Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

PART V: Commentaries: A Concise Guide

Commentaries: A ConciseGuide 1. Humash Commentaries 2. Other Historical-Critical Commentaries 3. The Great Medieval Commentaries 4. Synthetic Commentaries 5. Midrash 6. Women’s Commentaries 7. Web Resources P A R T V 180 COMMENTARIES: A CONCISE GUIDE Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs. —Henry Ward Beecher If I agreed with Beecher there would be no need for this discussion . And to some extent I do agree with him. In the exchange between the reader and the text that takes place every time we open the Humash, the reader is ultimately in charge. It is what the reader sees and hears in the text that is pivotal. That is what Beecher means to say by his analogy—and I think he’s right. So why bother with commentary? Because in reading the Humash we need all the help we can get. The landscape of the five books is sufficiently confusing—linguistically , rhetorically, and historically—that unaided the reader will not know what she is looking at even if all the cobwebs were swept from the windows and the reader were not up in the garrett but down at ground level. Commentaries can indeed obscure our view of the text, especially when they are tendentious or apologetic or didactic. But when they are responsible and carefully done they can illuminate the text in important ways. I would venture to say that Beecher never read Rashi. Had he done so, he might not have offered his analogy. Beecher’s analogy speaks to a basic question about biblical commentary : What is it for? Is its purpose to explain the text or to interpret it? One could argue that these are not clear-cut alternatives but two sides of the same coin. Is not every explanation an interpretation and vice versa? Hermeneutical theory (the theory of interpretation) usefully distinguishes between exegesis, the articulation (drawing out) of the text’s objective meaning, and eisegesis, the meaning that is subjectively determined (put in) by the reader. In Part II, I discussed these two modes as they impinge on the act of reading. I noted that in reading the Humash there is an ongoing tension between them. My point in bringing them up here is to note that this same tension also operates in the writing of commentaries. This shouldn’t surprise us since commentators are, first and foremost, readers, readers who make the results of their reading public. 181 COMMENTARIES: A CONCISE GUIDE In Jewish terms the exegesis/eisegesis dichotomy can be correlated with the difference between peshat and derash. Running through the whole history of Humash commentary from Rabbinic times to our own is a debate over what the commentator’s task is: to elucidate the peshat, the plain meaning of the words of the text? Or to produce a derash, a meaning that is read out of—actually into— those words? On one side are the pashtanim, those who hold that the function of commentary is to provide the peshat; on the other are the darshanim, those who believe that to expound Torah involves going beneath the verbal surface of the text to discover and teach meanings and implications hitherto unknown. Virtually all commentators on the Humash are implicated in this debate and, whether they say so explicitly or not, take a position in it. Some, like the great medieval exegete Rashbam (Rabbi Shemu’el ben Meir, France, ca. 1085–ca.1174), are pure pashtanim; others, like the early modern Keli Yakar (Shlomo Ephraim of Luntshitz, 1550–1619, Poland), are brilliant darshanim. Most walk both sides of the expository street and mix the two modes in their writings. The commentaries I note in the following discussion reflect this tension, even as the ones written in our time are couched in contemporary terms and language. But right here, two cautionary notes are in order. First, what follows is not a comprehensive listing. The variety and volume of material is vast and proliferates by the year, if not even more frequently. Much of it exists only in Hebrew. I list here only commentaries written in English, of which there is also no shortage. I have chosen to note those that I believe stand the best chance of helping the novice or the intermediate parashah reader to appreciate and contemplate the individual pearls on the...