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Session Two
Unexpected Depths: Chumash with Rashi
What is it? A number of things can make Rashi hard to understand at first. Terms explained: Chumash "Rashi" is the name of the most important Jewish commentator on
the Bible, and on the Talmud, and the name his commentary is known
by. ("Rashi" is actually an abbreviation for RAbbi SHlomo Itzchaki.
But you will never hear anyone refer to Rashi as "Rabbi Shlomo";
like many great rabbis he is known only by the abbreviation of
his name.) Rashi lived in northern France around the year 1000.
His commentary on the Torah very soon became standard, and it
has never been replaced.
"Chumash with Rashi" is the five books, the Torah, with Rashi's
commentary. In traditional Jewish communities, especially in eastern
Europe, it became unthinkable to study Torah without Rashi. All
traditional editions of the Chumash include Rashi's commentary,
and "Chumash with Rashi" would be the first Jewish text that children
studied as soon as they could sound out the Hebrew letters. (In
fact the first Hebrew book that was printed was Rashi's commentary).
The original version of the Yiddish song "Ale Brider" (which became
a hit again in recent years through Toronto's Flying Bulgar Klezmer
Band) says, "We stick together, like a bridegroom and bride, like
Chumash with Rashi, like kugel with buckwheat kasha."
Why Study This?
Most people would agree that it makes sense to spend some of your
Jewish study time on the Chumash, because so much in Judaism depends
on it. But why Rashi?
A Good Read
There are several reasons that draw me to Rashi. First of all,
I enjoy him. He has something to say about nearly every sentence
in the Torah, usually in a concise, clear way. His comments are
either helpful in understanding what's going on, or they bring
in stories and ideas that open up the text and are often charming
and fascinating.
The Best of Midrash
The stories and ideas that Rashi brings in are usually not his
own inventions; they are a selection from the many centuries of
commentary and midrash that went before him. ("Midrash" is imaginative
interpretation of the Bible, and the subject of our next class.)
So another reason to read Rashi is as an anthology of what Jewish
teachers and storytellers through the ages have had to say about
the Torah. It is an anthology selected by someone who knew the
material intimately and had good taste in choosing from it.
"The Jewish View"
Judaism is rich and varied, and whenever anyone says "Judaism
says..." or "The Jewish view is..." they are not telling the whole
truth. However, the closest thing to "The Jewish View" of the
Torah is Rashi, because it is the standard commentary, the one that would automatically be studied
together with the Chumash itself. This is another reason to study
Rashi: to get an awareness of a normal, standard Jewish view of
the Bible -- which is often very different from what we would
think is normal and standard, given the basically Christian environment
we live in.
Catching up with the Kids
As I mentioned, because Rashi is the standard commentary, it became
the first item on the traditional Jewish curriculum. One of the
things that motivates me to learn Rashi is a desire for basic
"Jewish literacy" -- I want to catch up with what every Jewish
kindergarten child in a traditional community would know!
Worth Deep Study
But Rashi is by no means only for children. Some comments of Rashi's
are not suitable for children at all. They would be discreetly
censored by teachers and are not translated in some English editions
of Rashi. But beyond that, Rashi rewards deep study. Some of the
greatest rabbis wrote commentaries on Rashi's commentary, exploring
what he meant, what his sources were, what the implications of
his comments are. There is a whole genre of these "supercommentaries"
(a "supercommentary" is a commentary on another commentary, although
it always gives me an image of mild-mannered Rashi slipping into
a phone booth and coming out rippling with muscles, in tights
and a cape, as SuperCommentary!) Today, a wonderful practitioner
of this kind of study is Aviva Zornberg, who teaches Chumash in
a poetic way which brings in insights from world literature and
modern psychology, but very often starts with a comment in Rashi
and explores its implications. Her work is now available in print
in the book "Genesis: The Beginnings of Desire".
Unexpected Depths
So no one should be fooled by the conciseness and seeming simplicity
of Rashi. He is very deep -- if he's studied deeply. There is
a famous story that one of the great Kabbalists set out to write
a mystical commentary on the Torah, including all the deepest
insights and all the mysterious allusions that the Kabbalistic
masters have found. He spent years working on his commentary,
refining it, making it clear and concise and filled with the deepest
wisdom, and then he read over what he'd written -- and it was
word for word Rashi's commentary.
"WHAT IS RASHI'S PROBLEM?"
Rashi's format is like many commentaries: each of his comments
begins by quoting a word or two from the verse that he is going
to comment on. However, it's often not immediately clear how his
comment relates to the words he quotes to begin with. Sometimes
he is actually talking about a more general issue, or about how
the words he quoted fit into the rest of the verse or the surrounding
verses. When he is actually talking specifically about the words
he quoted, it may be to tell a story which explains how they fit
into the bigger story, or it may be to explain a grammatical point.
You usually have to do some thinking to figure out what part of
the verse Rashi is addressing and what type of comment he is providing.
In traditional study, the figuring out is expressed by the question
(in Aramaic): "Mai kashya d'Rashi" -- literally, "what is Rashi's
problem?" This means: What problem -- what difficulty in understanding
-- does Rashi see in the verse and address in his comment? Is
there something grammatically difficult in the Hebrew, or something
contradictory or missing in the story line? Is it unclear how
the verse relates to what comes before or after it? Once you've
figured out "Rashi's problem" you've gained in two ways: you can
understand what Rashi's comment is talking about, and you have
a question to explore further. Because we may disagree with Rashi's
answers, but his questions are always worth thinking about.
WHOM DID RASHI WRITE FOR
Rashi didn't set out to write a commentary that would be studied
by people all over the world for hundreds of years. He was writing
for people a lot like himself: yeshiva students in France. We
know this because he quotes from various places in the Bible and
the Talmud and Midrash without explanation, assuming that the
reader will know what he's talking about -- know the text by heart,
or at least know where to find it -- as a yeshiva student in his
time would. Rashi also explains many words by translating them
into Old French, the language spoken in his part of France in
his time. He didn't have in mind a reader from another country
who wouldn't know French. These assumptions about what the reader
knows make Rashi difficult for us, but they are also, in a way,
inspiring. They tell us that Rashi was writing for his own community.
Yet what he wrote became a classic studied in practically all
Jewish communities to this day. In the same way, the Torah teaching
and learning that we do for our own circles, in our own time and
place, may turn out to have meaning beyond our own place and time.
The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers and Deuteronomy, are called the Torah or the Chumash.
"Chumash" means "five" and it is the name for these books when
they are printed in a volume to study from. (The "Hertz Chumash"
and the "Plaut Chumash" are editions of these five books used
in many synagogues for following the Torah reading and for study.)
"The Torah" refers to the same books in a more abstract way, or
when talking about the Torah scroll from which they are read in
synagogue.
