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classically defended on the basis of text as revelation. God in “His” infinity, after all, intended all the meanings future generations might ever find behind the text. Hence they were all “given to Moses at Sinai.” We cannot make such a claim in a literal sense. But I deny—and here I am arguing with Mordecai Kaplan, Gershom Scholem, and others—that this means that the game is up. God gives Torah—wordless, airy, revealing itself to be nothing other than God's own name, or thundering in our ears as a single-word challenge: Ayekah?—“Where are you?” We, the Community of Israel, receive Torah, dressed in the finery of tales, traditions, impossible commands. Something happened, to be sure, between the “giving” and the “receiving.” That “something” is translation into human-generated and evolving forms of religious life, embodiments of the elusive spirit. But this is the form in which we have that hidden Torah; we have no other. Only by digging deeply into the outer Torah, its sometimes harsh “shell,” spurred on by the pain it causes us, will we find our way into the secret places where the experience of generations tells us that insight into God's presence will be found.

Spinoza is, of course, a founder of modernity. By asserting the rebirth and legitimacy of Midrash, we are making a postmodern claim. The text bears a multiplicity of meanings, and we, its readers, have an active hand in creating them and selecting among them. We make this claim, however, in carefully defined ways. We apply it only to the canonical text of Hebrew Scripture, sanctified by the rabbis of Yavneh and by the Jewish people over two millennia of religious life. Because we are postmoderns and not premoderns, having bitten into the apple of historical criticism, we will always know the difference between peshat (the critical, historical meaning of the text in its original context) and drash (the host of fanciful explanations we find hinted at in the text), and must be honest in distinguishing between the two. But with this honesty in place, we understand that drash is where the ever-evolving spirit wants us to put our energies. The renewal of aggadah, as Hayyim Nahman Bialik so powerfully reminded us, is the real creative challenge.61 The power to reinterpret, the ability to expand meanings, is itself a divine gift or testimony to the divine presence within us. Listen to a Hasidic reading of the concluding Torah blessing which, recited after each portion, reads: “ … who has given us the Torah of truth and implanted eternal life within us. Blessed are You Y-H-W-H, giving the Torah.” The Torah, given once to the ancients, can only become “Torah of truth” when each reader takes that “eternal life” implanted with us and uses it to reread Torah in a way that speaks to his or her own life. We make Torah come to life. Only then may we say that God is “giving” the Torah, in the present moment, not only in the past. God resides not only behind the text as guarantor of its infinite elasticity but also within us, in the innermost chambers (nequdah penimit) of our endless creativity. We, through the living divine presence within us, make the text come alive. The text is a way into our own deepest selves, a tool for examining our inner lives. The king of Israel is to write a Torah and “read in it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:18-19). The Hasidic reading of this is: you become a “king” in Israel when you learn to read (or “discover”) all the days of your own life within the Torah.62

Such a licensing of interpretive freedom is not without its dangers. If we believe that the earliest transmitters of Torah tradition were human and fallible, how much more fallible are we in our readings! But we have no choice. We are blessed by history and community, which stand by our side, like Yakhin and Boaz, the two pillars of the Temple, to help see that our interpretations do not lead us astray. “Drink responsibly,” as they say in those TV ads, of the “wine of Torah.”

A Tree of Life

“She is a Tree of Life to those who take hold of her,” says a verse that we recite