Masekhet Sotah

Parshandata

I have always loved Rashi. I started learning Rashi with Chumash in grade school and studied about Rashi in the context of medieval Europe and the Crusades in college.  I even wrote a paper on him for graduate school. Now that I am learning the daf, my appreciation for Rashi has grown even greater as he is the ultimate guide to the complexities of the Talmud. I seem to recall a saying that God gave you two hands so that one could hold the place in the text and the other could hold the place in Rashi, since you needed to be looking at them simultaneously. Simply put, Rashi is the king, or, as one of his nicknames puts it, “Parshandata, “ THE parshan (commentator), a play on a name in the Megillah.

So I have been less than happy having only “pseudo- Rashi” for masekhtot Nedarim and Nazir. While the insights of this mysterious commentator are often helpful, they do not provide the level of explanation and hand-holding that Rashi does. So in honor of Rashi returning to us in Masekhet Sotah, here is a short post about Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchak, known to all as Rashi.

Rashi’s biography is well known. He was born in Troyes, France in the prosperous region of Champagne, in 1040. He left as a young man to study in the main Torah centers of the times, Mainz and Worms. In less than a generation, these academies of learning would be decimated  by the vicious attacks of the First Crusade.

(www.geni.com)

Rashi’s teachers were Jacob ben Yakar and Isaac ben Judah of Mainz and Isaac ben Elazar HaLevi of Worms. They in turn were students of the great Rabbenu Gershom, one of the most significant early leaders of Ashkenazi Jewry. Rashi brought these teachings back home to France and established his own school, where he passed the traditions and knowledge along to his students, children and notably his grandchildren. But Rashi did more than that- he took a step that his teachers did not and because of that he preserved these teachings through the very hard times that came next. Rashi took his student notes and used them to craft two of the most seminal works in Jewish history: his commentary on the Bible and his commentary on the Talmud. It would not be a great stretch to say that without Rashi’s writings, a major element of the mesorah, traditional learning, would have been forgotten, certainly in Ashkenaz.

(Wikipedia)

Rashi’s commentaries are notable for both their breadth and their brevity. He clearly was at home in the great sea of Jewish literature but he was also familiar with botany, zoology, grammar, business practices, language arts and a myriad of other disciplines. And yet, he is able to condense this vast knowledge into concise and clear explanations. Rashi never shows off how much he knows, and he is never afraid to say he doesn’t know something.

One last note about Rashi. Professor Avraham Grossman wrote that in his opinion, no scholar worried about women’s dignity like Rashi did. Here is a beautiful example: in one of his responsa, Rashi describes a situation where a husband wants to divorce his wife because  she has developed a skin condition. He claims he does not have to pay her the amount of her ketubah since she knew she had this condition and hid it from him. After Rashi proves that this is not the case, he excoriates the man for not acting as a Jew should. “If that husband had set his mind on keeping his wife as much as he had set his mind on getting rid of her, her charm would have grown on him. “ (quoted in The Jew in the Medieval World, edited by Jacob Marcus).

Rashi only had daughters (and brilliant sons in law). Did they really wear tefillin? Who knows? But it is hard to imagine a master teacher like Rashi, one who upheld the status of women, not sharing his Torah with the girls of his household. Would Rashi have approved of women learning daf yomi? I hope so!

Women of Alon Shvut at the Siyum HaShas