Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

HOMILETICAL RESOURCES
according to God's Word in the present and future. As the community
recognized that it required renewal for its present and future, it
inquired of and sought a link with its past. The act of interpreting the
past for the needs of the present—that was and is midrash. When
interpreters sought in Torah for communal standards, rules, and law,
they created halakic midrash, interpretations to produce or support
law. When they searched Torah for theology, spiritual values,
religious principles, ethics, consolation, even entertainment, they
created aggadic midrash or homilies.
One should not be misled into thinking that the interpretational
activity described above was dedicated to the pursuit of a progressive
uncovering of the plain meaning of ancient texts or traditions. That
was the work of commentators and translators, and the Jewish people
have produced such people. But the midrashists' work was
something else. They saw their task as making the text and tradition
live in the midst of the community. Hence, as they searched and
inquired of the past's legacy, perhaps a verse, or part of a verse, or
even a single word of the tradition might, as it were, leap from the
page to provide for the need of the day. The element that provided for
the community's sustenance was used for that purpose. Inevitably,
this meant that issues of conformity to the text's "plain meaning,"
though significant, were not primary, and sometimes they were
simply overlooked. The "preacher of Dubnow," R. Jacob Kranz
(nineteenth century), described the process as one of making arrows
appear to have hit the bull's eye by painting targets around them. That
view rightly indicates that Jewish homilies have been most significant
when our teachers found the issues pressing hardest on the Jewish
people's minds and hearts and addressed them through the creative
and sensitive application of the tradition to life.
The process I have described generated various types of homiletical
statements. Some retold and embellished biblical narratives or
painted often startling and probing portraits of biblical personalities.
Gaps in the Bible's narrative were filled with oral traditions and
folk-lore, and the text became illuminated with a new light. In such
cases, the midrashic preacher used the Bible's text archetypically. In
this manner the redemption from Egyptian bondage could become
the symbol of God's saving power in any generation, and Moses could
become the model for virtuous communal leaders and teachers of any
Jewish community. These homilies gave assurance that no Jewish
generation was an orphan. The nation's God and its fathers and
mothers traveled along with all Israel through time and space. Their
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