Weekly D'var

THE JEWISH LEGEND LITERATURE - PART II
Al Madansky, z”l
September-October 2007

Last month I gave some background and references to the body of Hebrew literature referred to as the Midrash.  It’s now time to delve into its content and the role Midrash plays in our religion.

Fundamental to all in our religion is the biblical text.  Indeed, each of our religious laws has an antecedent in a biblical text, sometimes called a “Proof Text,” i.e., a text from which, using certain rules of Talmudic reasoning, the law can be deduced.  (For those interested in a summary of these rules, see page 48 of the Art Scroll Siddur.) But the biblical text is to be viewed as more than a set of laws and proof texts for laws.  There are four levels at which the biblical text can be studied.  The first level is that of understanding the text itself; this level is called peshat (פשט, simple meaning).  The next level is that of viewing the text less straightforwardly, more as providing clues to deeper interpretations; this level is called remez (רמז, hint).  Beyond this level is one in which one goes beyond the text with, for example, an allegorical interpretation; this level is called derash (דרש, interpretation).  The ultimate level is the mystical level, in which one finds secret meanings to the text; this level is called sod (סוד, secret).  This multi-level set of interpretations is sometimes referred to as Pardes (פרדס), an acronym of the names of the four levels.

Let’s make this more concrete with an example.  The Torah begins with the word bereshit (בראשית).  Rashi is explicit about the peshat interpretation
(,ואם באת לפרש כפשוטו כך פרשהו, בראשית בריאת שמים וארץ), translating this word as “in the beginning of,” so that the full sentence is really a phrase which should end in a comma, namely, “In the beginning of God's creation of the heaven and the earth,”.  The Gaon of Vilna provides a remez interpretation, namely that the word בראשית is an acronym of the phrase
בן ראשון אחרי שלשים יום תפדה, “a first-born son should be redeemed after thirty days,” i.e., is a secret referent to the pidyon haben.  Here is a derash about בראשית.  Proverbs 8:22 refers to the Torah as “the beginning of his way” (ראשית דרכו); Jeremiah 2:3 refers to Israel as “first fruits” (ראשית תבואתו).  And so בראשית could be parsed as ב ראשית, interpreting the letter ב as the number 2, so that בראשית refers to the two בראשיתs, cited later in the Tanach, namely the Torah and Israel. Finally, here’s a sod level analysis of בראשית.  Ethics of the Fathers 5.1 says that the world was created with ten Divine utterances.  But if you count up the number of times in the Creation story the phrase “And God said” appears you will only come up with a count of nine.  The tenth utterance (see Megillah 21b) is the first sentence of the Torah, beginning with the word בראשית.  And the Talmud even gives a proof text, Psalm 33:6, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them [the earth] by the breath of His mouth.”  Since the creation of heaven and earth is only mentioned in the first sentence, this, too counts as an utterance of God.

The Midrash concentrates mostly on the derash level and somewhat on the remez level.  The sod level is the domain of the Kabbalah.  Not all Midrash is as exegetical as the above example might indicate.  Some of the Midrash pertains to law, and so is called halachic Midrash.  Some of the Midrash is designed to clarify the story text of the Torah.  But there are lots of material in the Midrash that are merely anecdotes and folktales (sometimes called Aggadah) which have little if any connection to the Torah itself.

The midrashic texts are largely the fragmentary remains of sermons preached in synagogues during the Talmudic period.  As such they may include rhetorical devices and often exaggerated material whose intent was to hold the attention of a live audience.  Being fragmentary, they often seem to be notes of innovative and interesting interpretations. The Rabbis were less interested in historical truth than in the moral lessons which could be drawn from the Torah.  The Rabbis viewed the Bible as a document that tells not only of its own historical time but relates also directly to the present. For this reason, much of the Midrashic Aggadah is subjective interpretation, creative rather than analytical in its approach to biblical historiography and philology.

Where details seem missing from the biblical text, the Aggadah fills them in.  Genesis 21:21 mentions that Hagar, Ishmael's mother, took a wife for him, but does not mention her name; the Aggadah names names, telling us that Ishmael had two wives named Fatima and Aisha.  In adding such specifics, the Rabbis might even stretch the obvious intention of the biblical text and the canons of historical probability in order to stress some message or moral. The statement that Isaac was thirty-seven years old when he was taken by Abraham to be sacrificed on Mt. Moriah is hardly obvious from the Genesis text; the addition of this detail in the Aggadah both serves to attribute merit to Isaac (since he was old enough to resist this supreme trial) and to tie the news of this terrifying incident chronologically as well as causally to the death of his mother Sarah.

No wonder the Midrash achieved the folk-popularity that it did amongst the Jewish people.