Atelier TenouaTalk27 June 2023
The art of saying no
1h 11min
The closing session of the 2022-2023 season, in the wake of the review's "Revolt" issue. Is Jewish thought a matter of obedience or of nerve? An etymology of revolt, a gallery of biblical rebels with the criterion separating Korah from Abraham, then the most scandalous text in Deuteronomy, the rebellious son, studied in havruta and overturned: the story's true rebels are the rabbis themselves. In French.
“Peace depends on our capacity to make our children builders: not people who accept and reproduce, but people who divert, who say no, who question. […] It is not we who raise them; it is they who raise us.”
“Hebrew identity is literally an identity of transgression, an identity of crossing. It is the refusal of the static state, the refusal to remain […] on the shore that gave us birth, and the necessity of passing, surpassing, overstepping an inheritance.”
“Korah's argument is not really a democratic argument but a demagogic one. Korah does not so much ask Moses: Why you, Moses? He really asks: Why not me?”
“A kippah, what is it? A small piece of cloth worn on the head which, in principle, reminds the one who wears it that there is something greater than himself, that he is not at the top of any tower, neither Babel's nor narcissism's.”
“Paradoxically, it is a kind of consciousness of smallness that makes them great: great rebels and great leaders at once.”
“Are you quite sure your son's rebellion is not the direct consequence of your own sour grapes: the effect of your own struggles, your own rebellions?”
“Kabed means heavy in Hebrew. The fifth commandment really says: your parents are heavy. But to be understood as: there is a weight that comes to you from them.”
The session
The session opens with a season recap and an etymological visit: mered, revolt, up on the slide. Against the false image of the Jewish revolutionary from the famous joke, the Talmudic spirit fits in three words: on the other hand. The names Jews give themselves set the thesis: Ivri, the one who crosses, whose root also gives transgression, and Israel, the name Jacob won in a night-time struggle. Then the gallery of rebels: Nimrod, whose name contains revolt, builder of Babel and enemy of Abraham; Korah, Moses' cousin and leader of a genuine social movement, whose argument is demagogic rather than democratic. The criterion lands: condemned rebels go bare-headed, praised rebels advance covered, aware of something greater. The havruta then studies Deuteronomy's rebellious son, the text Moses himself is said to have begged God to remove, and the Sanhedrin corpus that methodically empties it: a three-month window of applicability, a precise weight of meat and an Italian wine, parents with identical voices, up to the verdict: there never was and never will be a rebellious son; so why is it written? Interpret, and receive the reward. The room's readings surface the rabbis' rebellion against their own law, the daughters absent from the text, the clone-child without otherness. The wrap-up unfolds the Haggadah's four sons and the key nobody had seen: Jeremiah's sour grapes hidden in the answer to the rasha, intergenerational responsibility turned back on the parents. Jewish reading reveals itself as rebellious reading, faithful and unfaithful at once: the rabbis do not topple statues, they comment. Through Manitou and the Torah's first word, the session closes on Isaiah: do not read your children, read your builders. And a punchline: none of this exempts them from tidying their rooms.
Texts studied
- Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (the ben sorer u-moreh, parashat Ki Tetzei)
- Talmud, Sanhedrin, chapter 8 (the rebellious-son law emptied by the sages)
- The Passover Haggadah (the four sons, the answer to the rasha)
- Jeremiah 31:29 (the sour grapes) and Isaiah 54:13 (Al tikrei banayikh ela bonayikh)
- Along the way: mered · Ivri · Nimrod · Korah · the kippah · the rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21) · Talmud, Sanhedrin · the Haggadah's four sons · Jeremiah 31 · kibbud horim · Léon Askénazi (Manitou) · Rashi · Isaiah 54.