BY: Jason Schnier
The language of travel is all pervasive in our everyday speech and our attempts to articulate personal and religious development. We speak of our life’s journey, about crossroads, and being on the correct path, or being off the derech. The metaphor of traveling on the road offers the fundamental narrative frame: betwixt voyage and return, a story may contain chance, opportunity, metamorphosis, and fate.1 These formal stages of travel suggest a temporal and spatial structure—what Mikhail Bakhtin styled the chronotope—that framework helps us to make meaning not only of voyaging, but of narrative and, in the broadest senses, life and the passage of time.2
In Jewish circles, and especially in discussion of this week's parasha, the connection between travel and religious experience is predictably a recurrent leitmotif. Although some of his familial details are lodged at the end of Genesis 11, the heart of Abram’s religious experience begins with the famous and provocatively redundant call at the beginning of our parasha: “The L-rd said to Abram, ‘Go forth (lekh lekha) from your native land and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”3 As Rav Soloveitchik classically put it, "'go forth' is not a matter of geographical change from one locality to another, but a deeply human and spiritual event." Calling Abram to a process of inward and outward change amounted to total conversion.4 This call was not only personal, of course, but resonated throughout centuries of religious history. Through the process and metaphor of travel, we are told to discover higher purpose and transcendent essential truth.
Why is it that travel has assumed such a primary place in our colloquial and religious vocabulary? As Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote, we travel because we need "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." Travel, that is to say, is hard work. Authentic travel is undertaken not for pleasure, but rather "to taste hardship."5
In travel, we find ourselves precisely in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations, lacking knowledge or convenience, reminded again of how little control we truly exert over the world. We are stripped to our essentials; left to communicate with simple sentences, we survive with only the bare essentials packed into carry-on luggage. Yet if travel is transformative in its hardship, it is so because it involves the essential dialectical encounter between the self and the world, in which each rubs against and informs the other. As Pico Iyer puts it, "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves."6
Yet I wonder if today we can understand what our tradition means when it speaks about travel. To be sure, we denizens of the twenty-first century traverse more frequently, more cheaply, more comfortably, and more quickly than any previous generation. The world has been "flattened" under the effects of globalization, wealth, and technology, making air passage to the far corners of the globe easy and affordable. Thanks to the admirable efforts of American philanthropists, many more of my generation have traveled to Israel than in any other time in history. But is this the kind of travel, with all of its metaphysical implications, that Avram was called to with G-d's command to "Go forth?"
When Yehuda Ha-Levi, the eleventh century Spanish poet and polymath took sail for the land of Israel around 1140, he recorded his epic journey in strings of lapidary verse. The journey was beyond treacherous. There were pirates and robbers, food was scarce, the stench of deathly illness permeated the cramped cabin. In one poem, he writes, "between him and death is nothing more than a thin sliver of a board (unless death has already occurred, since he is buried in a wooden box six feet under water without a coffin's worth of space). Seasick and scared of pirates, tempests, and Mohammedans..."7 In another, Ha-Levi pleads to survive the harrowing voyage, evoking the Blessing of Thanksgiving (Birkat ha-Gomel) and pledging himself to G-d's service if only he emerges alive.
But today? The journey to the land of Israel involves an overnight flight in a comfortable airplane. We are well-fed (relatively!), entertained, and generally speaking, without serious anxiety. Who could help but feel puerile when reciting the Wayfarer’s Prayer from the cosmopolitan luxury of an international jetliner, "May You rescue us from the hand of every foe, ambush, bandits and wild animals along the way..." Given our frame of reference for travel today, it is clear that we can hardly grasp the deep religious meaning understood in this metaphor by previous generations.
The apparent tenacity of the travel metaphor in our own language should therefore give us caution when it comes to our presumed ability to deduce the simple sense of any ancient text. Although we are led by traditional commentators such as Rashi to seek literal explanation only for those obvious vagaries and hapax legomena, we would be remiss to skim over the familiar words with easy translation. Since Biblical language is highly textured and localized in a way distant from our own natural sensibilities, the task of interpretation should always begin with close reading and deep humility.
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1 See for example Gerhart B. Ladner, "Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order," Speculum 42 (1967).
2 M.M. Bakhtin, “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP, 1981. 84-258.
3 NJPS Translation.
5 c.w. Rav Soloveitchik's famous statement that the religious quest "is not always a eudaemonic experience." Lonely Man of Faith, 8.
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