Remembering Rashi at 900

DAVE GORDON

Rabbi Shlomo Itzchaki, best known by the acronym Rashi (1040-1105), is known among Torah scholars and academics alike as one of the top talmudic giants of the past millennium. This year marks the 900th anniversary of his death and corks of Champagne (which comes from the region in France from where he came) will pop in celebration of this unequalled commentator whose work is at the centre of rabbinic scholarship and Jewish learning.

This historical figure from Troyes, in northern France, is the subject of intense interest. While attractions in the region nearby include Rheims and its famed cathedral, Troyes has its own towering historical notoriety. A statue unveiled in the early 1990s marks the 950th anniversary of Rashi's birth – his burial place remains unknown.

Legend says that Rashi died while writing the word "pure" into his commentary of a tractate of the Talmud. (Makkot 19b)

Rashi lived during the first crusade. In his youth, he studied for a number of years at the great centre of Jewish learning, Mainz, in Germany, where his teachers, to whom he refers repeatedly in his commentaries, were the disciples of Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz, the spiritual father of Ashkenazi Jewry.

At 25, Rashi returned to Troyes, where he started a family, worked as a vintner and founded a yeshivah, where he taught without charging a fee.

Legend has it that Rashi's daughters not only helped re-publish many of his manuscripts, but also may have put on tefillin, sparking many recent egalitarian Jews' case against the practice of only men wearing tefillin.

Two of Rashi's grandchildren were famed talmudists, Samuel (known as Rashbam) and Jacob (Rabbenu Tam). They and other students were called the Tosafists and they added their own contributions and elaborations to Rashi's work.

Rashi's straightforward style of analysis explained basic concepts while weaving commentary into the text and finding a balance between literal and midrashic interpretations, making the text more accessible.

However, instead of just quoting the early rabbis directly, Rashi applied the stories specifically to the biblical text, often abridging them. He assumed that his students knew the midrash and he just emphasized its immediate relevance to the Bible.

One cannot really study Talmud without having access to Rashi's commentaries. His greatest contribution was opening the Bible and the Talmud to subsequent study and interpretation on many different levels. His was not just a definitive word, but the indispensable first word that allowed others to access many treasures of Judaism. The Talmud was written in legalese: terse, unexplained language with no punctuation. Rashi provided a simple explanation of all talmudic discussions. He explained all of the terse phrases, the principles and concepts assumed by the sages from a millennia earlier.

It is interesting to note that he did not actually write most of his explanations. Apparently, students would ask him questions about the text, or he would rhetorically ask questions about specific words, and a student would write his short, lucid answers in the margin of the parchment text.

Universally read and admired by scholars, Rashi solved riddles that have aided in the understanding of many talmudic mysteries and has built a reputation as one of the most important and primary explicators of the Bible. He was so important that the very earliest existing versions of the Talmud contain his commentary, even Sephardi ones (despite Rashi being Ashkenazi).

Writing in Hebrew with a mixture of Aramaic, Rashi's masterful brevity sometimes included French words, or laazim (foreign words), to describe certain things. Thus, he inadvertently preserved Old French, becoming an important source for the history of that language. This past summer, a host of events took place in Troyes to mark Rashi's life, including exhibits, lectures and even a theatrical production. The French government has also released FranceGuide for the Jewish Traveller, tracing Jewish history in France back more than 2,000 years.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, best known for his contemporary translation and commentary of the Talmud, wrote recently, "Rashi can be understood by the smallest children and still be an enigma to the greatest scholars."

Dave Gordon is a Toronto freelance writer.

^TOP