Scarcity and Plenitude: Thoughts on Some Recent Jewish Books.

Destroying illusions, creating realities.

In his 1980 book The Night Sky of the Lord, Alan Ecclestone -- an Anglican clergyman writing to understand the Christian relationship to the fate of the Jews under Hitler -- offered as useful a working definition of Judaism as one is likely to find. He called it "a radical, ruthless, confident attempt to come to the truth of our human condition." "Ruthless" must be understood in the light of the Yiddish ideal of mentshlekhkayt -- the repudiation of violence, the alleviation of suffering, and the love of study; Jewish ruthlessness is not battle-lust but the absolute commitment to destroying illusions, which so often screen us from the suffering we inflict. In its essence, Judaism is a form of intellectual fearlessness. Possibly that degree of fearlessness can only be justified by the amount of mercy released when the illusions are finally dispelled.

One of the realities that Judaism has faced for all its long history is competition for resources. From Abraham's treaty with Abimelech over a well to the present dispute over the Golan Heights, as simple a thing as water has been scarce in Israel; even the land of Israel itself was already inhabited when the people Israel arrived in it -- both the first and the second times -- and for nearly two millennia was more a metaphor than a polity. In Europe in that long interim, severe restrictions were often placed on Jews' ability to own land and to work in ordinary trades. Modern Europe and the Soviet Union produced new variations on the old restraints on Jews' liberties: on freedom to emigrate, freedom not to emigrate, freedom to live at all. And from the start, the architects of Jewish thought were keenly aware of competition and disparity, the refusal of brothers to be their brothers' keepers. "Have you no blessing for me, father?" cried the defrauded Esau; the complaint of the poor and marginal against the s ecure is essentially the same cry. Richard L. Rubenstein's disquieting book The Cunning of History postulated that competition -- the presence of a population for which there was no clear social use -- was the force that prompted the ruling powers of Germany and England in World War I to treat their young men as simply redundant, expendable, prefiguring the massive destruction of civilian populations under Hitler and Stalin.

Regina Schwartz, in The Curse of Cain (University of Chicago, 1997), attacks the paradigm of scarcity itself as a source of religious ethics and collective identity. Proceeding from a student's charged question, "But what about the Canaanites?" in a discussion of the Exodus narrative as a model for liberation movements, she demonstrates that the Exodus story is not purely a source of hope for the powerless but also a narrative of conquest for the powerful. She finds in the Bible's proscription of multiple allegiances (theological, ritual, ethnic) an intrinsically violent method of conceiving identity. Her investigations range from the nature of covenant and land ownership, to the narrow permissible range between endogamy and incest in biblical marriages, to the nineteenth-century American slave owner's tortured construction of "kinship" to exclude all blacks, enslaved or free, from citizenship. While keeping firmly in mind that the Bible was not the first text to establish a collective identity in violence, and that the Bible is too large and contradictory to be held to any one political viewpoint, she nevertheless charges that its influence has made a world where the assertion of difference is a matter of fear and hostility.

The descriptive and the prescriptive in biblical narrative are, of course, moving targets; in her search for the pattern of biblical exclusions, Schwartz occasionally looks for ethical models where they are not to be found. Her assumption (for example) that Jacob's marriage, falling as it does at exactly the right degree of kinship, "should offer the ideal model for the people of Israel," rather than involving Jacob in yet another relationship of deceit, competition, and conflict with his father-in-law, seems to hope for anthropology to override personality. Gabriel Josipovici remarks in his new book On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion (Yale, 1999) that many biblical stories seem "carefully designed to confuse the moralist and the theologian, to say to him: take us seriously if you dare and see what happens!" Schwartz's premise is that "we need to take the ethics of these stories seriously because such stories are the cultural locus where, if anywhere, ethics are encoded"--but if anywhere is a ver y big if; maybe ethics really are not and cannot be encoded, and every code from the Decalogue to the rabbinic responsa is a painstaking and doomed attempt to systematize unique and unrepeatable situations. The Bible achieves much of its moral effect by counterexample; maybe the shock of seeing Jacob strapping on goatskins to pass as Esau, or waking up next to Leah when she has passed as Rachel, teaches us ethics more memorably than any principle could. Certainly it teaches us that scarcity can arise from irrational preference as well as from systemic injustice.

Schwartz's work on the relations between land ownership and nationalism is some of the most powerful in the book; her recurrent play on the words Adam, adamah (earth) and the am ha-aretz (in Jewish tradition the ignorant "man of the earth," the "clod") serves as a reminder that the story of Eden is not primarily about sexual sin but about the human relationship to land. She traces the fierce contention over the earth and its fruits from Cain and Abel to the rise of nationalism in a biblically literate Europe. In one of the more painful moments of the book, she looks at the rise of Zionism in light of the parallel rise of German nationalism (an influence one also notes with discomfort in the postcards and coffee-table books of modern Israel's early days, with their artless photos of flags and tanks and strapping young women in uniform). She finds the Bible's insistence on distinctions and impermeable boundaries a sinister model in a world where the need for civil coexistence and negotiation is ever more press ing. She calls for a new method of grounding identity in plenitude rather than scarcity.

In order to puncture the inflated certainties of nationalism, Schwartz returns to a fundamental query: "How can land be owned?" Yet there are other, competing fundamental queries. If ownership is a legal fiction, what it fictionalizes is the need to live on and use land -- to depend on it, to love it, not to be evicted from it, to trust that you have a home and that you know where your food will be coming from. Nationalism is an extension of ownership -- the fiction turned into a myth, and a dangerous myth -- but it does have an origin in real life, in the need (which so easily becomes desperate) for whatever form of security we can grasp. In the Exodus narrative the Israelites live for forty years in the wilderness marvelously preserved on manna, not needing so much as clothing or shoe leather, but they had supernatural intervention at a level we cannot expect. During those years not only was the slavery in Egypt repealed but the curse of Adam suspended: they had no need to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.

Evan Eisenberg's The Ecology of Eden (Knopf, 1998) suggests why plenitude is elusive. We exhaust land: we leave ruin behind us in widening circles spreading outward from Eden. By a Hebrew pun, "cursed is the ground for thy sake" can be made to read "cursed is the ground by thy passing over," which is just what agricultural use is liable to do: Eden declines to Arcadia (in our day to suburbia) and Arcadia to scrubland and desert as human fertility devours without replacing the fertility of the land. A remarkable midrash names wheat as the forbidden fruit; in this sense the loss of paradise has everything to do with sexuality, or at least with reproduction, as a dependable food source multiplies our conception and the struggle to feed more mouths reduces the dependability of the food source.

Eisenberg is a polymath, as much at home in classical texts (Greek, Latin, Hebrew) as in biology. He writes an elegant, sly prose, as invigorating as his subject is painful; he seems to have set himself the task of becoming the Gibbon of ecological history, charting the decline and fall of the human empire. He rejoices in turns of phrase like "protoctists pop out of their protective cysts" and "the great mycelial clot beneath a toadstool"; of the burning of fossil fuels he remarks that the carbon released in the process "floods the carbon cycle, as if the dead should arise from their graves and flood the job market." His assessment of current agricultural practices is as memorable as it is severe:

To say that we are snatching food from our children's mouths is to put it too gently; what we are snatching from them is the very possibility of feeding themselves. The nutrients that wash from our fields and flush down our toilets are stolen from their protoplasm. Instead of eating the recycled remains of our ancestors, which is the natural order of things, we are eating our children. Lavish as it may look, the banquet that industrial agriculture spreads before us is the same one Thyestes set before Atreus.

Preindustrial agriculture does not (with a few exceptions) get much higher marks from Eisenberg, who is quite unsentimental about pastoral and tribal ways; all human and animal populations, he says, tend toward the "dysfunctional" because plenitude and scarcity alternate in a cycle of boom and bust. The booms become smaller and more laborious, and the busts more permanent: Mesopotamian agriculture was so successful at irrigation that it raised the brackish water table, thus permanently salinating the soil. The bucolic pastoral landscape gradually destroys its trees; as they are cut down for fuel and for building they are not replaced, since those picturesque sheep and goats eat up the shoots. (Eisenberg observes that pastoral poetry seems quite unaware of the possibility of pregnancy; the nymphs and shepherds couple without a thought of sorrow or of conception. Perhaps the Arcadian tombstone is a memento of birth as well.) The New World's apparent wilderness was "not virgin, but widowed" by the European settl ers' disruption of native culture and agriculture through disease and attack; it had been subject to human management, and not all of that management was sustainable in the long term. Eisenberg does find some encouragement in the past -- he admires the "remarkable cunning and tact" of certain tribal forms of land clearing and forestry -- but it will take extraordinary ingenuity and cooperation to develop techniques of this kind on a global scale for a population of more than six billion.

We have, of course, the motivation. As of this writing, Ford Motor Company has withdrawn from the stonewalling Global Climate Coalition, having concluded that climatology is not bunk; possibly the tide of willful ignorance is turning at the corporate level. It turned some time ago among scientists, and Eisenberg reports in detail on the attentive and intricate technologies that some of them are evolving. His book, forthright as it is about the seriousness of our condition, is something more demanding -- something more Jewish -- than a doomsday report: a radical, ruthless, confident attempt to imagine a means of sustainable survival in the teeth of the evidence against it. He views genetic engineering with a jaundiced but not a horrified eye, recognizing that it is likely to be used carelessly for short-term gain by corporate interests but can also be incorporated into the more cunning and tactful plans of the ecological strategists. The name he coins for their improvisatory approach is "Earth Jazz" -- a reci procal, provisional, witty, and prolonged interaction in which each player leaves silences for the others to be heard. The metaphor of play is, in spite of itself, one of the most joyless and earnest to have infected theological language in modern times, but Eisenberg gets it right: Earth Jazz is not a forced optimism, but begins in "earth blues."

Until you have felt in your bones what it is to be a species that cannot help changing the world -- a species that in making its paradise unmakes Eden -- your attempts at a joyful, playful dialogue with nature are bound to ring hollow. Until you have sat down and wept by the rivers of Babylon, you will not discover that they, too, flow from Eden. When you do make that discovery, the Lord's song will rise in your throat unbidden.

The paradox of dialogue with nature -- and of jazz -- is that only in the most extravagant superfluity can we find our necessity; nature, in good health, is lavish and wasteful. Frugality is pinching, anemic; it leaves us in a permanent state of anxiety, in which our brother's keep is such a liability that it is no wonder if we deny our duty toward him. Merle Feld's memoir, A Spiritual Life (SUNY, 1999), affectingly chronicles a frugal childhood and the flowering of her life once she entered the middle class through marriage. Any attempt to remake the global economy and ecology would do well to remember how stunting poverty is -- how it plants in a child's mind the pattern of self-denial: "Don't ask for what you can't have. Try not to want what you can't have. Try not to want anything very much."

Unable to afford synagogue tickets, Feld's mother sat at home all day on Yom Kippur and read to herself from the prayer book; Feld as a child reproduced that self-isolation by refusing all invitations and experiences that might cost money. At the commuter college she attended, she became enamored of Jewish observance, met and married a young rabbinical student, and found herself in a wide circle of friends at the birth of the Havurah movement (which brought Jewish liturgy and Torah study into the living rooms of young people disaffected from synagogue life). Her husband's work took them to Illinois, then to Princeton for nineteen years; Jewish feminism emboldened her to study, teach, and write; she had two children and became a force in many students' lives; she evolved her own forms of superfluity.

Feld writes from what are commonly taken to be the intellectual sidelines: as the rabbi's wife, not the rabbi; a writer, not a scholar; the cook who makes the challah and the Shabbat dinner, not the charismatic teacher the students come to hear. But she is firm in her insistence that the generous creation of an atmosphere is a crucial part of the enterprise of religion and learning: the security, the enchantment, the sense of being cared for, all work on the neophyte's mind to relax and expand it. To surround the people you love with good things of your own making, she says, "has a spiritual force that the devotees of Martha Stewart both sense and miss." (Anyone old enough -- and privileged enough -- to remember the role of faculty wife when it was still full-time work will remember the complexity and ease that a woman who loved the role could bring to it: Mrs. Dalloway with brains, Martha Stewart without self-promotion.) Of course it takes plenitude to accomplish this: you have to be able to shop without fe ar, you have to be free to want something very much and to find a way of creating it. Feld, having lived without plenitude, never takes it for granted. Approaching fifty, contemplating all the ways she has defended herself in response to the question "What do you do?," she thinks the real answer may be "I make Shabbes." That answer both confirms and refutes Regina Schwartz's essential point, that we can shift our paradigm from scarcity to plenitude at will: confirms it, because plenitude is deliberately made, and cannot be made unless it is first imagined; refutes it because plenitude is not manufactured ex nihilo, the resources must really be there. God, by reputation, is able to make something out of nothing; the rest of us are bound by the laws of thermodynamics.

Feld's book alternates prose with poetry; she speaks of how, after a particularly dismissive snub from a college writing teacher, she stopped writing verse and went back to it only years later. The period of inhibition has left its mark: the verbal play in the poems is more the play of intelligence than of sensuality, as sensual as the subjects often are. Poetry at its very best somehow manages to suggest each by means of the other. But Feld is absolutely right to reach for heightened language to speak of her parents, of love, of ritual, of Israel and the intifada, of the dark truths of motherhood. In language too, it is essential to want and to ask and to have.

Poetry is a plenitude that has been artificially turned into a scarcity by a culture that cannot use it as "information" and therefore finds it difficult and obscure. Robert Pinsky, who has been energetically using his position as poet laureate to reverse this impression (and whose working-class origins happily render him immune to the charge of elitism), has recently issued a little anthology called The Handbook of Heartbreak (Morrow, 1998) which explores the question of why poems of loss and grief are so satisfying to read. From the Middle English "Western Wind" to the contemporary poet Heather McHugh's "What He Thought" -- and including some forgotten Elizabethans that Pinsky is fond of -- the book makes it clear that poetry is not too hard for us, neither is it far off: it is in our mouths and in our hearts, in the pleasure of speaking it and in its direct hold on our emotions. It is "obscure" only because emotion is not measured in dollars or bytes; because the immeasurable frightens people who have bee n discouraged from wanting anything but success. To a culture whose cure for emotional poverty is therapeutic formula, verbal plenitude is incomprehensible.

A complex web of relationships emerges between the poems, both by the editor's intent and by the tendency of chaos to fall into order. The losses he considers are small and large: love, honor, health, parents, work, physical dignity, social standing, political security, life. Edward Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos," a poem Pinsky has admired for a long time, tells in tight, restrained meters and with remarkable delicacy of a woman's ill-fated marriage, closing on the terrible image of her life as "like a stairway to the sea / Where down the blind are driven." Frank Bidart's "The Yoke" keeps starting over, in helpless, fragmented phrases, a lover's half-sleeping expectation of seeing his dead lover's face. Edward Dyer cries on the death of Sir Philip Sidney: "Time crieth out, my ebb is come: his life was my spring tide." Thomas Nashe's sixteenth-century "Litany in Time of Plague" ("The plague full swift goes by; / I am sick, I must die / Lord have mercy on us!") takes its place with poems by Mark Doty and Carl Phillips on men dying of AIDS. Mark Turpin's "Last Hired," on firing an incompetent worker, is followed -- stunningly -- by Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"; no one who has ever lost a job will read the Dickinson poem again without an instant of gratitude to Pinsky for making the connection. There are overheard voices: C. K. Williams, in "Fragment," is transfixed by the voice of a murdered convenience store clerk crying "God! God!" on the surveillance tape as he falls to the ground. Alan Shapiro, after beginning "Old Joke" with an elaborate invocation to the perfect and deathless Apollo, cuts to the voice of his old father, "half blind, and palsied, at the toilet, / he's shouting at his penis, Pigs, you! Piss! Piss!," and then his mother on her bad knee hobbles by and calls "who are you talking to in there? / and he replies, no one you would know, sweetheart." As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, said the blinded Gloucester in Lear: they kill us for their sport. But Sh apiro's parents laugh, "godlike, better than gods," refusing to let their hearts be broken any sooner than necessary, or for any but the last and absolute reason.

It would give away Pinsky's purpose -- and in any case there is no way to paraphrase the poem with any adequacy -- to say much about Heather McHugh's final piece, which presents the full conundrum, personal and political, of the link between loss and verse. Suffice it to say that Pinsky does not see the emotional power of poems as a private or wallowing matter. If we can have our hearts broken -- and it happens again and again: one only arrives at the position of the laughing old couple by having survived severance many times -- heartbreak becomes a matter of public importance: policy cannot be made, medicine cannot be practice, jobs cannot be abolished nor merchandise sold without a duty to heartbroken human beings, who will not, in their extremity, accept any illusion. The central fact of our lives is the approach -- and the attack -- of various forms of scarcity: we lose the people and the beliefs and even the landscapes we love, and we cannot have them again. When we die we will still be loved by people who cannot have us, and one of the few forms of access to that lost emotional link is through the relief of speaking the loss in cadence. Christ, that my love were in my arms. In what sense is Pinsky's book Jewish? In its urgency, its insistence on the truth of our human condition: that the dead do not praise, that all flesh is grass and its goodness as the flowers of the field, that the grass withers and the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it. Poetry is a call to teshuvah, return: to renewed intimacy with the life that beats temporarily in our bodies.

In some international crisis of the seventies I became convinced that the world would not last another week -- that we were all about to be bombed into oblivion and could do nothing to stop it. I came home from work and put Heinrich Sch[ddot{u}t]z's "Fili me Absalon" on the record player as the only piece of music equal to such dismay: the horns with their long sober notes, the bass soloist crying with fine control the hoarse shouts of wild grief. As the record played I slowly became convinced that a world that had produced such music could, if it had to, die proudly. It may yet have to do so. Schwartz, Eisenberg, Feld and Pinsky are right in their various ways to insist that we behave as if plenitude is possible; if we do not, it may not emerge. But plenitude can be understood only against the possibility -- the recurrent certainty -- of its absence.

CATHERINE MADSEN is a contributing editor for Cross Currents.