"Moby Dick," an Incomplete Anagram

It is about seven weeks until the Jewish High Holidays.  For me, among other things, that season always brings to mind Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick.  A few years ago, I wrote an article about the relationship of Moby Dick to the Jewish High Holidays.  Interestingly enough, I have not been able to find similar ideas anywhere in the enormous amount of commentary on Melville’s novel.  

Recently I had occasion to review the article and it occurs to me that this might be a good time to reprint it.  It is not an easy read, and the next seven weeks might be a good time to read Moby Dick.  For those of you who observe the Jewish High Holidays, it might even enrich your participation in the Holiday services.  

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                                     Moby Dick, a Jewish Novel?

                            (or “Moby Dick, an Incomplete Anagram”) 

                                                 Jack Lippman                                                  

 

I have always felt that there was a special relationship between Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, and the Jewish High Holidays.  Many of the biblical allusions in the book relate specifically to Old Testament occurrences which are part of the Jewish High Holiday liturgy.  This is so striking that I have often wondered, even though it is clear that Herman Melville had an extremely thorough knowledge of the Old Testament, whether he might also have had a Jewish friend who took him to synagogue during the High Holidays.

For people who like to play with words, the very title of Moby Dick is enticing and perhaps exciting.  If you look at the letters, and try to construct an anagram from them, you fail to produce “Yom Kippur,” but you do come fairly close.  The first five letters of the holiday’s name, “Yom Ki” easily fall into place, but then the anagram fails.  But this failure to complete the anagram may not be accidental.  In the book, the white whale called Moby Dick never appears in his entirety, only that portion of him which is not submerged in the water being visible.  Might it not be logical that Melville, in entitling his book, would create only a partial anagram since his view of the whale was never more than a partial one?   He actually says “… there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.”   (Chapter 55)

In another quote, Melville apparently associates the sperm whale, whose face he considers to be an inscrutable blank wall, with the Deity. (Chapter 79)  He paraphrases Exodus 33:23 (“Thou shall see my back parts … but my face shall not be seen.  But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face”)  (Chapter 86) causing us to wonder whether Melville is talking about God or about a whale.  To those familiar enough with the novel to subscribe to the idea that the White Whale might be a manifestation of God, or actually represent a Deity which mankind has never actually fully seen, the incomplete anagram may make some sense.

Herman Melville came from a socially prominent Manhattan family which had lost most of its money, precluding his pursuing higher education.  Instead, at age eighteen, he went to sea on a merchant vessel.  This was followed by whaling voyages, capture by cannibals, teaching, lecturing, and ultimately a government job at the Custom House in New York.  Early on, Melville turned to writing about his experiences at sea and from Moby Dick, it is clear that he was very familiar with the Old Testament.  I am unaware of Melville having any close relationship with Jews of his period, although undoubtedly, there certainly were Jews in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Perhaps, as I have thought, he had a Jewish friend.   But let us get on with the book, and of course, its uncanny relationship to the Jewish High Holidays

The “Etymology” which begins the book includes the word for “whale” in many languages.  It is noteworthy that first of all of them, however, Melville lists (in Hebrew letters, no less) the Hebrew word for whale.  Immediately following that is a section labeled “Extracts,” where quotations involving whales are cited from various historic sources.  The first five of the many extracts quoted, notably, are from the Old Testament, specifically from the Books of Genesis, Job, Jonah, Isaiah and Psalms, texts with which Melville obviously was very familiar.

The novel itself starts with three words, “Call me Ishmael.”  And Ishmael is the narrator as we read “Moby Dick.”   In the Bible, Ishmael is Abraham’s son, born of Hagar, his wife Sarah’s maidservant.  Genesis 21 tells us that when, after years of barrenness Sarah gives birth to Isaac, she no longer wants Hagar and Ishmael to remain in the household.  The Lord instructs Abraham to accede to his wife’s wishes and to send Hagar and Ishmael off, assuring Abraham of Ishmael’s future wellbeing.  Apparently, Ishmael did survive his wanderings, because years later, we find his namesake about to set off on a whaling voyage out of Nantucket, which as his telling the story evidences, he also survived.  Coincidentally, Genesis 21 is the morning Torah reading for the First Day of Rosh Hashanah during the Jewish High Holidays.

On his way to Nantucket, Ishmael stops in the whaling port of New Bedford, waiting for a boat to take him to the island, where he will seek employment on a whaling vessel.  He visits the Whaler’s Chapel in that city where he listens to a sermon about the punishment which awaits those who defy and disobey the Lord, but how the Lord also forgives those who repent.  This, of course, is the story of Jonah, which in the salty language of the seagoing preacher, is told in its entirety in that Chapel in New Bedford.  That same Book of Jonah also is read, again coincidentally, as part of the afternoon service on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. 

An interesting footnote to the chapter in which Ishmael visits the Whaler’s Chapel is Melville’s passing reference to “antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago.”  If the author was using a Hebrew calendar, and rounding off to the nearest century as he says he is doing, he is fairly close to the mark, because I place the story of Moby Dick as taking place approximately in the year 1850 or 5610 on the Hebrew calendar, only 390 years off from Melvilles’s “sixty round centuries ago.”  Melville, again coincidentally, was obviously conversant with that calendar, which moves on to another year at each Rosh Hashanah.

The novel deals with the whaling ship’s captain, Ahab, who drives his crew mercilessly in his mad quest to find Moby Dick, the White Whale who, on an earlier voyage, had taken Ahab’s leg and left him seeking revenge.  In the Old Testament, Ahab was a Hebrew king, and influenced by his evil wife Jezebel, became an idolatrous worshipper of Baal.  Melville’s Ahab apparently was one who in the past, like his biblical namesake, also had disobeyed and defied the Lord.  The novel does not go into the specifics of Ahab’s transgressions but it is clear that unlike Jonah, neither the biblical King Ahab nor Melville’s Captain Ahab had any intention of repenting.  In fact, many view Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick as his way of battling the Lord’s efforts to punish him, represented by the whale.  This, in effect, is the novel’s story.  Ahab, in hunting the whale to avenge his mutilation, is fighting the God who has punished him for his sins, and continues to do so, through Moby Dick. 

Early on in the novel, before the Pequod (for that is the name of the boat Ishmael sailed on) left on its voyage, a mystical character named Elijah appears on the dock to warn Ishmael that something is wrong with Captain Ahab, that he has a history of something terrible that had happened in the past.  Elijah tries to discourage Ishmael from signing onto Captain Ahab’s boat.  In the Bible, the Prophet Elijah is precisely the one who attacked the idolatry of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, urging the Hebrew people to recognize only the one true God, and not the false god worshiped by King Ahab.  And just as the Prophet urged ancient Jews to keep their faith pure, so Melville’s Elijah is there to warn Ishmael against Captain Ahab as he signed onto the crew of the  Pequod  on that dock in Nantucket.  The parallel is striking. 

But what might you ask does this have to do with the Jewish High Holidays?  The story of King Ahab and Jezebel is not part of the High Holiday liturgy.  The Prophet Elijah is more associated with Passover, when a door is left open for him at the seder.  Nevertheless, you will find those same words Elijah used to the Hebrews, uttered in the face of King Ahab’s apostasy, still resonating to Jews of today, as Yom Kippur draws to a close just prior to the final sounding of the shofar.  “The Lord, He is God” (Adonoy Hu Ha-Elohim) is repeatedly intoned as Jewish worshippers complete their period of “tshuva” (penitence) on the Day of Atonement.   Was this the same message that Melville’s Elijah was trying to communicate to Ishmael?  Indeed, it is a Jewish message.

The novel goes on to tell the story of Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick, and how the Pequod ultimately finds him, battles him and is destroyed by him, with Ishmael being the only survivor.    As the novel approaches this climax, the vessel encounters another whaling ship, which is sadly crisscrossing the sea, looking for missing crewmen, lost in an earlier attempt to challenge Moby Dick.  These crewmen included the vessel’s captain’s children, and the name of the ship, the Rachel, obviously relates to the biblical Rachel who laments her lost children in Jerimiah 31.  That reading happens to be the Haftorah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, another indication of the relationship of Moby Dick to the Jewish High Holidays.  It is the Rachel, still searching for its lost children, which rescues Ishmael from the disaster which befell Ahab, his ship and the rest of its crew.

(Twenty-five years after writing Moby Dick, Melville published a 30,000 word poem entitled “Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.”  Melville scholars have suggested that this is really a study in comparative religion, a field which became popular in the late 19^th century, when industrial and scientific advances were causing many to question long standing fixed beliefs.   Melville’s knowledge of Judaism, as indicated in Moby Dick, would logically lead him in this direction a quarter of a century later.)

No, Herman Melville was not Jewish, nor do I really believe he had a Jewish friend who took him to High Holiday services.  What is clear is that he was extremely familiar with the Old Testament, and included many references to it in Moby Dick.   In re-reading the novel, and relating it to the Jewish High Holidays, this reader has had frequent occasion to put the novel down and refer to the Torah and the Prophets in order to deepen his understanding of what Melville is saying.  To my way of thinking, a novel which prompts its readers to study Torah has to be considered a Jewish novel, and Moby Dick certainly meets this standard.




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