----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: "Midrash"
> Frederick Pollack wrote:
>> Midrash
>
> Utterly astounding, even if I don't have clue one why it's called Midrash.
> Doesn't matter: it's terrific.
>
> ken
>
> --
Midrash is rabbinic commentary on the Torah (the Pentateuch) or on the
Talmud, the initial body of such commentaries. Loosely, any textual
hermeneutics carried out in a Jewish rather than Christian way can be called
(a) midrash. In Walter Benjamin, Marxist and Jewish (even Kabbalistic)
thought intersect, very notably in the "Theses on the Philosophy of
History," which contain his parable of the angel. So my poem is a midrash
upon that passage:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures
the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive
a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
|