Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (26 page)

Reflection on midrash has been divided into virtually the same two schools of thought as above. Traditional scholarship has considered midrash a wholly transparent reflection of the historical conditions obtaining at the time of its creation. This is in spite of the fact that its explicit generic claim is to be interpretation of a text which belongs to another time and place. Indeed, it may be because of this claim. Since midrashic interpretation often seems so far from what we might imagine as paraphrase, it seems inevitably to condemn itself to a reading which takes it as a reflection of something else, almost as a kind of historical allegory, disguised as pseudocommentary. This version of historicism has the virtue of emphasizing the vital, ideological import of midrash, but underestimates the contribution to ideology of reading the Bible. More recently, theorists working in the "deconstructive" mode have read midrash in terms suggesting that it is a kind of protodeconstruction, a hermeneutics of Dionysian free play with the biblical text.
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This move has had the great virtue of leading to a reconsideration of these texts as a
reading
of the Bible, but

seems to undermine the very significance of that reading for social practice, indeed for life and death.

A revised conception of the hermeneutics of midrash ought accordingly to allow us to reunderstand its relation to history and rabbinic culture and account for both its character as interpretation and its relation to life in historical time. My purpose in this chapter will be to draw together many of the themes of the book by studying closely one passage of the Mekilta. In my reading of this text, I will try to reveal a much more complex and exciting relationship between hermeneutic and historical practice than has been imagined by scholars of midrash until now.
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This is my God, and I will beautify Him
[Exod. 15:21]. Rabbi Akiva says: Before all the nations of the world I shall hold forth on the beauties and splendor of HimWhoSpakeand theWorldCametoBe! For, lo, the nations of the world keep asking Israel, "What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O most beautiful of women?" [Song. 5:9], that for His sake you die, for His sake you are slain, as it is said, We have loved you unto death ['
ad mwt
] "for thus do the maidens ['
almwt
] love Thee" [Song 1:3]—and it is said, "for Your sake we have been killed all the day" [Ps. 44:23]. You are beautiful, you are heroes, come merge with us!

But Israel replies to the nations of the world: Do you know Him? Let us tell you a little of His glory: ''My beloved is white and ruddy, braver than ten thousand. His head is purest gold; His hair is curls as black as a raven. His eyes are like doves by springs of water. . . . HIS cheeks are like perfumed gardens. . . . HIS palate is sweetmeats and He is all delight; This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem'' [Song 5:10 ff.].

And when the nations of the world hear all of this praise, they say to Israel, Let us go along with you, as it is said, "Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? Whither hath thy beloved turned, that we may seek Him with thee?" [Song 6:1].

But Israel replies to the nations of the world: You have no part of Him; on the contrary, "My beloved is mine, and I am HIS; I am my beloved's, and He is mine; He feedeth among the lilies" [Song. 2:16 and 6:3].
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Let us recapitulate some of the ways in which this text manifests differences from commentary as traditionally understood:

(1). Meaning is produced in the creative interaction between text being read, reader, and other texts, and does not even pretend to be a simple paraphrase of the interpreted text.
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(2). There is a certain erasure of difference between the text being interpreted and the interpreting text.
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(3). These last two result in an ambiguity of reference in the interpreting text. When and where does the conversation presented in the midrash take place? (4). A crucial moment in the reading of this midrash is accomplished by linguistic play: the pun on '
almwt
(maidens) as '
al mwt
(until death).

Scholars of the historical school have universally reduced this text to a reflection of events that took place in the time of its speaker, R. Akiva, who died a martyr's death. Thus, the leading scholar of rabbinic thought, E. E. Urbach, argues with regard to our text, "Hadrian's decrees and the
consequent facts
of martyrdom as the supreme expression of the Jew's love for his Creator gave rise to interpretations that discovered in Canticles allusions to Jewish martyrology and to the uniqueness of Israel among the nations of the world. R. Akiva already expounded, 'I shall hold forth . . .' "
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Notice that Urbach begins his quotation
after
the verse upon which R. Akiva's midrash is presented as an interpretation, thus showing that he regards the claim of the midrash to be interpretation of that verse as irrelevant. Similarly, the historian Yitzhak Baer argued that "R. Akiva already expounded and said of the verse, 'This is my God': I shall hold forth. . . . The verse 'my beloved is white and ruddy'
alludes to the ecstatic vision
to which the martyrs were privy in the days of their torture and the hour of their death."
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Again no effort is made to account for how R. Akiva's statement is connected as an interpretation to the Exodus verse. Even more explicitly, Gedaliah Alon remarks that ''the passage
reflects
memories from after the war of the destruction, or it
describes
a reality from after the war of Quietus."
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The reduction of the midrashic text to a reflection of its historical circumstances is thus practically a commonplace of the earlier scholarship in spite of the obvious truth that the passage claims to be doing something radically different. Moreover, it is universally assumed by these scholars that the historical context, socalled reality, is transparent and selfunderstood and can therefore have explanatory force with regard to the midrashic text.

In a passage quoted above, chapter 1, Joseph Heinemann has argued that it is the strangeness and apparent arbitrariness of the midrash, its distance from the plain meaning of the biblical narrative, which leads scholars to read its discourse as a transparent reflection of the time of the midrashists.
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Such motivation for historicism depends on assuming that the "plain" sense is obvious (and indeed that there is such an entity); and, moreover, that this plain sense was believed in by the rabbis,
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who nevertheless ignored it in favor of some other discourse about the meaning of the text (or, even,
ostensibly
about the meaning of the text). I would like to begin, then, by analyzing the interpretive moves of our midrash as they function in this text to produce its meanings. If we can detect here that the midrashic reading is generated by hermeneutic principles, which although different from ours, are not arbitrary or unexpected within their own system, then a major support for the purely historicist interpretation of midrash will have been weakened.

In an interpretive text, even one that locates meaning in the "shuttle space between the interpreter and the text,"
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it makes sense to begin by looking at the interpreted text: "This is my God, and I will beautify Him" [Exod. 15:2]. This verse presented certain difficulty to its rabbinic readers. "Is it possible for

flesh and blood to beautify their Creator!?"
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R. Akiva's answer to this wonderment is that people beautify God when they sing His beauty. Up till now, then, we have a paraphrase of the verse. We begin to have midrash, however, with the expansion of this paraphrase into a fullfledged narrative with two protagonists, a

conversation which is nowhere signified in the original verse, and with the importation of an entire passage from the Song of Songs. These are the sorts of moves which have led previous interpreters to locate the meaning of this text transparently in the time of the interpreter. However, it seems to me that this discourse is considerably more complex than such readings suggest, and much more of the story can be shown to have been generated by a practice of interpreting Scripture. I would like to show through my reading that it thematizes not the facts of martyrdom or some other extratextual reality, but precisely the issue of history itself; that far from being a simple reflection of facts which "gave rise to interpretations," it is a resource for the creation of that interpretation which is not secondary but integral to a life lived in a text.

The crucial word of the verse for my interpretation is the smallest, namely the demonstrative, "this." While there are many verses of the Bible in which the demonstrative can be read (or is even most simply read) as
anaphora
or
kataphora
, for the rabbis, "this" is compellingly deictic,
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as certified by the following passage:

This month shall be for you
[Exod. 12:12]. R. Ishmael says: Moses showed the new moon to Israel and said to them: In this way shall you see and fix the new moon for the generations. R. Akiva says: This is one of the three things which were difficult for Moses to understand and all of which God pointed out to him with His finger. And thus you say: "And
these
are they which are unclean for you" [Lev. 11:29]. And thus: "And
this
is the work of the candelabrum'' [Num. 8:4]. . . . R. Shimeon the son of Yohai says: Is it not a

fact that all the words which He spoke to Moses He spoke only in the day? The new moon, of course, He showed him at night. How then could He, while speaking with him at day, show him the new moon, at night? R. Eliezer says: He spoke with him at day near nightfall, and then showed him the new moon right after nightfall. [Lauterbach, I, pp. 15–16]

A verse which is talking about a month is interpreted as being about the new moon, because it includes the demonstrative "this," which for the rabbis always signifies seeing and pointing with a finger, even where such an interpretation leads into obvious logical contradictions with other interpretive commonplaces, namely that God only spoke with Moses by day.
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It is no wonder, therefore, that R. Aldva reads the verse, "
This
is my God," as signifying a theophany, an experience in which the Jews could point with their fingers at the visible God. We have, moreover, explicit evidence that this was the reading of our verse from R. Eliezer's remark in the Mekilta that from this verse we learn that, "a slave saw at the sea what neither Isaiah nor Ezekiel nor all of

the other prophets ever saw."
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That such a view was generally accepted is suggested, moreover, by the line from the daily evening prayer, "Thy children saw Thy power, splitting the sea before Moses; '
This
is my God,' they uttered and sang."

Another important signifier in the verse is the pronoun, "my." On my reading, it is this morpheme which sets up the rhetorical situation which R. Akiva's story expands. If there is a "my," then it seems that there is a "not yours." Indeed, in this verse the first person singular pronoun is repeated no less than four times.
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As James Clifford, following Emile Benveniste, has acutely remarked, "Every use of 'I' presupposes a 'you,' and every instance of discourse is immediately linked to a specific shared situation."
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It is hardly surprising, then, that the midrash understands "This is my God'' to imply a rhetorical or dramatic situation in which Israel is addressing some other nation, and saying, ''This is my God" and not yours.

For the rabbis, the Song of Songs is the record of a historical theophany, and in particular, the description of the lover in 5:9–16 is the description of God, as He was seen on that occasion.
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Although there is some controversy among the early rabbis as to whether the theophany referred to is the one at Sinai or the one at the Red Sea, our text obviously fits into the view that reads it at the Red Sea. Accordingly, it is entirely plausible that R. Akiva associates the deictic "this" of "This is my God," with the same deictic of "This is my lover and my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem" in the Songs of Songs passage. The dialogue with the "daughters of

Jerusalem" (who, if the maiden is Israel, must be the Gentiles) produces virtually the whole narrative. The story that R. Akiva tells is then generated, as it were, of itself by the force of the association of the two texts. The chapter of Song of Songs begins with the maiden (to be sure, after some coyness on her part) pursuing her lover through the streets of Jerusalem and being beaten and wounded by the guards. She adjures the daughters of Jerusalem to fred her lover for her, in spite of her wounds, and tell Him that she is lovesick for Him. The daughters wonder at this request, and ask, "What is thy beloved, that you have so adjured us"—even though you are suffering so much for His love? Come join with us, "O most beautiful of women." At this point in Akiva's interpolating narrative, the maiden, Israel, answers: Let me describe His beauty, as I have seen Him, "
This
is my God, and I will sing His beauty. My beloved is white and ruddy. . . .
This
is my lover and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem." The maidens become jealous and want such a lover also, but Israel answers, "My beloved is mine and I am His."

This reading of "my God" as mine and not yours was certainly amplified by the "This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem" in the Song of Songs passage, and most explicitly by "My beloved is mine and I am His." I suggest, then, that the story is simply, for R. Akiva, the unpacking of the meaning and rhetorical force embodied in the verse, "This is my God and I will

beautify Him," as it is unpacked by that text which, as I have shown in the previous chapter, was understood as the key to the meaning of this historical moment, the Song of Songs.

However, this reading is paradoxical and problematic, because the dialogue between the Jews and the Gentiles certainly could not have taken place alongside of the Red Sea. The Jews were not being killed for their God then, nor were there any Egyptians left alive with whom to talk. However, locating this story in historical time is also problematical, in spite of the views of the abovementioned scholars. There simply was no time in which Jews were being killed en masse for the love of God, and there was a simultaneous desire of many Gentiles to convert to Judaism. Accordingly, the arguments of the historians as to whether the text refers to this period in the life of R. Akiva or that one only serve to demonstrate this paradoxicality of reference, this impossibility of interpreting our text as an indirect reference to historical events.
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Moreover, the deixis of "this" in the Song of Songs verse suggests that an experience of theophany present to those speakers is also being evoked.