Atelier TenouaTalk18 June 2024
Mourning upon mourning: where is consolation to be found?
1h 39min
The last workshop of the 5784 season, given on 18 June 2024, between the dissolution of the Assemblée and the French elections. From the broken glass of the wedding to the torn garment of the kria, from a midrash on the inconsolable Yohanan ben Zakkai to Stefan Zweig’s last letter: a crossing of personal and political mourning, and of what the Jewish tradition knows to do with loss. In French.
“Jewish thought could be called a management of loss: an art of living with what is missing, broken, or cracked.”
“We imagine that mourning done well means moving on. Judaism, through its rites and its words, seems to say exactly the opposite: the trace does not disappear, but you will be given to learn to live with what is torn, and perhaps even to wear it, to go on inhabiting the world.”
“In most languages there is no word for what you become when you lose a child. In Hebrew there is one: shakoul. A vine whose cluster has been cut is shakoul: the sap keeps flowing and no longer knows toward which fruit to go.”
“Instead of speaking of what is no more, he shifts the focus and says to the mourner: do not look at what is no more, look at what was. Look at what that life brought into the world.”
“What mourning does, first and above all, is kill language. Words no longer manage to say. And the whole task becomes knowing how to speak when words betray us, how to reinvent a twisted, damaged tongue.”
“Where there are no men left, strive to remain one, says the Talmud. I propose that we promise one another never, never to mourn the humanity within us.”
The session
The workshop first unrolls the year 5784 festival by festival, from Kippur to October 7 falling on Simhat Torah, from Hanukkah to Purim, from a Passover celebrated while hostages remain at Egypt’s gates to Shavuot. Then mourning in the tradition: the broken glass of the wedding, the kria tearing the garment, the covered mirrors and the revenants, the shiva, the psalms as a script offered to those who no longer find words, and the etymology of consolation, cum solus, being with the one who is alone. In havruta, the midrash from the Pirkei de Rabbi Nathan: four sages violently console the inconsolable Yohanan ben Zakkai, before Rabbi Elazar shifts the focus. Finally the political turn of 18 June 2024: Psalm 121 as the kabbalists read it, the vertical alliance of Arendt, Yerushalmi and Trom, Zweig’s last letter seen at the National Library of Israel, Perec’s La Disparition written without the letter E, without them, and Rabbi Nachman’s tale of the poisoned harvest: what sign to set on our foreheads to cross the madness without mourning our own humanity.