Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

PART III: Some Major Approaches to Reading a Parashah.

SomeMajor Approaches to Reading a Parashah 1. Modern Historical-Critical Approaches 2. Premodern Ahistorical Approaches 3. Existential Readings P A R T I I I 60 SOME MAJOR APPROACHES TO READING A PARASHAH There are any number of ways to read the Bible. (Note: In the following discussion I talk a lot about the Bible, but always with the purpose in mind of advancing the ultimate objective of this book: how to read a Torah portion.) Likewise, there are any number of ways of organizing and listing the various approaches. What follows is hardly a definitive or an exhaustive presentation but simply my own way of selecting and detailing them.1 I do so out of an awareness that how we read a parashah, how we read anything, will depend of how we want to read it, or how we choose to read it. And that will depend of what we are looking for in our reading. One of my teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary , Abraham Joshua Heschel, used to say in class: “The Bible is an answer. Do we know what the question is?”2 When it comes to the Bible and the parashah, there are many possible questions. The ones we ask will shape the answers we look for in our reading. More often than not, our questions will be only implicit, below the surface of our conscious awareness as we read. The great divide in approaches to the Bible is what I’ll call historical consciousness. On one interpretive side is the premise that life is lived not only in space but in time, and that human events unfold sequentially, the process of which is called history. Such a premise predisposes anyone holding it to want to understand the Bible in historical terms. The modern, post-Enlightenment mind is hardwired this way. Over against this is a point of departure that reads the Bible as a book that transcends history. This view is not necessarily antihistorical ; it is ahistorical. This perspective prevailed in premodern eras. If it persists in our time, it is by no means to be equated with religious fundamentalism; in fact, it is increasingly prominent in the contemporary teaching of the humanities. As we shall see, modern ahistorical approaches do not deny the historical origins of any of the books but rather hold that the Bible is about much more than the merely historical. These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. The richness and depth of the text can accommodate—indeed requires—both. We can, and should, read a parashah out of both interpretive stances, though it will take time—many readings over many 61 SOME MAJOR APPROACHES TO READING A PARASHAH years—to be able to do this. That said, let me now outline what these different approaches entail. There is one other point, though, before we begin: this discussion is not about commentaries. We must distinguish between the way of reading and the reading itself, between the principles and objectives that drive the reading and the actual practices and results of interpretation. Although I will show in the next few pages how the different approaches work by citing commentaries that exemplify them, I will discuss commentaries in Part V. ...