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

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.