New Volume Opens Door to Rebbe’s Rashi Sichos

Scholars for generations have tried to decipher the seemingly simplistic words of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, the 12th-century commentator known as Rashi whose glosses on the Five Books of Moses have become standard fare for any student of the Torah. But a new English volume attempts to reveal some of the principles behind the commentary, drawing on several talks delivered by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, whose elucidations of Rashi’s writings have been called by modern-day scholars as “revolutionary.”

Published by the Kehot Publication Society, the new Studies in Rashi presents 12 essays focusing on Rashi’s commentaries in the Book of Genesis.

The Rebbe began addressing various problems and solutions to segments of Rashi’s commentary in a series of talks dedicated to the memory of his mother, Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, who passed away in the middle of the High Holidays in 1964. During each weekly gathering, he devoted a large chunk of time to a specific explanation of Rashi on a particular verse, dissecting the wording used in order to explain why the commentator seemed to follow one particular approach over another, such as one used by a source in the Talmud as opposed to a Midrashic teaching, or amalgamated the two into a coherent whole.

Over time, he developed 389 general principles to clarify Rashi’s style. The new Kehot volume features an explanatory introduction on 17 of them.

“The Rebbe was a genius,” said Rabbi Pinchas Doron, author of eight scholarly volumes of Rashi and a retired professor of Hebraic Studies at City University of New York. “His talks on Rashi are very profound. Like in many other areas [of Jewish scholarship], he outdid everybody.”

In one of the essays in the current volume – on Genesis 18:23, where Abraham does not want G‑d to destroy the city of Sodom – the Rebbe examines why Rashi needed to explain the word used for “Abraham approached” at all when he does not clarify the word during its other numerous appearances in scripture. On this one inconsistency, the Rebbe asks eight pointed questions that might appear at first to be impossible to explain.

Utilizing one simple observation – that the previous verse specifies that Abraham was already standing before G‑d, so there is presumably no need for the Torah to emphasize that he “approached” – the Rebbe notes that Rashi saw a need to explain Abraham’s “approach” as indicating three different things, that he “drew near to speak strongly, to placate and to pray.”

The seven page essay then goes into length explaining how this one detail responds to all of the eight questions.

Appearing alongside the Hebrew original, the English translation of each of the Rebbe’s talks opens the door to serious textual-based study of what many might find to be a complicated text.

The beginning of the Rashi project was undertaken by the late Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Kagan, a scholar and author who was the associate director of the Lubavitch Foundation in Michigan. The other essays were translated and adapted by Rabbi Eliezer Danzinger, Canada’s only full-time Jewish military chaplain.

Doron praised the fact that the Rebbe’s lengthy footnotes and “footnotes to footnotes,” which are scholarly achievements in themselves, are available at the end of the 407-page volume for those that wish to delve further in the Rebbe’s exhaustive approach to explaining Rashi.

“The way of the Rebbe’s teaching on Rashi is wondrous,” the late chief rabbi of Montreal, Rabbi Pinhas Hirschprung, said in a 1984 interview. “It is hard to find a way of learning that is so clear, elucidating and precise.”

Click here to purchase the new volume.