Taking Torah as Our Own

So I have not been true to my word and keeping in touch through this space.

Nina maintains a blog much more faithfully at BJEN.org, and her reports these last few weeks, in particular a very lovely one today, are a place you might go if you are more interested in what we are about than I am interested in writing.

Be this as it may, these last few weeks have been very fruitful ones. We are in a perfectly serviceable, quaint, grand-motherish fourth floor walkup apartment just fifteen minutes on foot from the heart of the Harvard campus and the Widener library. Do not, however, go in every day, as I can at one moment take out enough books to keep me occupied for a week, and, in this new age of electronics, many journal articles are available on line. What a difference from the days of my academic work many years ago.

The text that I am working on, officially called the Gates of Righteousness, though popularly known as Iggeret haKodesh, roughly to be translated as a Letter Concerning Sacred Behavior, is not very risque, though its subject is marital sexuality. It begins with the impressive insistence, for a medieval text, that sex is not shameful – that it is part of God’s plan and should, pardon the double entendre, be embraced.

But one of the things I have noticed, though I guess I always knew this, is that the author takes the process of midrash very personally. That is, that he assumes that Biblical verses, whatever their contextual meaning, have another meaning that is directly addressed to him and his concerns.

There is a well known ruling that scholars should engage in marital sex every Friday night (by the way, in the read of my author, only then). He explains that the work week saps a man of his strength and only on shabbat is his strength replenished by virtue of an infusion of extra soul on shabbat. How do we know this – because it says  (at the end of v’shamru) “bayom hash’vi-I shavat vayinafash”.  Now in its context that verse is about God, and informs us that us the seventh day He rested and was refreshed. But the author of the letter reads it as shabbat rather than shavat (Torah text is unvocalized, so you can’t tell one from the other), and interprets it about an individual, who “on the seventh day, it being shabbat, is ensouled.” Now that extra soul is also a piece of old midrash – that is why, in theory, we have smelling salts (otherwise known as b’samim) at havdalah, so that when we grow faint with the loss of that extra soul we can be revived. But, since this is his particular concern, the author weaves all this into his picture of Friday night sexual intimacy.

He interprets the verse in Jeremiah (1:5), “I knew you before ever I formed you in the belly” not as a special dispensation for the prophet but as a general statement that applies to everyone, that God foreordains each of our natures. (Incidentally, this approach has been used by fundamentalists to “prove” that life begins at conception).

And so I am left wondering how different a view of the Bible was operating for him, and what difference such a view would make for us. When we read the Bible we are trained to ask what it means in context. That saves us in some regards having to bear the full brunt of a text that is unacceptable to us. Slaveholding in the Torah? Well that was then. But we do not do what the author of the letter does, and treat the Torah as our personal book of instruction – not like a fundamentalist – we must do what it says, but as a kabbalist – as a free-form text speculating on our problems. The “right” reading is then fully subjective – but the sense of mission, once the “right” reading is settled upon is enhanced by it.

I do not know that that is good. Only that it is very different.