The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah (review)

The eternal text has not been exhausted yet, and it still enfolds mysteries that make the reading and studying of it forever exciting and pleasurable.¹

“Without music life would be a mistake.” Nietzche’s comment is somewhat analogous to the indispensable role midrash plays in the life of tradition. Without an innovative, vibrant interpretation and reinterpretation, a sacred tradition is prone to atrophy and become irrelevant to the changing needs of the community of the faithful. Much of what is right and true in one generation can easily become a “mistake” or bogus in another. The genius of rabbinic midrash, as edited and seen from a synoptic, ahistorical perspective, is the polyphonic nature of its interpretations. Even within the same generation, you find a multilayered open-endedness that allows for a lively engagement of views and counter-views.

The sayings of the wise are like goads. . . . They were given by one Shepherd (Eccles. 12:11). Like goads: R. Berachia said: “Like a game of catch between girls. One throws it in this direction, the other in that direction. So it is with the Sages when they are occupied with their study of Torah. One gives his interpretation, another gives a different one, and these and those were all given by Moses the shepherd from what he received from the Singular One of the world [as it is written]: They were given by one Shepherd.

(Pesikta rabati, ed. Ish Shalom, Piska 3)

Taking this teaching one step further, the classic midrashic literature can be characterized as a concatenation of dialogues between Sage (ḥakham) and biblical text; Sage and colleague (present, past or future); Sage and audience; Sage and the divine court on high; and Sage and the exigencies of the times.²

To this rabbinic conceit of the profusion of views legitimated by divine approval, the midrashic approach adds the presumption that the answers to the pressing problems of time immemorial can be found in the Torah and its interpretation. “Turn it [Torah] and turn it again, for all is contained in it” (Pirkei avot 5:25). Whichever way the Oral Tradition of the Rabbis turns, the Bible is the ultimate inspiration and authority for the midrashist. Through the portals of midrash, a living tradition was transmitted. Midrash became the “shuttle space” where the Bible and the sitz im leben of the Rabbis meet. And as the Bible impacts on the contemporary scene, so the contemporary scene impacts on the interpretation of the Bible. As Daniel Boyarin has put it:

The rabbis were concerned with the burning issues of their day, but their approach to that concern was through the clarification of difficult passages of Scripture. Ideology affected their reading, but their ideology was also affected by their reading.³

Another, more subtle characteristic of midrash is its inclusion of an audience/ reader response in its teachings. Not only does the classic form of the petiḥta invite the active participation of the audience/reader, but other midrashic formulations are so constructed, intentionally or otherwise, as to elicit the audience’s own conclusions. Unexplicated parables or a tantalizing metaphor beg interpretation. The point made by literary critic Peter Brooks applies to our reading of midrash: “Meaning . . . is not simply in the text nor wholly the fabrication of a reader (or community of readers) but comes into being in the dialogical struggle and collaboration of the two, in the activation of textual possibilities in the process of reading.”⁴

In the rabbinic self-perception, the classical midrashic model of “pluralistic” discourse, with its expansions, its transformations and its daring reinventions of God and Scripture, is the exclusive domain of the Sages. As they and their successors saw it, their authoritative learning, piety and commitment to the imperatives of Torah licensed their interpretive “excesses.” However, modern interpreters have usurped rabbinic exclusivity and authority by creating their own conversations with traditional texts. Happily, Ellen Frankel is numbered among them. Her...