Ha'azinu - Once Upon a Time

  B"H

 

The entire midrash text can be found here - it's Siman 8. It is wayyyy too long to paste below, but please do read before diving in (otherwise none of this will make sense). 

You'll also need to refer to Berachot 31b here. 

All translations below courtesy of Sefaria.

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Part 1

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the world of folktales, myths and legends. An avid bookworm, I grew up with Greek myths, assorted Scottish/British and international fairytales, and general fantasy literature (I think I was 12 when I tackled Lord of the Rings - this was before the films!). Later, I became a Terry Pratchett fan* and spent most of university diving headlong into folk and folk-rock music - to the extent that the work which inspired this blog in the first place (see here) was basically my way of wangling Pratchett and Fairport Convention into an Oxbridge dissertation**. 

So when I first read this midrash, my inner folkie was dancing a jig. After all, if this were a secular fairytale, there's a bucket-load of tropes to get stuck into. We've got:

• Our heroine, the beautiful, virtuous daughter of a rich man (of course), who is apparently cursed with her grooms always dying on their wedding night***;
  
• A poor, struggling woodcutter relative who happens to have exactly ten sons;
• Our hero, the eldest of the said ten sons, who goes to seek his/his family's fortune, is taken in by his uncle, and takes just one week to fall in love with his rich-but-cursed cousin;
  
• Someone being tricked into swearing to something he never ever would have agreed to otherwise (i.e. the rich man into marrying off his daughter again);
• A mysterious elder (Eliyahu) showing up to advise our hero about the Test (see below);
• A poor beggar dressed in black showing up at the wedding feast, with the Test apparently being for our hero to feed him and show him great honour etc. The beggar turns out to be the Angel of Death, obviously;
  
• Multiple bouts of bargaining with said Angel to try and cheat death.

And after all that - the Angel of Death is defeated, the curse is broken, and they all lived happily ever after. Hooray!

But, but, but - the problem is, this isn't just any old fairytale. This is midrash. And while it may not have precisely the same level of holiness as the Torah itself, it still belongs to the sphere of kodesh, on a different plain from secular literature.**** So while an academic could easily gloss over the difference and treat this midrash as 'Jewish exhibit A' for whichever tropes they want to discuss, I cannot in all conscience go down that route. 

So, what to do?

At this point, I turn to the late Rabbi Sacks zt"l and two ideas of his. The first is his famous saying 'aval zeh shelanu' (but this is ours), from an anecdote about an Israeli fisherman comparing the green hills of England with the landscape of the Kinneret. As fascinating as I may find the folk literature of other peoples or cultures, when it comes to midrash - zeh shelanu. Which, to my mind, also means that to do midrash justice it has to be read in the way it was originally intended - within the framework of the Torah and wider Jewish scriptures. 

But that doesn't mean discounting the wider context of myths and fairytales. In his Haggadah and elsewhere, Rabbi Sacks also advanced a theory - challenging Freud's 'Moses and Monotheism' - that Moshe's 'origin story' is in fact an anti-myth, upturning a classical mythic motif about the birth of heroes to teach us a moral lesson about heroism and royalty. Clearly, for this to work we have to be familiar with the motifs challenged by the Torah in the first place. 

Maybe, just maybe, Rabbi Sacks' approach above could also be applied to our midrash? Let's see. 

Part 2

The midrash opens and closes with the ideas that 'the Holy One, blessed be He, guards those tested by Him, like a man guards the pupil of his eye', (hence the link to Ha'azinu) and that 'the Holy One, blessed be He, guards those that have faith in Him' (notably, the 'faith' here is bitachon - active trust - rather than emunah). Presumably the point of the intervening tale is to prove these points. 

The question is - who exactly is being tested here? And who is shown to trust G-d? After all, we have three possibilities - the bride's father, the bride herself, and the groom. 

 The bride's father can be ruled out fairly easily. Despite appearing at the beginning and end, his actual involvement is minimal - he is tricked into marrying off his daughter to his nephew, throws a big party, then (unsurprisingly) gets up the next morning expecting the worst only to discover a happy ending. Is he tested? Possibly, by risking losing his nephew to his daughter's curse. Does he show trust in G-d? Not really, if he still expects to bury his nephew in the morning.

Then we have our hero, the groom. Is he tested? Yes - first by his own poverty, then by being asked to honour a poor beggar at his wedding feast. Does he show bitachon? Yes - he obeys the advice of our 'mysterious stranger' Eliyahu about how to treat the beggar aka Angel of Death, which can be read as a form of trust. 

But there's a problem. I'm 99.9% sure that if you look up this scenario in the Bumper Book of Mythical Motifs*****, honouring a poor beggar at your wedding feast is going to earn you some serious brownie points. Especially if done on the say so of a mysterious adviser who promises as much. But this doesn't actually change the Angel of Death's mind about bumping off the groom. At the most, it buys him enough time to go and tell his bride what's happening. Which, yes, is what saves him, but it's not the immediate reward we might expect. Could this be an anti-fairytale in the making?

And so we come to our heroine, the bride. Is she tested? Most certainly. Does she show bitachon? Yes - but it's the way she shows this which is key to unlocking our midrash. 

The bride speaks out three times. First, in declaring herself a metaphorical agunah (i.e. not to be married to anyone) until G-d shows her mercy. Second, in praying directly to G-d to bring an end to the curse of her grooms dying. Lastly - and most importantly - in challenging the Angel of Death with the following passage:

"She said to him, "He shall not die now - it is written in the Torah (Deuteronomy 24:5), 'When a man takes a woman for a wife, he shall not go out with the army nor be assigned to it for any purpose; he shall be exempt one year for his household, to rejoice his wife that he has married.' And the Holy One, blessed be He, is true and His Torah is true, but if you take his soul, you will make the Torah a fraud [te'aseh haTorah pelaster]. [So,] if you accept my words, good; but if not, come with me to the great court."

Note the bold italics. 

Within the world of aggadah, there are several examples of Biblical women arguing with G-d to change what appears to be destiny. Rachel and Leah spring to mind, but the most obvious is Hannah. Famously, there is an aggadah (Berachot 31b) where Hannah threatens to turn herself into a sotah - a woman accused of adultery - to force G-d into giving her a child as the stated reward for a sotah who is found innocent. And what do we find Hannah saying here?

"Since I secluded myself, they will force me to drink the sota water to determine whether or not I have committed adultery. I will be found innocent, and since You will not make Your Torah false [v'i atah oseh Toratekha pelaster], I will bear children."

The bold italics here being almost exactly the phrase which the bride uses in our midrash. Which is unlikely to be a coincidence. 

Hannah's prayer is the point at which she changes from passively accepting her fate as a barren wife to actively pleading with G-d on her own behalf, to the point - at least, according to the above aggadah - of blackmailing G-d by holding Him to account against His own Torah. Similarly, our bride's shift from passivity to action in arguing with the Angel of Death is the real turning point in breaking the apparent curse on her - again, by demanding that G-d act in line with the (implied) promise made to grooms in the Torah.

The bride, then, seems to be the one who demonstrates the moral of this midrash through her bitachon and passing G-d's tests. However, the bitachon shown here is not simply following orders (as per her groom, and the expected fairy tale trope the midrash may be alluding to). Rather, the bride puts her trust in the truth of the Torah itself, and in G-d's readiness to bear out that truth when challenged rather than make the Torah appear false. 

Which is a pretty Jewish approach in its sheer level of chutzpah. Aval, zeh shelanu.

RPT

* Hence the footnotes. Of which there are admittedly a lot this time. Sorry.

** No, this is not the most obvious of links to a blog about midrash. I could try and set out the full thought process some other time, but for now let's just say it works in my head. 

***There's a whole essay begging to be written here from a feminist and/or psychoanalytic perspective. But let's not go there...

****This is absolutely not to do down secular literature. There is a trend in more, ahem, 'black hat' circles to dismiss secular literature as trivial and not worth our time - possibly as an easy way to differentiate between kodesh and chol. Needless to say, I don't agree with this approach - especially when it comes to folk tales and song, which I feel are a timeless way of exploring the human condition. Hence my dilemma. 

***** Folklorists are basically a subset of geeks, so this must exist somewhere!