The Commentator

Grasping the Truth

Chava Chaitovsky

Issue date: 11/5/07 Section: Kol HaMevaser

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Looking back at my high school years, I recall how a single conversation with a teacher profoundly impacted my derekh halimmud. I am sure others can make the same statement. But how many will go on to say that the conversation was with their English teacher and even directly focused on an English assignment? I can honestly say that Ms. Molly Pollak and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried have significantly impacted my limmud Torah since eleventh grade.

As many undergraduate students know, Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried addresses the theme of truth, especially as it relates to story-telling. A character named Tim O’Brien (purposely named to be confused with the author) narrates the loosely-related stories within the book from his perspective as a middle-aged Vietnam veteran whose writing career focuses on the war period. With lines such as “That’s a true story that never happened”ⁱ and “A true war story…makes the stomach believe,”ⁱⁱ the real and fictional O’Briens show the reader that the quality of “truth” in a story has nothing to do with historicity. Rather, it has everything to do with aesthetics, humanity, and communicating something that factually true words cannot communicate. After mentioning one character’s tendency to exaggerate when telling a story to his comrades in Vietnam, O’Brien writes, “It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”ⁱⁱⁱ It was in reaction to this line that my teacher made a profoundly simple comment: “Isn’t that the purpose of Midrash?” With that statement, I could almost feel the “click” as a passage from Rambam, the words of my Tanakh teachers, and a subconsciously absorbed attitude that had all been floating around in my head suddenly fell into place.

Growing up in the Orthodox world, children are rarely taught to distinguish between information about biblical characters that is written in Tanakh and that which is added by Chazal in the form of aggadeta or Midrash. Therefore, dogmatic belief in the truth of Torah as expressed by the phrase, “Moshe emet ve-torato emet,”^iv expands to include the top five hundred Midrashim most commonly taught to children under the age of ten. Unfortunately, no one bothers to correct this simplistic conflation of pasuk and Midrash even once the “children” are old enough to understand the difference. The two statements, “Maybe Nimrod never threw Avram into a furnace” and “Maybe Hashem never split the Yam Suf” are seen as equally heretical despite the fact that the former is rooted in Midrash and the latter in the pesukim.

In his Perush Ha-mishnayot,^v Rambam outlines three approaches to the issue of aggadeta and Midrash; the foolish, the irreverent, and the wise. The first approach takes every statement of Chazal and interprets it literally, despite the fact that it may contradict rational thought. The rationalists who take the second approach berate Chazal and the Midrashic tradition for defying rational thought in favor of fanciful stories, which, as far as they have heard from the first group, Chazal meant quite literally. Hence, Rambam not only berates the first group for being foolish, but blames them for the sacrilegious views of those who take the second approach. Rambam himself is one of the few who take the third approach, which he deems the proper one. This approach asserts that not every aggadeta was meant to present historical fact. Rather, the majority of aggadeta was written cryptically and therefore must be decoded in order to reveal their intended meaning.

From the time I first heard that “Midrashim didn’t all actually happen” until that fateful day in eleventh grade, I struggled to find the correct approach to divrei Chazal. Ms. Pollak and Tim O’Brien taught me that there is a profound difference between taking Midrashim literally and taking Midrashim seriously. This approach to Midrash is not new. Ramban makes this same point in his discussion of the character of Nimrod, described by the pasuk as “gibor tsayid lifnei Hashem.”^vi Rashi quotes the Gemara’s Midrashic interpretation, namely that “[Nimrod] captured the minds of the people with his mouth and led them astray to rebel against God.”^vii As Rashi does not elucidate the words of this Gemara, this comment does not shed light on his approach to Midrashim in general. Ibn Ezra ignores the Midrash and describes Nimrod’s actions as positive ones: he captured animals and sacrificed them to God. Ramban rejects Ibn Ezra’s interpretation because the Gemara’s comment evidences the Rabbinic tradition that Nimrod was a negative character; that was the message of that Midrash. Still, Ramban does not feel a need to accept the Midrashic interpretation and chooses to explain the pasuk as stating that Nimrod forced his way into kingship. In many other instances as well, Ramban quotes a Midrash and reinterprets it to form a more rational, logical, or text-based explanation of a pasuk. This enables him to walk the tightrope of assigning the proper kavod to divrei Chazal while not interpreting them simplistically.

Simplistic interpretations and symbolic interpretations of Midrash are often at odds with one another. For example, longer passages of aggadeta often make use of certain symbols in the names, numbers, or objects that they employ. Stated differently, those details each contain a message. But one who claims that the agedata is historically true will obscure the message in those details because he or she will claim that the details just describe the factual situation as it occurred. This example demonstrates clearly that “tafasta merubah lo tafasta;”^viii relinquishing the claim of factual truth enables the reader of Midrash to grasp the deeper truth contained within it, the kind of literary truth that “makes the stomach believe.”²