The importance of Chazalic drashic interpretations

 A quick thought I had last night, before getting on to part 2 of the Barak/Devorah posts:

I've been troubled in recent months as I realized that I was moving away from my old comfort zone of favoring both P'shat and Drash in understanding Tanach, and moving towards almost an entirely P'shat mentality, grounded in archeological findings and word etymologies, among other things. I was bothered by this because it felt like I was beginning to see the aRDeS part of PaRDeS (P'shat, Remez, Drash and Sod) as meaningless, which I know it's not. But in a sense, it felt like I no longer saw any point in these aspects. Well, I'm still making my through this forest, but I wanted to share a thought I had last night:

I was listening to a class on the story of Palti ben Laish and Michal. The question is an oldy: How could Palti marry a married woman (it doesn't say that David divorced Michal) and how could David take back Michal, after all, a man cannot take back his wife after she has remarried! Most of the class was a summary of the various opinions on the story. There are two or three explanations in the gemara about this story. As I was listening, it occurred to me that a running theme in our sages' explanations is that they view the people from the Tanach as having been pious talmidei chachamim (wise sages) themselves. This is in stark contrast to how most modern bible scholars view them, and even how most modern people view them, including people of other religions. At that point, I realized that perhaps what has allowed us Jews to preserve our high admiration for the people of the Tanach, and our viewing of them as higher people whose challenges and experiences, though relatable, were nonetheless on a different level than us, is the way they were characterized by our sages, and how these characterizations were then passed onto us through the generations. It is thanks to our sages that we see Avraham's decision to sacrifice Yitzchak as devotion at it's highest, not as some twisted echo of Molech sacrifices that he just couldn't give up; it is thanks to them that we see that Shlomo had a grand plan for humanity and bringing about the full redemption, and not just deeply involved in Middle-Eastern politics. And so forth.

Once you lose sight of this, I suppose shrugging off all of the Torah quickly follows.


Well, that's pretty much where I am at right now.

Comments

  1. AlexAugust 23, 2021 at 10:50 PM

    Well said! Really, the same thing applies to the mitzvos of the Torah too; only with Chazal's interpretations do we see them for the examples of humaneness that they are. For example, without Chazal we'd think that "an eye for an eye" means the Hammurabic cruelty of lex talionis, that the ben sorer umoreh is an example of the Roman-type patria potestas in which a father could put his children to death at his whim, etc.

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