In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava

such care and insight, Auerbach was something of a rare fish in literary circles of the early twentieth century, swimming against the stream of interpretation that regarded the Bible with enlightened condescension, ranking it far below the Greek imagination.⁹ As an exile himself—a German Jew forced into exile by the Nazis in 1935—he regarded the urgent realism of the Bible, especially the narratives of expulsion and bondage, as a key to his own self-understanding and more generally as a key that might unlock the hermetic codes of modern literature.

      By concentrating on the form and style of these sacred texts and contrasting them with Homer, Auerbach made various discoveries. One in particular has to do with the laconic and rough tongue of biblical narratives. In Auerbach’s reading, biblical narrative is far more restrained than Homer’s epic poetry: it holds much back and does not explain everything; it leaves things and characters partially unsaid, unknown, and unexplained; and it controls language with an ascetic discipline. His primary example is the command to Abraham in the matter of his son, Isaac (Gen. 22:1). From out of nowhere, from some mysterious height or undetermined depth, God suddenly appears to Abraham and demands obedience. In contrast to Homer’s narratives, very little is said about the setting in which this happens, the characters, or their motives, and even less is said about the nature of this unpredictable, unfathomable God. The contrast with Homer is illustrative: “Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come like Zeus or Poseidon from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations of his own heart been presented to us.”¹⁰ In contrast to Homer’s depiction of the gods, the Bible veils God with profiles of indeterminacy; he is devoid of anthropomorphic features, totally Other. In painting pictures of the divine with words instead of images, Israel deconstructed the common representations of pagan gods, choosing to envision God in impalpable, imponderable forms, without a vast array of visualizations. As a fitting illustration of this perspective, the symbol of emptiness became a rich allegory for the Jews, a signifier of the desert-like barrenness of YHWH. Legend has it, for example, that when Pompey conquered Israel and approached the Holy of Holies, he was startled to find an empty room. According to Tacitus, he remarked: “The shrine had nothing to reveal.” Pompey, it seems, expected something tangible, some effigy in burnished gold or bejeweled silver, but he found nothing of the sort. The significance of emptiness was lost on him; it was a blank and meaningless sign to him and his legions, but for the Jews there was splendor in emptiness. YHWH was an anagram of the desert landscape itself, a luminous void, making all images of G-d evaporate in the sun like puddles of water on the burning desert soil, turning them into a fleeting mirage that forever recedes before one’s eyes.¹¹

      Similar mirages or shadows are apparent in the Bible’s representation of its key characters. Though we clearly learn about biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible, there is nonetheless a shroud of secrecy, a penumbra of obscurity, and a subtle haziness that keeps them hidden from human knowledge. In considering these characters, we are faced with an impossible question like the one Moses poses to God: What is your name? The response, “I am who I am, YHWH,” is an answer with gaps and fissures, lacking in vowels, a reminder of divine ineffability. When Isaac is introduced, for example, we are only told that Abraham loves him, not whether he is handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, kind or cruel. Details are scant. In fragmentary speech and resounding silences, the narrative simply instructs Abraham to take Isaac and “go forth” (in the same spirit of Abraham’s first summons to leave his homeland and migrate to a new land in Gen. 12:1–3, a model for all intrepid explorers).¹² In the space of this terse narrative, we are introduced to the riddling and puzzling richness of the Bible. By leaving so much in a cloud of indeterminacy or secrecy, this narrative arouses in its readers a taste for mysteries that exist beyond the borders of what can be said and thought. The story pulses with hidden meanings and challenges the reader’s imagination to compensate for what is missing.¹³ In the silences, gaps, and missing vowels, biblical stories refrain from telling us what to think about each and every episode or character and subsequently invite us—or confront and cajole us—to supply our own meaning. As economical and austere as the narratives may be, there is untold treasure hiding here, gold mines under the dry desert soil.¹⁴

      Thus the reader journeys through the course of biblical narrative, as through the course of life, a lot like Abraham does, mystified and bewildered but beguiled and allured by the unthinkable. Homer’s narrative, by contrast, is a paean to what can be expressed and thought. (The Greek philosophers, of course, extended this confidence even further.) He gives us a feeling that almost everything can be described and understood: the passions of gods and men; the delights of physical existence; the adventures and dangers of life; the fears, cruelties, and valor of human beings; and even the awful and ennobling reality of death. Whereas Homer seeks to diminish the mystery of life, the Bible extends the obscurity and envelopes us in that mystery, placing human beings within its vast canopy. The Bible abhors transparency.

      In consequence, nephesh is a foil to transparency and a metaphor for the strange, opaque, twilight regions of the human person, for what is shadowy and slippery about human identity, for what only God can see (1 Sam. 16:7, 25:37; Ps. 44:22, 64:7). Though the soul is as intimate as one’s own breath, it remains a trace of the sacred Otherness that resides within us all, a mark of the unknown, as if it were engraved with a hieroglyph that stubbornly defeats decryption, like the tattoos on the body of Queequeg in Moby Dick (undecipherable “mystical treatises,” in Melville’s words).¹⁵

      While much of modern thought has sought to shrink the scope of the unknown, I agree with Emerson that artists—he singles out preachers, poets, and musicians—pay homage to the enigmas of life. “After the most exhausting census has been made . . . this is that which the preacher and poet and the musician speak to: the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown.”¹⁶ Perhaps intuitively, poets, preachers, and musicians build their works of art out of the dark materials of wonder and sublimity. They recognize the persistent presence of foreignness in the shadows of our being, even after the most careful and exhaustive census is performed. They are the best exegetes of the Bible.

      The Mutability and Eccentricity of Nephesh: A Center of Surprise

      Since the obscurity of the divine also extends to biblical characters, these souls are resistant to explanations that presume to offer absolute clarity. The shadows of the narratives cling to all of the characters like a spider’s web that has them—and us—in its clutch. One might say that the most intriguing characters of the Bible are the most entangled, the most scrambled and confused, the most human. There are so many layers to their mysterious souls because they undergo many surprising and dramatic changes, and they are never static. These characters advance and retreat, develop and regress, and are always subject to the wayward misfortunes and humiliations of life. Though freedom is a crucial attribute of these creatures, the narratives also show them bandied about and dragged along by events, leaves carried by the wind. No one epithet adequately summarizes these characters, because they have undergone too many changes for one designation to stick. Jacob (Ya’aqov) is a “heel-grabber,” but this label reveals nothing about the actual changes and revolutions in the course of his life. At the most, this label characterizes the genius of “Israel” (Jacob’s new name after wrestling with God) as a tradition of art and spirituality that confronts God with the wiles of a trickster, the combativeness of a wrestler, and the agony of a wounded warrior. It epitomizes the kind of wounded wisdom that is central to the painful history of Israel.

      With an eye trained on the surprises, agonies, and eccentricities in biblical art, we learn something valuable about the soul: it is a “center of surprise,” in Robert Alter’s nice choice of words.¹⁷ Though awakened and infused with the divine breath of life, the soul of biblical characters is also made of the stuff of earth: dust, mud, and funk. What else can account for the imperfections and follies of people as seen in biblical narrative; what else explains their astonishing array of beauty and vileness? The highest aptitudes and possibilities of human beings are surely celebrated and extolled in the Bible, but rarely without digging into the lows, nadirs, and dregs of their lives. Rabbi Hillel caught this play of irony in the Bible