Abstract
It is motze tisha b’av, and these summer greetings come to you in a spirit of change, hopeful yet sober. A complex day, is it not, for Jews in the scribal/pharisaic/rabbinic tradition of textual reasoning? A day of terrible loss, against a backdrop of ominous politics, that also became a time “to do for the Lord” – eyt la’asot lashem.” Our tradition of oral Torah appears to have achieved cultural authority by way of suffering. After this day, according to the mishnah in Berachot 40a, the pharisaic sages recited “l’olam u’l’olam” after psalms once recited in the Temple, one “forever” for this world, one for the world to come. But also one, so it seems, for the present day of literal death, one for the day of life to come; one for the literal House, one for the one rebuilt in our hearts; and one for the literal Torah, one for the Torah she b’al peh. Does the oral torah arise only out of the sufferings of the other one? Does midrashic reasoning emerge only when and where the plain-sense is troubled?
Recommended Citation
"Old Series: Volume 5, Number 2 (July 1996)." Journal of Textual Reasoning Old Series: Vol. 5 (1996): 58-105. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jtr/vol0/iss5/2