A City in Its Fullness by S.Y. Agnon

Author:S.Y. Agnon [Agnon, S.Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Toby Press
Published: 2016-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

20

One day the rabbi said to Rabbi Mordechai, My son, if you want to study Torah, I will teach you. He opened the Bible before him and taught him Torah with Rashi’s commentary, and the Aramaic translation, and the haftarot.

The rabbi saw that his pupil’s mind was good and his thinking straight. He understood quickly and forgot little, he absorbed everything, and he loved studying. He was happy with every new teaching, and the new learning did not displace the old, so the rabbi doubled and redoubled what he taught him several times over. He began by teaching him a single weekly portion over seven days. Then he started teaching him two or three portions in two or three days, and he taught him Rashi and Onkelos’s translation, and he started teaching him the Aramaic translation attributed to Yonatan, and the Jerusalem Aramaic translation, and the commentary on the haftarot. He would show him the several laws that were derived from each verse in the Torah, and this stood Rabbi Mordechai in good stead all his life. For if he remembered a verse, he remembered all the laws derived from that verse, and if he remembered a law, he remembered the place of that law in the Torah. This is a very great virtue among Torah scholars, which is not attained by all. Some great scholars are experts in the laws and know the opinion of the authorities. They even know the source of the law in the Gemara, and they sometimes derive a new ruling from it that is not mentioned by either the Medieval or latter-day authorities. But they do not know the divine quarry from which verse in the Torah the law was hewn. The rabbi also did something more. In the evening, when he went out to walk in the fields, leaning on his student, he would teach him general principles, and these too stood by Rabbi Mordechai in his Torah study.

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