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3 the Garments of Torah—Or, to What May Scripture Be Compared?

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3 the Garments of Torah—Or, to What May Scripture Be Compared? Page 33 3 The Garments of Torah—Or, to What May Scripture Be Compared? In recent years, there has been a growing concern in various literary circles to accord Scripture the status of a privileged text—that is, the status of specialness which was once called sanctity. Now, such a hermeneutical move should at least raise some eyebrows in this day and age when, after centuries of benign or not so benign neglect, and after the rise of new literary attitudes and canons, Scripture has been apparently put 'in its place'—as but one corpus of national texts among all their ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic congeners. No one factor has reversed this process of neutralization; just as no one factor has catalyzed the recent renaissance of secular interest in the Bible. Still, it may not be entirely misguided to suspect that the new concern to privilege Scripture within the acknowledged literary canon of our culture may be motivated in part by a desire to provide a challenge to modern literature, where such notions of 'specialness' and 'sanctity' are conspicuously and determinately absent. Indeed, for many moderns all texts are complexly textured by the threads of all predecessor texts and by the play of differences inherent in language itself. There is never a first thread in this garment that may be pulled loose; for there is no paradigm text, no Logos. Accordingly, the reemergence of Scripture to the privileged status of a pivotal and generative literary code presumably serves to recenter our Western cultural enterprise and its creativity. Some critics have even begun to query whether there may in fact be something specific to the biblical text which gives it this re­found specialness. Amid all this breathless activity it would therefore seem salutary to pause for some historical air, and ask: Where would such features as might constitute the specialness of Scripture lie, and how would one ever begin to find them—particularly if one started with literary categories and criteria drawn from secular literary criticism, and not from our traditional religious cultures where the tasks of reading and textual anal­ Copyright © 1992. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable Copyright © copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 3:15 PM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 11056 ; Fishbane, Michael A..; The Garments of Torah : Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics Account: s8356098 Page 34 ysis have been altogether different? For me and I suspect for many other moderns, no matter how well disposed, the possibility of proving the ontological uniqueness or privilege of Scripture from its very nature—and not from secondary attributions—seems either hopeless or tendentious, or both. But there were other times in our cultural past when such a polemical challenge would have been taken up with confident glee—and these may serve to refocus the discussion from an enlarged perspective. A most striking instance of just such a polemic is preserved in a Jewish mystical text from thirteenth­century Spain. The passage responds to Averroistic trends in certain Jewish circles which regarded many biblical narratives as crude stories, and many biblical laws as symbolic truths only. The result is a powerful attempt to privilege Scripture on the basis of a "myth of Torah." Rabbi Simeon said: If a man looks upon the Torah as merely a book presenting narratives and everyday matters, alas for him! Such a torah, one treating with everyday concerns, and indeed a more excellent one, we too, even we, could compile. More than that, in the possession of the rulers of the world there are books of even greater merit, and these we could emulate if we wished to compile some such torah. But the Torah, in all of its worlds, holds supernal truths and sublime secrets. [Indeed,] the Torah it was that created the angels and created all the worlds and through Torah are all sustained. The world could not endure the Torah if she had not garbed herself in garments of this world. Thus the tales related in the Torah are simply her outer garments, and woe to the man who regards that outer garb as the Torah itself, for such a man will be deprived of portion in the next world. Thus David said: "Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law" (Ps. 119:18), that is to say, the things that are underneath. See now. The most visible part of a man are the clothes that he has on, and they who lack understanding, when they look at the man, are apt not to see more in him than these clothes. In reality, however, it is the body of the man that constitutes the pride of his clothes, and his soul constitutes the pride of his body. So it is with the Torah. Its narrations which relate to things of the world constitute the garments which clothe the body of the Torah; and that body is composed of the Torah's precepts, gufey­torah (bodies, major principles). People without understanding see only the narrations, the garment; those somewhat more penetrating see also the body. But the truly wise, those who serve the most high King and stood on mount Sinai, pierce all the way through to the soul, to the true Torah which is the root principle of all. These same will in the future be vouchsafed to penetrate to the very soul of the soul of the Torah. Woe to the sinners who look upon the Torah as simply tales pertaining to things of the world, seeing thus only the outer garment. But the righteous whose gaze penetrates to the very Torah, happy are they. Just as wine must be in a jar to keep, so the Torah must be contained in an Copyright © 1992. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable Copyright © copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 3:15 PM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 11056 ; Fishbane, Michael A..; The Garments of Torah : Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics Account: s8356098 Page 35 outer garment. That garment is made up of the tales and stories; but we, we are bound to penetrate beyond. (Zohar, III. 152) 1 As is trenchantly stated here, Hebrew Scripture is an ontologically unique literature: not because of its aesthetic style or topics of concern—which are judged weak in comparison with contemporary medieval romances and epics—but precisely because such externalities are merely the first of several garment­like layers concealing deeper and less­refracted aspects of divine truth whose core, the root of all roots, is God himself. Thus, as is indicated in this myth of scriptural origin, the divine Reality exteriorizes and condenses itself, at many removes from its animating soul­root, into a verbal text with several layers of meaning. The true hermeneut—who is a seeker after God and not simply a purveyor of aesthetic tropes or normative rules—will be drawn to this garmented bride (as the Torah is called in another text in this corpus) and will strip away the garments of Torah until he and the beloved one (God as discovered in the depths of Scripture) are one. Seen thus, the goal of interpretation is an ecstatic hieros gamos of sorts, and the successive hermeneutical penetrations to deeper and less veiled truths may be compared to a spiritual rite of passage. "Such a man," says another Zoharic text (II.99a–b), "is . a 'bridegroom of the Torah' in the strictest sense . to whom she (divinity as beckoning Bride) discloses all her secrets, concealing nothing." Let me put the matter slightly differently. The Bible is proclaimed sacred by our mystical author not just because it communicates divine teachings in a narrative or legal form, but precisely because these teachings are not constituted by language in any ordinary sense. Indeed, these narratives and laws are but a species of the divine Logos which radiates from the inmost center of divinity: a tangible exteriorization of divinity providing the symbolic map for the human spiritual journey that may culminate in communion with the most inward truth of God. On this view the Bible, compared to a veiled body or bride, is ontologically unique principally because it is nothing less than a dimension of divinity itself. The words of a later kabbalist, R. Abraham Azulai, may sum up these various reflections while providing a hint of the deep simultaneity that may exist between textual study and spiritual quest. the Torah [in this world] is robed in a material garment just like mankind [in its corporeal condition]. But when mankind will rise up from its physical condition to a more subtle [spiritual] state, so will the material manifestation of the Torah be altered and its spiritual essence be apprehended in ever higher levels of reality . [Then] the con­ Copyright © 1992. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable Copyright © copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 3:15 PM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 11056 ; Fishbane, Michael A..; The Garments of Torah : Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics Account: s8356098 Page 36 cealed faces of the Torah will shine and the righteous will meditate on them. But in all this the Torah remains one [and the same] .
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