Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (9 page)

Let us look now at an example of a metaphorical paradigm in the
Song of Songs
that helps the midrashist to interpret the Exodus ideologically. As we will see in the next two chapters, one of the major issues facing the tannaim as they read the Exodus accounts was the evaluation of the character of Israel in the wilderness. The problem is, in brief, that the Bible seems to contain two diametrically opposed readings of the people's status at this time: one which understands it to have been the "honeymoon" of God and His bride, Israel, the other which reads the period as one of unrelenting unfaithfulness on the part of the bride. The following midrash, dated somewhat later than the Mekilta, approaches this antinomy through the collection of verses into a paradigm under the rubric of a paradigmatic verse from the Song of Songs, which we shall see below (chapter 7) was read as the hermeneutic key to the Exodus:

I am black, but I am beautiful
[Song 1:5]:

I am black in Egypt, but I am beautiful in Egypt. I am black in Egypt: "And they
rebelled
against me and did not want to hear" [Ezek. 20:8]; but I am beautiful in Egypt, in the blood of the Passover and the blood of circumcision, as is written, "And I passed over you and saw you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, In your blood you will live" [Ezek. 16:6]; this is the blood of the Passover; "In your blood you will live''; this is the blood of circumcision.
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Another word: I am black at the sea, for it says, "And they
rebelled
at the sea, at the Red Sea" [Ps. 106:7]; but I am beautiful at the sea, as it says, "This is my God and I will beautify Him" [Exod. 15:2].

I am black at Mara, for it says, "And the people
complained
against Moses, saying, What shall we drink?" [Exod. 15:24]; but I am beautiful at Mara, for it says, "and he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord taught him a tree and he threw it into the water and the water became sweet."

I am black at Refidim, for it says, "And he called the place
Contention
and
Strife
" [Exod. 16:7]; but I am beautiful at Refidim, for it says, ''And Moses built there an altar and called it, God is my standard'' [Exod. 16:15].

I am black at Horev, for it says, "They made a calf at Horev" [Ps. 106:19];
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but I am beautiful at Horev, for it says, "All that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will hear" [Exod. 24:7].

I am black in the desert, for it says "How much have they
rebelled
against Him in the desert" [Ps. 78:40]; but I am beautiful in the desert, by building the tabernacle, as it says, "On

the day of building the tabernacle" [Num. 9:16].
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The series continues through Joshua, giving four more examples along the way. This is a classic example of paradigmatic midrash. Under the rubric of interpreting the verse, "I am black but I am beautiful," a series of examples from the desert period are chosen that show the dual nature of the people—black and beautiful. The verses chosen all refer directly to the events for which they are being cited, and half of them belong naturally to those texts which regard the Jews as having been faithful at this time, half to those which regard the Jews as having been rebellious and faithless. The text is paradigmatic in two ways. On the one hand, each half of the collection of verses is a member of a substitution set of linguistic strings which belong to the semantic field, "positive or negative statements about the people in the desert." On the other hand, each pair forms a contrast set, with each half marked either positive or negative for the semantic value in question. The dialogical nature of the biblical text itself—its intertextual heterogeneity—is revealed powerfully in the citational structure of the midrash. What can be read as bifurcation in innerbiblical interpretation is here represented as a bifurcation in the actual condition of the people at each of these events in the wilderness history. Practically the whole text consists of nothing but cited verses. The verse, "I am black, but I am beautiful," is read in several situations, the "black" being substituted for by one response to that situation and the "beautiful" by another. The crucial word here is, of course, "substituted," for a paradigm is a substitution set by definition, and the substitution set thus becomes the mark of a deep structural element in the values of the biblicalrabbinic religious system. Thus, by cutting pieces of discourse out of their original context, the midrashist reinserts them into a semiotic system which is both new and old.

The rabbis were keenly aware of the radical appropriation of subtexts their midrash performs. The Talmud preserves a story
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about the very rabbis of the Mekilta which contains a nearly explicit commentary on midrashic intertextuality:

We have learnt there: If it Ia stove] was cut into coils and sand was put between the coils; R. Eliezer calls it pure and the sages call it impure. This is the stove of Akhnai. What is "Akhnai"? Said Rav Yehuda, said Shmuel: They encircled it with words like this Akhna [species of snake] and called it impure. A sage teaches: On that day, R. Eliezer used all the refutations in the world, but they did not accept it from him. He said, If the law is as I say, this carob will prove it. The carob was uprooted from its place one hundred feet. Some report four hundred feet. They said to him, One does not quote a carob as proof. He further said to them, If the law is as I say, the water pipe will prove it. The water began to flow backwards. They said to him, One may not quote a waterpipe as proof. Again, he said to them, If the law is as I say, the walls of the house of study will prove it. The walls of the house of study leaned over to fall. R. Yehoshua rebuked them, saying to them, If the disciples of the wise are striving with each other for the law, what have you to do with it?

They did not fall because of the honor of R. Yehoshua, and did not stand straight for the honor of R. Eliezer. He said to them, If the law is as I say, let it be proven from heaven. A voice went out and said, What are you next to R. Eliezer, according to whom the law is in every place? R. Yehoshua stood on his feet and said, "It is not in heaven!" What is "It is not in heaven"? Said R. Yermia: Since the Torah has already been given from Mt. Sinai, we do not pay attention to heavenly voices, for You have written already at Mt. Sinai, ''Incline after the majority." R. Natan found Eliahu [the prophet Elijah] and asked him, What was the Holy One, Blessed be He, doing at that moment? He said to him: Laughing and saying, My children have defeated Me. My children have defeated Me.
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This story has been studied from the point of view of its manifest content, that is, on the one hand, as a reflection on the nature of interpretation and the role of intention in determining (or not determining) meaning,
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and on the other, as a manifestation of rabbinic power struggles.
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The case of the purity or impurity of a certain type of earthenware stove is made a synecdoche for the question of the Oral Torah as a whole. What is the snakestove? "Said Rav Yehuda, said Shmuel, They encircled it with words like this snake." For R. Yehoshua,
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"Oral Torah" means the Torah expounded orally in the interactive process of dialectical reading for the law. Meaning is not in heaven, not in a voice behind the text, but in the house of midrash, in the voices in front of the text. The written Torah is the Torah which is written and Oral Torah is the Torah which is read.

What has not yet been shown is the structure of signification of this text itself—not what it talks about, but what it says by how it talks. R. Yehoshua suits his speech act perfectly to the word of his interpretation. "It is not in heaven" is a citation, the use of which is radically different from its meaning in its "original context."
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R. Yehoshua is arguing with God from God's own text. You gave up Your right as author and even as divine voice to interpret Your Torah, when You said, "It is not in heaven." R. Yehoshua is, then, not only describing or making a claim about interpretation, but instituting and creating

the Oral Torah. I should make it clear that I am not making the ridiculous historical claim that before R. Yehoshua there was no midrash or Oral Torah. Indeed, I am not sure that this late story reflects any "actual" historical reality at all. I wish rather to claim that in the form of narrative it
represents
the structural possibility which creates a space for Oral Torah. "It is not in heaven" is itself not in heaven. R. Yehoshua breaks it out of context and recites it in his own. In the Torah which is written, the verse seems to say only that the fulfillment of the Torah's commands is not beyond the reach of the human being:

For this commandment which I command you today is not too difficult for you or too remote.
It is not in heaven
, that one should say, Who will arise to the heaven, take it and make it heard that we might do it. And it is not over the sea, that one might say, Who will cross to the other side of the sea and take it for us, and make us hear it, that we might do it. Rather, the word [thing] is very close to you in your mouth and heart, to do it. [Deut. 30:11–14]

R. Yehoshua transforms the verse through his citation into meaning that the Torah is beyond the reach, as it were, of its divine author. The nature of R. Yehoshua's hermeneutic speech act here is vital to understanding the text. If we do not perceive what he is doing with the verse from Deuteronomy, we could misunderstand him to be making precisely the opposite claim, namely that the text is autonomous and sufficient in itself, not requiring the author to guarantee its true interpretation—a version of the New Criticism. By performing the act of tesseration of the language, however, the rabbi disables any such reading of his statement. Without fanfare, R. Yehoshua creates radical new meaning in this verse, simply by reinscribing it in a new context. "It is not in heaven" means not only that the Torah is not beyond human reach, but that it is beyond divine reach, as it were.

This brings us squarely up against the dilemma of any hermeneutic theory that does not allow appeal to author's intention as a curb on interpretation. Once that control is gone, it seems that any interpretation is the same as any other, that anything at all can be said to be the meaning of the text. Such hermeneutic anarchy is clearly
not
the way that midrash presents itself. Within our text both the dilemma and an answer to it are offered. Present within the narrative is a commentary on itself, namely the sentences: "What is 'It is not in heaven'? Said R. Yermia, Since the Torah has already been given from Mt. Sinai, we do not pay attention to heavenly voices, for You have written already at Mt. Sinai, 'Incline after the majority.' "

R. Yermia's rereading of R. Yehoshua solves the problem of what constrains interpretation. The answer is surprisingly modern: the majority of the community which holds cultural hegemony controls interpretation. To put it another

way: correctness of interpretation is a function of the ideology of the interpretive community. The question is asked: What is the meaning of "It is not in heaven"? and R. Yermia answers by supplying another subtext, namely the verse from Exod. 23:2, which says explicitly (i.e, in its own context) that the law is in accordance with the view of a human majority, and therefore a voice from heaven cannot control its interpretation, but neither does hermeneutic anarchy result. However, R. Yermia's

move only enacts once more the tesseration of context which midrash performs. The whole verse which he quotes reads, "Do not side with a majority for evil; and do not distort the evidence in a dispute by siding with a majority to side." My verbatim translation purposely emphasizes the syntactic difficulty at the end of the verse with its extra and unexplained occurrence of the verb ''to side." R. Yermia's solution (actually a common midrashic reading of this verse) is to take this as a tricolon, reading in effect: Do not side with a majority for evil; do not distort the evidence in a dispute; follow the majority. By taking the last clause out of its context, he then derives warrant for the claim that God Himself has authorized the rabbis to overturn even the simple meaning of the Torah, in order to authorize their interpretations by majority. Once again, God the Author spoke and did not (as it were) know what He was saying: My children have defeated Me; My children have defeated Me.

The irony is that the hermeneutic conservative, R. Eliezer, the one who literally has God on his side, was excommunicated and exiled for his insistence that the Author controls the reading of His text, while R. Yehoshua, the hermeneutic radical, ended up by inevitably supporting the institutional claim over meaning and reading practice:

On that day, the brought out all of the things which R. Eliezer had declared pure and burned them in the fire and anathematized him. They said, Who will go and tell him? R. Akiva said to them, I will go, for if someone who is not fit tells him, he could destroy the whole world. What did R. Akiva do? He dressed himself in black and wrapped himself in black [mourning clothes], and sat a distance of four ells from R. Eliezer. R. Eliezer said to him, Akiva, what is different about today? He said, It seems that your colleagues are estranging themselves from you. He then also rent his garment, and sat on the earth, and his eyes poured forth tears.
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Our story is the story of a community in which interpretation was the central, definitive act of religion and therefore of culture. Misinterpretation (from the perspective of that culture's practice) was perhaps analogous to the violation of ritual and taboo in other cultures and led therefore to the removal of the misinterpreter from the society. The paradox is, of course, that the misinterpreter is the one who had the author on his side, and indeed there is independent evidence which suggests that precisely what characterized R. Eliezer's

hermeneutic practice was an extreme fidelity to received tradition. A great deal must have been at stake here. It seems to me that it would not be too much overreading to claim that what was at stake was the ability of the Torah to survive by being renewed, an ability which the "logocentrism" of R. Eliezer and his school would have threatened.