Torah and Intertextuality
We know what a light bulb is for. What is the purpose of a rabbi? There is more than one answer, but the simplest of all is that a rabbi is a teacher. And what is it that a rabbi should teach? There are objects that come in quantities that have no fixed number. This is what a rabbi should teach, but what then is the shape of that teaching? The shape is Torah-shaped, but what is the shape of Torah? The shape of Torah is threefold – The Five Books of Moses, The Prophets and the Writings. The first is the foundation, but the foundation is not the entirety.
We share the Tanakh (T – Torah, N – Nevi’im, K – Ketuvim) with people of other religious traditions: Christians, Muslims, Karaites, Samaritans, Hebrew Israelites, and others. What we do not share with these other groups is the vast and growing body of interpretation of the Tanakh, a body of wisdom revealed through two thousand years or more of rabbinic activity (some of which being the product of “Rabbis” and some the product of rabbis, our teachers, and we should consider every person our teacher). Rabbis are the ones with light bulbs over their heads.
I have found myself spending a lot of my teaching time of late trying to explain the difference between Biblical religion and Rabbinic Judaism. Biblical religion is the religious practice as it appears in the Tanakh and if one tries to understand the Torah law without the benefit of any interpretative tradition. Rabbinic Judaism is the religion of what are now known as Jews. It is a vast body of interpretation that begins in Second Temple times and comes into its own after the destruction of the Second Temple.
It begins with collections of midrashim, short commentaries on words or verses of the Tanakh, and the Six Orders of the Mishnah, an original explication of the practical procedures of following the laws of the Torah. Mishnah is terse. Talmud which interprets Mishnah with greater reference to Tanakh, is a grand enlargement which draws midrash into the discussion of law. As the saying goes, “the rest is interpretation.” I keep wanting to use the word “vast.” I tried to limit myself to using it only once, but what can I do? The record of rabbinic interpretation is vast, vaster and reaching for vastest.
It is a saying about Torah (Tanakh), “Turn it, turn it, everything is in it.” Nevertheless, there is a traditional toolbox of methods. Academic biblical scholarship has some of its own tools and the academic toolbox is organized differently from the traditional one. In her book, “Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other,’’ Judy Klitsner writes biblical criticism in a way that would not be entirely unfamiliar in an academic setting. She clarifies her purpose in writing:
“In this volume I have attempted to convey my relationship with the Bible as ‘Torah,’ a book that in many ways is studied like all other books, but whose ultimate purpose is to guide and inspire, to be deeply affecting in the human search for a godly existence.”
In this way, she separates herself from the academic community of biblical scholars who concern themselves with issues like authorship, and view the Torah as bible, a text that is not of divine origin in any fundamentalist or non-fundamentalist understanding. For her, Torah is the record of God’s guidance shared with humanity. Consequently, study of the bible, Torah, is an interaction with the Divine and an effort to better oneself in the effort.
The idea from the modern lexicon for what her primary method consists of is the study of intertextuality. Intertextuality is the use of external texts or references to external texts within a later text. This usage creates a dialogue between the two texts. As a modern idea, intertextuality was referred to as dialogism by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (later referred to as intertextuality by the Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Kristeva). Bakhtin observed intertextuality in the work of the modernists - cubists, futurists, dadaists and constructivists – but he also did so in the early history of the novel, particularly in the work of Rabelais.
Klitsner uses a traditional tool of Torah interpretation to identify intertextuality within Torah texts, the repetition of specific words and variations of those words. This has been used as a way to identify the significant themes in specific Torah texts as a homiletic tool for rabbis (writing sermons). The commonness or rarity of specific words within the texts help to clarify the concerns of the text. It was normative rabbinic knowledge to have some degree of familiarity with the relative frequency of word use, but modern tools like the Brown, Driver, Briggs “Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament,” have made it much easier to make these connections.
Klitsner has used this tool to locate some of the places where words that are uncommon cluster in two specific stories. Some of her connections are easier to make through intuition or other methods. Others are more surprising, like the link that she makes between the Tower of Babel and the Hebrew Midwives in the Exodus story. Once she has made these connections, she compares two texts using the sort of methodology that one needs to employ to understand midrash, rabbinic storytelling. Through this method she is able to uncover motivations and intentions within these stories that are harder, or nearly impossible to get at from reading the texts on their own.
What Klitsner underlines in her writing is that the practice of interpretation, which is the central activity of Rabbinic Judaism, is something that has always been embedded within Tanakh itself. Academic biblical critics see these actions as signs of authorship or of contradiction within the biblical text. Klitsner, perhaps unintentionally, undermines this questioning of the text’s self-knowledge. The way that the elements of and themes of Torah texts reflect upon each other is so thorough that a mystical idea of the rolling of souls tries to systematize these recurrences. The rolling of souls is a view of reincarnation, believed by some Jews, that sees the same souls being repeatedly reincarnated and participating in versions of themselves over and over again. This is a bit much for me, but I can see where it comes from.
I have long used this sort of methodology in my effort to understand Torah. In certain ways, I view the ways that Klitsner gets herself going as not all that new. However, the analysis that she does once she has identified her pairs is genuinely impressive. She brings a lot of light to the difficult question of the role of the individual within Judaism and makes strong cases for a theology in which God places a high value on the individual, not in opposition to the community, but as the basis of the Godly community. Bakhtin saw in literature what Buber saw in theology. Klitsner takes it back to Torah. Her understanding of Torah is arrived at with a foundation in traditional analysis, but arrives at a place that allows Torah to speak in a contemporary ethical voice. She can be my Rabbi.
