We are beginning our very last series of the church liturgical year. As we come round the home stretch towards Advent, we’ll be living inside the prophetic imagination of the OT prophets.
The prophets saw beyond the world as it was, and looked towards the world as God envisioned it to be. They refused to be silent about what diminished life, insisting that despair didn’t get the last word.
I’ve entitled the series “The interplay of darkness and light”. I noticed these dark shadows in the texts: injustice, grief, God’s anger bearing down on the earth. There are also shafts of light: the exposure of God’s compassion, promises of justice, and visions of a world made right. Sometimes I found myself uncomfortable reading these texts, and sometimes they expanded my imagination.
Because I find some of these texts daunting, and because they were the sacred texts of the Jewish people before they became sacred texts in the Bible, I have been wondering how the Jewish community makes meaning out of the darkness and light within these texts.
So, I have been reading a book in preparation for this series called The Torah is an Open Book, written by Rabbi Caryn Broitman and published this summer. I highly recommend it as a companion piece to this series.
In the book, she illustrates the practice of Midrash. Many of us grew up in Christian churches that interpreted scripture to find the right answer or the correct interpretation. We were taught that the scriptures are a closed revelation, and our job is to find the proper revelation God intended for the text.
That is not a Jewish way of approaching scripture, I learned from Rabbi Broitman.
The Torah is not a closed book with a closed revelation. Instead, the Torah is an open book, with the revelation continuing through the conversations about the text that happen across generations.
Midrash is a way of approaching scripture that invites us into this open conversation that continues across generations. Rooted in Jewish interpretive tradition, Midrash is the practice of wrestling with the sacred text: asking questions, attending to silences and tensions, exploring what seems troubling or unfinished, and listening for meanings that might otherwise remain hidden.
In Midrash, it’s OK to bring your questions and experiences to the text. At the same time, you allow the text to question you, unsettle your assumptions, and open possibilities you had not imagined.
Blessings, Anne