Womanist Midrash thoughts (introduction)

I have "discovered" an interesting book.  Written by Wilda (Wil) Gafney, Womanist Midrash presents a new perspective on Bible reading.  The introduction is intriguing. 

The author uses the term womanist to describe herself and her approach to Biblical stories.  Many of us are unfamiliar with womanism. "Most simply, womanism is black women's feminism." (p6) According to Gafney, many black women do not feel included in a movement dominated by white, dominant culture, relatively wealthy women.  There is a strong sense that the egalitarian values of the feminist movement are often distorted by the wealth, privilege, and biases of the predominantly white leaders.  At the same time the black liberationists, who can understand what it is like to be a minority, often seen as "less than" to a white majority, tend to focus on their male leaders. Womanism bridges those movements. "Womanism emerged as black women's intellectual and interpretive response to racism and classism in feminism and its articulation and in response to sexism in black liberationist thought." Ms. Gafney explains it in a much more compelling way, and her description does make me think of how Jesus spoke to, and stood up for, those who were overlooked and without a voice in society.

The term Midrash was also new to me. The online dictionary defines it as "an ancient commentary on part of the Hebrew scriptures, attached to the biblical text." Gafney explains "In Jewish sacred literature, midrash is the primary rabbinic term for exegesis....Traditional midrash is also mystical, imaginative, revelatory, and, above all, religious. Midrash interprets not only the text before the reader, but also the text behind and beyond the text and the text between the lines of the text." (p4)

To get to the whole reason why I find this all so intriguing, there is one more term that was defined in the introduction to this book.  It is "Sanctified Imagination" which is what preachers can invoke to say that what is about to be said is "going beyond the text in a manner not likely to be challenged, even in the most literal interpretive communities...the fertile creative space where the preacher-interpreter enters the text..."

The author explains that there are, depending on way of counting, roughly 111 named female characters in the Hebrew Bible, and hundreds more who are unnamed. She has chosen to present the stories of at least some of these women, giving some of the unnamed women names, and using her knowledge of biblical languages and times, tied together with sanctified  imagination, to fill in their stories to speak to us today.  I look forward to new insights and understandings as I explore this Womanist Midrash.