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To Favor the Ellipsis . . .
God’s Echo: Exploring Scripture with Midrash
By Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
Paraclete Press 2007. 168 pages
Reviewed by Wayne-Daniel Berard
About midway through her eminently accessible and perfectly tuned little book, Rabbi Sandy Sasso recounts a tale from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s childhood. When the future scholar, sage, and ecumenist first heard the story of the binding of Isaac, he began to weep inconsolably. “But, rabbi,” the future co-worker of Dr. King asked his teacher, “what if the angel had come a second too late?”
It is just that personal response, that heartfelt reinvigoration of time-worn texts and their infusion into the day-to-day that Rabbi Sasso hopes to promote in this introduction of the Jewish literary form Midrash to a larger audience. One should say rather “form of sacred literature,” for, as Rabbi Sasso points out, the volumes of Talmud (of which Midrash is a part) are referred to in Jewish life as the Oral Torah and held (by some literally, others figuratively) to have likewise been given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. According to this tradition, Midrash, along with the rest of Talmud, is a “continual unfolding of revelation,” addressing the times and circumstances which God’s wisdom and compassion knew would arise. Indeed, although the formal recording of this Oral Torah closed about 200 CE, many writers and thinkers have created and continue to create enlightening new “unofficial” midrash to this day.
Rabbi Sasso does a fine job herself when, in the book’s opening chapters, she defines and explains the nature of Midrash. Such groundwork, so necessary but so easily turned to just work, Rabbi Sasso accomplishes in ways both scholarly and heartfelt (and so engages both the mind and heart of the reader). The Midrashic rabbis, she explains, “filled in the gaps” in some Biblical narratives (what did Cain say to Abel in that field, just before the fatal act?) and provided illuminating commentary on others (why does the Torah text, so exacting with language, say that Jacob’s angels ascended and descended the ladder, rather than vice versa?) Always, Rabbi Sasso is careful to assure those in her audience more used to one (holy, apostolic, or fundamental) version of any scriptural passage that “Midrash does not challenge the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired or revealed.” Rather, she explains, these rabbis saw it as their responsibility to “discover connections and harmony where on the surface none appeared to exist.” And no Midrashic tale or commentary claims to be in any way definitive or exclusive; there are any number of differing midrash on a particular passage. Rabbi Sasso quotes the preeminent Catholic scholar Raymond Brown that any sacred scripture “is not simply an object” from which to “extract a permanently univocal meaning,” but rather “a structure that is engaged by readers in the process of achieving meaning” and therefore “open to more than one valid meaning.”
Both as object and in structure, Midrash are primarily stories and accounts; Rabbi Sasso offers us ten of them, each as delightfully rendered and touchingly explored as the next. (I assume the number is not an accident. Ten is the number for a minyan, the minimum number required for a Jewish prayer gathering, and the author, with her mixture of personal sharing, rabbinic commentary, and “just right” references to greats such as Buber and Amos Oz, truly leads the reader into a sacred space between her pages). Two midrash spoke especially deeply to me: In a chapter entitled Revelation Takes Place All the Time, we are asked to consider that booming, definitional voice from Exodus, “I am the Lord your God . . . ,” only to be gently made aware that, in the Biblical Hebrew of the text, the “you” is singular, not plural. It is not to the people as a whole that God identifies himself, but to the individual, to “you there,” rather than “you all.” (This alone was enough to make this individual catch his breath!) Rabbi Sasso then goes on to provide the accompanying Midrashic wisdom, that (according to Rabbi Yossi, son of Rabbi Hanina), “This divine word spoke to each and every person according to his particular capacity . . . thus David said The voice of the Lord is in strength (Psalm 29:4)—not ‘The voice of the Lord is in His strength,’ but . . . in the strength and capacity of every person.”
Considering what a botch we individuals have often made of that revelation, it seems particularly fitting that the next chapter addresses the question, Should Human Beings Have Been Created? Here, in a case of “like son, like father,” the aforementioned Rabbi Hanina offers a tale of God consulting with his “ministering angels” as to the wisdom of creating us. Rigging the outcome a bit, God only mentions the righteous side of his planned new creation, hiding the knowledge of wickedness from his team (and perhaps embedding “deniability” in our genetic vocabulary?). Rabbi Simon extrapolates further: The angels in question “formed themselves into groups and parties,” two, named “Love” and “Righteousness,” advocating for our existence, while “Peace” and “Truth,” in an effort to head off violence and falsehood, drew a verbal circle with a line through it around the entire experiment. “What did the Lord do?” asks the Midrash. “He took Truth and cast it to the ground . . . Hence it is written, Let truth spring from the earth (Psalm 85:12).” Morals to the story are clear: from the beginning, God deemed people more sacred than truth, and, if one truly wished to find it, one need look for truth, not in the heavenly, but in the human, made from the earth to which God assigned truth. (Hence Jacob’s angels first ascend from earth to heaven).
Although I know no literary term for it, in size and approach this book is more a non-fiction novella than a treatise (a treat?) The rabbis and their versions of God, angels, patriarchs and scholars are quickly and lovingly drawn, the sections progress like a brisk plotline of the soul; following the question of human creation comes What Makes Us Angry?, succeeded by chapters like Who Is Responsible? and God Is in This Place, But I Did Not Know It. The afterword by Sister Joan Chittister reminds one of the closing of a “Whodunit”—in this case a “Who Needs to Do It” (hint: novellas are designed to be unintimidating and inviting to all).
I was young during Auden’s Age of Anxiety, when all were asking themselves, “Will we ever have certainty again?” Now, in this Reign of Fundamental Terrors (Western and Eastern), when The Right Answer is our worst weapon of mass destruction, Rabbi Sasso offers us ancient wisdom(s) illumined by remarks such as this from Amos Oz: “Fundamentalists live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.” Rabbi Sasso and the Midrash with which she so ably gifts us seem for their part to favor the ellipsis (. . .), to serve not a god of “either/or” but the God of “yes and . . .” To serve and to warn.
“About what did Cain and Abel quarrel? 'Come,' said they, 'let us divide the world.' One took the land and the other the movables. The former said, 'The land you stand on is mine,' while the latter retorted, 'What you are wearing is mine.' One said: 'Strip'; the other retorted: ' Fly ' Out of this quarrel, Cain rose up against his brother Abel.” (Midrash: Breishit Rabbah 22:7).
Sometimes the angels are right on time.
Wayne-Daniel Berard, Ph. D. is Professor of English, Director of Spiritual Life and Chaplain at Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts, and the author of When Christians Were Jews (That Is, Now): Recovering the Lost Jewishness of Christianity with the Gospel of Mark.
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