---------------------------------------------------------------
Rav Avi: Hi, and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, Executive Vice President at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. So we've got a great question today about ritual, and in particular about the ritual of Torah reading, of reading the Torah. But before we dive in, I thought maybe we'll do like a little quick fire round.
I would love to know, like, what works for you in a Torah reading? Do you have like a top three things I'm looking for that work for me in a public Torah reading approach?
Rav Eitan: Like as a listener?
Rav Avi: Yeah, right. Like you're sitting in the pew. You're a Jew in the pew, as they say. What are three things that make it a particularly engaging or meaningful Torah reading experience for you?
Rav Eitan: Oh, that's great. Well, I'll say something. Someone once gave a compliment to my son as a Torah reader, which I really appreciated because it resonated with me. He said, when he's reading the parasha, I feel like he's telling me a story. And that I really like, when it feels like someone has kind of command over the text, and they're betraying some emotional involvement in it, as opposed to just technical proficiency. That's one thing I really like.
I like speed, like not too much speed, like not to the races, but a sense of like, it's going, it's moving. If you don't pay attention, like you might miss it. I actually find that sort of gets my adrenaline going in a good way.
Rav Avi: Nice. I like it. Emotion. Tempo. What else?
Rav Eitan: Tempo. Exactly. The third thing, I mean, this is less about the reader, but I kind of like sometimes seeing people up there at the desk, having like little minor interactions with each other, when you feel like they're like, hey, good Shabbos. Nice to see you. I haven't seen you, Mazel Tov, or a little joke or something that just makes it feel like everyone's kind of happy and comfortable to be there, and it doesn't feel overly stiff.
Rav Avi: Yeah, so like not robotic, sort of social.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Not inappropriately so, but just on the right side.
Rav Avi: So we have this question today, actually. A person is reflecting on a practice that they have not ever seen, and they kind of want to know why have they never seen it? They encountered it in a Mishnah. In Megillah 4:4, and elsewhere also, we see the idea of a meturgeman who translates the Torah to Aramaic between each verse in order to enhance the understanding of the community. So the question is, would it be appropriate to have something like this now? And one of my favorite things about this question actually is that it ends with a postscript, and the postscript says, by the way, I'm curious about this as a hypothetical question, not a practical one. I am in seventh grade and came across this question when learning Mishnah with my dad.
Rav Eitan: I love this, and I also love the basic orientation of, I'm reading a text, it's interesting, and I kind of assume it should have some practical effect. I think that's such a obscure thing that I'm learning about something from the past. I don't know. We still read Torah, why isn't this a part of it? So this is a really interesting topic, and I think we can talk about some of the details of sources that get into this, and we can just as much talk about what does this tell us about the place of ritual tradition in our life? Where are we seeking? What kind of meaning and why? Let's go to the beginning. The story begins in Nehemiah chapter 8, where we have a scene of Ezra, the priest, the scribe, the religious leader of the people during the second commonwealth when they're returning to kind of reestablish a presence in the land of Israel. Ezra is a kind of almost second Moshe figure. He really kind of reboots the community's relationship to the laws of God, the laws of Torat Moshe, as talked about repeatedly in the book.
And you have a scene in chapter 8 of the book of Nehemiah which becomes the basis for a lot of what we do in Torah reading. I'll just read little bits of it because it's quite striking. There's an actual scroll of the Torah. He opens up this scroll in the presence of all the people, and when he opened it, they all stood up.
If you've ever seen people standing when it's during Torah reading, and certainly like the person-
Rav Avi: It's ancient choreography.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. The person reading, standing, you've got that. Vayivarech Ezra, then Ezra says a bracha, Vaya'anu chol ha'am amen, and they answer amen. Like that part of the choreography seems to match some of what we do.
Rav Avi: If Moshe is the OG rabbi, the original rabbi, then Ezra is like the OG gabbai.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. Very good. And then it says the following, which is important for our topic. They read from the scroll in the teaching, the law, the Torah of God in an explicit and explained way, in a way that enabled people to have intelligent understanding of what was being read. That's a sort of loose translation of that verse. And so what you find there is, there is an emphasis on reading from the scroll, doing it from the words that are in there. This is not an improv routine. But there is a description and seems a prescription that people have to understand what's going on. So these words, one of the things that gets extracted from them is the idea of a meturgeman. It's not enough just to read the biblical Hebrew words of the scroll, You have to render it also in the language that will make it intelligible.
Rav Avi: So translate the word meturgeman for me and tell me what part of speech it is.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So it's a term that does not appear commonly in the Bible, but it does appear in the book of Ezra. Miturgam, meaning translated, and a meturgeman is just the person who is engaged in that activity. The translator, but here we have to be a little more precise, certainly in the way it's used, like in the Mishnah that our questioner has encountered. It's not just like, let me precisely give you a word by word. It's more like a rendering, translating into another language can be trying to do an interlinear text word by word. It can also be, let me translate this for you. Here's what it means.
Rav Avi: I can hear in my head the voice of my sixth grade Tanakh teacher s saying, translation is interpretation.
Rav Eitan: There you go.
Rav Avi: That's, you think, built into the essence here? You're having someone interpret the words for you?
Rav Eitan: A hundred percent. And we know that because we have recordings of targumim, of translations, as it were, of the Torah that were used in the context of this ritual. We'll unpack a little further. And some of them, like Targum Onkelos, one of the most famous renderings of the Torah into Aramaic around the year zero, or like in that period of time. Targum Onkelos is a pretty close, almost interlinear, like word by word. And that was the most traditional targum.
Rav Avi: And that's a text. That's not, meaning this sounds like an oral, like spoken word.
Rav Eitan: A hundred percent.
Rav Avi: So in what way is an Aramaic targum text like and unlike a modern translation, where I would say like, do you prefer the Everett Fox versus the Robert Alter?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I would say you actually see the same kind of range, which is to say modern translations tend to be more like Onkelos. They're going a little closer word by word. But Everett Fox, as one example of a translation, is trying to capture in the English the cadence and rhythms of the Hebrew, so you almost feel like you're in the original while you're in translation. Robert Alter, very attentive to the Hebrew original, but he's not doing the same, word by word. It's a slightly different project. And you have others that are, that are much freer in some ways, like the modern JPS commentary will rearrange, you know, the order of verses and be like, this is how it'll make it sound more normal to the reader.
Rav Avi: Yeah. Or I'll say when we do translation of verses in Devash, the Devash team translates those verses with an eye towards kids understanding what they mean. As opposed to any of those other projects.
Rav Eitan: That's right. So you have other ancient Palestinian Eretz Yisrael Targumim of the Torah that are much freer in that regard and that integrate other stories.
Rav Avi: Like Midrash as opposed to translation. Where do we draw that line?
Rav Eitan: So Targum, I think sort of encompasses something in that range. Because again, if you think about it functionally, it's, I've got a text, people don't understand it, or won't understand it in full in its original. And this supplementary apparatus is meant to give people access. So they come out the other end. Oh, I understand it. Understand a little bit literally and understand a little bit deeply spiritually. So the important thing to know, first of all, about the Targum and what the questioner finds in Masechet Megillah is it wasn't just like a free-for-all. There are rules around it.
Certain people are eligible to do this and not eligible to do this. Like if you are not eligible to read Torah for whatever reason, you can't do the Targum. In other words, it's not like, oh-
Rav Avi: That makes sense to me. You have to understand it in order to translate it.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. But you could imagine, for instance, saying, well, maybe you need someone who's Jewish to lead the prayers. But actually anyone could announce page numbers, right? And you might think about, who cares? This is like someone providing some added explanation, but it's not the real ritual. No, no, no. This was understood to be a practice with biblical authorization that required a certain fitness in order to do it.
Rav Avi: That's really helpful. This is not something that disrupts the Torah service. It's not an interruption in the Torah service, this is part of the Torah service!
Rav Eitan: That is right. And there are rules around it. You have to make sure that the meturgeman and the Torah reader speak at the same decibel level so that one is not more important than the other. There's a sense of, I'm just channeling what this person is doing. They have to coordinate on that. There are passages where they say, don't translate this. So, for instance, the Mishnah says, Maaseh Reuven, Nikra velo mitargem. The story about when Reuven sleeps with Bilhah, his father's concubine, then wife. You read that because it's part of the Torah. You don't translate that.
Rav Avi: I think anyone who's ever studied the parasha with their kid has intuited that kind of role.
And we'll just keep going. Maybe you didn't notice it.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. And long sections. Actually, we have a remnant of this today when we're talking about remnants, the idea that you read certain portions of the Torah more quietly that are like curses, some of those map onto sections they wouldn't translate. They didn't want people to confront them. It's in a way like an ancient trigger warning in its own way. You're like, actually, this is not helpful for public consumption. It's part of the Torah. We read it. We might discuss it one-on-one, but we're not getting into a public presentation here. So, this is a real piece of the reading. And I should say, the convention around it does really develop, does stick in a lot of communities. In particular, Targum Onkelos becomes like a standard text that then would be used. And it continued and still continues in many Yemenite communities up until today. Yeah. So, there is a branch where this lives on.
Rav Avi: And in those communities, they're reading the text of that ancient Targum or they are like free translating on the fly?
Rav Eitan: So, I've never been present for it. So, maybe one of our listeners can write in if they have been and share. But my understanding is they're reading from the text in front of them or perhaps they've memorized it as part of their job. In particular, in a lot of Yemenite communities, memorization is still very highly prized. But you're reciting a text. The freeform art, I would say, has pretty much died everywhere.
Rav Avi: Yes. And I'll just share that I've been in and witnessed sort of like in renewal communities, actually people picking up this practice of having someone who's designated to like verse by verse translate and interpret the text for the community. So, I do think there are some people, this questioner said like, this is a theoretical question. But there are Jews now who have read this and said like how awesome, how inspiring had that same sort of spark that this student had and have incorporated it into these more sort of experimental newer practices.
Rav Eitan: Good. So, I assume those people are not doing it in Aramaic.
Rav Avi: I've only heard it in English.
Rav Eitan: So, this is the next part of the story where then it's interesting to see where that goes, the Yemenite communities that have kept this up have done the Aramaic that was done in some form for some time. The Tur, Rabbi Yaakov Bar Asher in the 14th century, is codifying the laws of the meturgeman because they're laws like they're in the Talmud, et cetera. He introduces the whole section by saying in the days of the sages of the Talmud, they had the practice of translating so people would understand. So, you already know something's coming here at the end where this is not live for him. But he says that and then goes on to say, yeah, because they spoke Aramaic and you then follow all these rules and he lays that all out. And then at the end of codifying that, he says the following. They were used to lefarish, if you remember back the word in Nehemiah was meforash. This is the idea of we're explaining, a pirush, an explanation. They would do this to the masses gathered to hear the Torah because they spoke Aramaic. But for us, what good would that do? Because we don't understand Aramaic. The Tur sitting in Europe is basically like both Hebrew and Aramaic are Greek to us.
Rav Avi: Yeah. I always feel that way about the Talmud where you're like, oh, the Talmud? Well, that's written in the more accessible language, except it's not meant to be the less accessible language.
Rav Eitan: Totally. In that sense, learning Talmud with a good English translation makes perfect sense. And the end of his sentence is really interesting because it swerves the other way. And he says, the Ein lomar, and don't argue from what I just told you, nilmod mayhem. Well, let's take them as our example, this is exactly what you're describing the renewal community is doing, to render the Torah in the language that we speak. Why not? That seems totally reasonable. Well, the Targum, and here he means like the Targum with a capital Taf, Onkelos, is different because it was established with Ruach HaKodesh, with divine inspiration. Now, this is, it's not clear where do we get that from, right?
Rav Avi: Meaning this is the first sort of declaration of that ancient commentary form is actually also divinely inspired.
Rav Eitan: Well, I wouldn't say it's necessarily the first. I think there's some sense of it's special and this and that, but the Tur is sort of the first major normative voice to say, it's divinely inspired, not just as a compliment. It's divinely inspired as an obstacle to ever doing anything else that's not it.
And so then you get this binary choice, like it almost becomes like you can only offer sacrifices in the temple and then you destroy the temple. So guess what? No sacrifices anymore. As opposed to, no, that's where we offered them, but now we'll have to find somewhere else. So you put all your eggs in the basket of the Targum, then you forget Aramaic, bye-bye Targum, right? That's essentially the Tur's.
Rav Avi: It is an interesting mix of the purpose of the ritual versus the specific details of the ritual that you could sort of imagine, you say it because you say it, that's the rule. Parts of the Seder that are in Aramaic, we don't leave those out. Or parts of our tefillah that are in Aramaic, we're not like, well, the Kaddish, no need for that.
Rav Eitan: Or just say it in English. I mean, some people will.
Rav Avi: Right. But then also saying like, look, the purpose of a translation is to translate. If you can't understand the translation, you're not translating.
Rav Eitan: Right. So I don't know how you feel about this. I always struggle with texts like this. I do have a strong initial reaction usually when I see a text like this that's like, really? Oh man, come on, that's it? We're just going to cancel that out. We're going to box you in from all sides.
Rav Avi: Meaning you feel sad at the loss of this ritual.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Initially when I read it, I'm like, I don't know. This seemed like it was a central part of Jewish practice. I understand you no longer have Aramaic. Why not sub in something else? But then my next instinct is always to say, okay, but why didn't they make that argument? In other words, you could have made that argument. It would be totally reasonable, but everyone seems pretty happy broadly across the board to get rid of this. And then the question is, are we gaining something else, right? What is the advantage? What is gained by not having the Targum such that people were perfectly happy to let it go? Going back to my analog with sacrifices, right? It's hard to say that everyone was really chomping at the bit to offer sacrifices when the second temple was destroyed and then just settled in totally unhappily for 2,000 years without it. It seems like there was also an element of, yeah, that's bad. But I don't know if that was really actually anymore the center of our religious life, or maybe after 1,000 years that's the case. So I don't know how this strikes you, but I always have that kind of tension of two directions with a text like this.
Rav Avi: I don't know why I feel so clear on this, but I have such a strong instinct to feel like it didn't die. It morphed into the sermon. I'm one of those people who grew up in a shul community where the rabbi's sermon was the center of the shul, of davening, where it was Rabbi Arnold Goodman. He was really such a force. I always say to people, I think of his presence, I think of Dumbledore. It was somebody tall and wise and quiet who was watching and had the answer. And when he opens his mouth, you're like, what's he gonna say? And my mom being like, well, we have to get there. We can't miss the sermon. That's what matters. So I feel like I see this show up in that place and that maybe don't get confused and follow that model. It's not part of the Torah service anymore during line by line, but it's very much part of the Torah service. In many communities, the sermon happens with the Torah out on the table, to make the point of this is a part of the Torah service. I'm curious how that lands with you.
Rav Eitan: So what's interesting is this on some level is the debate that then breaks out among some of the acharonim. One of the things that is most vexing in European modern religious and ritual reform is around language, access, how much to turn the synagogue into a place where the language of engagement is something other than Hebrew, whether that happens in the actual prayer itself or it happens in a sermon in the vernacular. These were real contentious things at the time. We take it for granted, like in America, certainly across all denominations, a sermon in English is just totally normal. But-
Rav Avi: Yeah, or a sermon in Yiddish, but that's the vernacular. Right.
Rav Eitan: But in the 1800s, that was not a given. That was seen as a radical reform, that you would get up and speak in sort of the common language of the street in God's house. It was a cipher on some level for how are we navigating assimilation, acculturation.
Rav Avi: And did people call on this concept of the meturgeman as justification?
Rav Eitan: Yes! So the idea of what are you talking about? We had a foreign language. We think of Aramaic as a Jewish language. It's not, right? It's a foreign language that's also Semitic that Jews spoke and parts of the Bible are in it, admittedly, but it's not really a Jewish language in the way Hebrew is. It was the language of the empire. And in that sense, there's a strong precedent there of what are you talking about? That was an authorized piece of the tradition. But people will pick up from the Tur's comments in different ways. When the Tur says, well, we don't understand Aramaic anymore. And that was a special divinely inspired text, which can't be mimicked. So there's two ways to go there. You have a number of figures, some of whom are looking out, watching their back from religious reform and acculturation that they don't like. But Rav Moshe Feinstein is among these. He says, you shouldn't be giving even between little explanations about the Torah reading because the Tur told us we phased that out. That's gone. And if we were to give the positive piece of it, there is kind of a power to: I just want to hear the word of God in the Torah on its own terms with its own music. Don't cut it off in the middle. Let it speak for itself that I think there's a kind of aesthetics and ideology that coalesces for certain people around keep that stuff out of my Torah reading and maybe out of my davening entirely.
Rav Avi: Yeah. I think the thing that's so compelling to me about that, I really resonate with that vision. I sometimes sit and I don't even want to open my book. I just want to listen and feel sort of like the words of Torah wash over me. For me personally, it's like the worst week I've had. I can meditatively feel like, okay, I just need some healing Torah. I just need to hear the words. And maybe I'm picking up a word or a story depending on how focused I am or how well I know the particular verses from that Aliyah, but that I really feel sort of like I'm experiencing the text. I taught a class once that was like ways to interact with Torah other than study it and talked about like, oh, what does it look like to sing it? And what does it look like to take writing prompts out of Torah or to do a Jewish Studio process, art process around it? And one of the things I offered was like ritual actually. It's like, this is built in that sometimes we study Torah and sometimes we ritually hear it and that can be different. And the concept of the meturgeman and this translation sort of can muddy those waters. Like, well, am I studying it or am I experiencing it ritually? There's something sort of moving to me about the purity of just the ritual experience. And then having the sermon, for me personally, it also means like if I interpret the text differently than someone else, I appreciate having the unmediated access to the Torah itself to figure out what it means for me to hear those words right now in this moment without having someone else translate what it should mean for me. When you hear this story of Moshe, you should feel this. I get to decide until I get to the sermon how I experience that. That also is compelling to me from like an empowered Judaism perspective.
Rav Eitan: Right. So I think, yeah, that is an instinct. And I wonder, like, is that a reading of some of what's going on with the Tur way back that there's some sense of, I don't know, people stopped liking the Targum or whatever. But on the flip side, Rav Ovadia Yosef says, you're reading the Tur all wrong. It's actually very interesting. He says, all the Tur meant to say was, since we no longer understand Aramaic, there is no sense in forcing people to do the Aramaic Targum. If they want to, they can. And Rav Ovadia says, you can still do Targum Onkelos in the middle. That's fine, even if you don't understand it because it's the way Chazal did it. And the Tur when he said, and we're not going to learn from them with respect to other languages also meant we're not going to now mandate a translation into Yiddish or Spanish or German or whatever he has in mind that you'd be talking about. We're not going to force you to do it the way Chazal actually forced you to do the Aramaic piece.
Rav Avi: So he says permitted, but not required.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Now he doesn't really go far enough to say, if you're not doing the Aramaic Targum, you're going to insert it in verse by verse, that he says between the Aliyot, 100%, the rabbi, someone else can get up, translate it, give a little bit of a drasha, explain what's going on. Because he's leaning more into, well, I don't know, within limits of some degree of integrity. I don't know without Chazal's authorization with a divinely inspired text, I can interrupt each verse, but people are supposed to understand what's going on.
Rav Avi: Yeah. This is certainly something I see in practice.
Rav Eitan: For sure. Right. And that happens more broadly. And certainly in, you know, if you have something that's explicitly marked as a learner's service or communities that are very much focused in their culture around study and learning and engagement, this kind of thing will happen. And yeah, I think it's interesting to think about like the very different environments that plays. Now, I think you mentioned this, like at the beginning, there is the way in which, well, in some ways you could say, we accomplish all these goals with all our printed books. And the commentaries that the synagogue has is putting this in a different form.
Rav Avi: You don't need a Meturgeman, you can read Devash Parashah magazine!
Rav Eitan: Exactly. I think it's interesting to think what the different modes do and don't do, right? Reading is not the same as listening. In certain ways it's superior, at least for some people. It's also inferior in other ways. We certainly don't think, well, you don't need to read the Megillah out loud, just like pick up the book and scan it with the eyes. We still emphasize with our ritual, actually, the aural experience. And so that's a potential counter critique of the book doesn't do it. Because on some level also the book is where do your eyes, you know, flip to in this moment or that, whereas if the person's reading it, you have to hear it, right? Unless you leave the room. So I don't know. I think this is, you know, going back to our questioner, I think so you hopefully have some of an answer of the, why do we not do it on the kind of the history? How did this play out? I think we're leaving a little more open that maybe we don't know the full answer of the really, but why don't we do it? Feels to my instinct to be bound up with some competing instincts of what are we trying to get out of the Torah reading experience? What does it mean to understand it and to experience it in a deep way? And I'm not sure there has been agreement on that overall of Jewish history.
Rav Avi: I think I maybe want to end with one last image in my life where I sort of see and feel this come through. And it resonates, especially with this question that was submitted, you know, this is what I came to when learning with my dad is that I really do think I've experienced this most in learning with my children, right? Like the experience of reading a verse, trying to translate it for them, trying to think like, how would I say this so that you would understand it, that experience of like a free translation. It feels to me like that's probably the thing that's most resonant in my life of the Ezra experience. And I wonder if that's because Ezra's trying to teach people who don't yet know what the text says. And that's what it feels like to read it to a child, you know, if like my six year old or my eight year old walks over and I'm like reading along in the in shul that I might want to translate what's what's being said for them. I'm trying to say like, well, okay, you don't know what this story has to say yet. And I want you to understand it. That's maybe the moment when I'm most like embodying Ezra in that original Gabbai need to translate to say it's just so important that this person understand what these words mean for them. Translation can't be an afterthought.
-------------------
-------------------