[Avodah] dvar tora

[Michael Makovi]

 On Dec 27, 2007 11:20 PM, <Saul.Z.Newman at kp.org> wrote:

>
> http://www.yctorah.org/content/view/345/10/  r avi weiss=    myaldot
> -jewish or not?  are rashi and sforno looking thru the lens of the goyim of
> THEIR day, as to whether to expect the noble gentile?
>

Perhaps. It's a distinct possibility that Rashi and Sforno have biases. But
it could simply be a textual disagreement. After all, the text could go
either of two ways even without an ideological basis.

And if one lives in a time of evil Christians, one could say Shifra and Puah
were gentiles, and say, "See look! Gentiles CAN be good!" This is clearly
the lesson in juxtaposing Amalek with Yitro - the Torah wants to say, yes
gentiles can be evil like Amalek, but they can be good - look at Yitro! I
believe Rabbi Telushkin in Biblical Literacy may say this, but I'm not sure.


And besides, Rashi did live through the Crusades, but he was also very
friendly with his Christian neighbors. I read that he was so friendly with
them that one brought him a cake as a gift, the gentile not knowing that
kashrut would preclude Rashi's eating it. It also happened to be Pesach at
the time.

Nechama Leibowitz in Studies on the Weekly Sidra suggests that Chazal
assumed that these two women were ones already known to us, and so they
asked, who do we already know about? Yocheved and Miriam. This fits well
with R' Chayot's guide to the Talmud, where he says that Chazal would equate
obscure characters with well-known ones, as Chazal couldn't imagine a
character being in the Torah if he didn't have significance; so the
character was named without having done anything significant or noteworthy,
they'd equate him with someone more well-known.
In any case, I don't think there's much of a question on Rashi himself.
After all, he mostly just quotes Chazal. The better question is, why did
Chazal think it was Yocheved and Miram, and why did Sforno disagree? (But
the question is the same; I'm just quibbling.)

Apposite all this is Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in Biblical Literacy. He says
that Pharaoh never would have asked Jews to kill Jews, and if he had, he
wouldn't have been surprised when they didn't - the reason would have been
eminently obvious. But we know that Pharaoh is honestly perplexed by their
refusal to honor his request. This suggests they are not Jews. All the same,
we can assume they weren't Egyptian, as the master race never serves as
midwives to the slave - a white woman never would have been midwife to a
black slave. And we know that Shifra and Puah are Semitic names, so Rabbi
Telushkin suggests they are non-Jewish Semites, in a position similar to the
Jews in Egypt.

Mikha'el Makovi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071228/1af13bb5/attachment-0001.htm>