SHIUR 10

PARSHAT TSAV, SHABBAT HAGADOL, 5764

PAGE 194-END OF 5TH DERUSH

As this is the last email before Pesah—and please note that we will suspend this shiur for two weeks, as Pesah ends on a Tuesday, and the post-holiday recovery makes it unlikely that I will be able to send out the shiur that week—we will not only finish the Fifth Derasha, but will pause for a brief review of what we have seen so far. THE GREATER EFFECT OF ESSENTIAL FLAWS Ran is continuing his explanation of why the Avot preferred to marry women from back home rather than those of Canaan, and to do so he reaches for an analogy (which, as he explained, eases the understanding of complex subjects). He notes that errors at the beginning of study of a discipline are much more significant than those that come later, since they will impact every step afterwards. (The example he gives is of a circle with radii stretching from the center to the circumference; starting on the wrong radius will take you farther away from the point on the circumference you wanted to be than if you at some later part of the journey stray off the path, even a greater distance. Another good example is the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, two wholly different branches of math which differ only in their decision as to whether to accept the axiom that two points define one and only one line. The distance between everything in Euclidean geometry, almost no matter how far, will be smaller than that between Euclidean and non-Euclidean in anything that has to do with that axiom). Moving to human beings, Ran argues that the heart is the center of human experience, thought, and action, so that characteristics of a person’s heart will shape that person more significantly than other things. The Canaanites’ actions were ones that warped their hearts, their whole beings, and therefore rendered them more unfit for joining the Jewish people than the Arameans back home. EMPHASIZING THE HEART To further demonstrate the importance of the heart in service of God, Ran points out that all mitsvot have a significant “heart” (read: mind, consciousness, experienctial) component. Some, of course, are all in the “heart,” such as the obligation to believe in Him, His providence, and reward and punishment (I mention Ran’s examples because I have too often misspoken in public by assuming that we all agree that these are parts of Jewish belief; I take the opportunity here to note that Ran casually assumes the belief in each of these to be mitzvah obligations).

Second, there are mitsvot that involve an action but that inculcate a characteristic, such as charity involving the act but also training the heart to feel a certain way. Interestingly, Ran here mentions the story of Hillel telling a potential convert that the essence of the Torah was loving your neighbor as yourself, and interprets Hillel as referring only to a substantial portion of mitsvot, not to his having seen love of one’s neighbor as truly the essence of the entire Torah (another point that I am not sure most Orthodox Jews today would realize; I believe that Rashi, by the way, interprets that line as meaning God—loving God is the essence of the Torah, with the rest being commentary). Third, Ran notes the mitsvot thought of as hukim, whose reason is not clear. These would seem to be disconnected from the “heart” since people do not know why they are doing them. Even so, Ran stresses that such mitsvot as well need to be performed with full intent and attention, and that they have important “heart” affects as well. The same applies to sin. Ran notes that the Gemara refers to “thoughts of sin” (hirhurei averah) as being worse than sin itself, a counterintuitive statement. Rambam in the Moreh has said that it was because when a person thinks of sin, he is misusing his intellect (or heart; for Ran, they’re pretty much the same), which is the aspect of a person that makes us human. When he actually sins, though, he is misusing some part of the body, which is just the physical vessel for our intellects. Ran admires that idea, but offers another as well. He notes that sin can only occur if there is an underlying flaw in the person’s heart. He returns to the three examples I mentioned above, that the person denies the existence of God, or of His providence, or of reward and punishment (Ran cites verses from Tanakh for each, suggesting that he thought these heresies were already known in Biblical times; even finding them in Ran’s time is somewhat surprising, as those ages were still largely religious. It shows us that it is not scientific sophistication that offers these heresies as attractive—they have always been out there, and some percentage of people are lured by them in every generation. That does not make them any less wrong). Without some such fundamental error, no person would sin (who would give up eternal life in the presence of God for the sake of turning on a light on Shabbat?). I think we nowadays would want to mitigate this line of reasoning somewhat, as it is fully possible to intellectually believe that God exists, pays attention, and rewards and still not have that stop us from putting that particularly tasty piece of whatever in our mouths. Even that, though, fits Ran’s model—without a flaw in our internalization of our beliefs, there would be no room for that disconnect. If we experienced God’s Providence and reward as fully as we do gravity, for example, we could never sin. Those internal errors that leave room for sin, Ran now says, are in fact more serious than any particular sins themselves, since the hirhurei averah, the flaws in our heart that render sin possible, lead to numerous sins, while each actual sin is just one act. BACK TO YITSHAK, YAAKOV AND ESAV The role of the heart in worship of God leads Ran back to another statement about prophecy, which says that prophecy can only rest upon a person when he is in a mood of happiness (not frivolous or silly, but happy), another example of the role of the heart as the starting point for all human events. It is the importance of that happiness that made it necessary for Yaakov to step in for Esav instead of just coming to his father on his own. For whatever reason, Yitshak had developed a greater love for Esav, probably out of a lack of recognition of Esav’s true character. Had God told Yitshak to bless Yaakov the main blessing, he would have done so, but grudgingly. His excitement about giving the blessing to Esav strengthened that blessing, despite it having been Yaakov who was standing before him. Ran recognizes the oddity of that position, since we would think that the blessing shouldn’t work at all if it was given to the wrong person. In an earlier derasha, he had raised this issue, and offered several answers. Here, he sticks with the view that Yitshak’s blessing was a prophecy not a blessing, in which case Yitshak had no real say in its content. His joy and enthusiasm were only important for the manner of its being conveyed to Yaakov (as an analogy, Ran notes that a farmer planting a wheat stalk thinking that it was barley will still harvest wheat. Although Ran doesn’t say it, I believe he means that the farmer’s job is to plough, plant, water, and reap, and that if he doesn’t do those actions as well as possible, the harvest will not be as bountiful as it could have been. What plants he gets, however, are set by the seeds he plants, not by his feelings about it). In addition, Ran sees this incident as just one more part of the inscrutable Divine plan to foster opposition and hatred between Yaakov and Esav, so that when the Jews sin, the people of Esav can and will serve as the vehicle of God’s punishment for us. It is for that reason that they were embedded with such different fundamental qualities (Esav being, naturally, a hunter with a fiery temperament, and Yaakov being calm, etc.), and the passing of the rights of the firstborn from Esav would only further separate them.

Ran, in fact, points to the book of Daniel as indicating that Esav is guaranteed to remain as an identifiable nation (Rome and Christianity are identified with Edom) until the end of days, meaning that the dance of anger that Yaakov and Esav have with each other is calculated to function throughout the rest of human history. (This, as I have noted before, seems to me to be connected to Ran’s belief that the connection of like things is part of what the world is all about; by having Yitshak and Rivkah produce such diametrically opposed sons, the challenge of their finding unity was one that would dominate world history. When the Jews are acting well, their dominion would repress Esav to the extent that the differences would be papered over. When the Jews sin, however, Esav gets the chance to fully express himself, and to stand over and opposite the Jews and their view of how to have the world function). In mentioning the book of Daniel, Ran pauses to add that the prophecy was unclear there, even to Daniel himself, and has remained obscure ever since. He attributes this to two causes: first, since (as time has shown) the redemption was going to be significantly delayed, Hashem didn’t want the full extent of the length of the Exile to be clear to people, since that might lead to despair. Second, Daniel lived in a time when prophecy (meaning God or His emissary speaking to people; I think Ran, and certainly Rambam, believed that it is always possible for people to achieve the personal qualities of a prophet). These two factors render prophecies of the third redemption, like those in Daniel and in Zechariah, almost completely incomprehensible. Ran notes that even the exact definition of the first two redemptions—the prophecy to Avraham about the redemption from Egypt and to Yirmiyahu about the end of the First Exile—was so unclear as to lead to errors; news of the third given to Daniel and Zechariah, when prophecy itself was weakening, was all that much less understandable. What was perfectly clear, however, was that Esav would be the last of the kingdoms in Daniel’s vision of history. Ran closes the derasha by noting that Yaakov had a vision of God as he left Israel, and then had a vision of angels again when he returned (at the very end of Parshat Vayetse), emphasizing to him that the Land of Israel is an essential place in terms of readiness for visions of the Shekhinah. In fact, Ran sees Israel as an in-between place, mediating between Heaven and Earth, so that it is a place more ready for visitations of Shekhinah than other places (incidentally, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that Ran has just managed to throw Ramban’s understanding of the dream into his own view of Yaakov’s visions by combining the ladder dream with the vision of angels upon his return. It’s not the ladder dream itself that tells Yaakov of the Land’s special status, it is the combination of his having a vision when he left and one when he returned, marking Israel as a place prone to feeling the presence of God more directly than usual). WHAT IS THE FIFTH DERASHA ABOUT? There are numerous points we could dwell on, but as we are winding into Pesah, I want to bring some kind of reasonable closure to what we’ve done so far. Having seen 5 of 13 derashot, I hope for us to be able to at least offer an educated guess as to the emerging pattern of the derashot. First, though, we have to understand this one on its own terms. Considering Ran’s starting assumptions—his particular reading of the Talmudic list of necessary qualities for a prophet—one central point seems to be the question of the factors that affect the production of prophecy (remember that this was a big issue for Rambam as well, who seems to think that people could earn prophecy, although God could, and apparently has for thousands of years, miraculously prevent them from achieving it).

Seeing Ran’s focus on the qualities of the prophet, at least some of which are only important for getting a message across to others, and knowing that Ran accepts Ramban’s view that the Land of Israel as especially prone to prophecy, I think this derasha aims to show that prophecy in the ordinary sense—Moshe is deeply different, hence his repeating his whole proof that Moshe Rabbenu was intentionally and obviously supernatural-- is not a sign of personal perfection. People are a mix of character and physical traits, some of which are inherited. Even though personal actions affect that genetic background as well, it nonetheless sets limits on what a person can expect to accomplish. Someone born without impressive stature through no fault of his own has a harder time achieving prophecy than others. So, too, women of Canaanite origin simply have a more difficult challenge in becoming righteous than did the daughters of Lavan, who lived in his home and absorbed his genetics and ideas, yet managed to develop into the Matriarchs of our people. Rather than the apex of personal perfection that Maimonides reported, Ran is, in his own digressive and apparently disorganized fashion, portraying prophecy as a complicated mix of qualities, location (since it is easier to prophecy in Israel than outside), and ability to impact on others. THE STRUCTURE OF THE DERASHOT As I characterize the fifth derasha that way, I would be remiss if I did not admit that it does tend to focus on Parshat Vayetse; central questions are the nature of the dream and why Yaakov had to be sent to Lavan to get a wife. It is also true that medieval derashot tended to begin with a verse or saying from elsewhere in Jewish literature and then relate it back to the parsha. It is possible, therefore, that the editor was correct and this is simply a derasha for Parshat Vayetse, that the book Derashot haRan is just a collection of some of the derashot Ran gave, in no particular order. I still suspect, however, that there is more going on here. The first derasha we had, on Parshat Bereshit, dealt with issues of the fundamental nature of Creation—the importance of combining things in Creation, for example, the difference between negative results of sin and active punishment, the way in which people’s role in the world changed after the sin in the Garden of Eden, and so on. The second derasha, which spoke of Yaakov and Esav and could therefore be seen as a derasha on Parshat Toldot, also took on significantly larger themes, such as the inherent and continuing battle between the brothers as an embedded aspect of human history, their battle over the blessings, the significance of that battle, and so on. Again, this may just have been what Ran chose to teach about Parshat Toldot, but it strikes me as moving from Creation to underlying social structures of the world, and the role of people in shaping or affecting those (such as the question of whether the blessings were only a prophecy or had some affect on the future).

The third derasha, a discussion of Parshat haChodesh, deals with the nature of mitsvot, the role of the Rabbis in defining those mitsvot, Moshe’s prophecy (also part of defining how mitsvot were communicated to Jews by God), and how those various aspects of mitsvot were incorporated in that first one.

The fourth derasha, as we mentioned, was about many issues (and focuses on the end of Parshat Mishpatim and Ki Tisa), but focused a great deal on prophecy. The fifth one, as we have just seen, is about “normal” prophecy and disconnecting it from human perfection. My guess, then, is that Ran’s derashot were on specific sections of the Torah, but were chosen to provide an avenue of attack for discussing central themes of Jewish belief, many of them in response to previous claims by Rambam. We won’t be able to verify that until we’ve finished the whole work, be”H, but we will use this as our working hypothesis for the time being. Shabbat Shalom, Hag Kasher ve-Sameah, and we will meet again in this forum in three weeks, be”H.