A Letter to Elizabeth.

Dear Elizabeth,

You asked me to write a paper about religious commitment and Biblical Studies. As I mused and mused, both terms became less and less clear. I found myself unsure what "religion" meant, what "commitment" is, once subjected to critical analysis. Both terms are meant to describe specific desires. Both words are at their best when describing relationships of agency, and relationships articulated with clarity. They are less useful when talking about religious desires and commitments that are marked by ambivalence, or by the storminess of difficult relationships, or by anger and opposition. They are even less helpful when thinking about how ennui and annoyance, too, are forms of commitment and modes of religiosity. The latter are the kinds of things I have been considering recently: how do we analyze forms of religion and commitment when these are not carefully articulated, when they are vestigial, undocumented, nondogmatic, and everyday. In terms of Bible and related texts, I have become less interested in questi ons of hermeneutics, and more intrigued by how the Bible -- as such, as a cultural artifact, as a "thing" -- works in our societies, and by the meanings and effects of this cultural work. I find myself less and less interested in folks who already "know" they are religious, and already know what their Bibles mean, and increasingly intrigued by those whose relationships to these things is ingrained, vaguely oppositional, accidental or ignored. It's here that I begin to reflect on religious commitment and Biblical Studies, aided by a series of anecdotes in need of analysis.

I pick up my copy of Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia. BHS for short. Flip through. Remember for a moment how the North Carolina humidity used to make the open pages curl up at the sides, as if they were animate. But that's a fleeting thought because I am on my way back into pages that mean something to me when I read them, mean lots of things, actually, depending on where my fingers and eyes fall in this massive collection, on how I am reading that day, who I'm reading with, who I'm reading for and in front of, how many things I remember as I do. I pick up BHS. But this has never been, nor is it now, my only Bible or my Bible of choice.

I remember my introduction to the chosen text of Old Testament/Biblical Studies, when I was twenty-three years old. At graduate school, in my first Old Testament seminar. No one ever explained why this was the authorized text of our studies. It was just assumed, and I pieced together the answer along the way of a few years. My Hebrew Bible - or just plain "Bible," as we called it where I lived -- took different forms. Here are a few. One was covered in white faux leather, with fake gold leaf at the edges. Another, older copy had brown-yellowed pages. Another I recall, had brightly colored illustrations, a children's Bible. Still another Bible filled the synagogue pews; there the Bible came to us divided into pieces to be read each Shabbat. These were interspersed with readings from the prophets. I was in my mid-twenties before I would ever read a book of Ketuvim or Neviim straight through at a sitting, or think that this might be worth doing.

Knowing the Bible these and other ways, it took some doing to get used to a Hebrew Bible where all the parts of all the books come in order. It took some doing to enter the odd world in which the moniker "critical" and the BHS text -- with the so-called "critical apparatus" at the bottom of the page and the explanatory handbook that went with it -- went hand in hand. It took some time to figure out all the things that are at stake in defining a field of study. In our case Biblical Studies as historically constituted denies its commitments to reading biblical text. Except in the most very recent political and ideological interventions, this practice silences the complicated ways that readers care for and care about the Bible. Religious care and religious commitment (I will use the words care and commitment interchangeably) are supposed to distinguish Bible Study from Biblical Studies. Bible Study is what one does if one has overt religious commitments. Biblical Studies is done by putatively tabling such commit ments and desires, a repression done historically in the name of objectivity, science, and attaining greater truth. Too many commitments, it seems, takes one's status to do Biblical Studies and throws it into question. Too much religion and one can no longer do "Biblical Studies" as such. Too much caring undercuts one's ability to speak with authority.

Furthermore, the commonsense understanding is that if one cares about the Bible, that "care" is religious. In this general parlance, one's relation to the Bible is either "religious" or its putative opposites: secular, scientific, objective, critical. If someone cares about Bible, that person must be religious, goes the common logic. If they don't care, they are secular (or, perhaps, belong to another religion where they care about other sacred texts). This discourse, I contend, leaves out the many many ways that people care about the Bible. Not all who care about the Bible are "religious" in any easily understood way. There are lots of ways to care for the Bible, lots of modes of caring about it, and reasons for both.

Thus, I argue two major points about commitments. First, in discourses of Biblical Studies, cares and commitments are not absent, only silenced. Second, in general terms, we analyze care and commitments too narrowly. The result is that we lack ways of talking about and explaining the many relationships people have with biblical texts, biblical stories, and Bible itself. In a nutshell, if care is always "religious," and if "religion" is about some kind of overt display, practice, and/or articulated belief, then we are left with no critical language to describe commitments that are not enunciative, not performed, and for commitments marked by ambivalence. How are we to speak of, speak as, and speak to people who read Bible without the emotional equivalent of a cross around their neck? How will we speak of, as, and to Bible readers who do care about the Bible-not within the increasingly narrow terms of Bible--caring, but still care?

The ethos of critical objectivity makes it difficult--barely possible--for one to voice commitments and still be deemed a proper scholar of religious texts. One result is that commitments are voiced only in private, among friends. Intellectual twists and turns make certain that these commitments are kept from public study. This silencing concerns me not because I think that "religious commitment" per se is either a good or a bad thing. My concern is more elemental than that. It focuses on the dangers of knowledge produced within an ethos of enforced silences of any kind. From many directions we've learned the danger of silence. We've been robbed of the humans and of the humanity that might otherwise have prospered. We've had stolen from us the various kinds of creativity, comfort, and wisdom that might have bubbled up and developed were they not restricted by prevailing habits about things that should not be said in public. We've learned about silence's disfigurement and death. And less dramatic but still tr agic is that the dishonesties of informal and self-enforced silences deprive people of things they-we--need to know. Informal and self-enforced silences, the habits of what may be said and what must remain unsaid, leave all of us an intelligentsia that is remarkably dull and uninteresting. Disciplined silences erase our vibrancy and the fighting chance of saying something important. Silences about how and why we care about--or rage against, or disdain or love--Bible means that we scholars are forever removed from any real, public discussion.

An anecdote. It's August in Atlanta. It is daytime, perhaps mid-afternoon. It is hot. I'm at work on my book Travels in the Holy Land, a study of how Americans experience the Bible visually and environmentally-when they see it performed in Passion Plays, see it in theme parks, landscape replicas and other built environments. The doorbell rings. I rise from my seat, all 170 pregnant pounds of me, and I walk to get the door. Just over the threshold are three people holding their Bibles. Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm not interested in talking to them. It's too complicated. Them with their Bible. Me with mine. I tell them I'm Jewish which usually makes them pause for the moment it takes me to say good-bye politely and close the door. Only today they've prepared for this contingency. Their comeback line is this: "Oh good. So you care about the Bible." "No," I respond, with a good-bye and a firm movement that shuts the door. I return to my manuscript. The discussion ends because I care in ways that are not simple to ex plain.

One more anecdote. About my friend Barry. Early forties. Works for the Cartoon Network. Ponders questions like: will Brazilians watch Hannah Barbera cartoon reruns in profitable numbers? or which oversized puffy cartoon characters will appear next to me at the Children's Day press conference with the First Lady of Costa Rica? Telecolonialism he calls it when he's feeling ironic. He plays guitar in a retro fifties lounge band. He's the husband of my friend Phyllis, and father of their young daughter Mariah. Barry is not "religious" by anyone's definition. He doesn't go to church or synagogue or mosque, or even the local drumming circle. He has no informal spiritual practice that I know of. But last winter he started reading the Hebrew Bible voraciously. Wound his way through the various books. As Phyllis describes it, his reading is "not just spiritual and not just intellectual; it's just Barry." Can't exactly explain it, doesn't seek out professional guidance for his reading, he just asks me every so often t o recommend a book that might help him through the hard-to-understand parts. I struggle for an answer. I pass over guides that are too academic and narrow, and those that are too confessional and Christ-centered. I come up with nothing. He struggles on, dependent on the random choices that appear in the Bible Section at Barnes and Noble. I am left feeling that my training in Biblical Studies has failed us both.

In the anecdote about the Witnesses at the door, I am stuck between the oppositions that mark discourse on religion and the Bible. Yes, I do "care" about the Bible, in my own complicated way. I claim lack of interest in order to avert an hour with missionaries who've stuck their foot in my front door. I am trapped by the discourse in which either one cares in a recognizably "religious" way, or one does not care, by the assumption that one must be "religious" to care about the Bible. In the second anecdote my friend Barry tries to find some help for his Bible reading among the interpretive guides out there. He fails because of the same problem: the assumption about the Bible is that if one reads it, one cares, and that this "care" is always "religious," always about faith or a search for eventual faith. Biblical scholarship fails him by silencing humane concerns and commitments in the name of scholarship as such, as much as by its professional practices that obscure much of its insights -- even radical insights--for non-scholarly but very intelligent readers.

In an odd twist of the academy it seems somehow transgressive to speak of cares, commitments, and religious commitments at that, within a mode of interpretation that historically demands the performance of objectivity. It seems radical -- still, after so many challenges from so many directions -- to inject care, politics, concerns, and commitments into intellectual life. But even within these radical interventions it has been difficult to parse commitments of religion, whether clear or less-than-clear. "Critical" Bible reading emerged historically as the opposite of "religion." Biblical Studies was to supply scientific exactitude to the reading of Bible. It was to replace other, revelatory modes of interpretation. As a result, critical discourse by definition had (has?) to silence religion. A reimagined critical discourse not dependent on this silencing, one engaged in unraveling it, might offer some chance of producing knowledge that matters, understanding that helps, and wisdom not caught in this blinding trap. It might provide us intellectuals with a more vibrant role in interpreting these texts that remain powerful, compelling, and repulsive in so many complicated and unexplained ways.

Miriam Peskowitz is author of Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender and History numerous articles on Hebrew Bible, Early Rabbinic Judaism, and Jewish Feminism, and co-editor of Judaism Since Gender She is currently Visiting Associate Professor in Emory University's Institute for Jewish Studies.