A Singing Conversation Among Open and Rational Minds

A SINGING CONVERSATION AMONG OPEN AND RATIONAL MINDS

MIDRASHIC AND TALMUDIC METHOD

DESCRIPTION & COMMENT

A Paper by

William Haney

Presented to

PRAIRIE GROUP

Pere Marquette State Park, Grafton, Illinois

15 November 1993

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress [a stranger], for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

(Ex 22:20, Tanakh, New JPS Translation)

There can be few sentences which express so briefly, but at the same time so clearly, the essence of . . . Jewish religion: relationship with God has, in immediate terms, practical rather than speculative consequences; and the imperative (or in this case the prohibition) is based on an appeal to history, not on an appeal to authority or to revelation in abstract form.

(Problems of Suffering . . . , Bowker, pg. 5)

Meeting is an essential aspect of religion, whether with strangers or friends. Meeting here, with you, my Prairie Group colleagues, I do not feel as a stranger among you; nor do I feel oppressed by the Program Committee for this assignment. Once I was a stranger in this strange group. I have received much in the past few years. Now, in remembrance of the promise made upon joining, I am reciprocating. I wish to thank the Planning Committee for the opportunity to present the material I have crafted. This paper affords me the opportunity to build off of my seminary experience where I was privileged to attend four classes in Jewish studies under the able leadership of Jo Milgrom and Hy Perelmuter. I have also received gracious assistance from my friend and colleague in Columbia, Harvey Rosenfeld. All have been patient with me and their generosity has given me the courage to undertake this task with joy and many rewards.

For many of us in Prairie Group, we are entering into a strange realm with this topic of midrash. As Bowker’s quotation above indicates, we are dealing with a unique appeal to history. We will not be engaged with theological discussions or philosophical dissertations. The “theology” of the Jewish heritage is indirect through the midrash. Instead of theology, we will be reviewing a people’s memory of, and reflection upon, their history. That historical paradigm is encapsulated in the powerful image of a saving event at the edge of a large body of water, and a commanding event at the foot of a mountain. Martin Buber refers to these events as an “abiding astonishment.” These memories of, and references to, the saving and commanding events were so astonishing they shaped the entire biblical narrative. The very brevity of the imperatives voiced in Exodus, held in just a few abiding words, launched an immense amount of words to explicate and understand the nature of the Covenant. It isn’t the Covenant that will be unusual for us to understand; nor will the realm of the biblical narratives be foreign to many of us. What will be strange for us is grasping the significance of the forms, methods, memories and history of the midrashic tradition.

This paper will attempt to open our range of investigation in order to better understand the basis of this new (for us) kind of literary landscape. I will set out to place the midrashic tradition into a historical and methodological context, tracing the path of the rabbinic tradition. I also intend to devote some space to addressing three optional questions asked of me by the Planning Committee: (1) “the differences between this tradition and modern biblical scholarship,” (2) “an understanding of the ways in which this method has been or could be used to challenge orthodox ideas of God and established social structures, on behalf of the oppressed,” and (3) “judgments concerning the relevance of this method for liberal religious understanding and use of the Tanakh.” To begin this task, I believe it is appropriate to begin at the beginning.

THE BEGINNING IS IN THE POWER OF THE WORD AS THE SOURCE:

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.

(Ex 20:4-5a, Tanakh, New JPS Translation)

The admonition of the second commandment as a part of a new Covenant was an astounding change in world outlook. The Israelites found themselves in the midst of the giants of symbolic image-makers: Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the late 13th- or early12th-century BCE they were commanded not to follow the same path as their predecessors or contemporaries. And why not? After all, there was a power in the majesty of the sculptured image, which elicited magic. The people of the ancient world responded to this power and magic with adoration and worship. By shaping and delineating the deities, their form and power could be better visualized, more easily understood – even, perhaps, controlled. What could be wrong with that? The response by some in the Israelite community held that God is beyond human reach; that the error is in deluding the people into emphasizing the wrong aspects of the divine. By worshipping the sculptured image of the deities, it was believed the people were mistaking the part for the whole: practicing, in a word, idolatry. The Israelites focused upon idolatry as an issue of supreme importance as a matter of self-identity. Because of this, they were commanded not to express their religious aspirations visually –that is, through graphics and statuary. As Emil points out in his remarkable book, God’s Presence in History, “Jewish theological thought resists . . . a god as finite as the idols” (pg. 19).

In competition with the power of the artifact, the sculptured image is the power of the word. The primary ideal in the second commandment is the voice of God shall be heard; yet God shall not be seen. The calling of the voice supersedes being drawn toward an ideal concrete image. The saving and commanding voice of God takes precedence over any image of God. Moses asks for the name of God; the answer lacks any form or image – enigmatically, it is a voice from a burning bush. The distilled answer, “I shall be what I shall be” became “the Name that was not a name in the sense of a label by which God could be called and controlled, and therefore the Name which could not be said aloud” (Waskow, pg. 29). Both name and image made God finite.

Robert Alter, in his excellent book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, notes that; “In a mode of [biblical] narration so dominated by speech, visual elements will necessarily be sparsely represented” (pg. 70). He points out that “narration-through-dialogue” preempt descriptions of settings, sites and visual elements “because in the biblical view words underlie reality” (pg. 69). He concludes with this thought; “Hebrew writers may have been led to evolve this convention by the very structure of the language” (pg. 92). There is indeed an intrinsic resource and richness of word shaping and wordplay in Hebrew and Aramaic. Yet, I feel Alter’s assessment to be incomplete. My premise is that Israel’s radical and revolutionary monotheism insisted upon a new order of viewing the world. I believe the paucity of visual elements in the biblical narratives respond to the ideal inherent in the second commandment as much as to the innate nature of the Hebrew language. The artifact is consumed by the power of the word and the potency of the voice alone gives expression to religious values.

Alter ponders a passage in 1st Samuel where thought is reported as speech, and concludes with this supposition;

One is tempted to conclude that the biblical writers did not distinguish sharply between [thought and speech] in their assumptions about how the mind relates to reality. Perhaps, with their strong sense of the primacy of language in the created order of things, they tended to feel that thought was not fully itself until it was articulated speech (pg. 68).

“Articulated speech” breaks forth in the first chapter of Genesis. We are aware of only the commanding voice of God. God speaks and the world comes into being. Words give form to the formless. Speech shapes order out of chaos. A shapeless, formless God gives shape and form to the cosmos.

As soon as the power of the word, this commanding voice, establishes the world, the pernicious tension between the revolutionary new way and the older order is felt immediately in the second chapter of Genesis. No sooner had God created reality with utterances the power of the word is undermined by God the artificer. The first human is modeled out of clay. The very stuff of sculptured images is shaped into an androgynous being.

This tension between what is in place in society and the aspiring ideal to replace it is repeated numerous times throughout the Tanakh. The most notable example is in the 32ndchapter of Exodus (vv. 15-20). Here the tension is vividly dramatized as a collision of these two competing values. Moses brings the Written Torah to the people just as they are worshipping before the statue of the Golden Calf. The word and the image collide in one moment. There is more to this tension than the human longing for comprehensive artful expressions. There is at root the tug of ambiguity about the nature of humanity and the nature of God.

TRAJECTORY OF INTERPRETATION FROM THE SOURCE:

The religion of Israel drew on many alien sources, and it often made use of foreign practices and ideas, but always it constructed out of them something distinctively its own.

(Problems of Suffering . . . , Bowker, pg. 5)

Alter points out the possible seeds of the midrashic tradition may be found in the ambiguities in the biblical texts themselves (pg. 154). He goes on to say; “It is no easy thing to make sense of human reality in the radically new light of the monotheistic revelation” (pg. 176). He further indicates; “Since art does not develop in a vacuum, these [biblical] literary techniques must be associated with the conception of human nature implicit in biblical monotheism” (pg. 115). Alter touches on a greater ambiguity that I believe grounds the midrashic tradition. This one is cultural.

Bowker asserts in the opening quotation alien sources and foreign practices formed a distinctive Israelite religion. Biblical scholarship has indeed ferreted out precursors to a number of biblical stories and literary genre. As examples; Noah and the flood is a retelling of the earlier Atrahasis story: Sargon I’s birth story is rephrased as that of Moses: the ravaging violence of the Babylonian warrior god Marduk, splitting Tiamat in half with his sword to make sky and earth to seal off the waters of chaos, is elegantly and symmetrically reshaped into the sublime and calm narrative of Genesis 1. The list is long. There are nearly 460 instances of similarities with other ancient sources in the Tanakh (Matthews, pp. 257-274).

The issue for the Israelites was a tension between a common fabric of cultural, social, ethical and mythical precedents and presuppositions based upon polytheism and their revolutionary monotheism. Many of these stories became unintelligible. What biblical scholarship calls parallels (as similarities or contrasts with other ancient Near Eastern literature), I believe can also be called midrashim: “and here the term Midrash is used in the largest sense: interpretation, illustration, creative imagination“(Messengers, Wiesel, pg. xiii). The ideal in the first and second commandments caused them to imaginatively interpret new purposes and meanings out of the older stories. These are creative efforts at taking the existing cultural paradigms and re-shaping them to undergird an understanding of a new and revolutionary concept of God. The roots of rabbinic midrashim are to be found in the initial shaping of the biblical narratives and images. From this view, the Tanakh is essentially an exquisite midrash upon the mythic and symbolic currency prevalent in the ancient world, framing a unique vision of what is possible.

A second level of midrash in this “largest sense” is in the experience within the specific Israelite saving and commanding memory and history. This is indeed the abiding astonishment set apart from the surrounding cultural neighborhood. Within the Tanakh, previous Israelite experiences are interpreted. Nevi’im (the Prophets) and Kethuvim (the Writings) are commentaries upon Torah; they are in their own ways midrashim upon Torah.

There is yet another way of seeing the Tanakh as in essence a midrash;

On one occasion it happened that a certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole of Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he [Shammai] repulsed him with the builder’s cubit which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he [Hillel] said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole of Torah, while the rest is commentary (pirushah) thereof; go and learn it [lit. ‘perfect it’].”

(Shabbat, 31a)

(cited in Jesus & Pharisees, Bowker, pg. 128)

All midrash, whether specific or implied, is reducible to the unity of God, as expressed in the few abiding words at the commanding event. This is at root the very stimulus and basis of midrash in its “largest sense.”

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORAL TORAH:

moses received the torah at sinai and transmitted it to joshua, joshua [handed it] to the elders, the elders [handed it] to the prophets, and the prophets [handed it] to the men of the great synagogue. the latter used to say three things: be patient in [the administration of] justice, rear many disciples, and make a fence round the torah.

(Abot. 1.1)

My hypotheses concerning the essential lay of the land of the primacy of the word, and the move from a polytheistic to a monotheistic interpretation, as forming the midrashic tradition now gives way to the recognized development of that tradition. Let us follow this initial trajectory into the rabbinic age.

We begin with the exile into Babylon in 586 BCE. Jeremiah protests against the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked; yet there is no voice to give an answer (Jer 12:1). The interpretation of the ensuing destruction of the Temple is seen as punishment, bearable only because repentance by the people would end the exile. Under ordinary circumstances, the people suffering such a loss would have lost their cultural and religious identity and would have disappeared from the world scene. Yet, the earlier Israelite genius of avoiding the presence of God to be invested in a sculptured image made this great loss different than what the ancient Near East had ever experienced before: God being in history, and the loss of the land, Jerusalem and the Temple being part of history, in the mind, heart and memory of Israel, God is a part in the loss. And because God is in the loss, there is hope;

Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, to the whole community which I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.

(Jer 29:4-7, Tanakh, New JPS Translation)

A new claim was made upon Israel, which did not produce a new faith. “What occurred instead was a confrontation in which the old faith was tested in the light of contemporary experience” (, pg. 9). The old faith came from the memory of the saving and commanding voice, and it is not forgotten. The state was lost, but history did not come to an end. In that understanding, God is still with Israel. There is a midrash which refers perhaps more to the Second Temple than to the First, but it reflects the determination to keep Israel together while in exile;

God foresaw that the Temple would be destroyed, and [God] said, “While the Temple exists, and you bring sacrifices, the Temple atones for you; when the Temple is not there, what shall atone for you? Busy yourselves with the words of the [Teachings], for they are equivalent to sacrifices, and they will atone for you.”

(Tanh.B., Ahare Mot, 35a)

(cited in Montefiorte, pg. 119)

The power of the word still lives in the hearts, minds and memory of Israel. In fact, biblical scholarship has determined Genesis 1 was written during, or shortly after, this period of exile. God of the word rises out of the ashes of God of the artifact, the Temple.

Tracing the trajectory of the midrashic tradition from the exile is difficult. Its source is buried. The arc has gaps. The line is blurred. There are three passages in Ezekiel that give us some hints to the possible spring point of the trajectory. Ezekiel, a priest of the Temple, had a house either in northern Judah or in Babylon (biblical scholarship is about evenly divided on this issue). In the course of six to seven years after the exile of King Jehoiachim, Ezekiel refers to “certain elders” of Judah/Israel sitting, or who sat, “before me” (Ezek 8:1; 14:1; 20:1). It is presumed this is an assembly organized either before the exile, or in exile, perhaps the Great Assembly or Synagogue. Legend has the Great Assembly began the tradition of the study of Torah. The soferim, or “scribes,” now as students of Torah (not as mere copiers of texts) probably come from the institution of the Great Assembly in Babylon during the Exile.