Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (6 page)

Combining the import of all of these insights into the role of intertextuality in the production of the interpretive text leads to the following schema. The biblical narrative is gapped and dialogical. The role of the midrash is to fill in the gaps. The materials which provide impetus for the specifics of the gapfilling are found in the intertext in two ways: first in the intertext provided by the canon itself, the intertextual and interpretive interrelations which exist and which can be made to exist between different parts of the canon, and second, within the ideological intertextual code of the rabbinic culture. The midrash is not, then, a reflex of that ideology but a dialogue with the biblical text conditioned and allowed by that ideology—and as such is no different from any other interpretation.

This story of midrash quite reverses the narrative of hermeneutic that is presupposed by the historical school. As we have seen, their assumption is that the text is clear and transparent at the moment of its original creation, because it speaks to a particular historical situation, and it becomes unclear, owing to the passing of time and that situation. In contrast to this, our conception of midrash is one in which the text makes its meaning in history. We find this insight adumbrated in a crucially important

text in the midrash on Genesis,
Bereshit Rabbah
:

Rabbi Yehuda the son of Simon opened: "And He revealed deep and hidden things" [Dan. 2:22]. In the beginning of the creation of the World, "He revealed deep things, etc." For it says, "In the beginning God created the heavens,'' and He did not interpret. Where did He interpret it? Later on, "He spreads out the heaven like gossamer'' [Isa. 40:22]. "And the earth," and He did not interpret. Where did He interpret it? Later on, "To the snow He said, be earth" [Job 37:6]. "And God said, let there be light," and He did not interpret. Where did He interpret it? Later on, "He wraps Himself in light like a cloak." [Psalms 104:2].
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This is certainly a very rich and paradoxical
theoretical
statement. The Author of the Book (and indeed the Author of the world) has chosen at the time of creation— at the time of writing about creation—to hide the interpretation, but

He, through His prophets, has revealed something of this truth later on. This text bears out Bruns's understanding of midrash completely, as we will see it borne out throughout the readings of the Mekilta in this book. We see now that in this midrashic perspective all of the later books of the Bible are in a strong sense readings of the Torah, and so does the midrash continue to use them as interpretation of the Torah and develop their interpretations further. Thus we often find in midrash the phrase, "About them it has been interpreted in the tradition," ['
aleyhem meforash baqqabbalah
] before quoting a verse of the Prophets or Writings. When the rabbis of the midrash quote verses from these texts, the quoted verses are the generating force behind the midrashic elaboration and filling in of the gaps in the "historical record."

However, Bruns has even more to teach us about midrash. The gaps and dialogue and contestation of meaning which the biblical text presents to the reader act as a block—indeed a stumbling block in Bruns's words—precisely to those ideologies, whether romantic or positivistic, which set as their goal recovery of the original meaning. "The Bible always addresses itself to the time of interpretation; one cannot understand it except by appropriating it anew" [Bruns, p. 627]. Although Bruns quotes with approval precisely the language of Joseph Heinemann in which the latter proposes that the rabbis were not concerned with the meaning of Scripture, he himself proffers an understanding of midrash which is much more rich and powerful. "Midrash is not only responsive to the Scriptures as a way of coping with the text's wideranging formal problems; it is also responsive to the situations in which the Scriptures exert their claim upon human life. Think of midrash as the medium in which this scriptural claim exerts itself" [p. 629]. A theory of midrash for our time will have to account for the midrash's responsiveness to the ''formal problems" of Scripture, which I have described as Scripture's own intertextuality, as well as for the responsiveness of midrash to the ways in which Scripture laid claim to human life in the past and lays such claim in the present as well.

In a very strong sense, if the Rambam posited two schools of readers of the aggada before him and then himself, the Aristotelian reader of midrash; and Heinemann then posited himself, the Gundolfian and Crocean reader of midrash; I come to propose a reading of midrash which is in keeping with the intellectual, critical, and theoretical movement of our times. I might indeed claim for my model that it incorporates all of the types of midrashic readers which Maimonides presented. On the one hand, I
will
claim that midrash is true reading of the meaning of the biblical text, a reading which is sensitive to literary values, echoes, contradictions, intertextuality in all of its senses within the Bible. Midrash is a reading of the "plain sense of things," but only if we recognize that the plain sense grows and changes throughout history and that this is the Bible's underlying meaning. However, I will also accept the characterization of midrash as the product of a disturbed exegetical sense, but only if

we recognize that all exegetical senses are disturbed, including most certainly our own. All interpretation is filtered through consciousness, tradition, ideology, and the intertext, and the opposition between subject and object, so characteristic of the romantic ideology, must be deconstructed. Finally, midrash is literature, but all serious literature is revision and interpretation of a canon and a tradition and is a dialogue with the past and with authority which determines the shape of human lives in the present and future. The rabbis were concerned with the burning issues of their day, but their approach to that concern was through the clarification of difficult passages of Scripture. Ideology affected their reading but their ideology was also affected by their reading. The task of our research is to try to understand how. Perhaps the
nimshal
of my text is that each generation of serious readers of aggada will have to create a
Darkhe ha'aggadah
for itself. Let us begin.

This is a much less ambitious book than its model
Darkhe ha'aggadah
in two senses. First of all the latter attempted to describe both the aggada of the tannaim and that of the later amoraim, while this book confines itself only to the earlier period and indeed to one document of that period. Second, Heinemann's book attempted to account for all of the methods of the aggada, that is, both those concerned with philosophy of history and those which have to do with the philosophy of language. This book confines itself to the first of these, and will have to be followed by a companion volume on the second. Following is a schematic plan of the present text.

In accordance with the view that all texts are a "mosaic" of marked and unmarked citations from earlier texts, the second chapter of this book is a study of the role of quotation in the midrashic text, not only the quotation of the text about which the midrash is speaking, but also the apparently subsidiary quotations of other verses, the socalled prooftexts. The third chapter discusses the Mekilta's response to the intertextuality of the Torah itself, that is, the heterogeneity of its narrative structure, which read synchronically invites dialectical/dialogical reading. This method of reading will be presented as an alternative to diachronic methods, such as source criticism.

The next chapter is an examination of the builtin ambiguity of the biblical text and the way that the midrash represents the doublevoicedness of the Torah by setting up a dialectic between interpretations. I will try to show how what has been taken as homily and even allegory is, in fact, a reading of precisely the kind of textual heterogeneity exposed in the previous chapter. Certain kinds of ambiguity function by mobilizing alternative intertexts, thus generating more than one legitimate reading,
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Also, in this chapter I pay more

attention to the midrash as text, that is, to the meaning generated by the edited concatenation of the different interpretive discourses, as opposed to the individual discourses themselves. The "scandal of midrash," namely that the founding interpretations of the most authoritative text of Judaism are presented in the form of controversies, is read as a representation of this biblical intertextuality.

The next two chapters are an analysis of the particular type of midrash called the
mashal
, usually translated as "parable". In the first of the these, a theory of the mashal is presented which shows it to be a method for motivating the quotation of several verses in connection with a gapped narrative of the Torah and as a solution to that gap. The mashal, it will be claimed, provides as well an ideological model through which hypothesis formation in midrashic reading is both generated and constrained. Such ideological models are themselves intertextual in that they represent in concrete form the anonymous codes of a given cultural practice. In the second of these chapters, an extended reading of a single mashal will be presented. In the analysis of this text, I will claim that another aspect of intertextuality is revealed by the midrash, that is, the intertextuality of the Bible visàvis its earlier Hebrew cultural practice and in particular the mythology of ancient Israel. Another concept of intertextuality, one drawing on the psychodynamic model of repression and displacement, will be introduced and illustrated through this text.

In the next chapter, a discussion of the crucial role of the Song of Songs in the Mekilta and in midrash in general is undertaken. The main point of this chapter is to draw distinctions between the intertextual reading practice of midrash and the other prominent type of ancient hermeneutic, allegoresis. Midrash interprets by correlating text to text, while the allegorist interprets by correlating text to "hidden meanings". The final chapter continues this theme and attempts more strongly to relate the midrash to its rabbinic culture—however, not in the way that historians have traditionally done, i.e., by claiming that midrash
reflects
its culture, but by considering complex and fateful transactions between midrash and other cultural practices.

The relationship among events, current needs, interpretation, and ideology is accordingly a much more nuanced one than the one subscribed to by the historical school. In my view, the general approach of Isaak Heinemann and Gerald Bruns, which sees
midrash as a special type of interpretive discourse which needs to be accounted for in terms of literary and historiographical theory
, provides for a much richer way of reading these texts. "Intertextuality",
because
of the polysemy

of its usages, provides a powerful metaphor within which to pursue this reading. In each of the chapters, the points will be made via close readings of particular texts drawn from the Mekilta on the biblical pericope regarding Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea. This is a particularly paradigmatic moment in the selffashioning of the Jewish People, so it provides especially rich material

in which to explore the modes of rabbinic literary/historical hermeneutic. I hope by the end of this essay to have provided material for a much more nuanced and rich understanding of the interplay between history and interpretation—both in the special method of Jewish reading called midrash, and by implication, in the hermeneutics of culture in general.

. . . to uproot and stabilize simultaneously; to reject and preserve in one breath; to break up and to build—inside, from within, casting a new layer on a previous layer and welding them into one mold . . .

Simon Rawidowicz
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Studying the Torah—interpretation—is the dominant cultural practice of rabbinic Judaism. As such it does the work that alternate cultural practices do in other societies. One of the tasks of a successful culture is to preserve the old while making it nevertheless new—to maintain continuity with a tradition without freezing it. Intertextuality is a powerful instrument in the hands of culture for accomplishing this task. As Julia Kristeva has written, "every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text is absorption and transformation of another text."
2
By absorbing and transforming, the textual system both establishes continuity with the past and renews itself for the future. The simultaneous rejection and preservation of tradition in midrash is shown in the allpervasive quotation which forms its very warp and woof. A typical page of the Mekilta bears anywhere from ten to twenty citations of verses or parts of verses from other biblical texts. In this chapter, I will examine how the Mekilta performs this historical work of simultaneous uprooting and stabilizing by considering in detail the function of quotation in the midrash. The regnant view is that when a midrash like the Mekilta quotes a verse from another part of the Bible in the interpretation of the Exodus passages, these quotations are prooftexts—texts cited in good or bad faith in support of previously determined conclusions.
3
In contrast to this usual view of the role of these scriptural citations, I will argue that the texts cited (sometimes only alluded to)
are the generating force behind the elaboration of narrative or other types of textual expansion in the Mekilta's text
. That is to say, the socalled "prooftexts" are to be read as

intertexts and cotexts of the Torah's narrative, as subtexts of the midrashic interpretation. There is a tension between the meaning(s) of the quoted text in its "original" context and in its present context.
4
What is so striking (and strange) about midrash is its claim that the new context is implied by the old one, that the new meanings (Oral Torah) revealed by recontextualizing pieces of the authoritative text are a legitimate interpretation of the Written Torah itself, and indeed given with its very revelation.
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