The humble master

The JC- featured essay

People often ask me, “Where did you get your Jewish education?” A fair question, but one that leaves me slightly embarrassed. I can’t lay claim to a classical yeshivah education, nor did I imbibe Jewish knowledge at the knee of a learned parent. Though I have been lucky enough to learn with some wonderful modern teachers — Aviva Zornberg, Shmuel and Judy Klitsner, Rafi Zarum — it’s only been in the form of occasional sessions.

No, most of my teachers live in books, and I have been privileged to study with a wide range of them, spanning 3,000 years and half the globe.

When I consider them, however, one figure stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. If I had to nominate someone as my rav muvhak (the traditional term for one’s principal teacher), it would have to be Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchak of Troyes, in France, whose 900th yahrzeit fell on August 5. Like many of the details of Rashi’s life, this date is uncertain: it’s first mentioned in the 14th century, but nevertheless, this is an appropriate time to reflect on what makes Rashi so special to me and to thousands of others who count themselves his pupils.

First and foremost are Rashi’s personal qualities, the basis of his superb teaching skills. His patience, faith, and humility are evident — perhaps surprisingly — in his commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. No question is too trivial for him. You read a passage of Isaiah or a tricky bit of Talmud and come across a completely unfamiliar word; Rashi is there at your elbow, providing a translation or a paraphrase that can instantly be grasped, and often ana-lysing the word to show how he arrives at his conclusion.

If you lose the thread of an intricate talmudic wrangle, Rashi is there to explain it. Nor is he content with rescue work: he will often anticipate errors of understanding and traps for the unwary, and guide you past them with a deft word or two. Like all the best teachers, he doesn’t tell you everything, leaving you space to work things out for yourself and discover new depths in the text.

It is often assumed that Rashi’s commentaries are very simple — after all, kids learn them, don’t they? — but once you have started to explore them, level after level of depth is revealed if you take the trouble to look. It’s no wonder that more than 200 scholars have written commentaries on his commentary.

The wise, gentle, and benign teacher I discovered in his commentaries is also revealed in his answers to the halachic questions that were sent to him from across Europe. Rashi rebukes a questioner who doubts whether forced converts to Christianity who have recently ret-urned to Judaism are genuine, assuring him that “they are perfectly kosher” and should be welcomed back with love.

He stands up for a woman who is being mistreated by her husband — something that comforts me when he doesn’t always display a modern attitude to women. I remember, too, that he must have educated his three daughters (he had no sons), since they gave halachic decisions in his name, though I am still looking for a source to confirm the often-repeated ass-ertion that they wore tallit and tefilin.

It’s important to recognise that he was a medieval man, though in many ways, a surprisingly modern one. This is clear in another of Rashi’s remarkable qualities: his passionate in-terest in the latest intellectual developments of his time, things we now take for granted, such as Hebrew grammar and dictionaries. He frequently makes use of the very first examples of both, and his commentaries are themselves pioneer efforts.

A century earlier, in Iraq, Sa’adia Gaon had written the first single-author biblical commentaries, but they were in Arabic, and there is no evidence that Rashi knew of them. He effectively invented both the biblical and the talmudic commentary, a stupendous revolution in Torah study. He drew on the entire range of earlier literature at a time when books were scarce and no reference libraries existed, let alone study aids such as concordances. He must have had a superb, perhaps photographic, memory.

But the two qualities I love best in him, those I would most like to take as my inspiration in teaching, are his deep love of the text and his humility before it: of all the classic commentators, Rashi — the greatest of them all — is the only one who can summon the courage to say, as he does on several occasions: “I do not know what this is meant to teach us.”