Miriam in Shreveport: Black History and Jewish Hermeneutics in Marian D. Moore’s Louisiana Midrash

Abstract

Jewish thinkers and artists have used Midrash as a framework for exploring the entanglement of cultural inheritance and social justice projects. Marian D. Moore’s (1956–) poetry collection Louisiana Midrash (2019) exemplifies this dynamic. It blends Moore’s cultural landscape, Shreveport and New Orleans, Louisiana, African History and the Biblical and Midrashic literary traditions. Moore’s unique poetic voice, in the context of twenty-first century Midrash grounded in Jewish tradition, explores the intersection of African American history and Jewishness. Moore’s Midrashic poetry integrates African American and Jewish traditional biblical interpretation with the cultural reality of post—Katrina Louisiana. This article will discuss several of Moore’s poems in the context of her Black poetic Midrashic framework. The analysis illustrates how Louisiana Midrash shows the flexibility of Midrash as a creative genre and literary form, as it grows beyond a normative Jewish framework and becomes open to a multitude of voices and perspectives.

1. Introduction

Midrash is a form of Jewish literary creativity in which Jewish people negotiate their cultural, moral, and political concerns through biblical characters and narratives. Since antiquity, biblical figures have been used by Jews as exemplars or as literary fodder for contending with contemporary issues. The collections of writing categorized as “Classical Midrash” were composed roughly between 400 and 1200 C.E., primarily in Palestine and Babylonia. The Babylonian Talmud also contains Midrash. Some functions of Classical Midrash (Aggadah) include filling gaps in biblical narrative, resolving linguistic ambiguities, and contending with ethical questions raised by the Hebrew Bible.1 Midrash typically involves the narrative expansion of biblical narratives. Classical midrash adopts distinctive assumptions about the Hebrew Bible, such as the view that biblical language is divine and follows fixed hermeneutical rules in its productive interpretation of the Bible (Sommer 2012, pp. 66–67). The term midrash thus refers both to a body of literature and a process of reading and interpreting the Hebrew Bible.

Many modern Jewish writers and artists explicitly claim Midrash as a framework for their creative engagement with the Hebrew Bible.2 Modern texts include poetry, shorter narratives that sometimes mimic the style of classical Midrash, short fiction and novels. An author’s decision to classify their work as Midrash both (a) seeks to legitimize it as an engagement with the Hebrew Bible that is an authentic part of the broader Jewish textual tradition and (b) places itself in a tradition of expansive post-biblical interpretation.

David C. Jacobson (Jacobson 1987) proposes the framework of “Modern Midrash” to characterize how writers, poets, and religious thinkers since the early twentieth century have developed the practice of “interpret retelling(s)” of the Hebrew Bible in new ways (p. 1). One important type of modern Midrash is what is often called “feminist Midrash,” a type of Midrash that “wrestles” with the patriarchal Hebrew Bible (Graetz 2005, p. xi). Characteristic of Jewish feminist Midrash are the works of Jill Hammer (Hammer 2001), Alicia Ostriker (Ostriker 1994), and Norma Rosen (Rosen 1996), as well as the texts collected in Dirshuni (Biala 2022), to name several.3

Some scholars and thinkers have argued that modern Midrash is so distinctive from classical Midrash that the former should not be classified as “Midrash.” Deborah Kahn-Harris has drawn a distinction between classical rabbinic midrash and modern Midrash in all its forms. Kahn-Harris worries that modern Midrash, particularly modern feminist Midrash, “is so open that [it] might include almost any form of interpretation imaginable” (Kahn-Harris 2013, p. 302). For Kahn-Harris, classical Midrash has a particular form and function. Its form hews closely to a particular biblical verse and follows set hermeneutical principles (Kahn-Harris 2013, p. 299). For the authors of classical Midrash, the Bible is “pregnant with divine meaning” but not “merely elastic” (Kahn-Harris 2013, p. 301). Feminist Midrash, such as that found in Ostriker (1994) and several works by Judith Plaskow, Kahn-Harris contends, “use[s] the term midrash in its fuzziest sense to denote a kind of creative, spiritual quest that can take the form of writing, song, or dance” (Kahn-Harris 2013, p. 302). For Kahn-Harris, if any kind of Jewish writing that touches upon the Hebrew Bible can be called “Midrash,” then the category has become so broad that it is nearly meaningless.

One can characterize Kahn-Harris’s definition of Midrash as “prescriptivist” insofar as it assumes a fixed definition of Midrash that is misapplied by many modern writers. This distinction is not “semantic” about the meaning of the term but about the claiming of authenticity with regard to the Jewish textual tradition made by categorizing one’s work as midrash. Even as modern writers acknowledge that they are not engaged in the same activity as the creators of classical rabbinic midrash, they nonetheless see themselves as part of that tradition. Jill Hammer, for example, uses the metaphor of a tree with branches to describe her creation of feminist Midrash. Calling the Torah the “tree of life,” her modern feminist hermeneutic is one of the branches that is rooted in the authentic text (Hammer 2001, pp. xii–xiv). Kahn-Harris is not categorically opposed to the creation of feminist Midrash. In a later article, she sketches a method for creating feminist Midrash that consciously adopts the classical form, employing prooftexts and fixed hermeneutical rules (Kahn-Harris 2017, p. 208).

Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg suggests a four-fold taxonomy of midrash that acknowledges Midrash’s “capacious and fluid definition” (Stahlberg 2016, p. 320). For Stahlberg, Midrash, in all its guises, serves as an example of the intersection of literary and religious concerns. Her fourth category, “literary Midrash,” exemplified by “the turn to sacred texts within (in this case) twentieth- and twenty-first-century (Jewish) literature,” aptly applies the feminist Midrash Kahn-Harris critiques as well as poetry that engages with the Hebrew Bible in certain ways (Stahlberg 2016, pp. 321, 327). Indeed, poetry written by both Jews and non-Jews has been understood as midrashic. In his introduction to a well-known anthology, David Curzon categorizes poetry that engages with the Hebrew Bible in a certain way as a “contemporary version of an old and serious pleasure” (Curzon 1994, p. 3). According to Curzon, the engagement with the Hebrew Bible as a “living tradition [that] assists the free imagination avoid solipsism” and permits “the type of seriousness and wit possible only in relation to known stories and propositions (Curzon 1994, p. 4). Unlike Kahn-Harris’s view of authentic midrash as a rule-governed engagement with the Bible, for Curzon it is the shared knowledge of the Bible that gives poetic engagement with it its power. Nonetheless, the poems in Curzon’s anthology can be organized into certain tropes that are shared by the examples of contemporary midrash discussed below.

Curzon identifies several midrashic techniques employed by twentieth-century poets (the focus of his anthology).4 In addition to the narrative expansion or “gap” filling of biblical narratives (Curzon 1994, p. 5), midrashic poetry relates the Bible to an author’s present context. Curzon writes that poets often ask of biblical sources: “how could this apply to a contemporary such as myself?” (Curzon 1994, p. 9). Thus, the biblical material “provides a means of thinking about current social and moral issues in fundamental terms” (Curzon 1994, p. 17). Hence, Midrash leads to a kind of poetic biblical literacy that “gives readers the pleasure of a necessary and feasible participation by requiring them to know the biblical stories and propositions it plays against.” For readers who know the Bible, it offers a “reward in the form of a surprising and contemporary addition to a permanent foundation,” i.e., the Bible (Curzon 1994, p. 19). In sum, midrashic poetry builds on a shared corpus of biblical knowledge to pursue the contemporary relevance and significance of biblical narrative by participating in an authentic tradition of Midrash that builds on a biblical foundation but speaks to contemporary concerns.

This article focuses on an example of contemporary midrashic poetry that both exemplifies modern Midrash—a midrash that attends deeply to history and contemporary socio-economic conditions—and is a unique contribution to the genre of midrashic poetry. To demonstrate this, the article discusses several poems from a collection titled Louisiana Midrash by Marian D. Moore (1956–). The collection was published by the University of New Orleans Press in 2019, reflecting a localized context for her work.5

Moore is a Black American woman from the Shreveport area of Louisiana. She was raised by her Baptist mother and United Methodist father, whose church she attended (Moore 2019, p. 84). After her father’s death late in her adolescence, Moore formally converted to Judaism. The poems in Louisiana Midrash blend Moore’s cultural environment of Shreveport and New Orleans with African history and the Biblical and Midrashic literary traditions.

Classical Midrash is, to the best of our knowledge, composed by men. Because Louisiana Midrash is a self-consciously Midrashic work written by a woman, it is natural to think that it might be appropriately categorized as a feminist Midrash. However, Moore’s work differs from the type of feminist Midrash composed by the aforementioned feminist Midrashists. Although it is written by a Black woman, Louisiana Midrash is not womanist or Black feminist; it engages with the Hebrew Bible found in the works of Renita Weems (Weems 1988) or Wilda Gafney, who titled her work Womanist Midrash (Gafney 2017, 2024).6 Gafney writes that she is inspired by how rabbinic midrash interprets the Hebrew Bible for religious readers. Specifically, her womanist approach is, in her words, radically egalitarian like feminism but does not center white women as the default reference of women. Womanist Midrash is “a set of interpretive practices, including translation exegesis, and biblical interpretation, that attends to marginalized characters in biblical narrative, especially women and girls, intentionally including and centering on non-Israelite and enslaved persons” (Gafney 2017, pp. 2–3). As discussed below, Moore’s poetry is attentive to racial and gender issues in ways that attend to the racialized aspects of biblical figures, but it is not her exclusive focus, despite her identity as a Black woman. In other words, even as Moore’s poems touch upon feminist or gender-related topics, as well as race, it is not comfortably classified as exclusively feminist or womanist. The salient concerns of these genres are not as prominent in Moore’s poetry as they are in exclusively feminist or womanist Midrash.

The article’s conclusion considers interlocutors for Louisiana Midrash, but this overview serves to highlight its uniqueness as a Midrashic poetry collection by a Black American Jewish Woman. Even if one rejects the strong claim that the poems in Louisianna Midrash should be understood as Midrash in a way that would satisfy Kahn-Harris’s narrow prescriptivist definition, the broader argument about Moore’s use of the Hebrew Bible and its re-imagining of biblical figures in contemporary Louisianna remains.7

Before turning to the poems, it is appropriate to acknowledge some structural elements of Louisiana Midrash. It features a short, anonymous introduction and a 21-page appendix that is an interview between Moore and Kalamu ya Salaam.8 Moore discusses her family, her conversion to Judaism, and her creative process. The poetry section of the book is divided into two parts: (1) Midrash and (2) Musings. The four poems explored at length below are from the first section, although poems from the “Musing” section also engage with biblical and Jewish themes. Playing music, both vocal and instrumental, is important to many poems as they attend to biblical figures (especially prophets) who are conceptualized as musicians.

Many poems contain explanatory notes that are usually italicized and are found at the bottom of the page after the conclusion of the poem. In some, such as the note to “Jeremiah in Egypt,” Moore explains the inspiration for the poem. It began with an epiphany she had regarding the biblical prophet Ezekiel, another prophetic book. Moore quotes, but does not cite, Ezekiel 33:32, which reads: “Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well…”9 This verse depicts Ezekiel as a musician, rather than as one of the “soapbox screamers” found in film parodies such as Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (Moore 2019, p. 36). Rather, Ezekiel is an adept instrumentalist with a beautiful voice akin to those of the Black rhythm and blues legends Sam Cooke or Richie Havens. The conception of prophets as blues musicians is central to “Jeremiah in Egypt” as discussed below. The note to “Miriam” explains that Miriam, Moses’s sister, is also traditionally considered to be a prophet. Without citing any verses, Moore notes that Miriam is said to have led the women of Israel to dance after their exodus from Egypt and is credited with providing water during their journey in the wilderness (Moore 2019, p. 30). These notes (a) quote biblical texts without citing them, thereby assuming some knowledge of the Bible and some conception of its authority and (b) describe Moore’s creative process by explaining the aspect of the biblical story that inspired the poem. Other works of modern Midrash also include explanatory notes. Biala (2022) collects midrashim by several female writers. Each midrash contains a commentary by Biala that is often longer than the midrash itself.

In sum, the poems of Louisiana Midrash combine elements of three trends in modern Midrash (feminist, womanist, and poetic) in new ways. They function like other midrashic poems in which pace Curzon, the biblical tradition, serves “a means of thinking about current social and moral issues.”

2. The Prophetic Bluesman: “Jeremiah in Egypt”

Moore’s poem “Jeremiah in Egypt” exemplifies her poetic midrashic technique as she casts a biblical figure in twenty-first-century Louisiana. It is named for the biblical prophet Jeremiah, known from his eponymous book. The poem begins by introducing an “old blues man” who sits beneath the city gate. This reflects her aforementioned conception of biblical prophets as musicians. The poem later reveals that the bluesman is the biblical prophet Jeremiah, transported to a bustling urban Louisiana where “hanging torches smoke and crowds gossip.” Street musicians are common in urban Louisiana, especially in New Orleans, where it is appropriate to imagine the setting of this poem. Moore’s note suggests that Jeremiah’s musical prowess is reminiscent of the great singers Sam Cooke and Richie Havens.

New Orleans, with its famous Bourbon Street, is associated with revelry, especially the annual Mardi Gras festivities. Biblical Egypt is likewise a land associated with every kind of sinful or ungodly behavior.10 In Jeremiah 42, the prophet asks God for direction in the wake of a battle. The Lord unequivocally counsels the Israelites to remain in Jerusalem, promising to rebuild the city and grant them political autonomy and protection against their enemies (Jeremiah 42:10). Should they go to Egypt, God’s “wrath will be poured out” and they will never return to Jerusalem (Jeremiah 42:18). Yet the commanders do not believe Jeremiah and, having collected the entire “remnant of Judah” that has survived, sojourn to Egypt (Jeremiah 43).

Having situated Jeremiah as the bluesman at the gate, the poem continues:

• Some ignorant
• well-wisher has thrust a small
• harp into his hands begging for
• a song of descent,
• for weary words to dull their
• drunken delight.
(Moore 2019, p. 34)

Moore’s Jeremiah may be reluctant to play, having had the harp “thrust” upon him. Similarly, Jeremiah, the biblical prophet, initially resisted the call to prophecy (Jeremiah 1:6). The revelers of Egypt/New Orleans are “a motley mob,” a culturally and racially diverse group. The poem describes them later as “Ebony children of distant Sheba/Mingled with the cedar progeny of Pharaoh.” Having set the scene, the poem continues, drawing on other aspects of the figure of Jeremiah in the biblical tradition, to craft a scene in which economic concerns and the sadness of loss contrast with the revelry engendered by music:

• Jeremiah tunes his instrument.
• He can cover “Lamentations”;
• smooth progressions of aleph, beth, gimmel
• flow over his tongue like bitter myrrh.
• He can moan “Alas, the forlorn city”
• as if the words were his own
• Gritting his teeth only at the lines
• That praise a blind King
• who agreed to toss him into a well.
• This throng will like that: their bodies
• swaying like waves in easy sympathy.
• And his paycheck will easily cover his rent
• Leaving a shekel or two
• For the stone-faced children of Israel.
(Moore 2019, pp. 34–35)

In this poem, Moore riffs or draws associatively on the Bible, even if it is not a rule-governed engagement with a particular biblical text like classical Midrash, or even many “modern” midrashim such as those in Dirshuni. The association of Lamentations with Jeremiah reflects the post-biblical tradition that attributes Lamentations to Jeremiah. This association is reinforced by the placement of Lamentations just after Jeremiah in both the Septuagint and the Christian Old Testament.11 In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Jeremiah is grouped among the prophetic books, whereas Lamentations is found in the final “writings” section among the “five megillot (scrolls).” Moore’s Jeremiah quotes Lamentations, moaning “Alas, the forlorn city” (Lamentations 1:1), although the poem does not make an authorial attribution. Jeremiah sings “as if” the words were his own.

While in the biblical Lamentations this “forlorn city” is Jerusalem, in “Jeremiah in Egypt” it is New Orleans. Even at the time of Louisiana Midrash’s publications, the city of New Orleans was still recovering from the effects of the devastating 2005 Hurricane Katrina.12 “Ignorant well-wishers,” perhaps white tourists, force the bluesman to play, changing the mood from one of revelry to something more somber. The “smooth” style of his signing contrasts with the “bitter myrrh” of the content of his lament. Jeremiah also retains the bitter memory of being thrown into a well (or “pit” in the JPS translation) in Jeremiah 38 for prophesying that the city of Jerusalem would be overtaken by the Babylonians. Although neither the poem nor the note explains the “blind king” of Lamentations, it could be a nod to Lamentations 3:6, in which the speaker intones, “He has made me dwell in darkness, like those long dead.” If so, the “blind king” would refer to King Zedekiah, whom Jeremiah warned not to rebel against the Babylonian empire lest Jerusalem fall. (Jeremiah 21, 27, 34, 37–38). Zedekiah “did what was displeasing to the LORD (Jeremiah 52:2), leading to Jerusalem’s fall to Nebuchadnezzar. Zedekiah and his sons attempted unsuccessfully to flee the city. Upon capture, Nebuchadnezzar ordered that Zedekiah’s sons be killed before his eyes and then had Zedekiah blinded before taking him captive to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7; Jeremiah 52:10–11).13

The prophetic power of poverty is highlighted by the final lines. The poem ends on a note of communal care amidst economic precarity. The prophet Jeremiah, qua street-playing bluesman, must secure his own lodging before giving charitably to his countrymen in exile. The concern for having one’s basic needs met contrasts with the mood of Jeremiah’s audience, who dance along to his lament “in easy sympathy.” Thus, the “ignorant well-wisher” visiting New Orleans in a state of “drunken delight” dances along to his performance without paying heed to the person behind the instrument or the lament for the “forlorn city.”

This text exemplifies Moore’s particular kind of Black Jewish riffing on the Bible, one informed by Black history, southern culture, and the history of biblical exegesis. The present concerns of economic precarity and the entanglements of urban Louisiana are crucial as well. The depiction of Jeremiah as a Black bluesman, living in exile in New Orleans, is a distinctive, if not unique, conceptualization of the prophet.

3. The Neglected Prophetess: “Miriam”

It is well known that the Exodus narrative has been the most used among enslaved persons who were violently transported to the United States from Africa or were of African descent and were introduced to, if not converted to, Christianity without their consent. The liberatory power of the divinely directed story from bondage to freedom in a promised land, in the words of Eddie Glaude, “resonated with those who experienced the hardships of slavery and racial discrimination” and demonstrated God’s active presence in history as well as God’s willingness to intervene on behalf of his chosen people (Glaude 2000, p. 3). Authors of feminist Midrash who explore the Exodus narrative often latch onto the biblical character Miriam. Although she is explicitly called a prophet, Miriam’s perspective is almost entirely absent from the biblical narrative. Developing these silences is a central objective of feminist Midrash. Wendy Zierler writes that feminist readers of the Hebrew Bible “can discern or conjure up voices of women in the Bible in spite of or in light of their absence from the written page” (Zierler 2005, p. 10).

In “Miriam,” Moore follows the objectives of feminist Midrash by giving voice to Miriam while highlighting how men neglect her. Like “Jeremiah in Egypt,” Miriam is a musically inclined prophetess in contemporary urban Louisiana. Moore’s Miriam “stands on Fannin Street/four blocks from the Red River and/sings Leadbelly for the mixed multitude of Shreveport.” Miriam’s placement near the large Red River that passes through Shreveport parallels the biblical Miriam’s proximity to the Red Sea. The term “mixed multitude” (erev rav, transliterated from the Hebrew) from Exodus 12:38 refers to non-Israelites who joined the Ancient Israelites after they completed their exodus from Egypt and wandered alongside them in the wilderness. Because they are not Israelites, they are not faithful servants of Yahweh, the Israelite deity. They are traditionally blamed for the “Golden Calf” incident of Exodus 32. The “mixed multitude” here may be another name for the “motley mob” discussed in the previous poem, referring to the multiethnic denizens of Shreveport.

Like Jeremiah in “Jeremiah in Egypt,” Miriam is a blues musician. While Jeremiah plays biblical tunes, the works of the Louisiana-born Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly (1889–1949), are in Miriam’s repertoire. Lead Belly’s work is steeped in Black Southern musical traditions, including gospel, blues, and folk music (Bernard 2024).14 Depicting Miriam as the purveyor of soulful blues music locates her in the fabric of urban Louisiana.15 It also shapes the mood of Miriam’s appearance, another singer of sad songs. Unlike Jeremiah, who is goaded to play, Miriam’s gender renders her nearly invisible to the men.

The poem draws upon the “Song of the Sea” scene in Exodus 15. At this point in the narrative, Moses and the Israelites have fled Pharaoh’s army and successfully crossed the Red Sea. Moses sings a lengthy hymn, beginning “The LORD is my strength and might; He is become my deliverance.” After Moses’ poem (that has become a standard part of the morning liturgy), Miriam briefly becomes the focus of the narrative as they repeat Moses’s words from Exodus 15:1. Exodus 15:20–21 reads:

• (15:20) Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels.
• (15:21) And Miriam chanted for them:
• Sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously;
• Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea.

Moore places Miriam near a fire hydrant on a street corner in Shreveport. A puddle of water pools at her feet, reflecting the biblical tradition crediting Miriam with providing water for the Israelites in the desert (Moore 2019, p. 30). Despite Miriam’s musical performance, she is entirely ignored by the men. Miriam sings as her instruments, sistrums rather than timbrels, emit a “slim jangle” that “never enters their ear drums” (Moore 2019, p. 29). Despite playing the music of a renowned male blues singer, she is invisible to the men. Like the biblical Miriam, Moore’s Miriam, the prophetess musician, summons the women:

• It is the women pausing to rub their heeled ensconced feet
• who hear the tiny ting of finger cymbals.
• Between the glass towers, they see
• a shimmering figure bidding them to dance.
(Moore 2019, p. 29)

Rather than a prelude to the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam goads the women of Shreveport to dance on the historic Fannin Street. This was the outer edge of the once-legal Red-Light district. So infamous was Fannin Street that it is referenced as shorthand by Lead Belly. On a song called “Mister Tom Hughes’ Town”16 alternatively titled “Fannin Street” Lead Belly, in one of the variant recordings, sings about how his mother warned him not to associate with the “Shreveport women” on “Fannin Street.”

(Leadbelly 1994)

What is the significance of depicting Miriam as standing on a historic but notorious street in Shreveport, softly playing her sistrum and cymbals, ignored by the men of the “mixed multitude” of Shreveport, but receptive to “the shimmering figure bidding them to dance”? Should Miriam be understood as a sex worker, using music to summon clients? Casting Miriam the prophetess as a sex worker would certainly be daring, but it may highlight the economic conditions that led her to engage in such behavior. Less boldly, Miriam’s placement among the women with “heeled ensconced feet,” another possible reference to sex work, suggests that she is a prophetess for the ignored, economically disenfranchised women. According to this reading, Miriam is a prophetess of the oppressed who, like the biblical Miriam, can summon her fellow women with song.

The “glass towers” line provides additional context for understanding Miriam. Shreveport boasts several large glass buildings, including the glass-paneled Petroleum Tower. The Petroleum Tower became a historically protected building in 2015. Built in the late 50s, the tower stands just a block over from Fannin Street. Originally, it was used by an insurance company, and now it is home to several lucrative businesses. This can be read as a juxtaposition—Miriam, the neglected female prophet, standing on Fannin Street amid pooling fire hydrants, contrasts with the massive building. The prophetic witness of poverty and its resultant push to sex work, contrasted with the men who do not heed the call from the prophet.

“Miriam,” in particular, and Louisiana Midrash, more generally, both highlight the economic precarity of urban Louisiana while celebrating its musical culture. The poems attend to the social conditions of urban Louisiana by weaving the biblical figures into its cultural fabric. Both poems analyzed refer to the inhabitants of Louisiana. In “Jeremiah in Egypt,” Moore calls them a “motley mob,” while in “Miriam,” she refers to them as a “mixed multitude”, the Erev Rav of Exodus. A third poem develops this image explicitly. More overtly political than the previously examined poems, “Mixed Multitude” also engages the liberatory themes of the Exodus narrative.

4. Black Revolutionaries: “Mixed Multitude”

Moore draws again on the image of the erev rav in the cryptic poem “Mixed Multitude.”17 Unlike the previous two poems, it lacks an explanatory note, although the biblical reference is clear. The opening two stanzas of “Mixed Multitude” adopt male and female first-person perspectives of ancient Israelites wandering before crossing into the promised land. Both figures are, it seems, formerly enslaved people who were liberated by Moses from Egypt. They remain faithful, despite the title of the poem referencing non-Israelite interlopers.

The man and woman of the poem stray briefly away from the Israelite camp. The man chases “an errant lamb” but returns to his flock, weary of “wolves in the wilderness” (Moore 2019, p. 28). It is unclear if he caught the lamb, but the fear of danger kept him close. The woman in the second stanza, having left camp to fetch water, hears “a burning melody” from “russet leaves.” The next stanza suggests this is a divine voice. However, the woman does not pursue the voice further, remembering her ailing mother back at camp.

The beginning of the poem resembles classical Midrash in narrating the actions of unnamed or under-explored biblical figures. The characters in this poem are those who have fled slavery in Egypt. The poem concludes with a long third stanza, also voiced in first person, that links the Israelite Exodus to nineteenth-century anti-slavery activity. The speaker is not identified but may be understood as Moore. It reads:

• I am the retinue that must be rescued.
• By Moses, by Harriet,
• by Toussaint in his borrowed uniform.
• Released from my servitude; I hold
• my head high-
• brazen enough to ask for back wages.
• Tell the prophet that I was loyal to family
• if not to God.
• I preserved the blaze of life
• and I know where the bones of my forebears
• are buried.
(Moore 2019, p. 28)

“Mixed Multitude” links slave-liberators Harriet Tubman (1822–1919) and Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) with the biblical Moses.18 This is not surprising, given that Tubman was likened to Moses (Marks 2009, pp. 69–105) and Louverture led a slave rebellion. These Black liberators are the speaker’s forebearers. This poem, like the others, acknowledges twenty-first-century socio-economic reality. The speaker claims to be “brazen enough to ask for back wages.” Asking for “back wages” is a call for reparations for slavery, a proposal that has gained more notoriety in recent years but has not achieved any serious political traction (Coates 2014).

This poem balances the power of the biblical exodus, or specifically, the Israelites’ liberation from bondage, with slavery’s legacy continuing to the present. It may be that Moore, as a Black convert to Judaism, claims a double loyalty—both as the progeny of formerly enslaved Black people and as a convert to Judaism. She knows “where the bones of her forebearers are buried,” treading between her formerly enslaved Black and Jewish ancestors.19 In knowing where their bones are buried, the speaker understands, almost threateningly, the power of anti-slavery resistance.

A biographical reading of the poem might understand the line “loyal to family, if not to God” as referring to a time before Moore’s conversion to Judaism, where she was not serving God properly. Alternatively, it can be read as an acknowledgement of the understandable vacillation of one’s faith, like the first two figures of the poem who stray briefly. Alternatively, the speaker holds their head high and defiantly asks that the “prophet” (perhaps Moses) be informed of their loyalty to family and deity. This would be a protest against the charge that the speaker is a member of the mixed multitude, an interloper in the Israelite community. Rather, they have the same moral right to freedom from enslavement as the ancient Israelites. Although they may have a different lineage, they uphold kinship and religious expectations. Even if this biographical reading is admittedly speculative, it is noteworthy that the speaker claims fidelity to the one true God, unlike those who corrupt the Israelites, forming the mixed multitude.

In sum, this refraction of the Israelite wanderers against heroic anti-Slavery fighters connects the moral significance of freedom with contemporary calls to rectify the legacy of slavery. “Mixed Multitude” is midrashic in its development of biblical figures, poetic in its form, and distinctive to Moore in its engagement with figures from Black history and economic reality.

5. Masquerading as Ezekiel: “Dry Bones”

Moore once again draws on the biblical prophets in her prose poem “Dry Bones.” Before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the poet encounters “an angel” masquerading as the prophet Ezekiel, shouting “Can These Bones Live?” referencing Ezekiel 37:3. The angel appears shaking a tambourine on “Lafon Street.”20 The angel is the spitting image of the speaker of the poem’s grandfather: “an old papershell-pecan colored man dancing in pin stripes” (Moore 2019, p. 39). In the second stanza, it is revealed that the speaker’s grandfather was a Louisiana sharecropper. Like the prophetess in “Miriam,” the angel-qua-Ezekiel plays an ancient instrument, smacking a tin rattle against his thigh.

The mask does not fool the poem’s narrator. They recognize that the angel is neither their grandfather nor the biblical prophet who “saw the chariot” (Moore 2019, p. 39). The question “can these bones live?” was spoken not by the prophet, but by God. The fourth stanza of “Dry Bones” concludes: “It was God who cried out ‘Dare me, will you? Dare me to resurrect these bones!’” (Moore 2019, p. 39).

The speaker castigates the angel. Although masquerading as a prophet, the mere prophetic call about those who have left is insufficient to the task of helping those in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Moore writes:

“Hineni, Angel,” I called, “Here I am and all. But is this the best you can do? The East needs more than a song and dance man; the Lower Nine earned more than a tambourine. And where you going to get second-liners in this wilderness? The bones, they sent to St. Gabriel. The live ones, they packed off to Houston”.

(Moore 2019, p. 39)

The poem directly references the devastation, death and displacement that the residents of New Orleans faced after Hurricane Katrina. Both the eastern part of the city and the Ninth Ward section, which was among the areas hit hardest by the storm, need material help. A “song and dance man” is insufficient to contend with the dead whose bones are interred in St. Gabriel Cemetery, while many residents of New Orleans relocated to Houston. The “wilderness” of New Orleans needs more than a prophet playing songs about resurrection. The victims have “earned more than a tambourine.”

The poem concludes with the speaker retaining the responsibility for action. The “single-minded” angel gives the speaker an instrument, a “woman-drum.” The speaker asks: “Now, what I’m supposed to do with it, tell me? And who is there to hear me play?” (Moore 2019, pp. 39–40). If the angels are uninvested in properly understanding the prophetic power of Ezekiel, one who is up to the task of inheriting the moral witness of the economically impoverished of Louisiana, from sharecroppers (like the speaker’s grandfather) to those who continue to be affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, what should be done? If they are dead or displaced, the speaker asks, what is appropriate to the task? The poem does not answer the question but poses it in conversation with the prophet Ezekiel.

6. Poems from “Musings”

The second section of Louisiana Midrash, titled “Musings,” contains additional poems that are more personal as well as poems on biblical and Jewish themes. It opens with two poems dedicated to her parents, titled “For My Father” and “My Mother in the Mirror.” (Moore 2019, pp. 47–52). The poem “Bashert” is titled after the Yiddish term signifying a romantic partner for whom one is destined. Moore’s note adds that it is sometimes used to refer to an important nonromantic friendship. (Moore 2019, pp. 69–70). One poem, “Tractate Baba Bathra,” draws on Moore’s study of the Babylonian Talmud, contrasting the restricted discussions about privacy and property with the tribulations of romantic love (Moore 2019, pp. 74–75).

“No One Speaks” reflects on the emotional toll of the loss of culture and history, while exploring the emotional significance of studying what has survived from a culture that has been largely lost. Indeed, the profound sense of what has been lost is evident to anyone who studies the ancient world. Similarly, for African Americans, especially those descended from enslaved people, the severing of connection to the past is deeply painful. Hartman (2007) describes the pain of being wholly severed from one’s direct ancestors and their culture. Hartman (2007) explains that her decision to travel to Ghana, a hub of the transatlantic slave trade, was motivated in part because her academic training had left her unprepared to “tell the stories of those who had left no record of their lives and whose biography consisted of the terrible things said about them and done to them.” Hartman attempts to “fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering” (p. 16). “No One Speaks” plays with the same concept of the limited way those in the present can understand the world of the distant past when the historical record is either insufficient or nonexistent. The poem begins:

• No one speaks Etruscan, a language lost
• to history, all that remains are loan
• words and a few brilliant images.
(Moore 2019, p. 65)

The ancient Mediterranean language Etruscan connects the speaker temporally to the ancient world and thematically to the loss of culture. Etruscan civilization flourished in the first millennium B.C.E. in Ancient Italy. The Etruscan language is “lost to history” insofar as it is only partially deciphered and, more to the point, there are no contemporary speakers (Agostiniani 2013, pp. 457–58).

The poem’s speaker emerges to “hover their hand over a museum wall,” imagining that they could slip into one of the relics from Etruscan civilization. The speaker imagines herself in a musical scene, dancing with a fellow female figure who twirls behind a flute-playing man. Unlike the previously explored poems in which biblical figures are transported forward in time to twenty-first-century New Orleans, the speaker is transported to the ancient world. The poem concludes with a reflection on the inevitability of the present becoming the past. Just as Etruscan speakers have disappeared, “some future earth” nobody will speak English (Moore 2019, p. 65). Humans’ “rants and fear” will be “lost to antiquity” (Moore 2019, p. 65). Perhaps, just as the poem’s speaker visits the remnants of Etruscan civilization, “curious cephalopods” will explore the ruins of human culture (Moore 2019, p. 65). Rather than lamenting the loss of ancient culture or wallowing in the inevitability of her own death and decay, the speaker places herself in the scene of musical delight. In “No One Speaks,” Moore takes a piece of ancient culture, like the poems in the “Midrash” section, and puts them in conversation with contemporary concerns. This dynamic, imagining the biblical past in the present, is central to Moore’s midrashic methodology.

7. Conclusions: Politics and 21st Century Midrashic Poetry

The range of biblical sources, the musical culture and geography of urban Louisiana, and the intertwining of African American history with the Jewish biblical heritage make Louisiana Midrash a distinctive work of contemporary midrashic poetry. Jeremiah is not the biblical prophet warning the king not to rebel against the Babylonians and living his life in exile, but a Black bluesman, attentive to the needs of the poor. Miriam is also a musician, neglected by male locals and tourists, dancing in the streets. In exploring Miriam’s neglect by men, the poem combines elements of feminist and womanist Midrash as it attends to the role of power in biblical narrative. Moore draws again on the prophetic tradition in “Dry Bones.” Rather than using the moral power of the prophetic tradition to critique “ignorant well-wishers” as in “Jeremiah in Egypt,” in “Dry Bones,” the speaker calls for a greater response than a “song and dance man” to address the economic issues caused by Katrina.

These poems are midrashic insofar as they are ethically engaged narrative expansions of the Hebrew Bible. They are “modern Midrash’ insofar as they do not follow the fixed hermeneutical rules of classical Midrash. One could even argue that by transporting the biblical figures to contemporary New Orleans, Moore has forfeited her right to classify her work as Midrash. However, this would be adopting the “prescriptivist” account of Midrash I outlined above. Rather, by classifying her work as Midrash, Moore, as a Jewish woman, claims authenticity for her work. In a note appended after the section “Midrash” begins, Moore writes: “What Torah means and how Judaism is practiced is defined by Jews” (Moore 2019, p. 18). Moore adds that “Midrashim continue to be written” (Moore 2019, p. 18). Taken together, Moore claims her work as an authentically Jewish work of Midrash that reflects her own perspective but is part of a broader Jewish literary tradition.

One should not overlook the exploration of identity in Moore’s poems, especially given that she is a Black convert to Judaism. Read this way, Louisiana Midrash is an example of a contemporary artistic engagement with Jewish identity alongside other aspects of their identity and cultural inheritances, including race. Michael Twitty (2022) explores the significance of his Black and Jewish identity and the challenges he has faced in having his Judaism recognized as a Jew of color. Recent critical Jewish Studies scholarship has investigated how Jewish people became assimilated into whiteness in America and how the assumption that Jews are white (Brodkin 1988; Goldstein 2006; Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007; Haynes 2018).

Moore’s Midrashic poetry is also undeniably political. There are other recent instances of this historically, culturally, and socially informed poetic riffing on the Hebrew Bible that can be put into conversation with Moore’s work. For example, Ofer (2022) analyzes several Arab and Israeli sources that use the conflict between Hagar and Sarai from Genesis 16 and 21 as analogues for the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Louisiana Midrash is but one example of a recently published poetry collection that draws upon the biblical tradition in its discussion with contemporary political events. Aviya Kushner’s collection Wolf Lamb Bomb (Kushner 2021), which uses the prophetic book of Isaiah to interrogate recent political conflict in America and Israel, engages with the biblical tradition in similar ways to Louisiana Midrash.21 Neither is midrashic in the classical sense, if midrash entails the rule-governed narrative expansion of the Hebrew Bible. However, both, to return to a quotation from Curzon, use biblical figures, tropes, and narratives to construct poetry that assists in “thinking about current social and moral issues in fundamental terms” (Curzon 1994, p. 17).

Kushner’s poem “Talking Back to Isaiah,” which builds associatively on Isaiah 21:4 (Kushner 2021, p. 63) opens with the speaker begging to be left alone in the desert, “my persona and terrible country/of lust and poverty and want.” Although she has heard “the throaty prophecy” of Isaiah, whose words “have snaked across centuries,” she exhorts him to “lie back now, lie back” (Kushner 2021, p. 27). Even as she imagines that, had she been born in the ancient world, she could have followed Isaiah’s counsel, given the distances of historical time and the problems of the present, she tells Isaiah to “go back/to the books now,/and let me be” (Kushner 2021, p. 29). “Talking Back to Isaiah,” like “Dry Bones,” asks whether the counsel of the biblical prophets can meet the needs of present-day reality.

The poem “New York,” which takes inspiration from Isaiah 23:3 (Kushner 2021, p. 64), connects the September 11th attacks with Isaiah’s exhortation to keep the faith amidst massive destruction, while acknowledging that one’s faith may be shaken after such a significant attack. The opening stanza exhorts the victim to ask why they are lying under the destruction of the attack on the towers. The poem then reads “Now what is it that you have done? Isaiah would say/belief has left you, but I am not sure about that…” (Kushner 2021, p. 42). The poem ends by raising the fundamental issue of faith after destruction: “Earth totters, crumbles, and the dead leave us to wonder, again, in God” (Kushner 2021, p. 42).

Moore’s poetry’s mix of cultural inheritance attests to the creativity of Midrash as a framework for making religious meaning. Its unique poetic voice, in the context of twenty-first century Midrash grounded in Jewish tradition, explores the intersection of African American history and Jewishness. Louisiana Midrash integrates African American and Jewish traditional biblical interpretation with the post—Katrina social and cultural reality and challenges of contemporary Louisiana. If nothing else, Louisiana Midrash illustrates how the Hebrew Bible has been a source of identity for many Jewish people, regardless of their life history, their commitment to normative practices or their fidelity to received Jewish literary forms.