Midrashic Rhetoric and the Problem of Passion in Public Life

The rabbinic reading tradition of midrash is closely tied to rhetorical expression. Strands of classical midrashic literature were initially delivered homiletically, and today, the midrashic spirit commonly yields Torah interpretations in the form of a derash, an expository sermon. While scholarship in Jewish thought and beyond has attended to the literary aspects of midrash, midrash as a practice of speech that forms a public rhetorical culture and subjects within it has not been thoroughly explored. The rhetorical culture of midrash today is a particularly rich one, as Jewish individuals of all backgrounds offer derashot frequently and widely, from the pulpit, in publications, and on social media. Attempting to understand the meaning of shared sacred texts through evolving experiences is ultimately a collective endeavor—and increasingly a more inclusive one. We can therefore approach the topic through the lens of democratic theory on public discourse, specifically with attention to critical scholarship on affect. This approach highlights the distinctiveness of midrashic discourse as both allowing subjects to express interpretations passionately and shaping them with humility sufficient for a stable and productive conversation between divergent perspectives. Thinking of midrash rhetorically, politically, and affectively expands both understandings of Jewish hermeneutics and of its constructive relevance for modern political life.

In this paper, I depict the manner in which midrashic rhetorical culture allows individuals to enter into conversation with others. I argue that midrashic speech affords individuals the possibility to speak with unruly passion despite, and because of, its fundamentally humble form. Inhabiting the hermeneutical norms of midrash forms a subject who can both be accountable to a communal discursive project of determining shared meaning and generous toward subjective, psychological, and affective experience. Such a subject, I will suggest, offers a possible model for current conversations around the ethics of citizenship in political life, which struggle to fully incorporate the practical and ethical considerations of affective expression from a supposition that it is at odds with the type of liberal subject who can humbly participate in pluralistic conversation.

I draw the uninhibited phenomenology of midrashic speech from an analysis of Avivah Zornberg’s work. From both her meditations on her psychoanalytic method of scriptural interpretation and her Torah commentaries, we can understand Zornberg as concerned with the desires of the interpreter. In her account, midrash represents a way of answering repressed questions beyond conscious aspects of the text. Behind these questions, I suggest, is a reader who cannot stand to be repressed either, and seeks to cathartically give voice to what strikes her as begging for attention. A “cascade” of meaning bubbles over as midrash satisfies the desires of readers who bring particular experiences to the text over time. Within a single interpretation, the midrashic reader may according to Zornberg, “read in” and “go too far,” rather than account for all possible meaning. Midrash allows for an experience that is excessive, “unrooted,” and “fantastic,” a type of speech that reveals, rather than restricts, passions.

The other side of the midrashic posture, that of humility, is discernible in Michael Fishbane’s phenomenological writing on the classical hermeneutic of derash. In Fragile Finitude (2021), Fishbane describes the midrashic mode as specifically where “the private valence of natural experience and its summons of Divinity are filtered through the medium of collective behavior and thought” (62). Rather than claiming to be a plainly revealed sense of meaning, midrash translates immediate experience. By engaging Bible passages, rabbinic commentaries, and live interlocutors—by playing by the rules of intertextual quotation and justification—the individual enters a public conversation. This form admits a distance between the speaker and revelation and generates a recognition of “hermeneutic pluralism,” of the possibility of alternative interpretations by other subjects.

Midrashic rhetoric, then, signals a public-mindedness and contextualizes even expressions of outrageous narrative or tone within it, as something other than a hubristic claim to knowledge of divine intent. Examples ranging from contemporary feminist midrash to derashot which deliver moral rebuke can be understood instead primarily as ways of communicating desire.

My discussion of a rhetoric that is both publicly responsible and potentially extrarational can help us rethink the problem of affect for liberal models of public discourse. Traditionally, rational discourse is privileged as the model of responsible political speech. Liberal theorists worry that a public discourse which admits emotional intensity can result in claims of certainty akin to revelation; such a religious character cuts against the civic virtue of humility and the possibility of pluralistic political conversation. However, more recent attention to affect calls us to recognize the difficulty of subscribing strict norms of reason to fundamentally unruly subjects. Furthermore, affect theorists coming from feminist, queer, and racialized positions suggest the value of a public ethic that is sensitive to affect and honors subjective experience by not silencing its expression. Nevertheless, the question remains of what norms can still shape a stable and productive political sphere which admits the extrarational.

I suggest that the culture that shapes the midrashic subject seems to speak to both affect theorists’ concern for indulgence and liberal theorists’ concern for accountability. It prompts us to rethink the association of extrarational speech and postures of epistemic certainty and demonstrates the possibility of more complex relations between public speech and claims of knowledge. Building out an understanding of the midrashic rhetorical culture, public space, and subject holds promise for further conversation between Jewish hermeneutics and contemporary political theory.

Select Bibliography:

José Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism (2008)

Emily Filler, “Difficult Jewish Texts and Contemporary Political Crisis” (2023)

Michael Fishbane, Fragile Finitude (2021)

Michael Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task: A Reinterpretation of Medieval Exegesis” (1975)

Cathleen Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (2016)

Norman Lamm, “Notes of An Unrepentant Darshan” (1986)

Chantal Mouffe, “The Affects of Democracy” (2018)

Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200-1800 (1989)

Donovan Schaefer, Religious Affects (2015)

Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2002)

Avivah Zornberg, Moses: A Human Life (2016)

Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (2011)