For those of us raised in a world of Hollywood three-act story structure, we’re used to stories with a beginning, middle, and end, where the hero is introduced at the beginning, sets out to accomplish something, faces obstacles that necessitate their growth or transformation, and succeeds or fails in their quest at the end, plus a denouement or coda that closes their emotional arc or ties up loose ends. We also absorb a lot of western European fairy tales and legends that either fit this format or have been tailored to it over centuries of retelling. In People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn points out how much this structure and even the language we use to describe it comes from the New Testament: The story is centered on the hero’s destiny, which they fulfill by saving/being saved, or if not, by having an epiphany, or if not, by at least having a moment of grace.
So it can be strange for us when we read a work from a very different culture that has other ideas about what makes a story coherent, meaningful, satisfying, because some of these elements may be missing, and others that we would normally not include are seen as essential to that culture’s mode of storytelling. And I particularly wanted to see what storytelling looks like in Torah if I stopped trying to fit everything into the western/Christian format and instead looked at what was actually there.
The first two parshiot (weekly Torah portions) are the only ones to show any person’s life from beginning to end, which makes them easier to analyze for structure. In both, we begin with God stating a goal and implementing it: creating the world, destroying the earth in a flood. The things that go wrong are not obstacles to accomplishing the goal, they are either unrelated incidents or unforeseen consequences of the goal–life is what happens when we (or God) are making other plans: Eve and Adam eat the fruit, Cain kills Abel, Noah gets drunk, people build Babel to avoid being anonymously wiped out again. There is a response of some kind, and then the people and issues that are going to be important in the next set of stories are established towards the end of the current story: Noah is born with a special destiny, Terach sets out on a journey with his son Avram. We’ll see this structure again and again throughout Torah, with the children of Israel going down to Egypt at the end of Genesis, the building of the Tabernacle at the end of Exodus, and with Moses setting his affairs in order at the end of Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Why is this important? Because if we read Torah as we’re used to, through a Western/Christian lens, Moses’s death is massively unfair and unfulfilling: he doesn’t get to finish his life’s work. But even if he got to enter the Promised Land, Moses would not live forever, and the true test of his success is the long-term health and success of the people. If we listen to the signals that there is another form of storytelling at work here, we recognize that in the Torah, people’s stories are part of a continuing stream, that every life is beset by unforeseen problems and unfinished business, and that the best end a hero has is to play a key role in choosing and shaping the next person or people who will direct events, which Moses does by training and ordaining Joshua, and by giving the Israelites their marching orders.
I’m keeping my eyes out for signals of other storytelling techniques and tropes at work, but that’s what’s striking me so far.
Lisa Batya Feld 