Exegesis and the Rabbis

I love my midrash class that meets on Mondays. This is the class where I gave the professor credit for sufficiently herding the animals-aka Israeli graduate students. It is a midrash class called "'The readings for shabbat and festive days': The exegetical musings of the sages and the weekly Torah portion" taught by Dr. Tamar Kadari. It is one of the courses that I added to my schedule because of the topic title and reputation of the professor. Basically it is a class where we look at one topic in the Torah reading for the week and look at approaches of the sages while also working to create our own interpretations. This is a great class especially as I look ahead at needing to write a d'var Torah each week.

This week, we looked at Hayei Sarah. We started the class by looking at the death of Sarah at the very start of the parsha. Just before mentioning the death of Sarah, the text lets us know that Rivka (Rebecca) was born. Bereshit Raba provides some commentary here called a Petichta (introduction or opening). It takes a verse from elsewhere in the Bible and then expounds and exegetisizes until they end at the verse in the text that they are trying to explain. In other words, they start at a far spot (in our case- Kohellet/Ecclesiastes) and end with our verse in Genesis (Bereshit). The verse in Kohellet that the sages chose is "The sun rises and the sun sets- and glides back to where it rises."

If you just looked at the passuk (verse) on its own, it says that everything repeats but the meaning is not so clear. The commentary takes the verse from Kohellet and tries to give it meaning. They read the word sun (shemesh) as scholar (shamash) and explain that when one scholar is set to take over for another one- there is no nighttime, only day with the sun. For some that still seems obscure but when you look at it with the rest of the commentary and the verse about Sarah's death, it is quite beautiful. The rabbis use the verse in Kohellet to explain that when one leader dies, there is already a new leader who has been born who will take its place.

Basically, the midrash shows that when there is panic when a leader dies, its not the end of the world because there is another leader who will take their place- God provides this leader and so too with the matriarchs of the nation and not just with the rabbis. The text had to tell us that Rivka was born before it could tell us that Sarah had died so that we would not be overly concerned for the longevity and fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham about being the ancestor for generations.

In the second half of the class, we jumped to the end of the parsha where Avraham dies. While looking at the death of Avraham, we specifically focused on the line: "And Abraham breathed his last, dying at a good ripe age, old and contented...." In preparation for class and again in hevruta during class, we looked at a story in Bereshit Raba.

In the story, there are some students who go, sit and study under a date tree. One day, the students came to the tree early in the morning and saw the owner harvesting the dates. They thought that the owner feared that they would pick and eat the dates and suggested that they go to a different place to study. The owner harvested the dates early in the morning, not because he was concerned about the students but rather because dates have a very small harvest window before they go bad and each day there are some more on the tree that become ripe so it is a daily affair for the 2-3 month harvest.

What is the connection of the story according to the Sages of Bereshit Raba? Just as the owner of the date trees would have knowledge of the dates even if the students don't know when to harvest them, God is the creator of man and knows when the right time to take someone's life is whether they are young or old. I thought that this was a beautiful midrash that can teach one way of looking at death, especially the death of someone young. While this is one attempt at acceptance and reason it does make me think that there are often things in our lives that we cannot control or even understand. Maybe if we ask- the tree owner, others, and even God- one day we might get an answer.