The First Three Words
How Rashi’s first comment quietly reveals the method behind his entire commentary — and the living chain of tradition that stands behind it.
As most of us know, Rashi wrote a running commentary on the Chumash. Line by line, he works through the text. He addresses difficulties, clarifies meaning and thereby helps us flow through the Torah with a deeper sense of what it is teaching us.
But the very first Rashi doesn’t quite fit that pattern.
The first Rashi on the first pasuk of the Torah doesn’t function like a typical running commentary on a particular difficulty in a particular pasuk. It reads more like a quasi-introduction — a window into the nature of the Chumash as a whole, rather than a comment on a single textual issue.
We’re going to treat it that way. But we’re also going to treat it as something else: an introduction to Rashi’s own method. Rashi never explains his method outright. We have to figure it out as we go along, and certain Rashis along the way will give us hints. This first Rashi is one of them.
And the hint is hiding in the first three words.
אמר רבי יצחק
Rabbi Yitzchak said.
Everything that follows those words — the entire substance of this Rashi — is a quote from Rabbi Yitzchak. But before we get to what Rabbi Yitzchak said, we need to stop and ask: who is Rabbi Yitzchak? And why is Rashi quoting him?
These may seem like small questions. They are not.
If I were giving a lecture and opened with “As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said...” or “In the words of Einstein...” — those names carry weight. They signal to you that what follows comes from someone whose insight you should take seriously, someone whose authority in a particular domain is well established. Rashi is doing the same thing here. Rabbi Yitzchak is a name that means something. And if we take some time to understand who he is and why Rashi considers him worth quoting, we will begin to understand one crucial aspect of what Rashi is doing in his commentary on the entire Chumash.
To get there, though, we need some background. More than just a bit.
We need to understand something fundamental about the Torah — something that some people readily grasp, and others find quite difficult. The Torah has two pillars. There is the תורה שבכתב, the Written Torah — that part which is actually written down. And there is the תורה שבעל פה, the Oral Torah — that part which was transmitted orally through the generations.
The goal of what follows is not to prove this claim or to argue theology. The goal is much simpler: to show that the idea of an oral tradition accompanying a written text should not surprise us at all.
In fact, what should surprise us is if there weren’t one.
The World the Torah Was Given Into
From the time of Avraham Avinu onward — and probably earlier — oral traditions existed throughout the ancient world. The Egyptians had them. The Hittites, the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Phoenicians — all of them passed down knowledge orally. Some of these traditions were stories, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which scholars believe began as an oral tradition long before it was written down. Some were laws and customs. The Phoenicians passed on trade routes and navigational knowledge through oral teaching. Various forms of wisdom literature circulated by word of mouth across the ancient Near East.
This makes sense for two reasons.
The first is technical. We are talking about a world before electricity, before the printing press, before mass literacy. Writing was the province of specialized scribes, often cloistered in temples or royal courts. Reading and writing were simply not the most practical means of disseminating information to large numbers of people. In this context, the Torah’s insistence that everyone in the nation should be able to engage with the written text is itself quite remarkable — a striking departure from the norms of the ancient world.
But there is a second, deeper reason why oral traditions flourished: they have qualities that writing does not. Oral transmission involves engagement. It involves dialogue — the ability to question, to discuss, to push back. A written text sits on a page. It cannot defend itself. It does not respond to your confusion. But a teacher, a conversation partner, a court of law — these can.
And it is here that we should look at two striking examples, both from the world outside the Torah, that illuminate this idea in different ways.
Homer and the Power of Memory
In the eighth century BCE — roughly the time of Yeshayahu HaNavi, Chizkiyahu HaMelech, and the exile of the ten tribes — a poet (or perhaps a tradition of poets) known as Homer composed two monumental works: the Iliad and the Odyssey.
These are massive texts. Hundreds of pages of material. And they were not written down — not for centuries. They were composed in a form designed for memorization and oral performance, using rhythmic structures and formulaic phrases that made them easier to remember, to recite, and to transmit. Generation after generation of performers memorized and passed on these epics, perhaps improvising in places, but preserving the core narrative with remarkable fidelity.
Hundreds of pages. Transmitted orally. For centuries.
That is remarkable. And it tells us something important: oral transmission, when done with care and structure, is capable of preserving vast quantities of information across long stretches of time.
Socrates and the Value of Not Writing Things Down
A few centuries later — in the period when the Jewish people were returning to Eretz Yisrael after the destruction of the First Beis HaMikdash, the time of Koresh (Cyrus) of Persia and the early prophets of Shivas Tzion like Chaggai and Zechariah — a man named Socrates was walking the streets of Athens.
Socrates did not write anything down. Not because he couldn’t, but because he believed he shouldn’t.
In one of the dialogues recorded by his student Plato — the Phaedrus — Socrates articulates a position that may sound surprising. He argues that writing things down is actually bad for learning. Writing weakens memory. It weakens understanding. When you commit something to writing, the words become fixed. They can’t defend themselves. They can’t respond to questions. They don’t invite the kind of thinking that emerges from genuine dialogue.
In a conversation, ideas are alive. Each side can challenge and refine the other’s thinking. That, for Socrates, was where real understanding happened.
Now, we might disagree with Socrates — and I think he takes his point too far. But there is truth in what he says. There is something irreplaceable about dialogue, about the back-and-forth of thinking together with another person, that a written text alone cannot fully replicate.
Greek society as a whole did not go as far as Socrates. The Greeks wrote prolifically. But they also built an extraordinary culture of oral education — the academy, the lyceum, public debates, rhetorical training. There was a dual track: a recognition that writing things down has value, and that discussing things orally has a different and complementary value.
This dual-track idea — writing and oral discussion working together — should sound familiar.
A Living Tradition Within the Torah Itself
So we’ve established that oral traditions were common throughout the ancient world, and that there are real reasons — both practical and philosophical — for why information might be transmitted orally rather than in writing.
Now let’s look at the Torah itself. Because within the written text of the Chumash, there are clear indications that something very much like an oral tradition must have existed alongside it.
Yisro and the Court System. Consider the story in Sefer Shemos where Yisro observes Moshe sitting from morning to night, fielding questions from the entire nation. People are coming to him with legal questions, questions about how to conduct themselves, disputes that need resolving. They come all day long. Yisro tells him this is unsustainable — he needs to set up a system of judges and courts at multiple levels.
Think about what this means. There are questions being asked. There are answers being given. There is, implicitly, a growing body of legal reasoning. Do we really think that once a question was answered, it was never discussed again? That no one remembered the ruling, passed it on, or referred to it when a similar case arose?
The Chumash describes a sophisticated court system — local judges in every city, higher courts for difficult cases, a supreme court in Yerushalayim. Any serious legal system generates precedent. New cases raise new questions about how to apply the law. That accumulated reasoning has to go somewhere.
The Shema. Then there is the Shema. In Devarim, we are explicitly told:
וְדִבַּרְתָּ בָּם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ
And you shall speak of them when you sit in your home and when you walk on the road.
The Torah itself commands us to talk about these things — at home and away, day and night. And to teach them to our children. When people discuss ideas, when they teach their children, when they engage with a text over the course of generations — new understandings develop. That is how intellectual societies work. That is how education works.
And the evidence does not stop with the Chumash.
Yehoshua. In the very first chapter of Sefer Yehoshua, HaKadosh Baruch Hu tells Yehoshua:
וְהָגִיתָ בּוֹ יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה
You shall meditate upon it day and night.
If the leader of the nation is instructed to contemplate the Torah constantly, do we imagine he kept every insight to himself? In a society whose foundational text demands that the Torah be taught, discussed, and lived?
Tehillim. The same idea appears in the very first chapter of Tehillim — the righteous person is described as one who meditates on the Torah day and night. So this is not only for leaders. It is a quality of anyone who takes the Torah seriously.
Shmuel, Devorah, and Shlomo. In Sefer Shmuel, we see Shmuel himself traveling throughout the land, judging the nation — which means adjudicating cases, which means applying the law, which means generating the kind of legal reasoning that accumulates over time. Devorah sat under a tree and took questions. Shlomo HaMelech was famous for his wisdom and his judgments, and the text references teachings of his that do not appear in any of the books we have.
Bnei Neviim. In Sefer Melachim, we encounter the בני נביאים — schools of prophets. Whatever they were studying in those schools, they were learning something, discussing something, and passing it on to their students.
Iyov. And then there is Sefer Iyov — a book-length dialogue in which a man and his companions sit together for days and engage in a passionate, searching debate about the deepest questions of suffering and justice. This is the portrait of a culture that valued sustained, serious oral discourse.
Ezra. Finally, when the Jews returned from Bavel in the time of Ezra, the text tells us they gathered the people together, read the Torah aloud, and explained it — making sure everyone understood. There was teaching. There was explanation. There was a living engagement with the text.
All of this points in one direction: from the time of Moshe through the end of Tanach and beyond, there was a rich, active, ongoing conversation about the Torah — its meaning, its application, its implications. The Chumash itself tells us to have these conversations. And human societies that value education do not simply ask questions and forget the answers.
Where Did It All Go?
So we have centuries — more than a millennium — of discussion, debate, teaching, and legal reasoning about the Torah. All of it happening orally, alongside the written text.
What happened to all of that?
The tradition tells us that this information was passed down through the generations. I assume this means that the deepest insights, most meaningful interpretations, and most authoritative legal reasoning were preserved and transmitted — while the less significant material was naturally filtered out over time.
And at a certain point in history, this vast oral inheritance began to be gathered together and organized into written collections. The Mishnah compiled legal traditions. The Gemara recorded the discussions and debates surrounding the Mishnah.
And then there were the Midrashim — some focused on halacha, legal matters, and others on aggadah, the philosophical, narrative, and homiletical dimensions of the Torah. Much of this material relates directly to understanding what the Chumash says and means.
Can Information Really Survive That Long?
At this point, a reasonable person might object. Can information really be preserved faithfully over a thousand years of oral transmission?
It can — if the system is designed for it. And to see why, consider a game most of us have played: Telephone.
In the classic version, someone whispers a word to the person next to them, who whispers it to the next, and so on down the line. By the end, “elephant” has become “pajamas,” and everyone laughs. This is a terrible system for transmitting information — and it is designed to be terrible. You whisper, which makes it hard to hear. You pass the message to only one person. There is no verification, no redundancy, no way to check whether the message arrived intact.
Now redesign the game.
This time, you don’t whisper. You write the word down clearly on a piece of paper and hand it to Reuven. Then you speak the word aloud and have Reuven repeat it back to you. He writes it down and shows it to you. You verify — written and oral, in both directions. Then you do exactly the same thing with Shimon.
Before either of them passes it on, Reuven and Shimon verify with each other — writing and speaking, checking and confirming. Only then do they move to the next row, where each of them repeats the entire process with Levi and Yehudah.
What you have now is a system built on two principles: redundancy and verification. Multiple people hold the same information. Multiple modes of transmission — written and oral — reinforce each other. And at every stage, the information is checked before it moves forward.
With a system like this, it does not matter whether there are ten rows or ten million. So long as the system is maintained, the information arrives intact.
Now, there can be disruptions. An earthquake. An exile. A period of upheaval where the lines of transmission thin out. But notice — the system does not require that every single link remain intact. If a hundred people in one generation hold the information and a disruption reduces that to five, those five can faithfully transmit to the next generation, and from there the chain can expand again. What matters is that a critical mass of carriers is maintained.
And when we look at the Torah’s own system, we see redundancy and verification everywhere. The Torah is written on scrolls. It is also written on stones. It is read publicly. There is a national gathering every seven years — הקהל — where the entire people hear the Torah read aloud. Every person is supposed to study it, teach it to their children, discuss it day and night. There are schools, courts, teachers, judges. Even in periods of decline, there were always core groups who preserved the tradition.
This is not wishful thinking. This is how information systems work. It is why DNA can replicate faithfully across billions of generations. It is why you can send an email that gets forwarded a million times and arrives with every word intact. The principle is the same: redundancy, verification, and a system designed to catch and correct errors.
What Rashi Is Doing
Now we can finally understand what Rashi is up to — and who Rabbi Yitzchak is.
An analogy might help. Most of us are familiar with the United States Constitution. Imagine you wanted to write a book explaining, line by line, what the Constitution means at its most fundamental level — its peshat, so to speak.
You wouldn’t just read the text and offer your own thoughts. You would go to the source material.
The debates that took place during ratification. The landmark court cases that interpreted and applied the text. The academic scholarship that has accumulated over two hundred and fifty years. And more.
You would sift through this enormous body of material and select the most authoritative, most insightful voices — the ones that best illuminate what the Constitution is actually saying.
That is something like what Rashi is doing with the Chumash.
The Chumash was written over three thousand years ago. Between then and Rashi’s time in eleventh-century France, more than two millennia of discussion, study, debate, and interpretation had taken place. Much of this was captured in the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the various Midrashim.
But it doesn’t stop there. Even within Tanach itself, the books of Nevi’im and Kesuvim contain passages that elucidate and develop ideas found in the Chumash. A line in Tehillim, a story in Melachim, a passage in Yeshayahu — these can shed light on what a verse in the Chumash means, even if the connection is not immediately obvious to us.
One aspect of Rashi’s genius is as a curator. He goes through this vast body of literature — the Midrashim, the Gemara, the rest of Tanach — and he selects. Not everything in that literature relates to peshat. Not every insight is about the straightforward, first-level reading of the text. Some material relates to remez, or drush, or sod — deeper layers of meaning. Rashi’s task is to find those statements, from among the thousands available to him, that best help us read the Chumash at the level of peshat.
And peshat, let me be clear, does not mean superficial. It means the first level of deep understanding. Think of it like meeting a person. You might interact with someone at length — observe their body language, listen to how they speak, watch how they conduct themselves — and come away with a genuinely good understanding of who they are. But there may still be deeper layers, things you would only discover through years of close relationship or in moments of crisis. Peshat is that first good understanding. It may be very deep. But there is deeper still.
Rashi wants to give us peshat. And one of his primary methods is drawing on the accumulated wisdom of the oral tradition — the insights of the sages whose words were preserved in the Midrashim and the Gemara — and selecting those that illuminate the straightforward reading of the text.
Meeting Rabbi Yitzchak
And so we arrive at Rabbi Yitzchak.
Rabbi Yitzchak was one of the Tanna’im — the sages of the Mishnaic period — whose teachings are found in the Midrash Tanchuma, among other sources. He is one of those great minds whose insights, transmitted and preserved across the generations, help us understand what the Chumash is saying at its most fundamental level. Rashi quotes him here, at the very opening of the Torah, because what Rabbi Yitzchak has to say speaks directly to the peshat of why the Torah begins where it begins.
It is like opening a book on constitutional law by quoting one of the great justices. The name signals authority. It signals that what follows is not casual opinion but the fruit of serious, sustained engagement with the text — the kind of engagement that has been happening, as we have seen, since the Torah was first given.
Now, Rashi does not continue this pattern of attribution throughout his commentary. He does not say אמר רבי פלוני before every comment. Most of the time, he simply presents the insight without naming the source. But here, at the very beginning, he lets us see behind the curtain. He is telling us: this is how I work. I am drawing on a tradition. I am drawing on the accumulated insight of the greatest minds who have engaged with this text over the centuries. And I am selecting from among them the ones that I believe best help us understand what the Torah is saying on the level of peshat.
That is what the first three words tell us.
אמר רבי יצחק
Three words — and in them, an entire methodology. A tradition of learning stretching back over a thousand years. A vast body of literature, carefully preserved, from which Rashi draws with extraordinary discernment. And an invitation to us: when you learn Rashi, you are not only reading the thoughts of one of the greatest Rishonim to ever live. You are also accessing a chain of insight that reaches back to the earliest conversations about the Torah itself.