Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

3. Existential Readings

100 SOME MAJOR APPROACHES TO READING A PARASHAH 3. Existential Readings Of all the ways to read the Humash these are the most subjective. I use the plural because there are many approaches that could fall under this rubric. When we read existentially we come to the text to discover how it addresses us—you and me—in the life situation in which we are at the moment. Or if it addresses us at all. The perspective is personal. As we have seen, Martin Buber would have us read the Humash this way, though he is not inattentive to or unappreciative of the contribution more objective approaches make to our understanding of the biblical text.53 Buber, a thoroughly Western Jew, was much influenced in his religious thinking by his encounter with the Hasidism of eastern Europe, and many of his ideas of how we should read the Bible are grounded in Hasidic thought. So we may hold up Hasidic reading as a good model of what it might mean to read the Humash existentially. Hasidism descends from the kabbalistic tradition. But as an expression of—or perhaps a response to—the Enlightenment, the winds of which were blowing through Europe in the 18th century and figuratively rustled the curtains as far east as Czarist Russia, Hasidism focuses on the individual in a way Jewish mysticism in the Middle Ages, for example, the Zohar, did not. This is probably one of the factors that accounts for its appeal to many Jews today who are otherwise marginal to Jewish communal institutions. Hasidism has generated a rich literature on the Humash, most of it in Hebrew, that works in an essentially midrashic way to yield insights that I can only call existential.54 Here is an example 101 EXISTENTIAL READINGS where one verse—indeed one word—can be abstracted from the biblical narrative to be read in the context of the personal life of the reader. In 1798, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi [the founder of Lubavitch Hasidism] was imprisoned on charges, put forth by the opponents of Hasidism, that his teachings undermined the imperial authority of the czar. For 52 days he was held in the Peter-Paul Fortress in Petersburg. Among the Rebbe’s interrogators was a government minister who possessed broad knowledge of the Bible and Jewish studies. On one occasion, he asked the Rebbe to explain the verse (Genesis 3:9): “The Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” Did God not know where Adam was? Rabbi Schneur Zalman presented the explanation offered by several of the commentaries: the question “Where are you?” was merely a “conversation opener” on the part of God, who did not wish to unnerve Adam by immediately confronting him with his wrongdoing. “What Rashi says, I know,” said the minister. “I wish to hear how the Rebbe understands the verse.” “Do you believe that the Torah is eternal?” asked the Rebbe. “Do you believe that its every word applies to every individual, under all conditions, at all times?” “Yes,” replied the minister. Rabbi Schneur Zalman was extremely gratified to hear this. The czar’s minister had affirmed a principle which lies at the basis of the teachings of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the very teachings and ideology for which he was standing trial! “‘Where are you?’“ explained the Rebbe, “is God’s perpetual call to every man. Where are you in the world? 102 SOME MAJOR APPROACHES TO READING A PARASHAH What have you accomplished? You have been allotted a certain number of days, hours, and minutes in which to fulfill your mission in life. You have lived so many years and so many days (Rabbi Schneur Zalman spelled out the exact age of the minister). Where are you? What have you achieved?”55 But the Humash is more than a screen on which we can project the particular concerns of our individual attempts to find meaning in our journey through this world. However else we read it, we also read it in our collectivity, as Jews, and it addresses us in that context as well. The story the 54 parshiyot tell is our story. Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers are our family. They may be a “dysfunctional family,” as Aviva Zornberg has trenchantly observed, but at some level don’t we feel that we know...