 |
|
Posted July 20, 2006
Book: A Christian Encounter with Jewish Midrash: The Burning Word Author: Judith M. Kunst Paraclete Press. Brewster. MA. 2006. Pp. 156 An Excerpt from the Jacket:
"Judith Kunst not only introduces us to the power of midrash, but also shows how this approach has given new meaning to her Christian faith." An Excerpt from the Book: Attention To Study is to Play From the moment I first began seeking to understand the "something vital" that midrash has to offer me as a writer and as a person of faith, I have been struck by the simplicity, playfulness, and almost childlike ease with which Jewish writers approach both scripture and their own creative response to difficulties. It's hard to find a resemblance between the delight and pleasure of scripture study evident in Jewish literature, and the somber, suspicious, indignant and nit-picky picture the Christian tradition has often painted of Jewish leaders and teachers. This is not to say Midrashic rabbis consider their work frivolous or insignificant. Much the opposite, say the Biblical scholar Avivah Zornbert, who points to a passionate verse in Psalm 119:92: "If your Torah had not been my plaything - sba'asbu'ai - I should have perished in my affliction. The play-activity of Bible study, says Zornberg "is the secret of [Jewish} survival, enigmatic, never fully understood." She explains that the Hebrew word sba'asbu'a "has at its roots the word sba'a (al yishb' u) to pay attention, in its doubled form, this becomes sba'asbu'a, which means play, the diffuse attention to multiple aspects of an object." If I think about how small children go about their play, Zornberg's sophisticated definition becomes clear. My three-year-old, Aidan, will zigzag around a single room for an hour, using just a few toys to play out three or for totally different, complex scenarios. I once met a five-year-old girl named Emma who held up the end of a telephone cord and said earnestly, "Today this is a bumblebee, but yesterday it was a trumpet." To say a child has a short attention span is inaccurate, a child's attention, rather, is diffuse, spread out over many objects of intense focus, or using one object in many different ways. Play - whether the game is a child's hide-and-seek or a rabbi's midrash - has a set structure, a flexible form that varies according to different time periods and cultures. Key ingredients to structured play usually include a leader, a community (real or imagined), a challenge, and an outcome (success or failure). The folk tradition of medieval Hasidic sermons represents perhaps the high point of playfulness in the history of Midrash. Medieval European-Jewish congregations, their minds uncluttered by television, radio, or even books, took zesty pleasure in listening to a rabbi's imaginative play with scripture, expecting to be both edified and entertained as they followed the preacher's meandering path through the Bible. The structure of this midrash sermon was simple: The preaching rabbi, called the darshan or "midrash-maker," would always begin by reciting the assigned weekly Torah portion. Then, without commenting on that scripture at all, he would immediately recite another verse, called the "verse from afar," that seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to the original portion. The challenge for the preacher was first to raise a question or problem in this new verse, then to imaginatively show how the initial verse could be used to solve the originally stated problem, and in the process, draw from the entire exercise a spiritual lesson or insight. In one example, a rabbi named Judah ben Simon draws his opening verse from the Torah portion Leviticus 19:23: "And when you shall come into the land, you shall plant all manner of trees." He recites this verse, then immediately cites his "verse from afar", Deuteronomy 13:5: "After the Lord your God shall you walk." These two seemingly random verses now need to be connected to a problem and a solution by the bridge of the rabbi's imaginative logic. The problem Rabbi Simon discerns in his "verse from afar" is: How can a human being "walk after" God himself? He weaves in other verses from the Bible to intensify the question: God's path goes through "the great waters" (Ps. 77:20), God's footsteps are "unknowable" (Deut. 4:24), and God's presence is "all fire" (Dan. 7:9) - how then can any person walk as he walks? Up to this point the rabbi takes the Bible's command literally: How can we physically walk after a divine being? But suddenly he turns back to the opening verse and finds a playful, non-literal way to obey the command. "But in fact the Holy One, blessed be He, from the beginning of the creation of the world, was occupied before all else with planting. For thus, it is written "and the Lord God planted a garden at first in Eden' (Gen. 2:8), and so you shall also - when you first enter the land you should occupy yourselves first with nothing bu planting. God plants, says the rabbi, and this is a divine activity we can emulate. Thus the midrash-maker arrives at the place he started, having solved the problem of the second verse and infused the first with spiritual import. "Thus it is written," he says, "And when you shall come into the land, you shall plant all manner of trees . . ." Why should we plant? Because planting was God's first act after the creation of the world, and in our own acts of planting we imitate God. Table of Contents: 1. Intimacy: turn and return 2. Reverence: the word is real 3. Curiosity: the word is burning 4. Community: to argue is to love 5. Suffering: the yeast of exile 6. Attention: to study is to play 7. Imagination: bring the whole tithe 8. Repetition: the mirrored voice 9. Truth: freedom in the rough 10. Creation: a fire in the belly 11. Revelation: word without end |
|
