Torah MiEtzion: Shemot Hardcover – March 18, 2012

Glad to see some of the gems from the YHE's indispensable website vbm- Torah.org finally in print but I am not quit sure how they could have chosen so few for publication! I hope they plan on publishing virtually all of their archive but alas, this would take volumes & volumes to do so. But it is better than nothing and a welcome addition to my library!

This book is part of a significant enlightening five book series in which twenty-three contributors, all male rabbis and one female rabbanit, offer readers a fresh reading of the Torah’s plain meaning, its literal meaning. The editors state that although many think they cannot understand the Torah unless they read commentaries such as Rashi, they are mistaken. “That all modern readers need to stand on the shoulders of giants is a given; to believe that one can stand there without the ability to read the holy text itself is absurd.”Torah MiEtzion is addressing a severe problem within Judaism as well as other religions, the failure to read what the Torah is actually stating and replacing it instead, in schools and synagogue sermons with imaginative midrashic tales that weren’t composed to elucidate the Torah text, but to teach lessons. Maimonides (1138-1204) wrote in Chelek that people who accept Midrashim as the literal truth are fools, those who reject it entirely because it is not true are also fools; the proper approach is to realize that Midrashim are not true but were composed to teach proper behavior; people need to mine Midrashim for these lessons, and not accept the details of the tales as true.There is a Midrash, for example, that the biblical Esther was married to Mordecai. This is not stated in the book of Esther. The Midrash “reveals” that while she was a queen and married to the pagan king, she would sneak out of the palace, ritually immerse in a mikvah, and rush to her other husband Mordecai and have sexual relations with him. I heard a rabbi teaching this as a fact. I also heard a prominent rabbi teaching that the tale of Abraham smashing his father’s idols is told in the Torah. It isn’t. This is the problem that this series is addressing, improper misleading teachings. But its approach is positive not polemical. The contributors show what the Torah is actually saying; and what they reveal is far more fascinating than the Esther and Abraham Midrashim.The authors use a broad methodology. Instead of focusing on midrashic lessons that can be “derived from” single words or isolated sentences, they base their examinations on an entire story, episode, or narrative, or in some cases on different books of the Bible, while they search for the meaning and significance of what is being said. They use literary tools to understand the Torah, for the “Torah is literature, divine literature, written not in a special divine language but in the language and style of man…. Different authors (in this book) use different literary tools, aside from the shared commitment to listening to every word.”All of the contributors are well-versed in Torah study and what they write is enlightening. Readers will enjoy this series and learn much from it.