The week I got married, I read Mark Z Danielewsky’s House of Leaves. I can’t say this was necessarily a good choice, but it was certainly a choice that I made. For those unfamiliar with it, House of Leaves purports to be an amateur academic analysis of a fictitious documentary film about a house that contains an unending, eternal, ever-shifting labyrinth — an analysis that has been heavily annotated by an unreliable narrator who apparently suffers some kind of nervous breakdown over the course of trying to understand the analysis he is reading. Many of the narrative events are told out of order, and the text itself is sometimes violently rearranged on the page, with text being cropped into small boxes, tilted diagonally and sent around corners, and sometimes even turned about such that one part of each page is read from front to back and another part back to front. It's one part surreal horror novel and one part send-up of pretentious academic tomes.

And one part love story. At the climax of the book, a character who is deathly afraid of dark, enclosed spaces attains a transcendent grace and walks into the void of the labyrinth to rescue her husband, who is on the brink of death after losing himself in its bewildering expanse. Their marriage has been a troubled one — the house with its mysteries has driven them to the point of total alienation from one another — and the tail end of the book is largely concerned with the two of them finding each other again and rebuilding their relationship into something strong and beautiful in the wake of this deeply traumatic period.

When I finished the book, I was left with an all-pervasive dread that lingered for weeks, and also a desire to read people talking about this book. I was specifically hungry for deeper analyses of the love story it builds to — analyses of the house’s broken spacetime as a metaphor for the couple’s broken dynamic, of forgiveness and grace as engines of repair, of love as a choice that can be deliberately made even against the bleakest of circumstances.

Instead, I found a lot of people trying to suss out, on a very literal level, what the heck even happens in the book. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising. Again, it’s a deliberately confusing book, with events told out of order, footnotes swallowing each other, and dense academic prose that sometimes contains crucial information and is sometimes there just to waste the time of anyone who tries to read it. I understand the impulse to ask for some answers.

I understand it, but I was also disappointed by it. I couldn’t help but feel that many of these pieces were missing something crucial about this book. They were approaching it as a puzzle to be solved instead of an experience to be had — if only we can snap all its constituent pieces together into a tidy grid, then we'll finally understand it, and nevermind the metaphors. (Not for nothing, but at least one character in the book is driven mad by this very exercise, which seems like it might itself have some value as a cautionary tale against this sort of approach to the text.)

This whole experience set me thinking about different modes of literary analysis, different ways of picking apart and thinking about a text. And that thinking lead me to a loose framework that I’ve found productive in the time since in thinking about how I approach analysis and what I hope to get out of others’ approaches.

This framework has two poles: bug analysis and prism analysis. Bug analysis seeks to pin down the parts of the text like insects in a display case. It asks, “What is this? What are all its parts and how do they work, separately and together?”. Prism analysis opens up the text and branches outward from it, like colored rays of light scattered about a room from a small glass pendant. It asks, “What do we get from this text? How does it relate to other things we know in the wider world?”.

I like this framework because I think both of these modes are useful, while also being prone to different pitfalls, and I think that each, done well, helps keep the other on track. I’ve alluded above to how bug analysis can somehow miss the forest for the trees — the precise narrative sequence of events in House of Leaves is, in some sense, irrelevant, and getting too bogged down in it is a hindrance to actually engaging with the novel on its own terms. But prism analysis can fail just as hard, losing contact with the specifics of the text and spinning off into ungrounded ruminations that aren't based in anything at all. Bad prism analysis will take you from “Romeo and Juliet is a story about powerful love” to “It's a good idea to bless these newlyweds by comparing them to that Shakespearean couple”. Bug analysis keeps you grounded in the specifics; prism analysis tells you why those specifics matter.

All of which brings me to the current project. As a regular shul attendee, I've heard my fair share of sermons on the weekly parashah cycle — in many cases two a week, first on Friday night then again on Saturday morning.

Overwhelmingly, these sermons tend towards prism analysis, starting from the broad narrative strokes of the parashah and branching out to apply the Torah's themes and lessons to the contexts of contemporary life. This isn’t surprising, and I don't think it's a bad thing. One of the things people come to shul for is answers to the question of how to live a rich, meaningful, moral life, and surely part of the job of a service leader is to draw those answers out of a sacred text we literally call “instruction” [a].

[a] Torah in Hebrew comes from the root ירה | YRH, which encompasses a sense of “to point out, show the way” and thence “to guide, teach, instruct”.

Nevertheless, there are times when this prismatic approach can make it feel like the Torah is less a specific text and more a collection of thematic lecture topics. It’s parashat Nó’aḥ this week, time to talk about ecological catastrophe. This week is parashat Yitro, time to talk about delegating authority or perhaps revelation and the gift of regulation. Small wonder that some communities trim the Shabbat morning Torah service to only a few verses! If all that really matters is the broad thematic strokes of the narrative, why take so much time to read an extended rendition of it in a language no one present is even fluent in?

Call me a writer, but I think the language of the Torah does matter, in all its labyrinthine specifics, quirks, and strangeness. It doesn’t just matter what this text says, it matters how it says it, too.

And so in 5785, I want to get my insect on. I want to take a bug’s eye view of Torah and spend each week focused on the nuts and bolts of the actual text of this strange and multi-layered document. I think this will open the door to some interesting and deep questions, questions that are different, perhaps, than the questions prism analysis leads to, but questions that are no less meaningful for that. There will still be moments of pulling back to talk about why these details matter — bug and prism analysis are complementary, after all, and work best when they feed back into each other — but the starting point is going to be the text and what it says, not the big questions it raises thematically.

In fact, I’ll be narrower than that: Each week, the starting point is going to be a single word. For each parashah, I'm going to take one single word and drill down into it, seeing just how much depth we can get from the smallest starting point. In Jewish circles, we often call sermons divrei Torah, and that’s just what these will be: words of Torah, taken one at a time, turned and examined every which way until we’ve pulled an entire world out of them and are ready to start all over again in 5786.

To be clear, I’m going to be choosing the words based on what strikes my fancy as I read thru each week’s portion. I’m not seeking to find one word that captures all of the parashah’s themes and questions — in some cases we’ll certainly touch on them, but in other cases I’m going to follow rabbit holes that entirely bypass the Big Themes that most people will be trying to address in a given week. This is not “The Whole Torah in 54 words”, it's “Here Are 54 Words That Caught My Attention This Time Thru The Scripture Cycle”.

The vibe is going to be casual, conversational, as tho we’re sitting together at an oneg and someone asks whether I learned anything interesting in Torah Study this week and then no one interrupts me until I finish. I’ll be citing things more formally than I would in casual conversation, but not nearly as formally as a full academic treatment would require. Some of the ideas I explore will be very personal midrashic meditations, some will be rehashings of academic arguments without the journal paywalls, and some will be somewhere in between. I'm going to read them over before posting, but I’m not going to do the kind of intensive workshopping that I would do before formal publication. These are informal musings, not polished essays. Still, I hope they’ll both entertain you and teach you something you didn’t know about this ancient, polyvocal text.

As you can probably guess from the fact I’m only posting this now, five weeks in to the current Torah cycle, I don’t exactly have a plan here. I’m hoping to post new dəvarim every Friday afternoon, more or less, but I work full time and have several other projects going, so probably at some point the schedule is going to get a little funky. I don't know what all I'm going to find, but I’m excited to share it with you when I do.

Who’s ready to get lost in the weeds?