Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (27 page)

Here we have figured perfectly the paradoxical time of midrashic reading. The linguistic transformation of anaphora into deixis thematizes the issue of midrash brilliantly. Anaphora is the very figure of absence. "This which I am telling you about; this which was in the past; this which is history." Deixis is the very figure of presence. "This which I am pointing at; this which you can see." The absent moment of theophany is thus transformed into an evocation of a present moment of vision of God both in the form and in the content (or rather in the indistinguishable formcontent) of the midrash. The absent moment of revelation is transformed into a present moment of reading. The text of the Text and the text of history (reality) merge, however tensely. When could this theophany be taking place, since it is not at the crossing of the Red Sea itself? A more detailed reading of the text will be required before we can suggest an answer to this question.

The midrash represents the relationship of God and the Jewish people as an erotic one—through the reading of Song of Songs into Exodus. However, Thanatos also introduces itself into this erotic idyll—formally and thematically. "For, lo, the nations of the world keep asking Israel, 'What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O most beautiful of women' [Song 5:9], that for HIS sake you die, for His sake you are slain, as it is said, We have loved you unto death ['
ad mwt
], 'for thus do the maidens ['
almwt
] love Thee' [Song 1:3]—and it is said, 'for Your sake we have been killed all the day' [Ps. 44:23)." Note that the theme of death is a simultaneous intrusion into the world of the text and into text of the world. This intrusion is represented in three ways: first, by the insertion of the verse from the beginning of the Song of Songs into a context which interprets the fifth chapter; second, by the violation of the language of that verse, via the transformation of '
almwt
[nubile maidens], the very symbol

of Eros (here, however, maidens represented as desiring subjects and not as desired objects)
23
into '
al mwt
[until death], and third, by the insertion into this context of another text entirely, the verse from Psalm 44, "We are killed for You all the day." The violation of textual space which the midrash enacts can be read as a figure for the violation of the erotic relationship between the Jew and God implied by the fact that Jews are being killed in the real world of R. Akiva. Put yet another way, the transformation of '
almwt
into '
al mwt
, of love into death, is itself a representation of the question directed at God in other texts as well: If You love us so much, how come You kill us?

However, the text alludes to an answer as well. As we have seen often in this book, midrash often signifies by allusion to other biblical passages.
24
These allusions are discovered by observing the ungrammaticalities of the midrashic text, that is, linguistic forms which either do not quite fit their context or belong to another linguistic stratum. While the phrase, '
al mwt
, could mean "until death" in rabbinic Hebrew, its grammar is sufficiently unusual to call attention to itself; the normal form would be rather '
ad mwt
, as the midrash indeed glosses it. I would read this nearly ungrammatical form as an intertextual clue. The only place in the Hebrew Bible where '
al mwt
occurs in the sense of "until death" is verse 15 of Psalm 48. Moreover, this verse begins also with a language strongly reminiscent of the very verse that R. Akiva's midrash is reading, "
This
is God, our God, until eternity. He will lead us unto death.''

The verse of the psalm overflows with potential meanings. The sober medieval commentator, R. A. Ibn Ezra, glosses it as follows:

'
almwt
like '
wlmit
, until eternity, [the written consonants are the same; only the pronunciation varies], for He exists until eternity and leads until eternity. The Massorete has read this as two words, and their meaning is "until our death". R Moshe says it is from the root '
lm
, youth; He will lead us always as the fashion of the maidens, as He led us in the days of our youth.

We need not choose between these meanings, but from the perspective of contemporary reading practice can assume that they are all latent in the verse—eternity, death, and eros—a whole world of psychological resonances in a single word.

This verse is also (on rabbinic hermeneutical principles) a record of a theophany, again because of the deictic "
this
." Rabbis of a period only slightly later than R. Akiva animate the rich ambiguity of the Psalms verse by reading "until death" as "maidens," in precisely the reverse move of R. Akiva's reading of ''maidens" as "death" in the Song of Songs verse:

Rabbis Berechia and Helbo and Ula and Rabbi El'azar in the name of Rabbi Hanina have said: In the future God will lead the dance of the righteous . . . and they will point to Him with their fingers, as it says, "
this
is God, our God,

until eternity. He will lead us until death (
'al mwt
)" as maidens (
k'alamwt
), in the dances of the righteous.

It seems to me not too much to suggest, therefore, that R. Akiva's midrashic transformation of "maidens" into "until death" alludes to this very verse, in which death is transformed into maidens by the midrash. It is not only the two signifiers that can substitute for each other, but also their signifieds as well. Death becomes eros and eros death.

Now it is very important to note that Psalm 48 is itself a meditation on history. The psalmist, speaking at some indefinite time, recalls the distant past of the splitting of the sea in a series of blatant allusions to Exodus 15, the same text which R. Akiva is interpreting.
25
Moreover, he claims, "As we have heard, so have we seen," the very transformation of history into present experience which R. Akiva enacts by his transformation of anaphora into deixis. Finally, the psalmist draws past and present together with the future with his "In order that you tell the last generation:
this
is God, our God, until eternity. He will lead us until death." The psalm replicates in its thematics the very interpretation of history that the midrash makes both in its thematics and in its hermeneutic method. For the psalmist, it seems, the promise of God's selfrevelation, of seeing Him again as He was seen at the crossing of the sea, redeems the vicissitudes of history. Indeed, the Greek translator of the Bible, Aqilas, a contemporary and colleague of R. Akiva, himself translates the '
al mwt
of the verse as
athanasia
, which the Palestinian Talmud, in its turn, retroverts as "the world in which there is no death.'' This suggests very strongly to me that R. Akiva's narrative with its paradoxical timereference is, in truth, an eschatalogical narrative. For the rabbis the crossing of the sea was the type, of which the final redemption will be the antitype.
26

Strong support for the eschatalogical reading of this story comes from yet another allusion. The phrase which the "daughters of Jerusalem" use to formulate their request to seek God with Israel, "Let us go along with you," is an exact quotation from the eschatalogical prophecy of Zech. 8:20–23, in which the Gentiles seek to join Israel, and it is couched in an archaic grammatical form, which is only found in biblical Hebrew.
27

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: The nations and the dwellers of great cities will come. And they will go, the dwellers of each one, saying, "Let us go and seek the face of the Lord, and seek out the Lord of hosts. I will go, even I." And there will come many nations and mighty peoples to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to seek out the face of the Lord.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: In those days, ten Gentiles will hold onto the garment of a Jew and say, "
Let us go along with you
, for we have heard that God is with you."

We find the same hermeneutical pattern that we have found above. A linguistic

anomaly in the midrashic text—in this case the use of an archaic biblical form—is actually an allusion to another biblical text, which provides an important clue to the interpretation of the midrash. When we combine the midrashic text itself with its biblical subtexts, we can generate a strong reading of it. The interpreter stands in a position of desire. His Torah tells him of a moment of perfection when the people stood in such a marvelous union with God that what a slave saw then, no one has seen since. How can the desire to relive that moment of presence be fulfilled? the distance between the present reader and the absent moment of Presence is the tragedy of history. R. Akiva conquers history by bringing it into the present. For him, as well as for the psalmist, that which we have heard is what we have seen, and if death, time, and history interfere, they can be conquered through a reading strategy which eradicates them by effacing the difference between past, present, and future. Anaphora becomes deixis. This reading strategy is called midrash. Perhaps, then, what this midrash has to teach us about textuality is something about the inadequacy of the very oppositions that we make between textuality and history, or between intertextual reading strategies and those grounded in the outside world.

In the hour that they took R. Akiva out [to be executed], his disciples said to him, "Our teacher, so far? [i.e., is this necessary]" He said to them, "All of my life I was troubled by this verse, 'And thou shalt love the Lord with all thy soul'—even though He takes your soul, and I said, when will it come to my hand that I may fulfill it? Now that it is come to my hand, shall I not fulfill it?"

1. Akiva's midrash joins Eros and Thanatos, and so do the stories of his death. According to the text just quoted above, R. Akiva died for the love of God; indeed he died because he held that this was the only way to fulfill the commandment "to love the Lord with all your soul." This is the "reality" to which the historians quoted above were appealing when they interpreted the midrash as a reflection of the events of the rabbi's life. However, these "events'' are no less artifactual, no more factual, than the very midrash they are purported to be the explanation and referent of. Nevertheless, these texts must be connected. The love joined with death or fulfilled by death seems the same in both the midrash and the historiographical legend. If we do not read the midrash as a reflection of this "historical" event, how can we account for their congruence? I would suggest that we substitute for the language of "reflection'' and ''referentiality," which explicitly privileges one kind of text over others, a language of intertextuality. Seen in that light, R. Akiva's midrash and the story about his martyrdom belong to the same historical context and complex— neither is the context nor the explanation of the other, but both belong
   

   to the same cultural process. I suggest that R. Akiva's reading of the Torah, his midrash, led him to an apocalyptic view of the religious life. The high moment of union with God which the Jews experienced at the crossing of the sea could only be relived in two ways—on the national level at the moment of the
   eschaton
   , and on the personal level, by dying a martyr's death.
   

   This ideology of death as the necessary fulfillment of the love of God appears often in texts of the time of R. Akiva. Thus we read in a halakic text of his period: "And thou shalt love the Lord with all thy soul: [This means] even when he takes your soul, and so it says, 'For Your sake have we been killed all of the day.' "
   28
   

   Now this text is particularly significant for us, because it brings into the textual complex the exact same verse of Psalms which I considered an intrusion in the midrash of R. Akiva on "This is my God, and I will beautify Him." It seems that while we cannot speak of any precise historical background which determines the midrash, we can grasp hold in it of a very crucial cultural/ideological moment, the moment of the creation of the idea of martyrdom as a positive religious value per se. True, in the past also there was a concept of martyrdom, but it was very different from this one. The former model was that of the Hasmonean period, in which the martyr refuses to violate his or her religious integrity and is executed for this refusal; now we find martyrdom being actively sought as the only possible fulfillment of a spiritual need. To put this in more classical Jewish terminology: in the past martyrs refused to violate a negative commandment (to worship idols); in the present, they are fulfilling through their deaths a positive one (to love God).
   

   The astounding thing is that we can almost actually catch this transition happening in our texts: "When Rabbi Akiva died a martyr's death, a verse from Canticles was also applied to him, 'Joshua b. Jonathan used to say of those executed by the wicked Turnus Rufus, They have loved Thee much more than the former saints, "sincerely have they loved Thee." ' "
   29
   

   There were, indeed, saints in former times, that is, those who were willing to die for the faith; so why have R. Akiva and his fellows "loved Thee much more than the former saints"? I would claim that this is because they died with joy, with a mystic conviction; not only was it that their deaths were necessary, but that they were the highest of spiritual experiences. This transition is already identifiable in the parallel story of R. Akiva's martyrdom in the Palestinian Talmud:
   

   Rabbi Akiva was being judged before the wicked Tunius Rufus. The time for the reading of the "Shema" ["Hear O Israel", which includes the verse, "Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy soul!"] arrived. He began to recite it and smile. He said to him, ''Old man, old man: either you are deaf, or you make light of suffering." He said, ''May the soul of that man expire! Neither am I deaf, nor do I make light of suffering, but all of my life I have read the
   

   verse, "And thou shalt love the Lord, thy God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your property." I have loved Him with all my heart, and I have loved Him with all my property, but
   until now, I did not know how to love Him with all my soul
   . But now that the opportunity of [loving Him] with all my soul has come to me, and it is the time of the recital of the "Shema" [once again, the very moment to fulfill the commandment of loving God with all one's soul],
   and I was not deterred from it; therefore, I recite, and therefore I smile
   .
   30
   

   In this text, we catch R. Akiva in the act, as it were, of discovering that dying is the way to fulfill the commandment of loving God (and, perhaps, as well, the way to relive the experience of seeing God in all His beauty). I am not claiming, of course, that this is "what actually happened," but rather that the text is the representation of a moment in the history of an ideology. Here R. Akiva did not know until now how to fulfill the commandment; in the (later) Babylonian version quoted earlier he already knew from before what it was he had to do, and was just waiting for the opportunity. These are then not two competing "reflections" of circumambient reality but two diachronically emplaceable stages in cultural history—the history of an idea. Our midrash, with its concatenation of Eros and Thanatos, death and the maiden, also represents the ideological, spiritual base and source for this very idea. It is hardly the case, then, that the midrash reflects some privileged external, unsemioticized reality. Reality exists—R. Akiva is not in a prisonhouse of language but in a Roman jail. He will undoubtedly be executed, but it is he who transforms this execution into a consummation of erotic love for the beautiful King.
   

   This reverses, as well, the hierarchy which Baer assumed for our midrash and ecstatic vision. He interpreted R. Akiva's midrash of the Song of Songs by claiming, "The verse 'my beloved is white and ruddy' alludes to the ecstatic vision which the martyrs were privy to in the days of their torture and the hour of their death."
   31
   However, while torture may indeed be an external reality, ecstatic visions of the Godhead are a cultural production—a text. Not only, I would claim, does R. Akiva's midrash not reflect his martyrdom nor allude to his ecstatic visions; I suggest that it was rather the hermeneutic, intertextual connection of the Song of Songs with the Song of the Sea, of "This is my God and I will beautify Him" with ''This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem," and indeed, with "This is God, our God, He will lead us unto death,'' which inspired the idea of erotic, mystic death, led to the creation of the ideology of martyrdom, and indeed may have produced the ecstatic visions awarded to the martyr. R. Akiva may very well have had the ecstatic vision of the beloved at the hour of his death, but his midrash could hardly reflect that experience; if he did have such a wonderful experience, it was the reward his life in midrash gave him.
   

   Scarcely divorced from history, but even more intimately connected with it
   

   than the historians imagined, midrash is a way of reading and living in the text of the Bible, which had and has profound implications for the life of the reader. If my reading has any cogency, R. Akiva is represented in the tradition as having died a martyr owing to his way of reading. Moreover, his model had profound implications for the development of martyrology. All through the Middle Ages, Jews went enthusiastically to a martyr's death with R. Akiva's words on their lips.
   

   Epilogue
   

   . . .midrash gives us an insight into what interpretation always is (whatever the method) when interpretation
   matters
   to human life. In hermeneutical terms, midrash shows the historicality of understanding.
   32
   

   We have come full circle. As remarked in the citation from Bruns in chapter 1 midrash is best understood as a continuation of the literary activity which engendered the Scriptures themselves. Because of this literary history, the Bible is characterized already by a degree of selfreflexivity, selfcitation, and selfinterpretation, which is perhaps more evident than in literatures that have had a different type of history.
   33
   The rabbis, as assiduous readers of the Bible, developed an acute awareness of these intertextual relations within the holy books, and consequently their own hermeneutic work consisted of a creative process of further combining and recombining biblical verses into new texts, exposing the interpretive relations already in the text, as it were, as well as creating new ones by revealing linguistic connections hitherto unrealized. This recreation was experienced as revelation itself, and the biblical past became alive in the midrashic present. The Song of Songs—as the high point of poetry in the Scriptures, understood as the record of a theophany—became the focus of desire for the two greatest theophanic moments in biblical history: the revelation at Mt. Sinai and the crossing of the sea. Midrash, by continuing the process of creation of Scripture, by being Oral Torah and not mere paraphrase of Written Torah, became a spiritual vehicle for the reliving of these great events, for making them present.
   

   Many have sought to characterize midrash as an updating of Scripture, an effort to make it relevant to present day life and problems. James Kugel has well expressed the incompleteness of this view:
   

   And if we are to designate the Halakic reading of Scripture as a bridge between the Bible and the presentday Jew, out of fairness one must add that the bridge has another (if anything, greater) lane going in the opposite direction. For in midrash the Bible becomes, as stated, a world unto itself.
   

   Midrashic exegesis is the way into that world; it does not seek to view presentday reality through biblical spectacles, neither to find referents of biblical prophecy in presentday happenings, nor to find referents to the daily life of the soul in biblical allegory. Instead it simply overwhelms the present; the Bible's time is important, while the present is not; and so it invites the reader to cross over into the enterable world of Scripture.
   34
   

   This is a powerful and elegant formulation. My only disagreement is in the dichotomy it makes between the two directions of the lane. In this essay, I hope to have contributed something to an understanding of specifically how the process of crossing over into the world of Scripture takes place in one midrashic text. However, the reader who crosses over into the enterable world of Scripture remains nonetheless in his/her own, and inevitably his/her crossing into the world of Scripture has powerful implications for life. We have seen just what this "crossing over" into the world of Scripture could mean for such a one as R. Akiva. The halakic bridge for him became a bridge between life and death, and its meaning was revealed to him through his midrash. Poised thus between intertextuality and history, midrash reveals the inadequacy of any model of culture which divorces one way of making meaning from another. The Torah read and lives lived are equally processes of making reality yield human meaning, and midrash subsumes them both.