[De]constructing the plain: The scope of Rashi’s peshat and the rise of literate mentality

Introduction

In today’s postmodern climate, a broad consensus has emerged that there is little innocence in notions like plain sense (or sensus literalis). ¹ Most of today’s scholars would agree that the plain meaning is at least in part constructed by the reader. The definition must, in other words, take into account horizons of expectation related to the author, the text, and the reader. In the words of Frank Kermode, ‘So it [plain sense] must change; it is never naked, but, as the poet says, it always wears some fictive covering’. ² The growing suspicion of an objective meaning, though unsettling to religious communities, plays a positive role in liberating texts from hidden controls of authority. To that end, reviewing the other’s way of understanding plain sense becomes a self-revealing practice. The unfamiliarity as an outsider turns into an asset that helps expose interpretive maneuvers easily veiled to insiders. The sense of strangeness we feel in learning what is plain for them and seeing how their plain reading has been shaped and has evolved helps us question the innocence of the way our plain reading has been constructed.

Jewish interpretation has its own history of debating the plain sense, or peshat, of Scripture, ³ and attending to this history offers much benefit for Christians. Peshat is a technical term claimed to signify, ‘plain’, ‘literal’, or ‘contextual sense’, that is set against derash, ‘derived’, ‘homiletical’, or ‘applied’ sense. ⁴ Traditional Jewish exegesis is well known for its indulgence in midrashic discourse, and, thus, the emergence of the peshat approach is recognized by many as an innovation. Among the Jewish exegetes who paved the way for the peshat approach, Rashi (acronym for Rabbi Shelomo ben Isaac, 1040–1105) is perhaps most well known. Although his commentaries are not the best illustrations of the peshat approach, his leading role in establishing the northern French school, best known for their establishment of the peshat exegesis, is well recognized. ⁵ In Rashi scholarship, however, Rashi’s seemingly contradictory stance on peshat has become the subject of a decades-long scholarly discussion, which, despite numerous efforts, is still frustratingly unresolved. ⁶ Rashi appears to claim to focus on peshat but continues to rely on the midrash and other rabbinic tradition. ⁷ Experts in Jewish studies have explored this problem mostly from the detailed textual examination of Rashi’s comments. A consensus view admits the complexity of defining his conception of peshat and agrees that Rashi’s peshat was different from the way literal or plain sense is conceived today. ⁸ Many Jewish scholars today admit the conditional nature of peshat. As Mordechai Cohen recently put it, ‘peshuto shel miqra [the peshat of the text] in the medieval tradition is never simply about “the text alone”’. ⁹ For Christian thinkers, the uncertainty replete in Rashi’s peshat, or any notion of peshat throughout the history of Jewish exegesis, sits comfortably with theories that problematize the myth of objectivity in sensus literalis.

In this study, I do not pretend to offer a thorough textual analysis of rabbinic tradition. Rather, my aim is to present an outside perspective, adding some theoretical insights by relating peshat to the ambiguity of the very notion of what is plain. I first argue that to set the scope of the text constitutes one of the crucial acts of reading and that the plain sense dwells always within this boundary. I then attempt to scrutinize the nature of the ambiguity of Rashi’s peshat by situating it in the cultural milieu of the 12th-century renaissance, especially stressing the transition to literate textuality and the negotiation between the two modes of textuality therein.

The ambivalence of Rashi’s peshat

That Rashi is called the pioneer of peshat exegesis is not without reason. On several occasions, Rashi makes explicit his goal to pursue peshat, ¹⁰ and one finds the most well known statement in his first methodological comment in his Torah commentary (Gen 3.8):

There are many midrashic explanations and our teachers have already collected them in their appropriate places in Bereshit Rabba, and in other midrashim. I, however, am only concerned with the plain sense of Scripture (פשוטו של מקרא‎) and with such aggadot that explain the words of Scripture in a manner that fits in with them. ¹¹

Here, Rashi appears to indicate that the main purpose of his commentary is to lay bare the peshat of the text, unlike the traditional midrashic collections, while employing midrashim only when they align with the peshat. Yet even a cursory look at his commentary proves Rashi’s continued reliance on the midrash and other rabbinic tradition. For example, encountering Qoheleth’s controversial call to enjoyment, Rashi repeatedly interprets references to ‘eating and drinking’ as ‘Torah and doing good deeds’. ¹² To modern readers, this may not seem even remotely close to the peshat of the text, leaving them baffled as to what is going on in Rashi’s mind. However, anyone who is acquainted with rabbinic tradition will be quick to notice a clear midrashic undertone in this reading. The rabbis, sensing the potential hedonistic misuse of the call, redirect attention to the deeper, safer, and more satisfying meaning via a midrashic means: ‘Torah and good deeds’. ¹³ Likewise, faced by the challenge of Jacob passing Jerusalem without paying due homage to it en route to Bethel (Gen 28.10), Rashi offers a stunningly acrobatic interpretation in his comments on wayyipga’ bammāqôm (literally, ‘he encountered the place’): ‘when he was at Bethel the ground shrank’. ¹⁴ Rashi interprets ‘the place’ as Jerusalem through the intertextual connections with other texts. What ‘he encountered the place’ indicates to Rashi is that through his prayer, his journey back to Jerusalem is miraculously shortened. Thus, Jacob’s later exclamation, ‘this is none other than the house of God’ (28.17) refers not to Bethel but the Jerusalem temple that came to him. ¹⁵ This may appear far removed from its contextual meaning, and it is not even based on the midrashic tradition. ¹⁶ Yet, most learned students of the rabbinic interpretive tradition would know that there are other instances of a teleportation by the shrinking of the earth in rabbinic tradition. ¹⁷

Compare these with the comments of Rashbam, his maternal grandson, who is known as one of the most rigorous practitioners of peshat exegesis. ¹⁸ On Qoheleth’s call for enjoyment, he comments, ‘There is nothing good in the affairs of man except that he eat and drink and find enjoyment from the earnings of his money for which he troubled himself’. ¹⁹ Rashbam simply paraphrases the text with no midrashic undertone. ²⁰ Although he adds a couple of interpretive points, they are far from midrashic, and, most importantly, he makes no mention of ‘Torah and good deeds’, two midrashic guideposts for Rashi’s comment. Likewise, on Jacob’s experience at Bethel, Rashbam mentions neither Jerusalem nor the shrinking of the earth. In all, both claim to carry out a peshat exegesis but with starkly different outcomes.

A question arises regarding the nature of Rashi’s exegetical program or the nature and extent of his conception of peshat. A Spanish pashtan Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167), about a generation later, already challenges Rashi regarding the discrepancy in his approach, ‘[T]he late Rabbi Solomon [i.e. Rashi] wrote a commentary on the Bible following [standard] midrashic methods. He thought that his commentary was following peshat methods but only one comment out of a thousand in his works represents peshat’. ²¹ Furthermore, Rashbam himself has left a much-discussed anecdotal note (in his comment on Gen 37.2) in which he purportedly relates Rashi’s late admission of his own work’s limitation as a peshat commentary:

However I, Samuel, son of his son-in-law, Meir—may the memory of the righteous be a blessing—[often] disputed [his interpretations] with him to his face. He admitted to me that, if only he had had the time, he would have written other commentaries (לעשות פרושים אחרים‎), based on the insights into the plain meaning of Scripture that are newly thought of day by day (המתחדשים בכל יום‎). ²²

While scholarly debate abounds regarding this infamous comment, ²³ taken at face value, one can say that this comment reveals Rashi’s acknowledgment of his own shortcomings in realizing the fuller extent of what peshat exegesis constitutes. Noteworthy in this regard is the expression ‘that are newly thought of day by day’, which may indicate that his understanding of peshat has evolved over time. Thus, Benjamin Gelles concludes after a thorough comparison of the usage of various terms that purport to represent peshat in rabbinic literature and in Rashi:

Peshat and Derash emerge not so much as conflicting forces but rather as the two ends of an exegetical spectrum, separated by intermediate shades of perception, including, no doubt, an area of methodological indeterminacy. This state of affairs is only possible because of the major influence which midrashic thinking still had upon Rashi hardly allowing for a clear division between the two opposing camps. ²⁴

According to Gelles, Rashi began to see the import of peshat and promoted peshat exegesis against the dominant traditional approach, but his conception of peshat has not yet fully matured compared to what it later evolved into. ²⁵ In the end, he calls for caution in appraising Rashi’s contribution to peshat exegesis. Rashi retains the title, ‘the pathfinder’ of peshat exegesis, but ‘not so much through the actual results of the new policy, but rather on the strength of his vision and his determination to acquaint his contemporaries with the new concept of peshuto shel miqra’. ²⁶

Yet, most experts in Jewish exegesis today do not seem to accept this view. Sarah Kamin, for instance, in her seminal study of Rashi’s exegetical program, rejects the idea that the difficulty in defining Rashi’s exegesis results from his incomplete sense of peshat ²⁷ nor does she accept the idea that Rashi intended to pursue an exegesis solely oriented around peshat. Rather, Kamin grounds her argument on the dual exegetical tendency of peshat and derash manifest in Rashi’s comments and, based on that, she reevaluates what Rashi intended to achieve in his commentaries. She claims that Rashi’s program is best characterized by a dual commitment to literal and applied senses, not peshat exegesis in a modern sense. ²⁸ Greenstein supports this thesis and argues, ‘Rashi employed both peshat and derash for essentially the same purpose: to give a relatively full account of the language of the Torah’. ²⁹ The question remains, however, to what extent, then, Rashi’s policy statement and Rashbam’s note can be reconciled with this position. The way Rashi frames his policy statement appears instructive: ‘There are many midrashic explanations and our teachers have already collected them . . . I, however, am only concerned with the plain sense of Scripture (ואני‎ לא באתי אלא לפשוטו של מקרא‎)’. Note the contrast drawn between his program and the midrashic collection by a clear syntactic structure (ואני לא באתי‎) and its affinity with Rashbam’s policy statement (on Exod. 21.1): ‘I have come to explain the plain sense of the verses (ואני לפרש פשוטן של מקראות באתי‎)’. Likewise, Rashbam’s firsthand witness, although the statement came not through Rashi’s own words, cannot be simply taken as irrelevant either. Either of these positions, therefore, cannot resolve fully the ambiguity in Rashi’s exegetical program and his conception of peshat, which illustrates the complexity of the issue at hand.

The scope of text and the transformation of plain sense

From the hermeneutical standpoint, confusion regarding the ambiguous boundary of peshat is not surprising. When we ask whether peshat and its conception are related, even remotely, to plain sense, ³⁰ it is impossible not to consider the influence of the reader in the production of peshat: plain to whom? However, definitions of peshat that scholars utilize when assessing Rashi’s concept of it tend to lack concern for the role of the reader. Kamin, for instance, anchors her entire project of assessing Rashi’s exegesis in an exceedingly text-oriented definition of peshat,

an explanation in accordance with the text’s vocabulary, syntax, context, literary form and structure in their mutual relationships. Thus, an explanation according to the method of peshat takes into consideration all the linguistic elements, the way they are combined and interact, while giving each element a meaning within the complete structure. ³¹

One wonders if this text-oriented definition of peshat does not predetermine her rejection of the affinity of Rashi’s peshuto shel miqra (that traverses beyond the boundary of the peshat according to her definition of peshat) with the peshat exegesis as a more developed exegetical program.

The lack of a concern for the reader is striking considering that rabbinic literature has often been prized as a postmodern phenomenon of antiquity. ³² Notably, scholarly definitions of peshat in the Talmudic era, such as Loewe’s ‘teaching propounded by an authoritative teacher, or teaching recognized by the public as obviously authoritative, since familiar and traditional’ ³³ or Rabinowitz’s ‘the usual accepted traditional meaning as it was generally taught’, ³⁴ employ elements of the reader’s involvement. Note that Kathryn Tanner, in defining plain sense in Christian interpretation, follows the lead of Loewe and defines plain sense as ‘a functional reality’ in communal life: ‘The plain sense is a consensus reading, interpretation having distilled into conventional opinion when a certain approach to texts has come to be a community’s unselfconscious habit’. ³⁵ My question, which rests at the heart of my proposition, is to what extent the understanding of peshat that embraces the role of the reader helps us better understand the way Rashi perceived peshat. At a minimum and by way of anticipation, it becomes clear that Rashi’s peshat is dependent upon other factors which he as a reader brings to the text.

Among other factors that the reader brings to the text—what I bring to the fore—is the effect of setting the boundary and context in constructing the plain sense. Among the factors that are commonly employed to define peshat, are for instance, ‘the text’s vocabulary, syntax, context, literary form and structure’. However, following Kamin’s definition, the most variable factor and the one most susceptible to readers’ involvement is context. ³⁶ Context can be expanded or limited with the approval of authority or by communal habit, and the effect is immeasurable. The communal act of setting the normative boundary for the authoritative text must be taken seriously when plain sense is concerned. The textual boundary maintenance consists of two different acts, either to expand the scope by making connections with other texts—physically adjacent or not—or to narrow it by severing established connections. To juxtapose one text with another or to break the existing connections itself constitutes an act of meaning making or, simply, an act of rewriting the text. ³⁷ Reading operates within boundaries, and boundaries factor decisively in framing what feels plain for readers. When the boundary of a text is redrawn, the plain meaning must change as well. Much of the confusion revolving around the discourse of the plain sense, and of peshat, has to do with the fact that too much emphasis has been given to how it is read when, in actuality, the problem may well lie in with which other text it is read.

The concept ‘the scope of justice’, used widely by social scientists, suggests that where to set the boundary between us and them matters as much as how justice is defined. ³⁸ A perfectly acceptable notion of justice could do much harm when the boundary of a group is redrawn to reposition some members outside the scope of us. Accordingly, we may discuss matters of maintaining textual boundaries and connections in terms of ‘the scope of text’. It helps us highlight and problematize to what extent the reader’s act of controlling textual boundaries and connections frames the plain sense. If plain sense is in part a product of the scope of text, we cannot address Rashi’s peshat without addressing how he maintained and controlled the scope of his text, knowingly or unknowingly.

Hans Frei has demonstrated how setting textual boundaries has played a major role in changing the landscape of modern biblical studies. ³⁹ The ‘eclipse’ of biblical narrative, as he famously coined it, occurred precisely when the traditional boundary of biblical narrative was redrawn. When critical scholarship arose, the scope of the Christian canon had long been set as the Old and New Testaments. In this configuration, the once independent Hebrew Scripture exists only as a preface to the Christian Testament. It was against this long-standing canonical scope and its normative force that critical scholarship mounted its challenge, redefining the age-old textual boundary, so that the Hebrew Bible could be read on its own, that is, independently of this connection. ⁴⁰ Similar is the dynamic between Written and Oral Torah in Jewish tradition. Jewish biblical hermeneutics have oscillated between the physical text, Written Torah, and other texts that lived in the minds of the Jews in the name of Oral Torah. ⁴¹ The enigmatic relation between the two, divided yet connected, is the very basis of the Jewish legacy of scriptural interpretation. The Talmudic axiom, ein miqra yotze midei peshuto, ‘no Scripture is deprived of its plain sense (or its peshat)’, characterizes it well. What does this phrase mean when Jewish interpretation of Scripture is crystallized in rabbinic tradition? What lurks behind this radical dictum is the connectedness of Written and Oral Torah, and it is this connectedness, or the expanded scope of text, that conflicts with the contextual autonomy of the emerging peshat approach.

This expansion of text would of course turn out to be ongoing, and it is this continuing growth that allows for the emergence of a distinct character and identity for each interpretive community. Rabbinic tradition can aptly be described by the continual additions of text that gradually expanded the textual corpus, from Written Torah to Oral Torah, from Mishnah to Talmud by the addition of Gemara, and its further expansion by means of continued interpretation. ⁴² Yet, the community does not accept every text, and controlling the proper scope of text is instrumental in maintaining group identity. ⁴³ Revising the scope of the authoritative text imposes a new meaning on the text, and, thus, each community’s textual boundary maintenance serves well in defining who ‘we’ are over and against the others. ⁴⁴ Indeed, ‘Much of the polemics between religious traditionalists and historians over the past three centuries can be reduced to the issue of which context shall be normative’. ⁴⁵ To place the Hebrew Bible as the prelude to the Christian Testament in and of itself constitutes an identity-defining act, drawing a line against the Jews, for whom the same text is to be read with Mishnah and Talmud. ⁴⁶ For each side, the attached text plays a normative role in rewriting the original text. The new scope instills added dimensions of meaning to the same text. The virtual effect of the expansion within each interpretive community is that the text, though constant in the accidental forms (accidens), may transform in the substantial forms (substantia) over time. Thus, the identical text can be read radically differently among disparate interpretive communities. Juxtaposed with different texts, it no longer is the same text. Indeed, transubstantiation is not something limited to the sacrament table. It is an on-going reality in the life of an interpretive community. It is precisely this identity-defining force of the attached text that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to read the text independently of its customary connections.

The expanded scope of text and its transformative effect provides one way of accounting for the continued evolution of peshat and the difficulties in defining Rashi’s exegetical program and his conception of peshat. That Rashi was still under the influence of tradition even when he carves out his peshuto shel miqra might primarily mean that his contextual scope of text was larger than other exegetes like Rashbam and Ibn Ezra. In other words, as Rashi takes up a text and reads it, the text he sees instantly expands and conflates with other texts. This larger scope of text prevents him from isolating the more immediate literary context from all other connected texts, and the text at hand is frequently influenced by the heteronomous contexts. Thus, in the case of Qoheleth’s call for enjoyment, even though the text unequivocally states ‘eating and drinking’, in Rashi’s mind the signifiant is transformed into a different level of signifié, ‘studying Torah and doing good deeds’. In this case, the passage is read in connection with midrash and the Targum. ⁴⁷

This points to a way to resolve Rashi’s self-contradictory policy statement. Perhaps Rashi did intend to stick with the text, but his lenient boundary maintenance let him slip outside it. Since the act of setting the boundary of text operates inside the mind, guided by a communal custom, it often evades one’s attention, making it difficult to maintain a clear awareness as to which particular textual scope is at work in each interpretive manoeuver. In this regard, Rashi mirrors a universal symptom from which no reader is free—a difficulty in seeing clearly one’s own presumptions. ⁴⁸

The mind in transit: peshat between oral and literate mentalities

Jewish scholars have scrutinized the emergence of the peshat approach in northern France. They count the 12th-century renaissance as one of its major cultural backdrops. ⁴⁹ They consider several features of the era, such as the growing interests in rationalism, historicity, or grammatical precision, as the settings that gave rise to the peshat approach. However, the impact of the emerging literate culture of this era for the conception of peshat has not received due attention. There are two recent studies that have begun to pay attention to the rise of the awareness of literature as a backdrop for the emergence of the peshat approach. Robert Harris has proposed that the development of peshat among 12th-century French Jewry evinces their new awareness of Scripture as literature. ⁵⁰ Although this point has been stated rather than proven, ⁵¹ the connection drawn between peshat and the emerging sense of literature merits attention. Pushing this point a step further is Hanna Liss, who, independently of Harris, argues that the emerging peshat exegesis must be understood in the context of the rise of Old French vernacular literature. ⁵² Rejecting the dominant tendency to focus on historical aspects of the rise of peshat in which peshat is posited as part of anti-Christian polemical efforts, ⁵³ Liss stresses the literary and narrative quality of Rashbam’s commentary. ‘The “discovery of fictionality” (Haug) that we find in Chrétien’s writings, but also in Rashbam’s re-narrations of biblical stories some ten years earlier was the result of a new “Zeitgeist” that encompassed the French nobility as well as the Jews’. ⁵⁴ To be sure, if Liss’s thesis regarding the ‘discovery of fictionality’ entails a slightly different emphasis than our concern with peshat, it cannot be ignored in our quest to find out what lies behind the exegetical innovation of peshat. That Rashbam’s retelling of biblical narrative indicates his awareness of Scripture as a continued narrative thread, comports well with our view that his peshat is rooted in the autonomous literary context of biblical stories, unimpeded by the heteronomous contexts by which Rashi’s comments were still influenced. Whereas Harris and Liss utilize the alleged rise of the awareness of literature in explaining the emergence of the 12th-century peshat exegesis exemplified by Rashbam, my focus is to utilize it in illustrating the ambiguous or more generous boundary of Rashi’s peshat and how he vacillated between the two modes of textuality. To make this point, I must clarify how I understand the difference between the two modes of textuality.

Text as a written artifact is a relatively modern concept. It is a byproduct of a material development, a luxury introduced only recently in human history. How the advent of a textual mentality and the gradual transition to a literate culture have transformed the way the human cognitive system engages with information and data has been a subject of serious discussion among scholars of multiple disciplines. ⁵⁵ It is important to note that medieval historians have repeatedly indicated the 11th and 12th centuries as the formative era of literate culture. Brian Stock, for instance, opens his celebrated book by stating, ‘This work is a study of the rebirth of literacy and its effects upon the cultural life of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’. ⁵⁶ M. T. Clanchy, focusing on a specific period and locale (1066–1307 England), also demonstrates a remarkable growth in the uses of literacy driven by unprecedented material development and explores the subsequent emergence of the ‘literary mentality’. ⁵⁷ This general tendency is attested also in Jewish culture in northern France at the time. Scholars tend to stress a higher degree of literacy among Jews than their neighbors, pointing to a wider circulation of texts and a strong emphasis on education. ⁵⁸ What is argued by these scholars is certainly not that literacy was first introduced in this period nor that the emerging literate culture had definitively marginalized the traditional oral mode of communication. Rather, what changed from the 11th century onward was the way the oral and the written interact, overlap, and complement each other. It was a period of negotiation between the two modes of textuality. For our purposes, the relevance of this observation is the reciprocal nature of the interaction between the oral and the emerging literate modes of communication in this formative period. ⁵⁹ Given our earlier discussion that plain sense hinges upon the scope of text assumed within a given reader’s mind, the alleged reciprocity in the negotiation between the two modes of mentality, which directly affects the way the reader accesses the text, may hold one key to explaining the ambiguity inherent in the ever-evolving conceptions of peshat.

One of the key effects of literate culture is a sense of fixity, ⁶⁰ or an autonomy of discourse, ⁶¹ that it instills in human cognition. When Ong remarked, ‘Writing makes “words” appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed “words” in texts and books’, what he points out is the residual nature of written words. ⁶² In literate mentality, written material begins to be taken as a source of meaning independently from its author/performer and its communicative setting. Moreover, it instills a sense of fixed boundaries among texts. This sense, however, is a mere illusion fostered by material culture. What originally dwelled in the immaterial realm of the cognitive space materializes as a thing, a process accelerated by the invention of print. ⁶³ A text may exist independently in the material world but cannot be perceived in isolation from other texts. Of course, today, it would be impossible to understand fully how a purely oral mentality functioned. Yet, this illusion has been targeted by postmodern theorists, and, ironically, critical theories developed by them provide useful concepts and terminology that help scholars imagine the way text was perceived in a pre-literate mentality. ⁶⁴

According to Julia Kristeva, every text is ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’. ⁶⁵ Beyond each text, history, culture, and ideology are all woven together into the texture, as intertexts. ⁶⁶ A text as a thing carries no meaning. It does so only when it is interiorized by a human mind. ⁶⁷ When a text is read, meaning making takes place in the matrix of a textual network. In the cognitive domain, there is no limit, barrier, or distance among the nodes of idea, concept, dictum, and so on. Every text, once interiorized, stays either connected or ready to be connected with other texts. Every reading, then, is performed under the influence of or in relation to other texts. The nature and scope of this relation, I suggest, is one of the factors that differentiates one reading from another. A literal reading operates within the narrowest scope of text, whereas a theological or homiletical reading does so within a much larger scope.

Likewise, Roland Barthes has famously defined his ‘ideal text’ as ‘a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach; they are indeterminable’. ⁶⁸ Note also Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ and ‘plateaus’ image, ‘Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point . . . the rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple . . . It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’. ⁶⁹ Compare this with a famous Talmudic notion, ‘There is no earlier and later in Torah’. ⁷⁰ This open-ended textuality has been materialized in the cyberspace of the Internet and given rise to the theory of hypertext. ⁷¹ In a virtual space, distance between texts disappears. Through links that connect between texts, the reader can now navigate through and beyond the boundary of each text. Yet, we often forget that human cognitive space is, as Deleuze and Guattari have anticipated, equally ideal as a space for such connected reading and writing. ‘The reader’s implicit task’ of reading a book like A Thousand Plateaus, Stuart Moulthrop explains, ‘is to build a network of virtual connections’. ⁷² Compare this with what Handelman had to say about rabbinic literature, ‘The Rabbinic world is, to use a contemporary term, one of intertextuality. Texts echo, interact, and interpenetrate. In the world of the text, rigid temporal and spatial distinctions collapse’. ⁷³ To build this virtual network was the very goal of traditional rabbinic education. The more erudite the reader is, the wider the scope of text becomes. A rabbi who interiorized massive knowledge of tradition in his brain is capable of freely navigating through the network of rabbinic hypertext. ⁷⁴ Since there is no sense of distance in the human mind, in its intertextual space—indeed space is a misleading term to use here!—the textual boundary disappears. On the flipside, the connectedness may hinder a learned rabbi from detaching a text from the intricate web of connections fixed by tradition. It may be difficult to open a new route of connection; however, once connected, it is even more difficult to escape from it.

If these theoretical discussions provide a glimpse into the world of pre-literate textuality, they may provide a useful frame in which we can appraise Rashi as a reader. Rashi was at the threshold of the transition to a new mode of textuality, a transition that took centuries to fully materialize. This transitional character of Rashi’s mode of textuality, I submit, provides yet another dimension, in addition to many others that scholars have hitherto investigated, which may shed some light on the ambiguity of Rashi’s peshat exegesis. The rising literate culture may have imbued in Rashi a desire to stick to the immediate textual context, ⁷⁵ but the residual influence of the oral culture and its connected mode of textuality did not allow him to step away from the traditional textual network. To use a contemporary analogy, Rashi continued to stay online in the rabbinic network and struggled to disconnect from it, whereas Rashbam learned how, and when, ⁷⁶ to turn off the network and go offline. ⁷⁷ The ambiguous boundary of Rashi’s peshat and his characteristic arbitration between peshat and derash may evince the influence of the on-going negotiation between the oral and literate modes of textuality of his time.

I intentionally employ the image of negotiation to stay away from a linear perspective as if the concept of peshat simply evolved from Rashi’s conceptualization to Rashbam’s. Despite Rashbam’s rigorous efforts, his peshat exegesis simply did not overtake Rashi’s exegesis. The influence of the peshat school was short-lived, belying a modern expectation. As Grossman put it, ‘It disappeared almost as rapidly as it had developed’. ⁷⁸ Many of Rashbam’s contemporaries and successors reverted to the more traditional mode of exegesis exemplified in Rashi’s commentaries. Thus, one ought not to think that the emerging mode of literate textuality simply replaced the traditional one, but that it opened a domain in which the two modes began to negotiate. This initial negotiation certainly did not end up with the literate mode displacing the oral one at the time. Yet, its initial failure must not prevent us from realizing that these initial efforts and many others since have fundamentally reshaped the task of exegesis.

The endless reconceptualization of peshat throughout the history of Jewish exegesis, from the time of ancient Talmudists until today, should be seen as one manifestation of the continued maintenance of textual boundaries. On one side of the spectrum, one finds an expansionist tendency in which the rabbinic textual corpus continues to expand, while, on the other side, one finds an opposing tendency to restrain this expansion and narrow the textual scope to the immediate literary context. Seeking a proper balance on this spectrum was one way of expressing Jewish identity over against others who would promote different ways of maintaining the textual boundary and its network. Thus, one way to appraise Rashi’s exegesis is to determine the textual domain within which his meaning is constructed and to what extent his sense of plain meaning could be stretched by it. It also encourages Christian readers to consider the scope of their own text(s) and its impact on the way they make meaning, plain and otherwise.

Conclusion

Rashi’s concise, erudite, and balanced presentation of biblical passages has captivated generations of Jewish readers, but the ambivalence of his program has puzzled many. To shed some new light on the ambiguity of his peshat exegesis, I have suggested directing our attention to the role of the reader in his construction of what is a plain or contextual meaning from a theoretical viewpoint. Among the elements that are commonly thought to define the plain sense, I have stressed the variables inherent in the notion of context. The disparity between Rashi’s peshat and the modern plain sense may be expressed in terms of the divergent scope of text reflected in his work. That is, the scope of Rashi’s text, though physically identical with the text we now have, may in essence have been much larger, due to the traditional rabbinic expansion of the textual scope and the inherently connected mode of pre-literate textuality. That it was traditional may have prohibited him from fully realizing the extent and effect of the expanded scope of his text. If so, even if his definition had remained identical to the modern standard, his actual reading would have diverged from the plain reading in later periods.

In search of the roots of the ambiguity of Rashi’s exegesis, or his conception of peshat, I have pointed to the transitional, oral-written mode of textuality of his time. Observing the difference between the two modes of textuality, I have suggested that Rashi’s peshat may reflect one end of the negotiation between the two modes of textuality. One may place Rashbam’s rigorous peshat at the other end of a spectrum of opinion that might reflect the influence of the emerging literate textuality. The ambivalence manifest in Rashi’s peshat, and his exegetical program in general, may reflect the lingering influence of the traditional oral mode of textuality.

The large gap between what is plain for Rashi and what is plain by modern standards—let us suppose they exist—helps us realize that our own sense of plain is hardly innocent. The identity-defining force of the boundary maintenance of text and the construction of the plain sense heightens our awareness of the polemical nature inherent in them. To simply define what is plain can impinge upon the very ground of another’s identity. The way Jewish exegetes like Rashi and Rashbam varied in their negotiation of the scope of peshat may be used as a notable example, along with other Christian exegetes’ analogous cases, of what is universal in any interpretive community in salvaging the meaningfulness and applicability of texts in the life of their own community.

The influence of pre-literate textuality in Rashi’s conception of peshat and the post-structural recognition of similar dynamics in our contemporary predominantly literate culture forces us to admit that our literate culture hardly exempts us from being critically suspect of what other texts, in a broad sense, are at work in our own reading of the text.