An interview with Delphine Horvilleur
Plurielles The theme of our next issue of Plurielles will be fear. As usual it will be cross-cutting, examining this notion through history, literature, film, and psychoanalysis. Delphine Horvilleur, thank you for receiving us to speak about fear in the Jewish tradition. To begin this conversation, might we evoke the words for fear in the Bible and the conceptions they convey? Words such as pachad and yirah, for instance, each of which points down a different path…
Delphine Horvilleur When one thinks of fear in the Bible, one thinks at once of a character associated with it, and that is Isaac. So much so that he is called pachad Yitzhak, the fear of Isaac. Every character in the Bible has a quality attached to him. If Abraham, for example, stands for hospitality, Isaac is inseparable from his fear. And this fear refers back to the moment we call “the binding of Isaac.” That moment when, according to the Sages, this character lived through the greatest fear, a panic-stricken fear.
But before speaking of that episode, it would be worth discussing the other term you mention, yirah, which also designates fear. The etymology of this word has something to do with sight (lirot: to see; raa: he saw). For yirah or yir’e, in Hebrew, it is literally a matter of seeing in the future: it is what one is going to see, what one might see.
I think that Isaac’s fear, even though the word pachad is used, has a great deal to do with what he saw, with the problematic of vision. Isaac saw something he should not have seen, that no one should have seen. He saw a father raising his knife over his son. And things become troubling, because Isaac’s anatomical, physical peculiarity is precisely that, at one point in his life, he goes blind. The Sages are convinced that this “ophthalmological” problem is wholly bound up with what he saw and should not have seen. As if that vision had been capable of triggering a fault in his gaze, of bankrupting his sight. It happens at a point in his life, but not at the moment itself: Isaac does not go blind when he comes down from the mountain; there is a kind of latency, which leads certain commentators to say that Isaac is the biblical character who embodies trauma. For he lived through something of the order of the unspeakable. And in fact it is as though he had been unable to be present to what he lived through, as though he had not had the possibility of seeing what was happening to him. So all his life he seeks to see, to know. And he will go blind.
It is interesting to reread in the Bible the verse that says Isaac is blind. At what moment, exactly, does the Bible tell us that Isaac does not see? When he has grown old, when he wishes to bless his sons and asks them to draw near. In the Bible it is written that his sight grew dim. Literally, “his eyes had grown dark from having seen… mi reot” — but seen what? In fact he loses his sight from having seen. So, for the Sages, from having seen what he saw, well before this moment when he calls his sons. From having seen something of the order of the unbearable experience. Fear, then, always has to do with vision. There is in the text a modality of seeing that links pachad and yir’a, seeing and fear.
One could evoke other moments in the Bible that link a character’s fear to the fear of seeing, to the fear of vision. For example, the moment when the Hebrews witness the manifestation of the divine on Mount Sinai and say to Moses: “It would be better now if you went, and then came back to tell us about it.” For according to the Bible no one can see (the divine) and live.
PL Since you bring up Sinai, there is also the midrash which says that God offered the Torah to the seventy nations, but that each found a pretext to refuse it, and that He then said to the Jews: “Either you take it, or I drop the mountain on you.” So they took the Torah — but out of fear.
DH The experience of Mount Sinai is unique by definition. The text says that at the moment of the Revelation “they saw the voices” — yet no one can see voices, that would be like tasting a color. I have to say that I love this image of a God comparable to a traveling peddler trying to offload his encyclopedia. Everyone says, “No, that’s not for us.” He ends up offering it to the little people of the Jews and tells them: “Either you take it, or I tip the mountain over you and it will be your tomb.” What is funny is that we tell our own history in a way that is not at all to our glory.
PL That is a particularity of the Jewish tradition, notably in Kings.
DH We are not heroes. We were placed in a situation we had to accept. We are not at all in a heroic theology. We are presented rather as rebellious children, stiff-necked. Tradition says that our ancestors fell asleep on the night of the Revelation. And that, when Moses came back, they said to him: “From now on you are the one who will speak with God, because we are afraid, we are not capable; we won’t hold up.”
It is, then, a people that is not heroic. Likewise, in Egypt, the people do not want to leave, to go out of Egypt. It is too distressing, this offer of freedom. The people doubt: “Is this a good idea?” and a little later, “Shouldn’t we turn back? We were fine in Egypt.”
This fear of going forward, for me, is what we are living through today; it is the fear of transition. Fear shows itself in society every time we are in a process of transition. At bottom we are afraid of seeing what is to come, what announces itself as change. In some it even provokes a kind of terror. We are in this chiaroscuro of a world that is dying. And, as Gramsci says: “The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear, and in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge.”
This phrase of Gramsci’s is very often quoted, but I find that it captures our time well. There is a world slow to be born — this moment, we do not know what to call it — and out of this liminal zone the monsters emerge. Today everything appears to us as monstrous, in the sense of monstration, where something is being shown to us. We are halfway between the known and the unknown.
PL Indeed, the old world is going, and we stand before the unknown. The old references are coming undone, and the new references are not yet here. That is what is frightening.
DH In fact, we don’t know what to call the new world.
PL An expression like “the new world” usually has a positive connotation — whereas here, in this case?
DH It is true that I always think of the Freudian principle of “the uncanny” (l’inquiétante étrangeté, das Unheimliche). In children’s tales, the moment of terror is the moment when the mother looks like the witch and the witch like the mother. We are at a moment when we recognize features of the old world, the world we trusted, but all at once a strange smile appears, a strange grimace, and it is terrifying. It has shifted a bit, but there are still traces — it is the uncanniness of the in-between.
PL It is the anguish Isaac feels at the moment he gives his blessing to Jacob, believing he is giving it to Esau: it is the same and it is not the same.
DH They are Esau’s hands but it is Jacob’s voice, and it is terrifying. At such moments, we are brought back to all the chiaroscuros of our past life. And we understand better why all the “there was once a time” discourses are now in vogue.
PL These discourses express the nostalgia for a golden age, for a fantasized period, and I think the wind of messianism now blowing is wholly bound up with this phenomenon.
DH This wind of messianism makes the world’s onlookers believe that it is all already written, that the recipe is given in the book. “And I am going to read to you, between the lines, the reason I had a car accident today. It was written.” We are in the refusal of whatever might emerge, except through the prism of it was already written.
PL There is also that tendency in Judaism expressed by the phrase chadesh yamenu ke-kedem (“renew our days as of old”). There is always a kind of baseline nostalgia for the past, the idea that there is a kind of decline, of degradation of the present relative to what existed in the past. In messianism, too, there is the desire for a return to the old.
DH That is a good example. There is paradox in this expression “renew our days as of old.” For either there is something new and we renew, or there is something that was given before and we must maintain it.
In fact, the Jewish tradition walks along this ridgeline, an impossible ridgeline, but a permanent one, and it is the ridgeline of Judaism. We can be here only because we come from somewhere, because something was given to us that we want to perpetuate. And we will be able to hold both ends only if we let go of the rope a little. If we merely repeat what has already been done, we kill the system. But if we wholly abandon what has been transmitted, we kill it too. We may think that things will go on if we are, at the same time, sufficiently faithful and sufficiently unfaithful.
In fact, that phrase you cited, I hear it as if we were asking God: give us the courage to be as audacious, to have as much nerve as the preceding generations. It is difficult, but it is in the end the model we are given, the model of Abraham. At a certain point, Abraham leaves his father’s house and leaves the world of his origins. When you are a son of Abraham, you spend your whole life wondering how to be faithful to someone who was not faithful to his origins, how to be faithful to a father who was not faithful to his own.
PL This goes back a long way, for in Bereshit (Genesis) it is said: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother.” One is obliged to leave, in order to create something. The problem of infidelity is a problem that every culture confronts, but Judaism perhaps confronts it a little more forcefully.
DH I believe it is even stronger in Judaism because it is, in a way, ontological: Jewish identity is a kind of identity of unmooring, not of anchorage. Which is not easy to explain today. For example, if the Hebrews are so called in the Bible, it is because they are people who left. The Greeks are called Greeks because they come from Greece, and the Romans because they come from Rome. Whereas the Hebrews bear the name of an unmooring. It is an identity that says it is not identical to what it was, where it was.
In a certain way, one can say that this identity carries movement within it. There is, all the same, a mystery of Jewish perseverance that plays out in the non-identical repetition of its identity.
To come back to the subject of fear, of the in-between, and to that phrase of Gramsci’s we were evoking — for me, it is not so surprising that the discourses we were citing should meet with such success. In recent years there was Trump’s slogan, so emblematic: make America great again. We must go back to the moment when we were great. Likewise one may think of Brexit and its slogan: take back control. We tell ourselves our history as if, before, we had control. And in fact many political systems — the extremist political systems, of course — tell history as a return to a control of origins. That is what is troubling, because, once again, it is a way of saying: “I promise you tomorrows that will be like yesterday.” A strange promise, but one that is there to reassure when you are overwhelmed by fear. If I am afraid of what tomorrow will be, I will “buy” the slogan of someone who tells me, “I am going to make tomorrow a replica of yesterday.” And indeed, if there is one discourse that is the apotheosis of this approach, it is the discourse of religious fundamentalism, of whatever kind. The very essence of religious fundamentalism is that it promises you a return to the foundation. Always with the idea that, in the beginning, it was better, it was pure. They tell you a story that is historically absurd, that is a lie and a fiction: “In the beginning you were pure of any contamination by the other, you had not been altered by that other. We were ourselves, and we must return to the time when the Prophet was here, when the Temple was in Jerusalem, when families were as they should be.” This way of telling history can be declined in a thousand ways.
Far be it from me to want to say that progress is necessarily always better. But it is, all the same, a strange thing common to all fundamentalisms, this telling of their past history as a golden age. When you think about it, among the Jews it was, all the same, an extraordinary thing, this march of European Judaism toward progress, toward universalism. There is a love story between Judaism and the quest for the universal, for progress, for science and the Enlightenment — even if it is true that the Shoah came to cast its shadow over all this and completely changed the rules of the game. One cannot help, after the Shoah, wondering why it happened there, precisely at that moment. And yet, after the war, the Jews engaged anew in political movements, in all the struggles, such as that for civil rights in the United States.
Today, among some Jews, we are witnessing a new disquiet. They tell themselves that they were so present in those struggles — for example those of anti-racism — and they wonder how it is that today one hears antisemitism in that very camp. And this is a new crisis. We had something like a love story with the Enlightenment, and then there was the Shoah. We fought for the rights of minorities, and we have the impression that it is blowing up in our faces. Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh said that Judaism has the universal as its lighthouse and particularism as its means. Judaism navigates between universalism and particularism.
PL It is true that the present danger, for Judaism, is to throw out the baby with the bathwater — that is, to reject the ideas that nourished its bond with universalism and to close in on itself completely.
DH It seems to me that the current debate in Israel turns, astonishingly, on this. Constantly. All the recent debates in the Knesset pit the Jewish State against the democratic State. As if one had to choose. They are going to pass laws that reinforce the State’s Jewish character, as if there were too many laws reinforcing its democratic character. As if the one made the other lost.
PL The right drives home the idea that we must barricade ourselves, for everyone is against us (kulam negdenu). And it works very well. In Europe too, for that matter. What is very troubling is that it cuts off completely the rest of the Jewish message — that is, the part that has to do with ethics, the commandments concerning the relation between a person and his neighbor.
DH As if, in the eyes of some, this were the vision of diasporic Judaism, the one the Shoah had defeated. As if the Shoah and the State of Israel had created a new reality, in which the priority was security. As if these ideas, this ideal of the diaspora, corresponded to a bygone moment.
PL One might evoke the problem of the passage from fear to hatred. In societies, hatred is built on fear. Like a kind of collective tipping over. I wonder whether the very idea of Amalek — the enemy who runs through the ages — and the divine injunction to destroy Amalek are not a response to the primitive existential fear of the Judeans.
DH Amalek represents this hatred that will emerge in every generation. In the Bible, Amalek is a cousin, a descendant of Esau. So one cannot regard him as wholly external.
The rabbis tell a story about Amalek: he is the son of a woman named Timna, a local princess who very much wanted to become Jewish. And she presented herself before the Beth Din (the rabbinical court) of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who rejected her. (Of course, this is a total anachronism.) Timna never recovered from this rejection. And she ended up marrying the son of Esau and gave birth to Amalek — that is, to the ancestor of all the scoundrels of history. This is what leads the rabbis to say that hatred is never totally disconnected from what did or did not take place. This story also speaks of our inability to open the door.
In Deuteronomy there is this phrase: “Remember to blot out the memory of Amalek. Do not forget.” It is as if it were written: “Above all, do not forget to forget.” For me this phrase is the only recipe, if there is one, for getting out of the competition of victimhood. Today, people tell themselves their history so much, and tell themselves that they have rights because they have suffered. Now this commandment says: “Remember what happened to you, but remember to forget it enough to live.” There is a lesson here in necessary amnesia. At once a duty of memory and a duty of amnesia, mingled in the same phrase. One must know how to remember Amalek, but not to the point that he haunts your way of being alive. To be sure, one must not forget the past, but how to keep the past from saying everything about you?
We come back to all these Jewish identities of today and to all the fears of the Jewish community, in the Diaspora or in Israel — to the way they are haunted by the Shoah, and it cannot be otherwise. But the question is: how to keep this history from saying everything about us? By dint of repeating the mantra “Never again,” it is as if we were still there.
PL And there are those who say that we are in the prodromes of the Messiah.
DH That is a way of being completely conditioned by that history, of being still conditioned by the other, as in Sartre. There must be a path on which we say, “in spite of everything, we are going to build, we are going to teach our children to get back up.” But this implies not making a clean slate of the past. What worries me today is that some think we can do without the rabbinical or diasporic heritage, which was a force of resilience, and which appears to some as a residue fit to be thrown away.
PL In favor of what?
DH In favor of other elements of the narrative that had been set aside by the rabbis — for example, those of territorial conquest. Today there are Jews who recognize themselves in certain biblical narratives of power, of the refusal of vulnerability. As for me, I often tell myself that I am Jewish because in my texts the heroes are vulnerable: Abraham is sterile, Isaac blind, Jacob limps, and Moses stammers. We are in the story of an impotent man, a blind man, and a lame man — a story told by a stammerer. And all this is built not in spite of, but upon, the hero’s vulnerability. And it is these heroes whom we pray to, whom we invoke. We do not pray to Samson and his strength, or to Judah Maccabee.
PL Can one say that the discourse of ethics is a discourse of incompleteness?
DH I think so. I think it is the discourse of the fault, of the rupture. It is built theologically upon the fault, at a moment when the Temple is destroyed. At a moment when God has let his house be destroyed. And we will indeed have to build, theologically, a Judaism that accepts the idea of an absent God whose presence is marked by absence; a fallible God. All the rites of religious Judaism recount this fault: one cannot marry without breaking a glass, one cannot begin a Seder without breaking a matzah, and Moses does not come down from the Mountain without breaking the Tablets of the Law. Everything is built upon shattered landmarks. We build upon what is broken. It is all this that makes Jewish theology the inverse of Christian theology, which builds itself upon a presence.
PL Are there still other moments that are moments of individual and collective fear in the Bible?
DH In fact there are many moments where the fear of the face-to-face with the other is evoked. One cannot be face to face with the divine, with the transcendent; and one cannot be face to face with one’s brother either. The name Israel tells it well. This name is won, one night, in a combat. Jacob is terrified before his encounter with his brother Esau, from whom he stole the birthright; he must face his past and he must face his enemy, he is terrified. And he suddenly finds himself, in the night, facing this being or this angel (it is not very clear), and fights. He will win this name, Israel, which means combat with God. There are two senses to this combat: combat with and combat against. To come out of fear means to go toward a particular combat, in the night.
And it has a physical cost: Jacob — who is another of our identities — is a man who limps, who will limp for the rest of his life. This name, Israel, which he wins in a combat, made of him a limping man, a cripple, an incomplete being, a vulnerable being. And what does it mean to limp? Not to be able to stand upright nor to be entirely in place. It is exhausting and terrifying, not to be able to rest, but it is the Jewish condition. We do not know how to manage with settling in, with standing still. How can Jewish identity be reconciled with the idea of settling, precisely when Jewish identity in the texts is founded on the idea of movement? This does not mean that it is impossible, but it requires limping. In my view this is Israel’s great challenge today.
PL How can we connect this reflection to another dimension present in religious Judaism: the fear of sin?
DH Sin… I have the impression that it is a word so loaded with Christian meaning. Like the word faith. But it is interesting to go looking for where the word “sin” (chet) appears in the Bible. It is said that King David’s archers never committed a chet. What does that mean? It means that they never missed the target. In Hebrew, to commit the chet is, literally, to miss the target. It is error. I should have been there, at the heart of the target, but I am elsewhere. It is a gap. We will have to work at drawing nearer to the heart of the target, all the while knowing that we will never be there completely. There is the fear of being beside where we should be, the fear of being beside oneself.
I come back to fear and vision. My favorite rabbinic legend is set during the slavery in Egypt. This legend says that during the slavery in Egypt the men worked hard in the fields and were completely discouraged. They no longer wanted to have children, they no longer wanted a new generation to be born, because they did not believe in the possibility of a better world, of a redemption, of a liberation. They were living through a moment of collective depression, of extremely intense fear. And something happened — in any case a midrash tells a pleasant story: one day, the women of the Hebrews went into the fields with mirrors, they went to see their exhausted husbands, and then each looked at herself in the mirror alongside her husband, saying, “I am more beautiful than you.” A kind of rabbinic version of Snow White: mirror, little mirror. At that moment, they revive desire in the men, and the men recover the play of love (le je, and also le jeu). This, we are told, is the key to survival.
We come back to this idea that getting out of fear is bound to the capacity to see. One must be able to look at oneself in the mirror (in Hebrew the mirror is called mar’a, and fear is called yir’a. It is the same root). These women were able to bring out the mirrors, and a whole people was able to look at itself in them, and revive desire; afterward we were ready to come out of slavery and out of fear and to recover courage. The exit from fear and from exile always has to do with the capacity to look at oneself in the mirror.
PL This could be brought into relation with the psychoanalytic view according to which desire can be based only on a narcissism already assumed.
DH Desire is born of a self-love already assumed. One must already look at oneself. Fear emerges when one fails to see what has happened to us, or what might happen to us. To come out of fear is to tell oneself, “I am going to look.” Even though the text says, with respect to the Transcendent, “No one can see and live.”
There is yet another word that designates terror more precisely, eima, stupor. The moment that precedes the meeting of Jacob and Esau shows him terrified. He separates his wives and his children into two groups. He will multiply his encampments so that, if one is attacked, the other can survive. At this moment he embodies the divided man.
What is called the combat with the angel will allow him to become whole again, but the price is to limp. He stands upright so long as he is divided. But when he becomes physically whole, he no longer stands upright. Isaac’s experience is the fear of the father; and Jacob’s key experience is the fear of the brother.
PL It seems to me that in the Psalms there are two fears: the fear of men, and the fear of God that protects against the fear of men.
DH There is one thing we have not spoken of: the Haredim, the God-fearing. Harada is the fear that makes one tremble. It is a declaration of humility, this fear. We fear God, but we expect him to grant his protection: “lo ira ra ki ata imadi,” “I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” In the end, there are many words in Hebrew to say fear.
PL To conclude: is the concept of fear a central concept in Judaism, and does it, at one moment or another, play a role?
DH In Judaism, I can quarrel with God, but in the end it is my actions that will change the world. In this sense we are the opposite of what Christianity says, where it is by the grace of God that things can change. In Judaism we are in a position to negotiate, and this requires overcoming one’s fear so that it does not paralyze us but helps us to act in order to change the situation. Fear must help us to act. But we are wary of the moment when it would immobilize us.
PL Can we sum up by saying that the Jewish people is a restless one?
DH Yes, a restless one.
Interview conducted by Anny Dayan Rosenman and Izio Rosenman