Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (2 page)

One more word on theory: My reading is not guided by any specific theory of language or interpretation. It is informed by a general climate of inquiry surrounding these. As Wolfgang Iser has remarked, "interpretation today is beginning to discover its own history—not only the limitations of its respective norms but also those factors that could not come to light as long as traditional norms held sway."
10
My use of terminology and concepts may appear eclectic to some readers. This grows out of the very nature of my project. My question is not posed as: given that we know what reading is, why does midrash deviate from it, but rather, seeing how midrash reads, what theoretical concepts are useful for understanding it? That is to say, without ascribing any theory to the rabbis, I am nevertheless attempting to determine what sort of theory would allow them to make the interpretive moves that they make in good faith. Accordingly, in my reading in literary theory, when I have found a concept that seems to help in understanding a structure of midrashic reading, I have adapted it to my descriptive system. This does not mean that I have here just a

grab bag or smorgasbords for two reasons. First of all, those concepts and terms that I use are those which make sense to me at some epistemological level aside from their aid in understanding midrash. Second, while the terms and concepts are eclectic in origin, I have molded them into a more or less selfconsistent system of my own. Thus, I combine Wolfgang Iser's descriptions of gaps with Michael Riffaterre's "ungrammaticalities."
11
My disagreement with Riffaterre on certain fundamental points has not prevented me from learning much from his work and adopting it in several ways.

This essay has another meaning for me intimately related to the first. The valorization of midrash as interpretation and indeed as a model for interpretation means as well the revoicing of a Jewish discourse in the discourse of the West. The liberal term "JudaeoChristian" masks a suppression of that which is distinctly Jewish. It means "Christian," and by not even acknowledging that much, renders the suppression of Jewish discourse even more complete.
12
It is as if the classical Christian ideology—according to which Judaism went out of existence with the coming of the Christ, and the Jews are doomed to anachronism by their refusal to accept the truth—were recast in secular, anthropological terminology. In recent theoretical writing about literature, which searches for a richer, more nuanced understanding of reading, the unique Jewish discourse called midrash has been distinguished and has even entered the theoretical canon. For someone who has devoted his life to the study of midrash (and Talmud), this is profoundly encouraging, since it means to me that I have something to say that people other than committed Jewish scholars (or scholars of Judaism) may want to hear, that my work has meaning and importance beyond a coterie of specialists.

A sympathetic reader of my manuscript remarked that it reads like a celebration of midrash, and I suppose that this is so. He asked that I attend to what is lost in midrash as well, but I do not seem yet to have the capability of doing so. My hope is that my readings of midrash are neither tendentious nor apologetic, however much they are grounded in a committed position. While I began my project with a determination to understand and read midrash in as rich and nonreductive way as I was able, I was not committed to one kind of result. I am undoubtedly blind to and suppressing much that is in these texts and much that is presupposed in my reading of them. I hope that nevertheless I have seen something in them that enriches their reception into the canon of interpretation and literary creation.

The effort of communication always involves some loss. Any comparison to other literatures is a reduction of mystery and strangeness, and therefore I would like to clearly state that midrash is somehow radically different. Any revelation is also a concealment. Any understanding is also loss of understanding. But making no attempt to bridge the gap seems worse. Frank Kermode has expressed this best:

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For whether one thinks that one's purpose is to recognize the original meaning, or to fall headlong into a text that is a treacherous network rather than a continuous and systematic sequence, one may he sure of one thing, and that is disappointment. It has sometimes been thought, and in my opinion rightly, that the world is also like that; or that we are like that in respect of the world. Yet we have ways of working through the world, and ways of explaining unfollowable texts. There are certain conditions which make the task more comfortable: more or less acquiescent in the authority of institutions, more or less happy that we have an acquired taste for fulfillments, for a state of affairs in which everything hangs together, we accept a measure of private intermittency in our interpretations—unless we are unhappy because such acquiescence is an acceptance of untruth, and prefer antinomianism and the unhappiness of an even more complete isolation. In any case, a sense of mystery is a different thing from an ability to interpret it, and the largest consolation is that without interpretation there would be no mystery. What must not be looked for is some obvious public success. To see, even to perceive, to hear, even to understand, is not the same thing as to explain or even the same thing as to have access. The desires of interpreters are good because without them the world and the text are tacitly declared to be impossible; perhaps they are, but we must live as if the case were otherwise.
13

There are no words with which I could paraphrase or express more clearly or more simply the beauty and truth of Kermode's credo as an interpreter.

Midrash has been largely suppressed in Jewish hermeneutics, as much as it has been marginalized in the West. The allegoricalAristotelian tradition of Judaism, best represented by Maimonides, has been hostile to the view of language that midrash presupposes, and this tradition has gained hegemony in the dominant Jewish culture. For this reason, I find unconvincing such attempts as that of Susan Handelman
14
or José Faur
15
to speak ora uniquely Jewish way of understanding language or texts. Jewish thought and interpretive practice for over a thousand years has been thoroughly caught up in the logocentric tradition, and midrash has been devalued within Judaism as much as without. Moreover, while in some ways similar, the Kabbalistic understanding of language must be understood as significantly different from midrash and must not be conflated with it. Reification of "Jewish" modes of thinking actually masks the "primitive" (as opposed to "civilized") critical force of the midrashic mode. In future studies, it will be important to deal with the ways that midrash has been occulted in the JewishChristianMoslem polysystem, and to discern the underground channels within this system in which it was kept alive as well.

The language of the Mekilta, as of the midrashic and talmudic literature in general, is in the original very vivid and quite elliptical. This is perhaps owing to its status as a more or less stylized written text of oral dialogues, as they were carried on in the rabbinic academies. I have tried to retain this style in my translations, which will undoubtedly make them more difficult to follow than a smoother English rendering would have done. I hope that my commentaries on the texts will make it possible for the reader to find his/her way among them. After all, even experienced Hebrew readers need commentaries for these texts, so a translation which makes the meaning too clear is really a disguised commentary. Jacob Z. Lauterbach's translation is readily available for anyone who feels the need to have a more accessible English version, and I have included references to that version for all texts cited.

Isaak Heinemann's
Darkhe ha'aggadah
1
is a powerful reading of midrash aggada predicated on a sophisticated theory of literature and history.
2
As has been often remarked in the critical literature, it is really the only serious fullscale attempt to describe midrash theoretically. It therefore constitutes the ground for any figuration of midrash to follow. Heinemann begins with a discussion of Maimonides' (Rambam's)
3
theory of aggadic midrash. It would be no exaggeration to say that Maimonides occupies a place in a specific Jewish literary history and theory analogous to that of Aristotle in the discourse of European literature. The Rambam's reflections on the nature of the Bible and the midrash are the
Poetics
of Judaism. Heinemann, accordingly, begins his work by citing the
Guide of the Perplexed
, "for the words of the Rambam must be seen as the founding type for all the discussion of [the question of the midrash aggada]" [p. 2]. He cites a passage in which Maimonides attempts to establish the genre of midrash, identifying

the manner of
Midrashim
whose method is well known by all those who understand their discourses. For these [namely, the Midrashim] have, in their opinion, the status of poetical conceits; they are not meant to bring out the meaning of the text in question. Accordingly, with regard to the Midrashim, people are divided into two classes: A class that imagines that the [Sages] have said these things in order to explain the meaning of the text in question, and a class that holds [the Midrashim] in slight esteem and holds them up to ridicule, since it is clear and manifest that this is not the meaning of the [biblical] text in question. The first class strives and fights with a view to proving, as they deem, the correctness of the Midrashim and to defending them, and think this is the true meaning of the [biblical] text and that the Midrashim have the same status as the traditional legal decisions. But neither of the two groups understands that [the Midrashim] have the character of poetical conceits whose meaning is not obscure for someone endowed with understanding. At that time this method was generally known and used by everybody, just as the poets use poetical expressions.
4

In a sequel to the quoted text, Maimonides refers to a particular midrash as "a most witty poetical conceit by means of which he instills a noble moral quality.'' The Rambam claims here that in order to understand the aggada, we must first have an appropriate conception of its genre. And indeed, the initial question that must be asked in order to say anything about midrash is the question of genre. What type of discourse is it that we are encountering? Is midrash hermeneutic, homiletic; or perhaps fiction? After rejecting views that propose that aggada is commentary—either bad or good—Maimonides argues that it is poetry—i.e., didactic fiction.

Heinemann's reading of this text in the Rambam is remarkable. It forms, in fact, almost an allegory in which each of the three terms of Maimonides' taxonomy of

readers of the midrash are projected onto three strains in the interpretation of aggada in the
Wissenschaft Des Judentums
. Thus, Rambam's first category is described as those "who depend on the fact that the
drashot
which turn from the plain sense are not entirely without scientific value" [p. 2]. This class of readers of the aggada is then identified by Heinemann with such interpreters as Umberto Cassuto and Benno Jacob, just to take the most well known of them today, who support the

midrashic understanding either from context and literary analysis or by showing that it is a survival of ancient Near Eastern literature and therefore a true representation of the intertext of the Bible. (This last, is, of course, my formulation.) In addition, Heinemann includes in this group all those who read the midrash as a response to genuine exegetic difficulty in the Torah's text. The second category of the Rambam, that is, those who "find that the [aggada] cannot be reconciled with the words quoted, and therefore reject and ridicule it," is represented in Heinemann's
pesher
by none other than the young Abraham Geiger, who wrote that the rabbis manifested a "
höchst getrübter exegetischer Sinn
."
5
The third category of the Rambam, that is, the Rambam himself, is filled in the
Wissenschaft
by Nahman Krochmal (Ranak), who indeed does seem to have made that identification himself, as the title of his masterwork,
A Guide to the Perplexed of Our Time
, indicated quite poignantly.

Against each of these three types of readers, Heinemann presents what he clearly takes to be fatal objections. Thus against the Orthodox school
6
he argues that they fail to see the woods for the trees. Although on occasion we may be able to use their interpretation of the aggada as a response to exegetical difficulty in the biblical text or as an echo of ancient knowledge, there are many cases where we surely cannot. Moreover, Heinemann argues, the rabbis themselves made a distinction between
peshat
[plain sense] and
drash
, so we cannot claim that also in the
drash
they intended simply to provide the "true, scientific" interpretation of the text.
7
Against the Reform school he only needs cite Yehuda Halevi's attack on Karaism, claiming that the same rabbis who were perfectly capable of interpreting the Mishna correctly ought to have been able to do so with regard to the Bible as well, and therefore, if they did not, it

must be because they chose not to and not because they could not. Against the Conservative view of Ranak (who is, however, forgotten here), he argues that

if the view which Maimonides rejected brought the aggada too close to the plain meaning, his answer [Maimonides'] does not take sufficiently into consideration the difference between the midrash and stories which are purely fictions. It is certainly correct that the
drash
gives greater freedom of movement to the personal character of the interpreter than does the plain sense, and the aggadic drash is "freer" than the halakic, which even Maimonides took seriously . . . but not infrequently the darshanim cited logical proofs for their midrash and also rejected the interpretations of their colleagues; also the most serious controversies between the sages of Israel and the sectarians and Christians were carried on with the methods of midrash . . . [p. 3]