[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 167 (Thursday, October 26, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15842-S15843]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            NAOMI ROSENBLATT

  Mr. PRESSLER. Mr. President, it has been my great privilege to have 
attended Naomi Rosenblatt's bible classes over the past few years. I 
have found her teaching to be directly related to my duties in the U.S. 
Senate. She is a splendid teacher, but more importantly, a fine, 
insightful person. I wish that time would allow me to attend more of 
her classes.
  Naomi Rosenblatt takes the approach that the great stories of the 
Bible are relevant today--as we struggle with some of the same issues 
in running the United States as Joseph faced in running ancient Egypt 
for the Pharoah.
  Recently a review of her new book appeared in the Washington Post. It 
summarizes some of her classes that I have attended along with certain 
other Senators and journalists. I ask unanimous consent to have the 
article printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

              [From the Washington Post, October 15, 1995]

                         The Bible Tells Us So

                          (By Jonathan Groner)

       In an era when many of our politicians are still trying to 
     locate the proper place of religion in American life, Naomi 
     Rosenblatt has for several years played the role of Bible 
     teacher to many of Capitol Hill's movers and shakers. The 
     weekly Old Testament classes led by Rosenblatt, an Israeli-
     born Washington psychotherapist, have captivated tough 
     political professionals like senators Larry Pressler and 
     Arlen Specter and journalists William Safire and Marvin Kalb, 
     Wrestling with Angels, co-written with her longtime student 
     Joshua Horwitz but bearing Rosenblatt's stamp as chief 
     author, grows out of these sessions.
       It's Rosenblatt's first book, and what a fascinating effort 
     it is; part biblical interpretation, part self-help treatise; 
     a book that adopts an unmistakably Jewish perspective yet 
     remains accessible to readers of all backgrounds.
       Rosenblatt's ambitious project was to traverse the entire 
     book of Genesis--amply familiar for the stories of Adam and 
     Eve, Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel, and the 
     wanderings of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--and to 
     derive from it universal and psychologically valid lessons 
     about human character. Her approach to the first book of the 
     Bible is inseparable from her therapeutic method.
       Rosenblatt says that her role as interpreter of the text is 
     to provide ``a psychological and spiritual examination of the 
     multigenerational family,'' by which she means the family of 
     Abraham, Sarah and their descendants. Sibling rivalries, 
     midlife crises, blended families, guilt and personal 
     responsibility--these are the therapist's stock in trade. 
     Rosenblatt is able to convince me, most of the time, that 
     these also represent useful interpretive tools in 
     understanding the biblical text.
       Two thousand years ago, a rabbi said in the Mishna that he 
     had learned more from his students than from his teachers. In 
     struggling with these old riddles, Rosenblatt too enjoyed the 
     assistance of her students. Like the Talmud, Wrestling with 
     Angels is a distillation of discussions held over a period of 
     years. And the questions with which Rosenblatt grapples, as 
     she fully understands, were already noted by the rabbis of 
     the Jewish tradition, who provided their own answers. What 
     was the real nature of the sin of Adam and Eve? Why did God 
     command Abraham to sacrifice his only son? With whom was 
     Jacob really wrestling in his nocturnal encounter with the 
     ``angel''? What was the secret of Joseph's success in Egypt?
       Yet Rosenblatt's method yields new solutions, or at least 
     new versions of old solutions. Here is her interpretation of 
     Jacob's wrestling with the angel: ``Is this `man' his twin 
     brother, Esau, with whom he wrestled in the womb and whom he 
     must confront the next morning? Is he Jacob's shadow self, 
     the darker part of his psyche that doubts and fears--that he 
     must integrate before he can become whole? Could he be an 
     angle of death, Jacob's fear of mortality rising up to greet 
     him on the eve of his brother's revenge? . . . It seems to me 
     that the `man' is all of these.'' Rosenblatt's sensitive 
     reading takes full advantage of the ambiguity and 
     mysteriousness of the biblical story, which is a dream an 
     allegory, or both.
       As might be expected, Rosenblatt is at her most convincing 
     when she touches on the portions of Genesis that deal 
     explicitly with intra-family conflicts. The text tells us 
     this directly in Chapter 25, after all: Of her twins, Rebekah 
     preferred Jacob, while Isaac, their father, chose Esau as his 
     favorite. From these facts sprang rivalry and disruption that 
     continued for generations. Rosenblatt's psychological filter 
     is helpful here. She explains, for example, that the story of 
     Jacob and Esau ``is a strong warning to us of the danger to 
     children when parents draw them into the shifting power 
     balance of their marriage.'' That's as true now as it was 
     then.
       Rosenblatt's thoughts often echo and extend some of the 
     interpretations already found in Jewish tradition. The result 
     is as if one were seeing the old stories with new eyes. The 
     tradition notes, for example, that once Isaac was consecrated 
     and nearly sacrificed on the altar by Abraham, he took on a 
     personal holiness and thus was never allowed to venture 
     beyond the holy land of Israel. Speaking from a psychological 
     perspective, Rosenblatt also recognizes how circumscribed 
     Isaac's life was. As a child growing up in the shadow of a 
     famous father, she argues, Isaac ``never experiences the 
     cathartic personal transformation that the other patriarchs 
     undergo.''
       Or Rosenblatt explains how Jacob's ``emotional blindness on 
     his wedding night mirrors Isaac's physical blindness when 
     bestowing his blessing on his son [Jacob].'' This echoes an 
     old rabbinical interpretation that emphasized how the onetime 
     deceiver, Jacob, was later himself the victim of deception.
       Not all of Rosenblatt's interpretations are on target. My 
     understanding of the conflict between the wives of Jacob was 
     not measurably aided by Rosenblatt's digression on the 
     dilemma of 20th-century women who are torn between career and 
     motherhood. Nor did her cursory discussion of the attempted 
     seduction of Joseph in Egypt, citing modern views of sexual 
     harassment, add anything to my thinking on either the Joseph 
     narrative or the harassment dynamic. She somewhat 
     shortchanges the whole Joseph narrative, a section of Genesis 
     that gets better treatment from the brilliant contemporary 
     critic Robert Alter.

[[Page S15843]]

       But these are minor points. Rosenblatt's students on 
     Capitol Hill feel privileged that she is their teacher, and 
     now that this book is available, all of us who take the Bible 
     seriously can consider ourselves similarly blessed.

                          ____________________