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TenouaTalk27 May 2026

Who decides who I am? Identity revisited

49 min

Who decides who I am: my birth, my desire, the story I tell? A study session on identity, against the twin assignations of the moment, neither pure inherited belonging nor pure subjective feeling. Delphine Horvilleur rereads the three biblical names of the Jewish people (the Hebrew who crosses, Israel who wrestles, the Jew of exile) as a braid of identities in motion. In French.

Highlights

“I am what I have always been, what I will always be: that is my identity. It is magnificent, it is interesting, it is seductive, and it is false.”

Translated from the French

“None of us is only our birth; none of us is only our desire. […] We are what we make of our birth: at once what we say of ourselves and what we live through.”

Translated from the French

“Hebrew identity, in the Bible, is given to a man who is not one with his origin and not one with his destination. A man in motion, who crosses, changes name, changes shore, and takes on his responsibility. Migration, otherness, relation, the pursuit of justice: all of it is contained in that Hebrew identity.”

On Abraham, the first “ivri” (Genesis 14), translated

“These three names weave together like a braid that tells the complexity of this undefinable identity.”

Hebrew, Israel, Jew: translated from the French

“You sense the scandal of this story: at the very moment we celebrate Jewish identity among ourselves, in a perfectly legitimate intimacy, we read the story of Ruth, a foreign woman, the ancestor of King David and of the messianic line.”

On the book of Ruth, read at Shavuot. Translated

The session

A study in three movements. First the word itself: the dictionary definitions, the illusion of permanence, and what biology and memory make of it (an identity that is not an essence but a continuity of narrative). Then the three biblical names of the Jewish people: the Hebrew of Genesis, Abraham called “ivri” at the moment a refugee calls on his responsibility; Israel, Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, a fighting identity that limps; the Jew of the book of Esther, Mordecai, figure of exile. Finally the paradox of Shavuot: at the most inward-looking moment of the calendar, tradition requires reading Ruth, the Moabite stranger who became the ancestor of King David. The session ends as every Atelier Tenoua does, in havruta: the first chapter of the book of Ruth, studied in pairs.

Texts studied

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