Having received a few more responses to my request for input, I am beginning (next week, mostly) to study the book of Proverbs, intending to study the commentaries of R. Saadya Gaon, Rashi, and the Gaon of Vilna. Of those three, only R. Saadya (WHO I WILL HENCEFORTH REFER TO AS RASAG) wrote a specific introduction to this work, so I thought I would take this week to provide my own brief introduction.

First, the book we are studying. A part of Tanakh, Mishlei is perhaps the most difficult to interpret accurately, since it announces that it is phrased in parables and other hidden modes of expression. That means that the literal meaning of the text may have some interest for the reader but is never (or, almost never) the whole story.

Once we move away from literal readings, we open up a much wider range of readings than usual. In most books of Tanakh, the goal of a commentator (of the peshat-oriented variety, anyway), is to explain the words of the text in a grammatically reasonable way. Commentators differ either on the meaning of a specific word, or the grammatical construction of the sentence. But here, even if our authors agree about the meaning of the words and the grammar of the sentence, they must then define the underlying meaning of the parable, a meaning that the text often gives no indication of. That means that this text leaves much more of its meaning up to the author than other texts of Scripture.

The more a text leaves itself open to each author's reading, the more we can expect to find interpretations that reflect each one's personal concerns. In a text like Mishlei, then, every time the text refers to either positive or negative parts of life, the meaning of those references will differ sharply according to commentator. That means that when we study Mishlei we need, more than usually, to know about the people whose commentaries we are reading. So, for the rest of this week's session, I will introduce our three authors.

Rashi is perhaps the best known of the group, but allow me to review a couple of points. He was born in 1040, in Troyes, France. At about the age of 20 (when already married) he went to Germany for ten years, where the leading Torah scholars of the Ashkenazic world resided. After that time- when he was apparently desperately poor-- he returned to France and continued to grow in his knowledge of Torah and his renown in the Jewish world. Issues that seem connected to this brief review of his life will, I suspect, crop up in the commentary as well.

RASAG (for those who were not listening before, this is the accepted acronym for R. Saadya Gaon) was born in Egypt (his last name was actually al-Fayyumi, meaning that he came from Fayyum). He moved to Babylonia, where he eventually rose to the position of head of the academy (which, ex officio, earned one the title of Gaon) at Sura, a remarkable achievement for a foreigner. R. Saadya (Rasag to the attentive) is remarkable in many ways, some of which are reviewed in Robert Brody's The Geonim of Babylonia and the Making of the Middle Ages. Among the most interesting features of his life is that he was either the first or one of the first to write works in various genres of literature that later became standard among Jews: a listing of the 613 mitsvot in the Torah, a commentary on the Torah, discussions of various issues of Jewish law, and a monograph on Jewish philosophy. In many important senses, then, Rasag ushers in a new era in Jewish intellectual history.

For studying this particular commentary, we need to know that Rasag has a lengthy introduction (which I will try to summarize next week) that gives us a clear picture of the slant with which he is going to approach the text. Issues that are important to him are not necessarily the ones we would have expected of a traditional Jew, and sometimes come close to a Torah u-Madda perspective. The second point to mention is that Rasag wrote this in Arabic, a language I neither know nor wish to know. Fortunately, R. Yosef Kafih (who only recently passed away in Jerusalem) spent a life prolifically translating Arabic writings into Hebrew-- he translated many of Rasag's commentaries, a new translation of Rambam's Guide, as well as other works. May our study of his translation serve as an additional merit to the many he left this world.

Finally, we will also look at the Vilna Gaon's reading of Mishlei. The Vilna Gaon, R. Elijah b. Solomon Zalman of Vilna, is a figure cloaked in legend, much of it deserved. As Emmanuel Etkes pointed out, he was blessed with outstanding mental capacities but added to that an almost superhuman diligence. Without giving a full summary of his impact on Jewish history, we can mention that he is seen as the "first among equals" of those who became the Mitnagdim (certainly his signature on a herem in Vilna, 1772, began the war on Hasidism among the Mitnagdim); that his student, R. Hayyim Volozhin began the Lithuanian yeshiva movement, and that his commentary on Shulhan Arukh is widely recognized for its brilliance.

The value of the commentary on Mishlei lies in several aspects of the work: first, because the student who wrote it (R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov) claims that the Gaon dictated the commentary to him, reviewed with him those parts that he did not understand, and checked at least some of the commentary once it was written. It serves as one of the few of the Gaon's writings, then, that seem to come largely from his thoughts, with little admixture of later and lesser minds. Second, the Gra uses Mishlei as a vehicle for expressing his view of Jewish ethics generally, so that a proper study of his commentary can allow us to understand how he thought a Jew should structure his life and why. Thus, the Gaon will not only teach us Mishlei, he will teach us his perspective of a well-lived Jewish life.