Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

5. Midrash

199 5. Midrash What about reading Midrash so as to see directly what the Rabbis said about the Torah verses without mediation by later darshanim? In translation this could be disappointing and frustrating. Midrash is a form of poetry and, like poetry, it does not travel well to other linguistic systems. It is so rooted in the Hebrew language to attain its effect and meaning that to read it in any language other than Hebrew produces a relatively small return for one’s efforts . The wordplay that is at the heart of the midrashic process just doesn’t work in English. But if you are undeterred, here are two possibilities that will open up this textual field to you. • The Soncino Midrash Rabbah: Midrash Rabbah is not a discrete work but a composite collection of Rabbinic commentary on several books of the TANAKH. The translation is best described as serviceable. The Soncino Midrash Rabbah, vols. 1–5. London: Soncino Press, 1939. • Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: Mekhilta covers only the middle part of the book of Exodus, but it displays well the Rabbis’ repertoire of interpretational methods. Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael. Trans. and ed. by Jacob Z. Lauterbach, 2nd bilingual ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004. 200 COMMENTARIES: A CONCISE GUIDE Translations of other midrashic texts are also extant. They mostly serve scholarly needs and will be instructive only to the most determined nonspecialists. They are generally available in university libraries. If you are going to read midrashic text, it is best to do so with a teacher. That said, there are two collections of midrash on the Humash that do communicate its content, if not its method, to the nonHebrew reader. • Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews: This is one of the greatest works of scholarship in any language and of any age. In seven volumes, two of them notes alone, Ginzberg collected a vast array of midrashic texts on the TANAKH and wove it all into a unified whole starting with Genesis and going through to Esther. The work thus presents a continuous and coherent telling of the biblical books as interpreted by the midrashic tradition in all its diversity. The first three volumes cover the Humash. Ginzberg wrote the work in German. Most of the English translation was done by Henrietta Szold. The Jewish Publication Society put the work out between 1909 and 1939 and it has been reissued many times since then. • The Book of Legends: Sefer ha-Aggadah. This was edited by the great Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky (1859–1944) and appeared in Hebrew between 1908 and 1911. This, too, is a monumental work, as Bialik and Ravnitzky, working together in the early years of the 20th century, combed the corpus of Rabbinic literature in order to compile what they believed were the essential texts of the midrashic tradition in its aggadic (as opposed to its halakhic) mode. They took what they found and presented it quite differently from Ginzberg. Whereas Ginzberg synthesized all the texts into a seemingly seamless sequential narrative whole, Bialik and Ravnitzky took an anthological approach. They did order some of the material according to the biblical chronology, but they also organized it around a wide spectrum of themes. The result is that in this collection one can see (though not always) discrete midrashim more clearly than in Ginzberg’s, where the individual texts all blend together into a narrative. Bialik and Ravnitzky also rewrote the texts, taking them out of the Rab- 201 MIDRASH binic Hebrew of the original and casting them in an early 20th-century literary Hebrew. Upon publication Sefer ha-Aggadah became a staple in homes and schools in prestate Palestine and wherever else Hebrew was read and taught. In 1992 Rabbi William G. Braude translated the tome and the English version was published by Schocken Books (New York). ...