This is the Bainwall podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we take a look at even more Midrash that surrounds the character of Noah.

Some commentary describes Noah as the man in the fur coat. What is this all about?

Indeed! Hey, before we even get started, this is relevant. I wanted to read, so I just finished recently this book by Rabbi David Foreman.

Genesis, a par-shot companion, will link it in the show notes here. This isn't his introduction. I'm going to read just a little bit here. Just a page or two or three, perhaps four.

But I want to read his thoughts here. We always talk about what it's like for a Rabbi to get trained in the Midrash.

Here we are doing episodes on Midrash and what it means to be a Rabbi. I thought it was great to read his perspective on some of this. But B, it was just resonated with why I love all the rabbis I've listened to.

There's something really special and unique about Rabbi Foreman and why it resonates so much for me. He's not a follower of Jesus, but it resonates for me because of how I interact with the Bible.

The Bible, from my view, I'm going to say as a Christian, and I just loved it. So I just wanted to share. I think it's relevant to our episode. It's relevant to the Midrash anyway. I don't know if it's relevant to our episode.

The way I was taught, this is this is Rabbi Foreman in his introduction, page two, the way I was taught back then went kind of like this. You start, say with a verse. God tells Abraham to go and leave his birthplace for a land that God will show him.

It's a very nice verse. It seems intuitively understandable, but then you learn that it's not so simple. Rashi has one view of the verse. Sforno has another view and Rambham takes the whole thing to an entirely different way.

Moreover, Rashi's view of the verse isn't really too clear. Mizrahi thinks Rashi means one thing and sifter, ha-ha-ha-ha-mim thinks Rashi means something else. And did we forget about Hirsch? Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch has his own unique way of interpreting all these words. Okay, God, all that? Great. Let's go on to the next verse. And we'll do it all over again.

At the end of the week, we'll have a quiz and at the end of the month, a test. It felt like you had to be really smart, really good at remembering lots of details just to keep pace. Now don't get me wrong.

Learning the Rishwanim is important. These sainted commentators were brilliant interpreters of the text and they are a crucial part of our tradition.

But somehow I was getting lost in the simplest of questions, like what does the story as a whole mean? I'm reading the story of Yeruda and Tamar and Genesis 38. And I can tell you why there might be three extra words in the third verse according to Orchheim.

But somehow I'm hard-pressed to tell you anything about what the story is trying to teach me, what the story is doing there, interpreting the Joseph Saga so blatantly, interrupting the Joseph Saga so blatantly.

I was seeing a lot of trees, but somehow the forest was passing me by. Eventually, in an effort to regain my footing, I tried a bit of an experiment.

I tried getting back to basics, as it were. These commentators of generations passed, Rashi, Rambams, Forno, Malbeam, Hirsh and others. All had the same starting point. As seemed to me, they read the text of Torah carefully, made their best attempt to understand what it was going on.

Whatever else these greats were doing, they certainly started with that first basic step. Nowadays we call this basic reading comprehension.

Moreover, not only did they do that themselves, they must have expected their readers to do it too. You wouldn't read a commentary on a text before reading the text itself, would you?

So if that's the case, I found myself thinking maybe I should just start there. Let me clear my mind of everything else I knew, go back to the basic texts of the Torah, take a deep breath and try to read it carefully.

In practice, wouldn't you know it, I found that this wasn't so easy. Having read the stories of Torah over and over again, it's not the simplest thing in the world to clear your mind, forget everything you know about them, and read them afresh, paying close attention to the words without leaping to conclusions.

But gradually I got better at it. I found that there is a deceptively simple set of tools, little games almost, that were helpful in the process.

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