A Christmas Midrash

A Christmas Midrash

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Christmas season is in full swing. Decorations are everywhere. Sometimes people ask if their ubiquity bothers my Jewish sensibilities. Not at all: they’ve become so familiar, I don’t even see them anymore.

Nativity scenes, however, catch my eye. Of course I like the animals, but I like the blessed baby motif, too. Some creches illustrate Jesus’ birth story in Luke’s Gospel, surrounding the baby with angels. Others present the scene from Matthew’s Gospel, where the baby receives gifts from the Magi, spiritual teachers from a foreign faith tradition.

My preference is for Matthew’s scene. Not because I prefer the magi to the angels (which I do), but because I enjoy reading Matthew’s Gospel. Likely written by a Jewish writer for a Jewish audience, it is a masterful piece of midrashic writing. Around quotations and motifs from Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), Matthew weaves his vision of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah.

Unfortunately, Matthew’s creativity is lost on many Christian readers. For them, Matthew simply makes explicit existing Biblical themes. The whole point of Hebrew Bible, they say, is to predict the coming of Jesus. Thus, Hebrew Bible can only be read correctly through a Christological lens.

Paul Ricoeur, in his book Freud and Philosophy, describes this style of reading as a “hermeneutic [interpretive style] of suspicion.” To read suspiciously is to approach a text without letting it speak to you on its own terms — because you know in advance what it means. The text is a coded message; a good reader knows the key, and finds the secret message. To borrow Ricoeur’s vocabulary, a Christological reading of Hebrew Bible applies a hermeneutic of suspicion.

The process starts innocently enough in Tanakh as a result of inner-Biblical interpretation. The author of the Book of Ruth, for example, knows the stories of Genesis. She hints that Tamar, Judah’s cleverly self-reliant daughter-in-law, is a great-grandmother of King David. Reading Genesis after Ruth, we know where Tamar’s social boundary-crossing is going: it’s the stuff kings are made of.

The process continues in the New Testament, where Jewish writers like Matthew borrow motifs from Hebrew Bible to express the character of Jesus – including lists of boundary-crossing female ancestors (Matthew 1:1-17). If you reread the earlier Biblical books through Matthew’s lens, you see the seeds of the future development of Jesus’ ministry.

Of course, creative midrashic writing continues long after Matthew. Authors of the early midrash collection Genesis Rabbah (c. 500 CE) taught that Genesis is an allegorical prediction of the future history of the Jewish people. Authors of the Zohar, a 13th century mystical work, said that all of Torah’s characters are allegorical representations of God’s inner spiritual qualities.

Obviously, the Hebrew Bible can hold this “surplus of meaning” – as Ricoeur likes to call it. In Jewish thought, we like to say that the white spaces between the words are as important as the words themselves. As a great book of human civilization, begging to be read and re-read, Tanakh overflows the boundaries of any single hermeneutic. Instead, it invites us to collect and re-collect meaning, to engage in what Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutic of recollection.”

Maybe this scholarly side trip into hermeneutic theory really explains why I like creches. Each year, Christian folk artists re-create the Nativity scene. Some present New Testament motifs faithfully; others mix local folk traditions with personal inspiration and political commentary. Some envision a dignified scene; others gleefully create kitsch, or ambitiously engage live animal actors. Each one extends Matthew’s meanings, playfully re-mixing and re-collecting them.

Although Canada is a multicultural society, Christmas and Easter are the only religious holidays to be named legal holidays. The week between Christmas and New Years is the closest we get here to a national vacation. Does this bother my Jewish sensibilities? Of course! But I intend to find as much meaning in it as I can.

6 Comments
  1. weird to read midrash and x-mas in the same line but u wrote some good stuff there. sandy corenblum canada. thanks by the way. happy neetle….

  2. Thanks, Laura… glad to find you and your commentary, forwarded to me here in Vermont from a friend whose brother in Nebraska forwarded it to him!

    I also appreciate Matthew’s gospel because of its Jewish context, and for its amazing mention of no less than four dreams in the first two chapters (the birth story and a bit beyond). As a retired liberal Christian pastor with a rabbi friend here (Joshua Chasan), I am seeing myself more and more as a dream coach, having watched my dreams since 1979. We miss the attentiveness of the ancients to dreamwork. We miss important guidance, like the guidance Joseph got to get out of Dodge when Herod’s barbarity got constellated by his paranoia.

    Where are you in Canada? My daughter is in Montreal. Keep me on your list. Michael Caldwell

    1. Thanks, Michael. I agree with you about dreamwork. The dreams in Bible are not just literary devices, I think, but important records of a living spiritual practice. I’m in Vancouver. If you want to sign up for updates, you’ll need to do it using the button on the right of the article. Unlike the email marketing sites, WordPress doesn’t allow me to sign anyone up.

  3. Excellent, thought-provoking post. I have the same “issues” with nativity scenes. Years ago I had a tiny wooden nativity scene that included all kinds of characters and townspeople. My favorite was the “cake lady”, the woman who brought food (was it a casserole or a cake?) for the holy family. In real life, isn’t that what women often do for new mothers after the baby is born?

    1. I love the idea of creating a more loving scene! And food is such a theme in the Gospels, of course cake ladies would be there!

  4. I’ve been intrigued by Mathew’s appeal to external validation. It’s familiar to me as a Canadian – we only recognize our talented teachers and performers if they have been recognized in The States. Same for the Hebrew Matthew, whose Jesus couldn’t have been much if his birth had only been attended to by local wise men. Having three leaders of the Sanhedrin make their way fifteen miles from Jerusalem to Bethlehem is nothing to inspire the locals. But hey! – three Zoroastrian leaders coming from New York or L.A. must mean this guy is big news! So I think Matthew’s marketing vision overrules his commitment to Midrash since the earlier texts such as Isaiah suggest that Israel would come to see the deliverance of God – without the need for external validation.

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