Rabbi Benjamin Resnick | JTA

The release of filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which brought in $264 million at the box office during its blockbuster opening weekend, has sparked renewed interest in the 3,000-year-old poem on which it is based. It’s not difficult to understand why. The movie version is epic in scope, with magnificent cinematography and visual effects, and exceptional performances by an ensemble cast. And, like its source material, it tells a story of universally relevant themes: homecoming, forbearance, fate. This is why the story of Odysseus’ journey back to those he loves has inspired fascination and homage from the likes of James Joyce, the Coen brothers and now Nolan. It is also why there was a time (if recent archeological investigations into an ancient Ithacan shrine are accurate) that the king of Ithaca was not only admired as a hero but also worshipped as a God.

I thought a lot about that ruined shrine a few days ago, as I watched Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus in the new adaptation, swing his sword and string his bow from my seat inside a darkened theater in Tel Aviv, Hebrew subtitles flashing across the screen. And as the movie went on, even as I found myself enthralled by the unfolding story, I became increasingly aware of a dual narrative. There we sat, my wife, my children and I, watching a story about a homecoming while experiencing one ourselves. I thought about how Odysseus took 20 years to return home and about how the Jews took around 2,000 years, and I became acutely aware that the theater I was sitting in would not exist, the city I was sleeping in would not exist and the country that I love would not exist but for the enduring power of another great piece of ancient literature.

Like The Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, tells epic stories full of complicated characters. They are in thrall to mysterious visions. They pursue goals and passions that they do not quite understand. There are journeys and betrayals and contorted politics and brushes with the divine. But, as I watched all the battles and bloody machinations race across the screen, I began to reflect on the curious fact that there is no one on earth who still brings offerings to Odysseus or to Poseidon, no one who prostrates herself before Aphrodite or Athena, no one who prays to Zeus for mercy. Meanwhile, those of us who remain devoted to the stories in the Tanakh still speak its language and sing its songs and bow down where and when it says. We still read it on an endless loop. We kiss it when it falls. We bury it when it is beyond repair. Its vision for humanity has not fallen into ruin, and it has not been sequestered inside the marble halls of “great literature.” And we build new thriving cities on the very ground it hallowed thousands of years ago.

It is indeed remarkable — and not to be taken for granted — that stories written thousands of years ago, whether in Hebrew or Greek or Sanskrit, can still speak to us and inspire great art. But whereas The Odyssey remains an object of fascination, the Tanakh is both an object of fascination and of passionate devotion. It is possible that Helen’s face once launched a thousand ships. It is certain the unfinished journey of Abraham still guides billions of lives — the lives of Jews, of course, and many others. Why? What distinguishes the Tanakh from many other ancient epics, giving it not only the power to inspire but also the power to command?

In an important book written in the 1950s, “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,” Eric Auerbach, a Jewish literary critic from Germany, suggests an answer. Contrasting The Odyssey with the Binding of Isaac in Genesis, Auerbach points to the dramatic stylistic divergences between Homeric literature and the Hebrew bible and their vastly different approaches to representing the world around us.  The former, he points out, includes great detail; it is “Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm with everything visible … orderly, even in their ardor, are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved …The Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”

Like Odysseus’ journey, the Binding of Isaac is unquestionably one of the greatest stories ever told. However, unlike Odysseus’ journey, it unfolds over a mere 19 sparse verses. It does not include elaborate exposition or psychological analysis; instead, it includes yawning silences and lacunae:

“Yitzhak said to Avraham his father, he said: Father! He said: Here I am, my son. He said: Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering-up? Avraham said: God will see-for-himself to the lamb for the offering-up, my son. Thus the two of them went together” (Genesis  22:7-8).

Filled with pathos and almost unbearable tension, this is among the most stirring, disquieting passages in the history of literature. But where, when and why is all this happening? What are the characters thinking and feeling? These questions are not answered in the text but are instead left for the reader to contemplate. The result is a mysterious, halting tale. It is gestural rather than precise, rooted not in the present but in a haunted past that overreaches into an imagined future. This paradoxically allows the Tanakh to create characters of greater depth and complexity, Auerbach argues. The Homeric poems, in their specificity, belie the turbid, unknowable aspects of life itself. And the heroes in The Odyssey, though ostensibly more complex, are in fact much more simple.

Auerbach, of course, is not attempting to resolve the question that struck me so forcefully a few days ago as I watched The Odyssey near Dizengoff Square, namely why all the shrines to Odysseus are in ruins while the world remains full of synagogues. But in one place he begins to offer a possible answer, observing incisively that the mysterious nature of the stories in the Tanakh means that “they require subtle investigation and interpretation. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.”

Essentially — though he does not use this language — he is saying that, unlike Homeric epics, Tanakh stories demand midrash to fill in the gaps. They are not written with exhaustive specificity, and they are not told in order to astound, entertain or beguile. They are told to be generative and to give their readers a chance to uncover deep truths that the stories themselves only gesture towards. They are not arguments or expositions, but offerings to the imagination. They are odysseys of interpretation, questioning, reading and endless re-reading. And so they finally attain the immortality for which lesser heroes die searching.

Rabbi Benjamin Resnick is rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in Pelham, New York.

This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge.