The effect of their faith,
their piety, upon these simple souls was to make them somewhat
childish, and give their practices a somewhat superstitious
tinge. Thus, Rashi says in the name of his teacher Jacob ben
Yakar, that one should smell spices Saturday evening, because
hell, after having its work interrupted by the Sabbath, begins to
exhale a bad odor again in the evening. This naive faith at
least preserved Rashi from pursuing the paths not always avoided
by his co-religionists of Spain and the Provence, who dabbled in
philosophy. Rashi never was conscious of the need to justify
certain narratives or certain beliefs which shocked some readers
of the Bible. Not until he came upon a passage in the Talmud
which awakened his doubts did he feel called upon to explain why
God created humanity, though He knew it would become corrupt, and
why He asks for information concerning things which cannot escape
His omniscience. But Rashi was not bewildered by certain
anthropomorphic passages in the Bible, the meaning of which so
early a work as the Targum had veiled. Nor was he shocked by the
fact that God let other peoples adore the stars, and that altars
had been consecrated to Him elsewhere than at Jerusalem. Thus his
plain common sense kept him from wandering along by-paths and
losing himself in the subtleties in which the Ibn Ezras and the
Nahmanides were entangled. His common sense rendered him the
same service in the interpretation of many a Talmudic passage
that Saadia and Nissim had thought incapable of explanation
unless wrested from its literal meaning.
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