Learning Rashi Again, for the First Time

Title: Echoes of Rashi: Bereishit

By: Rabbi Moshe Taragin

Kodesh Press

Echoes of Rashi is not quite the book one might expect from the intellectual world of Yeshivat Har Etzion and its affiliated Herzog Academic College. Both institutions have helped popularize an approach to Tanach that emphasizes larger themes, literary structures, and comparisons between different biblical sections. Rabbi Moshe Taragin appreciates this “meta-analytical” approach but deliberately offers something different. His approach returns to the close reading of individual words and phrases characteristic of Chazal and of Rashi and other Rishonim. His overarching goal is to “reassert the centrality of Rashi.”

At the same time, Rabbi Taragin has yet another goal: he looks backward in order to look forward. Building upon Rashi’s comments, Rabbi Taragin moves into larger questions related to how Jews serve Hashem, develop morally, understand their identity, and experience the return to Eretz Yisrael.

The essays in this new volume originated as shiurim delivered at Yeshivat Har Etzion, where Rabbi Taragin has educated generations of young men. Thousands around the world turn to Rabbi Taragin's Torah teachings, his lectures, writings (including in the pages of the Jewish Press), books, and scholar-in-residence appearances have brought his perspective to an especially broad international audience.

In an introductory section, Rabbi Taragin acknowledges the “voices” of his own teachers, through which he reads Rashi. Rav Yehuda Amital’s was a voice shaped by the Eastern European shtetl, the Holocaust, Jewish history, and the return to Israel. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein supplied a voice shaped by traditional lomdus, yiras Shamayim, and moral clarity. Through the writings of Rav Kook, Rabbi Taragin gained appreciation for a conception of redemption extending beyond the Jewish people to the entire cosmos. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s voice emphasized Jewish universalism and the Jewish mission to inspire humanity. Rabbi Taragin also credits the voice of the settlement movement as shaping his worldview as well. These voices are not merely autobiographical background, but instead become audible in Rabbi Taragin’s interpretations of Rashi.

Consider Rashi’s explanation in this week’s Parashas Vayeira of how Lot successfully persuaded Hashem to save the city of Tzoar. After all, Avraham had pleaded on behalf of Sodom and the group of surrounding cities but apparently failed. Why was Lot’s intersession seemingly more effective?

Rashi observes that Tzoar had existed in its sinfulness for only 51 years, while Sodom for 52. Rabbi Taragin then asks the question that may have bothered many longtime students of Rashi: Can a single year really make such a difference?

“That one-year difference matters,” he writes. “Fifty-one is still fifty-one. A trajectory toward corruption does not itself warrant punishment.” Hashem is erech apayim, slow to anger, and judges people “ba’asher hu sham” – “where they are now, not where they are likely to be in a year.” Nor does Hashem simply destroy Tzoar together with its neighbors in collective punishment: “Every human life matters. Every city is judged on its own merits.” Lot’s prayer also differs from Avraham’s in another important way. Rather than arguing that Tzoar deserves salvation, Lot petitions for kindness. Hashem may grant “a favor, even when it is not fully earned” and “can grant mercy even beyond strict justice.” Beginning with an apparently minor chronological detail in Rashi, Rabbi Taragin develops fundamental principles of Divine justice, patience, and mercy.

His essay “Not Yet,” on Lech Lecha, applies his approach to contemporary Medinat Israel in an unexpected way. Rashi explains that Lot’s shepherds allowed their animals to graze on others’ property, because they believed the Land had been promised to Avraham and would ultimately pass to Lot, his then-presumed heir. Avraham’s shepherds responded that the Land had not yet been given to Avraham, and so regardless of what the future may hold, taking someone else’s property remained theft. On the one hand, Rabbi Taragin makes clear he believes “with full conviction that every centimeter of this land will belong to the Jews one day.” But Jewish destiny does not cancel present responsibility. “A prophecy does not suspend mitzvos, morality, or decency,” he writes. “We must remain halachic and moral… We can’t allow prophetic certainty to cloud our judgement or behavior… The Torah itself anchors us in restraint and moral patience.”

Very pointedly, Rabbi Taragin does not leave the application abstract. “I’m talking about the average, law-abiding Palestinian citizen who lives here and has rights,” he continues. “We are not allowed to sacrifice their rights in pursuit of our own goals. That was the great mistake of Lot” he concludes. Rabbi Taragin’s argument is less a political one than a moral one. He is asking what honesty, halacha, and basic human decency require even when Jews passionately believe in their historical and religious claim to the Land. Here, especially, one hears the moral voice Rabbi Taragin describes receiving from his teachers.

Not every reader will agree with all of Rabbi Taragin’s conclusions. Some may also question whether every contemporary inference necessarily follows from Rashi. Yet even readers who disagree will find this new volume stimulating. Rabbi Taragin repeatedly prompts us to reflect on a comment of Rashi we may have studied countless times and discover a question, implication, or moral challenge we had never noticed. Without confining Rashi’s implications to the past, Rabbi Taragin asks what his familiar words demand of Jews living in a dramatically transformed historical moment. Whether readers accept every interpretation or not, they will find themselves looking backward, looking forward, and, most importantly, looking again.

Echoes of Rashi invites us to learn Rashi again, for the first time.