Toledot: The Censored Radak - You're Rubber, I'm Glue
Eliyahu Munk is a prolific translator of rabbinic commentary, and his translations of various meforshim on Chumash appear in Sefaria. One drawback of his commentaries results from his unique approach to translation. You can read his interview in the Jewish Press where he discusses how he sometimes expands, sometimes reduces, and sometimes omits. My reading of the omissions is that it is proud censorship for ideological reasons, to guard the reader from the Rishonim’s heresy.
You have been criticized in the past for omitting material in your translations. How do you respond?
It’s not only permitted, but in the Targum of Edut HaMizrach, certain aspects of Aharon’s participation in the eigel are not translated. So if portions in the Torah could be eliminated from the Targum, certainly I can eliminate some portions from a rabbi who lived a couple of thousand years later.
This type censorship can be IMHO problematic, since it is essentially how the modern English reader will encounter Rashbam or Radak. And if all the reader sees is the English, the reader doesn’t even know that something was withheld.
In one recent digital humanities project, we explored how to identify these changes. Outright omissions of an entire comment is easy to detect, but what about deleted phrases? Need we worry about ideas being recast to make them more “kosher”? Once you cannot trust the translation, you just cannot trust the translation.
At the same time, when he chooses to explicitly omit something, that can tell us that it is a particularly “juicy” comment. And so, here it one such juicy explanation by Radak.
The pasuk in Bereshit 27:13:
אוּלַ֤י יְמֻשֵּׁ֙נִי֙ אָבִ֔י וְהָיִ֥יתִי בְעֵינָ֖יו כִּמְתַעְתֵּ֑עַ וְהֵבֵאתִ֥י עָלַ֛י קְלָלָ֖ה וְלֹ֥א בְרָכָֽה׃
If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster and bring upon myself a curse, not a blessing.”
וַתֹּ֤אמֶר לוֹ֙ אִמּ֔וֹ עָלַ֥י קִלְלָתְךָ֖ בְּנִ֑י אַ֛ךְ שְׁמַ֥ע בְּקֹלִ֖י וְלֵ֥ךְ קַֽח־לִֽי׃
But his mother said to him, “Your curse, my son, be upon me! Just do as I say and go fetch them for me.”
How can a curse, leveled by Yitzchak to target Yaakov for something Yaakov did, bounce off of him and stick to Rivkah? Is he rubber and she glue?
We might imagine all sorts of valid explanations. Maybe her righteousness will protect him, or given that he was following her directions, the curse should rightly devolve upon her. Or maybe she would then speak up to Yitzchak and have him not curse / retract the curse. (See Rabbi Yitzchak in Bereishit Rabba for something similar.) Maybe she is referring to Yitzchak’s anger, which she would deflect to be upon her.
Or maybe curses are magical, and she can be the stand-in and accept the tentative curse so that it wouldn’t hit Yaakov. You could see how the idea might be theologically fraught.
Here is how Ibn Ezra treats it, as translated / explained by H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver:
עלי קללתך. אל תפחד שיקלל, ואם יקלל תהי קללתו עלי ולא עליך, וזה משפט דברי הנשים והגאון פי' עלי להסיר קללתך, וי"א חלילה לכזב הנביא רק הוא כן:
UPON ME BE THY CURSE. Don’t be afraid that your father might curse you. If he does, the curse will be upon me, not on you. This is the way women talk. However, Saadiah Gaon explained Upon me be thy curse to mean: it is upon me to remove the curse.
The translators there explain that “this is the way women talk” that “A mother is willing to have any trouble that is destined to fall upon her son fall upon her.” I think it is slightly more sexist than this. Namely, that just because a Biblical woman says something does not mean that it is theologically sound. Women talk this way but of course you cannot deflect a curse, because if it is deserved and God follows through, then it is deserved. A similar idea was offered by others about the efficacy of the dudaim.
Radak writes:
עלי קללתך, אם יקלל לא תנוח הקללה עליך כי אם עלי כי אני גרמתי לך, אבל אני רוצה שתשמע קולי ותלך על זה הספק:
“Upon me your curse — if he curses you, the curse will not rest upon you but upon me, for I have caused you [to do this]; but I wish for you to listen to my voice and go based on this doubt.”
The preceding Radak was translated by Eliyahu Munk, as follows:
והבאתי. עלי, אני גורם להביא עלי קללה:
והבאתי, I will be the cause of bringing a curse upon myself.
I note that to show that translation is actually happening in context; also, the word גורם there matches גרמתי. The idea being that, for Radak, Rivkah is the ultimate cause of Yaakov’s actions.
Meanwhile, in the same HaChut Hameshulash translation, he does translate Seforno who has a similar explanation:
עלי קללתך. עלי להכנס תחתיך אם תארע לך קללה כמו שאמרו ז"ל שעשה שלמה שקבל עליו קללות יואב והשיגוהו:
עלי קללתך, I will take your curse in your place should you become the subject of a curse. We find in Sanhedrin 48, that Solomon is reported to have accepted for himself any curse which would devolve upon him for carrying out his father’s dying wish not to let Yoav die a peaceful death and David’s curses against Yoav. In the event, Solomon or his descendants were afflicted with these curses. [I presume the author just wished to authenticate that Rivkah’s statement was not spurious, and that one can substitute oneself for the target of curses pronounced on someone else. Ed.]
The “[Ed.]” insertions are Munk’s own expansions. The idea of Seforno is that one can take on the impact of a curse, and that this aligns with Chazal’s theology in Sanhedrin 48.
I am not sure why one translation was included and the other was omitted? Maybe it was indeed for space consideration, because we already had the idea from Seforno? Maybe because Seforno grounded himself in Chazal?
Or, maybe Radak is saying something different from Seforno — it is not a spiritual trick that works as Chazal would agree to, but a theological argument that we don’t care who the tzaddik targeted with his words — the tzaddik’s curse won’t impact his target, because the real culprit, the one ultimately responsible, is someone else. That could be considered kefira by some. Especially given the idea found in Chazal that a kilelat tzaddik, even is the curse was in error, and even if conditioned on an event that didn’t occur, still sticks and impacts the target.