What's Peshat in the Peshat Controversy?

On Parshas Acharei Mos and why Tanach isn't more widely studied

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Following the death of his sons Nadav and Avihu, Ahron is cautioned about approaching the Holy of Holies, known as the Kodesh Hakedoshim. We are familiar with the inner sanctum of the Beis Hamikdash from the Yom Kippur service, which revolves around the kohen’s service inside.

Here, however, the Torah’s retelling of the service needed for Ahron to approach the Kodesh Hakedoshim differs starkly from what we know about the normal service to enter on Yom Kippur.

Just a heads up—this is slightly complicated. There is a very specific regimen dictated for the Yom Kippur service—it’s a combination of the regular daily service, but performed specifically by the Kohen Gadol, as well as a special service that would take place within the Kodesh Hakedoshim. For the daily service, the Kohen Gadol would wear his regular golden vestments, while the special Yom Kippur service required the Kohen Gadol to immerse in the mikvah and don his white Yom Kippur vestments before entering the Kodesh Hakedoshim.

This brings us to Rashi, based on the Talmud, stating that a verse in our parsha’s description of the Yom Kippur service is out of place. When the Torah describes Ahron entering wearing special white garments to take the spoon and coals from the Kodesh Hakedoshim, this really occurs later in the service. Before taking out the spoon and coals, normally the Yom Kippur service requires that the Kohen Gadol first offer his personal ram offering and the ram offering of the Jewish people. However the ram offerings are not mentioned in our parsha’s accounting of the Yom Kippur service.

Ramban is also baffled by the Torah’s accounting of the Yom Kippur service here. Our parsha makes no mention of the Yom Kippur services that the Kohen Gadol did while wearing his golden vestments. Surely the Torah doesn’t expect Ahron to do the service without clothing—a question the Ramban actually asks!

In fact, the Torah’s description here is even stranger. After telling Ahron that it is impermissible to enter the holy of holies except with the special Yom Kippur regimen, the Torah states that Ahron did everything he was commanded. But our parsha occurred a few months before Yom Kippur! How could Ahron have performed this regimen when it was still Nissan—Yom Kippur was months away!

To understand a brilliant and moving approach to the oddities in our parsha, let’s explore the history of biblical interpretation, most notably the meaning of peshat.

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If you’ve ever walked into a yeshiva, you immediately notice that few study Chumash—the Bible, Prophets, and Writings, known by the acronym Tanach. I remember when I was in yeshiva, being asked what I was learning by someone unfamiliar with the yeshiva curriculum. My answers were always contorted, “torts” or “levirate marriage,” instead of Bava Kama or Yevamos. And they would always be puzzled, why we didn’t spend more time learning just classic Bible. Didn’t you spend time on this week’s parsha, they’d ask. And the answer was, honestly, very little.

There is a long history behind the movement away from the study of Torah—a shift in emphasis that many rabbinic leaders have been decrying for centuries. As Frank Talmage explains in his article, “Keep Your Sons from Scripture: The Bible in Medieval Jewish Scholarship and Spirituality,” much of the early battles were over the integrity of rabbinic interpretation itself. The Karaite movement denounced the Oral Law and felt rabbinic interpretations obscured the messages of God’s revelation in the Torah. From the outside, Christians debated their interpretations with rabbis—appealing to the very same text as Jews in order to bolster their religious interpretations. The text of Tanach decoupled from rabbinic interpretation can literally yield other religions. It is no wonder that the hesitancy to read Tanach unmediated from classic rabbinic thought—Jews opposed to literal Torah study?—took hold so broadly.

Not everyone abandoned the study of Tanach to the same degree. Talmage notes distinctions between Ashkenaz and Sefard regarding their emphasis on learning Tanach. As my friend Rabbi Eliyahu Krakowsky quotes in his bluntly entitled article, “Why Isn’t Tanach Studied More,” one theologian, Prophiat Duran, described the Ashkenazi approach this way:

Jewish scholars, even the greatest among them, show great disdain for Biblical studies. It is enough for them to read the weekly portion shenayim mikra v’echad Targum, and still it is possible that if you ask them about a particular verse they will not know where it is. They consider one who spends time doing Biblical studies a fool because the Talmud is our mainstay.

In the 16th Century, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, known as the Maharal, bemoaned the lack of foundational Bible education in the traditional Jewish community. “Why has the Torah been forgotten,” Maharal asks. His answer places much of the blame on the traditional approach to Torah study that prizes Talmudic reasoning over foundational text study.

As modernity accelerated in the 18th and 19th centuries, the stakes for traditionally mediated Torah study became more pressing. Reformers wanted to return Judaism to a prophetic religion divorced from rabbinic interpretations. The early emergence of Biblical Criticism, an approach that posited multiple authors of the Torah, increased the stakes further for how, if at all, plain textual reading of Tanach should be taught. Without rabbinic interpretations, a plain reading of Tanach does not explicitly reflect our relationship to Jewish life as we understand it today. To combat the growing heretical possibilities, many 19th-century rabbinic interpretations, such as Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch and Rav Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg tried to more clearly align how the rabbinic interpretations emerged from a plain reading of the text.

In Eliyahu Stern’s book on the Vilna Gaon, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, he argues that the school of thought of the Vilna Gaon, which placed renewed emphasis on the plain meaning of texts, was a major precursor for modernity. His legacy, Stern argues, is better reflected by modern critical study than more traditional yeshiva approaches to the text. Stern greatly overstates his case in his portrait of the Vilna Gaon, as Rabbi Krakowsky details in his review essay, “Between the Genius and the Gaon: Lost in Translation,” but the underlying point about the Vilna Gaon’s approach to text study has some merit. Especially when it comes to the study of Chumash, most traditional yeshivas neglect both the methodologies and approaches that emphasize the plain meaning of the text divorced from rabbinic interpretation. Still, the Vilna Gaon was a far cry from a modern academic. As Professor Lawrence Schiffman concludes his article, “The Vilna Gaon’s Methods for the Textual Criticism of Rabbinic Literature”:

His methods of textual criticism, then, were very distant from those that scientific philological scholarship would develop for classical texts and that would be imported into Talmudic research after the rise of the scientific study of Judaism…But in one respect the Gaon of Vilna was truly a forerunner of modern, academic rabbinic scholars. He was convinced that the texts in the printed editions were corrupt and needed to be corrected…In this the Gaon was truly a reformer, a posture that seems to have motivated some of his other avenues of activity as well, such as his corrections to ritual and liturgical practice. He believed that one could reconstruct an original purer form of Jewish life and literature and he took upon himself the authority to do so.

We have lost a great deal from our collective neglect of peshat in the traditional Jewish schooling system. As Rabbi Yaakov Beasly writes in his review essay, “Return of the Pashtanim,” there is an incongruence between the amount of detail and conceptual methodology applied to Talmud versus the traditional study of Chumash. Study halls are filled with rigorous Talmud study, but seem much more reticent for high-level Tanach study.

Perhaps this was just a necessary concession, given the dangers beginning with the Karaites until modern-day academics, that this form of study has been relegated to the back of the Beit Midrash. Some lament that this concession, however well-meaning, has ultimately hurt the quality of our Torah learning.

In 1954, Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch, Rosh Yeshiva of Telz, wrote a long letter responding to criticism against him for participating in a Mizrahi Yom Haatzmaut celebration. Rav Bloch, who was aligned with the yeshiva world represented by Agudah, explained why he felt the yeshiva world’s tepid embrace of Zionism was a mistake. He writes, as translated by Rabbi Elazar Muskin, “When Unity Reigned, Yom Ha-Atzmaut, 1954”:

In general, I already expressed my view that we lost a great deal by refraining from recognizing correct issues just because the irreligious and those manipulated by them, the Mizrachi, agreed to them, because through agreeing with them we would have strengthened their false opinions. In my opinion, our views did not find receptive hearts within the nation not because of our stance against their incorrect views; rather it is because of our negative position against the correct views such as learning Bible, speaking Hebrew and Erez Yisrael. The populace cannot understand our concerns and, moreover, when we emphasize our positive views they will accept us and allow us to fight the falsehoods. In addition, I must express that this attitude of ours is not unique to our life in America. We acted this way in Lithuania as well despite the fact that then, as now, we were totally zealous concerning anything that, God forbid, is not in accordance with the spirit of Torah. We did not regress because of persecution, denouncement and sometimes even suffering, sorrow and much damage to our holy Yeshiva.

Essentially Rav Bloch argues that the yeshiva world made concessions to distance themselves from modernizers. In many instances that was the correct approach—to distance themselves from heretical or religiously corrosive ideas. But sometimes the non-yeshiva world champions something that is positive—Rav Bloch explicitly mentions learning the Bible, speaking Hebrew, and our relationship to Israel— and in the efforts to distance from negativity, much positivity is lost as well. The study of the plain meaning of the Bible is just one of them.

And this controversy continues to brew. In 2022 a public letter was issued banning the Hebrew sefer Peshuto shel Mikra because it emphasized a plainer approach to the text not exclusively based on the midrashim cited by Rashi. Much of the controversy seemed outlandish for those outside of the yeshiva community—the work is very traditional—but the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the present. For many, the peshat in the Torah remains a closed book.

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And this brings us back to our parsha.

The Vilna Gaon offers a truly eye-opening peshat read to the opening of our parsha. The instructions for Ahron to enter into the Holy of Holies don’t seem to align with the Yom Kippur ritual. So the Vilna Gaon suggests something incredible that effortlessly coheres with the plain meaning of the verses, as well as answers all of the previous questions.

Ahron haKohen, the Vilna Gaon explains, was able to enter the Kodesh Hakedoshim at all times. It was only future Kohen Gadols whose entrances into the Kodesh Hakedoshim were restricted exclusively to Yom Kippur. Aharon haKohen, however, with the instructions at the beginning of our parsha, was able to enter at all times.

This explains, why the verses seem out of order—the ram sacrifice of the nation was only necessary when entering on Yom Kippur, not for Ahron who was permitted to enter whenever he wanted. This also explains why Rashi said Ahron did everything as he was commanded, even though Yom Kippur was a few months away. Ahron HaKohen did not have to wait for Yom Kippur to enter the Holy of Holies.

And if you read back the verses carefully, you’ll see how neatly it fits into the plain meaning of the verses. First, only Ahron is addressed—not the Kohen Gadol because this applied specifically to Ahron. And only after mentioning the entire procedure for Ahron is Yom Kippur introduced—because originally this was not just for Yom Kippur.

Why did Ahron have this special privilege that allowed him to enter the Holy of Holies on any day, not just Yom Kippur?

I think it is a reminder that ideally, at its inception, the Holy of Holies is more accessible than we think. Entering the innermost sanctums requires its own set of rituals and was really only intended for Ahron, but there was a message for future generations as well. Even though access to the Holy of Holies is restricted, we are not fully removed from the holiness of the inner sanctum for the rest of the year. Rav Tzadok compares the Holy of Holies to the heart of the world. And like accessing our innermost feelings and desires—there is a special day, Yom Kippur, that lends itself to such existential introspection. But we can still glimpse inside the rest of the year. Not every encounter needs to be fully mediated—like our approach to the plain words of the Torah itself. It requires proper preparation and thoughtfulness but the Holy of Holies remains within our reach.

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Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned

• Keep Your Sons from Scripture: The Bible in Medieval Jewish Scholarship and Spirituality, Frank Talmage

• The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern

• Between the Genius and the Gaon: Lost in Translation, Eliyahu Krakowsky

• The Rebirth of Omnisignificant Biblical Exegesis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Yaakov Elman

• The Vilna Gaon’s Methods for the Textual Criticism of Rabbinic Literature, Lawrence Schiffman

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