Whither Exodus? Movies as Midrash, by Alicia Ostriker
"As with screen adaptations of novels one has loved, it is easy to be shocked, shocked, at omissions and deviations in Biblical epics from the original sacred text. But suppose we think about De Mille's The Ten Commandments and Dreamworks's The Prince of Egypt in terms of a Jewish genre whose essence is sacred play with sacred text for the sake of communal need-the genre of midrash.
Describing the medieval rabbinic tradition of midrashic storytelling, the scholar Gerald Bruns argues that efforts to reconstruct "original meaning" in biblical studies necessarily fail, because Scripture is itself future-oriented. "The bible always addresses itself to the time of interpretation; one cannot understand it except by appropriating it." "Midrashic understanding," says Bruns, means that we "take the text in relation to ourselves, understanding ourselves in its light, even as our situation throws its light upon the text, allowing it to disclose itself differently, perhaps in unheard-of ways." Rabbinic midrash is full of "excessiveness . . . legendary extravagance . . . always seems to be going too far, saying what the text does not say but also what the text, taken by itself, does not seem to warrant," because it is a two-way "dialogue of text and history" in which text is always being adapted to and by a community that is ongoing in time, and which is always itself being shaped by the text. When the rabbis re-tell Scripture with "parables, sayings, puns, stories" and flights of imagination designed to fill in its gaps, reconcile its contradictions, locate its meaning in the time of the listener, it is also understood that a single text may yield multiple meanings. "There is always another interpretation," say the rabbis."
Link
Brought to you by my rereading of Ted Cohen's Thinking of others: on the talent for metaphor by way of comfort reading. (The connection is Bruns' article.)
This entry was originally posted at http://hagar-972.dreamwidth.org/2402611.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Describing the medieval rabbinic tradition of midrashic storytelling, the scholar Gerald Bruns argues that efforts to reconstruct "original meaning" in biblical studies necessarily fail, because Scripture is itself future-oriented. "The bible always addresses itself to the time of interpretation; one cannot understand it except by appropriating it." "Midrashic understanding," says Bruns, means that we "take the text in relation to ourselves, understanding ourselves in its light, even as our situation throws its light upon the text, allowing it to disclose itself differently, perhaps in unheard-of ways." Rabbinic midrash is full of "excessiveness . . . legendary extravagance . . . always seems to be going too far, saying what the text does not say but also what the text, taken by itself, does not seem to warrant," because it is a two-way "dialogue of text and history" in which text is always being adapted to and by a community that is ongoing in time, and which is always itself being shaped by the text. When the rabbis re-tell Scripture with "parables, sayings, puns, stories" and flights of imagination designed to fill in its gaps, reconcile its contradictions, locate its meaning in the time of the listener, it is also understood that a single text may yield multiple meanings. "There is always another interpretation," say the rabbis."
Link
Brought to you by my rereading of Ted Cohen's Thinking of others: on the talent for metaphor by way of comfort reading. (The connection is Bruns' article.)
This entry was originally posted at http://hagar-972.dreamwidth.org/2402611.html. Please comment there using OpenID.