Year End

We’ve been investigating the 119^th Psalm since the 30^th of June.  Nearly half a year now, and we still have 37 verses to go.  But this is the end of the year, so I’m taking a break and providing something else to think about at this moment.  I want to share some citations from Avivah Zornberg’s book, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus.  Each one is worth a study, but until we finish Psalm 119, we’ll delay further comment.  For now, I’ll leave you with these:

“What psychoanalysis ultimately tells us is that  . . . our bodies are always haunted by nameless loss, by an ontological incompleteness against which we defend . . . by our specific form of ‘Egyptomania.’”[1]

“The fantasy of escape from the struggle of existence must be deeply addressed if one is to find the vital center of one’s being.”[2]

“‘May Your compassion prevail over Your anger!’  The blessing acknowledges the uncanny, the violent, the inscrutable in the divine persona.”[3]

“The Golden Calf is described in the book of Psalms as a crisis of forgetting.  ‘They forgot God their Savior’ (Ps. 106:21).  The whole wonderous saga of the Exodus, says the Psalmist, has simply dropped from their minds—a process that began right after the crossing of the Red Sea: ‘They speedily forgot His deeds.’  A strange amnesia brings them to the crisis of the Gold Calf and to Moses’ reaction: ‘God was about to destroy them, if Moses had not stood in the breach against Him.”[4]

“Acts reshape the world of possibility.”[5]   Nietzsche

“Life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.”[6]   Jorge Luis Borges

“The joy that a person should express in performing the commandments and in the love of God who commanded them, is a great worship of God.  Whoever avoids expressing this joy is worthy of punishment . . .”[7]

 “Excessive joy is, then, a response to catastrophic anxiety.”[8]

“Daily prayer, in its repetitiousness, even its tedium, arms one with words and stories that penetrate unconscious life.  Daily prayer engages with anxiety about survival, about the economics of everyday life and the energies required to sustain that life.”[9]

“People are possessed by guilt, shame, and resentment about their idolatrous past; they project their hatred onto God.  They put into God unbearable elements of their inner world.  In doing so, they constrict their world of possibilities and, in effect, prophesy their own fate.”[10]

 “Mourning for this loss [of the mother] is an essential element of development; the inner world of a human being is made of the work of mourning.  To refuse to acknowledge loss results in depression” ‘My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? . . . The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.’”[11]

“Learning how to lose is a sobering but liberating process.”[12]

“Difference, rather than ecstatic merging, creates the dynamic of relationship.”[13]

“Conventional behavior becomes a form of idolatry.  Common sense obviates any other kind of sense.  One ‘goes off at the shallow end.’”[14]

“For R. Leiner, to be a normal human being is to acknowledge inner trouble and to pray.”[15]

See you next year.

Topical Index:  Avivah Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy, Leviticus

[1] Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 45, cited in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 15.

[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 16.

[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 21.

[4] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 26.

[5] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 31.

[6] Cited in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 34.

[7] Rambam, The Laws of Lulav, cited in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus(Schocken Books, 2022), p. 52.

[8] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 58.

[9] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 90.

[10] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 95.

[11] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 102, citing Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 41.

[12] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 102.

[13] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 105.

[14] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 105, citing Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, p. 146.

[15] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 105.