Dondi,
Because BB and I both lean more toward mysticism than rationalism on some issues we're really not on opposite poles at all. And it's something that concerns me on this forum because rationalism (both in its contemporary critical form and its more tenured form) are very big in Judaism. So even beyond the spectrum of ultra-orthodoxy-to-classical-reform there are times when I try especially hard to ensure that some of the rationalist ideas get more representation in my answers.
I think what you're saying about miracles is significant. I've been reading an excellent book by Lawrence Kushner. One of the things that he says (coming from the perspective of a Reform rabbi heavily engaged in Jewish mysticism) is that miracles are always happening and they never violate the laws of physics. But most of us miss them all the time, miss the significance, the sign, in the events in our lives because we'll see the ordinary and say, "oh, it's just the ordinary." I haven't seen anything by him about the revelation at Sinai but I imagine from his perspective that he would say the miracle was really that everyone was paying attention at the same time.
BB,
I never really gave my own perspective, which is that, while not word-for-word reflecting literal truths the stories may very well at times reflect historical truths about hazal either because similar events ocurred or because they reflect the individual's character while at other times they may be re-workings of older stories and at other times not contain much truth at all but that in most of the cases the value of aggadah is not in the potential history told but in their ethical and theological value. I'm really less fond of interpretations that get very far from the pshat and really flowery, which I think only gets away from what hazal were trying to say. There are two wonderful techniques I have learned that attempt to prevent this. One I learned applied to midrash is taught in the book Learning To Read Midrash by Simi Peters. The flaw in her approach is that it can lead to reading into the text, finding meanings that aren't really there, based on assuming the structure is fairly rigid from midrash to midrash, but still useful. The other is one I learned from Reb David Ingber at Elat Chayyim, which he in turn learned in yeshiva. It's basically understanding aggadah as folklore, as stories that follow the predictable patterns we see in all stories of having a beginning, middle, and end. Rising action, climax, falling action. In this method the text is read very closely, line-by-line, focusing on what the text is saying instead of its traditional interpretation, looking still at the word-play hazal engaged in but cautiously not overextending or applying ways of using the words they were probably unaware of, not taking any line for granted, looking at the surrounding passages in which the aggadah is placed and seeing if there's any similarity in theme. This method has gone very far for me in showing that, while in some cases they may just have been preserving familiar stories, some of them maybe even things that go so far back they were once excluded from Torah but remained in the Israelite consciousness, they were actually very skilled storytellers who could write fairly deep and engaging stories with a lot of depth.
Dauer