Word: midrash
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Things devolved from there. Jews, stung, took steps to cement Abraham's Jewish identity. The Talmud describes him anachronistically as following Mosaic law and speaking Hebrew. And they severely downgraded Ishmael. Initially, says Shaul Magid, professor of Midrash at New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary, Jewish parents named their boys after Abraham's Arab son, but the custom evaporated as they began living under Muslim rule. By the 11th century the great biblical scholar Rashi, citing earlier authorities, described Ishmael as a "thief" whom "everybody hates," an insult that can still be found in his prominently placed commentary...
...Passover story, when the Egyptians try to follow the escaping Israelites across the sea, God causes the parted waters to return, drowning all of the Egyptians. There is a midrash, a legend, that when the Israelite women began to dance at the shore of the sea in praise of God, the angels in heaven also started to dance. God turned to them and asked, “Why are you dancing? Why are you celebrating? I have just drowned hundreds of my people.” Neither side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict deserves the fate of the Egyptians...
Everett's field of inquiry expands to include the strange appeal of popular music: "When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you recite the words you will hear the melody." Everett imagines a group called the Midrash Jazz Quartet performing Old Testament-style exegeses on such works as Me and My Shadow and Stardust...
...choose a few pregnant situations: the first from Matthew and Luke, the others largely from Mark--and then I'll examine them imaginatively but responsibly, adding a few glancing notes on my sources. It is, after all, a process with which Jesus himself would have been familiar--Haggadah and Midrash being traditional, and often narrative, expansions of Hebrew scripture...
There is a midrash (a legend) that explains, "the further you are from Sinai [the moment of revelation], the more you are diminished." Bak varies the notion of family lineage in From Generation to Generation through a series. An elder from the village of Vilna, gazes upon versions of himself, his body decreasing in size, each time preserving his old age. The ancestors bless their descendents but stare toward the earth, without joy or life. It is as if these men have always been old, but one cannot tell which man is the oldest. Each generation, now with the knowledge...