☕ R. Bachya ben Asher made the burgeoning Kabbalistic movement more accessible in his beloved Torah commentary, where he also anthologized much midrash, some of it otherwise lost.
Thank you for this series; I’ve learned a lot. It helps that all these rabbis are now people, not just names.
About the “Pardes”: does anyone else actually define “remez”? I see it defined in modern works the way you do, but as far as I can tell Moshe de Leon just mentions the name without saying what it means, and Ramban never uses the term as a whole way of understanding Torah (the way he does pshat, drash and sod). The classical commentators seem to just use those three.
It’s nice to see Bachya defining the third way, but it doesn’t seem to go with the word “remez”.
It's a great question. The sense of "pardes" exegesis seems to arise in the mid- to late thirteenth century and Rabbenu Bachya is perhaps the most explicit of its early practitioners; I'd suggest the word "allusion" for remez in his thinking. In other words, a remez is a symbol that represents an idea or thing. So, for example, he may have had in mind contemporary allegorical interpretations that suggested that the twelve tribes of Israel represent (were a "remez" of) the twelve constellations of the zodiac.
Thank you for this series; I’ve learned a lot. It helps that all these rabbis are now people, not just names.
About the “Pardes”: does anyone else actually define “remez”? I see it defined in modern works the way you do, but as far as I can tell Moshe de Leon just mentions the name without saying what it means, and Ramban never uses the term as a whole way of understanding Torah (the way he does pshat, drash and sod). The classical commentators seem to just use those three.
It’s nice to see Bachya defining the third way, but it doesn’t seem to go with the word “remez”.
It's a great question. The sense of "pardes" exegesis seems to arise in the mid- to late thirteenth century and Rabbenu Bachya is perhaps the most explicit of its early practitioners; I'd suggest the word "allusion" for remez in his thinking. In other words, a remez is a symbol that represents an idea or thing. So, for example, he may have had in mind contemporary allegorical interpretations that suggested that the twelve tribes of Israel represent (were a "remez" of) the twelve constellations of the zodiac.