I'm an English major and notwithstanding Northrop Frye's "The Great Code: The Bible and Literature", the OT should not, in my view, ever be read as literature or as a history book. It takes not a mental powerhouse like Frye to see that the OT and especially the Psalms and even more so the works of King Solomon are full of poetic imagery. It is the lowest form of information, in my view. What is much more sublime is what the text intends us to understand. Why read Rashi? He only touches on the surface, on the "p'shat" of the verse. Why? because at least you know what the simple meaning of the verse is. You want deeper? You read the Ohr Chaim, you read the Kli Yakar and you get much deeper levels of meaning. You want deeper still you look into the Zohar on the specific section of the Torah and try to get your head around what the Rabbi's are hinting at. It is almost impossible to really make sense of what they say because they speak in a language full of code words and hidden meanings that only people at their level could appreciate. So, there are many levels of interpretation, the poetic/metaphoric is the simplest and lowest level, in my view. I have to always say in my view because these are my understandings or failures to understand.
Rav Nachman of Breslov, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, wrote much and sometimes gives incredibly thrilling insights into very high levels of insight. Someone was writing a bit earlier (I've lost track with so many postings) about the raising up of the dead....and a mention was made of the Rambam. Although it might be the n'th degree of "chutzpedik" for me to say so, I think that even the Rambam might have been in error here. The truth might be that if and when a so-called Messiah shows up that the way he teaches Jewish law might not sound like anything that has been familiar to 2000 years of Rabbinic thinking. In my view of things (all guesses) if the M will usher in a new age, then he will have to help destroy all the crusty old ways of thinking that have accumulated over the years since prophets died out. If, like MMY, he was to usher in a "spiritual regeneration" he might appear to be almost heretical to mainstream ultraorthodox Jews. This would not surprise me at all. What type of thinking he will introduce is beyond my imagination. I've had discussions with other orthodox J's where my position is that the entire section of the OT where sacrifices of animals and birds take place, is a misinterpretation of huge proportions. Somewhere along the way, don't know when, the mystery of sacrifice got mixed up with a literal interpretation. In other words, instead of knowing what sacrifice a goat meant, people went out and slaughtered a goat and dashed its blood about and thought that this is what God wanted. To me that part of the OT is all upside down and inside out. Closing off for now: I recall years ago when MMY sent a team to Israel...and the way I heard the story is that MMY was told about what goes on during Passover and when he heard of the story of the blood of the paschal lamb being daubed on the door lintels he was supposed to have said "Oh, I didn't know that the Children of Israel had a technique to get to immortality?". When I heard that told to me I got the shivers. Cheers, Fred [snip]
