Rachel Adelman
Rachel Adelman (PhD Hebrew University), is currently an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible in the rabbinical program at Hebrew College in Boston. She studied for many years at MaTaN, a high level women's Beit Midrash in Jerusalem, and went on to teach there. Her first book, "The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha" (Brill 2009), is based on her doctoral work. She just completed her second major book project: The Female Ruse — Women’s Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield-Phoenix Press 2015), which she began as a research associate five years ago in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. When not writing books, articles, or divrei Torah, it is poetry that flows from her pen.
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See the following link: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8580-5#tabs-4
https://thetorah.com/article/the-burning-bush-why-must-moses-remove-his-shoes
Rachel Adelman, "Channah, Daughter of Mattathias: Instigator of the Maccabean Rebellion" TheTorah.com (2019).https://thetorah.com/article/channah-daughter-of-mattathias-instigator-of-the-maccabean-rebellion
also in Be-Ron Yahad: Studies in Jewish Thought and Theology in Honor of Nehemia Polen, eds. Ariel Evan Mayse and Avraham Yitzhak Greek (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 50-73.
See the following link: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8580-5#tabs-4
https://thetorah.com/article/the-burning-bush-why-must-moses-remove-his-shoes
Rachel Adelman, "Channah, Daughter of Mattathias: Instigator of the Maccabean Rebellion" TheTorah.com (2019).https://thetorah.com/article/channah-daughter-of-mattathias-instigator-of-the-maccabean-rebellion
also in Be-Ron Yahad: Studies in Jewish Thought and Theology in Honor of Nehemia Polen, eds. Ariel Evan Mayse and Avraham Yitzhak Greek (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 50-73.
(Summary of MA thesis submitted to Matan/Baltimore Hebrew University, 2001)
By Rachel Adelman
The thesis begins with a close literary analysis of Chapter 15 of Genesis, in which God promises Abraham the Land of Cana'an as an inheritance and progeny to inherit it. In the context of this promise, God induces a deep sleep and warns Abraham that his descendants will be "strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be oppressed four hundred years" (Gen. 15:13). The theophany is fraught with ominous imagery--animals cut up in pieces, birds of prey swooping down, the descent of a "great dark dread", and a "smoking oven and flaming torch which pass between the pieces." The conversation often shifts radically, alternating between reassurance and doom-toll, on God's part, and expressions of faith and doubt on the part of the patriarch. My main question, throughout the thesis, is why did God have to induce a deep sleep to tell Abraham of the four hundred years of exile? Was the content of the revelation too unbearable? Did Abraham "resist" the revelation, necessitating a prophecy on the unconscious level? And when he awakes from his stupor does he remember? There is no allusion to the four hundred years of exile and the promise to return until the Book of Exodus. In chapter one, "A Surface-scape of the Covenant between the Pieces", I raise many questions on the level of peshat, and draw on ancient Near Eastern sources and classical medieval commentaries for insight.
In chapter two, I draw on the midrashic narrative as a means of sounding out the resonance between the obscure imagery in the passage and other biblical episodes. I link this Covenant between the Pieces with two other trials in the Midrashic tradition on the biography of Abraham--his first "trial by fire", known as the Legend of the Fiery Furnace, and his "last trial," the Binding of Isaac. The link, of course, is the image of the "smoking oven and flaming torch" passing between the carcasses of the animals. Most commentators consider this to be a foreshadowing of the theophany at Mount Sinai. However, the innovative insight of the thesis is found in its psychological reading, linking the image of "the smoking oven and flaming torch" to the trauma of Abraham's first trial. According to legend, as presented in Breshit Rabbah, Abraham was turned over to Nimrod by his own father, and then thrown into the fiery furnace, only to emerge unscathed; his brother then was subject to the same fate and incinerated. The legend can be read as an attempted filicide, on par with King Laius' plot to kill Oedipus as an infant. The trauma is "repressed" in the biblical text, parallel to the repression within Abraham's own psyche, and surfaces, over the course of his life on three other occasions (Gen. 15:7,17, 18:27, 19:28), as hinted at by the midrashic narrative and Rashi's commentary. The trauma of near-filicide is only confronted and resolved when Abraham is faced with the demand to sacrifice his own son. What prompts that trial, as I suggest, is the misapprehension on Abraham's part that he has not sacrificed enough to God; his hand is stayed, in the end, to teach him not to repeat his father's mistake.
I follow Daniel Boyarin and Avivah Zornberg's psychoanalytic model of exegesis, in which the midrashic narrative serves as a means of uncovering "repressed information" in the primary, biblical text. Inspired by Zornberg's teachings, I draw on the W.D. Winnocott's theory of trauma, and Gaston Bachelard's literary and psychoanalytic exploration of the motif of fire. In the end, I suggest that Abraham is, paradoxically, put to sleep during the prophetic revelation because he must access that early trauma in order not to choose it as the means of Divine punishment for his people. Breshit Rabbah suggests that, while steeped in a deep sleep, God presents a choice to the patriarch: retribution through the collective fate of subjugation to the conquering nations (malchuyot), or retribution through the individual's doom to Gehinom in the after-life. In the end, he chooses the cycle of exile and redemption, the participation in history for the Jewish nation, over the individual's suffering of Hell's fire and ice. The theological and psychological motive behind this choice is explored. I argue that the course of Abraham's trials serves as a process of clarification by which the patriarch becomes increasingly more conscious and the Divine plan for his descendants is gradually revealed.
the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic, 2021) challenges traditional interpretations of the
Aqedah (the binding of Isaac) by questioning whether Abraham’s silent
attempt to sacrifice Isaac was what God intended. This article
interacts with Middleton’s work. It was originally presented at a panel
discussion on Abraham’s Silence at the annual meeting of the Society
of Biblical Literature in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 2022.