[Avodah] How the Torah portrays our great men Again

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 06:02:01PM -0500, Yitzchok Levine wrote:
: The following is from the new translation of the 
: commentary of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch on 
: Bereishis 12: 10 - 13. He is discussing the 
: question of how Avraham could leave EY and put Sarah in danger.
: 
: In light of this, I have to wonder why some think 
: that all "negatives" about our predecessors 
: should be suppressed.....

: RSRH quotes ...
: The Torah does not seek to portray our great men
: as perfectly ideal figures; it deifies no man. It says of no one: "Here you
: have the ideal; in this man the Divine assumes human form!"...

And yet there is a tendency in medrash to do just that "kol haomer Davd
chatah"... Justifications are given for all the "good guys" so that all
of Tanakh's major sins were really guzma about something judged kechut
hasa'arah, and nefarious interpretations given to the deed of the wicked
-- it wasn't a meal, it was an attempt to poison, but a mal'akh switched
the plates; it wasn't a kiss, it was a check for hidden jewelry. With
exceptions, such as Yishmael's teshuvah before Avraham's petirah.

But the trend certainly is to portray the good as exclusively good. Any
explanation as to why HQBH and the nevi'im held these people up as
flawed has to explain why Chazal minimized it.

Perhaps RSRH doesn't need to address that question because he holds
that Chazal's stories were not taught as history, and that they wrote
with the assumption that people knew this to the extent that they
weren't removing the impact of the story as told in peshat by their
derashos.

Or perhaps they simply assumed we would deal with the story on both
levels.

Or, leaving RSRH territory for a general answer of the difference in
tenor between peshat and derashah, perhaps one could distinguish between
how HQBH writes a biography and how we should. (Vehlakhta biderakhav has
limits; people dying doesn't imply a precedent against lo sirtzach.)

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The fittingness of your matzos [for the seder]
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