On Midrash (5/3/21)

I was reading today in a book titled The Bible With andWithout Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, authored by Amy Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler who are prominent Jewish professors at  Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Duke Center for Jewish Studies, respectively, working at the intersection of Christianity and Judaism.  Chapter 3, titled "The Creation of the World" has as its first subheading "In the Beginning."  Readers of this blog will probably recognize those words as the famous King James Version opening of Genesis, the first chapter in the Christian Old Testament.  The Christian Old Testament is basically the same as the Jewish Bible, also called the Tanakh (there are differences, but they are not important for present purposes).  Genesis was written in Hebrew, so whether the reader of an English version gets to Genesis through the Jewish tradition or the Christian tradition it comes to us mediated by the vagaries of translation from Biblical Hebrew.

Chapter 3 in the Levine-Brettler book with the subheading In the Beginning starts with the quote from famous prologue to John 1:1-5 (verse numbers omitted).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Professors Levine and Brettler say that the quote “is a midrash, or elaboration, on the opening verses of Genesis.”  (Emphasis supplied.)

As it happens, today I was working on midrash in connection with preparing to lead a book study group connected with Torah Study at Congregation Beth Israel in Houston.  The book is Moses: A Human Life by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.  The book is based significantly on midrash which, in Jewish biblical interpretation, fills out cryptic biblical text that might puzzle or even disturb the biblical reader.  Christian interpreters also do a form of midrash, as Professors Levine and Brettler note. 

My first introduction to midrash was in a 2005 listening to an interview of Zornberg by Krista Tippett (here).  The midrash was on what happened after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea and the waters closed over and drowned the Egyptian troops pursuing them.  The Israelites on the safe side celebrated with the Song of the Sea and Miriam’s song.  Exodus 15:1-21.  The midrash added that God stopped the angels in heaven from singing to celebrate the Israelite’s deliverance by the killing of the Egyptians; God rebuked the angels "the creatures of My hand, the work of My hands, are dying in the sea. How can you be singing a song of praise?”  I was stunned that Jewish tradition had added the flourish that was not hinted in the biblical text (at least to a literal reader).  The midrash extended and smoothed out what on its face was pretty harsh.  (Of course, it does not explain why God had not just made the Egyptians retreat without killing them, but that’s another story or another midrash.)

In preparing my discussion submission to the book study group, I spent some time trying to find a good relatively short discussion of the concept of midrash.  I thought I would offer some of the fruits of that search here.

 Zornberg in the book describes midrash:

These [midrashic] texts, compiled mainly in Palestine from the third to the tenth centuries, are amplifications of the biblical narratives. Gaps are intuited, turbulences are palpated. Based on ancient reading traditions, midrash arises out of the discussions and disagreements of the House of Study; it often takes its origin in homiletical oral presentations to the community. It carries authentic, even inevitable resonances of the biblical words.

 As I said to the book study group:

My distillation is that midrash (which, I think, was a continuing process after the tenth century) offered Judaism the opportunity to fill in the blanks of cryptic written text, in partnership with God and the biblical text, sometimes with great imagination, to make the text meaningful to the evolving Jewish community.  Perhaps I stretch a bit and quibble, but I think that midrash at least not only palpates turbulences but in some cases calms turbulences.

Another discussion of midrash from my favorite book on the Jewish Bible, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, by James Kugel, offers the following on midrash after describing a midrash that added to and smoothed out turbulences in the cryptic biblical text in the Binding of Isaac story, the Akedah:

By interpreting the [Akedah] story in this fashion, ancient interpreters solved two of the major problems raised by this account, God’s apparent ignorance of how the test would turn out and Abraham’s apparent callousness and evasiveness vis-à-vis Isaac. But did these interpreters actually believe their own interpretations? Didn’t they know they were playing fast and loose with the text’s real meaning?

This is always a difficult question. I personally believe that, at least at first, ancient interpreters were sometimes quite well aware that they were distorting the straightforward meaning of the text. But with time, that awareness began to dim. Biblical interpretation soon became an institution in ancient Israel; one generation’s interpretations were passed on to the next generation, and eventually they acquired the authority that time and tradition always grant. Midrash, as this body of interpretation came to be called, simply became what the text had always been intended to communicate. Along with the interpretations themselves, the interpreters’ very modus operandi acquired its own authority: this was how the Bible was to be interpreted, period. Moreover, since the midrashic method of searching the text carefully for hidden implications seemed to solve so many problems in the Bible that otherwise had no solution, this indicated that the interpreters were going about things correctly. As time went on, new interpretations were created on the model of older ones, until soon every chapter of the Bible came accompanied by a host of clever explanations that accounted for any perceived difficulty in its words.

Midrash, in its ancient tradition and in its ongoing dialog with the God of Israel, the text and the Jewish community does indeed solve many problems.

Finally, here is another midrash about Hadassah Levy, Moses and the Oral Law (Hadassah Levy, How did the Oral Law become part of the Torah? (Times of Israel 6/7/19), here.

A famous midrash in Menachot 29b recounts a fantastical story about an interaction in heaven between Moses and God:

R. Yehuda said in the name of Rav:

When Moses ascended to the heavens, he saw God sitting and tying crowns to the letters [of the Torah].

Moses asked, “What’s the hold up [i.e., why can’t you give the Torah as is]?

God replied, “there’s a man who will be in the future, after many generations, named Akiva b. Yosef, who will find in every jot and tittle mounds of laws.

Moses said, “Master of the Universe, show him to me!”

God said, “Turn around”

Moses went and sat in the eighth row of students in R. Akiva’s class, and had no idea what they were saying. His strength deflated.

The class asked R. Akiba about a certain matter, “From whence to you know this?” He replied, “It is a Law transmitted to Moses at Sinai. Moses’ mind was put at ease.