cite Melville again, it is to kneel and revere. If anything, this study explores the ideas, sounds, and styles that include moments of both, that know when it is fitting to negate and defy and when we must affirm in a loving embrace. If there are moments when we must deviate from the crudest versions of “good,” when we must, as Simone Weil says, turn away from God, it will not be long before we fall back into his arms.122 The jazz great Louis Armstrong expressed his own version of this sentiment. When accused of turning away from God and embracing the devilish delights of blues and jazz, he would respond in words penned by W. C. Handy (though in his own rasping, gravelly voice): “Just hear Aunt Hagar’s children harmonizin’ to that old mournful tune. It’s like a choir from on high broke loose, amen. If the devil brought it, the good Lord sent it right on down to me.”123 In generations to come, Aunt Hagar’s children will find new mournful occasions to sing and rap about, and the products of their efforts, however infused with hellfire, will remain a gift that has broken loose from the heavens.
2
On Hebrew Soul
De Eloquentia Vulgaria
And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.
—Federico García Lorca1
Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me
And true savant of this dark nature be.
—Wallace Stevens
At the end of Socrates’s Symposium, late in the night when all the revelers at the party have succumbed to sleep except for Agathon and Aristophanes, Socrates shares a prophecy of a poet yet to come. He dreams of a poet who will combine tragic and comic styles in a new, comprehensive manner. Presumably this artist will make poetry out of the wild discord and contradictions of human life—out of grief and laughter, violence and love, the sublime and the ordinary—adding bits and pieces of each to make a rich brew. If one is persuaded by Eric Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis, however, this prophecy never materialized in ancient Greece. While the Greeks mastered tragedy and comedy, high and low styles, they generally kept the two apart, rarely allowing the experiences and characters of ordinary, everyday life to play a significant role in anything but comedy. For the marriage of these disparate styles another kind of genius had to emerge, outside of the aristocratic culture of the Greeks, and it did so at the hands of barbarians at the farthest edges of the Greco-Roman world, nomads and tribes that came together to produce the sacred writ of the Bible.2
By joining together the incongruent themes of tragedy and comedy, the Bible turned the spectacle of lowly, poor lives—shepherds and wanderers, exiles and refugees, the conquered and colonized—into the stuff of sublimity. For the first time in Western history the lives of the ordinary, poor, and rude were the subject of lofty narratives, with themes that were as sublime as anything found in Greek tragedy or philosophy. In contrast to the emphasis on the ruling classes in Greek tragedy, nothing was too humble or too coarse for biblical texts. They inscribed everything in their pages and made the long treks of exiles and slaves sacred history. Access to the Bible’s tree of knowledge, to its soul, is only possible if we have the eyes and ears to recognize the unlikely wisdom that comes from the experiences of the dispossessed, that oozes from the Bible’s lowest branches like thick sap.
I begin this chapter with a consideration of the terminology of nephesh in the Hebrew Bible, but I also explore the meaning of this concept from a more elevated, bird’s-eye perspective, one that surveys the dense, tangled forest of the soul from a literary and narrative perspective, in the last part of this chapter. Because the concept of the soul is the product of a story—a “living book” as Teresa of Ávila said—I do my best to unspool the narrative threads of this story, with a specific focus on the way the Bible commingles tragedy and comedy and hence weaves together its drama with high and low strands of thought. As I discuss later in the chapter, the result is a pattern that features, in bold color, the sensibilities of the outcast, the outsider, and the downtrodden, so that if one can speak of the heart and soul of the Bible, it will be found in the Bible’s predilection for these themes. Later interpretations of “soul” in Western history—say in African American or Latin American Christianity—addressed many of these themes when they spoke of “soul,” even when it was transfigured in a newer, more modern light. But here I begin with a discussion of some of the basic qualities, tones, and inflections of nephesh in the Bible.
NEPHESH AND THE BREATH OF LIFE
As an entry point, I begin with nephesh’s association with the life force of a living being: the soul is related to the needs and respirations of the human body, to the blood and oxygen coursing through one’s veins (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:11) or to the throat, where life is maintained by the absorption of food and respiration of air (Ps. 107:5; Eccles. 6:7; Isa. 29:8; Prov. 6:30). Nephesh is a source of life, the secret power that enlivens the body and spirit of a person, the gush of life vivifying and quickening the substance of man and woman, bringing it into being. More encompassing than corporeal or spiritual needs alone, the soul is a shrine or reservoir for a variety of passions and hopes, both sensual and intangible.
Because nephesh is connected to the breath of life (in its verb form, it can mean “to respire or breathe”), it also suggests something deeply intimate and interior to the human person and thus can be used in the Bible with a personal pronoun, as in “my nephesh” (Gen. 19:19; Judg. 16:30; Ps. 54:6). In this form the term seems to indicate the sanctity of personal identity, that which constitutes the unseen fabric of a singular human being. With this nuance added, nephesh is the life or spirit that defines and distinguishes one person’s existence from others, the quintessence that makes one unique and peculiar. As a product of God’s maternal care in the womb, the soul is irreplaceable and inimitable: “You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). In this vein, Robert Alter notes that nephesh can mean a person’s essential self, in addition to “life force” or “vital spirit.”3
Notwithstanding this intimacy between God and the human soul, however, the Hebrew soul remains a creature of flesh and blood; it is not inherently divine. The Torah leaves no doubt on this point: Like the grass of the earth and flowers of the field, the human person will wither and drop its leaves, fade, and return to the dust, says the poet and prophet Isaiah (Isa. 40:6–7). The human soul is fragile and impermanent, vulnerable to events outside its control and always vexed by the burden of the grave (Josh. 2:13; 1 Sam. 19:11; Ps. 34:23). Given the omnipresence of death and destruction in ancient Jewish history (individually and collectively), it is only natural that nephesh would be marked by the heavy and at times awful destiny of Israel. If biblical authors speak of Israel as often tottering on the edge of ruin, it is scarcely different when they consider the human soul: it is human-all-too-human. Consider the distressed effusions of the soul in the following psalm:
For my soul is sated with troubles,
my life’s reached the brink of Sheol.
I’m counted with those who go down to the Pit,
in darkness, in the depths.
Your wrath lies hard upon me,
With all your breakers you afflict me. (Ps. 88:3–8)
The image here of descent into the Pit (similar to the “Pit” of lions into which Daniel is thrown or the “Pit” of the whale in the Book of Jonah) is of course a confrontation with the underworld. The psalmist here is in an existential struggle, fighting for his life, doing what he can to keep the breakers
