By Gavriel Aryeh Sanders

Hidden Zip Files In Tanach?

First up, a little housekeeping: I’m grateful to SW for emailing me to point out a void in a comment I made in a previous column. I had mentioned that Hebrew is distinct from other languages as it is the language of the Divine. I should have clarified that this remark applies to what we know as Lashon HaKodesh versus modern street Hebrew. Thanks, SW, for the input. It is always welcome!

In our last column, we looked at the literary phenomenon of hakbalah/parallelism and gave examples of the three basic forms (synonymous, antithetical [contrastive], and synthetic), which are most prominent in the poetic passages of Navi and Ketuvim. Hakbalah can also be found among the narrative portions, but less frequently.

There is another pervasive literary device that appears in both the poetic and narrative sections, but it is virtually invisible unless you know what to look for. It’s a pattern that can encompass a single verse, several consecutive chapters, and even whole books. I first became aware of this literary structure in graduate school while studying a section of Navi. It was about five years ago (some 11 years into my mitzvah-observant life) that I heard a master Tanach teacher reveal this obscure pattern in shiurim to his students. The teacher was the Five Towns’ own Rabbi David Fohrman, founder of the AlephBeta Institute, and the pattern was called “chiasms” (KY-azims).

I spent 45 minutes recently conversing with Rabbi Forhman about his own awakening to chiasms in Tanach. He offered many compelling insights into this little-understood literary gem which, once apparent, can revolutionize one’s perception of Hashem’s deeper messages in the sacred texts.

To those who’ve studied Torah for decades, the previous sentence might exude a scent of hubris, as if there’s anything significantly new to learn after mastering Rashi, Ramban, and the many meforshim found in the Mikraot Gedolot. Our humble rejoinder is that chiasms aren’t new; they are simply unseen until pointed out. Rabbi Fohrman, through his one-of-a-kind visualized learning at www.alephbeta.org, has been teaching thousands of eager learners, from high-school students to retirees, how to perceive seemingly separate threads of text as part of an elegant tapestry of fresh and profound understanding. But as we illustrated in our previous column about hakbalah, those chiastic threads, like stars in the night sky, have always been there. Let me share some highlights of my conversation with Rabbi David Fohrman.

GS: Rabbi Fohrman, what’s the origin of the word “chiasm”? It doesn’t sound Hebrew.

DF: It’s not at all. It comes from the Greek letter Χ, which looks like an X and is pronounced kai, like the first syllable in kayak. The words Χάρισμα (charisma), Χαρακτήρ (charactar), and Χρώμιο (chromio/chrome) are Greek words which have crept into English. [GS note: Now you understand why a few English words that begin with “ch” are pronounced with a “k” sound.]

GS: What’s the relationship between the letter Χ and the structure of chiasms?

DF: That Χ tells the whole story. What is above is reflected below and there is a crucial nexus in the center where above and below meet.

GS: That sounds almost Kabbalistic.

DF: It actually has roots in a form of gematria known as At-Bash, wherein the first letter mirrors the last, the second letter mirrors the next-to-last, etc. Envision the Hebrew alphabet vertically oriented as a column in descending order. At the upper and lower extremes, you have the letters א and ת. The next pair of upper and lower letters are ב and ש, followed by ×’ and ר, ד and ק, and so on. Now let’s use the same construct of mirroring, but instead of letters, we’re going to use thoughts, words, whole texts, even whole chapters.

GS: Can we start with a simple example? This sounds heavy already.

DF: Sure. You previously wrote about synthetic parallelism and pointed out how a short phrase like “Hashem loves the righteous” can be restated in a second phrase to reflect a similar idea, such as “G-d favors the just.” There we have a structure of A1-B1-C1 being reframed synonymously as A2-B2-C2. In a chiasm, the second phrase is in reverse order with: C2-B2-A2. In a more fully developed chiasm, we’ll also discover the nexus, what we would apply here as D, which stands in the middle between the two phrases, i.e. A-B-C-D-C-B-A. We could technically call a chiasm an inverted parallelism. That’s the theory.

By way of example, here’s the shortest chiasm in Tanach, consisting of six words from Gen. 9:6 and mirrored in the A-B-C-C-B-A pattern: שֹׁפֵךְ דַּם הָאָדָם, בָּאָדָם דָּמוֹ יִשָּׁפֵךְ (Shedder of blood of the man, by man shall his blood be shed.) Those who read Hebrew even at a basic level can clearly see the chiasm.

GS: You’ve taught that chiasms can be much bigger.

DF: Yes. Very much so. We finished our collective reading of Sefer Sh’mot (Exodus) recently. It contains a giant chiasm which spans several whole chapters. My team produced a video on AlephBeta.org to vividly illustrate it. When you understand where that chiasm begins and ends and what the nexus point is in the middle, you won’t see Sefer Sh’mot the same again. I know that because so many people have told me.

There are many more examples throughout Tanach. We have an 80-part series called “Genesis Unveiled” at AlephBeta.org wherein the chiasms figure prominently throughout the text. The Gan Eden narrative is a chiasm. Noach and the vineyard is a chiasm. The Akeidah is a chiasm–and there are more.

Going beyond Chumash, Sefer Yonah is a chiasm. So is Megillat Esther, which is certainly relevant to this week.

GS: Can you give us a chiastic example from the Megillah?

DF: Yes. In fact, it was while doing some research that I came across an essay by Professor Yehuda Radday from Bar Ilan University. He is an expert on chiasmus in the biblical texts. In his examination of the Megillah, he identified the nexus, the center of the X, into which and from which the events surrounding Mordechai and Esther flow. That point is 6:1, when Achashverosh cannot sleep. That is the point where Hashem “intervenes,” causing a monarch to be unable to sleep. From this came a chain reaction of events resulting in salvation for the Jews. Mind you, Radday doesn’t speculate on the meaning of the center point in his essay. But having identified it, we can all infer its significance. Coming up to the center point and leading away from the center point we can see a set of mirrored events.

GS: I’ve seen at least a couple of developed examples from scholars of a chiastic matrix for the Megillah. They are fascinating. [Note to reader: To request the two examples, please email gavrielsanders@gmail.com.] But couldn’t this chiasm simply be some interpreter’s introjection, a sort of homiletical imposition of a structure that’s not really there, like the constellations in the night sky aren’t really there?

DF: If chiasms were very infrequent, I suppose you might make a case for that. You wouldn’t bet your house on its certainty. But if you find them over and over again, some of them with 25 or even 75 twinned themes spanning large blocks of text, then you have greater confidence that this is something bigger than any human author or commentator.

GS: Why don’t we see direct discussion of this among Chazal, our Sages?

DF: Well, recognize that the first commentator on the Torah is the Torah itself. Hashem chose to embody His message to the Jewish people in a book. It follows, then, that His use of language would include many subtleties for us to dig out. I’ve compared chiasms previously as a kind of Zip file, which is a very compact way of loading and compressing information. The ancient world didn’t have megabytes, thumb drives, and cloud storage of data. So when our eyes behold the wonder of chiasms in Tanach, it engenders awe for the Author who embedded it there for us to discover.

Chazal certainly seem to have been aware of this phenomenon. There is evidence of chiastic influence in the Gemara; for example, in the structure of a short story in Shabbat 119a about Yosef Mokir Shabbat. We know that Chazal had ways of interpreting which weren’t street knowledge. We see the end product, but not the process by which it was achieved.

The Midrash is a good example of this. The Midrash doesn’t teach you the methodology of what Chazal did. It has to be reverse-engineered to see it. The conclusions of Chazal seem to indicate they knew it and used it, but were not specific or public about the methodology. We today have to engage in a sort of literary archaeology to unearth it. Baruch Hashem, a lot of work has been done so that the beauty, power, and significance of chiasms are within reach of all Torah learners.

GS: How did you first encounter this concept of chiasms?

DF: I mentioned Professor Radday previously. I read a rather lengthy paper he wrote on the subject; afterwards it was like I had new glasses when learning. I could see them; they were there; they weren’t a literary mirage; they were real.

GS: בקיצור (in brief), it looks like we’re only scratching the surface about chiasms. How can we learn more?

DF: It’s a substantial and substantive path of study. It’s also richly rewarding intellectually and spiritually. But if you’ll permit, Gavriel, I have to give a shout out to our brilliant graphics and editorial team at AlephBeta.org, along with guidance and support from Robbie Rothenberg. These amazing people have simplified and shortened the process for everyone. That’s why we have so many day schools using the illustrated content. Most of the learning modules are around ten minutes long. You click, view, learn, and have an “ah-HA” moment.

GS: By the way, I hear there’s a new book coming out from the pen–or keyboard–of Rabbi David Fohrman?

DF: Yes. It’s called “The Exodus You Almost Passed Over.” It’s coming out in a few days. It will likely change how most of us look at the Seder night–positively, of course.

GS: Mazal tov and hatzlachah on that. Rabbi Fohrman, thank you for sharing your insights. We wish you and the work of AlephBeta.org great success. חַג שָׂמֵחַ

DF: ×—Ö·×’ פּוּרִים שָׂמֵחַ to all the readers. I hope they’ve found this motivating and beneficial.

Gavriel Aryeh Sanders has spoken to tens of thousands of Jews across North America and abroad, delivering lively lectures related to Jewish living and learning, including his autobiography on “A Minister’s Journey to Judaism.” He currently teaches Hebrew at a Long Island Jewish high school. Email: GavrielSanders@gmail.com

 

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