SHIUR 9

SHABBAT VAYIKRA

We ended off last week in the middle of a series of questions about prophecy that Ran had already recorded in the 3^rd derasha (although we won’t address it this week, one question about the work as a whole is why he would repeat large chunks of his analysis in two or more places).  As there, Ran proved that the Gemara meant literally its requirement that a prophet be wise, modest (which Ran understands to mean well-formed intellectually and ethically), mighty, rich, and of impressive form.

Ran accepted the need for the first two kinds of perfection, but does not understand the last three.  In terms of might, he suggests that the prophet needs to be able to declare his message fearlessly despite any threats that may be made against him (understanding “mighty” as a character trait despite the gemara’s having proven that Moshe was physically strong; Ran may have thought the two go together).  He remains puzzled by why a prophet should be wealthy and impressively formed.

Ran answers, as we have seen before, that the prophet’s outer-directed mission (the word navi, in his reading, refers to his always speaking God’s messages to the people) mandates that he be a person who will not be dependent on others (hence the need for wealth) and who will impress others with his words.  I note that Ran thinks that the navi needs to be able to impress others regardless of what they find impressive, to be smart for those impressed with intelligence, ethical/nice for those impressed with that, and so on. 

Given the importance of the prophet’s being impressive, Moshe’s continuing stutter is out of place; why didn’t God heal him? (I hope this is all familiar, which is why I’m going through it so quickly).  Ran’s answer, that God wanted Moshe’s entire prophecy not only to be supernatural, but to be obviously so (so that He left the stutter in place, or actively gave it to Moshe), to prevent people mistaking him for a magician or other kind of charlatan.

REGULAR PROPHECY

Regardless of whether his stutter was supernatural, the level of his prophecy certainly was, as ordinary prophets are limited to prophesying with a halom, a dream, or a mareh, a vision (whereas Moshe was told his messages directly and clearly).  In those kinds of prophecy, the prophet is shown a riddle or analogy that has to be related to the actual message.  Ran interprets Jacob’s dream differently from Ramban to show how this works.  Ramban thought the dream showed Yaakov how events in this world are guided by the angels (the point of them going up and down the ladder) but Ran objects that if so, they should have been descending from Heaven and then ascending, after completing their mission.

Instead, therefore, Ran thinks the dream shows Yaakov that God’s angels here on Earth—the righteous—go up and down the ladder of closeness with God, since no human being can just rise; rather there are points of ascent and descent.  While that reading explains the angels’ directions in the dream, it makes it unclear why Yaakov would have the dream as he was about to leave Israel.

Ran explains that the up and down motion of the righteous is most prominent in Israel, where closeness with God is most readily available.  Had Yaakov been leaving for little reason, he would have been forfeiting the maximal growth in closeness to God.  Since God agreed that finding a wife in Haran was vitally important, He came to tell Yaakov that, despite the ladder really being in Israel, He (God) would be with Yaakov throughout his journey, up until and beyond his return to Israel.

That reading of the dream leads Ran to two different directions of questions.  First, he wonders why the daughters of Lavan—an idol worshipper—would be more fit for Yaakov than Canaanite women, whose sins were certainly not objectively worse than idol worship.  Second, he wonders why it should be that ordinary prophecy is phrased in a riddle or analogy.  We will take them in order.

SINS OF ACTION, SINS OF CHARACTER

Ran prefaces his discussion of sin and its affect on a person and their offspring by vigorously upholding the ideal of free will, a principle he calls the base of the entire Torah.  Even so, people have tendencies towards certain types of actions and away from others (so while I have the free will to be a perfectly placid person who does not get angry or hurt, I may have tendencies otherwise).

In addition to a person’s basic character—given at birth—Ran thinks that our actions shape our character as well, which is no novelty in classical, medieval, or modern thought.  What is novel is that he believes some actions also feed back and affect the genetic (he doesn’t call it that) legacy we pass on to our children.  Just as a person’s natural tendencies fuel certain actions, some of those actions affect the kinds of tendencies they pass on to their children.

The sins of the Canaanites, Ran thinks, were exactly of that kind, which explains not only why Yaakov had to marry a non-Canaanite, but also the commandment to eradicate them when the Jews were conquering the Land.  Ran is saying that at least some of our actions are passed on to our children in the form of tendencies.  (All other things being equal—identical twins, for example, who marry identical twins—offspring will be affected by the kinds of lives their parents lived.  Theoretically, even within a family, kids born at different stages of their parents’ lives will have slightly different legacies).

Idol worship, on the other hand, is not that kind of sin, so that there was no reason to think that Lavan’s daughters would be genetically infected with his flaws (although I would have thought that his character flaws were themselves fairly significant).  It was therefore preferable for Yaakov to marry one of his daughters (or both) to marrying Canaanite women. 

ANALOGIES IN PROPHECY

The other issue that Ran raises, which we will not be able to complete this week, is that of why prophecy is expressed in riddles or analogies.  The first part of the answer is itself an analogy from physical experience in which we progress from the light to the hard.  If a person, for example, wants to run a marathon, they don’t start with 26 miles right away, they start with easier tasks and work their way up to them. 

An analogy is a way to do the same thing for the intellect.  When prophecy wants to deal with subtle and deep matters, it uses an analogy to provide a less delicate handle on the issue.  So, for example, Ran points to the verse in Kohelet that speaks of a city surrounded by a powerful king, but one lone and generally ignored man manages to deliver the city from him.  Ran reads the verse as a reference to the battle with the evil inclination; only the intellect, which the rest of the body doesn’t generally support, manages to teach the body how to be delivered from his hands.

We’ll see the rest of that discussion, and the end of the derasha, next week.  For now, I want to return to four topics that came up in this week’s summary.  First, we should reconsider Ran’s claim that intellectual and ethical perfection are obviously necessary for a prophet. Then, we will analyze why a prophet should be able to attract all people at their level.  Third, I want to think a bit about the up and down motion Ran envisions for the righteous.  Fourth and finally, I want to spend a little time on the idea that some of our actions affect our genetic legacy to our children.

THE “OBVIOUS” PERFECTIONS

When Ran takes the gemara’s statement that a prophet needs the various characteristics, he understands the claim that a navi has to be hakham and anav, wise and modest, to mean intellectual and ethical perfection.  Even if we take the Hebrew word shelemut to mean “fairly well developed” rather than perfect, it is still not obvious to me that a prophet needs those characteristics.  Rambam was the one who set the tone for Ran’s ideas, and he assumed the need for those perfections in order for the person to be able to connect with God.

But the prophets in Tanakh do not, to my understanding, clearly betray those characteristics.  Shmuel becomes a navi when he’s quite young; Yirmiyahu is told that he was a navi from before he was born; Yonah has a bad temper, as does Elisha.  I recognize that Rambam would re-read those stories to mitigate those flaws and to assume Shmuel and Yirmiyah’s inherent perfections, but it might be worth our while to re-think this issue.

Rambam had an almost naturalistic view of prophecy, such that if a person developed a certain kind of personality, he or she would prophesy, unless God intervened supernaturally.  That had to do with his belief that God’s emanations, God’s impact on the world, were largely accessible to human beings if they developed in the right way.

Another possibility, though, would be that all prophecy requires some kind of supernatural intervention by God.  While I recognize that Moshe’s prophecy was qualitatively different from the others, it might nonetheless be true that people cannot “hear” God directly unless He chooses for them to do so.  If that were true, the gemara’s statement about the necessary characteristics of a navi would be saying that, as they understood it, God would only choose certain kinds of people to be prophets, those who were reasonably wise, ethical, etc.  It is not that they need these characteristics to be able to hear God—you’d think God would have the power to make Himself heard by whomever He chose—but that He would only choose certain kinds of people to bear His messages, as we’ll see in the next section.  (It might even be that Ran’s idea of a navi as sent to the people is only if God chooses the person, whereas Rambam’s “natural” prophecy need not be outer-directed).

ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE

Ran’s belief that prophets need to be literally wealthy, mighty, and impressive so as to reach those who are motivated by those aspects of a person has far-reaching implications.  It means that a navi wasn’t only supposed to put God’s Word “out there,” leaving it up to people to be smart enough to heed his message.  Rather, the navi apparently needed to try to get the message across; part of that was that God would only select prophets who were likely to appeal to a wide audience.  This raises (and I won’t go into it, but it’s worth thinking about) the question of the balance between appealing to people and giving them the unvarnished truth.  Looking in Tanakh, of course, we see prophets who balance their negative messages with positive ones, but whose warnings are fairly dire, and gloom and doom.  Were there a prophet today, when such negative messages are likely (certainly) to be ignored, would a prophet need to phrase himself differently?

THE ROLLERCOASTER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Ran’s reading the angels on the ladder in Jacob’s dream has two interesting components.  First, his easy assumption that angels symbolize righteous people, who are God’s angels on earth, reminds us that he and many other Jewish thinkers viewed the levels of greatness from the lowest human to God as something of a continuum, with the most highly developed humans approaching or reaching the level of angels.  While there may be such a thing as actual angels, then, there are people who perform the same functions.

Second, Ran takes for granted that even these highest-form humans do not travel continuously upward in their journey towards God; they go up and down on that path.  This casual realization emphasizes that the righteous are not so different from us—they have successes and failures, just as we do, and have to pick themselves up and try again, just as we do.  The difference is where they focus their up-and-down energies, and the overall success they achieve.

In this context, I am always reminded of a story I read about R. Moshe Feinstein, zt”l.  One day, a student from MTJ (his yeshiva) was sent to R. Moshe’s house to deliver a message.  R. Moshe thanked him and left the room to take care of something, leaving the young man alone with an open volume of R. Moshe’s beautiful and expensive Shas.  Leaning over to admire it, the student knocked over the inkwell (Note to the young: there was a time when people used fountain pens that could not hold a lot of ink on their own.  Instead, the person dipped the pen in a container of ink to replenish the ink, and went back to writing), and watched in horror as the blue ink spread over R. Moshe’s prized Gemara (the kind of mistake there is no way to hide).  R. Moshe came out, he looked at what had happened, and said “Doesn’t the blue look wonderful on the page?”

As told so far, it’s another gadol story, proving how much greater the giants are than the rest of us.  But in the version I read (I think in one of the Maggid books, but possibly in the ArtScroll R. Moshe hagiography), R. Moshe himself told that story and always added, “It took me many years to gain enough control of my temper to react that way at that moment.”  Now it’s a wonderful story of what a giant is—a person who starts with a flaw, and after years of struggle (with successes and failures along the way) ends up at a place few of us can imagine.

THE GENETIC IMPRINT OF SIN

Ran’s brief comments about the difference between the sins of the Canaanites and that of Lavan is fascinating, for one thing because I would think Lavan had many character flaws we would have worried were passed on to his children.  More than that, though, the claim that idolatry does not leave a character imprint, but sexual immorality and witchcraft (what the Canaanites are famous for)do suggests a whole new area of study, trying to analyze which of our actions have what kind of impact on our characters and our genes.  (Following Ran, by the way, makes Sefer haHinukh’s claim that the Torah prohibited eating certain animals, such as pig, because we would become like them doesn’t seem as outlandish).

In addition, Ran’s idea suggests an answer to what has been portrayed as a hugely troubling issue, the status of a mamzer in halakhah.  Many have pointed out that the offspring of a prohibited union has not committed any wrong, so it seems a little unfair to prohibit that child from marrying an ordinary Jew.  Ran might answer, however, that it’s not meant as a punishment, but that the inappropriate relationship will necessarily affect the offspring’s genetic makeup, particularly in terms of his/her attitude/experience of marriage.  As part of the sanctity of the nation as a whole, God wanted to protect the nation from the impact of such wrong unions.

That might also explain why we do not work too hard to find mamzerim.  It may be that if the mamzer never discovers that aspect of his or her past, the genetic tendency will be more easily suppressed, so that we can hope that the mamzer will produce a good marriage.  Knowledge of that status combined with the genetic effect, though, might doom it.  Of course, all that is speculation, but builds off Ran’s idea that different sins affect different aspects of ourselves, with some of them inherently being passed to our children.  Shabbat Shalom.