Midrashic Rhetoric and the Problem of Passion in Public Life

While scholarship in Jewish thought and beyond has attended to the literary aspects of midrash, midrash as a practice of speech which forms a public rhetorical culture and individual subjects within it has not been thoroughly explored. This paper approaches the topic through the lens of democratic theory on public discourse, with specific attention to critical scholarship on affect. By analyzing the phenomenology of midrashic interpretation through the writings of Avivah Zornberg and Michael Fishbane, this paper argues that performing midrash allows a subject to be indulgent regarding desires and passions—to imagine particular narratives and publicize them expressively—while still developing the humility required for a collective discursive project. In this way, midrashic rhetoric offers a model for rethinking current conversations around the ethics of citizenship in political speech, as they struggle to square the liberal demands of accountability to a public and the demands of the affective subject.