This paper provides a commentary on Philip Cushman's “A Burning World, an Absent God: Midrash, Hermeneutics, and Relational Psychoanalysis.” Cushman creatively uses the rabbinic midrash as a model hermeneutic and dialogic tradition for contemporary psychoanalysis as an alternative to fundamentalist interpretation. I agree with Cushman's goal, but I find that he places greater emphasis on absence over presence, narrative over law, transcendence over immanence, change over continuity, revolution over evolution, construction over discovery, and individual freedom and autonomy over community and tradition. I believe that it is just this leaning to one side that leaves him defensive about the collapse to relativism. Holding these poles in greater tension and valuing both sides of these polarities offers a dialectical model that serves contemporary psychoanalysis better as a hermeneutic, dialogical, contextual, and dialectical model for interpretation.