Midrashic Life

"Reality is not just the story we are locked into" - David Grossman. A friend of mine sometimes reminds me that the way I tell the story is sometimes tainted (just like for every other human being), sometimes not The Story. That came to mind, as this line jumped out at me from an article that another friend emailed to me. It also fits with something I was learning with a chavrusa tonight.

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We were learning about the Meraglim and how (as Rabbi Yitzchak Twersky develops in it in his Amittah Shel Torah) they chose to tell their own story. G-d told them that the land was good, but they decided that it was bad.

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The Torah makes a point of describing the giant grapes that they carried out of the land in broad daylight. The inhabitants of the land stood by as these visitors took their fruit, apparently intimidated. G-d was showing them that they had the upper hand.

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The story they choose themselves is a very different one. They twist things around in their heads and herts and come up with the idea that the only reason they were able to carry out the fruits was because they were insignificant (like grasshoppers) in the eyes of the native giants of Israel.

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On another note, Rabbi Josh Hoffman told me about a Kli Yakar which says that the mistake of Moshe was sending men rather than women. He says, as we see from the daughters of Tzolfchat, that the women of the time loved the land. But the men did not. So G-d said, if you really think that men love the land and will bring back a good report then send them, but I'm telling you that they don't and they won't. G-d said to go with the women - according to the Kli Yakar.

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I am in the middle of two ambitious posts, one about he Josh Bell experiment and the other about sailboats. I am also in the middle of life. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle...

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Avivah Zornberg writes on page 3 of The Particulars of Rapture, "...I would like to claim that the articulation of the repressed is the genius of midrashic narrative. Adopting the psychoanalytic model, I suggest that the peshat, or plain meaning of the text, functions as the conscious layer of meaning; while the midrashic stories and exegeses intimate unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning..."

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I think some of us lead midrashic lives. We see layers, hear subtexts, live deep inner lives. Like the story the medrash unfolds, one layer at a time, some of us are always peeling away layers, almost as naturally as we breathe.

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It's late at night, it's time for bed, the thoughts bounce around the walls of my head. I wish you a good night and blessings from G-d. May all our prayers be answered for good.

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Shma Koleinu

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