Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 197Paul Ricoeur, must involve both “distanciation” and “appropriation.”41 Each
party to the dialogue must make an honest attempt to regard the other as
an “other,” as someone who sees from a perspective deriving from a diff er-
ent biography or history. Th is consciousness of “otherness” works to pre-
vent the imposition of one perspective onto another. Only aft er this stage
of distanciation can there also be appropriation, the expansion of self-
understanding and reorientation to life that results from the assimilation of
aspects of the other’s perspective into one’s own.
Dialogue and Midrash — A Dialogue and a Synthesis
For some scholars, the characterization of the hermeneutic approach of
Buber and Rosenzweig as merely “dialogical” has not seemed “Jewish”
enough. While not disavowing the “dialogical” nature of their herme-
neutics, such a scholar would refer to their mode of Bible interpretation
as a species of modern “midrash.” My own distinguished teacher, Eliezer
Schweid, has used this appellation to characterize the project of Buber and
Rosenzweig, noting that they did not relate to their dialogue with the Bible
in the same way they related to other forms of dialogue.42 Th ey saw Bible
as not just another dialogue partner — as if it were a matter of happenstance
or pure choice that they should fi nd each other and fi nd meaning in their
conversation. For them, the Bible was a “source” toward which they felt an
a priori responsibility as inheritors of the Jewish tradition. Th ey assumed
that the Bible, as source, was endowed with the resources to address the
special kind of alienation experienced by moderns such as themselves, the
alienation caused by the predominance of the I-It relationship in modern
life. Although these thinkers (particularly Buber, in Schweid’s view) under-
stood themselves as approaching the Bible in the spirit of pure dialogue,
wherein both partners have an equal voice in determining if, when, and
how a dialogue is to take place, it would be more appropriate to refer to
their hermeneutic orientation as a species of modern midrash, wherein it is
assumed in advance that the source has the potential to off er answers to the
quandaries of the reader — if not immediately and totally, at least gradually
and bit by bit. Michael Fishbane writes, in a similar spirit,
Th e truth of midrash is not the truth of historical information or textual
analysis. It is the truth of the power of scriptural words to draw a reader
into an authentic relationship with the mystery of the world — a world