Textual Mirrors. Dina Stein
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and experiential principles.
Although midrash plays a part in the narratives addressed in Chapters 4 and 5, it is not the only self reflected on. In Chapter 4, Seraḥ, daughter of Asher, as portrayed in Pirke deRabbi Eliezer (and earlier sources), embodies an alternative to the patriarchal-hegemonic discourse. While the latter is understood to be a mediated textual praxis, her hermeneutic discourse and linguistic skills imply an immediacy that rabbinic textual practices may lack. However, she is not situated in opposition to midrash per se because she at times engages in it. Thus, she can be said to reflect critically on aspects of a rabbinic-midrashic self, or, alternatively, she can be viewed as encapsulating a midrashic ideal.
Chapter 5 takes up tales about Rabbi Judah the Patriarch’s (R. Yehudah haNasi’s) maidservant. Being at her master’s beck and call, her acts of reflection have to do with institutional hegemony. While she engages in midrashic mimicry, the rabbinic self that she reflects on is not exclusively a midrashic self: the institution of the Sages, whose faults and weaknesses she exposes, is primarily identified as a male, closed-off enterprise. Here, it is rabbinic authority as it relates to knowledge—mainly textual knowledge—that is being reflected on. Midrash is part of that hegemonic praxis and self, as some of the narratives that involve her figure state. Yet what is at stake in this reflective gesture is not only the rabbinic-midrashic self but rather rabbinic discourse as literally an institutional discourse. What is implied by the very term “discourse”—its social, institutional premise—is what is being reflected on here.
Rabbinic texts continually look into the mirror. What they see depends on the lens through which they reflect on themselves. The lens can be a terrified Abram, in fear of his life, frightened by the animating force that he has just recognized (Eros). In the tale from Midrash Tanḥuma, he immediately projects his own menacing desire onto an externalized other, the Egyptians. In staging a moment of actual self-reflection, the rabbinic tale displays two major features that are at play in rabbinic textual self-reflexivity: thinking with and through a possible self (the Egyptians); and employing the practice of midrash. That these features are uniquely rabbinic and that they produce a highly self-reflexive text may be better appreciated if we briefly compare the Tanḥuma narrative to two other texts that address Abram’s less than worthy conduct in Pharaoh’s land. The first is an earlier text, dating from the Second Temple period, known as the Genesis Apocryphon. It suggests a dream as a transitional point in the biblical plot:44
I, Abram, dreamed a dream, on the night of my entry into Egypt. And in my dream, I saw a cedar and a palm tree…. Some men arrived, intending to cut and uproot the [ce]dar and to leave the palm tree by itself. But the palm tree shouted and said: “Do not hew down the [ce] dar because both of you are from root….” And the cedar was saved, thanks to the palm tree, and was not [hewn down]. blank I woke up from my slumber during the night and said to Sarai, my wife: “I have had a dream [and] I am alarmed [by] this dream.” She said to me: “Tell me your dream so that I may know it.” And I began to tell her the dream, [and I told her the interpretation] of th[is] dream. [I] sa[id:] “… they want to kill me and leave you alone. This favor [o]nly [must you do for me]: in every place [we reach, say] about me: ‘He is my brother.’ And I shall live under your protection and my life will be spared because of you.” (1Qumran Genesis Apocryphon 20)
The Apocryphon belongs to the Second Temple genre of the “rewritten Bible” and, as such, tells a continuous narrative. That is, even if its underlying exegetical motive is to comment on the scriptural story, it nonetheless presents itself rhetorically as an independent, self-contained tale. In the passage above, Abram recounts his story as a first-person narrative. The narrative is thus granted authority by his own firsthand testimony, and it is through revelation—in a dream—that Abram is informed of the impending danger and consequently resorts to extreme measures. It is here that the authority of the narrative and the authorization of its protagonist’s acts converge: the narrative is, as it were, directly revealed by a witness who retells a long, successive narrative and in turn is granted a divine revelation via a dream.45 Unlike the rabbinic Abram, the Genesis Apocryphon’s Abram does not, and cannot (given the epistemology of the narrative), cite verses. His source of knowledge is a dream, an epistemology of revelation. He does engage in interpretation—otherwise, he would be unable to conclude that the two trees are coded images of himself and of his wife.46 Yet, whatever basis there may have been for his interpretation, it is not made part of the narrative. This is a narrative, let me again stress, that draws on the authority of a first-person narrator, Abram, who was “there.”47 Abram is granted direct knowledge, and the Apocryphon ostensibly relies on the direct testimony provided by the biblical figure. It is in this unequivocal premise—of a narrative that draws on testimony and of a figure who acquires knowledge but not self-knowledge—that textual self-reflexivity and the self-reflectivity of its protagonist are excluded. Unlike this Second Temple Abram, Abram of the midrash is a reflective figure who echoes the very reflexivity with which midrash as an exegetical discourse is imbued. He, like the narrator of the Tanḥuma text, cites verses and is situated in the liminal-reflective position implied by midrash.
Likewise, narrative style, grounding of knowledge, authorial position, and the reflexivity that they entail emerge in the second, later, example, from Sefer hayashar, a medieval or Renaissance Jewish work that recounts biblical events from the Creation until Joshua’s conquest of Canaan.48 In the introduction, its author tells a long story in which he vouches for the text’s antiquity. It is, he claims, an authentic ancient document saved by a Roman official from a hidden library in the ruins of Jerusalem.49 As in the earlier Genesis Apocryphon, we are presented with a continuous narrative; but this time, the tale is told by a third-person narrator who is granted authority by the putative authenticity of the supposedly ancient book. Not quite impersonating Abram, as the Apocryphon does, but still appealing to an extra-textual source of authority, a textual relic, this is Sefer hayashar’s version of Abram’s reflective moment: “And Abram and all his chattels went down to Egypt because of the famine, and they were at the river of Egypt, and they dwelled near the river to rest from the voyage. And Abram and Sarai walked on the bank of the river of Egypt. And Abram looked at the water and he saw how very beautiful Sarai his wife was. And Abram said to Sarai: After God had created you with this good appearance, I am afraid that the Egyptians might kill me and take you, for there is no fear of God in their place.”50
This rendering offers the reflective scene but one stripped of its midrashic component. Not only is there no underlying exegetical framework for this tale, as there is in the Tanḥuma, but when providing a rationale for later hiding his wife, Abram does not cite scriptural verses. He simply states that “there is no fear of God in their place.” Here, the reflective moment is translated immediately into the divine. Sarai’s beauty points to God’s Creation, and it is the Egyptian’s lack of “fear of God” that will endanger him. In this rendering, the reflection in the river does not lead to self-reflection but still serves as an animating force that determines the ensuing action. But Abram, immediately upon recognizing Sarai’s beauty, ascribes it to divine Creation. In doing so, he divests responsibility from himself and hands it over to God. He therefore states his fear of the Egyptians in theological terms.51 I would suggest that the lack of self-reflection on Abram’s part, the suppression of Eros, is also tied up with the lack of self-reflexivity of the text: in the Tanḥuma text, the verse from Ezekiel makes “lust” (projected onto the Egyptians) an explicit theme of the tale. More important, it is not only part of Abram’s self-reflective moment; it is a moment of textual self-reflexivity, thus associating the portrayal of the human subject and the discourse that constructs him.
Of course, the two examples—one predating rabbinic textual practices and the other attesting to new forms of medieval or Renaissance Hebrew fiction—deserve to be appreciated for their own poetic merits (and maybe even for their own aspects of self-reflexivity). In this context, however, they clearly underline the heightened mode of self-reflexivity that I ascribe to midrash as a generative