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Midrash as Law and LiteratureAuthor(s): Geoffrey H. HartmanReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 338-355Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1204492.

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Midrashas Law and LiteratureGeoffreyH. Hartman / YaleUniversity

My motives in studying Midrash are not pure. I am a raider of the lostark looking for treasure. It is not for the sake of heaven I study but tobring back voices and types of interpretation of which that ark is as fullas Noah's was of beasts. In an era of restitutions, such a restocking ofidentity through a historical and compensatory search is commonenough. But in the case of Midrash-by which I always mean a methodof exegesis as well as the collections formed by it-another motive enters.I cannot forget how these writings were slandered, and how public igno-rance abetted such slander in the Nazi era. Jews were demonized at atime when Talmud and Midrash were available yet remained a closedbook even to the educated. And for centuries before that, theological anti-Semitism had misrepresented the spirit of Jewish law: non-Jews weretaught to see only a crass and stubborn literalism, a mean-spirited, mate-rialistic frame of mind, rather than what David Weiss Halivni has calledthe predilection of Midrash for justified law, which heaps interpretationupon interpretation.' That era of prejudice and ignorance should be ap-proaching its end.Yet to make sure of its demise will take a concerted effort. Those wholive within the walled garden are often so absorbed by its pleasures andduties that they do not open it to others. And those like myself who sneakthrough the wall like a thief in the night cannot emerge with more thanfragments wrongly detached from a living environment. I am not dis-couraged, however, because the need is so great-the need of those inmy generation who "have the Bible and their great poets, but no longerunderstand how to use their imaginations in reading them." These areNorthrop Frye's words forty years ago, describing how William Blake felttwo hundred years ago.

You can imagine my mixed feelings when I read in Ralph Waldo Emer-son's journal the following entry: "If Minerva offered me a gift and an

1David Weiss Halivni, Midrash,Mishnah,and Gemara:TheJewishPredilectionfor JustifiedLaw(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).@ 1994 by Geoffrey H. Hartman.338


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Midrash as Law and Literatureoption, I would say give me continuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wishto be a literary or intellectual chiffonnier. Away with this Jew's rag-bag ofends and tufts of brocade, velvet, and cloth-of-gold; let me spin someyards or miles of helpful twine, a clew to lead to one kingly truth, a chordto bind wholesome and belonging facts."2On the level of tradition I, too, want continuity, and on the level ofintellectual, especially literary analysis, that desired continuity translatesinto a search for the formal unity of the Hebrew Bible and correlativelyof midrashic method. Yet the first lesson Midrash itself teaches the ap-prentice is to be wary of overunifying its words or of unifying them ina totalizing way. It is comforting to anticipate with Emerson "a clew tolead to one kingly truth," and it is intellectually imperative to keep thatpossibility in mind. The Hebrew Bible, however, is not a classical workof art, nor is Midrash a Patrologia in which a supersessionist revelationdraws everything into that regal unity of "wholesome and belongingfacts." Emotionally and intellectually I am with Emerson, but empiricallyand spiritually I am closer to the point at which Midrash and Kafka in-tersect.

Let me return to Emerson's image of the Jew's rag-bag. It does nothave to be an insult or an indication of abject poverty. Many contempo-rary scholars accept a documentary hypothesis which views the HebrewBible as a glorious patchwork, and that the seams show through, as inmodern collages, can be an artistic, though not a theological, virtue.Since with Midrash and Talmud there is-perhaps all the more-amarked effort to preserve every significant tradition and law, howeverelliptical or unclear, many sayings or exegeses are agglutinated: havingbeen stored in a collective memory-the Oral Tradition-and waitingto get into the written text at the appropriate moment, if no such mo-ment comes along, they sneak in nevertheless. The founding rabbis, inshort, can be considered as law-rhapsodes, and the halakha as a severepoetry.3The literary study of Midrash makes us aware that what is meant bythe literary has not been clearly defined. Does it neatly preclude this me-morial and encyclopedic dimension of rabbinic literature? One reasonfor the modern interest in both Bible and Midrash is their apparent care-lessness about literary effects associated with the concept of genre andformal unity. What we call "rhetoric" and "poetics"-arts indebted toGreek and Roman thought-did not separate out as technical branches

2 See Bliss Perry, ed., TheHeartof Emerson'sournals (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 267.3 I allude, of course, to Giambattista Vico's famous description, in TheNew Science(1725-44) of the Roman Law, chanted by the decemvirs and still memorized by the schoolboyCicero.339


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The Journal of Religionof knowledge during the formative period of talmudic Judaism. It wouldbe exciting to know what the paidea of the sages involved, and while weknow something about the rabbinic academies, we do not know enough.But it seems that, despite the impact of Hellenistic learning in the areaof dream interpretation or hermeneutics,4 poetics played no role. Eventoday, the elements of Midrash are taught mainly through immersion.The best an essay can do is to smear a little honey on this or that text.My essay may not be different in this regard. But I do want to raise theissue of what happens to that cornerstone of poetics, the concept of unity,when Midrash enters the picture. Consider J. B. Soloveitchik's "TheLonely Man of Faith.""5 he essay rejects source criticism (the documen-tary hypothesis) as an attaint to the unity and integrity of the divine text.This rejection does not entail, however, a denial of contradiction in Scrip-ture. What ensues-what Soloveitchik liberates himself into-is a strongMidrash on the two stories of Adam's creation. Their incongruity is not atextual accident (as the Higher Criticism proposes) but points to a realcontradiction in the nature of man. Soloveitchik develops the two ac-counts into a picture of Adam the first and Adam the second.These two categories allow him to pursue a sensitive contrast thatbuilds into an entire moral and social philosophy. It sets against the intel-lectual and scientific dignity of man the crisis-feeling of being overpow-ered by God or the world, a feeling which radically deepens the questfor redemption. The first Adam though not alone is lonely because he iscommitted to an ideal of mastery that results in dominion over the cos-mos yet separates him from it; the second Adam is doomed to explorethat loneliness as a loss which can only be illuminated by the dimensionof faith and the convenantal idea. The muteness and indifference of analienated cosmos now sharpen Adam's consciousness of separation; foreach "I" is ontologically lonely-that is, incomplete-and so the "naturalwork community" of Adam the first cannot solace this ordained lack ofconnection. Hence a turn from cosmos to covenant. "Our sages said thatbefore Abraham appeared majestasdei was reflected only by the distantheavens and it was a mute nature which 'spoke' of the glory of God. Itwas Abraham who 'crowned' Him the God of the earth, i.e., the Godof men." 6

By a surprising return to the text Soloveitchik then suggests that Eloh-ist and Yahwist do express very different sourceexperiences.The craving ofconvenantal man for a personal and intimate relation with God cannot4 See Saul Lieberman, Hellenism nJewishPalestine(New York, 1950).5J. B. Soloveitchik, "The Lonely Man of Faith," Tradition7 (1965): 5-67.6 Ibid.

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Midrash as Law and Literaturebe realized through the cosmic "E-lohim encounter," so that the locus oftranscendental experience must shift to where "the finite 'I' meets theinfinite He 'face to face."" This more communal relation between manand God is symbolized by the Tetragrammaton in the Biblical account ofAdam the second.I do not apologize for spending time-little enough-on part of Solo-veitchik's essay. It participates in an intelligent revolt against modernity;it acknowledges yet does not accede to the claim made on us by moderncategories. Here is someone acquainted with the language of contempo-rary philosophy, who knows that Jewish thought has often flourishedwithin a foreign environment, and who will not accept the fact that phi-losophy speaks only Greek. His brilliant rejection-conversion of HigherCriticism seems to come right out of the lineaments of midrashic style. Itis true that he does not call his procedure "midrashic," yet there is noquestion that it is so. It explores an incongruity, it puts into play proof-texts and associated authorities in a potentially endless dialogue, one thatbrings the Bible closer to us even as it brings us closer to it. The essay'sfusion, moreover, of homiletic dependence on Scripture with an analysisof contemporary spiritual problems culminates in an appropriation of1 Kings 19 that makes Elisha into a typical representative of the naturalwork community, an Adam the first transformed by his sudden encounterwith Elijah into an Adam the second. Convenantal mankind replaces ma-jestic mankind.There is, however, one disconcertingly superficial aspect to this mod-ern orthodox scholar. What he says about the literary is both minimaland wrong. The Higher Criticism, he alleges, based itself on "literarycat-egories invented by modern man." Now contemporary critical theoriesdo use stylistic criteria to distinguish sources, but no literary scholarwould stop there. It is precisely the issue of the unity or coherence of artthat has exercised poetics since Aristotle. Using the example of Greektragedy, Aristotle defined a unity that was nonepisodic, that did not de-pend, like epic, exclusively on the presence of a hero but was the outcomeof an "action"involving all elements. It seems impossible to apply Aristo-tle's scheme to the Bible, which remains episodic and, though it is said tohave been given to Moses, is not unified around Moses as hero, or "onegreater man." The unity of Scripture supported explicitly and unre-servedly by Soloveitchik obviously suggests different criteria and forms ofanalysis. To discover them is also a task of contemporary literary theory.

7 Ibid.

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The Journal of ReligionRecent literary thinkers have challenged the simple location of unity in

art.8 They rejoice, like Midrash, in the "interpretive bounty" of a text;9they accept the mediacy of linguistic and interpretive structures. A full-scale rethinking of the dichotomy of creation and commentary is in pro-cess, which has already modified our picture of what constitutes unity. SoClaude Levi-Strauss engages, like Soloveitchik, disparate creation myths,from Greek literature and South American folklore, because interest hasshifted from elegant ideas of artistic coherence to the making and sus-taining of traditions. A consensus is building that cultures stabilize contra-dictions in their belief-system by the interpretive extension of founda-tional texts. On this view, commentary is not, or not only, a by-productof these texts but is itself a functional revelation. The structure of first(Scripture) and second (Midrash/Interpretation) is modified into a hendi-adys or syzygy. Dan Sperber, the French anthropologist, has said suc-cinctly: "Exegesis is not an interpretation but rather an extension of thesymbol and must itself be interpreted."10This understanding of the relation between text and commentary isimportant for Judaism, where commentary becomes the authorized formof creative thought." We have no statement more radical in this respectthan that both Oral and Written Law were given on Sinai, for this legiti-mates talmudic commentary as strictly coterminous with Scripture.Therefore the daring intimacy of Midrash with Bible. Remember Mosesin Akiba's cheder, marveling at what he hears, and just a little bemused.Instead of a magisterial theology expressed in Aristotelian treatises, our

8 Northrop Frye indicates the problem while trying to obviate it. He writes: "Unity, aprimary principle of works of art since Plato's time, also indicates the finiteness of the hu-man mind, the care that works toward transforming the 'imperfect' or continuous into the'perfect,' the form achieved once and for all. The Bible, however unified, also displays acarelessness about unity, not because it fails to achieve it, but because it has passed throughit to another perspective on the other side of it" (Northrop Frye, TheGreatCode:TheBible asLiterature New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982], p. 207).9Harold Fisch, "The Hermeneutic Quest in RobinsonCrusoe," n Midrash and Literature,ed. G. H. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 230.10See Dan Sperber, RethinkingSymbolism,rans. Alice L. Morton (New York, 1975). In hisrecent book, The VoiceofJacob (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), Leslie Bris-man demonstrates how sensitive biblical interpretation can be, which accepts the documen-tary hypothesis (its modification of the Bible's inspirational or authorial unity) yet bringsthe documents (here J and E/P) into dialogue. To do this requires (1) a definition of theliterary as "the primacy of intertextual, as opposed to sociological or political, motives forinvention" (p. xiii), and (2) a midrashic sense of how late voices have a standing, how a kindof firstness can be drawn from secondariness.

I1The best discussion of the innovative and revelatory role of commentary in Judaism isthat of Gershom Scholem. See his "Offenbarung und Tradition als religiose Kategorienim Judentum" (Revelation and tradition as religious categories in Judaism),Judaica, vol. 4(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984). The English translation appears as TheMessianicIdeainjuda-ism (New York: Schocken, 1971).

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Midrash as Law and Literaturemain inheritance is the composite, heteroglossic supplement of Midrash:a supplement that converts exegesis into law finding (halakha) or a litera-ture of justification (aggada).Of course, literary commentaries and Midrashic ones have their differ-ences. But these are not easy to define except by pseudo criteria. Thevery advance of contemporary theory toward Midrash makes Jewishscholars more zealous to avoid contamination. There is fear that the mo-tive for Midrash will be mistakenly reduced from Everything s in thetext,and whatthetextsignifies s its relevance o theactionsorthoughts f theinterpretivecommunityo Everything s text,and the text s a structureof imaginaryrelations,a tissuewithout ssue. I acknowledge the danger, but why be frightened bythose who insist on being superficial?The literary establishment has its anxieties, too. Is it not foolhardy toextend from sacred to secular texts the principle that an apparent inco-herence signals an overarching integrity? Yet every good literary inter-pretation takes precisely that risk. It comes upon an obvious or less obvi-ous difficulty: a crux, a deviation from the norm, a contradiction. On thatevidence it either impugns the authority of the work, or it values theanomaly and so augments the authority of the work.The secular critic, of course, has a choice between negative and re-demptive approaches, while the religious interpreter does not. The dar-shan cannot stay in the negative. His inventiveness is spent on ways toredeem the text's negative features (incoherence, ellipses, the disparityof historical fact and religious expectation, gaps between tenor and text).His basic choice may be characterized as follows. Does the harmony heevokes in order to repair the text point to a higher unity? Or is the truthplainer, a rectification, ven polemically directed against a mystification,nethat comes from our need to think of the sacred in sublime rather thandown-to-earth terms?In brief, though the words of the Torah can be made to fly up, moreoften Midrash infers from ellipses or condensations a very human storyand introduces dialogues that draw God deeper into the affairs of man-kind. Let me bring an example from Midrash Tanhuma, which has paral-lels in Genesis Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 60a).

Genesis 30:21-22 reads: "Afterwards she [Leah] bore him [Jacob] adaughter and named her Dinah. And God remembered Rachel andlistened to her and opened her womb." Here there are four possibleellipses: "Afterwards"could raise the question, Precisely after what? "Di-nah" is not followed by an explanation of the name, as is the norm inGenesis (the name Joseph is explained twice in lines 23-24 of the same

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The Journal of Religionchapter).12 The transition from Leah to Rachel is abrupt. And Leah aswell as Rachel could be referred to by "God ... listened to her."Here is how Tanhuma interprets the verses:AfterLeah had given birth to six sons, she sawby way of prophecythat therewouldbe twelvetribes n the futureemergingout ofJacob.Shehadalreadygivenbirthto six sonsand waspregnantwith her seventh.The two maidservants[Bil-hah and Zilpah]hadgivenbirthto two sonseach,hence a total of ten. Leaharoseandcalled out to the HolyOne,blessedbe He: "Master f the World, welvetribesin the future willarise out ofJacob;I alreadyhavesix sonsand ampregnantwithmy seventhand the maidservantshavetwo each. If my next child is a male,mysister Rachel will be even less than the maid servants "Immediately, he HolyOne, blessedbe He, listened to her prayerand transformed he fetus withinherinto a female,thus it says:"Afterwards,he bore him a daughterand named herDinah .. ." Why did she name her Dinah?Because Leah the righteous stoodbeforethe HolyOne, blessedbe He, seekingajudgment (din)and the HolyOne,blessed be He, saidto her,"Youarerahmanitkindperson,mercifulperson]andso I will be mercifulto her,hence:"Now,God rememberedRachel."'3

The interpolated story, typical of a patriarchal society, makes the ellip-ses fertile, and suggests that Leah, after giving birth to six sons and car-rying a seventh, remembers the plight of her sister and calls on God togrant Rachel the next male child. God converts the fetus in Leah's wombto a female, while mercifully (a pun intervenes here linking the word formercy with that for womb) granting Joseph to Rachel as her first maleoffspring. Whereas the Bible story mentions nothing about Leah's frameof mind and, indeed, has God abruptly "remember" Rachel after Leahhas given birth, the Midrashic writer ascribes that "remembering" first toLeah and then uses it as a charming psychological touch to explain themeaning of the name Dinah. In brief: he assumes that Leah has an openline to God and can influence Him. He also shows God making a decisionnot autocratically, or in a great consult with his angels, but after a pleafrom a mortal. Leah's rachmones eems to activate his own.Is there a literature from that time which is so down-to-earth? It may bestrange to call Midrash literature since it remains a mode of commentaryexplicitly linked to the very words of Scripture. Yet we recognize the cre-ative and parafictional result of its interpretive elaborations. Moreover, ata certain level Midrash is not satisfied with the text as it stands, and whileit refuses to produce a new or transformed writing it looks for more ofthe original in the original, for more story, more words within the

12 It is also rare, moreover, that a female child is given a formal naming phrase.13 I am grateful to Barry Holtz for drawing my attention to this passage in an interestingtalk held at a Midrash colloquium at Yale.344


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Midrash as Law and Literaturewords.'4 But this potentiality in the sacred text is rarely treated as a mys-terious void. Leah, as she stands before God, exerts a theurgic force, how-ever weak,'5 and such force, such pressure, is also what the darshan ex-erts on and through the Bible. The rabbinic interpreter is characterizedby participation xigetique.That Midrash is not satisfied with the text-in the sense that it wishesfor something more, not something different-means that its labor of thenegative can be very daring. Gaps or obscurities, everything that couldbe characterized as indeterminate, are emphasized before being resolvedby one interpretive or interpolative davarafter another. And though whatis potential is usually understood in accord with the dictum that the lan-guage of the Bible addresses the normal person's capacity for under-standing, in the tricky area of theurgic interpretation text moves close totheory in one respect: it must be "falsifiable"(in the Popperian sense ofthat word).Let me clarify this scandalous idea. The midrashic skill, for instance,that divides up words or verses, together with an ingenious repunctua-tion (revoweling) of phrases, is a combinatory art that questions the can-onized letters before us. While these letters have a received meaning onthe grammatical evel of word and sentence, they are taken to be, at thesame time, anagrammatic, n the sense of constituting the elements of adivine name coterminous with the Torah and guaranteeing every mark init. This perspective is made explicit by the Kabbalah. "The whole Torah isthe Name of the Holy One," we read in the Zohar (Yithro 87a); the lettersof the Torah, the Ramban comments, were written continuously, withoutbreak of words, which makes it possible to separate them into DivineNames when read by that "path" (Nachmanides, Commentary on theTorah, Introduction to the Book of Genesis). Scholem remarks that thesenames of God constitute a language without a grammar.16The established link between signifier and signified can therefore beheuristically modified by viewing the signifier anagrammatically as a com-

14 God Himself, in Menahot 29b, the famous story about Moses already cited above, isshown ornamenting the letters of Scripture (making crowns or wreaths for them). Scholemin "Revelation and Tradition" interprets Moses's query to God, "Who is restraining you?"to mean, "Why are you not satisfied with the letters as you have constituted them, so thatyou add to them crowns, that is, the hooks which are found on certain letters in the Torahscrolls?"15 If "theurgic" is objected to, a different word should be found; I am not interested herein the differentiation of theurgy and magic or whether "theurgy" comes in only with aNeoplatonic influence.16 Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition." Scholem's further remark, that Revelation is es-sentially that of the name or names of God (linked to the signatures or rishumim ound increated things), suggests how intrinsic the mystical mode of commentary is that reachedexoteric status with the Kabbalah.

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The Journal of Religionbination of letters that yield, by permutation if necessary, another signi-fier. So "Israel" Y = yod, S, R, 'L) is reinscribed as "Y-SAR-EL"o revealthe mystical number 10 (Y = 10) which in the series of Sephirot or sepa-rate intelligences is the last emanation (Prince of the Presence, or SAR-EL).'7 The extreme of this combinatory art is found in Abulafia and theprophetic Kabbalah, but normative Midrash never loses sight of that po-tential.'8Isaac Heinemann, it is well known, sees Midrash as "creative philol-ogy." The difference, even known to Milton, between kri (the voiced text)and ktiv (the written, consonantal text) permits pun and paranomasia,such as substituting "builders" (bonecha)where the received text has"sons" (banecha),and far more startling shifts. Such revoweling containsan entire allegory, extracted by readers alert to the inner flow, the lava asit were, of the Sinaitic text. Even consonants can be changed, or trans-posed, at the level of kri. So in Jacob's struggle with the angel, wayyasar,he "fought" (and prevailed), is repunctuated and read as wayyashar, e"sang"(and prevailed)-suggesting a significant fusion of the roles of pa-triarch and angel.There is usually, of course, a homiletic or moralistic aspect to this playwith words. Indeed, the segmentation of the Bible for the sake of com-mentary may have produced fragments memorable enough to circulateas proverbs or to pass more fully into the common language as well asthe common understanding.'9"The creation, by an art of division andcombination, of quotable fragments ("citemes," as Arnold Goldberg callsthem)20allows their recitation in the most varied circumstances: releasedfrom their immediate context, the interpreter or preacher can find new

17 The fullest account of such practice in the Kabbalah may be found in Moshe Idel'sKabbalah:New PerspectivesNew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). For gematria nMidrash, see, e.g., Rabbi H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds., MidrashRabbah:Numbers(London: Socino, 1939), 2:734-39, especially on the yod. For information on Abulafia andon the Kabbalah I am indebted to conversations with Moshe Idel as well as to GershomScholem's chapter in his Major Trends n Jewish Mysticism, 3d revised ed. (New York:Schocken, 1939). Scholem first pointed out the crucial importance to the Kabbalah of mitz-vot and halakha as more than "allegories," indeed, as often resembling mystery rites ofcosmic importance. Idel, in his revision and extension of Scholem, distinguishes betweenecstatic Kabbalah (ascendental and unitive) and theurgical Kabbalah (descendental, work-ing more through the mitzvot to harness divine powers).18The hermeneutic devices of Midrash, as they border on permutation, are described bySaul Lieberman in his chapter "Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture," in Hellenism nJewishPalestine(n. 4 above).~9 owe this observation to Moshe Greenberg. Compare Kenneth Burke on proverbs, ThePhilosophyof LiteraryForm, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 2,294 ff.: "Could the most complex and sophisticated works of art legitimately be consideredsomewhat as 'proverbs writ large'?"20 Arnold Goldberg, "Der verschriftete Sprechakt als rabbinische Literatur,"in SchriftundGeddchtnis, d. A. Assman, J. Assman, and Chr. Hardmeir (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983).

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Midrash as Law and Literatureframe narratives for them in any Bible episode or invent conversationsbetween Israel and God. This has the effect of renewing Scripture wordsin startling ways. They come at us now from another context as if it weretheir original site or as if a later text (their source) had lodged in anearlier one, emanating from it as Midrash itself does at a still later point.Consider how, in the Mekhilta de' R. Ishmael, the verse from Song ofSongs, "O my dove that art in the clefts of the rock, let me hear thy voice,"is applied to Israel caught between Pharaoh and the Deep Red Sea."What were the Israelites at that moment like? Like a dove fleeing froma hawk, and about to enter a cleft in the rock where there is a hissingserpent. If she enters, there is the serpent If she stays out, there is thehawk In such a plight were the Israelites at that moment, the sea forminga bar and the enemy pursuing. Immediately they set their mind uponprayer. Of them it is stated in the sacred writings [Kabbalah]: O my dovethat art in the clefts of the rock," and so on.21

Through this re-citing (resiting) of citations we seem to hear somethingspeaking from the "cleft"of the Torah's words. In this uncanny sense also"there is no earlier or later."Contextual unities of time, place, narrative,or grammatical meaning are overruled by a dynamic that points to anintertextual coherence. When the midrashic author associates a passagefrom the Writings (ketuvimor kabbalah)with a passage from the Penta-teuch, this synoptic method works because the special authority of thePentateuch actually promotes a sense that the earlier contains the later-a sense that extends itself (for this reader at least) to Midrash, as if mikrah(the canon) were always already Midrash or as if, were we to lose mikrah,it could be largely reconstructed through the "distributivejustice" of in-terpreters whose prooftexting skills have opened the canon to a text-faithful imagination.

Let me return to the relation between the Bible as, on the one hand, alanguage of names and, on the other, a language of common wordsadapted to human capacities. The interpreter's emphasis on names isbased, formally, on etymological traditions that explain place names likePenuel or personal names like Israel and Joseph. The name is convertedinto a paraphrase and comes with a story. It functions like a hook for

21 Jacob Z. Lauterbach, ed., Mekiltade-Rabbi shmael(Philadelphia, 1942), 1:211. My atten-tion was drawn to this passage by Daniel Boyarin's suggestive essay on intertextuality, alle-gory, and the meaning of Midrash by way of "handles" provided by the Song of Songs. Seehis "Re-citing Scripture," Orim:AJewishJournal at Yale,vol. 3, no. 2 (1988); cf. his Intertextu-ality and theReading of Midrash(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), chap. 7.Does this Midrash recall a speculation that the Song of Songs was revealed to Israel at theRed Sea?347


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The Journal of Religionmemory, whether or not that was the formal intention. What is importantfrom a hermeneutic perspective is that the name-paraphrase-story pat-tern can suggest a transformation from story and paraphrase back toname, from signified back to a material yet numinous signifier. In thatway the common words, under hermeneutic pressure, may disclose anuncommon language, the presence of sacred name or alphabet. Andwhen that occurs, exegesis moves closer to prayer and becomes participa-tionexegetique.Midrash, in brief, can motivate and potentiate words as if they werenames. By "motivate" I mean that an opaque piece of language, like theproper name "Dinah" in the passage from Tanhuma, is explained by anetymological byword or narrative, and by "potentiate" I mean that thismotivation sensitizes the reader to a numinous element in all Scripturewords, as if they originated in theophoric voicings. What is evoked is areversibility that recovers the divine names within Scripture's accommo-dated language.Consider once more the passage from Tanhuma. It comments on theBible via a mishnaic rule about a certain kind of prayer. The Mishnahdiscourages the wish for a male child-so strong in patrilinear societies-once conception has occurred. A prayer expressing that wish is consid-ered tefilatshav: pointless or worthless. Yet both in the Talmud and inTanhuma the mishnaic stricture is not accepted without qualification.The Gemora asks, "Is there no room for mercy [rahmani]?"hat is, SurelyGod's decision is modifiable? The question seems humorous to the con-temporary mind, and a pun linking "mercy"and "womb"may be active.Yet the theological coherence of the mishnaic ruling has been challenged,and the Talmud meets the challenge.22Rabbi Yosef, for instance, supports the worth of the disputed prayer,arguing that it was after (v'ahar)Leah's appeal to God, not immediatelyafter her son Zevulun's birth, that God "remembered" Rachel. This argu-ment for the worth of the prayer is rejected, however, on the ground that'enmaskirinma'asehnisim,the precedent of miracles is not accepted for themaking of halakha. But the Talmud does proceed to discuss in detail whatprayers arepermitted and when: in the first three days one may wish thatconception take place, from the third to the fortieth day that the child bea male, and so forth. (Rabbi Yosi goes even further in the Tanhuma, in-sisting that such prayers are not worthless until the moment the womanis actually on the birthing stool.) After rejecting, that is, an imputed mira-cle as the basis of law, the rabbis revise an apodictic Mishnah in the light

22 See the Babylonian Talmud, Mishnah 3, and Tractate Berachot 60a.

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Midrash as Law and Literatureof their own human and empirical knowledge. A timetable is suggestedas in the recent abortion debate.23

Seen in context, then, Tanhuma's Midrash still develops in the shadowof a legal restraint that reaches deeply into personal, albeit socially condi-tioned, attitudes. Whether that conception of law appeals or appalls isnot at issue here. Nor whether it leads to a mingling of sublime and triv-ial.24 The field of halakha is obviously very broad, and the field of so-called aggadic or nonauthoritative Midrash equally so. Like secular typesof imaginative prose, aggadic midrash is overdetermined. Its relation toMishnah, folklore, and the Bible itself exceeds a unity imposed by talmu-dic law finding. We can rarely claim that a passage from aggada has beenintroduced for only one reason.What I want to emphasize, however, is the wordplay that animates mid-rashic discussion. Such wordplay enters not as a disposable device butas a crucial aspect of the traditionary materials. The continuity of theTanhuma Midrash with its talmudic and halakhic counterpart revolvesless on a dissident opinion than on the retelling of a heartwarming storyand the reinforcement of linguistic devices that allow the story in. Whatis said about Leah is grounded verbally in the Bible: close reading, similarto that of modern language-obsessed exegetes, discovers a textual opacityand correlates it with a hidden-though not esoteric-meaning. Whatthe darshan does with the language of Scripture (with 'ahar/'aheret,Dinahand rahmah)provides a glimpse into a level of action that is more personaland comforting, more "anthropopathic" than what transpires at the ex-plicit narrative level. The midrashic habit of segmentation, moreover,works here so brilliantly that it seems to be a technique inspired directlyby the text rather than ingeniously imposed on it. We are encouraged toread wajishma eleyha "and He listened to her") as if the verse had Leahand not Rachel as the object of the verb, a reading motivated by hearingin 'eleyhathe name "Leah." The process that enriches meaning (thesignifier-signified axis) also enriches the word as a phonemic rather thansemantic entity (the signifier-signifier axis), for since there is no obvious

23 Yet what is science here, and what theology, is hard to say: for Thomas Aquinas, too, amale child becomes a soul by the fortieth day. (For a girl it takes longer )24 The tendency to interpret down as well as up, and perhaps the redactors' unwillingnessto let go of any interpretation that illustrates human behavior, can lead Midrash aggadato include silly or dubiously humorous exegeses. For example, see the following, in theBuber edition of the Tanhuma: "(Genesis 30:23) Thenshesaid: Godhas takenaway myshame.What is the meaning of Has takenaway?Simply that before a wife gives birth there is shamefound within her house. How? When she breaks a vessel in her house, whom does she haveto blame? When she gives birth, she blames her child. She therefore said: Godhastakenawaymy shame"(Salomon Buber, ed., Midrash Tanhuma[Vilnius: Wittwe & Gebriider Romm,1885]).

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The Journal of Religionagrammaticality the verbal thickness is rather an anagrammatic discoveryof the interpreter. Sensitized by this kind of reading, every word in Scrip-ture could become a name or a crux open to elaboration.Thus Tanhuma's commentary centers on an adverb ('ahar); a noun(rahmah)not in the Bible episode but introduced through talmudic dis-cussion; also perhaps the root zakhor,male, with its link to jizkhor (Heremembered, i.e., "maled" Rachel); the name "Dinah" construed as averb ("she strove") and the name "Leah" heard in an inflected pronoun('eleyha).No one can read such interplay of Bible, Talmud, and Midrashwithout slowing up at every word and marveling how this augmenting ofLeah's name contributes to God's name, which the Bible writes out, as itwere, in every particle of its language.There is, then, a double movement, which maintains at one and thesame time the familiar, grammatical sense of the Bible words and suggeststhat any or all of them are open to an anagrammatic, divinatory read-ing.25The secular reader also knows about this doubleness, for it is differ-ent only in degree and not in kind from his own interpretive ventures.Ferdinand de Saussure's experiment with "hypograms" and such coin-ages as Walter Benjamin's "Agesilaus Santander"-perhaps inspired byJewish name mysticism via Gershom Scholem-are dramatic instancesthat point in the same direction. Midrash invalidates the distinction be-tween the muses as Daughters of Memory-here textual memory-andDaughters of Inspiration.Can I gather what I have said into a single hypothesis? The attempt toput imagination in the service of memory reverses an emphasis in Helle-nistic culture, if we recall the opening invocation of the Iliad and charac-terize fiction as putting memory in the service of imagination. More tech-nically stated: the art of memory that Midrash may reflect depends ontextual instances (topoi or citemes) rather than images (imagines) orplaces (loci). This is no more than a guess on my part; yet the mnemo-technics operative here do not seem to rely on "visual impressions of al-

25 Another way of putting this is that in Midrash (but not, perhaps, in the extreme permu-tations of prophetic Kabbalah) the idea of a divine (pure, absolute) language did not leadto a rejection of the accommodated or current language. A strictly analogous problem incontemporary thought is the relation of scientific language (in its as yet unrealized perfec-tion) and ordinary discourse. The perfect language or metalanguage of science, writesHenri Lefebvre, "would be a 'pure' construction, closer to an elaboration in logic pushed toits final term than the natural and spontaneous 'expression' of feelings, emotions, passions,images. It could turn out ... that this perfectly rational language is characterized by thedisplacement or elimination of stops, blanks, cuts, pauses, which abound in our spoken orwritten language. The latter segments and punctuates our 'expressiveness' in language; itintroduces articulations but also haltings, uncertainties, choices that are doubtless arbitrary(between words, turns of phrases, ways to compose a discourse). ... A mathematical dem-onstration is obviously not spaced and articulated like a discourse. Its continuity followsthrough without gaps." See his Le langageet la societi (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), chap. 1.350


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Midrash as Law and Literaturemost incredible intensity."26 The visuality directs itself to, and perhapsbreaks itself on, scriptural words and letters, even their shape. I describea tendency, of course, not something invariable. What is important hereis that imagination, whether it sponsors or represses images, is disciplinedby and yoked to the sacred in theform of a text,at least during the talmudicera. So the sharpness and imaginative acuity shown by Midrash, its fertil-ity and wit, remain commentary; they find their way back to the words ofthe Bible, and however many meanings are discovered, these never re-place Scripture. While some interpreters play with fire, they continue torecognize the Torah as God's Promethean gift to man. Moreover, thoughpassages may be defamiliarized (which can actually aid memorization),by being taken out of their immediate context and paired intertextuallythrough the devices of gematriaor pun and paranomasia, the "infinity"ofinterpretation suggested does not-in rabbinic Midrash-favor mysticalover everyday kinds of meaning. (The balance shifts with Kabbalah, butthat is another story.) Like a good psychoanalyst, the redactor allows hisattention to float or distribute equally: the impression, in fact, is that sto-ries and similes from daily life predominate. As in Soloveitchik's readingof the two accounts of creation, Midrash speaks with Bible or God inintelligible, even intimate terms and, so, produces either a halakha or anaggadic flourish that puts the strangest experience within reach.

From a simple starting point, the literary study of Midrash, we havearrived at a complex result. Let me summarize and conclude. Literarystudy that has Midrash as its subject faces a number of difficulties. Thefirst of these is that contemporary thought is moving away from the liter-ary-from essentialist definitions that are said to be ideologically moti-vated and favor a fixed, eurocentric canon. The very existence, at thesame time, of a writing like Midrash, that cannot be said to have a literarypurpose yet is intensely textual and intertextual, helps to expand thecontested notion of the literary. What interests literary scholars in Mid-rash is, therefore, that it cannot be constituted as literature, that it chal-lenges narrow aesthetic or genre-conscious theories.27

26 See Frances A. Yates on "The ClassicalArt of Memory," in her TheArtof Memory Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 19. David Stern suggests, however, that some elements inthe important type of parable called the king-mashal"represent the literary equivalent inRabbinicJudaism to the pictorial art of early Christianity."See his Parablesn Midrash:Narra-tive and Exegesis n RabbinicLiterature(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991),pp. 94-97.

27 This does not mean, of course, that important types of discourse like the peticha(proem)should not be isolated and defined; "literary" indicates a development of form-criticismliberated from source-criticism, though not from a speculation about the genesis of struc-tures that could provide insights into their historicity.351


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The Journal of Religion(Another way of stating the originality of Midrash is to point out its

exceptional position as a form of commentary with strong residues of oraltransmission which elude a concept of the literary based on manuscriptand especially print culture. Midrash, even in the age of manuscript cul-ture, is allowed a freedom characteristic of oral tradition, which does notcongeal the transmitted communication but leaves room for diversity ofperformance. In Midrash, as in oral forms, "the integrity of the past [is]subordinate to the integrity of the present."28With one, essential excep-tion: the integrity of the letter of Scripture must be preserved. The textcommented on is accorded sacred status and, though itself reflecting ear-lier forms of oral transmission, is not allowed further change. Thus Mid-rash, which tends toward a retelling of the Bible that might eventuallyhave replaced it, becomes instead a spiritual means to preserve a letter-perfect Hebrew Scripture.)A further difficulty springs from pious fears about secular misuse. Yetthe scholarly study of Midrash was among the first fruits of thenineteenth-century "Wissenschaft des Judentums." Zunz's book on therabbinic homilies remains a classic.29What is strange and exciting is thatin our time a form of close reading has developed which displays somefeatures of Midrash. So far, however, the similarities between rabbinicMidrash and this new Midrash, inquisitive, open, highly text-dependent,have elicited more antagonism than sympathy.30 There is already an at-tempt to disqualify the secular mode by imputing to it mystification orprivatism: ingenious academics and punsters should not be compared,we are told, with rabbis whose utterances are historically situated andmake a truth claim.31These turf-protecting charges assume that the historical situation of

28 Walter Ong, Oralityand Literature:The Technologizing f the Word(London: Routledge,1982), p. 48.29 Leopold Zunz, Gottesdienstliche ortrage erJuden (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann,1892).30 Exceptions are Susan Handelman's TheSlayersof Moses: TheEmergenceof Rabbinic nter-pretation n ModernLiteraryTheory(Albany, N.Y., 1982); and Boyarin's Intertextualitynd theReadingof Midrash.31 Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, in an important article, "Who's Kidding Whom? A SeriousReading of Rabbinic Word Plays,"Journal of theAmericanAcademy f Religion, vol. 55 (1988),reads rabbinic paranomasia from the perspective of "linguistic assumptions (that) wouldhave made a dichotomy between activities called philology and word-plays inconceivable.

Any linguistic transformation that we might designate as a pun or word-play would consti-tute, from the rabbis' linguistic understanding, a reasonable interpretation of a word." Itis "reasonable" because they believed in the pre-existence of Hebrew and Torah and theinterdependence of both. This belief produced what he usefully calls a "molecular" analysisof biblical Hebrew in terms of consonantal recombination and revoweling: "There is aseemingly unproblematic level that tells a story. But the words that comprise this narrativeare linked in various ways to one another and thus force the reader onto the level of com-mentary." I can follow Eilberg-Schwartz so far. But the rabbinical assumptions he offers as352


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Midrash as Law and Literaturethose who are evolving the new Midrash is not worth examining. Yetwhy do paramidrashic readers come on the scene? And why, long beforeDerrida, is there a revival of interest in Patristic typological commentaryas a complex literary form and, beyond that, in a critique of any methodof reading that insists on "unity" as the literary work's highest value de-spite ambiguity, polysemy, and complexity of reference?If we are troubled today by unifying modes of commentary, it is be-cause, in the past, they have been triumphalist. Midrash, however, is sub-tle in this regard. It encourages the intellect to find room in the strictestlaws or else to support by proof-texts the most imaginative turn on Scrip-ture. It is as if the original text had become unreadable except throughan extreme fragmentation that paradoxically confirms its unity. The frag-mentation deconstellates phrases and words, producing what MauriceBlanchot has called an "'crituredu disastre"yet installing all the morefirmly the law of citation. "If citation," Blanchot writes, "in its fragment-ing force, destroys in advance the text from which it is not only torn butwhich it exalts to the point of being nothing but this having-been-torn-away, then the fragment without text or context is radically uncitable."32It is crucial to separate the concept of unity from that of triumphalismby a hermeneutics of the faithful fragment, and the disaster of the hurbanmay have contributed to just this separation in Jewish commentary. Themultivocal or aspectival qualities of Midrash do not seem to be the resultonly of historical distance-of our ignorance of the mode, its forms orgenres. Goldberg can talk of the "aporia" of midrashic texts and theirspecial linguistic and literary characteristics.33How to interpret that "apo-ria" without oversimplifying it by referential history or a purely contem-porary appropriation, is the critical task.

superintending he interpretive process do not determine t. His anxiety about the notion ofplay leads him into a restrictive intentionalism that deprives the interpreter of a freedomwithin those assumptions (not just against them), a freedom without which the entire rab-binic enterprise of interpretation would lose much of its interest and integrity-for if thedivine words were totally presignificant, they could not be used to argue with or even "de-feat" God in the drama that plays itself out between God and man but also between conflict-ing interests in the community (e.g., the Schools of Hillel and Shammai), each of whichclaims authority.32 Maurice Blanchot, TheWritingof theDisaster trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1986).33 Goldberg (n. 23 above), p. 139. In his careful "Introduction: Law as Literature," toSemeia,vol. 27 (1983), William Scott Green points out that halakha too should be studied asa cultural construction, as texts that are "sources" rather than simply data. He emphasizesthe "literary strategy of juxtaposing opposites without resolution" in halakhic law finding,which makes it difficult to treat it as mimetic, as an unmediated form of actual rabbinicpractice. "Indeed, the structure and form of rabbinic writings suggest that our first readingof these documents must see them not as records of collective behavior or institutional

legislation, but as works of intellect and imagination."353


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The Journal of ReligionYet we need not give up all speculation about the mimetic character ofmidrashic style, as long as it is taken to be heuristic rather than dogmatic.The impact of the hurbanhas to be considered, but also the shift in con-temporary intellectual life from identity-philosophies to theories of dif-ference based on an appreciation of the intertextual character of writing,and the light this throws on psyche and structure of belief. If quality ofbelief matters in midrashic texts as well as belief itself, if interpreters testthemselves and their listeners over and again, this would recall a modernrevolt against the automatism of creeds. "No forcing of image, plan orthought," writes A. R. Ammons, admiring how nature undoes art. At thesame time he senses, as we do in Midrash, a darker side to this apparent

freedom:... all possibilitiesof escapeopen: no routeshut,except inthe sudden loss of all routes ... 4

It is true that there is also a deeply unmodern aspect to Midrash. Forthe self-consciousness we characterize as "modern" often seeks to es-trange itself through the deceptive "anti-self-consciousness" of fiction. Ev-ery trace of secondariness is then displaced or denied. "Toforget the textwhich has engendered the text. We write starting from that forgetful-ness." 35There is no such forgetting in either the old or the new Midrash,which are citational to an extreme degree. They reject amnesia andcryptomnesia. Even when, as in Jabbs, the absolute authority of Scriptureis lost, words of the other are recalled, or simulacra that continue tohaunt us.

Once the religious thinker understands that the literary study of Mid-rash does not turn everything into aggada and then into a web oflanguage-inspired forms (that linguistic aspect is fascinating, of course,and poses an obvious challenge),36 then it is possible for Midrash to bestudied comparatively, as an exceptional form of commentary. It is excep-tional because of its close yet supple relation to a canonical text, becauseof the way exegesis turns into exegesis plus, or "literature"-in short,because of matricial qualities that allow us to see the creative yet text-

34 A. R. Ammons, CorsonsInlet:A Bookof Poems(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1965).35 "Oublier le texte qui a enfante le text. Nous ecrivons a partir de cet oubli" (E. Jabes,Le livre du dialogue[Paris, 1963]).36 If the anagrammatical reading of Scripture points to a "revelation" of the divine namesor to a mystical alphabet, a logosthat created the world and still has creative (or destructive)force, then there is a strange convergence with a radical kind of deconstruction that seesliterature as "revealing" nothing more and nothing less than the remarkableness of thealphabet we already have, and by whose combinations everything that we do or think is ar-ticulated.

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Midrash as Law and Literaturepermeated mind at work. The dichotomy between (primary) text and(secondary) interpretation is alleviated: exegesis augments instead of dis-placing the received symbols and words. There is a fictional momentum,but it does not become freestanding even in the mashalor Midrashic para-ble, a form that goes farther in devious naivet6 than the Homeric simile.Just as the mashalcan be accused of stylistic insubordination, so Midrashis an insubordinate type of exegesis,37 a wonderfully inventive yoking ofone text to another by a virtuosity that saves the whole-in Soloveitchik'swords, the "unity and integrity" of Scripture.As for the future, and the field that may eventually be created by theawareness that Midrash and literary study take of each other, I can sayonly one thing with confidence. A knowledge of Midrash will prove moreinteresting for the literary critic than a knowledge of literary criticism forthe scholar of Jewish texts. Ask not what deconstruction may do for Mid-rash; ask what Midrash may do for deconstruction.

37 David Stern's Parablesn Midrash:NarrativeandExegesisn RabbinicLiterature(Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), in a section called "Theorizing Midrash" (pp. 63-67), shows finely how "in midrash, exegesis may be the mashal's occasion, but its exegeticaloccasion does not exhaust the mashal's meaning, which goes far beyond both exegesis andnarrative alone, lying instead in their intersection."

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