Yeshiva University Observer

Issue date: 5/5/09 Section: Features

This past January, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem held an erev zikaron [evening memorial conference] as a tribute marking twenty years since the passing of the important Bible scholar Sarah Kamin (1938-1989), a name well-known to the students of Rabbi Mordechai Cohen here at Stern College for Women (SCW). In fact, Professor Cohen was invited to Jerusalem to deliver the keynote address at this event, in which he spoke about Kamin's seminal contributions to parshanut ha-miqra, i.e., the Jewish tradition of Bible interpretation. This event marks a significant step forward for the Yeshiva University community in a number of ways. To begin with, the bestowal of this honor at the Hebrew University - the foremost center of academic Jewish studies -- upon a member of the YU faculty demonstrates the status our school has achieved in the academic world. More importantly, however, the conference itself reflects a decisive change in the scope of academic Bible scholarship in recent years. For most of the twentieth century, this field was dominated by the critical-historical approach to the Bible, which sought to interpret it within its ancient near eastern context. Kamin devoted her scholarship, on the other hand, to the ways in which Jewish commentators interpreted the Bible - how they understood it in their time and place. The convening of a conference of likeminded scholars to honor Kamin's work at the dawn of the twenty-first century indicates that the community of academic Bible scholars has come to value the careful study of the Bible's reception and interpretation, areas in which YU offers particular expertise.

Sarah Kamin demonstrated the importance of studying parshanut in an academic context through her study of Rashi, tackling the age-old question of the disparity between Rashi's stated adherence to peshat [literal rendering of the text] and his actual commentaries, which seem quite distant from peshat. In his keynote lecture, Rabbi Cohen summed up what he viewed as Kamin's essential answer. The problem, according to Kamin, stems from the assumption that Rashi used the word peshat as it is used in modern Hebrew, i.e., to connote the original sense of the biblical text in its ancient context. According to Rabbi Cohen, "Kamin argues that peshat is not, in fact, a constant. Instead, as she illustrates in Rashi's case, it was a strategy of reading he constructed by drawing upon concepts from Latin learning in the twelfth-century renaissance, with its advances in science, history, grammar, and rhetoric - and a new Christian interest in Scripture's sensus litteralis [literal sense]. Working within this intellectual framework, Rashi synthesized a new method of reading the Hebrew Bible through the prism of classical Rabbinic interpretation and his own keen linguistic-literary sense." Rashi deliberately drew upon the richness of his surrounding culture as well as Jewish tradition to interpret the Bible in a way that was relevant in his time and place. Additionally, rather than limiting himself to reconstructing the single original meaning of the text of the Bible, which is the exclusive goal of historical-critical biblical scholarship, Rashi viewed the Bible as a sacred text that therefore allows for diverse understandings and multiple meanings.

Continued...

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