Modern Midrash

by Kass

Notes:
An essay posted to livejournal in November, 2007.

One of my favorite midrashim -- exegetical stories; more about midrash in a moment -- goes like this:

During the 40 days and 40 nights that Moses spent atop Mount Sinai before bringing Torah down into creation, he ascended to heaven, where he saw God hard at work actually writing the Torah. God was doing the work of a sofer (scribe), carefully writing word after word.

"What are you doing?" Moses asked.

God continued working, and as Moses looked more closely he saw that God was busy adding tagim -- crowns -- to many of the letters. (If you look at a Torah scroll today, you will see these tagim. They are very beautiful.)

"These crowns are very important," God explained.

"Why?" asked Moses, who frankly couldn't see why they mattered.

"They are the hooks on which future generations will hang their interpretations," said God, "and without the interpretations, the text is incomplete."

This is a fanciful retelling of a classical story (which doesn't include the somewhat dark twist the story takes at its end -- not germane to this conversation -- though if you're curious you can find the original on page 29a of Tractate Menahot, the second tractate of the order Kodashim, in the Babylonian Talmud.) I love this little story to bits. Because it depicts God as a writer, taking care with the text (a text which the Jewish mystical tradition understands as the blueprint for all creation); because it offers us an image of God invested in the details and fiddly bits; and most of all because it puts forth the notion that we are fundamental partners in the creation of our story. The text we're given is filled with embellishments and lacunae (gaps or holes) on purpose -- they're there to give us something to work with, something to explain and interpret, something to hang our ideas and understandings on.

In Jewish tradition, it's a mitzvah (commandment) to be deeply involved with our texts. We're supposed to turn them over and over again, read and write commentaries on them, invest ourselves in them and explore them in every way imaginable. Whole libraries are filled with what we've written in response to our central texts, and in response to each others' responses (and so on.) We get obsessive over details of characterization and language. We interpret everything, down to the mystical resonances of individual letters. We're meant to be active readers: not passive consumers of our holy texts, but invested and engaged with them in ways that allow us to make them our own. We're meant, one might say, to be fans.

Midrash is/are exegetical stories, written to explore textual loopholes or bring silent voices to life. Historically, midrash arises out of Torah. But it seems to me that what we do as fans is a variation on that same theme -- the same kind of practice, only with a different sort of beloved text at its heart. Fans bring a midrashic sensibility to every sourcetext with which we fall in love, be it Harry Potter or the collected public appearances of Fall Out Boy.

Fanwriters and vidders explore backstory, relationships, what makes characters tick. When characters do inexplicable things, when we notice bizarre repetitions or omissions or contradictions, fantexts offer reasons why. Torah midrash often speaks from the same impulses: why did Abraham take Isaac to the top of Mount Moriah with that knife, and what exactly was he thinking while he did? Why does the first chapter of Genesis contain two different creation stories, and what can we make of them? As midrashists plant their perspectives in Torah's fertile soil, we as fans add our own voices to the stories that encode the values of our time. And just as no single midrash cancels out the multiplicity of others -- there's no singular "right" answer to any question of Biblical interpretation -- no single fantext cancels out the multiplicity of AUs, alternate perspectives, and other ways we might imagine the storyline shifting or branching.

As a fan, I love playing with the sourcetexts at the center of my fannish community and my fannish life. I love taking in new books or movies or episodes, and then talking about them with other people who relate to them in ways alternately squeeful and intellectual. I love teasing out the implications of what we're given.

It's a joy to relate to the texts that come to us already awesome and fully-formed, of course. But I also love relating to texts that aren't quite perfect yet. (Sometimes I think I especially love relating to texts that aren't quite perfect. What else could explain my deep attachments to The Sentinel and Stargate: Atlantis? *g*) Every gap, every inconsistency, every odd choice of characterization or unexplained loophole, is a hook on which I can hang my own interpretations. They're tagim, crowns on the letters; they're not mistakes, they're opportunities. (Or, at least, I can choose to see them that way.)

The act of caring enough about a sourcetext to create our own interpretations is exactly what makes us fans. And the things we create, in our fannish process, are gorgeous examples of the kind of creativity that brings midrash to life. Granted, contemporary fannish creativity has more in common with contemporary midrash than with classical midrash (not surprising -- the classical sensibility is a little bit foreign, for obvious reasons), but I think the inclination to respond to textual lacunae with a multiplicity of creative explanations is consistent. We write these modern (sometimes postmodern!) secular midrash out of the desire to explain things, to add subtlety and nuance, to offer new perspectives on the stories we love. When we do, we're following in some very well-trodden midrashic footsteps.

And contemporary fanwork and contemporary midrash use some similar techniques to explore similar themes. I'd happily shelve 's HP novel Finding Himself, in which Cedric is the story's protagonist instead of Harry, alongside Anita Diamant's novel The Red Tent which gives voice to the minor Biblical character of Dinah. Or 's Written by the Victors alongside Julian Barnes' A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, which revisits the story of the Flood along with the question of what history is and who tells it. (I could go on for days here. Feel free to post more examples in comments.)

For me, the fannish sensibility is a midrashic one, and therefore a very Jewish one, regardless of the religious identity (or lack thereof) of any given fan. Fans relate to our texts with the kind of love and careful attention that I recognize from my immersion in the Jewish world. It's awesome, and it's one of the reasons I feel so at-home in both of these communities. I thrive in contexts where caring a lot about the details of a story is not only okay, it's encouraged.

I love the classical midrash I quoted at the start of this post because it presumes that our practice of creating an endless stream of new interpretations and stories is precisely what God intended -- that active and creative reading is needed in order for the text to be whole and complete. The Torah doesn't exist in its fullest form until we enter into dialogue with it. Just so, a fannish source doesn't exist in its fullest form until we watch or read or listen to it, until we care about it, until we natter excitedly with each other about it -- and, I would say, until we create our own responses to what it offers us. If a television show airs in the forest and there's no one there to see it, it only semi-exists; but if fans buy the dvds, natter on message boards, and continue to invest ourselves in the characters and their world, we make the show real.

Midrash, like fanfiction, is sometimes serious and sometimes playful. Sometimes it offers a way for the author to make a serious philosophical or theological point, and sometimes it's basically crack!fic. Sometimes midrash posits that the plain old human strangers in our stories are actually angels in disguise (making it -- er -- wingfic?) Sometimes midrash subverts the timeline of a text, or juxtaposes characters who never interacted in canon. Midrash gives voice to the voiceless, explains the unexplained, explores details in new and personalized ways. And midrash, like fanfiction, exists in the context of a community: in one case a community of Jews, in the other a community of fans, in both cases a community of people who are invested and involved, who gain insight and understanding and squee from exploring our shared texts together.

The End