Studies in the Weekly Portion

Plot

Those mimeo­graphed gily­onot were a gold mine of infor­ma­tion. But the infor­ma­tion was not what Nehama sought from her stu­dents. Rather, these yel­lowed sheets pre­sent­ed a series of com­men­ta­tor texts, fol­lowed by a few ques­tions. The most dif­fi­cult of these ques­tions were sig­naled with an ​“x” or at times ​“xx” — and via these gily­onot she would chal­lenge her stu­dents to under­stand the per­spec­tive of the com­men­taries, and the dif­fi­cul­ty in the Bib­li­cal text.

Among her many thou­sands of stu­dents was Dr. Moshe Sokolow. A mas­ter of Bib­li­cal texts and teach­ing in his own right, Dr. Sokolow was for­tu­nate to have stud­ied with Nehama for many years, to have mas­tered her tech­nique, and much of her teach­ing. To Nehama, he was a talmid-chaver, a stu­dent and colleague.

The book is divid­ed into fifty-four chap­ters, cor­re­spond­ing to the fifty-four parshiy­ot in the Torah. Unlike the orig­i­nal gily­onot, each parasha includes not only the texts in ques­tion, but also com­ments of Nehama, and the answers to the ques­tions posed. Because of this, the chap­ters can be read and dis­cussed, and yet it is not intend­ed, as were the orig­i­nal gily­onot, to serve as a source of active dis­cov­ery and investigation.

To Dr. Sokolow’s cred­it, many of the key lessons Nehama sought to teach are includ­ed in these chap­ters. From the dis­tinc­tion between peshat and drash to the Bib­li­cal use of sto­ries, and the true dif­fer­ences between the ways that dif­fer­ent com­men­ta­tors view the Bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, many of the great­est issues addressed dur­ing the thir­ty years which she com­posed her gily­onot are found in this book.

Nehama Lei­bowitz was the ulti­mate teacher, whose own epi­taph reads sim­ply ​“Morah.”