The Murmuring Deep

Book excerpt: A book that enhances our appreciation of the Bible—"explaining, exploring, and deepening our sense of what it means to be a human being of faith in a world as fractured and fragmentary as ours” (Forward). Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg informs her literary analysis of the biblical text with concepts drawn from Freud, Winnicott, Laplanche, and other psychoanalytic thinkers to make a powerful argument for the idea that the creators of the midrashic commentary, the medieval rabbinic commentators, and the Hassidic commentators were themselves on some level aware of the complex interplay between conscious and unconscious levels of experience and used this knowledge in their interpretations. In her analysis of the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Abraham, Rebecca, Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Ruth, and Esther, Zornberg reveals the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness.