Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com
Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1
Descripción
[https://i0.wp.com/www.nehemiaswall.com/wp-content/uploads/HV-248-1920x1080-1.png?resize=584%2C329&ssl=1]https://www.nehemiaswall.com/midrash-for-the-modern-day-1 In this episode of Hebrew Voices #248 - Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/midrash-for-the-modern-day-1], Nehemia brings on Dr. Stephen Arnoff to talk about the art of midrashic interpretation, how the “secret sauce” works, and why it exists in the first place. I look forward to reading your comments! PODCAST VERSION: Download Audio [https://audio.nehemiaswall.com/Downloads/Hebrew-Voices-Midrash-for-the-Modern-Day-Part-1.mp3] Transcript Hebrew Voices #248 – Midrash for the Modern Day: Part 1 You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com [https://www.nehemiaswall.com]. Stephen: That is a massive intellectual theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system. It’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time where midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine. — Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff. He is the CEO of the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem, Israel, which is an educational, spiritual, and cultural center in the heart of Jerusalem. He wrote his PhD dissertation on a topic that we’re going to get into today. It’s called Memory, Rhetoric, and Oral Performance in Leviticus Rabbah, which is an ancient midrash, and he’ll explain what midrash is. He’s got a sub-stack. He’s got a website, which, we’ll link to this on Nehemiahswall.com, but it’s stephendanielarnoff.com. And you can also find out about him at thefuchsbergcenter.org. Shalom, Dr. Aronoff. Shalom, Stephen. Stephen: Shalom, shalom, Nehemia. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me here. Nehemia: Yeah, I’m excited. So, we were speaking last week and trying to decide what we’re going to talk about, and you mentioned that you did your dissertation on midrash. I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. I love texts. And the midrash, number one, it’s a text, but it’s also a response to a text or texts.” So, what is midrash? Let’s start with that. And then ultimately, we want to ask the question; what is the relevance and application today for people, with midrash? Stephen: Amazing. Well, I should say that you’re in rare company actually asking me about midrash. That question is not asked enough. I think midrash is the special sauce that runs all the way through monotheism as we know it. Really do. Nehemia: Wow, that’s a heavy lift… a big statement. So, you have to explain that. Stephen: I’m confident in the statement. And I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so it’s a metaphor that I would stand by, “the special sauce.” The concept of midrash is essentially a kind of scriptural technology. It is the art of interpreting sacred text. It’s the art of interpreting sacred text. Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: So, even in the Hebrew Bible itself there is midrash. Deuteronomy is a midrash on the four books that precede it because it is a retelling, a second telling of a sacred text. In the same way that Chronicles, in certain ways, is a midrash, a retelling, of the narratives that preceded it. There is within the Hebrew Scriptures an inclination to reimagine or to interpret events, figures, concepts, that have occurred previously. The midrash, as it develops out of the world of the Hebrew Bible, is a late Second Temple phenomenon, which we see in a variety of forms of literature and structure. It actually probably emanates in some ways from the world of scribes, who are in the realm of manuscripts, both oral traditions and written traditions, and passing them down from generation to generation. And at a certain point, there’s a coalescence of a kind of set of rules about how one does interpretation. Some of those rules come from the world of Greco-Roman literature, where the understandings of what particular materials mean are interpreted by scholars, sages, poets, who are trying to parse the meaning of a received text. And some of these technologies, or these techniques, that become midrash are unique, or at least unique in the way they’re used in Rabbinic tradition, moving into late antiquity. In a sentence, midrash is the art of imagination which interprets received texts and ideas. You can say that there is a midrash, so I am doing an interpretation. It is a midrash. It is a singular moment or structure, engagement of text with interpretation. But we can also say Midrash, meaning the whole body of materials that do that. There’s a library of Midrash, and there’s also a singular midrash. And we can talk about all the different pieces of the puzzle and the comment that I began with about the secret sauce of monotheism. But that’s an introduction. Nehemia: Okay. So, help my audience who may have no background in this, some of them. Stephen: Sure. Nehemia: What does the word midrash mean? Let’s just start with the most basic thing. Stephen: Midrash comes from a Hebrew word in the Scriptures which seems to be something like asking a question, akin to asking a question of an oracle. The idea that one would take that three Hebrew letter form, Dalet-Reish-Shin, which in a verb is lidrosh, or, to ask. The framing is, is asking for understanding, for meaning, or asking a question that comes from some other place, where the answer is going to come from some other place. And as the way that languages sort of evolve over time, that understanding that midrash is asking some unique entity for an answer to the question becomes, not asking an oracle, not asking a prophet, but asking the text what it means. Asking, demanding, from the text what its intention is. Nehemia: Okay. Is that the question, what its intention is? Okay, now you just said a very important statement, which… Okay. So, I’ve explained to the audience many times that semitic languages, including Hebrew, are built on these three-letter roots, and here the three-letter root is Dalet-Reish-Shin, which means to seek. And I just pulled up here in my bible software… and so, we have Genesis 25:22 is, Rebecca goes “lidrosh et Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.” She’s going to seek God, because there’s these two children in her womb, and she’s like, “What’s going on here?” Stephen: Right. So, you can hear in that… I’m not implying that the systems are parallel… the system’s going to Delphi and going to Yud-kay-Vav-kay, right, to go to the Lord, to go to the divine, but the idea is that one needs to go to a force outside of oneself to ask a question that’s a faithful question. Nehemia: Well, but then here it’s maybe used in a more, I would even call, like, a secular daily sense. Maybe secular is definitely not the word here, but where God says that, if somebody commits murder, He says, “And their blood I will seek.” Right? So, in other words, if you murder a person, then God’s going to seek the blood of that person from the person who committed the crime. Stephen: Right. But it’s a unique valence, right, it’s a unique usage. Because there are lots of other verbs that could be used to find out something, to understand something. And it’s a very rarely used verb. So, in this sense, it shows that it is at a level of… almost like a level of unstoppable mystery or something that is a reversal. Rather than you going to the oracle to get something that you don’t understand, the oracle itself is going to come to you. There is no way you will not be found out. Right? An immovable force is coming to… Nehemia: So, here I have an example. Again, I’m just pulling up examples here. It’s talking here about a certain thing in Deuteronomy 13, and it says… let me just pull up the JPS translation here. “You shall investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly. If it is true, the fact is established that an abhorrent thing was perpetrated in your midst,” et cetera. And the word investigate here is, ve’darashta, you will darash. So, in other words, it means to seek and investigate. It can mean to seek, like for example, in Deuteronomy 18 famously, it’s “doresh el ha’metim”, where you’re seeking the dead. Which may be some kind of a prayer, or like you said, maybe it’s an oracle, where you’re expecting to actually hear an answer from… one version is there’s a skull, then the diviners would talk to the skull. I don’t think it originally necessarily meant that. But the point is, doresh is to seek, and you’re saying it could be to seek some sort of a, well, you said oracle, so we’ll stick with that terminology. Okay, but it doesn’t mean that in the Jewish context of… and it has different meanings. This is where people get confused, right? They’ll say, “Oh, there’s a beit midrash, and the beit midrash,” which you guys have at the Fuchs Center in Jerusalem… so, a beit midrash is where you study, and it’s a very broad thing of what you study. Right? Am I right? Meaning, you could be studying Talmud, you could be studying Tanakh, you could be studying different things. You could be studying ethical musar, or ethical studies. So, there’s midrash in that sense, and then there’s midrash like Leviticus Rabbah, what you wrote your dissertation on, which is a collection of midrashim, and that’s called midrash. And then you have the action of midrash. So, talk to me about the action of midrash in Second Temple times. What is that? Stephen: True. We’ll talk about the action of midrash, but I think the framing is important. The concept here is that any act relating to midrash is a religious or spiritual act. That this is not a classroom; a beit midrash is not a classroom. Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: You can study midrashim in a classroom, but it’s not a beit midrash. A beit midrash is intentional. The intent is that there is something which is divining. It is about an element of holiness in the act of engaging with the sacred text. It is, in some way… and when we think about this as sort of midrash emerging, and when it emerges, the beit midrash is, in some ways, the replacement of the Beit ha’Mikdash, which is the Temple. The house of study is emergent after the Second Temple is destroyed, and the beit knesset, which is the synagogue, the place of gathering, is also emergent after the destruction of the Second Temple. There were betei midrash, there were houses of study, in some form, while there was a Second Temple. And there were synagogues in some form during the period of the Second Temple. But as a cultural phenomenon, this idea that the study of sacred text is a holy act which carries with it an element of relationship between human and divine through text, is something that carries through all the way to today. And it’s carried through, in some ways, somewhat democratically, in the sense that, in ancient times, in Temple times, who had access to holiness? Holiness was centered in the Temple and there was a cast of characters and a cast of officiants who were responsible. And people used them as a vessel to engage with the holy. In the world of the beit midrash, if you are committed to learning in an environment where, you know, whomever wishes to learn can learn, you are entering into an engagement with holiness, with religious activity, which is akin to engaging with the divine through the study of text. So, the framing for that as a religious act is really important. And then the specific question of how that works in practice, which you asked, is essentially, as a person who is engaged in midrash, who is using midrash with a sacred text, I am asking what the text means in many, many different ways. Let’s imagine, for example, that there’s a character, and it’s not clear who is speaking in a particular passage. Or if there’s a character that is not named as a character, or if there’s a possibility that a verb could mean more than one thing in a passage. Or a question as to why a passage appears when it does, or if there is a misunderstanding about whether the scribal transmission of that particular passage, if there may be some questions around transmission. All of these are what could be called an irritant, a textual irritant, that’s calling out for interpretation. And it literally says, darsheni. Darsheni, which means interpret me, interpret me. Nehemia: Or perhaps literally, drash me, investigate me. Stephen: Drash me out. Nehemia: So, you said a lot of things there, and I think I want to start with, there’s a linguistic concept called false friends. False friends is where you have the same word in two different languages, and they actually come from the same root, like I say, a common root, but they mean different things. So, my favorite example is in Hebrew, lechem is bread, and in Arabic, lahm is meat. So, here we have a false friend that you used. And I think the audience might have missed it, so I want to make sure it’s explained. You use the word learning. And learning in standard American English doesn’t mean what it means in, I’m going to call it Judeo-English. Stephen: No kidding. Nehemia: No, and I’m serious. Stephen: Yeah. Nehemia: People have written about this, entire dissertations. When a Jew says, “I’m learning Torah,” it doesn’t mean the same thing as when a non-Jew says, “I’m learning accounting,” or something. You used that word, and I think you used it just as part of Judeo-English. What does it mean in standard American? What is learning? Stephen: You’re an excellent listener, and it’s a great point. And I often say to my kids, some of whom were born in the U.S., but all of whom grew up here, they’ll often say about their homework, “I’m learning math.” And I’ll say, “You’re actually not learning math, you’re studying math.” You might learn math in some form, but we’ll talk about what the difference is, just as you had posed it. Learning is the religious act of studying sacred text. One goes to learn. It means one is going to have a concentrated experience which has an element of holiness in it. Studying, as you said, one could study engineering. Very difficult to make a case for one learning engineering, in Judeo-English, as you said. Because there’s a… Nehemia: And there’s a term for this. This is called “semantic loan.” I just looked it up. So, semantic loan is where, like, there’s the example that some Americans who were immigrants from Germany, if they didn’t know what you said, they would say please. And that was in the sense of, repeat what you just said. Which we don’t say in American English, so maybe it’s not semantic loan because that’s a translation of the word bitte. Which means, please may you do something, but also please repeat what you said. So, here, learning comes from the Yiddish learning. So, explain to the audience what it means to learn Torah, because it’s a whole world of meaning there that’s not part of standard… Stephen: Yeah. Learning Torah, and this is true for every realm of Jewish life, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and every form, to learn means talmud Torah. Talmud Torah is the studying of sacred text. Nehemia: So, in this sense, it’s a calc. In other words, there’s a Hebrew concept, lomed talmud, which is translated into Yiddish. And then from Yiddish, because it has the same root, it comes over into English, unsuspecting, without people realizing it has a completely different meaning in English. Not a completely different meaning, but there’s nuances that are lost. Stephen: Well, I’m not an expert in Yiddish, so I wouldn’t be able to say. Nehemia: But when you’re saying learning Torah, you’re using the Yiddish meaning, which comes from the Hebrew meaning. Stephen: Right, but if I were to walk in, you know, seven or eight blocks from here to, you know, a Sephardic beit midrash, house of study, and say, “What are you learning?” They wouldn’t think, “Why are you speaking, you know, in a phrase that comes…” Nehemia: No, no, they would go directly back to the Hebrew word. Stephen: They’d understand that the point was, “What are you studying today? What part of Torah are you studying today? Where are you in Talmud?” Nehemia: So, I once had this encounter with someone who was… I won’t give the details. There was a discussion about something in the Book of Shoftim, of Judges, and I could see he clearly was unaware of anything in the Book of Judges, and I said, “Have you ever read the Book of Judges?” He said, “I don’t read Tanakh, I learn it.” I said, “Okay, did you ever learn the Book of Judges?” And he said, no. Right? But it struck me about that semantic distinction. So, still, what is learning in the Talmud Torah sense? Stephen: It’s a religious act of engaging with sacred text. Learning is considered one of the highest, if not the highest acts that a person can do. We say in tradition, in a litany of listing the mitzvot, “talmud Torah keneged kulam.” “Talmud Torah learning is higher than any of them combined.” So, this has all kinds of sociological aspects over time, including the fact that in Israel there is a kind of protected class of learners, of students of Torah, ultra-Orthodox men who make the claim that it is of national security significance that Torah is learned. Even to the extent that, during recent conflicts here in Israel, the case has been made in the headlines of papers, right, that we must not interrupt the learning of the ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, houses of study, yeshivas, because they are the highest, most important thing that can be done in any time for the Jewish people. So, it’s a real phenomenon which goes back to the sanctification of learning as being a high, if not the highest, act that a person can engage in. And that is related, of course, to the fact that we’re talking about a tradition that goes back thousands of years which holds the Hebrew Scriptures as immutable, and the ultimate expression that humans can engage with, to engage with the divine, to engage with the oracle, if you will, forgive the parallel. But there’s a second lane in that highest place, and that is Oral Torah. Written Torah is the received Torah of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is considered perfect and immutable, but there is also Oral Torah, which is the world of midrash, which is the world of interpretation. There is an understanding that there is an entire world of interpretive acts, of interpretation of text, of the parsing of text, of the use of midrash and other techniques, which is as holy and as necessary as the written text. And so, the culture develops in two lanes, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, and the house of study, the beit midrash, is where they meet. That is where those lanes meet. That is the intersection of spiritual, intellectual life emergent in late antiquity. That doesn’t mean that the synagogue, the beit knesset, isn’t critical or doing the commandments, the mitzvot, isn’t critical. There are many other ways to do what’s considered the highest and best use of Jewish life, right? But in terms of the map of Jewish life, there are two lanes in the map; Written Torah and Oral Torah. Written Torah, in the most simple terms, and I’m truly simplifying here, Written Torah is what the Oral Torah is bringing light to. And you don’t have Oral Torah without the Written Torah. But without the Oral Torah, the Written Torah… we don’t say it, but it’s implied; is incomplete. You need both. And that is a massive intellectual, theological claim. That’s why midrash is so important, because midrash is the technical system; it’s the technique which is running all the way through the story of scriptural peoples from the time when midrash becomes very much prevalent as a way of understanding commandment, law, community, purpose, the divine. Nehemia: Okay, so, the way I’ve heard it described, and tell me what your thoughts on this are, is that the Written Torah is like, if you were to hear a lecture in the university, you know, setting, you hear your professor giving a lecture and you write down notes, and then somebody comes and they read your notes. Well, there’s pieces of the puzzle they’re missing. There might have been a slide up on the screen that you don’t see in the note, and the Oral Torah brings in all the information that elucidates, what are these notes really saying? Do you accept that explanation? That may come from a particular, like, maybe ultra-Orthodox perspective, I’m not sure. Stephen: I think it’s part of the description, but it’s not complete. As I understand Oral Torah (and I’m limited by my own brain, and studies, and learning, and all the rest) but the concept is that the Oral Torah, as it’s described, for example, in the Ethics of the Fathers, in the mishnaic text, which is known as Pirkei Avot, which is a brief kind of litany of the chain of tradition and a variety of teachings, the Oral Torah is received by Moses and passed down from generation to generation as if the Oral Torah already existed in total, totally and completely at the beginning, in the same way that the Written Torah existed in total at the beginning. So, conceptually, there’s an idea that there is an entire universe of Oral Torah that is passed down from generation to generation and is revealed through study. Now, that being said, I think it’s historically viable and practically fair to assume, even if you have a mystical, faith-based understanding that all Torah, whether it’s Written or Oral Torah, is complete and perfect and just discovered by humans in the Beit Midrash, as we see it in action in the classic texts of midrash and in the Talmud and all the way through to the present day, it looks a lot like people coming up with great ideas based on study, right? So, whether it is predestined that that note that someone took in the class on the lecture already existed, and they’re just doing the act of being a scribe, inscribing it, and writing down Oral Torah, right? Writing down their oral Torah, even if they’re actually writing down something that is essentially new, that’s a question for mystics and prophets to determine, not me, obviously. The point being that my impression of what it means to engage in the world of midrash is that it is a creative act. Nehemia: Okay, midrash is a creative act. A creative act (I’m writing it down) to engage the sacred text. So, you said midrash is a technique, and this technique is creative. So, tell us more about that. For someone who has no idea what you’re talking about. Stephen: Oh, sure. Well, I’ll pretend that I do. Nehemia: No, I’m saying someone… for the audience who’s hearing here the word midrash for the first time. Stephen: I am also the audience. Nehemia: Oh, I see! Stephen: … to assume that they know truly and deeply, completely what they’re talking about is already a sign that they probably don’t. I mean, there’s knowing and then there’s knowing, right? Nehemia: Gotcha. Stephen: So, I know what I know, and I can describe it as I’m able to. But these topics are so vast and incredibly multifaceted that we’ve got to enter them with a level of humility. Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough. Stephen: And I’m going to endeavor to do that. The way I would describe midrash is that there are playbooks for midrash, right? There is the equivalent of the basic plays that one can play in the world of midrash. There are certain terms, kal va’chomer, or gozer hashava, or heikeshim, which are actual formulaic ways that you engage in a meaning of a text. So, kal va’chomer, for example, is part of a list, an early list, of the types of techniques that one can use, and it’s basically an a fortiori argument, right? Nehemia: Which is Latin. So, what is that in English? Stephen: Well, I’m hoping that some of our Latin scholars listening in will correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially it’s the relationship between what you would call a minor argument and a major argument, a smaller case and a larger case. So, if it’s true in small letter a, then it stands to reason that it’s going to be true in large letter A, right? There’s going to be, alike grows into even more alike, and there’s a relationship. And there’s a whole list that comes in a couple of different forms (the list gets bigger) of what are the acceptable techniques that one can use to do midrash, in the same way that, if you’re playing basketball, there’s a lot of things you can do with the ball, but you cannot take a shot from a seat in the arena. That’s not part of the game. But you can do all kinds of things on the court as long as you follow the rules. Midrash functions in a similar way, in that there’s a court that becomes defined; here are the rules. Here’s what you can do with the ball, which is the sacred text, in order to advance it down the floor, right, and to score. Which is to enlighten your community. Which is to make a higher meaning, a meaning that suits and fits and is engaged with the problem you’re trying to solve. But also, above anything else, fully immerses you in the game, right? Midrash is about problem solving for Halacha, for legal reasons, for literary reasons, for religious practice reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people come to the written text and say, “We’ve got to figure out what this means.” That’s a reason why my midrash is used, because there are no oracles, right? There are learned people who have to answer questions. “What does this text mean if I need to know whether I can turn my lights on during Shabbat or not,” right? Or whatever the question is going to be, right? Bad example, but the concept is that I need to solve a religious practice problem from written text into oral text, to oral tradition, in order to make sense, to know how to live religiously. But there’s another reason why midrash is engaged, and that is simply for the love of the game. Right? Sometimes it’s to win the game, to use the basketball metaphor, and winning the game means knowing what to do, and sometimes it’s just because you love to play the game. Because you love to learn, you love to study, you love to engage in sacred texts, and the house of study is a house of problem-solving and a house of love. Love of study, problem solving for religious problems; it’s both. Midrash does both things, and that’s why, in general terms, you divide the worlds of midrash into Midrash Aggadah, which is the midrash of narrative and story (what’s this story saying?) and Midrash Halacha, which is the midrash that has legal implications. Now, many times it’s hard to see the difference because a story can lead to a legal implication. But the essential division of the types of texts are Midrash Aggadah texts, which are primarily focused on the narrative, and Midrash Halacha texts, which are primarily focused on the legal implications of the interpretations. Nehemia: Okay, so, I want to try to have you bring some concrete examples, maybe from Leviticus Rabbah that you wrote your PhD dissertation on. Let’s start with Aggadah, which is the story, meaning the narrative side of midrash. Well, actually, before we get to that, can you say something about… and my audience has heard the term pshat before. What is the relationship? Because you say midrash is a technique, there’s another technique called Pshat, unless you’re using the terminology differently. So, that’s a question I’m going to throw out and let you deal with, or discuss. Stephen: Midrash is, you know, it’s kind of like, you know… imagine cars; you start out with carburetors, and you get to electric vehicles. I mean, there’s layers of how the technology advances. So, pshat is part of a sort of a four-layered approach to interpreting text, which is pshat. I don’t know if you’ve gone through this with the… Nehemia: They’ve heard of Pshat, Remez, Drash, Sod, but why don’t you explain it from your perspective? Stephen: So, the idea of the PaRDeS, which is Pshat, Remez, which is literally the hint, Drash, and Sod, which is esoteric. And drash, maybe we’ll call it symbolic. Okay? Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: So, the idea is that pshat, the first level, the level that’s quote-unquote easiest to access, and pshat is from that root, like pshut, which means simple, or basic, or unencumbered, is the literal meaning of the text. What is the literal meaning of the text? So, the literal meaning of the text is different than the remez, which is the suggested meaning of the text. Okay? Which is different than the drash level of the text, which enters into the realm of the symbolic, or the associative perhaps, which is different than the quote-unquote highest level, which is sod, which is esoteric, which you probably can only learn from a master, okay? In terms of examples of how an aggadic, or narrative-focused midrash works, let’s take something actually from Bereshit, from the Book of Genesis, because it’s a famous example. And it’s a good one; the story of Abraham smashing the idols in his father’s workshop. Is it in the Hebrew bible? Or is it midrash? Nehemia: You’re asking me? No, it’s not in the Hebrew bible. It’s not explicitly anywhere in the text. Stephen: Three points for Dr. Gordon. For House Gordon. It’s not in the Hebrew bible. Nehemia: Before you explain that… So, using the word midrash, and I’m not sure; are you using the word midrash to include all of pardes? In other words, is phsat part of midrash technique? Or is it one technique within midrash in the way you’re using it? Because other people would use the word midrash as a synonym for drosh. So, I want to clarify that. Stephen: Yeah, well… Nehemia: Or is it multiple meanings? Stephen: The realm of the four-level interpretation, which is something that seems to be present in, I believe, Origen, early Church Fathers; there’s elements of this in late antiquity at the same time, that sort of classical midrash is really starting to heat up. The industry is moving, you know, 3rd, 4th, 5th century. This is something that becomes very important in Kabbalah, in mystical interpretations of sacred texts, the idea that there are these four levels going from the simplest meaning to the most esoteric meaning. And it’s an area that, you know, I’m not in any way an expert in, but it’s something that evolves over time. It’s using the midrashic system for another kind of theological approach to text, and it develops over centuries. The idea of pshat, the simple meaning, that is, I think, an inclination that one would see in all kinds of collections of midrash, but sometimes you’ll see one interpretation after another and none of them are privileged over the other. They will just come as a kind of encyclopedia entry or a dictionary, a lexicon, what the word could mean, what the phrase could be, as a kind of collection. And that’s probably what the collections of midrash were. They were almost like an encyclopedia in which Jewish knowledge was contained and hooked onto the particular text. We can talk about that. Nehemia: Hooked is a good example, or good phraseology. Let’s now talk about Abraham smashing the idols. If it’s not in the book of Genesis, where does it come from? Stephen: It comes from Midrash Aggadah. It comes from the attempt to explain something about, who is Abraham? What motivates him? It’s the liner notes to the album. It’s what the dramaturge knows about the character that’s not written into the play. Nehemia: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know what a dramaturge is. Help me out with that. Stephen: The dramaturge has to understand the guts, the heart, the motivations of the script, of the actors, of the staging. Nehemia: What is a dramaturge? Is that like a director, or something? I don’t know what that is. Stephen: It’s part of the team that creates a play. Nehemia: It’s called the dramaturge? Stephen: An easier example is, imagine that the student of the Hebrew Scriptures has come to be reading passages on Abraham and asks a question like a method actor, right? What’s Abraham’s motivation? We know that Abraham’s been told what to do by God, but, you know, maybe I’ve been told what to do by God sometimes, and it’s not so easy. Who is this person who was so brave to leave his homeland, and leave his family, and leave his customs, and go off and, according to tradition, to be the first monotheist? What motivated him? What was he like when he was a kid? What was his family like? Nehemia: So, I looked it up here. Dramaturge is (according to Google, take it with a grain of salt) a literary editor on the staff of a theater who consults with authors (that’s interesting) and edits texts. And you’re saying the dramaturge’s job (I love that. I’ve learned a new word here) the dramaturge’s job is to help the actor say, “Okay, when you speak this line, here’s what’s going through the head of the character.” And you mentioned method acting, which if I understand correctly, is basically, they’re not just reciting lines, they’re like, “Okay, I’m talking about, the character’s mother died. I have to think about the worst thing that ever happened in my life so I can feel the emotion of what it’s like, as close as I can for my mother.” Stephen: I know the motivation of the character I’m playing. Right. What’s Abraham’s motivation? So, in some sense, you know, there’s a linkage between the reader and the actor, right? In this case, the reader, the student, the student of the text, is trying to understand the text from the inside out. Nehemia: But if the text doesn’t tell us what Abraham’s motivation is, and you called midrash a creative process or creative technique, creative process, help the audience understand; are you just making it up? That’s the question. Stephen: You may just be making it up in practice, but the fact of the matter is, there are rules about how you can make it up as midrash develops. You can’t just come and say, “Abraham was like that because he had high cholesterol.” “Abraham was like that because he was chased by a dragon out of his homeland.” You have to tie it to something in the text. Nehemia: Oh, beautiful. Okay. Stephen: It could be a letter; it could be a curlicue on top of one of the letters. It could be the fact that a word sounds like a different word, and if you change the letter Sin and the letter Samekh, you get a different meaning. It could be you create a fault. You see a false friend and you make something of it. It could be because of the context of where the text appears. It occurs in a passage which has something before or after. It could be, even more broadly, because somewhere in the Book of Prophets, there’s a mention of Abraham saying that he had a temper. And you come and say, “Oh, we know that he must have had a temper.” How did he have a temper? He had a temper because he did the following, based on this inference that I make from the text. So, you are inferring from the text. You are looking for a hook to hang an interpretation on, or you are seeing the hook. You are seeing where there’s a discrepancy; you’re seeing where there’s something unusual in the text, and you’re trying to explain it. Nehemia: Okay. So, explain to the audience where they get the idea that Abraham smashed his father’s idols when there’s no verse that said, “And Abraham came down from the upper loft, and he smashed the idols, and he placed the hammer into the hand of the largest one.” There’s no verse like that in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible. So, where do you get that from? Stephen: I would have to sit right here with the text in front of me and show you. And we could pause and try to do that. Or I think we could leave it as a sort of rule of how midrash works, which is that midrash can be highly speculative and associative and imaginative and creative, but it cannot disconnect itself from the text. Nehemia: So, I looked this up. So, I think it’s worth looking at and discussing with you and getting your input on. So, it’s Genesis 15:17, and it says, “Va’yomer elav, ani Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey asher hotzetikha mi’Ur Kasdim. “I am the LORD who took you out of Ur Kasdim.” And Ur, in ancient Hebrew actually is a word that means a furnace. And so, “I am the LORD who brought you out of the furnace of the Kasteans,” or the Chaldeans. And then what midrash does is, it basically, I mean, obviously it takes the story from the Book of Daniel, of Hananiya, Mishael, and Azariah, or I think in English it’s Shadrach, Mishael, or how do they say that? And Abednego, or something. So, in other words, they’re like, “Oh, God took Abraham out of a furnace.” And they know in the context, Ur Kasdim is the name of a place because it appears repeatedly. But I guess they’re employing the technique that you described. They want to understand; how did Abraham come to know God and how did that manifest itself? Right? And so, they’re like, “All right, God took him out of a furnace. You get thrown into a furnace by pagans because you do something against their idols.” Right? Stephen: Well, so throw their idols into a furnace. If they’re clay idols, you have to put them in the kiln. Nehemia: Fire them, that’s true. Stephen: It provides specificity; it is specific where things are amorphous. So, if I can take a text like Ur Kasdim, and I can say, “Okay, every word, every letter, or as we say in one of the sayings, every jot and tittle of text is significant.” There is no element of the immutable, perfect Written Torah that is extraneous. So, I can interpret anything, which includes saying, why is Abraham the way he is? He came from Ur Kasdim. What do I learn from that? I learn from that that there was an element of him coming out of the furnace. What does that mean? He differentiates himself from those who put something that’s meant to represent the divine in the furnace and comes out and he sees that. He says, “No, no, no. I am in the image of God. Be’tzelem Elokim.” Right? “I am a son of God. I am…” You can interpret that by focusing, not on what you feel or think, but bringing what you feel and think to a word. It has to be locked down in an interpretive act. It’s not enough for me to dream up some weird story about the first monotheist smashing a bunch of idols. I need to tie it to a specific inference from the text, and then I can go as far as I want with it. But it’s got to be tied to it. Nehemia: Talk about that, “I can go as far as I want.” And actually, just let me… I pulled up here on my Bible software program, Accordance. So, Targum Pseudo Jonathan translates Genesis 15:7. “Then He said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of the fiery furnace of the Chaldeans.” And then we have something called the fragmentary Targumim, which has the same thing. “I am the Lord who brought you out of the furnace of fire of the Chaldeans.” So, a slightly different order of words. But in both cases, they’re interpreting Ur as basically a double interpretation; it’s both a furnace and a fiery furnace, right? So, this is an ancient interpretation which gets elaborated on, or you could say maybe the full story was known to the translator of Pseudo Jonathan and he’s putting up as much into the text as he can, right? He can’t put the whole story. I guess he could, right? But it’s going to be a push to put the whole story of the smashing the idols in. So, talk to me about this; you can go as far as you want. I’d like my audience to understand that, because it’s not as far as you want, right? You can’t say anything you want, right? Or can you? I don’t know what… you said, it’s a creative process. Stephen: Mm-hmm. Nehemia: So, how do we get from ‘there’s a furnace’ to ‘he smashed his father’s idols?’ Because part of that, you could say, is… and here I’ll use these big fancy terms. I apologize to the audience. I try to get them to understand the terms eisegesis and exegesis. Exegesis is, you read meaning out of something, and eisegesis, from the word eise in Greek, is you read meaning into something. And so, you could argue that it’s exe-gesis, reading the meaning out, to say that ur means furnace, even though maybe it’s clearly not in the context, but the story of the smashing of the idols is entirely eisegetical. There’s nothing in the text about that, even hinted at. Stephen: Well, I didn’t prepare the text in advance, and I don’t want to… Nehemia: Okay, so maybe bring a different example. Stephen: I would say that if we went line by line, I’d be willing to bet, because midrash works this way, that it is eiso and exo. Midrash is eisegesis and exegesis, but you cannot have only eisegesis, right? You can call it the Midrashic imagination, perhaps, certainly in contemporary terms, and say, “Well, I’m doing midrash because I’m interpreting Jonah as a teenager who slams the door on his parents, and he’s so angry, he’s like a teenager.” You know? I mean, you can say that, and it does have a nice midrashic feel to it, but classical midrash would require you to find something referencing Jonah behaving like a teenager in the text. Exe-gesis, right? So, an example of this idea of going as far as you want or you can. There’s a concept in midrash, and there are different forms of midrash, and one of the forms, a very popular form, is called the Petichta. Petichta. The Petichta is a homily, or an interpretive narrative, which is basically designed to go between two verses, a near verse and a far verse. Okay? So, let’s say that I’ve chosen a verse from somewhere in the wisdom literature. Let’s say I’m choosing something from the Book of Job. I choose a verse, and a Petichta is where I show you how I put together a chain of interpretations, which are exegetical, which are coming out of the text, to link between that verse from the Book of Job all the way to something from Proverbs or Psalms. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I can show you that everything is connected through exegetical interpretation. This is a performance. If I am in a synagogue in 5th century Galilee, and it is time for a sermon, I do not get up and talk necessarily about politics, or the way we would see a sermon in a synagogue or a church or a mosque necessarily in contemporary times. I would perform the feat of linking together as many verses as possible. That’s my Petichta. So, imagine it like a jazz musician. Okay? A jazz musician is taking a jazz standard, Summertime, okay? Which is not even a jazz standard, it’s just a popular song that was made into a jazz standard. And the job of the jazz musician, who’s a virtuoso, is to go crazy on that melody. Now, they’re limited by how great they are, because some jazz musicians can even play atonal things that sound right. They can bang on the side of their cello, and it fits perfectly. They can pluck the strings, they can bow the strings, they can bump the cello on the ground and have a cacophony of sound. And if they’re a really great musician, it somehow all fits together, and is connected back to when they come back around to the melody. And here comes the melody of the song that I’m interpreting again. It’s the same concept with the Petichta, or with midrash in general. It’s about a virtuoso act of engaging as much content as you can in that performative space, right? To amplify, embellish, raise up the core text by a virtuoso performance of the text and showing how it’s all connected. So, you can go all the way through the Torah and come back to where you started if you can link text to text to text to text because the basic understanding of what the Written Torah is, and what the Oral Torah does, is that it is all perfect. It all makes sense. There are no holes. You’re just to bring all your mind, all your heart, all your soul to the learning you do with it. And not only are you a better person because you’ve done that, not only, perhaps, have you solved some halachic problem because you’ve done that, but you’ve immersed yourself in something that is akin to being connected to the divine by being able to so deeply engage yourself in the Torah, through your interpretation of it, that it’s like your perfect prayer. It’s like doing all 613 of the mitzvot. It’s like very, very high level. So, midrash goes from being a way to make sense of narrative, Aggadah, or law, Halacha, to becoming a dance for dance’s sake, for playing that perfect virtuosic solo, for a jazz player, right? Because it’s not solving anything. It’s just an incredible homily that is showing the beauty and perfection of the sacred text. Midrash can be a problem solver. It can be art. Nehemia: So, tell me, in your dissertation, you have the phrase oral performance. Tell us how that plays in. What does it mean in this context? I know that that’s terminology that comes from an entire world of academic literature. Stephen: Right. Nehemia: And so, it’s a… what do you call that? A term to art, right? In other words, it’s like a technical term. What is oral performance here? Stephen: So, I learned the terminology from sort of… the classic text on this is the Singer of Tales, Albert Lord, who was collecting epic songs from essentially uneducated Slavic epic poem singers and analyzing that, and it led him to understand that memory of epic tales was a function of creating what had already been heard, not rote memorization. Okay? What it means is that, when we think about Homeric epics, we think about the Odyssey. And then, when we think about ancient tales, Gilgamesh, and when we get into the world of sacred texts like the Hebrew Bible, there’s a line between what’s written and what’s performed. It’s complicated as heck to try to explain that vis-a-vis the Hebrew Scriptures, but, you know, people have tried to do it. And the point is that, a poet, and we’re not talking about poet in the sense of someone sitting at their desk and writing poetry, we’re talking about someone who is basically the messenger of tradition; they’re somewhere between a scribe and a prophet. They are carrying those 100,000 lines of the Odyssey. Their immersion in the core text is recreated by them every time they perform it. So, I am not standing like an actor reciting lines in a play, but I am also not improvising. I am only using received content, and I am assembling it for you in real time. I am performing the epic. Nehemia: That’s the oral performance? Stephen: So, the study of oral performance theory, or the study of oral performance, is studying the ways that traditions are carried over generations, hundreds of years, thousands of years, by figures who are the performers. And then the small ways that all of us use oral, O-R-A-L, performance as a way of conveying knowledge, as a way of conveying culture. The way it comes into play in midrash is that you can imagine… here we’ll go from jazz to blues. There are certain phrases… Nehemia: And guys, Stephen here has a musical background, which I don’t know the first thing about, but go ahead. Jazz to blues. Stephen: Can you think, Nehemia, of a phrase from the blues? If I say, “Give me a classic blues phrase. A phrase from the blues.” Nehemia: I don’t even know what phrase means in the concept of blues. Is a phrase like words? Stephen: Yeah, like a couple words that fit together. Nehemia: So, if you asked me to list three blues songs, I couldn’t. If you played them to me and said, that’s blues, I’d say, “Oh, okay. That’s what you mean by blues.” I know almost nothing about music. Stephen: Okay. So, let’s take an example of… let me think of one that’s kind of new. Nehemia: What’s the most famous blues song my audience would have heard of? Stephen: I don’t know. Nehemia: What’s your favorite blues song? Stephen: I’m a big B.B. King fan. I’m trying to grab one from there. “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she might be jiving too,” okay? There’s a ream of blue songs that relate to the mother, okay? There’s a whole semantic domain (that’s a biblical phraseology, right) of songs about mothers, phrases about mothers. Okay? So, if I am standing up to present my performance, right, I’m not going to be making up new phrases about mothers, I’m going to be using phrases that I already know. Just like when the midrashist came to engage with the question of why Abraham was the way he was, just as you said. You said, or you mentioned Pseudo Yonatan, the Targum, the translation. I am actually drawing on my reservoir of phrases and stories and vocabulary that I picked up in my culture and assembling them. In Greek, the word for, to say, to speak, is lego. We use Legos to put together… Legos to make a design. Imagine texts like Legos. They are spoken, but they are assembled. I do not sit at home and create blocks of Legos out of plastic with the right little tabs so that they fit together. I go to the place where the Legos are sold in the store. They’ve been produced, they are the received tradition, and then I can assemble from them all kinds of things. I could assemble from them a picture that the Lego tells me exactly what to make, or I could make something out of them that I want to make. Okay? The idea is that there is a core vocabulary in traditions, in cultures, that are assembled to meet the moment of what the interpretation demands. So, in oral performance theory, we think about midrash, we know that there are going to be certain characters, certain phrases, certain descriptive terms, which are used over and over again, that are used for the particular interpretive moment that comes into play. And that what we have in the texts that we have, the compendiums of midrashic texts that we have, these are in some ways an attempt to replicate what those creative moments were like, what those associative moments were like. Imagine it as trying to look at, like, a snapshot of what some of those conversations, or study sessions, might have been like. That’s one way of thinking about midrash. Another way of thinking about midrash is, because no one really knows how these Midrashic collections, where they came from… you know, behind you, you have a collection of many, many old books, right? Nehemia: It’s a photo from the Bologna University Library, but yeah. Stephen: All right. Well, some of those are probably encyclopedias, right? Nehemia: Could be, yeah. Stephen: Let’s imagine that a Midrashic collection (just imagine for a sec) is like an encyclopedia. Vayikra Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, which I did my dissertation on, is an interpretation of the Book of Leviticus. How many verses, percentagewise… how many verses do you think of the Book of Leviticus, you know, the ultimate midrashic interpretation of the Book of Leviticus; what percentage of verses are covered in that massive encyclopedia of Leviticus Rabbah? What percentage do you think? Nehemia: I’m going to guess at 10 percent. Stephen: You under guessed, but you were not far off. It’s like around 18, 20 percent, okay? Nehemia: Okay. Stephen: Now, how can… Nehemia: In other words, this is important, guys. It’s not a systematic commentary, like, let’s say Rashi, who goes through pretty much every verse, right? “The Lord spoke to Moses saying,” he probably doesn’t have much to say. But almost every verse, his aim is to… anything that’s not clear, he’s going to try to explain. That’s the approach of, certainly, a medieval commentary. So, in one sense, it’s a commentary, but in another sense, it’s not. Stephen: That’s where the hook idea comes in, again, to go back to a previous, I guess, metaphor that we used. Imagine that I am a 4th century Rabbinic Jew who has a distant memory of a Jewish world with a Temple, where everything was centralized, more or less, who is now seeing that Christianity is the emergent dominant form of monotheism and no longer needs people to become Jewish to become Christian. And Christianity is taking over the Roman Empire. I’ve got a small community which is scattered across certain places in Israel, and, you know, you’ve got communities in different places, maybe in North Africa, in Rome. You’ve got Jewish communities, but the continuity has been snapped, okay? I don’t have anywhere where I can go to tell me what Judaism is. I have the Holy Bible, right? But my community’s been shattered. There’s no longer a Temple. The Temple was the center, right? So, what do I do? How do I teach my people what it is that we are? Well, I have all kinds of ideas. I have legal ideas. I have philosophical ideas. I have jokes. I have customs. I have all that. Where am I going to keep it? What epic poem will I use to carry the layers that I want to pass on to the next generation? I know what I’ll use. I’ll use Hebrew Scriptures, because Hebrew Scriptures have been around for thousands of years, right? And people have memorized, actually memorized Hebrew Scriptures, and we have a written version of it, which is really rare, because there’s very few books. Very few books. So, what do I do? I store the things that are important to me in the text. Imagine that the Hebrew Scriptures are like a locker where I can keep the things that are important to my culture. I know that a lot of people know the Hebrew Scriptures well, and I know that a lot of people can read Hebrew Scriptures, because it’s actually a fairly highly literate community, by those standards, because we read the Scriptures in synagogue. People know it. They certainly know it orally. And it’s done year after year, same day, same reading, et cetera. But there’s more that I need to convey. It’s not enough for me just to convey what’s in the Hebrew Scriptures, I need to convey all this other halakhic, this legal knowledge, all this customs knowledge, linguistic knowledge. I have languages that I’m speaking that… you know, I have Greek, I have Aramaic, right? So, I use the hook of the text to hang on it all kinds of other stuff that I want you to know. It’s not important for me in Vayikra Rabbah, in Leviticus Rabbah, in the, let’s say, the 4th century, to interpret every single verse of Leviticus, but it is important for me to cram into it as much as I can about what I want carried on from my culture. And that is a role the midrash plays. It is giving you the place, the character, the language, the art, the custom, the jokes, the humor (because there’s a lot of humor in there) on the hook of the Scriptures. So, midrash comes to be, both a way to carry through like a Trojan horse, right, all kinds of other stuff within it, but it also remains, remains, a tool for solving real problems. Nehemia: So, when you say there’s this hook that you’re hanging all these ideas on and all this information on, I want you to comment on this; does this mean that the person producing the midrash, or performing the midrash, however you want to call it, that they know very well that that doesn’t come from the text, but if they can connect it to the text, it can survive and live in a sense? Stephen: Imagine the midrashist as a combination of a scribe and a prophet. The scribe and the prophet are both deeply connected to the text. When Ezekiel comes to speak, Ezekiel is bringing reference back to the Scriptures all the time, and is engaged in interpretation, not just declaiming whatever Ezekiel wants to declaim. Ezekiel is coming out of a tradition. The scribe is obligated to copy down the text. So, there’s a way that the Rabbinic tradition sort of combines the role of the transmitter, of the core map, which is the Hebrew Scriptures, and the spirit of it, the launching of it, which is prophetic, in a kind of role that does both. But it’s also a bit of the judge, right? The judge is there too, because someone has to adjudicate what this text means. The prophet can tell you what is the, quote-unquote, right thing to do, or invoke, or inspire, or disparage you. The scribe can give you the best record possible. But who’s going to tell you what to do? If you’re coming with an injured goat and you need to know whether or not it can be sacrificed, in theory, right? Or if you are dealing with issues of property ownership, and you want to follow the law, but it’s not clear what the law is, who’s going to help you? So, the Midrashist is a judge, they’re a prophet, they’re a scribe, in a sense, and they’re also something else; they’re a performer. They’re an entertainer. They’re a magician. Nehemia: A magician? Stephen: Magician. Magician. Nehemia: How so? Stephen: In a sense that… because, watch this magic act I can do. I can go from a text in Job all the way to a text in Mishlei without missing a beat. I can impress you with this incredible tour de force of showing you the magic, the incredible nature of this universe of text that we live in. I’m going to wow you with it. Nehemia: Does it involve exegetical sleight of hand? In other words, you used the word magician. I’m trying to wrap my head around what you mean by that. Stephen: Because there’s magic in the text. There’s magic, not in the sense of occult. I mean, that’s not my area, right? Nehemia: Well, no, I said sleight of hand. Stephen: Magic in the sense of electricity, incredible energy. Wow. There’s a wow, this incredible text, and there’s a wow in linking the text together and seeing how the text plays with words in different places and different times in the text, to suddenly see, you know, as the story goes of, you know, Moshe Rabbeinu, of Moses. There’s a midrash that has Moses transported by the powers of time into Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. Rabbi Akiva, who’s an early Rabbinic figure, a famous one. And Moses is sitting in the back of the class, and he has no idea what’s going on. And he’s saying, “I don’t understand how it could be that I, Moses, have no understanding. This is the text that I brought. Who are these people? Right? What’s happening here?” And there’s this idea that there’s a linkage between the generations, right? And you can be linked through the text, and the text can still be the text, and it can continue to evolve. And there’s something that goes beyond any human being, even the most versatile, brilliant human being, the text is what wins the day, because all that we’re doing is coming out of it. So, you know, the tradition, the tradition, one can carry it far and wide, but ultimately the grounding for that, the force, the power, the magic, is embedded within the text itself. You can be an incredible scribal, prophetic, adjudicator, performer of the text, but just like a jazz artist or a blues musician, they will always tell you about the tradition of the blues or the tradition of the jazz. You are a servant of your genre. You are a servant of the artistry of the tradition that you’re interpreting. So, that levels an element of humility on the whole midrashic process, because as great as you can be, as far as you can travel with midrash, you can only travel as far as you know the text. That’s the number one… The most important quality of a midrashist is not imagination, it’s knowledge. But then, when you combine imagination and knowledge, then you have the amazing midrash. — Nehemia: So, I remember back a long time ago, there was this discussion in American political sphere about the meaning of the phrase crimes and misdemeanors. This was when Bill Clinton was being put up on charges of… I’m not sure what the terminology is correctly, but they were trying to have an impeachment trial. There’s what I think they call, like, the French approach, which is, “No, the law is this clay from which I mold what I want it to be.” And then there’s the originalist approach, which says, “I have to find out what they thought it meant, the people who formulated this law.” Where does midrash come into those two approaches? You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com [https://www.nehemiaswall.com]. 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