Carrying the Veil
Nasso and the Hermeneutics of Love
“Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils.” (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)
This week’s Torah reading, Nasso (Numbers 4:21-7:89), takes its name from a word that means both “to carry” and “to marry” (as well as “to lift” and “to forgive.”) It is this first meaning that frames the parasha, as each familial division of the priests (Gershonites, Merarites, and Kohathites) receives a unique command to carry the holy vessels, parts, and accessories associated with the Tabernacle from place to place. Yet the second meaning, “to marry,” looms in the background of the text. The first (and strangest) hint of marriage is negative: The Gershonites’ family name means to be separated or divorced. No explanation is provided for the name (other than that the Gershonites descend from a house named Gershon), but it’s worth noting that they are specifically charged with carrying the covers of sacred openings:
They shall carry the cloths of the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting with its covering, the covering of dolphin skin that is on top of it, and the screen for the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; the hangings of the enclosure, the screen at the entrance of the gate of the enclosure that surrounds the Tabernacle, the cords thereof, and the altar, and all their service equipment and all their accessories; and they shall perform the service. (Numbers 4:25-26)
The word for cover or screen, masach, evokes, homophonically and visually, a bridal veil (masveh). It’s curious that the people whose name means separated ones are charged with transporting cloths whose resonance conjures up images of both intimacy (a wedding) and deception/separation (a veil). If you think of the ark and Tent of Meeting coverings as bridal veils, the Gershonites form a kind of wedding procession as they carry it through the wilderness. The word Levite is related to levaya, accompaniment, and, on its own, can mean both a funeral procession and a wedding procession. Strange as it sounds, the Gershonites hold God’s veil as She walks to her beloved, the Jewish people. They escort divine immanence by virtue of their insistence on divine transcendence or otherness.
Later, in the parasha, we encounter the Sotah ritual, a strange process by which the priest seeks to make peace and restore trust between a couple struggling with marital strife (to put it mildly). (You can read my fuller thoughts on it here). In the best case scenario, the priest dissolves the name of God to save a marriage; he sacrifices the name of God, as it were, to bring people together. Read romantically, the priest effectively says, “I might as well be an atheist—I might as well erase God’s name—if I can’t get people to stay committed to each other.” Recall that Moses tells God to remove his own name from the Torah if God destroys the Jewish people for the sin of the Golden Calf (Exodus 33:32). The priest goes further (on my dramatic reading), asking, as it were, “What’s the point of God in a world in which lovers are irredeemably jealous of one another?”
Peter Szondi’s description of Othello’s jealousy well captures what the priests are up against:
“Othello’s doubts can be put to rest only by the evidence that proves him right, not by the evidence that proves him a liar. And this is his only wish.” (“An Essay on the Tragic”)
The jealous husband—as I imagine him—would prefer to have his jealousy confirmed than disproven; he would rather be a victim of infidelity than appear to himself and others as baselessly insecure, vulnerable, paranoid. He would rather be scorned and be able to say “I told you so” than loved and exposed as a human being struggling with self-worth and self-doubt. To counter our overweening desire to be right at all the costs—our ego-driven addiction to winning the argument but losing our capacity for relationship—the priest symbolically places God’s name, the seal of truth, in water. Let the flood overtake the order of creation if our rage for order leads us to dehumanize ourselves and one another. The Talmud teaches the principle derech eretz kadma l’Torah (human decency comes before Torah). That principle is operative in the Sotah ritual as human relations are prioritized above holy Writ.
As I am an associative reader, I take it as no coincidence that the Gershonites carry the veil. For I see the veil as a tikkun, a rectification of the human desire to see clearly and unobstructed. But relationship requires and thrives on mystery. One way to understand the jealous husband is as a figure, a stock character, of someone who requires certainty in all things. Slavoj Zizek argues that jealousy is a pathology irrespective of whether it is justified, i.e., irrespective of whether the jealous husband happens to be correct in his suspicion. The priests whose name means divorce (and who we can associatively link therefore to the jealous husband) must labor with the veil, must accept that the veil never fully comes off. It must stay on so that it can be lifted again and again (and new veils can be discovered).
While the Sotah episode describes a priestly intervention in the space between people, the details of the Gershonite porters intimate a priestly intervention in the space between people and God. We need to keep the veil between ourselves and the divine. When theologians become too scientific, too metaphysically certain, too dogmatic, they risk taking on the negative qualities of the jealous husband. Or to borrow from a different mythic system, they end up fitting God to a Procrustean Bed. Poetry preserves the veil where theology and philosophy generally seek to remove it.
Thus far, it seems the veil is God’s; after all, it protects the sacred spaces. But it’s possible that the veil is also ours, shielding us, as it were, from an objectifying divine gaze, the gaze of divine judgment rather than the relational gaze of divine love. The veil or curtain is bi-directional. Throughout Tanakh God is described as jealous. Idolatry is likened to adultery throughout Scripture. Hosea explicitly describes the people as a prostitute, and himself marries one to make the point—to enact (with prophetic license) what it might feel like to be in God’s position.
Yet if Zizek is right that jealousy is pathological even when it’s justified, then divine jealousy needs to be understood as a symptom of a God who does not want to be constitutively jealous; a God who is ultimately unthreatened by and even desirous of human difference, human mystery. To love us, God must see us through a veil. In both the metaphor of the jealous God and in the law of the jealous husband, the Torah offers the priest as someone who must heal a broken dynamic. Both the dissolution of God’s name and the transportation of sacred covers imply that we can over-emphasize objectivity to our detriment. Most powerfully, to the extent that God is likened to a jealous husband, the dissolution of God’s name in the Sotah ritual contains a mystical teaching: God can’t have it both ways. God can’t be in control and be in relationship. God, as it were, can know our position, but not our velocity—to put it in Schrödinger’s terms. God can know our actuality or our potentiality; but not both. Justice corresponds to actuality, while love and mercy and forgiveness correspond to potentiality. If God is to avoid the fate of Othello, God must be willing to be proven wrong. Can God make a stone too heavy for God to lift? Yes. We are that stone.
I’ve waded into some difficult (bitter?) waters. For some, the notion of a God described in such human terms will be alienating even though, to be clear, I treat the theological language speculatively and playfully, as though peering through a veil. For others, the Biblical conflation of idolatry and adultery will seem either anachronistic or offensive. For others, the patriarchal framework on which Biblical law and metaphor rest may be irredeemably off-putting.
I hope that the Torah will appear as a veil into which we can peer and through which we can, in turn, be seen peering by the divine. I am in pursuit of the Beloved, and on some gut level, despite my modern sensibilities, I accept the mystery of a text and a tradition that are captivatingly weird. The difficult aspects of Torah, at least as a textual tradition, intrigue me and make me feel that I could spend many lifetimes learning and still not come to the end of what I am seeking. A hermeneutics of suspicion is an understandable and reasonable stance to take to texts, traditions, and people that (we feel) have hurt us. But it is the hermeneutics of love that open ups the possibility of relationship. And since relationship is generally what I seek, this is what I seek to model. The eye with which we read the Torah is the eye with which the Torah reads us.
In my speculative reconstruction, the Gershonites were the ones who initially sought to know God; they failed to know God on their terms and so they lost faith, thus becoming outcasts. In carrying the curtains to the openings of divine meeting, however, they found a new, mature faith. Their practice of transporting covers, positioned them to teach their fellow priests how to bring people together, to get people to wear their personae more loosely, to see more wholesomely, and to grant each other permission to show themselves more fully—without giving up their fundamentally mystery. They could dissolve the name of God for others, because, as spiritual seekers themselves, they had already done so countless times before.
L’hinasei: To carry, to marry, and to forgive.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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