Derashot haRan, Shiur 3, Parshat Yitro, 5764

Page 17-end of Derasha 1 Summary

PUNISHMENT OF THE WOMAN AND SNAKE

When we last left Ran, he was explaining the punishments that God handed out in response to the eating from the Tree.  He had argued that the punishment responded exactly to the crime; for the woman and the snake, too, that will put the responses in perspective. 

First, he notes that they ate from the Tree expecting that it would strengthen them physically; instead it weakened them.  For the woman, that weakness expressed itself in her difficulty in having children, whereas before (Ran assumes) she could have children easily, with no trouble.  This is a doubly important statement, to which we’ll return below.  In addition, the woman misused her influence over the man, prevailing upon him to eat of the Tree.  In response, God gave the man dominion over the woman.

(We will not go into that obviously sensitive issue because it would take us too far afield.  Let me briefly say that even if we accept Ran’s claim, we need assume only that God gave man dominion on those kinds of issues and modes of influence that were used in the Tree incident, not that He gave Adam dominion generally.)

Turning to the snake, Ran is puzzled by God’s referring to hatred between peple and snakes, since he does not see people hating snakes, just running away from them.  There is no sense of lasting relationship between snakes and people; people just don’t want to be hurt by them—reminiscent of another relationship in which one side just wants to be rid of the other, but does not hate them.

Ran therefore argues that the snake’s punishment was not in the specifics of what happened to it-- crawling on its belly (Ran is not even clear that the snake didn’t always crawl on his belly, perhaps with little legs supporting it a touch off the ground) or being hatred by people-- but the shifting of its nature to the opposite of humans’.  The snake had been trying to become more human by interacting with Havah, but got the reverse.  Humans walk on their legs, the snake would do the opposite, humans eat food, the snake would only be able to get sustenance from dirt (because, Ran believes, that which sustains us is that to which we bear a closeness) or will taste all food like it was dirt (because of their flawed nature).  The hatred, too, is a result of their natures being so opposite from ours, since love stems from commonality and hatred from difference (in Ran’s view, to which we will return).

END OF CREATION

As of that point in the story, as Ran reads it, Creation has now been completed, and the world shifts to its natural mode.  It is that shift—from a creative God, adding facets and elements to Nature, to One that oversees a generally natural world—that Ran sees symbolized in the shift from the name Elokim to the name YHVH.  When people have been created, but not yet left the Garden, he sees the double name as reflecting the need for both aspects, since people’s extraordinarily long life still was being created by God; once they sinned, and were left with their physical bodies to age and die, the shift to YHVH was complete.  The issue of names of God is both generally important and specifically important here, and we will return to it in the comments section of this shiur. 

Having finished Creation, though, Ran tells us that the story was placed at the beginning of the Torah as the foundation for everything about to come.  That foundation is that it establishes the need to recognize the complete freedom of God’s Will and His running the world in what might seem counterintuitive ways.  Instead of a physical strengthening of the body leading to longer life, for example, it actually led to shorter, since the physical body on its own has limited life, while a spiritual focus could supernaturally maintain the body forever. 

The body, then, does not really support the soul, it contradicts it, and the more that one suppresses or denies the body, the stronger the soul will be.  This accurately represents one strand of Jewish thought, and in discussing it below we will see the conclusions to which that leads.  This whole idea, for Ran, is a foundation of the Torah similar to the Exodus, because in both cases God showed that the world runs in a way that only He could ordain.  In the case of Egypt, He made sure to perform plagues that the Egyptians could not duplicate (more on this in the third derashah), and here He showed that spiritual goodness earns not only the World to Come but longer physical life as well.

CONTRADICTION PROVES POWER OF GOD

It is in showing that kind of contradictory idea that Ran thinks that God best proves His power, and it is for him the explanation of Devarim 4;6-7, which warns the Jews to keep God’s laws (the hukkim and mishpatim, the laws that have no obvious rationale and the ones that do), for “it is your wisdom and insight in the eyes of the nations. Ran says—in contrast to Rambam, who we will discuss below—that it is our observance of the hukkim, the counterintuitive laws, that will inspire this reaction in non-Jews. Ran bases this odd claim—normally we ridicule those who do crazy things—on the verse’s noting that non-Jews will admire our ability to call out to and secure a positive response from God.

If God responds primarily because of our observance of the mishpatim, Ran says, there would be no reason for that admiration, since non-Jews keep those laws as well.  (This statement is an example of the general growth in Jewish respect for non-Jewish lawfulness during the period of the rishonim).  It is in God’s relating to us for our performance of strange, astounding acts that non-Jews respect us.  As an example, Ran offers Naaman, a non-Jewish general, who went to Elisha to be healed from his tsara`at. 

Instead of going out to greet him and ostentatiously performing a strange and wonderful ritual—the expectation in a magic-influenced culture-- Elisha sent a message that Naaman was to dip in the Jordan 7 times. Naaman’s original reaction was rejection- he wanted fireworks, and anyone can dip in a river.  When he actually did so and was healed, however, it was clear to him that it was miraculous, since there is nothing inherently curative about the Jordan.

So, too, Jewish observance of hukkim.  When we merit a greater connection with God because of them, non-Jews have to respect what is clearly a supernatural connection with God.  It is this world’s rewarding spiritual activity that the Torah wanted to stress in telling the Creation story; other important ideas, such the existence of a World to Come, would come from other stories, such as the Binding of Isaac, since Avraham would never have been willing to kill his son without there being a World to Come.

To close the derashah, Ran notes that the Torah both opens and closes with the issue of miracles; it  opens with Creation, and closes by referring to Moshe, whose prophecy itself was miraculous (as we’ll discuss in a later derashah), but also who performed numerous miracles as well. 

WOMEN—MADE FOR CHILDBEARING?

Ran’s understanding of Hava’s punishment interests me for two assumptions it makes.  First, he assumes that women were always destined to have children; before the Tree, they would have had them easily, afterwards they’d have them in great pain.  That makes sense textually, since God tells them to be fruitful, etc, even prior to eating the Tree.  It means, though, that human sexuality itself was an inherent part of Creation; when we see Adam reacting to his nakedness after eating the Tree, it should mean that some attitude towards sexuality changed, rather than the need for sexuality itself.

But Ran actually implicitly assumes that childbearing is central to women’s existence, since God means to punish the woman by weakening her physicality generally (since she tried to improperly strengthen it), and changes her experience of childbirth.  That makes most sense if he assumed (and we need not agree with him to note his view) that women’s physical selves were centrally focused on childbirth.

HATE AND LOVE STEM FROM COMMONALITY

Ran’s understanding of the hatred between humans and snakes after having their nature adjusted raises an interesting general question, the extent to which anyone can really love the Other.  Ran says that once the snake was opposite of people, hatred would stem almost automatically, because we love that to which we are similar and hate that which is opposite.  This first of all contradicts the popular vision of opposites attracting, and also seems at odds with his view earlier that the world is about combination, with some of those combinations including people of different kinds (remember the smelly spice in the incense).

Ran doesn’t address the issue, but I wonder whether he might argue that it is usually not so easy to categorize the same and different, and that what seems the same in some way is actually different in many other ways.  When we speak of opposites attracting, I wonder whether the people involved don’t actually experience that other person as similar to them in some way as well; or, perhaps, expect to build a similarity within those differences.  So, too, in nations, I think we celebrate the melting pot most when we see all the different kinds of people finding a common basis to share and to grow around.  Ran may be right that it is commonality that leads to love, but people build it from a variety of starting points.

NAMES OF GOD

Ran’s mention that the Torah shifted the Names of God from when the world was constantly having new rules and laws being added to it to when it was basically set interests me for two reasons.  First, it means that Ran thought the laws of Nature were finalized at a much later point of Creation than modern science.  Much of science’s reconstruction of the past (which is often breathtaking in its ingenuity) assumes that Nature largely functioned then as now.  Were that not true, we would have to revisit all of those questions.

More to our point, though, Ran uses the names of God in the exact opposite way to most commentators that I have seen.  In general, I believe, interpreters of Tanakh (traditional and scholarly) assume that Elokim is a more general Name—the Name of strict Justice, without any room for extenuating circumstances, it applies to the world in general and the way it ordinarily runs.  The four letter Name, on the other hand, is the Name of mercy (which requires stepping out of the regular reaction to an act), the Name more connected with specific Providence, and more connected to the Jewish people.

I have no real explanation for Ran’s reading it the other way except that it fits his view of Creation, but it is worth noting and thinking about.

PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL CONTRADICT

Assuming that the spiritual can support the physical, but that the physical on its own is inherently limited is an interesting twist on Rambam’s view.  Rambam had stressed the limitations of all physical creatures, which led him to assume that the World to Come was nonphysical, to emphasize how different humans are from God, and the soul’s centrality to religious experience.  By assuming an interaction between the soul and the body, with—ideally—the focus on the soul sustaining the body, Ran has found a way to give the body a place in a person’s existence, while still stressing the centrality of the soul and physical experience.

This is, admittedly, not a huge advance over Rambam, since he still thinks people should focus almost exclusively on their souls—doing so properly, in his view, would actually make it unnecessary to work on the body at all.  It is important, though, because it is a step towards understanding a positive role for the body in our relationship to God, which in turn might explain why God chose to create a physical world instead of just a spiritual one.

MIRACLES ROOT OF SEEING GOD

The most important issue that comes out of this derasha, though, is Ran’s stress on miracles as the essential path to relating to God.  One example is his view that proper spiritual focus could in fact sustain the body.  His stress on observance of hukkim as the Jews’ avenue to admiration from non-Jews is a particularly good example since it diverges from Rambam, who  had thought that it was our observing a rational and explicable law that would earn that respect. (Note that Rambam lived in a philosophical culture, which respected intellect and rationality while Ran lived in a Christian one, which followed a credo quia absurdum est, a creed that reveled in its not being intuitive). 

In addition, Ran’s focus on the miraculous here will recur in at least the next several derashot, suggesting that at least one theme of the work is the need to appreciate the miraculous and unnatural—the underlying structures of the world, the ones not accessible to human observation and experimentation, the ones he derives only from his understanding of Scripture and tradition-- as part of how the world works.

DERASHAH 2 (PAGES 21-24), SUMMARY

THE BROTHERHOOD AND JEALOUSY OF ESAV

While I recognize that we have already done a lot this week, I just want to begin our study of the second derashah, which already at the beginning raises three interesting points.  First, Ran starts off this derashah, as all the others, with a verse.  I just like to remember that for most of Jewish history the form of a sermon was to start with a verse —sometimes from the portion of the Torah reading at hand, but often with no obvious connection to the topic at hand-- part of the skill of the preacher being his ability to bring the discussion back to his main topic.  In this case, Ran’s verse, from Malachi 1;2 refers to the choosing of Jacob over Esau as a sign of God’s particular love for the Jewish people.

Ran’s topic will be the giving of the blessing to Jacob, so the connection is not distant, but the verse he cites does lead Ran to discuss an extraneous topic, why it is that God’s choice of Jacob is a particular sign of that love.  To explain, he notes that all the other descendants of Abraham had it made clear from early on that they were not part of the central lineage, so their jealousy was mitigated.  Esav, on the other hand, was never officially removed from Yitshak’s central lineage, and, at least until the episode in Toldot, would have thought of himself as in line for the central blessing (more on that next week).  The disappointment was thus greater for him, with the concomitant jealousy greater as well.

But Ran goes one step further.  Based on the gemara’s interpretation of “u-le`om mi-le`om ye’ematz, one nation will be more powerful than the other” that only one of Jacob and Esau will be in an ascendant position at a time, Ran asserts that the structure of the world is such that when the children of Jacob are doing well and God rewards them with power, Esav’s descendants will be in a subservient position, and when the children of Jacob are downtrodden because of their sins (note that Ran is careful to deny that Esav’s ascendancy brings about the subservience of Jacob’s descendants—the power to decide is in the hands of the children of Israel), Esav will be ascendant. 

The necessary reciprocal nature of the fortunes of the two peoples—Esav can only be ascendant if the Jews are downtrodden, and the Jews’ ascendance necessarily implies Esav’s subservience—stems from their close connection to each other.  Other nations’ fortunes —such as Ishmael—are less connected to the Jews, and are therefore not related to them, either.  But Esav and Jacob are locked into each other’s worlds forever.

The next, and last, part of the derasha will take up the birth of these twins and the miracles involved in that birth.  Before moving on, however, I wanted to note Ran’s assumptions here.  As opposed to Yishmael, Ran sees both of Yitshak’s children as being part of his line, although Esav gets a decidedly inferior role.  Esav becomes, for Ran, the permanent foil to Jacob’s fortunes, the barometer of how well the Jews are doing in their service of God.  By the end of this derasha, we will want to think about why Ran would see God as having set up such a situation.

THE MIRACLE OF THEIR BIRTH

Part of the grounding of Ran’s view of their continuing connection stems from his view of their birth, which was miraculous.  Ran wonders why Rivkah, who was clearly destined for Yitshak was born infertile, since she clearly needed to have children.  We won’t answer that this week, because Ran first digresses to considering how Yitshak and Rivkah finally succeeded at having children.

He notes that the verse refers to Yitshak praying “le-nokhakh” opposite, his wife, which some read as setting up God’s answering Yitshak rather than Rivkah, a view Ran labels derash.  As peshat, he assumes that the only way that Rivkah could have become pregnant was by a change of her physical circumstances, a change that God would bring about by changing some of the higher celestial beings as well (remember that Ran believes that God runs the world through intermediaries—He wouldn’t actually go to Rivkah’s body and change it, He’d adjust whatever Fates—we might think genetics—underlay her physical issues).  Once that change occurred, her pregnancy was almost assured.

To produce such changes, Ran is going to argue, prophets will often perform a physical act to focus their attention, or their prayers, or the Godly influence, on the hoped-for recipient of the change.  For example, he points to Eliyahu and Elisha’s actions when each resurrected a dead boy; each lay on top of the boy before praying for him.  I vividly remember a cynic in my high school class claiming that they were just performing mouth-to-mouth, which would only work if the child wasn’t actually dead (only “mostly dead,” which is very different from “completely dead.”).  Ran (and Radak in Melakhim) would claim that it was a way to focus the prayer most effectively.  Yitshak’s praying “opposite” Rivkah means, too, was a way to focus the prayer most directly on Rivkah, so it would have the best hope of achieving the necessary miracle, altering her body (and the factors that control her body) so that she could have children.

SUMMARY

We are obviously pausing in the middle as we end this shiur, but I just want to note the themes we have already seen in this second derashah, which remarkably continue the central ones of the first.  First, Ran is tracing an underlying shaping force of human history, the eternal balance of power between Jacob and Esav, one that is determined by the actions of the Jews rather than by any power of Esav’s. 

Second, that eternal connection stems from Esav, too, retaining his status as a descendant of Yitshak’s (in contrast to Avraham’s many children).  Where we might ordinarily think of Jacob as Yitshak’s only important offspring, Ran is pointing out that Esav has an eternal share of history as well, although not one we might envy [I think there’s plenty of room to find positive sides to Esav’s role as well, but that’s for another time].

Third, Ran recognizes that this interconnection between Esav and Jacob is supernatural, and has its roots in their miraculous birth.  That birth, brought about by Yitshak and Rivkah’s prayers, “convinced” God to change Rivkah’s physical makeup so that she could have children, a “convincing” that was made easier by Yitshak’s deep focus on Rivkah as he prayed.  This sets us up for the rest of the derashah, which will continue analyzing how people bring about miracles, furthering our understanding of Ran’s view of the miraculous in the world.  Shabbat Shalom.