Peeling Away the Parshah’s Layers

I would be remiss if I did not call readers’ attention to the publication of Rabbi David Fohrman’s newest work, Genesis: A Parsha Companion. I have written previously about his longer, thematic works: The Beast That Crouches at the Door on the sin of Adam Harishon and Kayin and Hevel; The Queen You Thought You Knew on Megillas Esther; and The Exodus You Almost Passed Over.
Genesis: A Parsha Companion, the first of a projected five volumes, is much closer to the popular weekly parshah videos produced by Rabbi Fohrman for the Aleph Beta Foundation. Rabbi Fohrman began teaching Chumash many decades ago in the adult education division of Johns Hopkins University, while still in the Ner Israel kollel. And his insights into the parshah hold fascination both for the newcomer to Chumash study and for one well versed in Torah texts and the classical commentaries, though the fascination will be of a different sort.

With respect to the first group, he relates in his introduction an incident in one of his Johns Hopkins classes, in which a medical school professor asked Rabbi Fohrman to comment on what he had been always taught — that the Written Torah is the product of multiple authors and an editorial team, chas v’shalom. But even before Rabbi Fohrman could respond, the student answered his own question: “But I’m having a hard time seeing how that could possibly be true. I mean [based on what we’ve been studying], it’s all so interconnected.”

The surprises for the veteran student of Chumash are generated by Rabbi Fohrman’s invitation to read the text with fresh eyes — e.g., read the Biblical narrative as if we did not already know what comes next, or we were unfamiliar with Rashi and the other classic commentaries. In other words, read the text as the classic commentators themselves did.

My guess is that every longtime student of Chumash will find at least one piece in the collection too novel to accept. But even then, he or she will have to attend to the evidence that Rabbi Fohrman presents. He is a close reader of the Biblical text in a way that only someone who is deeply in love with that text can be. He sees patterns that we have missed, but seem blindingly obvious after he has laid out the text in front of us.