Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (21 page)

The analogy to our midrashic meshalim is precise. In these as well, it is a "family tradition" and a "biographic structure" which are being interpreted. This tradition and biography are real stories, just as they are in the case of Pascal's young duke. However, by themselves they have no meaning. They are merely data.
They must be made into fictions before they can signify
, fiction here not being used in the sense of a text which is not true, but in the sense of a text which has been structured so as to mean, an artifact. The function of the mashal is to reveal the fictionality of the true story of the Torah, that is, to take its recital of events, gapped as it is, and by assigning it a place in the cultural codes articulated by simple narrative functions and structures, to allow it to be completed and to signify. That is why until Solomon created the mashal, the Torah was like a thicket into which no one could enter, or like a basket of fruit which no one could carry.
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Again in Marin's words: "The function of the parabolic narrative therefore appears through an ambiguity which gives it great practical efficacy: the parable designates in its fiction a real narrative (situation, position) that it assimilates to itself in the process of showing that this narrative is the revealing figure of one term of the code by which the parable was encoded into a fictive narrative."
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The parable in Marin's analysis has as its designatum not an abstraction but the "true story" itself. The "real narrative" is interpreted by being shown to be an element in a paradigm, "the revealing figure of one term of the code," through its attraction to the parable. The entire then forms one signifying system—"the parabolic narrative." This is precisely what I have claimed for the midrashic mashal as well. Its designatum is the very biblical narrative. This narrative is assimilated to the mashal—the history itself is shown to be a figure of the code which the mashal represents. The mashal then stands in an ambiguous position similar to the one that Matin discusses. Is there a story or is there not? Is it history or is it fiction? This ambiguity is greatly heightened in the story of the king and his son, wherein the two narratives are physically assimilated to each other. Ostensibly R. Yehuda begins by telling a fictive narrative of a king and a king's son, which we would expect to be placed beside a real narrative of God and the people, but as soon as he begins, it becomes clear that only one story is being told at all, for God is the king and Israel is the son. This

ambiguity is embodied in such sentences as: "He [the son] became hungry, He [who, the king or God?] fed him, as it says, 'Behold I [God] will rain bread down' "! This is not, in my reading, merely a shorthand, owing to the perpetual nature of the metaphorical transfer king=God, son=Israel, but rather a matter of the inherent logic of the mashal's essence. There is no story of a king and his son at all, but only an interpretation of the relation of God to His people as being that of a king to his infant child, so that the gapped, unmotivated movement of the angel from in front to in back of the people can be motivated and understood. Moreover, the assigning of this narrative to the underlying structure, king and son, allows for the collection of the other verses which relate to this structure and their reemplacement in a narrative sequence.

At this point, we can return to our overall characterization of the mashal as a type of midrash. The biblical text as written is characterized by hiatus and indeterminacy at many points. The work of midrash, similar to all reading of narrative, is the filling of the gaps. The way that midrash works is by introducing into the fissures in the text new narrative material, largely created out of other biblical texts. This practice is founded again on the insight that the Bible is a single semiotic system—in hermeneutic terms, a selfglossing text. However, this work is not—at least in midrash—a free, individual response to the text, but one which is constrained by a very specific ideology.
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Only certain plots and certain associations of text to text are allowed. I would suggest that this is true of any reading in any culture, but it is usually unconscious and suppressed, while the rabbis have often represented on the surface of their hermeneutic texts precisely the ideological codes which allow and constrain their interpretation. The mashal is the most clearly defined of those codes which generate interpretation by narrative expansion. The mashal is a basic narrative structure whose characters and actions belong to the common coin of the intertext. These basic narrative structures are thus the carriers of values and ideology in the culture. The biblical story, referential and historical in its generic claims, is made to signify by being read with its rabbinic intertext.
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By this practice, history becomes parable.

The text, however, as we possess it today, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes. Two mutually opposed treatments have left their traces on it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated it and amplified it and have even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solicitous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus almost everywhere noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come about—indications which reveal things to us which it was not intended to communicate. . . . the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. We might lend the word
Entstellung
[distortion] the double meaning to which it has a claim but of which today it makes no use. It should mean not only "to change the appearance of something" but also "to put something in another place, to displace." Accordingly, in many instances of textual distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been suppressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else, though changed and tom from its context. Only it will not always be easy to recognize it.

Sigmund Freud
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As pointed out in an important recent paper by Christopher Johnson, Freud is here drawing a powerful analogy between textwork and dreamwork. In typical nineteenthcentury fashion he projects an "original" pure text which has been distorted through the conscious efforts of repressive scribes. In the present climate of thought, I find it hard to imagine this originary purity of the text (except as an article of religious faith), but Freud's remarks are, nevertheless, very suggestive. If we transpose (displace) them, as Johnson does (and, as he claims, Kristeva does), from the realm of textual transmission to that of textual production, we arrive at intertextuality—intertextuality as the traces within the text, the bumps on its surface, which mark the suppressions, conflicts, and transformations of earlier signifying practices of which it is the site.

Intertextuality is, in a sense, the way that history, understood as cultural and ideological change and conflict, records itself within textuality. As the text is the transformation of a signifying system and of a signifying practice, it embodies the more or less untransformed detritus of the previous system. These fragments of the previous system and the fissures they create on the surface of the text reveal conflictual dynamics which led to the present textual system. Now, it is, I would claim, precisely these gaps in the text which the midrash reads,
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and the rabbis very early drew the connection between dream interpretation and hermeneutics of the Torah.
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It is, then, perhaps, not altogether unexpected to find the psychodynamic model a useful one for the understanding of some aspects of midrash and its relation

to the biblical text. The Torah itself, even as it is generically identified as God's work, nevertheless indicates its own belatedness with respect to earlier texts: "Therefore it says in the book of the Wars of the Lord 'and Waheb in Sufa and the rivers of Amon' " [Numbers 21:14]. Other markers of the presence of earlier signifying

systems within the biblical text are less explicit but nevertheless discernible in the "noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions" to which Freud referred. Indeed, all those fissures in the Torah which diachronic scholarship figures as evidence for a plurality of sources, our present reading practice will refigure as indications of intertextuality.
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These intimations of intertextuality are part of what gives the Bible its continuing power to fascinate, and the rabbis could not fail to mark and interpret them in the midrashwork. In analyzing a text from the Mekilta, I will try to show that it constitutes an interpretation of these intertextual fragments of earlier repressed but not utterly expunged cultural practice. The claim that I wish to make about this midrash is that it enacts in very important ways the conflict in Jewish culture between its pagan past and its monotheistic present. Putting this in psychic terms, the midrash makes manifest the repressed mythic material in the Bible's "textual subconscious." More specifically, much of the Bible records openly the conflict in its culture between paganism as the old religion of the people and the new religion of the Torah and the Prophets. The remnants of that conflict, and indeed the remnants of the suppressed culture, are to be found in the allusions which the Bible makes, willingly and willynilly, to the content and images of the earlier mythology. One of the important dynamics of midrash as reading is that it makes manifest the hidden dimensions of that mythic intertext by gathering together these fragments of allusion and figural language and reinscribing them into narratives.

This idea is not entirely new. Samuel Loewenstamm already pointed to an example of this process in the very text we are studying here, the Mekilta:

As for the wind [which drove back the water of the Red Sea], the midrash has already focused on it very precisely and remarked that it is not accidental

that God here acted by means of an
east wind
, but indeed this wind is counted as one of the traditional weapons of God. [The midrash] cited evidence for this in its interpretation of Exodus 14:21 from the verses: "With the east wind I will scatter them before the enemy" [Jer. 18:17]; "With the east wind You have broken the ships of Tarshish" [Ps. 48:8]; from the verse in Hosea [13:15], which dubs the east wind, "the wind of the Lord"; and from the verse in Isaiah [27:8] about the War of the Lord, "With His strong wind, on the day of the east wind." . . . It is clear that the east wind was singled out from all the winds in the mythological tradition of Israel.
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As Loewenstamm has acutely realized, the Mekilta,
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by gathering all of these verses into a paradigm (under the rubric, "And you also find that God punished the generation of the flood and the people of Sodom, only by means of the east wind. . . . And you will also find in the case of the People of the Tower . . ."), has revealed that which perhaps the biblical authors sought to hide, the actual mythic background of the description of the east wind as a weapon of God. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to analyze a much more complex text from the same midrash, which thematizes both this mythological intertext and the conflict with it:

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea
[Exod. 14:21]. The sea began to resist him. Moses said, 'in the name of the Holiness,' but it did not yield. The Holiness, blessed be He, revealed Himself; the sea began to flee, as it says, "The sea saw and fled" [Ps. 114:3].

Its
mashal;
to what is the matter similar? To a king of flesh and blood, who has two gardens, one inside the other. He sold the inner one, and the purchaser came to enter, but the guard did not allow him. He said to him, "In the name of the king," but he did not yield. He showed him the signet, but he did not yield until the king came. Once the king came, the guard began to flee. He said, "All day long I have been speaking to you in the name of the king and you did not yield. Now, why are you fleeing?" He said, "not from you am I fleeing, but from the king am I fleeing."

Similarly, Moses came and stood at the sea. He said to him, "in the name of the Holiness," and it did not yield. He showed him the rod, and it did not yield, until the Holiness, blessed be He, revealed Himself in HIS glory. The sea began to flee, as it is said, "The sea saw and fled" [Ps. 114:3]. Moses said to him, "All day long I have been speaking to you in the name of the Holiness, blessed be He, and you did not submit. Now, 'what has happened to you, O sea, that you flee? [Ps. 114:5]' "He answered him, "Not from before you am I fleeing, son of Amram, but 'from before the Master, tremble earth [progenitor of the earth],
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from before the God of Jacob [Ps. 114: 7–8]' ".

This midrash fits the formal structure theorized in the previous chapter. We begin with the Torah verse to be interpreted, "And Moses stretched out his arm over the sea—and God moved the sea with a strong east wind all of the night . . ." The verse provides a gap. Aside from any theological problem

which this verse raises, it is problematic from the point of view of narrative logic. If Moses has been empowered to split the sea with his hand, as implied by God's command to him in the previous verse, "Stretch out your hand over the sea and split it," then why does God intervene directly and perform the splitting Himself? Alternatively, if Moses has not been thus empowered, then for what purpose does he stretch out his hand? The oddness of this verse can be shown by comparison with others, e.g., "Then the Lord said to Moses, 'Stretch out your hand toward heaven that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt'. . . . So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was a thick darkness . . ." [Exod. 7:21–22]. Or in the continuation of our very story, "So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and as morning broke, the sea returned to its normal course" [14:27]. The effect of our verse is so jarring that the Higher Critics have placed a juncture between two sources in its caesura.
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In fact, many Bible critics regard the whole account of the splitting of the sea as the interweaving of two contradictory traditions or documents.
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The rabbis who composed the midrash, unwilling, of course, to adopt such diachronic solutions, read the text synchronically, that is, as a system of gaps.
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They resolve the contradiction of the two halves of the verse by narrating a set of events which took place between them and which motivates the change in subject from Moses to God Himself as director of the sea's split. The plot of this narrative expansion is structured by a mashal. It is the text of Psalm 114, however, which provides the primary material for the narrative. The solution of the midrash is produced by reading the text of Psalm 114 as a commentary on the Exodus passage. The text of the psalm, which generates the story of the sea's opposition, is thus introduced precisely into the middle of the original verse, precisely into the split where the Higher Critics see the junction of sources and for exactly the same reason.
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The dialogue of the psalm is inserted right into the middle of the verse between "And Moses stretched out his arm" and "And God moved the sea.''