Response to Lewis Aron

Ivery Much appreciate Lewis Aron's discussion of my paper. Rarely have I seen a discussion as painstakingly researched, well thought out, and conscientiously engaged with the material; it must have taken a great deal of time and effort, and we are all in his debt. He has brought especially one very important issue to the fore, and I have tried to give it the thoughtfulness it deserves.

I think, as Lew mentioned, that he and I agree on most issues my article discusses. I also think that, on the one basic issue with which Lew finds disagreement, it is mostly a matter of degree that separates us. For instance, some of the stories he draws on were initially included in early drafts of my paper, and I was delighted to see them in Lew's paper. That said, his concern is substantive and certainly does bear discussion.

To be brief, Lew is concerned that I do not adequately hold both sides of the presence-absence and communalism-individualism dialectics that are identified in my article as characteristic of Jewish biblical commentary, called midrash. He thinks I favor absence and individualism, which causes me to lose the dynamic tension that is at the heart of the paradoxes that inhere in midrashic practice. He thinks that by doing so I misrepresent Jewish tradition, fall into the relativism to which hermeneutic and postmodern theory are susceptible when not sufficiently dialectical, and as a result fail to supply the kind of opposition to fundamentalism that is the goal of my paper.

To tell you the truth, I am of two minds about this concern. On one hand, Lew is right; in my article I do not emphasize the presence of God and the communal standards of midrashic interpretation in quite the way I do God's absence and the importance of moral decision-making. I certainly do discuss them and, in fact, mention them frequently (for instance, presence was mentioned 42 times, absence 40—but who's counting?). In truth, though, presence and standards are not treated with quite the same rh