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Commentary on Exodus: Perush ha-Maccabee

In the Preface to his book They Must Go, written in 1980 in Ramle Prison, Rabbi Meir Kahane wrote: The greatest enemy of modern man is boredom. In prison, it can drive men mad. And so I instituted a stiff, daily regimen of study and writing that would keep me busy from early morning (4:30 A.M.) until lights-out (midnight). This schedule included…writings of various kinds. I have, for example, been creating a biblical commentary for the past ten years, and, ironically, never did I have so much time – and peace and quiet – to work on it as in prisons. It is a labor of love, and I spent many hours on it, daily, while in Ramle. It is this “labor of love” that eventually grew into Peirush ha-Maccabee. Towards the end of his life – though no one could have known that it would so soon and so brutally be cut short! – he dedicated ever-increasing amounts of time and energy to his Torah writings, rather than the political field for which he was better-known. Peirush ha-Maccabee is much more than just one more commentary on the Tanakh. The volume presented here covers only the first two and a half chapters of Exodus – a mere sixty-two verses out of 1,209 in the entire Book – and cuts off heart-rendingly in the middle of a sentence. Had the Rabbi lived to complete this work, it would have covered perhaps fifteen volumes – on Exodus alone! We will never know what we have lost: what treasures would the Rabbi have brought us in his commentary on the Ten Plagues? What infinite lessons would he have taught from the Song at the Red Sea? What morals – including for our own day – would he have drawn from the encounter with Amalek, the first war that Israel ever fought as a nation? What dazzling insights would he have given us into the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the sin of the golden calf, the construction of the Tabernacle which was the paradigm for the Holy Temple? The writings that the Rabbi left us contain tantalizingly brief glimpses into what he would have written, had he but lived out his natural life. Scattered through his other books and countless newspaper articles, in the shiurim that he delivered in his yeshiva (and which were partially collated by his students), we find beautiful and startling hiddushim – just sufficient to hint at the wealth that could have been. The opening chapters of the Book of Exodus set the basis for Moses’ leadership of the Jewish nation. Rabbi Kahane’s experiences in his own personal life as a Jewish leader are clear in Peirush ha-Maccabee: his insights into Moses’ words and personality and the charge given him by GOD and so on, could only have come from someone who had himself been a Jewish leader. (This becomes far clearer in Rabbi Kahane’s insights into the Israelite kingdom, and King Saul and King David personally, in his commentary on the Book of Samuel.) And when he describes how the Establishment – both Egyptian and Hebrew – excoriated and vilified Moses for threatening the familiar order, when he shows how Hebrew leaders ostracized Moses for being too “extreme” in his defence of Jews and his attacks on the Egyptian persecutors, one feels that Peirush ha-Maccabee is almost autobiographical. Rabbi Kahane’s commentary on the entire Tanakh, had he finished writing it, would have been not merely his masterpiece, it would surely have been the single greatest commentary ever written on the Tanakh. It would have been voluminous enough to fill an entire library. A few – a very few – commentators in history have written similar works: Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, for example, like the Ramban and the Ohr ha-Hayyim before him, can spend whole pages expounding on a single verse. But Rabbi Kahane goes further yet: Peirush ha-Maccabee not only expounds on the meaning of the verses and individual words in the text, it also lays forth the entire philosophy and rationale of Judaism.