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nonstandardrepertoire · 19 days ago

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Parashat Shəmot: נִתְחַכְּמָה | nitḥakəmah

We want to be wise, but so did Pharaoh. How sure are we that our wisdom is any better than his? What stands between the inchoate urgings of our souls and the wholesale slaughter of children?

[Note: Next week, I’ll be giving a dəvar at my shul. Out of respect for the congregation, I don’t want to post my thoughts publicly before I share them with my community, so next week’s installment of one-word Torah will go live on Sunday, Jan 26, instead of Friday, Jan 24.]

The Torah is full of lies. Even without bringing in the all-too-earthly historical accounts in the books of Judges and Kings, there’s no shortage of characters who deal deceitfully in the five books of Mosheh. People fabricate, they selectively omit, they misrepresent what they know and what they think. It doesn’t always work out for them, but that certainly doesn’t stop them from trying.

No wonder, then, that Biblical Hebrew has any number of words for mendacity and confabulation. You might expect one of those words in Shəmot 1:10, when Pharaoh says to his people — as it is rendered in the JPS translation — “Let us deal shrewdly with [the Israelites]”. But if you look at the Hebrew, that’s not what you find.

Instead, Pharaoh uses the word נִתְחַכְּמָה | nitḥakəmah. Despite translations often deploying verbs of deceit and misdirection here, the root has none of those connotations. Nitḥakəmah comes from חכם | ḤKM, a root that very directly and positively means “wise”.

I want to really emphasize the overwhelmingly positive associations with this stem. Iyov 28 includes an entire expansive hymn in praise of חׇכְמָה | ḥokhmah | “wisdom”, deploying exactly this root. The holiest holy of G-d’s dwelling in the wilderness is to be made by כׇּל־חֲכַם־לֵב | kol ḥakham leiv | “all those wise of heart” (Shəmot 31:6). The sages who shaped the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism are regularly referred to as חֲכָמִים | ḥakhamim | “wise ones” as an honorific title. The verb itself, in its various other forms, is used regularly in an uncomplicatedly positive sense, as in Psalm 19:8, where G-d’s instruction is said to מַחְכִּֽימַת פֶּֽתִי | maḥkímat péti | “make wise the foolish”.

What about the specific form of the verb used here? It’s conjugated in what’s known as the hitpa’eil, which generally — tho not always! — has a reciprocal force. If you and I write letters back and forth to each other, that might be described using a hitpa’eil verb. This isn’t always the exact sense of it, but it’s a useful place to start when parsing these forms. And with the hitpa’eil here, we don’t have much else to go on; the only other place the hitpa’eil inflection of ḤKM shows up is in Qohélet 7:16 — אַל־תְּהִי צַדִּיק הַרְבֵּה וְאַל־תִּתְחַכַּם יוֹתֵר | al təhi tzadiq harbeih və’al titḥakam yoteir | “Don’t get excessively righteous and don’t make yourself exceedingly wise” — a passage that supports the notion that this good quality can show up in bad ways, but otherwise does little to pin down the sense of the verb. In a close translation of Shəmot 1:10, we might have Pharaoh say, “Come, let us make each other wise”.

I find this word choice disquieting. Here is this root that generally denotes an unalloyed good being deployed by a tyrannical ruler in plotting a genocide. What is there to say about this?

Of course, one response might be to argue that Pharaoh is laboring under a grave self-delusion: He thinks he is doing something wise and good when actually he’s doing something foolish and evil. That is a perfectly sustainable reading of the text. But as ever, I want to be a little obstinate here: The Torah uses a word for wisdom in this line; in reading it, I want to spend time with wisdom here.

And part of that, for me, means pinning down just what wisdom means. After all, another solution here is to posit that the difficulty is an illusion of translation, that ḤKM, as a root, can encompass not just wisdom but also cleverness, shrewdness, even guile. Maybe it’s wrong to suggest Pharaoh is striving after wisdom here; maybe the Torah really just means he’s striving after intellectual robustness in its most expansive sense, which can obviously be deployed in the service of wicked ends.

Well. Just as Biblical Hebrew has plenty of words for deceit, it has plenty of words for smartness, too. Off the top of my head, in addition to ḥokhmah, we can list binah, dá’at, séikel, and ormah. The last of these, עׇרְמָה | ormah, is worth special attention, because it has exactly these overtones of intellectual deception: The serpent in the Garden of Eden is described as עָרוּם | arum, as full of ormah. And we all know how that turned out.

But ormah isn’t ḥokhmah. And ḥokhmah, as we’ve seen, is overwhelmingly used in a strictly positive sense.

There is, in fact, rather a lot of writing in the Jewish tradition about just what exactly ḥokhmah is, because ḥokhmah is one of the Divine Attributes on the mystical Tree of Life.

Specifically, it is the second attribute, coming between kéter (crown) and binah (discernment). Kéter is, as the Zohar puts it, the most hidden of hidden things; it transcends the human mind’s ability to grasp, representing the infinite mysterious unknown of Divine Abstraction unmixed with even an atom of the tangible materiality of specific creation. Ḥokhmah, in this framework, is the next step on this journey towards absolute physicality, bridging the gap between kéter [a] and binah. Binah is, in a way, easier to pin down: It comes from the same root as the preposition meaning between, and refers to the faculty of telling the difference between one thing and another. Binah is tied to analysis; it lets you find categories and put things in one grouping or another.

[a] There is something to tease out here some other time about the Divine status commonly attributed to kings and emperors of all stripes. Pharaoh is, in his understanding, himself a g-d, which means from his point of view he just is a manifestation of kéter. And if binah is the form of knowing that’s closest to kéter, why shouldn’t it be the first one he reaches to tap into?

Ḥokhmah, then, is a form of knowing that comes before analysis. It is a knowing that comes after, or from, nothingness, a knowing that you know without being able to articulate or explain how you know it. It is a gut feeling, or a bat qol — a fragmentary echo of the Divine Voice of creation. It is a vital intuition; if binah helps you construct categories, ḥokhmah tells you whether those categories are right. Binah without ḥokhmah is sophistry, a dazzling but pointless shuffling of symbols unteathered from the meat and blood and breath of life.

And here it is not hard to see how ḥokhmah could lead us astray. Just as a ḥokhmah-level intuition that murder is wrong may drive us to construct a binah-level moral framework justifying that position, so too a ḥokhmah-level intuition that certain categories of people are inherently disgusting or inferior may drive us to construct a binah-level framework justifying that bigotry. Indeed, this is a common explanatory gloss offered in analyzing certain manifestations of transphobia: Some people intuitively find trans people disgusting, and rather than analyze the sources of that disgust, they instead concoct elaborate theories in an attempt to render that intuitive disgust philosophically justified. It is a common pattern: We feel first, then search for reasons our feelings are correct. First ḥokhmah, then binah.

Pharaoh, then, is saying to his court, “Come, let us strengthen our gut feelings”. In this case, the feelings are ones of mistrust, estrangement, and fear. Strengthen these enough, and it’s easy to construct an intellectual paradigm of dehumanization; it’s easy to think your way to the conclusion that some lives are less fully human than others, that some forms of killing aren’t even murder because the victims aren’t even people. Ḥokhmah’s closeness to kéter now seems a double-edged sword: both a near-perfect communion with the Divine and a hubristic attempt to usurp Divinity for ourselves, a setting out of our own order of creation that metes out life and death by our own unjustifiable impulses, a Tower of Babel built not of bricks but of hunches and unexamined gut-rooted drives. Perhaps it is for this reason that the prayer asking for enlightenment in the weekday təfilah does not ask for ḥokhmah but for other forms of knowing instead (and then, for good measure, immediately leads us to petitions for repentance and forgiveness). Don’t make yourself too wise.

Shəmot is a difficult book. There’s an awful lot of genocide in it on the part of the characters you’re meant to be rooting for. In the face of this difficulty, there’s a deeply relatable tendency to seek for comforting readings, to find those parts of the text that are still relatable to us, so long after its composition. To present the good in it as a way of reassuring us that it’s OK to keep bringing this text into the heart of our sacred communities. That is a valuable project, but I think there’s also value in sitting with the difficulty, in letting it disquiet and unsettle us. We want to be wise, but so did Pharaoh. How sure are we that our wisdom is any better than his? What stands between the inchoate urgings of our souls and the wholesale slaughter of children? The blood in our veins pounds out its heartfelt truth, and blood runs in our streets, covers our hands, clots the water we drink.

The signs and wonders here are meant for us.

This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read all the other entries in the series here.