Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (5 page)

The sovereign notion informing the present reading of midrash is "intertextuality." This concept has several different accepted senses, three of which are important in my account of midrash. The first is that the text is always made up of a mosaic of conscious and unconscious citation of earlier discourse. The second is that texts may be dialogical in nature—contesting their own assertions as an essential part of the structure of their discourse—and that the Bible is a preeminent example of such a text. The third is that there are cultural codes, again either conscious or unconscious, which both constrain and allow the production (not creation) of new texts within the culture; these codes may be identified with the ideology of the culture, which is made up of the assumptions that people in the culture automatically make about what may or may not be true and possible, about what is natural in nature and in history.

In the first place, the analysis of literary systems shows the power of Mikhail Bakhtin's insight that the romantic view of literary creation as
creatio ex nihilo
(such as Heinemann's) cannot be sustained. Every author/speaker/human is constituted by all of the discourses which he/she has heard or read. There is,

therefore, no such thing as the selfidentical subject of the subjectobject dichotomy, and this very distinction is revealed as a term in a specific ideological code. While recent writers on rabbinic literature have already discussed it in terms of intertextuality, I believe that a misreading of this concept often shows up in their texts, for they speak of "intertextuality" as if it were a characteristic of some texts as opposed to others.
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Symptomatic of this misunderstanding is the vigorous attack which James Kugel's essay, "Two Introductions to Midrash,''
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has provoked from Jacob Neusner.
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While Kugel's text has much that is new and interesting in it about the historical origins of midrash and its connections with apocalypse, pseudepigrapha, and Philo, the aspects that Neusner attacks are more a perspicacious and elegant rendition of generally held views on midrash than they are new departures. This fact makes Neusner's text, however, all the more interesting and revealing, because of its seemingly misplaced virulence against a rather unexceptionable piece. What is interesting, then, is to try to understand what it is in Kugel's article that so stimulates Neusner's ire.

I will begin, therefore, by dealing with an egregious misunderstanding of Kugel in Neusner's text. I do not do so to point out an error on the part of Neusner, but rather because I think that this error is symptomatic, and ramified in other of Neusner's recent texts. Neusner is commenting on a passage of Kugel's which reads: "midrash is exegesis of biblical verses, not of books. The basic unit of the Bible for the midrashist is the verse: this is what he seeks to expound, and it might be said that there simply is no boundary encountered beyond that of the verse until one comes to the borders of the canon itself.''
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I think it will be quite clear to anyone reading this passage with even a modicum of distance that "canon" here intends the
biblical
canon and all that Kugel is doing is unpacking the virtual commonplace that "midrash is exegesis of biblical verses, not books." However, in Neusner's gloss Kugel is made to say that "there is no boundary between midrashexegesis of a single verse
and the entirety of the canon Judaism
.''
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The question which interests me is what led Neusner's to such a gross misreading of Kugel. I think that it would not be too speculative to suggest in the context of Neusner's recent writing that he has a kind of obsession with arguing against his misconceived notion of ''intertextuality" as a characteristic of midrash (or rabbinic literature in general). He believes that the use of this term implies that all rabbinic literature is a "seamless whole'' without history or contestation. Since this straw man has become his nemesis, he sees him hiding under every bed. In his zeal to attack the intertextualists on every possible front, he has opened here another battlefield against those scholars that he refers to as "Kugel and his friends" or sometimes, the "
Prooftexts
circle.''
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That this is indeed Neusner's animating obsession here is eminently clear from his having devoted an entire monograph solely to this subject.
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Now it is precisely on this point that I wish to address the issues. Neusner's entire discussion both in the monograph on the subject and here is founded on an entirely mistaken conception of the notion of intertextuality as it appears in myriad discussions in literary theory.
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Intertexuality in virtually all discussions is not a characteristic of some texts as opposed to others but part of the structure of the literary text as such. One could certainly argue against the concept of intertextuality on theoretical grounds, but Neusner's attempt to discredit the concept visàvis rabbinic literature on empirical grounds merely shows that he has not the slightest notion of what he is talking about,
when he uses the term "intertextuality
." Now, if the term "intertextuality" has any value at all, it is precisely in the way that it claims that no texts, including the classic singleauthored works of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, for example, are organic, selfcontained unities, created out of the spontaneous, freely willed act of a selfidentical subject. What this means is that every text is constrained by the literary system of which it is a part and that every text is ultimately dialogical in that it cannot but record the traces of its contentions and doubling of earlier discourses. The scholars that Neusner is attacking are certainly right in the intuition that if such be true for the texts of Wordsworth, it can only be more true of the texts of group production and redaction which comprise the rabbinic classics. Since these conceptions, in their broadest sense,
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are, I would claim, among the virtually universally maintained positions in literary theory today, Neusner's wish to see each of the documents of rabbinic Judaism as just such organic texts and as the reflection of a worldview of ''authorships" is nothing short of primitive from the perspective of precisely the discipline that he is invoking against Kugel and socalled company.
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Far from leading to a claim that rabbinic literature is a seamless whole of harmonious views, the concept of intertexuality would suggest that not even one document of that literature (or any other) is nor could be a seamless whole that could reflect the
Weltanschauung
of an "authorship.''

Not only a claim about the dialogical and social nature of all text production, the notion of intertextuality is also an extension and concretization of the philosophical position that there is no such thing as a true, objective mimesis of reality in language. Reality is always represented through texts that refer to other texts, through language that is a construction of the historical, ideological, and social system of a people. In these terms we can perhaps retrieve Isaak Heinemann's work, removing from it the mystifying encrustations of romantic ideology. In place of the hero of the spirit in communion with the true timeless essence of the heroes of the Bible, I will imagine the rabbis as readers doing the best they could to make sense of the Bible for themselves and their times and in themselves and their times—in short, as readers. The text of the Torah is gapped and dialogical, and into the gaps the reader slips, interpreting and completing the text in accordance with the codes of his or her culture. In this

sense too we can retrieve Gundolf's ideas—however, in terms that he would hardly have understood or been sympathetic to. What I wish to suggest is that the legends that history produces can indeed be read as a historiography and an interpretation of the past, and the aggada can indeed then be read as an interpretation of the Bible. In other words we will return to the idea that the aggada is the most significant kind of historiography, however, not because it represents a true subjective communion with the past on the part of geniuses, but because it manifests the past as it was represented by the culture in which the aggada was produced. Midrash is a portrayal

of the reality which the rabbis perceived in the Bible through their ideologically colored eyeglasses, just as Heinemann and Heinemann are reading the rabbis and the Bible through their eyeglasses—and indeed just as I am reading through mine. In place of one Heinemann's reduction of aggada to a mere reflection of the historical reality of its time and the other's ignoring of its time entirely in the name of a supertemporal psychological connection between the rabbis and the Bible, I propose a reading of aggada in which, from the distance of our time, we try to understand how the rabbis read the Torah in their time—taking seriously their claim that what they are doing is reading, and trying to understand how a committed reading of the holy and authoritative text works in the rabbinic culture. The program for a new
Darkhe ha'aggadah
is to explore and justify the view of midrash as a kind of interpretation that continues compositional and interpretive practices found in the biblical canon itself.
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Rather than seeing midrashic departures from what appears to be the "simple" meaning of the local text as being determined by the needs of rhetoric and propaganda and rooted in the extratextual reality of the rabbinic period, or as being the product of the creative genius of individual rabbis wholly above time and social circum stance, I suggest that the intertextual reading practice of the midrash is a development (sometimes, to be sure, a baroque development) of the intratextual interpretive strategies which the Bible itself manifests. Moreover, the very fractured and unsystematic surface of the biblical text is an encoding of its own intertextuality, and it is precisely this which the midrash interprets. The dialogue and dialectic of the midrashic rabbis will be understood as readings of the dialogue and dialectic of the biblical text.

The intertextuality of midrash is thus an outgrowth of intertextuality within the Bible itself Gerald Bruns has written that midrash is founded on the

ancient hermeneutical insight [that] as the Rabbis, Augustine, and Luther knew, the Bible, despite its textual heterogeneity, can be read as a selfglossing book. One learns to study it by following the ways in which one portion of the text illumines another. The generations of scribes who shaped and reshaped the Scriptures appear to have designed them to

be studied in just this way. Thus Brevard S. Childs speaks of "the interpretive structure which the biblical text has received from those who formed and used it as

sacred scripture." This does not mean that redaction produced a unified text (or what we would think of as unified: a holistic text, free of selfcontradiction, a systematic or organic whole: the Bible is everything but
that
); rather it means that the parts are made to relate to one another reflexively, with later texts, for example, throwing light on the earlier, even as they themselves always stand in the light of what precedes and follows them.
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Bruns finds a way to achieve that which Isaak Heinemann set out to do, to explain in what sense the midrash is a reading of the Bible. We do not need the romantic ideology of communion and creation to understand this sense; it is a product of the very process by which the Bible was constituted as Scripture. This perspective comprehends how later texts interpret and rewrite the earlier ones to change the meaning of the entire canon, and how recognizing the presence of the earlier texts in the later changes our understanding of these later texts as well. We have here, then, an almost classic intertextuality, defined as, "the transformation of a signifying system." This is what the midrash itself refers to as "stringing [like beads or pearls] the words of Torah together . . . from the Torah to the Prophets and from the Prophets to the Writings.''
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Were I to attempt to define midrash at this point, it would perhaps be radical intertextual reading of the canon, in which potentially every part refers to and is interpretable by every other part. The Torah, owing to its own intertextuality, is a severely gapped text, and the gaps are there to be filled by strong readers, which in this case does not mean readers fighting for originality, but readers fighting to find what they must in the holy text. Their own intertext—that is, the cultural codes which enable them to make meaning and find meaning, constrain the rabbis to fill in the gaps of the Torah's discourse with narratives which are emplotted in accordance with certain ideological structures. The type of midrashic parable called the mashal
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is only the most explicit of these structures, but it can be taken as a prototype—a privileged type—of all midrashic narrative interpretation. It is here that Hayden White's work on the theory of historiography becomes so significant, for he is the theoretician who has most clearly articulated the role of the intertext in historiography.

What the historian must bring to his consideration of the record are general notions of the kinds of stories that might be found there, just as he must bring to consideration of the problem of narrative representation some notion of the "pregeneric plot structure" by which the story he tells is endowed with formal coherency. In other words, the historian must draw upon a fund of culturally provided mythoi in order to constitute the facts as figuring a story of a particular kind, just as he must appeal to that same fund of mythoi in the minds of his readers to endow his account of the past with the odor of meaning or significance.
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In White's theory, then, any historian who writes history as a story has

perforce emplotted his discourse using the plot structures that carry the ideology of the culture. Otherwise the story will make no sense to people in the culture. These basic plots—the narratives which the culture allows one to tell—form a vital aspect of the intertext. The mashal and its congeners play a role in the present description of midrash analogous to the "eternal truths" of which Isaak Heinemann spoke. They also serve to take the biblical text out of the accidental and uninterpreted chronicle into the interpretive, valueladen structures of a true historiography; however, the eternal, unchanging verities of romanticism are replaced here by culturebound, historically conditioned, specific ideological patterns of significance.