Layers: Of Text and Ourselves

--Gabriel Karger

Much of the Jewish world today studies Talmud in a “classical” way, reading lines of the gemarah with Rashi, and moving to other commentaries develop more conceptual and halachic understanding of the sugyot. Talmud at Maale Gilboa sometimes employs a more contextual focus, which aims to understand voices of tradition in a carefully historical mode. We'll sometimes spend a full week looking at psukim, comparing parallels in the Mishna and Tosefta and wondering which came first, going over the Yerushalmi, and occasionally checking different manuscripts of the Bavli. When I tell outsiders about this methodology I sometimes receive a rather horrified – or at least perturbed– look, and responses along the lines of “That's not how one learns Talmud” or “What is this, a university with kippot?” It's true, a historical kind of reading isn't the one employed by many Orthodox Jews, but I think it's worth explaining the power of 'academic' tools for a religious community, and the ways in which they do and do not threaten current practice.

            Though my morning class's Rav hates the term, the methodology of looking at different historical periods is often called Rivadim, meaning “layers.”  Let's take as an example of method the very first line from Sanhedrin, which we learned as a yeshiva the bulk of the year.  The mishna states that “monetary cases [are judged by] three, assault and robberies by three.” We have no reason to suggest the monetary cases here exclude loans between individuals, but that's exactly how the gemarah begins. It asks: “[Why separate between monetary cases and assault?] Aren't assault and robbery part of monetary damages?” R. Abahu is brought to give an answer, saying that “The monetary cases refer only to assault and mayhem, but not to loaning money.” In other words, instead of two categories, money and assault, money is turned into a category which contain the others.

            This isn't what the mishna means in its own context. Why the sudden change? As it becomes clearer later, later rabbis essentially saw that stringent requirements about the number and type of person doing the proceedings could make it harder to loan money, specifically to poor people. For the sake of “not locking a door in front of the poor,” they relaxed the requirements. So why does the mishna then require three judges at all? Perhaps it's protecting the integrity of the judicial system and its consistency. Maybe it's worried about the safety of these loans – if the loans aren't regulated strictly, no one will like his/her chances of getting back the money loaned out. This is when we pull out the laptops and start searching for parallels.

            I don't see this method of reading as always being radically different from a classical one. Just reading the gemarah without any historical periodization one can see the tension between those loaning and receiving loans, the priority of the poor, etc. We would, however, miss the temporal development of the law, which I'll get back to later. But first here's another short example: In discussing the institution of smicha, it seems that there's a split between authorities in Israel and Babylon about what to do with the practice. Rabbis in Israel were committed to an idea of judgment as coming from God, and continuing a chain of authority which enacts the divine law. A story tells of Rabbi Yehudah ben Bava who alone saved the institution of smicha from destruction in the land of Israel. On the other hand, Babylonian sources are more mixed about both smicha and knasot, a kind of fine leveled by these judges that exceeds the direct damage caused by one person to another. In the first and third chapters of Sanhedrin, the gemarah presents the notion that knasot can't be collected in Babylon.

            Why the difference? One possibility is the structure of authority that ruled in the land of Israel versus that of Babylon. Rabbis in the land of Israel may have felt more comfortable exercising political power over Jews that authorities in Babylon were wary of, or had no ability to enforce. In Babylon a less severe idea of equitable judgment developed that had to be more accommodating to what kinds of punishments individuals would accept, and so the notion of punishments above and beyond damages received was not enacted.

            This case raises all sorts of interesting questions about legal authority, pragmatism, equality, and so forth. But what does this method of reading give us that others do not?

            Once more, we can arrive at the same conceptual questions about justice and the law that we've raised by eschewing all this talk of Babylonian traditions versus Israeli ones. I don't necessarily need this framework where I differentiate between statements by Babylonian and Israeli sources. First and foremost, I could always pick up the latest works on ethics, jurisprudence, or religious thought on similar issues. But when I read Talmud I'm not interested in doing philosophy. I'd rather enter the world of the text in all of its difference, and that includes the historical layers from the Code of Hammurabi and psukim all the way to anonymous editors two thousand years later.

            The crux of the issue isn't really if we should be uncovering the layers of the text at all, but rather how many layers we should look at. Anyone reading a page of Talmud and relying solely on Rashi to understand that s/he is learning gemarah exactly like I do, except that his or her understanding of the text comes straight out of the 11^th century. There's nothing wrong with the 1000's – truly, they're an interesting period – but today we have electronic tools, manuscripts, historical knowledge and new methods that allow us to see into so many more worlds. Everyone uses the conceptual language and understandings of specific times in history, but when we read Talmud we can look at radical changes, progressions, and deep differences in approach all on one page.

            In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if this method of learning has remained in universities because of the temporal aspect contained in historical reading. The most amazing moments in our shiurim sometimes occur when we realize that an individual or group has totally revolutionized an aspect of the law, or subverted a previous generation's ruling with an okimpta or reinterpretation. I imagine some people would rather read the Talmud as a document consistent across time precisely because they feel uncomfortable with the radical changes the text makes. They are those who will call bringing modern methodologies into a religious setting 'untraditional.' I'd say our readings of the text are vastly more traditional than others – we actually care about every voice in our tradition. And yes, perhaps there is an implication here that every generation should reverently add new layers to our tradition. I can't think of much more traditional than that.

            I would like to think that learning fundamentally changes a person – that an acquisition of knowledge or text makes a person different than the one before. When we ignore the contradictions and layers of our history we risk assimilating the text into something we already know. Most people have heard a drasha in a shul where the rabbi raises various questions about the parsha, immediately jumps from the psukim to Rashi, the Ramban or a chasidic tale, and says the whole issue really teaches us the importance of derech eretz. There's nothing wrong with this kind of motivation in a speech, but it would be rather disappointing if the greatest resurgence of Jewish learning in history amounted to an enterprise of assimilation of the familiar instead of an encounter with the unknown.  When we learn, we have the opportunity to truly become a different person, to step into another historical world, focusing on each voice of the text. Maale Gilboa has tried to seriously enter this world of the text in all its richness. I hope others will join us.

There and Back Again; A Story of P'shat vs D'rash

There and Back Again; A Story of P'shat vs D'rash

Chanan Heisler

            When I was a little, the lines that separated פשט and דרש were blurred; they were both torah, so I considered them one and the same. In elementary school, I knew the facts of the bible: עשו bit  יעקב's neck when they embraced each other after years apart. אברהם smashed his father's idols in order to prove a point. He was consequently cast into a burning oven, but with the help of God, he emerged unscathed. יצחק became blind because of an angel's teardrop that inconveniently fell into his eyes during the עקידה. These stories weren't made up by rabbis later on in history, they were crucial facts in the stories of our forefathers. Facts that made these stories more interesting and more memorable.

            In high school, I started to learn about the dichotomy between what was actually written in the torah, and what was, in my mind, forced into the texts afterwards by later rabbis using the torah to promote their own agendas. The cynical Chanan had no room in his heart or head for דרש. I can remember my frustration when learning Gemara, how after every אוקימתא, I would cynically disregard what each commentator of the previous generation was trying to do. When the Gemara would bring a random פסוק, taken out of its intended context to learn a rule, I might have snidely remarked to my חברותה how that wasn't the real meaning of the פסוק. When a rabbi in the talmud would create an אוקימתא, specifying a given case to a single context, in order to bolster and affirm their understanding of the Gemara, I would think to myself how they clearly just missed the point. In my head, these rabbis weren't trying to learn torah, they were trying to shape the words of the torah to advocate their own opinions. Cynical Chanan cared first and foremost for intellectual honesty, and cared little for those who seemed to be inventing an understanding that wasn't previously there.

            The point where I started to open up to the concept of דרש was in a senior year english class. We started off the year reading Textual Power by Robert Scholes. We discussed the meaning of reading literature and what a reader is supposed to do. In class, we spoke of two flaws the normal reader has. One is that they try to find the author's intentions or the original meanings behind the book. A text has a life of it's own, and its meaning goes well beyond the original or intended significance. The second is that one shouldn't be a passive reader, waiting for the message to come forth on its own. There is no 'right way' of reading literature. Instead, one must analyze literature and search for meaning even one that seemingly isn't actually there. As long as one could use quotes and details to support a claim about a message or hidden meaning, it was fair game.

            It took me until this past year to begin to conceptualize the bigger picture of the reality that is פשט vs דרש. דרש, in its essence, is also a form of literary analysis. In english class, we use different lenses to understand a given text. Freudian, feminist, and historical analytical lenses all bring a different focus to the table when understanding Shakespeare. פשט and דרש are tools to understand the various religious texts we analyze. פשט focuses on what is really going on, what is simple or basic understanding. דרש, on the other hand, focuses on something much greater. A דרש oriented reading of biblical stories will care more for lessons and morals of a story, than on the actual meaning of a text. Even though the study of הלכה is more dynamic and complicated than a reading of a single text, talmudic study also has the d'rash style reading in it as well. A דרש oriented talmudist isn't necessarily looking to formalize law, rather to use the law and apply it in a way to better understand the situation. Someone who brings a random פסוק out of its context to prove a law is using their sources to prove a point or refocus a conversation. Even the אוקימתא that, once upon a time, frustrated me to no end, serves a bigger goal than intellectual honesty. Yes, it is important to understand the פשט, but the value in judaism and in jewish learning is in the דרש. Otherwise, we might as well be poking out each other's eyes and killing every rebellious teenager.

            As I continue my learning at Maale Gilboa, I have returned to the world of דרש once again. Maybe I didn't originally know the difference between פשט and דרש, and I would take them both as torah and apply both. Now, as I am able to understand a more nuanced view of Jewish texts, I can distinguish the differences between פשט and דרש, and afterward understand what there is to gain from both viewpoints.

Loving Math and Talmud

By Michael Zanger-Tishler

Recently, I was reading a book called “Love and Math” by Edward Frenkel, a famous professor of mathematics at the University of California Berkeley. In the book, Frenkel describes (almost as if describing why he loves his wife) the way in which he fell in love with mathematical theories and with the culture around doing math. Growing up in the Soviet Union, however, learning math was difficult for Jewish students. One of the more poignant scenes that Frenkel describes is climbing over a fence to sneak into Moscow State University’s famous Mekh-Mat, the department of Mechanics and Mathematics, in order to hear seminars by the revered mathematicians who taught there. This University, which Frenkel was forbidden from studying in because he was Jewish, was the center of pure mathematics in Russia.

When reading this story, I could not help but reflect on the behavior of Hillel Hazaken. We learn (יומא דף לה, עמוד ב) that Hillel used to work every day to earn money for his family. He would then use half of his money to support his family, and half of his money to pay the guard of the Beit Midrash so he could enter and learn. However, one day Hillel did not make any money and was not allowed by the guard to enter the Beit Midrash. Instead of sulking, Hillel was so committed to learning Torah that he went up on the roof of the Beit Midrash and listened through the sky light. So distracted was he by learning Torah, that three amot of snow fell on him without him noticing. The sages learning in the Beit Midrash needed to revive him the following morning.

These two characters share a similar love of learning, and the topics they enjoy learning are more similar than one might think (Rav Soloveitchik was a student of pure math and physics and would often compare the study of those subjects to the study of Halacha). Throughout my life, I have been full of Frenkel’s insatiable desire to learn math. As a child I would read through math textbooks on my own and participate in math competitions even when they weren’t offered through my school. For two years, I was even fortunate enough to take part in math research supervised by the professor who convinced Professor Frenkel to sneak into Moscow State University when they were college students. During these years, I was surrounded by brilliant mathematicians. These mentors and peers, however, were also people who, if given the option between doing math and something else, would almost certainly choose math. These people rubbed off on me and during the last two years of high school I would often stay up late scribbling down math equations in the cliché way people often imagine mathematicians working.

Now that I am at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa and find myself contemplating masechet Sanhedrin long after night seder has finished at 10 pm, I wonder why this type of dedication to Torah learning was not something I could have imagined in myself before yeshiva. I had access to all of the resources to do so and also access to a plethora of rabbis at school, camp, and in my community who would have loved to guide me in my Torah study. My answer ultimately comes from the different ways I was introduced to Torah and to math. Being around people who love math (fellow students and teachers), I have noticed that when they try to explain what they find magical about studying math, it is always through examples of problems or theorems that initially enamored them. Whether it involves showing a pattern in Fibonacci numbers or demonstrating the way a theory beautifully describes a certain phenomenon, individual examples, when explained by someone knowledgeable and invested in the topic, can give a lay person insight into why mathematics is an amazing endeavor. Sadly, it has often been my experience that in the Jewish institutions I have been part of, the education process is different. Instead of studying l’shem shamayim (for the sake of heaven), the emphasis is on making students study just so they can be literate Jews. Then, instead of giving examples of how fascinating a specific sugya of Talmud can be, students are relegated to sitting through classes on controversial topics in Judaism or modern “issues” in halacha. These classes are meant to pique student interest and, while provoking discussion, they often make those who already do not feel an obligation towards Jewish learning angrier at the tradition. Ultimately we are taught to learn not because it is fun, but because it is simply something we have to do if we are Jewish.

One of the experiences that Frenkel describes most glowingly in his book is that of sitting in on Israel Gelfand’s shiur while an undergraduate (I’m pretty sure that they called it a seminar but for my purposes it helps me imagine it as a shiur). Gelfand was, as Frenkel describes, “the patriarch of the Soviet mathematical school” and one of the most brilliant and charismatic mathematicians of the 20th century. However, Gelfand’s brilliance was not the only thing that made his seminar so attractive. Gelfand created a lively (if not slightly scary environment) where he would tell jokes, call up different speakers, and have different people participate (often without advance warning ) in his upbeat and engaging seminar. This famous seminar seems a lot like many of our shiurim at Maaleh Gilboa. If this were the type of environment that surrounded Torah learning for me before this year, I have no doubt I would have been inspired to learn Torah with a fervor I was not inspired to before this year. I do not know that I have a way to improve the atmosphere at American Jewish schools, but a place to start is by trying to emphasize learning about Judaism in an exciting way and not an apologetic way.