I'm taking a class this semester on Medieval Ashkenazic Biblical interpretation. Something that the teacher said juxtaposed two thinkers in my head in a way that would not have occurred to me otherwise.
He said something along the lines of "Of course, we do not look at Rashi (an 11th and 12th century Jewish exegete from northern France) in order to understand the Bible." His reason for this is obvious. A medieval commentator is starting from a very different place than a modern biblical critic. However, it was also incredibly arrogant. Just because he is approaching the text from a different angle, it does not mean that his is not the correct reading of the text at times.
A sharp contrast to his approach to Rashi is that of the late Nechama Leibowitz, a professor at Tel Aviv University for many years, and a great teacher of Torah. In the introduction to her book,
The Study of Torah Commentators, and Ways to Present Them she says,
In schools, high schools as well, we don't study Biblical commentary for it's own sake, but we learn Torah with the help of its commentators. And if, God forbid, the Torah becomes marginalized, its stories and laws, its morals and ideas, its tradition and beauty, because of a preoccupation with the commentators, the essence of study has been reversed, and whatever minor benefit is gained is outweighed by a huge loss.
(The emphasis is her's, but the translation from Hebrew is mine.) I don't think she is discounting the use of the medievals as primary sources to teach about their times. What she is doing is emphasizing their use for the study of the meaning of Bible.
She was an Orthodox Jew, but she was also a university professor. Professor Leibowitz was aware of modern scholarship, and supported many (if not all) of its conclusions. But she was also aware of the richness of the tradition, and was not afraid to turn to it for possible answers. The Maimonidian dictum, "Accept the truth from whoever says it," pervades her work.
As thoughts of Professor Leibowitz's approach to the Bible flashed through my head, in contrast to that of my teacher, I was suddenly reminded of the Political Philosopher Leo Strauss. His approach to Medieval and Ancient Philosophy is similar to Leibowitz's to Medieval Biblical interpretation. In his preface to the English translation of his book
Spinoza's Critique of Religion he wrote something of an intellectual/spiritual autobiography. The book was written in the 1920s in Germany, and in the preface he reflects on how his thought developed at that time. He had rejected modern philosophy as presented in the Existentialism of Heidegger, whom Strauss saw as the great thinker of his age, because he felt it led to nihilism. (This was before Heidegger became a Nazi.) He was seriously considering turning to Orthodox Judaism, thinking that if reason could not provide meaning to life, the only place that meaning might be found is in revelation. However, he turned back from Orthodoxy, writing, in the last paragraph of the preface,
The victory of Orthodoxy through the self destruction of rational philosophy was not an unmitigated blessing, for it was a victory not of Jewish orthodoxy but of any orthodoxy, and Jewish orthodoxy based its claim to superiority to other religions on its superior rationality (Deut 4:6).… Other observations and experiences confirmed the suspicion that it would be unwise to say farewell to reason. I began therefore to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from pre-modern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and it (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation.
What we see, in these two drastically different personalities, is a similar respect for the past. They refuse to arrogantly assume that we are superior to our predecessors, while at the same time not accepting the approaches of the Ancients and Medieval blindly. I don’t know how far this can be taken, it’s just kind of idle thought, but I think its an interesting comparison, and one I would never have come up with if not for a small aside by one of my teachers.
