“Smashing The Tablets”

A new anthology from SUNY Press

A Jewish anthology of creative responses to the Torah? Labeled as “Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible”? Sounds intimidating! Sounds iconoclastic! Sounds dangerous!

So first of all, as is my wont – rather than find shame in my jealousy, here you go: I WOULD HAVE SMASHED THIS OUT OF THE PARK. Literally half of the assignments I wrote in Gavriel Savit’s incandescent workshop, “Be Not Afraid: Writing the Jewish Supernatural”, would have fit the bill – and I’d be even better now, I wrote those three years and multiple pregnancies ago. I’m like every other writer who grew up Orthodox, who’s waging a near-constant battle to avoid writing about the Holocaust, and trying my damndest not to riff on the Biblical chapters that serve as the foundations of our storytelling engines. I could have riffed!!!!

So yes, I’m jealous I didn’t get the opportunity to be included, but there is another reason to talk about this anthology: The incredibly funny dissonance going on between the foreword, written by Shalom Auslander, and the actual meat of the stories.

I’ve tried both Foreskin’s Lament and Mother for Dinner, and while neither were my cup of tea, I loved Auslander’s article in Tablet on finding out his old teacher had sexually abused students and the most important part being why Auslander wasn’t good enough to be chosen for abuse.

The foreword is a bit scary, with Auslander going off in his usual angry way against the Orthodox establishment. He even goes so far as to insult the anthology itself, writing: “… we’re now up to twenty million Bibles sold each year. If I sold that many books, I wouldn’t be writing the foreword to this collection.” Insert eye-roll emoji.

So we have Auslander cursing God and country in the introduction, and here I am, expecting stories to follow with … I don’t know what. Moshe Rabbeinu’s idealism torn asunder by a high school debate team, maybe. Zionism cast as Nazism, though maybe the anthology proposal predated October 7, 2023. God on His knees. I was expecting discomfort, the anger that I’ve felt toward organized religion reflected in prose and literary devices.

But that’s not what I found.

The stories appear chronologically, in accordance with the 24 Biblical canon books. Many of them could be interpreted as modern midrashim. As the introduction by editors Seth Rogoff and Sara Lippmann reads:

“At the same time as this volume seeks to honor and extend the history of midrash aggadot and the incredible interpretive creativity of postbiblical literature in the widest sense, it also stands in relation to another important aspect of biblical and religious history: the relationship between social, political, and cultural power and interpretive control.”

In the collected stories, there’s often a shift in perspective to the secondary characters of Biblical narratives. Lot’s daughters (my favorite). Bilhah and Zilpah, Jacob’s wives’ slaves. Isaac during his sacrifice “hike”. Serah, daughter of Which (aka Asher – hysterical), leading up to Saul at his lowest coming to consult with a witch. Or the characters have been supplanted by others, a sorority girlboss taking the place of Job.

There’s Amazon bashing, and sex, both consensual and non. There’s an overabundance of figs. On several occasions that I very much enjoyed, the stories seek to fill in the blanks of women who were written about without their consent or input.

I actually wish there’d been less contemporary retellings, since it dulled the effect of seeing these archetypal characters in our times. Most of the stories are fiction, though there are a few (unfortunately unlabeled) nonfiction pieces sprinkled throughout.

So this is what follows Auslander’s rage. Writers with their little stories, trying to find truth in their own voice and lens, whose agendas encompass less of God and more of the injustices found in His texts. The question of God is raised only in relation to the characters.

This isn’t a study of what people will do in the name of their religion – it’s bein adam lechaveiro, not bein adam lamakom. It’s about what we, as people, do to each other.

And isn’t this juxtaposition between rage and creativity a perfect encapsulation of the religion? That the same basis can generate emotion and innovation in the same breath? I think this anthology does a wonderful job of capturing a snapshot of modern Judaism, because it’s never really about the individual, is it. It’s about people coming together, in harmony or dissonance. No single voice matters because in Judaism, there’s never a single voice. Every Dvar Torah is sitting on the shoulders of the one that came before it. Every leader is following a path set for them by the person who influenced them most, as is that person.

And I’ve got some new books on my TBR list.