Fathers and Foundations

“A new beginning is an invitation to re-examine the foundations of our lives.” 
— Rabbi Shai Piron 

This Shabbat we begin reading the Torah anew and look forward to new discoveries we will find in it. We assume we will read it in a slightly different way than we did last year, simply because we’ve changed and hopefully grown. We notice this change because we are able to look back at the way we were. The way we were, takes us all the way to the beginning. To our beginning.

When we open a printed Torah, called a Chumash, we read the first lines: “In the beginning God created…” Rashi, our most famous interpreter, right off the bat, offers a pretty radical interpretation, questioning the entire choice of beginning the Torah this way. He writes:

“Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah, which is the Law book of Israel, should have commenced with the verse (Exodus 12:2): “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; which is the first commandment given to Israel.”

Rashi asks, why does the Torah begin with the world's creation and not with the first Mitzvah? The first commandment? In other words, why does the Torah begin with the laws of nature (creation) and not the laws of men? He provides an answer to this question. However, I am going to focus on something else in his interpretation.

I notice that Rashi’s very first Torah commentary begins with the words “Rabbi Isaac said...”

Who is Rabbi Isaac? Rabbi Isaac was in fact Rashi’s father. The book of Siftei Chakhamin (Rabbi Shabbetai ben Bass’s supercommentary on Rashi’s commentary) explains:
 

אלא שזה ר"י היה אביו של רש"י ולא היה כ"כ גדול בתורה ובנו רש"י רצה לכבדו ולהזכירו בתחלת חבורו ושאל מאביו להקשות איזה קושיא ולכתוב משמו והקשה זאת הקושיא למה התחיל בבראשית ולא הקשו מה טעם.

“... that R. Yitzchak was Rashi’s father, and he was not a great Torah scholar. Rashi wished to honor his father by mentioning him in the beginning of his work. Thus, Rashi asked his father to pose a difficulty that could be cited in his name.”

How beautiful. The first words Rashi writes in his Torah commentary are his father’s name. This is not just a simple fulfillment of the Mitzvah of Kibud Horim (honoring parents) but also a statement that everything going forward has a foundation. Everything going forward has a beginning. The beginning of the Torah, the beginning of the world and the beginning of Rashi’s life, his father.

Another Jewish writer whose body of work is known to be shaped by his relationship with his father, is Franz Kafka. (1883-1924)

In his forward to Kafka’s “The Trial,” the Nobel Prize laureate author José Saramago wrote: “The first factor—that is, the never-overcome antagonism between father and son, and son and father—is what constitutes the main supporting beam of Kafka’s entire body of work.”

Kafka scholars and fans alike, especially upon reading Kafka’s “Letter to my Father” (1919), conclude that the entire Kafka universe or state of being is that of dwelling in proximity to an intimidating inaccessible entity. In Kafka’s work it is usually the law. In Kafka’s life, it is his father. 

“Dearest Father: You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, how to answer, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, partly because an explanation of my fear would require more details than I could even begin to make coherent in speech.’’

Kafka, as well as Kafka’s characters, forever stand at the entrance, forever facing a barrier which they themselves cannot understand.

In his letter, Kafka describes how different he and his father were:
“In any case, we were so different, and in our differences such a danger to each other that, had anyone wanted to predict how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the fully-grown man, would behave towards one another, they could have presumed that you would simply trample me underfoot until nothing of me remained.”

A bug that can be squashed, a bug that is a man, was also a protagonist in another famous Kafka work. 

Another place in the letter Kafka writes to his father says: “I had lost my self-confidence whenever I was in your presence, had exchanged it for a boundless sense of guilt.”

That sense of guilt is woven into the fabric of almost all of his unforgettable works. 

What I found fascinating in the ‘Siftei Chakhamim’ comment were the words: “R. Yitzchak was Rashi’s father, and he was not a great Torah scholar.”

Like Kafka and his father, Rashi and his father were perhaps very different as well. Rashi, the giant of giants, the father of Torah scholarship and interpretation, was himself the son of a man who is described as “not a great Torah scholar.” Despite that, Rashi chose to open his entire commentary with his father’s name.

Our foundations, good or bad, are not larger carbon copies of us that we are destined to continue or imitate. A lot of us grow precisely because of the great differences we possess from our parents and our upbringing. Nonetheless, different or not, it is this foundation which informs the rest of our lives. It is this foundation without which there is no innovation.

Perhaps the commandment “Honor your mother and father so you may have a long life,” doesn’t just reward us with many years of living, maybe it brings with it a promise that if we remember our foundation, our lives will be filled with meaning, and that honoring our foundation might just be the beginning of creation.