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The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos - Softcover

Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb

 
9780805212372: The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos
Softcover
ISBN 10: 080521237X ISBN 13: 9780805212372
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In her commentary on the book of Exodus—the stories of slavery and liberation, the burning bush, the revelation at Sinai, the golden calf, the shattering of the tablets, the building and consecration of the tabernacle—Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg weaves a magnificent tapestry of classical biblical, talmudic, and midrashic interpretations; literary allusions; and insights from the worlds of philosophy and psychology into a narrative that gives us fascinating new perspectives on the biblical themes of exodus and redemption.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AVIVAH GOTTLIEB ZORNBERG is the author of The Begginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (and winner of the National Jewish Book Award), The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, and The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. She lectures widely in Israel, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She lives in Jerusalem.

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Introduction
 
Some books cannot be taken by direct assault; they must be taken like Jericho.
—Ortega
 
Since these essays on Exodus are largely concerned with the interpretation of the narrative as it is found in midrashic sources, I would like to introduce them by offering a working definition of “midrash” and—perhaps more to the point—a personal meditation on the midrashic model for reading texts. My working definition—with all due caveats, acknowledging the essentially undefined nature of the term—would be this:
 
Midrash, derived from the root darash, “to seek out” or “to inquire,” is a term used in rabbinic literature for the interpretive study of the Bible. The word is used in two related senses: first, to refer to the results of that interpretive exegesis; and, second, to describe the literary compilations in which the original interpretations, many of them first delivered and transmitted orally, were eventually collected.
 
These essays on Exodus make extensive use of some of these midrashic collections, notably Midrash Rabbah and Midrash Tanchuma. In addition, Rashi, the great French eleventh-century commentator on the Torah, includes in his text a significant selection of midrashic interpretations; often, I refer to Rashi’s versions, where they offer interesting nuances on the orig­inal sources. Since Rashi’s commentary has been absorbed into the blood­stream of Jewish culture, his midrashic material has become a kind of “second nature” in the traditional reading of the biblical text.
 
Before turning to a more personal view of the nature of midrashic reading, some technical observations are in order. These essays are based on the literary and liturgical device of “Parshat ha-Shavua,” or “the Parsha”: the Bible is read in Synagogue in weekly sections, so as to be completed in yearly cycles. Each Parsha is titled after a significant opening word. This device constitutes a way of living Jewish time; each week is saturated, as it were, with the material of that particular biblical section. One thinks, one studies, one lives the Parsha. If one is a teacher, this process is intensified. It is as a result of years of teaching the Bible in this form that I have come to articu­late the ideas in this book.
 
Since on one level, then, this book began life as oral presentations, delivered to a wide range of students, of all ages, backgrounds, and intellectual habits, these essays remain separate attempts to engage with a particular literary unit, the Parsha of the particular week. They address themes that arise compellingly from the Torah text, often from the midrashic or other interpretations of the text. On another level, however, they flow into one another, engaging with the narrative of the Exodus as a whole, and addressing the themes of the grand narrative: redemption, revelation, betrayal, and the quest for “God in our midst.”
 
In my approach, the biblical text is not allowed to stand alone, but has its boundaries blurred by later commentaries and by a persistent intertextuality that makes it impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text. Such an approach represents perhaps the greatest difficulty for the modern reader. It continues, in a sense, the rabbinic mode of reading, where “the rabbis imagined themselves a part of the whole, participating in Torah rather than operating on it at an analytic distance . . . [I]t follows that the words of interpretation cannot be isolated in any rigorously analytical way from the words of Torah itself.”2 Elliot Wolfson articulates this reading practice: “the base text of revelation is thought to comprise within itself layers of interpretation, and the works of interpreta­tion on the biblical canon are considered revelatory in nature.”3
The blurring of boundaries between revelation and interpretation, between the written and the oral Torah, is a fundamental mode of the rabbinic imagination. In this book, I have adopted this mode. I confess to a perhaps naive sense of the naturalness of this mode. However, as I invite the reader to enter the world of midrashic reading, I would like to offer an account of my reading practice, of how I understand the midrashic enterprise.
 
Central to this enterprise is the telling of stories that fill in gaps in the written biblical text. For instance, the midrash that, in a sense, engenders this book—about women’s play with mirrors and the “secret of redemption”4—intends to explain a mysterious verse at the end of Exodus: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who thronged, who came in throngs to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (38:8). The reader is baffled: Which mirrors (the mirrors)? What is the purpose of this specific gift to the Mishkan (Tabernacle)? Why is the ex­pression tzava—to throng, to proliferate—repeated? Why is this particular copper contribution singled out from the larger mass of copper donated to the Mishkan? The midrash offers a narrative and, consequently, an interpre­tation of the enigmatic text: The women created the hosts, the throngs of Is­rael by their play with mirrors. As the midrash puts it: “It was all done with mirrors!”
 
Such a narrative spins away from the biblical text; in a sense, it seems unrooted, fantastic. Yet close study of the midrash reveals multiple skeins of connection, a network of textual roots within the language of the Bible. And—perhaps more importantly—the midrash offers an answer to a re­pressed question: How are this people to be redeemable? Can they be imag­ined as, in some sense, generating their own freedom? If we make use of the classic image of birth, must we have recourse to a forced birth, a forceps de­livery, in imagining the relations of God the “midwife” and the newborn?5 Or is there some way of catching the elusive moment of inner transformation that creates human possibility where before there was only necessity? The “secret of redemption,” as the Rabbis call it, is the real problem at the heart of this midrash.
 
While the question of “redeemability” is repressed in the biblical text, it is articulated in many midrashic sources, and it emerges significantly in Rashi’s commentary. Here, I would like to claim that this articulation of the repressed is the genius of midrashic narrative. Adopting the psychoanalytic model, I suggest that the peshat, or plain meaning of the text, functions as the conscious layer of meaning; while the midrashic stories and exegeses in­timate unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning. The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative.
 
The result is a plethora of possible stories of redemption. Some of these will be attributed to “the enemy”: they are false, adversarial narratives, Egyptian narratives, narratives of obtuse misunderstanding. These counter-narratives, the demonized expression of unthinkable thoughts, construct the official Israelite history of the Exodus as incomplete, inflated, or mythic in­vention. In chapter 3, I discuss the problem of such counter-narratives and the implications of the Rabbis’ willingness to articulate them....

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
080521237X
ISBN 13 
9780805212372
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
594
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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