White Fire and Black Fire

The Jewish tradition has its own way of describing this fact about biblical narrative. The ancient Rabbis spoke of the Bible as having been written in black fire and white fire. The black fire are the words on the page, the black ink of the letters which each of us can see and read. Though written words are, like all words, slippery and capable of meaning many things, the words stand before us as given; they are fixed in the canonized text . They can be analyzed, looked up in dictionaries, understood in context, and they cannot be altered.

The white fire is the space between the words on the page or scroll, the space around the words, even the space between the letters. Because of the commandment against the making of graven images, Judaism did not develop a tradition of religious art and illustration as a response to the white fire. That impulse to illustrate, explain, and imagine took place in words, in what began as an oral commentary on the Bible and gradually passed into writing and formed a body of sacred material called The Midrash.

The Midrash—the interpretation, explanation, and illumination of the black fire of the biblical text— was codified centuries ago in a series of volumes that for the traditional Jew represents a definitive commentary on the Bible, its stories and laws.

However, for more liberal minded Jews, and especially in the last two generations in the United States, there has been a renaissance of interest in midrash, not as a fixed body of commentary, but as a process of interpretation: midrash, taking the form of poetry and play, as dance and song, inspired by the Bible’s laconic style, its narrative spaces and gaps. The white fire is very much a-kindle; it flickers in many places, and one of its tongues is Bibliodrama.