Well, Zornberg didn’t quite go in the direction I thought she would, but continues to explore the inner psychology of the blasphemer in parshat Emor. The Rabbis, as usual, had built up several competing possible biographies for the man, which Zornberg synthesizes into a view of him being an outsider, not quite Israelite, not quite a member of the Tribe. Her interpretation tries to reckon with why he would blaspheme at all and link it up to the core directive of Leviticus, to “love your neighbor.”

“…a [man] without a place in the world who, in fighting to defend [his mother’s] name and his integrity, blasphemes. He gives voice to a scream of rage. Behind the scream lie what Elizabeth Hardwick has called ‘the human collisions [of the past] that are, finally, our biographies’” (194).

Sometimes Zornberg’s psychoanalytic approach vexes me. So much Freud can feel old fashioned or fanciful, but she always brings me back to the core of compassion and the deep humanity of Torah.