Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (23 page)

Heinemann bases his description on his conception of the rabbis as belonging to one of those romantic peoples who are closer to the earth than the peoples of culture, but the point is well taken nevertheless. There is something different in the way that rabbinic literature regards the world of nature. It is hard for me to imagine precisely what it "felt like" to live in a world peopled by a personal earth, a personal sea, and a personal desert, but it is not hard to imagine in general how different an orientation to the world this provided. Certainly it is difficult to see people who have such a consciousness acting toward nature as if it were only there to be exploited and spoiled for human purposes—as if it had no ontological importance of its own. If we cannot recover fully the sense of an earlier and other culture, we can nevertheless, it seems to me, have some sensation of it by paying close attention to practices within our own culture which seem somehow closer to that other one. I have found certain passages in romantic poetry strikingly evocative in that regard. For one example, among many possible, I will cite a famous passage from "The Prelude":

I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat

Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep till then

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head.
I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode artier me.
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The poet, even the high romantic, locates the space of nature which is not a thing, in the noplace, the utopia of childhood, and from the point of view of the adult, the "working" poet,
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it must all be displaced into the realm of "as if" and ''seeming," marginalized, however longed for. In a sense, we might say that in the absence of an active (however repressed) cultural unconscious, the only resources for the recovery of the unreified nature are in the individual psyche and its childhood memories.

If my reading has any historical validity, the true inheritors of midrash are the kabbalists, for whom the world is populated with anthropomorphic entities, from animals to trees to books. Thus Gershom Scholem refers to a "classical period" in the development of religion, "in which the scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious action of man and the community of men, whose interplay brings about history as, in a sense, the stage on which the drama of man's relation to God unfolds," and then jumps to a "romantic period" of mysticism, which ''strives . . . to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed, but on a new plane, where

the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man."
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In my reading of this midrash, however, we have a third term, mediating between these two, in which nature itself is projected into history and into moral and religious action in a community of man and nature. In such a world, it is irrelevant to speak of "personification" altogether—as it would be irrelevant to speak of the portrayal of George Washington in a history book as personification; the world is already personal. It is reification which is the trope.

I have interpreted the midrashic text as bringing to consciousness, as it were, repressed elements of cultural history which are scattered throughout the biblical text. Both the repression and its interpretation belong to a kind of psychic repression within the collective (that is, socioideological) consciousness of the people. By putting it in these terms, I have already signaled a kind of homology that I see between psychical and political repression and return of the repressed. It is intriguing that this homology or ambivalence of the psychological and the culturalpolitical in the conflict with polytheism has already been recorded in the Talmud:

"And they cried out unto God in a loud voice" [Neh. 9:4]. What did they say? Rav (and some say Rabbi Johanan) says, "Woe is us; this is the one who destroyed the temple, and burned the holy place, and killed all of the righteous ones, and exiled Israel from their land, and still he dances among us. What is the reason You gave him to us? Is it not to receive reward [for resisting him]? We don't want him or his reward!" A sherd fell from heaven with the word "truth'' written on it. . . . They sat in fast for three days and three nights, and he was given over to them. A figure like a lion of fire went out from the Holy of Holies. A prophet said unto Israel: "That was the inclination to worship strange gods, as it is said, 'That is the evil.' [Zech. 5:8]"
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This rather obscure legend requires some exegesis. After the return from the Babylonian exile, the book of Nehemiah tells us of a great revival of religious fervor. The Talmud asks here what was the burden of the prayer which they prayed on that occasion and answers that they prayed to be delivered of the desire to worship idols, recognizing that it was this desire which had led the Israelites into exile and all of its terrors. We see here an amazing confluence of political and psychic imagery. The "evil inclination," that is, the temptation to worship idols, is understood to be both a collective and an individual force—or better, a collective force realized within each individual. This dual nature is depicted by being referred to in psychological terms but dealt with in political ones. The activity against it is that of the "Men of the Great Assembly," the semilegendary governing body of the Jewish people at the end of the second temple period. Their prayers being answered, the evil inclination is delivered into their hands. As Saul Lieberman has argued, this is an etiological legend; it explains the fact that, while the ancient Jews were inclined to idol worship, the ones of rabbinic (talmudic) times were not.
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It thus provides evidence that the rabbis considered the temptation of polytheism a dead issue. It indicates memory, as well, of the historical struggle that killed that temptation.

We can offer now a model for the "regression" of the rabbis, and account for this reversal of an apparent progression in the history of consciousness. As Frederic Jameson has argued, "strategies of containment are not only modes of exclusion; they can also take the form of repression in some stricter Hegelian sense of the persistence of the older repressed content beneath the later formalized surface."
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In this model, the Bible's allusions to the ancient myth of the rebellion of the sea are precisely the older repressed content beneath the formalized surface of the Bible. I would suggest, therefore, that given that the rabbis had no fear of the Jews succumbing to polytheism, they were able to allow the barely repressed mythic intertext of the Bible to resurface, as it were, into textual consciousness. If, as I have suggested, Sidney's figurative reading is responding to the textual surface of Psalm 114, the literalized midrashic reading is going below this surface and touching the repressed mythic intertext. In the midrash, the coming of God into the world and the psychological effect

which it had on the sea need no longer be reduced from myth to the figure of prosopopeia, which gives voice to the voicelessbynature, but can be given fullfledged narrative and visual representation, representing nature as having its own voice.

This text and its reading can offer us insight, then, into the general dialectics of cultural history. History is not a oneway street. Older formations remain. They manifest themselves in the social body as dissident groups, in the individual as hidden and partly repressed desires, in the texts of the culture as intertextuality. Since the fragments of such older cultural forms are not entirely expunged from the "textual unconscious," cultural history can, as it were, regress, transforming and recovering older orientations to the world. While this textual unconscious is perhaps only a metaphor, it seems to be one of great heuristic value. Reversing the Lacanian dictum, we can say that language is structured like a psyche and the reading of sign systems can have the same dynamic dimensions as the reading of the negotiations of the conscious and the unconscious in the individual.

PseudoSaadya, an anonymous Jewish commentator of the tenth century, characterized the Song of Songs as a "lock to which the key has been lost."
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Some few centuries earlier the rabbis of the midrash regarded the holy song as a mashal, a hermeneutic key to the unlocking of the Torah.
However, both the rabbis and Saadya interpreted the Song of Songs itself in essentially the same fashion,
as a poem on the love between God and Israel. The question immediately rises: how can it be that opposite theories can lead to the same interpretation? What is the meaning of this opposition of theory? What happened, historically, to generate this difference in the apprehension of the very nature of the text? These are the questions I would like to explore in this chapter, with a particular view toward achieving greater understanding of midrash and of rabbinic thought about interpretation and meaning.

As portrayed in the midrash, Solomon, the author of the Song, is the very prototype of the rabbinic reader. In the sequel to the passage quoted above in chapter 5, the rabbis give us no less than five meshalim, through which we can get a double handle—through the content and the form—on the meaning of Solomon's interpretive work:

Rav Nahman gave two [parables]: It is like a great palace with many entrances, and all who entered it would lose the way to the entrance. A wise man came and took a rope and attached it to the entrance, and all would enter and exit by following the rope. Thus until Solomon came, no man could understand the words of Torah; but once Solomon had come, all began to understand the words of Torah. Rav Nahman gave another version: Like a thicket of reeds, and no man could enter into it, and a wise man came and took a sickle and mowed, then all began to enter and exit by way of the mowed [path]. So Solomon. Said Rabbi Yose: It is like a basket full of fruits, which had no handle, and it could not be carried, and someone wise came and made for it handles, and it began to be carried by its handles. So until Solomon came, no one could understand the words of Torah, but once Solomon had come, everyone began to comprehend Torah. R. Shila said: It is like a pot full of boiling water, which had no handle to carry it, and someone

came and made it a handle, and it began to be carried by its handle. R. Hanina said: It is like a deep well full of water, and its waters were cold and sweet and good, but no one could drink of them. Someone came and provided a rope [tied to] a rope, a cord [tied to] a cord, and he drew from it and he drank. Then all began to draw and drink. So from word to word, from mashal to mashal, Solomon comprehended the secret of Torah, as is written, "The meshalim of Solomon the son of David, King of Israel" [Prov. 1:1.]—by virtue of his meshalim, Solomon comprehended the words of Torah.

These little narratives are themselves meshalim of the mashal and give us accordingly a clear insight into the midrashic reading of Song of Songs. The mashal is a story whose meaning by itself is perfectly clear and simple, and because of its simplicity enables one to interpret by analogy a more complex, difficult, or hermetic text. Of recent writers, it seems that only Gerald Bruns has realized the crucial import of this text for the theory of midrash:

The passage is essentially a litany of parables giving the theory of the parable as a hermeneutic rather than (as we would figure it) a literary form: the parable is a vehicle of instruction in the meaning of Scripture—but notice that it is a vehicle of a special kind. It does not convey a meaning to an audience, rather it conveys the audience to the meaning. The meaning of the Torah is, after all, a hidden meaning and is meant to remain so: it is not to be carried out of the Torah, that is, its hiddenness is not to be dispelled by understanding but requires to be preserved, for hiddenness is an essential part of that which is to be understood.
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Bruns draws a distinction between a literary and a hermeneutic form, and indeed the function of the mashal as it is described from within the culture is that it is interpretive. I am less in agreement with the general description that he draws of the nature of this hermeneutic. It does not seem to me obvious that this text is claiming that the meaning of the Torah is hidden and meant to remain so. Indeed, in my reading, such propositions as that the Torah was in the past like a thicket into which no one could enter, but now one can enter, indicate that there has been a fundamental change in the status of the Torah as a result of the interpretive activity of Solomon and his rabbinic followers. I am not certain, moreover, that Bruns has paid enough attention to the differences between the different images of the mashal conveyed in these meshalim. Thus in R. Yohanan's first version, the people can get in but not out, but in the second, they cannot even enter. In R. Yose's mashal, the basket which cannot be carried has sweet and good things; in R. Shila's, it holds something dangerous, which if it cannot be carried properly can kill. Finally, R. Hanina's image is similar to R. Yohanan's second one, except that it adds the image of the Torah itself as water, as the goal, and not as the space into which one has to enter; furthermore, it speaks of conveying the goal to the people and not the people into the goal. The exact hermeneutic analogues of these metaphorical differ

ences are difficult for me to grasp, but they do not seem to support Bruns's claim that the meaning of the Torah is meant to remain hidden. However, one point is clear and should be amplified, for it will be of some importance in my whole argument: the mashal is not a text which is itself enigmatic; it is a text whose declared function is to interpret.
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I will cite again a passage which I have discussed in chapter 5:

The rabbis say: Do not let this mashal be light in your eyes, for by means of this mashal one comes to comprehend the words of Torah. A mashal to a king who has lost a golden coin from his house or a precious pearl—does he not find it by means of a wick worth a penny? Similarly, let not this mashal be light in your eyes, for by means of this mashal one comes to comprehend the words of Torah. Know that this is so, for Solomon, by means of this mashal understood the exact meaning of the Torah. Rabbi Judah says: It is to teach you that everyone who teaches words of Torah to the many is privileged to have the Holy Spirit descend upon him. From whom do we learn this? From Solomon, who became he taught words of Torah to the many was privileged to have the Holy Spirit descend upon him and uttered three books, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs.
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