The Helpfulness of Midrash

I thought the concept of Midrash was interesting and can be used in just about every movie we watched this semester. Midrash is a Jewish technique to understand biblical actions and is very simply a way of looking past the initial meaning of something and finding its secret or hidden meaning. This is done to better understand something in the film. There are several approaches to interpreting biblical symbols or actions. The first, is “peshat.” “Peshat” is the literal meaning of the biblical text or in our case for the movies (which is what we call visual Midrash), finding the literal meanings in the actions/ events or symbols in the film. The next approach is called “remez.” “Remez” is the deeper meaning of something in the film, looking beyond what you actually see and what is actually means. The third approach is called “derash,” which is a focus on the comparative meaning of something seen in the film, by seeing what the difference in the literal and deeper meaning are. Finally, the last approach is called “sod.” “Sod” is the hidden meaning of something in the film. This is not the same as the deeper meaning, they do mean different things. With the concept of Midrash in Judaism, can use the four approaches to  better understand all the movies we saw in class.