Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Memory 9781463240264, 1463240260

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Second Slayings

Judaism in Context

24 Series Editors Rivka Ulmer Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman Elisheva Carlebach Jonathan Jacobs Naomi Koltun-Fromm David Nelson Lieve Teugels

Judaism in Context provides a platform for scholarly research focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished, from ancient times through the 21st century. The series includes monographs as well as edited collections.

Second Slayings

The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Memory

David N. Gottlieb

gp 2019

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2019 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܝ‬

1

2019

ISBN 978-1-4632-4026-4

ISSN 1935-6978

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

To Galit, without whom the journey would never have even begun.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents................................................................................. v Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 Genesis 22:1–19 ............................................................................ 18 Chapter One. Sacrifice and the Formation of Jewish Memory ......... 23 1. Key Concepts and Definitions ................................................ 31 2. A Brief Review of Key Theorists and Theoretical Works on Cultural Memory .......................................................... 35 a. Maurice Halbwachs ........................................................... 36 b. Pierre Nora ........................................................................ 38 c. Kerwin Lee Klein (Critique) ............................................ 40 d. Jan Assmann ..................................................................... 40 e. Aleida Assmann ................................................................ 44 f. David Manier and William Hirst ...................................... 45 g. Richard B. Miller .............................................................. 46 h. Dietrich Harth ................................................................. 48 i. Yerushalmi and Funkenstein ............................................. 50 3. The Akedah as Cultural Code ................................................ 53 4. Memory and the Midrashic Condition.................................. 54 5. Midrash: The Social and Exegetical Construction of Reality ................................................................................. 58 6. The Akedah and Midrashic Memory ................................... 60 Chapter Two. Transformation through Repetition in the Akedah ........................................................................................ 63 1. Sacrifice and Mimesis ............................................................. 66 v

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2. Sacrifice and Interpretation ................................................... 74 3. The Offering of the Firstborn and the Construction of Memory ............................................................................. 77 4. Substitution and the Firstborn Son ....................................... 81 5. Reading the Akedah: Methodology ....................................... 85 6. Recitation, Revision, and Repetition: The Doubling of Word and Phrase in the Akedah....................................... 89 7. Analysis and explication of the text........................................ 93 8. The Akedah as a Map of Midrashic Memory ....................... 101 Chapter Three. Rabbinic Transformations of Sacrifice and the Formation of ‘Midrashic Memory’ .......................................... 103 1. The Beginning of Text Culture, the End of Temple Culture .............................................................................. 108 2. Ke’ilu and the Mimetic Transformation of Sacrificial Rite . 113 3. Ke’ilu and Midrashic Memory in Leviticus Rabbah 7 ........ 115 4. The Akedah in Genesis Rabbah: Ke’ilu, Substitution, and Divine Mimesis .......................................................... 123 5. Memory, Mimesis, and Martyrdom: The Theme of the Second Slaying .................................................................. 130 6. Polysemy, Indeterminacy, and the ‘As If’ of Memory ......... 132 7. Memory and Identity............................................................ 136 Chapter Four. Shalom Spiegel and the Modernization of Midrashic Memory ................................................................... 139 1. Spiegel and the ‘as if’ of Midrashic Memory ........................ 142 2. Ricoeur: The Threefold of Narrative, History, and Memory ............................................................................ 143 3. Three Phases of Narratization .............................................. 144 4. Jan Assmann and the Iron Wall: Hypolepsis, Permeability, and Midrashic Memory ............................ 148 5. Spiegel’s The Last Trial as a Work of Midrashic Memory .. 151 6. The Ashes of Isaac.................................................................. 155 7. Malkhuyot, Zikhronot, Shofarot: High Holiday Liturgy and Divine Mimesis ..........................................................159 8. The Second Slaying ............................................................... 165 9. Merit, Martyrdom, and Eternal Mimesis.............................. 171

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10. ‘Anamnestic Time’ and the Individuation of Consciousness ................................................................... 177 11. Toward a Re-theorization of Jewish Cultural Memory ..... 178 Chapter Five. Toward a Theory and Taxonomy of Jewish Cultural Memory ....................................................................... 181 1. A Theory of Jewish Cultural Memory...................................183 2. Cultural Memory: Linguistic Orientations ......................... 188 3. Hebrew and the Ontology of Rupture ................................ 189 4. Rupture, Remembrance, and Selfhood............................... 194 5. A Taxonomy of Jewish Memory .......................................... 197 a. Canonical Memory .......................................................... 197 b. Canonical: Halakhic Memory ........................................ 199 c. Canonical: Liturgical Memory ........................................ 199 d. Canonical: Midrashic Memory...................................... 200 6. Temporal Memory: Historical, Archival, and Reconstructive.................................................................. 201 7. Cultural Memory Rubrics: Ruptures, Fractures, and Fractals .............................................................................. 203 8. Historical: Secular Memory .................................................. 205 9. Toward an Ethics of Midrashic Memory............................ 207 10. New Directions for the Study of Memory, Jewish and Other ................................................................................ 208 11. Conclusion ............................................................................ 210 Bibliography ....................................................................................... 215 Index .................................................................................................. 233

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To seek to take up advanced studies in middle age is folly. To engage in and complete those studies was one of the great privileges of my life. It has taken the proverbial village to help me study the creative and reconstructive ingenuity of rabbinic midrash and its role in the establishment of Jewish cultural memory. I take great delight in thanking the residents of that village, without whom this work would not have been possible. Paul Mendes-Flohr introduced me to the field of cultural memory studies and guided my work with patience and encouragement. Without him, I would not have completed my studies, nor would I have had the opportunity to explore in depth the fruitful connection between cultural memory theory and rabbinic midrash. Moreover, I also would not have gotten to know one of the finest scholars and kindest human beings one could ever hope to meet. I also could not have conceived of this project without the guidance of Michael Fishbane, whose combination of intellectual mastery and skill as a scholar, teacher, and mentor both sustained and challenged me as my studies progressed. Studying with professors Mendes-Flohr and Fishbane was the greatest honor of my late blooming. Richard B. Miller and Omar McRoberts, who served as dissertation readers along with professors Mendes-Flohr and Fishbane, made possible my exploration of the sociological and ethical aspects of cultural memory. Their careful readings and probing questions on draft chapters helped me identify and synthesize strands of scholarship into what I hope is a coherent work. I am grateful to the University of Chicago Divinity School for granting me access to its hallowed halls, the support to pursue susix

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tained study, and for the community of towering scholars and peerless students assembled there. In the latter category are friends and colleagues Erik Dreff and Ashley Boggan Dreff, without whom I would not have had the strength or the wisdom to see my studies through. Profound thanks are due to the board of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, for giving me the opportunity to design and teach an undergraduate class on textual interpretation and cultural memory at the University. In addition to gaining valuable teaching experience, teaching this class afforded me a valuable change to explore anew, and convey my passion for, the study of Jewish memory. I am grateful to the students in that class. Their intellectual acuity and curiosity taught me a great deal. I am deeply indebted to Nancy Diann Pardee, the Greenberg Center’s administrator, without whose patient assistance I would not have been ready for a single day of teaching. I am also grateful to Kathy Bloch, librarian at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, who provided skilled and patient guidance toward resources needed for the revision of this manuscript, and to scholars Robert Cohn, Gary Porton, Amy Shevitz, Norbert Samuelson, and Dov Weiss, who provided advice and encouragement. Through Cambridge Editors, I found Rachel Siegel, who edited the manuscript, and Elizabeth Mannion, who prepared the index. They are skilled professionals who are also easy to work with. I will always be grateful for my month as scholar in residence at Hope United Church of Christ in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where the Reverend Richard Feyen, our hosts Patsy and Eric Vollrath, and the entire church community provided a haven for peace, productivity, learning, and fellowship. While teachers and mentors guided my education, family made that education possible. My brothers-in-law and business partners, Milton and Martin Pinsky, enabled me to pursue advanced study, after they had been instrumental in working with me to found Full Circle Communities, the nonprofit affordable housing development company I oversaw before and during much of my time as a student. Janet and Gadi Cohen helped me learn Hebrew and supported my family through difficult times. Alex and Helen Pinsky have been

ACKNLOWLEDGMENTS

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wonderfully supportive parents-in-law. My niece, Anat Cohen, helped me study for the Graduate Record Exams, a harrowing experience for anyone in middle age. My mother, Jean Gottlieb, the finest scholar in our family, was the model for how to learn in middle age. I owe her more than I can say. My sister Annie Gottlieb provided advice, solace, and expert proofreading; my sister Martha Gottlieb provided love and patience. Sisters Sara Monroe and Janet Salian and brother Alan Gottlieb were kind and patient, even when I was dour and discouraged. My nieces and nephews and their families sustained me with love and good humor. My father, the late Harry N. Gottlieb, was a supportive presence through my entire education. I miss him but still draw strength from his resolute optimism. The staff and board of directors of Full Circle Communities, Inc., were very forgiving, very patient, and very talented people whom I am proud to continue to work with and to know. Thanks, too, to the leaders and my fellow teachers at Orot, the Center for New Jewish Learning; to Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein, for meeting with me via Skype from Jerusalem for weekly midrash study; to rabbis Karyn Kedar, Yehoshua Karsh, Zev Kahn, Kenneth Berger, Sam Feinsmith, Jordan bendat Appell, Lizzi Heydemann, and Lauren Henderson for their contagious love of Jewish prayer, meditation, study, and thought; to Rabbi John Linder, whose encouragement caused me to take the first step along the path; to Rabbi Akiva Tatz, for his knowledge, wisdom, and friendship; and to Anne Knafl, librarian extraordinaire at Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. My education would have remained a dream without my children Danielle, Rebecca, and Gabriel, who are each models of determination, discipline, ambition, humor, and abiding love. I would like to be like my children when I grow up. None of this would have been even so much as a dream without my wife Galit, whose love and encouragement, whose support and patience, even through her illness, were living Torah. Galit’s knowledge and love of Judaism lit the spark that became the course of study that resulted in this project. Her passion for learning set the standard. Her discipline and grace through treatment and recovery

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have been an inspiration. Her belief in me has been something to live up to. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

INTRODUCTION This project is a study of the ways in which Jewish cultural memory is shaped by rabbinic midrashic hermeneutics of the Amoraic period, the second through fifth centuries of the Common Era. This study proposes that rabbinic midrashic commentary on metahistorical biblical narratives relies on what Ithamar Gruenwald calls the ‘Midrashic Condition’, which is … the mental attitude or disposition in which the interpretive attention expressed entails more than a concern for lexicological or plain-sense meaning of a text or piece of information. What really matters … is not the mere understanding of texts, but the creation of the meaning that is attached to them. 1

The creation of meaning is a means of applying biblical narratives to lived experience, and to excavating the abiding significance of ritual praxis. What is here termed ‘midrashic memory’ relies on and extends the Midrashic Condition through a fundamentally mimetic process of repetition and elaboration, one that is signaled by the use of the word ‫)כאלו( כאילו‬, ke’ilu, most often translated as ‘as if’. Ke’ilu introduces a mimetic transformation of surface meaning, in the process creating a parallel but significantly transformed interpretive possibility of the text. This analytical matrix allows us to understand the means by which traditional Jewish memory remains dy1

Ithamar Gruenwald, ‘Midrash and The “Midrashic Condition”’, in Michael Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 7.

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namic, while still maintaining its foundation in sacred canonical text. This thesis will be illustrated through midrashic commentaries on the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19), as a primordial metahistorical event constitutive of biblical and Jewish faith. The concept of cultural memory is a means for exploring the process of mutual shaping and reorientation that occurs between individuals and the cultures in which they are situated. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, who exerted a decisive influence on the formation of cultural memory studies, propose that ‘[t]he specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is not seen to maintain itself for generations as a result of phylogenetic evolution, but rather as a result of socialization and customs’. 2 Through reformulative processes embedded in liturgical cycles and modes of halakhic deliberation, Jewish memory is continuously reinforced and communal practices are refined. The procession of socialization and enculturation is centered upon the celebration and reinvocation of the metahistorical moments of creation, revelation, and redemption. Franz Rosenzweig’s canonical exploration of these intertwined processes paid special attention to the role of liturgy in the shaping of Jewish memory; more recently, Y. H. Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein debated the tensions between Jewish history and Jewish memory, with Yerushalmi claiming that history had altogether supplanted memory, and Funkenstein asserting that memory is shaped through the temporal, spatial, and cultural specificity of halakhah, or Jewish law. However, the role of Midrashrabbinic exegetical explorations and explications of Torahin the formation of Jewish memory has not been given great attention to date. I propose that it is through the radical reimaginings of the metahistorical, found uniquely in midrashic literature, that the rabbis live in history, guide cultural

2

Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring– Summer 1995), 125.

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recovery, and develop a creative-interpretive memory form, whose primary articulation will be referred to here as ‘midrashic memory’. Midrash 3 represents a radically performative and creative approach: the interpretation of Scripture through gap-filling, intertextual association, and collaborative retelling, processes crucial to the shaping of cultural memory. These interpretive strategies facilitate transformations of ritual and reinterpretations of narrative for cultural contexts that have experienced rupture and are attempting reconstruction. Thus, the interiorization of ritual sacrificea process that has left its imprint on all forms of Jewish literature and liturgy, throughout all eras of Jewish historycan best be understood not only as a hermeneutical but also as a cultural strategy, through which post-Temple cultural memory derives structure and meaning, without foregoing either continuity or creativity. Midrashic reformulations of sacrifice in Amoraic midrash, then, represent the literary record of a cultural strategy in its formative stages. Midrash exemplifies and records the development of a hermeneutic of mimetic substitution and transformation through which the culture is reoriented, and by means of which traditional Jewish memory is established. Midrash reflects on historical experience, reflected through metahistorical moments that are rehearsed in liturgy. We can test this hypothesis by tracing the deployments of a particular canonical narrative as interpreted in moments of cultural crisis or trauma, and by analyzing the hermeneutical procedures by means of which historical crises are confronted and interpreted through that particular text. We shall see that traditional Jewish memory relies on the mimetic and performative procedures of ‘midrashic memory,’ which has its roots in an ‘archetypal reexperiencing’ 3

The midrashic corpus is, of course, vast and varied. Furthermore, the midrashic hermeneutic is not restricted to works of midrash (nor halakhic reasoning to the Talmud). The focus here, however, is upon the exegetical and homiletical midrashim redacted during the Amoraic period. Although pertinent passages appear, with small variations, in other midrashic works, the works of Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah will receive special attention.

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of that crisis. 4 That is, the textuality of Jewish cultural memory develops mimetically through appropriations and interpretations of archetypal biblical crises read through the lens of contemporary crises. This is particularly (although not uniquely) evident in midrash, which is ‘not a formal operation but a form of life lived with a text that makes claims on people’. 5 Midrash documents a mimetic process in which intertextual and gap-filling interpretations of biblical narrative suggest reformulations of social and cultural codes and practices. This process is fundamental to the production of meaning after cultural crisis, and thus to the formation of Jewish cultural memory, through which that meaning is continuously transmitted and transformed. It is also a means by which canon retains its urgent presence in traditional Jewish culture. In this project, the biblical story of the Akedah (the Binding of Isaac, Gen. 22:1–19) is proposed as the master narrative of traditional Jewish memory. It anchors Israelite (and later Jewish) cultural identity, and thus cultural memory, in a moment of sacred violence that establishes the interpersonal, cultural, and ritual-religious facets of Israelite ontology, and it becomes a principal model for radical devotion and daring interpretation as strategies for recovery from crisis. As the paradigmatic act of devotion to God, the Akedah is at once myth, rite, and text; it encompasses the dramatic element of myth, the performative aspect of ritual, and the textual structure of narrative. It acts as the typological basis for Jewish martyrdom, and is the focus of disputations with nascent Christianity on the ongoing legitimacy of Jewish covenantal commitment. The Akedah is thus both a culturally and historically situated account of mimetic praxis and an account of a ritual, psychological, and spiritual crisisas well as a response to that crisisthat becomes a metonym for radical submission to divine will. 6 Radical submission, however, contains a barely Moshe HaLevi Spero, ‘Remembering and Historical Awareness’, Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 15, no. 3 (Fall 1975): n. 45. 5 Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 118. 6 For the role of mimetic praxis in shaping performative interpretation, see William Schweiker, ‘Sacrifice, Interpretation, and the Sacred: The Import of 4

INTRODUCTION

5

concealed aspect of rebellion: the Akedah captures the scriptural moment when human interpretation wrests a measure of autonomy from divine decree. Through Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, covenantal consciousness reaches a new level of individuation; interpretation becomes the fulcrum of Israelite (and later Jewish) recovery from crisis. Whether through emendation or error, the ‫אחד‬ ‫איל‬, the solitary ram, becomes the ‫איל אחר‬, the ‘second slaying’, through which the substituted victim attains exalted status and lasting merit for the original victim. It is through gaps and ruptures that traditional memory constructs the creative and collaborative forms of midrash. After the Akedah, Abraham has no further direct interaction with either his God or his son Isaac. The covenant is reaffirmed, but Abraham’s biblical family is shattered. The Akedah narrative thus represents a cultural and theological caesura. Through the Akedah, rupture becomes, through repeated occurrence, invocation, and interpretation, a foundation stone of cultural identity and Jewish cultural memory. The Akedah is memorialized and transformed through all major motifs of Jewish worship and study, and all periods of Jewish history. It is the sacrifice upon which the ritual cult is founded. The ram that Abraham substitutes for Isaac both symbolizes and is substituted for a sacrifice of oneself and one’s descendants. In this way, sacrificethe gift of oneself, ‘the gift that cannot be replaced’is continuously reenacted through substitution, opening ever-new possibilities for interpretation and mimetic transformation.7 The Akedah becomes the paradigm of martyrdom in medieval Jewish chronicles of the Crusades; it is used to activate divine memory through the zikhronot (verses of remembrance) of Jewish New Year liturgy; it is invoked in memorialization of the Holocaust and as a cultural trope in the establishment and defense of the State of Israel. The substitution of the ram for the beloved son initiates Gadamer and Girard for Religious Studies’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 791–810. 7 Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 25.

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and serves as a metonym for rupture, renewal, and the creation of new meaning, and thus it serves as the progenitor of Gruenwald’s ‘Midrashic Condition’. The Akedah, as the mnemonic and cultural basis for ritual sacrifice, serves, then, as model and metonym for a collective, performative, embodied procedure that binds meaning to Israelite cultural and social institutions, and the people to its God. The loss of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the discontinuation of the practices that undergirded Israelite society’s order, was thus seen not only as a cultural but also as a cosmic crisis. It necessitated the reinterpretation of the laws of sacrifice, and indeed of the Akedah itself, which Scripture held and the rabbis affirmed took place on the Temple Mount. The Amoraic sages address these twin crises by proposing interiorized substitutes for sacrifice, and it is through this iteration of the Midrashic Condition that the structures, rhythms, and mimetic enactments of sacrifice are established as the font of Jewish (postTemple) cultureand cultural memory. Within Jewish culture, across the millennia, the memorialization and invocation of the Akedahand even, in some quarters, the rebellion against the moral-theological legitimacy of its central trialraises this midrashic corpus to a new level of public language. Even the emergence of secular Jewish memory does not diminish the Akedah’s influence or presence: it is both the axial event of Jewish self-understanding and, in one Israeli author’s view, a ‘black bird hovering over our history’. 8 Demanding interpretation, summoned at each crisis, invoked anew in liturgy at the beginning of each Jewish year, the Akedah shapes Jewish consciousness, and thus traditional Jewish memory, throughout Jewish history. Reinterpretations of the Akedahand interiorizations of the practice of ritual sacrifice proposed in works attributed to the Amoraimshape a remembering culture by unmooring sacrifice from its See A. B. Yehoshua, Mr. Mani, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992); see also, in Yehoshua’s ‘Mr. Mani and the Akedah’, Judaism 50, no. 1 (January 2001): 61–65, the author’s explicit call for the ‘annulment’ of the Akedah, which he sees as ‘morally insupportable’ (pp. 61, 62).

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external ritual forms. This provides impetus to the development of the mimetic, interpretive form of memory referred to here as midrashic memory. Midrashic memory will be defined here as Jewish memory that contextualizes moments of cultural, historical, and theological crisis with events recorded in Scripture, in order to create new meaning and formulate new ideological content out of crisis. This study proposes that without appreciating and applying the pattern laid down by the Akedah and its rabbinic interpretations, any study of traditional Jewish memory and commemoration is deficient. This is in part because any such studies fail to account for the role of interpretation and substitutionfundaments of midrashic memory that are central to the Akedah narrativein the development and structure of traditional Jewish memory. 9 To be sure, historians, cultural anthropologists, and cultural memory theorists have devoted attention to the development of Judaism as a text culture, a memory culture, and as the progenitor of a ‘portable homeland’ in which its citizens, however far-flung, were commanded to dwell. 10 Scholars of cultural memory, however, have in general failed to anaSee Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Assmann does note the ‘number of Jewish (and Greek) trends that sought to do away with the fundamental idea of the cult, namely blood sacrifice and ritual killing, replac[ing] it with a process of sublimation, moralization, and internalization’ (p. 136). However, any such study fails to identify the mimetic, midrashic aspects of sacrifice or of its transformation, and thus its central role in the formation of Jewish cultural memory. Assmann is drawn, rather, through the person of Moses, to Freud’s theorization of Israelite religion as a cult of world-alienation, as well as to his depiction of religion as a dynamic of remembering and forgettingwhich bears surface similarities to, but is quite different from, the memory form proposed and outlined here. See also Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Knopf, 1939). 10 In his Hebraïsche Melodien, Heinrich Heine described the Bible as the Jews’ ‘portable homeland.’ See Heine, ‘Geständnisse’, in H. Schanze, ed., Werke: Schriften über Deutschland (Frankfurt Am Main: Insel, 1968), 4:511. 9

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lyze the means by which foundational narratives in canonical text have shaped and continue to shape Jewish memory. Such narratives are re-presenced through midrashic literature as the frames upon which post-Temple memory is established. Benjamin Sommer insists upon the dialogical nature of Torah, writ large: ‘there is no Written Torah; there is only Oral Torah, which starts with Genesis 1:1’. 11 This dialogical orientation compels us to consider Jewish memory as developed through mimetic interpretation and hermeneutical expansion across verses, books, texts, and millennia. In this context, memory becomes not merely a repository for but a generator of interpretations that make meaning for the culture; not merely a receptacle or record of past action but itself a strategy for future action. 12 Remembering as a cultural strategy can thus be understood as emerging from the performative reenactment and the mimetic appropriation of responses to crisis recorded in Scripture. Jewish cultural memory is thus shaped through hypolepsis 13: the mimetic procedure that undergirds the dialectic of continuity and innovation of rabbinic midrash, allowing the integration of new experiences within the emerging cultural and religious tradition. The continuity and consistency sought through commemorative acts exists in rabbinic literature, but it exists in dialectical relationship with the urgethe necessityto renew sacred acts and precincts by transforming them for new cultural contexts and crises. Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 147. Emphasis Sommer’s. 12 See Sommer, op. cit. The author asserts that, for the purposes of studying and understanding Scripture, ‘the boundaries that divide … fields [of academic disciplines] are inappropriatenot only intellectually inappropriate but also religiously inappropriate’ (p. 5). The interdisciplinary approach developed here adopts this viewpoint, attempting to analyze cultural memory from cultural, hermeneutical, historical, and theological perspectives. 13 See Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 255–63. 11

INTRODUCTION

9

Interpretation and its text constitute mimetic doubles for destroyed ritual and social structures and their interpretational replacements. This amounts to ‘telling it like it is for the purpose of changing it’. 14 The Amoraic reformulations of the Akedah and of ritual sacrifice establish this critical cultural doubling: they preserve sacrifice as an internalized ‘culture-structure’, that is, a set of symbolically freighted and discursively constructed relationships through which a culture conveys meaning. 15 Once previously constructed meanings can no longer be sustained and enacted through ritual sacrifice, the complex of rites and relationships is reformulated into ethicaldevotional acts such as prayer, repentance, fasting, and charity. This constitutes preservation through transformation: a mimetic double response of repetition and interpretation that, as will be shown, can be traced to the Akedah itself. 16 The lacunae of the Akedah narrative demand (and likely result from) interpretive reformulation.17 Gap-filling interpretations are evidenced in the form of mimetic, performative, and retrojective hermeneutical procedures taken up in rabbinic midrash and used 14

Edward L. Greenstein, ‘Mixing Memory and Design: Reading Psalm 78’, Prooftexts 10, no. 2 (May 1990): 197. 15 The term ‘culture-structure’, coined by Eric Rambo and Elaine Chan, is a central if contested concept in cultural sociology; central because it assumes a relationship between culture, structure, and agency, and contested because the definition of these concepts and their relationships is the source of considerable and ongoing foment in sociological theory. See Rambo and Chan, ‘Text, Structure, and Action in Cultural Sociology: A Commentary on “Positive Objectivity”’, Theory and Society 19, no. 5 (October 1990): 635–48. For a comprehensive summary of the debate over analytical and concrete autonomy of culture, see Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘What is “The Relative Autonomy of Culture?”’ in John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff and Ming-Cheng Lo, eds., Handbook of Cultural Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2010), 97–108. 16 See Schweiker, op. cit., 807. 17 See, e.g., R. W. L. Moberley, ‘The Earliest Commentary on the Akedah’, Vetus Testamentum 51, no. 3 (July 1988): 302–23. The author considers and endorses text criticism suggesting that vv. 15–18 constitute a ‘profound theological commentary’ (p. 323) on vv. 1–14, 19.

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extensively, as we shall see, in Amoraic midrash with respect to the interiorization of sacrifice. The interpretive act through which Abraham substitutes the ram for Isaac is repeatedly revisited and reenacted; canon, crisis, and interpretation become the tools that shape the post-Temple cultural memory. The remembering culture develops and revises its mnemonic structure through an accumulation of intertextual interpretations, juxtaposing canonical text with ‘event as text’. Tracing the development of midrashic memory to the mimetic process of adaptive reinterpretation to which the Akedah narrative is subjected suggests that a deeper understanding of traditional Jewish memory must begin with interpretation of, and within, the archetypal sacrificial substitution. The relationship between myth and ritual is both preserved and transformed through the ‘rites’ of rabbinic interpretation. As Fishbane has demonstrated, mythic elements are embedded in canon, and these elements exert considerable influence on midrashic exegetical strategies. Gruenwald’s delineation of the close relationship between myth and ritual affirms the contention that there is a close connection between narrative, ritual, and myth, and also their influence on the production and preservation of memory. Gruenwald notes that the ‘epistemological exceptionality’ of myth ‘can endow phenomenological reality with metaphysical qualities’.18 So transformed, ‘reality’ is remembered through a midrashic lens, subjected to ongoing performative reinterpretation through the calendrical spiral of Jewish observance. In the narrative of the Akedah, the interweaving of myth, ritual, and interpretation is established as a self-reflexive and mimetic defense against oblivion: the oblivion that confronts Isaac, and through it, the oblivion that threatens Jewish culture and each individual within its orbit. The mimetic hermeneutic procedure of preservation through performative transformationin liturgy, in midrash, and in forms of Jewish cultural expression, both traditional and mod-

Ithamar Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel (Boston: Brill, 2003), 97. 18

INTRODUCTION

11

erntakes the form of duplication and elaboration, a process of double response. The relationship between three hermeneutical-cultural phenomena guide this project: midrash, both the hermeneutic of creative exegesis of the Bible and the Amoraic works that elaborate it; mimesis, a concept denoting a dynamic activity, proceeding from imitation to elaboration, which seeks to produce understanding through exploration of the relationship between the represented and the representational; and cultural memory, collective knowledge of the past that directs behavior in the present, through repeated practice and initiation. Each of these subjects on its own could fillindeed, already has filleda library’s worth of volumes. The dangers inherent in this project are numerous, but two are most significant: the first is that the vastness of these topics, when considered together, will expand exponentially, swamping the thesis in a deluge of theoretical, theological, and hermeneutical exploration. The second is that viewing the process of midrashic memory formation in isolationisolation, that is, with regard to one narrative, as interpreted within one of the three religious traditions in which it plays an important roleartificially restricts the focus of mutual influence and dialogue and disputation through which the narrative achieved elevated importance. In order to avoid these pitfalls, the five chapters of this work will consider the Akedah, its midrashic interpretations, and its ritual expressions, as well as the separate but related phenomenon of the post-Temple internalization of ritual sacrifice, as retrospective transformations of the narrative, deemed necessary to respond to cultural rupture. This project, then, draws on the disciplinary perspectives of social theory, hermeneutics, history, and theology. Because exegetical strategies overlap and intertwine in midrash, we shall develop a multidisciplinary perspective on the formulation of traditional Jewish memory by reading and rereading the Akedah and Amoraic rabbinic reformulations of sacrifice, through the lenses of these disciplines, with a particular focus on the transformative hermeneutical ‘as if’ procedure. The project will conclude with a proposed revision to cultural memory theory, articulated through a theory and taxonomy of Jewish memory. The taxonomical aspect of the project will consult Richard B. Miller’s taxonomy of memory, and in particular his ob-

12

SECOND SLAYINGS

servation that ‘memory is a dynamic process of remembering and forgetting that is constantly undergoing revision’. 19 In chapter 1, I seek to lay the theoretical groundwork for the centrality of the Akedah to traditional Jewish memory. I critique theorizations of Jewish memory, principally the constructionist theory of Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann. The Assmanns developed their theory of cultural memory as a response and corrective to the concept of collective memory, developed principally by Maurice Halbwachs. They suggest that memory proceeds along cultural pathways. I apply their theorization of memory and their reformulation of hypolepsis to Israelite culture, in order to suggest mimesis as a fundamental motivating force in traditional Jewish memory precisely because of its roots in the sacrificial act. I deploy the mimetic theory of Paul Ricoeur and William Schweiker to explore the reliance of traditional memory upon mimetic appropriation and transformation. I propose Ithamar Gruenwald’s Midrashic Condition as the principal cultural-hermeneutical matrix of traditional Jewish memory. ‘Midrashic memory’ is born of confrontations between the Midrashic Condition and the need to interpret cultural crisis in light of Scripture. I conclude the chapter by providing a close reading of the Akedah narrative, seeking not to identify its provenance or its historical veracity (the latter being impossible to establish), but to analyze how mimetic doubling of rhythms, sequences, and events amplify the narrative’s power as a mnemonic artifact. In chapter 2, I establish an interpretive framework for the Akedah narrative itself. Distinguishing between the roles of interpreter, reader, and hearer/witness of the Akedah, I demonstrate the predominance of doublings of word, phrase, and action sequence, in the narrative. These doublings are set within a chiastic structure, reaching a climax with the angelic double call of Abraham’s name in almost the precise center of the narrative. This reveals the essential and performative role played by mimesis in the power of the narrative and in the substitutive dynamics of sacrifice. This pattern also Richard B. Miller, ‘The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 3 (September 2009): 540.

19

INTRODUCTION

13

establishes the mimetic dynamics of the human-divine relationship and, on a mnemonic level, provides patterns by which both the reader and the hearer of the text can grasp and internalize its patterns. The substitution of the ram for the favored son (v. 12) is posited as the mythohistorical moment through which substitutionas an act of interpretation, rather than divinely commanded modificationbecomes a principal motive force behind Jewish religious imagination. This dynamic is conveyed from the sacrificial cult to the rabbinic conventicle. In chapter 3, the hermeneutics of substitution and interiorization evident in the Akedah will be traced forward to Amoraic midrashim on both the Akedah narrative and on interiorized reformulations of sacrifice for the post-Temple era. The hermeneutical approaches will be analyzed in textual terms but also in light of cultural concerns, focusing especially on ke’ilu. This is the foundational hermeneutical strategy of midrashic memory; the mimetic process by which interpretations are ‘read’ back into culture transforms that culture both in spite of and in deference to existing cultural codes, strategies, and interpretations. The internalization of sacrificial rites will be seen as preserving the ancient structures of traditional Israelite praxis, establishing the contours of Jewish memory. This perspective suggests reorienting the study of Jewish cultural memory from static sites, archives, and testimonies to dynamic and interwoven sequences of crisis and interpretation, with the verse as the basic unit of interpretation. 20 The rabbinic response to crisis will be contextualized through theoretical approaches to cultural rupture; these sequences, and the accumulation of interpretations, are the means by which canon re-exerts its presence, memory is reshaped, Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 225. Sommer identifies midrashic reading as inherently centrifugal: a form of reading in which a search for holistic unity is not primary, but one in which the verse is the most important unit, and the next most important is the Torah as a whole (p. 218). As such, midrashic reading ‘refer[s] to biblical interpretation that brings together verses from disparate parts of the biblical canon to create a new narrative or law’ (p. 225). The centrifugal hermeneutic is crucial to midrashic memory.

20

14

SECOND SLAYINGS

and culture is renewed: interpretation of the present crisis follows the hermeneutical procedures of reinterpretation of the past; it is all seen through the lens of canon. Gruenwald’s ‘Midrashic Condition’ describes the hermeneutic disposition, and it is through the performative nature of midrash that sacrifice and memory are transformed. This ‘condition’ will be traced forward through select medieval interpretations of the Akedah. The chapter will conclude with a reading of Genesis Rabbah on the Akedah (56:7–9), in which the gaps in canonical narrative provide the sages with a twofold opportunity: to interpret manifestations of divine will in crisis and to suggest substitution and interpretation as valid strategies for creating a culturally valid replacement for ritual sacrifice. Rabbinic sages, engaged in surfacing new scriptural interpretations, become the new priests in a culture that reconnects canonical texts to radically revised social texts, resulting in the creation of newly interiorized forms of ritual practice. The performative language of sacrificial ritual is thus internalized and individualized into a new yet structurally familiar form of mnemonic device. Chapter 4 will consider Shalom Spiegel’s masterwork on the Akedah, The Last Trial, as a singular modern masterwork of midrashic memory. 21 Spiegel’s study brings scholarly mastery to bear on the Akedah and on its centrality in interpreting cultural crisis, both documenting and demonstrating how the work is consulted, reinterpreted, and reinforced as a cultural strategy for recovery. Spiegel’s work, however, is both scholarship and midrash, both commentary and mnemotechnic. The Holocaust is hermeneutically and historically linked, through the Crusades, to the Akedah; etymologically linked to the burnt offering; and mnemonically linked to both. The Last Trial is nested in an accumulated series of interpretations of the past, and thus a response to crisis is mimetically developed, through which a path to interpretation and cultural recovery is proposed by Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. Judah Goldin (New York: Schocken, 1967). 21

INTRODUCTION

15

means of a scholarly iteration of midrashic remembering. Spiegel’s work implicitly extends those interpretations, and the Akedah itself, to confront the Holocaust, an event whose scope was still not fully comprehended when Spiegel’s work was completed. Spiegel considers three historical approaches to the metahistorical event of the Akedah: Amoraic rabbinic explorations of the theme of the ‘ashes of Isaac’ on Mount Moriah; liturgical invocations of the Akedah in High Holiday liturgy; and the theme of the ‘second slaying’ of Isaac, as consciously adopted by Jewish martyrs throughout history. I also consider the chronicles of the martyrdom of Jewish communities of the Ashkenaz during the Crusades, theological and social-theoretical responses to the Holocaust, and the Binding of Isaac and its centrality to the formation of Israeli identity and memory in order to further contextualize the enduring power of the Akedah as a templatethe templatefor deploying midrashic memory in order to facilitate cultural recovery. In each instance, contemporary crises are seen as mimetic echoes of the foundational crisis of Jewish consciousness. Radical obedience to divine will is confronted, in each historical instance, with the seemingly paradoxical dependence upon human interpretation in order to discern and obey that will. As with Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, this hermeneutical dialectic reveals an aspect of traditional Jewish memory that carves out and maintains interpretive space as critical to not only the discernment but the continuous presence of divine will as an active force in cultural construction. Here, too, both culturalsociological and hermeneutical theory are consulted: the culturally strategic and hermeneutically creative approach to catastrophe illuminates the presence of divine will, glimpsed through the ashes, deepens the dialectic of obedience and alienation, and summons, in awful clarity, the ruptures of individual and collective martyrdom, bringing the Akedah into the present. With respect to the Akedah, Spiegel’s exploration of the ‘second slaying’ of Isaac reveals the midrashic metonym for traditional Jewish memory: each crisis is a mimetic elaboration of an archetypal rupture. Returning to text is thus a cultural strategy, in which the divine will is revealed through interpreting, remembering, and contextualizing crisis. Spiegel’s work demonstrates midrashic memory’s capacity for personal reflection and remembering by means of the traditional

16

SECOND SLAYINGS

corpus. Ancient narratives are contextualized with modernity’s most profound crisis. Interpretation is summoned as a strategy for recovery; the Akedah becomes urgently present once more and cultural memory continues along its meaning-making spiral, without becoming unmoored from its origins. The metahistorical becomes historical through mimetic adoption, adaptation, and expression. Having read the Akedah and rabbinic midrash through the lenses of theory, chapter 5 revisits and suggests revisions to cultural memory theory through the lens of the Midrashic Condition. A revised approach to Jewish memory in particular will be developed through a taxonomy of Jewish memory, drawing from Miller’s detailed taxonomy of individual and cultural mnemonic processes. In this context, the rabbinic dictum ‘What happened happened!’ can be understood as de-emphasizing historical narrative in favor of interpretive ingenuity.22 The ‘dynamics of memory’ approach will provide the lens through which the Akedah can be read as suggestive of a textually and culturally mimetic response to crisis: one that opens a space for interpretation within the cultural requirement for total obedience to divine will, and one that provides the contours for midrashic memory. Dynamic memory theory, as articulated and taxonomized by Richard B. Miller, accommodates the mimetic, transformative aspects of midrashic memory and its roots in ritual sacrifice. Through this process, the manner in which reformulated, interiorized acts and practices become supports in the larger structure of memory will become clear. By articulating the process by which texts and rites are read in the light of new cultural and theological concerns, even as they are reestablished as principal motive forces in the ever-extending spiral of cultural memory formation, we shall understand the Akedah as the foundational link in the chain of Jewish cultural memory, through which the ‘social construction of 22

See Isaiah Gafni, ‘Rabbinic Historiography and Representations of the Past’, in Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–312.

INTRODUCTION

17

reality’ 23 is wedded to ‘the exegetical construction of reality.’ 24 The work concludes by proposing future directions for the development of a theory of midrashic memory. This project, then, proposes a thorough reconsideration of what constitutes and continually revises Jewish memory: first, through analysis and critique of the most essential works in the extant literature on the topic; next, through analysis of the Akedah through hermeneutical, social-theoretical, liturgical, and theologicalhistorical perspectives; and finally, through a proposed retheorization of the structure of Jewish memory itself. This work relies upon a renewed theoretical focus on Scripture, echoing Levinson’s plea: Contemporary theory has all but divorced itself from the study of Scripture, from thinking in a sophisticated way about religion. The biblical text, in particular, is regarded as a parade example of an unredeemed text that encodes and perpetuates concepts of power, hierarchy, domination, privilege, xenophobia, patriarchy, and colonialism. The truth is much more complex. Unfortunately, many within the broader academic community are woefully uninformed about how to read the Bible critically, historically, and intellectually. [This] has transformed the scriptural text into a golden calf, lacking in intellectual complexity, awaiting theory for its redemption. 25

My hope is that this work will spur a reconsideration of the role played by master narratives in the approach and response to the unfolding of history in a culture that sustains itself through memorya memory whose roots are set in scriptural interpretation.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967). 24 Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4. 25 Bernard M. Levinson, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 93. 23

18

SECOND SLAYINGS

GENESIS 22:1–19 26 ‫אמר‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ת־א ְב ָר ָ ֑הם וַ ֣יּ‬ ַ ‫�הים נִ ָ ֖סּה ֶא‬ ִ֔ ‫ וַ יְ ִ֗הי ַא ַח ֙ר ַה ְדּ ָב ִ ֣רים ָה ֵ֔א ֶלּה וְ ָ ֣ה ֱא‬22:1 ‫אמר ִה ֵנּֽנִ י׃‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ֵא ֔ ָליו ַא ְב ָר ָ ֖הם וַ ֥יּ‬ Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Here I am.” ‫ר־א ַ֙ה ְב ָ֙תּ ֶאת־יִ ְצ ָ֔חק וְ ֶל�־‬ ָ ‫ת־בּנְ ֨� ֶאת־יְ ִ ֽח ְיד�֤ ֲא ֶשׁ‬ ִ ‫ח־נא ֶא‬ ָ֠ ‫אמר ַק‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֡יּ‬22:2 ‫ל־א ֶרץ ַהמּ ִֹר ָיּ֑ה וְ ַה ֲﬠ ֵל֤הוּ ָשׁ ֙ם ְלע ֔ ָֹלה ַ ֚ﬠל ַא ַ ֣חד ֶ ֽה ָה ִ ֔רים ֲא ֶ ֖שׁר א ַ ֹ֥מר‬ ֖ ֶ ‫ְל ֔� ֶא‬ ‫ֵא ֶ ֽלי�׃‬ And He said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” ‫ת־שׁ ֵנ֤י נְ ָﬠ ָר ֙יו‬ ְ ‫ת־חמ ֹ֔רוֹ וַ יִּ ַ ֞קּח ֶא‬ ֲ ‫ וַ יַּ ְשׁ ֵ֨כּם ַא ְב ָר ָ֜הם ַבּ ֗בֹּ ֶקר ַוֽ יַּ ֲחב ֹ֙שׁ ֶא‬22:3 ‫ר־א ַמר־‬ ֽ ָ ‫ל־ה ָמּ ֖קוֹם ֲא ֶשׁ‬ ַ ‫ִא ֔תּוֹ וְ ֵ ֖את יִ ְצ ָ ֣חק ְבּנ֑ וֹ וַ יְ ַב ַקּ ֙ע ֲﬠ ֵצ֣י ע ֔ ָֹלה וַ ָיּ֣ ָ קם וַ ֵ֔יּ ֶל� ֶא‬ ‫�הים׃‬ ֽ ִ ‫֥לוֹ ָה ֱא‬ So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. ‫ת־ה ָמּ ֖קוֹם ֵמ ָר ֽחֹק׃‬ ַ ‫ת־ﬠ ָינ֛יו וַ ַיּ ְ֥ רא ֶא‬ ֵ ‫ישׁי וַ יִּ ָ֨שּׂא ַא ְב ָר ָ ֧הם ֶא‬ ִ֗ ‫ ַבּיּ֣ וֹם ַה ְשּׁ ִל‬22:4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. ‫ם־ה ֲח ֔מוֹר וַ ֲא ִנ֣י וְ ַה ַ֔נּ ַﬠר‬ ַ ‫בוּ־ל ֶ ֥כם פּ ֹ֙ה ִ ֽﬠ‬ ָ ‫אמר ַא ְב ָר ָ֜הם ֶאל־נְ ָﬠ ָ ֗ריו ְשׁ‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֨יּ‬22:5 ‫יכם׃‬ ֽ ֶ ‫וּבה ֲא ֵל‬ ָ ‫נֵ ְל ָ ֖כה ַﬠד־ ֑כֹּה וְ ִ ֽנ ְשׁ ַתּ ֲחֶו֖ה וְ נָ ֥שׁ‬

Translation from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999).

26

INTRODUCTION

19

Then Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you.” ‫ת־ﬠ ֵצ֣י ָהע ֗ ָֹלה וַ יָּ֙ ֶשׂ ֙ם ַﬠל־יִ ְצ ָ ֣חק ְבּנ֔ וֹ וַ יִּ ַ ֣קּח ְבּיָ ֔דוֹ ֶאת־‬ ֲ ‫ וַ יִּ ַ ֨קּח ַא ְב ָר ָ֜הם ֶא‬22:6 ‫יהם יַ ְח ָ ֽדּו׃‬ ֖ ֶ ֵ‫ת־ה ַמּ ֲא ֶ ֑כ ֶלת וַ יֵּ ְל ֥כוּ ְשׁנ‬ ֽ ַ ‫ָה ֵ ֖אשׁ וְ ֶא‬ Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the firestone and the knife; and the two walked off together. ‫אמר‬ ֶ ֹ ‫אמר ִה ֶנּ ִ ֽ֣נּי ְב ִנ֑י וַ ֗יּ‬ ֶ ֹ ‫אמר ָא ִ֔בי וַ ֖יּ‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ל־א ְב ָר ָ ֤הם ָא ִב ֙יו וַ ֣יּ‬ ַ ‫אמר יִ ְצ ָ֜חק ֶא‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֨יּ‬22:7 ‫ִה ֵנּ֤ה ָה ֵא ֙שׁ וְ ָ ֣ה ֵﬠ ִ֔צים וְ ַא ֵיּ֥ה ַה ֶ ֖שּׂה ְלע ָ ֹֽלה׃‬ Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he answered, “Yes, my son.” And he said, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” ‫יהם‬ ֖ ֶ ֵ‫ה־לּוֹ ַה ֶ ֛שּׂה ְלע ָ ֹ֖לה ְבּ ִנ֑י וַ יֵּ ְל ֥כוּ ְשׁנ‬ ֥ ‫�הים יִ ְר ֶא‬ ִ֞ ‫אמ ֙ר ַא ְב ָר ָ֔הם ֱא‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֙יּ‬22:8 ‫יַ ְח ָ ֽדּו׃‬ And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together. ‫ם וַ ִ֨יּ ֶבן ָ ֤שׁם ַא ְב ָר ָה ֙ם ֶאת־‬ ֒ ‫�הי‬ ִ ‫ר־לוֹ ָה ֱא‬ ֣ ‫קוֹם ֲא ֶ ֣שׁר ָ ֽא ַמ‬ ֮ ‫ל־ה ָמּ‬ ַ ‫ וַ יָּ ֗בֹאוּ ֶ ֽא‬22:9 �ַ ‫ל־ה ִמּזְ ֵ֔בּ‬ ַ ‫ֹתוֹ ַﬠ‬ ֙ ‫ת־ה ֵﬠ ִ ֑צים ַוֽ יַּ ֲﬠק ֹ֙ד ֶאת־יִ ְצ ָ ֣חק ְבּנ֔ וֹ וַ ָיּ ֶ֤שׂם א‬ ָ ‫ַה ִמּזְ ֵ֔בּ ַ� ַוֽ יַּ ֲﬠ ֖ר ֹ� ֶא‬ ‫ִמ ַ ֖מּ ַﬠל ָל ֵﬠ ִ ֽצים׃‬ They arrived at the place of which God had told him. Abraham built an altar there; he laid out the wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. ‫ת־בּנֽ וֹ׃‬ ְ ‫ת־ה ַמּ ֲא ֶ ֑כ ֶלת ִל ְשׁ ֖חֹט ֶא‬ ֽ ַ ‫ וַ יִּ ְשׁ ַל֤ח ַא ְב ָר ָה ֙ם ֶאת־יָ ֔דוֹ וַ יִּ ַ ֖קּח ֶא‬22:10 And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. ‫אמר ַא ְב ָר ָ ֣הם ׀ ַא ְב ָר ָ ֑הם‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ן־ה ָשּׁ ַ֔מיִ ם וַ ֖יּ‬ ַ ‫ וַ יִּ ְק ָ ֨רא ֵא ֜ ָליו ַמ ְל ַ ֤א� יְ הוָ ֙ה ִמ‬22:11 ‫אמר ִה ֵנּֽנִ י׃‬ ֶ ֹ ‫וַ ֖יּ‬ Then an angel of the LORD called to him from heaven: “Abraham! Abraham!” And he answered, “Here I am.”

20

SECOND SLAYINGS ‫וּמּה ִ ֣כּי ׀‬ ָ ‫ל־תּ ַﬠשׂ ֖לוֹ ְמ ֑א‬ ֥ ַ ‫ל־ה ַ֔נּ ַﬠר וְ ַא‬ ַ ‫ל־תּ ְשׁ ַל֤ח ָי ְֽ ד ֙� ֶא‬ ִ ‫אמר ַא‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֗יּ‬22:12 ֖�‫ת־בּנְ �֥ ֶאת־יְ ִח ְיד‬ ִ ‫ים ַ֔א ָתּה וְ ֥ל ֹא ָח ַ ֛שׂ ְכ ָתּ ֶא‬ ֙ ‫ַﬠ ָ ֣תּה יָ ַ ֗ד ְﬠ ִתּי ִ ֽכּי־יְ ֵ ֤רא ֱא� ִה‬ ‫ִמ ֶ ֽמּנִּ י׃‬ And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.” �‫ה־איִ ל ַא ַ֕חר נֶ ֱא ַ ֥חז ַבּ ְסּ ַ ֖ב‬ ַ֔ ֵ‫ת־ﬠ ָ֗יניו וַ יַּ ְר ֙א וְ ִהנּ‬ ֵ ‫ וַ יִּ ָ֨שּׂא ַא ְב ָר ָ֜הם ֶא‬22:13 ‫ת־ה ַ֔איִ ל וַ יַּ ֲﬠ ֵ ֥להוּ ְלע ָֹל֖ה ַ ֥תּ ַחת ְבּנֽ וֹ׃‬ ָ ‫ְבּ ַק ְר ָנ֑יו וַ ֵיּ ֶ֤ל� ַא ְב ָר ָה ֙ם וַ יִּ ַ ֣קּח ֶא‬ When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son. ‫הו֣ה ׀ יִ ְר ֶ ֑אה ֲא ֶשׁ ֙ר יֵ ָא ֵ ֣מר‬ ָ ְ‫ם־ה ָמּ ֥קוֹם ַה ֖הוּא י‬ ַ ‫ וַ יִּ ְק ָ ֧רא ַא ְב ָר ָ ֛הם ֵ ֽשׁ‬22:14 ‫הו֖ה יֵ ָר ֶ ֽאה׃‬ ָ ְ‫ַהיּ֔ וֹם ְבּ ַ ֥הר י‬ And Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh, whence the present saying, “On the mount of the LORD there is vision.” ‫ן־ה ָשּׁ ָ ֽמיִ ם׃‬ ַ ‫ל־א ְב ָר ָ ֑הם ֵשׁ ִנ֖ית ִמ‬ ַ ‫הו֖ה ֶא‬ ָ ְ‫ וַ יִּ ְק ָ ֛רא ַמ ְל ַ ֥א� י‬22:15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham a second time from heaven, ‫ת־ה ָדּ ָ ֣בר‬ ַ ‫ית ֶא‬ ָ֙ ‫הו֑ה ִ֗כּי ַי ַ֚ﬠן ֲא ֶ ֤שׁר ָﬠ ִ ֙שׂ‬ ָ ְ‫אמר ִ ֥בּי נִ ְשׁ ַ ֖בּ ְﬠ ִתּי נְ ֻאם־י‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ וַ ֕יּ‬22:16 ‫יד�׃‬ ֽ ֶ ‫ת־בּנְ �֥ ֶאת־יְ ִח‬ ִ ‫ַה ֶ֔זּה וְ ֥ל ֹא ָח ַ ֖שׂ ְכ ָתּ ֶא‬ and said, “By Myself I swear, the LORD declares: Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your favored one, ‫כוֹכ ֵ ֣בי ַה ָשּׁ ַ֔מיִ ם וְ ַכ ֕חוֹל‬ ְ ‫י־ב ֵ ֣ר� ֲא ָב ֶר ְכ ֗� וְ ַה ְר ָ֨בּה ַא ְר ֶ ֤בּה ֶ ֽאת־זַ ְר ֲﬠ ֙� ְכּ‬ ָ ‫ ִ ֽכּ‬22:17 ‫ל־שׂ ַ ֣פת ַה ָיּ֑ם וְ יִ ַ ֣רשׁ זַ ְר ֲﬠ ֔� ֵ ֖את ַ ֥שׁ ַﬠר אֹיְ ָ ֽביו׃‬ ְ ‫ֲא ֶ ֖שׁר ַﬠ‬ I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes. ‫גּוֹי֣י ָה ָ ֑א ֶרץ ֕ ֵﬠ ֶקב ֲא ֶ ֥שׁר ָשׁ ַ ֖מ ְﬠ ָתּ ְבּק ִ ֹֽלי׃‬ ֵ ‫ וְ ִה ְת ָבּ ֲר ֣כוּ ְבזַ ְר ֲﬠ ֔� ֖כֹּל‬22:18

INTRODUCTION All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, because you have obeyed My command.” ‫ל־בּ ֵ ֣אר ָ ֑שׁ ַבע וַ ֵיּ ֶ֥שׁב‬ ְ ‫ וַ ָיּ ָ֤שׁב ַא ְב ָר ָה ֙ם ֶאל־נְ ָﬠ ָ ֔ריו וַ יָּ ֻ ֛ קמוּ וַ יֵּ ְל ֥כוּ יַ ְח ָ ֖דּו ֶא‬22:19 (‫ַא ְב ָר ָ ֖הם ִבּ ְב ֵ ֥אר ָ ֽשׁ ַבע׃ )פ‬ Abraham then returned to his servants, and they departed together for Beer-sheba; and Abraham stayed in Beer-sheba.

21

CHAPTER ONE. SACRIFICE AND THE FORMATION OF JEWISH MEMORY

For it is rational conduct that connects man to his Lord and therefore Isaac had to become an unblemished burnt-offering to become reconciled. The reign of the stars was taken from him and his kin as if they were all sacrificed on the spot, because they were all potentially present in him at the time of the sacrifice. –Isaac Abrabanel, Perush 'al ha-Tora (Commentary on the Torah)

Although the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1– 19), is one of the most often-interpreted stories in the Bible, its centrality to the formation and continuous development of Jewish cultural memory is underappreciated. 1 In the concise and elliptical bibli1 The profound influence of biblical narratives on cultural memory has been

addressed conceptually. See, e.g., Pernille Carstens, Trine Bjørnung Hasselbalch, and Niels Peter Lemche, eds., Cultural Memory in Biblical Exegesis (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2012); Tom Thatcher, ed., Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014). Several studies exist on the topic of cultural memory in ancient history, e.g., Martin Bommas, ed., Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies (New York: Continuum, 2011), and on the influence of biblical text on contemporary memory, e.g., Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds., Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). Significant schol-

23

24

SECOND SLAYINGS

cal narrative, the patriarch Abraham is confronted with a metaethical command from God to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, in a location that God will reveal to him. In this last and greatest of the ‘ten trials’ of Abraham, according to some interpretations, a family is shattered, a son is traumatized (and perhaps grievously wounded, or worse 2), but the ancestral line is assured. Abraham’s place as God’s principal inheritor is likewise affirmed, and, although God and Abraham never again communicate in the Torah, the act, and the merit imputed to it, lives on in law, liturgy, and literature. The narrative captures not only a harrowing encounter, but the relentless tension between devotion to God and adherence to the ethical strictures that define Israelite and (later) Jewish law, literature, philosophy, and history. Through invocations and interpretations of the Akedah, radical devotion to God becomes the standard to which Jewish tradition aspires; upon its climactic act of substitution, an entire cultic system of sacrifice is constructed. 3 Due to the sheer dramatic power of the narrative and its centrality in Jewish identity and history, the Akedah, ‘the central text in the formation of our spiritual consciousness’, 4 is continuously brought arship, including work by the Assmanns, has focused on the influence of Freud’s materialist approach to religion on contemporary memory and psychology. See Paul Cantz, ‘Toward a Biblical Psychoanalysis: A Second Look at the First Book’, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 15, no. 8 (2012): 779–97. 2 As we shall see, one prominent theme of rabbinic interpretation is that Isaac is indeed slain, then resurrected and healed by the tears of the heavenly retinue. 3 However, although child sacrifice is transmuted to non-fatal consecration of the firstborn, Scripture retains references to the widespread practice of the sacrifice of the eldest child; prophetic injunctions against the practice include the claim that God had sanctioned the practice in order to deliberately lead the Israelites toward their deservedly cataclysmic fate. See Exod. 22:28–29; Num. 18:15; Jer. 19:5; Ezek. 20:2–6. See also pp. 33–35. 4 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, ‘Akeda: A View From the Bible’, in Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates eds., Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holidays (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 144.

1. SACRIFICE AND THE FORMATION OF JEWISH MEMORY

25

into the present. It serves as a metonym and a byword for the everpresent tension between radical devotion to God and the sacred commitment to ethically informed action faced by the descendants of Isaac. Israeli authors such as David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua, in seeking to banish the story from the national lexicon, continue to invoke it; Israeli parents sending their children to their compulsory military service express feelings that they are binding their children on the altar of the nation.5 American authors, most recently Jonathan Safran Foer, approach it only to recoil from it.6 Artists, poets, and musicians in Israel and the diaspora invoke and interpret the text. The Akedah is even subjected to satire. 7 Despite the horror and cynicism with which contemporary culture tends to view the story, the Akedah remains the defining moment, the ‘chosen trauma’ of Jewish identity: it becomes a scarring event caused by the collision between covenantal commitment and communal suffering, preserved through liturgical, midrashic, and psychological interpretation and repetition, spanning generations, continents, and cultures. 8 That the Akedah continues to exert a hold on Jewish imagination and spiritual consciousness affirms its critical role in the ongoing articulation of Jewish identity and memory. In both traditional and secular variants of Jewish culture, remembering as a cultural strategy emerges from the performative interpretation, liturgical invocation, See, e.g., Yael S. Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 6 See Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am (New York: Macmillan, 2016). The author’s title is a translation of Hineni, Abraham’s response of obedient readiness, spoken twice during the Akedah. 7 HaYehudim Ba’im (“The Jews Are Coming”), http://www.jewishhumorcentral.com/2013/11/abraham-and-isaac-directorscut-another.html; http://www.jewishhumorcentral.com/2014/12/the-realstory-of-binding-of-isaac-as.html. Viewed September 6, 2016. 8 See Howard Stein, ‘“Chosen Trauma” and a Widely Shared Sense of Jewish Identity and History’, The Journal of Psychohistory 41, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 236–57. 5

26

SECOND SLAYINGS

and mimetic reenactment of responses to crisis recorded in Scriptureand the Akedah is a crisis of singular significance. We can test this hypothesis by tracing interpretations of the Akedah in moments of cultural crisis or trauma and by analyzing the hermeneutical and cultural procedures through which such crises are confronted and interpreted. We shall see that traditional Jewish memory relies on a mimetic and performative memory procedure that we shall term ‘midrashic memory’, which has its roots in interpretations of an ‘archetypal re-experiencing’ of that crisis. 9 That is, the textuality of Jewish cultural memory relies on and continuously reorients itself by means of interpretation of contemporary crises through the lens of scriptural narrative. This hermeneutical transformation becomes especially prominent in aggadic midrashim from the Amoraic period. Midrash documents a process in which intertextual and gap-filling interpretations of biblical narrative suggest reformulations of social and cultural codes and practices. 10 This process is fundamental to the production of meaning after cultural crisis, and thus to the formation of Jewish cultural memory, through which that meaning is continuously transmitted and transformed. Studies on Jewish cultural memory to date have focused primarily on literature and popular culture; on commemorations of and testimony on the traumatic upheavals of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, culminating in the Holocaust; and on the foundational battles, military and cultural, that marked the formation and growth of the state of Israel. 11 The study of collective memory more broadly is seldom traced further back in time than the upsurge of European nationalism in the late nineteenth century, when the commemoration of national struggles and triumphs began to concretize collective identity and solemnize seminal historical events through ritual, ceremony, and the creation of commemorative 9 See Introduction, n. 7.

10 See Bruns, Hermeneutics, 113. 11

See Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Transference, and “Working through” in Writing the History of the “Shoah”’, History and Memory 4, no. 1 (Spring– Summer 1992): 39–59.

1. SACRIFICE AND THE FORMATION OF JEWISH MEMORY

27

spaces, sculptures, and museums. Such developments have provided rich material for theorizing the relationship between modern culture and its memory forms, but scholars have devoted insufficient attention to the role played by canonical narratives and to their interpretations in rabbinic text, in the ancient mnemonic and hermeneutical techniques that have shaped Jewish cultural memory. This is true of the Akedah, not only because it is invoked in liturgy, but also because it is a foundational act of sacrifice, and the role of ritual sacrifice in the establishment of Jewish identity and memory is especially underappreciated. To be sure, historians, cultural anthropologists, and cultural memory theorists have devoted attention to the development of Judaism as a text culture, a sacrificial culture, a memory culture, and as the progenitor of a ‘portable homeland’ in which its citizens, however far-flung, were commanded to dwell. The problem, however, is that scholars have not appreciated the ways in which text, ritual, and memory interact with each other. When we examine these separate strands, and the braid they form, we see that Jewish cultural memory is not merely a repository for but a generator of interpretations that make meaning for the culture; it is not merely a receptacle or record of past action, but a strategy for future action, with how and what to remember being principal among those strategies. Despite literary criticism’s brief infatuation with midrash, scholars have in general not analyzed midrashthe literary genre and the hermeneutical procedureas constitutive of a particular, and particularly crucial, aspect of Jewish cultural memory: that aspect that helps the culture surface new meanings from canon as a response to cultural crisis. I propose here that ‘midrashic memory’ is evident in interpretations of the Akedah (the Binding of Isaac), and in reformulations of the practice of ritual sacrifice, proposed by the Amoraim. Midrashic memory is the cornerstone of a creative and performative cultural memory that interprets rupture as evidence of divine care, and as an opportunity for covenantal renewal to be achieved through interpretation. Analyses of Jewish cultural memory must consider the ways in which retrojected interpretation, mimetic transformation, and substitution help the culture recover from crisis by interpreting incidents of cultural rupture and by contextualizing them with canon. This study attempts to do that by theorizing the

28

SECOND SLAYINGS

deep relationship between Jewish memory and the Akedah, in which the relationship between interpretation and cultural rupture is established. It attempts to show that this relationship is refined and elevated by the Amoraim, who develop midrashic memory in order to maintain a dynamic and productive tension between canon and post-Temple culture. The ways in which the Amoraic sages reinterpret the Akedah and interiorize the ritual forms and practices of sacrifice become the hermeneutical techniques through which post-Temple Jewish memory is formed. The basis of these techniques is mimetic transformation. Through a carefully constructed system of one-to-one correspondences and substitutions, the rabbis preserve and interiorize not only the practice of sacrifice but the sacral effects of the sacrificial system as a whole. This is paired with a hermeneutic of retrojection. 12 By retrojecting the significance of historical events into canonical narratives, the rabbis bring the past forward through a hermeneutic of retrospective prefiguration, or what Jan Assmann terms ‘retro-projective theology’: demonstrating the capacity of canonical narrative to anticipate and provide structures and strategies for renewal after crises yet to come. Midrashic memory emerges from this confluence of hermeneutical strategies. 13

12

See David Stern, ‘Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism’, Prooftexts 4, no. 2 (May 1984): 193–204. In this pointed critique of Susan A. Handelman’s Slayers of Moses, Stern makes clear that for the rabbis, their own belatedness had a liberating effect on their exegetical range, and that this emerged from a keen concern with the content and meaning of history: ‘Although the rabbis do not often explicitly acknowledge the actual historical circumstances that directly affected their interpretations of the Torah, it was the very force of history, of historical change, that created the need for that entire interpretive project in the first place’ (202). 13 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 37. See also David Stern’s concept of ‘belatedness’ in Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 32, 33.

1. SACRIFICE AND THE FORMATION OF JEWISH MEMORY

29

This project will apply social and hermeneutical theory to interpretations of the Akedah (the Binding of Isaac, Gen. 22:1–19) and to post-Temple interiorizations of and substitutions for sacrifice in Amoraic midrash. Through this process, interpretations and mimetic adaptations of the Akedah will be connected, in ritual and cultural terms, to reformulations of sacrifice after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Repeated commemorative acts and bodily practices become supports in the structure through which life and text (and life-text) are interpreted. 14 Texts and rites are reinterpreted in light of new cultural and theological concerns, even as they are reestablished as principal motive forces in the ever-extending spiral of cultural memory formation.15 The ‘social construction of reality’ 16 is wedded to ‘the exegetical construction of reality.’ 17 Rabbinic sages, engaged in surfacing new scriptural interpretations, become the new priests in a culture that reconnects canonical texts to radically revised social texts, resulting in the creation of newly interiorized forms of discontinued ritual practice. The performative language of sacrificial ritual is thus internalized and individualized into a new yet structurally familiar form of mnemonic device. Creative Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7–10. 15 Paul Ricoeur sees that this ‘hermeneutical spiral’ moves, like calendrical time, through ‘old’ dates reexperienced in ever-new moments. ‘That the analysis is circular is indisputable. But that the circle is a vicious one can be refuted. In this regard, I would rather speak of an endless spiral that would carry the meditation past the same point a number of times, but at different altitudes’ (Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 1:72). Sara C. VanderHaagen describes this as ‘the agential spiral’, the ‘repetitive yet progressive process in which a series of agents or groups of agents both interpret and act in response to the past’ (‘The “Agential Spiral”: Reading Public Memory Through Paul Ricoeur,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 46, no. 2 [2013]: 182). The theoretical construct of the mimetic spiral will be taken up in chapter 4 of this work. 16 Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality. 17 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 4. 14

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remembering through reinterpretation of canonical law and narrative thus becomes a strategy for cultural renewal in response to crisis. This perspective suggests reorienting the study of Jewish cultural memory from sites, archives, and testimonies to sequences of interpretation, by means of which canon reexerts its presence and memory is reshaped by reinterpretation of the past through the lens of newly unearthed meaning. At the heart of the Akedah and thus of Jewish memory, interpretive ingenuity and mimetic repetition are put forth as the bases of a culturally salutary and religiously sanctioned response to rupture. As a metonym for devotion to God, a foundational act of sacrificial substitution, and a formative interpretation of crisis as a manifestation of divine will, the near-sacrifice of Isaac at the hand of his father Abraham forms the epistemological basis of traditional Jewish memory. Here, the focus is on selected Amoraic midrashim on the Akedah, and on sacrifice, through the lens of the theoretical and methodological rubrics assembled, because it is specifically in the Amoraic works of midrash that interiorized acts are proposed as not merely equivalent but superior to the rites they replace. 18 I analyze interpretations, evocations, ritualizations, reenactments, and depictions of the Akedah in rabbinic midrash, historical accounts, and Jewish liturgy, principally through the lens of Shalom Spiegel’s landmark work, The Last Trial. This project will conclude with two theoretical proposals: first, the development of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish cultural memory; and second, revisions to hermeneutical and cultural theory, on the basis of the readings that that same theory has made possible. First, however, we must assess the extant literature, especially in its definitions and delineations of cultural memory. We shall see that existing cultural memory theory does not account for what Ithamar Gruenwald calls the ‘Midrashic Condition’, reviewed below. The 18

Baruch M. Bokser, ‘Rabbinic Responses to Catastrophe: From Continuity to Discontinuity’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983): 46–47.

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Midrashic Condition is the fertile ground in which midrashic memory is nurtured and through which Jewish culture reorients itself in the wake of cultural rupture, even while maintaining its roots in biblical and rabbinic ontology and epistemology.

1. KEY CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS The concept of cultural memory is employed in this study, as it provides a methodological perspective to analyze the epistemological and mimetic dynamic whereby societies construct and reconstruct their collective memory. Theories of cultural memory, and critiques of the concept, are consulted, with the ultimate goal being a revised theory and taxonomy developed through the process of tracking interpretations of the Akedah at key moments of rupture in Jewish history. 19 The emphasis here will be placed on traditional Jewish memory, which, grounded in primal religious narratives, is refracted through Scripture, rabbinic and mystical commentary, and liturgy. Through this process, these narratives attain a paradigmatic function: they are employed as a hermeneutical key with which to decode the meaning of new, ever-unfolding events, and evolving axiological and cognitive orientations. This process continues to shape how Judaism as a religious culture sustains its foundational memories and revitalizes their relevance, particularly in instances of cultural crisis. Within Jewish culture, across the millennia, the memorialization and reapplication of the Akedah and ritual sacrifice raises this corpus to a new level of ‘public language’, and the Akedah to the axial event of Jewish selfunderstanding. The text, repeatedly consulted, revised, and reenacted under new circumstances, forms the nucleus of midrashic memory. The substitutive transformations of rite and text in midrash serve as examples of Gruenwald’s Midrashic Condition, which he 19

We shall adopt William H. Sewell Jr.’s definition of rupture as ‘a surprising break from routine practice’, resulting in ‘sequences of occurrences’, which lead in turn to ‘transformation of [social] structures’. Sewell, ‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’, Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (December 1996): 843.

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characterizes as ‘a mental attitude or disposition in which the interpretative attention expressed entails more than a concern for lexicological or plain-sense meaning of a text or piece of information’. 20 Such meanings are not created ex nihilo, but as an urgent response to cultural crisis. Gruenwald’s delineation of the Midrashic Condition illuminates the performative essence of the midrashic hermeneutic: ‘interpretation is one of the ways in which spiritual adjustments and changes of behavior are introduced into a Scriptureoriented culture’.21 The terms with which the rabbis construct meaning around the radically disrupted precincts and practices of sacrifice involve the language of substitution (temurah, ke’ilu, zo taḥat zo) and the establishment in cultural memory of a radically interpretive act leading to knowing and remembering (yir’eh, yada‘, zekher) arrived at through a collective absorption (mit‘asqim) in text. Not only are the acts themselves taken up and preserved through transformation: the Temple and its precincts are transformed into interiorized foci embedded in a system of performative meaningmaking. Thus, midrashic reinterpretation can be seen as a direct descendant of sacrifice and a fitting basis for post-Temple cultural reorientation: Interpretation is an indispensable accompaniment to the cultural transformation that we have described as the transition from ritual to textual coherence. When the whole weight of cultural continuity is thrown onto foundational texts, everything depends on keeping those texts alive by bridging the ever-widening gap between them and the changing reality of life. Initially, this happens within the text, through rewriting or continuation, or editorial adaptation to changing circumstances of comprehension. Then, when the text has been canonizedthat is, irrevocably fixed in its wording and its volumethis bridge can only be built through a metatext: the commentary. 22

20 Gruenwald, ‘Midrash and The “Midrashic Condition”’, 7. 21 Ibid., 14.

22 Assmann, Religion

and Cultural Memory, 269.

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The cultivation of the Midrashic Condition facilitates interpretive possibilities that not only can work radical cultural transformations but can retroject these transformations back into the texts being reinterpreted. These retrojected reformulations then reflect forward, into the moment of crisis, an imprimatur of divine care and sanction. ‘Midrash not only creates exegetical information … but also the spheres of meaning in which new halakhic and theological norms are established and realized.’ 23 This is the social construction of reality at work in the interpretive community, that is, the exegetical construction of reality, expressed through the hermeneutic of retrospective prefiguration. As experienced and influenced by the emerging rabbinic interpreting class, then, midrashic memory is not monolithic and not a top-down imposition of mnemonic content. Rather, such content is dynamic and contested; it engages with a canon both immutable and open, in and through which interpretation, substitution, and memory are fundamentally intertwined; and it is a dynamic admixture of remembering and forgetting. The influence of this dynamic memory on sacrificial law and praxis is evident in inner-biblical and inner-canonical interpretation: Another dimension … [of] the constitutive inner history of canonical texts and cultures … [is] the way the remembered past is itself the product of interpretation. That is, the past is not viewed as something that is simply or objectively given, but rather as an exegetical construction achieved by cultural memory for its own purposes. As diverse studies now confirm, even the canonical texts are variously the product of acts of mnemohistory; and these achievements are further perpetuated through reinterpretation and ritualization … For canonical text cultures the ancient past may thus return as a ritual present, through … acts of reappropriation, and thereby shape the ongoing culture in fundamental ways. 24

23

Gruenwald, op. cit., 9. Michael Fishbane, ‘Canonical Text, Covenantal Communities, and the Patterns of Exegetical Culture: Reflections on the Past Century’, in A. D. 24

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As Gruenwald has noted, scriptural text calls for interpretative attention when it appears to have lost its significative function among a certain group of people. From this perspective, interpretative attention helps the text regain its meaning, relevance, and applicability. Such moments are indicative of historical or intellectual crisis … interpretation not only helps resolve such crises but enables the scriptural text to maintain its meaningfulness until the next cognitive “break”.’ 25

Midrashic memory is thus formed through sequences of interpretive transformation that retrieve text and return to its interpretation as a mode of meaning-making after a cultural crisis. This reconstructs the culture both exegetically and socially, that is, along the mimeticexegetical spiral of meaning-making and within the context of political and social reorganization that follows a cultural crisis. This is the hypoleptical process referred to by Aleida and Jan Assmann in their delineation of cultural memory. 26 Communicative and cultural memories are melded into a dense tapestry that constitutes the repository for cultural codes and strategies of action. Remembering through reinterpretation becomes a dialectical movement that binds the covenantal commitments of Israel with the urgent cultural concerns of each historical moment, even as it restores the presence of the canonically preserved past. In social-theoretical terms, the spiral through which the midrashic reformulations of text move serves to objectivate crises (such as the Akedah and the destruction of the First and Second Temples), so that they may be internalized by the culture. The retrospective prefiguration of crisis fills gaps in Scripture with meaning, endowing the crisis at hand with transcendent significance. ‘Discovered’ interpretations emerge with each instance of crisis and upheaval, when narraH. Mayes and R. B. Salters, eds., Covenant as Context: Essays in Honour of E. W. Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 141–42. 25 Gruenwald, ‘Midrash and The “Midrashic Condition”’, 14. 26 See Introduction, n. 14.

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tive must be refigured and looped back into the ongoing culturally regenerative act of interpretation. Precisely, this is the process by which the ‘script-based culture’ appropriates and transforms its own tradition and so forms its cultural memory by means of mimetic, transformative interpretations of cultural caesura. 27

2. A BRIEF REVIEW OF KEY THEORISTS AND THEORETICAL WORKS ON CULTURAL MEMORY The literature on cultural memory is vast; studies of the narrative of the Binding of Isaac, and the history of its interpretation and influence, are no less so. To attempt a comprehensive review of either field of study would require its own opus. However, this project, as noted previously, will center on the relationship between the two phenomena: how the Binding of Isaac and its rabbinic reformulations in Amoraic Midrash constitute a fundamental shaping force in traditional Jewish memory. No literature has been found on this topic. As such, the review that follows will focus on conceptualizations that theorize structures of traditional memory: that form of memory consistently inflected and influenced by the rituals, readings, and observances of cultural and religious tradition. However, in order to 27

Our understanding of mimesis diverges from Girard’s theory of sacrifice as an expression of ‘mimetic desire’. From the standpoint of cultural critique, Girard considers sacrifice to be a fundamental and formative injustice to which violence in contemporary society can be traced. Indeed, there is ‘hardly any form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrifice’. Girard’s work betrays historicist, evolutionist, and supercessionist biases. See, https://www.amazon.com/stream e.g., René Girard, ‘Generative Scapegoating’, in Robert G. Hamerton Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 74–105; Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and Sacrifice (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011). For scholarship on the biases and flaws in Girard’s work, see, e.g., Jonathan D. Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22–26; Ninian Smart, Review of Violence and the Sacred, Religious Studies Review 6, no. 3 (1980): 73–77.

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proceed to consideration of this form of memory, we must briefly explore the foundations of the relatively recent rise to prominence of the field of memory studies. This review will conclude with consideration of the debate between Y. H. Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein on the question of whether Jewish memory is defined primarily by response to crisis, ritual, and repetition or by historical consciousness. This question undergirds our exploration of the role of the Akedah in the construction of Jewish memory. a. Maurice Halbwachs Although the recent scholarly focus on memory may have peaked in the last years of the twentieth century, its emergence can be traced to the century’s first quarter, when Maurice Halbwachs analyzed memory as a social phenomenon. 28 Halbwachs’s delination of collective memory ran counter to the views of Freud and Bergson, for whom memory was an ineluctably individual and subjective faculty. In Halbwachs’s view, social frameworkscommunities of worship, family units, and living environmentsprovide the context through which individual memories are mediated and constructed. ‘The individual memory’, after all, ‘could not function without words and ideas, instruments the individual himself has not invented but appropriated from his milieu’. 29 Halbwachs depicted memory not as a past-oriented but as a future-oriented social functiona distinction crucial for our study. To be sure, Halbwachs recognized the existence of ‘resonances’ of the past, but he insisted that these impressions ‘are not to be confused at all with the preservation of memories’: that is, such impressions are generators of the web of social structures and narratives that maintain a culture’s coherence, even though they exist

See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also original: Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925; Bibliothèque de l’évolution de l’humanité, 1994). 29 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 51. 28

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apart from that web. 30 Here Halbwachs was taking his teacher Émile Durkheim’s theorization of social phenomena and applying it to the concept of collective memory. At times, however, Halbwachs hypostasized the term ‘collective memory’, so that it seemed to take on an even broader meaning, indicating the ‘spirit’ or ‘inner character’ of a race or nation. 31 Halbwachs defined collective memory not as a shared or collaborative internal faculty but as a thoroughly social and cultural phenomenon. The clear problem here, of course, as Funkenstein points out, is that memory is an ineluctably individual faculty.32 If only individuals can undergo the process of remembering, then what groups or institutions ‘do’ collective memory, and how do they ‘do’ it? Halbwachs situates memory within social structures, but he also never precisely defines what collective memory is. His hypostatization of collective memory suggests that it works only within social frameworks, and this presents a significant methodological and conceptual problem. If memory cannot work unless in relation to a social framework, then we cannot arrive at a full understanding of how the memories of individuals are formed, or even whether they are. If so, are they, in fact memories; admixtures of memory, thought, and misperception; or something else entirely? Such thinking also endows collective entities with a concreteness deemed lacking in the individual. Ultimately, Halbwachs backs away from such an assertion, but this leaves his theory with a theoretical and definitional inconsistency that undermines his entire project. Halbwachs’s contribution is crucial, however, because he recognizes and attempts to define the means by which a collective attains its identity through memory. The question remains whether Ibid., 40. See also Chris Keith, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 56–57; and Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 13–16. 31 Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 153. 32 See Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory 1, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1989): 6. 30

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society (the ‘collective’) is a ‘framework’ within which individual memories are contextualized, or whether society is in fact a ‘state of affairs which cannot be reduced to its individual components’, and thus whether it is capable of ‘remembering’ at all.33 b. Pierre Nora Les Lieux de Mémoire is a definitive work in cultural memory studies. Nora reveals the emergence of a memory discourse that is constructionist and highly self-conscious. He inherits and extends Halbwachs’s definition of cultural memory as intimately tied to a commemorable national identity and the locations ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’. The burgeoning of historically informed cultural identities has led to a ‘tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception’, which has been substituted for a ‘memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage’. 34 This has occurred, in Nora’s view, because of a break with the past, a cultural rupture that must in part be mended through the interpretive and preservative activities of historical continuity. Nora asserts that an ‘acceleration of history’ is responsible for giving rise to a fundamental opposition between history and memory. In other words, as Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam have pointed out, ‘collective memory’ may simply be among the most recent in a series of terms that ‘emerges … like a bright shining star, with some great promise of clearing up old controversies and shedding new light on an all too familiar field of knowledge. Soon enough’, however, ‘this new term takes over the whole territory.’ 35 Nora’s evocative definition seems to conform to this observation. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deforSee Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Cultural MemoryWhat Is It?’ History and Memory 8, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1996): 37–41. 34 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–8. 35 Gedi and Elam, ‘Cultural Memory – What Is It?’ 30. 33

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mations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. 36

And yet, as Kerwin Lee Klein points out, ‘by the end of the eighties, we were awash in new historicisms that took memory as a key word’. 37 Even as he proclaims the separation of their respective domains, Nora’s work represents and extends the intrusion of memory into the realm of historical discourse, primarily through commemoration of cultural rupture. This dichotomy emerges in part, on the one hand, from post-historicist and post-structuralist perspectives on truth and objectivity and, on the other, from commemorative memory formations that emerged in Europe, beginning after the French Revolution and peaking in commemorations of World War II. 38 Nora insists on a fundamental schism between history and memory, even while outlining their intimate connection, and in the view of Kerwin Lee Klein, this has resulted in an avalanche of scholarly conflations and confusions of the concepts and in the displacement of other words such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, and ‘language’ that were once closely paired with ‘history’. 39

36 Nora, ‘Between History and Memory’, 8.

Memory in Historical Discourse’, 128. As discussed elsewhere in this project, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall also occasioned a new generation of commemorative sites. See, e.g., James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Martin Evans and K. Lunn, eds., War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Barbara A. Biesecker, ‘Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 393–409. 39 Klein, op. cit., 128. 37 Klein, ‘On the Emergence of 38

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SECOND SLAYINGS c. Kerwin Lee Klein (Critique)

Klein, a cultural and intellectual historian, is not a frequent or prolific contributor to memory studies, but his trenchant critique of the field is relevant to this study. Deriding what he calls the ‘memory industry’, Klein observes that memory, originally ‘an anti-historical concept’, becomes ‘an identifying feature of the new historicisms’ at the close of the twentieth century. 40 He traces the emergence of the concept of cultural memory in the twentieth century, concurrent with the ‘crisis of historicism’ and the rise of the nation as the guarantor of collective identity, and he critiques the intellectually imprecise use of memory as a metahistorical category that threatens to subsume all the sub-genres of historical scholarship. Klein’s most crucial point is that the elevation of memory, especially in its relationship to history, is due to memory’s association with theological concepts and ‘vague connotations of spirituality and authenticity’. This, along with memory’s function in ‘the generation and inflection of affective bonds’, makes the concept a warm, subjective antidote to history’s cold and objective analysis of the past.41 In Klein’s view, contemporary scholarly conceptions of memory come full circle to archaic uses, ‘in the union of material objects and divine presence, a meaning that was displaced by the rise of the modern self and the secularization and privatization of memory’. 42 Despite his critique of the lack of epistemological precision in deployments of the concept of cultural memory, Klein accurately perceives its utility as a common fund of resources for meaning-making, which, through rabbinic interpretations of the Akedah, will be one of the focuses of this project. d. Jan Assmann The Egyptologist and memory theorist Jan Assmann has concisely defined cultural memory as ‘knowledge that directs behavior and experience in the interactive framework of a society and one that ob40 Ibid., 128, 129. 41 Ibid., 130.

42 Ibid., 132.

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tains through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation’. It is ‘exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent’. 43 The principal characteristics of such a memory are ‘organized or ceremonial communication’ and ‘distance from the everyday’. 44 Assmann thus holds that cultural memory is distinct from what he refers to as ‘communicative memory’, which ‘lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations’. 45 Assmann understands collective memory to be at bottom an intersedimentation of ‘relics, traces, [and] personal memories’, while cultural memory can be the ‘deliberate creation’ of elites for whom such memory is a means of social direction and control. 46 As a social construction, memory serves as a connective structure, providing diachronic identity to societies, individuals, and groups. Assmann’s constructivist view holds that memory is an ‘institution’ rather than a culture-structure through which canon and history are imbued with, or discovered to contain, meaning. 47 Assmann’s later work on Jewish memory misapprehends, and reaches troubling conclusions about, the relationship of Israelite religion to the world through the prism of text. Assmann has deployed 43

Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 110–11. It is the exteriorized, situation-transcendent aspect of this form of memory that links it to culture, as distinct from the social or collective memory shared by groups through personal, intergenerational interaction and family and community archives. 44 See Assmann and Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, 126, 128, 129. 45 Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, 111. 46 See Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’. 47 Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, 57. The concept of culture structures will be applied to the Akedah in chapter 5.

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the concept of ‘mnemohistory’ to explore ‘modes of remembering as a form of social and cultural practice’ in contemporary culture; he also has focused sustained attention on the transition from orality to textuality in the ancient Near East and the panoply of effects on cultural memory issuing from this cultural shift. He notes that mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. It surveys the story-lines of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of reading the past. Mnemohistory is not the opposite of history, but rather one of its branches or subdisciplines, such as intellectual history, the history of mentalities, or this history of ideas … Mnemohistory is reception theory applied to history. 48

However, Assmann holds that the mnemohistorian is uniquely tasked with ‘analyzing the mythical elements in tradition and discovering their hidden agenda’. 49 In Israelite religion, Assmann avers, the transition from cult to book establishes the existence of what he calls ‘the Mosaic distinction’: an impenetrable barrier between Israelite religion and its exclusive truth claims and all other cultures and religions. Assmann contends that this distinction, in which there is only one true religion and one true God, to which Israel has a singular claim, has led to millennia of historical violence and ‘world alienation’. There are two major weaknesses in Assmann’s theorization that undermine all his work on Jewish cultural memory. First, such a social constructionist assumption depicts memory as the creation of a cadre of cultural elites, whose deliberate admixture of mythical elements into the historical record is meant to assist and conceal the consolidation of political and social control. This view fails to consider whether elites not only attain but sustain their status in part through the mnemonic practices they develop, practice, and propagateand indeed, whether memory practices are cultural constructions that undergo constant and collaborative adaptation. Construc48 Assmann, Moses 49 Ibid., 62.

the Egyptian, 8–9.

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tionism rejects such dynamic theories of cultural memory, which portray cultural memory as a ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ cultural construction. 50 Second, Assmann disprivileges the mimetic aspect of remembering, which occurs, through repeated reference to canonical text, ritual acts, and social structures and practices, within and through a threefold process of articulation, interpretation, and rearticulation. Third, Assmann’s narrow definition of canon fails to appreciate canon as commentary, and rabbinic commentaryin the case under consideration, the Amoraic stratum of rabbinic midrashas evidence for a strategy of action for cultural renewal and reorientation, through the exegetical construction of reality. In Amoraic midrash, we see the formative stages, indeed the very process of the creation of what would become traditional Jewish cultural memory. Thus, Assmann so fundamentally misunderstands the construction and continuous reformulation of Jewish memory that he undermines his theorization of memory writ large. Assmann’s Mosaic distinction betrays a thorough and potentially poisonous misunderstanding of the relationship between textuality, memory, and history. 51 But it is precisely here that midrashic memory’s transformative and culturally reconstructive function is deployed. Midrashic memory, properly contextualized and understood within the larger framework of Jewish cultural memory, is action informing hermeneutics and hermeneutics as action: through enchained mimetic and transformative interpretations of Torah, in the service of cultural reconstruction, from Sinai to the present moment. Properly understood, rabbinic exegetical creativity is not a 50

A most helpful review of cultural memory theory is Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003). Misztal describes dynamic theories of cultural memory as ‘stress[ing] the presence of the past in the present through psychological, social, linguistic and political processes’ (p. 70). 51 See Richard Wolin, ‘Biblical Blame-Shift: Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism?’ Chronicle of Higher Education, April 15, 2013. Accessed March 26, 2016, at http://chronicle.com/article/Biblical-BlameShift/138457/.

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constructionist conspiracy, it is dialectical engagement with text as a tool for action; the action being the urgent task of Israelite selftransformation, undertaken by masters of canon and exemplars of exegetical creativity. 52 In blaming Judaism for the invention of holy war and the self-exclusionary and self-isolating invention of monotheism, Assmann veers dangerously close to the classic libel of blaming Jews for their own sufferings, including the annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of German National Socialism. 53 e. Aleida Assmann Aleida Assmann traces the arc of the use of the word ‘memory’ in academic discourse. She notes that as the word ‘ideology’ fell away in the 1960s and ‘70s, ‘memory’ took its place. 54 She holds that the ‘cultural memory of a society is based on institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, monuments, institutions of education and the arts as well as ceremonies and commemorative dates and practices.’ Yet she also notes that individual remembering ‘is a process of continuous reinscription and reconstruction in an ever-changing present’, and the dialectical relationship between individual and cultural modes of inscription carries cultural memory forward. 55 The concept of cultural memory as rooted in commemoration, shaped by rites and monuments, institutions and historical dates, is effective in describing the cultural memory of Western cultures, especially after the Enlightenment, but fails to accurately describe traditional Jewish culture, in which rite and text cause repeated confluence and interchange between individual and institutional, cultural memory, in a context defined for millennia by and within Diaspora. Aleida Assmann, however, notes that scholarship on memory has On the development of the rabbinic sage, see Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975); and Catherine Hezser, The Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). 53 Assmann, Price of Monotheism, 17. 54 Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations between History and Memory’, Social Research 75, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 53. 55 Ibid., 56, 53. 52

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passed through three phases: the phases of polarity, identity, and most recently, the interaction between history and memory. It is this last phase that is relevant to the midrashic memory form we hope to elucidate in this project. f. David Manier and William Hirst Manier and Hirst approach the issue of collective memory through the discipline of cognitive psychology. They propose a taxonomy of collective memory in which collective memories are recognized as ultimately being retained and retrieved by individuals, who are embedded in complex social networks. 56 As such, they suggest that ‘the distinctive structures of human individual memory may be reflected in the varieties of collective memory’. Because human memory comprises ‘multiple memory systems, each of which follows a distinctive set of principles’, they develop a systems approach to collective memory in which the distinct realms of memory are delineated.57 Direct memory tasks require the recall of previously studied material; indirect memory tasks do not require conscious remembering. Manier and Hirst point out that these two memory systems are disassociated from one another at both the psychological and neurological levels. Further distinctions include episodic memories, which are spatially and temporally specific (e.g., having toast for breakfast this morning), and semantic memories (you know that General Washington crossed the Delaware, but you don’t remember where or when you first learned this fact). Procedural memories refer to skills one possesses or tasks one knows how to execute; declarative memories are memories of both experiences one has had and facts one knows. These taxonomic distinctions apply to both individual and collective memories, which Manier and Hirst analyze using systems and epidemiological approaches. They point out that ‘a memory spreads across a community not by dint of societal memory practices and 56

See David Hirst and William Manier, ‘Towards a Psychology of Collective Memory’, Memory 16, no. 3 (2008): 183–200. 57 Manier and Hirst, ‘A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective Memories’, in Erll and Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies, 253–61.

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resources or by individual cognitive efforts, but through a complex interaction between the two, what might be viewed as a system consisting of brain in body in context’. 58 Arguing against the social scientists who would prefer to exclude psychology and its methodological individualism from the study of social processes, Manier and Hirst suggest that a psychologically attuned taxonomy of collective memory can help distinguish it from ‘collected’ or ‘shared’ memories, that is, memories that are recognized and retrievable, but ones that do not meaningfully shape collective identity. 59 g. Richard B. Miller Richard B. Miller shares Assmann’s view of memory as self-reflexive, but his taxonomy of cultural memory can best be characterized by its approach to memory, mentioned earlier, as ‘a dynamic process of remembering and forgetting that is constantly undergoing revision’. 60 Miller’s approach to memory is not socio-constructivist, as is Assmann’s more recent work on Jewish memory, but focuses on the dialectical relationship between different aspects of memoryremembering and forgetting, memory in ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ relationsand between the key divisions of Miller’s own principal taxonomical categories: procedural, propositional, and recollective memory (or memory how, memory that, and memory when). Miller, in reviewing four scholarly works centering on the concept of memory, provides a detailed taxonomy of memory that culls from ‘multiple, hybridizing discourses in religious studies’ to reveal complex moral and ethical dimensions of cultural memories as ‘those that individuals have as members of a group’. 61 Key to our considerations of Jewish cultural memory are Miller’s distinctions between archival and reconstructive memory: archival memory stores a representation of our experiences in a way that allows us to call them to mind on subsequent occasions. 58 Manier and Hirst, ‘Towards a 59 Ibid., 184.

Psychology of Collective Memory’, 188.

60 Miller, ‘Moral and Political Burdens of Memory’, 540. 61 Ibid. Emphasis Miller’s.

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By contrast, reconstructive memory is affected by events and factors that arise subsequent to that which is remembered. Consistent, then, with ‘dynamics of memory’ theory, Miller sees cultural memory as not only undergoing constant revision, but as existing in interpenetrating layers, each of which possess, to varying degrees, elements that are ‘smooth and linear’, and ‘jagged or interruptive’. The latter form is characterized by spikes of ‘trauma time’, rupture plunged into the plane of ‘linear time’, quotidian cultural existence. 62 In other words, ruptures rend the fabric of the culture’s internally regulated self-definition and must be interpreted in the light of earlier memories and the texts and rites that produced and preserve them. Miller emphasizes the complex and variegated nature of cultural identity, noting that ‘we reside in multiple communities with different clusters of memory, and … such communities provide multiple discourses for engaging in memory and critical reflection’.63 His principal focus is the issue of memory and moral agency: ‘Remembering is a function of being a certain kind of people, disposing ourselves toward certain ideals over time [and] transmitting our ideals to a younger generation’. In contrast to Assmann, Miller rejects a top-down imposition of the concept and contents of memory. Against Assmann’s depiction of the unitary sense-making of the rabbinic mnemo-historical record, Miller notes that the writing of history itself enters history’s flow, and he suggests that the ethics and politics of memory, complicated by the overlap between memory’s private and public spheres, is not monolithic: this overlap of spheres ‘both shapes and arrests’ memory, leading to its ‘dialectical relationship with social processes, civic formation, and material culture’. 64 After Miller, then, traditional Jewish memory may be characterized as an intersedimentation of memory and forgetting, of history and myth, privileging the narratization of collective identity and national self-seclusion in a web of ritual and recital. In the traditional

62 Ibid., 539. 63

64

Ibid., 547. Ibid., 561.

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sphere, this form of memory is seen as the best, indeed the only way of preserving and perpetuating traditional identity. Traditional memory provides a durable yet flexible foundation for covenantal commitment, as it forms a network of diachronic relations that can at once be interwoven and individually selected and rearticulated. The traditional mnemohistorical stance is coordinated with canon and its calendar. Assmann notes that this form of memory has a contrafactual component, in that it ‘keeps present to the mind a yesterday that conflicts with every today’. 65 Both the socio-constructivist theory of Assmann and the dynamic taxonomy of Miller provide useful insight into Jewish religious tradition. Assmann’s emphasis on the ontological and epistemological bases of text culture identifies the complex relationship between fluidity and fixity that characterizes Jewish religious tradition. As the tradition travels successive spirals along the axis of ‘vertical time’, it is called upon to continually coordinate its self-understanding with its covenantal origins, its halakic proscriptions, and its increasingly complex web of relationships with internal and external communities. Within tradition, the interpretations of the rabbinic elite serve to guide the community toward a diachronic situatedness with respect to the wider world while maintainingor seeking or appearing to maintainits synchronic stance toward Sinai, Scripture, and all that follows thereon. Miller’s taxonomy captures memory’s complexity and its indispensability for moral agency. h. Dietrich Harth Dietrich Harth critiques the methodology of Jan Assmann and the working group he assembled at the University of Heidelberg, which generated some of the most significant and enduring scholarship on cultural memory. According to Harth, ‘the authors of the Heidelberg cultural theory have expressly linked their concept with the problems of German historical memory and have participated in controversial debates regarding appropriate forms of commemora-

65 Assmann, Religion

and Cultural Memory, 29.

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tion of the Holocaust’. 66 Harth critiques Assmann’s assertion that the medium of writing preserves the creation of memory as the domain of a privileged few: those who are able to read and interpret. Harth asserts that the ‘genesis and validity of values and their translation into effective practical norms is instead based on the processes of negotiation and agreement that are part of common experience’. 67 Harth also delves into the linguistic and semantic distinctions that highlight the differences between Heidelbergian and EnglishAmerican conceptions of memory. ‘Kultur’ stands for the intellectual, artistic, and creative achievements of a community and is used to express the advanced development of humanity. In addition, ‘Gedächtnis’ and ‘memory’ are not only very different morphologically and etymologically, but also their standard semantics signal subtle differences which can only be hinted at here: ‘Memory’, as force, process, or repository, primarily refers to the reproducing and recalling of learned knowledge. ‘Gedächtnis’, however, stands for the capacity to store not just what is learned but also sensory impressions and ‘mental processes’, which can then at an opportune moment be allowed to ‘enter one’s consciousness’ again. 68

Through Harth’s analysis, then, we arrive at a conception of cultural memory as the capacity to store and retrieve intellectual, artistic, and creative achievements that advance the culture. This definition clearly excludes the interruptive crises that define Jewish cultural memory. Harth’s depiction of memory is nonetheless useful, in that he highlights the reproduction, recall, and (re)interpretation of achievements rather than events. This accords with this study’s analysis of Rabbinic 66

Dietrich Harth, ‘The Invention of Cultural Memory’, in Erll and Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies, 93. Harth’s observations align with the findings of researchers who documented the inability of Germans to confront and mourn their past. See, e.g., Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Robert Lifton (New York: Grove, 1975). 67 Harth, ‘Invention of Cultural Memory’, 94. 68 Ibid., 87.

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and later Jewish interpretations of the Akedah, especially in its consideration of the hermeneutic of mimetic transformation. i. Yerushalmi and Funkenstein Perhaps the two foremost scholars on Jewish memory, Yosef Haim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein, offered the most well-defined theorizations of Jewish memory. They failed, however, to accord midrash, and the Midrashic Condition, its seminal place in the formation of Jewish memory. In his landmark work Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yerushalmi sees modern historical consciousness and Jewish memory as separated by an enormous ontological gulf. He notes at the outset that, although the verb zakhar appears 169 times in the Bible, ‘historiography, an actual recording of historical events, is by no means the principal medium through which the collective memory of the Jewish people has been addressed or aroused’, and that ‘what is remembered is not always what is recorded’. To Yerushalmi, Jewish memory is preserved in liturgy, through ritual and recital; and for him, the central concern is ‘the relation of the Jews to their own past and the role of the historian within that relationship’. 69 Yerushalmi sees liturgical memory as removing Jews from history: for Jews, Yerushalmi asserts, history has no ontological significance. Modern historical consciousness would suggest to Yerushalmi that the epistemological foundations of Jewish historical consciousness could seem at odds with the liturgical and mythohistorical formations of Jewish cultural memory. To this, Funkenstein replies that Yerushalmi has fundamentally misapprehended the singular historical consciousness that Jews have developed and exercised by virtue of their own perception of, and constant reinterpretation of, their past. This consciousness is based, according to Funkenstein, on Jews’ assertion of their own uniqueness as a people, their consciousness of historical origins, and their responses to historical events as influenced by their singular ontologYosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 5, 6.

69

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ical and historical orientation. Funkenstein sees Jewish memory as principally expressed and preserved historiographically in halakhah. The interpretation of precedent and promulgation of law to Funkenstein represent the presence of a metahistorical consciousness. He finds the concept of ‘historical consciousness’ more useful than cultural memory not only because it emphasizes the effort to remind about the past in order to create collective identity and cultural cohesiveness, but also because it is grounded in the ongoing attempt to understand and give meaning to that past. Funkenstein’s phenomenology of Jewish historical consciousness reveals critical gaps in Yerushalmi’s claim that Jewish memory has been eclipsed by Jewish historiography. For example, Yerushalmi suggests that true historical awareness (aside from a brief and anomalous burst in the sixteenth century) emerges only in the nineteenth century. Funkenstein understands Yerushalmi’s theorization of cultural memory to be presentist in its essence. Although the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums forced a split between their own newly emergent critical historical consciousness and the scripturally based historical consciousness of Jewish collective/cultural memory, theirs did not, in the end, succeed in moving the foundation of that memory to entirely new ground. This is due to the fact that Jewish historical consciousness had existed all along, but in a form that Yerushalmi fails to recognize. Crucial to our critique of Yerushalmi’s claimand as close as either author comes to acknowledgement of the midrashic hermeneutic as fundamental to memoryis Funkenstein’s observation that ‘historical consciousness also includes the development of myths or historical fictions’. 70 This claim would suggest that Jewish historical consciousness has not erased and indeed cannot entirely eradicate the performative, mythohistorical template through which historical events are depicted, understood, stored in, and retrieved from Jewish cultural memory. The canon, the Siddur, and the calendar form too tight a circular current; the Jewish sense of time and history continue 70 Funkenstein, Memory

and Historical Consciousness, 18.

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in this spiral, even as it ascends the vertical axis of sacred time. However, Funkenstein’s epistemological categorization of myths and fictions elides the work of midrash, which combines what might in contemporary terms be called myth and historical fiction, in order to develop a hybrid with a profound sensitivity to the need for meaning-making as a means of transcending rupture. 71 As Funkenstein notes, halakhic discussions include ‘clear distinctions of place and time throughout: distinctions regarding customs according to period and location, exact knowledge of the place and time of the messengers and teachers of halakha, the estimated value of money mentioned in sources, the significance of institutions of the past’. 72 Perhaps most crucially, Funkenstein insists that historical consciousness finds its origins in biblical monotheism, and specifically in the concept of chosenness. The origins of Israel took place in history, indeed in recent history. In and of itself, the consciousness of being a relatively young nation must have been a burden rather than an asset, a blemish that made their own community inferior to others of an older pedigree … But the blemish was turned into a virtue. True, Israel is younger than most nations, and much smaller. Yet, this circumstance is compensated for by the fact that God has chosen this particular nation. He made it into a nation. Historical consciousness and the Israelite version of monotheism went, from the outset, hand in hand. 73

Funkenstein does recognize a role for midrash in the creation of Jewish memory, but he insists that it ‘provided a paradigm for completely ahistorical interpretations’. 74 That is, typological thinking, not history, is the domain of midrash. The problem with this argument 71

Psychoanalytic analyses of Jewish responses to rupture tend to ascribe such epistemology to traumata. See, e.g., Mortimer Ostrow, ‘The Jewish Response to Crisis’, Conservative Judaism 33, no. 4 (1980): 13. This topic will be considered in more detail in chapter 4. 72 Funkenstein, ‘Perceptions of Jewish History’, 17. 73 Ibid., 52. 74 Ibid., 16.

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is that it diminishes the impact of typological thought on the development of cultural memory, through midrash. No more influential example exists than the Akedah, through which mimetic substitutions and transformative interpretations come to constitute the foundation stone for the interpretation and commemoration of history. This brief review of theorizations of cultural memory, while far from comprehensive, nonetheless provides a basis for the development of an appreciation of the Akedah as a foundational example of the structure of Jewish memory.

3. THE AKEDAH AS CULTURAL CODE Given the theoretical perspective on collective memory developed by the scholars outlined above, we can begin to develop an appreciation of the Akedah narrative as both a foundational crisis and as a cultural code: a crisis, and a narratization of crisis, upon which the culture continuously (re)constructs itself. This process begins within the narrative, with Abraham himself: he must interpret God’s demand to bring Isaac as an olah, or offering, to Mount Moriah.75 Isaac must interpret the absence of a sacrificial animal, and also his father’s assurance that ‘God will provide the lamb for a burnt offering’ (Gen. 22:8). When the angel of God stays Abraham’s hand, Abraham interprets God’s will and sees the ram as a worthy substitute offering. The ambiguities and lacunae of the narrative are, for the sages, op75

Gersonides interpreted God’s test of Abraham not as one of loyalty, but of Abraham’s ability to properly interpret divine will: the command to bring Isaac upya’alehuis grammatically ambiguous. Abraham adopts the more extreme interpretation. See Gen. 22:1, Be’ur Ha-millot, s.v. Nissah. See also GR 56:8, in which God says to Abraham, ‘Did I tell the slaughter him? No! but, “Take him up.” Thou hast taken him up. Now take him down.’ One could thus conclude that God, through his praise of Abraham and reaffirmation of the covenant, regards Abraham’s extreme interpretation with compassion, and retrospectively affirms Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac; an act that was not commanded but that Abraham interpreted as a valid substitution. This will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

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portunities for culturally reconstitutive interpretations hiding, as it were, in plain sight. The Akedah thus becomes the stable, situationtranscendent archetype upon which the habitus of ritual sacrifice is formed; in turn, it is through the Amoraic substitutions for sacrifice that midrashic memory develops. As Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac becomes an offering even superior, in God’s eyes, to the offering of Isaac himself, animals become more acceptable sacrificial offerings than humans. This mimetic process of substitution and interpretive elaboration reaches its apogee when the rabbis, in prescribing internalized substitutes for sacrifice, bring devotional acts, within carefully delineated parameters, to replace sacrifice itself. Through these orientations around sacrifice, Jewish cultural memory is affixed to chosenness, martyrdom, and redemption against overwhelming odds. This is the midrashic aspect of cultural memory, in Irwin-Zarecka’s words, ‘not as a collection of individual memories or some magically constructed reservoir of ideas and images, but rather as a socially articulated and maintained “reality of the past”’. 76

4. MEMORY AND THE MIDRASHIC CONDITION Scholars have, variously and at different times, seen midrash as primarily a method of exegesis, a genre of literature, a collection of homilies and sermons, or even as a lachrymose response to cultural collapse.77 More recently, the imaginative, interpretive, performative, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 54. 77 On midrash as sermon and homily, see J. Heinemann, ‘The Nature of the Aggadah’, trans. Marc Bregman, in Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 41– 55; on a critique of this view, see Burton Visotzky, ‘The Misnomers “Petihah” and “Homiletic Midrash” as Descriptions for Leviticus Rabbah and Pesikta De-Rav Kahanah’, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2011), 19–31; on midrash as exegesis of Scripture, see James Kugel, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 9, ‘Nine Theses’, 247–70. On midrash as consolation after tragedy, see H. Slonimsky, ‘The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash’, Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 235. 76

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and radically creative aspects of midrash have been elevated as primary functions. 78 The focus in this project will be on aggadic works of midrash redacted in the Amoraic period. As noted below, among these works one finds detailed reformulations and interiorizations of sacrificial practice, and imaginative and collaborative retellings and interpretations of the Akedah narrative. For our purposes, then, we must adhere to a broad and therefore stable definition of midrash: Midrash is a type of literature, oral or written, which has as its starting point a fixed, canonical text, considered the revealed word of God by the midrashist and his audience, and in which this original verse is explicitly or clearly alluded to. 79

‘Jewish culture’ has, over the millennia of diverse manifestations in worship, literature, and law, long stressed the importance of collective memory. Midrash of the Amoraic period applies the imperative to the task of remembering the laws and procedures of ritual sacrifice. Rabbinic literature, and in particular midrash of the Amoraic period, presents reinterpretations of the Akedah, and of ritual sacrifice, that retrospectively prefigure the interiorization of sacrifice: the rabbis fill the lacunae in the narrative with dialogue between Abraham and God and between Isaac and God, suggesting a hidden reservoir of spiritual struggle and personal suffering that results in renewed covenantal commitment. The Amoraim establish the foundations of post-Temple cultural memory by proposing interiorization On the interests of literary theorists in midrash, see Stern, Midrash and Theory; on midrash and imagination, see Stern, ‘The Rabbinic Parable and the Narrative of Interpretation’, in Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination; on midrash and literary creativity, see Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Stephen D. Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 79 Gary Porton, ‘Midrash: Palestinian Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the Greco-Roman Period’, in Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, eds., Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.19.2 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 112. 78

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of the discontinued practices of the sacrificial cult, largely through the practices of study, prayer, and acts of charity, which are ‘revealed’ to be no mere dry legislation, but rather a series of methods to be employed both in communal ritual and in personal devotional and ethical acts. They are the result of the hermeneutic of retrospective prefiguration, in which the rabbis fill gaps in narrative with events prefiguring or presaging current circumstances. The Torah, containing all wisdom and foreseeing all eventualities, gives up its hidden meanings when it is propitious. Retrospective prefiguration is a key rabbinic hermeneutical device, and it plays a fundamental role in the continuous formation and adaptations of Jewish cultural memory. It is essential to Gruenwald’s Midrashic Condition, in which ‘[w]hat really matters … is not the mere act of understanding texts, but the creation of meaning that is attached to them’. 80 We shall extend Gruenwald’s conception to the development of midrashic memory, in which the Akedah plays a crucial dual role. First, the Akedah comes to serve as a noncontext-dependent aide-mémoire due to its vivid imagery and its compact and compelling narrative thrust. That is, it can be remembered, reinterpreted, and retransmitted because it is short, and because it is a vivid and memorable story. 81 Second, it serves as a mnemotechnique on how to remember and respond to a crisis, leaving interpretive space for utter devotion and sacred violence on the one hand, and rejection of these extreme practices and attitudes, on the other: for hewing to tradition through its very modification. By tracing the establishment of midrashic memory through interpretations and mimetic reenactments of the Akedah in Jewish text and tradition, we can appreciate the Akedah as a foundational element of the structure of traditional Jewish culture. 82 The Akedah becomes the 80 Gruenwald, ‘Midrash and the “Midrashic Condition”’,7.

James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 73. 82 See William H. Sewell Jr., ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation’, American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (July 1992): 1–29. Sewell distinguishes between social-theoretical and anthropological conceptions of structure in culture and further develops Anthony Giddens’s view 81

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paradigm of martyrdom in medieval Jewish chronicles of the Crusades; it is used to activate divine memory through the zikhronot (verses of remembrance) of Jewish New Year liturgy; it is invoked in memorialization of the Holocaust and as a cultural trope in the establishment and defense of the State of Israel, and it indeed becomes a cultural trope in Israeli national identity in fiction, drama, poetry, and song. The substitution of the ram for the beloved son serves as a metonym for rupture, renewal, and the creation of new meaning and thus can be seen as a principal motive force in Jewish cultural memory. Throughout the diverse manifestations of Jewish culture and society across the millennia, the memorialization and reapplication of the Akedah and of ritual sacrifice raises this corpus to a new level of ‘public language’, and the Akedah to the axial event of Jewish self-understanding. The text, repeatedly consulted, revised, and reenacted under new circumstances, forms the nucleus of midrashic memory. It is at once a ‘chosen glory’, that is, ‘an event … whose mental representations include a shared feeling of success and triumph among large group members’ and a ‘chosen trauma’, which ‘reflects a large group’s unconscious “choice” to add a mental representation [of loss and helpless victimization] to its own identity’. 83 As such, it can be asserted that Jewish cultural memory, from its preIsraelite roots and influences to its responses to contemporary cultural crisis, cannot be fully appreciated until the formative and ongoing influence of the Akedah is analyzed and appreciated.

of structure as both presupposing and enabling human agency. See Anne Kane, ‘Cultural Analysis in Historical Sociology: The Analytic and Concrete Forms of the Autonomy of Culture’, Sociological Theory 9, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 56. 83 Stein, ‘“Chosen Trauma”’, 238. See also Vamik Volkan, ‘Large-Group Identity, Large-Group Regression and Massive Violence’, The Freud Conference, 2005. Accessed at www.freudconference.com.au/online_papers/Large-Group_Identity.pdf, March 21, 2016. Volkan addresses the phenomenon of mythologization of the chosen trauma. The similarities and differences between mythologization and midrashic transformation will be discussed in detail in chapter 4.

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Sacrifice contributes to the construction of cultural memory, in that it works, through a series of substitutions, to focus and coordinate cultural energies in time and space, and to do so through ritualization and repetition. Substitutive interpretations, which form the basis of sacrifice, also serve to preserve the relevance, and indeed the presence, of the past. 84 Over time, sacrifice is ritualized and formalized in law, which comprises an ever-evolving series of formulations and substitutions; then, after the abrupt end of the sacrificial cult, the dialogical study of the laws becomes one suitable substitute for the sacrificial act itself. The move from interpretive performance to performative interpretation serves to preserve sacrifice as a ‘realm of memory’, in which ‘the recycling of knowledge through associations and new symbolic representations’ activates a culture’s ‘capacity for metamorphosis’. 85 In this way, the Midrashic Condition of meaning-making is brought to bear on the problem of how the rite-centered society moves forward as a text-centered society, once the transformative and substitutive rites are no longer culturally viable.

5. MIDRASH: THE SOCIAL AND EXEGETICAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY Gruenwald’s delineation of the Midrashic Condition illuminates the performative essence of the midrashic hermeneutic: ‘interpretation is one of the ways in which spiritual adjustments and changes of behavior are introduced into a Scripture-oriented culture’. 86 The ongoing reorientation of the culture occurs through oral/aural modes of transmission, which are themselves mimetic: the realignment of the culture with its Scripture occurs through interpretation, and the revalorization of a cultic practice occurs through a replace84

See Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder, eds., Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View (New York: Springer, 2011), 23. 85 Lawrence D. Kritzman, Foreword. Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press), xiii. 86 Gruenwald, “Midrash and the Midrashic Condition,” 14.

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ment of that practice with an interiorized mimetic iteration thereof. The act of performative learning is itself deeply mimetic; the dialogical and mimetic nature of rabbinic discourse was itself a kind of offering, through which Israel could attend to its covenantal commitments. The nature of the likeness of sacrifice to oral learning is introduced as a means of ritual substitution: oral learning, transmitted and refined mimetically, becomes a religious rite, endorsed by God and refined through the system of transformative mimetic exegesis that study endorses and perpetuates. ‘Mimeticized’ substitutions for sacrificeand aggadic Midrash discusses several, including prayer, fasting, repentance, charity, and study 87bring the efficacy of substitution into ‘the hermeneutical circle of narrative and time [that] never stops being reborn from the circle that the stages of mimesis form’. 88 Mimetic retrievals of just this sort provide the rabbis with new avenues into Scripture, and a means for retrieving the culture from crisis. These avenues, and the retrojective sense-making inherent in the Midrashic Condition, bring inner- and intertextual ingenuity to bear on the task of stimulating the divine memory: After the exile, the book that had been regarded as the inviolable source of the law and as the chronicle of the people’s beginnings took on a radically new dimension, becoming the blueprint for its future as well. This placed the burden of historical recapitulation and interpretation squarely on the shoulders of man. Of course only God could ever be expected to know and remember everything in its finest detail, but since the God of History was not imprisoned in history, it was sometimes left to man to remind Him, as it were, of His promise that each exile would be followed by a new exodus to freedom … The ‘reminding of God’ was the reassertion of human continuity: we remember; we’ve stored away the promises all the way back to Abraham 87

Michael Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice in Judaism’, in Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart, eds., Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 114–34. 88 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:76.

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This is the means by which mimesis becomes essential to the development of the rabbinic hermeneutic, in which ‘vicarious forms function “as” the real thing’. 90 As we shall see, the rabbis attribute to God the assertion that the study of sacrifices can facilitate the same expiatory effect as the sacrifices themselves. God makes this substitution at the prompting of rabbinic inquiry. By appointing themselves the overseers of Jewish continuity, the rabbis have become partners with God in the reformulation of covenantal commitment. Through interpretation, ‘the old sacrificial rites are reactualized through new acts of sacral efficacyperformed by laymen acting voluntarily in the world.’ The result is that ‘[i]n the new spiritual order of this postdestruction teaching, the sage is the new priest, and the scriptural exposition a sacral gift of the highest and most favorable sort.’91

6. THE AKEDAH AND MIDRASHIC MEMORY Although we cannot trace midrashic memory definitively to the incident or the text of the Binding of Isaac, we can trace its interpretation through periods of rupture and demonstrate its continuing significance to the orientation and forms of Jewish memory. The centrality of the Akedah in Amoraic midrash establishes the phenomenon of midrashic memory as basic to human and divine memory. It reaffirms that human interpretations of divine will draw the human

David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 23. Emphasis Roskies’s. 90 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 125. 91 Ibid., 130. 89

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and divine into a mutually influenced relationship characterized by mimesis and restraint. 92 Thus far, we have attempted to set the Akedah in a theoretical context that establishes its centrality to Jewish memory. We have done so by proposing a particular form of memory, midrashic memory, which makes creative and mimetic interpretation central to the development of Jewish memory, especially in its traditional variant. It must be admitted, however, that, like any theoretical construct, this one betrays aspects of a presentist approach that threatens to undermine its viability. The employment of psycho-historical and cultural-sociological concepts may in themselves be retrojections of current modes of thought into the ontological and epistemological orientations of previous interpreters. And yet, as readers of the Akedah narrative, we are suspended between our own perspective and the narrator’s: we are implied actors in the Akedah, and also collaborators in its interpretation. The horror we may feel at Abraham’s actions and the pathos invoked by Isaac’s innocence are the result of the meaning-making initiated through the narrative itself. The gaps in the narrative demand our attention. What are the ‘things’ (or ‘words’) after which God ‘tested’ or ‘tried’ Abraham (Gen. 22:1)? Were they connected to the test? And what exactly was the test: whether Abraham could follow through with God’s awesome and terrible command, or whether he could interpret the command with the blend of creativity and loyalty that would ensure the hermeneutical-spiritual viability of covenantal commitment going forward? Do we read the passage as the record of a historical event, a myth whose outlines are shared in the myths of other cultures, a rejection of child sacrifice, orthe reading emphasized hereas an example of interpretation as a means of recovery from and commemoration

92

See, e.g., Gen. 18:16–33. Abraham’s ability to, as it were, influence God is established not only in Abraham’s plea to spare the innocent of Sodom, but is foreshadowed in God’s asking (either himself or his divine retinue) whether he, God, in order to act on his intention, must conceal it from Abraham (Gen. 18:17).

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of crisis? And how do we identify the influence of the Akedah in the ongoing development of Jewish memory? How we formulate answers to these questions will determine how the passage is interpreted. In the chapters that follow, we shall examine midrashic interpretations of the Akedah and the mimetic echoes of those interpretations through different eras. We shall see, in each instance, that cultural rupture presents stark cultural and theological choices that appear to juxtapose the continuance of covenant with that of the culture itself; that only interpretation can resolve this unbearable tension; and that the very act of interpretation is the act that summons the divine, through the development of a memory form that ties the current rupture to the dialectical tensions of the Akedah. Through this dialectic, continuity and covenant are preserved, even as the ‘chosen trauma’ is resurfaced and reexperienced. The presence of the divine is discerned and celebrated anew, even in, especially in, cultural upheaval. The act of interpretation is both collaborative and solitary, creative and yet rule-bound. It is a lens through which the world is interpreted, and yet that lens is ground through perpetual contact with canon. Above all, interpretation is the taproot of memory and the constant, lonely task of the chosen.

CHAPTER TWO.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH REPETITION IN THE AKEDAH A major factor in the shaping of sacrifices is the intimation that a certain reality, or existence, is either under threat or undergoing disintegration … the sacrificial act enacts or repeats the act of breaking: it mimetically repeats a disastrous event. –Ithamar Gruenwald 1 [God] authorized man to quest for ‘sovereignty’; He also told man to surrender and be totally committed … Halakhah considered the steady oscillating of the man of faith between majesty and covenant not as a dialectical but rather as a complementary movement. –Joseph B. Soloveitchik 2

In chapter 1, the Akedah was proposed as a decisive influence on Jewish memory and the motive force behind what was termed ‘midrashic memory’, through which the act of interpretation endows a crisis with covenantal significance and transcendent meaning. The Akedah was put forth as a decisive event in the formation of this memory pattern because it plays a critical and ongoing role in the embedding 1 Gruenwald, Rituals

and Ritual Theory, 185. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 77, 79.

2

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of interpretation in collective acts of commemoration and representation, and thus in the formation of cultural identity and memory. In chapter 2, we shall focus on how the Akedah narrative places the act of interpretation at the heart of Israelite ritual praxis: through the composition and redaction of the narrative itself and through the words and actions of its characters. This is achieved through repetitions of words and phrases that occur in a chiastic pattern of symmetrically inverted order, which are in turn placed at the climax of the Abraham narrative, itself characterized by a chiastic structure (see Table 2). In order to show how interpretation is embedded in the Akedah, however, we must first explore the significance of sacrifice, both as a procedure and as a cultural institution. We must then narrow our focus to the doubling of words, phrases, and acts in the Akedah. These doublings represent internal and external clues to the direction and flow of the narrative. Internally, they pair moments of action and intention. Externally, they provide mnemonic markers to those who would have recited the text aloud, certainly its most common mode of transmission for the first millennia of its existence. 3 Internally, these doublings frame Abraham’s act of ‘double interpretation’: first, his interpretation of God’s initial command, which Abraham interprets as a command to sacrifice Isaac; then, his interpretation of the presence of the ram caught in the thicket as a substitute victim. Externally, these doublings, and the narrative within which they are set, model and instantiate a mimetic basis for cultural identity and cultural memory. We shall see that utter devotion and strict adherence give way, during the course of the narrative, to mutual interpretive autonomy between God and Abraham. We shall claim that this is not merely an act of exegetical ingenuity, but one of cultural construction: the text demonstrates how revision and reinterpretation validate changes in cultural direction and selfconception, as they both depict and instantiate changes in the human-divine relationship. Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE–400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. 3

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This analysis will point the way to midrashic memory’s basis in transformation through repetition and substitution, a fundamentally mimetic process. That is, transformationof the fates of Abraham and Isaac and of their relationships with Godoccurs through repetition and substitution, which are part of both the chiastic structure and the repetitive action of the text. Here, transformation through repetition and substitution is both a hermeneutical and a cultural strategy: a means of cultural renewal through performative reinterpretation, in which the end both mirrors its source and completes the source’s transformation. 4 Our attention turns to the ways in which interpretation is already embedded in the text’s very composition, along with the mimetic transformations of sacrificial substitution. This approach reveals that the Akedah models interpretation and transformation of memory as a means to cultural repair after crisis. As we shall see in the next chapter, the sages of the Amoraic era appropriate and elaborate this methodology as they promote the interiorization of sacrifice. It should be noted that the history of interpretation of the Akedah is not addressed here. Such histories have already been written. 5 The major emphasis of many of these studies is the search for both the plain sense of the text (peshat) and the deeper meanings, found through allusions, gaps, repetitions, and other surface irregularities (derash).

4

We shall approach the text again in chapter 5, after having considered it through the lenses of rabbinic exegesis and hermeneutical and social theory in chapters 3 and 4. 5 Among the most recent and most thorough is Albert van der Heide, ‘Now I Know’: Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017). The author delineates in detail the emergence of interpretive strategies in Babylonia and Palestine, and their influence on the voluminous and distinguished tradition of medieval exegesis.

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1. SACRIFICE AND MIMESIS Mimesis is a basic component of the rabbinic hermeneutic and thus of midrashic memory. 6 Usually reserved for consideration of artistic and aesthetic processes, and often confused or conflated with mere mimicry, mimesis deserves consideration as a basis of culture and of the formation of cultural memory. 7 The aspect of mimetic theory focused on in this chapter is the way imitation and representation relate to and transform what they replicate or signify. That is, the extent to which replication becomes transformation, and the extent to which what is represented is transformed by its representation, plays a central part in the development of cultural memory, through interpretations of texts, through the texts themselves, and from mimetic echoes within the texts themselves. We shall consult literary and social-theoretical applications of mimesis further on but begin with Michael Taussig’s broad definition: [Mimesis is] the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into, and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power. 8

6 See Fishbane, Exegetical

Imagination, 125. For the influence of biblical and ritual ontology on Israelite culture, see esp. Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory; Jon D. Levenson, Sinai & Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987); David Janzen, The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: A Study of Four Writings (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004); and Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple. For rabbinic appropriations and reformulations of biblical text, we will rely extensively on the work of Michael Fishbane, esp. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Exegetical Imagination (see n. 4, above); and Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), along with essays in selected volumes. 8 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii. Emphasis added. 7

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Language itself depends upon mimetic relays of duplication and depiction. ‘Language realizes a world, in the double sense of apprehending and producing it.’ 9 Stephen Halliwell considers the long history of mimesis in Western thought and the role it plays in literary and cultural construction. For Halliwell, mimesis is more than mere imitation: it is ‘a concept (or family of concepts) of representation … broadly construed as the use of an artistic medium (words, sounds, physical images) … so as to produce an object or form of behavior that is intentionally significant of a piece of supposed or possible reality’. This is indicative of ‘a natural human propensity toward imaginative enactment of hypothetical realities, with a concomitant pleasure in learning and understanding … from mimetic activity’. 10 Mimesis is also ‘not the act of an autonomous mind but the product of a practice’. 11 That is, mimesis is both the result of and the motive force behind the performative and interactive generation of representations, through which cultural memory is constructed and continuously refined. This is because it is through mimesis that ‘the world is “translated” into images, put at our disposal in the form of memory and ideas’. The translational and transformative properties of the mimetic process preserve events, experiences, and interpretations, making it possible to ‘perceive similarities and invent correspondences’ through performance, expressive naming, and the generation of similarities. 12 The search for ‘nonsensuous similarities’ is an insight owed to Walter Benjamin, who understood that similarities exist as reference points whose decoding reflects back upon the doubled object or idea, thus transforming both, and resulting in a ternary structure, in which ‘the significant and the signified are bound together in a conjuncture, which produces a nonarbitrary relation between language and the world’. 13 This ternary structure is built into rotating 9 Berger and Luckmann, Social

Construction of Reality, 153. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16, 179. 11 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 320. 12 Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, 267, 269. 13 Ibid., 270. 10

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axes of tension in the Akedah narrative itself and becomes the basis of the mimetic processes of recital and remembrance in rabbinic exegesis. The admittedly narrow example of ritual substitutions that we shall discuss in chapter 3 will demonstrate just one of the ways in which rabbinic discourse is mimetic in its appropriation and reorientation of biblical text, in part because its very composition and redaction is a mimetic process with its own particular ‘structure, repetition, and … artful use of language’. 14 The heart of transformative mimetic exegesis is the Ricoeurian threefold mimetic process, in which the temporal sequence of events is emplotted and made sense of via narrative, then looped back into the flow of experience via reading and interpretation. Ricoeur’s threefold mimetic theory will be defined, with help from William Schweiker, as the ‘prefiguration, configuration [and] refiguration of the world of action through [text]’.15 This process ‘brings together life and narrative, thereby refiguring experience and rendering productive narrative emplotment’. 16 It is, furthermore, ‘a dynamic activity [in which] texts are webs of signs activated in interpretation. They are performances in which we are the participants’. 17 The performative aspect of the rabbinic hermeneutic is illuminated particularly clearly through the mimetic theory of Gadamer, who sees mimesis in part as a reparative response to Fremdheit (strangeness or alienation), centered ‘around forms of social praxis through which Being comes to presentation’. 18 Gadamer emphasizes the performative and improvisatory aspects of mimesis, that is, there

Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 20–21. 15 William Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology, and Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 100. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Ibid., 133. 18 Ibid., 45. 14

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is an element of Spiel or what Susan Handelman calls ‘serious play’ 19 in aggadic discourse. This discourse is ‘serious’ because it confronts great spiritual, theological, and societal dislocation, and it is ‘play’ because its performative, dialogic, and improvisatory qualities often dominate its formalism. We shall rely on Schweiker’s scholarship on Gadamer and Ricoeur to guide us toward an understanding of how the rabbis, through transformative mimetic exegesis, move Jewish praxis from archaism to hermeticism and so practice what Peter Berger calls ‘world maintenance’. 20 This form of exegesis is an urgent refiguration of text, which Berger’s sociological lens helps us perceive more clearly. Gadamer’s mimetic theory, while applied primarily to the visual and performing arts, is nonetheless an essential building block for Ricoeur’s work: ‘Gadamer’s mimetic strategy explores the relation of Being and meaning in language. Being is self-presentative. Etched into the way things exist is a mimetic character: to bring to presentation’. 21 Gadamer’s view of mimesis contains not only a presentative and re-presentative but a performative element (Spiel) that ‘breaks the universe of mirrors’ 22 that had previously confined mimesis to its imitative qualities. Understanding as a means of overcoming Fremdheit is a mimetic act: one that the rabbis pursue through the act of reading text and subjecting it to interpretive, performative dialogue. Overcoming Fremdheit through active engagement with text is a way to fashion meaning out of the aporias of temporality, 23 and this is the literary locus at which Ricoeur’s threefold mimetic theory meets the rabbis’ use of ke’ilu, a transformative exegetical device. ‘Though all discourse and texts involve metaphor and narrative, they are best understood as mimetic: figurative presentations of the interSusan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 75. 20 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 59. 21 Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections, 79. 22 Ibid., 45. 23 See ibid., 120–23. 19

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section of human temporality and being that call for interpretation.’ 24 The rabbis’ mimetic exegetical transformations thus develop a ternary structure in which text, interpretation, and transformation work both on the text and on the society that (re)interprets. The recentering of praxis in study and prayer must itself be considered as a mimetic transformation of the communion, gift giving, and expiation previously achieved through sacrifice. The meaning-making possibilities found in text preserve sacrifice’s ‘ethos and drive’ in internalized form. 25 Schweiker consults Gadamer and Ricoeur to articulate a theory of mimesis as a ‘figurative practice through which something is enacted.’ This is, in a fundamental sense, a textualizing process: … cultural systems and human actions can be envisioned as a ‘text’, a dynamic matrix of signs activated through interpretation … By depicting religious and cultural traditions as frameworks of meaning fixed in specific works, actions, and customs, the ‘textual’ approach isolates strategies of understanding within a tradition and also explores the unending task of interpretation itself … [This] reminds us that religious traditions as social realities, whatever else they are, are frameworks of meaning about the human condition. 26

In this context, mimesis is not mere slavish imitation, but, after Gadamer, ‘the performance of a thing’s being’, the coming-to-being of its essence. The mimetic process is threefold, consisting first of a Spiel or play, which in itself is ‘a key to the character of being’. Second, through the presentation of Spiel, a metamorphic process is a ‘leap into the true’. 27 That is, it is through the transformation into figuration that the leap from play to praxis, from Spiel to understanding, is affected. Third, the threefold transformation into understanding is 24

Ibid., 93.

25 Halbertal, On

Sacrifice, 7.

26 Schweiker, op. cit., 791. 27 Ibid., 791, 794.

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complete when the Spiel unfolds before an audience, which completes the transformation through its participation. Hence, the Spiel initiates a dialectical process through which understanding is brought to figuration through performance. Understanding is the basic mimetic phenomenon. It is mimetic since, in understanding, a primal relationship between the human and its world comes to figurative presentation in consciousness. But this happens only through interpretation … There is a performative relation of the work and understanding through the mimetic act of interpretation. Understanding and its object are bound together. They are mimetic phenomena because they come to presentation in the figurative praxis of interpretation. 28

Applying Schweiker’s delineation of mimesis to the Akedah narrative, it becomes clear that our own reception of the text requires interpretationthat, indeed, our presence before the text is essential to its presentationnot only because it must be presented in order to fulfill its narrative function, but because its disclosure to us begins the three-phased mimetic process by which understanding is made manifest.29 And because ‘interpretation is a performative enactment of what is interpreted’, we, the audience, are wound into the process of bringing the narrative, the text, the story, and its multiple interpretations to presentation. We become, as it were, present to, and in, the narrative. 30 Understanding comes to figuration in stages. As we progress through the Akedah, we adjust our interpretation as information accumulates and the narrative takes its turns in action, reaction, and anticipation. In this sense, we mimetically adopt the progress and process of the characters in the narrative itself, which moves along 28 Ibid., 796–97. 29

Later in this chapter, we shall consider how the text itself is formed so as to aid the presenter and stimulate the desire for understanding in the audience, even as the narrative presents multiple facets and gaps into which interpretive energy must be poured. 30 Ibid., 797.

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triangulations of conflict and resolution. From God-Abraham-Isaac to Abraham-Isaac-the Angel, and then to Abraham-the Angel-the ram, the narrative causes the reader to repeatedly shift perspective.31 This pattern of triangulation is a mimetic echo of the (alreadyestablished) relationship between God, the one offering the sacrifice, and the one being offered: between, in metaphysical terms, Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. But at the moment of maximum tension, the triangulation of the narrative shifts from God-AbrahamIsaac to Abraham-Isaac-the Angel. The intercessory figure alerts us to divine restraint before the human capacity for radical action: it is a messenger, an emissary, not God, who stays Abraham’s hand. This restraint opens the space for human interpretation: when Abraham looks up, he sees not the angel that addresses him, but the ram that he alone interprets as the substitution for Isaac. 32 No divine directive indicates that the ram has been bestowed as a substitute; no order is given to Abraham to sacrifice it. The ram is simply realized as being present, and Abraham makes the key substitution, indicated by the word ‫תחת‬, taḥat. As Abraham interprets the presence of the ram as a divinely delivered substitution for Isaac, the angel interprets the divine will to Abraham, speaking as an angel of YHVH, the divine name associated with the attribute of mercy, but noting that Abraham fears Elohim, the name of God associated with the attribute of justice (Gen. 22:12). This is a moment of divine approval, in which the angel’s mediating presence doubly affirms 31

The triangulations in text, which have been connected here to Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and Berger’s threefold social construction of reality, also can be said to stimulate what Michael Fishbane calls ‘the triadic structure of the “life-setting” of innerbiblical legal exegesis’, ‘consisting of mental, textual, and social-historical modes’ (Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 270). 32 This is consistent with the interpretation of Isaac Abarbanel, who notes that, lacking a divine command, Abraham could not be certain to whom the ram belonged. Sacrificing a stolen animal renders the sacrifice unfit. Abarbanel goes to considerable lengths to justify Abraham’s substitution of the ram. See Omri Boehm, The Binding of Isaac: A Model of Religious Disobedience (New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), 10.

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Abraham’s actand restraintas effecting a unification of God’s two names. The near-sacrifice of Isaac is thus a universe-healing feat of interpretation, in that it recalibrates the cosmic balance between divine justice and divine mercy. 33 From this vantage point, we gain perspective on the multiple levels of interpretation present in and crucial to the Akedah narrative itself. The substitution of the ram is an act of interpretation on Abraham’s part, and it stimulates a response on the angel’s part. The ram’s mediating function thus makes it a potent metonym for the role of interpretive substitution in sacrifice and, moreover, as a metonym for Jewish memory itself, which accumulates and reformulates interpretations for new cultural circumstances, interpreting the presence and participation of the divine in the midst of crisis through the mediation of extremes. It also suggests that human acts of substitution are modeled after similar acts in the divine realm. Abraham’s radical substitution mimetically appropriates the character and power of the original divine decree; the sanctity of interpretation is thereby established. This, it can be argued, is why there is no further direct interaction between God and Abraham: none is needed. Abraham has demonstrated both the strengths and the limits of his interpretive capacity, along with his willingness to risk all. The suggestion here is that two radical interpretive substitutions are critical to the narrative: that of the ram for Isaac, and of the angelic voice for the voice of God. Divine vision and memory are thus responsive to human interpretation. It is as a result of Abraham’s bold substitution that God comes to ‘know’ (yadati) Abraham’s piety, and Abraham comes to understand the extent to which such interpretations stimulate the merciful attributes of divine mindfulness: the name Abraham bestows on the site, Adonai yireh, suggests that ‘God will see’, by means of such human interpretations and substitutions, and will ‘remember’ to act in accordance with this new vision (Gen. 22:17–19). 33

It would appear, in this reading, that Elohim commands the sacrificeor sets the parameters of the testand YHVH prevents it. See Boehm, Binding of Isaac, 67.

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However, transformation is also suggested in the realm of the divine: as noted previously, as Abraham’s test reaches its climax, it is an angel of YHVH that stays Abraham’s hand (Gen. 22:11), although it was Elohim that initiated the test (Gen. 22:1). This shift from the divine name most associated with the attribute of justice to that associated with the attribute of mercy is heralded, as we shall see, by a double call from the angel, at nearly the precise center of the narrative. Here, then, the climax of the narrative, the intensity of mimetic doubling, and the shift of divine attributes conjoin to announce nothing less than a human-divine mutual transformation.

2. SACRIFICE AND INTERPRETATION The significance of mimesis for our analysis of the Akedah and its centrality to Jewish cultural memory is in its stimulation of innovative repetition: cultural coherence depends in part on the emplotment and interpretation of narrative and its reinterpretation over time. It is through this process of continuous emplotment and reinterpretation that cultural memory is subjectivized and personalized; it is through the exegetical-social construction of reality that crisis is interpreted. This is achieved through the ‘retrospective projection’ of meaning into the texts upon which a text culture bases its identity. 34 Sacrifice, as numerous scholars have noted, is a mimetic procedure in which a substituted victim takes on the status of an original. 35 Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac is a mimetic act: it is, after Haliwell, an imaginative reenactment of a hypothetical reality, but it replaces and even improves upon, the original, 34

Berger’s theorization of the ‘plausibility structure’ includes a suggestion that maintenance of the basis for social cohesion depends upon a socially sanctioned act of reinterpretation: ‘the past is reinterpreted to conform to the present reality, with the tendency to retroject into the past various elements that were unavailable at the time’. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 149. 35 See Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart, eds., Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), especially Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’.

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‘commanded’ act. The Akedah is, on one level, a mimetic adaptation of the plausibility structure of sacrifice to the rituals of textual interpretation. Auerbach’s description of the narrative captures the extent to which all participantsthe reader, Abraham, Isaac, even Godare, in some sense, ‘bound’ into roles that demand interpretation. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements that come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background … Doctrine and the search for enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the narrative … we are to fit our own lives into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. 36

The interiorized reactualization of sacrifice after the destruction of the Temple suggests that it played too critical a role in Israelite culture to simply be forgotten, and yet theorizations of sacrifice have tended to ignore or overlook the substitutions and hermeneutical transformations through which the ontology of ritual remained present in Israelite culture. This oversight can be attributed in part to the attempt to articulate universal theories that purport to demonstrate a thematic and practical consistency in sacrifice, across cultures and eras, and in part to supercessionist biases that influence scholarly work on this subject. 37 Although assaying a critique of these theories is outside the focus of this paper, it must be noted that they tend to impose an artificial unity on an almost endlessly variegated series of rituals, and they reveal a less-than-complete comprehension

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 10, 15. 37 Klawans convincingly demonstrates that ‘scholarly treatment of sacrifice has been unduly influenced by various contemporary biasesreligious and culturalthat typically work to the detriment of a sympathetic understanding of the temple and its sacrificial service’ (Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 290). See also n. 16. 36

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of what purposes specific rituals served. 38 These theories also are characterized by a presentist orientation. For one, sacrifice as ‘a sign and a concrete act of submission to YHWH’ is seen as a defect either in the sacrificial culture or in the historical interpretation of that culture. 39 More important, a thought/action dichotomy, in which the sacrificial act is merely the expression of interpretations arrived at through conceptual elaboration, obscures the possibility that Israelite sacrifice is embodied thought: a ritualization of interpretation that is formative and expressive of a culturally foundational hermeneutic of substitution. This hermeneutic, over the almost uninterrupted millennium of the practice of ritual sacrifice in Israel, becomes basic to the Jewish religious imagination, and to the cultural memory it helps construct. The hermeneutic of substitution is engrained by means of ‘habit, repetition, and formality that allow participants to involve themselves without terribly much thought … [and] it is precisely the things that we do habitually, with little reflection, that are most deeply rooted in our memories. These are precisely the sorts of things that one needs to know in order to understand a culture.’ 40 Through the faculty of mimesis, substitution becomes ritually basic: ‘the victim stands in for both the sacrificer and the deity and draws them together’. 41 Sacrifice, then, is an act of ritualized interpretation, and substitution is the means by which the interpretation is made. It is a principal element of the Midrashic Condition.

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 49. 39 Janzen, Social Meanings of Sacrifice, 160; see also Bruns, Hermeneutics, 112. 40 Ibid., 34–35. 41 Brian K. Smith and Wendy Doniger, ‘Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification’, Numen 36, no. 2 (December 1989): 190. 38

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3. THE OFFERING OF THE FIRSTBORN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY The cult of ritual sacrifice has its roots in practices that were widespread in the ancient Near East. Among these was the practice of child sacrifice, and particularly sacrifice of the firstborn. In the context of Abraham’s place and time, the sacrifice of the oldest son was a known and not altogether anomalous practice. It seems that animal sacrifice, in which the animal served as a substituted victim whose worth as an offering matched or even exceeded that of the original was a relatively late innovation. 42 Thus, in order to better understand the ritual act described in Genesis 22, we must set the context for that act, first in terms of the extant practices in the ancient Near East. The practice of ritual sacrifice is in fact a constellation of practices, ‘a group of social facts among which it is possible to trace analogies based on some common criteria’. 43 In the Bible, the practice is attributed to the first generations of humanity and is depicted as a means of offering to and communion with the divine. Ritual offerings are thus central to Jewish ontology. In the Biblestrikingly, in contrast to evolutionist theories of sacrificethe first such offering does not replace human murder but is depicted as a proximate cause thereof (Gen. 4:1–16). Problematic even at its roots, sacrifice is woven into biblical scenes of human violence and conflict: Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4) occurs when Cain cannot bear God’s rejection of Cain’s offering. Whenever peace between competing or antagonistic parties is established against great odds, an altar is built and a minchah is offered up, a gift that returns the offeror’s bounty to its source. 44 Sacrifice takes on commemorative qualities, as it is embedded in cultural formations that circumvent violence. Each circumvention is achieved by means of a substitution that modulates and redistributes two different dialectical tensions: between scarce material resources and those who compete for them, 42 Boehm, Binding

of Isaac, 15. Simone Ghiaroni, ‘Sacrifice’, in George Ritzer, ed., Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 3981. 44 Halbertal, On Sacrifice, 9. 43

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and between the offeror and the divine recipient who might, for any or no discernible reason, reject the offering. Moshe Halbertal and others thus consider sacrifice primarily as a gift. 45 The giver is known, but it is impossible to say whether and on what terms the recipient will accept the gift. The terror of the possibility of rejection and all it implies puts the human being who brings the gift in too vulnerable a position to be borne, as the Cain narrative shows, but this remains true only so long as the giver stands alone. Cultic sacrifice, however, is a social construct that embeds the offering in a communal context. This diminishes the chance of rejection and protects each individual, and his resources, because, while not moored in a self-reflexive and individualistic perspective, sacrifice is nonetheless a primary act around which the culture and its economic and religious structures can cohere. As a cultural strategy, sacrifice has physical, socioeconomic, and socially salutary effects: the cultural conditions for sacrifice are set and borne communally and are linked to all previous sacrificial acts. The universal obligation blunts competition between factions and individuals, increases the harmonizing effects of communal giving, and diminishes individual vulnerability. 46 In ancient Israel, sacrifice supports the levitical cult and the Temple precincts, thus producing a tangible flow of goods that sustain central cultural structures, primarily through pilgrimage festivals during which great numbers of people throng to the same location and participate in the same endeavor. 47 Human-divine harmonization is mimetically reinforced: ‘Everything “here below” has

See also Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 46 See Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Domestication of Sacrifice’, in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 199–200. 47 See Victor Turner, ‘Pilgrimages as Social Processes’, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). 45

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its analogue “up above”. By participating in the institutional order men, ipso facto, participate in the divine cosmos.’ 48 Thus, even as each sacrifice supports the established structure of society, it commemorates the acts and structures that made the present possible. That sacrifice is a culturally accretive act of commemoration is clear in the Israelite sacrifices depicted in the book of Exodus. Exodus 12:3–14 details the imperative to offer an unblemished lamb in its first year and depicts the Paschal sacrifice as a zikaron, a memorial. The first verses of the Covenant Code feature detailed prescriptions for the conduct of ritual sacrifice, suggesting that its proper execution causes God’s name to be ‘remembered’ and the people to subsequently be blessed (Exod. 20:20). In Exodus 24:3–8, the covenant is formalized in a communal, call-and-response affirmation as Moses sprinkles the people with blood from a sacrificed bull. As Hendel notes, this sacrificial ceremony ‘enacts or commemorates the covenant with Yahweh’. 49 Moses does not interpret the event but solemnizes it by sealing it and affixing it in the collective consciousness or memory of the people: ‘This is the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you concerning all these things.’ As Hendel notes, ‘there is nothing mentioned here of mystical communion, propitiatory gifts, purification, or atonement’. 50 These concepts are introduced later, in the sacrificial laws detailed in the Book of Leviticus. Sacrifice is depicted, then, as continuing to accumulate meaning and efficacy around a commemorative core. Commemoration is not merely ceremonial; nor is it memorial in only the solemnizing sense: it is an active, embodied, and communal act that impresses, upon the senses and the flesh, a lasting bond between the people and its God. The relationship between exegesis (the basis of the rabbinic model of study) and commemoration is crucial to the understanding 48 Berger, Sacred

Canopy, 34. Ronald S. Hendel, ‘Sacrifice as a Cultural System: The Symbolism of Exodus 24,3’, Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 101, no. 3 (1989): 370. Emphasis added. 50 Ibid., 371–72. 49

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of the centrality of sacrifice. The philosopher and phenomenologist Edward Casey defines commemoration as ‘intensified remembering … through the interposed agency of a text … and in the setting of a social ritual’. 51 This definition posits a dynamic relationship between the commemorandum, the commemorated act or object, and the commemorabilia, the commemorative conveyors of meaning. The text, a blueprint for commemorative action, establishes links in the chain of memory by constructing associations that are renewable in the constantly unfolding present. ‘Through the appropriate commemorabilia I overcome the effects of anonymity and spatiotemporal distance and pay homage to people and events I have never known and will never know face-to-face … It is as if this past were presenting itself to me translucently in such mediaas if I were viewing the past in them, albeit darkly: as somehow set within their materiality.’ 52 The presencing of a commemorandum by means of carefully chosen commemorabilia is the process by which ritual praxis does its culturally accretive and substitutive work. 53 The links in the ever-lengthening chain of cultural memory are exegetically forged substitutions 54: of an unblemished animal for the imperfect offeror, and ultimately, in a daring exegetical inversion, of the voice of human instruction for the voice of divine revelation. 55 Over time, the Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 218. Emphasis Casey’s. 52 Ibid., 218–19. Emphasis Casey’s. The phrase ‘as if’ is central to the substitutive nature of sacrifice, and to the development of cultural memory. This will be discussed in detail in chapter 3. 53 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 224–27. 54 Although Lévi-Strauss perceived the substitutive basis of sacrifice, he saw sacrifice as ‘wanting in good sense’. See Lévi-Strauss, ibid., 228. For an excellent summary of scholarship on sacrifice, see Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 17–48. 55 See Michael Fishbane, ‘Inner Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 23. 51

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appropriations and transformations with which the sacrificial act is invested are preserved in the oral tradition and then transferred to text, where they continue to be transformed through interpretation.

4. SUBSTITUTION AND THE FIRSTBORN SON In legal and midrashic literature on sacrifice, an exchange of one offering for another is based upon equivalences drawn or sacred similarities interpreted between the original offering and the substituted one; through repetition and elaboration, substitutions are subjectivized and personalized in the performance of the sacrifice, in keeping with Levitical prescriptions. The vocabulary of substitution is employed by the rabbis in interpreting the Akedah and comes to retrospectively suffuse the sacrificial laws with the power of interpretation. The word temurah (‘exchange’ or ‘substitution’) is a key term in the Levitical laws concerning substitutions in sacrifice, which are further elaborated in Mishnah, Gemara, and Tosefta (and later, in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah). 56 ‘One may not exchange or substitute another animal for [one that has been brought as an offering], either good for bad, or bad for good; if one does substitute one animal for another, the thing vowed and its substitute (temurato) shall both be holy’ (Lev. 27:10). Tithes of the herd are subject to this same formulation: ‘[The shepherd] must not look out for good as against bad, or make substitution for [the sacrificial victim]. If he does make substitution for it, then it and its substitute (temurato) shall both be holy; it cannot be redeemed’ (Lev. 27:33). Through the simultaneous forbidding and permission of substitution, both the processes and the goods of sacrifice are taken in and transformed, and interpretation becomes essential to sacrifice.

Temurah is the name of tractates in Mishnah, Tosefta, and Babylonian Talmud; these deal in large part with matters of exchange and substitution in ritual offerings, and with the articulation and legislation of distinctions (i.e., communal vs. individual, permitted vs. forbidden substitutions) in such offerings. Maimonides offers a comprehensive interpretation of the laws of sacrifice in his Mishneh Torah (Sefer Korbanot, Hilchot Temurah).

56

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We can detect this pattern, as well, in the laws regarding the donation of the firstborn in Exodus 22. As Fishbane notes, an exegetical expansion is here transformed into a fixed biblical law. In Exodus 22:28–29, the donation of the firstborn to God is phrased as follows: ‘You shall give me your firstborn son, you shall do likewise for your ox and your sheep. Seven days he [or ‘it’] shall stay with his/its mother, [but] on the eighth, you shall give him/it to me.’ The language is ambiguous: does ‘he/it’ refer to the animal or the human son? Fishbane notes that commentators try to harmonize the ambiguities and grammatical inconsistencies through interpretation (‘it’ refers to animals and not to humans) or emendation (‘they will stay’ rather than ‘he will stay’), in order to avoid the possibility that both animals and humans are offered as sacrifices to God. And yet, Exodus 13:2 suggests otherwise: ‘Dedicate to me all the firstborn, whatever opens the womb of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.’ No distinction between humans and animals is drawn. If so, then are humans and animals dedicated or donated to God in the same manner? A comparison with other biblical laws regarding redemption of the human firstborn suggests the coexistence of two literary strata: one that distinguishes between methods of redemption for humans and animals, and one that does not. An instance of the latter can be found in Numbers 18:15: ‘The first issue of the womb of every being, man or beast, which they [the priests] will offer to God [‫ ]יקריבו‬will be yours; however, you shall surely redeem the human male.’ The categorical statement of Numbers 18:15a can, as Fishbane notes, be considered ‘a sign of the most vestigial cultic custom regarding [the] human first-born in ancient Israel’, until later formulations (‘you shall surely redeem’, Num. 18:15b) were put forth as an ‘inner-cultic rebuke’ of sacrifice of the firstborn human child, for both economic and moral-theological reasons. 57 It is beyond doubt that child sacri174F

See Fishbane’s trenchant analysis of these passages, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 180–87.

57

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83

fice was an accepted practice in portions of the ancient Near East. 58 Fishbane’s analysis identifies textual evidence for a cultural turn, in which the sacrificial practices common in neighboring cultures were rejected. Prophetic literature also contains evidence of this turn. In Jeremiah, God sees child sacrifice as an abomination associated with idolatry: ‘They have built shrines to Baal, to put their children to the fire as burnt offerings to Baalwhich I never commanded, never decreed, and which never came to my mind’ (Jer. 19:5). In Ezekiel, however, the possibility surfaces that God endorses child sacrifice in order to deliver deserved desolation to Israel: ‘Moreover, I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live. When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts, that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am God’ (Ezek. 20:25–26). In other passages in which Ezekiel condemns child sacrifice, it is clearly deemed idol worship. Here, however, it would seem that God has deliberately established child sacrifice in Israel, either by ‘perverting the Israelites’ hermeneutics’ and letting them arrive at this practice on their own, or by giving them the laws as retaliation for idolatry. Either way, the laws ‘are not idolatrous themselves, only lethal’. 59 The prophetic careers of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, before and during the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian exile, overlap each other, revealing a transition in the elaboration of sacrifice and a seam in the fabric of Jewish cultural memory. The conflicting interpretations of the divine sanction of child sacrifice suggest conflicting interpretations of mythohistorical narrative; this in turn suggests a hermeneutical transformation of levitical law. We see here the inner workings of a reciprocal and dynamic system of law and memory, in which transformations proceed through constant adjustments of what is brought into the present from the See, e.g., Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 34–35. 59 Levenson, ibid., 7–8. 58

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past. A hermeneutical bridge, maintained between formative mythohistorical events and their commemoration in legislated communal acts, traverses the gap created by changing cultural circumstances and conditions. The power of this hermeneutical transformation is to be found in the act of sacrificial substitution. The korban, the sacrificial object, is not the one slaughtered, but the one brought forward, and yet the transformation brought about by the acts of slaughtering and consumption makes the slaughtered animal equivalent, even superior, to the one on whose behalf the sacrifice is made.60 Thus, the ram is offered up not as a replacement for Isaac, nor even his equal, but in a sense as Isaac himself, transformed. This may in part explain why the liturgical prayer mentions the ‘ashes of Isaac’, and why the rabbis posit that the ram was the bellwether of Abraham’s flock, and also named Isaac.61 The substitution takes on the identity of the original victim, in the process becoming a superior offering. It can be argued that the substitution of the ram for Isaac is part of a larger pattern of repetition and substitution: a way of radically redefining a crisis in the midst of that crisis by creating a ritual connection between current and previous circumstances. This is a transformative operation that is central to the sacrificial act, and thus to rabbinic hermeneutics, and therefore to Jewish identity and memory. In analyzing the Akedah according to the criteria outlined above, we must keep in mind the substitutions and revisions latent in the text, and explicit in the actions of Abraham and the responses of God, because together they form the tightly woven but radically pliable pattern of repetition and substitution that becomes the very fabric of Jewish memory. Analyzing the repetitions and substitutions in the Akedah provides a lens through which to understand the ontology and epistemology of sacrifice and to more fully appreciate how these 60 See Halbertal, On

Sacrifice, 117, n. 3. See also Lev. 1:3–5. See Spiegel, Last Trial, 65ff. Spiegel posits that ‘[in] the biblical account of the Akedah the legend of the name of the place was amalgamated with the legend on the institution of substitutes in sacrifice’ (p. 69). This topic will be addressed in more detail in chapter 4.

61

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procedures inform not only sacrifice but also textual interpretation. Here, sacrifice and textuality are telescoped into 19 verses. For purposes of this analysis, we forgo text criticism in favor of an operation that is consistent with the hermeneutical principles outlined above. First, we are outlining a strategy of interpretation that is distinct from that of simply reading the text: that is, we are not approaching the Akedah as if for the first time. Second, we are proposing a simple and unified approach to the text, in which sacrificial proscriptions and practices are retrojected into and embedded in the text, through those same mimetic practices that define sacrifice itself. And third, the reason these retrojections ‘work’ is that they make the text a more excellent literary work: a more dynamic, dramatic, and more culturally immediate narrative that maintains its literary and cultural coherence and relevance over time.

5. READING THE AKEDAH: METHODOLOGY Having explored the mimetic underpinnings of sacrifice, we now turn to the way mimetic substitutions and transformations undergird the story itself. The Binding of Isaac clearly has ancient origins. Traditionally, source- and text-critical analysis attributes the kernel of the story, Genesis 22:1–13, 19, to the E source, in approximately the eighth century BCE in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. 62 Text criticism on the passage generally shares consensus that the text was subject to repeated revision and redaction and that, in fact, the text ‘was, so to speak, in motion up to the end’. 63 Critics have failed to reach consensus on the age of the story itself, the number and content of individual revisions, or the shape of the story in its earliest form. Some textual critics have focused on the angelic interventions in 22:12

62 See Boehm, Binding

of Isaac, 21; Pauline A. Viviano, ‘Source Criticism’, in Steven R. Haynes and Stephen L. McKenzie, eds., To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999). 63 Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. H. Marks (London: SCM, 1961), 238.

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and 22:15–18 as possible later interpolations into the story. 64 In the original version, say such critics, Abraham averts the slaughter of his son when he sees the ram caught in the thicket. 65 Another vein of criticism holds that the story concludes with the sacrifice of Isaac, who is then spirited off to heaven, resurrected and healed, and returned to earth. 66 Yet other gaps, inconsistencies, and changes in style in the narrative suggest more than one revision, and also suggest that verses 11–14, the first angelic intervention, were edited, perhaps by the author of the second intervention. This is suggested in part because the more florid language of the second angelic speech interrupts the verbal economy of the text as a whole. However, it is possible that the first angelic intervention is a later interpolation as well; that both angelic speeches are retrojected interpretations and theologizations of the actions in earlier versions of the story; that the author-editor(s) who inserted the second angelic intervention left their mark on the rest of the passage; and/or that the version that is preserved in canon is a carefully constructed hybrid of versions and interpretations of an ancient narrative. For this reason, great care must be taken, when reading the Akedah, to be mindful not only of its place in and influence upon Israelite and Jewish ritual and religious practice, but also of how the history of the narrative’s interpretation is already, to a certain extent, embedded in the story itself. Furthermore, methodological principles for analyzing the story must be clearly delineated. For example, readings of the narrative that psychologize Abraham, or Isaac, or even God, are inherently problematic, as they often fail to contextualize the narrative either in terms of its larger biblical context, or in terms of the characters as mythologized expansions or borrowings from earlier narratives in the Bible and elsewhere. Furthermore, the narrative’s fame and canonical status must not be retrojected into the story itself. That is, we must keep in mind that what likely was a long 64

See, e.g., Moberley, ‘Earliest Commentary on the Akedah’, 307–8; Boehm, Binding of Isaac, 21–30. 65 See Boehm, Binding of Isaac, 29. 66 See Spiegel, Last Trial, 6–8, 39–44.

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history of revision of the Akedah narrative is intimately connected to the long redaction history of the Bible as a whole. We must remember that canonical status was attained because or in spite of multiple factors, including competing sectarian agendas, cultural developments and pressures, and technological advancement in the production of scrolls, allowing eventually for the entire Pentateuch to be contained in a single scroll. The process of canonization was a centuries-long, densely interwoven sequencing of selection, revision, contestation, and redaction. It is likely that this process repeatedly touched narratives upon which fundamental features of Israelite mythology and history rested. 67 Our interpretation of the Akedah will therefore proceed from three methodological principles outlined by Omri Boehm in his work on the Binding of Isaac. First, the reader and interpreter are not synonymous: ‘Whereas the first is an individual subject who may correctly be considered as the authority of the meaning of the text for him/her, the interpreter should be acting under clear methodological restrictions.’ 68 The interpretation here will be narrowly focused on instances of repetition, transformation, and substitution within the narrative as critical shaping forces of the narrative itself, and, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, of interpretations thereof. Second, Boehm’s adoption of Ockham’s Razor will be applied to this interpretive approach: ‘When explaining a given phenomenon, one must appeal to the smallest number of factors required. That is, any phenomenon must be explained by the least number of explanatory elements.’ 69 Hence, although text-immanent and historical-critical approaches are of interest, they will be deemphasized, as they lack the simplicity through which a clear approach to and understanding of

67

See Jeffrey Stackert, ‘Before and After Scripture: Narrative Chronology in the Revision of Torah Texts’, Journal of Ancient Judaism 4, no. 2 (2013): 168–85. 68 Boehm, Binding of Isaac, 5. Emphasis Boehm’s. 69 Ibid., 8.

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the text can be developed. 70 Finally, we shall adopt the Charity Principle as adapted by Ronald Dworkin for application to literary works: in Boehm’s paraphrasing, ‘When a text has more than one interpretation, the one that should be adopted is the one that yields the most excellent literary work.’ 71 This latter principle must be further refined, however, because for most of its earlier history, the Binding of Isaac, and indeed most of the Bible, was a spoken work: read or recited aloud, in public, transmitted through repetition, revised through performance, and redacted more than once. It would be plausible to suggest, then, that the ‘most excellent literary work’ would be the work that would be (a) most memorable, (b) most memorizable, and (c) most culturally salutary for the circumstance in which it was spoken or performed. The first criterion refers to the narrative’s dramatic flow and impact, the second to its transmissibility, and the third to the cultural drivers influencing interpolations and revisions. In this context, exactly how and when the Akedah achieved its final form is not as important as how the narrative embeds and models interpretation. That is, the Akedah both implicitly advocates and explicitly deploys interpretation as a means of overcoming crisis. As we shall see, this becomes a fundamental force in the shaping of Jewish identity and memory. Our analysis of the Akedah, then, will focus on one principal element as the driver of its impact: the doubling of key words, phrases, and themes. These doubled phrases and motifs conform to the three criteria outlined above: they provide a methodological framework for interpreting the text; they provide a simple and unified explanatory basis for the development of the text in its final form; and they are instrumental in making the Akedah an excellent literary work. These doublings intensify the impact of the singularities in the Akedah, especially the non-commanded substitution of the ram for Isaac. In order to appreciate that 70

Christo Lombaard, “Issues in or with Genesis 22: An Overview of Exegetical Issues Related to One of the Most Problematic Biblical Chapters,” Verbum et Ecclesia 34, no. 2 (2013): 3 of 5. 71 Bohem, op. cit., 10.

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substitution (v. 13), we must move forward in historical time to consider the institutionalization of substitution as embedding substitution in the ritual/moral axis of the culture, and interpretation in the web of interpretive/mnemonic elaborations of midrashic memory. 72 Ritual sacrifice, then, is completed by acts of interpretive substitution. We can trace this through the language of substitution as it appears in the written and oral canon. The foundational substitution of Israelite sacrifice is that of the ram for Isaac in the Akedah. What commands our attention here is the language that describes Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, vaya’alehu le‘olah taḥat beno (Gen. 22:13): ‘Abraham offered it up in place of [literally, “beneath”] his son.’ 73 Here the act and the language of substitution become essential to the offering; just as, in ritual sacrifice, circumstances may demand changes in the parameters of what may be offered, so do interpretations and elaborations enlarge the substitutive vocabulary of sacrifice. Abraham’s substitution, as we shall see, is the sacred precedent, resulting not from a divine decree but a human interpretation of what is an acceptable offering in that instance. Here, the exegetical construction of reality, through substitution, stimulates the social construction of reality, through the ongoing repetition and elaboration of that foundational sacrificial act.

6. RECITATION, REVISION, AND REPETITION: THE DOUBLING OF WORD AND PHRASE IN THE AKEDAH The story takes place in Abraham’s old age, and begins with the first of numerous repeated phrases, ‫א ַחר ַה ְדּ ָב ִרים ָה ֵא ֶלּה‬, ַ literally ‘after these things’, often translated as ‘some time afterward’. 74 This sets the Akedah off from the previous narrative, in which God rescues 19F

On sacrifice as an interpretive act, see Janzen, The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in Four Writings, 73; Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 260–61. On mimesis, see chapter 4. 73 The use of this word led the rabbis to speculate that Abraham, out of absolute devotion to God, sacrificed both the ram and Isaac. See GR 56:9. 74 On the range of uses of this formulation, see Lombaard, ‘Issues in or with Genesis 22’, article no. 814. 72

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Abraham and Sarah from the clutches of Abimelech (Gen. 20, 21:22– 34). The phrase ‘some time afterward’ also indicates a shift in narrative focus and positions the subsequent text as the next significant occurrence to take place after the events in the immediately preceding verses. Interestingly, the Akedah’s end is marked with a repetition of this phrase (22:20). The second use of the phrase introduces the lineage of Abraham’s brother Nahor; this lineage includes Rebekah, who will become the wife of Isaac, hence reinforcing ‘some time afterward’ as presaging a significant development. This phrase would also have served as a mnemonic device in recitation of the narratives: ‘Some time afterward’, then, suggests a connection, both causal and thematic, between Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac and the emergence of the lineage that will produce Rebekah, thereby realizing God’s promise that Abraham’s line would be continued through his ‘favored’ son (Gen. 22:2). Between these two uses of a bracketing phrase, a series of exact or near-exact repetitions of words, phrases, and themes occur. These repetitions overlap with usages in other narratives, with the effect of drawing the action into a series of overlapping thematic and temporal links. A computer-aided semantic analysis of the Abraham cycle reveals that the Akedah has the highest ‘connectivity value’ of any narrative in the cycle. That is, this pericope ‘repeats verbs and subjects used elsewhere in the text to a higher degree than any other episodes used elsewhere’ in the cycle’s ‘peak region’. 75 These doublings are summarized in Table 1: Table 1 Doublings in the Akedah Word/Phrase (and Variations) Aharei ha-devarim haeleh Hineni (Hineh) 75

Verses

Translation

22:1, 22:20

After these things/some time afterward Here I am

22:1, 22:7, 22:11

Robert D. Bergen, ‘Genesis 22 in the Abraham Cycle: A ComputerAssisted Textual Interpretation’, Criswell Theological Review 4, no. 2 (1990): 317.

2. TRANSFORMATION THROUGH REPETITION

Et bincha, et yaḥidcha

(22:13) 22:2, 22:12, 22:16

Vayishkam Avraham ba-boker Va-yisa Avraham eteinav Va-yelchu shneihem yachdav Avi … b’ni … b’ni

22:3; see 20:8 and 21:14 22:4, 13

Elohim yir’eh//YHVH yireh/ YHVH yera’eh

22:8, 22:14 (2)

Abraham! Abraham! Al-tishlach … al-ta-as …

22:11 22:12

[Angel calls Abraham a second time] Ki varech-avarekha v’harbah-arbeh

22:15

Va-yakumu va-yelkhu yaḥdav

22:19: See Gen. 22:3, 6, 8

22:6, 8 22:7, 8

22:17

91

(here/behold) Your son, your favored one Abraham arose early in the morning And Abraham lifted his eyes And the two of them walked on together ‘My father …’ ‘my son’ (2) God will see (to) … God will see/there is vision 76 Lay not your hand … neither do anything (to him)

In blessing I will bless you, and in increase I will increase [your descendants] And they rose up and went together

Reviewing the table above reveals the chiastic overall structure of the Akedah, within which clustered repetitions are contained. Repeated words and phrases generally move from the exterior of the narrative to the interior (see Table 2). 77 And there, precisely in the center of

77

The rabbis noted this pattern in the whole of Torah: ‘Rabbi Simlai taught: the Torah begins with deeds of lovingkindness and ends with deeds of lovingkindness. It begins with deeds of lovingkindness, as it is written: “And Adonai, God, made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and

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the narrative as a whole, we have the angel’s double call, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’: the closest doubling of the entire narrative. It is interesting to note that it is also at this point that the narrative transitions from employing Elohim (22:1, 3, 8, 9, 12) to YHVH (22:10, 14, 15, 16) as God’s name. Furthermore, the double call to Abraham constitutes the 179th and 180th words of a narrative that totals 323 words: it is, literally and figuratively, the heart of the narrative. The symmetry in the patterning of these uses and the fact that they overlap in verses 10 and 12 indicate both evidence of a redactional interpolation and a deliberate emphasis on Abraham’s engagement of the divine attributes of both judgment and mercy. 78 We shall return to this point, and its relationship to the centrality of the act of interpretation, further on in this analysis. It is clear that repetitions internal to the Akedah narrative in at least two instances echo usages in previous narratives in the life of Abraham. For example, lekh-lekha, which occurs when God commands Abraham to ‘go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house’ (12:1), is echoed in the command for Abraham to ‘take your son, your favored one, whom you love, and go forth to the land of Moriah …’ (22:2). Abraham arising early in the morning (22:3) echoes Abimelech’s troubled awakening (20:8) and Abraham’s early rising to send off Hagar and Ishmael (21:14). In the case of 12:1 and 22:2, the command to go forth comes with a three-phased command of increasing specificity (land/birthplace/father’s house; son/favored one/whom you love) and requires dependence on God’s directions (‘the land/one of the heights that I shall show you’). In the latter case, arising early indicates either eagerness to complete a task or a night of troubled sleep, or perhaps both. The fact that phrases clothed them” (Gen. 3:21). It ends with deeds of lovingkindness, as it is written: “And God buried Moses in the valley in the land of Moab” [Deut. 34:6].’ b. Sotah 14a. The Akedah is not unique in this respect; however, it is emblematic of, and very likely an influence upon, the establishment of this pattern in biblical text. 78 The Amoraic sages suggest that the sound of the shofar, a blast of the ram’s horn, is a mnemonic device that moves God from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy. See, e.g., Leviticus Rabbah 29:3.

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are repeated indicates similarity of mood and circumstance, but, again, it also indicates the likely existence of a storehouse of phrases that suggest tone, mood, pace, and narrative direction to an audience, while, as noted previously, providing mnemonic markers for oral presenters. This is part and parcel of the larger chiastic structure of the entire Abraham narrative, as outlined below in Table 2. Table 2 Chiastic Structure of Abraham Narrative

7. ANALYSIS AND EXPLICATION OF THE TEXT ‫ ַו ֡יּ ֹאמֶ ר קַ ח־ ָ֠נא אֶ ת־ ִבּנְ ֨� אֶ ת־יְ ִ ֽח ְיד�֤ אֲשֶׁ ר־אָ ֙ ַה ְב ָ֙תּ אֶ ת־יִ צְ חָ֔ ק וְ לֶ�־‬Gen. 22:2 ‫ֲשׁר אֹ ַ ֥מר אֵ ֶ ֽלי�׃‬ ֖ ֶ ‫ל־א ֶרץ הַ מֹּ ִריָּ ֑ה וְ הַ ﬠֲלֵ ֤הוּ שָׁ ם֙ לְ עֹ ָ֔לה ֚ ַﬠל אַ ַח֣ד ֶ ֽההָ ִ ֔רים א‬ ֖ ֶ ֶ‫לְ ֔� א‬ Already, the density of rhythmic and verbal repetition is notable. Furthermore, as we shall see, the phrase ‘your son, your only son, whom you love’ will itself be repeated twice more in the text. What might this indicate? First, as previously noted, the covenantal aspect of the relationship between God and Abraham is invoked by the repetition of lekhlekha. When God commands, Abraham goes. Second, the urgency in God’s command that Abraham must leave one place is followed, in this instance, by the specificity of whom Abraham is to take with

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him to another, as-yet-unrevealed place. Third, it is probable that these repetitions were pregnant with meaning for the audience, which in Amoraic times was likely already very familiar with these narratives. 79 Prior to this, however, God issues not a command, but a request: Kakh-na et binḥa is a plea for Abraham to take his son with him on this journey. The word yaḥid’kha, ‘your favored one’, would likely have been familiar to hearers of early versions of the text as a phrase denoting the preciousness of the firstborn son and his value as an offering before God.80 Its appearance in 22:2 is the first of three in the Akedah narrative. The request to take or send Isaac up as an offering would likely have been familiar to hearers in antiquity as well, as employing technical language regarding sacrifice. However, as Rashi points out, the phrasing of the request is grammatically ambiguous, suggesting technical preparation for a burnt offering, but not specifying completion of the act. 81 To be sure, among the most plausible interpretations to Abrahamand to audiences hearing the textwould have been that the request was to sacrifice Isaac; but, as Gersonides avers, the request could conceivably have meant to bring Isaac up for (not as) the offering of an olah sacrifice. 82 Indeed, again, ambiguity is inherent in the very nature of the ‘test’ to which Abraham is submitted by God. Although to those familiar with the arc of the Abraham narrative it is understood that 79 Jaffee, Torah

in the Mouth, 18, 124. See yahud in Levenson, Death and Resurrection, 27. Furthermore, the increasing specificity of the command echoes Gen. 12:1, in which God commands that Abraham go forth (lekh lekha) to another journey whose end will be shown to him. Here, too, a three-phased command of increasing specificity is given: ‘Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house.’ 81 Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary: Bereshith, trans. A. M. Silbermann (Jerusalem: Silbermann Family by arrangement with Routledge and Kegan Paul, 5745 [1985]), 93. 82 See Baruch Braner and Eli Freiman, eds., Rabbinic Pentateuch with Commentary on the Torah by R. Levi ben Gerson: Genesis, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1993) [Hebrew]. 80

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God repeatedly tests Abraham, what is less clear is the nature of the test, or the impetus for it. It is possible that the nisah is a test not of his obedience but of his ability to interpret the will of God: a test that is hinted at in Genesis 17, in which God says his covenant will be established with Abraham, through Isaac. After Maimonides, it is likely that this event is designed to make of Abraham, and Isaac, a singular example of faith through imitation and interpretation. 83 As Boehm has noted, the writer of the Akedah demands of the reader/hearer an ‘independent, subtle interpretation’ of the text. 84 This is partly because God’s request is not unambiguous, and partly because we view the narrative not through God’s perspective but through Abraham’s. This means that the opening verses of the Akedah could be paraphrased thus: ‘As a result of his previous actions, God decided to make an example of Abraham. “Abraham”, He said. “At your service,” was Abraham’s reply. And God said, “Please take your son, your beloved and only son, and raise him up to me on a mountain I will reveal to you.”’ Boehm points out that Abraham’s actions are traditionally taken to indicate utter obedience, even zeal, to perform the sacrifice of his son. However, the order and pace of Abraham’s actions suggest ambivalence toward God’s command, and even a test of God by Abraham. Until the angelic interpretation in verse 11, Abraham proceeds along three tracks simultaneously: punctiliously and silently obeying God’s command; concealing his predicament from others; and delaying and resisting the most extreme interpretation, even while moving toward it. We cannot determine at what time of day the communication from God arrives, but Abraham arises ‘early next morning’ (22:3) to begin his preparations. Although we must resist the urge to psychologize Abraham, we also must note that his preparations for departure are not executed with maximum speed and efficiency. First, he saddles his own donkey; a task that someone of

83 84

Boehm, Binding of Isaac, 121. Ibid., 27. Emphasis Boehm’s.

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Abraham’s age, station, and privilege would ordinarily delegate.85 Next, he assembles his two servants and his son Isaac. Then, he himself splits the wood. Finally, he sets out. Rabbinic interpreters surmise that the journey from Abraham’s location to Mount Moriah, which would typically have taken eight hours, takes three days. 86 Because God and Abraham each must interpret the actions and intentions of the other, what is traditionally taken as God’s ‘test’ of Abraham (Gen. 22:1), it can also be perceived as a mutual test: by God, of Abraham’s interpretive ability and autonomy, and by Abraham, of the ethical nature of the covenant to which he is sworn. The traces of editing, revision, and redaction conceal what may be other versions and strands of the story, each of which may have been added, revised, or edited out as new interpretations that helped highlight and address new cultural concerns. We shall highlight those textual gaps and irregularities that the Amoraic sages detect and explore in chapter 3. Va-yisah Avraham et-einav: ‘And Abraham lifted his eyes’ (vv. 4, 13). The lifting of eyes indicates not only the act of looking up, but also an act of spiritual elevation or increased perceptual awareness. 87 This occurs both when Abraham sees Mount Moriah and when he sees the ram caught in the thicket by its horns. Both these sightings, it 85

Commentatorsincluding the Amoraim in GR 55:8have noted the similarity between the narration of Abraham’s actions and those of Bilaam (Num. 22:21). In that instance, however, God comes to Bilaam at night (22:20), and Bilaam rises early the next day to saddle his donkey. The passage of time is thus explicitly delineated. Similarly, Abraham arises early in the morning to send Hagar and Ishmael away in the previous chapter of Genesis (21:14). This would suggest that prophecy comes to both Abraham and Bilaam, in these instances, in their sleep. See Jo Ann Davidson, Toward a Theology of Beauty: A Biblical Perspective (New York: University Press of America), 108. 86 This was noted by several commentators, including Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:24, and R. Yaacov Culi, Yalkut Me’am Lo’ez. 87 See Genesis Rabbah 48:9. See also Diane Vikander Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi, The Production of Prophecy: Constructing Prophecy and Prophets in Yehud (New York: Routledge, 2014), 35.

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should be noted, initiate acts of interpretation: we are not told how Abraham knows the mountain is the site that God showed him (although midrash speculates on this matter); nor, as previously noted, does God explicitly condone the substitution of the ram for Isaac. In any case, the lifting of the eyes indicates elevated vision in both the physical and metaphysical senses. Va-yelchu shneihem yachdav: ‘And they walked on together’ (vv. 6, 8). The repetition of this phrase suggests a cloak of silence, punctured by one spike of dialogue. The silence before and after Isaac’s question (‘Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?’ v. 7) is evocative: of the effort of the journey, the seriousness of the question, the closeness of father and son, and the gravity (and the ambiguity) of Abraham’s answer. 88 Furthermore, the word yachdav echoes Isaac’s status as yaḥid, the unique and favored son who is to be offered up. Avi … b’ni … b’ni: ‘My father … my son … my son’ [vv. 7, 8]). Further emphasizing personal and familial closeness, these possessive terms set a pattern of familiarity in which the self-mimesis of the narrative begins to intensify, prior to the climax of the text and the angel’s double call. That is, the clustering of exact and near repetitions continues to intensify, even as the horror of the impending act is intensified by shared expressions of closeness. Elohim yir’eh/YHVH yir’eh/YHVH yera’eh (2x): ‘God will see to the sheep … On the mount of the Lord there is vision’ (vv. 8, 14). Here, the relationship between sight, divine providence, and fear of God (v. 12) is established. 89 The morphological similarities between sight and awe of the divine suggest that Abraham’s substitution was an appropriate insight into or interpretation of the entire experiencethe interpretation that resulted in affirmation of his lineage and the outcome of the ‘test’ or ‘demonstration’ that God had initi88

Another repetition, not of exact phrases, but of a cluster of active verb forms, must be noted here: Abraham’s preparation for the journey in 22:3 are paralleled by his preparation for the sacrifice in verses 9–10. 89 Spiegel, Last Trial, 69. Spiegel also notes that ‘[i]n the biblical account of the Akedah the legend of the name of the place was amalgamated with the legend on the institution of substitutes in sacrifice’ (emphasis Spiegel’s).

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ated. The ‘lifting of the eyes’ has resulted in an act of substitution not ordained but nonetheless accepted. Abraham! Abraham! (22:11). Commentators and rabbinic sages noted the double call and pondered its necessity. Was it an urgent call because of the imminence of the slaughter? Was it a call from angels of both YHVH and Elohim? Did the angel have to call a second time because Abraham did not stay his hand after the first call? The crucial point for the purposes of this interpretation is that the mimetic doubling in the passage reaches its crescendo here, almost precisely in the center of the narrative and at its climax. It encapsulates the interrelationship between Abraham’s dual aspects of radical obedience and ethical resistance, paralleling God’s twinned attributes of judgment and mercy. It even suggests that, just as the divine has a dual aspect in this narrative of doubles, Abraham does as well: the loving father, the zealous lover of God. The whole human being must be summoned, and the hand must be stayed, by the dual faculties of judgment and mercy inherent in divinity and mimetically taken up by humanity. Al-tishlach … al-ta-as …: ‘Do not lay your hand … neither do anything’ [22:12]. The doubling and increased specificity of God’s command to Abraham to desist from the sacrificeand here the angel of God does issue a commandboth suggests an eagerness on Abraham’s part to do something to Isaac (which rabbinic interpreters assert, and which we shall explore in chapter 3) and reinforces the notion that the sacrifice itself and the nisah, the test or examplemaking, are here at an end. Yet, despite the pronounced end of the harrowing episode, Abraham makes the crucial substitutive interpretation upon which the future of his lineage, and indeed the establishment of the sacrificial cult, is based: the ram for the favored son. Abraham again goes beyond what God has commanded and interprets the ram as a substitute. This elicits a second call from the angel of YHVH, and only then does the angel make specific promises on behalf of YHVH to Abraham and on behalf of his descendants. The angel conveys the message that God swears by Godself, and that ‘in blessing I will bless you and in increase I shall increase you’ (v. 17); the angel’s second call is elicited by Abraham going beyond merely the cessation of the act; God swearing by Godself is assured by the mimetic substitution of the ram for Isaac; and the doubled emphases

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in God’s promise represent the climax of doubled phrasing and description in the passage. As previously noted, numerous interpreters have remarked on the ambiguity of God’s command to Abraham. Is he truly asked to sacrifice his son? Ibn Ezra suggests that Abraham misunderstands the command, setting in motion the chain of events that will culminate in angelic intervention. Is the test, then, a test of Abraham’s interpretive abilities? In the ram, Abraham detects the opportunity for preserving covenantal commitment through interpretation. In this and in all instances of interpretation, we must keep foremost in mind that we are reading a text that, through a long chain of transmission, ultimately demand[s] Boehm’s independent, subtle interpretation. That is, the text is a mimetic embrace of the test: God demands ethical autonomy from Abraham, and the text requires it of the reader. 90 Thus, the ayil aḥar, the ram ‘behind’ Abraham, may be an interpolation or a retrojection, coming ‘after’ Isaac and being sacrificed, or ‘after’ a previous version of the text. It may also be a mistranscription of ‫אחד‬, indicating a single or solitary ram. 91 This would also indicate the suitability of the replacement for the ‫יחיד‬, the yaḥid, or beloved son. Herewhether intentionally or notthe text interprets itself through retrojection and self-transformation: the ram becomes the metonym for transformation through substitution, and for recovery through interpretation. For again: no command comes for Abraham to substitute the ram for Isaac. Now, reading the narraBoehm, Binding of Isaac, 27. As Boehm later notes (p. 39), the episode is taken by some commentators to suggest that ‘God does justice because of human ethical integrity’ (emphasis Boehm’s). 91 ‘The scribe may, in effect, perform his professional work in one of three ways, or by a combination of one or two or all three of them. He may, on the one hand, copy out his text by eye … On the other hand, he may transcribe his text from dictation … Or, as a third way, he may transcribe his text from memory. And here we must remark that our modern conception of memory has been modeled and seriously affected by the advent, diffusion, general use and plenty of the printed word.’ Malachi Martin, The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1958), 1:6. 90

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tive through again, we are alerted to the possibility that Abraham’s diffident pace suggests that he is seeking just such an interpretive way out of the hopeless situation in which he has found himself. Whether God provides it or not, God accepts the substitution, which is indicated by the word ‫תחת‬. The chiastic in miniature that is contained in this palindrome itself suggests, among other things, that sacrificial substitutions are performed in the human realm and validated in the divine realm. This may be the reason that Abraham is rewarded through doubled reaffirmations of the covenantal commitment: -‫כי‬ ‫ברך אברך והרבה ארבה‬, ‘In blessing I will bless you and in increase I will increase …’ (22:17). We must note again that the narrative shift from Elohim to YHVH occurs at the climax of the narrative, and at the decisive moment of Abraham’s ‘test’. Amoraic sages attest to this shift as announcing a divine shift from judgment to mercy, a shift mnemonically induced by the blast of the shofar (GR 56:9). The blast reminds God of the superior substitution, with the result that the attributes of mercy hold swayor at least are summonedeach year at Rosh Hashanah when the ram’s horn is sounded. We may say, then, that the Akedah narrative, in structure and composition, establishes the precedent not only for ritual sacrifice but also for interpretive autonomy through repetition, transformation, and substitution: a fundamentally mimetic process in which covenant is established. Human interpretive autonomy is granted concomitant with the shift from judgment to mercy. The mythohistorical event, by virtue of being sealed in canon, is opened to reinterpretation in perpetuity. The meritorious acts of Abraham and Isaac become forever associated, through yearly liturgical recital, with zikaron, memory. 92 These hermeneutical transformations are fundamental to the exegetical daring that defines rabbinic Judaism, and also to the efforts of the Amoraic sages to transform sacrifice from external cultic structure to a series of internal devotional acts. These acts are delimited in law, liturgy, and midrash, but it is in the latter 92

The liturgical-mnemonic significance of the Akedah will be discussed further in Chapter Four.

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genre that the pathways of midrashic memory reach their sharpest definition.93 The mimetic doublings of the Akedah itself suggest textual revisions and interpolations meant either to echo and invoke previous narratives or to reposition the Akedah narrative itself as a ‘plausibility structure’ for new circumstances.

8. THE AKEDAH AS A MAP OF MIDRASHIC MEMORY The principles laid out at the beginning of this chapter stressed the need for an interpretive methodology for exploring the Akedah; employed Ockham’s Razor, asserting that the analysis employing the fewest explanatory elements would be most effective in delineating the narrative structure; and endorsed a variation of the Charity Principle, which claims that the interpretation that yields the most excellent literary work is the one that should be adopted. Having adopted these criteria, we endeavored to show how the Akedah uses an intensifying pattern of doubling words, phrases, and chiastic structure to heighten the tension in the narrative, to evoke previous narratives in the Abraham cycle, and to endorse mimesis and substitution in sacrifice through literary correlation. The text serves, then, as a template for the Midrashic Condition, a foundation for cultural identity, and an example and instantiation of midrashic memory. The ‘hermeneutic of elaboration’ outlined in chapter 1 is evident in the second angelic speech in the Akedah. Whether or not this speech is a later interpolation, the meaning of the divine test is articulated and elaborated within the narrative itself: as a result of Abraham neither withholding nor sacrificing his favored son, a doubled blessing and a doubled increase are promised. The hermeneutic of mimetic substitution is established through Abraham’s autonomous interpretation that the ram be substituted for Isaac. It is possible, in fact, that this mimetic substitution See William Kolbrener, The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 36: ‘Rabbinic Judaism began, in literary circles, with midrash.’ On the Akedah and the origins of ritual sacrifice, see Levenson, Death and Resurrection, 173–87. 93

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marks the passage of the actual test, or the definitive proof that Abraham can be set forward as a parade example of devotion to God not only through his acts of devotion, but through the substitution that defuses the unbearable tension initiated by the test itself. Finally, the hermeneutic of retrospective prefiguration is sealed through the final textual doubling, in verse 20, in which aḥarei ha-devarim haeleh, ‘[s]ome time after’, echoes verse 1, but also introduces the ancestral line that produces Rebecca, Isaac’s wife. It can be suggested, in fact, that the entire narrative serves as a retrospective prefiguration of the substitutive dynamics of ritual sacrifice, and the indispensability of interpretive autonomy to the remembering culture. The deployment of chiastic structure, and the intensification of textual doublings around the angel’s double call to Abraham (v. 11) can even be said to suggest the mimetic double nature of Israelite identity itself: firmly rooted in canon and covenant, but insistent and dependent upon interpretive ingenuity and autonomy; faithful to God and to God’s commands, no matter how awesome or awful, but insistent upon developing a carefully elaborated system of substitutions; and seeking, in crisis, the foretold blessing and its relationship to the ultimate resolution of crisis. As we shall see in chapter 3, Amoraic interpretations of the Akedah are closely related to the retrospective interiorization and reactualization of sacrifice in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, and to the construction of a remembering culture around the virtualized and interiorized precincts and practices of the Temple cult. Thus, sacrifice continues to shape post-Temple identity, and it provides the contours for a memory that is midrashic in its essence. How sacrifice interprets becomes the template for how the culture remembers.

CHAPTER THREE. RABBINIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF SACRIFICE AND THE FORMATION OF ‘MIDRASHIC MEMORY’ Build an altar. Arrange the wood. Kindle the fire. Take the knife to slaughter your existence for Me … This is the very foundation of prayer. Man hands himself over to God. He approaches the awesome God, expressing this movement in sacrifice and binding of oneself. – Joseph B. Soloveitchik 1 [R. Judah and R. Yose spoke,] one saying, ‘That ram fortunately happened along at the right moment’; and the other saying, ‘That ram was the bellwether of Abraham’s flock, and its name was Isaac; but Abraham failed to recognize it. Said the Holy One, blessed be He, “Let Isaac for Isaac come.”’ 2

The previous chapter developed an interpretive framework with which to analyze the Akedah narrative. That framework highlighted the mimetic repetitions of words and phrases: not only did these doublings serve to evoke previous (and subsequent) crises and trials in the life of Abraham and his lineage, but they provided clues and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Worship of the Heart: Essays on Jewish Prayer (Newark, NJ: Ktav, 2003), 163. 2 Midrash haGadol on Gen. 22:13; see Spiegel, Last Trial, 40, n. 12. 1

103

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cues to both reciters and hearers engaged in the performative (re)telling of the story. The clues signaled to the hearing audience the nature, magnitude, and building intensity of the story, and, concurrently, its connection to other episodes related, either in magnitude or through narrative progression, to the Akedah itself. The narrative provided cues to those reciting the story as well, the repetitions of word, phrase, or theme serving as mnemonic aids. 3 As we noted in chapter 2, despite compelling evidence of later interpolations into the text, the Akedah retains a force and forward motion that bespeaks significant compositional unity and redactional expertise. This combination of cohesion, momentum, and concision makes the Akedah unique as a foundational biblical narrative and as a figure of memory. One particularly noteworthy aspect of its literary and mnemonic power is the sheer variety of possible interpretations inherent in the narrative’s 19 verses. Precisely what the story is meant to convey is the subject of ongoing debate. Does it advocate radical obedience to or disobedience of divine will? Does it indicate a lack of faith in Abraham on the part of God; a God who, though omniscient and omnipotent, must test his subject’s fealty? Does it serve as a polemic against child sacrifice? Does it indicate the existence of a God who is arbitrarily cruel, inscrutable, and perhaps less than omniscient? Biblical texts fall almost completely silent on the great trial after its appearance in Genesis: the Akedah receives no further mention until it becomes the object of considerable interpretive attention in the first centuries of the Common Era. 4 Here, cultural transformations, both interpreted and aided by exegetical mastery, necessitate a reformulation of sacrifice. As the taproot of sacrificial ontology, and increasingly as the ground of contestation with Christian exegetes, the Akedah becomes a principal guide for the reinterpretation and internalization of sacrifice. In a larger sense, the narrative is recruited as an interpretive means of recovery from rupture, and as

Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 18. Robert L. Wilken, ‘Melito, The Jewish Community at Sardis, and the Sacrifice of Isaac’, Theological Studies 37, no. 3 (1976): 58ff.

3

4

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proof, waiting to be unearthed through exegetical ingenuity, of divine presence and care in the midst of upheaval. The exertion of increased exegetical energy on behalf of the Akedah seems to coincide roughly with the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the cult of ritual sacrifice. Its role in the development of doctrine, noted by Géza Vermès, makes its way from first-century chronicles to Targumic translations of the Akedah narrative, and then into rabbinic interpretations. Increasingly, in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, exegetical attention is focused on Isaac as a willing martyr. His self-oblation is held up in the oldest Targumic sources, 4 Maccabees, and in the work of Josephus and Pseudo-Philo as the supreme example of a willing martyrdom that comes to be valorized in the works, and in some cases the torturous deaths, of rabbinic sages. 5 This approach evolves during an extended period of massive and near-continuous upheaval, persecution, and dislocation for Israelite populations across the ancient Near East and is accompanied by a newly reflexive approach to myth and praxis. 6 Contending with rival sects, invading armies, growing and dispersing Diaspora populations, rebellions against Roman rule, and a rising Christian sect that increasingly defined itself in opposition to Israelite religion, the class of rabbinic sages emerged through development of ‘a new religious attitude that sought to rebuild the life of the nation, without a Temple and without its own state, on a basis of 5

See Géza Vermès, ‘Redemption and Genesis xxii: The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Jesus’, in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies (Boston: Leiden, 1973), 193–227. Vermès focuses on the role of the Akedah in the doctrinal development of Judaism. That doctrine developed concurrently with, and as a result of, the growing need to replace the functions and the cult of sacrifice through internalized acts as substituted equivalents. See also Roger Le Déaut, La nuit pascale (Rome: Institut Biblique Pontifical, 1963) about the Targum of the four nights. 6 See Shmuel Safrai, ‘The Era of the Mishnah and Talmud,’ in H. H. BenSasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 313–56; and Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5, 9.

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observance of the Torah and the performance of good deeds while awaiting the redemption’. 7 The Amoraic midrashim, especially Genesis Rabbah, borrow from and adapt these older sources and in turn focus extensively on issues of both theological and cultural import: the enduring merit of the willingness of Abraham (and Isaac) to the command to sacrifice Isaac; and the interiorization of sacrificial rites. It must be noted, as well, that rabbinic interest in the Akedah does not arise in a vacuum. As numerous other scholars have documented, the Akedah is a critical site of contestation with nascent Christianity, which, by adopting and adapting Jewish exegetical strategies, sees the Isaac’s binding as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion. 8 In this chapter, we shall explore interpretations of both the Akedah and the laws of ritual sacrifice, as propounded by the Amoraim, as examples of what Fishbane has called ‘the exegetical construction of reality’. 9 These interpretations represent not only the exegetical innovations of rabbinic conventicles, but vital and restorative responses to cultural rupture. Our exploration will focus on the mimetic adoption and adaptations of biblical law that shaped the transformation of the Akedah and sacrifice. We shall attempt to trace how Abraham’s act of interpretive substitution, already enshrined in sacrificial law, reemerges in feats of rabbinic textual interpretation that hinge on the word ke’ilu‘as if’through which substitutions are endowed with covenantal legitimacy. Through such mimetic transformations, the rabbis nurture the seeds of a culture that would adhere around textual, legal, and liturgical interpretation, repetition, and transmission. They do so by means of a culture of ‘pervasive orality’ in which writing and written texts are rare and even distrusted instruments of cultural and spiritual pedagogy, and in which oral, performative transmission builds a remembering culture. 10 7 Safrai, op. cit., 318. 8 See below, 33n.

Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 126. 10 Yaakov Elman, ‘Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud’, Oral Tradition 14, no. 1 (1999): 53. The Mishnah (whose name means ‘repetition’), was redacted during the Tannaitic era, the first flourishing of rab9 Michael

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In order to understand the decisive influence of rabbinic hermeneutics on the shaping of Jewish memory, we must first appreciate the extent to which sacrifice shaped the rabbinic mind. We have noted previously that scholarship on Jewish memory has tended to ignore the import of sacrifice to the content and contours of Jewish memory; thus, by extension, the decisive influence of sacrifice on rabbinic epistemology and exegesis after 70 CE has suffered similar neglect in memory studies. The disregard of sacrifice as an ongoing influence can be attributed in part to the attempt to articulate universal theories that purport to demonstrate a thematic and practical consistency in sacrifice, across cultures and eras, and in part to supercessionist biases that influence much early scholarship on the subject of sacrifice. 11 Three additional forces are at work that tend to occlude scholarly focus on this issue: the first is an unstated assumption that sacrifice simply vanished after the destruction of the Second Temple; the second is an implicit assumption that sacrifice was a barbaric practice whose loss was a sign of progress; and the third is a presentist retro-projection of current epistemological categories onto an ancient Near Eastern culture. Although assaying a critique of these theories is outside the focus of this project, it must be noted that they tend to impose an artificial unity on an almost endlessly variegated series of rituals, and they reveal a less-thancomplete comprehension of what purposes specific rituals served.12

binic leadership in the land of Israel, during the first and second centuries of the Common Era. Comprising sixty-three tractates in which biblical law is systematically interpreted and codified, the Mishnah cements the already well-established relationship between ritual, interpretation, and repetitiona relationship further elaborated by the Amoraim in the third through sixth centuries of the Common Era. 11 See Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 290. See also n. 16. Furthermore, the omnipresence of sacrificial language and procedures in Jewish liturgy is testament to its ongoing influence. See, e.g., Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, ‘Understanding Jewish Prayer’, The Koren Siddur (Jerusalem: Koren, 2009), xviii–xix. 12 Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 49.

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As experienced and influenced by the emerging rabbinic interpreting class, then, memory is intimately interwoven with sacrificial law and praxis. However, memory is dynamic and contested, and as such rabbinic text preserves the collaborative and competitive process through which the remembering culture remembers itself.

1. THE BEGINNING OF TEXT CULTURE, THE END OF TEMPLE CULTURE Fishbane’s observation accords with theorizations of cultural memory as an ongoing process of negotiation between permanent and changing views of the past in light of present circumstances. This is the meeting point of the exegetical and social constructions of Israelite reality. The acts of reappropriation of which Fishbane writes are indicative of a cultural turn in Israelite attitudes toward the localization of worship. This turn is not a turn away from the Temple but toward a ‘“sacrificialization” of prayer’ that, as Jonathan Klawans notes, ‘was well underway long before the destruction of the temple, without the sponsorship of the rabbinic (or Pharisaic) elites.’ 13 This cultural turn, also noted by Jonathan Z. Smith, is a part of a larger shift in the ancient Near East, away from ‘a locative type of religious activity no longer perceived as effective in a new, utopian religious situation with a concomitant shift from a cosmological to an anthropological viewpoint.’ 14 For Stroumsa, this is embedded in the larger shift occurring within Jaspers’s ‘Axial Age’, in which ‘there developed a hierarchical differentiation between the visible and the invisible, the material and spiritual, worlds’. Inherent in this new era was a ‘reflexive thinking about religionon myths as well as on practic-

13

Ibid., 202. Emphasis Klawans’s. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 128. This assertion comes in an Afterword, in which Smith reconsiders the mythology of exile in light of evidence for ‘the positive response to the cessation of archaic forms of worship’ (ibid.).

14

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es[which] would now become an integral part of religion instead of remaining outside it’. 15 Reflexivity at this time parallels an enlargement of the definition of the self. Stroumsa holds that the Christianization of the Roman Empire is the result of a broadened concept of the human person. 16 Personal practices to thwart sin arise: the flesh is the locus of sin, and thus the ‘axis of salvation’, according to Tertullian. A personalization of ethical practice was part of these axial changes. This process was facilitated in part by the gradual rise of improved technologies for preserving, reproducing, and distributing written text. Although rabbinic culture was almost entirely an oral culture, it rose to prominence at a time in which the codex was gradually replacing the scroll as the dominant means of textual production, preservation, and dissemination. A codex was significantly cheaper and easier to produce, it was more compact and portable, and the increased ease with which internal references could be made greatly facilitated the development of intertextual interpretations. 17 Such developments had profound and wide-reaching effects on Israelite ritual praxis; and because, as Stroumsa notes, there was considerable instability in the equilibrium between myth and ritual during this period, as evidenced by the texts of numerous breakaway sects, the development of competing liturgies and modes of prayer encouraged both the proliferation of textual interpretation and the commission of such interpretations to writing. Prayer, too, developed rapidly during this period. Contrary to widespread perception, however, prayer was not a rabbinic innovation or a late Temple-era novelty. Nor, prevailing views of scholarship notwithstanding, were prayer or study deemed superior to sacri15 Stroumsa, End

of Sacrifice, 5, 9. James Kugel has made an important contribution in this regard, demonstrating how changing conceptions of the self transformed Israelite conceptions of God in the early part of the Common Era. See James L. Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 59–71, 342–44. 17 See Stroumsa, End of Sacrifice, 23, 32–33, 41. 16

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fice until the Amoraic books of aggadic midrash. 18 Rather, prayer was part of the human mimesis of cosmogonic structures, in the way that, for instance, the Jerusalem Temple was held to be the earthly correlate of a heavenly temple. As Klawans notes, certain ancient and well-known prayers ‘involve human imitation of audible angelic praise’. 19 The practices of imitatio Dei and ‘imitatio angeli’ cause socially constructed reality to mimetically embrace the heavens: ‘just as the angels … encounter the divine in the temple above, so too can the pure encounter a divine presence in the temple below’. 20 Israelite conceptions of the divine realm, and their reflection in social reality, thus endorse the mimetic nature and chiastic structure of the very cosmos. In this context, although sacrifice may not be possible, the intercessory and cosmic efficacy of prayer is limited. 21 Substitutions for sacrifice are thus envisioned not as superior, but as emendations made necessary by the destruction of what had been deemed an eternal institution. It is ‘only when statutory prayer has become fully and unquestionably establishedso that its novelty is forgotten and its temple-based antiquity accepted by all[that it becomes] safe to assert that prayer is better than sacrifice.’ 22 The elevation of prayer and study in rabbinic literature is thus best seen as an evolutionary process, in which the Temple’s cosmic significance is maintained through interiorized and subjectivized rites that are (a) due in part to tectonic cultural shifts in the ancient Near East, including the move away from localized cultic centers and toward both textual and oral-performative transmission, and polemical and apologetical engagement with early Christianity; and (b) rooted in a midrashic cultural memory that conveys this transformation both backward and forward in time, through transformative interpretation. 18 Klawans, Purity, 19 Ibid., 137.

Sacrifice, and the Temple, 207.

20 Ibid., 143.

21 Ibid., 205. See b. Berakhot 32b. 22

Ibid., 208. See also Baruch Bokser, ‘The Wall Separating God and Israel’, Jewish Quarterly Review 73, no. 4 (April 1983): 349–74.

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These shifts in technology, memory, and religion helped define rabbinic modes of study and interpretation. The sages, in attaining mastery of text and performative interpretation, came to fully embody and personify the textat a time when text was the main cultural pillar left standing. The rabbinic disciples in particular, in dynamically working their way through the collected traditions of the commentary in relation to one another as Scripture, continue the interpretive process of gathering and weighing, connecting and differentiating, that the redacted text itself has set in motion but not completed. These students, in socially enacting the text through their engaged study of it, advance its unfinished work by filling out (but never finally) the anonymous narrative voice that is only partially present in the text itself. The dialectical dynamic of such study leads to the transformative internalization and actualization of the commentary’s interplaying network of traditions (and perspectives) within its students who, like their text of study, thereby become one notwithstanding plurality. In a sense, as they work through the commentary the commentary works through them. 23

Yet the Temple’s physical destruction leads not to abandonment of sacrifice, but to its transformation through internalization. The Temple is preserved in cultural memory in part through the preservation of Temple ritual. In the Mishnah (Sukkah 41a), which contains some of the earliest rabbinic considerations of how to confront the loss of the Temple, R. Yoḥanan ben Zakkai determines that the ‘lulav should be taken in the provinces for seven days in memory of the Temple (zekher le-miqdash). “She is Zion, there are none that seek her” [Jer. 30:17]. “There are none that seek her”this implies that she must be sought.’ The rabbinic approach to the loss of the Temple in the Mishnah is a mimetic one. ‘In contrast to biblical and Second-Temple sources which characterize the latter practices as secondary, contingent on the official cult, or mere private means of pie23

Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 19.

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ty designed to supplement public ones, the Mishnah gives them an independent and heightened role … The Mishnah’s practice [is] to innovate by restructuring the old patterns without necessarily openly introducing new ideas or rituals.’ 24 This is evident as well in m. Pe’ah 1:1: A. These are the things that have no measure: corners of the field [pe’ah], and first fruits, and appearing [at the Temple during the three pilgrimage festivals], and acts of loving kindness, and the study of Torah. B. And these are the things that a person benefits from their fruit in this world and the capital is laid up for him in the world to come: honoring father and mother, and acts of loving kindness, and bringing peace between a person and his fellow, and the study of Torah is equal to them all.

Here, in section A, Torah study is placed alongside both discontinued ritual acts and personalized ethical acts and is depicted as being of inestimable value. In section B, Torah study is part of an entirely ethical framework that ‘lays up capital’ in the world to come, and study is equal to all other ethical acts in that framework. Section A contains two commands that could be fulfilled only when the Temple was standing; section B mimetically appropriates and transforms ‘first fruits’ into ‘fruit in this world’, which helps lay up capital in the world to come. The acts listed here do not rely on the physical existence of the Temple. Although the Mishnah does not distinguish here between Temple and extra-Temple rites, ‘in listing and elevating a particular set of biblical precepts, it reminds people that extraTemple or extrasacrificial rites exist, thereby responding to the needs of those shaken by the Temple’s loss’. 25 This establishes mimetic substitutions of post- or extra-Temple actions as affecting the same worldly and extra-worldly benefits as Temple rites themselves.

24

Bokser, ‘Rabbinic Responses’, 40–41.

25 Ibid., 43–44.

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2. KE ’ILU AND THE MIMETIC TRANSFORMATION OF SACRIFICIAL RITE It is only with the Amoraic texts that prayer is posited as an interiorized, superior, and lasting replacement for sacrifice. After Klawans, it can be suggested that the process of arriving at replacements for sacrifice and other Temple rites occurs when, with the passage of time, it becomes increasingly clear that the Temple would not soon be rebuilt. As Bokser notes, ‘Amoraim not only delineate physical replacements for the cult but find symbolic substitutes for it as well. They extensively moralize the sacrifices, interpreting the animal offerings as symbols of different human attitudes and actions’. 26 Bokser cites a passage from Talmud (b. Sanhedrin 43b), which quotes Psalm 51:19, a prooftext that, as we shall see, is cited in Amoraic midrashic substitutions of study for sacrifice. The Talmudic passage twice uses the word ke’ilu, a key to the transformative substitutions for sacrifice that characterize the Amoraic stratum of midrash: A. Said R. Yehoshua ben Levi, Whoever sacrifices his evil inclination and confesses over it, the verse regards him as if (ke’ilu) he honored God in two worlds, this world and the world to come, for it is written, ‘Whoever sacrifices a thanksgiving offering honors me’ [Ps. 50:23]. B. And said R. Yehoshua ben Levi, When the Temple stood, if a person offered an olah [expiation sacrifice], he receives the credit for an olah, a minḥah [tribute sacrifice] he receives credit for a minḥah; but whoever is humble, the verse regards him as if [ke’ilu] he offered all the sacrifices, as it is said, ‘A sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit.’ Moreover, his prayer is not despised as it is said, ‘God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart’ [Ps. 51:19]. 27

Gruenwald’s Midrashic Condition is evidenced here through a transformative substitution for the Temple which succeeds by 26 Ibid., 50.

27 See also b. Sota

5b.

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preserving what it replaces. This is not a sudden hermeneutical masterstroke or a delayed response, as some scholars would have it, after a period of stunned silence following the destruction of the Temple. 28 It is, rather, arrived at as the rabbinic sages emphasize the turn to text, in the immediate context of their own cultural crisis, and in the larger context of a cultural turn away from locative ritual and toward personal, ethical, and interiorized rites. As Fishbane notes, this process represents one of the ‘axial transformations that mark the onset of classical Judaism … marking the movement from a culture based on direct divine revelations to one based on their study and interpretation’. Again, these acts of interpretation occur not in a vacuum, and not through transcription but through interpretation: the ‘sage-scribes’ of ancient Israel give way to the ‘sage-scholars’. 29 This transformation plays a critical role in formulating a radically new national identity: no longer is Israel defined as an autonomous (if bifurcated) nation with a cultic center. It is a script-centered collective with internalized equivalents for vanquished sites and discontinued traditions. Our interest in the route taken by rabbinic interpretations must be informed by understanding the means by which, and the milieu in which, the sages developed their interpretations. Midrashic memory is shaped in large part through performative text study, in the presence and under the supervision of a master. The job of the sage is to mimetically absorb what overflows from the master. The master is a fountain whose torah overflows from one vessel of tradition to another, eventually reaching the cup of the See, e.g., Bokser, ‘Rabbinic Responses’, 61; Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15–16, 108–10; Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 203–4, n. 105. Bokser’s viewthat scholarship claiming a ‘stunned silence’ of some two centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple is ‘more in the minds of the interpreters than in the evidence of early rabbinic sources’ (p. 203)is supported by the evidence he presents. 29 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 65. See also Paul D. Mandel, The Origins of Midrash: From Teaching to Text (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 222–275. 28

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disciple. It is that fountain of language that the disciple drinks and absorbs into his body. To switch metaphors, only the master can guide the disciple along the path that promises, at its end, to reproduce in the disciple what the master has experienced: the blending of fully memorized, fully mastered torah, into one’s personal subjectivity; the self-overcoming that transforms a person of flesh and blood into a servant of the Creator and an echo of His revelation … When performed from memory, in the setting of the discipleship circle before the Master, these writings were retrieved from the derivative status of the sign and became the very thing toward which they pointed. 30

The mimetic process of memorization and recital that was, as we have demonstrated, reciprocally bound up in the very composition and redaction of biblical text, now shapes the midrashic hermeneutic, through which the texts transform and are transformed by performative interpretation. This is the means by which textual substitutions for sacrifice in Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah, the books of aggadic midrash redacted between the mid-fourth and early sixth centuries of the Common Era, are developed, and through which Jewish cultural memory is given shape. 31 Thus, the ritual of exegesis and recital adopts and transforms the ritual of dedication and offering. Like sacrifice, rabbinic exegesis is a ritual that can be described as ‘communicating and clarifying social reality, as well as actually establishing it.’ 32

3. KE ’ILU AND MIDRASHIC MEMORY Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 155, 156. See also Mandel, The Origins of Midrash: From Teaching to Text. 31 Stemberger dates Genesis Rabbah to roughly the first half of the fifth century CE; Leviticus Rabbah’s redaction likely dates to the mid-fifth century CE. See Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 279; Burton L. Visotzky, Golden Bells and Pomegranates (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 38. 32 Janzen, Social Meanings of Sacrifice, 21. 30

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The additive nature of such substitutions is emphasized in Leviticus Rabbah (LR), perhaps the earliest compilation of Amoraic midrashim, in a focused series of rabbinic substitutions of study for sacrifice. 33 In LR7, the word ke’ilu appears four times. This cluster of usages focuses our attention on the exegetical strategy of cultural remembering through substitution. Each of these four uses of ke‘ilu is part of a larger hermeneutical exercise in which the rabbis equate the benefits of the study of some aspect of discontinued cultic practice with the practice itself. Taken together, the four uses of ke’ilu represent a primary example of the mimetic substitution of study for sacrifice as a means of (re)shaping the memory of the Temple and its cult. In social-theoretical terms, substitution is the act that injects interpretation of the gaps and dissonances between sacred text and lived experience into the nomos of the culture. In literary-theoretical terms, the heart of this exegetical cycle is best depicted by the Ricoeurian threefold mimetic process, in which the temporal sequence of events is emplotted and made sense of via narrative, then looped back into the flow of experience. Ricoeur’s mimesis posits lived experience, narrative, and reading as a cycle. Each of these components of the cycle is in turn comprised of ‘action, symbolic expression of the significance of experience, and the temporality of lived experience’.34 The dialogical tension between dialogue and narrative becomes a means for defining the parameters and the plasticity of cultural identity. Thus, we can understand the rabbis’ use of ke’ilu as preserving sacrifice as the structure through which the post-Temple culture’s identity and memory are framed, and effecting resolution to crisis on both the linear and anamnestic planes of Israelite ontology. That is, mimesis here represents the ongoing recalibration of the humandivine relationshipa cultural corrective previously achieved through the kinetic effort and cultic choreography of sacrificein Burton L. Visotzky, Fathers of the World: Essays in Rabbinic and Patristic Literatures (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 93. 34 Ibid. 33

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narrative form, in ritual life, and in real time. The ‘discovery’ of a hidden nomizing narrative within canonical text restores coherence to covenantal community; in Ricoeur’s words, it is ‘narrative consonance imposed on temporal dissonance’, 35 or perhaps theological consonance imposed on the dissonance of diaspora. Ke’ilu is the keystone of this exegetical effort in LR7. The laws of sacrifice become the means for making meaning through mimesis. This is particularly pertinent to the rabbis’ use of ke’ilu, for here, ‘the “as if” formulary has a strong force and serves to impress upon the audience the effectiveness of this act of exchange’. 36 In focusing their exegetical energy on the Book of Leviticus, the rabbis build a new religious consciousness, and religious memory, not on entirely new ground, but precisely on its original foundations. ‘There can hardly be a less promising field for aggadic treatment than Leviticus’, and yet the author(s), here and throughout, succeed in providing ‘edification, religious insights, and words of hope and encouragement relevant to their own situation of increasing despondency and despair under Roman-Christian rule, which became more oppressive as time went on’. 37 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken spirit and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise (Ps. 51:19) … Whence do we know that if a man repents it is accounted unto him as if (ke’ilu) he had gone up to Jerusalem and built the Temple and the altar, and offered thereon all the sacrifices ordained in the Torah? – From these verses: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, etc.’ 38

35 Ricoeur, Time

and Narrative, 1:72.

36 Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’, 122. 37

Joseph Heinemann, ‘Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39, no. 2 (1971): 141. 38 Translations are from Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds., The Midrash Rabbah, Vol. Two: Exodus and Leviticus (New York: Soncino, 1977).

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Attributed to R. Yose ben Parta, a Palestinian Amora, 39 this first usage of ke’ilu asserts that contrition and repentance have the same sacral efficacy as all the sacrifices and the construction of their precincts, and more: repentance mimetically constructs an interiorized Temple and establishes an interiorized order of sacrifices. From the perspective of religious psychology, it would seem that for R. Yose the act of contrition was something like an interiorization of religious action; namely, that the process of repentance was deemed to be something like a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and the act of contrition to be like the building of an inner temple, in which the heart is the altar upon which one offers the self. Hence the rebuilding of the Temple and its benefits need not remain a messianic longing directed toward the future, but can become very much a spiritual possibility hic et nunc, in the here and now of one’s religious life … Through a striking series of substitutions, a new self is thus envisioned and exhorted. The Temple may not be standing, but we are told that God will not even now reject the truest of offeringsnamely, the sacrifice of one’s inner spirit. 40

The process of interiorization here begins with Psalm 51:19, which, as noted earlier, is cited in b. Sanhedrin 43b in support of the substitution of a broken spirit for the sacrificial victim. The rabbis make an exegetical connection between the sin of the golden calf and God’s assignment of levitical duties to Aaron and not his sons in Leviticus 6:1. The verse the rabbis bring to begin the exegesis of this verse is Proverbs 10:12: ‘Hatred stirs up strifes, but love covers all transgressions’. The exegesis of this cross-verse is meant to overcome the rabbis’ previous conclusion that the ‘hatred which Aaron caused between Israel and their Father who is in heaven stirred up against them punishments upon punishments’. And yet, according to the 39

Perhaps an alternate spelling of Yose ben Peredah, a second or third generation Amora. See, e.g., Shulamis Frieman, Who’s Who in the Talmud (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2000), 409. 40 Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’, 122–23.

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rabbis, ‘Said Moses to the Holy One, blessed be He: “Can it be that the well is hated while its water is beloved?”’ Moses then quotes Mishnah to God, who relents in his punishment of Aaron. The question ‘Can it be that the well is hated while its water is beloved?’ is a question born of both cultural and exegetical urgency. The rabbis are considering whether a container of the sacred can be spurned, even as its contents retain their holiness. This establishes the mimetic basis of the series of exegetical transformations that follows, in the midrashic approach to Leviticus: can the well of ritual obligation (the Temple) be destroyed and discarded, even as the water of the covenantal relationship is still the sustaining force of Israelite identity? The rabbis’ answer is that the state of contrite brokenheartedness is itself a sacrifice: a sacrifice of the self. The act of sacrifice, in being hermeneutically transformed, is in fact elevated: the verse from Psalms is brought to demonstrate that that which is discarded and destroyed is precisely that which is holy. The effort to make sense of the distance God places between himself and Aaron begins the mimetic interiorization of the Temple and of ritual sacrifice. Ke’ilu, then, in this first use in LR7, transforms brokenheartedness and contrition into the very state that sustains covenantal connection. The previous verse of the Psalm (51:18), ‘For you delight not in sacrifice, else would I give it’, grounds the text in essential existential brokenness; the verse following (51:20) reveals the hopedfor end of the process of exegetically based contrition: ‘Do good in Thy favor unto Zion; build Thou the walls of Jerusalem’. Brokennessof the Temple and its walls, of sacrifice and its precincts, of the social context and the individual’s heartis mimetically transformed into the very means by which the endangered covenant is renewed. This passage in LR is followed in close proximity by a series of additional transformations of sacrifice through three additional uses of ke’ilu. Having established this transformation, the redactor of LR builds on it so as to impose narrative consonance upon the temporal dissonance of recent events as against canonical text. The first use establishes repentance as an equivalent to the offering of sacrifices; as

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Fishbane notes, this demonstrates nothing less than ‘the power of exegesis to proclaim new ideals’. 41 The LR text now moves to an equation of study with repentance, placing study in the foreground as a suitable replacement for sacrifice. When Scripture says, For Job said: It may be that my sons have sinned, and blasphemed God in their hearts [Job 1:6], it proves that the burnt-offering is due to be brought for sinful meditation of the heart. R. Aḥa said in the name of R. Ḥanina b. Papa: In order that Israel might not say: ‘In the past we used to offer up sacrifices, and engage in the study of them; now that there are no sacrifices, is it necessary to engage in the study of them?’ the Holy One, blessed be He said, to Israel: ‘If you engage in the study of them, I account it unto you as if (ke’ilu) you had offered them up.’

The harmonizing of the relationship between God and Israel occurs through a harmonization of Torah with the exigencies of the rabbinic Sitz im Leben; the revalorization of a cultic practice occurs through a replacement of that practice with an interiorized mimesis thereof. The insertion of study brings the efficacy of sacrifice into ‘the hermeneutical circle of narrative and time [that] never stops being reborn from the circle that the stages of mimesis form’. 42 Just as Job’s sacrifice is meant to make expiation for the unknown sins of his family members, so, as God affirms through the rabbis of the midrash, the study of such sacrifices can facilitate the same expiatory effect. Whether in contemplation, in community, or in crisis, ‘the old sacrificial rites are reactualized through new acts of sacral efficacyperformed by laymen acting voluntarily in the world’. The result is that ‘[i]n the new spiritual order of this post-destruction teaching, the sage is the new priest, and the scriptural exposition a sacral gift of the highest and most favorable sort’. 43 Not only the new priest, but the new prophet: ‘Since the day the Temple was de41 Fishbane, ibid., 125. 42 Ricoeur, Time 43

and Narrative, 1:76. Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 130.

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stroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise’. 44 Here, the influence of the Hellenistic value of paideia, the comprehensive method of educating an ideal member of the polis, melds with the existence of canonical text to create a new kind and class of spiritual leaderand the concretization of a mimetic basis for the transmission of mythohistorical tradition. For from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same My name is great among the nations; and in every place offerings are presented to My name, even pure oblations (Mal. 1:11). Now are there pure oblations and the taking off of a handful [of flour] and the letting [offerings] go up in smoke in Babylon? What then is this [that is referred to in the text]? It is the Mishnah. The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘Seeing that you are engaged in the study of Mishnah, it is as if (ke’ilu) you were offering up sacrifices’.

Israelite law forbade sacrifices outside the land. What, then, was the message from the prophet Malachi, who lived in Babylon during the exile? What could ‘every place’ mean? Just prior to the selection above, Rav Huna, a second-generation Babylonian Amora, had said that ‘All the exiles will be gathered in only through the merit of the study of Mishnah’, and we are thus given to understand that the study of ‘Oral Learning’ 45 is a makom (‫)מקום‬, a place or position from which the human-divine relationship is recalibrated and renewed. The Mishnah thus becomes one of the places where divinity may come to rest after the Temple’s destruction, and the study of the Mishnah is a means of offering oneself up. Mishnah here signifies not only codified law but also the mimetic capacities granted to oral learning through repetition. Uses of ke’ilu in LR7 begin with an exegetical equalization of sacrifice and repentance and are followed by an equalizing of sacrifice with study of the laws thereof. The rabbis now offer oral learning (an earlier meaning of the word ‘mishnah’) as the equivalent of sacrifice. They 44

b. Bava Batra 12a.

45 Leviticus Rabbah, Soncino ed.,

95, n. 1.

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have endowed their own text, and their own methods of study and exegesis, with canonical and cultural primacyand even with divine status. Study has been drawn into the mimetic spiral of text, interpretation, and lived experience. Samuel 46 said: [It is said], And if they [i.e. Israel] be ashamed of all that they have done, make known unto them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof and all forms thereof, and all the laws thereof, and write it in their sight; that they may keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them. This is the law of the house, etc. (Ezekiel 43:11ff). Was the form of the house in existence at that time [viz. of Ezekiel]? [Certainly not], but the Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘As long as you engage in the study thereof, it is as if (ke’ilu) you were building it’.

The second and third uses of ke’ilu in LR7 assert equivalent sacral value between the collective preoccupation (‫ )מתעסקים‬and the study of text and the performance of sacrificial rites. The root of this word, ‫עסק‬, connotes concerning oneself with a worldly matter, in the manner of a negotiation or dispute. 47 The rabbis might have had themselves in mind: their disputatious textual exegeses transform both the rite and the study thereof, both the Torah text and its commentary: study becomes a whole-hearted focus (though that heart be broken) on the transformative effects of the interiorization of cultic choreography. The cumulative effect is a sharpening of focus on the equivalences of and replacements for sacrifice. Again: in the first appearance of ke’ilu in LR7, repentance stands in for all the ritual preparations for sacrifice, and for all sacrifices; in the second use of ke’ilu, study becomes an enduring replacement for sacrifice, not just its equal. In the third, the study of oral learning is given the same valence as sacrifice: the mimetic and dialogical is posited as a worthy replacement for the ritually prescribed and univocal. 257F

46 Samuel of Nehardea, first generation Babylonian Amora.

See Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of Targumim, Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1099a.

47

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With this fourth use of ke’ilu, the ‘laws of the house’ become the enduring structure that replaces the house itself. The Temple is posited as a structure on which to erect the lasting study and interpretation of law and rite, rather than the reverse. The constructed and circumscribed site of cultic worship is absorbed and transformed into the geographically dispersed and exegetically diverse practice of preoccupation and engagement with text. The exegetical approach taken by the rabbis is a reflection of hermeneutical and historical circumstance: all that might once have been presumed to be eternal is ephemeral, and vice versa. That which is portable becomes central, replacing what, by its very physical centrality, was thought to be eternal but proved ultimately to be vulnerable. Ezekiel’s prophecy about the dimensions of the Temple is itself mimetically transformed: the rabbis, in citing a kind of contrition (as in Ps. 51:19) as a proper prerequisite for study, erect a virtual Temple through the workings of oral performative exegesis (see Fig. 2).

4. THE AKEDAH IN GENESIS RABBAH: KE ’ILU, SUBSTITUTION, AND DIVINE MIMESIS The interpretive energies of the Amoraic era were first turned to the Book of Leviticus and its extensive legal passages. Here, it may be surmised, the rabbis sought to interpret the laws of sacrifice as binding for all time, subject only to exegetical reformulation after the divinely foreseen destruction of the Temple. This was both an interiorization of rite and a counter to supersessionism: if all was foreseen, then the law was eternal, subject only to removal from the physical to the internal, spiritual plane. Of slightly later redactional provenance was Genesis Rabbah. Here, the rabbis turned their exegetical attention to the foundational stories of the canon, the Akedah among them. 48 In this context, the

48

Nahum Glatzer provides a comprehensive if not exhaustive list of rabbinic substitutes for sacrifice. See ‘The Concept of Sacrifice in Post-Biblical Judaism’, Essays in Jewish Thought (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 48–57. See also Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews,

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challenge faced by the Amoraim is to engage midrashic memory through the hermeneutic of substitution established through the Akedah, and formalized in the ritual cult. Through the retrojection of meaning and the re-presencing of mythohistorical text, the rabbis present the nature of the divine test, and the restraint of the divine realm, as mimetic and mutual recalibrations of the human-divine relationship. That is, God is not testing Abraham’s faith: he is (a) as Maimonides asserts, holding Abraham up as an example of supreme fidelity; and (b) modeling divine restraint in direct proportion to the human will to act in God’s name. Abraham’s combination of restraint and zeal, discussed in chapter 2, demonstrate that his interpretive acts show devotion as dependent upon interpretation. This transforms the means by which the covenant is preserved and enshrines study and interpretation as the primary means of commitment and communion. The rabbis rely extensively on this interpretive process to arrive at new formulations. To frame this exegetical procedure in terms of Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis, the rabbis take up the prefigured sense of sacrifice; configure it in the context of a bold and thoroughly human act of substitution; and refigure it through a verse that shows that God accepts human interpretation as a legitimate mimetic transformation of sacrifice. This ‘establishes atonement for the whole spectrum of sins without either the presence of the temple or functioning courts able to deliver punishment’. 49 Do not lay your hand upon the lad (Gen. 22:12). Where was the knife? Tears had fallen from the angels upon it and dissolved it. ‘Then I will strangle him’, said [Abraham] to [God]. ‘Do not lay your hand upon the lad’, was the reply. ‘Let us bring forth a drop of blood from him’. [Abraham] pleaded. ‘Nor do anything to him’ [God] answered … ‘For now I knowI have made it known to allthat you love Me, and you have not withheld [your favored son from me] … for indeed I ascribe merit to you trans. Henrietta Szold and Paul Radin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 224–33. 49 Halbertal, On Sacrifice, 43.

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as if (ke’ilu) I had bidden you to sacrifice yourself and you had not refused’ (GR 56:7).

In this remarkable passage, Abraham’s zeal is juxtaposed with divine sorrow, and Isaac’s binding mirrors the angelic inability to intervene in his behalf. The rabbis suggest that, even in the absence of a knife, Abraham’s eagerness to fulfill the will of God and his proposal of alternate means by which to offer up his son indicate such radical devotion that God must repeat, with increasing specificity, his request that Abraham not harm Isaac. 50 The rabbis also interpret God’s statement that he now knows Abraham’s devotion (yadati) to mean that God has made that devotion known to all. This undermines the interpretation that God did not know the extent of Abraham’s faith, or the outcome of the test. It also retrojects an interpretation of the divinely ordained trial: it is not a test of Abraham’s faithfulness, but rather the process through which God makes mutual faithfulness known. This interpretation suggests that acts that appear destructive on their face are in fact world-building and worldmaintaining acts through which the consecration of Israel to God, and the devotion of God to Israel, are heightened and renewed. The transformation of Abraham’s devotion into merit is effected through the use of the word ke’ilu (as if), the term that Fishbane has identified as formally completing the transformative power and effectiveness of such exchanges. 51 And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son (Gen. 22:13). Rabbi Judan said in Rabbi Banai’s name: he prayed to Him: ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Look upon the blood of this ram as if (ke’ilu) it were the blood of my son Isaac; its emurim, his emurim’, even as we 50

The passage also implies that Abraham’s zeal is excessive. His offer to strangle Isaac would in a sense be contrary to cultic law, which requires that an animal be sacrificed by draining the blood. After God rejects this possibility, Abraham suggests the drawing of blood. 51 Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’, 122. See also parallels of this mashal in TanB Vayera 40. See also Aggadat Bereshit 31A, in which a peacock is substituted for the child.

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The rabbis 52 deploy technical terms for sacrifices (emurim) and for acceptable replacements (zo tahat zo) and substitutions (zo t’murat zo) for such sacrifices. The mimesis of Abraham’s radically interpretive act is traced forward to the exchanges of animals in ritually acceptable sacrificial acts, then traced back to the rabbinically retrojected dialogue between God and Abraham. Here, Abraham mimetically takes up ke’ilu to transform the sacrifice that actually is conducted. The ‘concern of the ongoing tradition that the act of Abraham be formulated as the model for all valid acts of substitution in the Temple’ 53 is an instance of mimetic retrieval and transformation. In this way, the Akedah becomes a basic and essential Jewish mnemotechnic, through the retrojection and retrieval of levitical law and the substitution of the animal for the human sacrifice. As noted earlier, Abraham’s substitution of the ram for Isaac is not divinely directed, but it is his own interpretive act. The rabbis infer some regret on Abraham’s part: ‘Sovereign of the Universe: Regard it as though (ke’ilu) I had sacrificed my son Isaac first, then this ram in his stead (taḥtav)’ (GR 56:9). Abraham’s act would make the substitution of the ram into an additional sacrifice, and it serves to embed an additive nature into all such substitutions. Thus, substitutions, rather than being fading echoes of original acts, are enhanced rather than diminished through the substitutive act, and thus reconstitutive of the human-divine covenantal relationship. This is perhaps the central rabbinic response to rupture (and to Christianity): the reconstitution of the shattered cultural and covenantal pieces into something even greater, more holy, more dear to God for its very brokenness. In one respect, to be sure, the rabbis are no different than the inheritors of other cultures seeking recovery 52

Fishbane identifies these as either R. Yudan II or Yudan Nesia, of the early third century, and R. Benayah, a Tanna of the last generation. 53 Fishbane, op. cit., 131.

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from rupture: they seek to interpret the rupture in a way that will be culturally salvific. However, by employing a hermeneutic of retrospective prefiguration, they loop recovery into the destruction itself, and divine mercy into the judgment that rupture represents. As we have seen, later midrashic uses of ke'ilu continue the process of hermeneutical transformation through one-to-one substitution. Just as the Amoraim endow ‘performative mimesis of study’ with the efficacy of sacrifice, which ‘has its own independent merit’, so later authors and redactors identify correspondences, endorsed and encouraged even by God.54 Thus, hermeneutical transformations of sacrifice can be considered direct interpretive descendants of Abraham's substitution of the ram for Isaac: the archetypal instance of autonomous interpretation, through which the substitution takes on and even exceeds the qualities inherent in the original victim (GR 56:7), and through which enduring merit is earned. The physical substitution endows subsequent, hermeneutical substitutions with sacral efficacy. This is an example of the axial consistency of the agential spiral, which ‘cultivate[s] relationships between agents across distances of time and thereby perpetuate memories’.55 And these substitutions, in turn, provide a means for detecting aspects of divine care both in canonical, and then in cultural rupture. In this way, each rupture is a rung on the ladder of mimetic interpretation, each crisis provided its interpretive rung as a means for rising from crisis, and thereby constructing a cultural memory that is midrashic in nature, rising through layers of text and time. Interpretation renews the cycle of myth and mimesis, with each new midrashic transformation becoming embedded in living and textual memory. Here, crisis and destruction play a (re)formative role in the renewed expression of mutual, that is, human-divine, covenantal commitment. In his canonical work on the history of the interpretation of the Akedah, Spiegel notes that ke’ilu occurs repeatedly in the

54

Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’, 125–27. See also b. Menahot 110a. 55 VanderHaagen, “‘Agential Spiral’”, 187.

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sources regarding the Ashes of Isaac. 56 Spiegel refers here to Tannaitic and Amoraic midrashim, in which the substituted ram was depicted as a crucial, salvific component of fulfillment of the covenant. This substitution receives further elaboration in dialogues attributed to the sages in later midrashim. The ram is offered up as a burnt offering is completely consumed.; And yet, the sages say, its tendons become the strings of David’s harp, its skin Elijah’s mantle, and its horns shofars, the smaller at Mount Sinai and the larger preserved for use at the ingathering of exiles. 57 Thus, the ram is physically present in the kingly, prophetic, and eschatological activity of national life. Accepted as though (ke’ilu) it had been Isaac himself, the ramnot only its memory but its very matter is preserved in perpetuity, calling the community of memory into closer union with God through song, worship, and mindfulness of ancestral merit. Not only that: the ram, through the merit of Abraham’s willingness and through divine approval of the substitution of the ram for Isaac, is brought back to life. Here, the mimetic braid of myth, memory, and midrash is evident. The forward projection of the ram’s physical presence corresponds with the ‘retroprojective’ theological meaning with which the entire mythological event is invested. The ram livesnot just in the minds of rabbinic interlocutors or only in the merit of the archetypal substitutionbut even in the present moment, its bringing-forward a metonymic invocation of the power and divine endorsement of interpretation as a means of cultural resurrection. The ram thus predates, and retrospectively supersedes, any other interpretation of death, resurrections, and claims of a new covenant. R. Yose, a Tanna of the second century CE, reinforces the efficacy of the substitution by claiming that the ram was the bellwether of Abraham’s flock and was named Isaac. Here again, as in the Akedah narrative itself, the mimetic doubling of word, phrase, or attribute indicates a hypoleptical accumulation of significance and symbolism. R. Yose’s exegetical attention, having been drawn to the Last Trial, 41. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 123, n. 245.

56 Spiegel, 57 See

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possibility that Abraham’s favored son was indeed sacrificed and his ashes heaped upon the altar, is employed to play a critical role in personal and collectiveand utter and completerestoration from crisis. Hence, the ram, once sundered and dispersed, is knitted back together. Its name, its function, its very essence places it at the heart of the relationship between merit and memory. It is irreplaceable and eternal. As ke’ilu signals the transfiguration of the ashes of Isaac, heaped on top of the altar, so study, in later midrashic texts, is said to effect the very transformations previously accorded to sacrifice. Fishbane has identified and analyzed the significance of this mimetic substitution in rites of memory and memorialization, noting that much as the ram, as it were, becomes Isaac, so study becomes the new salvific cultural function, through which society, much like the oblated ram, is reconstituted and resurrected. 58 Thus, one-to-one correspondences, performatively adduced, serve as aides-mémoires, but more importantly ‘study is thus deemed a transformed priestly rite, whose sacrificial satisfactions may be achieved through rabbinic hermeneutics alone’. 59 No other interpretation can achieve priestly status. In such an instance, the fat and blood on the altar are reconstituted as the words that the sage develops and shares through midrashicmnemonic interpretation. ‘Hence, when a sage sits and expounds to the congregation, Scripture accounts it to him as if (ke’ilu) he had sacrificed fat and blood upon the altar’. 60 This merit is to extend to the entire congregation, through those very parts of the sacrificed ram:

58 Fishbane, ‘Aspects of the Transformation of Sacrifice’, 128–34. 59

Fishbane, ‘Torah Transformed’, in Yuval Levin, Thomas W. Merrill, and Adam Schulman, eds., Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver: Honoring the Work of Leon R. Kass (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 100. Emphasis Fishbane’s. 60 Avot de-Rabbi Natan, ed. Solomon Schechter, A IV, 18. Viewed at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Avot-de-RabbiNatan-Schechter-1887-HB38247.pdf, July 13, 2017.

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5. MEMORY, MIMESIS, AND MARTYRDOM: THE THEME OF THE S ECOND S LAYING The merit and validity of substitutions in sacrificial offerings, thus extended to the soul through study and prayer, were extended still further, through midrashic interpretation, to fasting and even selfmortification, whose domain was the human body. In times of siege and persecution, martyrdom came to be seen as a meritorious doubling: a donation of the whole self in memory, honor, and meritorious mimesis of Isaac. Spiegel’s treatment of this subject illuminates the midrashic interpretations to which the Akedah was subject in order to confer merit on the slaughtered Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley at the end of the eleventh century. Medieval chronicles record that, through sanctification of the divine name (or submitting to death as a Jew rather than life after forced conversion), entire communities submitted to the sword, wielded by fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and selves. In the poem penned by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, the author beseeches God to Recall to our credit the many Akedahs, The saints, men and women, slain for Thy sake. Remember the righteous martyrs of Judah, Those that were bound of Jacob. 61

In post- and extra-biblical sources on martyrdom, the act of surrendering one’s life is committed in the service of God and in sanctification of the divine name. 62 Part of this sanctification includes implicit 61 Ephraim

of Bonn, Akedah, in Spiegel, Last Trial, 152. 57b.

62 See, e.g., 2 Maccabees 6:12–16, 4 Maccabees, b. Gittin

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or explicit citation of precedents for martyrdom, of which Isaac is the supreme example. These invocations serve not only as further interpretations of the text, but as mimetic doubles of the archetypal act. Spiegel, however, pays particularly close attention to midrashic traditions in which the slaying of Isaac contains an internal doubling, in which Isaac is slain (or almost slain) a second time. 63 These second slayings bear the hallmarks of midrashic memory as defined in chapter 1: they contextualize moments of cultural, historical, and theological crisis with events recorded in Scripture, in order to create new meaning and formulate new ideological content out of crisis. By extending and intensifying the doubling pattern identified within the Akedah narrative itself, each second slaying extends the merit of the original act and embeds each new memory in the lengthening chain that binds cultural rupture and recovery to the original act and its series of mimetic repetitions. The aggadic traditions evident in R. Ephraim’s poem suggest that the angel’s double call to Abraham was due to Abraham’s having indeed slain Isaac, who was then revived with celestial dew, or perhaps the tears of angels. Such was the flood of these tears that Isaac was swept off the altar and into the Garden of Eden, where he was revived. But had he not been so carried off, Abraham would have slain him a second time. 64 Here we witness the profoundly mimetic qualities of the Midrashic Condition, as it absorbs and transforms ritual structure and cultural rupture into rearticulations of enduring myth. That mythic undercurrent flows backward into biblical text and forward into rabbinic text, historical chronicle, philosophy, mysticism, and liturgy. In the midrashic reading, the mediated nature of experience becomes the means by which the past is made newly present. Each slaying is a second slaying, but one that not only invokes but increases the merit of the original. Each new interpretation, rather than inSee, e.g., Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 32, 200b, and Spiegel, 47, n. 8. See Spiegel, Last Trial, 7 (n. 18), 129–38, and 42, n. 18. See also Midrash Tanḥuma, Vayera 23. Here Abraham rejects the first call, which comes from an angelic intermediary, but obeys the second call, which is spoken in God’s name. The theme of the second slaying will be taken up in more detail in Chapter Five. 63

64

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creasing distance from the original by means of accumulation, makes the narrative being interpreted more immediate, more urgent, and more proximate. Every sacrifice and every act of martyrdom accumulates merit, as did the sacrifice of the ram in place of or in addition to the favored son. Each memory is an act of teshuvah, of returning to the sacred and covenanted connections of text, not just to the interpretation of reality, but to its very creation. This return renews the cycle of mimesis that Ricoeur articulates in Time and Narrative, Vol. 1. 65 Here, lived experience is narratized and read, then looped back into lived experience. New events generate new interpretations of previous narratives; these, in turn, influence the narratization and interpretation of the present. Symbolic dimensions thus become coiled into the sequence of lived moments to be submitted to narrative structurization. Finally, ‘a new quality of time emerges’, in which ‘the power of revelation and transformation [are] achieved by narrative configurations when they are “applied” to actual acting (and suffering)’. 66 In just this way, rabbinic transformations of sacrifice establish interpretive substitution as the basis for midrashic memory. History, dormant until its narratization and interpretation, both awakens and is transformed through the mediating act of mimetic transformation. The interpretive act imbues historical events with meaning, and it is this meaning that is preserved and consulted when crises threaten to deprive time and events of their sacred significance.

6. POLYSEMY, INDETERMINACY, AND THE ‘AS IF’ OF MEMORY The multivalent nature of Scripture provided the rabbis, and indeed the numerous sects of post-Temple Israel, with a means of creating cultural coherence on the heels of the crisis of the Temple’s destruc65

For a thorough analysis of Ricoeur’s three-phased conception of mimesis, see Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections, 100–118. 66 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrated Time’, Philosophy Today 29, no. 4 (1985): 260. This topic is addressed in more detail in the subsequent chapter of this work.

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tion, and they did so through the interpretation of Scripture. The Amoraim, as interpretive masters, developed a hermeneutic that mimetically appropriated the polysemy of biblical text and that placed interpretations in careful juxtaposition both to the interpreted text and to other interpretations. Scholars such as Boyarin, Stern, and Fraade have approached the issues of polysemy and indeterminacy from diverse perspectives. Boyarin’s deconstructive and semiotic approach suggests that midrash is primarily a method of reading, in which adherence to or promotion of strict methodological or interpretive guidelines is eschewed in favor of radical exegetical creativity through textual mastery. For Boyarin, text is idealized history, a history written through intertextuality: the reading of a verse or passage of Scripture through its contextualization with another verse or passage. For us to understand the rabbis, we must read as the rabbis read. Boyarin’s highly theoretical approach tends to disprivilege text as an urgent exegetical response to crisis.67 This latter aspect of midrash is most deeply appreciated by Stern, Fraade, and, as previously noted, Fishbane. 68 Fraade emphasizes that Amoraic interpretation includes the voices of Tannaitic predecessors and that the aggadic midrash of the Amoraic era appears to feature a deliberate placement of opposing arguments in close textual proximity. However, contra Boyarin, Fraade asserts that these textual juxtapositions are not late, redactional arrangements, but are present throughout even the earliest rabbinic texts. This suggests that the culturally recohesive element of textual interpretation is em67

It should be noted that Boyarin does highlight the confluence of the national and personal significance in Rabbi Akiva’s midrash on Deut. 6:5 in BT Ber. 61b. The “apocalyptic view of the religious life” that R. Akiva propounds is consistent with midrashic interpretations that suggest Isaac’s willingness, even joy at the prospect of his martyrdom. This accords with, and serves as a precedent for, the commitment of medieval communities to selfannihilation, and sanctification of the Divine Name, as the definitive response to cultural crisis. See Boyarin, Intertextuality, 125–126. 68 Fraade offers a thorough critique of Boyarin’s theorization of rabbinic polysemy. See Fraade, ‘Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited’, AJS Review 31, no. 1 (2007): 1–40.

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bedded in scriptural exegesis from the earliest years of the postTemple era. Interpretations are set ‘not simply alongside one another, but in rhetorical dialogue, whether explicit or implicit’. 69 Stern notes that Boyarin confuses exegesis with its rhetorical function. For Stern, midrash, especially through the rhetorical device of the mashal, or parable, places tradition and the audience or reader in meaningful exchange. Stern’s wariness of excessive theorization and his keen appreciation of the cultural underpinnings of rabbinic hermeneutics suggest a historical urgency behind the ‘hermeneutic of anxiety’ evinced by the rabbis, emerging from concern over the loss of divine presence. In a mimetic double projection, the rabbis at times adopt an imperial model of God as a king profoundly ‘insecure and lacking confidence in his ability to exercise the power at his disposal. In portraying God this way’, Stern notes, ‘the Rabbis were surely mirroring their own feelings of insecurity, their own selfconscious powerlessness in the world, and their anger and resentment at the earthly powers who controlled their this-worldly existence’. 70 The contradictions of election and national destruction precipitated the urgent need to discover contradictions, mimetic pairings, and creative meaning-making in the emerging class of master interpreters. This resulted in the detection of dichotomies in the divine persona. The dialectical tension between the attributes of mercy and judgment, for example, or transcendence and immanence, were, Stern notes, resolved through the articulation of the most radical of mimetic-theological concepts, that of imitatio hominis: What distinguishes [characterizations of God in which he imitates human behavior]what makes them into viable characterizationsis not their transcendence or immanence but their humanlike behavior in all its unpredictability and strangeness … This can be seen most clearly when … God Himself undertakes to imitate human behavior, to adopt the anthropomorphic turn for Himself. In [these cases], God’s intention is not to demonstrate His abiding concern with mankind. He imitates human 69 Ibid., 11.

70 Stern, Midrash

and Theory, 90.

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behavior because He has no other satisfactory model to instruct Him as to how He should behave. 71

Hence, it would seem, the rabbinic attribution of anthropomorphic tendencies to God is an iterative loop of mutual imitations, one that above all brings to presentation the divine presence through an articulation of crisis, imitation, and reconciliation: a response to human-divine and intra-cultural rupture that resolves through reinterpretation. In this context, polysemy and indeterminacy are not purely theoretical constructs nor are they merely sociological or psychological theorizations of response to trauma and crisis. Rather, the accumulation of interpretations and their juxtapositions are lived and living responses to the intersection of life and text, moving in dialectical fashion between past and present, developing and constantly revising a chiastic structure of human action and experience. As Fraade notes, [t]his dynamic interplay of prospection and retrospectionin the very midst of forward progressionis as true of textual readings as it is of living in time. Even as we move individually from birth to death, and collectively from urzeit to endzeit, our experience of and actions in the present are determined to a large extent by our memories and retellings of the past. 72

The urgency of ongoing interpretation was for the rabbis a divine imperative: ‘[You shall keep and you shall perform] all the laws and rules that I have set before you this day (Deut. 32:11): Let them be as dear to you today as if [ke’ilu] you had received them today at Mt. Sinai; let them be as well rehearsed in your mouths as if [ke’ilu] you had heard them today.’ 73 Biblical interpretation was also a cultural necessity, as replacing the physical precincts of the Temple with the internalized precincts of textual mastery was, for the interpretive masters, a logical route toward cultural survival and continuity. Through this process, knowledge and memory became portable in a 71 Ibid., 88.

From Tradition to Commentary, 126. Sifre Deuteronomy (ed. Finkelstein), 124.

72 Fraade, 73

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precarious world: ‘If in the case of the Temple, which could be seen with the eyes and measured with the hand, a person needed to direct his heart and his eyes and ears [toward it], then how much more should this be with words of Torah, which are like mountains suspended by a hair’. 74

7. MEMORY AND IDENTITY Whereas halakhah emphasizes the preservation of memory through the regulation of actions along the horizontal plane of lived time, midrash emphasizes memory as a creative act, reconstituting postTemple memory around radical reinterpretations of text, and in contradistinction to Christian hermeneutical approaches. Thus, the reconstitution of culture after crisis renews and reemphasizes both temporal and anamnestic planes of communal action. Halakhic formulations proscribe and direct action; midrash directs interpretation, and thus memory’s meaning-making function. Midrash achieves this through the mimetic process of bringing to presentation, through performative dialogical encounter, the transformative representation of the crisis at hand. The crisis is endowed with meaning through a three-phased mimetic cycle of interpretation, emplotment, and subsequent reinterpretation. The doubling of word, phrase, and image encountered in midrash is evocative of the Akedah and emblematic of the doubled aspect of midrashic memory. The repetitions and reinterpretations of sacrificial law elaborated by the Amoraim, and their reinterpretations of the Akedah, correlate gaps in Scripture with chasms in culture. The ‘double-facing character’ of ancient biblical commentary, as Fraade notes, means that rabbinic commentary faces neither Scripture nor history exclusively, but instead moves between them and thus transforms them both. In the process, the rabbis form the society that they will lead, even as they assume leadership of it:

Sifre Deuteronomy on Deut. 32:26 (Fraade: §335 [See From Tradition to Commentary, 119]). 74

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If the work of commentary was to contribute to the solidification of a society of sages that desire to constitute Israel’s leadership, then it needed to provide those sages not only with a performative medium for their own shared self-understanding, but also with one by which they could effectively fashion for larger Israel a supple self-understanding that would make sense in and of the world, both presently and across time. 75

While historical considerations and halakhic hermeneutics are closely related, midrashic interpretations capture memory formation in midstride. The dialectical form of argumentation and elaboration established in rabbinic conventicles and Babylonian academies, as documented by, among others, Jeffrey Rubenstein, evoke a performative and even competitive study environment, in which exegetical ingenuity endows the interpreter with the ability to shape the emerging rabbinic culture’s direction, its self-conception, and its mnemonic skills. 76 Each interpretation, no matter how inventive or original, emerges from a context of interpretation and correlation with Scripture, which contains its own doublings and self-reflexive commentaries. We may call this context ‘culture’. The rabbinic interiorizations of sacrifice point to the increasing importance of the individual in the formation of cultural identity, but the conception of the ‘second slaying’ of Isaac provides a cultural-sociological key to reconstruction after rupture. Such a concept is not merely a literary trope or an act of interpretive sleight of hand: it is a response to history and Scripture from the point at which they meet, for interpreter, redactor, reader, and culture alike, and a powerful reconstitutive hermeneutic. These interlocutors are connected across time and text and advance the agential spiral across individual and collective, cultural and covenantal planes.

From Tradition to Commentary, 14, 19. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 49–51. See also Isaiah M. Gafni, ‘Rethinking Talmudic History: the Challenge of Literary and Redaction Criticism’, Jewish History 25, no. 3/4 (November 2011): 355–75.

75 Fraade, 76

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Through the process of mimetic elaboration and performative interpretation, the dialectical tension between crisis and meaning can be lessened. What is more, covenantal significance and divine care can be perceived as embedded in the crisis, and conveyed, with lovingkindness, from God to Israel, and from ancient stage to contemporary student, as the constant reinitiation of covenantal cleansing and renewal.

CHAPTER FOUR. SHALOM SPIEGEL AND THE MODERNIZATION OF MIDRASHIC MEMORY If man is more than his life, violence will attempt to kill him even to the retrenchment of the more; it is eventually this ‘more’ that is seen as too much. –Paul Ricoeur 1 If something within [the victim] remains unbroken … something has escaped [the destructive powers’] reach, and it is precisely this something … that must die. –Terrence Des Pres 2

The goal in this chapter is to apply the theorization of midrashic memory to an exemplary modern work of scholarship: Shalom Spiegel’s The Last Trial. In this work, Spiegel provides historical and exegetical context for a medieval poem on the slaughter and selfsacrifice of Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley during the Crusades. In doing so, he also creates a towering work of midrash, complete with a hypoleptic accumulation and interplay of midrashic sources on the Akedah. The work explores the existence of narrative Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 227. 2 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 60. 1

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themes hidden in redactional and editorial strata, and it both documents and exemplifies the propensity to return to the Akedah at times of cultural rupture. In collating and consulting these sources, Spiegel implicitly mourns the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, even as he employs the interpretive ingenuity that has long been turned to as a means of recovery. Spiegel’s approach takes as its point of departure the medieval invocations of the Akedah as a narrative that, through ritual reenactment, exegetical reinterpretation, and liturgical repetition, became an ever-happening event. 3 On one level, Spiegel’s work is a masterpiece of scholarship: he demonstrates how, in the chronicles of Jewish history and in the prayers of both daily and High Holiday liturgy, the Akedah serves as the template for discerning divine care even within the midst of contingency and calamity. Spiegel shows how, through liturgical repetition and imaginative reinterpretation, Jewish consciousness is repeatedly called back to the deep relationship between the inscrutability of divine will, on the one hand, and the necessity of exegetical ingenuity to discern, obey, and even influence that will, on the other. Spiegel demonstrates how the sub-textual inference of Isaac’s sacrifice and resurrection is an ‘as-if’ exegetical transformation of crisis, one that opens interpretive space critical to the discernment (or creation) of meaning that is crucial to cultural reconstruction. The substitutive procedure deployed in the Akedah, and in its midrashic interpretations, is the process through which strategies for recovery are retrojected into the event itself. The ‘retrospective prefiguration’ inherent in the correspondences between current crises and scriptural narrative endow each new crisis with meaning: divine care is revealed as a fundamental aspect of that crisis through the formation of hermeneutical connection to the Akedah, the ur-crisis.

3

Arnold J. Band best articulated the midrashic qualities of Spiegel’s masterwork. See Band, ‘Scholarship as Lamentation: Shalom Spiegel on “The Binding of Isaac,”’ Jewish Social Studies, New Series 5, no. 1/2, American Jewish History and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Autumn 1998– Winter 1999): 80–90.

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On another level, however, Spiegel employs midrashic structure and rhetoric to create new midrash. We shall attempt to show how Spiegel’s approach bears both the hallmarks of narrative configuration outlined by Ricoeur and the hypoleptical accumulation of and response to previous interpretations as delineated by Jan Assmann. Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutical spiral’ and Sarah C. VanderHaagen’s ‘agential spiral’ provide hermeneutical models that illuminate the ongoing process of midrashic appropriation and reformulation, proceeding through its threefold mimetic process of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. However, this ‘agential spiral’ 4 bears marks peculiar to scribal culture, which Assmann has formulated in his theorization of hypolepsis: Hypolepsis … proceeds from the belief that truth can never be more than an approximation, and the hypoleptic process is one of engaging in approximations. It draws its momentum from the awareness that knowledge is never complete, and there is always more to be had. You can only come closer to the truthagain, this is fundamental to hypolepsisby freeing yourself from the delusion that you can keep starting afresh, by recognizing that you have been born into an ongoing process, by seeing which way things go, and by consciously, understandingly but also critically learning what your predecessors have already said. 5

This ongoing process is one of mimetic appropriation and transformation and of new cultural strategies developed through dialogical interaction between texts and interpreters. Assmann notes that, under such conditions, truth claims are developed in competitive circumstances, in which the ‘dissonant plurality’ of voices maps a way toward new formulations for new conditions.6 It is precisely this process that undergirds reformulations of the Akedah and contrib-

4

See Chapter One, n. 16. Memory and Early Civilization, 261. 6 Ibid. 5 Assmann, Cultural

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utes to its decisive and ongoing influence in the formation of midrashic memory. This chapter will conclude with a consideration of how midrashic memory necessitates a reformulation of cultural and hermeneutical theory, which will be the subject of chapter 5. As we shall see, the compartmentalization of cultural and hermeneutical theory has obscured a vital component of the Amoraic project: the simultaneous and intertwined, exegetical and social construction of reality. 7

1. SPIEGEL AND THE ‘AS IF’ OF MIDRASHIC MEMORY Spiegel demonstrates how midrashic exegetical transformations are frequently initiated by the term ke’ilu, or ‘as if’. The ‘as if’ through which the substitution of the ram for Isaac is endorsed is summoned as the sacred precedent for the martyrdom of medieval German communities. Spiegel models this procedure as an implicit response to the Holocaust and the recovery represented by the establishment of the State of Israel. Spiegel’s exploration of the ‘as if’ procedure facilitates a hypoleptical accumulation of possible interpretations and thus possible responses to crisis. It pries open the seam in the text that suggests that Isaac was slain and resurrected and that his ashes form the basis of the altar in the Temple on Mount Moriah. Isaac’s status as living and having died in a sense makes him the Schrӧdinger’s Cat of Torah: his quantum state is emblematic of the transformative capacities of midrashic memory, in which loss is transformed into elevation and sanctification.8 Thus, contemporary aspects of Jewish crisis and recovery echo and often consciously inSee Paul Mandel, ‘The Origins of Midrash in the Second Temple Period,’ in Carol Bakhos, ed., Current Trends in the Study of Midrash (Boston: Brill, 2006), 30. 8 Schrӧdinger’s Cat is the name of a thought experiment devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrӧdinger in 1935. Schrӧdinger posits a paradox highlighting the counterintuitive aspects of quantum superpositions, in which atoms and subatomic particles remain in indefinite or multiple and even contradictory states until they are observed. In his paradox, the cat, representing an atom, could, under certain circumstances, be simultaneously alive and dead. 7

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voke Abraham’s shattering test, Isaac’s (near-)death, and his restoration (or resurrection) to life. It is significant that Spiegel publishes this work in the first years after World War II, in the wake of the near-total destruction of European Jewry. Although Spiegel does not mention the Holocaust, he engages the narratization process of the Akedah, as a fundamental and ongoing Jewish response to crisis, in which sense- and meaning-making emphasize the role of divine care in the unfolding of crisis. Once divine care is established, the response is designed to extend and fortify the relationship between God and his people. Midrashic memory is formed and consistently renewed by this process. Spiegel demonstrates how the exegetical transformations produced by the Amoraim derived from historical and exegetical concerns that were interpenetrable and inter-fluential. 9 The ‘as if’ procedure provides a variety of different potential mnemonic pathways for the development of midrashic memory. Each pathway develops through narratization of alternative interpretations of biblical text and its lacunae. In order to better understand this procedure, we must return to the work of Paul Ricoeur and examine his analysis of the narratizing process.

2. RICOEUR: THE THREEFOLD OF NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND MEMORY In his extensive work on the relationship between narrative, history, and memory, Paul Ricoeur insists on the ‘irreducibly narrative character of history’. 10 He suggests that analytic philosophy has elucidated general laws by which history functions, thereby overlooking the fact that an event that has already occurred has already been narratized: causation has been, as it were, baked into the explanation of the sequence of events that history describes. As narrative is emplotted in a framework of temporality, through a threefold mimetic proSee Richard Kalmin, ‘Midrash and Social History’, in Bakhos, ed., Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, 133–59. 10 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Narrative Function’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 275. 9

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cess, it induces real-world action, thus continuing narrative’s influence. Ricoeur asserts that, because ‘history is a species of the genus story’, it in essence retrojects linearity and causation into a dense matrix of action, reaction, and interaction.11 Ricoeur is in one sense trying to resolve the paradox articulated by Schrödinger, which posits a ‘superposition’ that, in terms of understanding history, would mean that a historical event could exist in all possible states simultaneously. In quantum physics, the observer effect is solved by defining both observation and measurement in quantum terms. Ricoeur seeks the same kind of solution for history, untangling its quantum system so that we may see the system observing itself. To the extent this is possible, the student of history can better understand that its act of self-observation is critical to its existence, just as its expression through helplessly ambiguous language is not an obstacle to understanding but rather an aspect of its essence and its relationship to us. In this model, memory does not precede history but comes after it (p. 161): it relies on its own three-legged stool, composed of testimony, archive, and documentary proof.

3. THREE PHASES OF NARRATIZATION In his landmark work on memory, Memory, History, Forgetting (MHF), Ricoeur’s abiding concern is the ‘problematic boundary between reality and fiction’, because it is here that his hermeneutic of suspicion rests its gaze (MHF, 163). Each aspect of Ricoeur’s thought is triadic: a mimetic spiral weaving history as it weaves the interpretation of that selfsame history. This triadic procession closely mirrors Ricoeur’s threefold mimetic process of the prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration of narrative. 12 The tripartite temporal universe of ‘lived time, cosmic time, and historical time’ (p. 154) correlates with the three-phase mimetic process outlined earlier and with the historiographic process Ricoeur outlines regarding testimony, archive, and documentary proof (pp. 161–81). These phases lead to the process of Explanation/Understanding (p. 182). What Ricoeur rec11 Ibid., 277–78. 12 See chapter 1.

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ognizes here is the passage of history from the fluid stream of time into the ordered boxes, shelves, and perspectives of the archivist and the historian. This ordering cannot come to exist without being birthed by testimony which is itself memory’s birth into language and the past’s birth into the present. The archive meets memory at the point of testimony. This, then, is where the agential spiral emerges from the forward-moving past, sectioning narrative as temporal, spatial, and social sequences that begin to remove history from the realm of memory and that bring the historian’s perspective from his fluid interior into the world of the archive, in which exploration becomes interpretation. Documentary proof reveals itself out of the request of documents for their testimony, and the rendering of judgment, in narrative form, as to their veracity and the lessons that emerge therefrom. Ricoeur quotes Paul Lacombe: ‘No observation without hypotheses, no facts without questions’ (MHF, 177). The entire process rests on linguistic procedures of witnessing, documentation, and preservation through language. Ricoeur maintains that language is where history is formed, because the edifice of narrative needs a structural skeleton to keep it from collapsing. It cannot stand without the semiotics of speech. Ricoeur knows that this can lead to a ‘general crisis of testimony’ (MHF, 181) because the moving referents and the thorough lack of objectivity mean that even an event whose horror, magnitude, and painstaking documentation cannot be denied is in fact at times denied on the very basis by which it has been horribly affirmed: its existence so far beyond the bounds of the comprehensible opens the door to implausible theories. The scale of its horror threatens to render all testimony on such an event incomprehensible. The crisis of testimony is compounded by the mediating and mediated nature of language, whose ambiguity makes it possible to interrogate and undermine the integrity of even the most unwavering witness. Language does the work of ‘linking memory to mourning’ (MHF, 181), but it also requires the next step: seeking to resolve the dialectical tension between explanation and understanding, to make sure that we understand that the testimony we read exists within us, creating a kind of inter-being (inter-esse, per Hanna Arendt [MHF, 183]). As such, it cannot be untrue and also cannot be fully known.

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In the phase of Explanation/Understanding, Ricoeur focuses on the triad of the economic, social, and cultural time spans. The history of mentalities as defined by the Annales school helps us understand this triad because (as defined by Robert Mandrou), ‘its objective is the reconstitution of behaviors, expressions and silences that express conceptions of the world and of collective sensibilities; representations of images, myths and values, acknowledged or affecting groups or society as a whole, and that constitute the contents of collective psychology, provide the fundamental elements for this study’ (MHF, 195); or, as Ricoeur puts it in yet another trinity: ‘worldviews, structures, conjunctures’ (p. 191). Explanation/Understanding takes not only time but space as one of its abiding mysteries and challenges (triad: ‘lived space, geometrical space, and inhabited space’ [p. 152]); it understands them as different aspects of the same unity, as Ricoeur makes clear when he explores how cities are built depictions of collective memory, and how a historical novel, or a Freudian analysis of history, helps hurl us from the causative and linear explanations of objectivity. Not merely archives or documents, then, not merely people or their testimony, but every built, sculpted, created, or engineered object in space and time is an expression of memory. Representations absorb and oppose mentalities by confining them, swallowing them whole, and then being utterly transformed, even killed, by them. The gathering of testimony into archive, the organization of archive into narrative, and the presentation of narrative as documentary proof are all interhappening. 13 Because this is so, we cannot follow a straight trail of archival documents to a singular truth. Instead, we must recognize that we ourselves comprise testimony, archive, and proof; we are coming to be and passing away along with the event, the interpretation, and the chronologized fact. We have indulged in this excursus because the implications of Ricoeur’s conception of the mimetic spiral for the genre of midrash and the concept of midrashic memory are significant. As narrative is See Yoshiko Imaizumi, Sacred Space in the Modern City: The Fractured Pasts of Meiji Shrine, 1912–1958 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 63. 13

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woven from strands of act, event, and interpretation, interpretation becomes a process negotiated between individual agents and larger social forces. The inter-occurrence of these phenomena both retroject and project interpretations: in the former case, narratization is projected into events that already have transpired; in the latter case, a template of narratization is constructed for events in the phase of germination. In the case of the Amoraim, interpretation is itself an outgrowth of discursive play and rhetorical mastery, played out against the fluid conditions of cultural recovery. 14 Most important, the radical reformation of agency in rabbinic discourse has the effect of telescoping temporal action, and this in turn extends individual influence into temporal and spatial frames in which it had not previously existed. That is, in midrash, the linear and synchronic quality of narrative explanation is used against itself in order to create parallel frames of action. These are then carved into mnemonic pathways in the mimetic procedure that Ricoeur outlines in Time and Narrative, vol. 1, and that was included in the wider discussion of mimesis in chapter 2. The mimetic development of understanding is thus multiform. It results from the elaboration of interpretive plasticity, in which multiple levels of action and understanding are inter-possible. Midrashic reformulation thus also has the effect of extending individual and collective agency, precisely when such an extension is needed for cultural survival. 15 The threefold mimetic process of narrative prefig14

The conditions in which the Amoraim sought to continue the work of reconstruction through interpretation are addressed in numerous works. Those that most thoroughly address rabbinic hermeneutics in the context of cultural upheaval include: Urbach, Sages, 603–48; Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1962), 100–127; Gedalia Alon, Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1980–84; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29–36, 515–47; Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 96–138; and Safrai, ‘Era of the Mishnah and the Talmud’, 307–87. 15 See VanderHaagen, “‘Agential Spiral,’” 187–89.

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uration, configuration, and refiguration occurs, as it were, out in the open, in Amoraic midrash. With respect to the passages analyzed previously in chapter 3, and the Akedah itself, the mimetic process not only retrojects multiple levels of action and meaning, but it then contributes to the retro-projection of such meanings back into the lived experience of rabbinic discourse. Put another way, the world-maintaining strategies evident in midrashic interpretations are appropriated and adapted by the Amoraim. Aggadic midrash, rather than being merely whimsical or wildly improvisatory, is a deliberate mimetic, pluriform refiguration of world and text as read and responded to, each by the other. Hence, the crisis of covenant and culture experienced by the rabbis is confronted through the development of an exclusive relationship between the people, the text, and the divine. Each ‘as-if’ internalization of rite reinforces the bond between Israel and its God. We have explored a cluster of uses of the word ke’ilu as such examples of this mimetic activity. The rabbis use ke’ilu to transfer the ritual and even ontological structure of sacrifice from the communal/exterior to the individual/interior plane of experience. This is mimesis not as mere imitation but, in Ricoeur’s words, as the process by which ‘a tradition is constituted by the interplay of innovation and sedimentation’. 16 Here, text and exegetical strategy are tightly interwoven and co-emergent.

4. JAN ASSMANN AND THE IRON WALL: HYPOLEPSIS, PERMEABILITY, AND MIDRASHIC MEMORY The shift from archaism to hermeticism identified by Ricoeur can be traced, as Assmann notes, to the dialogic interplay of figures from different temporal and geographical spheres. The caesura from which this shift originatesthe destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent development of rabbinic exegetical cultureis the wellspring of midrashic memory. However, this exegetical strategy is neither purely midrashic nor exclusively historical. Nor is it unilinear or exempt from internal contradiction. Rather, it is a semi16 Ricoeur, Time

and Narrative, 1:66.

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permeable membrane through which interpretive transformations are absorbed. Perhaps the most instructive example of this is the iron wall that Amoraic sages propose in the Babylonian Talmud. Assmann asserts that a ‘brazen wall’ is a deliberately constructed and impenetrable boundary between a self-selected and exclusionary group and the ‘assimilatory culture’ from which it secedes. 17 However, Assmann’s theorization of the closure of canon and the formation of the iron wall misapprehends a crucial feature of midrashic interpretation. This misapprehension is founded in unilinear and constructivist views of the formulation of history and memory: views that appear inconsistent with post-Temple epistemology and theology. As Bokser shows, the wall to which Assmann refers is not a barrier erected between God and Israel through the destruction of the Second Temple, but a removal of that barrier. 18 Bokser demonstrates that ‫נפסקה‬, the nifal form of the root ‫פסק‬, which is customarily interpreted to mean that Israel is cut off from God, actually suggests that the barrier has been removed. The Amoraic statement from b. Berakhot 32b is customarily translated as follows: ‘And Rabbi Elazar said: Since the day the Temple was destroyed an iron wall separates Israel from their Father in heaven.’ Bokser notes that this can be read as saying, ‘the iron wall separating Israel from their father in heaven has been removed’. This reading would suggest that the Temple, although originally a medium or site of intimate communion, had become a barrier between Israel and God, and thus its destruction was a divine act of cleansing mercy. In effect, the Temple had been made a sacrificial substitute for Israel itself. 19 Its destruction opened the way for the interiorization of ritual praxis, and the development of a religion based not in sacrificial rite but in textual interpretation. Individual immediacy could thus transform communal praxis, even while preserving it. This interiorization 305F

17 Assmann, Cultural

Memory and Early Civilization, 183.

18 Bokser, ‘Wall Separating God and Israel’, 349–74. 19

Ibid., 361, 362, n. 37. Bokser draws from a range of Talmudic sources, including b. Menahot 97a: ‘R. Johanan and R. Eleazar both said: When the Temple existed, the altar atoned for a person, but now, when the Temple no longer exists, a person’s table atones for him’.

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of rite extended the radical creativity inherent in midrashic interpretation, a creativity that Assmann overlooks and that is the motive force behind midrashic memory and cultural recovery. In short, the Temple’s destruction did not erect the iron wall but demolished it, thereby ensuring the ongoing hypoleptical accumulation and articulation of new interpretations of text and the deployment of new strategies for cultural survival. It is precisely this dialectical re-contextualization of text and history that the rabbis brought to the task of world maintenance. The rabbis filled the onto-theological void by reinterpreting canon in ways that ‘discovered’ and retrojected meaning and purpose in the intertextual and dialogical accumulations of nomos. Such interpretations, however, were not unitary or linear. The rabbis maintained a dialogic stance toward the Bible. Thus, as Assmann notes, the ‘hypoleptic frame could be extended … into a sphere of communication that could dispense with interaction, that is, an area in which “what the previous speaker had said” might have been said 2,000 years ago’. 20 In this framework, destruction becomes a mimesis of creation that, through interpretation, can result not only in a culture’s survival but in the ‘discovery’ of new meanings, and new directions for cultural recovery, unearthed in the layers (literary, temporal, redactional) of canonical text. This search for new dimensions of meaning in caesurae occurred in and through text because for the rabbis, text is not merely ‘a social process akin to other social processes’, 21 but the selfregenerating template for all social processes. To the extent that biblical text is a template for social process, then, rabbinic text must be seen as the construction of a social reality. To put it in both Bergerian and Ricoeurian terms: what is externalized (mimesis1) in the Bible is objectivated, or mediated and mimetically transformed (mimesis2) through dialogical interpretive play, and then internalized (mimesis3) through study and instruction. What begins in imaginaAssmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 258. See also ibid., nn. 49 and 51. 21 Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 14. 20

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tive relationship and serious play is, through transformative mimetic exegesis, brought into close and carefully calibrated harmony with that to which it is compared. The essential operation of meaning-making, then, is narratization. Through emplotment, and the imputation of causality in selecting and connecting salient points, narratization constructs the meaning it seeks to uncover. The order of the narrated event is essentially a function of the narration and not the order of the event itself, since narrations aim at constructing coherent stories, which are accepted by the audience. 22

It is within the diachronic delineation of a sequence of eventsits characters, antecedent circumstances, tensions, and resolutionsthat a narrative retrospectively orders events that previously may have seemed arbitrary, disconnected, or bereft of meaning. In endorsing the claim that ‘it is not textual or referential ambiguity that compels interpretive activity in narrative comprehension, but narrative itself’, we are asserting that the interpretive activity represented in midrashic discourse is a process of creation of alternative pathways to cultural recovery. 23 In the hands of the rabbis, hermeneutical creativity is a matter of spiritual and cultural life and death. No less is true of Shalom Spiegel’s The Last Trial.

5. SPIEGEL’S THE L A ST TRIA L AS A WORK OF MIDRASHIC MEMORY In The Last Trial, Spiegel illuminates early medieval associations between the Akedah and the mass martyrdom of Jewish communities during the Crusades to outline a searing if implicit midrashic response to the Holocaust. The book introduces a poem of some 104 lines, by Rabbi Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn, published for the first 22

Siegfried J. Schmidt, ‘Memory and Remembrance: A Constructivist Approach’, in Erll and Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies, 193. 23 Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 9. I touched on this theme in chapter 2.

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time in Spiegel’s work. The poem of twenty-six stanzas was written shortly before the end of Rabbi Ephraim’s life and some fifty years after he, as a thirteen-year-old boy, had taken refuge with his family in the fortress of Wolkenburg, under the protection of the Bishop of Cologne, to escape the destruction visited upon his community during the Second Crusades in 1146. Spiegel introduces this brief poem with a book-length essay of 138 pages, written in Hebrew and setting the poem primarily in exegetical rather than historical context. Through mnemonic associations and extensive midrashic crossreferences, Spiegel brings the vast compendia of aggadic interpretations of the Akedah to bear upon the persecution, slaughter, and self-sacrifice of Jews in medieval Germany, and, indirectly, to the near-total annihilation of European Jewry by the Third Reich. In doing so, Spiegel takes up the mimetic-midrashic process of connecting historical crises through the theological-exegetical connections they share with the Akedah. The Last Trial collates responses to historical crisis through the crisis to which Abraham and Isaacand, implicitly, Sarahare subjected. The Last Trial thus extends the mimetic spiral: by means of midrashic remembering, a response to the Holocaust is mimetically developed and merely implied, and a path to interpretation and cultural recovery is proposed. This memory form is recognizable in the work’s distinctly oral style: the author addresses the reader directly and personally, even while summoning, with considerable reach and mastery, a vast range of textual allusions to the Akedah. The parallels to the hermeneutical and intertextual inventiveness of Amoraic midrash are repeated and unmistakable. In his introduction to his English translation of Spiegel’s work, Judah Goldin notes the mimetic qualities of Spiegel’s masterwork. In its original Hebrew, The Last Trial weaves together the numerous strands of interpretation and appropriation of the Akedah, taking on the qualities of the literary genre on which it comments. Spiegel accomplishes this while making narrative and historical sense of the destruction of the Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley in the late eleventh century. Spiegel has appropriated the biblical word when a biblical tone is required, the midrashic manner when midrashic conversation and exchange must be dominant, the payyetanic flourish when

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only incantation does justice to the fact that must be acknowledged, the chronicler’s detail where only by recitative can the enormity of the event be indicated … By summoning biblical, midrashic, mishnaic, Talmudic, halakhic, haggadic, liturgical, exegetical, and modern statements and manners of speaking, Spiegel is reporting not only what sources say but how they say it. As a result, he adds to contemporary Hebrew expression the resonance of the classical sources, and reinforces the uninterrupted continuity of a literary and intellectual tradition from biblical days to our own. 24

In this adept analysis of Spiegel’s method, Goldin captures the mimetic give and take that characterizes midrash. In a larger sense, however, Goldin also reveals the mimetic-midraschic quality of Spiegel’s project: The Scriptures are not only a record of the past but a prophecy, a foreshadowing and foretelling, of what will come to pass. And if that is the case, text and personal experience are not two autonomous domains. On the contrary, they are reciprocally enlightening: even as the immediate event helps make the age-old sacred text intelligible, so in turn the text reveals the fundamental significance of the recent event or experience. 25

What is more, Spiegel’s text addresses the reader through the modalities of traditional learning, evoking the give and take of performative midrashic engagement. There is a distinctly oral quality in this literary composition. The reader is addressed directly, is summoned personally to consider the problems raised, to attend as the sources speak for themselves and as the scholar-author lists possible reasons for the particular statement. This is actually the way texts have always been studied in Jewish academies of higher learning. 26 Judah Goldin, ‘Introduction,’ in Spiegel, Last Trial, xxii–xxiii. Emphasis mine. 26 Ibid., xxiii. 24

25 Ibid., xvi.

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Spiegel has also placed the reader’s attention directly at Ricoeur’s blurred boundary between reality and fiction. This is partly because Spiegel is confronting the incommensurability of the destruction of entire Jewish communities in Germany. The Last Trial was originally published in a Festschrift to mark the seventieth birthday of Professor Alexander Marx, historian and librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It was published in 1950, when the scale and barbarity of the Holocaust was just beginning to be documented and comprehended.27 Spiegel’s work engaged the Midrashic Condition in the act of contextualizing the Holocaust with another catastrophe in the history of European Jewish life, even while honoring the life and career of a celebrated scholar through a traditional form of academic encomium. In tracing the Akedah from its formative influences through liturgy, text, and history, Spiegel not only documented the workings of midrashic memory but also engaged and embodied it. Although the Holocaust is never mentioned in The Last Trial, the work’s historical timing, its documentation of the devastation of German Jewish communities, and especially its summoning of the Akedah at a moment of cultural crisis, mark it as a masterwork of midrashic memory. 28 As Band has noted, Goldin does not appear to consider the possibility that The Last Trial (hereafter, LT) is itself a midrashic work. 29 We focus next on three aspects of Spiegel’s work: the elucidation of themes of the sacrifice of the firstborn and the placement of his ashes in the base of an altar; Spiegel’s analysis of the deployment of the Akedah themes in High Holiday liturgy; and the theme of the ‘second slaying’ in midrashic sources on the Akedah. These themes indicate the mimetic narratizing processes that may have influenced the shaping of the story of the Akedah. Furthermore, they constitute core processes of Jewish memory creation. It is thus not only the See Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 28 Band, ‘Scholarship as Lamentation’, 85. 29 Ibid., 83. 27

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Akedah itself, but the methods through which it attains its form that influence the shaping of midrashic memory.

6. THE ASHES OF ISAAC Spiegel’s work begins with the analysis of an irregularity on the surface of the biblical text: although Isaac is spared by the angelic intervention (Gen. 22:11–12), he does not appear in the Torah again until two chapters later, when his bride-to-be Rebecca is brought to him by Abraham’s servant. Invoking the rabbis, Spiegel asks, ‘Where was Isaac’ (LT, 3). He then draws the reader’s attention to Amoraic interpretations of the patriarch’s absence: ‘And where was Isaac? R. Berekiah said in the name of the rabbis of the other place: He sent him to Shem to study Torah30 … R. Jose b. R. Hanina said: He sent him [home] at night, for fear of the [evil] eye’ (GR, 56:11). Spiegel then adduces commentary from other midrashic and later rabbinic and philosophical works, pondering Isaac’s absence. The first of these is from Midrash ha-Gadol, a late (fourteenth century) midrashic anthology. It reports in the name of R. Eleazar b. Pedat, like R. Berekiah, a fourth-generation Amora: ‘Although Isaac did not die, Scripture regards him as though [ke’ilu] he had died and his ashes lay piled on the altar’. 31 Spiegel follows this ‘as-if’ transformation, which we have already highlighted as prevalent in Amoraic midrash regarding the Akedah and transformations of sacrifice, into the interstices of midrashic interpretation and mythic folklore from ancient Israel and from other cultures as well. Spiegel notes early medieval accounts of angels bearing Isaac to Paradise in order to be healed from the wounds inflicted on him by his father; these appear to be of ancient origin. Spiegel further notes that, in midrash, Isaac is the name bestowed upon the ram. Its exalted status is a mimetic adaptation of the status of the favored son: it is the bellwether of Abraham’s flock. Isaac the ram is then substituted for Isaac the son. The death of this 30

Rabbi Berekiah was a fourth generation Amora of the land of Israel. He refers here to the sages of Babylonia. 31 Midrash ha-Gadol on Gen. 22:19; see Spiegel, Last Trial, 4, n. 2.

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venerable substitute propitiates the deity: indeed, is deemed superior. The ‘ashes of Isaac’, it is said, form the basis of the altar that is built on Mount Moriah, directly under the throne of the Divine Majesty. Are they those of Isaac the ram, or Isaac the son? Spiegel makes note of ancient Greek narratives of child sacrifice, practiced by heroes such as Aristodemus, Agamemnon, and Phrixus, firstborn son of Athamas. Phrixus was to be sacrificed in order to propitiate the god who had caused a severe drought, but the god sent a ram that carried Phrixus away from the place of sacrifice. He sacrificed the ram as a thanksgiving offering (LT, 11). The Greek chronicler Pausanias, who was a contemporary of the earliest Amoraim, says the altar to Zeus on Mt. Olympus contained the ashes of the thighs of victims sacrificed to Zeus. Porphyrius (Porphyry), also a contemporary of the Amoraim, related an account of an Arabian people who annually sacrificed a boy who was then buried under an altar at which they worshipped. 32 The similarities between certain Greek and Israelite myths are well documented; their mimetic transformations are indicative of the regard some rabbinic sages had for particular aspects of Hellenistic culture. 33 However, to the Amoraim, the ram is not only a substitute but also a metonym for Israel: ‘Because the Patriarch Abraham saw the ram extricate himself from one thicket and go and become entangled in another, the Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: “So will thy children be entangled in countries, changing from Babylon to Media, from Media to Greece, and from Greece to Edom; yet, they will eventually be redeemed by the ram’s horn, as it is said, And the Lord God will blow the horn” [Zech 9:14]’ (GR 56:9). The entanglement in the thicket is what costs the ram its life and yet enables its eternal 32 See Lieberman, Hellenism

in Jewish Palestine, 162–63. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism, 181. Lieberman has documented the similarities in scribal, redactional, and editorial activity between rabbinic scribes and the Greek treatment of Homeric texts, as well as the Israelite absorption of technical terms and other vocabulary. See Lieberman, op. cit., 20–27.

33

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exaltation. Just so, Israel, ensnared in a thicket of competing and cross-fertilizing cultures, is both existentially threatened and eternally preserved. Like Temple worship itself, like Isaac, and indeed as with Israelite religion writ large, the destruction and offering up of the ram leads to its enduring life.34 The ram is retrojected to the time of the Creation by R. Josiah, a Tanna of the second century (m. Avot 5:6; b. Pesahim 54a), and brought forward throughout the ages by R. Hanina ben Dosa, a first-century Tanna, to whom the following is attributed: That ram, not a part of it went to waste: its tendons became the ten strings of the harp that David used to play on; its skin became the leather girdle around the loins of Elijah; as to its horns

34

The parallels to Christian belief are, of course, unmistakable. Isaac is seen in Christian sources as a precursor of Jesus, who performs the ultimate redemptive act of martyrdom. See, e.g., Spiegel, op. cit., 84–85; John T. Greene, ‘Selected Christian Interpretations of the Aqedat Izhaq’, in Michael S. Caspi and John T. Greene, eds., Unbinding the Binding of Isaac (New York: University Press of America, 2007), 7–68; Vermès, ‘Redemption and Genesis xxii’, 193–227, esp. 223, where Vermès notes that ‘the Akedah theme, bound, as in Judaism, to the Servant motif, belongs to the oldest pre-Marcan stratum of the Christian kerygma’. Scholars described Paul’s depiction of Jesus as ‘Son’ and ‘sacrifice’ as being a typological (and mimetic) adoption and adaptation of Isaac. See, e.g., J. Edwin Wood, ‘Isaac Typology in the New Testament’, New Testament Studies 14, no. 4 (1968): 583–89; Robert J. Daly, ‘The Soteriological Significance of the Sacrifice of Isaac’, The Catholic Bible Quarterly 39, no. 1 (January 1977): 45–75; and E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). As noted in the previous chapter, the development of the importance of the Binding of Isaac in Judaism occurs at least in part to preserve the narrative as a Jewish story, as against the view of early Christian exegetes that the story is a prefiguration of the Crucifixion. However, see, e.g., C.T.R. Hayward, ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac and Jewish Polemic Against Christianity’, Catholic Bible Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (April 1990), 292–306. Hayward calls into question the views of Chilton and Davies, among others, who see the rabbis as attacking Christianity through their interpretations of the Akedah.

158

SECOND SLAYINGS with the left one, the Holy One, blessed be He, sounded the alarum at Mount Sinai; and with the right one, which is larger than the left, He will in the future sound the alarum at the Ingathering of the Exiles in the Age to Come. 35

Spiegel traces Tannaitic and Amoraic elaborations of the ram’s provenance and history: the ram comes from the mountains, the Garden of Eden, or Abraham’s flock; it happens along by chance, or is brought by an angel. The ram, being a burnt offering, was indeed totally consumed, but then kneaded back together (LT, 39–41). It is precisely within these midrashic transformations that Spiegel notes the importance of the ‘as if’, not only to the transformations of the ram itself, but to the way the Akedah is embedded in memory: Indeed, you will often find this guarded expression as though recurring in the sources which refer to the ashes of Isaac, as though the expression were eager to dull somewhat the sharp edge of the startling phrase, to soften its effect, to reduce it to mere figure of speech or metaphor … The haggadah about the ashes of Isaac who was consumed by fire like an animal sacrifice, and of whose remains nothing was left except the sacrificial ash, is ancient indeed, and its traces are already visible in the first generation of the Amoraim … And you learn from the circle of R. Johanan’s disciples, from the report of R. Isaac, that in their days they believed that Isaac’s ashes were the foundation of the altar. 36

The placement of Isaac at the base of the altarIsaac the son, Isaac the ram?could hardly be a more apt symbolic expression of midrashic memory, or a more stunning image for the impact of ritual sacrifice as a mimetic act. For here, the favored son is preserved in memory, even though destroyed; enlivened, even though sacrificed; done away with, even though saved through substitution; and located, for all time, at the center of the sacred space: a space that is interiPirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 31; Rashi asserts the same. See Spiegel, Last Trial, 39, nn. 5 and 6. 36 Last Trial, 41, 44. Emphasis Spiegel’s. 35

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orized through rabbinic hermeneutics after the Temple itself is destroyed. 37 Isaac remains Isaac, the sacrificial victim. He is transformed, however, through an act of physical substitution that redounds throughout time to the merit of those who substitute, and those who serve as substitutes. Such acts are foundational. They are seeded at the root of cultural identity. The ram’s substitution for Isaac is deemed vital to the act of creation and to the covenant, and it is subject to a repeated retrojection in time. Merit and mimetic appropriation go hand in hand; indeed, they are mechanisms for preservation of the covenant and for physical survival. License to innovate, inherent in and proscribed by revelation, is looped back to, and repeatedly brought forward from, the proto-innovation of revelation. In this way, the caesurae in canon necessitate interpretation of the caesurae of cultural rupture. This in turn requires a constant readjustment of the balance between halakhically oriented prudence and radical innovation.38 In such a schema, linear time gives way to interpretive time. Myth becomes the foundational template for cultural memory. Through the interpretations of the Amoraim, the ‘ashes of Isaac’ suggest that even that which is destroyed can be vital, and even that which is dead can live in dynamic memory formsindeed, can find new and eternal life in virtual and interiorized form.

7. MALKHUYOT, ZIKHRONOT, SHOFAROT: HIGH HOLIDAY LITURGY AND DIVINE MIMESIS Midrashic mnemonic strategies in Jewish liturgy, in particular the Musaf (additional) prayer service of the second day of Rosh Hashanah, make the Akedah central to the process of individual and communal renewal and rededication to God during the High Holy Days. The Amidah service features the benedictions of Kingship, Memorial, and Shofar (Malkhuyot, Zikhronot, Shofarot). These special bless37 See Robert Goldenberg, ‘The Broken Axis:

Rabbinic Judaism and the Fall of Jerusalem’, Supplement, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (September 1977): 869–82. 38 See Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 10; Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth, 111.

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ings celebrate and invoke God’s sovereignty (Malkhuyot); God’s remembrance of Israel’s deeds (Zikhronot); and God’s redemptive and revelatory capacities as elicited by the blast of the ram’s horn, or shofar (Shofarot). 39 Each blessing comprises ten sentences, three each from the Torah, the Writings (Ketuvim), and the Prophets (Nevi’im), followed by a closing verse from Torah. This liturgical sequence celebrates (and perhaps facilitates) God’s move from the Throne of Justice to the Throne of Mercy. 40 The benedictions constitute an adaptation of not only the narrative theme but the structure of the Akedah, which employs the Ricoeurian threefold mimetic structure of prefiguration (Abraham’s recognition of God’s kingship and his capacity for radical obedience), configuration (the crisis of the divine test itself, enshrined in mnemonic and ritual praxis), and refiguration (the substitution of the ram for Isaac, the ram’s horn becoming the shofar and symbolizing God’s revelation). That these prayers are said on the day on which the entire community commemorates God’s creation of the worldalso claimed as the day on which Isaac was born, and on which his near-sacrifice occurredcompounds the significance of the Akedah by aligning it with events of foundational significance.41 Spiegel takes up the question of whether the blasts of the shofar were early, deliberate evocations of the merit accruing to all generations owing to the Akedah, or whether this was a later interpolation. His tentative conclusion is that the order and text of these benedictions were ‘instituted in the time of the early Tannaim … [and] crystallized in the course of many generations’, perhaps extending into See, e.g., Lawrence A. Hoffman, ed., All the World: Universalism, Particularism, and the High Holy Days (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2014); Hoffman, The Way Into Jewish Prayer (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2010); Norman A. Bloom, ‘The Rosh Hashanah Prayers: Historical Perspectives’, Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 17, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 51–73. 40 Leviticus Rabbah 29:3. 41 b. Rosh Hashanah 10b, 11a; Pesikta Rabbati 40. See A. Z. Idelson, Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (New York: Dover, 1995), 209, 213. See below, n. 40. 39

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the Amoraic period. 42 This would suggest that the assertion in Genesis Rabbah that God, upon hearing the sound of the shofar, rises and moves from the Throne of Justice to the Throne of Mercy is already influenced by the formulation of the Malkhuyot, Zichronot, and Shofarot verses. Here, Spiegel illuminates a crucial aspect of the Akedah: it elicits divine mimesis of human behavior. That is, after God’s kingship is celebrated, his capacity for memory is praised. The transition from Malkhuyot to Zikhronot marks the liturgical transition from praise to petition. Then the blasts of the shofar frame the most urgent and universal request, reminding and petitioning God to exercise the capacity of mercy. God is to do this through memory inflected with deliberate forgetting. ‘When you appear for Trial before Me on Rosh Hashanah, come with the shofar. Even if there are many accusers against you, I shall recall Isaac’s Akedah and acquit you’. 43 And again: ‘[God said,] Even as it is with a shofar, a person blows into one end and the sound comes out the other end, so as it were with all the accusations of your accusers before Me, I let them come in one ear and go out the other’. 44 Spiegel’s focus is the astonishing implication that the merit of the Akedah can essentially compel God to mimetically adopt the very behavior that the ‘test’ of the Akedah required. Genesis Rabbah 56:10 makes the case, as here excerpted and commented upon by Spiegel:

Last Trial, 96–97. Pesikta Rabbati 167a. 44 Midrash Tehillim 81:5. The Talmud connects this act of mnemonic association directly to the mimetic-transformative ‘as if’, in words attributed to R. Abbahu, a third generation Palestinian Amora: ‘R. Abbahu said: Why does one sound a blast with a shofar made of a ram’s horn on Rosh HaShanah? The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said: Sound a ram’s horn before me so that I remember in your behalf the binding of Isaac, son of Abraham, in whose stead a ram was sacrificed, and I will ascribe it to you as if (ke’ilu) you had bound yourselves before Me’ (b. Rosh Hashanah 16a). 42 Spiegel, 43

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SECOND SLAYINGS Even as ‘I suppressed my compassion (in order) to do Thy will’, ‘So may it be thy will, O Lord my God, that Thy compassion suppress Thine anger against Isaac’s children’ – (in order) to do their will? Theirs? Again, hand is put on mouth out of reverence for the Highest of the highest. 45

Spiegel notes that although the special Rosh Hashanah prayers took shape over generations, the Tannaim and Amoraim who engaged the issue of the shofar and its effect on God were drawn to the shofar’s association with Isaac. It is in Isaac that the merit of the Akedah reposes, say the sages, and it is through Isaac that the merit redounds to future generations. Spiegel notes that, although medieval (and indeed most) commentators focus on the inner fortitude required of Abraham, the most ancient motifs focus on the merit of Isaac. Indeed, one blessing among the Zikhronot prayers asks, ‘And in compassion do Thou recall today unto his seed Isaac’s Akedah’. Spiegel, amplifying this early theme, attributes the merit of Isaac to the rabbinic interpretation that ‘it was of his own free will, without any compulsion whatsoever, out of rejoicing at having a mitsvah to perform, that [Isaac] carried out the will of his father on earth and the will of his Father in heaven. Shall his reward be anything less than total?’ (LT, 103). Principal among Isaac’s rewards, according to the Amoraic midrash, is that he is an olah, a holokaustos, a whole burnt offering: Why is it that Abraham spent time outside the Land, Jacob spent time outside the Land, but Isaac was never given permission to leave it? The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Isaac: You are an unblemished whole burnt offering, which if it goes on the other side of the Veil, becomes disqualified! Which is another way of saying, on the altar Isaac was found acceptable and became sanctissimus, and that does not go outside the Temple court. 46 Last Trial, 95. Emphasis Spiegel’s. Ibid, 100. The author is paraphrasing and interpreting GR 64:3. Emphasis Spiegel’s. It should be noted that the depiction of Isaac as an olah offer45 Spiegel, 46

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Here, the ashes of Isaac and the prayers of High Holiday liturgy evoke a consistent theme in midrash and memory: Isaac’s willingness, even eagerness to submit himself as a sacrifice is the act that earns him enduring merit and the status of a pure oblation. His devotion seals him into sacred precincts, be they within the land, in the realm of Paradise, or as a heap of ashes, sealed beneath the altar. The High Holiday prayers inserted in the Amidah are mnemonic aids to Israel and to God that what is bound is free, and what is offered whole yet lives. This evokes parallels to the iron wall of Talmud: that which is walled off is liberated, that which is erected as a barrier is removed as an act of liberation and renewal. In exegetical terms, the dichotomy is extended: the doubling of word, phrase, and image in the Akedah narrative follows the agential spiral through midrash and liturgy to mimetic redoublings of the offering of the whole self. On the individual and the communal level, this mimetic appropriation extends narrative into act, rather than act into narrative. That is, the interpreted act is sealed in memory, where it becomes more ‘true’ with each reenactment. A principal role of the reinvocation of the merit of the Akedah is the summoning of divine memory, which may be a decisive factor in the designation of Rosh Hashanah as Yom haZikaron, the day of memory and memorialization. 47 The association of merit, martyrdom, and memory is summoned by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn in his poem linking the Akedah and the Crusades: Thus prayed the binder and the bound, That when their descendants commit a wrong This act be recalled to save them from disaster, From all their transgressions and sins. 48

The prayer for beneficent protection that Rabbi Ephraim attributes to Abraham and Isaac is now placed in the mouths of those who survived, in one form or another, the mass martyrdom of entire Jewish ing is a retrojection of a form of Israelite sacrifice to a time that predated it. See, e.g., Daly, op. cit., 45. 47 See Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Canonization of the Synagogue Service (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 215, n. 34. 48 Ibid., 152.

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communities. For Rabbi Ephraim, who survived the medieval slaughter, the merit is invoked with bitterness: Could, should not the communities have been saved by the merit of the original act? Or must there have been a second slaying, a reenactment by which the merit was renewed and the divine memory rekindled? The mass martyrdom of the Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley evokes the theological dilemma of the community in crisis and the individual in peril in the endless progression of the agential spiral: Does the merit of the Akedah extend even to the present? Or must the second slaying be undergone in each generation? 49 Must the father persist in his effort to slaughter the son? Must the living faith be buried beneath the altar in order to live on? Indeed, it is the prayer of the righteous that moves God from the Throne of Justice to the Throne of Mercy and assures lasting merit. As Bokser demonstrates, this has the effect of transforming divine will: Said R. Eleazar: Why are the prayers of the righteous (‫)צדיקים‬ compared to a pitchfork (‫[ )לעטר‬the root ʻtr ‫עטר‬, being used for praying, as in Gen. 25:21]? To show that as the pitchfork turns the grain from place to place, so the prayers of the righteous turn the Omnipresent from justice to mercy. 50 36F

Prayer replaces sacrificial service without diluting, and perhaps even by strengthening the influence of human action on divine will. Prayer retains and sustains the formulations of avodah, of service, through the example of the righteous. Mimesis of the righteous and fixing the forms of prayer were projects to which the Amoraic sages were devoted. 51 One can surmise that they knew that

See Willem Zuidema, Betekenis en verwerking: het offer van Isaäk en de holocaust (Zwijndrecht, Netherlands: Baarn, Ten Have, 1982). Zuidema posits Isaac being ‘offered again’ through the Holocaust. 50 b. Sukkot 14a–b, in Bokser, op. cit., 373. 51 Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 211. 49

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liturgy tells us that truth is performative, communal, and temporal rather than static, based on the individual mind, and divorced from space and time. Liturgy tells us that truth is also multi-staged and processional; it takes time to develop and unfold. Therefore, it is better known at the end of a process than at the beginning and can be seen from the fruits of actions, rather than in origins … liturgy tells us that truth is a hybrid multishaped thing rather than a pure and univocal essence … And monotheistic liturgies tell us that truth is married to scripture. 52

8. THE SECOND SLAYING The presence of the ram illuminates one facet of the concept of the ‘second slaying’ in acts of personal and communal martyrdom. The second slaying refers not only to the substitution of the ram for Isaac, but to other themes surfaced in midrashic interpretations: Abraham’s determination to sacrifice Isaac, even after the angel stays his hand; Abraham’s attempted re-sacrifice of Isaac after he has been resurrected; the wounding of Isaac, after which he is spirited off to Paradise and healed there; the slaying of the ram in addition to Isaac, rather than in Isaac’s stead; and to the performative reenactments of Isaac’s willing self-offering at decisive moments in Jewish history.53 The second slaying, represented by and reenacted in each new act of martyrdom, is seen as redoubling the merit first earned by Isaac in his (inferred) willingness to be sacrificed. God’s test of Abraham becomes, then, a test among all three participants in the event. God certainly tests Abraham: seeing how he will interpret the command to ‘offer’ or ‘bring’ Isaac up to Mount Moriah (GR 56:8) and how he will react to the order to desist are among the elements of Abraham’s test of God. Isaac is tested, too: will he willingly comply? However, God also is tested by Abraham in midrashic interpretations. Through delay, obfuscation, and ultimate willingness, Abraham is testing the limits and powers of the human interpretation of divine Stephen Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194–95. 53 See Elbogen, op. cit., 45–59; Leviticus Rabbah 20:2; Tanḥuma Vayera, 23. 52

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will. The creation of sense and meaning comes to include even those who participate in the process without their knowledge or, at least initially, their consent. Narrative captures two parallel mnemonic operations: ‘memory that imagines’ and ‘memory that repeats’. 54 The alignment of events of similar thematic significance on the same day is emblematic of the traditional Jewish response to crisis, and a means of mnemonic emplacement, even in modernity: Acknowledging that [the Holocaust] was so horrible, so unique, so unprecedented, and so sui generis that it could not be subsumed under Tisha be-Av and is therefore deserving of its own day of commemoration opens up the possibility that the age-old traditional “explanations” that had been presented in connection with Tisha be-Av would not also be applicable to the Holocaust. For example, “mipenei hata’einu galinu me-artzenu” [because of our sins we were exiled from our land], the fundamental and oft-cited “explanation” or “justification” for Jewish tragedy, could not be used to “explain” the Holocaust. And, when familiar, time-tested “interpretations” of Jewish tragedy are no longer considered sufficient, the resultant challenge to one’s faith might become too difficult to bear. 55

The theme of the ‘second slaying’ of Isaac can thus be said to be not only consistent with but in an essential manner even constitutive of the orientation of traditional Jewish memory. Each crisis is a mimetic elaboration of an archetypal rupture and forms the basis of a typological structure upon which a memory form will be based. Each such crisis is a mimetic elaboration of an archetypal rupture, folded into the chiasmus of human action and divine mimesis, and of return to foundational acts of merit as a means of reconstituting covenantal commitment. Each such rupture has a mimetic doubling that occurs through reenactment: precisely the kind of reenactment through Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 25. 55 Jacob J. Shacter, ‘Holocaust Commemoration and “Tisha be-Av”: The Debate over “Yom ha-Sho’a”’. Tradition 41, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 173. 54

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substitution upon which the Akedah was based. The observance of each holiday is thus not a mere commemoration but a reenactment and a re-experiencing of the rupture that it marks. 56 At the same time, the commemorated crisis is doubly located in spatio-temporal terms: in the present moment, but also in the archetypal moment being invoked; through universally recognizable rituals, but in specific locations at which human-divine interaction is said to have taken place. In the case of the Akedah, Mount Moriah is fixed as the site of the Akedah, as the site of the foundation stone and the navel of the world, and as the site of the once and future Temple. And it is a tradition accepted by all, that the place where David and Solomon built the altar … was the place that Abraham built the altar and bound Isaac upon it, and that was the place that Noah built upon when he left the ark, and that was the altar upon which Cain and Abel sacrificed, and upon which Adam the First sacrificed when he was created. 57

The sanctification of Mount Moriah as the site of the foundational sacrificial acts of Jewish mytho-historical narrative makes it the site upon which a change in ritual praxis receives divine sanction and creates human merit. It may even be, as Spiegel notes, that ‘perhaps the whole Akedah composition came into being with no other pur-

56

This is not to say that ruptures are purely negative events or only result in negative outcomes. It is to suggest, however, that the fundamental ontological and theological orientation of Israelite culture is within the destructive and the restorative functions embedded in the crisis of rupture. As postTemple liturgy is modeled to a large extent on the sacrificial service, it also indirectly and mimetically embraces sacrifice as a re-ordering form of rupture. 57 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, ‘The Chosen Temple’, Ch. 2. Viewed at https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah,_The_Chosen_Temple.2?lang= bi, October 19, 2017. This is a tradition attested by other commentators, most notably the medieval Spanish exegete Isaac Abrabanel. See van der Heide, ‘Now I Know’, 370.

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pose than to teach the lesson and provide for the basis for the practice of making proxy offerings’! 58 The blast of the shofar at Rosh Hashanah is thus an act of utter individual and communal transformation. It locates its witnesses at the nexus of Israelite experience and memory, present at the Revelation and the Akedah, at Mount Sinai and Mount Moriah. The blast is meant to transport the witness to the original conditions of foundational rupture: both to the creation of Israelite spiritual consciousness and, through the ram and its horn, to the very creation of the cosmos. The shofar blast is also a form of second slaying: an echo of the cosmos-rupturing events of the life-creating, life-destroying intrusion of divine might into the realm of the mortal. Seen in this light, the celebration of interiorized substitutes for sacrifice is placed alongside pleas for the Temple to be rebuilt. The prophet Hosea’s insistence that prayer is a suitable replacement for sacrifice (Hos. 14:3) is placed in the morning prayer service nearly adjacent to the prayer that the Temple be rebuilt: both the replacement and the plea are emblematic of continuity amidst destruction. This epitomizes the bivalent rabbinic approach to the interiorization of sacrifice and the preservation of the structure and order of Temple rites. This approach to the reconstitutive elements of crisis has been taken, in psychoanalytic circles, to be a pathological response: [T]here is a … maneuver, sanctioned in our society and many others, in which consensually recognized reality is acknowledged, but it is seen alongside a wish fantasy which is also designated reality and is in fact labeled an ‘ultimate’ and ‘transcendent’ reality. This transcendent reality outweighs material reality but does not obliterate it, so that affective commitment to it can blunt the pain of material reality and yet permit appropriate response to it. 59

As rupture is essential to the fabric of creation and the foundations of human culture, Abraham’s (midrashic) insistence on slaying even 58 Spiegel,

Last Trial, 68.

59 Ostrow, ‘Jewish Response to Crisis’, 13.

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the resurrected Isaac supports Spiegel’s assertion that the violence at the root of human consciousness is too basic to be altogether banished. It can be expressed and channeled but not extirpated. 60 The channel through which it must be guided is that of interpretation, which directs the ruptured culture and the traumatized individual toward activities whose patterns are enduring but whose practices are portable. Returning to text is a cultural strategy, in which the divine will is revealed through repeated interpretation, remembering, and contextualization. Interpretation is also an individual strategy: the narratization, telling, and reconfiguration of crisis preserve its memory while reducing its destructive immediacy. This is precisely the path of Ricoeur’s mimetic process, the ‘endless spiral that would carry the meditation past the same point a number of times, but at different altitudes’. 61 Spiegel, then, demonstrates midrashic memory’s capacity for personal reflection and remembering by means of the traditional corpus, calendar, and culture. Ancient narratives are contextualized with modernity’s most profound crisis, especially when cultural rupture exposes hidden strata in that narrative. 62 Interpretation is summoned as a strategy for recovery; the Akedah becomes urgently present once more, and cultural memory continues along its meaningmaking spiral, without becoming unmoored from its origins. Spiegel accomplishes this not in a vacuum, but at a critical juncture in history: the massive rupture of the Holocaust has destroyed European Jewry. The offering up of the innocent has become newly unfathomable. However, there is a dual aspect to the Holocaust, to which Spiegel has implicitly pointed, through the concept of the second slaying of Isaac: what lives on is irrevocably split off and altered, even as it is reaffirmed and renewed. Isaac’s survival (or revival) is facilitated by the discovery of a substitute, but this substitute promises a reenactment that may even involve the original victim in a double 60 Band, ‘Scholarship as Lamentation’, 84–85. 61 Ricoeur, Time

and Narrative, 1:72.

62 See Spiegel, op. cit., 138.

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killing. The substitute, then, enables the original victim to live a second life: a life within which death is a constant presence. 63 It is this second existence that extends the realm of being into an eschatologically anticipated future, while at the same time reshaping the past through hypoleptical accumulation and mimetic transformation. Thus, narratization of rupture preserves mythic tropes of Jewish cultural memory while preserving, in memory and ritual, the events themselves. This narrative reduction of cognitive dissonancebetween chosenness and destruction and between the God of Israel and the death campsserves at once to reduce the strain on the plasticity of canonical text and to reveal ever-new and yet timeless aspects of divine care. It is, in a sense, as Fackenheim notes, an act of tiqqun, or sacred repair, transcending boundaries between life and thought and thus between myth and history. This is the principal function of midrashic memory, a function that Spiegel has taken up and expertly adapted. 64

63

The phenomenon of the living death of the Holocaust survivor is well documented. See, e.g., Primo Levi, Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit, 1988); If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion, 1959); see also the testimony of Holocaust survivors, the most recent example of which is Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Afterdeath of the Holocaust’, in Henri Lustiger-Thaler and Habbo Knoch, eds., Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). Here, Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo is recorded as reporting a constant awareness of living death: ‘I died in Auschwitz, but no one sees it’ (p. 16). Langer notes that ‘Delbo and so many survivors in their testimonies convey … that life stopped at Auschwitz and other camps and ghettos and life went on afterward, giving birth to two selves whose contradictory natures must somehow be transmitted to us, the observers’ (p. 17). 64 See Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of PostHolocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1982), 13. See also Richard Rubenstein’s review and critique of post-Holocaust theology in Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 157–200.

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9. MERIT, MARTYRDOM, AND ETERNAL MIMESIS Spiegel’s work exemplifies the procedures of midrashic memory, which preserves, reformulates, and extends itself through mimetic appropriation and interpretive transformation. It is the comprehensive grasp of the vast scope of textual interpretations that enables Spiegel, as scholar-sage, to become a link in the chain of memory. The task of preserving, collating, critiquing, and presenting textual interpretations that illuminate the path of cultural memory is itself a mnemonic undertaking, one that stands only partially apart from the field it surveys. In the sweep of Spiegel’s work, midrashic interpretations of the Binding of Isaac center on gaps in text as the foci of meaning: the liminal spaces, the caesurae and seams of the text as we have it, hold meaning that emerges not only from sustained study, but from study informed by a comprehensive grasp of previous interpretations, and by the meanings that are surfaced from ever-new and yet familiar contexts of cultural situatedness. Thus, interpretations that emphasized Isaac’s willing participation in his own slaughter suggested Kiddush HaShem, sanctification of the divine name, as a supreme communal value; while those that emphasize Abraham’s struggle with Satan, while traveling toward Moriah, emphasize radical individual obedience to the divine will as virtue that attains merit throughout the generations. A preponderance of modern interpreters, however, express repugnance toward the act, fury at Abraham, and pity for Isaac and for his mother Sarah, the report of whose death immediately follows the Akedah. The powerlessness of mother and child, the inscrutability of Abraham’s zealous obedience, and the miraculous intervention come to seem, in the modern era, like one large and irrefutable cautionary tale about the excesses of religious zeal and patriarchal authority. In many contemporary Israeli interpretations, the Akedah is depicted as the act of a demented old man, with the instructions to slay his son seen as retrojected justification for extreme obedience: a form of acquiescence to self-destruction rejected by those who saw Israel’s more recent wars as unjust, and as rooted in just this form of passive partic-

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ipation in mass martyrdom. 65 Yet even these interpretations are extensions of the midrashic ingenuity and interpretive latitude that stretches back through midrashic reformulations and that, it is argued here, begins with the substitution of the ram for the favored son, or, more properly, with the narratization of the event that includes that salvific turn. Thus, every current memory has its mimetic master memory, and every crisis its origins in covenantally decreed catastrophe. The two-fold aspect of Jewish memory moves in mimetic synchrony, in pairs, from the two narratives of the creation of humankind, through the doubling of acts and phrases in the Akedah. The doubling process of the narrative itself extends into the midrashic second slaying of Isaac, to the two sets of two tablets given at Sinai, the two kingdoms, the two Temples, the two Talmuds, and on even to the twinned existences, in life and death, of martyrs and survivors throughout Jewish history. Spiegel provides a thorough text-critical analysis of the Akedah, in which he notes traditions that ascribe the doubling of the angel’s calls to, variously, the interruption of prophecy or the need for God himself to intervene when Abraham ignores 65

The scholarship on the influence of the Akedah on Israeli national identity and memory is extensive. See esp. Feldman, Glory and Agony. Also see Feldman, ‘From Avraham Avinu to Avi Mani and Beyond: The Oedipalization of the Akedah in Israel’, Zvia Ben-Yosef Ginor, ed., Essays in Hebrew Literature in Honour of Avraham Holtz (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2003), 61–87; Avi Sagi, ‘The Meaning of the “Akedah” in Israeli Culture and Jewish Tradition’, Israel Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 45–60; Ruth Kartun-Blum, ‘“Where does this wood in my hand come from?” The Binding of Isaac in Modern Hebrew Poetry’, Prooftexts 8, no. 3 (September 1988): 293–310; Jack Cohen, ‘Is This the Meaning of Life? Israelis Rethink the Akedah’, Conservative Judaism 43, no. 1 (1990): 50–60; Nahum M. Waldman, ‘The Akedah in Modern Midrash’, The Reconstructionist 44, no. 8 (October 1978): 13–17; Shimrit Peled, ‘Nationalism and Maternal Sacrifice in To the End of the Land’, Hebrew Studies 54 (2013): 345–57; Aryeh Be Gurion, ed., Al-tisihlach yadcha el-haNa’ar (Jerusalem: Keter, 2002) [Hebrew]; and Yehoshua, ‘Mr. Mani and the Akedah’, 61–65.

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the angelic call and attempts to proceed with the slaughter of his son. Notably, Spiegel’s concise summary of theory to date on the composition and redaction of the Akedah centers on the presence of the ram (Gen. 22:11–12) as a coincidence in which Abraham ‘discerned the finger of God’. Attributed to, among others, Rashbam and Sforno, this exegetical approach to the ram’s appearance is the opening through which exegetical autonomy arises to temper radical obedience. 66 Nonetheless, midrashic traditions exist, as expressed in the poem that Spiegel introduces, claiming that, despite even God’s own direction of the second angelic intervention, the second intervention in the text (Gen. 22:15–18), Abraham still would not desist from the slaughter of his son. Such readings respond to the literary stratum depicting the pagan tradition of sacrifice of the firstborn and Abraham’s obedience to God’s perceived command, threaded together with the stratum that endorses the end of child sacrifice through interpretive autonomy. In this latter view, God’s double identity, as both ‘God’ (‫ )אלהים‬and ‘the Lord’ (‫)יהוה‬, indicate a profound distinction within the divine itself: ‘“God” refers to the one who demands human sacrifice … and “Lord” [to the] one who takes pity on man and forbids sacrificing him’.67 The second slaying is thus a context-dependent expression of either absolute devotion or absolute martyrdom. Abraham must obey God, until the Lord intervenes. For those who invoke both the merit and cruelty of the Akedah, the tension is unbearable: one must either defy God or sacrifice all. Otherwise, why, Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn seems to ask, would God not desist in the slaughter of his chosen people, as Abraham would not desist in the sacrifice of his son, even after the first angelic intervention? The way out of this theological bind leads back through the way in: the doubling of word and phrase, the double calls, the chias35F

66

Spiegel, op. cit., 125, n. 18. Rashbam is the acronym for Shlomo ben Meir (1085–1158), the prominent Tosafist and biblical exegete and grandson of Rashi. Ovadia ben Jacob Sforno (1475–1550) was an Italian biblical commentator, physician, and philosopher. 67 Ibid., 124. Emphasis Spiegel’s. See Nachmanides’s commentary on Gen. 22:12.

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tic structure, the second slaying. These mimetic transformations indicate a mnemonic architecture that is built primarily not on history, but on interpretation. Midrashic memory deploys hermeneutics as a cultural strategy, and culture as a manifestation of hermeneutics. The two, inseparable and intertwined, continue to inform mnemonic strategies through the hypoleptical accumulation of interpretations. As such, when a rupture occurs, it is both a continuation of the pattern laid down in the most ancient narratives and a newly revealed facet of divine care. Ruptures can thus be understood as manifestations of the ongoing process of revelation. This is particularly evident in Amoraic interpretation of patriarchal narratives, in which Abraham’s every action sets the pattern for merit or suffering for generations to come. And [Abraham] said: My lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight [Gen. 18:3]. R. Ḥiyya taught: He said this to the greatest of them, viz [the archangel] Michael. Let now a little water be fetched [Gen. 18:4]. God said to Abraham, ‘Thou hast said, Let now a little water be fetched.’ I swear that I will repay thy children (in the wilderness, in inhabited country [the Land, Eretz Israel], and in the Messianic future).’ Thus it is written, Then Israel sang this song! Spring up, O wellsing ye into it (Num. 21:7)that was in the wilderness. Where do we find it in the land [sc. Eretz Israel]? A land of brooks of water (Deut. 8:7). And in the Messianic future? And it shall come to pass in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem (Zech. 14:8). (GR 48:10) Behold, it is for thee a covering of the eyes [Gen. 20:16] … [Abimelech] said to [Abraham]: ‘You covered my eyes; therefore the son that you will beget will be of covered eyes.’ (GR 52:12) 68

68

In the narrative in which Abraham claims that Sarah is his sister, after Abimelech is warned away from her in a nighttime visitation from God, the rabbis offer an interpretation in which Abimelech asserts that Abraham’s actions will cause Isaac’s dimmed eyesight.

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And Abraham set seven ewe-lambs of the flock [by themselves]. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him [Abraham]: ‘Thou gavest him [Abimelech] seven ewe-lambs; as thou livest, I will delay the joy of thy children for seven generations!” (GR: 54:4)

As Spiegel notes, ‘[t]he boundaries of midrash and reality get blurred’. 69 This blurring must be considered as a direct and even deliberate result of the rabbinic reformulation and reinterpretation of biblical text in light of cultural rupture. Indeed, the intertwining of these two influencing factors is in precise correlation to the interfluential aspects of culture and hermeneutics. These factors, misunderstood or entirely neglected in much literary theory, are crucial to understanding midrashic memory: [C]lassical Rabbinic exegesis, like rabbinic Judaism itself, was not so much completely ‘other’ to, or apart from, Western culture as it was a marginal presence on its borders, a tradition that developed by drawing on Western categories and transforming them without becoming wholly absorbed by them. Historically, Rabbinic Judaism arose in late antiquity out of the fusion of ancient Near Eastern Israelite tradition and Hellenism. Not surprisingly, then, its literature, including midrash, borrowed from both Biblical and classical literary traditions, yet managed to create for itself a fully distinct identity that exists in a kind of intermediate space between the conventional genres of Western literature. 70

It is in this intermediate space that rabbinic sages in Babylonia and Palestine defined the contours of Jewish cultural memory. In this space, ‘polysemy functions as a sacred trait of Scripture. Here, for the first time, editorial pluralism has become a condition of meaning’.71 It is this editorial pluralism that Spiegel explicates and extends. He does so at a decisive historico-theological moment, in which the 69 Spiegel, op. cit., 137.

David Stern, ‘Midrash and Indeterminacy’, Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 134. 71 Stern, Midrash and Theory, 33. 70

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opening of the abyss has called into question the most fundamental tenets of Jewish faith and the underpinnings of Jewish memory. Here, as in many of the hundreds of texts Spiegel cites, the way through the crisis is through the text. Ricoeur’s outline of the process of narratization illuminates the process by which midrashic interlocutors, including Spiegel, engage the ‘agential spiral’ of meaning making, extending the inter-influence of event and interpretation through both projection and retrojection. This is an essential function of the ‘as if’ hermeneutical procedure. And it is here that Bokser’s interpretation of the ‘iron wall’ highlights an aspect of rabbinic hermeneutics that Assmann overlooks: the iron wall is not a barrier, but rather a permeable membrane that absorbs, metabolizes, and reformulates Scripture for new cultural and historical circumstances. Perhaps more properly, the wall is a barrier, until it is interpreted to be permeable. Then the texts that pass through it are reinfused with transcendent meaning, and the barrier itself becomes a source of both nourishment and projection. This procedure extends as well to the liturgical repetitions and reinterpretations of scriptural verse in the High Holiday prayers of Malkhuyot, Zikhronot, and Shofarot. Not only does this series of prayers embed the narrative of the Akedah in the consciousness of the worshippers, it follows the narrative structure that establishes God’s kingship, God’s remembrance, and the shofar, the horn of the ram, through which substitution and interpretation are embedded in ritual praxis and cultural memory, and by means of which midrashic exegesis is endowed with ultimate sanction. The liturgical recurrence and ritual re-invocation of the Akedah endow cultural rupture with messianic significance: each act of individual and collective martyrdom extends the merit of the original act into the second slayings, by means of which Israel is both existentially threatened and exegetically reconstituted. Thus, hypoleptical accumulations of interpretation reflect and refract the numerous facets of experience, in which the singularity of each rupture is counterbalanced by the interplay of the interpretation of previous ruptures. The messianic hope may anticipate the end of interpretation.

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10. ‘ANAMNESTIC TIME’ AND THE INDIVIDUATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS The theorization of Jewish memory, and particularly of midrashic memory presented here, proceeds from an interpretation of the Akedah as a narrative that represents the individuation of human identity. Midrashic interpretations of the Akedah both express and extend the development of new notions of the self in both its human and divine forms; the flow of time and interpretation branch off into lived, historical time and ‘anamnestic’ time, in which distance from the everyday defines the contours of cultural identity and memory. The development of mnemonic culture is bifurcated into practicereflexivity and self-reflexivity: that is, acts (such as sacrifice) that interpret the meanings and maxims upon which the culture is based, and referral to the culture’s own fund of stories to interpret the culture itself and its experiences. 72 The shift in divine names from ‫ אלהים‬to ‫יהוה‬, at the heart of the Akedah narrative (Gen. 22:11), suggests the unfathomable: that acts of interpretation can transform not only the human-divine relationship, but divine consciousness and power. Midrashic interpretations of the Akedah run in the subterranean springs of anamnestic time and preserve possibilities for radical human-divine co-transformation. Spiegel’s summoning of midrashic interpretations of the Akedah brings these interpretive structures to the massive ruptures of modernity. Spiegel’s elucidation of the relationship between martyrdom and memory can thus be interpreted, on the anamnestic level, to demand a shift in divine consciousness after the Holocaust. The relationship between midrash and memory is thus brought to bear, once again, on the ethical imperative to challenge God in the face of calamitous human self-destruction.

72

Assmann and Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, 132. As Assmann notes, the self-reflexive aspect of cultural memory is developed hypoleptically.

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11. TOWARD A RE-THEORIZATION OF JEWISH CULTURAL MEMORY What we have strived to show in this chapter is that the processes of narratization and of the accumulation and coordination of such narratives are at the heart of the process we have termed midrashic memory. We have posited that the Binding of Isaac is a principal basis for this memory form, as it models and stimulates a process of interpretation of divine will that continues to proceed from ongoing interpretations and contextualizations with cultural rupture. It is certainly the case that in the modern State of Israel, the Akedah continues to capture the essence of the continuing struggle for national survival. Although an enduring focus of theological foment and moral and ethical disdain, the Akedah is generally understood as a foundational aspect of Israeli identity. In non-traditional Jewish communities in the West, however, the Akedah is generally regarded as a relic from Israelite culture’s primitive past, redeemed only by its perceived status as an ethical outcry against the practice of child sacrifice. However, even in modernity, after times of massive cultural rupture, such as the Holocaust, the ongoing process of reinterpretation of the Akedah reveals that the narrative is utterly fundamental to the process of reorienting Jewish identity, culture, and memory. This process is distinctly mimetic and thoroughly midrashic. Shalom Spiegel’s The Last Trial is a masterwork not only of scholarship but of midrashic memory, as it demonstrates how the dialogical interplay of texts from different eras, locales, and interpreters come together to re-presence the Akedah as the metonym of Jewish existence in a world governed by an inscrutable but omnipresent divine will. The ashes of Isaac, piled atop or buried beneath the altar, connect the Akedah to sacrificial acts and myths of neighboring cultures, in which the martyred eldest preserves and extends life through his death. The theme heralds the possibility of resurrection, of living through death. This latter theme promotes cultural salvation through martyrdom, which must be at once tempered and repeated: tempered, so that martyrdom does not entirely destroy the culture, but repeated so that the merit it conveys can be reinforced. This tension is managed through the theme of the second slaying. Spiegel reveals the pathways by which mimetic repetition of themes and actions in the Akedah becomes mimetic reenactment of Isaac’s

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martyrdom: an act of hermeneutical transformation that radically transforms society, preserving identity through an act of communally consecrated self-destruction. The liturgical recitations of the Akedah and the blowing of the shofar summon the entire community to the re-presencing of the unfathomable paradoxes of creation and destruction, of destruction and salvation, and of repetition and transformation. To the extent we have been successful in demonstrating the existence of midrashic memory, and the role of the Akedah in its continuous reformulation, we have thus made necessary a retheorization of Jewish cultural memory, with the Akedah as its foundation stone. Such a re-theorization must itself engage in a hypoleptical process of responding to and reformulating previous theorizations of memory. This task engages cultural theory, hermeneutics, and ethics, for cultural memory is a living instrument of the ethical orientation of a people. For much of its history, the Jewish people has in fact comprised several cultures, but these cultures are bound together in the ongoing task of textual interpretation and cultural reorientation. Our theory of memory will respond to numerous theorizations; midrashic memory will be the central component of a taxonomy of memory, whose point of departure will be the work of Richard B. Miller. In Miller’s theorization, memory is a form of care that is constitutive of cultural identity and continuity, and a dynamic process that enfolds both remembering and forgetting. This is crucial: in choosing what to remember, a culture implicitly, and often explicitly, chooses what to forget. However, paradoxical though it may seem, forgetting itself is essential to remembering. 73 The process of revision results in an ethico-mnemonic culturestructure whose foundation is textual, and whose movement 73

See Miller, op. cit. The blotting out of the memory of Amalek is a principle example of ‘forgetting memory’. See Exod. 17:8–16; Deut. 25:19. Blotting out Amalek is a commandment that undergoes its own ethical interiorization, moving from blotting out a people to blotting out, within oneself, the characteristics that those people represented. See, e.g., Alexander Green, The Virtue Ethics of Levi Gersonides (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 76.

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through time is mimetic, consisting of repetitions adapted to new circumstances and new cultural contexts. Consulting and borrowing from Miller’s work, we shall propose a mnemonic architecture in which midrash is the literary form, the rabbinic blueprint, and the cultural code by which memory is constructed; the Akedah is the mytho-historical matrix; and cultural rupture the inciting incident in the ongoing reformulation of Jewish cultural memory.

CHAPTER FIVE. TOWARD A THEORY AND TAXONOMY OF JEWISH CULTURAL MEMORY The individual Jew has no eternity, for he has no ‘midst’; the Jewish people has no temporality for it is always ‘in the midst’. –Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum

Having charted the development of midrashic memory, this project concludes with the articulation of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish cultural memory; proposals for future directions for the refinement of this work; and an interpretation of the Akedah from emphasizing the midrashic-mnemonic perspective. The theory of Jewish cultural memory will draw on a wide range of disciplines, including hermeneutics, cultural sociology, systems theory, and psychology. The taxonomy will draw primarily on the work of Richard B. Miller. We propose a new vocabulary and a new approach for understanding the procedures of cultural identity and memory formation, with recommendations for future directions for research on cultural memory. As noted in chapter 1, midrashic memory is rooted in the Midrashic Condition, in which interpretive attention and the creation of meaning are privileged over lexicological or plain-sense meaning. This condition is basic to traditional Jewish identity and grounded in Jewish text. Heschel has noted that ‘[a]s a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash’, and Sommer has similarly asserted the

181

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SECOND SLAYINGS

interpretive basis for all of Torah. 1 Because all of Jewish canon has been edited, redacted, and copied (at times with errors and emendations) through countless iterations before reaching the reader, it is suffused with mnemonic valence and midrashic creativity. Midrash is, as it were, ‘baked into’ the Hebrew Bible and into Israelite and Jewish culture’s ontological orientations. The result of millennia of interpretation and response to crisis is a typological form of memory in which every memory is a reremembering. Interpretations are accumulated in the mimetic process of re-coordination of text and event; those interpretations that retain historical or textual significance are folded into the culture’s identity and thus its memory. They are retrojected into the biblical strata of history and affirmed through midrashic transformations in which divine sanction is given to the new insight. Every interpretation, then, is at least a second-order discursive re-presentation. As each slaying of the sacrificial victim is a ‘second slaying’, so each reading is a second-order summoning of the ‘original’ text and its previous interpretive possibilities. As the substitute is deemed superior, so the new interpretation is deemed preferable in light of new circumstances and new crises confronting the culture. A fundamental bifurcation occurs, however, in Jewish memory between archival and reconstructive functions: between lived experience and the interpretive foundations rooted in myth, or what will be called here the ‘historical’ and ‘anamnestic’ planes of cultural consciousness. The culture’s memory develops along both the historical and anamnestic axes, with crucial differences according to the culture’s temporal, historical, and geographical situatedness. In traditional Jewish memory, however, the midrashic process remains primary, the anamnestic plane the locus of its work, and the shift between planes is signaled by the use of ke’ilu, ‘as if’. The exegetical shift from historical time to anamnestic time is key to cultural recovery and to the typological coordination of the past with the present. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 185; Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 147. 1

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183

This procedure is evident even in the specializations and epistemological atomizations of modernity, in which the analytical matrix laid over human experience attains supremacy. In modernity, ‘[m]yth dominates nature through reenactment. [But] Enlightenment dominates by distancing itself from nature … by grounding “reality” in the realm of ideas and classificatory schema’. 2 In modernity, Midrashic memory becomes subordinate to memory’s recollective, historical functions. It may be speculated, however, that the growing emphasis on storage and retrieval threatens to destroy the carefully calibrated equilibrium between memory’s archival and reconstructive functions. When any utterance can be stored and retrievedand indeed, manipulatedclaims to truth and authenticity are simultaneously preserved and undermined. In such an environment, even as the past may become more present and more immediate, it also becomes more prone to manipulation, and this has the effect of stimulating fervor for a triumphal and definitive defeat of alternative viewpoints. This longing for the ultimate triumph of a particular form of devotion, at such times, takes on messianic overtones. Jewish messianism anticipates the reunion of the historical and anamnestic planes, in which ‘the Lord will be one and His name one’ (Zech. 14:9). At such a time, the mundane and the divine aspects of remembering will be reunited, and memory will resume its Edenic, holistic unity. ‘The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said: “I will not enter the heavenly Jerusalem until I can enter the earthly Jerusalem”.’ 3 At such times, the development of an ethics of memory is more urgent than ever.

1. A THEORY OF JEWISH CULTURAL MEMORY We must agree with Wuthnow’s contention that culture ‘remains, by many indications, vaguely conceptualized, vaguely approached 2

Ernesto Verdeja, ‘Adorno’s Mimesis and its Limitations for Critical Social Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 4 (1999): 497. 3 b. Ta’anit 5a. Attributed to Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, a first-generation Tanna and a decisive influence on the formation of rabbinic Judaism.

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methodologically, and vaguely associated with value judgments and other sorts of observer bias’. 4 We approach the development of a taxonomy of cultural memory as dynamic, and as comprised of layers of remembering and forgetting that are constantly undergoing reformulation. 5 As noted previously, interpretations and theorizations of Jewish cultural memory have thus far not adequately explored canonical text and cultic ritual as sources for mnemonic forms, and these forms play a crucial role in the dynamism of Jewish memory. The taxonomy and theory presented here represent attempts to accommodate the ongoing influences of myth and ritual in the continuous elongation of the ‘agential spiral’, the repetitive yet progressive movement of interpretation and action in response to the past. Seen in this light, a theory of Jewish memoryindeed any memorymust consider individual (psychological) and collective (hermeneutical, historical, sociological, cultural) influences upon the formation of memory.6 A concise formulation of a theory of Jewish memory must, then, account for the broad range of rupturing events and axial shifts that a culture of memory must accommodate. Interpretation is the central axis of the Jewish agential spiral and the coordinates along which axial shifts must be plotted. Jewish culture lives in rupture: in the space between lived and anamnestic time, in both a Jewish homeland and in Diaspora. The harmonization of the historical and anamnestic planes of Jewish experience can be contextualized according to the three poles of Jewish ontological orientation: Chosenness, Canon, and Crisis. Thus, viewing Jewish memory as an act of recollection is not as productive as viewing it as an act of interpretation. An individual cultural memory is therefore best imagined as a series of interpretative stances that develop through the matrix of a system, rather than as a linear sequence of identical impressions that are preRobert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5–6. 5 Miller notes that ‘anamnesis requires some measure of amnesia’ (‘Moral and Political Burdens of Memory’, 540). 4

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185

served and archived. The theory of Jewish memory outlined here attempts to account for the mutual and overlapping meta-influences of law, language, tradition, and history, as well as the forces impacting the individuals comprising Jewish culture in its manifold forms: Jewish cultural memory comprises a core collection of mnemonic, interpretive, liturgical, and commemorative procedures that are continuously and collaboratively employed and reformulated in order to confront and recover from cultural rupture and to celebrate recovery through typological contextualization of contemporary crises with mythological archetypes. The roots of this memory form are established in Torah and refined through rabbinic interpretations, in which ke’ilu, or ‘as if’ signals the act of temporal and typological transformation that initiates recovery from rupture. Jewish memory is thus a re-remembering: a reconstruction and recalibration of the relationship between time (historical and ‘anamnestic’), text (canonical and interpretive), and tradition (time-honored practices and sanctioned modifications and innovations). Through this process of recalibration, the culture and its members seek to remain at the intersection of the canonical-mythological and temporal-historical planes of experience by preserving and continuously updating a complex and integrated system of memory forms. It is at this dynamic intersection that relationship with the divine reaches its fullest expression. Jewish cultural memory spirals between human agency and a predetermined pattern of fate, between lived (horizontal) and anamnestic (vertical) time, and between myth and history. Hence, this memory form is not simply a storage facility, in which events and their interpretations are archived and retrieved in chronological order. Rather, Jewish memory moves between historical and anamnestic time, developing and returning to typologies of event and interpretation that keep the past dynamically engaged and inter-fluential with the present. Jewish memory is resistant to monochronism and only tangentially related to history: it considers the anamnestic past as relentlessly present and fundamentally ‘real’. Each cultural rupture is received and interpreted in a way that allows the culture to realign itself with its mythohistorical origins

186

SECOND SLAYINGS and with the divine source of its covenantal commitments. Hypoleptical accumulations of interpretation privilege the act of interpretation over its specific expressions, and interpretive remembering over the narratization of events. Such accumulations of interpretation create a fractal profusion of interpretive stances, through which the divine is apprehended and reapproached in acts of self-similar duplication repeated at different scales. 7 In this way, Jewish cultural memory remains dynamic, plastic, and portable; constantly open to interpretation; typologically oriented and self-replicating; and eternally oriented toward immutable text and toward the God whose instruction it contains. The fractal process, reflected in the chiastic structure of biblical text, is foundational to a community of individual interpreters who nonetheless are bound together through the process of self-similar recreation. The mimetic aspects of Jewish memory are visible on the communal and individual levels; on the historical and psychological planes; in social systems; and even in the genetic expression and transmission of trauma. As in fractal systems, the process of individuation is a mimetic process, in which micro-processes play fundamental roles in the creation of macroforms of identity and memory. Midrashic indeterminacy and interpretive creativity preserve and extend the reach of Jewish memory, knitting together the planes of historical and anamnestic time, thus preserving the immanence of divine presence and the transcendence of the covenanted community. These processes are evident, too, in mythological speculations on the structure and ontology of the Hebrew language, through which Creation is said to be uttered into existence from preexisting, formless matter. Diasporic memory is constituted in part

7 Fractals are ‘a

visual expression of a repeating pattern or formula that starts out simple and gets progressively more complex’. http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/. Viewed December 15, 2017. On fractal duplication in academia, see Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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187

of the interweaving of the ‘lashon kodesh’, the holy tongue, and its linguistic and semiotic structures, with the languages of its culture(s). This interweaving and fractal duplication of cultural structures, upon a foundation repeatedly rebuilt after successive ruptures, is the basis of Jewish memory. The process of breaking and reordering not only enables the internalization of the systems and structures of ancient rites and beliefs, it also influences the development of the individualized and impermeable self. Thus, the creative, non-linear, and dynamic memory form that is present in every form of Jewish cultural selfconception becomes the basis of a highly autonomous and yet still covenantally obligated Jewish self.

The previous chapters of this project have attempted to demonstrate the overall architecture of this process and how that architecture can be followed ‘back’ toward a foundational narrative and ‘forward’ along the ‘horizontal’ axis of historical time. This dialectical movement has the paradoxical and yet permanent effect of locating Jewish memory partly within and partly outside of linear, historical time. 8 Rabbinic Midrash of the Amoraic period developed the practice of performative reorientation of the culture through consultation of canon and coordination with crisis. There, as in the interpretations and accounts of martyrdom highlighted by Shalom Spiegel, Torah was turned to as the matrix through which crisis was transformed into renewal and recommitment. Historical rupture was depicted in each instance as a grievous wound to the body and soul of the Jewish people, but also an opportunity, indeed a mandate to revisit the can-

8

After Gabriel Motzkin, it is claimed here that Jewish memory resists the ‘oppressive universality of time’. Motzkin says the collapse of the status of history as a science has led to the resurgence of interest in memory, which operates according to both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ time. Jan Assmann asserts that memory refers to both ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’. See Motzkin, ‘The Invention of History and the Reinvention of Memory’, Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 45 (July 1996): 26, 38; Assmann, ‘Cultural Memory and Collective Identity’, 128.

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on for clues as to the provenance and procedures for recovery and renewal. To be sure, such a mnemonic structure is not utterly unique. Cultures of canon share the propensity to coordinate current crises with ancient texts and rites; indeed, such is the process that canon affords. The focus here, however, is upon the hermeneutical procedures by which the Jewish canon is consistently placed, as it were, ‘in front of’ or superimposed as a template upon the historical moment.

2. CULTURAL MEMORY: LINGUISTIC ORIENTATIONS It must be noted here that the dual and mimetic nature of memory is reflected in different ways in cultural and linguistic orientations in cultural memory theory. Scholars in German, French, and English depict memory as multivalent, but the subtle differences branch toward significant variances in conceptualization. Gedächtnis must be differentiated from Speicher, which more distinctly denotes memory as a warehouse or silo, whose function is defined primarily by the capacity for storage and retrieval. Jewish cultural memory experiences significant overlap between Alltagsgedächtnis (everyday memory) and Festtagsgedächtnis (sacred memory). The conjunction of horizontal and vertical time, of the sacred and the mundane, is accommodated in the Hebrew word for memory, zikaron, which in rabbinic Hebrew also refers to a biblical verse in which divine remembrance is mentioned. The word’s trilateral root, ‫ר‬-‫כ‬-‫ז‬, means not only the capacity for and faculty of memory, but memorialization, mnemonic allusion. It is closely related to the trilateral root indicating the male gender and genitals. 9 These linguistic and definitional differences, while speculative, point toward three essential facets about Jewish cultural memory: it is profoundly rooted in the structure, etymolo368F

See Jastrow, Dictionary, 400. The gendering of cultural memory is explored most notably in Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, ‘Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 1–19. 9

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gy, and epistemology of classical Hebrew; it is closely linked to biblical canon; and it has traditionally been embodied, but in a way that excludes the feminine.10 In order to understand the formation of midrashic memory, and its place in the wider definition and functions of Jewish memory, we must first explore the Hebrew language as a language in which the reordering of rupture is inherent in its very ontology.

3. HEBREW AND THE ONTOLOGY OF RUPTURE Can rupture inhere in the culture it disrupts? One possible answer: rupture can be woven into the fabric of a particular cultural consciousness only to the extent to which it is embedded in the language of that culture. Rupture, then, both confounds and confirms, both traumatizes and beneficially transforms. A culture whose language accommodates and elevates rupture can achieve a remarkable dialectical adaptiveness. To a degree more significant than perhaps any extant faith tradition, the Jewish religion inheres in, relies on, and emerges from the semantic and linguistic characteristics of the Hebrew language. A brief and very general discursion on the Hebrew aleph bet from a historical perspective will lay the groundwork for consideration of how rupture is established as essential to reality in Jewish Scripture. The Hebrew language was a Semitic dialect that developed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in the second half 10

This trilateral root also suggests the possibility that memory is gendered. Speculation on this possibility is outside the focus of this project, but the gendering of memory has received limited scholarly attention and merits further study. See Signs, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): Gender and Cultural Memory Special issue. Such concerns are reflected in readings, like that of Sarah Coakley, that Isaac is associated with natality, disorder, and impuritya gender-labile figure that must be killed in order for Abraham to purify his masculine devotion to God. See Coakley, ‘In Defense of Sacrifice: Gender, Selfhood, and the Binding of Isaac’, Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo, 17– 38. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011.

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of the second millennium BCE. 11 This area was known as Canaan, which is the name used to identify the Hebrew language itself in its earliest writings. The first person identified as a Hebrew in the Bible is Abraham, and he is called a ‘Hebrew’ (Ivri) for two linguistically related reasons: first, he is a descendent of Ever (Noah’s greatgrandson); and second, the same linguistic root that forms the name Ever forms the root of the verb ‘to cross over’. 12 Abraham’s identity as a Hebrew may refer to him as a descendent of Ever, as one who crosses over into covenantal relationship with God, or as one who physically leaves one territory behind for the sake of another, or both. In both territorial and linguistic contexts, then, the very name Ivri is indicative of rupture. The Hebrews borrowed and began to experiment with a simple twenty-two-letter Phoenician writing system. Hebrew became the linguistic substratum of the consciousness of an entire people that had seen itself as ‘crossing over’ into Canaan as a result of the intervention of divine providence in the life of a single individual and his numerous descendants. The three letters that doubled as consonants and vowels in the Hebrew adaptation of the Phoenician system were the letters yud, heh, and vav: ‫י‬, ‫ה‬, and ‫ו‬. These are the letters that appear in the Tetragrammaton, ‫יהוה‬, the four-letter, unpronounceable divine name: the name representative of divine mercy, which suddenly replaces ‫ אלהים‬in Gen. 22:11, the center of the Akedah narrative. The four-letter name of God has of course aroused nearendless mystical speculation: i.e., the name as a pictogram (of the outstretched human hand receiving the yod of the divine soul from the divine hand; or, with the letters stacked, as a depiction of the human form, etc.), or as a telescoping of tenses of the verb ‘to be’.13 While striving to avoid pseudo-scientific speculation, it is nonethe372F

Angel Saenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language, trans. John Elwolde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1. 12 Jeff A. Benner, The Ancient Hebrew Language and Alphabet: Understanding the Ancient Hebrew Language of the Bible Based on the Ancient Hebrew Culture and Thought (College Station, TX: Zondervan, 1973), 3. 13 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), ch. 6. 11

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less important to note how midrashic energies and interpretations are focused on this divine name. What the Hebrew language made possible was a revolution in expression, communication, and narrative building. From a literary and religious perspective, Hebrew was the primary building block of the master narrative detailing a series of massive ruptures that inhere in and attain to the level of Scripture. Whereas ‘in modern linguistics there is no connection between the sound of a word, the meaning of that word, and the letters with which the sound is written down’, 14 in the Jewish mystical view, such a connection inheres in the Hebrew language. This fact has long given rise to mystical contemplations based on the shapes of the letters, their assigned numerical values and vocalizations, and speculations about the divine origin of the language itself. All this may itself be midrash of a sort, but it serves to imbue Hebrew with a multivalent influence in the formation of social structures, of which the Jewish religion is, of course, a seminal example. Hebrew was an outgrowth and reformulation of neighboring tongues, and it was influenced and inflected by the languages of conquering empires. Hebrew itself was increasingly confined to liturgical use, and Aramaic became the lingua franca of Jewish communities during and after the Babylonian exile.15 The exegetical and historical principles that such a language makes possible have been

J. H. Laenen, Jewish Mysticism: An Introduction, trans. David Orton (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 254. 15 It should be noted that Rabbi Yohanan bar Nappaḥa, the secondgeneration Palestinian Amora, declared that the Torah could be written in Greek. He arrived at this conclusion using a hermeneutic of retroprojection: ‘[It is written in Gen. 9:27]: “May God extend the territory of Japhet, may Japhet live in the tents of Shem.” [This means that] the words [i.e., the Greek language] of Japhet should be in the tents of Shem [in which the rabbis said Torah was studied]’. b. Megillah 9b. See Paul Heger, The Pluralistic Halakhah: Legal Innovations in the Late Second Commonwealth (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 237, n. 187. 14

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written about extensively16 and would require a formidable digression from the topic of this project. It is important here, however, to consider one prominent (but by no means universal) exegetical principle, propounded by Rabbi Ishmael: Torah speaks in plain human language. 17 This principle propounds the theory that ‘[t]he language of revelation uses elements of the familiar and natural order to transcend themand this procedure is in itself a property of the language of man, which operates through analogies and metaphors’. 18 This supports the notion that rupture is built and intersedimented into Hebrew, the ‘language of revelation’: Hebrew, a ‘language of man’, can nonetheless be bent to the tasks of transcending and transforming the very order it depicts, with the aid of analogy and metaphor. The human mind, which relies on analogy and metaphor to assess and order perceptions of reality 19 and reality itself, must react to being enmeshed in dialectic with revelation, simultaneously representing and rearticulating it. Hebrew, then, is a language of rupture (of which revelation is a classic example); and as such, it is the archetypal language of anamnestic time, because it preserves the covenantal community, even as that community develops or adapts new linguistic forms (Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and its variants, Judeo-Español, Yiddish, etc.) for the practical demands of communal life in Diaspora. Hebrew thus transforms the very reality it represents, as it engages in the task of representing and communicating that reality. The objectivation of the pattern of rupture results in the development of linguistic and narrative systems that rely on typology, chiasm, and mimetic appropriation to reinforce rupture as the engine of eschatological energy in the world. As the products of this objectivation are internalized, or ‘reappropriated and transformed See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Abraham Socher’s critique of the former work (Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 [2006]: 401–8). 17 PT Nedarim 36c. 18 Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 93. 19 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live by, 6. 16

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from objective structures in the world into “structures within subjective consciousness”’, 20 they reinforce rupture’s centrality in Jewish thought, cement its place in Jewish history and memory, and initiate a durable transformation of Jewish structures and practices. Thus, again, in Jewish consciousness, thought, and cultural memory, rupture renews and regenerates. Rupture rearticulates covenantal responsibility and relationship, transforming itself from a disruptive experience into a salutary and even essential component of Jewish identity and continuity. The centrality of rupturethe sacred status accorded the spike of anamnestic energystamps Judaism with its indelible dialectical pattern. In the words of the German Jewish philosopher Karl Löwith, Jewish history becomes ‘one great detour to reach in the end the beginning through ever repeated acts of rebellion and self surrender’. 21 The Jewish historical narrative, whose pattern was set when God intruded upon the void, was thus one of ‘progressing, and at the same time returning, from alienation to reconciliation’. 22 That history relies on rupture for the movement and meaning of its narrative, and for the making and mending of the fabric of Jewish historical consciousness, is an observation that brings us to this self-reflexive perspective on Judaism and the world: the Hebrew Bible is a record of the inherence of rupture in the Jewish understanding of the nature of divine decree, of Jewish history, and of the intersection of immanent and transcendent reality. Each decisive historical moment is a rupture. Each rupture remakes Judaism and the Jewish relationship to God. Each rupture further unfolds reality and remanifests Creation.

Warren S. Goldstein, ‘Secularization Patterns in the Old Paradigm’, Sociology of Religion 70, no. 2 (2009): 165. 21 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 183. 22 Ibid. 20

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4. RUPTURE, REMEMBRANCE, AND SELFHOOD This process is commemorated, and celebrated, through liturgical and cultural reenactments, in which the individual, historical actor is folded back into the communal, anamnestic presentation and expression of belonging. The result of successive iterations of this project is that the locus of ethical thought is placed increasingly on a bounded and distinct individual self. Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded selfI want to say the “buffered” selfand the “porous” self of the earlier enchanted world … For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from, everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them … By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful emotions [is] outside the “mind”; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense. 23

To be sure, to attribute the development of modern conceptions of the self solely to Israelite culture or the Hebrew language would be vastly oversimplifying a complex, ongoing, and global phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is possible to perceive a relationship between Israelite ontology, the regenerative and interpretive possibilities facilitated by Hebrew, and the development of conceptions of Taylor’s ‘bounded self’. Indeed, the Akedah narrative represents, on one of its many levels, a radical statement on the sacredness and autonomy of the individual human life, and the life-altering properties of humandivine (and textual) interpretation. These interpretations are repeated and reenacted in ritual commemorations that extend the interpreCharles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35–38. See also Kugel, Great Shift, 51–52; Clifford Geertz, ‘From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological SelfUnderstanding’, in Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983), 55–70.

23

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tive frame and the reconstitutive powers of rupture into the present: the anamnestic plane is willed, by human interpretive ingenuity, into collision with the historical. Such commemorations preserve the typological characterization of ruptures: as echoes of Creation, as evidence of divine intervention, and as opportunities for renewal of and recommitment to covenantal responsibility. This interpretive stance toward rupture was applied, as well, to the ‘theologizing experience’ of expulsion, migration, and the unfolding of the Diaspora. 24 In sixteenth-century Safed, for example, rupture constituted the very fabric of rabbinic theophanic contextualization of the exile from Spain. If ‘[t]he gesture acquires meaning, reality, solely to the extent it repeats a primordial act’, 25 then the exile from Spain was a rupture that echoed the exodus and Mount Sinai, revealing God’s active participation in the history of Judaism and the Jews, re-revealing worldly rupture as a symptom of divine rupture. As Western Europe was emptied of Jews, the expanding Ottoman Empire made significant Jewish settlement in Palestine under favorable circumstances possible for the first time in centuries. The return of a significant Jewish presence to holy terrain sparked a renewal of messianic hope and eschatological energy. At the end of the sixteenth century those Jews who still sought the meaning of Jewish historical suffering and of the length of exile found it in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and his disciples, which spread out from a Galilean hill town to rapidly conquer the Jewish world. It is surely more than coincidence that a people that did not yet dream of defining itself in mundane historical categories should now have found the key to its history in an awesome metahistorical myth of a pronounced gnostic character. That myth declared that all evil, including the historical evil that is Jewish exile, had its roots before history began, before the Timothy L. Smith, ‘Religion and Ethnicity in America’, The American Historical Review 83, no. 5 (1978): 1175. 25 Mircea Eleade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon, 1954), 5. 24

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SECOND SLAYINGS Garden of Eden was planted, before our world existed, in a primal tragic flaw that occurred at the very creation of the cosmos itself. 26

In the passage above, Yerushalmi identifies the development of an exilic cultural tool kit, and strategies for ordering the use of that tool kit, in this instance through the internalization of rupture that occurred after the expulsion from Spain. Seen as an event that was ‘felt to have altered the face of Jewry and of history itself’, 27 the expulsion was interpreted, in mystical terms, as being indicative of a rupture within the very fabric of the divine. That is, the expulsion from Spain spoke to the mystical Jewish exilic consciousness not only of the fractured relationship between the Jews and their God but also of the fractured nature of divinity and its cosmos. Expulsion was evidence not just of God’s anger at Jewish abdication of covenantal responsibility but of God’s own brokenness, and as such, in the context of covenant, it invoked Jewish responsibility to work for tiqqun, or cosmic repair. In other words, rupture was understood to be inherent in divinity. Rupture, to the Kabbalists of Safed, was the price God paid for Creation. 28 To the mystical Kabbalistic conventicles of Safed, then, rupture inhered in reality because it inhered in reality’s Source. ‘Kabbalah, the most theosophical genre of Jewish literature, held that forces within this world mirror those above and vice versa; the two can never be separated’. 29 Covenantal commitment required Jews to affect cosmic repair as a means of regaining shlemut, or wholeness; of cultivating devekut, or cleaving to God; and of hastening redemption, that eschatological endpoint in which man

26 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 27 Ibid., 59. 28

73.

David Biale, ‘Jewish Mysticism in the Sixteenth Century’, in Paul E. Szarmach, ed., An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe: Fourteen Original Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 322. 29 David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 4.

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would be restored to God, God to man, and God to Godself. 30 No history was merely the record of the interaction of men and of nations; no Jewish suffering was merely the result of human strife and striving. ‘[The] deeds of other nations that were profoundly affecting Israel’s vital interests also came to be regarded as wrought by Yahweh’. 31 We have hoped to show here that a language that accommodates an ontology of rupture carries within both an epistemology of recovery through interpretation and the development of the conception of a bounded self, for whom interpretation becomes a means of both individuation and belonging. In this way, a people defined by repeated crises constitutes, and is constituted by, the commemoration and celebration of mythohistorical events central to its own calendrical and liturgical cycles.

5. A TAXONOMY OF JEWISH MEMORY a. Canonical Memory In chapter 1, three significant taxonomies of collective memory were summarized and evaluated: those of the memory theorist Aleida Assmann, the cognitive psychologists David Manier and William Hirst, and the religious ethicist Richard B. Miller. Of these, Miller’s provides the clearest and most compelling basis for memory as a dynamic and intersedimented process of remembering and forgetting, one that absorbs and redirects individual and systemic inputs and guides the moral, ethical, and political development of a culture. Miller’s work accommodates the canonical, commemorative, and archival influences emphasized by Assmann, and it is sensitive to cognitivepsychological and systemic processes through which a culture absorbs, transforms, and recontextualizes events and ideas in ways that reinforce cultural identity. Miller’s work is part of a larger ‘turn to culture’, in which the autonomy of culture is posited, and cultural R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977), 94. 31 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Street, 1963), 23. 30

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analysis is paired with historical sociology, to form a more nuanced understanding of how cultures develop and change. 32 Fishbane’s observations on exegetical culture, in which ‘the ancient past may … return as a ritual present’, are relevant here, as they are consistent with Miller’s advocacy for developing an understanding of culture through the study of local knowledge and traditions. 33 As Miller notes, the ‘experience of memory occurs in different embodied, vernacular, institutional, social, and political contexts, and that fact has important implications for any understanding of memory’s ubiquity’ (MPBM, 535). Miller’s taxonomy is defined by a distinction between praxis and pathos, or ‘bidden’ and ‘unbidden’ memories (MPBM, 535). Cultural memory falls into the category of praxis, formed through regulated (‘smooth’) processes of retrieving archived practices, images, and events; while pathos is experienced through the ‘jagged, interruptive’ processes of crisis, trauma, and the unbidden (MPBM, 539). This accords with our conception of the intrusions of theophanic energy into the plane of historical experience. Traditional Jewish memory seeks to fold pathos into praxis, and individual and cultural memory into canonical context. Hence, our initial distinction in Jewish cultural memory is between canonical and historical memory. Canonical memory refers both to the memories contained in and conveyed by canon and to the contextualization of cultural memory under the rubric of canonical narrative, law, and rite. It is inherently anamnestic: that is, canonical memory repeats and works through canonical narrative, retrieving and recentering formative mythohistorical narratives within and through the varieties of current experience. Historical memory refers to the temporal plane of the lived experience of Jewish cultures, as recorded and commemorated in archive and testimony, monument and modern rite. Here, as in the 32

See Kane, ‘Cultural Analysis in Historical Sociology’, 53–69; Barry Schwartz, ‘Culture and Collective Memory: Comparative Perspectives’, Handbook of Cultural Sociology (New York: Routledge 2010), 619–28. 33 See Fishbane, ‘Canonical Text’, 141–42; Miller, ‘Moral and Political Burdens of Memory’, 535.

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rest of the taxonomy presented here, clear delineations do not equate to impermeable boundaries: the functions of different memory forms intertwine and overlap. Canon is wound into history. The centrality of the hermeneutic of retrospective projection and the hypoleptical accumulation of midrashic interpretations of lived experience mean that while functions can be distinguished, they cannot be unbound from one another. b. Canonical: Halakhic Memory Halakhic memory is at the heart of Funkenstein’s conception of Jewish historical consciousness. This memory form is developed through the promulgation of law, which flows from rabbinic dicta and directs individual and communal action on the temporal plane. ‘The Halakhah does not openly concern itself with beliefs and concepts; it determines, in practice, the way in which one should walk, that which is permitted and forbidden, obligatory and exempted, clean and unclean. Nevertheless beliefs and concepts lie at the core of many halakhot; only their detection requires exhaustive study of the history of the Halakhah combined with care to avoid fanciful conjectures and unfounded explanations’. 34 In this concise formulation, E. E. Urbach notes the emphasis on practical guidelines for developing a just society, and the careful hermeneutical procedures that can be deployed in detecting the mythohistorical underpinnings of these guidelines. Here, halakhic memory is a basis for the ‘thin’ relations of rabbinic Judaism. This memory form is ethical in its essence, summoning Miller’s duties and virtues of memory, or ‘excellences’. The development of these excellences is a cultural acknowledgement that ‘[r]emembering is a function of being a certain kind of people, of disposing ourselves toward certain ideals over time’ (MPBM, 535). c. Canonical: Liturgical Memory As noted in the previous chapter, liturgy is a vital and mimetic container for communally expressed memory procedures, enacted at regular intervals in the Jewish day, week, month, and year, and em34

Urbach, Sages, 4.

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bedded in Jewish epistemology. Liturgical memory enfolds the forms of the sacrificial service of the Temple into the rituals of synagogue life and the procedures of communal prayer. Although procedural in nature, liturgical memory is one instantiation of those memories that Miller notes ‘possess eros: they are energized by love, unity, and desire’ (MPBM, 536). More specifically, liturgical memory is memory as praxis, which, in traditional Judaism, is a deeply embedded form of ‘habit memory’, which in turn, as Miller notes, ‘refers to the deep presence of the past in everyday life and practice’ (ibid.). Furthermore, liturgical memory is the active and regular practice of joining historical and anamnestic time: communal prayer summons the meta-historical through commemoration of the ruptures of historical occurrence, and their combination with canonized prayer and prescriptions for their communal performance. Liturgical memory brings the past of interwoven mythology and history into the historical present. It is a form of ‘institutional’ memory (MPBM, 537), through which the continuity of institutions and the cultivation of communal cohesion are cultivated. d. Canonical: Midrashic Memory Liturgical memory is thus indebted and intimately related to midrashic memory. As noted in chapter 1, midrashic memory contextualizes historical crisis with biblical narrative through radically innovative textual interpretation. Through this process, typologies of mythohistorical rupture make sense of historical experience by considering them as episodes of the intrusion of divine energy and intention into the temporal plane of lived experience. Crises are not merely historical events and are not merely experienced on the plane of history. Rather, they are realignments of cultural and canonical identity. Midrashic memory is the matrix of the entire taxonomy presented here: the engine of cultural renewal and the source of interpretive ingenuity, linking traditional praxis with ever-changing cultural circumstances. As such, it corresponds to Miller’s depiction of those layers of memory that are ‘jagged or interruptive’ (MPBM, 539). And yet, as Miller also notes, ‘memory is more fluid than all these static categories and distinctions suggest’. It is, after all, ‘keenly self-reflexive. Making matters more complicated is the fact that remembering is driven by voluntary and involuntary processes; our

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memories, and their selective editing, are not entirely under our control’ (MPBM, 540–41). We apply the above distinctions to midrashic memory because its performative, dialogic, and inter-fluential properties suffuse the entire taxonomy. We pull the threads of the mnemonic tapestry to distinguish their individual course through the whole. Midrashic memory relies on the interpretations (and the memories) of others; it is thus not merely self-reflexive, it is other-reflexive. This leads us to consider the possibility that an ethics of Jewish memory must be built upon the foundations of midrashic memory. That is, we must consider the possibility that the creative, reconstructive, and anamnestic aspects of remembering as recovery, in the sense of both healing and retrieval, and not the historical, diachronic aspects of memory, are primary in Judaism.

6. TEMPORAL MEMORY: HISTORICAL, ARCHIVAL, AND RECONSTRUCTIVE Historical memory, expressed traditionally through halakhic decree, becomes, in modernity, foundational to secular Jewish memory, revealing a productive tension in the forward motion of traditional memory. Historical memory is monochronic, linear, and temporal in nature. It has both archival and reconstructive functions. It is an especially modern form of Jewish memory, whose primary motive forces were the Haskalah, or ‘Jewish Enlightenment’ and the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarship in the late eighteenth century in Central and Western Europe. 35 Jewish memory thus developed a historical component that emphasized the rational, objective, and empirical standards for judging historical events and compiling historical records. Against this process, however, midrashic memory continued to influence even early maskilic historical chronicles. This is evident in the typological ranking of early chroniSee esp. Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 125–37. These processes can be traced most broadly to the work of Benedict Spinoza. 35

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clers by the Polish dramatist and poet Shalom haCohen (1722–1845), in his comparison of the prophet Jeremiah, the chronicler Josephus, and the Portuguese scholar, philosopher, and statesman Isaac Abarbanel: They were great tsadikim, sages and writers … They experienced poverty and exile, Jeremiah after the destruction of the First Temple, Josephus after the destruction of the Second Temple, and Abarbanel during the bitter expulsion from Spain. 36

Indeed, even the principal figure of the Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, was lauded in terms that placed him in historical context, even while praising him in biblical (and not only Jewish biblical) terms. For this day a child was born unto us to increase wisdom among the people of Yeshurun, and who would become the father of all the children of Jacob, the prince of peace … this is the day God brought light unto us and cast off darkness … to open blind eyes that had strayed from the true path and were lost in the land for many, many years, and the gate of wisdom was closed before them … this is the day we had hoped for, when the shackles of our imprisonment were removed, the hope of Israel in its time of tribulation. 37

We may say that Jewish cultural memory, as a whole, comprises the dialectical engagement of historical and midrashic memory forms, which over time have become increasingly interwoven and interdependent. A problem posed by this theorization is that it depends upon historicist epistemics to define both historical and ahistorical or anti-historical processes. This points to a fundamental aporia in the objectivity of the discipline of history. As Koselleck notes, history claims at once to know facts and know itself. It is both subject and object; it ‘reconstructs circumstances which were not articulated into 36 Ibid., 86.

Judah Jeiteles, Reshit bikurim, quoted in Feiner, Haskalah and History, 87. 37

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language earlier but which can be worked up with the help of scientific methods and indices’. The reconstructions of historic memory exposes a ‘tension … at the level of the source language and of the language of analysis’. 38 The narratization of historical memory thus imposes a monochronic, unilinear temporal template upon a multidimensional and multi-temporal framework of sequences and events; it does so, in many instances, by imposing the linguistic and epistemological orientations of historicism, whose analysts are rooted in monochronic ontology, onto other cultures and eras in which time, language, geography, and culture evinced and promoted vastly different perspectival approaches. In the case of Judaism, the lashon kodesh inflects the faculty of memory through linguistic, liturgical, and cultural forms and practices. An analysis of Jewish memory is thus a self-reflexive practice embedded within the very structures it seeks to analyze.

7. CULTURAL MEMORY RUBRICS: RUPTURES, FRACTURES, AND FRACTALS The reemergence of a Jewish state has resulted in a fundamental bifurcation in Jewish memory. For almost two millennia, Israel was a metonym for Jewish messianic hopes, enshrined in liturgy and intoned on sacred days. The reemergence of Israel as a modern nation was a classic rupture in the Sewellian sense: a dramatic change that facilitated a cascade of other enduring transformations. One of the more recent notable changes is the movement of Israeli Jews into other countries around the world, which has interwoven not only secular and religious forms of memory, but also those forms particular to life in contemporary Israeli society. This is a crucial component of contemporary memory that deserves further study. Approximately 170,000 Holocaust survivors infused emerging Israeli society with diasporic experiential and cultural conditioning from both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities, as well as with the perspectives of exile, expulsion, and trauma; the arrival of Jews expelled from Arab Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 89–90. 38

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nations after 1948 swelled the Sephardic Jewish population and brought related but culturally distinct perspectives and experiences. 39 Successive waves of immigration have continued to infuse emerging Israeli identity with exilic memories and the consequences of cultural rupture. Hence, distinctions between Israeli and Diaspora memory must come with the caveat that the two are, like the cultures that produce them, inextricably interconnected. The blurred, repeated recombinations of exile and return, of Diaspora and homeland, of Ashkenaz and Sefarad, may render taxonomic distinctions ineffective. Such distinctions, for Miller, raise the question of whether a ‘supracollective or supranational memory can deploy the concept of memory only as metaphor’. 40 This memory pattern is fractal in nature: that is, it engages in self-replication, absorbing and duplicating modifications imposed by rupture or achieved by interpretation. 41 One critical aspect of the fractal process is epitomized by the paradox of the ‘Koch Snowflake’. This is a fractal process in which the middle third of each side of a triangle is raised into a symmetrical point. The process can be repeated infinitely, resulting in the paradox that the lengths of the triangle’s sides move toward infinity while the volume of the triangle’s

39

See https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005129#. Viewed December 14, 2017. 40 Miller, ‘Moral and Political Burdens of Memory’. Here, Miller is analyzing James Booth’s distinction between moral and ethical forms of witness, and also Booth’s assertion of a tension between liberal democracy and the duties of memory. See W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 41 Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has noted the fractal patterns inherent in Jewish prayer. See Sacks, ‘Understanding Jewish Prayer’, xxvi–xxvii. This pattern, too, may find its origins in the rational and scientific thought of Spinoza and represent the ‘secularization of theology’. See T. M. Rudavsky, ‘Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (October 2001), 611–31.

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interior remains the same. 42 The hypoleptical accumulations of midrashic and halakhic memories work in precisely this fashion: each interpretation preserves processes of covenantal obligation, even while preserving the sacred dimensions of canon. In the case of midrashic memory, however, the process responds to and proliferates on both the historical and anamnestic planes: a repetition of the chiastic pattern embedded in the narratives of Isaac and Abraham. The expansion of possible meanings develops fractal blooms in interpretive possibilities for recovery from cultural rupture. There is evidence, although contested, that the fractal pattern of self-replication, which exists on the molecular and genetic levels, extends even to the inheritance of trauma. Although further study is needed on this issue, it suggests that there may be a genetic component to cultural memory. 43

8. HISTORICAL: SECULAR MEMORY As Paul Mendes-Flohr has aptly noted, ‘God is still a presence in the space opened up by the process we are wont to call secularization’.44 Mendes-Flohr identifies the dynamics of Jewish memory in modernity and of the ways in which religious orientation persists even within the precincts of secular societies, and also within not only communities but the individuals that comprise those communities: [I]f faith in Godor some abiding sense of transcendencestill informs our public and private lives, it perforce must do so in conversation with other nontheistic cognitive orienta42

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/KochSnowflake.html. Viewed December 16, 2017. 43 See Rachel Yehuda et al., ‘Influences of Maternal and Paternal PTSD on Epigenetic Regulation of Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene in Holocaust Survivor Offspring’, American Journal of Psychiatry 171, no. 8 (August 2014): 872–80. Dr. Yehuda’s research has been widely questioned. See, e.g., Seema Yasmin, ‘Experts Debunk Study That Found Holocaust Trauma Is Inherited’, Chicago Tribune, June 9, 2017. 44 William Schweiker et al., ‘Grappling with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age’, The Journal of Religion 90, no. 3 (July 2010): 389.

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SECOND SLAYINGS tions. But this conversation, I should like to emphasize, does not only take place between representatives of these various faith postures but also internally within each of us as an interminable inner monologue between a hope grounded in the transcendent and a hope grounded in the promise of quotidian, secular wisdom and well being. 45

Indeed, secular Jewish memory blossomed as Jewish communities escaped the ghetto and made their way into broader European societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From that historical moment on, Jewish memory confronted text and tradition with the tools of both rabbinic and historical analysis. The intersection of historical and anamnestic time began to undergo a process of transformation, in which the standardization of conceptions of time, combined with the emergence of national identities, emphasized scientific conceptions of causality. 46 Under the auspices of the Enlightenment, reason eclipsed revelation as a source of authentic knowledge. In order to gain admission into the rapidly opening societies of Central and Western Europe, Jewish communities underwent wrenching change on the ‘cognitive, axio-normative, and social levels’. 47 The result was a form of Jewish memory that mimetically appropriated historicist elements of Western Enlightenment epistemology, even while retaining the ritual, mythological, and midrashic foundations of the rabbinic religion and its precedents. These broad historical brushstrokes are meant to illuminate the way in which Jewish memory develops and how that development influences Jewish conceptions of history, identity, and memory itself. The taxonomy is not hierarchical; the process is not linear. The fractal interpretive framework preserves and extends memory’s creative basis, infinitely increasing its external reach, while preserving the bounded space of its canon.

45 Ibid., 390.

46 See esp. Motzkin, ‘Invention of 47 Ibid., 391.

History’, 31–32.

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9. TOWARD AN ETHICS OF MIDRASHIC MEMORY Midrashic memory and the Midrashic Condition from which it emerges raise complex challenges around the development of an ethics of Jewish memory. This is because, strictly speaking, midrashic memories are not ‘true’: that is, they do not seek to represent dispassionate, objective perspectives on historical events. Rather, such memories seek to preserve evidence of the intersection of immanence and transcendence, and to detect the presence of divine care in even the most catastrophic occurrences. As such, midrashic memory bridges multiple categories of Miller’s taxonomy of memory. Midrashic memory is both preservative and creative. It can be said to be both archival and reconstructive, both institutional and popular, and to contain elements of both bidden and unbidden recollection. How, then, can such a memory be the basis for an ethically stable and viable cultural memory? Miller himself provides a possible response in his discussion of Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting. The ‘problematic of representation of the past’ (MHF, xvi) requires the admission of certain forms and amounts of forgetting, yet such regulations go against the phenomenological contours of memory, which is a presencing of what is absent. In order to fashion an ethics of memory, Miller suggests that ‘there is a critical ethics of desire that ought to mediate between the work of memory and forgetting, between (more precisely) recollection and repression’ (MPBM, 556). This is precisely the ethical gap that midrashic memory seeks to fill. To the question, ‘why did things happen like this and not otherwise?’ (MPBM, 551), midrashic memory produces and explores fractal interstices of text, and in effect problematizes the processes of remembering and forgetting. The challenge, from an ethical standpoint, is that the fractal duplication of interpretive possibilities can cloud searches for objective truths that can serve as the basis of cultural memory. One extreme iteration of this process is evident in the ways Internet technology has created portals and silos for the customization of facts and memories. Yet midrashic memories do not occlude truth; rather, they uncover and amplify the moral and ethical complexity of truth claims by interpreting, subverting, and reordering them, with no explicit claims as to the truth of such interpretations. In this way, midrashic

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memory engages dialectically with ‘social processes, civic formation, and material culture’ (MPBM, 561), pointing toward a truth more layered and more paradoxical than monochronic narratives can depict. If memory is, as Miller and others note, a dynamic and dialectical process of remembering and forgettingan ethics of Jewish memory, and of midrashic memory specificallymidrashic memory acknowledges and accommodates the forms of popular memoryprosthetic, finite, and repressedthat Miller identifies.

10. NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE STUDY OF MEMORY, JEWISH AND OTHER This project is an attempt to point toward fruitful new directions in the study, and the critique, of the field of cultural memory. The focus here, on Jewish cultural memory and its dynamic and interpretive orientation, can be adapted most readily to other canonical text cultures. The focus must be broadened, however, so that the variant influences of text and interpretation can be analyzed in Jewish societies around the world, and for the broadening spectrum of Jewish identities. While midrashic memory has been proposed in this work as the principal motivating force of Jewish cultural memories, deeper explorations of the various taxonomic forms proposed here should also be undertaken. For example, halakhic and liturgical memory, in all their fractal efflorescence, have resulted in rulings and responsa, prayer books, Passover Haggadot, and literary and artistic expressions that are looped back into cultural memory. The influence of canon on contemporary expressions of Jewish culture would shed additional light on the ways in which ancient rite and text continue to shape Jewish identity and Jewish memory. Memory has been explored as a system, but in light of advances in neurolinguistic programming, neurobiology, genetics, human psychology, and systems theory, memory is best approached with a transdisciplinary focus. As more is understood about how individual memory operates, theorizations of cultural memory must be reexamined. In the case of Jewish memory, the scholarly focus on trauma and violence, while crucial to the development of a deeper understanding of Jewish memory, is too seldom traced back beyond the source of the most recent traumas. Scholarship must turn to text to investigate the culture’s reliance on interpretive typologies, as has

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been attempted here. Such a turn promises to reveal essential resources in the culture’s efforts to contextualize, confront, and recover from even the most severe disruptions.48 The gendering of memory has received some attention, but the increasing participation of people along the gender spectrum in the creation of Jewish memory deserves study. Finally, technology is influencing how individuals receive, curate, store, and retrieve information, and this is changing the landscape of individual and collective identity. Cultural memory cannot continue to be traced solely to siteshistorical sites, archives, museums, and commemorative constructionsbecause it is increasingly located, and fractally distributing, along the vectors of techonological ‘community’ building. Some scholars of cultural memory have asserted that customizable technology will result in the death of memory; yet the accelerating pace of change suggests that even such dire predictions warrant constant reexamination. 49 Finally, and most important, more detailed study of Jewish memory forms, as conceived and articulated by philosophers, scholars, and exegetes throughout Jewish history, would shed light on contemporary receptions of cultural rupture and how earlier interpretations of upheaval continue to influence Jewish identity and memory. 50 See Duncan Bell, ‘Introduction: Violence and Memory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 2 (October 2009): 345–60. 49 Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, ‘Introduction’, in Assmann and Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4. See also Brad Buckley and John Conomos, Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Faringdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Libri, 2015). 50 ‘Fake memory’ has been deliberately excluded from the taxonomy of memory proposed here, precisely because it is ‘fake’. However, its power and ubiquitous presence must be acknowledged. Fake memory is defined here as a deliberate manipulation of collective memory, rooted in an untruth, which has as its goal the obscuring, undermining, or delegitimation of an existing memory. In its deliberate and often artful inauthenticity, fake memory seeks to undermine and transgress against the very hermeneutical 48

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11. CONCLUSION The Akedah has been analyzed here as both a map and a metonym for the process of midrashic memory. The goal has been to develop an understanding of the text as foundational to modes of interpreting through crisis, remembering through interpretation, building a mimetic mnemonic structure that is plastic, portable, and typological. We have proceeded from the observation that the narrative is linguistically and structurally repetitive, both internally and in its relationship to other patriarchal and matriarchal narratives. The characters are, of course, representations of human beings in a story with a beginning, middle, and end. However, they are also figures of memory. As such, the story can be read as a struggle to balance the demands of intra-human and human-divine covenantal and ethical and cultural procedures it exploits. What distinguishes fake memory from midrashic memory is the obfuscation or rejection of, rather than the conscious connection to, memory’s rootedness in previous mnemonic retrievals and interpretations. Fake memory contains no ‘as if’ proposition; rather, it seeks to delegitimize and replace the connection between interpretative and historical memory, and to obstruct the intersection between the temporal and anamnestic planes of memory. Fake memory is anti-memory. In implanted memories, propaganda, claims of ‘fake news’, and ‘deepfake’ videos, fake memory proposes its own legitimacy by employing the structures of enduring memory forms its proponents seek to undermine. While this study will not provide an in-depth analysis of fake memory, its presence in a wide variety of forms of contemporary discourse requires that its presence be acknowledged. Contemporary debates around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have included competing accusations of fake memory tied to the propagation of nationalist myths. See, e.g., Dr. Daniel C. Maguire, ‘The Immorality of It All’, United Methodist Task Force for Palestine-Israel, http://um-palestine-israel-tf.org/the-immorality-of-it-all/. Dr. Maguire cites Jacob Neusner’s observation of the Jewish ‘mythic mode of perception’, which he apparently considers as both unique to Jews and profoundly manipulative. The twinned roots of mythic Jewish and Christian perception, sunk into canonical text, receive no mention or analysis.

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obligation, through the act of interpretive remembering. The narrative is, as previously noted, already given context and framing through the narrative voice: as all reading is rereading, so all interpretation is re-interpretation, and all memory construction is remembering.51 Hence, the propulsive force of the doublings within the Akedah, and between the Akedah and Genesis 12 and other narratives, demands of the reader an awareness of planes of event and interpretation that interpenetrate and respond to one another. The Akedah is presented as the foundational act of the sacrificial cult, and of the act of resolving crisis through interpretation: in its location in the Book of Genesis and in the patriarchal narratives; in its chiastic structure, mirrored in other narratives and in the structure of the Abraham narrative as a whole; in its mimetic action and doublings of word and phrase; and in the crucial act of autonomous (that is, not divinely decreed) substitution of the ram for Isaac. It represents the instantiation of the Midrashic Condition in the development of Israelite culture. The ethical and historical implications of the presence of midrashic memory warrant a thorough reconsideration and retheorization of Jewish cultural memory; this project makes a tentative beginning at that undertaking. The focus has been restricted here to the Akedah and its effect on the development of Israelite and Jewish religion and culture, even though that culture grew in contestation and dialogue with other traditions, traditions in which the Akedah also played a central role. Jewish memory culture, however, afforded midrashic exegesis a formative role in the development of new interpretations for conditions and crises. The ‘Midrashic Condition’ thus made each crisis an opportunity for the ‘as-if’ operation, through which new meanings provided new avenues for connection to canon and renewal of covenant. Under these conditionsin biblical Israel, in Diaspora, and in the modern State of Israel; in settings both religious and secularnothing was new under the Sun. Typological thinking permitted the discovery of esoteric meaning in exoteric 51

The remark that all reading is re-reading is attributed to Vladimir Nabokov. See Christian Moraru, ‘Reading, Writing, Being: Persians, Parisians, and the Scandal of Identity’, Symploke 17, no. 1–2 (2009): 247.

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event, and cultural memory was infused with new energy, sourced through ancient narrative. The Akedah became the way to renew ancestral merit, to revive covenantal consciousness, to discern divine presence and care, and to seize a measure of human autonomy from the pagesand from the gapsof Scripture. Through this process, the act of mimetic substitution was made central to interpretation, and thus to Jewish memory itself. The replacement of the ram for the favored son provided equivalences through which both merit and memory were sustained: the ‘memory’ of the Akedah, to be sure, but also the singular merit of Abraham, through whom the substitution gained efficacy, and Isaac himself, through whom submission to divine will was seen as the ultimate expression of sacred commitment. Although this form of memory was for millennia the sole province of the masculine, and of masculinist systems of purity and priesthood, studies in diverse fields including linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, ethics, genetics, hermeneutics, and gender studies have demonstrated and revealed new possibilities in interpretations at intersections of influence: text and trauma, martyrdom and memory, culture and canon. Future studies of Jewish memory must take into account the Midrashic Condition, not only in its Jewish iteration, but in its development alongside, in contestation with and, at times, in conjunction with Christianity and Islam, with philosophical traditions, and with feminist and queer interpretations of text and tradition. The Akedah already has proven fruitful for explorations of gender, sexuality, and sacrifice; Coakley’s interpretation of Isaac as a gender-labile figure is but one example of how a new understanding of Isaac can afford more multivalent understandings of the role of sacrifice in maintaining gender roles and distinctions, even as sacrifice is internalized. Different disciplinary perspectives will continue to provide avenues toward a deeper understanding of how memory is shaped by cultural, sociological, linguistic, religious, genetic, geographical, and psychological factors, including in the interaction and confrontation with other spiritual traditions and exegetical strategies, including secular and post-traditional approaches to text and liturgy.

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Above all, it is the ‘as if’ hermeneutical procedure of midrash, especially as applied to the substitution of the ram for the favored son, that presents possibilities for appreciating the intersection of anamnestic and historical planes in Jewish memory and for the internalization of externalized and embodied rite. Here, then, is the reiterative and mimetic process begun again and again: the process of interpretation, through which the past is made present and the anamnetic and temporal planes are joined. The Binding of Isaac is not, or not only, a historical narrative, a myth, an ethical rejoinder to child sacrifice, or proof of human-divine connection. It is also the interiorization of ritual praxis, the sanctification of interpretation, the basis of a principal and dualized form of Jewish memory, and a map for the means by which the culture recovers from rupture. Isaac is alive, and yet his ashes are beneath the altar. Abraham has killed, and he has had mercy. God asked for Abraham’s beloved son, and God did not ask. Isaac is slain and slain again; he is spared and spared again. Thus, Jewish memory revives itself upon the altar of its ruptures, renewing its commitment and connection to the divine. Midrash is memory, finding its way back toward the locus of all life-giving rupture and recovery.

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INDEX

Amoraim, 6, 27, 28, 55–56, 96n85, 106, 113, 124, 127, 133, 136, 143, 147–148, 156, 158–159 Aramaic, 191, 192 Assmann, Aleida, 2, 12, 34, 44– 45, 197 Assmann, Jan, 2, 7n9, 12, 28, 34, 48, 141, 148–151, 176, 177n72, 187n8

Abarbanel, Isaac, 72n32, 202 Abraham, 5, 10, 18–21, 24, 30, 53– 54, 55, 59, 61, 64–65, 72–73, 84, 86, 89, 90–104, 106, 124– 126, 131–132, 152, 156, 162–163, 165, 167, 172–175, 211, 213 Akedah, 104, 105, 130–131, 140– 141, 148, 151–152, 159–162, 164, 169, 173, 176–177, 181, 190, 194, 211–212; and Israeli national identity, 172n65; and Jewish cultural identity, 178– 180; and midrashic memory, 60–62, 101–102, 136, 142, 154– 155, 158, 163, 210; and mimesis, 68, 71, 75, 101, 171; repetition in, 63–65, 74, 89–93; and revision of, 87, 89–93; and sacrifice, 100, 104, 106–108; and substitution, 84, 123–130, 166–167 Amoraic midrashim, 13, 26, 29– 30, 35, 43, 54–55, 60, 106, 113, 116, 128, 133, 148, 152, 155, 162, 187

Band, Arnold J., 140n3, 154 Benjamin, Walter, 67 R. Berekiah, 155 Berger, Peter L., 69, 72n31, 74n34 Boehm, Omri, 87–88, 95, 99 Bokser, Baruch M., 113, 114n28, 149n19, 149, 176 Booth, James, 204n40 Boyarin, Daniel, 55n78, 133–134 Casey, Edward, 80 Charity Principle, the, 88, 101 chiasmus/chiastic structure, 12, 64, 65, 91, 93, 100–102, 110, 135, 166, 173–174, 186, 192, 205, 211

233

234

SECOND SLAYINGS

Christianity, 4, 106, 110, 126, 157n34, 212 codex, production of, 109 Cohen, Arthur, 181 Cold War, the, 39n38 Crusades, the, 5, 14, 15, 57, 139, 151, 152 cultural strategy, 3, 8, 14, 15, 25, 65, 78, 169, 174 culture-structure, 9, 41 Davidson, Jo Ann, 96n85 Des Pres, Terrence, 139 Diaspora, 25, 44, 105, 117, 184, 192, 195, 204, 211 Dworkin, Ronald, 88 Dynamic memory theory, 16, 47 Enlightenment, the, 44, 183, 202, 206 Exodus, Book of, 79, 82 Ezekiel, 83, 123; Book of, 83, 122 Fackenheim, Emil, 170 firstborn, 94, 156; offering of, 77–81; substitution and, 81– 85 Fishbane, Michael, 10, 72n31, 82– 83, 106, 108, 114, 120, 125, 126n52, 129, 197–198 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 25 Fraade, Steven D., 133, 135, 136 fractals, 186–187, 203–206, 207, 208 Fremdheit, 68–69 Freud, Sigmund, 7n9, 23n1, 36, 146,

Funkenstein, Amos, 2, 36, 37, 5– 53, 199 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 68–71 Gedächtnis, 49, 188 gender/gendering, 212; and cultural memory, 188n9, 189n10, 209 Genesis, Book of, 8, 18–21, 77, 85, 95, 104, 211 Genesis Rabbah (GR), 3n3, 14, 106, 115, 123–130, 161 Gersonidas, 53n75, 94 Giddens, Anthony, 56n82 Girard, René, 35n27 Glatzer, Nahum, 123n48 God, names of: Adonai, 20, 73, 91n77; Elohim, 72, 73n33, 74, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100; YHVH, 72, 73n33, 74, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100 Goldin, Judah, 152–154 Greek myth, 156 Grossman, David, 25 Gruenwald, Ithamar (see also Midrashic Condition and midrashic memory), 10, 32, 34, 63 Halbertal, Moshe, 78 Halbwachs, Maurice, 36–38 Halliwell, Stephen, 67 Handelman, Susan, 28n12, 69 Harth, Dietrich, 48–50 Hebrew (language), 152, 153, 172n65, 186, 188–193, 194 Heine, Heinrich, 7n10 Heinemann, Joseph, 54n77

INDEX

235

Hendel, Ronald S., 79 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 181– 182 hineni/hineh (“Here I am”), 18, 19 Hirst, William, 45–46, 197 Holocaust, the, 5, 14, 15, 26, 57, 140, 142, 143, 151–155, 166, 169–170, 177, 178 hypolepsis, 8, 12, 34, 128–129, 139, 141, 142, 148–151, 170, 174, 176, 179, 186, 199, 205

Lacombe, Paul, 145 Levinson, Bernard M., 17 Leviticus, Book of, 117, 118, 119, 123 Leviticus Rabbah (LR), 115–123 Lieberman, Saul, 156n33 Liturgy, High Holiday, 15, 140, 154, 159–165, 176; Malkhuyot, 159–165, 176; and recitation, 89–93, 179; Shofarot, 159–165, 176; Zikhronot, 159–165, 176 Löwith, Karl, 193

indeterminacy, 133, 135, 186 intertextuality, 3, 4, 10, 26, 42, 59, 109, 133, 150, 152 iron wall, 148–151, 163, 176 Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, 54 Isaac, 5, 10, 15, 18–19, 24, 25, 172, 174n68, 205, 211, 212; Ashes of, 15, 84, 128, 129, 155–159, 163, 178–179, 213

Maimonides, 81, 95, 96n86, 124 Mandrou, Robert, 146 Manier, David, 45–46, 197 martyrdom, 15, 54, 57, 105, 130– 132, 142, 151, 157n34, 163–164, 165, 171–176, 178–179, 187, 212 memorization, 115 memory, archival, 46, 182, 183, 197, 201–203, 207; canonical, 197–199, 200–201; cultural, 203–205; direct, 45; halakhic, 199, 205, 208; historical, 48, 198, 201–203, 209n50; liturgical, 50, 199–200, 208; midrashic, 60–62, 101–102, 103– 138, 139–180, 200–201, 207– 208; reconstructive, 46–47, 136–138; secular, 205–206; temporal, 201–203 memory studies, 2, 36, 38 Mendes-Flohr, Paul R., 205 Midrashic Condition, the (see also Greunwald), 1, 6, 12, 14, 30–33, 54–58, 113

Jeremiah, 83, 202; Book of, 83 Job, Book of, 120 Judeo-Arabic (language), 192 Judeo-Español (language), 192 Kabbalah, 195, 196 Kane, Anne, 56n82 ke’ilu (“as if”), 1, 11, 106, 113–130, 132–136, 142–143, 213 Klawans, Jonathan D., 75n37, 108, 110, 113 Klein, Kerwin Lee, 39–40 korban (“sacrifice”), 84 Koselleck, Reinhart, 202–203 Kugel, James, 109n16

236

SECOND SLAYINGS

Miller, Richard B., 11–12, 16, 46– 48, 179, 181, 197 Mishnah, 81, 106n10, 111–112, 119, 121 Misztal, Barbara, 43n50 Motzkin, Gabriel, 187n8 narratization, 47, 53, 132, 143, 144–148, 151, 169, 170, 172, 176, 178, 186, 203 nationalism, European, 26 Nora, Pierre, 38–40 Numbers, Book of, 82 olah offering (“sacrifice”), 53, 89, 94, 113, 162 ontology, 31, 50–51, 61, 77, 84, 148, 182, 203 performativity, 3, 4, 8, 10–11, 14, 25–29, 32, 51, 54, 58–59, 65, 67–71, 104, 106, 110–111, 114– 115, 123, 127, 129, 136–138, 153, 165, 187, 201 polysemy, 132–136, 175 praxis, 69–70, 108, 198, 200; communal, 149; mimetic, 4; ritual, 64, 80, 109, 149, 213 Rashbam (R. Shlomo ben Meir), 173 reconstruction, 3, 31, 34, 39, 43, 126, 136, 146, 147n14, 201–203 Ricoeur, Paul, 12, 29n15, 69, 70, 132, 139, 141, 143–147, 148 Rosenzweig, Franz, 2 Rosh Hashanah, 100, 130, 159, 161–163, 168

Roskies, David G., 59–60 Rubenstein, Jeffrey, 68, 137 rupture, 3, 5, 6, 27, 30, 31n19, 194–197; cultural, 11, 13, 27– 28, 31, 38–39, 62, 106, 127, 131, 135, 140, 159, 169, 175–176, 178–180, 185–186, 203–205, 209; ontology of, 189–193, 197 Schrödinger, Erwin, 142, 144 Schweiker, William, 4n6, 12, 68– 71 Sewell, William H., Jr., 31n19, 56n82, 203 Sforno, Ovadia ben Jacob, 173 Slonimsky, Hayyim Selig, 54n77 Smith, Jonathan Z., 78n46, 108 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., 63, 103 Sommer, Benjamin D., 8, 13n20, 181–182 Speicher, 188 Spiegel, Shalom, 15, 84n61, 97n89, 127–128, 130–131, 139– 143, 155–156, 158, 160–161; The Last Trial, 14, 30, 139, 151–155, 178 Spiel, 69–71 Stern, David, 28n12, 55n78, 133, 134 Stroumsa, Guy G., 108–109 Talmud, 3n3, 113; Babylonian, 81n56, 149 Tannaim, 160, 162 Taylor, Charles, 194 temurah, 32, 81, 126

INDEX

237

time, 144–148, 159; aharei hadevarim ha-eleh (“some time after”), 18, 90, 102; anamnestic, 177, 182, 185, 186, 192, 200, 206; historical, 89, 144, 177, 182, 184, 185, 187, 206 Torah, 2, 8, 24, 28n12, 43, 56, 91n77, 106, 112, 115, 120, 122, 136, 155, 160, 185, 187, 191n15, 192

va-yisa Avraham et-einav (“And Abraham lifted his eyes”), 91, 96–97 Vermès, Géza, 105, 157n34; and the Akedah, 105n5 Volkan, Vamik, 57n83

Urbach, Ephraim E., 199

Yehoshua, A. B., 6n8, 25 R. Yehoshua ben Levi, 113 Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim, 2, 36, 50–53, 196 R. Yohanan bar Nappaha, 191n15 R. Yose ben Parta, 117–118

van der Heide, Albert, 65n5 VanderHaagen, Sara C., 29n15, 141 va-yelchu shneihem yachdav (“And the two of them walked on together”), 91, 97

Wissenschaft des Judentums, 51 Wolin, Richard, 43n51 Wuthnow, Robert, 183–184