Parsha_Push Parshat Vayeshev

Once a student asked me why the Torah is not written more clearly. If the Torah wanted us to know a specific detail, why does it only emerge in midrashim or interpretations? Indeed, many learners are frustrated by the fact that it is difficult to unequivocally know the Torah’s intent, and many ​additions, based on tradition or interpretation, are required to understand it. And it is possible to reach understanding in different and even contradictory ways.

Ramban on our weekly portion provides a possible glimpse into an answer. When Joseph is searching for his brothers, he finds a man who says to him, “They have departed from here. For I heard them saying, ‘Let us go to Dothan’.” Rashi, following the sages, understood that they ‘distanced themselves’ from brotherhood, and that they were seeking to harm Joseph. Ramban determines that it is impossible that the man, whom the sages understood to be an angel, was saying these words literally, but the text can be interpreted in two seemingly different directions: “For the man Gabriel who told him told the truth, and said language that serves two aspects, and both are true, and he did not understand the hidden within it, and went after the revealed understanding.”

One can say that Ramban points out that there is text and sub-text, or that the text itself contains different possibilities. The angel’s words have different interpretations, all of which are true. In fact, Joseph’s dreams appearing in our portion are also subject to different interpretations and different ways of being realized in reality. One can even claim that the entire Torah is multi-dimensional, with built-in ambiguity or multiplicity of meaning.

There is a frustrating dimension – that one can never know in the end what “the truth” is, but also an exciting and enabling dimension – the divine speech is multi-meaningful, with different possibilities of understanding and varied ways of applying th​e​ same text. There are the revealed and the hidden, as Ramban explains, where the hidden can sometimes only be understood retrospectively, or only by listening to the multi-dimensionality of the speech. One can say that the Torah’s opacity is intended to seek out the multiplicity of meanings, which will come to expression later through interpretive debates among scholars, and will allow implementing the Torah in different ways in various and complex realities. The Torah’s ambiguity is not a “bug”, it’s a feature.