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Their presence in Rashis on Parshath Ki TiSaH Volume 18, Number 1 This weeks Weekly Rashi with Hebrew/English source tables will be accessible, on Sunday, at http://www.Rashiyomi.com/rule1801.htm (c) RashiYomi Incorporated, Dr. Hendel, President, Mar 8 2012 Visit the Rashi website http://www.Rashiyomi.com The goal of this Weekly Rashi Digest is to use the weekly Torah portion to expose students at all levels to the ten major methods of commentary used by Rashi. It is hoped that continual weekly exposure to these ten major methods will enable students of all levels to acquire a familiarity and facility with the major exegetical methods. Although I frequently use my own English translations of biblical verses and Rashi comments, the Hebrew and English translations in the source tables are derived from online parshah files at chabad.org who in turn acknowledges the Judaica Press Complete Tanach, copyright by Judaica Press.
Verse Ex34-30a discussing the reaction of the Jews to Moses' appearance after Revelation states And when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come closer to him. Rashi notes that the underlined words, they were afraid to come closer to him. references verses Gn03-08 discussing Adam and Eve's fear of God after they had sinned. Hence the Rashi comment Fear of Divine people and communications happens after sin. That is, prior to sin the meeting of Divine people or the communication with God does not arouse fear while after sin it does. We see this with Adam and Eve who spoke to God without fear but feared God after they had sinned. We also see this with the Jews who did not fear God at the Revelation but, after they had sinned with the Golden calf, did fear meeting Moses after his prophecy with God.
Advanced Rashi: Rashi does not actually cite the Genesis passage about Adam. Rashi simply cites the contrast that before sin they were not afraid of speaking to God while after the sin of the golden calf they were afraid to even speak to Moses. Accordingly we have explained this Rashi in rule #5, contradiction below. However it is proper to find further support for Rashi in other verses. The most superior treatment of this Rashi would be by the database method - however, the database method would require several examples of the inference that prior to sin man is not afraid of speaking to God while after sin man is so afraid. Since we have not found several examples, but only a few, we have sufficed with the contradiction and reference method.
The FFF principle is a special case of the literary techniques of synechdoche-metonomy. These literary principles, universal to all languages, state that items can be named by related items, by parts of those items, or by good examples of those items. For example honey refers to anything sweet since honey is a good example of something sweet. Similarly hot refers to matters of love since the two are related. Todays Rashi can best be understood by applying these principles. We are fortunate to have a parallel example in English for today's Rashi. In English the word beam can refer to a long object and can also refer to a long ray of light. Hence, for example, we say his face is beaming. The facial muscular stance of a happy person is such that light is better reflected off his face giving the impression that a beam of light is coming from him. Hebrew uses a similar etymology by form. However instead of using a beam Hebrew uses another long object, the horn. Instead of saying his face is beaming we say his face is horning. The idea and approach to meaning are the same - something is named by a similar term with a similar form. Following Rashi's idea and the parallel in English we would translate Ex34-29b as follows: And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of Testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses knew not that his facial skin beamed.
Today, students of the Bible learn grammar from Biblical Hebrew grammar textbooks. These textbooks organize material by topics. Grammatical topics include a) verb mood and conjugation, b) plurality agreement, c) pronoun reference, d) subject-verb-object sequencing, e) sentence structure and type and many other topics. However in Rashi's time gramamr was just beginning. There were no official grammatical textbooks and tables. One of Rashi's functions was to teach grammar. Rashi did not write a grammar textbook but instead left grammatical explanations appended to each verse.
In the above illustrations we have mirrored the Biblical metaplasmus with a similar underlined English word which is misspelled. This technique was first presented in my article Biblical Puns.
The table below presents an aligned extract of verses or verselets in Ex32-18a Both verses/verselets discuss God losing his temper on the Jews because of the golden calf sin. The alignment justifies the Rashi comment that: Moses asked God: For what end will you lose your temper if the Jews are worshipping idols; the idols can't do anything and sooner or later the Jews will find out (without your losing your temper) that they made a mistake.
The table below presents presents two contradictory verses. Both verses say the same three Hebrew words. The underlined words highlight the contradiction. One verse says ....Abraham called to an affair for the sake of God while the other verse says ...God announced the reptutation - of God (of mercy) Which is it? Do the identical three Hebrew words mean announcement to an affair for God or an announcement of the reputation of God. Rashi simply resolves this using the 2 case method: There are two different punctuations to the same three Hebrew words! One verse has a pausal punctuation after the word called, while the other verse has a pausal punctuation after the word name/reptutation. Hence one verse is translated Abraham called: an affair for God while the other verse is translated God announced the reputation, of God. [In our translation we have indicated the pausal word using the English comma].
Advanced Rashi: The Hebrew words Kuph Resh Aleph can mean announce or call/invite. Similarly the Hebrew word Shin Mem can mean reputation or for the sake of. For example Ex31-02 is translated See I announce the reputation of Bezalel..... Here the Hebrew word Shin-Mem is interpreted best as reputation, and the Hebrew root Kuph Resh Aleph is best translated as an announcement By contrast Is44-05 clearly indicates by its parallel structure that the Hebrew Kuph Resh Aleph means call and the Hebrew Beth Shin Mem means for the sake of. Hence the verse is interpreted to means calling for the sake of God. Note that calling for God may be more appropriate here but inviting for God is more appropriate for Abraham since he had offered sacrifices and invited (called) people to partake of them.
Certain Biblical paragraphs are stated in a Theme-Development form. In other words a broad general idea is stated first followed by the development of this broad general theme in specific details. The Theme-Detail form creates a unified paragraph. Today's example illustrates this as shown below.
We have explained in our article Biblical Formatting located on the world wide web at http://www.Rashiyomi.com/biblicalformatting.pdf, that the Biblical Author indicated bullets by using repeating keywords. That is, if a modern author wanted to get a point across using bullets - a list of similar but contrastive items - then the Biblical Author would use repeating keywords. Today's verse illustrates this principle. Bullets whether indicated through modern notation or through the Biblical method of repeating keywords always indicate contrastive emphasis - that is, each bullet is presumed to be a distinct item contrasted to the other items on the list. Very often the bullets are also used to indicate that the entire list is exhaustive of some spectrum.
Advanced Rashi: Rashi does not actually say this interpretation. Furthermore, Rambam, in his great legal code, in the laws of Coming to the Temple, Chapter 5, throughout, especially law 14, does not explicitly (or implicitly) mention the above law. My thinking however is as follows. We have always seen that bullets create distinct emphasis. The distinct emphasis here would be that hands are washed separately and legs are washed separately. However as shown above in rule #4, alignment this is not the preferred method. We would then conclude that if they did wash hands and legs separately it did not invalidate the Temple service that followed. At any rate this is a novelty not discussed, nor contradicted, elsewhere in Jewish sources. It might be worthwhile to approach this matter symbolically. The legs symbolize ones social circle the people one walks with. The hands symbolize ones actions. It is preferable to sanctify ones action and social circle together; after all ones actions are not typically done solo, rather, they are done with a team. It follows that the sanctification of the team should occur at the same time as the sanctification of ones actions. However, if inadvertently one sanctified ones actions separately and sanctified ones social group separately the temple services that follow are valid.
Verse Ex30-20b discussing the requirement of the Priests to wash their hands and legs when entering the Temple states when they go into the tent of meeting, they shall wash with water, that they die not; or when they come near to the altar to minister, to cause an offering made by fire to smoke unto HaShem; Rashi clarifies: The verse says Let them wash when they enter to serve so that they don't die. From this we infer that If they didn't wash when they entered to serve they would be punished with death, since throughout the Torah we infer punishments from preventive verses. Since this Rashi clarifies a logical inference we classify it as a NonVerse, Logic method.
The symbolism method seeks to extract meaningful inferences from the symbolism of the biblical text. The concept of symbolic interpretation is very involved. A good, compact, clear reference explaining when symbolism can be used and how to apply it may be found in my article Genesis 1 speaks about the creation of prophecy not the world which you can find at http://www.Rashiyomi.com/gen-1.htm. Today we explore the symbolism in Ex30-34 which reads as follows:
Rashi makes symbolic inferences from the use of a bad smelling fatty spice in the sweet incense: This inclusion--of a bad smelling fatty spice in the sweet incense--teaches you that there is a requirement to include the bad smelling spices in the incense. Symbolically this means that every community who wishes to approach God in prayer which is compared to incense, is required to include bad and foul-smelling people.
Conclusion
This week's issue does not contain examples of the Rashi database method. Visit the RashiYomi website at http://www.Rashiyomi.com for further details and examples. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||