Death of Moses Revisited: Repetition and Creative Memory in Freud and the Rabbis William Kolbrener Learning mourning

may be the achievement of a lifetime. 1

Stanley Cavell For Freud, Jonathan Lear writes, Judaism is a religion of repetition.2 The Jews, in Freud s genealogy, re-enact the primal murder of the father in the killing of Moses,

and through the repression of its memory fall prey, as Robert A. Paul explains Freud, to a collective obsessional neurosis, namely Judaism itself. The refusal to remember turns into the repetition of apparently trivial or pointless rules, ordinances, ceremonies, prohibitions and self-accusations. In the Judaism understood to be a religion of repetition, the Torah is merely an instruction manual to

be recited, copied, taught, studied, and infinitely replicated Freud s figuration of Judaism is linked centrally to his representation of Moses, particularly his death his slaying, in the story Freud tells, at the hands of the people of Israel. The shared obsessional neurosis of guilt, part of the ambiguous Jewish legacy to the West, has its antecedent and cause

in the murder of Moses (HDRL 148). To be sure, Freud s enlightenment prejudices, his embrace of nineteenth-century scientific models, as well as his likely internalization of fin de siecle anti-Semitic conceptions of the Jew conspire to produce his narrative of primal crime, repetition and guilt.3 Even with Freud s fantasies of Jewish origins rejected, however, Moses and Monotheism, remains important for

its insights into what Richard Bernstein describes as the meaning of a religious tradition the nature of religious transmission, or what Freud describes as the uniting of the influences of the present and the past. 4 While turning away from Freud s account of Moses murder, I

want to import some of the arguments of Moses and Monotheism to understand a different set of representations of the death of Moses those in rabbinic literature, the aggadic figurations or interpretive stories of the Talmud. In both rabbinic and Freudian narratives, Moses death figures in the respective conceptions of transmission particularly how the people of Israel perpetuate

the Law. Though putting aside the genealogical narrative of Moses and Monotheism, I nonetheless emphasize what Lear describes as the volume s central insight: that it is only when one kills off the messenger that the message gets installed (HDRL 91). To be sure, the nature of this killing-off is different for Freud and the sages of the Talmud; for the

latter, the killing off is not the literal event which it is for Freud.5 To understand the rabbinic representation of Moses death or more figurative killing-off, I elaborate another insight of Moses and Monotheism that death and forgetting are central to the transmission of the Law from Moses to the People of Israel. The representations of Moses in

the Talmud show the rabbis meditating on forgetting, death and even murder in ways which foreground not so much guilt, but anxiety in facing the demands of transmission, particularly mourning and the creative remembrance it entails. What I call the hermeneutics of mourning the rabbinic response to loss figured in the narratives of Moses death shows, I argue, more

of an affinity to Freud s own secular science, than the caricature of the Jew and Judaism of Freud s volume on the Jews and their leader.6 For the contours of the religion of the rabbis resist not only the Freudian conception of Judaism but the conception of religious experience shared in many respects by neo-Freudians like Lear and Hans Loewald whose

works are much more sympathetic to the religious impulse. These later thinkers attempt to salvage the religious impulse through showing its affinity to versions of mystical and ecstatic experience which manifest an archaic or primal

unity. The rabbis, by contrast, emphasize a form of engagement which re-enacts not unity, but creative repetition and differentiation. In the death of Moses of the figured by the rabbis, I argue finally, there are uncanny antecedents for us, echoes of psychoanalytic practice. ii. death of Moses For Freud, Jewish history begins with repetition. Fate, as Freud writes,

had brought the great deed and misdeed of primaeval days, the killing of the father-figure, closer to the Jewish people by causing them to repeat it on the person of Moses, an outstanding father-figure. It was a case of acting out instead of remembering, as happens so often with neurotics during the

work of analysis (SE 23.88-89). The Jewish people are neurotics, guilty of acting out repeating instead of remembering. At once rapturously devoted to the newly appeared father-God Moses, they also show their ambivalence. With no place in the framework of the religion of Moses for a direct expression of the murderous hatred of the father, the people

of Israel, moved by the same hostility which had once driven the sons into killing their admired and dreaded father, repeat the murder of the primal father in the slaying of Moses (SE 23.134). Because of their insatiable guilt for the crime that they do not admit the Jews initiate a history of theology as failure of acknowledgement

they make the commandments grow ever stricter, more meticulous and even more trivial. Protecting themselves from conscious knowledge of the primal crime, they take solace in an ever-more intensive adherence to the Law. The so called ethical ideals embraced by the Jews possess, Freud continues, the characteristic uncompleted and incapable of completion of obsessional neurotic

reaction-formations. We can guess, too, he adds, that they serve the secret purposes of punishment (SE 23.135).7 In the Freudian account, Judaism stands at the foundation of a Western theological tradition permitting only what Loewald describes as repetition as passive reproduction. 8 Memory as a means to creatively re-organize the psyche a gesture towards the past with a future

telos is unknown to Freud s monotheism of Moses. Loewald assimilates the Freudian conception of this obsessional neurotic religious personality to Mircea Eliade s anthropological primitive for whom there is neither an emphasis on individuality, nor on process, just timeless repetitions (Loewald 99). Unable to achieve the active and creative form of memory which would liberate him from repetition as mere

replication, this figure merely repeats the gestures of another. He never aspires to the level of a truly historical being; he remains always in the atemporal present (Loewald 100). The condition of modernity for Eliade is the embracing of creative memory, what Adam Phillips calls a form of memory which has a future in mind. 9 But the dialectical structure

of productive commemoration of the appropriation of the past for the future, made emblematic in Freud s twice quoted passage from Goethe: what thou has inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine is absent from the primitive consciousness (SE 23.207). So also is individuation, the creative means of memorializing and creatively re-structuring origins, by which identifying with

the past allows for the differentiation of the self (Loewald 171). For Freud s Jew, there is only non-productive repetition, always existing in a primitive fore-history, lacking both individuality and the creativity.10 At the origins of such repetition is the slaying of Moses by Israel, forever unacknowledged, deferred in the observance of the meaningless intricacies of the Law.

iii. death of Moses revisited In the Freudian representation of transmission, the guilt of Israel is central; in the rabbinic representations of the death of Moses and the transmission that follows in a series of aggadic narratives in tractate T murah of the Babylonian Talmud not guilt, but anxiety over the loss of Moses is central. Rav Yehuda said in

the name of Shmuel: three thousand laws were forgotten during the period of mourning for Moses (16a). In this figuration, the trauma of Moses death and the loss of his privileged access to the divine is represented in the loss of the Law. Not only is Moses gone, but the clarity and singularity of his prophetic knowledge as well. To

this, the people of Israel turn to the newly anointed leader of Israel, Joshua. Ask! they demand. The question represents a desire to recapture the prophetic experience lost with their leader; more centrally, it represents an anxiety about inhabiting a world without the prophetic certainty of their leader Moses. God s response in this narrative, a verse from Deuteronomy (30:12) It is

not in Heaven emphasizes that the Law has already been given at Sinai, and, no longer in the province of the divine, has passed to the people of Israel. Notwithstanding the supplication of the Israelites, and their desire to recover a transcendent truth, God, in the rabbinic rendering, returns that there is no longer recourse to the certainty achieved

through the initial revelation to Moses on Sinai. The Talmud provides accounts of similar stories, with, each time, the people making the same demand to Phinehas, Eleazar and Samuel as they had earlier to Joshua (T murah 16a). Though Moses is gone, the persistent desire to return to the prophetic knowledge which he represents remains. In each of these accounts, the

sages show the people of Israel preferring a passive access to a transcendent truth, resisting the engagement in the processes of interpretation which God s rejoinder entails.

In Moses death, the people of Israel face both mortality and doubt: Rav Yehudah said in the name of Shmuel: Three thousand laws were lost during the period of mourning of Moses. After the death of Moses, the narrative continues, if those who pronounced a vessel impure were in the majority, they declared it impure, and if those who

pronounced the vessel pure were in the majority, they declared it pure (T murah 15b). Lacking the clarity of insight available to the prophet, the rabbis enter the realm of disagreement. For Moses, the law would have been clear and singular (and the object either pure or impure); for the rabbis, however, it becomes a subject for debate. From this perspective, the persistent entreaties

Ask can be seen as expressing anxiety about occupying that realm of doubt, a desire to return to the transcendental truth of Torah represented in the figure of Moses. Where the Freudian narrative focuses on the trauma entailed by the giving of the Law and the people s subsequent rebellion, the rabbinic account focuses on the loss of the

singularity of the Law which Moses death represents and the people s refusal to face up to the consequences of that loss. In the rabbinic representation, the people of Israel show themselves to lack the characteristic which for Lear represents a primary psychological virtue courage. Lear s conception of courage (a synthesis of Aristotle and Freud) entails facing the

rip in the fabric of life acknowledging and tolerating loss so that creative meaning becomes possible. The alternative to the development in courage in the face of loss is traumatic neurosis. 11 So the failure of Israel, in Lear s terms, can be understood as a lack of courage a form of neurotic fixation on the figure of Moses. With

their persistent demand for the return of Moses, the people of Israel show that they do not know how to mourn. That is, they do not have the courage to mourn.

Without such courage, Israel is unable to inherit and transmit the Law for the rabbis, integral aspects of the same process. In another Talmudic narrative of the same tractate, detailing Moses final moments before death, Joshua, the anointed leader of the people, is figured as an ambivalent even unfit agent for the transmission of the Law. For the younger

prophet is in denial about death and loss. When Moses was departing to enter Gan Eden to his death and the after life he turns to Joshua: Ask me to resolve any uncertainties you have (T murah 16a). Preceding his passing, Moses attempts to mitigate the uncertainties and doubts that he knows will follow upon his death. The

elder prophet acknowledges the principle of yeridot ha dorot the decline in generations as a hermeneutic principle; his appeal to Joshua is an attempt to limit the inevitable consequences of that decline.12 Joshua s response, however, reveals a failure to acknowledge the inevitability of loss and death

a failure further to understand the conditions of transmission. Did I ever for

a minute go to another place? Joshua asks. I was always by your side, he affirms, your right-hand man. That what Joshua says is true makes it no less a denial. Didn t you yourself write about me the younger prophet continues, citing chapter and verse and his attendant Joshua the son of Nun, a youth, would not stir

from out of his tent (Exodus 33:11; T murah 16a). Joshua had served Moses faithfully and, in the simple reading of the Biblical narrative which Joshua cites in his own defense, had shown himself the consummate talmid, or disciple, the natural inheritor of the Mosaic Law. Yet from the perspective of the rabbis, Joshua fails; he lacks the courage to face up

to loss. It is from the Biblical account itself that God twice blesses Joshua with courage from which the rabbis derive his lack of courage. As the wealthy man needs no blessing for riches, so the courageous man does requires no blessing for

courage. In each of these blessings, at the time of his anointment in Deuteronomy (31.23) and then again in the first book of the prophets which bears his name, death is in the fore. In the account in Deuteronomy, God first tells Moses that he will lie with his fathers (31.16); in Joshua, Moses actual death is

recounted (Joshua 1.1-2). When the fabric of life is ripped, one requires courage. And so the divine injunction and blessing to Joshua follows the intimations of death: be strong and of a good courage. In Lear s reading an uncanny echo of the Biblical account courage entails a creative response to loss. For the rabbis, Joshua lacks courage, and because

of that lack shows himself, especially at the moment of Moses death, to be an unsuitable figure of transition. For Joshua does not acknowledge the possibility of loss. When Joshua asserts himself wasn t I always in your tent? Moses, in the Talmudic account, falters: At that moment, Moses became weak, and three hundred laws were forgotten, and seven hundred doubts

entered his mind (T murah 16a). With Joshua s boast of his ability to pass on a tradition without loss, the tradition is impaired. Moses death provokes loss and doubt; Joshua s boast, showing a lack of preparation for mourning, makes matters worse. The continuation of the rabbinic narrative of Israel s experience of the death of Moses has Freudian resonances about Israel s murderous tendencies but

not as Freud himself articulates them. So anxious are they when faced with the loss of the Law and doubts brought on by Moses death that they stand ready to kill Joshua if he will not somehow reclaim the missing Laws (T murah 16a).13 Here the rabbis represent Israel as preferring murder and obliterating the memory of Moses to facing up to loss

and mourning the responsibilities of transmission in a world of doubt. In this reading, the murderous desires of Israel are expressed, but not, as in Moses and Monotheism, in relation to Moses for giving the Law, but to Joshua for forgetting it.

For Israel, it s either all or nothing: the prophetic clarity represented in the Law of Moses which they had hoped Joshua to continue to embody or nothing, the death of the Law of Moses, figured in the threatened death of Joshua. To the principle articulated by Hilary Putnam: enough isn t everything, but enough is enough, the

people of Israel, protest, we want everything !14 Without the certainty of the fullness of revelation, the people of Israel choose, in the rabbinic narrative, to kill the messenger, and the memory of the revelation which he embodies. Conceding to their demand, the story continues, Joshua asks for the resolution of the doubts and a re-statement of the laws, but, God replies: It is

impossible to resolve your doubts, and tell you the forgotten laws (T murah 16a). God tells both Joshua and Israel against their respective resistances to embrace their experience as historical beings, to take up the demands imposed by a Torah not in heaven, but in their own hands. Challenged to embrace loss, difference and doubt, the people of

Israel show themselves willing to be passive recipients of the Mosaic Law, not creative inheritors. They evidence the characteristics of Eliade s anthropological primitive, content to live in a timeless realm of ahistorical repetition, but not to embrace history with the loss it entails. The prerequisite for creative memory both psychoanalytic and rabbinic is courage the courage to mourn, requiring the

recognition of death, as well as an acknowledgment of the continued need for life, a simultaneous movement towards past and future. In the narrative in T murah, Joshua refuses to acknowledge the possibility of loss; the people of Israel, in their fixation on the memory of Moses prefer death to mourning. As the story continues, God does not resolve their doubts, but he does

offer a solution to the young prophet: Go and occupy Israel with war! To justify this

strange remedy, God turns Joshua s attention to the opening verses of the book that bears his name which narrates first the death of Moses, and then the divine command to conquer the land: After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua, son of Nun, Moses attendant. My servant Moses

is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all this people, into the land I am giving to the Israelites. (Joshua 1.1-2; T murah 16a). For the rabbis, the prophet not only records the conquest of the land, but a more primary activity, not military, but hermeneutic. The war that requires supreme courage in facing up to loss

the unstated but primary focus of the various rabbinic figurations of the death of Moses is the war of Torah, the transmission of the Law. My servant Moses is dead : the war of Torah must follow. To the rabbinic sensibility, the psalmist s sharp arrows are words of Torah, the warring enemies at the gate, showing hatred for one

another, are Torah scholars (Kiddushin 30b). Go and occupy Israel with war is God s response to Israelite passivity and their continued desire for a prophetic intervention that will free them from the obligation of creative memory. The people waver between the denial of the absence of their lost object the wishful fantasy of Moses continued presence

and the denial that the lost object was ever present enacted in the fantasy of Joshua s death. Joshua denies the necessity of remembering and the historicity of transmission, making creative repetition impossible. To these complimentary stances, God commands Joshua, be strong and of good courage ; and Go and occupy Israel with war. Acknowledge loss. Enter history. Notwithstanding his primacy in the

Biblical narrative, in the rabbinic accounts in T murah, Joshua occupies a less certain place. He may be the first to carry on the

tradition of Moses, ordained by God, but he is figured as a passive middle man, awaiting divine instruction before he lives up to the challenge of loss. By contrast, to the rabbinic imagination, Otniel ben Kanaz, the first of the Judges to lead Israel after the death of Joshua, shows no hesitation to go to war. In Judges, Otniel conquers Kiryat Sefer,

literally the Citadel of the Book (1.11). In this conquest, the rabbis see Otniel evidencing the paradigmatic response to death and loss. He is the model figure for transmission; for he knows how to mourn: A thousand and seven hundred Laws were forgotten during the period of mourning for Moses. Said Rabbi Abbahu: Nevertheless Otniel the

son of Kenaz restored [these forgotten teachings] as a result of his dialectics (T murah 16a). Otniel s conquest of the Citadel of the Book, for the rabbis, is, like the conquest of the land, primarily hermeneutic. From mourning, Otniel enacts the war of Torah a form of engaged and creative rememberance. Such remembrance or working-through of

healthy mourning entails, as Dominick LaCapra reads Freud, taking partial-leave of the past a forgetting placed in the service of remembrance, a remembering without fixation.15 Otniel faces the pain of loss, and provides a link between past and future: he is the true representative of the rabbinic hermeneutics of mourning. His mother, the Talmudic account continues, gave

him a second name Yabetz because, she said, I have bore him through pain pain or etzev containing the root letters of the name, Yabetz. Born of pain, Yabetz, the sages say, earned his name because he gave counsel and multiplied Torah in Israel (T murah 16a). The restoration of the Mosaic Law nurtured through loss and pain

leads inevitably to multiplicity. Through Otniel s dialect, the creativity of pilpul or chiseling an issue from all sides the

Law continues (Nedarim 38a). Here is Loewald s creative memory the moment of generating a new organization of something old, a repetition with its face towards the future while aware of the past (Loewald 94, 99). Living out the fate of his name, Otniel transforms the pain of loss into creative remembrance. But loss and creativity are tied together, underlining

the paradox that, in rabbinic readings, the possibility of creative remembrance is presupposed upon loss. iv. foreshadowing death: forgetting Memories become, writes Adam Phillips, forms of forgetting. 16 The people of Israel s fixation on Moses figured in rabbinic narratives represents a form of memory as forgetting. Otniel s war of Torah, by contrast, is made possible by mourning the partial forgetting

entailed in acknowledging Moses death such that creative memory becomes possible. Otniel does not forget Sinai or Moses, but his mourning depends upon distance from the memory of Moses as fixation so that he can properly remember. Loss the ripped fabric must first be acknowledged. The paradox: Moses is dead, the Torah of Moses lives on. This is the

rabbinic version of Freud s insight paraphrased by Lear: It is only when one kills off the messenger that the message finally gets installed (HDRL 102). Only when Moses is dead can the hermeneutics of mourning the creative appropriation of the past be enacted. That such loss is integral to the continuity of the Law is shown not only

in the rabbinic representation of the death of Moses, but also in the representation of the precedent Biblical event that also thematizes death and loss: the breaking of the tablets of the Law. After the divine pronouncement of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, Moses ascends to the heavens to receive the Torah. Because Moses is late the rabbis

say that the people miscalculated the forty days which Moses had told them he

would be absent the people, assuming his death, seek out other gods (Shabbat 89a). In this other figuration of Moses death, the people abandon the Law, providing an antecedent for the rabbinic narratives about Moses actual death where his death provokes doubt and threats of violence.17 Upon his descent from Mount Sinai, hearing the sounds from the camp

and seeing the worship of the golden calf, Moses throws the tablets to the ground: As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became enraged; and he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain. (Exodus 32:19). In Freud s reading

the Biblical narrative is a levitical cover-up (SE 23.48): it is not Moses, but the people who break the tablets, an event repressed in the Biblical narrative in the same way as Israel s murder of Moses the source of their continued guilt. For the rabbis, Moses not only breaks the tablets as in the explicit Biblical narrative, but in

their homiletic reading, he receives divine approbation for his act: yashar co ach sh barata! translated idiomatically as a job well done! (Menachot 99b). God does not condemn the breaking of the tablets, remarkably, he commends it. For the rabbis, the giving of the Torah made the people of Israel immortal, placing them beyond death and history. With the sin of

the golden calf, they lost that claim to immortality (Avoda Zara 5a). With mortality comes the impairment of memory for had it not been for the breaking of the first tablets, the Torah would never have been forgotten (Eruvin 54a). In the rabbinic representation, Moses throws down the tablets with the result that the people of Israel become mortal; memory

is impaired and the Torah is forgotten. And God offers his praise. The breaking of the first tablets represents a tragic re-entrance into history the necessity of the transmission of the Law in the face of loss. Of the action that

inaugurates history and mortality, the breaking of the first tablets, God proclaims: well done! The episode serves as an example of a principle of rabbinic interpretation, namely that sometimes, through negating the Torah, the Torah comes into being (Menachot 99b). On one level, the divine utterance well done! stands as a pragmatic accommodation to a new reality. The

Law cannot be nurtured in a culture of idolatry. Moses breaking of the tablets allows for a new manifestation of the Law, however impoverished and distant from its original state. More radically, the acknowledgment of mortality after the sin of the golden calf of the necessity of negating the Torah anticipates the principles that Otniel embodies when Moses, the privileged

mediator of the Law, dies. That is, for the Torah to be transmitted in a world of loss, proper mourning is the necessary pre-requisite. After the golden calf, in history, the hermeneutics of mourning is not merely an accommodation, but provides the only possibility for creative interpretation. The multiplicity of disputes and arguments that characterize Torah all of

the disagreements that followed Moses death and those that multiplied during later periods in the further elaboration of the Oral Law are the result of this forgetting. When the Talmud identifies the first dispute recorded among the early sages or tannaim, the dispute is attributed to when the minds of the sages became diminished, when they started to forget.18

For the Law to show itself in its multiplicity and variety, there must first be, as Moses casts the tablets down ushering the people of Israel into history, forgetting.19 Doubt may be experienced as traumatic, the conditions of forgetting as catastrophic, but this forgetting leads to the multiplication of Torah. Forgetting in the hermeneutics of mourning entails only

a partial leave-taking, not a total repudiation of the past. The shards of the first tablets, the sages say, are

preserved, and transported with the second tablets in the ark (Bava Batra 14b).20 The second tablets inaugurate a new more active relationship towards the Torah, resisted at first by the people, requiring argument and the embracing of diversity in the face of doubt. The preservation of the first tablets, however, allows for the perpetuation of a theoretical ideal, the unity

represented before the shattering entrance into history and loss. Forgetting does not mean the abandonment of the experience of Mount Sinai, but a forgetting of that originary unified Torah of that different era when men were immortal and the Law could not be forgotten. As Phillips writes, creativity is made possible through the gap we make by the act of

forgetting it is the gap that leads away from paralyzed passivity to life.21 In Freud s narrative, it is Israel resisting the Law who break the tablets; for the sages, it is Moses, who, as he did with Joshua before his own death, allows for the perpetuation of the Law after mortality and loss, the continued possibility of interpretation. As

Otniel realizes, only through acknowledging the death of Moses does the Law of Moses live. v. the future of Judaism: differentiation and creative memory In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suspends his rationalist prejudice against religion as illusion as he relates the perspective of his friend Romain Rolland. For Rolland, Freud writes, the true source of

religious sentiments consists in a peculiar feeling which he himself is never without It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded as it were oceanic. This feeling is the source of the religious energy which is

seized by various Churches and religious systems (SE 21.74) Though Rolland s perspective is at first related with sympathy, Freud, in the end ,derives his friend s self-confessed purely-subjective oceanic sentiments from the

primary narcissistic unity of the infant-mother matrix (Loewald 568). So Freud assimilates the religious impulse to the desire for infantile unity, an attempted return to the forms of primary mentation in which boundaries between subject and object have yet to be drawn. Not unlike love, the oceanic feeling of the religious personality is one in which the boundary between

ego and object threaten to melt away, where there is an experience of limitlessness and a bond with the universe (SE 21.68). In this reading, the religious experience is to be reclaimed for psychoanalysis (though not by Freud), through the experience of unity, the collapse of temporal categories in the description of ecstatic experiences the ability to

move beyond the frozen secondary process languages of our scientific mentality (Loewald 566). As religion has its sources in primary mentation, like sexual and artistic experiences, the former, for Loewald, going beyond Freudian skepticism, can be seen as more than a mere mark of human immaturity (Loewald 576). Following Loewald, Lear argues that psychoanalysis does not necessarily give us a reason to

abandon religious belief. Yet the basis for reclaiming the theological impulse remains for Lear, as in Loewald, in the Freudian insight that the religious sensibility has its origins in the narcissistic infantile desire for union in primary mentation.22 In a departure from Freud, Lear celebrates the infantile dimension of our love of God as marvelous the incorporation, for

example, of our infantile parts in the love of God commanded in Deuteronomy, or the Christian communion as repetition of an infantile act of oral incorporation. 23 Religious rituals are salvaged in so far that they give expression to the profundity of primary process mentation, otherwise suppressed in frozen secondary process languages. Mystics, with artists and lovers, have privileged access to such

primary experiences and thus give expression to paradox what Freud calls

the combining of contraries (SE 11.155). On this basis the ability to give voice to primary process mentation theological discourses reclaim the attention of psychoanalysis. For religious practices when they are properly mystical or archaic resonate, as Lear writes, with meanings which from a rigidly secondary-process perspective are irrational. 24 Despite their differences Loewald and Lear with

Freud figure religion as tending towards the experience or expression of unity. Rabbinic Judaism, however, strongly resists unity, certainly as it is defined in Freud as a re-articulation or return to an infantile dimension. The command following the Biblical vocative, Hear O Israel! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and will

all your might may require, as Lear writes, a service of integrated mind and body, but it is not for the rabbis a command to mystical union. It is rather an injunction to study, to know the Law in all of its variable multiplicity. Love of God is achieved through cleaving to these words not to an abstract conception

of the mystical divine.25 In the rabbinic model, what Freud calls secondary process differentiation takes precedence the paradoxical means of achieving unity through difference pursued, affirmed and maintained. Contradictions are nurtured not as mystical expressions of unconscious processes, but as the means in which the Law can be expressed in a world characterized by loss. The unity of the first

tablets may remain as an ideal, but that ideal is accessible only through the processes inaugurated by Moses with the second tablets a hermeneutics of mourning, as in the case of Otniel, leading to multiplicity and differentiation. The rabbinic sensibility embraces contradiction in Judaism s most highly articulated secondary process languages, Talmudic argument:

Rabbi Abba said in the name of Shmuel: For three years the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel debated each other. These said that the halakhah [law] follows their view, and these said that the halakhah follows their view. A heavenly voice went forth and declared: These and these are the words of the living God, but

the halakhah in practice follows the House of Hillel (Eruvin 13b). The Houses of Hillel and Shamai are themselves associated with a glory of Torah which had been diminished.26 Where there had once been six hundreds orders of the mishnah, Hillel and Shammai had only canonized six the rest were forgotten. Out of such forgetting comes dispute, the

multiplicity and differentiation which made the people of Israel, in their anxiety about creative memory, clamor for Joshua s death. Yet the disputes of Hillel and Shammai are beloved by God.27 To the multiplication of Torah that comes as a result of forgetting, the divine proclaims: these and these are the words of the living God. Though they contradict one

another one says pure, one says impure; one says permitted, the other says forbidden

they are both the words of the living God. This is not an expression of mystical union where distinctions are blurred, but of oppositions and differentiation affirmed, not on the level of primary, but secondary, processes. The rabbinic principle affirming the multiplicity

of truths is a necessary corollary to God s expression of approval to Moses upon breaking the tablets: a job well done. In the realm of history and forgetting, where the first tablets are left as splintered shards, there must be disagreement, for there is no longer access to an unmediated primal unity of the divine. The hermeneutics of mourning not only makes its

peace with difference, what Phillips calls the erasure of mutual exclusions, but affirms the necessity of difference and creative differentiation in a world of loss.28

That the divine approves of both Israel s entry into history ( a job well done ) and difference ( these and these ) shows the rabbis anticipating another of what Lear calls Freud s deepest insights that life can never be lived without remainder (HDRL 96). In the Republic, the text which initiates the Western philosophical tradition, Plato s allegory of the cave presupposes, as

Lear writes, an outside. As Lear explains, the narrative of the cave, and the escape from its limitations, enacts a fantasy of breaking through the restrictions of ordinary life for absolute knowledge and absolute happiness (HDRL 163). The insights, however, associated with that escape are so terrifying that the messenger, Socrates, as Lear writes, must be killed. The fantasy of the

remainder a fantasy of a truth outside of the limitations of language, convention and interpretation from Plato s allegory of the cave haunts the philosophical models of the West. But the remainder of life, the dream of an outside of the cave, the dream of an absolute truth to which Socrates aspires and for which he is killed, is

acknowledged by the rabbis from the outset to be impossible to attain. For in the acknowledgment that loss is intrinsic to the processes of transmission, the rabbis affirm that the achievement of the fullness of truth is impossible. The interventions of Hillel and Shammai as all the manifold and multiplying disputes of the generations do not provide full compensation

for loss. In claiming to do so, they would only produce an illusion of the presence of Moses, a fantasy of his return. Yet these compensations are still even in their inadequacy to the loss which they come to address words of the living God, and beloved for their representation of a truth that, acknowledged from the outset, can

never be fully embodied. Dispute and the differentiation it engenders are beloved because only through such differentiation does the Law manifest itself in the world of loss.

In representing Moses as a figure who enacts loss through both the shattering of the tablets and his death what Lear calls the constitutive fantasy of outside is acknowledged, but rendered impossible from its inception. It is as if the prophet in throwing down the tablets enacts the equivalent of the Socratic taking of the

hemlock, as a means of showing that the Mosaic inheritance, from its beginnings, acknowledges death and loss. In the image of the broken tablets, the sense of the remainder of life is acknowledged and deferred: there can be no efforts to construct an image of what lies outside. The disputes of the sages are an acknowledgement that the remainder is

always beyond history, that unity can only be achieved through interpretation and differentiation, through a remembering based upon forgetting: through negating the Torah, the Torah comes into being. *** Freud emphasizes the need to forget, what Phillips glosses as the putting aside of conscious expectations so that we can attend better.29 Phillips puts aside expectations to attend to the unconscious

what Loewald describes as the eternal in Freud s implicit metaphysics.30 The rabbinic correlate is the theoretical Torah figured as a series of the ineffable names of the divine or black flames on white fire

also requiring a form of non-fixative attention.31 The anti-hero in rabbinic hermeneutics the foil to the Houses of Hillel and Shammai

is Korach from the Book of Numbers who pursues arguments not for the sake of heaven, but instead takes himself to one side, pursuing one-sided dispute as a means of self-aggrandizement (Avot 5.17).32 Rabbinic discourse, by contrast, with its seeming lack of structure associative, expansive represents something like an intergenerational form of free association. Stuck on himself, Korach lacks the ability

for free-floating attention necessary to engage in dispute for the sake of heaven. His world is characterized

21 by narcissistic repetition. By contrast, Otniel s courageous dialectics chiseling an issue from every side manifest that non-fixative attention, an ability to put aside conscious expectations. This is a forgetting placed in the service of memory necessary for the transmission of the Law. Attending to the multiplicity bred by creative memory in rabbinic

texts may provide an opening for a new relationship for psychoanalysis towards religion or at the very least a new attitude towards that represented in the Judaism of the rabbis. Not merely phenomena to be studied like a dream, a mystical experience, a premonition of ecstasy a species of the kind of experience about which Freud learned

from his friend Rolland, a form of primary mentation. Rabbinic Judaism does not enact, as Freud would have it in Moses and Monotheism, a form of obsessional repetition, nor in the readings of Loewald and Lear, a more articulated form of primary process mentation for psychoanalysts to elaborate (Loewald 566-7). But rabbinic Judaism and the hermeneutics upon which his based

may provide, in this reading, an antecedent for psychoanalytic interpretive practice, emphasizing the processes of forgetting and creative memory. Freud entertained a belief in what he called the phylogenetic inheritance of the Jews to account for the persistence of Jewish guilt and attachment to the Law.33 Reading the Jewish phylogenetic inheritance against the Freudian grain, allows for another possible insight

not that Judaism is the bad memory from which psychoanalysis must awaken us, the history of repetition for which psychoanalysis is the cure, but the phylogenetic origin which Freud inherited from his unacknowledged Jewish antecedents. For both rabbinic Judaism and psychoanalysis share a common aim to paraphrase Freud s citation of Goethe, the taking of the inheritance of the fathers, and

making it one s own.

Notes 1 Stanley Cavell, In the Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago, 1988), 172. 2 Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 150 (cited within as HDRL). 3 As Harold P. Blum writes, Anti-Semitism in the Freud Case Histories: A Prologue to the Psychoanalysis of the Prejudices of Racism, Freud unconsciously internalized anti-Semitic

attitudes that he simultaneously fought against, implying in his last work that the Jews were partly to blame for their own persecution, indicative of the negative splitting from the largely philo-Semitic attitudes expressed in the work. 4 Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge, 1998), 61; The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

trans. James Strachey (London, 1964), 23.207 abbreviated within as SE. On the transmission of a religious tradition, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud s Moses (New Haven, 1991), 89-90. 5 On Freud s Moses, see Yerushalmi, as well as Harold P. Blum, Freud and the Figure of Moses: The Moses of Freud, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39 (1991): 513-536. 6

See my The Hermeneutics of Mourning: Multiplicity and Authority in Jewish Law, College Literature 30.4 (2003): 114-139. 7 On the Freudian ambivalence and the expression of admiration for Jewish advances in intellectuality, see SE 115; and also Yerushalmi, 83. 8 Hans W. Loewald, The Essential Loewald (Hagerstown, MD, 2000), 90-100; cited within as Loewald. 9 Adam Phillips, Side Effects (New

York, 2006), 102.

10 See however Peter Rudnytsky, Preface, American Imago 63.1 (Spring 2006), who writes that when Freud offered his critique of religion he had in mind what he terms the final form taken by our present-day white Christian civilization (1). 11 For Lear, Freud s description of a child s conversion of his mother s absence into a game of loss the fort

-o-o-o-o game is a profile in the development of courage, opening the possibility for the creation of meaning (HDRL 94, 96). 12 On the decline of the generations, see Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on the Decline of the Generations and the Nature of Rabbinic Authority (Albany, NY, 1996), 7-26. 13 On the rabbinic representation of Israel's attempt to kill both

Moses and Aaron, see Yerushalmi, 85. 14 Hilary Putnam, Reality with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 170. 15 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 14445; and see Mourning and Melancholy, (SE 14.244). 16 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Harvard, MA, 1994), 24. 17 On the two deaths of Moses and the people s imagining of Moses death

as a projection of their desire to murder him, see Betty Rojtman, The Double Death of Moses, in New Perspectives on Freud s Moses and Monotheism, eds. Ruth Ginsburg and Ilana Pardes (Tubingen, 2006), 108-109. 18 Rashi, Rav Yosi, Chagiga 16a. 19 For more on this see Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, Pachad Yitzchak: Chanuka (New York, 1998), 35-37. 20 See Gedalyahu Shor,

Ohr Gadalyahu (New York, 200 ) 3.159. 21 Phillips, Flirtation, 31. 22 See Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (NY, 1987), 16.

23 Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York, 2005), 207. Even if one accepts Freud s analysis, Lear writes, that there is an infantile dimension embedded in religious conviction, from a religious point of view, that can be a source of genuine solace, and may serve to enhance rather than impugn religious conviction (218). 24 Lear, Love, 192. 25 Sifri, V etchanan, piska

8. 26 Sefer M Kabblie HaTorah. 27 Maharal, Darche Haim, 5.17. 28 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (London, 1995), 84. 29 Phillips, Flirtation, 31. 30 The primary process, Loewald writes, in pure form is extant in the experience of eternity ; and Freud thought that the unconscious has no conception of death, and that the id is timeless. (Loewald 572, 573). 31 Ramban,

Commentary on the Torah, Charles B. Chavel, trans. (New York, 1971), I 14-15. 32 Rashi, Numbers 16.1. 33 On the phylogenetic inheritance in Freud, see Lear, HDRL, 145; Yerushalmi, 84-88, 101; and Eliza Slavet, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (forthcoming Fordham, 2010).