Sefaria Torah Talks: Dara Horn, Acclaimed Novelist & Hebrew Literature Professor

I think that every generation struggles to find two things: intimacy and authenticity... Embracing the idea that there's this constant dynamic struggle for those things, and that it isn't true that there were people in the past who had this perfect intimacy and authenticity, that all of those people were always struggling with those things -- I find it very comforting.

...because the words are so important to us, because they're the only thing we have, this is an entire culture that's really just based on text...and so what are the limitations of that, if we consider that text is a set of arbitrary conventions?

I think that this idea -- that if God had just revealed God's self to everyone at that point, there would be nothing else to talk about -- I think it's Martin Buber who says that revelation had no content; it was just an encounter. And all of the the laws and the text of the Torah is really an attempt to describe an encounter that doesn't have any content, which this reminds me of, because it's saying that if you were to have this intimate encounter with God, you would not need the rest of these descriptions.

[There is a linguist named] Ferdinand Saussure [who] has this theory about the signifier and the signified, where he basically says that there used to be this idea...that there was an intrinsic connection between a word and the thing that it represented...[Saussure's] big idea is that language is arbitrary - that it's almost like a parallel world to our world - so there's a tree, and then there's the word "tree" and there's no connection between those two things. The way I often explain this to my students is flavors of candies that are fruit flavors - how there's a flavor called grape. It does not taste at all like a grape...there's a convention that we've all accepted that this is grape flavor...it is only a symbolic connection to the actual thing...this problem becomes really interesting...when you're talking about God because, especially with the whole premise of God giving us the Torah, that God is somehow trying to translate God's self into language, and this is the only medium that we have. I mean also this is what Shavuot is...we're all standing at Sinai and as Jews we love doing these reenactments...we're always trying to approximate this experience...We're trying to approximate this encounter, and in a sense I think that what I think the Mei Shiloach might be suggesting here is that even from just this first word, there's already an approximation of an encounter.

In most ancient cultures, there's not really much of a robust idea of individuality. And the Hebrew writer, David Vogel...was writing during the turn of the 20th century, mostly before [Hebrew] was a robustly spoken language, [and] he had to make up all these terms. One of the terms that he invented is "ha-ani sheli" which literally means "My I," and it expresses selfhood...and what's amazing to me about that it's like there was no idea of the self. And so this idea that what the Mei Shiloach is talking about in this passage about God having a self is really interesting because there isn't the sense of individuality, of subjectivity, the way that we think of it in modern times, and it's certainly not in the Jewish community which...so emphasizes community. It isn't about self-actualization of individuals, so it's interesting that this is a question that he's bringing into this idea of intimacy with God.

The more you learn, the more you come out of the darkness into the light, is reminding me of [Plato's]...allegory the cave...where people are chained up in a cave and they're looking at shadows of puppets and they think that that's the world because they don't know any better, and then somebody goes out of the cave, and sees the light and then comes back and [tells everybody that] there's this whole world out there, and then they kill him...The Jewish version of that would be Shimon bar Yochai...he's in the cave studying Torah with his son because of Roman persecution...and then he comes out of the cave and...he sees some farmer passing by who's...doing something that's slightly in violation of some rabbinic law and he brings down the fire of God and burns this guy alive with his eyeballs. It's something very strange and then God's like, you need to go back to the cave because you can't handle it out here. I'm sure I'm distorting that a little bit...but the idea being that there's this idea that coming out of darkness into light is not going into this major mystical world, but rather going into our world, which I think would be consistent with the idea of the Torah as like a book that's really about living in this world.

This idea of the "kaf," that this is just an approximation of God...is interesting because it seems contrary to the whole of the revelation at Sinai, which is supposed to be this big reveal. And [the Mei Shiloach's] suggestion that it actually isn't, is really interesting...It's not enough even to the people who were standing at Sinai...those people did not have a full revelation...I think the idea of the loss and recovery of a tradition is itself the tradition, that we're always looking back to sort of this idealized moment where something was achieved, but in a sense, did that ever happen?

Before I had children, my relationship [with God] was more like a...parent-child relationship, and [now] as a parent myself, I see myself more as a servant of God, so it is a more of a a servant-employer relationship, which means that in the latter relationship you have less intimacy, but you have more responsibility when there's very specific work that you're supposed to be doing.

I think so much of the sort of struggle with authenticity in the American Jewish community, where the source of authenticity becomes...how religiously observant you are...it becomes this weighted thing...because of the separation from the language, and what's really interesting to me about this text is that it shows even when you're reading in the [original] language, even for the people who heard this [revelation], there's this separation. There's that "kaf" in there. This is only "ke-ilu." This is only "as if" we did this, as if we heard, as if we saw the light of God, and of course, they did see, but did they see it?