198 Jonathan Cohen
constituted by speech and . . . face-to-face relations. . . . To have taught us
this, allusively, is Buber’s enduring legacy. . . . Th e Bible is for Buber the
rescued and ever-hearable speech of the living God. It is a Teaching which
simply points out an ongoing way. Th is is also the teaching of midrash. 43Schweid and Fishbane are correct in modifying the description of the
hermeneutics of Buber and Rosenzweig as dialogical by pointing out the
midrashic dimension in their approach. In order to fully clarify the inter-
action between the dialogical moment and the midrashic moment in their
biblical hermeneutics, however, it is fi rst necessary to distinguish between
dialogue and midrash as reading modes. Only then (as with all good dia-
logical relations!) can they be shown to interact.
As distinct from the mode of “pure” dialogue, the midrashic mode of
reading does not assume an absolute parity and equality between the two
partners. Th e source, the Bible, is assumed to be an infi nite wellspring of
meaning — one wherein the potential for far-ranging and infi nitely ap-
plicable interpretations has been predeposited. Th e assumption of the
midrashic interpreter is that he or she is not presenting, in his or her in-
terpretation, any genuinely new content. He or she is rather activating a
preexisting potential, a direction or possibility that was embedded in the
text even before he or she set out to interpret it. Th e midrashic reader is, in
the words of Gershom Scholem, merely “laying” this potential “open in the
context of his own time.”44 True, the midrashic reader has an indispens-
able role vis-à-vis the text. Without the imaginative search of the midrashic
reader for the text’s address to the contemporary situation, the text would
remain silent. Th is, however, does not put the reader on a par with the text.
Neither does the message of the text for the modern reader subsist in the
space in-between the two interlocutors. Th is meaning proceeds from the
text and has merely been activated by the reader. Even if, from a strictly
“historical” perspective, what the midrashic reader has derived from the
text seems to have no precedent and seems totally original, it has, from a
metaphysical perspective, already been “placed” in the text, such that (as
the Talmud states in BT Megillah 19b and JT Pe’ah 13a/2.6) “whatever a
bright student might off er as a chiddush [new interpretation] was given to
Moses at Sinai.”45
We can characterize the hermeneutic of Buber and Rosenzweig as a dia-
logue between dialogue and midrash. As in all successful dialogues, each
party has undergone a transformation without losing his or her identity. In
Buber and Rosenzweig’s reading mode, normal dialogue has undergone an