Befriending Rashi

There comes a time when I’m working through a sugya, inevitably reaching the limit of my own understanding, I ask “What does Rashi say?”

My eyes turn away from the center column on the daf to the margins just next to the binding of the volume where his commentary can be found—close to the binding because Rashi, the famed 11th-century commentator from northern France, is central to the tradition.

More often than not, Rashi will offer an explanatory phrase, some context I was missing, or an original insight that helps me understand some confounding element of the sugya I’m trying to work through. Thus the longtime SVARA slogan, “Rashi is your friend.”

I’ve been so blessed by Rashi’s camaraderie. He is a kind and generous friend, deeply committed to helping us understand. And his commentary on the Talmud is born out of this commitment—Rashi witnessed the destruction of his formative teachers, colleagues, and friends in the Crusades. The yeshivot where he spent his early adulthood—in the Ashkenazi learning center of Worms—were destroyed. In a world without his teachers, Rashi aspired to become a teacher for all of us, creating a comprehensive commentary that ensured his yeshiva’s insights, passed down from teacher to student for centuries, would be available for each of us so that no one would ever have to learn Talmud without a teacher again. A great friend, indeed!

In our desire to befriend Rashi, we must be careful not to lose ourselves. Sometimes, when questioning my reading of a sugya, I turn to Rashi for confirmation—surely Rashi can tell me if I am “right” or “wrong.” Other times, I incorporate Rashi’s understanding so deeply into the sugya, that I forget his teaching is not embedded in the Talmud’s words themselves until I go back and do an “inside” translation. I’ve noticed this in the bet midrash, too, as we learn texts with new layers of complexity that render many of us incapable of moving through the sugya without Rashi’s interjections. 

To this, one of my teacher’s teacher’s teacher, Rav Ahron Soloveitchik (of blessed memory), offered another phrase, cautioning his students from over reading or over ascribing power to Rashi’s words: “Rashi is a Rishon.” By this, he means that the medieval commentator is one of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of voices we can lovingly pursue for elucidation, clarification, and perspective as we learn. (I’ve heard others similarly say, “Rashi didn’t have Rashi!”) The contextual information that Rashi provides is only one option for reading the sugya. It is an option that we should take seriously and be accountable to, but not one to which we must contort our own understandings to adhere. 

This is in the lineage of many Lithuanian yeshivot, whose disciples were careful to learn the Talmudic text itself in full before moving to Rashi and other commentators. Rav Bigman (Rav Ahron Soloveitchik’s student) writes of this process, “Looking at Rashi as a commentator and not as the decisive read of every line allows for an awareness of the difficulties in the text. If Rashi needed to smooth out the Talmud, that means that the Talmud itself is rough. Confronting that roughness enables the learner to uncover worlds of interpretive possibility and to evaluate and appreciate the interpretive choices of Rashi and the other commentators.”

The smoothness that Rashi offers is tempting: he has already worked through any given sugya, and has made it make sense to him in his own way. But when we are learning, I want us to “confront the roughness” of the Talmud together. Through it, as Rav Bigman teaches, we can truly uncover new interpretive worlds, bringing our svara to bear not only on the Talmud but on Rashi’s commentary alongside it. If we want to make Rashi our friend, we should approach him as such: with clarity and curiosity, humility and love, taking him seriously on his own terms and not rendering his words ultimate.

As we push ourselves to new layers of depth in our learning that enable us to read and learn from the commentators that have transmitted and transformed Talmud for centuries, we must remember to encounter them with awe and accountability, yes, and also we must find ourselves alongside their words.