[ RELIGION ]
CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARBULLETIN.COM
Rabbi Avi Magid, of Temple Emanu-El, reads from Nevi'im Rishonim, printed in 1617. Magid's wife, Shayna, had encouraged him to purchase the rare book.
Class studies texts
by medieval rabbiTemple Emanu-El looks
to Rashi as a guide
to the Torah
The very first words of the Bible are, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."
That seems self-explanatory. No more needs to be said.
Not if you're Jewish.
People who have attended Shabbat services in a synagogue or been a Hebrew school student are accustomed to reading or hearing the entire text of the Torah, the first five books of the Scriptures, year after year.
What invariably follows the text is a sermon invoking the commentary of a medieval rabbi about what he thinks those words meant. Then there's likely to be another version from another scholar, sometimes arguing from another point of view and sometimes just taking a different historical or sociological perspective.
To comment on the word of God is not to be a heretic, said Rabbi Avi Magid, of Temple Emanu-El, whose congregation embarked last month on a two-year journey using a 12th-century French rabbi as the guide on a study of the Torah.
Most Christians never heard of Rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac, known as Rashi, but his word-by-word, concept-by-concept analysis of Scriptures was a resource for Christian scholars who first translated the Hebrew into European languages.
"Reading a commentator is a time machine," said Magid, who described Rashi as "the pre-eminent commentator."
"You end up having conversations through history with different commentators, in their voices and reflecting their times, while you sit in the 21st century and comment on their styles," Magid said.
Rashi wrote to help the Jews of his time in Troyes understand the books that are the foundation of their faith. He lived from 1040 to 1105. His commentaries on the Word as given to Moses lived on beyond his first audience:
>> Scribes copied and dispersed his commentaries on the Torah and Talmud through Europe, which inspired other medieval Hebrew scholars to compose their own -- literally hundreds were written between 1100 and 1500.
>> It was the first Hebrew-language work ever printed. That was in 1475, 20 years after the first book rolled off Gutenberg's marvelous invention.
>> His writing is prominently featured in virtually every commentary published since, including current versions.
>> When the printing press made the Bible more widely available to Christians, the first translations from Hebrew into western languages were influenced by Rashi's writings.
"He was a source for Martin Luther," Magid said. "When the King James Bible was written in English, they studied Rashi in order to translate from the Hebrew."
CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARBULLETIN.COM
Rabbi Avi Magid, of Temple Emanu-El, leads a study group on commentaries on the Torah written by 12th-century French rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac, known as Rashi.
Magid and Rabbi Morris Goldfarb, Temple Emanu-El scholar in residence, teach a weekly class on "Understanding Torah," which will also focus on Rashi for the next two years, a departure from the usual pattern of using each week's Torah reading -- the same passage used on the same day throughout the world -- with various views from different scholars.
The 12 adult students are getting a peek into the mind of the medieval Jew, and they often get on a tangent comparing social issues from now and then.
They found that Rashi wrote on and on about that simple first sentence of Genesis. For example, he drew conclusions from which Hebrew word was used for "beginning" and which words were not used, and what the grammatical construction was.
"The text does not intend to point out the order of the acts of Creation," he wrote. The first paragraph of Genesis says that "the Spirit of God was hovering on the face of the waters." Rashi pointed out: "Scripture had not yet disclosed when the creation of the waters took place. Consequently, you must learn from this that the creation of the waters preceded that of the earth."
Not all students in the local Torah class are Jewish. The informal class discussion one recent Saturday morning explored Rashi's thoughts in terms of the theory of evolution, and his daring to interpret the mind of the Torah's author.
"Isn't his thinking close to Darwinism?" asked Sema Lipsett, of Bellevue, Wash., who has wintered in Hawaii for 30 years and finds classes "a way of relearning things I probably learned years ago."
The story "is a rather sophisticated and incredible interpretation of how the world came to be," Goldfarb said. "The idea is that human beings are the apex of creation."
What people reading the Bible in contemporary language don't always appreciate is the variables possible in ancient Hebrew in which only consonants were recorded.
"If you look at a Torah, there is no punctuation, no vowels, no sentence ending," Goldfarb said. "When scholars decided where is the end of sentence, where is the emphasis ... that was already an interpretation."
It was an eye-opener for some class members in the recent session that Rashi described God as consulting with angels as he designed the first human. The Bible story goes, "We will make man" -- a use of the plural pronoun that led Rashi to a lengthy dissertation.
He wrote: "The meekness of the Holy One, blessed be He, they learned from here. He consulted with His heavenly council and asked permission of them, saying to them: 'There are in the heavens, beings after My likeness. If there will not be on earth also beings after My likeness, there will be envy among the beings that I have created.'"
Magid said: "It's charming to think of God this way. What does he do but turn to the angels, whom he had already created in His image. What is the concept Rashi was applying to Jewish life in his time? The head of the community is not going to act without advice. Consensus is an aspect of Jewish life."
Charles Webster, a preacher in a nondenominational Christian church in Ewa Beach, has attended the class for several months. "It's almost like going to a theological seminary," he said. "They have a far-reaching background; you get an in-depth study. It's intriguing and enlightening."
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