Rashi Part 5

Ras.h.i.+ failed also to regard a thing in its entirety. He did not write prefaces to his works setting forth the contents of the book and the method to be pursued.[51] In the body of the commentaries, he hardly ever dwells on a subject at length, but contents himself with a brief explanation. In short, his horizon was limited and he lacked perspective. It is to be regretted that he did not know the philosophic works of Saadia, who would have opened up new worlds to him, and would have enlarged the circle of his ideas. If he had read only the Biblical commentaries of the great Gaon, he would have learned from him how to grasp a text in its entirety and give a general idea of a work.

Even if he had limited himself to the Talmud, Ras.h.i.+, without doubt, would have been incapable of raising a vast and harmonious edifice, like the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides. He did not possess the art of developing the various sides of a subject so as to produce a well-ordered whole. He lacked not only literary ambition, but also that genius for organizing and systematizing which cla.s.sifies and co-ordinates all the laws. Though methodical, he lacked the power to generalize.

This defect, common to his contemporaries, arose, possibly, from a certain timidity. He believed that he ought to efface himself behind his text, and not let his own idea take the place of the author's, especially when the text was a religious law and the author the Divine legislator. But it seems that his power of creative thought was not strong, and could exercise itself only upon the more original works of others. We find a.n.a.logous features in scholastic literature, which developed wholly in the shadow of the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and Aristotle.

This narrow criticism, this eye for detail, this lack of general ideas and of guiding principles at least guarded Ras.h.i.+ against a danger more original spirits failed to escape, namely, of reading preconceived notions into the text, of interpreting it by an individual method, and, thus, of gathering more meaning, or another meaning, than was intended by the author. Unlike the Jewish and Christian theologians, Ras.h.i.+ felt no need to do violence to the text in order to reconcile it with his scientific and philosophic beliefs.

Though Ras.h.i.+, as I said, had not a creative intellect, he yet had all the qualities of a commentator. First of all, he possessed clearness, the chief requisite for a commentary, which undertakes to explain a work unintelligible to its readers. "To write like Ras.h.i.+" has become a proverbial expression for "to write clearly and intelligibly." Ras.h.i.+ always or nearly always uses the expression one expects. He finds the explanation that obtrudes itself because it is simple and easy; he excels in unravelling [unraveling sic] difficulties and illuminating obscurities. To facilitate comprehension by the reader Ras.h.i.+ resorted to the use of pictures and diagrams, some of which still appear in his Talmudic commentary, though a number have been suppressed by the editors. Once, when asked for the explanation of a difficult pa.s.sage in Ezekiel, he replied that he had nothing to add to what he had said in his commentary, but he would send a diagram which would render the text more intelligible. It is remarkable with what ease, even without the aid of ill.u.s.trations, he unravelled [unraveled sic] the chapters of Ezekiel in which the Prophet describes the Temple of his fancy; or the equally complicated chapters of Exodus which set forth the plan of the Tabernacle.

Essentially this power of exposition is the attribute of intelligent insight. Ras.h.i.+'s was the clearest, the most transparent mind-no clouds nor shadows, no ambiguities, no evasions. He leaves nothing to be taken for granted, he makes no mental reservations. He is clearness and transparency itself.

But Ras.h.i.+'s language is not merely clear; it is extremely precise. It says with accuracy exactly what it sets out to say.

Ras.h.i.+ did not hesitate sometimes to coin new words for the sake of conveying his thought. He always heeded the connotation of a word, and took the context into account. Once, in citing a Talmudic explanation of a verse in Jeremiah, he rejected it, because it did not square with the development of the thought; and often he would not accept an interpretation, because a word in the text was given a meaning which it did not have in any other pa.s.sage. He grasped, and rendered in turn with perfect accuracy, shades of meaning and subtleties of language; and the fine expression of relations difficult to solve surprises and charms the reader by its precision.

Commentators in the effort to be clear are often wordy, and those who aim at brevity often lack perspicuity. The latter applies to Abraham Ibn Ezra, who might have said with the poet, "I avoid long-windedness, and I become obscure." Samuel ben Meir, on the other hand, grandson and pupil of Ras.h.i.+, is, at least in his Talmudic commentaries, so long-winded and prolix that at first glance one can detect the additions made by him to the commentaries of his grandfather. It is related, that once, when Ras.h.i.+ was ill, Samuel finished the commentary Ras.h.i.+ had begun, and when Ras.h.i.+ got well he weighed the leaves on which his pupil had written and said: "If thou hadst commented on the whole Talmud after this fas.h.i.+on, thy commentary would have been as heavy as a chariot." The story, which attributes somewhat uncharitable words to Ras.h.i.+, yet contains an element of truth, and emphasizes the eminent quality of his own commentaries.

He rarely goes into very long explanations. Often he solves a difficulty by one word, by shooting one flash of light into the darkness. The scholar and bibliographer Azulai scarcely exaggerated when he said that Ras.h.i.+ could express in one letter that for which others needed whole pages. A close study of the Talmudic commentaries shows that he replied in advance and very briefly to the questions of many a Talmudist.

It is only in considering the difficult pa.s.sages that he goes to greater length to note and discuss explanation previously propounded. Take for example what he says on the words 'al mut Laben', the superscription of Psalm ix, which are a crux interpretum. At the same time the reader will observe how ancient are certain interpretations of modern exegetes.

Ras.h.i.+ begins by refuting those who allege that David wrote this Psalm on the death of his son Absalom; for in that case Haben and not Laben would have been necessary, and nothing in the text bears out this explanation. Others transposed the letters of Laben to read Nabal, but there is no reference to Nabal in this Psalm. Others again, like the Great Ma.s.sorah, make a single word of almut. Menahem and Dunash,[52] each proposes an explanation which seems to be incorrect. The Pesikta, in view of verse 6, thinks the Psalm refers to Amalek and Esau; and this, too, is not satisfying. Finally, Ras.h.i.+ gives his own explanation, scarcely better than the others,- that the Psalm deals with the rejuvenation and purity of Israel when it will have been redeemed from the Roman captivity.

When difficult questions are propounded by the Talmud, or arise out of a consideration of the Talmud, Ras.h.i.+ cites previous explanations or parallel texts. But this is exceptional. As a rule he finds with marvellous [marvelous sic] nicety and without circ.u.mlocution the exact word, the fitting expression, the necessary turn. One or two words suffice for him to sum up an observation, to antic.i.p.ate a question, to forestall an unexpressed objection, to refute a false interpretation, or to throw light upon the true meaning of word or phrase. This is expressed in the saying, "In Ras.h.i.+'s time a drop of ink was worth a piece of gold." It was not without justification - though, perhaps, the practice was carried to excess - that for centuries commentaries were written upon these suggestive words of his under the t.i.tle Dikduke Ras.h.i.+, the "Niceties of Ras.h.i.+." Even at the present day his commentaries are minutely studied for the purpose of finding a meaning for each word. In fact, because of this concise, lapidary style, his commentaries called into existence other commentaries, which set out to interpret his ideas, - and frequently found ideas that did not belong there. Though the authors of these super - commentaries were Ras.h.i.+'s admirers, they were scarcely his imitators.

In this regard it is of interest to compare the commentary of Ras.h.i.+ upon the beginning of the treatise Baba Batra with that of Samuel ben Meir upon the end of the treatise, which Ras.h.i.+ did not succeed in reaching. An even more striking comparison may be made with the commentary of Nissim Gerundi upon the abridgment of the Talmud by Alfasi, which is printed opposite to that of Ras.h.i.+.[53] Ras.h.i.+'s style is unmistakable, and prolixness in a commentary attributed to him is proof against the alleged paternity.

By virtue of these qualities, possessed by Ras.h.i.+ in so high a degree, he is true to the traditions of French literature, which is distinguished for simplicity and clearness among all literatures. Besides, he compares with the French writers of the middle ages in his disregard of "style." It is true, he handles with ease Hebrew and Aramaic, or, rather, the rabbinical idiom, which is a mixture of the two. But he is not a writer in the true sense of the word. His language is simple and somewhat careless, and his writing lacks all traces of esthetic quality.

Since the Bible and the Talmud made appeal to readers of another time and another language than those in which they were written, Ras.h.i.+'s first duty was to explain them, then, if necessary, translate them, now to add clearness to the explanation, now to do away with it wholly. These translations, sometimes bearing upon entire pa.s.sages, more often upon single words, were called glosses, Hebrew laazim (better, leazim), the plural of laaz. They were French words transcribed into Hebrew characters, and they formed an integral part of the text. Ras.h.i.+ had recourse to them in his teaching when the precise Hebrew expression was lacking, or when he explained difficult terms, especially technical terms of arts and crafts. The use of a French word saved him a long circ.u.mlocution. Sometimes, the laaz followed a definition or description, in a striking manner giving the meaning of the word or expression.

In employing these French laazim, Ras.h.i.+ introduced no innovation.

His predecessors, especially his masters, had already made use of them, perhaps in imitation of the Christian commentators, who likewise inserted words of the vernacular in their Latin explanations. The Latin - speaking clergy were often forced to employ the common speech for instructing the people; and in the eleventh century beginnings were made in the translation of the Old and New Testament by the rendition of important pa.s.sages.

But while it perturbed the Church to see the Scriptures spread too freely before the gaze of the layman, the rabbis never feared that the ordinary Jew might know his Bible too well, and they availed themselves of the laazim without scruple. The frequent occurrence of the laazim is one of a number of proofs that French was the current speech of the Jews of France. Hebrew, like Latin among the Christian clergy, was merely the language of literature and of the liturgy. It is noteworthy that the treatises containing most laazim bear upon questions affecting the common acts of daily life - upon the observance of the Sabbath (treatise Shabbat), upon the dietary laws, (Hullin), and upon laws concerning the relations of Jews with non-Jews (Abodah Zarah). Ras.h.i.+ extended the use of the laazim, developing this mode of explanation; and the commentaries of his disciples, who continued his method, are strewn with French words, which were then inserted in the Hebrew - French glossaries. Several of these glossaries are about to be published. After Ras.h.i.+'s commentaries became a cla.s.sic wherever there were Jews, the laazim were often translated into a foreign language, as into German or Italian. The Pseudo - Ras.h.i.+ on Alfasi,[54] following the ma.n.u.scripts, sometimes presents a German translation now with, now without the French word.

Ras.h.i.+'s Biblical and Talmudic commentaries contain 3157 laazim, of which 967 occur in the Biblical commentaries and 2190 in the Talmudic, forming in the two commentaries together a vocabulary of about two thousand different words. In the Biblical commentaries, concerned, as a rule, not so much with the explanation of the meaning of a word as with its grammatical form, the laazim reproduce the person, tense, or gender of the Hebrew word; in the Talmudic commentaries, where the difficulty resides in the very sense of the word, the laazim give a translation without regard to grammatical form.

At the present time these laazim are of interest to us, not only as the expression of Ras.h.i.+'s ideas, but also as vehicles of information concerning the old French. As early an investigator as Zunz remarked that if one could restore them to their original form, they would serve as a lexicon of the French language at the time of the Crusades. But even Zunz did not realize the full value to be extracted from them. The rare specimens that we possess of the langue d'oil[55] of the eleventh century belong to the Norman dialect and to the language of poetry.

Written, as they were, in Champagne, the laazim of Ras.h.i.+ represent almost the pure French (the language spoken in Champagne lay between the dialect of the Ile-de-France and that of Lorraine [56]), and, what is more, they were words in common use among the people, for they generally designated objects of daily use. These laazim, then, const.i.tute a doc.u.ment of the highest importance for the reconstruction of old French, as much from a phonetic and morphologic point of view, as from the point of view of lexicography; for the Hebrew transcription fixes to a nicety the p.r.o.nunciation of the word because of the richness of the Hebrew in vowels and because of the strict observance of the rules of transcription. Moreover, in the matter of lexicography the laazim offer useful material for the history of certain words, and bring to our knowledge popular words not to be found in literary and official texts. In the case of many of these terms, their appearance in Ras.h.i.+ is the earliest known; otherwise they occur only at a later date. And it is not difficult to put the laazim back into French, because of the well-defined system of transcription employed. Even the laws of declension (or what remained of declension in the old French) are observed.

Unfortunately, the great use made of Ras.h.i.+'s commentaries necessitated a large number of copies, and frequent copying produced many mistakes. Naturally, it was the laazim that suffered most from the ignorance and carelessness of the copyists and printers, especially in the countries in which French was not the current language. Efforts have been made within the last two centuries to restore the laazim. Mendelssohn and his a.s.sociates applied themselves to the commentary on the Pentateuch, Lowe, to the Psalms, Neumann, to the Minor Prophets, Jeitteles and Laudau, to the whole of the Bible, and the Bondi brothers, Dormitzer, and, above all, Landau, to the Talmudic commentaries. But these authors, not having consulted the ma.n.u.scripts and knowing the French language of the middle ages only imperfectly, arrived at insufficient results. Even the identifications of Berliner in his critical edition of the commentary on the Pentateuch are not always exact and are rarely scientific.

a.r.s.ene Darmesteter (1846-1888), one of the elect of French Judaism and a remarkable scholar in the philology of the Romance languages, realized that in the commentaries of Ras.h.i.+ "the science of philology possesses important material upon which to draw for the history of the language in an early stage of its developinent." With the aim of utilizing this material, he visited the libraries of England and Italy, and gathered much that was important; but his numerous occupations and his premature death prevented him from finis.h.i.+ng and publis.h.i.+ng his work. In the interests of French philology as well as for a complete understanding of the text of Ras.h.i.+, it would be advantageous to publish the notes that he collected. In fact, such a work will appear, but unfortunately not in the proportions Darmesteter would have given it. Nevertheless, it will be found to contain information and unique information, upon the history, the phonetics, and the orthography of medieval French; for the first literary works, which go as far back as the eleventh century, the life of Saint Alexius and the epic of Roland, have not come down to us in the form in which they were written. "What would the trouveres of Roland and the clerics of Saint Alexius have said if they had been told that one day the speech of their warrior songs and their pious homilies would need the aid of the Ghetto to reach the full light of day, and the living sound of their words would fall upon the ears of posterity through the accursed jargon of an outlawed race?"[57]

In this chapter I have made some general observations upon the composition and the method of the Biblical and Talmudic Commentaries of Ras.h.i.+. Concerning their common characteristics there is little to add, except to remark that the explanations are generally simple, natural, and unforced. This is especially true of the Talmudic commentaries. Ras.h.i.+ in large part owes the foundations upon which his works are built to his predecessors, and no higher praise could be accorded him than to say that he knew the great ma.s.s of traditions and the explanations made before him.

However, Ras.h.i.+ rather frequently gave his own personal explanation, either because he did not know another, or because those propounded before him did not seem adequate or satisfying.

In the latter case, he usually put down the rejected explanation before setting forth his own. Yet there are cases in which intelligence and imagination fail to supply knowledge of some special circ.u.mstance; and such lack of knowledge led Ras.h.i.+ into many errors. On the whole, however, the commentaries contain invaluable information, and are of the very highest importance for Jewish history and literature, because of the citations in them of certain lost works, or because of hints of certain facts which otherwise would be unknown. Modern historians justly recognize in Ras.h.i.+ one of the most authoritative representatives of rabbinical tradition, and it is rare for them to consult him without profit to themselves.

CHAPTER VI

THE BIBLICAL COMMENTARIES

"Thanks to Ras.h.i.+ the Torah has been renewed. The word of the Lord in his mouth was truth. His way was perfect and always the same.

By his commentary he exalted the Torah and fortified it. All wise men and all scholars recognize him as master, and acknowledge that there is no commentary comparable with his." This enthusiastic verdict of Eliezer ben Nathan[58] has been ratified by the following generations, which, by a clever play upon words, accorded him the t.i.tle of Parshandata, Interpreter of the Law.[59] And, verily, during his life Ras.h.i.+ had been an interpreter of the Law, when he explained the Scriptures to his disciples and to his other co-religionists; and he prolonged this beneficent activity in his commentaries, in which one seems to feel his pa.s.sionate love of the law of G.o.d and his lively desire to render the understanding of it easy to his people. Yet it is true that all scholars did not share in the general admiration of Ras.h.i.+, and discordant notes may be heard in the symphony of enthusiasm.

Of what avail these eulogies and what signify these reservations?

If one reflects that the Bible is at the same time the most important and the most obscure of the books that antiquity has bequeathed to us, it seems natural that it should soon have been translated and commented upon. The official Aramaic translation, or Targum, of the Pentateuch is attributed to Onkelos and that of the Prophets[60] to Jonathan ben Uzziel. Ras.h.i.+ constantly draws inspiration from both these works, and possibly also from the Targumim to the Hagiographa, which are much more recent than the other two Targumim. Sometimes he simply refers to them, sometimes he reproduces them, less frequently he remarks that they do not agree with the text.

For the establishment of the text Ras.h.i.+ scrupulously follows the Ma.s.sorah, the "Scriptural Statistics," the work of scholars who lived in the period between the seventh and the tenth century, and who a.s.sured the integrity of the Bible by counting the number of verses in each book and the number of times each word, phrase, or expression recurs. The Ma.s.sorah soon came to have great authority; and many scholars, such as R. Gershom, for example, copied it with their own hands in order to have a correct and carefully made text of the Bible. The Ma.s.sorah was Ras.h.i.+'s constant guide. From a calculation made, of the number of times he transgressed its rules, the infractions do not appear to be numerous, and sometimes they seem to have been involuntary. As a consequence, variants from the text of the Bible are extremely rare in Ras.h.i.+, and the copyists eliminated them entirely. In general at his time the text was definitely established to the minutest details, and variants, if there were any, were due to blunders of the copyists. Ras.h.i.+, who probably carefully compared ma.n.u.scripts, once remarked upon such faulty readings.

It is to the Ma.s.soretes that some attribute the accents which serve to mark at once the punctuation and the accentuation of the Biblical text. Ras.h.i.+ naturally conformed to this system of accentuation, and if he departed from it, it seems he frequently did so inadvertently.

But the two great sources upon which Ras.h.i.+ drew for his exegesis were the Talmudic and the Midras.h.i.+c literature, with their two methods of interpreting the Scriptures. As a knowledge of these two methods is indispensable to an understanding of Ras.h.i.+'s exegesis, I will give some pages from the work of a recent French exegete, L. Wogue, who presents an excellent characterization of them in his Histoire de la Bible et de l'exegese biblique:

Whatever diversities may exist in the point of view adopted by the investigators of the Bible, in the aims they pursued, and in the methods they employed, the methods are necessarily to be summed up in the two terms, peshat and derash. This is a fact which scarcely requires demonstration. There are only two ways of understanding or explaining any text whatsoever, either according to the natural acceptation of its meaning, or contrary to this acceptation. At first glance it seems as though the former were the only reasonable and legitimate method, and as though the second lacked either sincerity or common sense, and had no right to the t.i.tle of method. Yet we shall see how it came about, and how it was bound to come about, that the Derash not only arose in the Synagogue, but a.s.sumed preponderating importance there.

From very ancient times the Pentateuch and certain chapters of the Prophets were read or translated in the synagogue every Sat.u.r.day. Accordingly, the interpretation of the Law could not be slavishly literal.

Destined for the edification of the ignorant ma.s.ses inclined to superst.i.tion, it perforce permitted itself some freedom in order to avoid annoying misconceptions. Sometimes the literal rendition might suggest gross errors concerning the Divine Being, sometimes it might appear to be in conflict with practices consecrated by the oral law or by an old tradition, and sometimes, finally, it might in itself be grotesque and unintelligible. Hence a double tendency in exegesis, each tendency a.s.serting itself in the synagogue at different epochs and with varying force.... Two sorts of Midrash are to be distinguished; if the question concerns jurisprudence or religious practice, it is called Midrash Halakah, Halakic or legal exegesis; if the subject bears upon dogmas, promises, the consolations of religion, moral truths, or the acts of daily life, the Midrash is called Midrash Haggadah, the Haggadic or ethical exegesis. The first is intended to regulate the form and the external exercise of religion; the second, to sanctify and perfect man's inward being. Each brings to the examination of the text a preconceived notion, as it were; and it reconciles text and preconceived notion sometimes by traditional, sometimes by arbitrary, methods, often more ingenious than rational. The Peshat, on the contrary, subordinates its own ideas to the text, wishes to see in the text only what is actually there, and examines it without bias....

The pious instructors of the people felt the need of utilizing and applying to daily life as much as possible these Holy Scriptures, the one treasure that had escaped so many s.h.i.+pwrecks. That a word should have but one meaning, that a phrase should have but one subject, this seemed mean, shabby, inadequate, unworthy the Supreme Wisdom that inspired the Bible. The word of G.o.d was perforce more prolific. Each new interpretation of the Biblical text added richness and new value to the precious heritage.... Another very important circ.u.mstance, if it did not originate the Midras.h.i.+c method, at all events tended strongly to bring it into vogue. I speak of the religious life, such as it was among the Israelites, especially in the time of the second Temple. A number of practices, more or less sacred and more or less obligatory, were established in, or after this period, either by rabbinical inst.i.tution, or by virtue of the oral law or of custom; and these practices, sanctioned by long usage or by highly esteemed authorities, had no apparent basis in the written law. To maintain them and give them solidity in the regard of the people, it was natural to seek to prove by exegesis ad hoc that the Holy Text had imposed or recommended them in advance, if not expressly, at least by hints and allusions.... The application of this method was called forth not only by the religious practices, but also by the ideas and opinions that had been formed or developed in the same period. After the Babylonian Exile the successive influence of the Chaldeans, the Persians, and the Greeks produced among the Jews of Asia as well as among the Jews of Egypt certain theories concerning cosmogony, angels, and the government of the world, which rapidly gained credence, and were generally held to be incontestable. These theories provided a complete apparatus of doctrines so attractive and so enthusiastically accepted even by our teachers, that the people could not resign themselves to the belief that they were not contained in the Bible, or, worse still, that they were contradicted by this store-house of wisdom and truth. But these doctrines - for the most part, at least - are not to be found in the literal text of the Bible, and, as a consequence, the scholars turned to the Midras.h.i.+c method as the only one calculated to read the desired meaning into the text.

Now the general character of Judaism had not changed perceptibly during ten centuries. In the eleventh century the Jews had the same needs as in the first, and the same method of satisfying their needs. They found it quite natural to bring their ideas into agreement with the Bible - or, rather, they did so unconsciously - and to twist the text from its natural meaning, so as to ascribe to the Biblical authors their own ideas and knowledge.

Yet, however great the favor attaching to this method, the Peshat was never entirely deprived of its rights. It was even destined to soar high into prominence. The appearance of the Karaites (eighth century), who rejected the Talmud and held exclusively to the Scriptures, brought into existence, either directly or indirectly, a rational, independent method of exegesis, though the influence of this sect upon the development of Biblical studies has been grossly magnified. It was the celebrated Saadia (892-942) who by his translation of, and commentary upon, the Bible opened up a new period in the history of exegesis, during which the natural method was applied to the interpretation of Biblical texts. The productions of this period deserve a commanding position in Jewish literature, as much for their intrinsic value as for their number.

While, however, in the countries of Arabic culture, natural exegesis made its way triumphantly, in the countries of Christian Europe, it freed itself from the traditional Midrash only with difficulty. Moreover, Derash - to carry a Jewish term into an alien field - was the method always employed by the Christian theologians. Throughout the medieval ages they adhered chiefly to a spiritual, allegoric, moral, and mystic interpretation. In the employment of this method the literary, grammatical, philologic, and historical aspect is perforce neglected. Nevertheless, even among Christian scholars the rational method found some worthy representatives, especially among the Belgian masters.[61]

The deplorable ease of the Midras.h.i.+c method readily accounts for its vogue. The Haggadist is not compelled to hold fast to his text, his imagination has free play, and is untrammelled [untrameled sic] by the leading-strings of grammar and good sense. The task of the exegete properly so called is quite different. He may not find in the text anything which is not actually there. He must take heed of the context, of the probable, and of the rules of the language. The exegete searches for the idea in the text; the Haggadist introduces foreign ideas into the text.

"At the same time, whatever the attraction of the Midras.h.i.+c method for the Jews of France and Germany, and however great the wealth of their material, neither this attraction nor this wealth could take the place of a pure, simple explanation of the genuine meaning of Scriptures, a meaning which often served as a basis for the Midrash, and in a vast number of cases would have remained obscure and incomplete. Here there was a yawning gap in an essential matter, and the man who had the honor of filling up this gap - and with marvellous [marvelous sic] success, considering the insufficiency of his scientific resources - was one of the most eminent scholars of the Synagogue, the leader of Jewish science, Ras.h.i.+."[62]

It would be unjust to ignore the efforts of two of Ras.h.i.+'s predecessors, Moses ha-Darshan (first half of the eleventh century) and Menahem ben Helbo, who prepared the way and rendered the task easier for him. The princ.i.p.al work of Moses ha-Darshan, often cited by Ras.h.i.+ under the t.i.tle of Yesod, "Foundation," is a Haggadic and mystic commentary, giving, however, some place to questions of grammar and of the natural construction of the text. As to Menahem ben Helbo, a certain number of his explanations and fragments of his commentaries have been preserved; but Ras.h.i.+ probably knew him only through the intermediation of his nephew Joseph Kara. Following the example of Moses ha-Darshan and possibly, also, of Menahem ben Helbo, Ras.h.i.+ used both the Peshat and the Derash in his Biblical commentaries. "Ras.h.i.+," says Berliner, "employed an in-between method, in which the Peshat and the Derash were easily united, owing to the care he exercised, to choose from the one or the other only what most directly approximated the simple meaning of the text. Ras.h.i.+ was free in his treatment of traditional legends, now transforming, now lengthening, now abridging them or joining several narratives in one, according to expediency."

This opinion is comprehensive; but it is necessary to emphasize and differentiate.

As a rule, when the Midrash does no violence to the text, Ras.h.i.+ adopts its interpretation; and when there are several Midras.h.i.+c interpretations, he chooses the one that accords best with the simple sense; but he is especially apt to fall back upon the Midrash when the pa.s.sage does not offer any difficulties. On the contrary, if the text cannot be brought into harmony with the Midrash, Ras.h.i.+ frankly declares that the Midras.h.i.+c interpretation is irreconcilable with the natural meaning or with the laws of grammar. He also rejects the Midras.h.i.+c interpretation if it does not conform to the context. "A pa.s.sage," he said, "should be explained, not detached from its setting, but according to the context." In other cases he says, "The real meaning of the verse is different," and again, "This verse admits of a Midras.h.i.+c interpretation, but I do not pretend to give any but the natural meaning." Ras.h.i.+ was fond of repeating the following Talmudic saying, which he elevated into a principle: "A verse cannot escape its simple meaning, its natural acceptation." Ras.h.i.+, then, cherished a real predilection for rational and literal exegesis, but when he could not find a satisfactory explanation according to this method, or when tradition offered one, he resigned himself to the Haggadic method, saying: "This verse requires an explanation according to the Midrash, and it cannot be explained in any other way."

A few quotations will facilitate the comprehension of this characteristic method.

1. CREATION OF THE WORLD (Genesis 1.1)

In the beginning]. R. Isaac[63] says: The Law ought to have begun with the rule enjoining the celebration of Pa.s.sover, which is the first of the Mosaic precepts. But G.o.d "showed his people the power of His works, that He may give them the heritage of the heathen."[64] If the heathen nations say to Israel: You are robbers, for you have seized the land of the seven nations (Canaanites), the Israelites can reply: The entire earth belongs to G.o.d, who, having created it, disposes of it in favor of whomsoever it pleases Him. It pleased Him to give it to the seven nations, and it pleased Him to take it away from them in order to give it to us.

In the beginning, etc. Beres.h.i.+t bara]. This verse should be interpreted according to the Midrash, and it is in this way that our rabbis apply it to the Torah as having existed "before His works of old,"[65] or to Israel, called "the first-fruits of His increase."[66] But if one wishes to explain these words in their natural meaning, it is necessary to observe the following method. In the beginning of the creation of the heaven and the earth, when the earth was confusion and chaos, G.o.d said: "Let there be light." This verse does not set forth the order of the creation. If it did, the word barishona (Bet Resh Alef s.h.i.+n Nun He) would have been necessary, whereas the word res.h.i.+t (Resh Alef s.h.i.+n Yod Tav) is always in the construct, as in Jer. xxvii. 1, Gen. x. 10, Deut. xviii. 4;[67] likewise bara (Bet Resh Alef) must here be taken as an infinitive (Bet Resh Alef with s.h.i.+n dot); the same construction occurs in Hosea i. 2. Shall we a.s.sert that the verse intends to convey that such a thing was created before another, but that it is elliptical (just as ellipses occur in Job iii. 10, Is. viii. 4, Amos vi. 12, Is. xlvi. 10)? But this difficulty arises: that which existed first were the waters, since the following verse says, that "the Spirit of G.o.d moved upon the face of the waters," and since the text did not previously speak of the creation of the waters, the waters