On the Origins of Words

One aspect of Rabbi Hirsch's commentary which is immediately evident is his attempt to make sense of the text via understanding and exploring root words.  Hirsch begins his commentary with pages upon pages of explanation of the first verse.

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

"From the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."*

He begins by taking apart each word and describing how, for example, bereishit, is related to five different roots, meaning: aspiration to emerge, emergence from potentiality to actuality, and release from bondage.  "Accordingly the root ברא denotes bringing to light, actualizing and bringing something out into external reality...Accordingly בריאה is applied only to the concept of God's creation" meaning that it is creatio ex nihilo.  

This is not a new concept for me, but the way Hirsch arrives at this notion, that there is a special way that God creates and the Torah provides a special word for God's creation, speaks to me this time around.  In part, it has to do with the taking apart to build back up, and how this method reflects God's methods in the first telling of the Creation story (Gen. 1:1-2:4a).  Existence is stripped down to its most base elements, and then taken down even more to an unrealized state of existence: the unformed and void, which I'll get to in a little bit.

Creation is more than the sum of its parts.  Light, dark, water, heavens, earth: these are the building blocks of creation.  But, when they are put in order by the Creator, they become existence.  So too the word בראשית is perhaps an amalgam of root words and concepts, but when put together they become so much more: divine creation through divine speech.  Coming into a new synagogue, I understand the need and desire to take things apart to best understand them, and how when they are put back together, they add up to more than they seem.  

"Verse one shows us heaven and earth as we see them in our own day, and proclaims to us the great truth about them: It was God who brought them into existence in both substance and form."

This quote comes from Hirsch's explanation of the beginning of the second verse:

 וְהָאָרֶץ, הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ

"And this earth was once confused and tangled"*

I don't claim to be a master translator, nor do I have access to the original German, so if anyone out there is a scholar of Hirsch's writings, please let me know if I am not on the right track here, but I take issue with the translation "substance and form" from the above quote.  In preparing my Rosh HaShanah sermon, I only had access to the Hebrew translation of Hirsch, and the Hebrew struck me as more interesting, given that it echoed Platonic thought about reality.  Now, I do understand that the Hebrew language is limited in its terms, but I cannot help but see the word form and assume that the correlative term should be matter rather than substance.  I have only my professor Rabbi Martin Cohen to thank for this blessing/curse.

Plato speaks of form and matter.  Form is the eternal, the idea the "tableness" of the table.  Matter is the stuff which makes up the table.  Every thing has both form and matter.  This is, perhaps, an overly simple explanation of this concept, but suffice it to say, that Hirsch appears to be channeling Plato's ideas here and saying, in contrast to Plato, that God is responsible for both Form and Matter when it comes to creation.  Form is not eternal, it is God created.  So, the notion of tohu vavohu, is truly pre-creation chaos.  There is nothing before God begins to create.  No matter, and not even Form, which Plato teaches is eternal and has always been.

Hirsch uses this point to describe how the Hebrew words תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ describe God's creation of the distinct and various species.  "This is also the fundamental quality of the earth: it yields from its midst a variety of products, each species in its distinctive form [ed. note: see, there it is!], each individual item unique."

Now, it is possible Hirsch had come into contact with Darwinian thought, given that Origin of the Species was published in 1859, but it seems to me unlikely that this is a missive against evolution.  Rather, it appears to be a polemic against some elements of Platonic thought.  Given that this is only the first verse, I will have to keep reading in order to see what else comes of this line of thinking.  

So far, at least in these first couple verses, Hirsch wants to use modern methods of semantics and linguistics to prove the text's veracity.  In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see when Hirsch's modernity asserts itself and where his traditionalism does.  I have come across some of this myself, as I have been asked questions about why it is that as a Temple, we our school is closed on Chag, given that we are open and have school on Shabbat.  My gut went traditional:  "It's chag.  That's why we're closed."  But my mind went elsewhere.  "Is chag different than Shabbat?"

It's a question I have yet to answer.

*All translations of Torah are Hirsch

The book I'll be using and some more on Hirsch

Hi everyone,

First, a note about the edition of Hirsch's commentary from which I'll be studying.

The original commentary was published between 1867 and 1878 in 5 volumes.  The edition I will be using is a modern English translation of Hirsch's German translation and commentary by Daniel Haberman.  This translation is copyrighted 2002 and reprinted 2010 by Feldheim Publishers.

A link to this edition can be found here.

Next, some more on Hirsch's style and philosophy toward Torah and commentary.

Torah im Derech Eretz as used by our Jewish sages, means the realization of the Torah in harmonious unity with  all the conditions under which its laws will have to be observed amidst the developments of changing times. Collected Writings Vol. VII p. 294

This quote represents a clear definition of the philosophy behind Hirsch's approach to Torah, Jewish Law and Modernity.  Hirsch neither eschews the changing times nor Jewish Law, nor does he bemoan progress.  Rather, he strives to find a harmonious unity between the two.  Unlike post-modernism, which strives to allow both aspects to exist simultaneously yet independently  Hirsch strives to unify two elements of Jewish life in his day and age which some, on both the Traditionalist and Modernist sides, saw as mutually exclusive.

Rabbi Hirsch believed that Judaism must be studied and understood out of itself and therefore we must "derive explanation of the text from out of itself." Editor's Foreword p. vii.

Let's hope that over the coming year, I am able to derive explanation and understanding out of both the text of the Torah and the commentary of Rabbi Hirsch.

Onward to the Beginning!

A new year, a new blog, an old commentary

Welcome to my new blog!

Before being ordained in May, I knew that I would want to continue to study something regularly, but I didn't know what that would be.  I went back and forth.  Do I want to continue the study of Talmud that had been the hallmark of my thesis?  Do I want to pick up and start daf yomi, the Talmud page-a-day process?  Do I want to stick with Torah?  Do I want to find a tractate of Mishnah that could be something new for me?  What about Maimonides?  He's always interesting.

In the end, I thought about the fact that the Torah is always the same, though we change each time we come to it.  So, I picked the Torah and decided that I would spend this first year as a rabbi experiencing the Torah anew, reading the weekly portion and seeing what the Torah chooses to tell me this time around.

But, what to do alongside the Torah?  What commentator should I choose?  Thanks to a suggestion by my good friend Rabbi Marc Katz (see, I told you) I decided to delve into the world and commentary of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

A quick note or two about Rabbi Hirsch:

Often called the father of the Modern Orthodox Movement in Judaism, Rabbi Hirsch wrote and worked in 19th century Germany.  At odds with the Reformers of his day, Rabbi Hirsch created a secessionist community in Frankfurt in response to the Reform style of worship.  He coined the term and approach to Judaism called Torah im Derech Eretz. According to Dr. Meir Hildesheimer, this term means:

a synthesis of Judaism and modern culture, embracing art and literature to the extent compatible with Halakha (i.e. religious Jewish law). However, this synthesis is to be understood in a Hegelian sense: two contradictory forces contending with each other are reconciled and renewed on a higher level. In other words: Torah and life, Judaism and culture, do not just complement each other, but achieve complete identity.[1]

In short, Hirsch believed in tradition and in modernity, but modernity only to the extent that it worked within the bounds of tradition.

Interestingly, in my first year of Rabbinical School, Rabbi Hirsch’s commentary was among the most widely referenced in our class’s divrei Torah.  He was so popular, that one of my classmates (Rabbi Keren Gorban) called him “our class’s best friend” in exegesis.  What was it about his commentary that was so appealing?  I believe it was the combination of tradition and modernity, and a real ahead-of-his time ability to hold onto both elements of his life at one time. While the early Reformers were focused on Modernity and the traditionalists were focused on Tradition, Hirsch sought a middle ground, a way to be both traditional and modern.  This is what I seek, as well.

So, over the next year, I hope you will join me weekly for some insights from the Torah including Rabbi Hirsch’s commentary.  I look forward to getting back to a regular habit of study and sharing my learning with you.

Please feel free to comment, question or challenge.  Pirke Avot teaches us: “when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests between them.”  God might not have envisioned the internet, but I’m pretty sure it still counts.

Next time: Parshat Bereishit.

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[1] From a speech given by Hildesheimer in June of 2008 on the occasion of Rabbi Hirsch’s 200^th birthday: http://www.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/rsrh/historical_perspectives_rsrh_hilesheimer.pdf