Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily. Just 10 minutes a day, and we will give you a tour of the entirety of the Talmud.
And today, I wanted to discuss a little bit of the history and some of the personalities behind the actual page of the Talmud. And I really wanted to talk about the two primary commentaries that are almost synonymous with Talmud study itself, and that is the works of Rashi and the works of Tosfot.
What are the differences between these two and what exactly is going on? So, as we mentioned, this is very important to understand, although we sometimes refer to Tosfot as if it was a person, the word Tosfot means additions. And the question’s going to be, additions to what?
So let’s start talking about who Rashi was. Rashi was born in the year 1040 in Troyes, France, and that’s really where he lived almost the entirety of his life, except briefly, at the age of, 18 Rashi went to yeshiva in Mainz, and he studied from the great European scholars who had an unbroken transmission of how to really understand the Talmud and he brought that back with him.
What he really had [were] stacks of notebooks that really had, not only the words of Talmud itself written down, but he interspersed it with his commentaries that really make the words of the Talmud much more comprehensible. It is a line-by-line commentary on the entirety of the Talmud. So, if you open up a Talmud, again, on the side that is closer to the binding, you will always find the commentaries of Rashi. And Rashi is a line-by-line commentary of how to make this Talmud make sense.
And Rashi is almost exclusively focused on the sense that comes locally on the page. Rashi, so to speak, is the local track, and just taking you through line-by-line every word of Talmud. Sometimes he’ll provide translation, sometimes it’ll be a little bit more of explanation, and sometimes, though a lot more rarely, he’ll bring a question and really start to flesh out a more conceptual idea. But what Rashi is really focused on is the plain meaning that emerges from the page.
Now, if you cross over to the other side of the page of Talmud, you will have the collection known as the Tosafists. Now, the Tosafists again are not a person, though we sometimes talk about them like they are people. But the Tosfot was a collection. It literally means additions, and these were most likely additions to the commentaries of Rashi.
Very often Tosfot begins by quoting and citing Rashi’s commentary. And it’s very interesting how Tosfot actually cites Rashi. Tosfot doesn’t call him Rashi, which probably stood for Rav Shlomo Yitzchaki, though he’s become universally known as Rashi, the acronym for Rav Shlomo Yitzchaki.
The Tosafists did something incredibly different. They quote Rashi, and the way that they quote Rashi is by calling him the Perush Hakuntras. Perush means commentary. Kuntras means notebook. They literally refer to Rashi as the notebooks. And I think the reason why is that, as opposed to Rashi’s commentaries on the Torah, on the Bible, which are never referred to, I don’t think ever, not a once, are referred to as notebooks.
It was specifically his commentary on the Talmud that was referred to as notebooks because these notebooks didn’t just contain the commentary on Rashi, but, as opposed to the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, the commentaries interwoven into the words [of the Talmud] themselves, where you literally can read words of Talmud and then interspersed you’re going to find Rashi literally weaving his words into the words of the Talmud themselves. That’s as opposed to the world of Torah Shebiksav, the Written Torah, where we always have the text of the Torah on top and the commentary of Rashi is on the bottom. They’re almost much more seriously divided. In the notebooks, Rashi seamlessly integrated his commentary into the words of the Talmud because again, the actual words of the Talmud are really just emerging right now into a fixed book.
Now Tosfot takes the local commentary of Rashi and he does something extraordinary. Basically, what Tosfot does, and one commentary described Tosfot this way: “He turned the entire Talmud into one ball, into one entity.” Rashi’s going line by line. He’s taking a passage of Talmud, a question of Talmud, and he’s explaining: “Why is this a question? How is this an answer?” Tosfot is doing something very different.
Tosfot takes the entire Talmud and approaches it as if it was one entity. Tosfot is constantly asking from one place in the Talmud to another place, maybe even a totally different tractate, and saying, “Don’t these two contradict? How do we resolve this contradiction?” And the way Tosfot did that was by offering conceptual distinctions. This is really the emergence, the fine-tuning, of the conceptual approach to Talmud study. And the people who pioneered this, many of these were grandchildren of Rashi, most notably Rabbeinu Tam.
Now Rabbeinu Tam: rabbeinu means our teacher, tam means literally pious, like a pious simplicity. That wasn’t his actual name. His actual name was Yaakov ben Meir, but he is affectionately known as Rabbeinu Tam, this pious, simple one, and he was really the leader of the generation and one of the great leaders of the schools of Tosfot, of these additions that are printed on the page of the Talmud.
Now what’s really interesting is what’s going on in Jewish history at this very time, and that is the world of the Crusades. The first Crusade by Pope Urban, I think is starting around 1095, this is happening in Rashi’s lifetime and the yeshivas where Rashi studied got totally wiped out during the times of the Crusades.
You will find references within Tosfot to many of the historical circumstances that are happening. That they were living, not only in Christian lands, but in lands that were now preparing for war, and they had to deal with some absolutely heartbreaking questions, questions about forced conversion, questions about who remains a Jew. And these were questions that were debated because as opposed to these more separate communities of the Jewish world in Iraq where the Talmud emerged from, the commentaries of Rashi and Tosfot are coming in Christian Europe and are contending with wars, they’re contending with a church, they’re contending with people who now for the first time can switch to a majority religion. One of the earliest questions that Rashi deals with is the question of apostasy; what happens if you convert to Christianity? That question is about a thousand years old by now. Rabbeinu Tam is dealing with all sorts of questions dealing with commerce and non-Jews. What rules do we have? Do we have any ability to be flexible in order to ensure that people’s professional lives remain intact? And this came up quite a bit in the wine-making trade about whether or not wine that’s going to be handled or shipped overseas can remain kosher.
One of the lasting disagreements that we have a tribute for is the question over the placement of a mezuzah, which you will notice anytime you walk into a Jewish home on the right-hand side of the door as you enter. There’s a little parchment with the words of the Shema inside affixed on the side of the doorpost of any Jewish home. And there is a question how a mezuzah should be affixed. Should it be affixed going totally straight or should it be affixed horizontally or vertically? And this was a dispute between Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam, who was of course Rashi’s grandson. And what’s so interesting is that the compromise that nearly every Jewish home has is that we put the mezuzah a little bit slanted. That is a tribute both to Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam.
So next time you walk into a Jewish home and kiss that doorpost, you can remember the great lights that appear on nearly every page of Talmud: the personalities of Rashi, who’s become synonymous with Talmud study, literally we call it Gemara Rashi, or the world of the Tosafists, the leaders of conceptual study of Talmud. And every time you walk into a Jewish home that slant is the compromise between these two great personalities of Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam.
So thank you so much for listening and let’s keep making Torah sweet.