Q&A: The Attitude Toward Midrashic Interpretations of the Torah
The Attitude Toward Midrashic Interpretations of the Torah
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: the Rabbi usually says that interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is not important, because the preacher’s personal opinion always comes before the interpretation, and therefore he always ends up finding in the Torah what he already thinks anyway.
And the Rabbi also says that the Torah too can be interpreted with a certain creativity so that it fits modern values, as the Rabbi wrote in one of the recent columns regarding religious feminists.
If so, it follows that the same criticism directed at interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) could also be directed at halakhic interpretations as well.
Answer
This has been discussed here ad nauseam, in those same places where I made that claim, and it was also explained in detail in the second book of the trilogy. In short: with regard to Jewish law, there is room for interpretations, and each of them is of course dependent on the interpreter’s positions, but it is not true that everything is predetermined. There are constraints. On my own, I would not arrive at a prohibition against eating pork or an obligation to observe the Sabbath, and I also do not have a list of labors that I feel like prohibiting. But in thought and in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), everything fits and is predictable in advance. There is no real novelty there, except perhaps on the interpretive level (and not the level of content). I do not want to get into this whole issue again, since it has already been discussed here a great deal.