Trauma and Abstract Monotheism: Jewish Exile and Recovery in the Sixth Century B.C.E

David Aberbach

THE EXILE OF THE JUDEANS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY B.C.E. is often linked to the emergence ofJudaism as a universal, e xclusively monotheist religion. [1] However, exile alone cannot account for the revolutionary nature of the Jewish acceptance of monotheism. It does not answer central questions relating to the biblical world: Why did non-monotheist religion in Jewish life, "the idols of wood and stone," suffer a mortal blow just then, ultimately vanishing from mainstream Judaism as completely as the dinosaurs? Why were the Jews the solitary heretics of the ancient world, accepting principles of faith which apparently no other entire people did for a thousand years? Why did they no longer tolerate idol-worship-which they had done until the sixth century B.C.E., at times to the exclusion of the worship of God? Why did most other defeated and exiled peoples, rather than become monotheists as the Jews did, evidently lose their faith in their local gods and fuse into the general pagan culture of their victors?2 And why did the sixth century mark a crucial stage in human development when for the first time a people, rather than go to war against its enemies, insults and threatens their religious culture instead-though there is no evidence that pagan societies were aware ofJudean monotheism, let alone its danger to them-and looks forward to an apocalyptic age of universal harmony and the end of war? The Judean acceptance of monotheism calls for a broad framework of explanation that takes into account not only historical, theological, and aesthetic factors but also psychological ones.

Circumstances in the late sixth century near east were favorable for Jewish monotheism. The need for unity of the surviving remnants of the two monotheist Jewish kingdoms, whose mutual hostility was now past, might have impelled them to escape further divine wrath by adopting the uncompromising faith of the prophets. General religious trends in the late sixth century, particularly Zoroastrianism, might have contributed to the Jewish acceptance of exclusive monotheism. [3] It may be thatJudean monotheism was supported by the Persians--the cost of rebuilding the Temple was paid by the royal treasury (Ezra 6:4; 7:20)--in part because of its likeness to Zoroastrianism. Furthermore, Judean monotheism was in many ways similar to the image of Ahura Mazda as taught by Zoroaster and accepted by Darius I (522-486 B.C.E.), in whose reign the Second Temple was completed. Ahura Mazda was believed to be creator of heaven and earth, source of light and darkness, sovereign lawgiver, center of nature, originator of the moral order, judge of the whole world. Boyce has pointed out that "Jews and Zoroastrians would have found a minor bond in their rejection of images of worship." [4] Still, the fact that Ahura Mazda was creator of Ahriman, his rival, was a major point of difference. Also, no people who came under Persian rule is known to have followed theJews in their exclusive turn to abstract ethical monotheism. These social and political factors were undoubtedly important in their time, but they hardly explain the power of monotheism among theJews in the long term.

The acceptance of one abstract God, to the exclusion of all others, by the exiled Judeans of the sixth century cannot be attributed to exile alone. There might have been a number of interrelated causes, unique in their configuration. Four are of paramount importance:

(1.) The fall of the kingdom of Israel in the eighth century inoculated Judah against the loss of identity when it, too, was exiled in the sixth century. This disaster gave Judah a terrifying picture of what its fate might be if it did not strengthen its national and religious identity and prepare for the possibility of exile. Grief for both kingdoms, particularly in the form of guilt over the betrayal of God and anger at false gods and idolaters (which had not saved Israel from exile) as well as the hope of restoration, helped preserve Judah's identity. By the sixth century theJudeans were, to some extent, ready to fight assimilation in exile and to grieve their exile. A key to survival, they found, was to split themselves off from what they regarded as the impure world of idolatry, to define themselves in hostile opposition to polytheism, and to offer a faith with a then-unique missionary character, superior in ideas and in human and aesthetic content.

(2.) A critical mass of Judeans were consequently inclined towards universal abstract ideals and principles which could not be defeated or exiled. In contrast, material gods and territorial identity were seen by the Judeans as weak and transient.

(3.) The destruction of the empires of Assyria and Babylonia within one lifetime (612,539) confirmedJudah in its anxiety to worship correctly an abstract and indestructible God, rather than gods of wood and stone, and become itself indestructible. The fall of these empires and the Persian Edict of Return appeared to vindicate Judean faith in one invisible God and the devaluation of worldly power and material gods. Judah, comprising little more than 1% of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, survived while these empires vanished. Its survival was evidence of the superiority of abstract moral ideas over military might, the trappings of state, and the exiled gods of the fallen empires. Principles of faith are indestructible, unlike territorial sovereignty, material objects, and the physical representations of gods and their edifices, which can be plundered, exiled, or destroyed. The need for the unity of the surviving fragments of both kingdoms of Israel and Judah as well as the general direction of ancient religion, especially Zoroastrianism, would have further inclined theJews to monotheism.

( 4.) The aesthetic revolution in Hebrew led by the prophets was a key factor in the turn to the abstract God. The poetry of monotheism was revered and recited in public worship as the word of God: non-Hebrew literature of the ancient near east was abandoned and lost. [5] Poetry helped turn the Judeans from a monotheist people, which had vacillated to and from paganism, into an international people who rejected idol worship and welcomed believers into a community of faith. At least some Jews in the sixth century found the spiritual inspiration and beauty of the prophets' poetry so manifestly above most other near eastern culture that it drew them away from assimilation, that natural, endemic cure for the wound of defeat, exile, and humiliation. They were, as Spinoza might have put it, too intoxicated by the divine poetry of the prophets to seek the sobriety of what seemed to them a more materialist faith. The particular form of national trauma experienced by theJews, coupled with their historic traditions, evidently enhanced their need for and receptiveness to creative repair through poetic art in the sixth century and later. The biblical prophets, then, may be seen as literary progenitors of later poets and philosophers seeking insight into and cure of trauma, whether personal or collective, in the quest for an abstract God.

Two and a half millennia on, the effect of the prophets on their first listeners and readers can only be imagined. A generation before the exile, King Josiah on hearing the words of the Scroll of the Law (presumably Deuteronomy) was awestruck and inspired into a total reform of religious practice in Judah (II Kings ch. 19). The prophets' words thundered in the ears of the exiled Judeans, left with little but memories and words, possessed with guilt and fear at having been untrue to their God and consequently exiled, then miraculously given the chance to rebuild their lives in their homeland. The release given by this second chance bonded them in hatred of idols coupled with faith in their God, whose fearful threats were now the realization of a promise:

If it crosses your mind-it shall never, never be!--that "We'll be like the nations, like the families of the earth, serving wood and stone"--I swear says Adonai Yahweh, that with a strong hand and outstretched arm and with outpoured fury I will rule over you! (Ezekiel 20:32-33)

Modern studies of catastrophe and grief, personal as well as collective, throw light on the movement to abstract monotheism among the sixth-century Jews. These Jews suffered unusually complex upheavals in their physical existence, their loss of sovereignty, land, property, pride, and continuity as the monarchy and Temple were lost. In this crisis, the idea of the Bible-of intellectual territory as their inheritance-became possible and necessary for Jewish survival. The concept of a "new identity" as the outcome of the grieving process after a severe loss helps us understand what happened to the sixthcentury Jews. [6]

Consider the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophets, like other writings deriving from trauma [7] as a tool of creative repair, setting abstract, spiritual values above material ones. The turn to abstraction served an adaptive, therapeutic function, for "The capacity for abstraction gives man a sense of mastery over that from which he is detaching himself." [8]

The prophets' depiction of God as an abstractbeingis aradically original aesthetic as well as theological phenomenon. It is striking how frequently the prophets use concrete imagery to depict abstract concepts: "I will betroth you to me in faith" (Hosea 2:22); "let justice roll down like waters" (Amos 5:24); "fountains of salvation" (Isaiah 12:2); "to go humbly with your god" (Micah 6:8); "the righteous shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4); "seek humility, perhaps you will find shelter" (Zephaniah 2:3); "righteousness the plumbline" (Isaiah 28:17); "circumcision of the heart" (Jeremiah 4:4); "like afire shut in my bones" Jeremiah 20:9); "a God in hiding" (Isaiah 45:18); "prisoners of hope" (Zechariah 9:12). [9] These and many other phrases point to a quality of mind substantially different from that which evidently prevailed in the ancient world, though there are occasional parallels, notably in Homer. To the mind capable of such creative leaps, material reality is not enough. Consequently, the Bible mocks pagan worship and totally ignores the vibrant, affirmative, moral qualities of the "strange" gods.

They--their kings and princes, priests and prophetssay "Hi, Dad!" to a tree and "Hello, Mom!" to a stone.

(Jeremiah 2:26-27)

The abstract imagination, which rejects "gods of woods and stone," must work harder, enriching itself in the struggle; traumatic sources are transcended by such creativity. The idea took root that the world is governed by invisible, immutable forces. The importance of this development was not, of course, confined to theology but marked a crucial advance in human intellectual growth: the imagining of an abstract God is one step away from the imagining of invisible particles, gravity, sound and light waves, and micro-organisms.

What brought about these changes among sixth-century Jews? What set them on a theological path followed by no other people in the biblical world? One notable factor was multiple grief. There were two monotheist kingdoms. Both were destroyed in a period of 135 years. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 721 drew the surviving kingdom ofJudah toward exclusive abstract monotheism. At the time of Israel's fall, Judah embarked on a massive reform aiming to uproot idolatry (II Kings ch. 18).Judah's exile in 586 B.C.E. reinforced the shift away from idolatry. Some Judeans and surviving Israelites who preserved their identity evidently denied at first the permanence of the exile of the ten lost tribes of Israel. They thought that the kingdom of Israel would be restored. This hope is found among all the written prophets of the eighth century: Amos (9:14-15), Hosea (11:11), Isaiah (11:16), and Micah (2:12), and it never entirely died away (e.g., Ezekiel 37:15-25). Still, as time passed, denial gave way to a more sober recognition: Israel was probably gone for good. Judah remained vulnerable. To avoid Israel's fate, Judah had to prepare for the possibility of exile.

This situation was rare in the ancient world. The common biblical explanation of Israel's fall was its idol-worship: hence the purges of idols and idolaters in Judah. The fall of Judah was felt more strongly than that of Israel. [10]

Never before had God's covenanted partner-at least that half that had survived the devastation of Israel and her capital city, Samaria-experienced, or even witnessed, such violence against the people, the land, and the fortified as well as unwalled cities. Even more shattering was the incredible fact that God's own sanctuary, His very own Zion, was taken by Gentiles and lay defiled by them."

The exiled Judeans, therefore, had greater need and capacity than the Israelites to mourn their loss and in so doing to retain their distinctive identity. Elements of grief such as guilt and anger were expressed more openly, in the form of self-blame for moral corruption and exile and attacks on idols and idolaters.

No survival can occur without severe guilt. [12] Similarly, "in normal mourning anger expressed towards one target or another is the rule." [13] Anger might have inclined the exiled Judeans to differentiate themselves totally from pagan beliefs. They did so by accepting the abstract God, who inspired their prophets, and rejected the idolatry odiously identified with empires. To the Judeans, the collapse and disappearance of Assyria and Babylonia confirmed the impotence of pagan gods and enhanced the credibility of the abstract God, who cannot be exiled.

Bel is bowed, Nebo bent doublea heavy load of gods

carried by weary beasts

buckling under the weightThey did not save a soul,

exiles all....

(Isaiah 46:1-2)

The centrality of the Land of Israel on one of the major trade routes in the ancient world-between Egypt and Mesopotamia-as well as exile itself, which brought the Jews into close contact with numerous beliefs and practices of other peoples, seems to have inclined them to a critical rather than empathetic view of the power of empire.

The prophetic teaching of faith in one abstract God helped overcome the great fear underlying Judah's theological vicissitudes-exile and loss of national identity. In grieving for their lost kingdom and that of Israel, the Judeans were drawn more than ever before to an exclusive, invisible God of the universe and to God's kingdom of Truth and Justice as the only source of power. This was a slow process, affected by a variety of factors and not completed until the late sixth century, perhaps not even then. [14] TheJews took strength and courage from a faith which denied the need for territorial existence and material objects. As a universal people, they, like God, could no longer be exiled. Their spiritual existence alone made them viable as a people, though it did not obliterate hope for the restoration of their land.

Clinical studies of multiple losses of siblings in childhood offer insight into the role of grief in ancientJudah. A frequently observed phenomenon among bereaved children is failure to absorb the meaning of death and the inability to grieve. [15] A second loss might trigger off an unusually powerful grief reaction in which long-suppressed mourning for the first sibling is also felt. [16] A powerful example of this phenomenon appears in De Quincey's autobiographical Suspiria de Profundis(1845), the never-finished sequel to Confessions of an Opium Eater(1821). In the Suspiria, De Quincey writes that his first knowledge of death came at age four- and-a-half, when his sister Jane died. He writes movingly of his ignorance of the meaning of death and of his disbelief that the loss was permanent:

I knew little more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but, perhaps, she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportionate to its strength! I was sad for Jane's absence. But in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again, crocuses and roses, why not little Jane? [17]

In contrast withJane's death, the illness and death of his sister Elizabeth when he was seven was a blow whose effects he felt for the rest of his life. De Quincey's mother was rather cold and aloof (he wrote of her, "She delighted not in infancy, nor infancy in her"), and Elizabeth had mothered him and was his favorite companion. News of Elizabeth's impending death set off an unusually strong grief reaction in which, no doubt, the long bottled-up mourning for Jane was also expressed:

Rightly is it said of utter, utter misery that "it cannot be remembered." Itself as a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos. Blind anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me. Deaf and blind I was, as I reeled under the revelation. [18]

He describes how he would search the inanimate world for some sign of his sister:

Into the woods or the desert air, I gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in them. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. Obstinately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, sweeping them for ever with my eyes and searching them for one angelic face that might, perhaps, have permission to reveal itself for a moment. [19]

How close this yearning and searching for the lost person is to the religious quest for an invisible God.

The importance of abstraction and detachment in creativity has been noted by psychoanalysts, literary scholars, and historians. [20] The "urge to abstraction" originates in anxiety, in the drive for self-preservation and the need to create order in a chaotic world. [21] The tendency to abstract philosophical thought is further linked to difficulties in relationships, especially in childhood, in which loss is often a factor. [22 Storr links contentment with the physical world with familial love and stability and discontent with trauma. Those like Poe, Descartes, Buber, Newton, and Bialik, who experienced the destruction of family bonds in childhood, perhaps for that reason found readier access to the world of imagination and abstract thought. Bereavement in some cases might lead to creative striving for mystical union with abstract ideas [23] (though most bereaved persons show no special proclivity for abstract thought after bereavement). Among certain individuals, however, irrational though normal grief responses may trigger a creative engagement with abstractions.

Consider the following passage from Martin Buber's I and Thou:

Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother--the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal world. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. But this detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from a bodily mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the world that is slipping away for a spiritual association--a relationship.... The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the earliest and dimmest stage. Before any particulars can be perceived, dull glances push into the unclear space toward the indefinite; and at times when there is obviously no desire for nourishment, soft projections of the hands reach, aimlessly to all appearances, into the empty air toward the indefinite. [24]

Buber is describing a movement from physical to spiritual attachment, from detachment from the "eternal mother" to a spiritual quest for a relationship with an abstract God. Underlying this thinking is childhood trauma: when Buber was three, his mother vanished, and for the rest of his life he saw her only once, when he was 33. This loss was "the decisive experience of Martin Buber's life, the one without which neither his early seeking for unity nor his later focus on dialogue and on meeting with the 'eternal Thou' is understandable." [25]

Consider also this passage from Chaim Nachman Bialik's Random

Harvest:

Every stone and pebble, every splinter of wood, was an inexplicable text, and in every ditch and hollow external secrets lurked. How can a spark be contained in a mute stone, and who puts the dumb shadows on the house walls? Who heaps up the fiery mountains in the skirts of heaven, and who holds the moon in the thickets of the forest? Whither stream the caravans of clouds, and whom does the wind in the field pursue? Why does my flesh sing in the morning, and what is the yearning in my heart at evening time? What is wrong with the waters of the spring that they weep quietly, and why does my heart leap at the sound? These wonders were all about me, caught me up, passed over my poor little head-and refuge or escape there was none. They widened my eyes and deepened my heart, until I could sense mysteries even in commonplace things and secrets everywhere." [26]

Random Harvestis a semi-biographical prose-poem in which the poetwrites of his "abandonment" by his parents and his "adoption" by the God of Nature. Bialik, though best-known as the great poet of Jewish nationalism, is also a poet of private grief, having suffered the complete break-up of his family by age seven: his father died and he was separated from his mother. [27] These losses are connected in his poetry (e.g., The Scroll of Fire) with the decisive tragedies of Jewish history, such as the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the exile. At times, one cannot separate Bialik's depiction of personal from national disaster. In clinical literature, similarly, the language of collective catastrophe (including the Shoah) is to a greater or lesser extent the language of personal loss. [28] For good or bad, the search for an abstract ideal-whether theological or secular-links modern writers and thinkers with the Biblical prophets: for them, too, "the power of abstraction is the beginning of wisdom." [29]

DAVID ABERBACH is Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies, McGill University, Montreal, and Visiting Professor, University of London. Translations from the Hebrew prophets in this essay were done by him.

NOTES

1. Itis a commonplace amongbiblical scholars that the acceptance by the Jews of exclusive abstract monotheism in the sixth century was linked in some way to national loss of the kingdom of Judah and the Temple in Jerusalem and the exile to Babylonia. For example, see Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, translated byJ. Sutherland Black and A. Menzies (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1885); W. O. E. Oesterley, A History of Israel(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Johannes Pederson, Israel: Its Life and Culture, Vols. 3-4 (Copenhagen: Dyva and Jeppeson, 1940); John Bright, A History of Israel (London: SCM Press, 1960); Rad, Gerhard von, Old Testament Theology, Vol. 2, translated by D. M. G. Stalker (London: SCM Press, 1965); David Aberbach, Imperialism and Biblical Prophecy 750-500 B.C.E (London: Routledge, 1993). Although the degree to which exile marked a radical theological break with the past is debatable (cf. W. Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957], pp. 250-251; and John H. Hayes and James M. Miller, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah [London: SCM Press, 1986], pp. 447-448), few dispute that the sixth century was a turning point. In Kaufmann's view, "With land, temple and king gone, only one contact with the holy was left: the divine word ... it was precisely in exile that the full stature of Israelite religion began to manifest itself" (Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, translated by M. Greenberg [London: Allen & Unwin, 1960] pp. 447, 450-451). Cohn sums up: "The experience of the Babylonian exile ensured the final victory of 'Yahweh alone'" (Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith [New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993], p. 149).

2. Exile could be, and sometimes was, seen-for example, by Judean exiles in Egypt Jeremiah 44:18)-as an unanswerable argument agains tmonotheism and in favor of polytheism: "there were Jews who regardedJosiah's reform not as a step that might have saved the nation, but as one that had contributed to its downfall" (John Bright, ed. & tr., Jeremiah. Anchor Bible [New York: Doubleday, 1965], pp. 265-266).

(3.) Cohn, 1993.

(4.) M. Boyce, "Persian Religion in the Achemid Age," in The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 1: The Persian Period, edited by W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 263.

(5.) The languages of Assyria and Babylonia, which ruled and destroyed the monotheist kingdoms, were forgotten until their rediscovery and decipherment in the nineteenth century.

(6.) Colin M. Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (London: Tavistock, 1986).

(7.) Andrew Brink, Loss and Symbolic Repair: A Psychological Study of Some English Poets (Hamilton, Ontario: The Cromlech Press, 1977); David Aberbach, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1989).

(8.) Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), p. 182.

(9.) On prophetic poetry as fundamentally opposed in content and style to the literature of the ancient empires, see Aberbach, 1993.

(10.) H. Orlinsky, "The Situational Ethics of Violence in the Biblical Period," in Violence andDefense in the Jewish Experience, edited by S. W. Baron and L. Goodman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977).

(11.) Orlinsky, 1977, p. 49. Despite the example of the kingdom of Israel, the finality ofJudah's fall might also have been met with disbelief by some Judeans: Judah was more stable and had more prestige than Israel as the kingdom of David with the Temple of Jerusalem atits center; it had been more loyal to monotheism than Israel; and it had lasted longer, in an unbroken line of kings. The book of Kings concludes with the release from prison in Babylonia of Jehoiachin, the legitimate claimant to the Davidic throne, and the implicit hope in the restoration of the monarchy. This hope, which was not realized, was the basis for the belief in the coming of the Messiah (cf. Isaiah ch. 11).

(12.) Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).

(13.) John Bowlby, Loss: Sadness andDepression. Vol. 3 of Attachment andLoss (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1980), p. 29.

(14.) There are vehement attacks on Jews who failed in other areas of observance of the Sabbath and festivals-and who intermarried (Ezra chs. 9-10; Nehemiah ch. 13). The religious obligations undertaken by Jews newly-returned to the Land of Israel do not include the rejection of idolatry (Nehemiah 10:28). This omission is all the more striking as theJewish theology deriving from the exclusive acceptance of monotheism did not demand of non-Jews belief in the one and only Godonly the turn away from idols as a false morality (Isidore Epstein, Judaism [Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959], pp. 143-144). It seems, therefore, that by the end of the sixth century, idolatry was no longer tolerated in mainstream Judaism.

(15.) Bowlby, 1980.

(16.) Erna Furman, Martiin Buber's Life and Works, 3 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1974).

(17.) Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis (1845). In Confessions ofan English Opium Eater and Other Writings (New York: Signet, 1966), p. 125.

(18.) De Quincey, p. 128.

(19.) De Quincey, p. 137.

(20.) See, for example, Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction andEmpathy, translated by Michael Bullock (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953 [1908]), Arthur Koestler, TheAct of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), Storr (1972), David Aberbach, Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media: Private Trauma, Public Ideals (New York: New York University Press, 1996), and Aberbach (1989). There is some critical recognition of the importance of traumatic loss in the history of ideas, for example,J. E. Gedo, "Nietzsche and the Psychology of Genius," American Imago XXXV. 1-2 (1978): 77-91, on Nietzsche; Robert J. Nelson, Pascal: Adversary and Advocate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) on Pascal; Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber's Life and Works, 3 Vols. (New York: Dutton, 1981) on Buber; G. Atwood, "The Pursuit of Being in the Life and Thought ofJean-Paul Sartre," in Psychoanalytic Review 70.II (1983): 143-162, on Sartre; and Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) on philosophers generally.

(21.) Worringer (1953).

(22.) See Karl Stem, The Flight from Woman (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966) and A. R. Dyer, "Descartes: Notes on the Origins of Scientific Thinking," The Annualof Psychoanalysisl 14 (1986): 163176.

(23.) Aberbach, 1989, 1993, 1996. Also David Aberbach, "Loss and Separation in Bialik and Wordsworth," Prooftexts 2 (1982): 197-208; and David Aberbach, "Charisma and Attachment Theory," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76.4 (1995): 845-855.

(24.) Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by W. Kaufmann (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970), pp. 76-77.

(25.) Friedman, 1981, Vol. I, pp. 4, 11, 15.

(26.) Chaim Nachman Bialik, Random Harvest: The Novellas of Bialik, translated by D. Pattersoon and E. Spicehandler (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999 [1903-23]), p. 22.

(27.) Aberbach, 1982; David Aberbach, Bialik (New York: Grove/Weidenfeld, 1988).

(28.) See Lifton (1967), B. Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays(London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), and Bowlby (1980); also see David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

(29.) Storr, 1972, p. 181.

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