BS"D
A woman walks into a sefarim store...
No, this isn't the start of a joke. Bookshops - Jewish or otherwise - are my happy place. Alas, I don't often get to visit one these days. However, for various reasons I had to kill some time outside the house last week - so of course I wound up (not for the first time) browsing in my local sefarim store.
These days I try to 'browse with purpose'. One of those purposes being to find useful translated commentaries for this blog - so, focusing on Sefer Bereishit for now - that aren't available online. So when I saw several shiny new Artscroll volumes of something called the Zera Shimshon on the Chumash, I decided to check it out.
A brief history lesson for those not already in the know (I wasn't). The Zera Shimshon, or Rabbi Shimshon Chaim Nachmani, was a late-18th century Italian rabbi and kabbalist who lived around the same time as the better known Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto) and the Or HaChaim (Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar). His only son/child, lo aleinu, passed away in his lifetime leaving him childless. Realising he would have no descendants, he turned to books as his legacy, penning the Zera Shimshon - a series of essays commenting on Chumash and the five Megillot - and the Toldot Shimshon, a commentary on Pirkei Avot.
On a skim read, he does bring some interesting ideas. There's an essay or two on Eliezer learning Torah as a slave and wanting to marry his own daughter to Yitzchak (so trying to sabotage his mission as matchmaker). There's an interesting take on Avraham as the father of all gerim and the 'souls that Avraham and Sara made in Charan'*. And there's an ongoing theme about Yosef arguing with his brothers over whether they were Noachides or Jews. Worth revisiting.
However, what triggered this post was something else. In the middle of my reading, the shop owner wanders over and starts talking about how it is a segula to learn this sefer; many wonderful things have happened to people who learnt this sefer; look at this other book by R' Nachman Seltzer with stories about people who learnt this sefer (together with extracts from the sefer itself). And so on.
I nod politely with my 'That's nice, dear' face on. But inside, I'm a bit upset. Why on earth should learning a Torah commentary have a segula attached to it? Why not just learn it for its own sake?!
It bothered me enough that I tried to find out more online. Some news articles shed more light - see, for example:
and
https://www.chevrahlomdeimishnah.org/zera-shimshon-revisited/ (an extract from another R' Seltzer book).
Now, learning Torah is generally considered to be a Good Thing. So is healing from sickness, infertility, or any other suffering. But card-carrying rationalist Jew that I am, I see a problem here.
The Zera Shimshon wanted to leave a legacy through his sefarim. But books, alone, are no guarantee of a legacy. Even in the days of the printing press, they are physically vulnerable to fire, mould, decay, or just getting lost. Furthermore, if your audience is limited to a small pool of scholars with the time and expertise to read your book, then the greater the risk that it gets forgotten and lost in obscurity.
The Zera Shimshon would have been aware of this danger - by all accounts, this is what actually happened to his work until recently. I'm 99.9% sure that the blessing in his Introduction for those who study his sefer is just that - a pious plea to actually learn and engage with his work to safeguard his legacy and memory. The 'promise' of seeing 'your children's children' 'like olive shoots around your table' is a clear homage to Tehillim 128 - and there are no doubt other references to Tanakh which a learned reader would recognise. All of which sounds and feels completely normal as the dedication for a work of Torah commentary.
However, Camp Segula are apparently reading this 'promise' literally. In a classic act of magical thinking, the reasoning seems to be - if you learn this sefer, or are even just involved in distributing this sefer to others, wonderful things will happen to you and all your suffering will go away! It feels like the earlier fad for 'brachot parties' within some Sephardi circles**. And not a million miles away, l'havdil, from the Catholic culture of saints or wider superstitions around demons, fairies and other Unworldly Things.
And this approach seems to be tacitly encouraged by those responsible for spreading the Zera Shimshon's work. R' Nachman Seltzer himself gives contradictory views. On the one hand, in the very last paragraph of the Yeshiva World article above (after a lot of breathless segula excitement), he is quoted as saying the main point should be to learn the sefer for its own sake, with any segula or yeshua being treated as a happy side effect. On the other hand, in the extract from his own work (see second link above) he states:
"Zera Shimshon is a gift. A special present from Hashem. Obviously, this is not meant to replace our davening. On the contrary, R’ Nachmani has provided us with a completely unique channel of tefillah. He was grateful to any person who learned his Torah and was willing to go to great lengths to help that person. And he did. And he does. Learning Zera Shimshon is like having a truly influential friend intercede for you in the corridors of power, just when you need it most. It’s like being able to hire and afford the best, most expensive lawyer in the world. This gift is truly something to take advantage of."
I've bolded part of the above as it waves a bunch of red flags. Again, the spirit of a long-dead rabbi actively helping people and 'interceding' for them with Hashem doesn't sound too distant from a Catholic saint. To my mind, it also treads dangerously close to the halachic minefield of whether we can pray for the dead or angels to do exactly this.
"But what's the harm?" I hear you cry. "It's just a different derech! If the end result is that more people are learning Torah with the Zera Shimshon, isn't that a good thing?"
Well, other than the halachic concerns above, it puts me in mind of this powerful post from R' Slifkin after Rav Chaim Kanievsky zt"l passed away earlier this year. To apply the same logic - plenty of people today claim to be upholding the legacy of the Zera Shimshon, but which one? The learned talmid chacham with rich and novel insights into the Torah? Or the magical saint with supernatural powers to cure all ills from beyond the grave?
RPT
PS Reader, I didn't buy the sefer. However, it is on my 'want to buy' list, along with Artscroll's Bereishit Rabba translation and an as-yet-unknown translation of the Abarbanel (if you know of one, please shout). So if you see the Zera Shimshon cropping up in later posts, you'll know why...
*As seems to crop up in kabbalistic commentaries, this is a bit X-rated - so I'm not sure it'll make it onto the blog!
**Basically, a group of women get together with different foods, and take it in turns to say a bracha over some food out loud as a segula for healing someone, helping someone find a shidduch etc. etc. This turns the bracha from an act of thanksgiving to G-d (the original intent) to a magic formula for making something good happen. To my mind this is a problem. But hey, it's only wimmin doing it...
Wimmin are more into partnership minyanim ;)
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily ;-)
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