সাহিত্যমূল্যে তোরাহ্ /The Torah as Literature
‘স্বরান্তর’ পত্রিকা, তাদের নববর্ষ সংখ্যায়, জানতে চায় কোন বই পড়ে এখনো বিমূন্ধ বা বিস্মিত হই. আমার নিজের একান্ত ভাবনাই বা কি সে বই সম্বন্ধে. কেন পাঠক নতুন করে সেই বইয়ের প্রতি মনোযোগী হবেন . এসব প্রশ্নের উত্তর তো ঠিক দেওয়া সম্ভব নয়. তবু… Sahityamulye Torah ___________________________ The English Version: Swarantar, the Bangla magazine, asked me to name a book that still staggers my sensibility. Why should readers return to such a composition? Naturally, these are partly rhetorical questions. Still… The Torah as Literature ____________________ A literary appreciation of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh– and especially the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch (the five scrolls) or the Torah (teachings/laws) – risks blasphemy. But it also risks something more fundamental: how to remain true to the spirit of the Torah and yet reserve an aesthetic sense while reading and immersing in an ancient journey. Harold Bloom had long ago observed that though Homer and Plato have turned safely secular for us, the Bible still retains an aura, even if one is not a fundamentalist. Does Yehwah’s numinosity disturb us in the same way as Lear’s or Prince Myshkin’s? What was that world of strange ordeals and aims that seems universal and yet so distant from our modern conditions of living and acting? How can one get closer to the literal sense of the Hebrew original and yet indulge in a cognitive music that is largely metaphorical and interpretative? Shakespeare or Homer does not help us to solve our problems, and neither does the Bible. On the other hand, the ethical urgency in the Torah is a consideration that one might like to address, especially since its ambit does not tally with modern expectations: it therefore creates an altogether different order of human and natural interaction, worked through a terse and coiled energy that comes from its language, narrative and worldview. The Torah can and must be looked at separately since strictly speaking the Bible is not a book at all but an anthology and “a set of selections from a library of religious and nationalistic writings produced over a period of one thousand years.” So there are diverse styles and points of view, though there have been certain attempts to homogenize it, like that of the whole ideological project in commissioning the King James’ version. There are also a series of textual issues like duplication, omissions, redactions, interpolations and contradictions. In this context, it is particularly important to dwell upon the forms that engage the Bible. For instance, many of the compositions in the Psalm-book, which were often used in the ceremonies of the Second Temple, are what modern literary scholars call lament. Similarly the whole text, especially the Torah, is filled with prophecies and oracles, short narratives (etiologies) and patriotic poetry, hero-stories, trickster-episodes, proverbs, pronouncements, and parables. This does not mean that the Torah is purely a sequential narrative. Each of the five books in the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—are complete in themselves. In fact, the question of literary form in the Bible is complicated by the fact that Biblical writers often wanted to submerge their individuality in the chosen form. The personal stamp therefore, is concealed in the communal narrative. To make a journey through the Torah is also to be aware of the history of a people and how the God of ancient Israel, their deity, stepped into human history and arranged events in their midst and in the process revealed himself to his people. To quote from the Talmud about the origin of the narrative—“God spoke them and Moses wrote them with tears.” We start from a point with an understanding at which Yahweh chose one man Adam (later Abraham) as a special entity and promised that Adam’s descendents would one day become part of a great nation. The narrative of the Torah is constructed out of the stories of Israel’s ancient heroes and covers the first 700 years of Israel’s existence. After the creation of the world and humankind and its spreading all over the world, the account follows Abraham’s descendents into slavery and out of it and their gradual welding into a nation with a covenant relationship with Yahweh. Finally they come to the verge of a land (Canaan) that they have been promised as their own. This extended narrative has also been called a salvation history. Along with the narrative we also encounter two other gifts to humanity in the Torah: one, a sense of the gradual ritualization of an ancient travelling people and two, an understanding of civil laws (halakah) that becomes part of a commune as it evolves and matures. Reading the Torah is a basis of Jewish public life. Needless to say, the Torah was actually composed over a period of many centuries by a process of culling, patching, rewriting and amplifying by anonymous writers (this is sometimes called the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis). This is not to undermine the authority of the scripture but in fact to strengthen the power and force of numerous believers over centuries coming together to forge an extraordinary document. One can see right from the first book—Genesis—that a literary artist of great acumen composed it. The organization is precise, separate acts of creation are carefully set in parallel form and the movement austere, solemn and dignified. The deity creates Adam by descending to the barren earth, getting hold of some clay and then breathing life into it (the Hebrew word used is yatsar—to mould). The creator himself is one of the actors in the drama. While the first account of creation is complete in itself, the second in Genesis is an etiology bringing man to the threshold of history– and all of earthly time is now before him. The two voices that we hear in the opening chapters continue to be heard in the whole of Torah. The first voice seems to be preoccupied with order and regulation, a voice that often produces genealogical lists. At appropriate intervals this voice issues sweeping laws—for observing