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Outside the Text: Sources of Non-Textual Meaning in Rabbinic Civilization
In April 2008 I will be delivering the inaugural lectures in the Bonita and Sigmund Stahl Lecture Series in Jewish Studies at New York University. The lectures will be entitled "Outside the Text: Source of Non-Textual Meaning in Rabbinic Civilization." The lectures bring together several themes I have been researching over the past few years.Judaism is thought to be the logocentric culture par excellence. Rabbinic literature, the formative literature of Judaism of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, is grounded in a mythic system by which the Torah is said to have formed the blueprint for the world. As a result, most historians of ancient Judaism understand it as finding meaning exclusively in textual sources. However, there is another approach to meaning to be found in ancient and medieval Judaism. This approach sees meaning in the natural world and derives it from visual clues rather than textual ones. According to this conception, the natural world and physical manifestations of the divine covenant contain hidden signifiers to be decoded according to complex systems of interpretation. These include divination, symbolic interpretation of physical features and dress, and interpretations of historical events.
The first lecture in this series will explore alternative creation myths in Jewish interpretation (Midrash) and synagogue poetry (Piyyut). Whereas in the classical rabbinic myth the Torah was used as a model for the creation of the world, some sources state that the sacrificial rituals, the Tabernacle, and the Jerusalem Temple were created before the world and serve as the focal point for the act of creation. This myth then yields a more general teleological conception of creation, in which each created thing has a purpose in future history.
The second lecture will explore how the elaborate golden and jeweled vestments worn by the High Priest in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem served as the subject of an intricate semiotic system in Midrash and liturgical poetry. This system attaches moral and cosmological symbolism to each article of clothing. According to this method of interpretation, each garment symbolizes an Israelite tribe or an episode in biblical history and at the same time serves as an active instrument in achieving the ritual goals of the sacrifice.
The final lecture of the series will concern the ancient art of divination in Jewish culture. Some historians have argued that divination was the first form of hermeneutics. Divination systems involve such activities as scrutinizing the natural world for signs of signification, developing techniques for generating random results, and reading personal significance into such disparate events as the chanting of children in a schoolhouse and the arrival of barges at a riverbank. In this lecture I will explore these techniques as well as related legends in which animals, stars, the earth, and other elements of nature are sentient and communicate the divine will.
I hope through these lectures not only to contribute to the history of Judaism, but to the comparative study of indigenous semiotic systems, by which we learn how signification and the creation of meaning are conceived in diverse cultures.
