Along with the etymology of the word "virtual," there is an interesting pun on VR that reveals a hidden connection to the alephtavian method.
The essence of the alephtavian method is to use the ambiguity inherent in the communications technology - the scripta defectiva, the defective phonetic alphabet of Hebrew - to promulgate alternatives, a divine uncertainty and metaphysical irresolution that supports a pragmatic, if alternative, way of knowing.
One passage in the Talmud is a sort of self-reflexive emblem of all Talmudic passages. It is known as Vayikra Rabbah, a 37-fold multiplication of alternative readings of a single phrase in Exodus. David Stern (in "Midrash and the Language of Exegesis" from Geoffrey Hartman & Sanford Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature) describes the curious method used in these alternative readings as petichta, or a "proem".
The petichta itself was originally both an oral form and a supplement that preceded the reading of the Torah, which is the main event, as it were, of the Jewish service. Petichta was an introductory mini-sermon, or what is now called a "dvar Torah" (a word or thing of the Torah). As Stern explains:
Instead of beginning with its proper subject [the verse which would form the central theme of the lecture] the petichta opens with another verse - most frequently from the Writings, sometimes from the Prophets, on rare occasions from the Pentateuch - which to all appearances is unrelated to the lectionary verse. From this verse ... the preacher evolves a chain of interpretations, often involving the quotation and interpretation of still other verses, along with various other rhetorical devices of interpretation (like parables and enumeration-lists), stringing one bead of interpretation on the next, until he arrives at a point where he makes the connection to the lectionary verse with which the petichta then concludes. At the conclusion, the lectionary verse is given a new interpretation, and some kind of connection between that verse and the opening proof-text can often be discerned - a word tally, phonetic similarity, or semantic rhyme.
The petichta method also requires what Stern calls "an infrastructure of interpretation" made up of actual turns of phrases and more local interpretations that include (even as they submerge) references to traditions, ideas, and movements outside the particularities of the theme of the pair of verses in question. The method contains a considerable amount of suspense and verbal ingenuity; sheer Western logic is often abandoned in favor of a more Oriental word play and witty inversions, the logic of language which follows its own labyrinthine idea of connection and genetics. And the more the opening verse is apparently disconnected and remote from the target verse, the more the dexterity, ingenuity, and wit - the genius - of the darshan (preacher) is displayed.
The other opinion represents the delight Midrash always takes in offering still another interpretation, no matter what its relevance to the theme at hand may be ... There is nothing more common in Midrash than 'the other opinion.' (Stern)
Now the method of the petichta is employed not just randomly throughout the Talmud. In the section of the Talmud known as Vayikra Rabbah - VR for short - 37 chapters use the same method to interpret the same verse and come to 37 different interpretations. Furthermore, in all 37 chapters, the original verse varies wildly but the target verse, the anchor, is the same. Stern suggests that the promise of this method is "as though the redactor wished to show that all roads, beginning anywhere in the Scripture, lead to a single verse." I would invert this and suggest that the point of the method is that an inscrutable single source leads to an infinite richness of expression or manifestation.
Let's go up the mountain with Moses again, and heed the call of this phrase.
The target verse throughout VR is va-yikra el Moshe (thus Vayikra Rabbah - or "multiplication on Vayikra" - rabbah coming from the root word for many). Thirty-seven times this chapter finds different routes to the phrase which means: "And He called to Moses." The verse is central to the Jewish mythos and to the question here: for though it occurs several times throughout the Bible, its signal occurrence is the revelatory moment at which G-d calls to Moses on Mount Sinai. The calling is clearly analogous (insofar as all of G-d's divine actions are analogous to merely human ones) to the oral act. G-d is using his Voice on Moses and it is part of Moses' greatness, in this mythos, that he can endure it, let alone heed it.
The world is a cacophony of multiple forms and ambiguities, but that complex surface is generated by a coherent, if unknowable, metaphysical essence. Thus the Talmud - and I hope this personal talMUD - in its literary form, is incoherent, having been composed over centuries, and having even undergone numerous redactions. It still shows seams, splices, inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions, strange lacunae, and silences. Furthermore, the changing context for interpretation also creates new gaps and fissures between the text and the understanding/experience of the Midrashist. How does the injunction against lighting fires on the Sabbath extend to turning on an electric switch? It takes a literary method such as this deconstructive one to reconstruct and tease out (as the Midrashist might think) or construct and paper over such gaps in order to reinscribe (as our postmodern sensibilities might suggest) the inner metaphysical coherence in/on the target-text.
This verbal logic requires a thoroughly different relationship to time. It demands a slow reading, a drunkard's walk of the imagination, with time permitted for exploration of parentheses, of digression, of free association, coupled with a taste for the coincidental, the contingent, the chaotic. This is an artistic, as opposed to technical, use of language, in which one assumes a certain opacity in the channel of transmission, where technical communication would assume transparency. As Viktor Shklovsky once quipped, the function of art is to prolong the moment of perception. We might supplement the remark with Derrida's suggestion that writing cannot help but delay, defer meaning, create différance.