‘Mind-bending’ Torah scholar set for five Bay Area lectures

Torah scholar and philosopher Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg seems to draw huge crowds wherever she goes, so it’s no surprise that many people in the Bay Area are excited about her impending visit.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

The Jerusalem-based Zornberg’s specialty is teasing new meanings out of the Torah and discovering its hidden nuances, and her distinct oral interpretations and written works have made her something of an international star.

She has spoken in the Bay Area before, as recently as last year, but that certainly hasn’t taken away any of the luster from her five upcoming appearances.

The schedule begins Thursday, April 22 in a Kol Shofar event being held at Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael. Zornberg will give a lecture titled “And I Am a Stranger: Becoming Ruth” starting at 7 p.m. Co-sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Brandeis Hillel Day School of Marin, in addition to the two synagogues involved, the event is free and open to the public.

After a couple of days off for Shabbat, Zornberg will lecture on “Jonah: Submission or Surrender” at the JCC of the East Bay in Berkeley and “And I Am a Stranger: Becoming Ruth” at Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto on April 25. She’ll finish on April 26 with “The Murmuring Deep” at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and “Why Did Sarah Laugh?” at the JCC of San Francisco.

Zornberg arrived in the United States April 14 and gave lectures in and around New York, Chicago, San Diego and Los Angeles. After she leaves here, she’s off to Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and the New York area again, with her final lecture scheduled for May 15.

Betsy Cohen, a psychoanalyst in Berkeley, first learned about Zornberg’s teachings from a patient five years ago. Since then she’s been incorporating Zornberg’s work into her practice and treatment, urging clients who are analytic thinkers or interested in faith to read her books.   

“It’s really easy to make connections between what Zornberg’s talking about and what takes place in therapy,” said Cohen, who has been in her profession for 38 years. “She really understands the human psyche and that’s exciting, especially coming from a non-psychoanalyst.”    

For more than two decades, Zornberg has taught students at women’s and coeducational institutions in Jerusalem, where her lectures regularly draw hundreds.

Having earned a doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University, she has a unique way of interpreting Torah, weaving together ideas from literature, secular philosophy and psychology with traditional Jewish texts.

Zornberg was born in 1944 and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. Her late father, Wolf Gottlieb, headed the Rabbinical Court of Glasgow and was himself a renowned scholar. He encouraged and mentored his daughter in her Torah and Talmud studies, something rare in the time.

“When I was growing up, women were not getting a good religious education,” Zornberg told j. before a visit to the Bay Area in 2005. “I was very privileged, in that my father devoted a great deal of time teaching me. But I was fairly alone in this.”

At 17, Zornberg left Glasgow for an internationally renowned women’s seminary in Gateshead, England. Religiously, she later noted, she was “on fire, very passionate” — in a way that many older teenage girls are fervently spiritual. Her path led her to Cambridge before she immigrated to Israel in 1969.

She began teaching English literature at the Hebrew University, and in 1975 married Eric Zornberg, a Canadian-born physicist. They have three grown children. 

In describing her teaching style, Zornberg has written that her approach is “to share my own personal struggles for meaning, to discover the ways in which life and text inform each other. My audiences … [are] in the position of ‘eavesdropping’ on my meditations, on the literary and philosophical resonances emerging from these texts.”

In addition to teaching, Zornberg also is an author. Her first book, “The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis,” won the 1995 Jewish Book Award for nonfiction. She has also published scholarly essays on the Book of Ruth and the matriarch Sarah, and she appeared on Bill Moyers’ PBS program “Genesis: A Living Conversation.” Her newest book, “The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious,” examines several figures from the Bible.

What makes Zornberg’s work unique is the range of disciplines and rigorous application of knowledge she brings to bear on the Judaic texts.

“Her teaching is about the wisdom of Torah,” Derby said. “She is brilliant and gifted in her ability to take the Torah text, the Midrash on the Torah, the mysteries of the Zohar and Chassidic teachings, as well as profound insights from the world of psychology, literature and art, and weave it all together to unpack the deepest possible meaning of the biblical text.”

Sarah Bronson, in an article written for JTA, contributed to this report.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg in the Bay Area: Thursday, April 22 at Congregation Rodef Sholom, San Rafael; April 25 at the JCC of the East Bay, Berkeley; April 25 at Congregation Kol Emeth, Palo Alto; April 26 at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley; April 26 at the JCC of San Francisco. Times, addresses and contacts for further information: http://www.avivahzornberg.com.