When we pray or when we recite liturgical texts which are a part of holiday or lifecycle observances, we know that the process is both didactic as well as experiential. We remind ourselves of our relationship with God, and of God's nature, but we also experience anew the covenant.

A primary example is the Passover Haggadah, in which we read: Even if we were all wise. all parsons of understanding, all knowledgeable of Torah, we would still be commanded to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. No matter the breadth or depth of our knowledge, it is incumbent upon us to retell, to relive the story of our journey from slavery to freedom in rehearsing the story, the goal is for each of us to feel as though we went forth from Egypt.

The search for more than the pshat
For most Jews the challenge to personalize the text is not carried over to our study of the Bible. Many of us, even the most committed, view the reading of the Bible as a dispassionate, objective exercise. The product of Modernity's emphasis on the use of our reason, our sole intent is to use our analytic skills--linguistic, literary, source-critical, historical--to understand the conventional meaning of the text (in Hebrew, the pshat, the simple, more obvious meaning). We focus upon the question of what the biblical writers meant for their day in any particular verse or narrative.

However, the search for the pshat is not the end-all and be-all of our immersion into the sacred stories of our past, and the dominant reading is not the only possible way to interpret any given piece of text. Even the rabbis of old recognized that there were "seventy faces to the Torah,"¹ only the first of which was the pshat. They intuited that the text, any text, is multivocalic--that there are a multiplicity of meanings implicit in the text and that each reader can find a voice that will touch him/her.

Abaye taught regarding the verse, God has spoken once; twice have I heard this(Psalm 62:12), that one biblical verse may convey many different teachings. In R. Ishmael's school it was taught: Behold My word is like fire. says God, and like a hammer that breaks the rock into many pieces (Jeremiah 23:29). So too, one biblical verse may convey many teachings.²

Although from this text it isn't clear whether it is the rock or the hammer that symbolizes the biblical verse, a parallel rabbinic text affirms the notion that God's word "is like a hammer" which, when it strikes the rock, divides into/produces many sparks. Like the hammer showering sparks, every word of Torah splits into seventy languages i.e., the number of nations in the world The message is clear: There are as many interpretations of any given biblical text as there are people in the world.³

Although the biblical text may be finite, its re-creation, mediated by the process of interpretation, is infinite. Multiple meanings may be heard resonating within each word when the reader opens him/herself to it in a significant way. The text comes alive and operative when the reader and the text become one. The process of re-creating the text through interpretation, i.e., reading it midrashically, has been compared to the birthing of a child. Once the umbilical cord, the tie of the biblical text to a particular time, place and set of redactors is severed, once its existence becomes a fact, the text leads a life of its own. It grows, expands and changes due to the interaction with it by readers in every age. Post-modern scholars describe this process as the "recontextualizing of the text." We today find meaning in the text by reliving it, by filtering it through our own life situations....