When Words Fail
The Greeks had a word for it. They called it aposiopesis, which means “becoming silent.” This was later adopted as a literary term for a sentence that, for rhetorical effect, is broken off in the middle, often to indicate that the speaker, overcome by emotion, cannot complete it.
Shakespeare gave us a classic example in the case of King Lear, overcome with rage at the way he had been treated by his daughters:
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall – I will do such things –
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!1King Lear, act IV, scene 2.
He is twice rendered speechless by his anger. A more profound and poignant instance occurs in Psalms 27:13: “Were it not for my faith that I shall see the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living….” The sentence is left unfinished. The psalmist had said in the previous verse, “Do not abandon me to the will of my foes, for false witnesses have risen against me, breathing violence” (27:12). Now he says that it is only his faith in God that allows him to continue. Were it not for that.… He leaves the next words left unsaid, as if overcome by a sense of the unspeakable despair that would follow. Then he continues, rallying himself: “Hope in the Lord. Be strong and of good courage, and hope in the Lord!” (27:14). The effect is powerful, as the psalmist wrestles with his fears and eventually defeats them.
There are certain rare occasions when the Torah itself signals a break in the sequence of words. It uses what is known as a piska be’emtza pasuk, a “paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.”2See David B. Weisberg, “Break in the Middle of a Verse: Some Observations on a Massoretic Feature,” in Pursuing the Text: Studies in Honor of Ben Zion Wacholder, ed. John C. Reeves and John Kampen (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 34–45, and the literature cited there.
There are only a handful of such cases, and there are varying traditions about some of them.
One such case, not marked as such in our texts but signalled in some ancient manuscripts, is Genesis 4:8: “And Cain said to Abel his brother…and it came to pass that, when they were in the field, Cain rose against his brother and killed him.”
With or without an actual piska be’emtza pasuk the ellipsis – the gap in the middle of the sentence – is obvious. The text says that Cain said, but it does not tell us what he said. The commentators offer various explanations. Some fill in the gap. They say that Cain had an argument with his brother, and there are several suggestions as to what it was about.3Another suggestion made by some commentators is that Cain was replying to God who had just warned him: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7). On this reading, the first part of the verse should be read, “And Cain spoke [to God, in reply to God’s warning] against Abel his brother,” meaning that he blamed Abel for his anger.
The Samaritan text and early translations simply add the phrase, “Let us go out into the field.” However, the simplest explanation is that the text is deliberately fractured to suggest, in the most dramatic way, that words failed. Speech broke down. Cain was no longer able to speak to his brother. And where words end, violence begins.4There is a further instance, signalled in our text as a closed paragraph break – that is, an empty space in the middle of a line in the Torah scroll – in Deut. 2:8: “So we went on past our kinsmen the descendants of Esau living in Se’ir, left the road through the Arava from Eilat and Etzion-Gever [pause], and turned to pass along the road through the desert of Moab.” Here the pause seems simply to indicate a change in the direction of the Israelites’ journey. Until then, they had been travelling in a southerly direction, away from the land. Now they turned north, towards the land.
However, the two most striking instances of a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence are in Genesis 35 and in our parasha. Numbers 25 describes the terrible events at Shittim. Enticed by the women of Moab and Midian, the Israelite men began worshipping the local idols. There was chaos in the camp, and divine anger. Leaders were sentenced to death. Pinhas killed Zimri and Cozbi, who were cohabiting within full view of the people. Twenty-four thousand people died in a plague. God told Moses to take revenge against the Midianites. Then we read: “And it came to pass after the plague.…” (Num. 26:1).
At that point there is a piska be’emtza pasuk, a paragraph break. In a Torah scroll, the writing breaks off and the rest of the line is left empty. The text then continues:
…God spoke to Moses and Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saying, “Take a census of the entire Israelite community by paternal lines, [counting] every male over twenty years old who is fit for duty.” (Num. 26:1–2)
The example in Genesis occurs after the death of Rachel. The text says:
While Israel was living in that land, Reuben went and slept with Bilha, his father’s concubine, and Israel heard about it…
Jacob had twelve sons. (Gen. 35:22)
In both cases, there is no obvious ellipsis. It would have made perfectly good sense to have Numbers 26:1 run without a break. It would simply say that after the plague in which 24,000 people died, God ordered a census so that the people would know the number of the survivors. That is one way in which Rashi explains the verse.5It is, in fact, his first interpretation. His second is that the text alludes not to what preceded it but what would shortly follow, namely Moses’ request that God appoint a successor. Just as the people were numbered at the start of Moses’ career as a leader, so they were numbered at the end.
In the case of Genesis 35, it would have made sense to end the verse after, “And Israel heard about it.” There is a break in the subject matter at that point. Why then the paragraph break in the middle of the sentence?
Some suggest, on the basis of Mesopotamian parallels,6See Weisberg, above, note 2. that the break indicated a belief, on the part of the scribes, that there might be words missing from the text at these points. They would not have added them. Any tampering with the received text was absolutely forbidden. Nonetheless, by leaving the rest of the line empty, they hinted that there might once have been an additional phrase in the text.
This, though, is unlikely in the case of the Torah. More probably, the break was there to signal an oral tradition that did not belong to the written text but was nonetheless essential to understanding it. The sages, for instance, explained the behaviour of Reuben by saying that he did not sleep with Bilha. He merely removed his father’s bed from her tent and shifted it to that of his mother Leah. He believed that if, after Rachel’s death, Jacob slept with Bilha, her handmaid, this would be an unforgivable slight to Leah.7See Shabbat 55b. The Reuben-Bilha episode was a much-interpreted text in ancient times. See James Kugel, The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 81–114. Kugel’s footnotes contain references to further scholarly studies of the piska be’emtza pasuk.
Likewise, in the case of the plague in our parasha, the break might be there to hint at the tradition, included in Targum Yonatan, that God was then moved to compassion and resolved to make this the last punishment the Israelites suffered in the wilderness. Along similar lines, Ḥizkuni writes that this is why a census followed. Everyone counted at that time lived to enter the Promised Land.8Alternatively, it may be a signal to indicate that the narrative, considered in historical sequence, continues elsewhere. The Torah has just told us that God told Moses to take vengeance against the Midianites (Num. 25:17–18). However, that does not happen until Numbers 31. The paragraph break may thus be a way of signalling that what follows for the next five chapters is in parentheses.
It may be that the paragraph break in the middle of a sentence is there not to break but to join. By continuing the sentence despite the beginning of a new paragraph, the text is telling us not to see them as two separate subjects, but rather as integrally related. Thus Jacob had twelve sons because Reuben had slept with Bilha, or rearranged the beds. This event so disturbed Jacob that he never slept with the handmaids (or Leah) again. That is why he had no more children.9Kugel, on the basis of Jubilees 33, in The Ladder of Jacob, 96-97.
So too in the case of our parasha, the Torah wants us to understand that it was not merely after the plague but also because of it that God ordered a new census.
Thus far, tradition and contemporary scholarship. Yet it seems to me that what we have here is not simply a scribal device but rather an integral element of the text itself. The piska be’emtza pasuk is an instance of aposiopesis, an audible silence within the text, a point at which language fails. In fact, the two stories, Reuben’s apparent intimacy with Bilha and the Israelites’ adultery and idolatry with the Moabite and Midianite women, are deeply connected and give rise to the same, almost unbearably powerful emotions.
Think first of Jacob in Genesis 34–35. He has just come through the trauma of his encounter with his brother Esau. The meeting itself was something of an anticlimax, but the anxiety Jacob felt beforehand was palpable, reaching a height in the nighttime struggle with an angel. We feel, at the end of Genesis 33, a sense of relief. Jacob has safely returned home.
Then comes the terrible episode of the rape and abduction of Dina. Simeon and Levi, Jacob’s second and third sons, rescue her, but at the brutal cost of the killing of all the males of Shechem, and the looting of all their property. Jacob, appalled, rebukes them, but they are unapologetic: “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?” (Gen. 34:31).
Then Jacob’s wife Rachel dies while giving birth to her second son, Benjamin. We can hardly begin to imagine Jacob’s grief. Rachel was the love of his life, and now she is gone. Immediately after this we read that “Reuben went and slept with Bilha, his father’s concubine, and Israel heard about it.” Whatever actually happened – we noted above the rabbinic interpretation that Reuben was doing no more than moving the beds – Jacob evidently suspected the worst and said so on his deathbed, cursing Reuben:
Unstable as water, you will not excel,
for you went up onto your father’s bed,
onto my couch and defiled it. (Gen. 49:4)
However, the real offence was far worse. We learn from the book of Samuel (II Sam. 16:21–22) that sleeping with your father’s concubine is tantamount to throwing off his authority and declaring yourself head of the household (or the nation) in his place. Short of murder, it is the ultimate Oedipal act.
Hence the silence. It is as if there are no words to describe Jacob’s feelings of grief and betrayal. He had survived Esau, only to lose Rachel and discover that his second and third sons were brutal killers, while his firstborn Reuben had seemingly usurped him within his own household.
That is surely the mood in Numbers 23–25. God had saved the Israelites from their enemies who had sought out Balaam to curse them, only to discover that they then allowed themselves to be seduced by the Moabite women, first sexually, then religiously, worshipping the local god Baal Peor. It was the ultimate betrayal. Seemingly unable to resist the slightest temptation, the Israelites had abandoned their King and Redeemer for a minor local deity before they had even entered the holy land. It is as if the Torah were telling us that there are times when even God is lost for words, when even Heaven is silent, because there is nothing to be said in the people’s defence with the sole exception of Pinhas’ single act of zeal.
The piska be’emtza pasuk is a deliberate pause in the flow of words until we can feel the pressure of sheer silence and begin to take in the enormity of the offence that has just been committed.
What the text does next is similar in both cases. After the silence comes a genealogy – in Genesis, a listing of Jacob’s twelve sons, in Numbers a census itemising the number in each of the twelve tribes. It is as if the Torah were consciously beginning again. A silence has been observed. We now know how close the story came to complete derailment. Seeing what his first three sons had done, Jacob might have given up. Seeing what His people had done, God might have destroyed almost the entire people as He had threatened to do twice before. But now, after the silence, comes a new beginning. There are acts that are unforgivable, but the story must continue somehow. That is what the Torah is telling us through these two paragraph breaks in the middle of a verse. They are audible silences. In them, the absence of words speaks more powerfully than any words could do.
That, for me, is Jewish history after the Holocaust. “And it came to pass after the plague….” There is nothing you can say. There is a reverberating silence, a black hole that swallows speech. And then you count the survivors and begin Jewish history again. The pain is undiminished, the grief unhealed, history unredeemed. But there is no choice but to begin again. That is what faith is.