Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, and Messianism

Two-Timely Matters: Nahmanides' Historical Reading of Genesis

53 Chapter two Timely Matters Nahmanides’ Historical Reading of Genesis Nahmanides’ contribution to the Maimonidean controversy offers an early illustration of his understanding of the interplay between tradition and innovation in the ongoing project of Jewish legal thinking. In the context of this dispute he presented an argument allowing for halakhic innovation suited to contemporary needs and circumstances, but regulated by accepted practice and precedent. The approach to interpretive and legal innovation that Nahmanides articulated in his response to the French rabbis’ herem finds echoes in his biblical exegesis as well. Though he wrote his biblical commentary some time after the Maimonidean controversy there is a clear continuity between Nahmanides’ early leadership strategies and his great exegetical work. Medieval Jewry produced several schools of exegesis with a variety of approaches and concerns. Beginning in the late eleventh century, there was a groundswell of Torah study and commentary among European Jews. Nahmanides’ exegesis is one among several comprehensive interpretations of the Torah that was completed and circulated during the middle ages by prominent teachers. Yet, his systematic biblical commentary stood at the crossroads of several fundamental developments in medieval Judaism , bridging classical midrashic commentary with medieval innovations including philosophy, Kabbalah, and a concern with seeking the peshat or 5 54 Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia the simple meaning of the text derived from Northern European exegetes who were influenced by Rashi’s school. Nahmanides’ exegesis is systematic and comprehensive. In keeping with the great medieval exegetical works, he followed the narrative structure of Torah and included commentary on each of the five biblical books. Nahmanides framed his commentary with a methodological introduction , which laid out the way he conceptualized human reception and understanding of divine revelation as well as some of the tools he deemed necessary for grasping the sense and structure of biblical literature. This introduction established the tone and intent of the commentary as a work. The method of interpretation presented here was designed to extract obscure or hidden meanings from the sacred text, while reconciling those with more widely accepted understandings. In the process, Nahmanides identified the story of creation as the epicenter of Jewish faith, practice, and community, the point at which Israel’s relationship with God was formalized and structured. Thus, he suggested, the early chapters of Genesis demanded careful explication. Nahmanides’ chief exegetical concerns included : 1) the correlation of events as they occurred with the sequence of events represented in revelation as a whole and in the creation narrative in particular; 2) the link between the extended process of divine revelation to Israel; and 3) the meaning and structure of Israel’s history. Throughout, he presented Torah as a tangible and dynamic expression of the many faces of divine will. Nahmanides’ concern with direct questions of sequence and history emerging from the creation story illustrates a more fundamental characteristic of his conception of the process, limitations, and objectives of interpreting (and applying) divine revelation. His approach to biblical exegesis , and particularly to Genesis, was rooted in a belief that Torah contained revelation of law and important information about the distant past, but also a map of the structure and duration of human experience from the time of creation until the messianic redemption. In other words, according to Nahmanides the biblical narrative represented, albeit in rough form, the superstructure of changes and events, the duration, rhythm, and purpose of the historical experience of the Jewish people. Change, disruption , and (perhaps paradoxically in the context of this discussion) uncertainty were thus fundamental components in the fulfillment of the historical drama. As a result, methods of interpreting Torah and the means of understanding conceptual and causal links between events or people in the past, present, and future also changed over time. Timely Matters 55 From a human perspective, processes of historical change occur at a snail’s pace; social and cultural shifts only gain clarity in retrospect. Similarly , according to Nahmanides’ view of history and Torah, methods of extracting meaning from Torah unfold incrementally over the course of many generations, as does the meaning itself. Meanings that had been hidden from one generation offer themselves as transparent to later generations . The assumed logic of sacred history would not allow for God to permit this slow unfolding of meaning to continue indefinitely. Rather, Nahmanides understood such processes of change to be contained between a clearly defined beginning and end: between creation and redemption . He perceived those processes of...