be read, they had to be added to, enspirited by the reader’s breath. The invisible air, the same mystery that animates the visible terrain, was also needed to animate the visible letters, to make them come alive and to speak. The letters themselves thus remained overtly dependent upon the elemental, corporeal life-world—they were activated by the very breath of that world, and could not be cut off from that world without losing all of their power. In this manner the absence of written vowels ensured that Hebrew language and tradition remained open to the power of that which exceeds the strictly human community—it ensured that the Hebraic sensibility would remain rooted, however tenuously, in the animate earth. (While the Hebrew Bible would become, as we have seen, a kind of portable homeland for the Jewish people, it could never entirely take the place of the breathing land itself, upon which the text manifestly depends. Hence the persistent themes of exile and longed-for return that reverberate through Jewish history down to the present day.) The absence of written vowels in ancient Hebrew entailed that the reader of a traditional Hebrew text had to actively choose the appropriate breath sounds or vowels, yet different vowels would often vary the meaning of the written consonants (much as the meaning of the consonantal cluster ‘RD,’ in English, will vary according to whether we insert a long o sound between those consonants, ‘RoaD’; or a long i sound, ‘RiDe’; a short e sound, ‘ReD’; or a long e sound, ‘ReaD’. The reader of a traditional Hebrew text must actively choose one pronunciation over another, according to the fit of that meaning within the written context, yet the precise meaning of that context would itself have been determined by the particular vowels already chosen by that reader. The traditional Hebrew text, in other words, overtly demanded the reader’s conscious participation. The text was never complete in itself; it had to be actively engaged by a reader who, by this engagement, gave rise to a particular reading. Only in relation—only by being taken up and actively interpreted by a particular reader—did the text become meaningful. And there was no single, definitive meaning; the ambiguity entailed by the lack of written vowels ensured that diverse readings, diverse shades of meaning, were always possible. Some form of active participation, as we have seen, is necessary to all acts of phonetic reading, whether of Greek, or Latin, or English texts such as this one. But the purely consonantal structure of the Hebrew writing system rendered this participation—the creative interaction between the reader and the text—particularly conscious and overt. It simply could not be taken for granted, or forgotten. Indeed, the willful engagement with the text that was necessitated by the absence of written vowels lent a deeply interactive or interpretive character to the Jewish community’s understanding of its own most sacred teachings. The scholar Barry Holtz alludes to this understanding in his introduction to a book on the sacred texts of Judaism: We tend usually to think of reading as a passive occupation, but for the Jewish textual tradition, it was anything but that. Reading was a passionate and active grappling with God’s living word. It held the challenge of uncovering secret meanings, unheard-of explanations, matters of great weight and significance. An active, indeed interactive, reading was their method of approaching the sacred text called Torah and through that reading process of finding something at once new and very old… By “interactive” I mean to suggest that for the rabbis of the tradition, Torah called for a living and dynamic response. The great texts in turn are the record of that response, and each text in turn becomes the occasion for later commentary and interaction. The Torah remains unendingly alive because the readers of each subsequent generation saw it as such, taking the holiness of Torah seriously, and adding their own contribution to the story. For the tradition, Torah demands interpretation. The reader, that is, must actively respond to the Torah, must bring his own individual creativity into dialogue with the teachings in order to reveal new and unsuspected nuances. The Jewish people must enter into dialogue with the received teachings of their ancestors,
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