Masters of the Word: Traditional Jewish Bible Commentary from the Twelfth through Fourteenth Centuries (Vol. 3)
By Rabbi Yonatan Kolatch
OU Press/Ktav
New York, 2023
512 pages
Reviewed by Rabbi Yaakov Taubes
After a two-year Covid-induced hiatus from our formal seudah shelishit program at the shul where I am privileged to serve as rabbi, I was looking for ways to enhance the Torah component that would reinvigorate the shul and bring people back in the afternoon for the third Shabbat meal. After considering various formats and styles of divrei Torah, we settled upon creating a series entitled “Scholars and Scholarship,” in which we explore a different commentary on the Torah each week. I divide my presentation between a few minutes on the life and times of the given commentator, a few minutes on his style of exegesis and a conclusion with an example from the week’s parashah.
Finding material and appropriate examples each week has not always been simple, and I was thus very pleased to discover the Masters of the Word series by Rabbi Yonatan Kolatch (full disclosure: the third volume of which was recently published by OU Press). This volume includes five chapters, covering the parashiot of Shemot through Yitro, while the previous two volumes covered all the parashiot in Sefer Bereishit. Each chapter is devoted to a different Torah commentator and is divided into three sections along lines similar to what I described above. This volume discusses five major figures: Rambam, Radak, Ramban, Rabbi Bachya, and Ralbag. It is a masterful work, as Rabbi Yonatan Kolatch has a keen eye for topics that would be of interest to all students of Torah, regardless of whether their knowledge of the commentators discussed is extensive or limited. I will provide examples of each section to illustrate his methodology.
Section I presents the life and times of the commentator, including a detailed biography and the historical context in both general history and Jewish history. For example, in both the chapter on Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (as an aside, Rabbi Kolatch includes a helpful footnote, with references, about whether his father’s name was Gershon or Gershom), known as Ralbag or Gersonides, and in the chapter on Radak, Rabbi David Kimchi, Rabbi Kolatch discusses their shared homeland: Provence. In this discussion, Rabbi Kolatch notes that this geographic term is one used almost exclusively by Jews and is somewhat problematic, as the several Jewish communities contained therein were mostly separate from each other, often governed by distinct kingdoms, and thus not a unified political entity (a helpful parallel to consider is the Jewish communities of Long Island which are often referred to as “the Five Towns” despite their not forming any real entity, municipal or otherwise). Other issues examined here include the development of parshanut hamikra in Provence; while there is some overlap in the two chapters, each presentation offers new material. Rabbi Kolatch includes in each of these chapters a discussion of the “Maimonidean Controversies,” in which both commentators played a part. In particular, the question of whether it is legitimate to interpret parts of the Torah allegorically, around which the controversy of 1305 revolved, was an issue that Ralbag cared deeply about, although Ralbag’s own view on this question is not completely fleshed out by Rabbi Kolatch.
Section II of each chapter describes the writing history, goals and structure, as well as the publication history of the commentator. Regarding the Ramban, for example, we are told of the scholarly debate over when during his life the commentary was written, along with the larger question as to which parts of the commentary were added and/or modified later, when he arrived in the Land of Israel. We discover in the chapter on the late thirteenth-century commentator Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher, that his commentary was first published in 1492 and has been published many times since. Rabbi Kolatch also describes the manuscripts upon which Rabbi Chaim D. Chavel drew to create the now standard edition, printed by Mossad HaRav Kook.
After a discussion of the goals of each work based on the author’s own introduction, Rabbi Kolatch highlights themes from the respective commentaries, including, in the case of Rabbeinu Bachya and Ramban, their approach to kabbalah, their sources, their writing style, and their attitude toward peshat, among other things. Rabbi Kolatch notes, for example, several features that characterize Ramban’s method of peshat, and his careful attention to Biblical style, including syntax, the use of ellipsis, word and information repetition and temporal sequence, better known as “ein mukdam ume’uchar baTorah.” Each of these methods receives a brief analysis with examples drawn from the commentary itself. The chapter on Rabbeinu Bachya devotes attention to a study of his introduction to the commentary in order to better understand his goals, with a particular focus on his famous use of four distinct methods of interpretation, including peshat, midrash, seichel and sod (which Rabbi Kolatch correctly notes is different from the well-known and sometimes misunderstood PaRDeS model).
In Section III of each chapter, we are presented with selections from the commentator on a specific parashah. As is known, the Rambam did not write a separate commentary on the Torah, but various modern works have culled exegetical material from his numerous other works, and Rabbi Kolatch devotes several sections to exploring Rambam’s exegetical methodology. He selects nine passages from Rambam’s Moreh Nevuchim, Sefer HaMitzvot and Mishneh Torah on topics such as incorporeality versus anthropomorphism, Names of G-d and halachic parshanut. These sections are relatively brief and include the original Hebrew and English translation (except in the case of the Moreh Nevuchim, which was originally written in Judeo-Arabic; Rabbi Kolatch thus included the English only) followed by a concise analysis.
In the chapter on the Radak, Rabbi Kolatch notes that Sefer Bereishit is the only book of the Torah on which Radak wrote a separate commentary; the selections for Parashat Va’era are thus taken from his other writings, particularly his monumental dictionary, Sefer HaShorashim, which means that the examples lean toward the philological. A separate section at the end briefly analyzes Radak’s commentary on the Akeidah, which, though obviously not from Parashat Va’era, clearly illustrates his exegetical style. Although the somewhat forced nature of these two chapters, on Rambam and Radak respectively, may seem to strain Rabbi Kolatch’s model of producing a book analyzing commentaries around the parashiot, the structure of the book does work overall, and selections from each of the five commentators surveyed do in fact offer interesting examples which inspire further study.
The book is also well laid out with various section headers and subdivisions within each chapter, as well as a detailed outline at the beginning of each chapter. Unfortunately, however, these outlines lack page references, so one must navigate through the chapter to find each section (although the work does include a fairly detailed index). Additionally, some may find the footnotes somewhat tedious, especially when multiple references are occasionally given to a single point, but for the most part, the footnotes add explanation and enhance the content.
One major lacuna of the work is an introduction or preface that would explain its goals, purpose and methodology. The first volume of the series, printed in 2006, does include a lengthy introduction to parshanut hamikra, noting the need for Biblical commentary and approaches as to why the Torah was written in a way that required commentary at all, as well as describing some of the primary avenues of textual exploration used by the major Biblical commentators. It also describes the various approaches to commentary employed throughout the generations as well as including sections surveying sources on multivalent exegetical approaches toward the Torah and classic defenses of peshat. While we would not expect the author to repeat all of this in each volume, the reader would certainly have benefited if at least some of the content of the preface to that first volume, which explained the style of the work, how each chapter is divided, and why knowing the historical background of a commentator can enrich our understanding of his writing, would have been included in this volume and expanded upon, especially when some clear differences of style are manifest in this new volume as compared to the original. It would also have been useful to include a note about which commentators were chosen for this volume and what unifying factor, if any, exists between the various commentators surveyed, in either style or background.
Overall, however, Rabbi Kolatch has crafted a most interesting work that is a pleasure to read on each parashah and which can be enjoyed by beginners as well as by advanced students of Torah commentary. I eagerly look forward to future volumes from this author, featuring different commentaries on the other parashiot of the Torah.
Rabbi Yaakov Taubes is the rabbi at Mount Sinai Jewish Center in Washington Heights, New York. He also serves as an assistant director at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, and is a PhD candidate in medieval Jewish history at the Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies.