SHIUR 5, PARSHAT TERUMAH 5764

SUMMARY, PAGES 33- END OF DERASHA 2 (89-94)

Those paying attention will notice that I have inserted new page nos. in parentheses.  That is because I have finally acquired my new Derashot haRan and will be using that from now on.  Since, however, that edition (Mossad haRav Kook, 2003) has a lengthy translation into Hebrew on the bottom (making it more user friendly for those who find Ran’s Hebrew daunting), we will have to do 20 pages of it a week to keep the same pace.  (That is not so difficult, because the new edition has, in addition to the translation, larger print.)

WHO CARES ABOUT THE BERAKHOT?

We ended off last week with Ran’s questions about why Rivka would care to steal the blessings and why Esav would be infuriated by the theft if the blessings were essentially prophecy.  On the other hand, if Yitshak’s bracha actually impacted the future, stealing shouldn’t work; while we wouldn’t expect that God would give Esav the berakha just because Yitshak thought Yaakov was Esav, He should equally not go against Yitshak’s conscious wishes just because he was mistaken about who was standing before him!  Either way, we have a problem.

Ran offers two answers, each of which leaves much room for discussion.  First, he suggests that Yitshak didn’t know of the prediction that the older would serve the younger, because prophets in his time weren’t allowed to publicize their predictions.  He assumes this because of the Torah’s care in saying that God told Moshe lemor, to say to the Jewish people; without that permission, he assumes that even Moshe Rabbenu could not have revealed his prophecy to the people. 

Adding to that Ran’s belief that prophecy in those days was not as absolute as it would later be, Ran can understand why Rivka would worry about Yitshak’s blessing.  While a bracha to Esav might not completely ruin the prediction of Yaakov’s mastery, it would change it in a way that Rivka did not want.  On the other hand, his unknowingly blessing Yaakov might strengthen that prediction in a positive way.

Ran then also raises the possibility that Yitshak was already doubtful about whether he was speaking to Esav.  Given the contradiction between Yaakov’s words and the way his arms felt, Ran claims, Yitshak would have been more likely to follow the evidence of the words and voice.  He assumes, therefore, that Yitshak at least half-suspected that he was blessing Yaakov, but that he didn’t mind doing so, as long as it did not get in the way of Esav’s also having a good life. 

Yitshak assumed that God would not put words in his mouth for Yaakov that would redound to the detriment of Esav.  God, in turn, took advantage of this situation to inform Yitshak (by the words he put in his mouth) of Yaakov’s true destiny.  Once he realized what God had done, Yitshak said gam barukh yihyeh, he should be blessed, as a way of announcing his submission to the divine plan.  And with that Ran ends the 2^nd derasha.

INDETERMINATE AND PRIVATE PROPHECY AND MARITAL DYNAMICS

Ran has made the point about the changeability of prophecy before —which fueled Rivka’s worry— only now it becomes clearer how much is at stake.  From Rivka’s perspective, the promise she had gotten about Yaakov’s role in the world was endangered by Yitshak’s blessing.  Her encouraging Yaakov to step in for his brother was, in her view, a way of safeguarding the future that had been predicted for her. 

This picture of prophecy, which changes somewhat after Sinai in that good prophecies become guaranteed, suggests that Ran thought human beings could affect the future even after a prediction by God, a remarkable idea.  Yitshak’s blessing Esav would, as far as Rivka knew, work against the prediction she had gotten and his blessing Yaakov would support it.  Prophecy, then, was not information about the future, it was information about how the future looked at that point. That is itself a revolutionary idea worth considering further, but we will press on.

Ran’s belief that prophecy could only be revealed if God commanded doing so raises two main issues worth addressing here.  First, it reminds us that medieval thinkers viewed prophecy as a valuable experience in and of itself, not as a way for God to get messages to humankind.  Indeed, Ran could have conceived of whole armies of prophets with useful knowledge about the future constrained to hold their knowledge to themselves.  Such people would have walked around aware of what blessings and calamities awaited people, but with no right to warn or prepare them.

Seeing Rivka as just such a person puts the Yitshak/Rivka marriage in an interesting light as well.  Whatever their love for each other, from the time of the twins’ birth, Ran has the two of them working at cross-purposes not only because they viewed their sons differently, but because God had vouchsafed information to Rivka that he had withheld from Yitshak.  This conflict, which Ran barely addresses, might have been there to support/foster the conflict between the brothers that Ran saw as crucial to their lasting roles in history, for reasons we discussed last week.

SUMMARY OF DERASHA 2

Taken as a whole, the derasha makes numerous important points about the underlying structure of our world, particularly in its nonphysical aspects.  The lasting conflict between the brothers (and perhaps the parents who bore them), the role and strength of prophecy in predicting the future (both during and after the time of the Patriarchs), the role of a blessing in shaping the future, the question of whether Yitshak was predicting or shaping the brothers’ future when he blessed them, all of these came up here.  Sum total, Ran seems to have used this derasha to analyze which aspects of human relations are determined and which are still open to human effort and action.  Thus far, his view seems to be that good prophecies post-Sinai must come true, and that Yaakov and Esav’s rivalry, with who is on top being dependent on the spiritual state of Yaakov and his descendants, as the determined aspects of the world.  The rest, as he might say, is up to us to affect and effect.

DERASHA 3 SUMMARY (95-109, 35-40)

AHARON’S SHARE IN THE FIRST COMMANDMENT

Ran opens by quoting the verse where God tells Moshe and Aharon to tell the Jews that the month we call Nisan should always be the first month of their year.  He notes that this mitzvah, the first commanded to the Jews as a people, was told to both Moshe and Aharon (despite the Torah’s generally addressing only Moshe) for two reasons.  First, since the Jews’ observance of this command—making Nisan the first month but also taking the sheep to be the Paschal sacrifice—was central to the Exodus, it was appropriate that Aharon, who was also deeply involved in the events leading up to the Exodus, be a part of this as well.

Second, Ran sees this as a reward for Aharon gladly, willingly, and without rancor accepting a subordinate role to Moshe despite his having been a prophet first (a contention he proves from verses in Shmuel and Yehzkel).  That selflessness earned him the post of Kohen Gadol in the Talmud (Shabbat 139a)’s view, and to be part of this commandment in Ran’s.

THE PARADOX OF MOSHE’S NEED FOR A SUBORDINATE

Seeing Aharon’s role in Moshe’s prophecy, though, causes Ran to wonder why God did not perfect Moshe to the point that he wouldn’t need someone to speak in his place.  To strengthen his question, Ran notes that Moshe’s prophecy was miraculous and not just a result of Moshe’s spiritual perfection, a statement he proves from two main points.  First, he notes that at the end of the Torah, the text announces that there will never again arise a prophet like Moshe, a statement that could not be guaranteed unless there were some supernatural element to Moshe’s prophecy.  If, after all, Moshe achieved a certain level by virtue of his own spiritual perfection, there could be no way to be absolutely certain that no one else would reach that level.  It was only because there was a miraculous, supernatural aspect to Moshe’s prophecy that the Torah could say that with confidence—God could know that He would never again intervene in nature to produce a prophet like that.

The second proof notes a source Ran will refer to again in a later derasha, where the Talmud in the beginning of Yoma assumes that the High Priest must take seven days to prepare for his performance of the Yom Kippur service, and derives it from Moshe’s having taken seven days to prepare for entering the cloud and communing with God.  Ran claims that at the simple level the Talmud makes no sense—Moshe was going to communicate directly with God and be taught the entire Torah; there is no logical way to extrapolate from that to the High Priest’s preparation for a Yom Kippur service that was performed once a year.

Rather, Ran says, the Talmud is assuming that Moshe’s waiting before entering the cloud could only have been meant as a sign to later generations, since Moshe himself did not need any preparation for prophecy, as is shown later in Scripture, when Moshe tells Zlofhad’s daughters “Wait a moment and I will hear what God commands.”  Prophecy at will and on a moment’s notice is impossible for physical beings, Ran says, showing that Moshe had, in a physical body, the ability to communicate with God in a way ordinarily reserved for completely nonphysical beings.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL PERFECTION IN A PROPHET

To forestall one possible answer to his question—that God only cared about Moshe’s intellectual/spiritual readiness for prophecy—Ran notes that Nedarim 38a seems to care greatly about a prophet’s physical circumstances, since it announces that prophecy will only come to one who is wise, heroic, and wealthy.  Ran recognizes that Rambam interpreted those terms along the lines of the Mishnah in Avot—wise is one who learns from all people, heroic is one who conquers his own inclinations, and wealthy is one who is happy with his lot—but disagrees, particularly because the Talmud proves its contentions by showing that Moshe literally had each of these characteristics.

Of course, before he can even answer this question, Ran has to explain why it should be true that such physical perfections are important.  He says that these qualities are important for the prophet to make the proper impression on the masses to whom he will be sent with a message.  This offers interesting contrast to his statement in the previous derasha that some prophecy is not meant to be spread around, as we will discuss at the end of this piece.

Returning to our issue, though, Ran thinks that Moshe himself was puzzled by this failure on God’s part, which is why he mentions to God that he is not a man of words even “from then when You spoke to your servant.”  Ran sees Moshe as stressing that he is still linguistically challenged, even after prophecy has descended upon him.  This surprises Moshe, and Ran, because they assumed that a prophet should be able to cut a dashing and influential figure with his listeners.

The answer, however, is that God wanted to differentiate the giving of the Torah, and the Exodus that preceded it, to make perfectly clear that it depended directly on God and not on any human skill or perfection.  To this end, as Ran notes in an aside based on a Talmudic discussion, part of the point of the plagues was to prove that they were not man-made; it was for this reason that the Jews were slaves in Egypt, the magic capital of the world.  Had God taken the Jews out of some unsophisticated land, not able to put up strong magic, others might have claimed it was sorcery rather than God.  Forcing Egypt’s sorcerers to admit that this was the hand of God made the point more effectively than it would have anywhere else.

So, too, with Moshe’s speech.  Demagogues can convince masses of people of the truth of their words by the skill of their speech; had Moshe been Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson (I have a weak spot for black preachers; I think they are excellent orators), people might have suspected that he swayed the Jews by the force, power, and eloquence of his talk rather than by his ideas or his representing God.  To that end, God took away his power of speech, making clear that people would only listen to him if he had something powerful to say.

Ran also intends to derive that point from God’s response to Moshe—who makes a man mute?—but gets caught up in a discussion of how language can ever refer to creating a negative, a discussion we will have to follow up next week.  For now, we can turn to a few striking points in this discussion.

AHARON’S SELFLESSNESS AND REWARD (A MITSVAH)

Ran focuses not only on Aharon’s lack of jealousy of Moshe, but that this was despite his having been a prophet first.  The whole idea that he was a prophet in Egypt bears consideration, since it is both another example of a prophecy that was apparently only for the prophet himself as well as an interesting perspective of Aharon who, in this reading, spent time watching the Jews suffer while he had direct communication from God.  That communication, though, did nothing to hasten the redemption, forcing Aharon to watch and share in their pain even as he knew in a way that they could not that their redemption was only as far away as God willed it.

Seeing Aharon as bearing the people’s suffering, bearing the indignity of having his brother instantly supersede him, and all the while accept what was happening with equanimity casts him in a more Buddhist light than I had ever thought.  At the same time, it shows why he was so perfect for the role of Kohen Gadol, who serves largely to gently educate the people and to be always ready to help them gain atonement when they have sinned.  Aharon’s pre-history thus predicts his future (as the Talmud noted in Shabbat).

The reward he gets is also worth noting—he gets his name attached to the prophecy that included the first mitzvah commanded to the Jewish people.  With all due respect, it takes a truly great man to see that as the reward for what Aharon had gone through.  The reward for letting yourself be stepped on and over is that a mitsvah will have your name attached to it!  The secret, though, is that truly great people only value meriting having a share in God’s plan in the world.  By having his name placed in the first stage of teaching the Jewish people how to serve God, Aharon was being told that indeed his retiring nature had been a positive action, and had not lost him the opportunity to be a vital part of bringing about God’s goals for the Jews and for humanity.

THE OUTWARD PERFECTION OF THE PROPHET

Ran’s whole discussion of the prophet, in which he assumes that physical perfections of various sorts were necessary (and this in contrast to Rambam, who re-reads those perfections), seems to fly in the face of his idea that prophecy is only outward-oriented when God commands it to be so.  All the years that Aharon was a prophet in Egypt, for example, would it have mattered if he were poor and/or physically unimpressive?  Ran does not give us any indication of his thinking here, but I guess that it is one of two possibilities. 

First, Ran may have thought that prophets always had to have a teaching aspect to their personas; it was just that they would not be allowed to reveal their prophecies to the public.  In that view, prophecy always came only to those people who were going to have a shaping influence on others; it was just that not every one of their prophecies itself would be revealed.  Prophecy was always a way to affect the world’s future; private prophecies would simply effect change in a two-step process, by changing the person who would then change others.  He might not have used the words of the prophecy in going out to change the world, but those words would reside within him as he attempted to do so.

Second, Ran may have thought that all prophets had to have the potential to reveal their prophecies.  While not all prophecies were to be revealed, part of making someone a prophet, in this view, would have been to have the option to have that person carry a message to the general public.  If so, the prophet would need all the fundamental requirements of an outer-directed prophet even before he was given a prophecy actually directed to the public.

THE MIRACULOUS NATURE OF MOSHE’S PROPHECY

The crux of Ran’s explanation of Moshe’s speech defect, Aharon’s assistance, performing the plagues in the sorcery capital of the world, among others, is that Moshe’s prophecy was inherently and miraculously different than all others.  Interestingly, Rambam, too, stresses the qualitative difference of Moshe’s prophecy, although he does not use the terminology of miracle.  The importance of that stress, particularly for Jews living among non-Jews who claimed to adhere to a later and superseding prophet, was to show why there could not be someone to uproot Moshe.

For our purposes in studying Ran’s Derashot, that emphasis ties in well with what has so far been his central theme, the mixing of natural and supernatural in the world.  Here, the Jews’ Exodus, culminating in their receiving a Law that is acted upon in the natural world (and, although Ran doesn’t mention it here, that is characterized as being “not in Heaven”), has as a central actor a figure Ran sees as completely supernatural.  We will see the ramifications of this assumption in the coming weeks (and, hopefully, will complete them before Pesah); for now, it means that Ran sees the foundation of the Jewish people—who, as a people, act within nature—in a supernatural, one time event of prophecy that will never be repeated.  Shabbat Shalom.