parsha bit: Chayei Sarah

[cellio]

When the torah tells us about Yitzchak's marriage to Rivka, it says he married her and he loved her. The rabbis pick up on that ordering. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch teaches that this is because the wedding should not be the summit of the relationship but, rather, the seed of future love.

My usual tertiary sources failed me this week; I was looking for midrash on the portion, not commentary. Is there a collection of midrash bits, sorted by theme or (ideally) parsha, akin to Baron's quotations? It seems like a handy tool for enhancing sermons.

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

I don't know if there's an English version, but the Torah Shlaimah (not sure how the second word would be transliterated, if you end up looking for it) is a compendium of lots and lots of midrash on each parasha. Each parasha has its own volume. (I have only one, for parshat Breishit, figuring that if I could afford only one (at the time), it might as well be the one we'd studied for months :-). Also off possible use, the Ayn Yaakov (Jacob's Well), which has the aggadic parts of the Gemara.

[madfilkentist]

I have no answer to your question, but you could draw an effective parallel between that and the song "Do You Love Me?" in Fiddler on the Roof.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

There are collections of midrashim ordered by pasuk (roughly - often they connect to a section rather than a specific verse, so the bit you want might be ordered a little before/after you'd expect 'cause that's where the author/editor thought it belonged). Bereshit Rabbah is one for bereshit and similar ones exist for various other books, generally with titles of the form "*name of book* Rabbah".

A quick poke at amazon.com (search for "midrash") lists a while bunch of Midrash Rabbah books of various lengths and prices...

Legends of the Jews

[goljerp]

Is there a collection of midrash bits, sorted by theme or (ideally) parsha

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews yet. Translated from the German by Henrietta Szold, it's a 7 volume of Midrash. The plus side: it's arranged chronologically, and two volumes are just notes/citations. The last volume is just the index. The minus side: the midrashim have been turned into sort of a narrative, and it's not always immediately clear what changes to do this were by Ginzberg (or Szold). Of course, since everything is cited, one could always look up the sources in the original texts.

It's published by the Jewish Publication Society, and I think they came out with a paperback reprinting a few years ago. There's also "Legends of the Bible", which is an abridged version, and unsatisfying to me, because it leaves out the notes and a lot of other stuff to fit in one volume.