* a partial and non-chronological investigation of the pre-digital past
Monday, January 10, 2011
Rabbinical Bibles
Dear Friends,
The most marvelous thing happened to me on the subway the other day, I met a rabbi, well, a rabbi in training. He was sitting and Iwas standing above him and saw this book, this gigantic book, open on his lap. Each page looked like a puzzle and the spaces between the segments of text looked like a maze. The cover was bound in thick red leather and printed on the sides of the pages was a swirling black and red marble design. As I got off the train I asked him what sort of book he was reading and he responded, a Rabbinical Bible. He also told me that the central text, the text which the other texts bracketed were scriptures from the old testament. The texts which encircled the central text were various historical interpretations of this text. What an interesting format, I thought, this idea that the translations held an equally valuable and informative weight as the primary text, not relegated to the back of the book or a separate edition entirely, these texts operated on a simultaneous level to the primary text, to be read on the same page, and at the same time.
This form of textual exegesis has fascinated me for years. There's a lot of directions to take a discussion of it, but its value lies, in part, in the implicit assumption that no text-even the Torah-is finished and fixed, and thus safely ossified, but rather grows and morphs in the historical continuum. It's a shame that so much Benjamin scholarship gets bogged down in the "theology v. Marxism" debate, because I think a lot of his work consciously tried to work out the implications of using this sort of analysis in a non-theological context.
1 comment:
This form of textual exegesis has fascinated me for years. There's a lot of directions to take a discussion of it, but its value lies, in part, in the implicit assumption that no text-even the Torah-is finished and fixed, and thus safely ossified, but rather grows and morphs in the historical continuum.
It's a shame that so much Benjamin scholarship gets bogged down in the "theology v. Marxism" debate, because I think a lot of his work consciously tried to work out the implications of using this sort of analysis in a non-theological context.
Post a Comment