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.

The Contradiction in Us All

The Contradiction in Us All:

A Religious Journey Through My Year at Ma'ale Gilboa

Rafi Bocarsly

When it came time to choose a yeshiva, I had a relatively defined image of what I was seeking: an open-minded Israeli yeshiva where I could engage in serious religious study of the Talmud and other texts in Hebrew. It wasn't much of a decision. There is really only one place that, at least on paper, fits those criteria. Add to the equation that I spent a week at Ma’ale Gilboa in 11^th grade and loved it, and that ended the discussion.

At least, that was the formatted answer I quickly developed when people asked me why I chose Ma’ale Gilboa. But there was another reason that I wanted to go to here: I wanted answers. Since the beginning of my teenage years, the inevitable questions almost all observant Jews must face at some point began to develop: Does God exist? What are the implications if not? Why is Judaism important to me? Is observant Judaism important to me? These are the questions that followed and haunted me throughout high school, the questions that I and most of my friends had discussed ad nauseum with each other and our parents and our teachers and had come out more confused and more frustrated than when we started.

I felt as if I was a caricature of what a Modern Orthodox teenager should be: thoughtful, questioning, committed to the ritual observance of Halakha, a good rational Maimonidian thinker, someone who viewed the world in the absolutist black and white light that I perceived Halakha to be. But I was just that: a caricature, exaggerated in an attempt to cover the inauthenticity and doubt. I wanted desperately to believe in the community that I had been raised in, but how could I when I felt that so much of the traditional Jewish law system went against my personal mores (i.e. treatment of women, attitude toward homosexuals, response to the non-observant, et cetera)? I wasn't foolish enough to assume that one year would fix all my problems, but I thought that Ma'ale Gilboa would be a place where I could at least start to get some satisfactory answers to my questions.

I was wrong. In fact, Ma’ale Gilboa has not answered any of my questions. When I came to Israel, I was in the throws of the ontological loneliness that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik so eloquently describes in one of his most influential essays on Modern Orthodoxy, “The Lonely Man of Faith”. “I am lonely because I feel rejected and thrust away by everybody,” Soloveitchik writes. “The words of the Psalmist ‘My father and my mother have forsaken me’ ring quite often in my ears like the plaintive cooing of the turtledove. It is a strange, alas, absurd experience engendering sharp, enervating pain as well as a stimulating, cathartic feeling. I despair because I am lonely and, hence, feel frustrated.” I too felt forsaken by my community. I too felt frustrated. I was stuck in the trenches, fighting to find reason and value in the practice that had meant so much to me for so long. I kept looking for the capital-t-Truth in Judaism and was coming up short every time. Ma’ale Gilboa has done nothing to avail those woes.

Instead, my time here has done something far different. It began about a month into yeshiva when, still perturbed by my self perceived lack of religious growth, I turned to an essay written by Rav Bigman for the Jewish publication Conversations. In the essay, entitled “Expanding Our Religious Vocabulary”, Rav Bigman argues that, “The rationalist mode and the mystical mode tend to contradict biblical imagery in the mind—and even more so in the heart. Some students manage to live in a dichotomous world. As a brilliant student once told me: ‘Although I find Maimonides' approach in the Guide very convincing, I live my life with the distinct feeling that God is holding my hand.” When I came across this quote, I found it to be an intellectually appetizing nugget to chew on. I let it simmer and settle in.

A couple of weeks later during tefillah, something strange happened to me. I was having a difficult day. Usually when I have difficult days, I try and push through and hope tomorrow will be better. On this particular day, I was more than a little surprised to find that what I wanted to do more than anything was to pray. That morning in tefillah, I had a strong sense of focus, or kavanah, that had escaped me since I had been a curious and intrigued child, beginning to explore the nature of prayer in his earliest days of elementary school. But what shocked me even more was what happened after tefillah that morning: nothing. For the first time since I happened upon rationalism and Maimonedian thought - which pushed the spiritual fire out of my life as quickly as it had been ignited when I was young - I didn't ask myself why I had just had a meaningful experience. I wasn’t plagued by the usual thoughts that would float across my mind and entrench themselves so firmly that I could think of nothing else; no questions of ‘what just happened?’ or ‘was it real?’ or ‘was I speaking to anyone?’ I was void of the usual cynical sardonicisms that I would so cleverly think up to explain away the spirituality and meaning. 

That was the first time I experienced rather than questioned, and my goal has been to do the same ever since. When Rav Bigman explained to us his conception of “God,” he continued to reinforce the train of thought I was already on. “God,” he told us, is not a man with a white beard sitting on his throne in the sky (a conclusion most of us had already come to.) Rather, “God” is a term we use to give voice to an experienced reality that we feel but we cannot quite express. This idea hit me with force: that “God” is an experience rather than a being. This was one of my first encounters with a phenomenological approach to Judaism, an approach that champions the idea that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we first exist and experience and then try to put ideas to the experiences we have had. It is possible that God is an absolute being; it is also possible that God is not. But a phenomenological approach is not concerned with that question. It engages life from the realm of the experiential rather than the ontological. 

What that means is that now, I don’t have any answers to the questions with which I started the year because those questions aren’t essential to me or my Judaism anymore. I’m now more concerned with the internal experience of being a Jew and what that means to me rather than the big Meaning-Of-Life type questions that had berated me constantly. I've now begun to enter a new phase of my religious life where I accept the inherent contradiction in my beliefs; I can enjoy Maimonides’ philosophy and the Kabbalists' spirituality.

This contrast is captured beautifully by the theologian James Fowler in his book Stages of Faith, wherein he outlines six stages of faith development:

Stage 5 Conjunctive faith involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed or unrecognized in the interest of Stage 4's self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. This stage develops a 'second naïveté' (Ricoeur) in which symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming and reworking of one's past. There must be an opening to the voices of one's 'deeper self.' Importantly, this involves a critical recognition of one's social unconscious-the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of one's nurture...Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience.

Here, Fowler is describing the “dichotomous world” that Rav Bigman spoke of in his essay, a world in which one can except and move past the contradiction inherent within one’s self and one’s beliefs. It is a stage I now find myself beginning, and I am more at peace with my Judaism than at any point prior in my life.

Despite Ma’ale Gilboa’s emphasis on being a place of intellectual honesty and open questioning, the most valuable thing I've received from my time and the Rabbanim here thus far – especially with so many shiurim (classes) on Chasidut and Jewish mysticism – isn't answers to my questions; it's knowing when to question. I'm still intellectually curious; I still question. But now, I also “live my life with the distinct feeling that God is holding my hand,” and I don't feel a contradiction in that. I still struggle with my Judaism as much as I ever have. Only now the struggle is practical rather than abstract or philosophical: 'It's hard to get out of bed in the morning for tefillah’ as opposed to ‘Why get out of bed for tefillah?’ ‘I’m having trouble concentrating in class’ instead of ‘Is learning Jewish texts even worth my time?’ ‘I’m not feeling connected to my Judaism today’ and not ‘Should I feel connected to my Judaism at all?’ I still struggle, only now I look internally for the answers instead of expecting the capital-t-Truth to come smack me in the face and feeling defeated and dejected when it doesn’t.

This past Wednesday it rained on Ma’ale Gilboa, as it had every day that week. During lunch, as I sat in the Beit Midrash reading, one of my friends came over to me smiling. “Rafi, look at that,” he said as he pointed behind me. I turned around to face the large wall of windows overlooking the surrounding mountains behind me. What I saw was astonishing; a breathtakingly beautiful, picturesque rainbow shown perfectly through the thick density of clouds several hundred meters off the end of the mountain. My friend was not the only person to notice the rainbow and one by one the people in the Beit Midrash began to file out onto the balcony to get a better view. Everyone was silent, in a trance from the indescribable, transcendent beauty before us.

Soon we were all on the balcony overlooking the rainbow, the length of which spread from one periphery of our vision to the next. Some people took pictures – first of the rainbow, then of themselves with the rainbow in the background. Everyone was smiling and laughing. There were awestruck whispers from friend to friend, questioning and affirming the singularity of the magnificence we were witnessing. Someone came out with a siddur and recited the prayer one says when one witnesses a rainbow. We all answered amen and everyone was silent. Then someone began singing. We all joined in and locked arms. Soon, we were all singing and dancing with vigor and spirit.

As I danced, I took another glance at the rainbow and I thought about the reaction it was eliciting in us all. I thought to myself, ‘why is this our response to nature’s beauty?’ ‘Does it really make sense?’ I meditated on the question for a moment when David Foster Wallace’s words from his short story “Good Old Neon” flashed across my mind: “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” Sometimes, it's worthwhile for me to ask ‘Why,’  to question and to grapple with the big questions, the capital-t-Truth, of the complicated world we all live in. Other times, it's better to let “what goes on inside” happen and just enjoy the rainbow.

Photo courtesy of Ofir Brand

Meaning and Purim (it’s never too late for a for a Purim Torah)

The holiday of Purim was just a while back, and our celebrations at Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa were so naturally and unselfconsciously joyous and fun that I think that I’m still feeling its reverberations approaching Pesach.  But besides all of the shenanigans (and a bit of schnapps too), I was surprised at how much Purim has proved relevant to my thoughts about Judaism and limud Torah that I have outlined in my prior blogs, and I hope the statute of limitations on a Purim Torah hasn’t passed—why should such a great holiday be limited to its one day of observance?  Again, I found inspiration in the writings of Rav Shagar, this time from his book about Purim called Chance and Providence.  The Shabbat before Purim is what is known as Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat where we read about the Amalekite nation who was the first to attack Israel on their way out of Egypt (as mentioned in my earlier blog).  But with the commandment to remember as it pertains to Amalek, we are also called on to erase their memory, two seemingly contradictory tasks.  Rav Shagar resolves the seeming antinomy as follows: “We do not forget Amalek.  The goal is not to ignore what was, to pretend that evil never existed, but rather to place it, to keep it, in a state of absence.” 

The erasure of the memory of Amalek is really the creation of an absence that is meant to give meaning to what it present.  The commandment to remember Amalek evokes the other commandment in the Torah I wrote about earlier in this three part blog involving remembrance: remembering the Exodus.  As we’ve discussed, memory is something that embodies experience, a method by which to preserve past experiences and their lessons in a perpetual state of relevance, even if those memories did not necessarily happen to us—or even if they may not have happened at all.  Here we see the flipside of this notion—the remembering of something that we desire strongly to forget, something that signifies the very opposite of what we aspire to be, precisely in order to extract from its deletion a deeper understanding of what it negates: we remember the evil and godlessness of Amalek—or more precisely we delete their memory, while still preserving it, as nonsensical as that sounds—in order to understand further the beneficence of God and the moral obligations the Jewish people have.  Just as the story of the Exodus, through its constant reminding of the experience of slavery is meant to ground our actions in an empathy with those less fortunate, so too is the remembrance of Amalek, the forgetting of Amalek, meant to teach us an equally powerful lesson about evil and a goodness that can overcome it.

In a chabura (learning in a small group) on Rebbe Nachman of Breslov that I have regularly with one of the “upper-classman” here, Arial Fisher, I found another idea concerning an absence that impacts what is present manifested in a different, but not irrelevant form.  Rebbe Nachman discusses how the question “Ayeh m’kom kvodo,” “God, where is Your glory?” something that is often shouted out in moments of extreme despair, when one is overcome by the feeling of God’s absence, is one of the strongest declarations of faith that exists.  In those moments of doubt, by the very nature of your cursing God’s absence, you prove to yourself that you’ve been seeking God, that you pine for Him, that His hiddenness deeply pains you.  The fact that in your most troubled times you cry out to God proves that you deeply care about Him. 

If I can extract another lesson from Purim and Chance and Providence that’s relevant here, it’s about alcohol.  There is an opinion in the Talmud that professes that on the holiday of Purim, you need to get drunk to the point where you can no longer distinguish between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.”  The notion of a point of reference where dichotomies decompose (even though it is here represented by heavy drinking), is one that strikes me, here and elsewhere, as an extraordinarily important idea.  Here we see, as in the Megillah itself, which does not mention God at all, whose primary character’s name is a derivation of the root meaning “to hide,” the meaninglessness of the distinction between a God who is hidden and a God who reveals Himself.  Just as earlier we learned an immense lesson from the merger in Parshat Mishpatim of the God of our past and the God of our future, the fluid fusion of memories with what is demanded of us in the current reality, it is specifically God’s hiddenness that enables Him to be eternally present, so long as we are willing to blur the distinction between those two things.  By the very nature of the fact that He is not bound to a specific, definitive form, He is able to reveal Himself in virtually every scenario in which one chooses to look for Him.

And so, I return to my initial anxieties expressed in the first installment of this blog—how do I find answers to my larger questions within Judaism and relate on a personal level to my learning?  I’ve already demonstrated that answers aren’t necessarily a reflection of priorities, but doubts, questions, and challenges all indicate what you value, what is important enough to wrestle and struggle with.  As I explained in part two of the blog, Rav Bigman pointed out to me that your relationship to Halakha, and I think to everything in life, changes with time.  The closest thing to answering a question will be to simply live and learn enough that you come to realize that your opinions—both the questions and the answers—will continue to evolve.  I recently came across a quote from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (while coincidentally browsing a website that was devoted exclusively to Nietzsche quotes): “A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”   To return to the earlier notion of this sort of drunken blurring of distinctions, I think that when the questions, answers, and the path of experience that determines and is determined by them cease to be separate entities, the passageway to a true, multilateral learning opens wide.

I’ve been taught a lot about subtlety and nuance thus far in Yeshiva, both in the intellectual and spiritual realms, which don’t necessarily have to be that separate.  The key to understanding and fulfillment on both those fronts seems to me to be pluralism, not exclusively in the post-modern sense that all opinions have some form of validity, but also in the sense that all opinions are deeply related and enmeshed in one never-ending, beautifully indistinct intellectual conversation.  This is a limitless endeavor: to give and take knowledge, to attribute sources as well as appropriate lessons, to engage texts and thinkers in continuum, stacking insight upon insight, rearranging and evolving not only one’s amassed knowledge, but one’s entire way of thinking.  This is the essence of the Jewish, Halakhic life, where action, intellect, and meaning all converge to create a systematic way of living in which you engage all knowledge, and find your own personal path to fulfillment. 

How can you treat a personal quest for meaning systematically?  While I’ll admit I’m on shakier ground here, something that’s helped me understand this question has been the very study of Halakha itself, which I’ve come to understand is constantly trying to find the balance between the divine, the individual, and the collective.  This is no easy task, but the nature of the problem is exactly what the Halakhic dialogue is, why people are still learning, struggling with, reassessing, revering, and reprocessing thousands of years of tradition in a way that stresses its meaning and relevance in a modern milieu, rather than its superficial antiquity and archaism.  Of course, having been embedded within this framework for most of my life, I have a much easier claim to its meaning than an outsider looking in, but that is really the essence of the thoughts in these last few essays: learning is the same process as experiencing, and vice versa.  If I continue to live and learn my Judaism, engaging it head on, I think I can continue to sustain personal meaning.  The moment I cease to put in the effort, the moment I cease both to study and to do as a single endeavor, in both a religious context and a secular one, I cripple my ability to sustain a meaningful existence.  Questions and their answers are only as good as the mindset and experiential context surrounding them, just as experience can only resonate with an individual if it’s filtered through his or her unique perception of the world.  This is all an experiment in empathy, patience, and openness—the quest to forge on in life, to grow intellectually, to actively engage your world, to amass lessons from experience and text while never closing your ears to anyone or anything, while never being complacent in your comfort zone, while never stopping to live questions. And maybe, although it’s not a necessity to meaning, you will, as Rilke put it, “gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer[s].”

Thanks,

Kal