Rutgers professor's new book opens up Bible
Feb. 1, 2008
The child of parents whom she described as anti-religion, Alicia Ostriker first read the Bible, cover to cover, at the suggestion of her then-boyfriend, later husband Jeremy. Her deep-felt bond with the biblical text surprised the college student who had grown up with no religious education.
"The men and women here were my mothers and fathers," said Ostriker, a Rutgers University professor emerita of English. "This God was my God, this book was my book. It seemed already there in my blood."
The first biblical persona she identified with was Jacob as he wrestled with the angel. Not one to accept the status quo, Ostriker thought, "This is where I got my interest in questioning and challenging authority and wrestling. It's in my blood, part of my imagination. And there is a sense that this is where I get my values."
Ostriker also found her parents' values in the Bible. Even though they probably never read the Bible, they were deeply involved in issues of social justice. "They didn't know they got that from the prophets, but I knew it," she said.
When Ostriker began to write about the Bible, her mother was astonished and dismayed and asked her, "Why are you doing this?" But when her mother died, Ostriker found the copy of her first book on the Bible, "The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions," on her mother's bookshelf, filled with marginal comments, asterisks, and comments like, "Oh, what a good metaphor." Maybe she had no interest in the Bible per se, but certainly she had one in her daughter's thoughts about it.
Alicia Ostriker's new book, "For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book," continues her longstanding engagement with the biblical text. It was published this fall by Rutgers University Press and comprises six essays, on Song of Songs, Ruth, Psalms, Jonah, Job, and Ecclesiastes.
What first fueled her professional interest in the Bible and resulted in "The Nakedness of the Fathers" was a midrashic insight into how Job's wife might have felt after God had allowed Satan to kill off her 10 children and then replace them with 10 new ones.
Thinking about what had happened to Job's family, Ostriker said she went into something of a trance, and for the only time in her life, she started doing what she called automatic writing.
"My pen was flying, I don't know for how long," she said. "When I saw what I had written, from the point of view of Job's wife, I was wondering what she would say to God when she got the courage, the chutzpah. What will Job's wife, or collectively all Jewish women, or all women -- what will we say to God? What will we ask God?"
This experience of empathy with Job's wife put her, she said, on one of these trains you can't get off. She thought, "I'm in it for the duration, in the activity of wrestling a blessing out of this book, this God, this tradition -- that's how I see my work."
"The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions," published in 1994, was part Midrash and part autobiography, even though Ostriker claims never to have heard of Midrash -- the process of imagining the underside of the biblical text -- at that time.
"Many people begin writing Midrash before having heard there is such a thing," she explained, "out of a desire to get into the text and see what it signifies to them."
Her new book is a very different enterprise, not midrashic at all, but a look at some of the texts she loves most, as she explores what in each of them engages her. The book developed over time, beginning with an essay on the Song of Songs that she was asked to write for an academic journal, then a piece on Ruth she developed for an annual conference on religion and literature in Australia.
Job has been a long-time interest for Ostriker. In her new book she muses about the two endings of Job: in one Job submits to an all-powerful God, and recognizing his own insignificance, he is content to be just dust and ashes. As Ostriker writes in her new book: "The Lord has revealed his magnificent amorality, beyond good and evil É who has created the beauty and order of the universe for his own gratification, not for ours. Job has accepted this -- or appeared to accept it."
But there is another ending, in the prose frame of the story, where God tells Job that he was correct to rail against God's treatment of him, and the friends who fed him the conventional religious arguments -- that he must have done something wrong to merit his sufferings -- were wrong.
As Ostriker worked on these essays for over a decade, she had the most difficulty with the one on Ecclesiastes -- "because I felt there was some wisdom in Ecclesiastes that I needed and wasn't getting," she said. She meditated, brooded, and read the book over and over, along with innumerable commentaries that disagreed one with another. She pushed and pushed, but wasn't satisfied. "There was something more that I wasn't getting but personally needed as wisdom for my own life," she recalled.
She finally had a moment of enlightenment one night in Cambridge, England. She was walking home one evening over a wooden bridge and thinking, "This is so beautiful; I wish I could hold on to it." What followed, of course, was the realization that she could not hold on to it, and she laughed at herself for ever having wanting to.
This experience gave her a new insight into Ecclesiastes, a book overwhelmed with the sense that everything is temporary, fades away, blows away like the mist.
"He's not just bitter," she said. "He's laughing at himself, and that is how he can get to the letting go and go on with life."
Ostriker felt she has learned from the process that allows Job to reach moments of serenity where he can enjoy eating and drinking, and she hopes to imitate that process herself.
The mix of personal discovery and academic inquiry that informs Ostriker's style is just what she has in mind when she sits down to write.
"I like to write not as someone impersonal and objective but to let my readers know who is this person, what is the process, what did it mean to her," she explained.
Though the biblical text is on one level deeply archaic, Ostriker believes it also holds contemporary meanings that we are obliged to uncover. She said, "We are enjoined to keep on reading generation after generation and find meanings that are meaningful to us now."