Aphra Behn, Part 7

Paradise and Surinam

The various modes of rabbinic interpretation that are abbreviated in the epigrammatic word Pardes or paradise (an enclosed garden, an orchard, a grove of sacred trees) need to be elaborated on.  PaRDeS or p-r-d-s פרדס  is an anagramme of four separate words: pshat, remez, drash and sod.  Each represents a process of analysis and interpretation, as well as a guide for application of the laws they contain.  Unlike the Christian version of four levels of scriptural exegesis—literal, figurative, allegorical and sacramental—the Jewish approach does not imagine a basic historical moment to be elaborated through interpretation, but an elaborate text to be increasingly broken apart and reassembled in a variety of ways.  In other words, the basic reality of the world and its sacred history is textual. Which is not to say, though, that the world is an illusion, as in a form of Docetism or Gnosticism; but rather that reality is a matrix of constituent letters, a language, in the sense that DNA is a language or the chemical table.

Pshat referees not to a literal meaning but to the first kind of interpretation of a sacred and/or rabbinical text.  Before interpretation can begin, the student learns to read the letters, studies the grammar and syntax, and identifies people, places, things and events mentioned in the passage under scrutiny.  This k-r-t is similar to what was taught in grammar schools in Europe: the basics of identifying letters with sounds and the formation of those sound pattern s into words and longer lexical units.  What is different in Jewish tradition lies in the further need to teach the various extra-lexical markings on the manuscript or printed page: the markers for voicing the words (since Hebrew, as other Semitic written languages, does not inscribe vowels) the cantillation (melodic and rhythmic singing and accompanying bodily movements) marks, varieties of enhancements of the ciphers used to form a filigree on certain letters, and the numerical equivalents of sounds (since Hebrew letters are also numerical figures).  Students will also be taught the meaning and use of abbreviations.  All this may be subsumed under the category of philology.  But pshat renders something beyond merely reading aloud of the silent—and unspeakable—text because it imparts to beginners and uneducated readers the received interpretation, that which, in a certain time and place has been deemed authoritative by rabbinical authorities as to form the basis of application in the mitzvoth (613 commandments)  and minhagim (customs and traditions) of normal life. Such a reading informs these non-specialist Jews that what they see is not always exactly what they speak, that what is there needs correction and adjustment, and that what may be applied cannot always be literal because time, place and political and moral circumstance have changed.

Remez, in asking what something is like, begins by discovering other places in Scripture where similar words, phrases, references are made, as well as similar grammatical, syntactical or orthographical peculiarities may be found; and moves towards the discovery of narrative, logical and imagistic ambiguities may be resolved in recontextualized settings.  Since it is assumed that all of the Torah is one continuous name, word, gesture, event, argument, conversation, passages—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, units of narration, description, speech and analysis—they may be juxtaposed, inserted, interpolated or overlaid  and melded into one another.  For instance, the fragments of archaic speech and ritual description of action in the Song of Songs can be made to yield meaning and relevance by being imagined as occurring during the Children of Israel’s passage through the Red Sea. Other statements that seem to have no context can be shown to belong in other more developed scenes, or actions which appear to lack motivation or consequences can be explained by events whose narrative voice has over-determined the immediate event, so that two or three or more separate passages can be revealed to form a cohesive body of sacred text. 

Drash, expanded into midrash, is a mode of expanding the text into more explicit terms or of propounding a figurative parallel or supplemental text through variety of metaphoric, parabolic, and allegorical means; such inventions re-imagine the original troublesome passage in such a way as to resolve gaps, contradictions and impossible-to-solve riddles. The midrash proper, of course, is a figurative enhancement of a scriptural passage in order to bring out its vague or incomplete basis as an application into law or custom, to give it vivid relevance into current circumstances, or to justify its seeming contradiction to another legally-binding statement of the Law.  Often, but not always, the midrash (or drash), transform syntactic, orthographic, grammatical or misplaced allusions into extra-historical persons, non-geographical places, anachronistic actions and fantastic events that have no contextual justification: they offer temporary aid to understanding but do not set ethical, legal or spiritual precedents. For example, the prologue to the Book of Job, with its conversation and bargain between God and the Shatan, establishes the grounds on which Job’s moral testing are based, but does not recur in the book as part of its dramatic, logical or narrative structure; the passage seems to respond to the implicit question, to what may we may scribe the divine motivation in testing Job? Let us imagine that once…  The midrash has now entered into the text proper, but only as a figurative preliminary, not as a constituent part of what the rabbis call the mashol, the exemplary scenario of the book.

Sod reveals a secret or occluded meaning in the text, what is more or other than the pshat, what is hidden in the sound and appearance and signification of the written and physical appearance of the words. Though a variety of word and letter manipulations, interpretations of the peculiarities of size, shape and even ink color used on the page, games such as gematria (where numerical equivalents of letters lead to finding equivalent totals for different otherwise unrelated words), extending and condensing letters to make anagrams, abbreviations and puns, other tricks such as sticking a pin through several folios in order to find various terms, allusions and values at similar points on the different pages of text—through all this wholly new texts are constructed, juxtaposed to the originals, and made to enter into dialogue with one another.  When dealing with a Crypto-Jewish book, such as Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, it is wide to be cautious and not to expect too many explicit clues, and yet to be sensitive to the subtle evidence of what is said in places where you don’t expect there to be such things, where the absence of or completed statements signals something awry, and other small bits of uncanniness.