) but the piece of communion wafer that represents it. There is no body of Christ per se; it exists only through the symbolic and performative gestures that define the space of the sacred and the profane. The priest has to pronounce it “the body of Christ” (“Corpus Christi”) in order for the wafer to become the body of Christ (as he has to pronounce the wine to be the blood of the Christ for it to be consecrated as such). The secret is that what is worshipped is not the body of Christ, but his death symbolized by the absence of his body replaced by the wafer. The sacred is structured around the mystery of this symbolic replacement that reenacts Christ’s “gift of death” via weekly liturgy. What is reenacted is the tremor in the face of the self-sacrifice, the mystery of death voluntarily taken. The economy of this gift veils the absence of God, for whom the sacrifice was made. The liturgy reenacts the absence via the performative gestures, which reenact the sacrifice.
• 10) “The plight of a barren woman, and God’s promise that she will conceive, is another repeated biblical theme (e.g., Sarah, Hannah, the wife of Manoah, the Shunammite woman)” (Berman 44). In Abraham’s story, the promise of a son and annunciation is a focal point of the dramatic structure. Westermann notices: "The promise of the son is an essential part of the sequence of motifs which lead from Sarah’s barrenness to the fulfillment in birth and marriage. It occurs only in the Abraham cycle, where it is of crucial importance for the whole. . . it is an inseparable element of a self-contained narrative. The promise of the son is the starting point and center of the promise motif in the patriarchal stories." (217) The dramatic conflict usually ensues because “typically, the favored wife is barren, while the other wife bears children” (Berman 1997: 44). The annunciation and promise of a son from the favorite wife solves the dramatic tension, reinstating the patriarchal economy of reproduction as narratively logical and just. Fuchs (1985) points out that woman becomes a heroine only in those annunciation scenes when she is promised to give birth to a son: "The biblical annunciation type-scene consists of three major thematic components: the initial barrenness of the wife, a divine promise of future conception, and the birth of a son. . . [T]he most significant variations pertain to the role of the potential mother in the annunciation type-scene; these variations, . . . constitute a consistently increasing emphasis on the potential mother as the true heroine of the annunciation type-scene." (“Literary Characterization” 119)
• 11) Following Levinas, Katz points out that “had Sarah been asked, she would not have agreed to sacrifice Isaac, and second, that this response would have earned her passing marks on the test! [. . .] Thus, one’s relationship to a child is still the paradigm for the ethical” (127).
• 12) See also Dennis, T. Sarah Laughed: Women’s Voices in the Old Testament. Nashville: Albingdon Press, 1994.
• 13) The Book of Jasher was added in the 16th Century, so its relationship to Genesis 22 is purely cognitive. Most feminist scholars treat the two stories as one, but it is important to keep in mind that although both stories are products of the same patriarchal apparatus, they have very different historical origins.
• 14) See also Alexander, T. D. (). "Genesis 22 and the Covenant of Circumcision". JSOT 25 (1983): 17–22; and Erling, B. "Firstborn and Firstlings in the Covenant Code." SBL Seminar, (1986): 470–478.
• 15) According to Islam, Muhammad was born without a foreskin (a condition medically known as aposthia), and Muslims practice circumcision in order to be like him.