This essay reads the midrashic mashal of the eighth day—Shemini Atzeret—preserved in Bamidbar Rabbah 21:24, in which the Holy One, after the seventy bulls offered on behalf of the seventy nations have been brought, turns to Israel with the words negalgel ani ve-atah be-mah she-timatzeh: “let me and you make do with whatever turns up.” The verb nitgalgel, with its root sense of rolling-with and improvising from scraps, is shown to encode a theology of sufficiency in which intimacy is constituted not by abundance but by its falling-away. Drawing on the theory of the parable in David Stern and Daniel Boyarin, on Menachem Fisch’s account of rabbinic self-revision, on Elliot Wolfson’s apophatic phenomenology, and on the deeper mystical reading of the Rebbe Rashab (Shalom DovBer Schneersohn), the essay argues that the mashal stages a movement from the register of multiplicity (ribbui) to the register of essence (etzem), where there is no number. The argument is then transposed, with psychological and clinical illustration and with the poetry of Mary Oliver as an unexpected midrashic interlocutor, onto the therapeutic encounter, where the exhaustion of protocol opens the space of the improvised, unmediated meeting of clinician and patient.
Julian Ungar-Sargon (Wed,) studied this question.