Parshanut

Bo II: Deep Peshat

2009-01-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

(ט) לאות על ידך - לפי עומק פשוטו יהיה לך לזכרון תמיד כאילו כתוב על ידך. כעין שימני כחותם על לבך:

In this comment on Shemot 13:9, Rashbam offers one of his most famous and controversial peshat interpretations on the Torah. The verse says “It shall be a sign on your arm and a rememberance between your eyes, so that the Lord’s teaching will always be in your mouth…” Rabbinic interpretation understands this verse to refer to the very concrete mitzvah of tefillin. One is to literally put the words of this passage—and three others with similar formulations—on one’s arm and head in the form of boxes containing written scrolls.

Rashbam comes along and offers a radical, straightforward alternative: The usage of arm and eyes here is figurative. The “sign” and “rememberance” refer to a desire that this powerful narrative be remembered and kept front and center in one’s consciousness. Rashbam cites a parallel usage from Shir Hashirim, where the female figure asks her male counterpart to make her like a seal on his heart and on his arm, which clearly does not refer to wearing some sort of tefillin item as a token of love! (For other examples of this sort of figurative usage, see Yirmiyahu 31:32, Mishlei 3:1,3, 6:20-22, 7:2-3.)

To have something as a “sign on one’s arm” means to have it so ubiquitous in one’s life experience that it is as if it is engraved on one’s body and thus unforgettable and unavoidable. Indeed, this is the understanding of non-rabbinic sects like Karaites and Samaritans, who do not have a practice of wearing tefillin. And, in fact, there seem to have been some of Rashbam’s contemporaries who were seduced by this reading of these verses. R. Yosef Bekhor Shor, a younger contemporary of Rashbam, in his own peshat-based commentary on the Torah, explains in a comment on Devarim 6:8 how the details of tefillin can be derived from the various verses of the Torah. He then goes on to say the following:

“There is no doubt in this matter [that the verses here refer to tefillin and all of the rabbinic specifications of how to make them], for so we have received from our masters, and such is the practice of our ancestors. And one who claims there is some doubt is like one who claims that alef might be bet and vice-versa and will be yet be called to account.”

It is fairly clear that Rashbam himself put on tefillin, however, leading us back again to the question of what exactly he thinks he is doing when he offers comments that diverge from traditional, practiced understandings of the Torah. Here the phrase עומק פשוטו—deep peshat—that he uses here may be helpful, and, in turn, we can understand better what he means by that phrase, which appears in 5 different places in his commentary. [The other 4 are Bereishit 37:2, 37:28, 49:16, and Shemot 3:14.] My best sense of what he means by this is that “deep peshat” is that plain reading of the text that one can only come to after working very hard to peel away the layers of preconceptions that obstruct one’s direct appreciation of the text at hand. In a way, the goal is to read the text like a novice, almost like a child, and to feel the power of what it has to say, unfiltered, as if it were being revealed for the first time today, with only its own language to explain itself.

Rashbam’s commitment to this sort of peshat seems to emerge from a conviction that without it, we would deprive the Torah of a major element of its essential character: its power to speak to us as a book. Even if the Torah is also interpreted in other ways, the deep peshat must not be neglected, lest we minimize the Torah’s power.

So how does this interact with the rabbinic interpretations that ground Jewish practice? David Weiss Halvini talks about this in his Peshat and Derash. Here is a brief passage from page 82:

“Peshat and derash are two distinct levels of interpretation. You follow the peshat when you are interpreting the meaning of the text…When peshat and derash contradict, one teaches the peshat but behaves according to the derash…one lives by the derash…Even when the peshat is not followed practically, one still has to study the text according to peshat. The theoretical (emphasis mine—EMT) value of peshat ought never to be ignored.”

I might soften this a bit and inject a bit more subtlety. The power of peshat is not just theoretical, in the sense of a stimulating and interesting intellectual exercise. It is religiously practical as well, if not ritually practical. One might put on tefillin every morning while still recognizing that this ritual action is ultimately connecting us to deep places in our national memory and to God’s deep love for the Jewish people as expressed through the story of the Exodus. Maintaining deep peshat helps us remember that the Torah retains a power to draw us into its message without need of accumulated layers of interpretation. Even if those interpretations shape and define my entire religious life, Rashbam encourages us to revisit the power of the Torah again and again through peshat, in a way that can help us recover and maintain the kind of connection necessary to keep its ongoing interpretation alive.

Bo I: The Essence of Peshat

2009-01-28T17:48:00.000-08:00

ראש חדשים - כר' יהושע שבניסן נברא העולם:

לחדשי השנה - בכל מקום שאומר לכם בחדשים שמיני תשיעי, לחודש הזה הם. ולר' אליעזר האומר בתשרי נברא העולם, עיקר פשוטו כך. החדש הזה לכם. אעפ"י שאינו ראש חדשים לשאר אומות, לכם יהי' ראש חדשים למנות ששי שביעי שמיני תשיעי חדש שנים עשר הוא חודש אדר. ממנו תמנו להיות לכם זכרון [כי] בו יצאתם ממצרים. וכשנאמר בתורה ובחודש השביעי, לירח יציאת מצרים פירושו. וכן רגילים הפסוקים לקחת חשבונם ליציאת מצרים, כדכת' בחודש השלישי לצאת בני ישראל וגו', וכן בבנין הבית ויהי בשמונים שנה וארבע מאות שנה לצאת בני ישראל מ[ארץ] מצרים:

I am not even sure if that is the best translation of עיקר פשוטו, the phrase used in the above passage. What is clear from this passage is that this term clearly does not mean, “the one indisputable meaning that the text obviously has to anyone who would read it closely.” In the above passage, Rashbam refers to the well-known debate between R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua, featured, among other places, on Bavli Rosh Hashanah 10b. R. Eliezer argues that the world was created in Tishrei—a view that ultimately informs the dominant liturgical tradition of considering Rosh Hashanah to be the birthday of the world, היום הרת עולם—whereas R. Yehoshua maintains that the world was created in Nisan, and the Exodus is thus a kind of second creation act.

Rashbam then explains how the peshat here could be read as supporting either view. For R. Yeshoshua, the phrase החדש הזה לכם ראש חדשים is almost descriptive: This month, which is the first of the months—because the world was created in this month—will serve as your initial month for your new national calendar. In other words, the Jewish people are here being told that they will order their year in keeping with the history of the world.

R. Eliezer, on the other hand, will have to read the verse differently. החדש הזה לכם ראש חדשים. For you, unlike the other nations of the world, this will be the first month of the year. You will be different; you will reckon time by your own calendar and realize that your history is fundamentally different from that of the world.

This reading is potentially an interesting inversion of how I have always read the debate in Hazal. Whereas R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua can fairly be read on their own terms as debating the significance of world history in light of Jewish history, Rashbam seems to read them as doing the opposite. Rather than taking the Jewish narrative for granted and then trying to understand where the global narrative fits into it, Rashbam’s reading of this debate back into God’s words to Moshe and Aharon has the effect of making this the moment when God tells the people how they ought to understand their emergent history in light fo the world context they take for granted. Those are two very different approaches to universalism and particularlism.

As noted above, Rashbam has no problem suggesting that both of these readings might be peshat, which adds another definitional element to our ongoing effort to explain this term. Peshat is not the search for a single, undisputed plain meaning. It is rather a style of reading, one with certain guidelines and parameters, but one which, like derash, can still produce multiple interpretations and theological possibilities.

Va’eira III: Hitpa’el

2008-01-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

מסתולל - מתפעל מן סולו סולו המסילה. כובש אותם לעבדים כדכת' ויכבשום לעבדים ולשפחות. ולהודיעך שיטת המתפעלים כי כל תיבת המתפעלים באה תוספת תי"ו בראש חוץ מאותן שאוציא מן הכלל לבסוף. מן אמר יאמר יתאמרו כל פועלי און, יתברך, יתגדל, והתגדלתי והתקדשתי, יתהלל המתהלל, יתווכח, ויתחבא, לשוא תתיפי, והמסכה צרה כהתכנס, יתלכדו, ויתמודד, מתנשא, (ויתלקטו), התעללתי, מתפלל, מתרושש והון רב. הרי לך כל האלפא ביתא תי"ו בראשם חוץ משבעת אותיות הללו, דז"ט ס"ץ ש"ת. השי"ן וסמ"ך באה התי"ו אחריהם במתפעל שלהם. מן סל מסתולל, מן שר תשתרר עלינו, מן שבח ישתבח, מן שמר וישתמר חוקות עמרי, מן שכר משתכר. הצד"י והזי"ן לא יבא תי"ו במתפעל שלהם. אלא אחרי הצד"י תבא טי"ת במקום תי"ו של מתפעל. מן צדק יאמר נצטדק, מן צבע יצטבע בדניאל, מן ציד הצטיידנו ביהושע, מן צרף מצטרף. ואחר הזיי"ן תבא דל"ת במקום תי"ו של מתפעל. זמן הזדמנתון בדניאל. אבל תוספת הן בתיבות ט' של נצטדק, ד' של הזדמנתון ותי"ו של יתאמרו לעשותן מתפעל כמו שפירשתי, וכן כולם. אבל הם עצמם כשהם ראש התיבה לא היה בה תוספת אות להתפעל. כמו וישמע את הקול מדבר אליו, לא יאמר מתדבר. לא יטמא בעל, לא יאמר יתטמא. ועם עקש תתפל לא יאמר תתתפל. תתמם, לא יאמר תתתמם:

I won’t write much on this, but Rashbam’s commentary on Shemot 9:17 is another great chance to watch him work through the fundamentals of grammar that anyone learning Hebrew today takes for granted. Here he takes on the reflexive התפעל form and all of its exceptional cases.

Va’eira II: No Replacement for Bekiut

2008-01-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

(יז) הערוב - אומר אני כי מיני זאבים הם שנקראים ערוב על שם שדרכם לטרוף בלילות כדכת' זאב ערבות ישדדם וכת' זאבי ערב לא גרמו לבקר. וכאשר יאמר מאודם אדום, כן יאמר מעמק עמוק מערב ערוב נויטריניר ב"ל, שהזאב ערוב הוא שהוא הולך בערב, עמק שם דבר, והמעשה קרוי עמוק [וכן] אדום שחור:

In the era of the CD-ROM, it is hard to remember how one functioned before the advent of searchable electronic tools, to say nothing of the concordance and the other trappings of modern scholarly research. Rashbam’s commentary often reminds us of the importance—and power—of sheer mastery of the biblical corpus for solving difficult interpretive problems.

Our parashah features one classic example. What is classically known as the fourth plague is described as ערוב by the Torah. Unfortunately, the word appears 7 times in Shemot chapter 8 but is never explicitly defined. How do you figure out what a word like that means? If you are a commentator like Rashbam, you reach for other parts of the Bible to unlock the obscure meaning. In this case—almost certainly influenced by the earlier interpretation offered by Targum Yonatan here—he suggests that ערוב refers to wolves. Why are wolves called ערוב? Rashbam notes that there are two verses where the word זאב is linked to the root ערב, in the sense of nighttime. Wolves prowl in the dark (ערב) and therefore their adjectival form is ערוב, just as other nouns like עמק (valley) generate adjectives like עמוק (deep). Only a stunning mastery of Tanakh could really yield this sort of prooftext, which essentially requires knowledge of all places where the root ערב appears in Tanakh (there are well over 300) such that one can think about the places where it is used in conjunction with animals that might be plausible matches for this plague.

I should also note that if we employ Rambam’s approach of כפל לשון (see earlier post), we might arrive at two very different definition of ערוב. Tehillim 78 features a brief recounting of Israelite history, including God’s punishment of the Egyptians:

(מד) וַיַּהֲפֹךְ לְדָם יְאֹרֵיהֶם וְנֹזְלֵיהֶם בַּל יִשְׁתָּיוּן: (מה) יְשַׁלַּח בָּהֶם עָרֹב וַיֹּאכְלֵם וּצְפַרְדֵּעַ וַתַּשְׁחִיתֵם: (מו) וַיִּתֵּן לֶחָסִיל יְבוּלָם וִיגִיעָם לָאַרְבֶּה: (מז) יַהֲרֹג בַּבָּרָד גַּפְנָם וְשִׁקְמוֹתָם בַּחֲנָמַל: (מח) וַיַּסְגֵּר לַבָּרָד בְּעִירָם וּמִקְנֵיהֶם לָרְשָׁפִים: (מט) יְשַׁלַּח בָּם חֲרוֹן אַפּוֹ עֶבְרָה וָזַעַם וְצָרָה מִשְׁלַחַת מַלְאֲכֵי רָעִים: (נ) יְפַלֵּס נָתִיב לְאַפּוֹ לֹא חָשַׂךְ מִמָּוֶת נַפְשָׁם וְחַיָּתָם לַדֶּבֶר הִסְגִּיר: (נא) וַיַּךְ כָּל בְּכוֹר בְּמִצְרָיִם רֵאשִׁית אוֹנִים בְּאָהֳלֵי חָם:

Verse 44 clearly features a parallel structure with each half referring to the transformation of the Nile into blood. Verse 46 similarly features parallel descriptions of locusts devastating the land, and other verses in this passage seem to be in parallel structure as well. Following this pattern, perhaps ערוב is parallel to צפרדע and refers to some sort of amphibian or other creature similar to frogs? Or, perhaps following Seforno’s interpretation of צפרדע as crocodile, we are dealing with something even more threatening?

Another possibility is opened up by Tehillim 105, which has a distinct account of this narrative:

(כח) שָׁלַח חֹשֶׁךְ וַיַּחְשִׁךְ וְלֹא מָרוּ אֶת דְּבָרוֹ: (כט) הָפַךְ אֶת מֵימֵיהֶם לְדָם וַיָּמֶת אֶת דְּגָתָם: (ל) שָׁרַץ אַרְצָם צְפַרְדְּעִים בְּחַדְרֵי מַלְכֵיהֶם: (לא) אָמַר וַיָּבֹא עָרֹב כִּנִּים בְּכָל גְּבוּלָם: (לב) נָתַן גִּשְׁמֵיהֶם בָּרָד אֵשׁ לֶהָבוֹת בְּאַרְצָם: (לג) וַיַּךְ גַּפְנָם וּתְאֵנָתָם וַיְשַׁבֵּר עֵץ גְּבוּלָם: (לד) אָמַר וַיָּבֹא אַרְבֶּה וְיֶלֶק וְאֵין מִסְפָּר: (לה) וַיֹּאכַל כָּל עֵשֶׂב בְּאַרְצָם וַיֹּאכַל פְּרִי אַדְמָתָם: (לו) וַיַּךְ כָּל בְּכוֹר בְּאַרְצָם רֵאשִׁית לְכָל אוֹנָם:

Here, each verse describes a single plague, whether that of darkness, blood, frogs, hail, locusts, or death of the first-born. The only exception is verse 31, which seems to speak about both ערוב and lice. But what if this verse hews to the pattern of the rest of the section and ערוב and lice are essentially the same thing, either different terms for the same plague or similar invasions of insects?

Thoughts?

Va’eira I: Only What is Necessary

2008-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

ובני קהת עמרם ויצהר וחברון ועוזיאל - על שלשה בני קהת עמרם ויצהר ועוזיאל מפרש בניהם ועל חברון לא פירש. ואם תאמר כי לא היו לו בנים, והלא בחומש הפקודים כתיב ומשפחת החברוני. ולמה לא פירש כאן בני חברון? לפי שאינן נזכרים בתורה לפנינו שמותם אבל אילו שלשה עמרם ויצהר ועוזיאל הוזכרו בניהם בתורה. [בני] עמרם בשביל אהרן ומשה ומרים, בני יצהר בשביל קרח דכתיב ויקח קרח בן יצהר וגו', בני עוזיאל בשביל מישאל ואלצפן דכתיב ויקרא משה אל מישאל ואל אלצפן בני עוזיאל דוד אהרן, ובני קרח אסיר ואלקנה לפי שכתוב לפנינו ובני קרח לא מתו, ובני אהרן על שם שכתוב ואל משה אמר עלה אל י"י אתה ואהרן נדב ואביהוא, ואלעזר בן אהרן וגו' בשביל פנחס בן אלעזר. אבל בבני איתמר לא פירש כאן שאין צריך להזכירן לפנינו בתורה:

Shemot 6 features a genealogy right in the middle of the narrative of יציאת מצרים. Seeing as it begins with Reuven and then shorts out with the completion of details on the Levitic line, the ostensible purpose is the introduction of Moshe and Aharon before they spring into action with Par’oh. But this section is also full of other genealogical details that are not critical for the story at hand. More important, Rashbam notes that while Shemot 6:18 enumerates Kehat’s four children, it only provides names for the children of three of them, withholding details on Hevron. Why?

Rashbam, employing his exegetical category of הקדמה, astutely notes that the other three children of Kehat produce offspring who feature in subsequent stories in the Torah. Amram’s children, Moshe, Aharon and Miryam, are obvious protagonists. But Yitzhar’s children include Korah—Korah’s children are also mentioned because their survival is specifically pointed out after their father’s violent death—and Uzziel’s children include Mishael and Eltzafan, who play the important role of dragging Nadav and Avihu out of the inner sanctum after they are struck down by God. Finally, not only are Aharon’s children mentioned—they will be important as priests later on—but so is his grandson Pinhas, who will play an important role of his own.

This explanation is an example of one so powerful that it seems totally obvious once you have heard it. It also provides important insight into how to read the Torah and the major advantages of a peshat approach. The Torah is not a book of history that records all of the facts associated with the various characters involved. [As I was pointing out to my daughter a few weeks ago, even the highly detailed stories about Yosef leave huge gaping holes both in the narrative of his life and in that of his father and brothers.] Rather, it is a book that seeks to teach us specific things for specific reasons. All the details that have been included play a role and they are chosen not simply because they happened, but because they are critical for setting up the unfolding drama. Rashbam here—through a close reading of an apparently uninteresting genealogical passage—helps articulate the key difference between the Bible and an ancient chronicle, which underscores why so many people still bother to read it today.

[For further expression of the idea that the Tanakh is not a complete repository of the happenings of—and even of the prophecies to—ancient Israelites, but rather a carefully selected set of texts that convey specific, sacred messages, see Kidmat Ha’emek, R. Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin’s introduction to his commentary on the She’iltot.]

Shemot III: Peshat as Self-Defense

2007-12-26T01:22:00.000-08:00

ושאלה אשה משכנתה - במתנה גמורה וחלוטה, שהרי [כתוב] ונתתי את חן העם. כמו שאל ממני ואתנה גוים נחלתך. זהו עיקר פשוטו ותשובה למינים:

Here, commenting on Shemot 3:22, Rashbam reveals another of his areas of concern: Christian use of Tanakh against the Jews. This verse features God telling Moshe that at the time of the Exodus, the Israelites will ask for expensive items of gold and silver from the Egyptians as they depart, and they will receive all of this bounty. The key question here regards the word ושאלה. This root often refers to borrowing, as it does in Shemot 22:13. If so, then the Israelites claim to be borrowing these items from the Egyptians and then make off with them in the dead of night. This was used by Christians to support the notion that Jews were inherently untrustworthy. Rashbam fights back, arguing that context here implies that the Egyptians gave all of these items as gifts and cites proof from another verse in Tanakh where שאל can bear this meaning. He thus simultaneously deciphers the peshat and refutes the Christian claim.

Whether Rashbam is correct about peshat here is unclear. After all, Shemot 12:36 suggests that the Israelites took advantage of the Egyptians through this “borrowing”, and this was hardly extravagant payback for hundreds of years of slavery. [See also Shmuel’s comment justifying this class action on Pesahim 119a.] Indeed, in the present case, we may have a fair degree of apologetics at work. But what is clear is that peshat was used at times to battle Christian interpretation. Rashbam’s commentary on Bereishit 49:10 also uses peshat to fend off a Christological interpretation of Tanakh, and one can imagine how a return to “the plain sense” of Scripture would have been an effective tool in parrying theological attacks fueled by highly allegorical and metaphorical readings of the Bible.

Shemot II: Peshat vs. Derash, Revisited

2007-12-26T01:21:00.000-08:00

אל רעואל - רעואל אבי אביהן. אם כן שם אביהם יתרו, וחובב בן רעואל האמור לפנינו הוא חובב הוא יתרו. ואם רעואל הוא יתרו, אם כן בן יתרו היה. ומה שכתוב בנביאים מבני חובב חותן משה מוכיח שחובב הוא יתרו, שבכל מקום שמזכיר חותן משה מזכיר יתרו:

A number of my earlier posts have pointed on the ways in which peshat—at least as conceived of by Rashbam—is not always actually the best way of getting at the meaning of a text. Let’s consider another example from this week’s parashah. Moshe’s father-in-law is a recurring biblical personality, and yet much remains uncertain about him, most notably his name. Here is a brief review of the evidence.

Our first encounter with this figure is in Shmot 2:16-21 we learn of how Re’uel, the priest of Midian, gave his daughter Tzipporah to Moshe as a wife. In chapter 3, we then hear about Moshe’s father-in-law Yitro, who appears in that role in numerous other places in the Torah. Shofetim 4:11 refers to Hovav as Moshe’s father-in-law, and Bemidbar 10:29 has Moshe addressing חבב בן רעואל המדיני חתן משה. Does this mean that Hovav was Moshe’s father-in-law and that Reu’el was the former’s father (which would accord with the plain sense of Shofetim but contradict that plain sense of Shemot 2)? Or does it mean that Hovav was Moshe’s brother-in-law, with Reu’el his father being Moshe’s father-in-law (which would accord with the plain sense of Shemot 2 but contradict Shofetim)? And how do either of these last two verses square with the traditions naming Yitro?

Rashbam, employing the assumptions of peshat and revealing his desire to read the Torah as a coherent, linear, literary work, decides the following: Shofetim established unequivocally that Hovav is Moshe’s father-in-law, and therefore he must be one and the same with Yitro. These two names refer to the same person. Reu’el, on the other hand, must have been Yitro’s father, and the term אביהן in Shemot 2:18—the subject of Rashbam’s comment here—must be taken loosely to mean “ancestor” or “grandfather.” Like most peshat approaches, we see here a kind of binary choice that must pick winners and losers, emphasizing the plain sense of one passage at the expense of another.

I wonder if, in this case, the midrashic approach taken in Mekhilta Yitro Amalek I—and cited in Rashi on Shemot 18:1—is not more insightful into the fuller meaning of these various traditions. The Mekhilta says that Moshe’s father-in-law had seven names, including the ones enumerated above. This sort of statement embraces the multiplicity of information relayed in Tanakh about this character and attempts to describe the rich tapestry that cannot be captured by trying to spin this material into a single thread. Derash eschews binary choices and, in doing so, sometimes gets at the deeper truth of Tanakh when read as a whole. Peshat indeed preserves a better linear narrative, but derash can sometimes help us see a richer plot.

Shemot I: Write What You Know

2007-12-26T01:19:00.000-08:00

ותשם בסוף - אשר סמוך לשפת היאר, והטמינתהו יפה שההולכים על שפת היאר לא יכלו לראות התיבה, אבל הרוחצים בתוך הנהר יכלו לראותה, כי יוכבד לא נכנסה בנהר להצפינו מכל צדדיו היטב. ולכך ראתהו בת פרעה שהיתה רוחצת בתוך היאר, אבל נערותיה שהיו הולכות על שפת היאר לא יכלו לראותה:

The old saw about writing urges one only to tackle the familiar. What is amazing about Rashbam is how much he thinks about the details of real life and how much this is able to enrich his commentary. One example from this week’s parashah followed by a quick recap of a host of comments like this in passages I have glossed over:

Shemot 2:3—Moshe’s mother hides him in the reeds by the side of the Nile. If she was intending to hide him, why was he so easily found by Par’oh’s daughter? And why did no one else find him? Rashbam: She hid him very well vis-à-vis the riverbank such that no one could see him. But she did not wade into the river to be sure that the basket was covered on all sides. Therefore, while Par’oh’s daughter’s servants could not see the basket, she, who was bathing in the water itself, was indeed able to see it.

Bereishit 24:2—Avraham orders his servant to put his hand “under his thigh” when swearing to him that he will not bring Yitzhak back to lands of the east in order to find him a wife. Rashbam: Whereas most agreements are sealed with a handshake, the master-servant relationship is like a father-son relationship and th specific ritual of placing the hand on the groin is intended to convey the notion that the slave adopts the totally subservient posture of a child vis-à-vis his master’s command.

Bereishit 27:45—Rivkah makes a cryptic comment to Ya’akov that he must flee Esav’s anger because she does not want both of them to die in a single day. Rashbam: This assumes the biblical-era institution of the blood avenger; Esav would kill Ya’akov in rage but he would then in turn be avenged by Ya’akov’s closest of kin. The result: both of Rivkah’s sons would die in a short period of time.

Bereishit 29:29—The Torah provides us with the detail, important for the unfolding story, that Ya’akov encounters a very large boulder on the well near Haran. Though this detail will later reveal how Ya’akov was overcome by a supernatural strength when he first met Rahel, the reason for having such a big stone in the firs place is not spelled out. Rashbam goes out of his way to explain: The large rock was either their for safety reasons (if no one could remove it alone, then no individual would ever forget to put it back) or for security reasons, such that no individual would steal the water. The latter possiblilty adds a whole other dimension to the story, as it casts the entire world Ya’akov is about to enter as a world of deception and mistrust, which will indeed be his dominant experience during his 20 years with Lavan.

Vayehi III: Pay attention to those notes!

2007-12-25T23:56:00.001-08:00

מטרף בני עלית - את יהודה בני לאחר שעלית מלטרוף טרף באומות ותכרע ותשכב בעירך, לא יבא אויב להחרידך ולהקימך ממקומך. זהו עיקר פשוטו. בני כפילו של יהודה. והמפרשו במכירת יוסף לא ידע בשיטה של פסוק ולא בחילוק טעמים כלל:

Here, on Bereishit 49:9, Rashbam shows us the usefulness of cantillation in deciphering the meaning of verses. The verse reads:

גּוּר אַרְיֵה יְהוּדָה מִטֶּרֶף בְּנִי עָלִיתָ כָּרַע רָבַץ כְּאַרְיֵה וּכְלָבִיא מִי יְקִימֶנּוּ:

The verse has four main parts: 1) Yehudah is a young lion; 2) מטרף בני עלית; 3) He crouches and lies in wait like a lion; 4) Like the king of beasts, who can rouse him? The precise meaning of part 2) is discussed here by Rashbam. Rashi had explained this phrase to refer to Yehudah’s withdrawal from the plot to kill Yosef. Picking up on the verb טרף, which is used in conjunction with Yosef’s feigned death, Rashi explains that Yehudah is here singled out for doing what he could to fend off Yosef’s murder. To read the verse this way, the word טרף must be joined to the word בני, in that Yehudah is said to have “risen above” (עלית) the (potential) “murder of my son” (טרף בני).

Rashbam pounces. A close look at the notes reveals that the word מטרף is matched with the note tipha, which belongs to the class of melekh notes, which end phrases. That means that מטרף is in fact separate from the word בני and the phrase must be parsed as follows: My son (בני), you have risen up (עלית) from your prey (מטרף). [Were Rashi to be right, there would have been a merkha or some other appropriate eved note on מטרף to indicate its connection with the word בני.] The principle of כפל לשון further confirms that this phrase out to be conveying the same basic content as part 1) and thus is merely a praiseworthy comment about Yehudah’s power and dominion over his enemies.

[Rashi, Rashbam’s grandfather, is anonymously criticized here with some force as simply not understanding how cantillation plays into the meaning of a verse. For another attack of this sort, see his comment on 49:16, where Rashbam reveals a general hostility to any interpretation that is overly associative and thematic as opposed to attending to the needs of the context at hand.]

Vayehi II: Biblical Parallelism

2007-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

ורבו - כפל לשון של חצים שבפסוק כמו יסובו עלי(ו) רביו, חציו. ולכן הוא נדגש. אבל מגזרת מריבה יאמר אשר רבו בני ישראל. כמו מן קם קמו, מן שב שבו, כן יאמר מן הרב רב עם ישראל, רבו. ומדמה הפסוק לשון הרע של [אשת] פוטיפר לחצים כדכת' חץ שחוט לשונם מרמה דבר, וידרכו את לשונם קשתם שקר. ורבו מגזרת רבב כמו סבו מן סבב, צהלי ורוני מן רנן. רבו שיטרוט ב"ל:

One of the things that every beginning student of Tanakh learns is the importance of parallelism in Biblical poetry. Many verses are arranged according to a parallel structure (A, B), where the first part (A) essentially means the same thing as the second part (B). This then becomes an extremely powerful tool for deciphering difficult words in poetic passages, provided they are used in parallel with more common terms.

As we have seen before, Rashbam is among the pioneering voices developing these sorts of theories about biblical literature. He uses the term כפל לשון to describe this parallelism and uses it here to great effect. In Bereishit 49:23, Ya’akov says of Yosef: וַיְמָרֲרֻהוּ וָרֹבּוּ וַיִּשְׂטְמֻהוּ בַּעֲלֵי חִצִּים. The word וָרֹבּוּ here is obscure. The temptation is to see it as describing מריבה, some sort of tension or fight, such that Yosef’s adversaries—using their arrows—are described as dealing with him bitterly, fighting with him and resenting him. Rashbam notes that the dagesh in the bet votes against this reading, since the plural third person past tense of fighting would be vocalized וָרָבוּ. But what really forecloses this interpretation is the principle of כפל לשון. Once we realize that the first and second parts of this verse are parallel, we realize that וָרֹבּוּ is likely synonymous with בַּעֲלֵי חִצִּים. It thus must refer to shooting arrows, which then calls to mind Iyov 16:13, where we find the same root referring to archers surrounding their victim.

This sort of lexical problem solving is at the heart of Rashbam’s work, and comments like this one show how effective it can be in elucidating peshat. [For other uses of the principle of כפל לשון, see his comments on Bereishit 20:13, 25:23, 49:5 and 49:9.]

Vayehi I: Ya’akov and Shekhem

2007-12-25T21:49:00.000-08:00

ואני - באותה הארץ נתתי לך חלק אחד יותר על אחיך, שמנשה ואפרים כראובן ושמעון יהיו לי לקחת שני חלקים בארץ אשר אני ובניי עתידים לקחת מיד האמורי בחרבי ובקשתי במלחמת יהושע. ואעפ"י שכת' ביהושע לא בחרבך ולא בקשתך, אותו פסוק בשני מלכי האמורי מדבר וכמו שאמרו חכמים צרעה לא עברה את הירדן, וכתיב ביהושע ואשלח לפניכם את הצרעה ותגרש אותם שני מלכי האמורי אשר בעבר הירדן לא בחרבך ולא בקשתך. זכותו של יעקב גרם להם:

Bereishit 48:22 is a difficult verse. Ya’akov, near death, tells Yosef that he has granted him שכם אחד over his brothers, which he took from the Amorites with his sword and his bow. There are two main problems in the verse: A) What is the exact meaning of שכם אחד? B) When did Ya’akov engage in a military battle with the indigenous Canaanite tribes?

Rashi already engaged with these questions and offered two main possibilities: 1) The term שכם אחד refers to the city of Shekhem, which in fact became the burial spot for Yosef’s bones (see Yehoshua 24:32), and the military reference here represents an extrabiblical account of Ya’akov’s military defense of his clan after Shimon and Levi’s unwarranted slaughter of the peope of Shekhem. This is a forced accounting of Ya’akov’s claim to have captured the city with military might. Rashi thus offers the second possibility: 2) Ya’akov here is talking about giving Yosef a double portion, where שכם refers to some kind of stake (see Tehilim 21:13, 60:8, Hoshea 6:9, and Tzefaniah 3:9 for some roughly parallel usages). The “military conquest” described here is metaphorical and actually refers to prayers and wisdom that were employed to secure Yosef this more prominent status by obtaining the birthright from Esav, who is her described as an Amorite because of his wicked acts.

Rashbam tries to get the benefits of both explanations by asserting that we are dealing with a double portion of inheritance and a military conquest, but said conquest is in the future, and Ya’akov is merely prophesying regarding its eventual fulfillment.

I would like to suggest another reading that may in fact clear up what is happening in this verse. Professor Baruch Schwartz has argued that Bereishit 34 reflects a complex and multi-faceted narrative of Ya’akov’s relationship with Shekhem. On the one hand, there are elements in the story that seem clear that Dinah was raped by Hamor, that Shimon and Levi exacted vicious revenge for this act, freed Dinah and were then condemned by Ya’akov, who feared for his life, claiming that they had put him at risk by attacking the much larger and more powerful indigenous population. On the other hand, there are elements that suggest that a more timid Shekhem falls in love with Dinah and asks for her hand in marriage. The brothers—not just Shimon and Levi—seemingly with Ya'akov's approval, hatch a plot to what they perceive to be a plan to be overwhelmed culturally through intermarriage. They demand all the men be circumcised and then slaughter them. This ruse works and the young clan's distinctiveness is preserved. As noted, these elements seem to presume Ya’akov’s passive, if not active, assent to the proceedings.

Against this backdrop, we can see our scene here as amplifying the elements that reflect Ya’akov’s participation in the conquest of Shekhem. In a lovely play on words, Ya’akov says to Yosef, "I have given you a leg up, in the form of the city of Shekhem, on your brothers, which I took from the Amorites, with my sword and my bow." In other words, I, Ya'akov, acting through my children, fought a battle to win the city of Shekhem and have given it to you as an inheritance. In this way, one can maintain what seems an obvious allusion to the actual city of Shekhem along with a biblical narrative that suggests some form of military involvement by Ya’akov. To be sure, Ya’akov’s condemnation of that attack finds echoes in our parashah as well, when Shimon and Levi are singled out in chapter 49 as being unable to control their violence and therefore unfit to hold inheritable land.

Vayigash III: Can Peshat be Inspirational? (Part II)

2007-12-25T19:06:00.000-08:00

(ח) יעקב ובניו - יעקב מחשבון שבעים נפש כמו שמוכיח לפנינו לפי הפשט כל נפש בניו ובנותיו של יעקב ולאה הכל שלשים ושלש עם יעקב. ורבותינו פירשו זו יוכבד שנולדה בין החומות:

(כו) יוצאי יריכו הבאים מצרימה כל נפש ששים ושש - כי יעקב שהוא מחשבון של שלשים ושלש של לאה אינו בכלל יוצאי יריכו, כי יוצאי יריכו לא היו כי אם ששים ותשע. וכי אמר משה בשבעים נפש ירדו אבותיך מצרימה, שיעקב ובניו היו שבעים:

One of the problems that vexes a host of commentators is how precisely the genealogy given in Bereishit 46 yields 70 people. In particular, Leah’s subclan is said to contain 33 people and yet only 32 are listed! How can it be that a passage that seems to be so careful in building up to the number 70 can miscount?

In these comments, Rashbam reveals what, to my mind, is the indisputable plain sense of the verses here. A close reading of the list of names here reveals the fact that none of the brothers except Reuven is mentioned separately; most are introduced by saying ובני שמעון and then listing their children. It is understood that this count includes both them and their children. Similarly, when is says בכר יעקב ראובן, this is intended to make us count Ya’akov as one of the 70. The other language in the passage bears this out: Whereas with the other three wives, it simply says כל נפש, thus totaling up how many people were contributed by each wife, the language when detailing Leah’s descendants is כל נפש בניו ובנותיו, the third-person possessive highlighting the fact that Ya’akov himself is included in that count. This also neatly solves the problem above of Leah’s subclan, which led to the midrash imagining that Yocheved, Levi’s daughter, was born as the family entered Egypt, thus contributing to the count of 70, but not being worthy of mention among those who came down to Egypt. While this reading is intriguing, it obviously suffers from the fact that Menashe and Efraim are named despite the fact that they did not make the journey down to Egypt as well as from the fact that Dinah and Serah are mentioned despite being women. If you just agree to count Ya’akov as part of the 70 and to recognize that the text is associating him with his first wife, all problems disappear.

This, in contrast to the previous post, is an example of the power of peshat, and, I think, its inspirational possibilities in restoring the clarity of the text such that it can once again speak with a full voice.

Vayigash II: Can Peshat be Inspirational? (Part I)

2007-12-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

אעלך גם עלה - כלומר ארד עמך וגם עלה אעלך, כמו וברכתם גם אותי. גם עלה. שנקבר עם אבותיו במערת המכפלה:

In an earlier post, I commented on the ways in which peshat sometimes provides a convincing explanation that nonetheless deflates more inspirational and spiritual possibilities. In his comment on Bereishit 46:4, Rashbam provides us with another such example. This verse’s promise of return to Eretz Yisrael seems—in the context of the Torah’s larger narrative—to refer to the eventual redemption of Ya’akov’s descendants. The ominous buildup to slavery starts now and this verse hints at its eventual end. [See Ramban on 46:1 for this reading of the text.] But Rashbam wants to see this promise fulfilled to Ya’akov himself, in a more local, less archetypal way. So he proposes that the divine promise here is that Ya’akov will return to C’na’an, and he indeed does, albeit posthumously. This sort of explanation sometimes takes some of the drama out of the text, even as it often preserves accuracy; here I think it may overreach altogether and sacrifice the larger narrative that the lives of the Avot seem intended to highlight in the first place.

Vayigash I: Philology

2007-12-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

אל תרגזו - אל תיראו כלום בדרך מפני ליסטים, כי שלום לי מכל צד. וכן רגזו [ו]אל תחטאו, היו יראים מן הק' ולא תחטאו. וכן ונתן י"י לך לב רגז, דחיל כתרג'. וכן ירגזון יריעות, לשון ניענוע כאדם המתיירא. וכן רגזה בוטחות, המרגיז ארץ ממקומה. אבל רגזה של תרגום של דניאל ושל עזרא לשון כעס. טרנבלר לעז של רוגז של כ"ד ספרים:

Here in Bereishit 45:24 we have a fascinating sensitivity to different kinds of Semitic roots: Hebrew and Aramaic. Rashbam notes that the root רגז in the “24 books”—which refers to Torah and Nevi’im (5 books of the Torah, Yehoshua, Shofetim, Shmuel, Melakhim, Yeshayahu, Yirmiyahu, Yehezkel and the 12 smaller prophetic books)—is different from the same root used in the Aramaic portions of Daniel and Ezra in Ketuvim. The Hebrew root used in the first 24 books of the Bible means “fear and trembling”, whereas the same root used in Daniel 3:13 and Ezra 5:12 means anger. Rashbam is here shadowboxing with R. Elazar on Bavli Ta’anit 10b, who explains that Yosef was warning his brothers not to engage in halakhic discussions on their way back from Egypt, lest they fight with one another. In keeping with his goal of not losing sight of the plain sense of the text, Rashbam reminds us that as a matter of peshat, such a reading is philologically unsound. The best way to read the text in context is as an assurance from Yosef that Egypt controls all the travel routes back to C’na’an and thus they should not fear that any harm will come to them during the journey.

Mikeitz II: Intertextuality

2007-12-25T17:51:00.000-08:00

ויפקד פקידים [וגו'] וחמש - שהממונים יגבו חומש כל התבואות לצורך המלך אשר משפטו בשאר שנים לעשר כדכת' בשמואל את שדותיכם יעשר, עתה יטול פי שנים. וכמו כן הנהיג יוסף לבסוף על אדמת מצרים לפרעה לחומש:

Sometimes Rashbam’s deep desire to have the Torah read as a linear book helps reveal the basis behind ancient exegentical disputes. Bereishit 41:34 features Yosef counseling Par’oh regarding the seven years of plenty. He tells him: וחמש את ארץ מצרים. What does the word וחמש mean here? Targum Onkelos renders this word as ויזרזון, indicating a suggestion to prepare, or arm Egypt for the tough times ahead. This approach makes perfect sense in context and matches the use of the word וחמשים in Shemot 13:18, which describes the Israelites as armed when leaving Egypt. But Targum Yonatan on this verse renders וחמש as ויפקון חד מן חמשא (and the Septuagint renders similarly) meaning that Par’oh should separate out a fifth of the produce during the years of plenty as reserves for the years of famine. This interpretation is not suggested at all by local context, and the figure of 20% might even seem somewhat conservative in light of the disastrous famine that is to follow. So why read this way? Rashbam helps us here: The larger context of Tanakh suggests that a normal tax for the king was 10 percent (note the parallel of tithing for God’s servants in the Temple), and 20 percent represents a doubling in the face of national crisis. But more important, Yosef’s association with fifths returns later in the narrative when he strikes a deal with the Egyptian population that they will sell their land to the crown in exchange for the right to be sharecroppers on those lands and retain one fifth of the annual produce. Though that fifth has little to do with the narrative here, the association of Yosef with fives is unavoidable. [See also Bereishit 43:34, 45:6, 45:11, 45:22 and 47:2 for other examples.] Rashbam helps us understand the associative and intertextual mindset that can affect interpretation.

Mikeitz I: Titles

2007-12-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

פרעה קצף על עבדיו - כל פרעה בלשון מצרים מלך, וכן כל מלכי מצרים נקראים. ושל פלשתים אבימלך אפי' בימי דוד, בשנותו את טעמו לפני אבימלך. ושל ירושלים מלכי צדק. ביהושע אדני צדק מלך שלם. ובימי דוד "על דברתי" אני מבטיח שתהיה "מלכי צדק" מלך ירושלים. ושל עמלק אגג, בימי משה וירום מאגג מלכו, ובימי שאול אגג מלך עמלק. אף כאן פרעה לשון מלכות, כי בשמו של מלך אין אומרין לפניו "דוד קצף על עבדיו", אלא כך אומרין לפניו "המלך קצף על עבדיו". וכן לפנינו אני פרעה, אני אהיה המלך לבדי, כדכת' רק הכסא אגדל ממך. לכן נקרא יוסף אברך, אב למלך. ובספר לקח טוב פירש כמותי:

This comment on Bereishit 41:10 is a great example of Rashbam’s sensitivity to tone. He notes that it is impossible that the butler would address his master, the king of Egypt, by his first name, or, for that matter, by anything less than the most honorific title. Moreover, the seemingly ridiculous verse, “Par’oh said to Yosef, “I am Par’oh…” becomes instantly intelligible once we realize that the king of Egypt is saying “I am the king [and therefore I can empower you fully even as I will always be superior to you].” This close readings therefore prove what we already suspected: Par’oh is not a name, but actually the Egyptian equivalent of “Mr. President”, or of the Vatican’s practice of assigning a new name to an incoming pope. He cites further examples of this phenomenon throughout Tanakh: Avimelekh=King of the Plishtim; Malkitzedek=King of Jerusalem; Agag=King of Amalek. This sort of range in Tanakh combined with a sense of how the world works makes Rashbam a particularly powerful and compelling exegete.

Vayeishev III: Sold or Stolen?

2007-12-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

(כח) ויעברו אנשים מדיינים - בתוך שהיו יושבים לאכול לחם ורחוקים היו קצת מן הבור לבלתי אכול על הדם וממתינים היו לישמעאלים שראו, וקודם שבאו הישמעאלים עברו אנשים מדיינים אחרים דרך שם וראוהו בבור ומשכוהו ומכרוהו המדיינים לישמעאלים, ויש לומר שהאחים לא ידעו, ואעפ"י אשר כתב אשר מכרתם אותי מצרימה, י"ל שהגרמת מעשיהם סייעה במכירתו. זה נראה לי לפי עומק דרך פשוטו של מקרא. כי ויעברו אנשים מדיינים משמע על ידי מקרה והם מכרוהו לישמעאלים. ואף אם באתה לומר וימכרו [את] יוסף לישמעאלים כי אחיו מכרוהו, אף כן צריך לומר שהם ציוו למדייני' סוחרים למושכו מן הבור ואחר כן מכרוהו לישמעאלים:

(לו) והמדנים מכרו אותו אל מצרים - מדן ומדיין וישמעאלים אחים היו, ומדן וישמעאלים אחד הם לפי הפשט. לכך הוא אומ' כי מדנים מכרוהו וישמעאלים הורידוהו שמה, כי שניהם אחד הם לפי הפשט:

Many of the narrative portions of the Torah are notorious for the difficulty they present the reader who tries to read them through as one consistent, linear text. The narrative surrounding Yosef’s journey to Egypt in Bereishit 37 is one such text and it is instructive to watch Rashbam—who is so adamant about the possibility and importance of reading the Torah is a linear literary work—cope with this challenge.

First, a review of the difficulties in this story:

1) Do the brothers hate Yosef because of Ya’akov’s favoritism or because of Yosef’s presumptuousness and arrogance? Obviously these two factors can be complementary; nonetheless, it does seem that one element of the story has Ya’akov favoring Yosef and finding nothing wrong in his character and providing him with a coat that is at the center of the drama whereas another element focuses on Yosef’s dreams, to which Ya’akov himself objects.

2) Reuven begs the brothers not to kill Yosef after their initial threat to do so. His solution: throw him into a pit. The brothers assume he will die there—especially given the lack of water—but Reuven will be able to come back secretly and save him. But then Reuven seems to disappear, since the story moves on to Yehudah’s proposal to sell Yosef to the passing Ishmaelites. When Reuven returns to the pit, Yosef is already gone. Where was Reuven? And why, when he tells the brothers that Yosef is gone, do they not respond and tell him what happened? And how does the story proceed directly from Reuven’s confusion and despair to the ongoing plot of tricking Ya’akov with the bloody coat?

3) Who actually brings Yosef to Egypt? Yehudah’s proposal is to sell him to the Ishmaelites, and this seems to transpire, with the beginning of chapter 39 confirming that it was they who sold him to Potiphar. But it also seems that it was a band of Midianites that actually removed Yosef from the pit, possibly even without his brothers’ knowledge and that they bring him down to Egypt. In short, is Yosef sold by the brothers to the Ishamelites, or is he stolen by the Midianites as a result of his brothers’ abandonment of him in a pit?

The story, on its own, does not resolve any of these problems.

Rashbam, in the two comments above, seems to struggle with these issues and even to contradict himself as he attempts an answer. At first, he proposes that indeed the Midianites took him out of the pit and that they sold him to the Ishmaelites. The brothers’ involvement in the sale is thus only second-hand, and the plot by Yehudah gets fulfilled only indirectly and incompletely.

Needless to say, this is a somewhat unsatisfactory, and Rashbam, in the second comment above, seems to try to solve the problem by positing that Ishmaelites and Midianites (and Medanites, who are also mentioned in the story) are actually just different names for the same people, given that they are all clans that descend from Avraham.

I think this comment actually gets us at some of the limits of peshat in tackling the meaning of the Torah. The simpler approach here would simply acknowledge that the Torah’s messages here defy a simple linear, literary analysis. There are in fact two elements of Yosef’s journey. On the one hand, the brothers’ malice leads to his vulnerability and subsequent theft by the Midianites. Yosef himself describes this element when he tells Par’oh’s butler later in the parashah: כי גנב גנבתי מארץ העברים—I was stolen from the land of the Hebrews. On the other hand, we see a picture of the brothers actively selling him into slavery, which he confronts them with later in the story: אשר מכרתם אותי מצרימה—you sold me to Egypt. The meaning produced by each element is beyond the scope of this already overlong post, but embracing this complex meaning rather than stamping it out in the name of literary uniformity would seem to be truer to the Torah itself.

All this raises the interesting question of the proper role of peshat. Might the Torah do better being viewed through more of a cubist lens, whereby multiple messages and components make up a rich text that can fairly be described as a work with seventy faces? Or perhaps we might consider the genre of magical realism, which invites the reader to imagine the ways in which the deepest meaning of our lives and memories can sometimes most accurately be related through a composite, non-literary, almost non-sensical narrative?

Vayeishev II: Peshat to the Rescue

2007-12-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

ואביו שמר את הדבר - מה צורך לכתוב זה? אלא כשבאה לו הבשורה ולא האמין לבניו שהוא חי וירא ישראל את העגלות אשר שלח פרעה, כי לא נשלחו כי אם על פי המלך כמו שכת' שם עגלות על פי פרעה, אז האמין על ידי החלומות שמוכיחין שסופו להיות מושל ועגלות הללו על ידי מלכות וממשלה באים, ומתוך כך אמר רב עוד יוסף בני חי, כי תימה גדולה היה היאך האמין אחרי שראה כתנתו מלאה דם? כמו שנחרד יצחק על יעקב בשביל שמצא שיער בחלקת צואריו:

I had always been bothered by Bereishit 37:11 and its seemingly cryptic comment that Ya’akov “kept the matter” of Yosef’s dream in his mind after scolding his son. And now I see Rashbam was as well; he provides a fascinating answer: This, like all good Biblical details, is setting us up for a scene we will not encounter for some time. When Yosef finally reveals himself to his brothers and orders them back to C’na’an in order to fetch Ya’akov, he sends a slew of wagons back with provisions and clothing to escort his father down to Egypt. There, too, there is a cryptic verse (Bereishit 45:27) that notes that Ya’akov did not believe the brothers that his long-presumed dead son was alive until he saw the wagons. Why did the wagons make the critical difference? Rashbam ingeniously links these two cryptic verses and explains that Ya’akov, for all those years, suspected that something would come of these dreams. He stored away that little piece of information—and hope—in his mind, such that when he finally saw royally appointed wagons coming to get him, he realized that these trappings of power were indeed evidence of what he had been imagining for years: that his son would indeed have the authority of a king with the power to rule over even his own father. [See Rashbam on Bereishit 45:27 for the second part of this commentary.]

Vayeishev I: The Place of Peshat

2007-12-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

אלה תולדות יעקב - ישכילו ויבינו אוהבי שכל מה שלימדונו רבותינו כי אין מקרא יוצא מידי פשוטו, אף כי עיקרה של תורה באת ללמדנו ולהודיענו ברמיזת הפשט ההגדות וההלכות והדינין על ידי אריכות הלשון ועל ידי שלשים ושתים מידות של ר' אליעזר בנו של ר' יוסי הגלילי ועל ידי שלש עשרה מידות של ר' ישמעאל. והראשונים מתוך חסידותם נתעסקו לנטות אחרי הדרשות שהן עיקר, ומתוך כך לא הורגלו בעומק פשוטו של מקרא, ולפי שאמרו חכמים אל תרבו בניכם בהגיון, וגם אמרו העוסק במקרא מדה ואינה מדה העוסק בתלמוד אין לך מדה גדולה מזו, ומתוך כך לא הורגלו כל כך בפשוטן של מקראות, וכדאמ' במסכת שבת הוינא בר תמני סרי שנין וגרסינ' כולה תלמודא ולא הוה ידענא דאין מקרא יוצא מידי פשוטו. וגם רבנו שלמה אבי אמי מאיר עיני גולה שפירש תורה נביאים וכתובים נתן לב לפרש פשוטו של מקרא, ואף אני שמואל ב"ר מאיר חתנו זצ"ל נתווכחתי עמו ולפניו והודה לי שאילו היה לו פנאי היה צריך לעשות פרושים אחרים לפי הפשטות המתחדשים בכל יום. ועתה יראו המשכילים מה שפירשו הראשונים:

Here, on Bereishit 37:2, we have Rashbam’s first major substantive comment about what his method of peshat is all about (with the exception of a very brief comment at the very beginning of his commentary). He makes a number of important points worthy of explication and emphasis:

1) The core purpose of the Torah is to provide us with rich narratives and detailed normative guidance so that we can lead religious lives. The Torah indeed conveys this substance to us through the use of hints and indirect associations and classical rabbinic exegesis—which is very different from what Rashbam understands to be peshat—is designed to draw this out of the biblical text.

2) Despite the above, אין מקרא יוצא מידי פשוטו, which is here assumed to mean that an exoteric reading of a verse—the peshat—is never fully displaced just because a more esoteric interpretation is offered. This other, admittedly non-central, aspect of the Torah remains a part of its essential character.

3) Ancient commentators were primarily interested in 1) over 2). Rashbam, however, describes himself as part of an intellectually electric environment in which peshat is experiencing an intense revival and thereby, in his view, enriching appreciation of the Torah. His language of הפשטות המתחדשים בכל יום conveys a feeling of scholarly discovery and excitement that plays out on a daily basis (see his comment on Bereishit 36:12 for another example and on 37:13 for an example of the collegial collaboration involved), and his description of the arguments he would have with his grandfather, Rashi, show how the new interpretations of this ancient text could spur tension and controversy.

All of these dynamics are worthy of more consideration, and I hope to return to them throughout the course of the commentary. For now, I will limit myself to one observation: Rashbam reveals to us here the delicate dance required when advancing novel exegesis while simultaneously maintaining established norms and conventions. On the one hand, he emphasizes here—almost to the point of the lady protesting too much—that all of his peshat explanations are not the עיקר, the essence, of Torah. The purpose of Torah is real-time, detailed, normative guidance that cannot be fully contained in the literary boundaries of peshat. On the other hand, his contempt for erroneous readings of Tanakh is palpable, as words like משכילים are trotted out to describe the enlightened pashtanim even as more traditional readers—including his grandfather!—are derided with terms like הבל and accusations of ignorance and unsophistication. Which is it? Is he truly a radical who simply wants to cover his tracks with occasional humble language, or is he truly a pious traditionalist who sometimes gets carried away in the intellectual moment?

I think the most honest answer to those questions is that these sorts of high-voltage intellectual pursuits—such as proposing alternative readings of the canonical word of God that is the supposed basis for all Jewish practice—inherently invite some degree of ambivalence and inconsistency. Rashbam is not alone in this regard. R. Yosef Bekhor Shor, a slightly more junior contemporary northern French exegete, displays similar vacillations. Bekhor Shor viciously attack any allegorization of the verses that produce the commandment to wear tefillin (another Rashbam interpretation we will eventually get to!) even as he advances a radical reading on the supposed ban on cooking a kid in its mother’s milk that would, if halakhically applied, completely eviscerate traditional Jewish practices surrounding mixing meat and dairy. Rashbam is best seen here, in my view, as exploring uncharted intellectual territory as he and others actually consider what it would mean to take the Biblical text seriously in its own terms. Given that he and his colleagues in this enterprise are situated as religious, practicing Jews, that intellectual exercise sometimes has limits—albeit idiosyncratic, not always consistent, internally necessary ones. Rashbam is indeed both a traditionalist and an intellectual risk taker; that is precisely what makes him so interesting.

Vayishlah III: Be Thankful For What You Have

2007-11-22T10:52:00.001-08:00

(יא) קטנתי מכל - מלהיות לי [כל] החסדים וגו'. וכן קטן מהכיל את העולה ואת השלמים. ולפי שעשית לי חסדים ואמת יותר מן הראוי לי ואני עדיין לא קיימתי נדרי ולא עבדתיך כראוי, לכך אני ירא אעפ"י שהבטחתני. שאינך [דן] את האדם אלא לפי מעשיו, כמו שמצינו בחזקיה שאמר לו הנביא מת אתה ולא תחיה, ואחר כך בתפלת חזקיהו הוסיף הק' על ימיו חמש עשרה שנה:

(יג) ואתה אמרת היטיב איטיב עמך - אעפ"י שאין אתה מחוייב לקיים לי הבטחתך שהרי קטנתי וגו' אעפ"י כן עשה למען כבוד שמך שתתקיים הבטחתך, כמו שאמר משה להק' כשרצה לכלות את ישראל (ו)למה יאמרו מצרים [לאמר] ברעה [וגו'], וינחם י"י על הרעה. ובמקום אחר מבלתי יכולת י"י וגו' וישחטם במדבר וגו', ואמר לו הק' סלחתי כדבריך:

Rashbam in Bereishit 32:11, 13 highlights what is already evident in the Torah: Ya’akov’s deep gratitude to God even in the face of difficult circumstances. Ya’akov recognizes that he is not truly entitled to anything that God has promised him, inasmuch as he has had plenty of failings of his own in his relationship with God. He therefore merely asks God to act for the sake of divine glory, but not out of obligation to him.

I think this approach to the divine-human relationship has always appealed to me, and I have thus always had a problem with genres of post-Holocaust theology that focus on anger towards God and even talk about nullification of the covenant between God and Israel. I don’t begrudge anyone the right to get angry at God—I have at times felt that way myself—any more than I would so for any relationship that features a range of emotions. But when people use personal pain as a fulcrum for leveraging a new theology, I become uncomfortable. Are we really entitled to anything such that we can really demand that level of divine compliance, particularly when we cannot possibly as humans transcend our own perception of the world and see a larger picture? Isn’t it one of the most striking features of being alive that we are so out of no action—and certainly not merit—of our own? [In the words of R. Eliezer Hakappar in Mishnah Avot 4:22: שעל כרחך אתה נוצר ועל כרחך אתה נולד ועל כרחך אתה חי ועל כרחך אתה מת.] How, then, can we ever see ourselves as anything but in the black as far as our lot in life goes?

Perhaps I am overly privileged and optimistic. And I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t a brit between God and Israel that has terms. But haven’t those terms more or less been met? We still exist, we still have a relationship with God, and we still have a foothold in the Land of Israel. I think Rashbam reminds us here, through his analysis of Ya’akov, that we sometimes forget the baseline of privilege that we enjoy nationally and personally, even if there remains a great deal of pain, uncertainty and fear.

Vayishlah II: Safety in Numbers

2007-11-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

המחנה האחת - לשון נקבה הוא, כדכת' אם תחנה עלי מחנה:

הנשאר - לשון זכר. הרבה מצינו תיבות פעמים זכר פעמים נקבה. כמו השמש יצא על הארץ, ותך השמש. רוח סערה עושה דברו, ורוח באה מעבר המדבר ויגע בארבע פינות הבית:

עשו לקח את נשיו מבנות כנען - המדקדק יתן לב כי בפרשה ראשונה של תולדות יצחק נאמר יהודית בת בארי החתי, בשמת בת אלון החתי, מחלת בת ישמעאל, ובפרשה זו לא הוזכר בת בארי כלל, לא שמה ולא שם אביה, אבל [אלון] וישמעאל אביהן של שתי נשיו הראשונות הוזכרו, שהוחלפו שמות הבנות כאשר מצינו בכמה מקומות. בשמת בת אלון נקראת כאן עדה בת אלון, ומחלת בת ישמעאל נקראת כאן בשמת. לכן יש לומר יהודית בת בארי מתה בלא בנים, אבל בת אלון ובת ישמעאל היו להם בנים המפורשים כאן. ואהליבמה בת ענה בת צבעון החוי לקח אחרי כן אחר שהלך לו לשבת בהר שעיר ונתחתן בבני שעיר החורי כ[ד]כת' לפנינו כי אהליבמה היתה בת ענה בן צבעון בן שעיר החורי, וגם תמנע פילגש אליפז כתובה שם בבני שעיר. ולפי שאהליבמה אשתו אחרונה היתה, לפיכך מזכיר אותה ואת בניה בכל הפרשיות האילו לבסוף:

A very brief comment on a strategy that I have already seen a number of times in Rashbam’s commentary, which strikes me as distinctive to a peshat and/or literary approach.

Rashbam notes that the phrase המחנה האחת והכהו in Bereishit 32:9 mixes male and female genders. His response: There are many other cases of such gender imprecision in the Torah. Similarly, in Bereishit 36:2, towards the end of the parashah, he notes that Esav’s wives as reported in that chapter do not match those detailed in 26:34 and 28:9. His response: Names are inconsistent all over the Bible.

This strategy is interesting, in that it doesn’t actually solve the problem head-on; it questions the assumption behind the question and thereby dismisses it: Who says genders are always fixed for nouns? Who says that people’s names are always recorded consistently? It strikes me that this sort of strategy is particularly attractive to someone who sees there entire enterprise as an attempt to learn about a text, such that one is open to questioning one’s assumptions based on what one finds in the text. Someone who is primarily interested in ideas and concepts, on the other hand, is more likely to stick with their premises and find ways to generate meaning out of the problem at hand.

[For other examples of struggling with "anomalous" grammatical forms, see Bereishit 30:38-39 and Shemot 1:10.]

Vayishlah I: Confronting One’s Past

2007-11-22T08:42:00.000-08:00

(ה) ויצו אותם לאמר - צוה אותם ואמר להם כה תאמרון. והשלוחים לא ידעו דאגתו של יעקב:

עם לבן גרתי - כאשר ידעת במצות אבי ואמי. שלא יחשוב בשבילי ברח:

(ז) באנו אל אחיך אל עשו - ומצאת חן בעיניו כאשר אמרת, וגם הנה הוא מתוך ששמח בביאתך ובאהבתו אותך, הולך לקראתך וארבע מאות איש עמו לכבודך. זהו עיקר פשוטו. וכן גם הנה הוא יוצא לקראתך וראך ושמח בלבו:

(ח) ויירא יעקב - בלבו, שאעפ"י שהראה לשלוחים כי לכבודו מתכוין, הוא לא האמין שמחשבת עשו לטובה אלא לרעה:

(כג) ויקם בלילה הוא - נתכוין לברוח דרך אחרת ולפיכך עבר הנחל בלילה, כמו שמצינו בדוד בברחו מפני אבשלום בדרכים הללו של ירדן ומחנים שעבר יעקב ובלילה, כמו כן ויאמרו אל דוד קומו עברו [מהרה] את המים וגו' ויקם דוד וכל העם אשר אתו ויעברו את הירדן עד אור הבוקר עד אחד לא נעדר אשר לא עבר את הירדן וגו' ודוד בא מחנים ואבשלום עבר את הירדן וגו':

(כה) ויאבק - מלאך עמו שלא יוכל לברוח ויראה קיום [הבטחתו] של הק' שלא יזיקהו עשו:

Rashbam’s take on the encounter between Ya’akov and Esav is fascinating.

First, he emphasizes that there was no concrete evidence of Esav’s hostile intentions. In fact, all indicators point in the direction of reconciliation! When the messengers return to Ya’akov, reporting that they have met Esav, and saying, in Bereishit 32:7, וגם הלך לקראתך וארבע מאות איש עמו, they are reporting Esav’s benign intentions. Rashbam notes that the לקראתך is also used in Shemot 4:14 to describe Aharon’s loving greeting of Moshe in the desert after the revelation at the burning bush. The 400 men marching with Esav are intended to be a welcoming party to show Ya’akov honor. [This interpretation is not at all necessarily as simple as Rashbam claims, as the word לקראת is often used in hostile contexts—see Bemidbar 20:20 for just one of many examples. But he does open our eyes to realizing that it can be read the other way here.] And even though Ya’akov himself understands this, he still cannot believe that there is not a trap somewhere lying in wait.

Second, he casts Ya’akov’s nighttime crossing of the Yabbok stream—detailed in Bereishit 32:23-24—as an attempt to escape. Rather than read this story as narrating Ya’akov’s effort to keep his family out of the way while he braces for the inevitable moment of confronting Esav, Rashbam casts him as terrified and looking for any way out. ויותר יעקב לבדו—Ya’akov was the only one left, he being the last person to be evacuated, and at that moment, an angel is sent to cut off his escape route, to force him to have the encounter with Esav that he so desperately wanted to avoid.

This interpretation highlights a Ya’akov plagued by doubt, regret and fear. Despite the positive signs from Esav, he cannot believe that it will end well. He doubts the divine promises to keep him safe, and tries to turn tail and leave. Only an emissary of God is able to bring him back to his destined path. Ya’akov ends up projecting outward his own insecurities, and Rashbam’s reading gives us insight into the ways in which Ya’akov must have had remorse about his earlier behavior and a fear that he could never make it right. The story thus becomes as much about Ya’akov confronting himself and his own past as it is about his encounter with his brother. [For more thoughts in this direction, see Rashbam's comments on 32:29, where he suggests that the injury that Ya'akov suffers at the hand of the angel is in fact a punishment for trying to evade God's master plan.]

Vayeitzei II: What about the women?

2007-11-17T19:55:00.000-08:00

ותקרא את שמה דינה - ולא נכתבה הודאה על לדת הבת לדעת למה נקראת כן, שאין מודים על הבת כמו על הבן. ולהודיעך בא, שכל בני יעקב היו זכרים חוץ מזו. וכן בת אשר סרח. בכל שבעים נפש לא היו רק שתי בנות, יוכבד וסרח:

One of the most jarring things about the Tanakh to a contemporary reader in Western society is the way in which it simply devotes far less time and detail to women than it does to men. Whether one approaches this point critically or apologetically, it simply cannot be denied that this pattern neither matches our reality nor the commitment of virtually all—irrespective of religious perspective and lifestyle—to the spiritual life of women as a critical component of contemporary Jewish life. This point begs דרשני, some avenue of explanation, if the Tanakh is to be a guiding force in our lives today.

In the midst of a long narrative about the birth of Ya’akov’s children, 11 boys in all, we are told in Bereishit 30:21 that Leah also had a daughter, Dinah. This announcement is almost a side point, with no etymology given for her name (unlike all the others), and her seeming irrelevance to the natal arms race going on throughout the parashah between Rahel and Leah. More important, Dinah is often genealogically invisible. She is indeed mentioned as part of the count of 70 who descend to Egypt with Ya’akov, but she is not reckoned as a tribe, never given a distinct blessing and Bereishit 35:22 (as well as I Divrei Hayamim 2:1-2) simply states that Ya’akov had twelve children. [I will never forget when my then three-and-a-half year old daughter exclaimed upon hearing this verse when I learned it with her last year, “But there are thirteen!”]

This is, in my mind, one of the first places in the Torah where one truly needs to confront the issue of gender in terms of who the protagonists in the narrative are. The first couple obviously includes a man and a woman and Avraham, Yitzhak and Ya’akov are all paired with women with interesting and defining personalities that reach out at us from the story. But with Ya’akov’s children, we get the first glimpse of a dynamic that will expand over time to phrases like שש מאות אלף רגלי הגברים (Shemot 11:37), the directive אל תגשו אל אשה (Shemot 19:15) and the general omission of women from the censuses taken in Bemidbar, all of which point to a marginal role for women, wherein they are largely ignored or viewed as adjunct players.

Again, departing from the assumption that women can no longer be treated as adjuncts in our contemporary religious world—quite independent of the question of whether an egalitarian approach is the solution or that of the Beis Ya’akov school system—how do we best relate to these passages and teach them to our children, especially our daughters? I am always confronted with two main options: 1) I can note that there were many women present at the time, but the details of their lives were simply not considered important by the Torah. We might approach things differently today, but the Torah reflects its own reality and historical context. Dinah is mentioned here only because of the story we will later hear about her being raped (another instance of הקדמה!), but any number of other daughters of Ya’akov (some of whom seem to be referenced in Bereishit 37:35—ויקמו כל בניו וכל בנתיו—see R. Yehudah’s view on this verse cited by Rashi) were simply not significant enough to mention. This approach has the advantage of being historically honest and accurate, though it runs the spiritual risk of distancing ourselves from the Torah by locating it in a time, place and idiom far from our own and thus jeopardizing an intuitive sense of its eternal hold on us. 2) I can claim, in a case like this, that Ya’akov actually had only 12 sons and one daughter, and no other children. Similarly, in the count of 70 people headed down to Egypt, there were only three women: Dinah, Serah and Yokheved. The Torah would always mention women when they were present; it just happens that there were none. [One deals with Bereishit 37:35 by saying it refers to daughters and granddaughters, i.e., the three women named above (Ramban) or to daughters-in-law (see R. Nehemiah cited in the above Rashi).] The advantage here is that I assert the Torah’s interest in women as principals, when they happen to be there, and thus the text is a model for the active engagement of female personalities that one can relate to regardless of gender. The obvious disadvantage is that it is very hard to sustain this reading in light of the larger context of the Tanakh, especially the 600,000 figure given at the Exodus, which pointedly only counts the adult men.

Rashbam—without, I assume, any concern for the issue I am raising here—blends both approaches in his commentary here. On the one hand, he explains unapologetically that the birth of a girl was simply not as celebratory an event as that of a boy and, therefore, we are given no record of Leah’s thanking God for this child and the corresponding naming. On the other hand, he asserts that there indeed were only three women in Yitzhak’s clan (if we exclude daughters-in-law).

I honestly don’t know which approach is better for raising Jewish girls who we want to self-understand as full participants in Jewish life. In some ways, this problem is just part of the larger tension of peshat and derash that gets played out in Rashbam’s commentary. The peshat is (almost) always more satisfying as a read of the text and as an honest assessment of where our own assumptions differ from biblical ones. But derash is what makes the Torah relevant to us in an ongoing way, what transforms an ancient Near Easten text situated in the Iron Age and helps us understand it as God’s eternal Torah. How can we be faithful to one while maintaining the goals of the other?

Vayeitzei I: Just the Facts, Ma’am

2007-11-14T20:06:00.000-08:00

ויקח - אחת: מאבני המקום - כדכת' ויקח את האבן אשר שם מראשותיו: על כן קרא שמו לוי - יש לומר שיעקב קרא לו שם:

I don’t want to jump the gun too early in this process (particularly since we haven’t yet gotten to Rashbam’s famous comment at the beginning of Parashat Vayeshev), but I think we can begin to say some useful things about what peshat means for Rashbam. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to me that one of his core criteria for considering something peshat, is that it requires only the facts and details of the Torah itself to understand it. That is to say, once I need to interpolate external information in order to make my interpretation cohere, I have left the world of peshat for that of derash. A peshat interpretation reads like a planned, authored work of literature, prepared with its reader in mind. The peshat acts on the reader, who can passively absorb its meaning. Derash is an active process, whereby the reader acts on the text, exploiting its inconsistencies and lacunae to make points that find their origin outside of the text itself. Peshat is sacred Scripture, to be understood on its own terms, derash is religious language, where the text becomes the sacred lexicon for expressing broader religious insights and truths. We will have to test this hypothesis as we continue.

In any event, there are (at least) two places in our parashah where Rashbam implicitly assaults the midrashic read of the text cited by Rashi and offers a way of reading the text without any esoteric presumptions. The first is in Bereishit 28:11, where Rashi notes the discrepancy between the plural form מאבני, possibly suggesting that Ya’akov took multiple rocks and placed them under his head, and 28:18’s use of האבן, indicating a single rock. This then becomes an opportunity to assert that a miracle occurred here, whereby the multiple rocks were fused into one after fighting over which one would merit supporting Ya’akov’s head as he slept. Rashbam rejects this and asserts a reading that eliminates any need to posit this extracanonical story: ויקח מאבני can just mean that he took one of the many stones present, and this then matches perfectly with the subsequent description of Ya’akov’s removal of the single rock that lay under his head.

Second, in Bereishit 29:34, we are told that קרא שמו לוי, which distinguishes Levi, Ya’akov’s third child, as being the only child that is not named with the female form of קרא, suggesting that someone other than Leah named him. Rashi cites the midrash that this alludes to the angel Gavriel’s intervention in the naming of Levi, as a portent of the latter’s eventual priestly character. But Rashbam turns us back to the text and suggests that it must be that Ya’akov is the anonymous male namer here, thus freeing us from engaging angels or other beings that have not been introduced as part of the story.

For more examples of this sort of dynamic, see Rashbam on Bereishit 21:9 (where he claims that the word מצחק has no sinister connotation, but merely indicates an age of sufficient maturity such that Sarah realizes the time has come to act to secure Yitzhak’s primacy in the household), 25:27 (where interprets the phrase יושב אהלים to be a simple reference to shepherding, as opposed to a more esoteric reference to the study of some sort of primeval Torah), and 27:1 (where he insists that Yitzhak’s poor eyesight is solely a function of age, as opposed to post traumatic stress disorder from the Akeidah or Esav’s intermarriages).

In none of these cases do I think that Rashbam is necessarily rejecting the alternative reading; it is just that it is not peshat. He is invested in defending the notion that the Torah can also be read as a book without necessarily also seeing it as an esoteric repository of wisdom and magical tales.

Toledot III: Enriching the Narrative

2007-11-14T19:58:00.001-08:00

אם לוקח יעקב - דרך חכמה אמרה רבקה ליצחק להרחיק יעקב מעשו ולא גילתה לו שבשביל שטימת אחיו עשתה כן:

Why is Ya’akov sent away to Lavan’s house back in Aram? According to Bereishit 27:42-45, it is in order ot run away from Esav, who, in his rage over having been robbed of his birthright and blessing, threatens to kill his brother. But according to Bereishit 27:46-28:9, it is in order to find a wife from the old country and to avoid intermarrying with the local Canaanite women. Indeed, two different verbs are used to command Ya’akov’s departure: In 27:43, Ya’akov is told קום ברח—run away, escape (a verb also used in Bereishit 35:1, 7 and Hoshea 12:13)—whereas in 28:2, he is told קום לך—go, travel. These two modes of departure really stand independent of one another: in one, Ya’akov flees in fear from danger; in the other, he strides off with purpose and mission. In one, he quickly abandons the land of his youth, in the other he walks in the footsteps of his ancestors, who also made purposeful journeys from one end of the Euphrates to the other. Both are critical aspects of Ya’akov’s narrative and history, but each stands on its own.

Rashbam, in keeping with his literarily sensitive approach to the Torah, links these two and introduces a marvelously complex dynamic into an already dramatic story. In his comment here, he casts Rivkah as concealing from Yitzhak the fact that Esav was in a murderous rage, instead preferring to enlist his support for Ya’akov’s departure by invoking the trump card of intermarriage. In this reading, the entire plot line about the fear of marrying Canaanite women is ultimately a tool Rivkah uses in order to get Yitzhak to play a role in hastening Ya’akov’s escape. The drama of Yitzhak and Rivkah operating in parallel universes—she firmly rooted in the oracle she heard and he groping in the dark—thus sees itself through to the end. They are never truly working as a team; even at this late stage in the story, Rivkah is still concealing things from him and finding ways to effect what she knows to be the divine will.

Yet another great example of a more linear reading of the Torah as a unitary narrative and the ways in which it adds nuances that transcend the individual narrative components.

Toledot II: Morality independent of Torah

2007-11-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

עקב אשר שמע אברהם בקולי - על העקידה דכת' עקב אשר שמעת בקולי: וישמור משמרתי - כגון מילה דכת' בה ואתה את בריתי תשמור: מצותי - כגון מצות שמונה ימים דכת' כאשר ציוה אותו אלהים: חוקותי ותורותי - לפי עיקר פשוטו כל המצות הניכרות כגון גזל ועריות וחימוד ודינין והכנסת אורחים, כלם היו נוהגין קודם מתן תורה אלא שנתחדשו ונתפרש[ו] לישראל וכרתו ברית לקיימן:

Bereishit 26:5 contains the intriguing claim that Avraham was a faithful servant of God, observing, God says, משמרתי מצותי חקותי ותורתי. These are charged terms: Which mitzvot was Avraham observing? Which חקים? Aside from the exegetical point at stake here, there is a much larger question: What did human (and Jewish/Israelite) morality look like before the revelation at Sinai?

Rashi, based on midrashim, jumps in here to tell us that Avraham observed משמרתי—the peripheral restrictions set up to protect against violation of the Torah’s core prohibitions, such as not marrying relatives slightly more distant than those listed in Vayikra 18 and 20. He also observed מצות—those things that a person could intuit on one’s own, such as the prohibitions on theft and murder—as well as חקים—commands that have no intrinsic meaning (according to this midrashic tradition), such as the ban on eating pig or wearing mixtures of wool and linen. And finally, he kept תורתי—the oral traditions that accompany the written Torah, those traditions that go all the way back to the revelation to Moshe at Sinai.

Rashbam takes these verses in a very different direction, albeit building on Rashi’s (his grandfather’s) explanation of מצות as commands that form a kind of natural law that is intuitive to all and can be generated by reason alone. Rashbam carefully explains every term here to refer to something that is completely independent of the covenant at Sinai. Avraham heeded God by following the command to bind Yitzhak, the משמרת here refers to the command of circumcision, the מצות refer to the timing of circumcision, and חקים and תורות are just synonymous words for the category of natural law already spelled out by Rashi.

This approach obviously has some significant literary and historical benefits, in that it allows the Torah to read as a coherent work from beginning to end, without presuming some sort of anachronistic knowledge of Torah (with a capital T) by Avraham hundreds of years before Sinai. In that sense, it fits with Rashbam’s larger project of peshat—which I would increasingly define as what the Torah would mean if we just read it like a book. But there is also some important theology at stake here. For Rashi, there is an implication that one cannot be fully righteous without having a stake in the Jewish covenant, and the rabbinic version of it at that. The written and oral Torot are eternal and ubiquitious, available to the righteous independent of the axes of time and history. For Rashbam, Torah enters the world in history, built on a foundation of morality and a human-divine relationship that stand independent of it. The Jewish path is thus not necessarily the exclusive pathway to God, though it is for Jews. And here is the last piece of this commentary that is so intriguing. For Jews, Rashbam argues, the convenant at Sinai not only adds new obligations and supplements older ones, it casts morality itself in new terms, as part of the ברית, the covenant that now defines the relationship between God and Israel. Natural law, once generated by reason alone, is now, for the Jew, a convenantal matter as well, and part and parcel of our relationship with God. [For another example of this approach to renewal of old mitzvot at Sinai, see Rambam’s commentary on Mishnah Hullin 7:6; though note that he only discusses “ritual” mitzvot there.] The tensions between these worldviews are worth exploring further and I invite comments to try to flesh out the implications.

Toledot I: Oracles

2007-11-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

(כג) ורב יעבוד צעיר - ולכך אהבה את יעקב שאהבו הקב"ה וכדכת' ואהב את יעקב: (כח) אוהבת את יעקב - שהיתה מכרת בתומתו וגם ממה שאמר הק' ורב יעבוד צעיר. והוצרך להקדים כאן אהבת יצחק לעשו ורבקה את יעקב להודיע מה שכתב לפנינו יצחק רצה לברך עשו ורבקה הערימה לברך את יעקב. (יג) עלי קללתך - עלי ועל צוארי, כלומר [אל תירא] כי היתה בוטחת במה שאמר לה הק' ורב יעבד צעיר:

At this critical moment in the prehistory of Yitzhak and Esav, Rivkah is privileged to receive a communication from God about the fate of the children in her womb. Seeking the reason for her pain, she is told in Bereishit 25:23 that a transnational struggle is unfolding within her, with the younger child destined to triumph over the older. Rashbam sees the entire subsequent narrative as emanating from this verse, which anchors Rivkah’s attachment to Ya’akov and justifies her machinations to make sure that he emerges as Yitzhak’s true heir. Yitzhak, Rashbam seems to imply, was unaware of this oracle, and, as a result, preferred Esav based on more earthly considerations. Rivkah, aware of the deeper historical implications, favored Ya’akov. This disparity helps fill in the gap in Bereishit 25:28, where we are told, without explanation that Rivkah loved Ya’akov more than ( to the exclusion of?) Esav. Her favoritism was rooted in this divine prediction and her sense that she was to help realize it. It also explains her confidence in Bereishit 26:13 when assuring Ya’akov that she would accept the brunt of any curse that might result from tricking his father—she knew that the plan had to succeed, as it was divinely ordained. Yitzhak, on the other hand, deaf to this oracle (and later blind), follows a different path. We thus have here another classic example of Rashbam’s use of הקדמה, an approach that sees the narrative of the Torah as setting us up for plotlines that will later emerge.

[For other examples of this dynamic in this parashah, see Rashbam on Bereishit 25:34 and 26:15.]

One other note: the ancient oracle of Delphi was famous for both predicting the future as well as doing so in a way that was marvelously ambiguous such that the acts and follies of human beings often ended up shaping its true meaning. Another approach to the above oracle is that Yitzhak did indeed hear it, but interpreted it differently. Part of the richness of Hebrew is the fact that word order in a sentence does not on its own determine what is the subject and what is the object. [Indeed, removing this ambiguity is often the entire function of the direct object designator את.] Take, for example, the first phrase of Yeshayahu 40:19: הפסל נסך חרש. This clearly means that the smith (subject) makes a molten statue (object), despite the fact that “statue” is the first word in the phrase. Similarly, here, Yitzhak may well have heard the same words, ורב יעבד צעיר, but would have understood צעיר to be the subject of the sentence, which would then be predicting that, after a long struggle, the younger brother would indeed serve the older, and thus he reserved his greatest affection for Esav. Rivkah, on the other hand, heard differently, and thus the tragic arc of this narrative unfolds based on dueling interpretations of the divine will. And perhaps like the Delphic oracle, the meaning of God’s words here were ultimately meant to be shaped by human will and initiative, with Rivkah gaining the upper hand.

Hayyei Sarah III: Genre

2007-11-01T20:06:00.001-07:00

ואומר י"י אלהי אדוני אברהם וגו' - כל אריכות דברים להודיעם שמאת הק' יצא הדבר:

One of the most striking things about our parashah is the repetitive nature of the narrative. Not only do we hear about the Avraham’s servant’s journey in great detail, but we then here him retell it in all its picayune glory to Rivkah’s family. Why is this repetition necessary?

My question itself presumes something about the Torah: that it only tells us that which is necessary. Indeed, many voices in Hazal approach the Torah in this way, assuming it to prize parsimony of language and they relate to it as a mythic, mystical work where every word is (and must be) pregnant with meaning. That is why this week’s parashah was so troubling to those who would seek deep purpose in every line of the Torah. Consider the following midrash in Bereishit Rabbah 60:

א"ר אחא יפה שיחתן של עבדי בתי אבות מתורתן של בנים, פרשתו של אליעזר שנים וג' דפים הוא אומרה ושונה, ושרץ מגופי תורה ואין דמו מטמא כבשרו אלא מריבוי המקרא, רשב"י אומר טמא הטמא ר"א בן יוסי אומר זה וזה.

Said R. Aha: “The idle chatter of the servants of our forefathers is [apparently] more precious than the teachings of their children! The parashah discussing the adventures of Eliezer (the midrash assumes the anonymous servant of Chapter 24 to be none other than דמשק אליעזר, who is referred to in Bereishit 15:2 as the still-childless Avraham’s presumed heir) can take up two or three pages (of parchment when written out in a Torah scroll) and is told twice. On the other hand, with regard to the impurity of reptiles—which is a fundamental principle in the Torah—we only learn that the blood of reptiles defiles as powerfully as their flesh from an exegetical inference! (The midrash then proceeds to give the inference from Vayikra 11:29 that produces this law; see further at Sifra Shemini Parashah 5:2.)

R. Aha hardly knows what to do with our chapter; it is so out of character with what he expects from the Torah that he can only conclude that there is some mysterious counterintuitive importance to the stories of our ancestors that we must somehow find a way to appreciate. Rashbam, on Bereishit 24:42, cuts the Gordian knot here and simply understands the genre of the Torah as sometimes being quite different from what R. Aha expected. The Torah indeed tells stories, and those stories often require detail in order to make them compelling and sensible to the reader or the listener. In this case, the lengthy and repetitive telling of the story is critical so that Rivkah’s family will understand how miraculous this match is so that they will quickly send Rivkah back to marry Yitzhak. A simple ויספר להם את כל הדברים האלה—which formulation is indeed found in Bereishit 24:66 when the servant relates the chain of events to Yitzhak—would not have sufficed, since we need to understand how Rivkah’s family came to internalize that מה' יצא הדבר—that this was truly a match made in heaven.

I might also add that this telling also seems to be of great importance in understanding how Rivkah is able to pick up the morning after meeting a stranger at a well to follow him to a land where she has never been to live a life she could not possibly have planned for herself. This story is eerily similar to Avraham’s own journey. But whereas Avraham was given a direct command of לך לך by God, Rivkah receives a more indirect charge through Avraham’s servant and his telling of the momentous events as they unfolded. Without this excruciating level of detail and repetition, Rivkah’s willingness to go seems almost shocking. But with this added telling of the story, we can both admire and understand her.

Hayyei Sarah II: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

2007-11-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

השוקת - מלשון וישק את צאן לבן, שם דבר כמו בושת מלשון גם בוש לא יבושו:

והאיש משתאה - מלשון תשאה שממה והתי"ו כמו תי"ו בישתבח מן שבח, וישתמר חוקות עמרי מלשון שמר. כלומר משתומם ומחשב על שאמרה לו זאת הנערה גם לגמליך אשאב. הבין שזימן לו הק' מה שביקש. והמפרש לשון שתייה אי איפשר, מפני שהאלף שבו לא תהיה בלשון שתייה. ועוד שלא אמרה לו רבקה להשקות את גמליו עד לאחר שתייתו ואז התחיל להיות מחשב ותוהא:

מקום לנו ללין - מקום לנו בביתך, ולמה אנו צריכין? ללין, לבית לינה. שם דבר הוא כמו כי יהיה ריב בין אנשים מן וירב בלבן. בין דין לדין [מן דן אנכי. כמו כן לין] שם דבר מן וילן שם בלילה [ה]הוא. אבל היא שאמרה גם מקום ללון, פירושו ללון גופכם כמו לקום, לשוב מצרימה, ואילו היא אמרה גם מקום לכם כמו שאמרו הם מקום לנו, היה לה לומר ללין כמו שאמרו הם, שהיה משמע גם מקום לכם, ולמה? לבית לינה. אבל ללון אין צריך פירוש, שהרי משמע ללון בו בני אדם. זהו עיקר פשוטו למדקדק לשון הקודש:

Anyone who has ever studied Hebrew grammar, whether by taking an Ulpan, going to day school or just cuddling up with a copy of 201 Hebrew Verbs takes it for granted that there are seven בנינים, that “normal” Hebrew verbs are composed of three-letter roots, and that nouns are often grounded in those same roots.

Rashbam’s above comments, however, reveal how much we take for granted based on the painstaking work of our medieval predecessors. First, Rashbam notes that the word שוקת—used in Bereishit 24:20—is a noun, and that its root comes from the verb להשקות, to cause others to drink.

But even the explanatory move I just pulled depends on knowing how to get back to a Hebrew infinitive form, which is itself something Rashbam is working out in the third comment above, on Bereishit 24:23! There, he notes the subtle difference between two similar words in our parashah. When the servant asks Rivkah for a place to stay, he inquires if there is place for him ללין, which Rashbam reads as a lamed followed by a noun form of לין, meaning a place to sleep, parallel to the noun form of דין, meaning judgment. But when Rivkah answers, she says that indeed she has a place ללון, which Rashbam takes to be the infinitive verb form, parallel to other forms like לקום (to get up) or לשוב (to return). Though I am not at all sure a contemporary grammarian would agree with this analysis—I am fairly certain s/he would not—Rashbam’s work here is part of the pioneering effort of medieval Biblicists to sort out the rules we take for granted, and must always be appreciated in that light.

And indeed, the second comment here reveals a work still in process. Commenting on the word משתאה in Bereishit 24:21, Rashbam notes that there were people who saw the verb לשתות—to drink—in this word, and they saw here some kind of reference to the servant’s drinking from Rivkah at this point in the story. Rashbam points out, rightly, that this cannot work with the narrative, since the servant had already drunk by the time the camels were given water, and it is only after all of this that this verb appears. But as he tries to make the grammatical point that the tav in that word is not really a core part of it, we see how primitive the available terminology remained at that point. We would just say: “Of course, that is a hitpa’el form and the root is שאה!” But Rashbam must appeal to patterns and intuition, noting that we seem to have something parallel to the word ישתבח, which, he assumes his reader will concede, is obviously related to שבח (praise). Once one can imagine that tav dropping out, perhaps it can be extended to this case as well. [For other interesting comments in this mode, see Bereishit 26:26; 28:12; 30:11, 37.]

Hayyei Sarah I: Choosing Distinctiveness

2007-11-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

ברך את אברהם [בכל] - להודיע האמור לפנינו שלא שלח עבדיו לקחת אשה ממשפחתו מחמת חוסר נשים בארץ כנען שלא יהו רוצין להזדווג לו, שהרי נתברך בכל וכל העולם מתאוים להזדווג לו, אבל הוא לא רצה כי אם ממשפחתו. וזהו שאמר העבד וי"י ברך את אדוני מאד ויגדל, ולכך הוצרך לפרש תחילה ברך את אברהם בכל. כמו וחם [הוא] אבי כנען:

Bereishit 24 opens with the intriguing phrase:וה' ברך את אברהם בכל —that God blessed Avraham with “everything.” Bava Batra 16b features a number of interesting interpretations that see this phrase as hinting at whether Avraham in fact had a daughter or not (with one view suggesting that he had a daughter that he actually named בכל!). These interpretations share an approach that sees this comment as somewhat disconnected from what follows. Rashbam, true to his attentiveness to the pattern of הקדמה, suggests that this passage is in fact intended to set up the next piece of the story—the search for a wife for Yitzhak.

Avraham, Rashbam argues, was among the most famous and beloved people in C’na’an (a fact that indeed seems borne out by the way בני חת treat him in chapter 23), and this is what is meant by his being blessed with “everything”. Canaanite women were lining up around the block for Yitzhak, and it was all Avraham could do to stick to his principles and find a wife for Yitzhak from his own clan.

Not only does this reading help tie the pieces together, but it makes even more poignant and powerful Avraham’s decision to choose distinctiveness in the context of such a welcoming culture. This is surely a lesson for contemporary American Jews; Rashbam’s comment here transforms Avraham from a lonely man standing apart in true faith from the rest of the world into a successful, beloved figure who knew that only he could take the necessary steps to ensure his own spiritual survival.

Vayera III: Akeidah

2007-10-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

ויהי אחר הדברים האלה - כל מקום שנאמר אחר הדברים האלה מחובר על הפרשה שלמעלה. אחר הדברים האלה, שהרג אברהם את המלכים אמר לו הק', אל תירא אברם, מן האומות. ויהי אחר הדברים האלה, שנולד יצחק, ויוגד לאברהם לאמר עוד ובתואל ילד את רבקה. וכן אחר הדברים האלה, שהגיד מרדכי על בגתן ותרש, גדל המלך אחשורוש את המן, שרצה להרוג את מרדכי והועיל לו מה שהציל את המלך ונתלה המן. אף כאן אחר הדברים שכרת אברהם ברית לאבימלך לו ולנינו ולנכדו של אברהם ונתן לו שבע כבשות הצאן וחרה אפו של הק' על זאת שהרי ארץ פלשתים בכלל גבול ישראל והק' ציוה עליהם לא תחיה כל נשמה וגם ביהושע מטילין על ערי חמשת סרני פלשתים גורל, לכן והאלהים נסה את אברהם קינתרו וציערו כדכת' הנסה דבר אליך תלאה, על נסותם את י"י, מסה ומריבה, בחנני י"י ונסני. כלומר נתגאיתה בבן שנתתיו לכרות ברית ביניכם ובין בניהם, ועתה לך והעלהו לעולה ויראה מה הועילה כריתות ברית שלך. וכן מצאתי אחרי כן במדרש של שמואל ויהי ארון י"י בארץ פלשתים שבעה חדשים. כת' את שבע כבשות הצאן תקח מידי. אמר לו הק' אתה נתתה לו שבע כבשות, חייך שבניו עושים שבע מלחמות עם בניך ונוצחין אותן. ד"א חייך שבניו הורגים שבע צדיקים מבניך ואילו הן שמשון חפני ופנחס שאול ושלשה בניו. ד"א חייך שבניו מחריבים שבע משכנות, ואילו הן אוהל מועד וגלגל נוב ושילה [וגבעון] ובית עולמים [תרין]. ד"א שארון מחזיר בשדה פלשתים שבעה חדשים.

I was going to post on the substance of Rashbam’s innovative approach to the Akeidah, but there is already a thoughtful post on this passage at ADDeRabbi.

I will just add these brief thoughts:

1) On Bereishit 21:22 and 22:1 (both cited above, the latter being the lead verse in the Akeidah narrative), Rashbam emphasizes the importance of taking terms like ויהי בעת ההיא and אחר הדברים האלה very seriously. These terms, he argues, are always intended to link what is about to be told with the immediately prior material. The vision Avraham receives in Bereishit 15:1 immediately follows his defeat of some prominent regional powers in chapter 14; God’s promise of protection there is to assuage any of Avraham’s fears that he will suffer retribution from the political allies of the defeated kings. The story about the treaty between Avraham and Avimelekh narrated in Bereishit 21:22-34 directly flows from Avimelekh’s realization that a powerful God is quite obviously behind any man whose 90-year-old wife is able to give birth. This spurs Avimelekh to seal an alliance with Avraham as soon as possible. Similarly, this (problematic) alliance forms the backdrop for what Rashbam portrays as the somewhat cruel divine punishment of the Akeidah, described in the above post. This is yet another example of how the Rashbam reads the Torah as a text heavily oriented towards its readers, a text that flows from one section to the next, in contrast to the midrashic comments cited in Rashi on 22:1, which are content to link the Akeidah to an earlier, though not immediately prior passage.

2) I suspect that Rashbam’s insistence that נסה means “testing” in the sense of “tormenting” and perhaps even “torturing”, is also an indirect swipe at Bereishit Rabbah’s attempt here to soften the meaning of this word—in light of Tehillim 60:6—to mean that Avraham was raised up as a banner (נס) through this and other trials, in order to make him greater. Rashbam will have none of that and prefers to read the story as God taking harsh steps against Avraham in response to the latter’s poor judgment.

3) There is an article on Rashbam on the Akeidah that I have not read, but which is by a prominent Rashbam scholar and is likely worth looking at:

שרה יפת, "פירוש רשב"ם לפרשת העקדה: פשוטו של מקרא או מדרשו?" המקרא בראי מפרשיו, 349-366.

‫

Vayera II: The Devil is in the Details

2007-10-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

כחום היום - מה צורך לכתוב כחום היום? אלא להודיעך כי בלוט כת' ויבאו [שני] המלאכים סדמה בערב, ולכך אמר להם לוט סורו נא אל בית עבדכם ולינו, אבל אברהם לפי שבאו אליו כחום היום בבקר שאין דרך אורחים ללון אלא לאכול ולעבור, לפיכך לא אמר להם אברהם ללון אלא וסעדו לבכם ואחר תעבורו:

ואל הבקר רץ אברהם - לפי שאמר להם פת לחם, דבר מועט, לפי שדרכם נחוץ ללכת, הוצרך לרוץ ולמהר, לפי שאמר להם מעט ועשה הרבה, ולהגיד חשיבותו של אברהם נכתב כל זה:

ויקח חמאה וחלב - לפי פשוטו של מקרא לא הוצרך לפרש שהביא את פת לחם על השלחן אלא התוספת שלא אמר להם הוצרך לומר שהביא. הבאת פת על השלחן אינו חידוש, אבל החמאה והחלב והבשר שאינו מזומן לכל האורחים הוצרך לפרש:

A number of comments on this week’s parashah reveal Rashbam’s penchant for detail, and his conviction that the Torah is a carefully crafted narrative where even minor phrases are intended to convey a richer picture of the scene at hand. Whereas much of traditional commentary grows out of an assumption of the Torah’s parsimonius use of language and therefore ascribed deep meaning to every jot and tittle in the Torah—see Mar Ukba’s comment to this effect on Eruvin 21b http://www.mechon-mamre.org/b/l/l2202.htm —Rashbam’s distinctive approach is to identify details that tell us something that enhances our understanding of the narrative itself. Here are three examples:

1) Why does Bereishit 18:1 have to tell us that Avraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the heat of the day? What does this point add? It functions as an explanation for the fact that Avraham does not invite his guests to spend the night. We would hardly expect Avraham to be less hospitable to Lot, and yet it is precisely Lot in Bereishit 19:2 who invites two of these same men to sleep in his home. Why doesn’t Avraham do so as well? The Torah, anticipating our question, notes that while Lot’s guests arrived in S’dom לעת ערב, in the evening, Avraham’s guests came to him in the middle of the day, making such an invitation inappropriate.

2) The beginning of chapter 18 is flooded with the language of speed. Avraham races to Sarah, tells her to hurry up and bake cakes, he then runs to the cattle and rushes to prepare the meat. Rashbam explains that all the hurrying is necessary on account of the fact that he is trying to prepare a full course meal after only promising a loaf of bread, which ought to have taken a relatively short time to bring out. This reveals Avraham’s great quality of promising little but delivering a great deal.

3) The promised bread—and the fruit of Sarah’s labors begun in Bereishit 18:6—mysteriously disappears when Avraham brings the food to his guests in Bereishit 18:8. Rashi offers the explanation that Sarah, in preparation for her pregnancy, was suddenly thrust back into a menstruating state after years of menopause, and this caused the food she had been preparing to become טמא, and thus it had to be discarded. Rashbam sees this omitted detail as pregnant with an entirely different meaning: Of course Avraham brought the bread! What meal doesn’t have bread? The verse only mentions that which was truly significant: all the things that Avraham did not promise but which he brought as extras. This minor “omission” thus highlights again Avraham’s extraordinary hospitality.

Vayera I: Angels

2007-10-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

וירא אליו י"י - היאך? שבאו אליו שלשה אנשים שהיו מלאכים. שבהרבה מקומות כשנראה המלאך קורהו בלשון שכינה כדכת' כי שמי בקרבו, שלוחו כמותו. וכן וירא אליו מלאך י"י בלבת אש מתוך הסנה, וכתו' שם וירא י"י כי סר לראות:

היפלא מי"י - ששלחנו אליך דבר? וכן וי"י המטיר על סדום גפרית ואש מאת י"י מן השמים, הראשון שבפסוק הוא גבריאל והשני שבפסוק הוא הק'. וכן הוא מפורש בספר הגדה:

ויקמו משם האנשים - שנים מהם הלכו לסדום כדכת' ויבאו שני המלאכים סדומה, וגדול שבהם היה מדבר עם אברהם. וזהו שכת' בו וי"י אמר המכסה אני וגו', [וכן] ואברהם עודנו עומד לפני י"י. שני פסוקים אלו מדברים [ב]שלישי:

השופט כל הארץ - ששלחך כאן לא יעשה משפט:

ויאמר ד' - המלאך, [וכן] עומד לפני י"י, לפני המלאך לבקש פניו:

This week’s parashah is full of angels, as God has many tasks to accomplish: notifying Sarah of her impending pregnancy, destroying the city of S’dom, and, according to Rashi, a separate mission to heal Avraham after his recent circumcision. Because of this intense angelic presence in the narrative, we are forced to ask a number of interesting questions: What precisely is the relationship between angels and God? Are angels people? Are they manifestations of God? What does it mean for God to be manifested in human form?

Rashbam lays out his thoughts in Bereishit 18:1, 14, 16, 25, 26 (among other places), all of which I cited above. He is emphatic that God’s “appearance” (וירא) to Avraham is none other than the vision that follows with the three men coming to his tent. Angelic appearances are often cast as an appearance of God’s self, as in the case of Shemot 3:2-4, where an angel appears to Moshe and the narrative continues seamlessly to tell us that God—and not a מלאך—then begins to speak. This, for Rashbam, shows that these terms are interchangeable: God is often revealed through human figures.

I can’t help but think that part of the motivation for this line of interpretation is a desire to deal with the shocking narrative of Bereishit 18:17-33, where God expresses human doubt about concealing things from Avraham, Avraham is described as standing in front of God—as if God is a person standing right there!—Avraham and God square off as equals in a debate over the value of human life, and the passage ends with וילך ה', a highly anthropomorphic picture of God’s departure. Rashbam’s approach addresses all this by asserting that this is indeed a divine being in human form in dialogue with Avraham who gets up and walks away at the end of the conversation!

[I just discovered a similar post over at ADDeRabbi. And thanks for the kind words there!]

[For other comments on angels, see Rashbam on Shemot 13:21.]

Lekh Lekha III: When Peshat is not Peshat

2007-10-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

ודור רביעי ישובו הנה - המפרש דור רביעי של ישראל ישובו הנה לארץ ישראל [טועה הוא]. כי [מאחר] [ש]נתן קצבה של ארבע מאות שנה, מה לנו אם דור רביעי או דור חמישי? והלא מכל מקום יתעכבו ארבע מאות שנה? אלא טעם נתן הקב"ה לדבריו. למה אני צריך לעכב ארבע מאות שנה? [לפי] שאחר דור רביעי של אמוריים ישובו [ישראל] הנה. שהדור מאה [שנה] כאשר נמצא במסכת עדיות, והרי ארבע מאות ארבע[ה] דורות. שאעפ"י שיושבי הארץ חטאו ודינם להקיא הארץ את יושביה, צריך אני להמתין ארבע[ה] דורות כדכתיב פוקד עון אבות על בנים על שלשים ועל רבעים לשנאי, אולי יחזרו הבנים בתשובה כי לא שלם זמן פרעון שאני עתיד ליפרע אליו מן האמוריים החוטאים עד הנה ועד אחר דור רביעי של אמוריים כדכת' על שלשים וגו'. זהו פשוטו:

As we have seen, Rashbam is vigilant in his search for the plain meaning of the text of the Tanakh. But sometimes, the choice is not so simply between פשט, an obvious plain meaning of the text, and דרש, a compelling homiletical interpretation that departs from the plain sense, but between two different plain readings, where different passages in the Torah pull us in divergent directions. What the pashtan like Rashbam then presents as peshat make actually be a highlighting of one set of data over another. I think this is one such example.

[Warning: This post is a bit long; try to stick with it.]

In the haunting scene of ברית בין הבתרים—the dramatic covenant building moment between God and Avraham in Bereishit chapter 15—a sedated Avram is told that his descendants will spend 400 years in oppression in a foreign land. God promises that the oppressing nation will have its accounting and that his progeny will emerge with more wealth than ever before. We then hear the following promise:

וְדוֹר רְבִיעִי יָשׁוּבוּ הֵנָּה כִּי לֹא שָׁלֵם עֲוֹן הָאֱמֹרִי עַד הֵנָּה:

“The fourth generation will return here [to the land of C’na’an], because the culpability of the Amorites will not be complete until then.” A surface reading would suggest that after four generations in Egypt, the people will return. Indeed, there is a simple accounting that leads us to that result: Levi goes down to Egypt, and his son Kehat is the first generation there to be subjected to any cruel treatment by the Egyptians. [Shemot 1:6-8 makes clear that the generation of Ya’akov’s sons died off before the Egyptians turned on בני ישראל.] From Kehat, we go to the second generation of Amram, the third generation of Moshe, and the following generation, the fourth, indeed returns to Eretz C’na’an under Yehoshua. This is a straightforward way of understanding our verse.

The problem is, this accounting of four generations is in tension with the timeline of 400 years a few verses earlier. To get 400 years in Egypt in four generations, requires everyone to be having the kind of unusual late-in-life births that Avraham is singled out for! For this to work out, we would minimally have to assume that Kehat goes down to Egypt as an infant, then has Amram at age 140, and then Amram has Moshe at age 140. We would then get to the boundary of Eretz C’na’an when Moshe was 120 years old and have reached the 400 year mark. [This assumes that it is fair to count the desert time as an extension of the oppression in Egypt. Otherwise, we need to assume these father’s had son’s around the age of 160!] This hardly seems like the plain sense of the verse. Indeed, a passage in the Mekhilta (Pisha 14) already grapples with this problem:

רבי אומר: כתוב אחד אומר, "ועבדום וענו אותם ארבע מאות שנה." וכתוב אחד אומר: "ודור רביעי ישובו הנה." כיצד יתקיימו שני כתובין אלו? אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא: אם עושין תשובה אני גואלם לדורות, ואם לאו אני גואלם לשנים.

One verse says, “And they will serve them and they will oppress them for 400 years,” and another verse says, “the fourth generation will return here.” How can both of these verses coexist? The Holy and Blessed One said: If they repent, then I will redeem them on a scale of generations (which would be considerably shorter, assuming a normal time scale for bearing children), and if not, I will redeem them on a scale of years.

This passage reveals awareness of the fact that these two verses don’t work so well together, and embraces the tension by asserting that two potential historical paths are encoded in these fundamentally conflicting promises. Rashbam takes a different tack, bothered not so much by the problematic math as much as by the seeming redundancy here? Why do we need to know the number of generations if we know the number of years? Unlike Rabbi in the Mekhilta, he is unwilling to read these two verses as anything but an integrated promise of one definite future. He suggests that the “fourth generation” here refers not to בני ישראל but to the indigenous Amorite tribes in Eretz C’na’an. Ingeniously borrowing from the Torah’s notion elsewhere that God mercifully preserves wicked generations by spreading out the magnitude of punishment they deserve—and which would utterly annihilate them if applied all at once—over four generations. This indicates a notion that wicked people are given four generations before God determines that they will never sufficiently repent to be able to avoid the full force of divine punishment. Therefore, for God to authorize the handover of Eretz C’na’an to בני ישראל and the corollary command to exterminate those living there, the moral culpability of the locals must be complete and irrevocable. Four generations are needed to finalize that process, and thus, the stay in Egypt must be prolonged. These two verses are thus making related, but distinct points: one is about the length of the sojourn on Egypt, whereas the other is the reason for why this sojourn must be so long.

[Only the seriously interested should keep reading.]

The problem with Rashbam’s reading is that the math is still fuzzy, requiring generations of 100 years each. Also, it does not seem to be the plain meaning of the phrase “and the fourth generation”, even if it helps explain it in light of the earlier verse about a 400-year stay in Egypt. Indeed, a closer look at other relevant passages in the Torah only makes matters worse. If I read our passage here without any other biographical information, I might be bothered by the long generations, but I might just assume that there were indeed 400 years of oppression in Egypt, as the verse indicates. [Shemot 12:40 argues for 430 years in Egypt, but I am not even engaging that discrepancy here, which creates all sort of further problems.] But Bereishit 46:11 makes it clear that Kehat is among those who goes down to Egypt, and Shemot 6:18, 20 and 7:7 make clear that there are only 350 avilable years in Egypt, and that assumes that Kehat and Amram had children on their deathbed! In other words, the genealogical linkage of Moshe as the fourth generation from Levi along with the lifespans provided for him and his ancestors do not work with the 400/430 year figure given for the sojourn in Egypt.

This is not a new problem. Fascinatingly, the Mekhilta (referenced above) cites Shemot 12:40 and its number of 430 years as one of a number of passages that was determined to be so jarring on a simple reading of the text that the translators of the Septaugint had to doctor it. [That passage is worth some study in its own right as a remarkable inside-outside self-awareness by Hazal of the ways in which their readings of the Torah were not always in keeping with the plain sense of the text or with the messages they wanted to convey to the outside world. Parallels to it can be found in the first chapter of Yerushalmi Megillah 1:9, 12b and on Bavli Megillah 9a.] Indeed, a check of the Septuagint there reveals that the 430 years are said to refer not only to the sojourn in Egypt, but to time logged in C’na’an as well, presumably starting the clock either with Yitzhak’s birth or with the scene we read in this parashah. This, of course, is not the plain sense of either Shemot 12:40 or Bereishit 15:13, both of which imply that the actual stay in Egypt was a four-century affair. But there is no real alternative, once the genealogical/lifespan data is merged with the historical memory of the length of Egyptian oppression, and even Rashbam elsewhere hews to this basic timetable, whereby “Egyptain enslavement” actually begins in Avraham’s lifetime.

As I said, I am not sure that Rashbam’s “peshat” here is anything more than one other attempt to deal with an intrinsically difficult issue in the text itself, one that is not amenable, in my view, to any single solution. It strikes me that the deeper message being conveyed by the Torah here is indeed twofold: 1) On the one hand, עבדות מצרים was a long, seemingly interminable process on the order of four centuries that wiped out all memory of the past such that the people had to be reborn anew. 2) On the other hand, even this reborn people would always have to remember their roots in the lives of ancestors who spent their own lives in the very land they were returning to reclaim, and the generational links between their present and that mythically powerful past are divinely guaranteed to be an antidote against the amnesia induced by slavery and suffering.

Lekh Lekha II: Malkitzedek and more הקדמה

2007-10-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

ומלכי צדק מלך שלם - לכך הפסיק בין ויצא מלך סדום לויאמר מלך סדום וכתב בינתיים ומלכי צדק מלך שלם הוציא לחם ויין, ללמדנו שאמת השיב אברהם למלך סדום כשאמר לו בלעדי רק אשר אכלו הנערים ולא אמר אכלנו, כי הוא אכל משל מלכי צדק:

Why, asks Rashbam, does this vignette about Malkitzedek, king of שלם (seemingly an earlier name for ירושלים), break up the story of chapter 14? If you read the text carefully, you will see that the chapter reads seamlessly if you skip from the end of verse 17 to verse 21: The king of S’dom comes out to greet Avram upon his triumphant return, and he then addresses him, offering him all to keep all of the possessions of S’dom that Avram recovered from Kedorlaomer and the other kings who had raided their former vassals. There is seemingly no need to hear about Malkitzedek’s greeting of Avram as well, at least at this point in the story.

There is a temptation to make something mythical of this interlude, and, indeed Rashi (for English, see here) cites an aggadah that Malkitzedek is none other than Shem, the son of Noah, and this conciliatory gesture was intended to show that Shem ancestor of the eponymous Semitic peoples of the East, was not at all upset at Avram for defeating his descendants, the Mesopotamian kings. [In the Christian Bible, Malkitzedek becomes an even more potent figure, based in part on Tehillim 110:4, a psalm that was said to have Christological overtones. For a reasonable summary, see here.]

But Rashbam senses that none of this explains why the story is here, as opposed to at the end of the encounter between Avram and the king of S’dom. He resorts again to his technique of הקדמה, which we discussed in an earlier post: The story of Malkitzedek bears out Avram’s claim to the king of S’dom a few verses later. In 14:24, Avram agrees to accept from the spoils only as much as his apprentices ate on the journey and cedes to his allies, Aner, Eshkol and Mamre, to take their due. The implication here is that Avram himself did not even eat from the spoils on the way back from the battle. That seems too pious to be true! But when we see that Malkitzedek brought out bread and wine for Avram to eat and drink, it indeed seems that he was not availing himself of other food, thus corroborating his later claim. [The notion that Malkitzedek brings out the bread and wine because Avram is hungry was already suggested by Rashi in his comment on 14:18.] Again, we see Rashbam viewing the Torah as a book that intentionally sets up its reader for greater comprehension later on, even at the cost of interrupting the narrative.

Lekh Lekha I: Pay attention to those dots!

2007-10-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

ונברכו - לשון מבריך ומרכיב, כלומר יתערבו במשפחתך משפחות האדמה, שהרי משקל רפי הוא:

Rashbam, throughout his commentary, reveals the ways in which grammar is a key implement in his toolbox for decoding the text of the Torah. This is one minor example that yields a very different interpretation from the conventional one. All renderings of Bereshit 12:3 assume that the word ונברכו is used here in the sense of blessing, starting with the Septuagint and Onkelos, all the way up to Everett Fox: “All the clains of the soil will find blessing through you!” This is natural in the context of the verse, which talks about blessing and curse.

But a closer look reveals that this reading is somewhat problematic: 1) The verse already covered the notion of blessing and curse, and, if anything, suggested that blessing would flow only to those who blessed Avraham, not to all the nations of the earth! 2) As Rashbam points out, the grammatical form here is passive, what we would call נפעל, as signaled by the lack of a dagesh (dot for emphais) in the bet. Were the verse truly about others receiving blessing through Avraham, then ought it not to have read ויתברכו, as it does in Bereishit 22:18?

Rashbam therefore provides an alternative interpretation: Perhaps the root ברך here is being used in another one of its senses: grafting. [Both blessing and grafting are related to the word ברך (knee); when blessing God, one bends the knee, and grafting reflects the creation of a joint between two parts that resembles a knee. One example of the usage of ברך in the sense of grafting can be found in Mishnah Kilayim 7:1.] God thus promises Avraham that all the clans of the world will be grafted onto his clan, such that his progeny will find itself represented throughout the world. [Interestingly, though not cited by Rashba, there seems to be an antecedent to this approach in the interpretation of this verse offered by R. Elazar on Yevamot 63a.]

Though it is not clear exactly what Rashbam intends by this, it seems that the blessing here is a promise that Avraham’s offspring—if we assume the focus is on Israelites and Jews specifically—will have far-reaching influence and their message for the world will penetrate even the most remote parts of the globe. Perhaps this notion was of some comfort to an exegete living in a small Jewish community in Northern France, deep in the heart of a Christendom whose total domination of religious power left room to wonder what had become of the promise to Avraham. If Jewish blessing, however, could be measure not by domination but by penetration and influence of host cultures, perhaps the promise to Avraham had indeed been fulfilled.

Noah II: The Sin of Bavel

2007-10-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

הבה נבנה לנו עיר וגו' - לפי הפשט מה חטאו דור הפלגה? אם מפני שאמרו וראשו בשמים, הא כת' ערים גדולות ובצורות בשמים? אלא לפי שצום הק' פרו ורבו ומלאו את הארץ, והם בחרו להם מקום לשבת שם ואמרו פן נפוץ, לפי' הפיצם משם בגזרתו:

The first 9 verses of chapter 11, despite their relative brevity, are packed with interpretive possibility. What did the generation of the dispersion (דור הפלגה) do wrong in this story? Was it the fact that they all spoke the same language and thus revealed totalitarian like tendencies to crush diversity? Was it their turn away from a nomadic lifestyle to the technology of building and civilization? Perhaps it was the choice of an urban life over a rural one, thus disconnecting themselves from more directly confronting God through raw exposure to nature? Or was it, as is often assumed, the building of a tower that was to be so high it would reach to heaven, an act which revealed a desire to rebel against or at least share power with God?

Rashbam, noting that elsewhere in Tanakh, large, impressive cities that are described as being בשמים are allowed to stand, argues that the height and prominence of the architecture cannot be the heart of the problem here. Instead, he focuses on פן נפוץ, the articulated motive of builders to avoid being dispersed. This, argues Rashbam, was a direct contravention of the order given to Noah and his line to fill the earth and to spread out. Interestingly, the “local” peshat here indeed seems to be focused on the tower and on God’s concern regarding excessive human power. But Rashbam reveals a synthetic approach to peshat here that attempts to make sense of this passage in light of others.

[For another commentary that builds on this approach—and for the notion that the tower was intended to function as a kind of panopticon designed to control human behavior—see העמק דבר, R. Naftali Tzi Yehudah Berlin’s commentary here.]

Noah I: Idiom

2007-10-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

לפני י"י - בכל העולם. וכן ונינוה היתה עיר גדולה לאלהים, בכל עולמו של הקב"ה לא היתה עיר גדולה כנינוה:

Here, Rashbam tackles the puzzling phrase לפני ה' used to describe the hunter Nimrod in 10:9. Does this signify something spiritual about hunting? About Nimrod? Rashbam answers like a classic pashtan: 1) He provides an explanation that flattens this tantalizing phrase into a common idiom, which simply means “in the whole world (which is God’s)”. [Similar to the phrase “God’s green earth” to describe the planet in its entirety.] 2) He gives you an example from elsewhere in Tanakh (in this case Yonah 3:3) to show you this is a common phenomenon and not worth getting too excited about.

These sorts of explanations are simultaneously empowering in their simplicity and deflating for their pedestrian outcome.

Bereishit III: The Limits of Peshat

2007-10-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

בצלמו - של אדם, הוא בצלם אלהים, מלאכים.

We have already seen that Rashbam is willing to strike out in search of non-conventional explanations if he feels they better capture the plain sense (peshat) of the text. Here, we might have expected the reasonable reading of 1:27 that God creates the human being in the divine form, suggesting that God has a body (see Shemot 24:10 and the great lengths Rambam must go to in the first part of the Guide for the Perplexed to dispel this possibility). But this is too radical for Rashbam, who already assumes the dominant medieval position that God is completely and totally incorporeal. [For important exceptions to this consensus, see Marc Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides' Thirteen Principles Reappraised.] He therefore makes the words בצלמו refer back to the human being itself—despite its lack of a preexisting form—and then in turn to the angels, who are less threatening as a physical mold for the human body.

This is an important comment for understanding the ways in which religious commitments ultimately shape and limit a commentator’s otherwise freely expressed interpretive preferences.

Bereishit II: Day and Night

2007-10-09T18:34:00.000-07:00

ויהי ערב ויהי בקר - אין כתיב כאן ויהי לילה ויהי יום אלא ויהי ערב, שהעריב יום ראשון ושיקע האור, ויהי בוקר, בוקרו של לילה, שעלה עמוד השחר. הרי הושלם יום א' מן הו' ימים שאמר הק' בי' הדברות, ואח"כ התחיל יום שיני, ויאמר אלהים יהי רקיע. ולא בא הכתוב לומר שהערב והבקר יום אחד הם, כי לא הצרכנו לפרש אלא היאך היו ששה ימים, שהבקיר יום ונגמרה הלילה, הרי נגמר יום אחד והתחיל יום שיני:

Here Rashbam reveals his willingness to go well beyond conventional modes of thinking in his search for peshat. The notion that the Jewish day begins at night pervades all of Jewish practice and discourse. But a close reading of the Tanakh reveals voices that do not necessarily hew to this pattern. Vayikra 23:32 features a command to begin observance of Yom Hakippurim, which is set for the 10^th day of the seventh month, בתשעה לחדש בערב, מערב עד ערב. Rabbinic tradition explains this to refer to the notion of תוספת יום הכיפורים, the requirement to begin Yom Kippur (and by extension, Shabbat and Yom Tov as well) somewhat earlier than the normal start time of sunset (see Bavli Rosh Hashanah 9a). But one might also read this verse as implying that all other days begin at dawn, whereas this one is distinct in beginning the night before.

Our verse here is said to serve as proof that the Jewish day begins at night (see Talmud Bavli Berakhot 2a for one example). This reading assumes that the words ויהי ערב ויהי בקר area kind of review of how the order of the day went. Rashbam suggests otherwise. He reads the verse as the end of the day’s narrative. God’s creative work happened during the daylight, it then got dark (ויהי ערב), and then it got light (ויהי בקר), thus concluding day one and commencing day two.

For more on this controversial interpretation and the high stakes with regard to Shabbat, see Ibn Ezra on Shemot 16:25. And see the comment over at Believing is Knowing.

Bereishit I: The Purpose of the Creation Story

2007-10-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

עתה אפרש פירושי הראשונים בפסוק זה להודיע לבני אדם למה לא ראיתי לפרש כמותם. יש מפרשים בראשונה ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ. אי אפשר לומר כן שהרי המים קדמו כדכתיב ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים. ועוד שאין כתוב כאן בראשונה. אלא בראשית דבוק הוא כמו ותהי ראשית ממלכתו בבל. והמפרש כמו תחלת דבר י"י בהושע, כלומר בתחלת ברא אלהים את השמים, כלומר בטרם ברא שמים וארץ, הארץ היתה תוהו ובהו וחשך על פני תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים, נמצא שהמים נבראו תחלה, גם זה הבל, שכן לא היה לכתוב והארץ היתה תוהו ובהו, שמאחר שעדיין לא נבראת לא היה לו לקרותה ארץ קודם יצירת המים מאחר שהמים קדמו. אך זה הוא עיקר פשוטו לפי דרך המקראות שרגיל להקדים ולפרש דבר שאין צריך בשביל דבר הנזכר לפניו במקום אחר. כדכתיב שם חם ויפת וכתיב וחם הוא אבי כנען, אלא מפני שכתוב לפניו ארור כנען ואילו לא פורש תחילה מי כנען לא היינו יודעין למה קללו נח. וישכב את בלהה פלגש אביו וישמע ישראל. למה נכתב כאן וישמע ישראל? והלא לא נכתב כאן שדיבר יעקב מאומה על ראובן? אלא לפי שבשעת פטירתו אמר פחז כמים אל תותר כי עלית משכבי אביך אז חללת יצועי עלה, לפיכך הקדים וישמע ישראל, שלא תתמה בראותך שהוכיחו על כך בסוף ימיו. וכן בכמה מקומות. גם כל הפרשה הזאת של מלאכת ששה ימים הקדימה משה רבינו לפרש לך מה שאמר הקדוש ברוך הוא בשעת מתן תורה זכור את יום השבת לקדשו [וגו'] כי ששת ימים עשה י"י את השמים ואת הארץ את הים ואת כל אשר בם וינח ביום השביעי, וזהו שכתוב ויהי ערב ויהי בקר יום הששי, אותו ששי שהוא גמר ששה ימים שאמר הקב"ה במתן תורה. לכך אמר להם משה לישראל, להודיעם כי דבר הקב"ה אמת, וכי אתם סבורים שהעולם הזה כל הימים בנוי כמו שאתם רואים אותו עכשיו מלא כל טוב? לא היה כן, אלא בראשית ברא אלהים וגו' כלומר בתחילת בריאת שמים וארץ כלומר בעת שנבראו כבר [ה]שמים העליונים והארץ, הן זמן מרובה הן זמן מועט, אז והארץ היתה, הבנויה כבר היתה תוהו ובהו, שלא היה בם שום דבר, כדכתיב בירמיה ראיתי את הארץ והנה תהו ובהו ואל השמים ואין אורם, ראיתי ואין אדם, מעוף השמים ועד בהמה נדדו הלכו. וזהו תהו ובהו, חורבו מאין יושב. וחשך על פני תהום זהו ואל השמים ואין אורם. ורוח מנשבת על פני המים. והוצרך הרוח למה שכתוב לפנינו ויאמר אלהים יקוו המים מתחת השמים אל מקום אחד גו', כי על ידי הרוח נקוו המים, כמו בקיעת ים סוף שנתראית היבשה על ידי ויולך י"י את הים ברוח קדים עזה כל הלילה וישם את הים לחרבה ויבקעו המים:

Here Rashbam tackles the famous problem of the first verse in the Torah, noting that he will depart from two main interpretations that preceded him. He first cites the interpretation that sees this verse as sustaining the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which claims that God created the world out of absolute nothingness. This notion is already present in II Maccabees 7:28 and seems to be implied in the Septuagint's rendering of this verse as "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." This interpretation wants to emphasize that God created heaven and earth, rather than merely forming them. Rashbam rejects this as unfounded in the text, since it does not solve the problem of the primeval water mentioned in the next verse, nor does it fit with the word בראשית, which means "in the beginning of" something, as opposed to בראשונה, which would be the appropriate word to signal a first point in time. He then cites a second interpretation that tries to contort the verse such that it implies that before God created the heaven and earth, God created the primordial water, thus preserving the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, while attempting to address the grammatical problem highlighted above. But this solution doesn't work either, since then there is no point in the text commenting on the state of the as-yet-uncreated earth as being in a chaotic state before describing the creation of water. Indeed, as Rashbam notes, and as did Rashi before him, we are fortunate in this case to have a verse in a totally unrelated context of the Tanakh that hews to the same grammatical form as this one and clarifies what is going on here. Hoshea 1:2 states:

תְּחִלַּת דִּבֶּר ה' בְּהוֹשֵׁעַ וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל הוֹשֵׁעַ...

The grammatical structure here is clear. The verse means, "When God began speaking to Hoshea, God said to Hoshea..." Accordingly, our verse should be rendered: "When God began creating heaven and earth, the earth was wild and waste..." This reading returns us to the fairly straightforward read, if interpreted without any preconceptions. The narrative begins here with a variety of preexisting matter: heaven, earth, water, an abyss and some form of divine wind. The process of creation here is of the transformation of chaos into order, not necessarily of nothingness into existence. So why do the two interpretations cited and rejected by Rashbam avoid this seemingly obvious interpretation? The answer is theological and cosmological, not exegetical. The notion that God created the world from nothing attains dominance over time--most strikingly in Christian thought--as a natural outgrowth of a monotheism that asserts that there can be no force in the universe other than God. Once God is supposed to be the source of all power, the notion of preexisting matter becomes potentially troubling, such that earlier texts will be read in ways to avoid that implication. This transition from the monolatry (worship of one God alone, but openness to other potent, albeit weaker, forces) of many of the sources in the Tanakh to the monotheism (belief in a single God who is the Creator of all) in Second Temple sources is a phenomenon beyond the scope of this post, but the doctrine of creation ex nihilo seems to be the logical extension of that process. [Note, however, that Rambam, among others, despite his assertion in the Commentary on the Mishnah that one must believe that God preceded all created things, acknowledges in the Guide for the Perplexed that the Platonic notion of creation--which held that God only formed preexisting matter but did not create it from nothingness--was not antithetical to the essence of the Torah's narrative of creation. He clearly preferred the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and presents this as the Torah's view, but he displays in the Guide sensitivity to the fact that the Torah itself never actually asserts this doctrine.] Back to Rashbam. A good medieval Jewish monotheist thus wants to see God as prior to all things. Many are willing to contort the text to fit this notion. But what is a peshat-focused exegete like Rashbam, who cares deeply about what the text actually means, to do? He asserts that God is prior to all creation, the heaven and the earth included, but that the Torah begins mid-scene, detailing the events of creation part way through their unfolding. The heaven and earth, along with the water, were already created at some unspecified time in the past; their origins are not the focus of our text. So what does our text care about? Here Rashbam introduces us to his notion of הקדמה, the ways in which the Biblical text introduces us to details that are critical for setting up a later passage. Just as we must learn the seemingly irrelevant fact that Ham is the father of C'na'an in Bereishit 9:18 in order to understand Noah's curse of his son through his grandson in 9:25-27, so too Moshe here wants to make intelligible the command of Shabbat that is to come eventually in Shemot 20. That text will speak of the fact that God created the world in six days, resting on the seventh, and therefore we must follow suit. But that command only makes sense if we have that story as part of our narrative. The creation story thus becomes a prop for understanding the Torah's central concern about time, which is not about what happened when the universe began, but what is to happen in contemporary human societies once a week. He uses this model to explain the cryptic הששי that is different from all the other day designations, which lack the definite article. This, says Moshe in telling this part of the creation story, is the sixth day, that one you keep hearing about as the last in a string of work days before the weekly rest kicks in. This interpretation obviously solves an exegetical and a theological problem at once, allowing a philosophical commitment to coexist with a close reading of the plain sense of a sacred text. But this resolution opens up much more. It provocatively suggests that the only reason we care about the creation story in the first place is as a way of anchoring the type of religious world we are trying to create today. As opposed to reading Shabbat as a response to the facts of creation, Rashbam inverts this: the creation story is the sustaining narrative for the prior command to create a holy society that respects the world as having a transcendental, non-human origin. The implications of this sort of approach can be unpacked much further, as it empowers us to view many of the Torah's narratives as being in service of its central normative claims on human beings, moving us away from speculation on the historical origins of the universe and towards contemplation of the ramifications of those origins for how we behave today. [For other instances of Rashbam's notion of הקדמה, see: Bereishit 1:5, 8, 9, 10, 27; 29:31; 38:22]

Parashat Hashavua 5768: Rashbam

2007-10-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

Welcome to this year's parshan, R, Shmuel b. Meir, also known as Rashbam. You can find a basic biography here. Each week I will provide some basic insights on some of the key passages from his commentary, with the goal of stimulating more interest in his commentary and in the weekly portion in general. Enjoy and share your thoughts.