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.

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