Read Like a Rabbi
- By Andrés Amitai Wilson
A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel and Grau, 2015).
Pirkei Avot (“The Chapters of Our Fathers”), a compendium of rabbinic ethical aphorisms, includes Ben Bag Bag’s prescription for studying Torah: “Turn the Torah over—turn it over for everything is in it. See into it, grow old and worn over it and from it never turn away, for you will not find a better portion than it.” Jewish tradition encourages a reverent grappling with its sacred texts, and the concept of “Torah” is itself elastic. Literally “teaching” or “instruction,” Torah is also the unifying heading of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, traditionally attributed to Moses; Torah is a catchall for the entirety of Jewish texts and a metonym for wisdom. A famous midrash depicts God consulting the Torah before creating the universe, and Torah is frequently hypostatized as God’s consort. Blessings are recited before Torah study, at the close of which it is asserted that “The study of Torah is equal to them all.” Torah thus may signify both a set of books and the mysterious machinations of creation hidden within the cells of words.
Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God marks an impassioned attempt to illustrate the elasticity of Torah and the intricacies of its Hebrew grammar for readers whose familiarity with the Bible stems from English translations. Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in Monsey, NY, an Orthodox Jewish enclave outside of New York City. The book depicts Kushner’s family—including her Bible-scholar mother—arguing over the Torah in the same way as most observant Jewish families, with grammar and its secrets debated over a sumptuous Shabbat meal (in the endearing scene that opens the book’s first chapter, Kushner states, “My family generally discusses the grammar of creation when I’m carrying at least thirty pounds of food” [7]). While in the writing program at the University of Iowa, Kushner found herself taking a course on the Bible in English translation and was shocked at the foreignness of an ostensibly familiar text. The surprise prompted a quest to articulate the disconnect of a Hebrew reader when reading the Bible in English. Kushner summarizes, “Certainly much is lost in translation, in the attempt to bridge not only languages but cultures and eras, and while some of these changes are understandable, others are unbearably painful for a Hebrew reader to see. The difference in language is not just about vocabulary and grammar, it is also about culture, about a way of viewing the world” (195). Culture and family figure as prominently into the book as does the jarring semantic distance of English Bibles from the Hebrew original. Kushner spent ten years traveling the world and studying various translations of the Bible in dialogue with the Hebrew original, and The Grammar of God is the culmination of philological soul-searching.
The Grammar of God is organized loosely by chapters entitled, “Creation,” “Love,” “Laughter,” “Man,” “God,” “Law,” “Song,” “Memory,” and “How It (Never) Ends.” Each begins with a biblical verse in Hebrew and Kushner’s translator’s crib facing that verse. On the pages that follow, she includes a series of English translations of the verse, ranging from the King James Bible to the scholarly Jewish Publication Society Bible. Kushner’s chapter “Man” is one in which she superbly elucidates the importance of names to the Bible—an importance that is transparent to Hebrew readers but lost in translation. For example, English translations preserve the name of “Adam”—a name that in Hebrew means “man” and comes from the word Adamah for “earth”—without explicitly noting these connotations, and most disregard the shared root between the name Chaya (Eng. “Eve”) and the word for “life.” Kushner summarizes, “But Adam the man—that first human on the stage of the world—is bizarrely earthless in English, and so is mankind. The essential connection between man and the earth is missing. Without the reader’s knowing at all times that Adam is adama—the ground he walks on, labors in, and will eventually return to—and without the reader’s understanding that Adam is also everyman, Adam’s name doesn’t mark him in the intense, intimate, and obvious way in translation” (65). Apart from being inaccurate, such discrepancies result in a dangerous literalizing of religion where important distinctions between history and myth either go unnoticed or are disregarded.
Thus Kushner illustrates how translations are not simply about words but are also worldviews, an essential point to consider for anyone engaged in the translation of sacred texts. In the chapter, “Love,” Kushner astutely summarizes how the rabbinic tradition explores the Torah and subtly nudges readers and translators of the Bible to employ a similar approach
The only cure for a quick glance is context. This is what so many of the rabbinic commentators try to provide—a map of how to read a verse within a neighborhood of other verses. It is as if the rabbis were creating a web of hyperlinks, encouraging the reader to read more, to see what other verses and ideas lie just beyond the boundaries of that particular page. The reader’s task is not to be lulled by the promise of the familiar, not to simply accept a refrain as seemingly clear as the cheerful ‘and God saw that it was good.’ The reader’s task is to ask what is going on. No matter how many readers have read before him, the reader must read again, must investigate, must lift the veil to seek the face of the text over and over again. (41)
The reader’s engagement with Torah should emulate the rabbinic conversation—to probe deeper and struggle with the text not until it yields in one direction, but until it has been turned in every conceivable direction and all interpretations seem compelling but not conclusive.
When Kushner showcases her insights and erudition, The Grammar of God is engaging, even for those with a deep knowledge of the Torah in Hebrew; however, the book struggles to find a consistent tone. The author expresses the hope “that these pages will spark discussion and ignite understanding” (xxxii) and cautions her reader that the book “is not a scholarly work but a personal one, a Hebrew speaker’s response to the Bible in English. For Kushner, it could not be otherwise, “because nobody else can write how you view your home except you.” Yet, for a text with as lofty a title as the Grammar of God, nostalgia and subjective notions of “home” seem relevant only up to a point, and at times overemphasized.
Furthermore, Kushner does not address the doctrinal distinctions that result in these different English versions of the text. The majority of the English translations that she offers stem from Protestant denominations and come with the added doctrinal baggage of those Christian movements. Biblical grammar also implies theology, and, despite its chapter entitled “God,” The Grammar of God might have benefited from further examination of the ways in which translation and grammar impart theological notions. Such reservations aside, through its intersection of memoir, commentary, and an astute (if at times clunky) history of biblical exegesis, Kushner’s book transcends grammar, posing essential questions about how history, words, and myth are translated from one culture to another, and how differing notions of canonicity are transmuted into holistic personal significance.
Andrés Amitai Wilson is a Ph.D candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
