Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

1. On Reading

30 READING AND HEARING 1. On Reading What happens when we read? A lot. More than meets the eye. What happens is an ongoing exchange between three parties: the text, the author, and the reader. (There is also a fourth presence hovering silently in the background, but I’ll come to that later.) In any act of reading each of these three “players” asserts itself and, in doing so, presents specific issues and problems. When we are reading the weekly Torah portion, there are some particular ones to note. Let’s consider them. The Text It’s one thing to read a text that is part of our universe of discourse , like an article in the New York Times or Newsweek. It’s quite another to read a parashah. For when we do we are tricked by an interesting optical illusion. We perceive the stories of Genesis or the laws of Deuteronomy within the covers of a bound book mechanically produced in the 20th or 21st century. The text sits there on a neatly printed page, set in contemporary typescript . And so, though we know we are reading the Bible, we begin to think, however subliminally, that the words and sentences we are taking in are much like the words and sentences we’d read in the New York Times or Newsweek, and the chapters we see are of the same order as the chapters in a novel by Toni Morrison or Charles Dickens. We lose sight of the fact that what faces us on the page is very, very old. We wouldn’t be deceived in this way by ancient buildings or monuments. We wouldn’t, for example, look at the Western Wall 31 ON READING in Jerusalem or the ruins at Megiddo or Jericho and think that they are of the same age and architecture or built of the same material as such modern structures as the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge or even the Eiffel Tower. Yet the stories in Genesis and the laws in Deuteronomy, not to mention the very words out of which they are made, are no less ancient than the stones of the Western Wall or Megiddo, however contemporary they may look typographically. Most of us probably read them with the conventions and expectations we have been conditioned to bring to the reading experience from our familiarity with more recent literature. The Joseph story cycle, for example, which occupies nearly the last third of Genesis, feels novelistic in the sweep of its plot and its intimations of character, and so we are blithely attuned to reading it more or less as we would read A Tale of Two Cities or Crime and Punishment. We make assumptions about the narrative and we ask questions about it similar to those we would ask about novels. But is making such a facile literary connection warranted? Is the connection itself workable? The Joseph story, indeed Genesis as a whole, is not a novel in the formal sense of what, after the 17th century, came to be known as the novel. In fact, each of the five books of the Pentateuch defies formal definition within modern literary categories. Genesis and Exodus are two very different kinds of works. Both are radically different from Leviticus, and Deuteronomy has its own distinctiveness. Numbers is something else again. These works have no precise formal equivalents, neither in the literatures of modernity nor of antiquity (although in the latter case there are some broad affinities). Then there is the matter of translation. It is one thing to read the Humash or the TANAKH in Hebrew. That alone presents a wide array of interpretive problems, to say the least. But to read a biblical text in translation creates a whole new tier of concerns. Nuances are lost (and sometimes gained, erroneously) because of lexical differences between Hebrew and English and the disparities in syntax between the two linguistic systems. I note all this not to throw up roadblocks to novice parashah readers . My point here is that when we open to a Torah portion we need to take into account the antiquity and the distinctiveness of what we are looking at. 32 READING AND HEARING The Author Now things get even more interesting. When we pick up a book by Toni Morrison or even by Dr. Seuss, we know who the author is. We can use this information...