In addition to the Torah, the Tanakh and the Talmud, there is another genre of rabbinic literature, which is the Midrash. There are many types and collections of “midrashim.” Essentially, it is the interpretation of sacred texts, usually from the Bible, although sometimes also from the Mishnah.

The language of the Bible is often brief and uncommunicative. Therefore, many questions remain unanswered. The Talmud answers some. The Midrashim try to answer most of them. They were written between the 4th and 6th centuries of our era. Some refer exclusively to halachic matters, laws, and others are hagadoth, theological narratives. There are many collections of Midrashim, such as Rabbi Ishmael’s “Mechilta” on the book of Shmot, “Sifra” on the book of Vaykra and “Sifre” on the books of Bamidbar and Devarim, all of them part of the Torah. The first is one of the oldest and is written in a simple and direct style.

It is clear that the Bible does not explain everything we would like to understand about its stories. And as times change, the relationship of readers to the stories of the Tanach also changes. This evolutionary process, along with the biblical way of telling a story, results in gaps and lack of order that affects our understanding and our relationship with the sacred texts. For the rabbis, the Midrashim were the way to fill those gaps and to order those texts, in some cases creating fables or legends that gave a background to the scarce narrative of the Torah.

There are three types of Midrashim: those that explain a text, especially commandments, those that contain parables or moral lessons and those that expand narratives of the Torah. They are rich in metaphors and allegories, wordplay and symbolism. For example, the Torah tells us that Adam told Eve, referring to the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “Do not eat from it, nor touch it, for you will die.” The Midrash Breishit Raba adds and tells us that the serpent “grabbed her and threw her against the tree” and explains that with this, the serpent made Eve see that she did not die by touching the tree and that she could then eat its fruit. This story is not in the Torah. Our sages created it in order to better understand what happened in that very famous biblical passage.

The Midrashim must be seen in their own context, because in them we can see the Jewish soul and mind perhaps in one of its most creative stages. The time in which they were written was a time of serious crisis for the Jewish people, especially in the Roman Empire. It seems that in difficult times, the talent of our sages grows more. The Midrash is part of that “Great Book” that never ends, that continues to grow and brings us new contexts and ways of understanding and relating to the sacred texts.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Essential Judaism by George Robinson.