studying midrash

[cellio]

A while ago our newest rabbi said that he was agreeable to some one-on-one study. (Hey, he implied it; I didn't just ambush him out of nowhere with the question.) I said I'd like to improve my text-reading skills; he pulled out a (Hebrew) copy of Sefer Aggadah and asked if I recognized it. Sure do, I said; I have that vast collection of midrash in English. He likes midrash too, so he proposed that we study that.

We had our first session this week. This is going to be nifty! (And now I've just had to slightly rename my "study with my rabbi" tag. :-) )

Sefer Aggadah is a collection published early in the 20th century in Hebrew and later translated into English. They collected midrash (stories) from a variety of rabbinic texts and translated them into Hebrew from the Aramaic they were mostly in originally. (I asked: it's pretty faithful, not "updated" or retold. And it cites sources, so we can -- and did -- backtrack.) The text we were looking at contains the styling of rabbinic Hebrew/Aramaic, not modern Hebrew, which is great for my purposes. I'm familiar with these turns of phrase.

The rabbi asked me to propose some topics and we ended up at the Akeidah, the binding of Yitzchak. If I could figure out how to post pointed Hebrew text (without using a scanner) I'd do that, but for now I'll just transliterate and translate.

The first text: "afilu bikeish hamakom mei-avinu avraham galgal eino hayah notein lo; v'lo galgal eino bilvad notein lo, ela af nafsho hu notein lo." (Drat -- I have no obvious way to different "lo" (lamed-vav) and "lo" (lamed-alef). Oh well... context.)

I originally parsed "hamakom" as "the place", which it means sometimes but in this case it's one of the names of God. (The grammer pushes in that direction too.) "Bikeish" is "asked" or "requested" -- we're talking about God telling Avraham to sacrifice his son, and that's certainly not the customary word. The phrase "galgal eino" gave us a lot of trouble and we consulted a couple dictionaries (including a spiffy Hebrew-Hebrew one (rabbinic to modern) that someday I will be good enough to use). That wasn't too satisfactory so we went back to the source text -- which also wasn't helpful. Either it's an idiom along the lines of "apple of his eye" or it refers to vision (perhaps metaphorically); couldn't really tell.

All that said... "Were God to have asked (? not sure of tense here) from our father Avraham [the apple of his eye?], he would have given it to him; and not only the [apple of his eye] [bilvad? I know this word, but not right now] give to him, but even his soul he gives him." That last "gives" is interesting; we would have expected it to say "but even his soul he would have given him". I wonder if the grammatically-unnecessary "hu" is a typo for "hayah", which sets up that phrasing.

Grammar thing learned today: past-tense "to be" + participle = "would have (verb)ed". "Notein" = "is giving", "hayah" = "it was", "hayah notein" = "would have given". Yay -- any day in which I learn a new grammar thing has to be good, right?

(Also, figure of speech: "ela (alef lamed alef) af" = "but even".)

What is this midrash saying? If God had asked for [ambiguous phrase] Avraham would have given not only that but his very soul -- does that make giving up [ambiguous phrase] better or worse than giving up his son? Is the midrash saying that some commands would have led Avraham to go overboard, with the implication that the demand for Yitzchak did not do so? Or, rather (I just thought of this), is Yitzchak the "apple of Avraham's eye" and the emphasis is that if God had asked Avraham would have done that and given up his own life as well -- so instead of asking God demanded?

We then started a juicier one (God loses a bet?), but I don't think I'll get that one written up tonight so I'll just post this now. More later.

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks! (And, sorry -- I thought I had thanked you a week ago...)

I heard a reference this Shabbat to "galgal" as referring to celestial spheres. (This was in the context of studying the first verse of B'reishit.) I don't remember where that came from, though. Doesn't seem related to this midrash, but I thought I'd share.