Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (16 page)

I will inflict upon you none of the diseases that I have inflicted on Egypt
, for if I should inflict them,
indeed I am the Lord your healer
. [These are] the words of R. Yehoshua.

This last paragraph is also difficult. It seems to involve a selfcontradiction. I will not inflict, but if I inflict. . . . R. Yohanan's reading of this verse in the Talmud provides insight into his meaning: "Said R. Abba to Rabba bar Meri, It is written 'I will not inflict upon you any disease which I inflicted on Egypt, for I, the Lord, am your healer.' Now since He does not inflict, why should I need a healing? Said R. Yohanan, This verse explains itself. 'If you will hear the voice of the Lord'—if you will hear, I will not inflict; if you won't hear, I will inflict, and even so, indeed, I the Lord am you healer" [Sanh. 101a].

R. Yohanan expands the verse according to simple logic of implicature. According to this, R. Yehoshua's statement is merely elliptical, not contradictory. He reads the verse like those verses in which the most terrible curses are mentioned but assurance of ultimate salvation is promised. I will not inflict—but should you force me to— even then I will heal you in the end. The value of this reading is that it recuperates the whole narrative as a covenant institution in minature, with both the giving of law and a structure of blessings and curses (however elliptical) at the close. Just as in the other great covenant texts there is an explicit promise that even should Israel fail, in the end God will redeem them, so is there here.

R. El'azar of Modi'in says,
If you will hear [=obey]
. It could mean optional. Thus the significance of saying, "you
will
hear."
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It is obligatory and not optional. [Another interpretation:
you will hear
; this is a principle in which the whole Torah is included.]

The voice of the Lord, your God
. Scripture says that anyone who obeys the voice of the Almighty, it is accounted for him as if he were standing and serving in the presence of Him who lives and subsists forever.
And do what is straight in His eyes
. This refers to business. It teaches that anyone who conducts business in good faith and people are pleased with him, it is accounted for him as if he had kept the whole Torah.
And hearken unto His commandments
. These are the
halakot. And keep all His statutes
. These are the laws of sexual morality.
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I will inflict upon you none of the diseases I have inflicted upon Egypt
. What is the significance of saying "for I, the Lord, am your healer"? God said to Moses, Say to Israel: The words of Torah which I have given you are a medicine for you, as it is said, "They are life for those who find them, and to all of his flesh a curative. It will be a cure for your

flesh" [Prov. 4:21 and 3:8].

R. El'azar picks up here the metaphorical recuperation of our narrative, taking the "healing" to refer not to the sweetening of physical water but to the healing effect that words of Torah have on the spiritual and physical body. As noted above, his interpretation cites the same intertext for this metaphor as the other interpreters, R. Shim'on ben Yohai and the
dorshe reshumot
, who adopt this line of reading.

In a recent book, exemplary for its thoughtful and powerful synthesis of scholarship and theory, Lee Patterson denies that there is any such thing as textual ambiguity per se:

Ambiguity is usually recognized as a characteristic possessed by the text, an uncertainty of meaning in fact present in discourse itself. But like other kinds of verbal meaning, whether fixed or indeterminate, ambiguity is also a function of reading: a text is ambiguous only to someone. As recent medieval criticism witnesses, there are many readers to whom no poem is ambiguous. Nor are these readers wrong in ascribing the meanings they do to the poems they interpret: indeed, correctness is clearly a misleading criterion to apply to criticism. Disamhiguating is always, and properly, a process of deciding not what a text means but what we want it to mean. We do this, basically, by locating the text in an interpretive context, such as an authorial intention or a genre (e.g., Christian instruction, courtly lyric), that organizes meanings into primary and secondary. Put simply, by privileging one context at the expense of others we decide how the text's ironies should be read, whence they derive their authority, and against whom they are directed.
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According to Patterson everything in the text, including its very ambiguity, is a function of hermeneutic preemption.

Not surprisingly, Patterson's model reader is Augustine. Remarking that, "One of the great achievements of Augustinian hermeneutics is to make the preemptive nature of interpretation explicit,"
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he cites very approvingly that Saint's claim that "whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God

and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way."
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Taking Augustine's rule of charity as merely making explicit the nature of all interpretation seems to me too extreme. Patterson seems to postulate that there are only two possibilities for theorizing ambiguity and disambiguation: either they are located entirely in the text or entirely in the reader. Are these two extremes really the only possibilities? Midrash is often portrayed as precisely the kind of radically preemptive reading that Augustine calls for and Patterson theorizes as the only available option for readers; that is, an interpretation the results of which are given wholly in advance and for which any distortion of the text is permitted to achieve those results. Indeed, both of the readings of the Mara episode in our Mekilta passage have been so characterized. Thus, for R. Shim'on ben Gamliel's reading a Realpolitik appropriation has been suggested by Ira Chernus:

R. Simeon, too, obviously thought that the tree Moses threw in the water was bitter, but he went on to generalize the principle implicit in this detail and show its applicability to other biblical incidents. Here again we have a paradoxical pattern of divine action in history; did R. Simeon intend it to be a paradigm by which contemporary events could be understood as well? As the highest ranking political leader of his community he surely must have been deeply concerned with the political situation of his day, and it seems fair to hypothesize that this concern would be a major factor in his midrashic activity. Such an hypothesis sheds interesting light on this particular midrash, for it accords well with R. Simeon's political position and political concerns. Certainly R. Simeon found the rule of Rome a bitter reality; he is reported to have said of the Jews' sufferings under Rome: "If we had to write [them] we would never finish." Nevertheless he was against any further attempts at rebellion and urged his people to acquiesce in Roman rule. His motives were apparently compounded of political prudence, a concern to maintain his own position of leadership, and a desire to avoid further war. Thus he opposed any attempt to replace the bitter Roman rule with something "sweet"—either a conquering Persian government or a renewed independent Jewish government in Palestine. Rather he hoped to work through the existing government to improve the lot of the Jewish community; he hoped to use something bitter to cure the bitter situation.

It seems plausible that R. Simeon stated the general principle implicit in the Mara episode to prove that he, in pursuing this political course, was acting according to the ways of God rather than man.
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Chernus assumes that the interpretation of the tree as bitter precedes logically and chronologically the association of our passage with the other ones and particularly with the curing of the waters by Elisha. He accordingly suggests that R. Shim'on's reading of the passage is externally motivated by his political

concerns. However, I have tried to show through my reading that our narrative is one that
requires
strong interpretation if it is to be readable at all, and that it is precisely the passage from Kings which provides one possible and indeed very plausible line of interpretation for it, for the story of Elisha and the water seems to have been generated by reading our story. If my suggestion is at all convincing, then the ambiguities of our text and their resolution via the intertexts provide sufficient motivation for reading the tree paradoxically as a real and bitter tree. This does not argue, of course, that there is no correlation between R. Shim'on's political concerns and his reading of the Torah here. Quite the opposite. Chernus's hypothesis remains very possibly correct (whatever correct can mean here), but the relation between the midrashic practice and the other social, historical practices implied by texts about R. Shim'on ben Gamliel would be considerably more complicated than the simple one of genealogy that Chernus hypothesizes.

A similar case can be made for the other interpretation. This is generally read as the parade example of allegoresis in midrash, of a reading wholly controlled and motivated by an external ideological construction, the typically rabbinic ideology of the moral and spiritual efficacy of the study of Torah and the destructive effects of dereliction therefrom. And, indeed, there may be no question but that this reading of the Mara story is located in that cultural realm. The question is again one of explanatory models for that location. If previous scholars have read the midrash as radically preemptive of a simple and literal meaning in order to make its ideological point, I would propose, in the light of my reading, that the Torah authorizes such a spiritual reading of itself, via the gaps, ambiguities, and ungrammaticalities of its narrative discourse, although I will admit that the particular inflection of the midrash's reading in which all that is spiritual is referred to as Torah is a particularly rabbinic move.

Close reading of the Mekilta's interpretation of the story of the waters of Mara has led me to the claim that the ambiguities and gaps of that narrative are to be located in the discourse and not as a pure function of reading. Moreover, while the strategies employed to foreclose and reduce the ambiguities of the story are clearly an effect of reading, these are also not merely an arbitrary choice on the part of the rabbis of what they want the text to mean. These processes of foreclosure of ambiguity are also authorized by choice of different controlling contexts or intertextual allusions given within the textual system for resolving the local narrative and its axiological meanings. While the choice of context involves a complex interaction with ideology, that is, it may function as a moment in ideological production, the possibilities themselves for such choice are not merely arbitrary nor imposed from outside. They arise, once more, from ideological tensions which the Torah (and the Hebrew Bible as a whole) make manifest.

In the next passage which I shall be reading here, the Mekilta interprets the story of the giving of the manna. The Mekilta here again and on the immediately following narratives consists of the running commentaries of Rabbis Yehoshua and El'azar of Modi'in.
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We shall find these two interpreters adopting consistent attitudes in the reading of this text—consistent attitudes which are diametrically opposed to each other. This seems to be a counterexample to my claim above that the Mekilta's reading practice is not radically preemptive in the Augustinian sense. It would appear that each tanna has decided
in advance
what the text must mean on ideological grounds and is now reading in a way that fits the idea. However, I will again read this consistent disagreement as a response to ambiguity that plays within the text, now not on the lexical level, but on the level of the
evaluation
of the entire narrative situation. The two alternative readings are generated once again by referring the current text to two possible intertextual codes which it calls up through its own heterogeneity.

The narrative and its interpretation begin with Exod. 16:2.

And the whole congregation of Israel murmured
. R. Yehoshua says: They ought to have consulted the greatest of their number, "what shall we eat?" but instead Israel stood up and said angry words against Moses. R. El'azar Hammoda'i says: Israel was schooled in saying angry words against Moses, and not against Moses alone did they say, but against Aaron, for it says, "And the children of Israel said to
them
, 'Would we had died, etc.' " They said: Would we had died in the three days of darkness of Egypt. (Lauterbach, II, pp. 100ff)

Both tannaim are faced here with the same interpretive problem as above. The verb "murmured" has a strong pejorative connotation, of rebellion and ungratefulness, but why should the question of the congregation have been characterized as such? After all, the people are indeed hungry, and what could be more natural for them than to ask, "What shall we eat"? R. Yehoshua answers this difficulty by minimizing and explaining away the pejorative aspect of the words; their fault was essentially one of protocol. Before complaining to Moses in an angry fashion, they ought to have asked their wisest man what they would eat. R. El'azar, on the other hand, enthusiastically activates the pejorative connotations of the word "murmured,'' and even enhances them dramatically. He claims that it was in the nature (or at any rate the nurture) of the people to be rebellious, and this act, therefore, was merely a manifestation of that tendency. Moreover, he even adds to the extent of the murmuring by arguing that they rebelled against Aaron as well as Moses. The two interpreters have thus taken diametrically opposed positions. One has read the text in a way least unfavorable to Israel and its actions, while the other reads it in a most unfavorable way.

We will see the same patterning of their interpretations also in the continuation: