Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (10 page)

The paradox is at the very heart of midrash; a text is being cited that is supremely authoritative for both attitudes and behaviors, and at the same time the local meanings of that authoritative text seem to be undermined. Now, any attempt to read this paradox is a kind of reduction of its meaning; there is a sense of loss. But not to read it at all seems to be an even greater loss. And to assert that midrash is merely some kind of erotic play with the text would be the greatest loss of all. I wish to claim that midrash—the Oral Torah—is a program of preserving the old by making it new. The very surprise of the new meanings that were read in (not into nor quite out of) the Bible by the rabbis was precisely the means by which the Torah was prevented from losing its ability to mold ideology and shape behavior.

"poetic quotations" . . . function as tools for building the cultural paradigm, for superimposing the past upon the present, thus reversing the flow of time. The poet [Mandelstam] himself conceived of poetry as a tool by means of which the past can reenter the present. "Poetry is the plough tearing open and turning over time so that the deep layers of it, its rich black undersoil, ends up on the surface. There are periods when mankind, dissatisfied with its today and yearning for the deep layers of time, craves, like a ploughman, for the virgin soil of time."
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Midrash seems to have great appeal to many people in our culture. To some, midrash is perceived as a liberating force from the tyranny of the "correct interpretation." An alternative tradition to that of Europe's metaphysics, midrash seems to provide support for the project of deconstructing that metaphysics and its "logocentric" interpretation of texts. Our study of midrash suggests that another reason that it may appeal to the postmodern sensibility is not so much for the way it liberates from cultural exemplars (that work really needs no buttressing in our culture!), but for the way that it preserves contact and context with the tradition while it is liberating.

The relation between the midrash and the Bible provides not only a model of the relation between text and interpretation but between the present and the past. It is not, then, surprising that modern textuality often structures itself by an allpervasive, radical poetics of quotation. The Acmeist poetics of Mandelstam and Akhmatova,

1. Eliot's work, and the
   critical texts
   of Walter Benjamin all provide parade examples of this practice. The latter also take up a place somewhere between scholarship and critical poetry, precisely defined by a poetics of quotation, which breaches and continues a tradition. As Hannah Arendt has described this:
   

   From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the center of every work of Benjamin's. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotations to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question in Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of "over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged" (
   Briefe
   I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work,
   with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another
   , and were able to prove their
   raison d'être
   in a freefloating state, as it were.
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   These modern texts are "fragments shored up against a ruin." They are produced in the wake of the destruction of a European culture a thousand years old. The rabbis, faced with the disruption of their times, the destruction of the Temple and Jewish autonomy in Palestine, and with the necessity of appropriating Scripture for their times, found in the creation of an explicitly and pervasively intertextual literature the ideal generative and reconstructive tool, which preserved the privileged
   

   position of the biblical text by releasing it from its position of immobilized totality. The paradoxes of quotation, implicated in the "general dialectic of cultural processes," were utilized by the rabbis as a way of
   avoiding
   the seeming necessity of "choosing between innovation and the duplication of canonized exemplars.''
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   The midrash realizes its goal by means of a hermeneutic of recombining pieces of the canonized exemplar into a new discourse. In the next chapter we will begin to look at the intertextuality encoded in the Bible itself and at how midrash is a response to that.
   

1. 3
   Textual Heterogeneity in the Torah and the Dialectic of the Mekilta: The Midrash vs. Source Criticism as Reading Strategies
   

   The previous chapter has introduced one of the central issues for midrashic hermeneutics: how midrash builds its discourse out of textual fragments as a biblical mosaic. This is, of course, a kind of intertextuality, there is another sense of "intertextuality" that will be most important in my readings of midrash. In the passage cited above, Gerald Brims remarks that, "the Bible,
   despite
   its textual heterogeneity, can be read as a selfglossing book".
   1
   I would like to go further than that formulation and claim that the Bible,
   because
   of its textual heterogeneity, allows for the multiple selfglossing readings of midrash. The heterogeneity—the multivocality of the biblical text itself, its hiatuses and gaps, creatively but not openendedly filled in by the midrash—allows it to generate its meanings—its
   original
   meanings—in ever new social and cultural situations. It is by now practically a commonplace that the narrative of the Torah is characterized by an extraordinarily high degree of gapping, indeterminacy, repetition, and selfcontradiction.
   2
   This sense of the fissured quality of the Torah narrative has been treated by biblical scholarship as an occasion for diachronic study of the composition of the text.
   3
   The Torah has been composed, according to the "Higher Criticism," by cutting and pasting between several documents without the benefit of a word processor to smooth out the resulting infelicities.
   4
   This view results in a reduction of the tension of the text and consequently constitutes a loss for hermeneutics. Fundamentalist interpretation, on the other hand, has often been reductive in an even more destructive way, for by harmonizing away the tension, it has been lost entirely to the consciousness of many readers. The Higher Critics may be said to have at least somehow preserved the phenomena for a new generation of readers. Such a generation is at hand. Geoffrey Hartman has reinterpreted the Higher Criticism and diverted it from a diachronic into a synchronic issue:
   

   Our questioning of the unity of the work of art is not so modern as it seems. It imports an older mode of study into a new context. Throughout the nineteenth century the prestige area for philology was ballad, folk song, and other forms of vernacular oral literature. When philological research extended to the Bible, Higher Criticism was born, and instead of a unity of inspiration or composition, a multiplicity of "sources" emerged, held together by an anonymous process of compilation.
   

   The sense that authors are compilers rather than creators is strong at present
   . . . . Literary theory marries philology! Not quite.
   5
   

   Let us explore this point a bit. Hartman is turning the claims of the Higher Critics on their heads in a particularly elegant fashion. These had, in effect, claimed that the Bible is
   sui generis
   in world literature or practically so, in that it was not written by an author but redacted by editors. The goal of literary scholarship was therefore to reconstruct the original sources out of which the Bible had been redacted. Study of the text itself became merely a pretext for studying what was hypothesized to lie behind the text, both as literature and as historical record. What Hartman claims is that in fact
   all literary texts
   are characterized by compositeness, and in general "authors are compilers." Moreover, this composite nature of the literary text is not an issue for diachronic study alone, although such study can be fascinating in its own right,
   6
   but one for reading itself.
   

   Now this view of authority gives us, as Hartman has realized, a powerful nonreductive way of reading the Bible.
   7
   If gaps, contradictions, otherness, dialogue are characteristic of all literary texts, then it will not surprise or disturb us to encounter them in the text which is the very prototype of Western literature, the Bible. As argued by Sternberg in a text anything but pious, the Bible encodes a divine author. In our culture, truth claim and knowledge of what cannot be known is an oxymoron—one signals historiography, the other fiction, but "in the Bible's sociocultural context, . . . truth claim and free access to information go together owing to a discourse mechanism so basic that no contemporary would need to look around for it—the appeal to divine inspiration.''
   8
   It follows then that God must be understood as the implied author of the Torah. This is not a theological or dogmatic claim but a semiotic one. That is to say that it does not matter for our purposes here if the inscribing of God as author of the Torah is a product of human work and therefore a fiction or an effect of actual divine authority. If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps, repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be
   read
   , as a central part of the system of meaning production of that text. In midrash the rabbis respond to this invitation and challenge.
   

   God, the implied author of the narrative of the Torah, has willingly, as it were, encoded into His text the very kinds of dialogue that all of His epigones were destined willynilly to encode into theirs. As with all literature, so with the
   

   Torah, it is precisely the fault lines in the text, the gaps that its author has left, which enable reading. The argument of this chapter is that midrash enters into these interstices by exploring the ways in which the Bible can read itself. The famous indeterminacy of midrashic reading—its allowance of several possibilities equally—will be understood as a figure for the possibility of several ways of filling in the gaps.
   9
   In the first example of an extended reading here presented, we will see precisely how this structure can be located in the text.
   

   GapFilling and Midrashic Indeterminacy
   

   The concept of the gap is a very important one in theories which attend to the work of the reader in the processing of the narrative text. Any such text cannot but leave out much detail, including much that is vital to a construction of the story and the characters. The reader must fill in the gaps, forming hypotheses about what is left out of the text. This notion has been much elaborated in varying theoretical frameworks by several recent critics.
   10
   The Bible is notorious for the paucity of detail of certain sorts within its narrative. Erich Auerbach described this as being "fraught with background". The gaps are those silences in the text which call for interpretation if the reader is to "make sense" of what happened, to fill out the plot and the characters in a meaningful way. This is precisely what midrash does by means of its explicit narrative expansions. I am extending the application of the term "gap" here to mean
   any
   element in the textual system of the Bible which demands interpretation for a coherent construction of the story, that is, both gaps in the narrow sense, as well as contradictions and repetitions, which indicate to the reader that she must fill in something that is not given in the text in order to read it. The reason for broadening the extension of the term is that ail of these textual phenomena, when read synchronically, turn out to function similarly; that is, they are resolved by assuming that something has been left out of the text which can be restored by a more or less motivated activity of the reader. There is even a native rabbinic saying for this quality of the text: "this verse cries out, 'interpret me!'"
   

   In our first example, we will see how the apparently unmotivated exceptionality of the action of a character in one of a series of similar situations constitutes a gap which the midrash reads. The exegetical context is the unusual statement, "And Moses removed Israel from the Red Sea" [Exod: 15:22]. Since all through the Torah the travels of the Israelites were directly commanded by God, our verse seems to contradict what has gone before, thereby setting up a gap which calls for comment. The midrash offers a series of interpretations of this verse:
   

   1. R. Yehoshua says, This journey Israel made by the word of Moses. All of the other journeys were by none but the word of the Lord, as it is said, "By the word of the Lord they camped, and by the word of the Lord, they
      

traveled," but this journey was by none but the word of Moses. Therefore, it says, "And Moses removed Israel."

(2) R. Eliezer says, By the word of the Almighty they journeyed, for we have found in one place, in two and in three, that they journeyed not but by word of the Almighty.

(2a) What is then the significance of saying [
ma talmud lomar
], "And Moses removed Israel," but to make known Israel's merit, for when Moses says to them, "Arise and go!" they did not say, "How shall we go out into the desert without any victuals for the way,'' but they had faith and went after Moses. Of them it is said explicitly in the tradition,
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''Go and call in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, I have remembered for you the righteousness of your youth, your going after Me in the desert" [Jer. 2:2].

In paragraph (1), we find R. Yehoshua insisting, as he does regularly in the Mekilta,
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on a rigorously literal reading. In spite of the fact that at every other point in the narrative of the Torah, the People are represented as being led by God in their journeys, since it says here that "Moses removed" them, this journey must have been at the prophet's instigation, and not God's. It is indeed remarkable that R. Yehoshua proposes no explanation for the
sui generis
character of this particular journey, only emphasizing the more his commitment to literalism. In paragraph (2), R. Eliezer argues for a nonliteral reading of our verse. His reasoning is that, since everywhere else in the Torah we find that the journeys were by the instigation of God and since there seems to be no reason for this one to have been exceptional, we must assume it to have been the same. Now, this is followed by an expansion of the narrative (2a) to explain the apparent statement that it was Moses who led the people this time. The reading suggests that, although it was indeed God who had proposed this journey as he did all the others, it was, after all, Moses who gave the immediate order which the people obeyed without question, even entering without provisions into a trackless waste on the strength of their trust in Moses. This story is then supported by the verse from Jeremiah which indicates that in the desert, the relationship of GOd and the people was an ideal one, a new bride unquestioningly trusting her groom and following Him, even in the wilderness.