Drashing Beyond Limits

Drash for Acharei Mot 5782

Traditional Egalitarian Minyan, Adas Israel

What do many people skip or speed through during their seder?

Often it's the midrashic interpretations of the three core verses (transplanted from the verses that everyone already knew from the formula recited over Bikurim, the First Fruits, at Shavuot). The literarly technique of citing another verse to explain each brief phrase from those verses doesn't catch people's attention the same way as other parts of the Haggadah.

Let's look at just one of those two word phrases, from the following pasuk:

(I) The original context for this midrashic "explanation" has nothing to do with Pesach. And the full context of the proof-text is shockingly violent, with further catastrophe just barely avoided:

(II) How else can we drash about וּבִזְרֹעַ נְטוּיָה ? We already have another interpretation, right on the seder table itself:

(III) Zeroah doesn't just mean shank-bone (or more anthropormorphically, "arm") for a paschal lamb. It means the forearm of a person too. Which leads to another midrashic alternative for וּבִזְרֹעַ נְטוּיָה :

This is the greatness of the daughter of Pharaoh, whose compassion earns her the name Batyah, daughter of God. According to a midrash in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Megillah, the arm of Pharaoh’s daughter “miraculously stretched to sixty amot when she extended her hand to reach for the baby Moses as he lay in a basket in the Nile River.” We are told that Pharaoh’s daughter saw the baby and heard him crying. Her compassion miraculously extends across the vast distances of class and nationality and religion that separate her from the Hebrew child. She is called the daughter of God because she acts in the image of God—extending a strong hand and an outstretched arm to protect this crying infant, the very embodiment of human vulnerability.

--R. Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, 2003

(IV) We can also drash on the words themselves: the same letters as זְרֹעַ are the shoresh for seed or sowing. And if you add an ayin (silent for ashkenazim), then נְטוּיָה becomes "planting" or "shoots". Both these roots show up in seder-related contexts, here are two for each:

(V) Finally, we can circle back to our context, and the verse from Shmot which defines the Pesach experience:

Why should we care about all this drashing? (Other than for those of us who love when their sedarim last until 3am, if not the time for the morning Sh'ma...)

First, Seder night is pretty darn important. And the heart of the seder is Magid, with the three "bikurim" verses (Devarim 26:6-8) as the heart of Magid. So if we want to fulfill the hiyuv (obligation) of telling the story of leaving Mitzrayim, we should be drashing our hearts out.

Second, if we want to not just tell the story, but fulfill the even more challenging obligation to feel that we ourselves are leaving Mitzrayim (בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם), we need to find ways to bring that experience to life.

Finally, the need to bring a new drash to old text isn't limited to Seder night. For example, what do we do when we hit a verse like the one in this week's parsha:

(A) The clarity of Leviticus 18:22 is, and should be, self-validating. It cannot be overridden. Or, as it is sometimes stated in a more informal mode: “What can we do? The Torah is clear on the subject!”

When someone says, “What can we do? The Torah is clear on the subject!”, what is being said amounts to a claim of infallibility and irrefutability for the text of the Torah. ...that the words of Leviticus...express directly and completely the will of God. (Indeed, treating a text as infallible on any basis other than on such an assumption would surely count as a form of idolatry.)

...This is not an assertion that the Torah is not divine, or that it is merely human. Heschel famously wrote that “as a report about revelation, the bible itself is a midrash.” [God In Search of Man, 185] ...It is...possible to (a) believe in God; (b) believe in revelation; (c) believe that it is meaningful to speak of a divine will for the world; and (d) to have faith in the idea that the Torah is our first ... most sacred expression of God’s will in human language, and still insist that the sacred text of the Torah does not perfectly and infallibly express that will.

--דרוש וקבל שכר: HALAKHIC AND METAHALAKHIC ARGUMENTS CONCERNING JUDAISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY

Rabbi Gordon Tucker

This paper was submitted as a dissent from all the decisions of the CJLS on December 6, 2006...and failed by a vote of seven in favor, fourteen opposed and 4 abstaining (7-14-4)

(B) We recognize that the precedented view of the Rabbis has beenthat the Torah meant to prohibit all acts of משכב זכר, and that it is a bold step to suggest a limitation or the non-applicability of what the Rabbis understood to be דאורייתא. We agree that the text of the Torah is unchangeable, but the meaning that the text holds, that is, its halakhic meaning, is explained by the rabbis.

--THE HALAKHAH OF SAME-SEX RELATIONS IN A NEW CONTEXT

Rabbis Myron S. Geller, Robert E. Fine and David J. Fine

This paper was submitted as a dissent to the decisions of the CJLS on December 6, 2006...and failed by a vote of six in favor, seventeen opposed and two abstaining (6-17-2).

(C) Although we sympathize with the motivation that inspires such readings, as a general rule the established rabbinic understanding of the Torah governs halakhah, even when modern scholarship is at one in proclaiming a different p’shat....To strike this law from the Torah is a radical step.

-- HOMOSEXUALITY, HUMAN DIGNITY & HALAKHAH: A COMBINED RESPONSUM FOR THE COMMITTEE ON JEWISH LAW AND STANDARDSby RABBIS ELLIOT N. DORFF, DANIEL S. NEVINS & AVRAM I. REISNER

This responsum was approved by the CJLS on 15 Kislev 5767 / December 6, 2006 by a vote of thirteen in favor and twelve opposed (13-12-0).

What are we left with? The bigoted "traditional" p'sak was voted down. The impassioned plea by Rabbi Tucker to basically ignore the Torah was also voted down (please note -- my comments are directed to opinions and writings, not to people). The drash that re-interprets the pasuk (not quite in the same way as our drash above, but with its heart in the same place) was *also* voted down.

The only Teshuva that passed, by a single vote, was a camel-by-committee combination of three other teshuvot, a jumbled mess of contraditions. Sure, let's leave in place the idea that the Torah promotes hate and bans love. And then let's go ahead and choose to ignore violations of what we've just affirmed as halacha, and admit gays to rabbinical programs anyway. It's the anti-Pangloss, the worst of all possible worlds.

But why does this matter? It was almost 15 years ago -- a blink of an eye in Jewish history, but a long time in modern cultural evolution.

First, because I'm definitely not over it. This balagan is still Exhibit A in why I do not identify as a Conservative Jew.

Second, because it's still on the books. The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has not adopted anything to replace what happened in December 2006.

And finally, this context isn't the only place where we need to do what we Jews have always done -- drash our way out of a place that seems to give the impossible choice of either hating or abandoning the Torah. Fortunately, the Torah shel Ba'al Peh (i.e. the Gemara) gives us a beautiful model for how this works:

Sometimes (not very often, but sometimes), we need to be presumptuous. As presumptuous as Yehudah ha-Nasi. We need to say, "Baruch ha-Shem, that we are fortunate enough to live in a generation that has arrived at an understanding of an aspect of Torah that was hidden from the generations before us." And then we need to proclaim and pass down that understanding to our children and our children's children, unabashedly proud of the Jewish people's most precious possession, the Torah.