Biblical scholar Robert Alter argues in The Art of Biblical Narrative that emotions and narrative are communicated in biblical writing through the ‘vehicle of reticence’. I will speak about this poetic aspect omnipresent in the Torah. We will look at several heightened moments of reticence and ask questions: why would the Torah be written in this way? What impact does it have? What does this manner of writing suggest about Judaism, spirituality, and the Torah’s central messages?

This shiur is part of a weekly series in memory of Dalia Hillman z'l. 

About the speaker: Eve Grubin is the author of poetry collections Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press) and The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press). She is a lecturer at NYU in London and a tutor at the Poetry School. Eve is the recipient of an AHRC / TECHNE scholarship to write her PhD thesis (Kingston University): 'Boat of Letters: and the Poetics of Reticence: a Creative and Critical Thesis'. Eve’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review, PN Review, The New Republic, and Poetry Review. Her poems have also appeared in anthologies such as The Poets Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt, and Wonder (Eyewear Press), The World is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson / Liverpool University Press), and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Her essays have appeared in anthologies including This-World Company: Collected Essays on the Work of Jean Valentine (U of Mich Press) and The Veil: Women Writers on Its History Lore and Politics (U of CA Press) as well as in the academic journal U.S. Studies Online (‘Emily Dickinson and the Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: The Poetics and Politics of Reticence’). Eve was the programs director at the Poetry Society of America and taught poetry at The New School for Social Research and in the graduate creative writing program at the City College of New York. Eve is currently teaching a five part course, The Poetics of Reticence, at the Poetry School where she has also taught Poems on the Hebrew Bible and other courses. She is a graduate of the Susi Bradfield Educational Leadership Programme.

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