My first class teaching parsha with Midrash. How do we cut into the topic?
I cleaned out my pantry of books (aka my library which has absolutely no room for any more books while still welcoming the purchases which arrive daily from Amazon) and looked around. Hayyim Nachman Bialik’s Sefer Aggadah,seems like a place to start. His Hebrew is so beautiful--reminds me of Helen Davidson, my favorite Jewish teacher of all time. And yet at this juncture, the selections are too short, all too punchliney. They read like sermons, I suppose.
Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, multi-volume--well--voluminous, and with references from everywhere, Going down the path of comparative folklore and mythology and classical texts and Christian interpretations is just too much. My students want to know what Midrash is and how it adds to the meaning of the Torah, plain and simple. This would become a scholarly disquisition (what a good word!) on critical reading and the history of textual traditions. Go read Thomas Mann’s Joseph if you want to enjoy this approach.
My buddy Michael Balinsky, who is likely to appear again in this blog, put me onto the Torah Temimah many years ago. I love these volumes because they follow the Torah with every place in the Talmud that a Midrash appears. Rashi is there as well, and the notes are clear and helpful. Does Temimah refer to Tam, pure, or simple? Either way, this book is for a dvar Torah, not this class. It would mean jumping into Talmud and Midrash simultaneously. Cutting and pasting snippets out of context is too jumpy for a first go around.
Aviva Zornberg on the parsha? Possibly, but you also have to embrace psycho-analysis and western literature to follow her midrashic path. Reading her is more a personal religious endeavor for me. More on this at some point.
What about Rashi at least? I read through his comments for the week and included a few in the first set of texts. More to report on how that worked out.
I finally settled on selections from Bereshit Rabbah . The Soncino translation is clumsy and too much to read each week, so I am back to a modified version--selecting individual midrashim while trying to convey some of what I call the concerns of the text.
How this turned into the first lesson and how the students shaped what follows next.
**** COMMENT FROM BETSY Would this description of the varieties of midrash not make a lesson in itself? Do students share a definition of “midrash?” Do they realize that even with a narrowed perception of midrash, in contrast to other Torah commentaries, there is a broad spectrum of midrashic literature. And what about women’s midrash that is getting so much attention today?
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We did discuss the term Midrash at length, that it is both a genre of inquiry as well as a term for a large collection of books. We have not jumped into contemporary midrashim yet, but most of the folks are coming with me to hear Aviva Zornberg next week and are very familiar with the work of Tikva Frymer Kensky z"l. We just need to start with the classics before we can branch out. More to come in another post on personal midrash meeting the classical.
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