Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (3 page)

Heinemann's argument means that midrash is encoded as biblical interpretation and not mainly as poetry or homiletic—on its textual surface.
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To take it as something else is analogous to the error of taking ancient historiography as fiction, merely because the "facts" described do not jibe with our reading of documents.
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Heinemann has accomplished through his rhetoric a "demonstration'' that none of the previous theoretical understandings of midrash aggada is adequate to the subject.

It must be said that Heinemann's interpretation of the Rambam here is open to question. The claims that Maimonides is making in the passage may be much more limited in scope than Heinemann implies and perhaps best understood in the light of several other passages in the
Guide of the Perplexed
. It is beyond the scope of the present study to attempt a fuller reading of the Rambam;
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however, the view of the aggada as a kind of praiseworthy sophistry or homiletic fiction has been common among many up until the present day, whether or not it is a correct representation of the Rambam's position. For example we can cite the following statement of Joseph Heinemann (no relation to Isaak), an influential recent student of midrash:

Much of aggadic exegesis is, therefore, a kind of parable or allegory.

The aggadists do not mean so much to clarify difficult passages in the biblical text as to take a stand on the burning questions of the day, to guide the people and strengthen their faith
. But since they addressed themselves to a wide audience—including simple folk and children—they could not readily formulate the problems in an abstract way, nor could they give involved theoretical answers. In order to present their ideas in a more comprehensible and engaging fashion, the sages cast them in a narrative format and employed parables and other familiar literary means which appeal to all.
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This view of aggada is also the one presupposed in many studies of rabbinic thought which treat the statements of the midrash as theological or otherwise ideological utterances while tacitly denying their hermeneutical function.
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If we look at some of the actual interpretive work done by
this
Heinemann

on the Mekilta, we will see how the a priori adoption of an extrinsic understanding of the midrashic process deflects one from reading the' next. Heine mann actually begins his discussion by arguing
against
the facile historical reduction of the midrash by an earlier scholar:

The interpretation of the
aggada
, and especially the unveiling of its meaning for current events on the background of the circumstances of the time in which it was created, is a complex problem, which has no facile answer. This is because we cannot avoid a great deal of guesswork, when we search for the expression of opinions and the taking of stands visàvis the problems of their own time in the homilies of the rabbis on verses and in their stories which expand the biblical text. Although there is no one who disagrees that the masters of aggada had
tendenzen
[i.e., conscious polemical designs] and contemporary intentions in many of their utterances, however, since these
tendenzen
were not expressed explicitly but wore the costume of biblical stories and are only hinted at between the lines, one cannot know with certainty whether they exist in a given aggada or not. And if you wish to claim that the strangeness of the aggada—its distance from what is said in the Scripture itself and its attempts to describe the events of the Bible and its characters with unexpected and apparently arbitrary descriptions, which have no basis in Scripture—this is what testifies generally that there is something else behind it, we are still very far from identifying those hidden intentions.
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When it comes to the actual interpretation of text, however, Heinemann departs from the salutary caution with which he has begun his chapter. When he reads a particular controversy in the Mekilta, one having to do with the willingness or unwillingness of the Jews to take the plunge and jump in to the Red Sea, he identifies one of the midrashic interpretations as generated by the difficulties of the text, and the other as ideologically motivated.
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When we look at this midrashic text, we see that both of the interpreters are using precisely the same hermeneutic techniques, whether those techniques make sense to us or not. The important point is that Heinemann himself realized and showed these same hermeneutic techniques in both interpretations! Why is it, then, that one view is identified as being a response to "the burning issues of the day," while the other is dealing with "the difficulties of the text"?

I think we would not be going too far to suggest an unacknowledged ideological background to Heinemann's own interpretive move on this midrash. Without attributing any scholarly bad faith to Heinemann, I can suggest what might have led to his blindness to the symmetry of the two rabbinic readings and the assymetry of his interpretation of them. Heinemann identifies the ideologically determined reading of the text as being one that supports military activism on the part of the Jews against their enemies, while the ideologically free reading of the verse does not lead to such a position. The exegetic reading is moreover identified by Heinemann with a more ancient tradition, that of the Targum (the Aramaic translation of the Bible).
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The later midrashic interpretation,

therefore, represents an ideologically occasioned departure from this ancient ideologyfree reading. Since the author of this view, R. Tarfon, lived at the time of the great rebellion against Rome, and his interpretation praises, in effect, those who are willing to act and die for the faith, his reading must have been occasioned by that political background and stance. The paradoxical point is that this would, in fact, privilege his reading for Heinemann, because the views of the rabbis are, in traditional Judaism, more normative than early resolutions of biblical obscurities would be. I can hardly escape the thought that the atmosphere of support for Jewish political activism in the early years of the existence of the State of Israel might have led Heinemann (unconsciously) to want to identify what he read as support for such activism in rabbinic thought.

I think Heinemann really shows his hand on this issue when, in another discussion of a passage of the Mekilta, he again argues that it must represent a reading based on the difficulties of the biblical text, and not a response to current events, because ''it is impossible to understand that the intention of the sages of the generation who

were responsible for the creation of an aggada—at that particular time and situation—could have been an absolute attack on the Bar Kochba rebellion as an act of pride and rebellion against the will of God, an act which was justly punished by the death of all who took part in it. Whatever the attitude of that generation to Bar Kochba was, it seems that it was not an approach of absolute and righteous disapproval" [p. 140]. Why not? Perhaps because that would have had implications for the politicalmilitary activism of the Jews in our own time. Would the Hassidic opponents of the establishment of the state of Israel before the coming of the Messiah read the midrash the way that Heinemann does? Thus, owing to his theory of midrash as being unconcerned with the meaning of the biblical text, but only a vehicle for the communication of rabbinic ideology, even as sensitive an interpreter of midrash as Joseph Heinemann ends up trapped in his own ideology and cannot read the midrash.

Again, the point of this is not to attack Joseph Heinemann for dishonesty or blindness to the way his ideology may have affected his reading, but only to suggest that such blindness is a component of
all
reading and cannot be used as a taxonomic parameter for describing midrash. I wish to discredit the opposition between reading which is valuefree and concerned with the difficulties of the biblical text and that which is unconcerned with those difficulties and speaks to the needs of the moment. It is clear, then, that I am not denying the reality of ideological concerns on the part of the rabbis nor that these ideological concerns may have often had an effect on the interpretive choices they made. I am asserting that we will not read midrash well and richly unless we understand it first and foremost as
reading
, as hermeneutic, as generated by the interaction of rabbinic readers with a heterogeneous and difficult text, which was for them both normative and divine in origin. Viewing the aggada through the eyes of a simplistic understanding of Maimonides results in a fatal reduc

tion of its importance in Jewish culture, rendering it a mere decorative clothing for rabbinic thought.

Isaak Heinemann, at any rate, considered that what Maimonides was talking about was "poetic license," which he claims quite misses the point of the seriousness with which the aggada was presented as biblical interpretation. He suggests, therefore, a fourth way. We could perhaps capture it by defining it as a combination of the first and third of the Rambam's classes, that is, a poetry which nevertheless does intend to be an interpretation of the text. Citing favorably Yehiel Michel Sachs's attack on philology which "for all that it understands the demands of methodology, that much less does it understand meanings," Heinemann argues that, "aggada is not a systematic creation; so far, the approach of the Rambam is justified. However, in spite of this—perhaps, because of this—we must see it as a serious and successful effort to discover the depths of Scripture and to clearly determine the truth which is hidden from the eyes of the rationalists" [p. 41]. In order to accomplish this rapprochement, he must find a model of interpretation which does not restrict itself to the "objective," to the ''plain sense of things." In order to find such a model, he tums to a strain in the literary and historiographical theory of his day (actually, as we will see, the historiographical theory of the day before his day). He argues that the most current theories of history propose a vital
subjective
character for historiography. Referring to Von Ranke's demand that the historian write things ''as they actually were," Heinemann says:

But contemporary historians do not agree to this demand. Some of them, for instance Mommsen, saw research "free of any assumptions" as an ideal goal, which no scholar ever achieved or could achieve. Some of them have even denied the ideal value of this requirement and limited its power to chronicle writing which recites individual facts . . . , whereas historiography emphasizes "the unity of events and their spiritual connection," something which is only possible with respect to the
Weltanschauung
of the author on individual and social life. Therefore, they did not compare the historian to the photographer who only creates the conditions for the objective action of light, but to the painter, the artist, whose vision and wisdom of life are recognizable from his pictures. . . .

The requirement for subjective activity of the historian has been fulfilled in recent times precisely in the area which interests us: the description of heroes of the spirit. The school of Stefan George has replaced detailed studies with intuition, that is, penetration into the "typical struggle" of the described subject, which requires an inner closeness between him and the describing subject; in this fashion even the scientists of this circle intended not only to achieve more accurate pictures, but also "to make peace between life," which requires satisfaction through spiritual contact with ancient heroes, "and science," which is indifferent to our longings.
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Heinemann proposes then that we read the midrash aggada as historiography. Furthermore, it is a historiography which modern thought has revalidated

or given us the intellectual, theoretical tools to read more sympathetically. The last paragraph, however, is written in what is practically code for the reader who does not share Heinemann's cultural context. The school of Stefan George was once an extremely dominant force in German art and thinking.
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Moreover, this school, and particularly George's most distinguished disciple, Friedrich Gundolf
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(he is undoubtedly the subject of the phrase "even the scientists of this circle"), had indeed very definite and widely circulated ideas about historiography.
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Gundolf's pivotal philosophical position was that history is a series of unique occurrences. Since each occurrence is entirely
sui generis
, the analogical methods of the socalled objective historian are of no value for understanding history. "It followed that the task of the historian was its
intuitive
recreation."
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Gundolf's theories of historiography were based on a withering attack on the scientism and objectivism characteristic of nineteenthcentury positivistic historical research, symbolized most fully in the person of Von Ranke. He held that that type of scholarship is the province of weak spirits. As G. R. Urban, a recent writer on the George school, has put it:

Modem scholarship, he believed, mistrusts the man who, to enhance his knowledge by direct experience, seeks to reenact for himself the events of history. Uninspired by the urge to set themselves at the centre of the flow of history or to identify themselves with its leading figures, modern scholars seize upon the secondary characteristics of historical occasions, because these appear to them to be less difficult to reduce to a familiar common denominator. . . . Too much impartiality produces a stupor of the senses; it rings the death knell of imaginative understanding.
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If we follow the logical implications of this statement, then the task of a true historian will be precisely to enhance his knowledge by direct experience and to seek to reenact for himself the events of history by identifying himself with its leading figures. Those epochs which see themselves as being a legitimate continuation of history will write history which is vital and which is infused with their sense of values. Again in the words of Urban: "The search for historical objectivity, Gundolf explained, is peculiar to those epochs which have lost the conviction that in them resides, in any important sense, the legitimate continuation of history, and which, therefore, possess no universal, i.e., selective, sense of values."
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