Derashot haRan Email
Shiur, Introduction (Shabbat, Parshat Bo, 5764)
To all those who have
chosen to join this email shiur, welcome. I have often said,
but can’t say enough, that the Gemara’s statement that
yoter mi-mah she-haegel rotsah linok, haparah rotsah le-haniq,
the cow wants to nurse more than the suckling, is true for
those who like to share their Torah—I enjoy the sharing
probably as much or more as the people doing the reading. So,
for giving me the opportunity, I wanted to thank you up front.
Before starting with
the Derashot themselves, we should introduce ourselves
to the Ran and to our discussions here. R. Nissim b. Reuven of
Gerona (1290-1380) was the acknowledged leader of Spanish
Jewry in the fourteenth century. Although he probably did not
study with Rashba, the giant of the late 13th and
early 14th centuries, he is seen as a continuity of
the intellectual line that included Ramban, Rashba, and Reah,
the rabbis of Christian Spain who synthesized the legacies of
the Tosafists and Rif/Rambam.
Ran is best known for
his highly influential commentaries on Rif on most of the
Talmud, where he expanded and explained Rif’s halakhic
decisions, comparing them to those of the Tosafists and the
subsequent literature. He also wrote novellae on the Talmud
itself, although these are less used (perhaps because the Rif
was generally closer to hand). The Derashot, which are not as
widely known but were quoted extensively by Abarbanel in his
commentaries, show us the thinker/philosopher side of Ran. A
creative thinker rivaling Rambam and Ramban, Ran’s ideas offer
another perspective of many of the central issues of Jewish
life and thought.
We will be using the
edition of the Derashot printed in 1977 in Yerushalayim,
edited by Leon Feldman, a professor at Rutgers. Although I
will assume and write for readers who do not have (or are not
studying along in) the Derashot, those who wish to follow
should know that I hope to cover 8 pages a week in that
edition (which isn’t as hard as it sounds, since there are
footnotes on those pages), so that we can complete our
discussions by Rosh haShanah. For those of you who do not yet
possess the Derashot, I recommend against buying this edition,
since Prof. Feldman has just edited an expanded edition,
published by Mossad haRav Kook, which I am in the process of
acquiring and is worth waiting for.
Although these essays
were apparently delivered as sermons-- indeed, the first
Derashah will show us that he was speaking publicly, as he
weaves praise of his audience into the topic of the sermon
itself, as will see-- one of the continuing questions we will
need to keep in mind is whether they were more than that. By
“more than that,” I mean that these do not seem to be just
twelve –fourteen sermons Ran happened to give on various
occasions. For one thing, they do not follow any consecutive
textual order. I suspect, but we will have to check this as
we study, that these sermons were more of a concentrated
attempt to unlock the central tenets of Jewish belief
(remember that Rambam had thirteen such principles; what if
each derashah was an analysis of one of what Ran saw as
central ideas?). At the very least, they have more of the
feel of a series of lectures on topics of particular
importance than of sermons that happened to be collected in a
book.
One more piece of
background and then we can dive in: Ran’s thought world is
that of Hazal, the Midrash, Rambam and Ramban. Others figure
as well, and we will note them as they come into our field of
vision, but Ran is creatively adding to that world of ideas,
and so we will try to not only understand what he has to say,
but how he contrasts with what came before. One last
structural note: I will first summarize the 8 pages of that
week’s discussion, and then go back over it making the points
I find interesting and useful. And now, to the matter itself.
DERASHOT HARAN, FIRST
SERMON, PAGES 1-8--SUMMARY
Ran opens the derasha
with the first verse of the Torah (“Bereshit bara eloqim,
etc.”) indicating that Creation will be his topic. We should
note right away, however, that while he does discuss Creation,
his analysis leads us to a deeper understanding of several
topics other than just the history of cosmolgoy. Within what
seems like a medieval attempt to guess at the origins of the
universe, we will find numerous statements about the nature of
reality that should stimulate our thinking.
He notes that past
commentators have understood the first verse of the Torah as
either indicating that all of Creation is made of one
underlying substance or, possibly, that the Heavens are made
of one substance and the Earth of another (this depends on the
medieval belief that the heavens were made of different
material than earth, an issue we can ignore for now).
Regardless of that interpretation, he notes that everyone
thinks that the second verse—the earth was tohu vavohu,
etc.—refers to the four elements, earth, wind, air, and fire
that medieval philosophy saw as the building blocks of all
Creation.
In presenting the
issue that way, Ran has assumed that at least all that is
sublunar (under the moon) has one fundamental substance—that
is what the verse means when it says that God created Heaven
and Earth, that he made the fundamental substance that
underlies them.
Since He was going to
then split that substance into the four elements, Ran wonders
why He first created that fundamental substance and offers two
answers, each worth further consideration: First, he suggests
that He wanted to minimize the absolutely miraculous; creation
from nothing (ex nihilo) is exactly such an absolutely
miraculous act, so He tried to limit it to one such act for
the Earth. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, Ran
assumes that the whole world is created for people (an
assumption that directly contradicts Rambam’s view in the 3rd
part of the Guide); in order to be useful to people, though,
the rest of the world had to have some commonality with
people, which God insured by creating them all from one
fundamental substance.
Ran sees those four
elements, however, as largely worthless on their own, which is
why the bulk of Creation was about combining those four
elements in a way that led to greater things. Embedded in
Creation, then, is a preference for connection and grouping
together, a powerful idea we will need to consider further.
FROM THE IMPORTANCE OF
CONNECTION TO THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY
Ran takes this already
interesting idea and turns it into a truly neat homiletic
trick. The importance of combining individual items to
produce a greater whole, he says, explains why Hazal spoke so
highly of the merits of congregations, noting that Moshe was
punished for speaking harshly to the people at Mei Merivah (a
very specific view of that sin, which will come up again in
future Derashot), and that the incense offered in the
Temple had to include in it some foul-smelling ingredients, to
symbolize the sinners, unintentional and intentional, who must
be included as part of the community facing God at the
Temple.
Based on a reading of
Kohelet that need not detain us here, Ran notes that the power
of combination only works when the combined elements share
good aspects and not bad ones. The combination, he says, will
reinforce whatever is common to the members of the
combination, and will repress or minimize what is not. This
explains the Talmudic statement that gatherings of righteous
people and dispersing evil people is good for them and for the
world. It also explains Yaakov’s calling for the splitting of
Levi and Shimon—despite their many individual strengths, their
combination emphasized their weakness, producing negative
results.
That also explains the
Tower of Babel story. Ran rejects the idea that the people
building the Tower sinned in so doing (the general reading).
Rather, he claims that God destroyed the tower and scattered
the people to insure that they not succeed at unifying
themselves. Although unity is usually laudable, those people
were all idol-worshippers, so that unifying would have only
strengthened their idolatry. God’s dispersing them was not so
much a punishment as an averting of a catastrophic future.
Returning to the
homiletic tool I mentioned before, Ran wonders how anyone
(meaning himself) can dare address a community, particularly
on a sensitive topic (Creation), which the Mishnah prohibits
studying with more than one other person. Either, he notes,
the speaker will have some knowledge of the matter, which he
is not then allowed to share, or he will not, in which case he
is a charlatan.
Speaking on this
issue, therefore, would seem to indicate arrogance, the
corrective for which is downfall, as Mishlei says “Pride goes
before a fall (did you know that was a verse? I didn’t).” He
then digresses to note that downfall is the proper reaction to
pride, since, first of all, Hashem punishes measure for
measure. This man uplifted himself too far, so God balances
that by lowering him farther than he deserves. Nature itself
also favors items returning to their proper place, so those
who push themselves too high are doomed, by the Nature of the
world, to downfall. That is the end of the matters we will
raise this week, with discussion below.
DISCUSSION—FUNDAMENTAL
SUBSTANCES
Ran’s assumption that
at least everything on Earth was made of one underlying
substance is startlingly modern, especially since his
scientific world assumed there were four basic elements. Even
when modern chemistry moved to a broader set of elements, it
assumed that the basic particles were different from each
other (electrons, protons, etc.). As physics took over and
found ever more elementary particles, the newest candidate for
a fundamental explanation is superstring theory, which I don’t
understand at all, but which I at least know claims that
underlying the particles is an essential substance or energy
common to them all.
THE VALUE OF
COMBINATION
Aside from its modern
echoes, Ran’s idea that the world favors combination despite
starting out with some form of unity is worth considering.
God, after all, is seen as being completely unitary. The idea
that the simple unity of the elements is not enough, but that
the world is about combining in a way that emphasizes
commonality and smoothes out differences suggests that we are
all supposed to be seeking a return to unity, but a higher
form of unity, a unity that encompasses disparate parts or
people, yet manages to forge a commonality among them. On
their own, each of the four elements (and each person in a
community) has important flaws, but together they form
stronger bonds and better substances. Building connections,
then, would seem to be both a fulfillment of the universe’s
purpose, in Ran’s view, and a coming closer to the Creator Who
is already One.
Of course, combination
for its own sake only has value if the combination produces a
better result than the parties singly. That explains, for
him, the Tower of Babel in a way that assumes several
interesting propositions. First, Ran argues that the act was
not a punishment, which suggests that not all occurrences that
seem negative are punishment. Although undoubtedly the
people’s plans had been frustrated, and they had to cope with
a reality that was less pleasing than before they started
building the Tower, God’s action was not a punishment but an
avoiding of more dire consequences. Recognizing that some
negative events are to be interpreted that way is a general
idea worth tucking away into our corpus of ways of
interpreting the world.
Ran’s using the idea
of the power of combination to lead into a sort of apology for
daring to address the community on such issues is particularly
impressive because it is a very nice way of flattering his
listeners, and yet also fits in with the general theme of his
talk. His final comment (on pride and its consequences)
assumes that the world, almost automatically, reacts to our
actions in a commensurate fashion. Those who lift themselves
higher than they deserve find themselves lowered by the
universe (and, perhaps, vice verse). This is, again, not so
much a punishment as a natural reaction embedded in the fiber
of the universe.
To summarize, then,
Ran seems to be discussing the importance of connection and
combination as fundamental to the world. That combination,
however, is only beneficial when it brings together parties
that share strengths and bear different weaknesses. Then,
such as in the Temple’s incense also containing a smelly spice
that only works within the context of other spices, the larger
and more variegated the group being combined, the better.
Where combination would strengthen negatives—such as in the
Tower of Babel—God may act to avoid that combination.
Despite the value of
combining different things, the world is built from one
underlying substance, insuring that people—who he assumes are
the reason God made the universe, itself a remarkable claim we
will have to return to at a later time—will be able to benefit
from all aspects of God’s world. The preference for
combination raised the question of how Ran could dare to
address them, particularly on issues of such moment as the
nature of Creation. We will see his answers, and his view of
Creation, next week, God willing.
