Midrashic Community

[formerly titled "Maggidic Community"]

Our learning with R' Mordechai last week ostensibly focused on the mechanics of midrash. R' Marc Gellman's classic Does G!d Have a Big Toe? defines midrash as "stories about stories in the Bible." I always thought this a very elegant way to introduce the concept of Scriptural commentary to children, because most children who have begun to develop narrative writing skills can imagine telling a story about a story (at least so long as their creative tendencies have been encouraged). The move from first perspective to meta-position is suggested in a gentle way. It is intriguing, but accessibly concrete.

It seems that there is a movement building to use the Gellman definition of midrash in a sort of kiruv (religious outreach) for adults: with talented modern writers like Anita Diamant and Aviva Zornberg maintaining an inspirational model, there is now an open invitation for Jews outside the old beyt midrash -- especially well-educated, literate women -- to join in the unfolding of Torah narrative by way of creative engagement. Find the traditional midrashim too arcane, too medieval, too patriarchal? Write your own! This is empowering stuff. It provides a new key to the vaults of Hebrew wisdom, opening the holy discourse to those who don't speak yeshivish. It is a tikkun for our people.

It is also, strictly speaking, not midrash. Gellman's "stories about stories" suggests the midrashic but doesn't adequately define it. A definition requires this rule: True midrash is inherent in the base text. In other words, midrash must be exegetical -- in Jewish terms, maggidic. This distinction, between simple meta-position ("based on a true story") and exegesis ("unwrapped from a true story") is, in my experience, the real crux of the heart-quest we call Art. If I make the basic theological assumption that I am provided access to exactly what Revelation G!d needs in/from/for me, then my creative output can go either one of two ways: it can be a realization of Divinity (realization = Shekhinah?), in which case I further my junior partnership in Creation, or not, in which case I don't.

In my own efforts at creative composition, I can usually intuit which kind of writing I'm pulling off -- whether I am teasing Revelation out by the hairs, or just filling in structural blanks with whatever is on hand (usually ego, or some stylistic fixation of mine or a past teacher's). One process feels different from the other. And the products have distinct flavor, so one can generally tell whether another artist's work "rings true" or not as well.

I don't mean to suggest that there is any clean line between bringing down prophecy and just making stuff up. Art is a famously messy business (it is practically cliche to say so), because it is gritty, deep, and, at its best, truthful. As it happens, the most electric inspiration often takes the artist down a maddeningly crooked path to substance -- and, just as often, G!d sows great truth in ostensibly superficial, even self-absorbed, exercises of "making stuff up." There is an echo of the chesed of Bavel here, which all serious artists must know well: keep regrouping, keep trying, in good faith, eventually something will click.

Whereas R' Mordechai speaks of the inspiration to build a "school for training prophets," I think my inspiration is to build a society for bringing midrash. Ultimately, the canon of midrash does not simply spill from great individual exegetes (Maggidim) -- the Rashis and Rambans, the R' Mordechais -- but from a much broader socio-historical life, consisting of artistic and scholarly engagement, inspiration, experimentation, development, peer review, and the "test of time," largely analogous to what we call the Scientific Community. What would it take to realize a real live Midrashic Community, such as could produce a Rashi or Ramban for our age? And could this be achieved at Point Roberts?

To begin with, we need a religious community in which textual engagement and artistic engagement are equally normative and serious. What sorts of community forums, spaces, habits would promote such engagement (and balance/symbiosis)?

It would also be enormously helpful, maybe even necessary, to have re-established the study of our rich midrashic heritage actually as midrash. As it is, classical midrash study is generally approached as either an exercise in tribal hero-worship or, most commonly, the referencing of a quick answer sheet in the back of the Chumash to the problems contained at the front. What would it be like to regularly spend the time with Rashi on a single posuk, to actually retrace his steps through its language and try to figure out exactly how he made his deduction? Wouldn't this practice inevitably have the effect of training the mind -- the individual's mind and the community's mind -- for exegetical sensitivity?

In an active society of habitual midrashing, the habits and rigors of effective exegesis (maggidut) would have to end up bearing upon Torah in all of its channels, not just the Chumash. Now, this is hardly a novel vision; rabbis have idealized such a consummate Midrashic Community in one form or another in many generations. But it does not seem to be the rabbinate's priority in this generation. Consequently, I see midrashic sensibilities generally better-developed among artists than in the batey midrash of our time.

It is my firm belief that the mutual estrangement of creative society from religious society represents a fatal limitation on both. The most obvious response, in my mind, is to establish the patterns, participants, and place(s) for society that is at once, symbiotically creative and religious. Both R' Mordechai and R' Shagar seem to grasp this basic necessity, though it is unclear to me the extent to which their respective institutions represent full steps or mere inching toward the "real live Midrashic Community" vision, which is after all radically distinct from religious Jewish culture as we know it today. In any case, the express purpose of the Point Roberts religious Jewish artists colony is to realize this vision in one instance, b'ezrat haShem.

Stay tuned.