Rashi

by Maurice Liber

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Rashi owes his great reputation to his commentaries on the two great works that comprehend Jewish life in its entirety, and lie at the very root of the intellectual development of Judaism, the Bible and the Talmud. His commentaries involving an enormous amount of labor are all but complete; they fail to cover only a few books of the Bible and a few treatises of the Talmud. The conjecture has been made that at first he set himself to commenting on the Talmud, and then on the Bible, because at the end of his life he expressed the wish that he might begin the Biblical commentary all over again. But this hypothesis is not justified. The unfinished state of both commentaries, especially the one on the Talmud, shows that he worked on them at the same time. But they were not written without interruption, not "in one spurt," as the college athlete might say. Rashi worked at them intermittently, going back to them again and again. It is certain that so far as the Talmudic treatises are concerned, he did not exert himself to follow the order in which they occur. He may have taken them up when he explained them in his school. But in commenting on the Bible, it seems, he adhered to the sequence of the books, for it was on the later books that he did not have the time to write commentaries. Moreover, he sometimes went back to his commentary on a Biblical book or a Talmudic treatise, not because he worked to order, like Ibn Ezra, and as circumstances dictated, but because he was not satisfied with his former attempt, and because, in the course of his study, the same subject came up for his consideration. Though the commentaries, then, were not the result of long, steady application, they demanded long-continued efforts, and they were, one may say, the business of his whole life. The rabbi Isaac of Vienna, who possessed an autograph commentary of Rashi, speaks of the numerous erasures and various marks with which it was embroidered.

The commentaries of Rashi, which do not bear special titles, are not an uninterrupted exposition of the entire work under consideration, and could not be read from cover to cover without recourse to the text explained; they are rather detached glosses, postils, to borrow an expression from ecclesiastical literature, upon terms or phrases presenting some difficulties. They are always preceded by the word or words to be explained.

It is evident, then, that Rashi's works do not bear witness to great originality, or, better, to great creative force. Rashi lacks elevation in his point of view, breadth of outlook, and largeness of conception. He possessed neither literary taste nor esthetic sense. He was satisfied to throw light upon an obscurity, to fill up a lacuna, to justify an apparent imperfection, to explain a peculiarity of style, or to reconcile contradictions. He never tried to call attention to the beauties of the text or to give a higher idea of the original; he never succeeded in bringing into relief the humanity of a law, or the universal bearing of an event.

Rashi failed also to regard a thing in its entirety. He did not write prefaces to his works setting forth the contents of the book and the method to be pursued.[51] In the body of the commentaries, he hardly ever dwells on a subject at length, but contents himself with a brief explanation. In short, his horizon was limited and he lacked perspective. It is to be regretted that he did not know the philosophic works of Saadia, who would have opened up new worlds to him, and would have enlarged the circle of his ideas. If he had read only the Biblical commentaries of the great Gaon, he would have learned from him how to grasp a text in its entirety and give a general idea of a work.

Even if he had limited himself to the Talmud, Rashi, without doubt, would have been incapable of raising a vast and harmonious edifice, like the <I>Mishneh Torah</I> of Maimonides. He did not possess the art of developing the various sides of a subject so as to produce a well-ordered whole. He lacked not only literary ambition, but also that genius for organizing and systematizing which classifies and co-ordinates all the laws. Though methodical, he lacked the power to generalize.

This defect, common to his contemporaries, arose, possibly, from a certain timidity. He believed that he ought to efface himself behind his text, and not let his own idea take the place of the author's, especially when the text was a religious law and the author the Divine legislator. But it seems that his power of creative thought was not strong, and could exercise itself only upon the more original works of others. We find analogous features in scholastic literature, which developed wholly in the shadow of the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and Aristotle.

This narrow criticism, this eye for detail, this lack of general ideas and of guiding principles at least guarded Rashi against a danger more original spirits failed to escape, namely, of reading preconceived notions into the text, of interpreting it by an individual method, and, thus, of gathering more meaning, or another meaning, than was intended by the author. Unlike the Jewish and Christian theologians, Rashi felt no need to do violence to the text in order to reconcile it with his scientific and philosophic beliefs.

Though Rashi, as I said, had not a creative intellect, he yet had all the qualities of a commentator. First of all, he possessed clearness, the chief requisite for a commentary, which undertakes to explain a work unintelligible to its readers. "To write like Rashi" has become a proverbial expression for "to write clearly and intelligibly." Rashi always or nearly always uses the expression one expects. He finds the explanation that obtrudes itself because it is simple and easy; he excels in unravelling [unraveling sic] difficulties and illuminating obscurities. To facilitate comprehension by the reader Rashi resorted to the use of pictures and diagrams, some of which still appear in his Talmudic commentary, though a number have been suppressed by the editors. Once, when asked for the explanation of a difficult passage in Ezekiel, he replied that he had nothing to add to what he had said in his commentary, but he would send a diagram which would render the text more intelligible. It is remarkable with what ease, even without the aid of illustrations, he unravelled [unraveled sic] the chapters of Ezekiel in which the Prophet describes the Temple of his fancy; or the equally complicated chapters of Exodus which set forth the plan of the Tabernacle.

Essentially this power of exposition is the attribute of intelligent insight. Rashi's was the clearest, the most transparent mind-no clouds nor shadows, no ambiguities, no evasions. He leaves nothing to be taken for granted, he makes no mental reservations. He is clearness and transparency itself.