Midrash and History
At the beginning of his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson poses a formidable question. “The Jews,” he writes, “created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives. They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present. Whence came this extraordinary endurance? What was the particular strength of the all-consuming idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogenous?”1Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 1.
Johnson is right to pose the question in these terms. For Jews were a people defined by an idea, specifically a faith. For that reason they were able to survive the loss of all other bases of nationhood: territory, sovereignty, the Temple and priesthood, even a shared culture and a common language of everyday speech. From the first to the nineteenth centuries of the common era, disempowered, dispersed, distributed among a variety of cultures, Jews nonetheless retained the characteristics of a nation. This, neither they nor their neighbours doubted. They were a people preserved by the force of a single all-consuming idea: the idea, quite simply, that they were a people apart, chosen for a special destiny.
Of the content of this idea, there is no mystery. God, creator of the universe, had, after the division of mankind into a multiplicity of nations, taken one extended family to be His witnesses. They were to be the bearers of His covenant. Their lives would enact His will. Their fate would mirror their faith or faithlessness. History itself would be a commentary to the covenant. And this idea, its prescriptions and organising themes, was contained in a document – no mere document but the constitution of the covenant, the divine word accepted by a people as the code of its destiny: the Torah.
The idea of “Torah from Heaven” was, even before it was explicitly formulated, far more than a belief about the origin of a text. It was a belief about the origin of a destiny. “Torah from Heaven” did more than negate the idea that a people was the author of its own texts. It reversed it. It suggested that the text was the author of the people. It went beyond the assertion that the Pentateuch was sacred scripture. It affirmed that the covenant it embodied had brought the people into being and would keep them in being despite their disobediences and exiles. The text was the source of Israel’s separate and specific identity and the secret of its extraordinary endurance. “The script,” notes George Steiner, “is a contract with the inevitable. God has, in the dual sense of utterance and binding affirmation, ‘given His word,’ His logos and His bond, to Israel. It cannot be broken or refuted.”2George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (Winter/Spring 1985), 12.
But this last sentence brings us face to face with the elemental drama of modern Jewry. If the Torah cannot be broken or refuted, then it applies no less to the present than the past. The events of the past half-century are not mere history but the unfolding of a timeless covenant through time. The arguments of modern Jewish thought are, on this interpretation, not philosophical, the abstract pursuit of knowledge wherever it might lead. Rather, they belong to what was once the domain of prophecy, the attempt to understand the religious meaning of specific events. To be sure, we no longer have access to prophetic certainty. Therefore we do not know whether the Holocaust echoes the Book of Job or Lamentations or the “suffering servant” of Isaiah or Ezekiel’s vision of collective death and resurrection. We do not know whether the return to Zion is a fulfilment of the prophecies of ingathering and whether the State of Israel is the first step towards the messianic age. But of one thing we can be certain: that these are events with religious meaning. They belong to that interplay between divine providence and human free will that the sages saw as the essence of the covenant. It is not absurd to interpret the present through the texts of the past. To the contrary, that is where its meaning lies. For Torah, the word binding God and Israel, cannot be broken or refuted. It is the code through which Jewry’s present no less than its past is to be deciphered.
But – and it is a momentous “but” – for some Jews the uniqueness of modernity is precisely that it cannot be assimilated to biblical anticipations. The Holocaust shatters our prior paradigms of suffering and evil. Israel, a secular Jewish state in the holy land, has no place in the prophetic scheme of heavenly redemption. At Auschwitz, Jews stared evil in the eye and could find no divine consolation. In Israel, Jews took fate into their own hands, relying on no divine protection. For such Jews, the present is not to be understood as the fifty-eighth century, covenantal time, a frame of reference that relates their lives to creation, the patriarchs, the exodus and the prophets. Instead it is the twentieth century, secular time, a context that marks a radical break with the past. For them, the covenant has been both refuted and broken: refuted by the Holocaust, broken by the conscious secularity of Israel. The meaning of the present is not to be sought in the past but in the revolutionary decision on the part of Jews to liberate themselves from covenantal destiny in favour of the active shaping of history, responsive to no heavenly voice. Which then is the image of Torah in our time: the scroll of Rabbi Chaninah ben Teradyon, its parchments burning but its letters immortal, or the tablets of stone brought down by Moses and shattered into fragments at the foot of the mountain?
Judaism is a religion of texts and its central arguments are arguments about texts. The division of opinion about “Torah from Heaven” is therefore vaster than its academic terms of reference imply. “Torah from Heaven” is the generative principle of Jewish destiny. Remove it and Jews and Judaism are reduced to the universalities of ethics and theology and the accidents of history and sociology. To understand the seismic movements of modern Jewish thought we must set them against the broadest of backgrounds: the relationship between revelation and textuality, interpretation and time, language and spirituality. In particular we must pay attention to the point of transition between biblical and postbiblical Judaism, for it is our best model with which to understand the stresses to which the covenant is subject at times of crisis and epochal change.
The word
Searching for a characterisation of Jewish consciousness, the nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz formulated a fundamental insight:
To the pagan, the divine appears within nature as something observable to the eye. He becomes conscious of it as something seen. In contrast, to the Jew who knows that the divine exists beyond, outside of, and prior to nature, God reveals Himself through a demonstration of His will, through the medium of the ear. The human subject becomes conscious of the divine through hearing and obeying. Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him; that is, it hears the commandments of His will.3Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History, translated by Ismar Schorch (1975), 68.
Subsequent researches into the nature of ancient Near Eastern religions allow us to flesh out this proposition. The differences between mythological cultures notwithstanding, their common feature is “the notion of a cosmic continuum, of a monism of divine life which finds expression or individuation in and through the plenum of nature.”4Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 50. There is no clear-cut differentiation between man and nature on the one hand, man and God on the other. Instead there is deep harmony. An iconic insect or animal can represent a cosmic deity, for the gods are present in nature, as is man. Life-and-death, time itself, is a self-germinating, endlessly repeated cycle. Reality constitutes a single unbroken whole.
This natural harmony is decisively rejected by Israelite monotheism. The world is demythologised or in Max Weber’s term, “disenchanted.” In place of the all-in-all, the opening chapters of Genesis set forth a vision in which God, man and nature are radically distinct. God stands outside the world which He creates. He acts through history, not nature. He acts ethically, which is to say through choice and principle. He is subject, not object. God is, in Peter Berger’s phrase, “fundamentally immune to magical manipulation.”5Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 117. Man too is marked by his ability to confront, name and master nature; by his freedom and responsibility and thus his capacity to be an agent in history.
The sensed immediacy of the gods, systematically present to the senses, has no place in this vision. A chasm separates man the finite being from an awesomely transcendent God. Only one thing now connects them, fragile, insubstantial but infinitely resonant: words. Man speaks to God in prayer. God speaks to man in revelation. Through speaking and hearing, transcendence enters the human frame. The word is the vehicle of all meaning and relationship, the point at which heaven and earth touch. Though God is unimaginably distant, “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.”6Deuteronomy 30:14.
God brings the world into existence through words: He speaks and the world is. Adam and Eve experience God as “a voice” in the garden. The patriarchs and prophets encounter Him in the promise and the command. The miracles in Egypt and the wilderness are only prolegomena to the formative moment of the covenant, itself an act of speaking and hearing. Moses reminds the Israelites that at Sinai, “You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens… Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice.”7Deuteronomy 4:12. The commands reverberate with a twofold theme: the prohibition against worshipping any form that can be seen, and a repeated invocation to “hear” and thus obey the word of God. For God is found in words.
Canonisation and interpretation
God, heard collectively at Sinai, continues to be heard by the prophets. But there is already a perceptible difference between the word spoken for the present moment and the word spoken for eternity. Moses relays laws; subsequent prophets warn, reprimand, envisage, but they do not legislate. The covenant unfolds in and through the history of Israel, of which prophecy is the inspired, authoritative commentary. But its essential constitution has been given in Israel’s prehistory, in the decisive encounter in the wilderness.
At a certain point in Israel’s existence, however, a twofold crisis supervenes, gathering momentum over several centuries and threatening the very basis of the covenant. The first is the cessation of the word, the gradual eclipse of prophecy. Already in the wake of the return of the exiles from Babylon we hear Zechariah’s dream of a time when “every prophet will be ashamed of his prophetic vision. He will not put on a prophet’s hairy mantle in order to deceive.”8Zechariah 13:4. It is not that there are no more prophets. It is that there are too many. Their words no longer carry assurance and the promise of authenticity. An alienation has set in from the primal experience of the heard word. There is a sensed moment of transition. Its most powerful expression is the long process of the canonisation of the sacred scriptures. With this activity a period has reached its closure. Beginning with Ezra, a new religious type enters and dominates the religious arena: not the prophet but the scribe. That is not to say that the covenant has ceased to unfold, but from now onwards it does so in a new, though still verbal, medium. Judaism had moved from the word heard to the word interpreted.
Interpretation was henceforth to bear the burden of prophecy, namely of turning the word spoken for eternity into the word spoken for the present. But a second crisis now threatened, perhaps the most serious since Israel’s history began. From the late second Temple period to the second century CE the bases of Jewish existence were one by one weakened and then destroyed: the Temple, sacrifices and priesthood, monarchy and sovereignty, even the land of Israel as the centre of Jewish life. Two things differentiated the destruction of the second Temple from that of the first. There were no prophets to interpret catastrophe. And by the time of the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE, an exile was taking shape that had no end in sight and which was in fact to last until the present century. The burden placed on interpretation was immense. Could the word spoken at Sinai apply to a situation unprecedented in Jewish history? If Judaism was to survive it would have to do so along different axes than political sovereignty or the Temple and its service. Could the divine word yield a meaning even for this hour? If it could not, the covenant itself was at risk of being broken and refuted.
At this stage a doctrine implicit in Judaism since its beginnings took on an immense significance: the idea of an oral Torah, coeval with the Written Torah and of equal authority, the concept of “revelation including within itself as sacred tradition the later commentary concerning its own meaning,”9Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1972), 288. No principle could have had more fateful consequences. It meant that the divine word could leap intact over even the abyss of catastrophe. New situations and the responses they called forth were already contained in the original revelation. What Rabbi Akiva was to say in the shadow of the ruins of Jerusalem was no more and no less than a “law spoken to Moses at Sinai.” The rabbis had no doubt as to the critical importance of this idea. Because of it, despite the silence following the end of prophecy, the Word continued unabated. Exegesis replaced inspiration. “Since the destruction of the Temple,” the Talmud noted, “prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the sages.”10Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 12a. The chain of transmission and renewal was unbroken, for tradition carried the dignity and authority of revelation.
The early rabbinic period has left us with a record of two intense activities. One was the articulation and codification of the Oral Law. The other was the work of showing that the Oral Law was implicit in the Written Law. There can be no doubt that oral law is as old as the law itself: no law can exist without interpretation and application. The Written Torah, for example, leaves underdefined some of its most basic institutions, such as the nature of tefillin (phylacteries) or the precise manner in which the Sabbath is to be observed. To be translatable into action the law must therefore be accompanied by further provisions not explicit in the text itself. Hence the necessity of an oral law. But the question now arises as to the status of the Oral Law: its authorship and authority. To this, the logic of the covenant yields only one possible answer. If Sinai is the constitutive moment of Israel’s existence, the unique point at which heaven and earth touched and the immutable code of Israel’s being was revealed, then all law, oral as well as written, is contained within it. Only the words transmitted by Moses carry permanent legislative authority. All oral law is therefore a direct tradition from Sinai (halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai) or an interpretation of the written text using rules themselves authorised by that revelation.
Few ideas are more fundamental to Judaism. Revelation is not progressive, nor is history evolution. To the contrary, revelation was a unique event to which subsequent history is the commentary. As a result, all authority lies within the word spoken at Sinai. Neither the prophets nor the sages saw themselves as innovators. To be sure, they might be mandated by the Torah to issue protective decrees or temporary suspensions to safeguard biblical law, but the law itself could be neither added to nor subtracted from. Oral law was therefore no mere “tradition,” law seen as the product of historical evolution. Such a view, though it accords with the assumptions of modern historicism, is wholly at odds with Judaic concepts of revelation, interpretation and authority. For if the covenant cannot be broken or refuted, then it contains within itself the code by which Israel agrees to be bound not only at some time but for all time. There can be no new revelation which alters the terms of the old, whether delivered by prophets, the “collective conscience” of the Jewish people, or historical catastrophe. On this, Jewish faith depends.
In the crisis affecting Jewry at the end of the second Temple period this faith was to prove crucial. For it meant that beneath the wreckage of the physical and institutional world of the Bible, its spiritual world was intact and unchanged. There was nothing new that was not at the same time and essentially a disclosure of the old. Though the circumstances of Israel’s existence had changed, its terms had not. The covenant was still in force. Its own texts said so. The curses at the end of the book of Leviticus, prophesying devastation and exile, ended with God’s insistence that “In spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking My covenant with them.”11Leviticus 26:44. If that were so and the Torah was still in force, then contained within its initial revelation must be the rules and meanings governing a Judaic response to the present. “The sages that have arisen in every generation received their teachings from Sinai.”12Exodus Rabbah 28:9. That faith is central to Judaism, and it was given consistent expression by those who lived through catastrophe, the Pharisees and the early rabbinic sages. Thus was crisis negotiated and the continuity of the covenant secured.
Crisis and continuity
Two points, however, should be noted about this period in Jewish history. The first is that it was a crisis. No religious faith, however ancient and vigorous, is invulnerable to events which threaten its very survival. In the present instance, Jewry was deeply fragmented by the situation it faced in the centuries immediately before and after the Common Era. The route taken by the Pharisees and the rabbinic sages was by no means the only one possible. We know of several groups who did not believe that interpretation could bear the weight placed upon it, and who thus denied the concept of an Oral Law. Among them were the Sadducees, a conservative and privileged group associated with the priesthood and the Hasmonean kings, who denied the elasticity implicit in an oral Torah which continually disclosed new facets of the Mosaic revelation. There were the Jewish sectarians, among them the group known through the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, who believed that scripture pointed not to the continuation of the past but to an apocalyptic end of history in which the foundations of the world would be shaken. And there were the Jewish‒Christians, one of whom, Paul, declared that the covenant had now ended and a new one taken its place.
Faced with crisis a tradition can respond in several ways. It can cling to conservative literalism, the route taken by the Sadducees. It can hope for miraculous deliverance from its predicament, the path taken by the sectarians. Or it can branch out in a new direction, replacing one tradition with another, the course mapped out by the early Church. The idea that revelation contained within itself the mandate for its own interpretation – that the new is continuous with and implicit within the old – was neither simple nor self-evident. The metamorphosis from Temple to synagogue, prophet to sage, sacrifice to prayer, atonement to repentance, agricultural to charitable redistribution and enlandisement to exile involved massive and systematic reinterpretation. Nonetheless, the history of postbiblical Judaism until the modern age is that of those who undertook this reinterpretation. The Sadducees and sects rapidly disappeared. Christianity became a religion in its own right. Those who remained Jews were those who were loyal to the faith that change of circumstance and new interpretation did not mean change in the terms of the covenant.
The second point, equally fundamental, is that we are now in a position to assess the claim that divided Pharisees and rabbis on the one hand from Sadducees, sectarians and Christians on the other, namely that postbiblical Judaism is marked by its principled continuity with rather than its departure from the terms of biblical Judaism. Until recently, no issue had been more fraught with ideology. For the Sadducees, and in later centuries the Karaites, the Oral Law was a rabbinic invention. Only revelation, not interpretation, carried divine authority. For the Church fathers, rabbinic Judaism was an obstinate refusal to recognise the new religious dispensation, the end of the “old” covenant. For surely the biblical texts themselves pointed to the advent of the Messiah. For nineteenth-century Jewish historians, anxious to legitimate reform, the early rabbis were themselves reformers. The Oral Law was a fiction under cover of which they enacted change. If any of these was true then the millennial claims of Judaism were false. The covenant had changed. Either it had been superseded by a new testament or it had evolved into a tradition whose authority was merely human and, being human, could be revoked. These assumptions governed both the reading of texts and the interpretation of history, so that a detached evaluation was difficult, perhaps impossible.
Recent researches, however, have allowed us to see how ancient is the history of interpretation in Israel. Focusing on the idea of “inner-biblical exegesis,” scholars have disclosed within the prophetic books themselves a constant reworking of Pentateuchal themes. Applying to the Bible the insight of Gershom Scholem13Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 282–303; “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1972), 32–86. and Simon Rawidowicz14“On Interpretation,” in Simon Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 45–80. into the importance of interpretation for Jewish consciousness, Michael Fishbane concludes that close textual analysis of the Bible supports “the validity of early Pharisaic claims that their exegetical tradition derives from biblical antiquity.”15Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 527. The “hermeneutical imagination” at work in the prophetic books is marked by its “desire to prolong the divine voice into a present which presupposes the entire Sinaitic revelation, and its willingness to subordinate the human exegetical voice, whose undisguised presence would then underscore a gap in the authority of the revealed law.”16Fishbane, The Garments of Torah, 11. Put at its simplest, the relationship between the prophets and the Mosaic books is precisely that suggested by the Judaic concept of oral law. The axioms explicit and implicit in rabbinic Judaism – that oral law is as old as the law itself, that tradition unfolds not through innovation but interpretation, and that this is a continuous process dating back to Israel’s origins – have thus received new scholarly attention and vindication. To be sure, there is inevitably a difference between prophetic and rabbinic exegesis, between modes of interpretation before and after the closing of the canon. Nonetheless literary analysis has provided fresh and independent support for the rabbis’ own contention that they were not innovators but rather continuers of the covenant in a time of cataclysm.
No less significant is the evidence provided by the shape of the biblical canon. Here we touch on the vexed question at stake between Judaism and Christianity: the advent of the messianic age. There can be no doubt that the concept of a final redemption is implicit in the Bible from its very beginning. Substantively and stylistically the Bible presupposes a chiasmic or arching structure of time. Many of its laws and narratives are cast in a chiasmus, an A-B-B-A form in which the second half reverses the order of the first (for example, “He who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed” [Genesis 9:6]). Form here mirrors content, for the chiasmus suggests that there is a moral order in the universe which may be disrupted but which will eventually be restored. In a chiasmus, the end is implicit in the beginning. The harmony present at the beginning of Genesis will return at the end of time. Exile already contains within itself the promise of ultimate return. From the outset, history holds the possibility of disruption: the sin of Adam, the rebellion of the Israelites. Such is the inevitable result of human free will. But human freedom exists in subtle dialectic with divine providence. Thus disruption is accompanied by the promise of eventual restoration. The story of Israel and of mankind is one of alienation and reconciliation, exile and return. This constitutes the messianic thrust of the biblical literature.
But the explosive question has been: When is the messianic moment? It was this question that, over the centuries, persistently divided the Jewish mainstream from its schismatic movements: the early apocalyptic sects, Christianity, the Sabbatean and Frankist pseudo-messianisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the quasi-messianic thrust of German‒American Reform and secular Zionism. The history of Judaism has been written by those who, in answer to the question “When will the Messiah come?” have replied without loss of messianic faith, “Not yet.” Was this answer already implicit in sacred scripture?
Here we note an extraordinary feature of the canonisation of the Hebrew Bible. At the core of the Bible, bearing the name Torah, is a Pentateuch, not a Hexateuch.17See, for example, Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 47. The Torah does not end at what might seem to be the most logical point, with the book of Joshua and the fulfilment of the promise of the land. Instead it ends a book earlier, at Deuteronomy, with the Israelites still waiting to enter the land and Moses seeing it from afar. The same pattern is evident in Genesis itself and in the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The book of Genesis closes with Jacob’s family in Egypt and Joseph’s vision of return. The book of Chronicles, with which the Hebrew canon ends, closes with Cyrus’s permission for the Babylonian exiles to return. The story of Jewish history might have been structured differently. Genesis might have ended with the Israelites leaving Egypt. The Bible as a whole might have ended with the return of the Babylonian exiles, their covenantal renewal documented in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, or the glorious vision of the closing chapters of Isaiah heralding an era of justice and peace. Such a division would have produced a natural sense of closure. Instead, the ordering of the biblical texts forces us repeatedly to focus on a promised but unachieved future. The Bible tells of a story not yet completed, a destination not yet reached. Recently, Brevard Childs has alerted us to the importance of the canon for our understanding of the Bible as a whole.18Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London: SCM Press, 197)9. If so, then the canonisation of the Hebrew Bible suggests precisely what Judaism maintained as its normative belief: that messianic faith is both fundamental and always directed to the future. Judaism, in contradistinction to Christianity, maintains that human existence is redeemable but not yet redeemed. The announcement of the end of history is always premature.
Midrash and Time
Thus the route taken by postbiblical Judaism cannot accurately be described as merely one among several alternatives. It was, as recent literary analysis has helped us to understand, the one suggested by the inner logic of the Bible itself. It was the route of continuity sustained through catastrophe. It was predicated, above all, on the idea of the Oral Law which was in turn entailed by the belief, enshrined in the Written Torah, that the covenant between God and Israel would endure for all time.
The means by which Judaism survived the loss of sovereignty, Temple and land was essentially textual, namely by reinterpretation understood as the disclosure of new facets already present within the original Sinaitic revelation. This entailed a specific view of the relationship between text and time, and the rejection of alternatives: Sadducean literalism, sectarian apocalyptics and the Christian new covenant, each of which Judaism saw as discontinuous with the Bible. We must now explore in greater detail the nature of textuality and time in postbiblical Judaism from the mishnaic to the Middle Ages.
For the rabbis, since all development is already implicit in the sacred text of Torah, change is merely apparent, not real. History as the arena of transformation is negated. Scholars have noted the extraordinary fact that in the Mishnah and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds we find little reference to the most important events of the ages during which they were compiled. Despite their vast and elaborate detail, it is impossible to reconstruct a contemporary history from these sources. “The Mishnah’s framer’s deepest yearning,” writes one scholar, “is not for historical change but for ahistorical stasis.”19Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27. The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi puts the point more forcibly still. One of the most distinctive features of biblical Judaism is its dedication to history as the working out of the covenant. Indeed it was ancient Israel that first conceived of history as the stage of the drama of redemption, the place where God’s will and design were revealed. It is therefore “all the more remarkable that after the close of the biblical canon the Jews virtually stopped writing history.” Between the first century and the nineteenth, with the sole exception of the period following the Spanish expulsion, there were almost no histories and historians. “It is though, abruptly, the impulse to historiography had ceased.”20Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1982), 16.
Time, for Judaism, is the vehicle of revelation, and with the shift from revelation to interpretation, a new concept of time took hold, one that dominates both the halakhic and aggadic imagination. All time becomes a simultaneous present. There is no concept of anachronism: “There is no ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Torah.”21Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 6b. In the rabbinic readings of the Torah, the patriarchs inhabit the world of the sages.22See Yitzchak Heinemann, Darkhei ha-Aggadah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1970), 35–43. Jacob contemplates the Roman conquest.23Midrash Tanchuma, Vayetze, 2. Moses hears a legal exposition by Rabbi Akiva and learns that it is “a law given to Moses at Sinai.”24Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 29b. In halakhah the same atemporality applies. A single legal argument extends from a first-century mishnaic teacher to a talmudic interpreter to a medieval commentator to an eighteenth-century codifier with no sense of innovation or discontinuity. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik has described the halakhic sense of time in these words:
[T]here is a past that persists in its existence, that does not vanish and disappear but remains firm in its place… The Jewish people’s all-embracing collective consciousness of time – the sages of the tradition, the Second Temple era, the age of classical prophecy, the Exodus from Egypt, the lives of the patriarchs, the creation itself – is an integral part of the “I” awareness of halakhic man… The consciousness of halakhic man, that master of the received tradition, embraces the entire company of the sages of the masorah. He lives in their midst, discusses and argues questions of halakhah with them, delves into and analyses fundamental halakhic principles in their company. All of them merge into one time experience.25Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, translated by Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 117–20.
This entailed a way of reading texts. The definitive rabbinic mode of reading is midrash, literally a “searching out” of meaning implicit in the words. Much has been written about the methods of midrash, but what concerns us here is its fundamental hermeneutic stance, namely that the biblical text contains infinite intentionality. In general, the meaning of a text is governed by the intention of its author, the context of its composition, the audience for whom it was intended and the linguistic conventions within which it was written. These criteria have some determinacy when applied to a human author but none when applied to a divine Author speaking to all Jews in all generations. The generative principle of midrash is the bridging of the hermeneutic distance between Sinai and the present. Its assumption is that the meaning of the Torah cannot be historicised to a single context. Its task is to search out, within the Word spoken then and there, the meaning intended for now and here.
The modes of classic rabbinic midrash varied from the highly formal, utilising fixed exegetical rules such as those collated by Hillel, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, to the spontaneous, imaginative and allusive. Midrash was used both to derive laws (midrash halakhah) and to interpret scriptural narrative (midrash aggadah). In some cases, especially in the domain of law, there were decision procedures for arriving at a correct conclusion. In others such as the fleshing out of biblical narrative and ethical and theological reflection, the rabbis were inclined to let conflicting interpretations stand, reflecting as they did the many-sidedness of truth seen from the human perspective.26See Gerald Blidstein, “Al Rav-Muvaniut ha-Torah,” Deot 44, 270–74. Of two opinions it could be said that “these and these are the words of the living God,”27Babylonian Talmud, Eiruvin 13b, Gittin 6b. or that “one verse yields many meanings,”28Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 34a. or, as a later aphorism put it, that “there are seventy faces to the Torah.”29See Responsa Radbaz, 643; Numbers Rabbah 13:15. In the middle ages kabbalists and philosophers used extensions of midrashic methodology to ground their systems in the biblical text. But underlying all these internal variations is the belief that Torah is the repository of all truth, and that truth in turn acquires its validation and authority by being discovered in its words. Its guiding principle was summarised in the dictum of a mishnaic sage: “Turn it [the Torah] over and turn it over again, for it contains everything.”30Mishnah, Avot 5:25.
In the Middle Ages, under the influence of rationalism and the polemic with Christian biblical interpretation, a sharp distinction was made between derash, the midrashic meaning and peshat, the literal, grammatical or historical sense. For the first time commentators such as Abraham Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam) and Rabbi Joseph Kara attached independent dignity to peshat, the “plain sense of things.” However, even for such commentators midrash retained its primacy as authoritative reading. Thus Rashbam, in a passage explaining his methods, writes that “the main point of the Torah” is to teach the laws and ethical principles derived by midrash. He confesses that his own concern, which is to seek “the deep plain sense of Scripture,” is of secondary significance.31Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, Commentary to Genesis 37:2; see also his comments to Genesis 1:1. Or as we might put it, if Torah yields a multiplicity of meanings, the plain sense is certainly one of them,32See the interesting, if speculative, comments of David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah and Gemara (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 105–15. but what is normative for the life of the community is the midrashic tradition. What is more, a clear polarity between derash and peshat is unknown to the early sages. In a masterly essay, Raphael Loewe has shown that though the term peshat was used by the rabbis of the talmudic age, it referred not to the “literal” but rather to the recognised, accepted or authoritative meaning.33Raphael Loewe, “The ‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis,” Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964), volume 1, 141–85.
Midrash, then, is neither a primitive anticipation of later, more critical methods, nor is it simply one interpretive genre among others such as the independent search for the plain, original meaning. For its early and medieval practitioners, midrash was the plain sense of the verse, given the cognitive assumption of reading a text as Torah, namely that the meaning it holds for us, here, now is the one it was intended to hold when the words were first spoken.34See Adin Steinsaltz, “Peshuto shel Mikra,” Deot 20 (Summer 1960), 13–18. For their author was not Moses but God, and their audience was not the generation of the wilderness but all future generations also.
Midrash is a precise reflex of rabbinic theology, the detailed working out of the proposition that throughout the dislocations of exile, the covenant remains unchanged. It is exegesis born in the tension between the empirical discontinuity of the present with the world of the Pentateuch, and the principled continuity of Pentateuch with the present as its unbroken, unbreakable and still operative code. Without the discontinuity, there would be no need for midrash. Without the continuity, there would be no possibility of it. Midrash is the continuation of the covenant through the perceived discontinuities of history.
The midrashic concept of Torah
Midrash as a way of reading the biblical text implies a particular view of what kind of text it is. What is its purpose or point? To what genre is it to be assigned? The answer is implicit in the name tradition gave it, namely Torah, meaning law, teaching and instruction. For midrash, the question to which Torah is the answer is less “What happened?” than “How then shall I live?”
An extreme expression of this is to be found in a midrash cited by Rashi at the beginning of his commentary to the Torah. “Rabbi Yitzchak said: the Torah should have begun with the verse, ‘This month shall be to you the first of months’ [Exodus 12:2] which is the first of the commandments given to Israel.”35Rashi, Commentary to Genesis 1:1; Midrash Tanchuma [Buber], Bereishit, 13. Behind Rabbi Yitzchak’s remark is the assumption that the Torah is essentially a book of commandments, and should therefore have begun with the first command addressed to the children of Israel. This implies a remarkable indifference to factual information, for it contemplates a Torah which omitted without loss the narratives of creation, the flood, the patriarchs, the exile and the first stages of exodus. The suggestion is not to be taken at its face value, for Rabbi Yitzchak was aware that the Torah did not begin in middle of the book of Exodus. But it reveals an essential characteristic of midrash. When the sages ask, “Why was this written?” or “Why was this passage placed next to that?” their typical answer is not “Because that is how things happened,” but “To teach you that…”
To be sure, much aggadic midrash is concerned to fill in the lacunae of biblical narrative. What did Cain say to Abel? Who was the “man” who wrestled with Jacob? Who found Joseph wandering in the field? But in answering such questions, midrash does not adopt the naturalism that informs the biblical text itself. Instead, in Yitzchak Heinemann’s phrase, it engages in “creative historiography,” almost invariably with a controlling theological or ethical intent. The Bible’s moral contrasts are heightened;36See Zevi Hirsch Chajes, The Student’s Guide through the Talmud, translated by Jacob Shachter (London: East and West Library, 1952), chapter 17, 139–47. episodes in the lives of the patriarchs foreshadow later developments in Jewish history; daring theological reflections are placed into the mouths of biblical characters.37For one strand in this tradition, see Anson Laytner, Arguing with God, (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1990). Every nuance of the text is searched not for its correspondence with empirical actuality but for its halakhic or moral implications. For the sages, Torah is not an assemblage of facts but a series of rules and models of how Israel should live and thereby be sanctified. That is its genre and proper mode of interpretation. Torah is not information but instruction.
That is not to say that there was no discussion of the correspondence between Torah and reality. That there was correspondence was assured by the fact that the Author of the Torah was also the Author of the world. But there was deep debate as to which served as the commentary to the other. A rationalist strand within Judaism argued that what we know of the world must govern our understanding of Torah, while a mystical tendency insisted that what we know of Torah must govern our understanding of the world. Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva debated whether the Torah was to be understood through, or independently of, the conventions of human language.38See the sources cited in Abraham J. Heschel, Theology of Ancient Judaism [Hebrew], volumes 1–2 (London: Soncino, 1962). Maimonides and Nachmanides disagreed as to whether Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel, Balaam’s talking donkey and Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of a whale took place in physical space or in prophetic visions.39Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:42; Nachmanides, Commentary to Genesis 18:1. The medieval philosophers declared that if a verse conflicted with the dictates of reason it was to be understood other than literally, while the medieval mystics assumed that precisely where a verse conflicted with reason it disclosed the structure of a supernatural reality. Similar arguments took place about aggadic statements themselves: Were they meant literally or metaphorically, mystically or philosophically? But these differences, though profound, were marginal to the issue at hand. They concerned the nature of language and reality but not the point of the Torah which was, for all, authoritative instruction on how to live and the interpretive key to nature and history.
We can now attempt a modern restatement of what Torah min ha-shamayim, “Torah from Heaven,” meant for rabbinic tradition. Torah is the constitution of the covenant between God and Israel. As such it is a relational concept. It involves One who proposes the covenant and those who accept it as binding; One who commands, and those who are commanded. It embodies two ideas, the giving of the Torah and the receiving of the Torah. The giving of the Torah is a mysterious and metaphysical idea, though no less and no more so than any other divine activity. “And God said” is a statement of the same logical form as “And God did.” The mystery in both cases lies at the intersection of the infinite with the finite, the supernatural with the empirical. Revelation and miracle both speak of the breakthrough of the transcendent into the world of the senses. By the twelfth century Maimonides was aware that such concepts lay outside the parameters of science. Science was concerned with the regular and repeatable. It could find no point of access to events that were by their nature unique and non-recurring. The revelation at Sinai, he wrote, is “one of the mysteries of the Torah,” adding that “It is very difficult to have a true conception of the events, for there has never been before, nor will there ever be again, anything like it.”40Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:33. The idea of Torah as revelation is therefore inaccessible to scientific research and belongs to a different frame of reference. But this provokes the positivist question: What difference does belief in revelation make?
The answer lies in the second pole of the relationship: the receiving of the Torah. Torah min ha-shamayim was not, for the rabbis, a mere metaphysical postulate. It was instead a hermeneutic stance. It determined how Torah was to be understood. Specifically it entailed what we might call a covenantal reading of the Torah, and we are now in a position to spell out what such reading involves. Firstly the Torah reveals not only information about God but God Himself: for God is found not in nature but in words. To be sure, God creates nature and acts in history, but He can be discerned in both only through His will made articulate in His word. Neither creation nor history carry their meaning on their surface: only the prophet, bearer of the word, or the sage, the word’s interpreter, can decipher it. The primary encounter is not with something outside the text but with the text itself.
Secondly the Torah is a covenantal document and its proper interpretation follows from this fact. Its eternity is no theological abstraction but follows from the covenantal commitment that God will not break or retract His word to Israel. Its words convey not “facts” but instruction and command. The seminal facts of the Pentateuch, the creation and the exodus, have moral implications and their significance lies in teaching us how to live. Torah can therefore never be simply read: it is proclaimed, heard, studied and obeyed. The encounter with the text is an explicitly religious act which must be prefaced by a blessing. There can be no detached academic study of Torah, because to understand it as Torah is to hear it as command. Nor is there universal access to the Torah, for it is addressed to the covenantal community, specifically to the heirs of those who at Sinai agreed to be bound by it.41Hence the rabbinic assertion that “If you are told, ‘There is wisdom among the nations,’ believe it. If you are told, ‘There is Torah among the nations,’ do not believe it” (Lamentations Rabbah 2:17). Those who interpret Torah do so as part of that community, meaning that they are bound by the tradition of interpretation accepted as authoritative by the congregation of faith. Indeed, “The community can be defined as a concentric tradition of reading.”42Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” 7.
Thirdly, since Torah forms the constitution of a covenant never to be revoked, there can be no further revelation; instead there can and must be continuing commentary on revelation. The sages were indeed heirs of the prophets, for midrash in its broadest sense is as old as Judaism itself. To be sure, there are marked differences between the prophetic and rabbinic literature, due to the intervening canonisation of Scripture, the difference in their historic context and the rabbinic insistence, after the close of prophecy, on the primacy of “rule-governed imagination”43The phrase is Frank Kermode’s. See his “The Plain Sense of Things,” in Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 179–94. over inspiration. But the centrality of commentary in biblical and postbiblical Judaism exemplifies in both substance and form the working-through of its fundamental assumption, namely the principled continuity and “textuality” of Jewish history. What happens now and in the future is “prescripted”; its meaning has already been written and merely awaits interpretation. This does not mean that events are predetermined. Man has free will and thus faces an open future. For precisely this reason, midrash is always necessary. The future cannot be foreseen; therefore the meaning of the text cannot be known in advance. It is disclosed, retrospectively, afresh in every generation. But midrash is always possible. For Torah as covenant rules out absolutely one eventuality: a “hermeneutic rupture,” an event so shattering as to render the biblical text inapplicable. To see an unbridgeable gap between the past and the present is, for Judaism, to have declared the covenant broken. 44On the general point, see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Covenant and criticism
Once put this way we can see that the doctrine of Torah min ha-shamayim was untouched and untouchable by biblical criticism. For they were and are two wholly opposed approaches to texts. To be sure, there are many different kinds of critical scholarship. But what they held in common, at least until recently, were the assumptions of post-Enlightenment scholarship, which stood at the remotest extreme from a covenantal reading of Torah. They sought detachment while the covenantal reading required commitment. They sought “original” meaning while midrash sought out the meaning for the present. They sought universal criteria of meaning while midrash invoked criteria internal to the community of faith. The question posed by critical scholarship was: How should this text be understood as a book among books? The question posed by Torah min ha-shamayim was: How should this text be heard and responded to as the word addressed by God and accepted by Israel as the unbreakable constitution of its being?
Nothing could be more familiar to Jews from their relationship with Sadducees, Karaites and Christians than the fact that the same text could yield a variety of meanings depending on the assumptions brought to bear on it. For Judaism, biblical criticism was therefore less a revolution than a new variant on an ancient theme: an approach to the Bible which disregarded its character as an eternally binding covenant and thus ruled out, ab initio, the concept of an oral law. That a single text can hold a variety of meanings for different faiths and cultures is unquestionable. Indeed there are certain texts – the Bible is the supreme example – which are so intimately related to the central values of a civilisation that it is more accurate to describe fundamentally opposed readings as producing different books, rather than different interpretations of the same book. Just as the Tenakh (Hebrew Bible) of Judaism was not the Old Testament of Christianity, so the Torah of Judaism was not the Pentateuch of the critics. Christianity had rewritten Tenakh by casting it as the prefiguration of a new covenant. The Enlightenment had rewritten it a second time by conceiving it as a historical document without special claim to authority. This was less a re-reading than a cultural revolution.
The illusion that somewhere beneath these conflicts of interpretation there lies an presuppositionless “correct reading” is based on a faulty philosophy of language and literature. At the very least, to establish the parameters of a correct reading we must determine to what genre the text in question is to be assigned. The hermeneutic axiom of Torah min ha-shamayim is precisely what Enlightenment scholarship denied: that the Torah is authoritative instruction directed to the community which agreed throughout its history to be bound by the covenant of which it was the constitution. Whatever, then, critics were studying, it was not Torah the book, as it had been understood from its beginnings and as it internally suggested that it be understood.
In its earliest forms, however, biblical criticism had large ambitions. Source criticism in particular aimed to answer the historical question: What actually happened? If it could do this it would, given the Enlightenment assumptions of its practitioners, have established its own supremacy as a “scientific” discipline as against the “mythic” approach of religion itself. In no respect was it guilty of greater hubris. Summing up the results of two centuries of critical research into the “genesis of the text,” Meir Sternberg writes, “Rarely has there been such a futile expense of spirit in a noble cause; rarely have such grandiose theories of origination been built and revised and pitted against one another on the evidential equivalent of the head of a pin; rarely have so many worked so long and so hard with so little to show for their trouble.”45Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 13. Modern archaeological research has tended, if anything, to confirm the historicity of biblical narrative; and, as we shall see, the most recent literary approaches to the Bible have abandoned the fragmentation of the text into “sources” and concentrated instead on reading it as a unity.
To be sure, these no more amount to a reinstatement of faith than the original claims of criticism amounted to a refutation of it. But what they suggest is the extraordinary set of myths that lay behind Enlightenment scholarship in its more imperialistic moments. One we will explore in the next chapter: the idea that somewhere, purged of all faith commitments, there exists a vantage point of absolute detachment from which all truths governing the meaning of human existence can be impartially assessed. Another, more relevant here, is the idea that texts (religious texts especially) are a veil covering a pristine core of historical truth, which must be removed if objectivity is to be arrived at. On this view, which held sway in the nineteenth century, texts are not to be read but dissected to reveal what lies beneath them.
This is a way not of reading the Bible but of misreading it, to which the most eloquent commentary is the Bible itself. For the fundamental axiom of Torah is that God is not seen but heard. He is not to be found in “objective” history (events as they are grasped by the senses) but in covenantal history (events as they are perceived through the “word” of faith). The most subtle dialectic in the Torah itself is between these two levels of reality. The long narrative of Joseph and his brothers is an extended study of the interplay between “history” (the apparently random acts of individuals) and “providence” (the end foretold in Joseph’s dreams which improbably but inevitably comes to pass). The whole of Genesis is a set of variations on the dissonance between the divine word (the promise of children and a land) and empirical reality (the childlessness of the matriarchs and the landlessness of the patriarchs).
Indeed two of the most powerful parodies of the “scientific” approach to faith (what is believable is only that which is empirically confirmed) are contained in the book of Exodus. God “empirically” confirms His existence to Pharaoh through the plagues, but at the same time gives him the “strength” or “hardness” of heart to disbelieve. God demonstrates His presence to the Israelites at the division of the Red Sea: they “see” and therefore “believe,” but in the very next passage are rebellious again. The faith that requires this kind of confirmation is not faith. Nor is it accidental that after the most precisely “scientific” demonstration of God in the Bible – Elijah’s controlled experiment on Mount Carmel – God instructs the prophet that He is not to be found in the wind, the earthquake and the fire but in a “still, small voice.” God is not seen with the senses but heard with the ear of faith. He is, to use Buber’s terms, not the “It” of empiricism but the “Thou” of relationship: the relationship of loyalty, fidelity and trust whose formal expression is covenant.
Historical research has provided us with an ironic commentary on its own methods. The earliest independent documentary evidence of the existence of the people Israel is the Merneptah stele (c. 1224–1211 BCE) which contains the sentence “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” The second most ancient, the triumphal inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (ninth century BCE), announces “Israel has perished for ever.” If objective evidence is to be believed, then Israel as a living people does not exist; a conclusion reiterated in the twentieth century by Arnold Toynbee. Against this, the people Israel knows – with a moral certainty which is the only certainty of faith – that Torah, as the covenantal word of the living God, cannot be rescinded. On this it stakes its very existence in each generation.
Torah min ha-shamayim is no abstract, metaphysical doctrine immune to proof or refutation. To the contrary, it makes precisely testable claims. Its most powerful, indeed definitive, claim is that Israel will always exist as a people and always testify to the presence of God. Given the history of Israel, its wanderings and persecutions, no claim can have been more improbable. In the late twentieth century, after the most systematic attempt in history to ensure that “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not,” Jews are confronted with the not unastonishing fact that the people Israel still lives, that it has been ingathered from its millennial dispersion and has returned to the land to which Abraham once travelled in response to the divine word nearly 4,000 years ago. No more conclusive vindication has ever been given of the power of a book over the course of human destiny. The only claim the Torah makes about itself is that the people who live by its covenant will, obscurely but unmistakably, testify to the presence of God in history. This I believe to be true, no more strikingly so than in this present, savage and secular century.
The birth of history, the eclipse of midrash
But though Judaism was immune to the challenge of Enlightenment scholarship, Jews were not. And here we reach the heart of the drama whose lasting effects have been charted throughout this book. The intellectual and social environment of nineteenth-century Europe was one in which the traditional collective identity of Jews had no place. Its key terms – history, progress, evolution, autonomy, universality, the individual and the state, the dichotomy between private and public domains – constituted a language into which Judaism could not be translated. For Judaism was a religion of a group that was neither a collection of individuals nor a state. Its ethics were particularistic, not universal. Its laws were divine commands, not choices of the autonomous self. Judaism made no distinction between private and public identities. Above all it held a midrashic view of time wholly at odds with the evolutionary assumptions of Hegelian philosophy, Darwinian biology and Fraserian anthropology.
Not only this, but a model of time in which the older a system was, the more primitive, could not but pass savage judgement on Judaism – a judgement explicit in all the great philosophers of the age: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The archetypal Jewish experience of modernity was, in John Murray Cuddihy’s phrase, a “consciousness of underdevelopment.”46John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987), 167. Until the nineteenth century Jews had explained their situation in terms of biblical-rabbinic theodicy. They were in exile because of their sins and they would be redeemed by God in the fullness of time. Now, for the first time, that model was challenged by a secular alternative. Jews were outsiders because of their separateness and they would be redeemed by westernisation.
This was a crisis for tradition no less grave than that which had faced Jews eighteen centuries earlier. Once again Jewry disintegrated into conflicting patterns of response, this time into Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaisms, secular Zionism, culturalism and Jewish ethnicity. Each confronted a critical problem, namely the towering authority of the biblical and rabbinic tradition which in principle excluded change in the terms of the covenant. For non-Orthodox Judaisms the issue was the mandate for halalchic innovation. For Jewish secularisms it was the simple issue of whether there could be a Jewish identity without a religious base. The crisis, made urgent by the rising tide of antisemitism, had no precedent since the first century CE. But the same forces that produced the problem seemed to offer a solution. Judaism, which had resisted history, could no re-enter history.
It is a face whose significance cannot be overestimated that the first gesture of Jews in coming to terms with the new European situation was the founding, in Berlin in 1819 of a society for the study of Jewish History. Its project was Wissenschaft des Judentums (“the science of Judaism”), but though its overt aim was the objective study of Judaism’s past, its ultimate agenda was otherwise. The society’s statutes declared that it had been founded as part of the movement “to harmonise, by way of educational work, the Jews with the present age and with the states wherever they live.”47Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 188. One of its founders, Eduard Gans, calling on Jews to become fully integrated into society, added that this would not necessarily mean their disappearance as Jews: Judaism will live on “as the river lives on in the ocean.”48Ibid., 192. The irony was unmistakable. One could now objectively study the Jewish past because Judaism was a thing of the past. Leopold Zunz, one of the most distinguished of the new scholars, declared that a historical study of rabbinic literature was now possible because “no new significant development is likely to disturb our survey.”49Ibid., 197. Moritz Steinschneider is reported to have said that the aim of the movement was “to give the remains of Judaism an honourable burial.”
As abruptly as Jewish historiography disappeared with Josephus in the first century, so it reappeared in the nineteenth, led by figures like Nachman Krochmal and Heinrich Graetz. What was revolutionary was not the histories themselves but the acquisition, by Jews, of historical consciousness. This was, in the course of time, to have a transfiguring effect on all subsequent developments outside Orthodoxy. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has this to say about its genesis:
Modern Jewish historiography began precipitously out of that assimilation from without and collapse from within which characterised the sudden emergence of the Jew from the ghetto… The modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time that witnesses a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and hence also an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory. In this sense, if for no other, history becomes what it had never been before – the faith of fallen Jews. For the first time history, not a sacred text, becomes the arbiter of Judaism.50Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 86. See also Lionel Kochan, The Jew and His History (New York: Schocken, 1977).
Jewish history was born in alienation, but it added to it an impetus of its own. Whereas midrashic consciousness lay in a sense of the presentness of the past, historical consciousness involved a sense of its pastness. Until the nineteenth century, as Yerushalmi has noted, Jews had memory rather than history. Each year, on Passover, Jews remembered the Exodus not as a remote event but as a present reality. The Mishnah had ruled that “One is obliged to see oneself as if one had personally gone out of Egypt.”51Mishnah, Pesachim 10:5. The Jewish calendar was a way not of recalling but of re-enacting history. The metamorphosis of modern Jewish thought lay in its new conception of time: in its distancing of the past as something that happened long ago and somewhere else to someone else. Time was the vehicle of real, not merely apparent, change. This meant in turn that the covenant was not a fixed, immutable datum. Like everything else, it was subject to evolution and change.
The birth of history was the eclipse of midrash. We can trace precisely the moment of transition. It was in 1670, when Spinoza published his Tractatus. In its seventh chapter, “Of the Interpretation of Scripture,” Spinoza decisively rejects an understanding of the Bible through tradition and commentary. Scripture is to be understood only through Scripture and as a document located in history. This Copernican revolution was not internalised by Jewry until a century and a half later, but when it was, its effects were momentous. The historicisation of Judaism allowed Reform to take the prophets, Conservative Judaism, the mishnaic sages, as models of innovation. Secularists like Simon Dubnow, removing what they saw as the religious veil that covered Jewry, were able to reconceptualise it as a culturally autonomous but essentially secular community. The most dramatic consequence, though, lay in the birth of Zionism. In its most radical form, Zionism was quite simply the return of Jews to history after 2,000 years of coma.
The idea of a detached, “scientific” reading of texts was, as we have seen, part of the mythology of the nineteenth century which twentieth-century sociology of knowledge and hermeneutics has effectively challenged. When we read, we do so with presuppositions, within conventions and for purposes. When Jews for the first time began to read the biblical and rabbinic literature historically, though they invoked the legitimation of “science,” their purpose was avowedly revolutionary. No one has described this process more poignantly than the literary critic Harold Bloom. Poets, he argues, create space for themselves within the constraints of the literary canon by deliberately misrepresenting their predecessors. The titles of two of his books, The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, summarise his thesis. A poet coming late to a tradition can only clear the ground for originality by first distorting and thus neutralising the tradition. For the creative artist, all reading is “defensive warfare” and all interpretation misinterpretation.52Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford, 1973); A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Bloom’s theory is explicitly Freudian. The poet, like the child, is engaged in an Oedipal struggle against the oppressive past. As with Freud, Bloom’s account is less convincing as a general theory than as an analysis of what it felt like to be a Jew in the modern world. Internalising the stigma which made them seem to others alien and uncivilised, Jews felt the need to liberate themselves from the past. Because their past was textual, the battle necessarily involved an assault on the text. There is no more exact opposition than that between midrashic and historicist approaches to textuality, the one seeking to transport ancient words alive into the here-and-now, the other confining their meanings and imperatives to the there-and-then.
The effect of historicism was inevitably to atomise and relativise Judaism and to dismantle the concept of a Jewish destiny. To be sure, this was not the intent of the historians. On the contrary, most felt that Jewish history had a theme and a direction and that the Jewish people had a distinctive character or “genius.” But the thesis could not withstand scrutiny because it was built on the negation of its essential premiss, namely the normativity of the past. In the hands of different practitioners, the historical study of Judaism led to the affirmation of the diaspora and the negation of the diaspora, to Jewry as a religious and as a secular people, to Judaism as the faith of individuals or the collective creed of a nation. The variety of revisionary readings of the Jewish past was limited only by the range of imagined Jewish futures. The unity of Jewish history was lost at the moment that its generative principle was challenged, namely Torah as the covenantal text which brought a people into being and mapped the terms of its destiny. Hence our assertion that, for the people of the Book, the fragmentation of the Book was the fragmentation of the people.
A new hearing
What has happened since? We have argued that, despite the divergent readings of the Jewish present, the epic events of the twentieth century have represented for many Jews the indivisibility and uniqueness of the Jewish fate. Has this been mirrored in a return to the text in which that fate was foreshadowed and given meaning?
In 1946, the German literary theorist Erich Auerbach, in his justly famous essay, “Odysseus’ Scar,” set out to explore the structural differences between Homeric and biblical narrative. His finding was that the biblical text is utterly contrasted to Greek epic in its spare, focused, morally driven prose. Unlike Homer, it abjures external detail; it makes strategic use of words unsaid and facts undisclosed; it is “fraught with background.” From his analysis, Auerbach drew a number of important conclusions: that biblical narrative involves an absolute claim to truth, that its silences invite continuing interpretation, and that its texture bears the character not of art but of command. He added:
If the text of the biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.53Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 15.
Auerbach’s essay became the starting point of the massive recent interest in the structure of biblical poetry and prose. Its significance lay in the fact that he reached his conclusions not on the basis of tradition and theology but in and through the text itself. It suggested that Torah as the will of God, as covenantal document, as the key with which to decipher history and as a text which invites its own midrash are not subsequent doctrinal developments, but rather the working-out of implications already latent in biblical substance and style. Needless to say, Auerbach was not a theologian but a secular critic, only too aware of the distance between the biblical world and his own. But his work, and that of his successors, suggests that the hermeneutic stance that lies behind the idea of Torah min ha-shamayim is not an accident of history nor an invention of later theology. It is, rather, how the Bible asks to be read.
Lending philosophic weight to this insight were the profound meditations of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, each determined to break away from the historicism of the nineteenth century and to “hear” again Torah as revelatory word.54See, recently, the fine essays on Buber and Rosenzweig in Fishbane, The Garments of Torah, 81–111. It was Buber who formulated the modern restatement of Torah as a dialogue between heaven and earth. “Only that man,” wrote Buber, “who wills to do and hear what the mouth of the Unconditioned commands him is a man worthy of the Bible.”55Martin Buber, On the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1982), 212. Rosenzweig undertook a searching exploration of speech as the medium of human‒divine encounter. Language “awakes to real vitality only in revelation.”56Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by William Hallo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 111. “That which we hear as a living word in our I and which resounds to us out of our Thou must also be ‘as it is written’ in that great historic testament of revelation whose essentiality we recognise precisely from the presentness of our experience. Once more we seek the word of man in the word of God.”57Ibid., 198. In their joint translation of the Bible, Buber and Rosenzweig sought to recapture the “immediacy of spokenness” of the word as revelation.
Auerbach’s seminal essay has been developed in a variety of ways by contemporary scholars. Roland Barthes58Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 125–41. and Harold Fisch59Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 155–72. have shown how texts like Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel and the book of Job frustrate the patterns of art and myth. Michael Fishbane’s researches have traced the midrashic process to the beginnings of the biblical literature itself.60Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Robert Alter has shown how the apparent repetitions in the Pentateuch are in fact finely nuanced variations,61Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981). while a number of writers have traced the way in which the textual tensions and apparent inconsistencies create involvement and interpretation on the part of the reader.62See, for example, Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).
But these are only part of the transformation biblical scholarship has undergone in recent decades. Literary analyses such as those of Meir Weiss and Meir Sternberg have focused on the intricate subtleties of biblical style.63Meir Weiss, “The Craft of Biblical Narrative” [Hebrew], Molad, 1962; Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985). See also J.P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis (Assen: van Gorcum, 1975), and Shimon Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1989). Brevard Childs’s “canonical” approach has reminded us that the Bible is not merely a document but also sacred scripture, to be understood at least in part through the faith traditions it has generated. 64Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. There has been renewed scholarly interest in midrash, both as a branch of rabbinic literature and as a mode of interpretation that has points of contact with modern hermeneutic theory. More importantly from an inner Jewish point of view has been the rediscovery of the immense theological possibilities of midrash. A key figure in this context has been Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, whose philosophical work has been largely cast in this mode and whose essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” was a virtual reinvention of midrash in the language of modern consciousness.65See, for example, Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982); Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Midrash as a response to catastrophe has figured largely, too, in the work of the leading contemporary non-Orthodox theologian, Emil Fackenheim, for whom it is the most potent resource for reflection on the Holocaust.66Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978), 252–72.
These developments fall far short of a reinstatement of traditional views. But collectively they testify to a revolutionary turn away from historical criticism and to a renewed desire to hear the Bible in its unity and uniqueness. The discrepancies which once led to dismemberment or emendation of the text are now taken to be integral to its texture. There has been a shift of emphasis from historicist concern with the writing of the Bible to hermeneutic interest in how it is to be read. Where once the mark of a “scientific” approach was to ignore tradition, today there is scholarly interest in the constant interplay between text and tradition. Cumulatively this amounts, if not to a return to, then at least to a new openness to the biblical voice in its integrity and singularity and to the inexorable unfolding of possibilities latent in the text itself.
But Torah is not merely a text. It is a covenantal constitution, the code of Jewish destiny. Something else has driven the Jewish re-engagement with the Bible, namely history itself. The shaping events of the twentieth century – the Holocaust and the return to Israel – have held for many Jews unmistakable biblical resonances. The Holocaust evoked the Ninth of Av, the Jewish day of mourning for the lost Temples, and the books of Lamentations and Job. Israel’s independence and its wars recalled the book of Joshua and the later struggles of the Maccabees. Successive immigrations of Jews from lands of persecution brought to mind the exodus and the festival of Passover. These metaphors and memories testify to the hold of biblical archetypes on the contemporary Jewish imagination.
Jewish history, for the prophets and the rabbis, was a series of events that happened again and again in the slow spiralling towards redemption. Each, to be sure, was a slight variant of its predecessors and it was just this that generated midrash, the new meaning of the old text. But there was nonetheless a pattern, a continuity, which once discerned became the recognition of providence. There were times – the destruction of the Temple was one, the Holocaust a second – when the pattern came perilously close to dissolving. But the covenant remained, and with it the Torah. It was in the first crisis that the sages produced their most daring midrashic readings, holding pain and faith together when they threatened to split apart. It is these midrashim that speak most directly to the Holocaust, more so indeed than any conventional theology. The events of the twentieth century have held for Jews intimations of a scriptural gravity in which the echo of earlier events was unmistakable. In pointing back toward the Book, they reminded many Jews that they remain the people of the Book, and as such a people not of history but of destiny.
We have suggested that Torah min ha-shamayim was and is more than a set of abstract beliefs about a text. It is a total vision, linking the ideas of revelation, covenant, command, the presence of God in history, and the interpretation of texts, time and events. The nineteenth century posed for Jews a series of crises that seemed to explode all these concepts, and we still live among their fragments. The depth of this drama cannot be overstated. To experience God, for Judaism, is not to see but to hear. The assault on the Word could not but be an assault on the Jewish God. Nor can we escape reflection on the fact that within a century, the culture which had reduced the book of the covenant to fragments had reduced a third of the people of the covenant to ashes.
The Torah was given once, said the sages, but it is received many times: whenever Jews hear it addressing them. Since the Holocaust there has been a partial return to the Book. There has been a new willingness to hear its strange and commanding singularity. And there have been, too, moments in this extraordinary half-century in which it seemed to Jews that history itself was once again beckoning them to wrestle with their destiny and with the texts in which it is prescripted and disclosed. After the whirlwind and the earthquake and the fire, a voice as yet still and small has begun to be heard.