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40 READING AND HEARING 2. Reading the Humash Generally, then, when we read a parashah, whether in the synagogue , at home, or in a library, the presence of the reading community within which we are situated is taken for granted. We are often not aware of it. That is why I have called it a silent player. But whichever one it is, Jewish or Christian or secular, it serves an important function: it qualifies the essential subjectivity of our engagement with the text. It impedes our advancing willful or idiosyncratic or even bizarre interpretations. With the Humash there are other features that are not so subtle that not only qualify our subjectivity but actually subvert it. These are aspects of the text that call attention to themselves, things like the repetition of words and phrases and the juxtaposition of people and events. There are sometimes quirky observations by the narrator. It’s hard to read the Humash for too long without realizing that we are in the hands of a writer or a redactor who seems to take delight in surprising us. We will examine these things more closely in Part IV when I’ll go through the actual mechanics of reading a parashah. I note them here in order to bring this whole discussion full circle. If it’s fashionable in literary circles today to say that in the threeway exchange that goes on in the act of reading among author, text, and reader, it is the reader who holds the balance of power in determining meaning, in the case of the Humash the three agents are in equilibrium. The text is not nearly as pliable in the reader’s hands as a modern text would be, and the redactor is by no means the passive secretary of an anthological committee. Text and redactor are almost as objectively present during the reading as the reader. So when we read the Humash and the text in ques- 41 READING THE HUMASH tion is the weekly Torah portion, we should not be too hasty to hand all the interpretive keys over to the reader. In sum, here are some things to keep firmly in mind when we open a Humash and begin reading the weekly parashah: • The text, though its meanings may be fresh and contemporary, is not from our time. Though we see it in modern typescript, it is suffused with antiquity. And if we are working from a translation , we are at an even further remove from the words and the syntax of the Hebrew original. • The author is unknown and unknowable regardless of how we understand who this author is and when he wrote. We can believe that the author is God, or God through the medium of Moses. Or we can posit, as I do, that the hands of several authors are in evidence and what we’re reading is a synthesis of their work into a unified whole, selected, compiled, and arranged by an anonymous redactor, a redactor with literary designs and a point of view. • As readers we absorb the Humash through the prism of our individuality and our subjectivity. This prism need not be a prison if we are aware of the particular assumptions and biases that we bring to the text, and if we recognize that our subjectivity is not only individual but collective. For whether we know it or not, we read inside the cultural or theological premises of some social group, be it religious or secular. We may not always be conscious of these premises, but they are always vectors on how we read. All this said, reading is not the only way in which we take in the Torah. There is another cognitive mode by which we do so, by which it invites us to do so: hearing. ...

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