Shakespeare | Sharing Jewish Tradition

“These many, then, shall die. Their names are pricked,” says Anthony (Julius Caesar, 4.1.1), as he and his colleagues decide who might threaten their power and must therefore be eliminated. Presumably they had a list of all Rome’s upper-crust and made a hole by the name of the doomed.

Funny thing, this phrase is used in this week’s Torah reading: the list of prominent census checkers (Num. 1:17) are “those who are pricked in name / אֲשֶׁר נִקְּבוּ בְּשֵׁמוֹת / asher nikvu beshemot.” If there’s a common meaning to the idiom as used by Shakespearean Romans and wandering Hebrews, perhaps it means that the person is marked for something, either good or bad.

Prick or pierce: the root is קב. Rashi uses a form of this root to explain that people used to oil their shields so that arrows and spears would slip right off instead of “piercing” them (note to Lev. 26:11).

The root may be related to נְקֵבָה, “feminine,” and נֶקֶב, “opening.” After all, what is a Hebrew letter nun but a nullifier that turns active verbs into passive! (A single Hebrew three-letter root may have more than one unrelated meaning, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to find a connection.)

The root קב seems to appear in Lev. 24:11, the story of the “blasphemer”: “And he pierced, the son of the Israelite woman, the Name / וַיִּקֹּב בֶּן־הָאִשָּׁה הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית אֶת־הַשֵּׁם / vayikov ben ha’ishah haYisra’elit et haShem.” This poor fellow did something shocking and nobody knew what to do. They took him to Moses, Moses had to get orders from on high, and then this fellow was executed, one of only two people in the Torah to suffer the death penalty.

What did he do? Perhaps “piercing the Name” means he did something to diminish God’s reputation (“puncturing” the “name”). Bil’am is engaged to curse the Israelites, and he uses the same root when he explains to his employer that this just can’t be done: “What shall I curse/pierce that God has not cursed/pierced / מָה אֶקֹּב לֹא קַבֹּה אֵל / mah ekov lo kabo El” (Num. 23:8).

Or perhaps the “blasphemer” did something else. In a patriarchal society, one’s identity comes from one’s father. The Israelites camp was organized by tribes, and your tribe was inherited from your father. This poor fellow who was executed didn’t have an Israelite father. His Dad was an Egyptian (Lev. 24:10), so where was he to pitch his tent? (Rashi explains that this was his problem.) His Mom’s tribe wouldn’t want him, because they might then have to share part of their promised land with him, too. So he was an outcast, trying to find his place in the Israelite community.

Like all of us, I suppose.

Maybe his very existence called into question the method of tribal organization and land allocation. Maybe when he “pierced the name” it wasn’t God’s name he undermined but the system of social identity, so-and-so the son of his father. And nobody could cope with that. So they offed him.

His Mom was “Peace-girl the daughter of Word-guy of the tribe of Judge-man” (שְׁלֹמִית בַּת־דִּבְרִי לְמַטֵּה־דָן), and maybe this is a comment on the irony of the whole episode: sometimes you have to shut up for the sake of peace, because if you make trouble the community will impose some kind of justice, and you won’t like the result.

Back to Anthony: when a dictator takes over, the first order of business is to eliminate the opposition!

“My rock, my redeemer.”

What do we mean when we call God a rock?

Reliable Rocks?

Surely a rock is the most reliable thing we can think of. We can lean on it, sit on it, stand on top of it to fight off our enemies, and hide behind it even when bullets and arrows are whizzing our way. The Psalmist speaks of taking refuge in craggy fastnesses, as David hid when pursued by King Saul: “God lifts me up on a rock / בְּצוּר יְרוֹמְמֵנִי /betzur yeromemeni” (Ps. 27:5).

But time, aided by wind and water, crushes massive rocks into dust. When the ancients contemplated ruins of earlier civilizations than their own, even they knew that a rock’s life is limited, and Shakespeare voiced this knowledge in Sonnet 55: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes / Shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

Now that atoms have become divisible, our physicists can contemplate a new world of subatomic instability, a roiling sea of turbulence beneath the harsh facade of a concrete wall.

Oh, you rocks. Like humanity, you turn to dust.

Reality Rocks?

So here’s another thought. The 18th-century British philosopher George Berkeley held “that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online). Dr. Johson (isn’t he everyone’s favorite figure in English literature?) didn’t agree. Boswell wrote:

… we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,–“I refute it thus.”

There we have it. When we call God a rock, we can say that God is the proof that matter matters, that existence exists, that you (dear reader) are not a figment of my imagination nor I of yours, but that we each possess a measure of reality. Ice cream is real, so let’s celebrate. When we say (in Aleinu, quoting Deut. 4:39) “Nothing else is /אֵ֖ין עֽוֹד / ein od,” we can understand this to mean that God is the source and proof of all existence.

Oh, the joy of these philosophical-theological-ontological-epistemological points! Though sometimes the joy is mitigated by an unsettling sense that the profound insight may in fact be a throwaway pun.

Or Does It?

I’d like to have seen the elderly Dr. Johnson (he was in his 50s), master of encyclopedic knowledge, stubbing his stubborn toe on a rock. Ho, ho, Berkeley is refuted, and who can ever argue with Dr. J.? And yet, and yet, you may feel something in your brain, but that doesn’t prove it’s real. What about those stories of amputees who have feeling in their severed limbs?

I shall take refuge in my rock, hoping it proves that I am right, and if you have a proof, dear reader, I hope you will share it.

Their Names Are Pricked

Why God is a Rock

“My rock, my redeemer.”

Reliable Rocks?

Reality Rocks?

Or Does It?