Torah and Torah Study

Love of Torah

No subject was treated by Rashi more extensively and lovingly than Torah study and its practitioners. The subject occupies a central place in the Bible itself and in rabbinic Midrash, and that no doubt had a bearing on Rashi's approach to it. But his devotion to the subject cannot be detached from his intellectual world or from the pedagogical goals he set for himself in writing his commentaries. The highest of those goals was to educate people to love the Torah and its study. Only in this light can we explain his extensive treatment of the subject even at points where the plain meaning of the biblical text has nothing to do with it. Drawing on rabbinic concepts, he emphasized that the Torah was the pre-eminent symbol of God's love for Israel and that the world could not exist without the Torah, ‘a thoroughgoing delight’. The Jews, unlike the other nations, accepted the Torah and thereby ‘came to the domain’ of God, forging a profound link between themselves and God (Rashi on Hos. 9:1).Rashi's desire to propagate Torah within Israel flowed also from a sense that the diaspora communities were in very difficult circumstances and that Christian pressure on them to convert would only become stronger. He believed that the Torah served as surety for the preservation of Jewish existence even in those hard times and that it symbolized Jewish independence.On the verse ‘we will find [nazkirah, alsomeaning ‘we will remember']Thy love more fragrant than wine’ (S. of S. 1:4,OJPS),Rashi wrote: ‘Even today in [my; that is, Israel's] living widowhood, I will remember Your early affection … today, too, we delight and rejoice in it; even in their torment and sorrows they delight in Torah and there recall his affection.’

Rashi's view of the matter was not atypical. Many other sages of the time shared it, including Rabbenu Gershom, for whom Rashi had great esteem. According to Rabbenu Gershom, after the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people, ‘nothing remains for us but this Torah’.