Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

233 Pages·2006·2.448 MB·English

by  Ranen Omer-Sherman

ISRAEL

IN EXILE
RANEN
-
OMER SHERMAN
JEWISH WRITING
AND THE DESERT
israel in exile
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ranen omer-sherman
Israel in Exile
jewish writing and
the desert
university of illinois press
urbana and chicago
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© 2006 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
c 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Omer-Sherman, Ranen.
Israel in exile : Jewish writing and the desert / Ranen
Omer-Sherman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-252-03043-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-252-03043-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Wilderness areas in literature. 2. Israeli literature—
History and criticism. 3. Jewish literature—History and
criticism. 4. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.
5. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
pj5012.w54o44 2006
892.4'0932154—dc22 2005021530
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For my mother, Betty
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Whose home I have made the wilderness,
the salt land his dwelling-place
Amused by the tumult of the city,
Oblivious to the demands of a taskmaster,
Roaming the mountains for pastures;
And seeking every green thing.
—Job 39:6–8
God Himself has spoken from these shores . . .
the desert still seems
struck dumb with terror, and one would say that it has
still not been
able to break the silence since it heard the voice of the
eternal.
—François-René de Chateaubriand
If grass is the question of life sand is perhaps its answer.
Then I would have devoted my life to pestering the desert.
—Edmond Jabès
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Contents
Preface ix
1. Representing Desert Wilderness in Jewish Narrative:
Poetics and Politics 1
2. Justice and the Old/New Jewish Nation 29
3. Desert Space and National Consciousness 60
4. Immobilized Rebels on the Outskirts
of the Promised Land 96
5. Sinai of the Diasporic Imagination 126
6. Wilderness as Experience and Metaphor 159
Notes 177
Works Cited 193
Index 203
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Preface
Then Abram journeyed by stages through the Negeb.
—Genesis:12:9
Wilderness is a necessary condition for every revelation,
for every internalization of the Torah’s teaching: “Who-
ever would wish to acquire Torah, must make himself
ownerless like the wilderness.”
—Midrash Rabba
The experience of the desert is both the place of the
Word—where it is supremely word—and the non-place
where it loses itself in the infinite.
—Edmond Jabès
The spirit of this project is much indebted to my first encoun-
ter many years ago with lines written by Maurice Blanchot observing
Kafka’s strange attraction and repulsion toward Zionism: “his wandering
does not consist in nearing Canaan, but in nearing the desert, the truth
of the desert—in going always further in that direction.”1 Challenged by
the prospect of testing that notion in relation to other prophetic Jewish
writers, my excitement grew as I encountered the vivid ways that strange
paradigm manifests itself in contemporary Israeli narratives as well as lit-
erature from the Diaspora. This book was in part inspired by and written
for a new generation of Jews, including a growing number of young rabbis,
striving to reinvigorate Judaism, in its myriad communal and individual
forms, by exploring the neglected close spiritual and political relationship
between Judaism’s sacred texts and nature and the wilderness. My book
describes how, in Jewish narratives, the desert becomes a metaphysical
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