More than halfway through the Days of Awe, now:\n
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment<\/strong>, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.<\/blockquote>\n
So, there are four methods of Scriptural interpretation: p’shat<\/i>, remez<\/i>, d’rash<\/i> and sod<\/i>. They are referred to by their initials: pardes<\/i>, Paradise. Kinda nice, although kinda not as well, given what happened to the Four who went there. Anyway, of the four, the p’shat<\/i> or simple meaning, is the meaning of the text, taken as literally and specifically as possible. remez<\/i> is an explanation that finds clues within various sources to reference each other. d’rash<\/i> uses a variety of methods including storytelling and symbolism to draw a general lesson, not always directly connected to or derivable from the text. sod<\/i> is the secret meaning of the text, not discernable at all without the keys provided by inspiration.\n
I generally eschew sod<\/i>, because for all my belief in the Divine, in the Divine Creation, and in Scripture, I can’t swallow that particular kind of revelation. I have no wish to turn my interpreting over to some Rebbe, just because the Divine spoke to Rebbe personally. I suppose my concordance-clicky-Bibliomancy is remez<\/i>, of sorts. But mostly, what I do is d’rash<\/i>: seeking out a lesson for myself from the text that is not the plain meaning of it. I try not to reject p’shat<\/i>, except I suppose where I do reject it, but I don’t feel confined to it.\n
I bring that up, because the word d’rash<\/i> means seek<\/i>, and our text here is dirshu mishpat<\/i>: seek justice. The plain meaning, the p’shat<\/i> is that we should, you know, seek justice. And any interpretation that rejects that meaning clearly rejects the verse: that is how p’shat<\/i> works. But there can be additional interpretations, d’rash<\/i> interpretations, too. And it seems to me that the verse is saying to me: d’rash<\/i> justice. Don’t just look for justice in the obvious and stop. Use storytelling, symbolism, allegory. Be creative; use whatever tools are in the mind the Divine gave you. Go beyond the obvious. Don’t stop.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger goes beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16529,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14980\/revisions\/16529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}