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Afterword
- State University of New York Press
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Afterword A fundamental argument of the preceding chapters has been the need to comment upon rabbinic texts not simply with an eye to uncovering what lies behindthem-whether hermeneutically, traditionally, or historicallybut to appreciate what lies before them in their pedagogic transforming of Scripture, tradition, and history to engage and empower rhetorically the society of sages and their disciples. Similary, I shall choose here not to repeat reductively what I have already concluded, but to look forward more expansively to the implications of those conclusions for work yet to be done. The Sifre to Deuteronomy itself stresses the identification of rabbinic teaching in all its variety-exegetical, legal, and narrative-with "words of Torah," and of the attentive study of such "words of Torah," scriptural as well as rabbinic, with divine worship or labor. Thus, I have argued, the rabbinic engagement with Torah as covenantal "song" is to be found as much in rabbinic texts of scriptural interpretation as in the intended study and interpretation ofthose rabbinic texts themselves. Even as such twofold study informs and must lead to religious practice, it is in and of itself, the Sifre claims, a performative religious experience of divine presence and redemptive expectation. The rabbinic Torah is not so much a univocal text to be monologically read as a multivocal song to be dialogically, and hence socially, performed. But if the Sifre claims this not simply for itself but for rabbinic "words ofTorah"in their differentiated aggregate, then might not other types of rabbinic texts, notwithstanding their major differences in rhetorical practice and historical context, yield to a similar sort of inward and outward looking commentary, one that seeks textual meaning in the complex interplay of the centripetal and centrifugal forces respectively of linguistic-literary signification and social-cultural practice? Because I have chosen in this book to comment upon discrete texts of the Sifre whose subject is itselfTorah and its reception or study, most have been nonlegal (or narrative) in character, even though a good number of legal texts have also been considered (especially in Chapter 3, but in the others as well). These were generally drawn from the nonlegal frame of the Sifre's commentary, which like the narrative and poetic frame of the Book of Deuteronomy, bracket, but in roughly equal measure, its legal core. My 163 164 From Tradition To Commentary next step will be to sharpen my focus even more on the texts of that legal core, asking whether they, too, should be engaged in the dialogical complexity and performative work of their discursive rhetoric and not simply for the legal norms, hermeneutics, or justifications they are conventionally thought monologically to contain. Might the same approach be applied not only to other texts oflegal and nonlegal scriptural commentary (or midrash), but also to the pedagogic discourse of the mainly nonexegeticallegal digest of the Mishnah, and in turn to its own dialogical commentaries ofthe two Talmuds? For these, no less than the midrashic texts here explored, exhibit the dialectic oftradition and transformation that provided the religious energy of rabbinic Judaism from its inception through its successive heirs. This is simply to hope that the preceding will prove to be a modest contribution toward and model for a much larger cultural history of rabbinic Judaism and beyond, which by necessity will have to be a collective scholarly commentary itself. ...