Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (17 page)

For you have taken us out into this desert,
to cause this congregation to die starvation
. [
bara'av
]. R. Yehoshua says, There is no death which is more painful than death by starvation, for it says, "Happier are those who were killed by the sword than those killed by hunger" [Lam. 4:9]. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says, Ba ra'av
27
"Comes starvation": there comes upon us starvation upon starvation, plague upon plague, darkness upon darkness.

Again, R. Yehoshua reads in a way that reduces the pejorative feel of the verse. This accusation which the people are bringing seems both unnecessarily harsh and unjustified; the people have been cared for until now. R. Yehoshua justifies their tone as owing to panic in the face of starvation, which he calls the worst death known to man. R. El'azar, on the other hand, reads this statement as one of the most incredible of false accusations. Again and again you have starved us, sent plagues upon us, plunged us into darkness! What, in fact, are the events to which these people are referring? They are nothing but the plagues sent against their enemies, the Egyptians, which they now turn into the basis for an accusation against God and His vicar, Moses! R. El'azar accomplishes this hermeneutic feat by his characteristic move
28
of dismantling the word
bara'av
[of starvation] into two:
ba ra'av
[starvation comes].

The story continues with God's response to these requests or importunities of the people:

And the Lord said to Moses: I hereby rain bread from Heaven for you
. R. Yehoshua says, I hereby reveal Myself immediately; I do not tarry. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says, He says "hereby" only to mean by the merit of your ancestors.

The word translated "hereby" in legal contexts has the sense of volition, of entering into an obligation to perform an action in complete free will and good spirit, without any duress. As R. Yishma'el is reported to have said, "Wherever it says
hineni
[hereby] it is none other than an expression of joy."
29
Therefore, R. Yehoshua's reading of
hineni
as an expression of volition (for, as Yohanan Muffs has proven, that is what alacrity symbolizes)
30
reads as a straightforward interpretation of the verse, which is consistent, of course, with his entire reading of the passage. R. El'azar uses his ''anomalist"
31
methods to make the verse consistent with his whole

reading as well. He reinterprets the word
hineni
in such a way that he takes away its positive connotation of will and joy (as referring to the present situation) by taking it to be an allusion to the
hineni
pronounced by the righteous ancestors, as in the following texts:

"And it was after these matters that God tried Abraham, and said to him: Abraham! And he said
hineni
" [Gen. 22:1]. Here I am, ready to do your

bidding.
32
"And God said to Israel in a night vision, Jacob, Jacob! And he said,
hineni
" [Gen. 46:2].

So God's response here was not at all joyful and willing, but grudging in the extreme. Only by virtue of the "merit of the ancestors" does God meet the murmuring of the people at all.

Again in the next passage we find the same two interpretive stances:

For you: R. Yehoshua says, Indeed it is {not} coming to you. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says, He says "for you" only by the merit of your ancestors.

If the emendation of R. Yehoshua's statement is correct,
33
he is saying that the words "for you" in the verse are a further indication of God's good will in giving the gift of the manna. R. El'azar, on the other hand, turns "for you" into an apostrophe to those very ancestors alluded to by
hineni
, as if to read (taking the two comments together): O
Hineni
! it is for
you
that I rain down bread from the heavens, and not for these unworthy descendants.

In the next series of comments by the two tannaim, the distinction between their views is again quite clearly drawn in the midrash:

And Moses said to Aaron: say to all the congregation of the Children of Israel, Draw nigh unto the Lord
! R. Yehoshua says, "draw nigh," for the Mighty One is revealed. R. El'azar says, "Draw nigh" to be judged.

The positions here are very clearly delineated. R. Yehoshua interprets that the people are being bidden to draw nigh to receive this wonder, to behold the glory of the Lord, but R. El'azar holds that this drawing nigh is for judgment (and possible punishment is implied, of course) of their sins. The differing evaluations of the whole episode are thus sharp and complete.

This theme is continued in the next comment as well:

And they turned to the desert
. R. Yehoshua says, They turned only because the Almighty revealed Himself. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says, They turned only to the deeds of the ancestors, for it says, "the desert"; just as the desert has in it neither iniquity nor sin, so too the first ancestors have in them neither iniquity nor sin.

Both rabbis seem troubled by the turning. Why did the Israelites turn? They had been asked to draw nigh! Moreover, they are in the desert; how can they turn toward it? (This is a question which troubles current commentators on Exodus.)
34
R. Yehoshua's solution—characteristically—is that they turned to observe the wonder that was happening: "And they turned . . . for behold, the Glory of the Lord was seen in the cloud." R. El'azar—just as much in character—reads figuratively and relates the events to the ancestors and their merit. This turning was spiritual—to the deeds of these ancestors; it may signify

repentance or appeal. The interpretation is "proven" by the figurative interpretation of "desert," similar to the other figures by which R. El'azar reads the ancestors in all these events.

Together the two readings produce the following picture. According to R. Yehoshua, the people were hungry, legitimately so. They asked for bread (admittedly committing a minor violation of protocol or etiquette in the process), and God answered them swiftly, generously, and willingly. According to R. El'azar, on the other hand, the story is quite different; the rebellious people acted according to their wont and rebelled. God would have punished them for this act of little faith, but the ancestors interceded on their behalf, and for the sake of these holy ones God not only desisted from punishing them but answered their prayers as well.

What could possibly motivate such radically divergent readings of the same text? Here we have a kind of crux for the interpretation of the midrash in general, a crossroads in which the nature of the questions that we ask will determine the nature of the answers we receive. One type of interpretive move would be to attempt to isolate a theological or ideological issue which divides the tannaim, having its origin, as it were, outside of the text, and assume that they are each pushing an interpretation in order to justify this theological position. The climax of this mode of understanding of midrash is E. E. Urbach's classic study,
The Sages: Their Beliefs and Opinions
, where he understands that R. Yehoshua's motivation here is opposition to the principle of the "merit of the fathers" (the principle that one receives undeserved benefits from God, owing to the meritorious behavior of one's ancestors), while R. El'azar Hammoda'i is firmly committed to this idea.
35
The weakness of this traditional research paradigm seems to me to he that it does not account for the role that interpretation of Torah plays in the formation of ideological and theological positions. Like literary research that considers the text to be a reflection of history, the literature itself is not perceived as one of the practices that
creates
that very history. We can exemplify this issue in our context by having a look at a passage we have not considered as yet. On Exod. 16:4 ["And let every person gather a day's portion on the day, in order that I may test them whether they will go in my Torah or not"], we have the following controversy in the Mekilta:

A day's portion on the day
: R. Yehoshua says: This means a person may gather on one day the portion for the next day, just as is done on the eve of Sabbath for the Sabbath. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says: This means that a person may not gather on one day the portion for the next day, as is done on the eve of Sabbath for the Sabbath. For it says, "A day's portion on the day"; He who created the day created its sustenance. From here, R. El'azar used to say, He who has enough to eat for today and says, "What will I eat tomorrow?" is one of little faith. For it is said, ''
That I may test them, whether they will go in my Torah or not
." R. Yehoshua says: If a person studies two
halakot
[paragraphs of the Torah] in the morning and two in the evening and the whole day occu

pies himself with his trade, it is accounted for him as if he had fulfilled the whole Torah. [Lauterbach, II, p. 103]

The tannaim differ in their interpretation of the ambiguous "a day's portion on the day." R. Yehoshua takes it to mean that one may provide today for tomorrow's

needs, while R. El'azar understands that one may only provide for today today and have faith that tomorrow will be taken care of. Their interpretations are immediately reflected in their prescriptive practices. R. El'azar, in accordance with his view, claims that one who has enough for immediate needs, and not being sure of tomorrow, continues to exert himself in searching for sustenance rather than studying Torah, is one of little faith. Such a one has failed the test of "whether they will go in my Torah or not," analogously to one who in the days of the desert wanderings would have gathered manna for tomorrow. R. Yehoshua, on the other hand, holds that one should devote oneself to livelihood, even beyond immediate needs, and the test is that, after having one's needs provided for will one find some time for Torah or not, just as in the desert, the Jews had their needs provided for tomorrow as well, and the question was will they
then
"walk in my Torah" or not. Now, we can adopt two approaches to this disagreement. We could assume that the attitudes held by the two tannaim derive from external ideological positions which force their readings, or we could assume that something within the text stimulates the different readings (or at any rate, the very fact of difference in readings) and promotes the different practices. At any rate, it should be noted that the midrashic text itself claims that this reading was the
source
and not the
effect
of R. El'azar's position. The two positions here are certainly in concord with the two readings of the whole story. R. El'azar projects a very extreme pietistic requirement which would make any complaint of hunger into a rebellion, while R. Yehoshua's position regarding livelihood would mitigate strongly any pejorative connotations in the request for bread. We see, therefore, that the disagreement here is embedded in a consistent bifurcation of their readings of the whole complex of narratives in this section of the Torah.

But what generates that bifurcation in the reading? I would like to suggest that the difference of the tannaitic readings, far from being an extratextual issue situated, as it were, in tannaitic times, is a profound response to and doubling of a tension within the biblical text itself.
36
Brevard Childs, along with many other modern commentators, has noted this tension. Childs begins by establishing that the tension is not only in one narrative but in the canon as a whole:

Perhaps the most basic traditiohistorical problem of the wilderness tradition has to do with the role of the murmuring motif, which, although it is completely missing from some of the stories [Exod. 17:8ff.; 18:1ff.], increasingly becomes the rubric under which these stories were interpreted [Deut. 9:22ff.; Ps. 78]. The problem arises from the apparent divergence within the Old Testament in the understanding of the wilderness period. . . . On the one hand, both within the Pentateuch and elsewhere, the wilderness period was

condemned as a proof of Israel's early disobedience and repeated rebellion against God. On the other hand, there are strands within the Pentateuch [Exod. 16] and explicit references in the prophets [Hos. 2:16, EVV 14; Jer. 2:2] which give an apparently positive interpretation of the period.
37
Indeed, it is characterized as a "honeymoon" before the corruption of idolatry set in, caused by contamination with the Canaanites.
38

These data provide in themselves a powerful explanation for the tannaitic controversy here documented. Our text, Exodus 16, is unique in the Pentateuch, in Childs's view, in manifesting the positive interpretation of Israel in the wilderness, and there are strong and unambiguous voices in other texts which hold the exact opposite position: "You have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you" [Deut. 9:24]. And even more to the point: "And they tried God in their hearts by asking for bread for their throats, and spoke against God, saying, 'Will God be able to set a table in the desert?'" [Ps. 78:18–19]. We can thus interpret that R. Yehoshua, responding, as he often does, to the indices within the local text, reads the story as positive, while R. El'azar takes more account of the larger narrative and axiological context. Can we go further in accounting for the two contrary readings?

To answer this question, we must look again at the exegeses of the two tannaim on the microlevel of the individual verses. The key is that each of them has read some verses in what appears to be a simple and straightforward manner while adopting apparently forced readings of other verses. Thus, on the one hand, in order to support his reading, R. Yehoshua troped the usual interpretation of the word "murmured," with its strong negative connotations of conspiracy and rebellion, and moreover felt bound to provide apologetic for the ungrateful accusation that Moses had taken the people out of Egypt to kill them by starvation in the wilderness. On the other hand, in order to support his reading, R. El'azar was forced to read such words as "
hineni
" and "for you," seemingly a gracious and freewill response on the part of God to the people's prayer, in a completely anomalous fashion, i.e., by totally ignoring their syntactic contexts. Since, in order to read it harmoniously, this biblical text seems to force any reader to distort the language of some of its parts, it can be said to contradict itself in its evaluation of these events. To be sure, the narrative of Exodus 16 leans heavily toward the positive interpretation of the events (and, therefore, R. El'azar's readings are so much more heavily troped than his colleague's), but nevertheless, there is a tension within it between indications of a positive reading and those which suggest a negative reading. This tension has been felt by many commentators, including Nahmanides, who writes: