For the rabbis, in trying to come to terms with certain closures, with a distancing of the divine voice, a concealment of God in history, respond by saying that if you turn it and turn it, you will find that, too -- concealment, indeterminacy -- is already in the text. Where? In the very gaps and ambiguities of the divine language; and there, too, is the space of their own interpretations. So they turn the loss of center, the Temple, the cult back into Scripture itself -- fold it over to enclose the loss of meaning into the text and, in doing so, they paradoxically make the text meaningful again.

Susan Handelman