Ambiguity is not an obstacle to meaning. It is the very source of it. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Political violence. Large scale global shifts of populations. Climate change. During moments of upheaval we tend to search for explanations, that we might reclaim some order in the face of uncertainty.
In 1972 psychologist Jerome Kagan proposed that the drive to resolve ambiguity and achieve certainty is hard-wired within the human personality. We seek to eliminate the distress of the unknown.
Social psychologist Arie Kruglanski in 1994 identified this drive for certainty as a desire for “cognitive closure.” He and fellow psychologist Donna Webster developed a way to measure the need for closure: the preference for order, predictability, decisiveness and a discomfort with ambiguity. During the past two decades Kruglanski has applied his theories to the study of radicalization which leads to terrorism.
It seems to make sense that in the face of displacement, upheaval and exile from the familiar we would embrace absolute and unassailable answers in order to stabilize our storm-tossed lives. Except Torah takes the exact opposite approach.
Parshat Matot-Masei concludes the book of Numbers. The book of Numbers can be thought of as the end of Torah. Yes, there is still the book of Deuteronomy. But there is no narrative in Deuteronomy, no movement. It is a summation by Moses of the Israelites’ 40-year journey.
Reading Numbers as the conclusion of Torah reveals that how Torah ends is how it began: not with answers and clarity but with questions and ambiguity. The opening verse of Genesis does not provide certainty about the nature of origins. The first word is a Hebrew grammatical non-sense. B’reishit is an anomalous construct. At the very least, according to the rules of Hebrew grammar, it should be followed by a noun. Instead, it is a verb that shows up. Order and clarification have been rejected in favor of confusion and ambiguity.
The Zohar disrupts our longing for simple comprehension even more radically. It argues that the words of that verse should be read in the exact order in which they appear. In which case, contrary to the rules of Hebrew grammar, Elohim (God) is not the subject of the verb “created” but the object! The opening words of the Bible, according to the Zohar, are to be read as: With beginning [understood to mean Wisdom], the ineffable [that which is incapable of being named] created God.
This confounding of our cognitive desire for explanation and information alerts us that Torah should be read less as a prose report on events and more as an e. e. cummings poem, with its defiance of literary rules and its disruption of what we expect to see on a page.
Parshat Matot-Masei ends Torah’s narrative similar to the way it began: not with clarity and answers but with confusion and questions.
The Israelites, having reached the entry to the promised land, are provided with a description of its borders. But that description is different from the one given at the start of their journey. Among the variants is the identification of Israel’s eastern border. Numbers locates that border as aligned with the Jordan River. Yet Exodus identifies it as reaching all the way to the Euphrates, an area extending into current-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
Discourse itself becomes confused in this last portion of Numbers. The tribes of Reuben and Dan tell Moses that they want to settle on the east side of the Jordan. Moses sees this as an act of abandonment on the eve of battle and is furious with them. “No, no,” they assure him. “We’ll go with you to help gain possession of the land on the west side. We just want to settle here once victory has been achieved.” Commentators are divided as to whether Moses is at fault for jumping to conclusions or Reuben and Dan are to blame for poor communication. In either case, clarity of intentions has become muddled at this closing and climactic moment.
Matot-Masei ends with new questions about an issue we might have thought resolved. The daughters of Zelophehad had earlier argued that they should inherit their father’s land since he died without male heirs. Moses consulted with God, who approved of the daughters’ position. Now, at the very closing of Numbers, their case is reopened by members of the community: If the daughters marry men outside of their own tribe, their inherited land will transfer to another tribe thereby disrupting the divine allotment of territory. A new consultation leads to a new resolution: the daughters must marry within their tribe. This final story in Numbers reminds the Israelites: nothing is ever final. To live within the promise is to live within waves of uncertainty and change.
By the age of twenty Helen Frankenthaler was already immersed in the center of Abstract Expressionism. The art critic Clement Greenberg was her guide into a world that included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, and Hans Hoffman. By the age of twenty-four she had innovated a style of her own. Rather than covering a canvass with thick paint, she thinned her oil paints with turpentine and used window wipers, sponges, and charcoal outlines to manipulate the resulting pools of pigment. Her soak-stain technique emphasized color, spontaneity, and the interaction between paint and canvas.
Pictured here is her work Seven Types of Ambiguity. It is inspired by an essay of the same name by literary critic William Empson. Empson emphasized that ambiguity in a literary work is not an obstacle to meaning. It is the very source of it. Ambiguity allows a work of art to elevate beyond pure depiction or a single viewpoint. It creates a space where the perception of the viewer helps create the piece. The viewer’s search for meaning becomes a central part of the artistic work.
For Empson, close reading yields deep relationships with a text, which produces new insights, new life. Frankenthaler applied this principle to her art work: “As the print evolves, it tells you, you tell it. You have a conversation with a print.” This is achieved by the artist not having the final, clarifying word. “How a picture works best for me,” she wrote, “involves how much working false space it has in depth…whether it be a Cubist Picasso or Braque or a Noland stripe painting – it’s a play of ambiguities.”
To be one who can play with ambiguities is Torah’s concluding lesson about how to thrive in the land of promise. Our moments of crisis are best handled not by burying ourselves in answers but by digging deeper into questions.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday August 1 as we explore the play of ambiguity.
