On the evening of January 24, 2023, Patrick Clancy drove out of his house in Duxbury, Massachusetts for a takeout order his wife had chosen and a medicine she had asked him to fetch, having checked that the store carried it. He was gone under half an hour. In the basement, Lindsay Clancy strangled their three children with exercise bands. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Then she went upstairs and threw herself from a second-story window, surviving with permanent paralysis.

A Massachusetts jury has now spent four days failing to agree about her. Neither the identity of the killer nor the physical sequence is in dispute; her defense concedes both and argues that mental illness had made her no longer criminally responsible.

Outside the courthouse a second impasse has formed, over whether maternal suffering and murdered children can be held inside a single moral frame. Women have appeared in pink shirts supporting Clancy.

On TikTok and Instagram, strangers recognize themselves in her exhaustion, her insomnia, the bewildering succession of medications, the experience of being failed by clinicians. Some have moved past sympathy into conspiracy, proposing that she did not kill the children at all, which her own defense does not claim. Reports from The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Atlantic describe an identification so complete that the medical system appears as the perpetrator and Clancy as its most visible victim.

Compassion for a mentally ill woman is no moral failure. But compassion has a camera, and here it keeps turning toward the living adult. We know the names of her medications, the chronology of her appointments, the hours she slept, the symptoms she reported and the ones she concealed, the clinicians she consulted, the diagnoses experts now dispute. We are invited into her terror, into the sensation of institutions closing around her. Cora, Dawson, and Callan appear as what happened to Lindsay.

We have seen this inversion before, in a more political and more grotesque form.

Ariel Bibas was four years old when he was taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz. His brother Kfir was nine months old. The image of their mother Shiri clutching two redheaded boys inside a crowd of armed men became one of the defining photographs of October 7. Israeli forensic authorities concluded that Ariel and Kfir were murdered by their captors in November 2023, contradicting Hamas’s claim that they died in an Israeli airstrike. Hamas killed two small Jewish children and then conscripted their corpses into propaganda.

Outside Gaza the inversion took a more respectable form. Hamas remained the ostensible victim, its violence absorbed into the suffering of the population on whose behalf it claimed to act.

Nobody is celebrating the murders of Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

What the two cases share is a reversal of moral attention.

In Duxbury the reversal wears compassion. Lindsay becomes the victim: of postpartum depression, of psychosis, of psychiatric medication, of medical negligence, of an unaffordable health system, of the expectations laid on mothers, perhaps of her husband. Each of these may name something real. Accumulated around the woman who performed the killings, they render the three children she killed nearly invisible.

The grammar is recognizable. Explain the killer. Identify the forces acting upon the killer. Transfer moral attention to those forces. Remember the killer as someone to whom something happened. The children survive as the residue of somebody else’s victimhood.

One can almost write the last conspiracy in advance. Clancy could not obtain treatment because the United States spends its money supporting Israel instead of providing psychiatric care, and Israel therefore becomes responsible for the Duxbury basement as well. No one has proposed this, which is why it belongs here only as satire. It would consummate a habit of mind in which every chain of causation, however long, eventually arrives at the Jews, and every chain of agency, however short, stops just before the person who killed the children.

Rabbinic thought begins somewhere else. Human beings act through forces: desire, despair, jealousy, fantasy, illness, and what the Talmud calls a spirit of folly. Naming the force does not make the actor disappear.

אין אדם עובר עבירה אלא אם כן נכנס בו רוח שטות. A person does not transgress unless a spirit of folly has entered him. (Sotah 3a)

All sin is insane. The sinner remains.

The dictum belongs to Reish Lakish, the third-century Galilean whom the Talmud remembers as a bandit before he was a sage, and it turns on a spelling. The Torah’s passage on the suspected adulteress reads איש איש כי תשטה אשתו, if any man’s wife goes astray (Numbers 5:12), and Reish Lakish notes that the consonants as written can be pointed tishteh, from shtut, folly. Sin occurs when a person’s grasp of reality goes crooked. An apparent good eclipses the good. An act that ought to be impossible becomes, inside the sinner’s picture of the world, necessary.

The same passage says the husband is moved by רוח קנאה, a spirit of jealousy, which the sages debate whether to call a spirit of impurity or a spirit of purity. Both parties act under a ruaḥ, a spirit or wind, and neither one vanishes. A force can enter a person, color perception, and move conduct without becoming the only agent in the room.

The demand here is for a more exacting psychology than the one offered in its place. We are responsible for more than the decisions made in moments of clean rationality: for our habits of attention, for the beliefs we indulge and the fantasies we rehearse, for what we conceal, for the ways we let desire or grievance or despair make another human being seem expendable. Much of morality is our responsibility for cognition.

That cannot mean every disorder is culpable. Rabbinic law recognizes the shoteh, the person whose collapse of da’at, settled mind, removes the legal authorship that obligation, transaction, testimony, and punishment all require. The law refuses to infer that status from the bare fact that someone has done something insane.

Hagigah 3b asks the question directly: איזהו שוטה, who is a shoteh? A baraita answers with behaviors. One who goes out alone at night, one who sleeps in a cemetery, one who tears his clothing. Rav Huna requires the signs together; Rabbi Yoḥanan holds one may suffice. Then the Gemara dismantles the list. Each bizarre act may have a situational explanation. The cemetery sleeper may be seeking an impure spirit. The night walker may have a different illness. The man tearing his clothing may be absorbed in thought. The conduct must be performed דרך שטות, in the manner of derangement, and strangeness alone establishes nothing.

Even then the sugya wants a pattern. The three behaviors together are compared to an ox that has gored an ox, a donkey, and a camel and has thereby become mu’ad, legally established as dangerous across circumstances. Status does not follow from one incomprehensible event that an observer calls crazy.

The placement of the question is revealing. Immediately before it, Hagigah tells of Rabbi Eliezer, enraged by a report from the study house, telling Rabbi Yosei ben Durmaskit to hold out his hands and catch his own eyes, which came out of their sockets. Only לאחר שנתיישבה דעתו, after his mind had settled, does Rabbi Eliezer pray for them to return. Then comes איזהו שוטה. A sage can lose settled judgment, blind a colleague, recover, and repair the damage, and the text never reclassifies him as a person outside responsibility.

Eruvin 65a makes the spectrum explicit. A drunk person’s transactions stand. If he commits a capital offense he is executed, the baraita says, because הרי הוא כפיקח לכל דבריו, he is like a competent person in every respect, exempt only from prayer. Only intoxication reaching שכרותו של לוט, the obliterating drunkenness of Lot, exempts him from everything. On the same page, far lesser disturbances, anger and travel and distraction and lack of composure, can make a person temporarily unfit to pray or to judge. The mind can be too compromised for one function while remaining present for others.

Psychosis is not intoxication, and illness should not be condemned as self-induced drunkenness. The analogy is about gradation. A person can be confused, deluded, compulsive, emotionally shattered, and cognitively narrowed while remaining the author of an action. What capacities did the illness actually destroy?

Clancy’s conduct that day, as presented at trial, bears the marks of practical authorship. She took a child to an appointment and played with the children in the snow. She chose the dinner, looked up the restaurant, placed the order, sent Patrick to retrieve it, and added the errand for medicine. During his absence she killed three children in succession, then went upstairs and attempted suicide. The prosecution reads these details as planning; the defense reads them as organized conduct inside psychosis. Even the defense’s account has to distinguish psychosis from non-agency. A person can reason coherently from a monstrous false premise. If Clancy believed the children had to die in order to be safe, the delusion identifies her motive without eliminating the agent who selected means and pursued the end.

The strongest objection comes from the rabbinic sources themselves, because Torah law does recognize episodic non-agency.

Gittin 67b considers a man seized by kordyakos, a temporary deranged state brought on, the Talmud says, by new wine. If the episode seizes him and he then orders agents to write a divorce, לא אמר כלום, he has said nothing. If he issued the order while competent, became deranged, and then retracted it, the retraction carries no legal force. The body speaks intelligible sentences and the law declines to attribute them to an authorized legal self.

Rosh Hashanah 28a draws the line as sharply. If Persians compel a competent person to eat matzah, the act can discharge the obligation despite the absence of ordinary willingness. If a shed, a demon, seizes him and he eats during an episode in which he is a shoteh, it does not count: כשהוא חלים הרי הוא כפיקח לכל דבריו, כשהוא שוטה הרי הוא כשוטה לכל דבריו. When lucid, he is competent in every respect; when deranged, he is a shoteh in every respect.

These texts block any easy claim that every bodily act must have a legally responsible author. Sometimes the body acts while legal personality is offline. If that was Clancy’s condition in the minutes she killed her children, the classical category points toward exemption.

“She heard a commanding voice” does not by itself establish that condition. Rosh Hashanah distinguishes coercion from incapacity, and “I felt compelled” answers what pressured the actor rather than whether an actor capable of understanding or resisting remained. Gittin distinguishes comprehensible speech from legally authored speech, and it can do so only because the disabling episode has already been established independently. Neither source lets an act’s strangeness prove its own non-attribution.

She was plainly not normal, and her belief was plainly not rational. The question is whether she remained inside the derangement as a choosing subject, capable of concealing, timing, sequencing, adapting, and converting a belief into a plan. Psychosis can coexist with all of that. Where it does, the illness explains the form of the culpability and leaves the culpability standing.

This is why the phrase “not criminally responsible” misleads even when it names a valid legal category. It invites the public to imagine mental illness and responsibility at opposite ends of a switch. The rabbinic map is less consoling. Ordinary responsibility already contains folly, compulsion, partial knowledge, self-deception, and degrees of unsettled judgment. The exemption sits at the far end of that spectrum, where the person no longer possesses the da’at that would make the act hers. On the publicly reported evidence, Clancy did not reach it.

Suppose that judgment is wrong. Suppose she was, for those minutes, a true shoteh. Rabbinic law is clear about what follows.

חרש שוטה וקטן פגיעתן רעה; החובל בהן חייב, והם שחבלו באחרים פטורין.

An encounter with a deaf-mute, a shoteh, or a minor is harmful: one who injures them is liable, and when they injure others they are exempt. (Bava Kamma 87a)

The shoteh who recovers does not become liable afterward for the earlier injury. His case differs from the slave or the married woman in the next clause, who possess agency and lack collectable property; their debt survives and can be collected later. The shoteh’s liability never arose.

The Mishnah therefore refuses to punish a true shoteh on the ground that somebody must pay. It also refuses to call the injury resolved. It calls the encounter פגיעתן רעה, and the result is bad in both directions. When the vulnerable person is injured, the injurer pays. When the legally incompetent person inflicts the injury, an innocent victim is left without compensation.

That is the moral remainder concealed by the clinical language around Clancy. A verdict of not criminally responsible would settle a question about her capacities. It would not restore Cora, Dawson, and Callan or make their terror less real. Exemption is not vindication. It means the law of agency may leave victims without a person it can punish.

The court must focus on Clancy’s mind, because her capacity is the issue before it. The rest of us are not bound to that focal point. Our sympathy has followed the defendant into her medical records and left the children alone in the basement a second time.

There is a further reason the insanity claim cannot close the inquiry. Incapacity changes the responsibilities of the competent people around the incapacitated person.

Bava Kamma 39a takes up an ox belonging to a ḥeresh, a shoteh, or a minor. The owner’s incapacity initially disrupts ordinary liability. Once the animals have become established as dangerous, הוחזקו נגחנין, the court appoints an apotropos, a guardian, and delivers the required warning in his presence. The system manufactures a competent address for prospective responsibility. Incapacity is not permitted to leave a known danger permanently unguarded.

The comparison has to be disciplined. Lindsay Clancy is not an ox, mental illness is not animal dangerousness, and Patrick was not her owner. The legal structure is what illuminates: demonstrated danger, notice, guardianship, a prospective duty to guard. Once a risk becomes recognizable, another person’s incapacity does not absolve the competent people who could prevent the injury.

Bava Kamma 59b brings it closer. “One who sends fire through the hand of a deaf-mute, a shoteh, or a minor,” the Mishnah says, “is exempt under human law and liable under the laws of Heaven.” The Gemara then asks how completely the competent person furnished the danger. Did he hand over only an ember that still had to be fanned? A flame? The fuel and kindling and lamp together, making the destruction more nearly his own act? Liability in a human court turns on causation. Moral responsibility reaches further.

Then the passage turns from fire law into catastrophe. Once permission is given to the destroyer, the Bavli says, it does not distinguish between righteous and wicked, and it may begin with the righteous. Rav Yosef weeps. The legal discussion assigns causation; the aggadah beside it makes the reader look at the innocent people whom released destruction consumes.

That is the right frame for asking about Patrick Clancy and the clinicians who treated Lindsay. It establishes no crime and transfers none of Lindsay’s guilt. It asks whether competent adults had notice of a danger, held a duty to protect the children, and furnished that danger with its opportunity anyway.

Patrick knew his wife was gravely unwell and had been suicidal. He testified that she had described intrusive thoughts of harming the children. He had also never seen her harm them, understood the thoughts as unwanted, relied on professional treatment, saw that clinicians had discharged her, and believed she was improving. Those facts make the negligence question hard. They do not make it illegitimate.

Every negligent entrustment contains an act of trust, so “he trusted her” cannot serve as its own defense. The question is whether the trust was reasonable given what he knew, what he had been told, what the clinicians represented, and what precautions were available.

The defense’s strongest description of Clancy puts pressure on the decision to leave her alone with three defenseless children. If she remained a functional adult capable of guarding them, that same competence tells against treating her, minutes later, as a body emptied of agency. If she had deteriorated so far that she could not be responsible for strangling them, then placing them under her exclusive control demands an account of who was responsible for recognizing and managing that incapacity.

Yevamot 112b supplies the domestic dimension. The rabbis did not institute marriage for a shoteh, since such a bond could not sustain reciprocal domestic life. Yet when a wife became a shota after a valid marriage, the husband could not simply divorce her and walk away, lest others treat her מנהג הפקר, as ownerless.

A household cannot claim the benefits of treating someone as autonomous when that is convenient and invoke her total dependency only after the catastrophe.

Three levels of responsibility are in play. Clancy’s direct criminal responsibility for the killings. Possible negligence by people who had notice and a duty of protection. And the wider category the Talmud calls חייב בדיני שמים, liable under the laws of Heaven: failures that positive law cannot confidently punish and that remain blameworthy. Someone can be acquitted at one level without everyone becoming innocent at all three.

Discovering that an evil act has psychological causes is not discovering that nobody acted. Every human act has psychological causes. The question is whether the person remained inside those causes, distorted and desperate and deluded, still able to translate belief into plan and plan into action.

All sin is insane. The claim challenges the assumption that psychological intelligibility and responsibility are enemies. Sin is possible because human beings can become strangers to truths they still hold, can organize intelligence around a falsehood, and can recruit practical reason into the service of destruction. The greater the crime, the more tempting it becomes to say that no sane person could have done it. If atrocity proves insanity and insanity proves innocence, the worst act supplies its own defense.

Clancy’s illness explains the world in which she killed her children. It does not show that she stopped being the person acting in that world. She is guilty.

The deaths of three defenseless children merit the ultimate language of retributive judgment. Massachusetts has no death penalty, and the evidentiary and procedural demands of classical Torah execution are plainly absent.

A society can decide it will not execute and still recognize that some acts deserve its most terrible condemnation.

If the jury concludes instead that she was a true momentary shoteh, the inquiry cannot end at the vacant chair where responsibility used to sit. It has to turn toward those who knew, those who treated, those who discharged, those who entrusted, and those who held the power to guard. Perhaps they acted reasonably. Perhaps no one could have anticipated the rupture. Incapacity is not a solvent to pour over the whole scene.

The more completely we remove responsibility from the person who killed the children, the more we have to ask who accepted responsibility for keeping them alive.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan were not symptoms of their mother’s disease. Ariel and Kfir were not symbols available for the rehabilitation of their captors.

Joseph’s brothers strip him of his ornamented coat. A priest removes his garments before changing stages of service. Moses strips Aaron and places the priestly clothing upon Eleazar. And in the opening chapter of Leviticus, the same verb names an operation performed upon a sacrificial animal:

וְהִפְשִׁיט אֶת־הָעֹלָה וְנִתַּח אֹתָהּ לִנְתָחֶיהָ

“He shall flay the burnt offering and divide it into its pieces” (Leviticus 1:6).

First the governing surface is separated from the body; then the body can be distinguished into its parts.

The biblical word for skin or hide is עוֹר, not peshat. Nor can the shared root by itself prove that the rabbis who later spoke of peshuto shel mikra consciously imagined reading as sacrificial flaying. Yet the later hermeneutical term belongs to the same פ־ש־ט word-family whose biblical verbs describe stripping a garment and flaying an offering. Returning the technical term to this older field of bodily action permits a different archaeology of the idea.

What if peshat is not the meaning lying untouched on the text’s exterior? What if it is the reading produced by disciplined removal of that which stands in the way?

In this paradigm, it’s not that truth waits naked beneath deceptive clothing. No, the hide removed from the burnt offering becomes priestly property. Joseph’s stripped coat carries his status away from him. Aaron’s garments transmit an office to his son. And the Torah itself will be written on processed animal skin, on a surface that did not become visible until the hide was removed and worked.

Peshat, on this account, is neither the first surface nor the naked body underneath. It is a second surface: a reading made possible by stripping, articulation, inversion, and preparation. Recovering that possibility requires following the root from shepherd and hunter to priest and tanner, through the garments that deceive and the garments that confer authority, until a flayed hide becomes capable of bearing words.

The Hunter’s Skin

Esav enters the world as a body already resembling clothing: אַדְמוֹנִי כֻּלּוֹ כְּאַדֶּרֶת שֵׂעָר—red, “all of him like a mantle of hair” (Genesis 25:25). He is not merely hairy. He is like an adderet, a cloak.

He soon becomes אִישׁ יֹדֵעַ צַיִד אִישׁ שָׂדֶה, “a man who knew hunting, a man of the field,” while Jacob is אִישׁ תָּם יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים, a quiet or complete man dwelling in tents (Genesis 25:27). The opposition is spatial as well as temperamental. Esau goes outward toward wild animals. Jacob remains among the tents and flocks. Esau’s identity is written on his hairy body and enacted in the open field; Jacob is smooth, domestic, difficult to classify by touch.

When Isaac prepares to bless Esau, he asks his son to perform that identity: צֵא הַשָּׂדֶה וְצוּדָה לִּי צָיִד—“Go out to the field and hunt game for me” (Genesis 27:3). Esau’s hunt is not incidental catering. It is the action through which the son presents himself to his father as worthy of blessing. He will bring the product of his vocation, Isaac will eat, and the paternal soul will bless.

Rebekah replaces the hunt with a domestic counterfeit. She instructs Jacob to go not to the field but to the flock and bring two goat kids. One becomes food. The skins become Jacob’s new body. She dresses him in Esau’s coveted garments and then עֹרֹת גְּדָיֵי הָעִזִּים הִלְבִּישָׁה עַל־יָדָיו—“clothed his hands with the skins of the goat kids” (Genesis 27:15–16).

Jacob thus approaches Isaac in two borrowed surfaces. Esau’s garments are his social skin, saturated with the scent of the field. The goats’ hides are his bodily skin, reproducing the hunter’s hair. His voice alone remains uncovered.

Jacob has not hunted the animals; Rebekah took them from the family flock. Yet he becomes the more successful hunter. Esau goes out to capture game. Jacob uses animal skins to capture recognition, blessing, and status. Esau converts animals into food; Jacob converts them into signs. The hunter is defeated by someone who learns to hunt with surfaces.

Isaac confronts conflicting textual witnesses. Language tells him one thing; touch, clothing, taste, and smell tell him another. The majority of the evidence supports Esau, but the evidence has been staged precisely to produce that result. The obvious reading is not pre-interpretive. It is the successful product of somebody else’s interpretation.

There is another complication. Isaac misidentifies the son, but the blessing may nevertheless reach its proper recipient. The exterior is false, yet the destiny it mediates may be true.

Bereshit Rabbah 65:22 notices that goatskins ought to smell foul. How, then, can Isaac smell Jacob’s garments and discover “the scent of a field blessed by the Lord”? The midrash answers that Eden entered with Jacob. Beneath the vile animal odor Isaac somehow detects the fragrance of a blessed world.

The midrash does not simply rescue Jacob from moral embarrassment. It radicalizes the hermeneutical problem. A false garment may convey a true blessing; an act of misrecognition may disclose something that ordinary sight would miss. Garments cannot therefore be reduced to lies, nor naked interiors identified with truth. Surfaces can deceive, but they can also bear authority, memory, scent, and futurity.

A second layer has come away. “Surface” cannot mean what exists before interpretation. Rebekah’s surface is already an interpretation; selected, assembled, and fitted to make one identity legible as another. The obvious reading is not raw evidence. It is someone’s finished argument.

From Hunter to Priest

The later midrashic tradition brings priesthood and sacrifice directly into the Jacob–Esau conflict.

Bamidbar Rabbah 4:8 identifies the garments God made for Adam and Eve—כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר, garments of skin—as garments associated with the sacrificial service of the firstborn. The tradition traces sacred clothing through the ancestral succession and explains Jacob’s purchase of Esau’s birthright as a desire to perform sacrificial service.

The connection produces a remarkable chain: skin becomes garment; garment conveys the birthright; the birthright authorizes priestly service; priestly service centers on sacrifice. Jacob’s dressing in Genesis 27 can now be read as more than disguise. It is an irregular investiture. He puts on the visible identity of the firstborn at the moment he receives the blessing attached to that identity. He dresses the part.

The Torah itself does not state that Esau’s garments were priestly garments, but here we find an enigma: why are Esau’s special garments in Rebekah’s possession, and why do clothing, animal skins, food, smell, firstborn status, and blessing converge in a single scene? The midrash answers by placing the garments within a sacred genealogy.

It also clarifies the difference between hunter and priest. Both stand over dead animals. Both remove skins. Both convert bodies into usable forms. But hunting and sacrifice establish opposing economies. The hunter makes the animal his possession. The priest receives an animal that has already been designated for relinquishment. Hunting culminates in capture; sacrifice culminates in offering.

Jacob stands uneasily between the two. He defeats the hunter by putting on the hunter’s surface, but the status he seeks is construed by the midrash as the authority to sacrifice. The animal hide is the medium of his passage from the world of Esau to the world of priesthood.

The Coat That Reads Its Reader

The Joseph story returns Jacob to the same interpretive chamber, now in his father’s place. The repetitions are too dense to dismiss as general family resemblance. In Genesis 27, a goat is slaughtered, its skin is joined to a son’s body, a brother’s garment supplies identity, and a blind father is asked to recognize the son before him. In Genesis 37, a son is stripped, a goat is slaughtered, its blood is joined to the son’s garment, and a father is ordered to recognize the absent son.

Even the governing root returns. Isaac “did not recognize” Jacob, וְלֹא הִכִּירוֹ. The brothers tell Jacob, הַכֶּר־נָא. Jacob recognizes the coat, וַיַּכִּירָהּ - but is fooled as a result. The second scene transforms the deceiver into the deceived and the son into the father. The inversion exposes two different kinds of misreading.

Isaac hears a contradiction and remains suspicious. He misidentifies Jacob but transmits a blessing that the narrative will not revoke. Jacob, by contrast, recognizes the coat with confidence and authors the false conclusion himself: חַיָּה רָעָה אֲכָלָתְהוּ, טָרֹף טֹרַף יוֹסֵף—“A wild beast has eaten him; Joseph has surely been torn apart” (Genesis 37:33). His sons never say this. They prepare the surface and allow their father to narrate the death of Joseph.

The goat, moreover, has changed functions. In the blessing scene the hide is worn and the blood disappears into the meal. In the Joseph scene the body disappears and the blood is written onto the coat. Jacob once hid himself beneath an animal surface; his sons now hide Joseph’s continued life behind one. The hunter’s technology has become a hermeneutical weapon.

Joseph is explicitly stripped.

: וַיַּפְשִׁיטוּ אֶת־יוֹסֵף אֶת־כֻּתָּנְתּוֹ אֶת־כְּתֹנֶת הַפַּסִּים אֲשֶׁר עָלָיו—“They stripped Joseph—his tunic, the ornamented tunic that was upon him” (Genesis 37:23).

The syntax piles object upon object: Joseph, his tunic, his ornamented tunic. The violence seems directed at the person as clothed, Joseph in the status his father gave him. As if the hide were the proxy for the man. Ibn Ezra on Genesis 37:23

reads the stripping as leaving Joseph naked before he is thrown into the pit.

Ha‘amek Davar on Genesis 37:23 offers a political reading: the coat is an insignia of rank, and before an important person is punished, his status is removed. The brothers are conducting a deposition.

But Joseph has not been reduced to an essence. He enters a succession of new surfaces: servant, household administrator, accused seducer whose abandoned garment becomes evidence, prisoner, and finally Egyptian ruler clothed by Pharaoh. Garments do not merely hide Joseph. They constitute his changing offices, including the change of clothes that will mark him viceroy of Egypt. His story therefore blocks any naïve philosophy in which stripping away externals automatically reveals an authentic, timeless self. Beneath one garment is a vulnerable body awaiting another investiture.

A third layer has come away. “Removal” cannot mean revelation of a pure interior. Joseph is stripped not into authenticity but into exposure.

Flaying - removing layers - changes the conditions under which a body can be read.

The Priest Who Changes Clothes

Priestly law takes this dangerous power of surfaces and subjects it to ritual order.

In the daily altar service, the Torah instructs the priest: וּפָשַׁט אֶת־בְּגָדָיו וְלָבַשׁ בְּגָדִים אֲחֵרִים—“He shall remove his garments and put on other garments” before carrying the ashes outside the camp (Leviticus 6:4). One stage of sacred labor requires one surface; another stage requires another.

Yom Kippur expands this principle into an elaborate choreography of investiture and divestment. The High Priest moves between the golden garments of his ordinary high-priestly office and the white linen garments required for entry into the innermost sanctuary. When the linen service is complete, Aaron returns to the Tent of Meeting: וּפָשַׁט אֶת־בִּגְדֵי הַבָּד אֲשֶׁר לָבַשׁ בְּבֹאוֹ אֶל־הַקֹּדֶשׁ וְהִנִּיחָם שָׁם—“He shall remove the linen garments that he wore when he entered the sacred place, and leave them there” (Leviticus 16:23).

The garments are not exposed as fraudulent. They were true garments for a bounded encounter.

This offers a better model for the relation between peshat and derash than is normally thought.

Derash need not be an alien covering that the courageous modern reader tears away. It may be a sacred garment fitted to a particular service: legal derivation, homily, theology, consolation, communal memory. The mistake is not wearing it. The mistake is forgetting that one has entered another chamber and refusing to change clothes. Still, the new meaning of peshat emerges - despite being the first level named in the Pardes, it is by no means the first mode of reading we learn. Stripping away homily is the beginning of Peshat.

Why did God choose Abraham? The Midrash answers: b/c Abraham destroyed his father’s idols (not in the text). But the Pashtan removes this blinder and encounters something more strange: the Torah does not tell us why God chose Abraham, only that God did. Where drash rushes to fill in the lacuna, peshat begins by admitting it exists.

At Aaron’s death the transfer becomes still starker. God tells Moses: וְהַפְשֵׁט אֶת־אַהֲרֹן אֶת־בְּגָדָיו וְהִלְבַּשְׁתָּם אֶת־אֶלְעָזָר בְּנוֹ—“Strip Aaron of his garments and clothe his son Eleazar in them” (Numbers 20:26). Moses strips Aaron, clothes Eleazar, and Aaron dies (Numbers 20:28).

Here the garment bears an office that survives the individual body. Aaron can be separated from the priesthood; the priesthood can be placed upon Eleazar. The controlled transfer on Mount Hor repairs, or at least contrasts with, the irregular transfer in Genesis 27. Rebekah dresses one son in the garments of another to capture a contested blessing. Moses strips a father and clothes his son to transmit an acknowledged office. Genesis shows investiture as family deception; Numbers turns it into public law.

Another layer has been removed. A garment is not false merely because it can be removed. Aaron’s clothing is neither decoration nor disguise; it is a real, transferable office. The priestly laws do not abolish surfaces. They discipline their use.

Flaying the Offering

The animal counterpart to priestly undressing is the flaying of the olah, the burnt offering. Leviticus 1 presents the sequence: slaughter, blood service, flaying, division, washing, arrangement, and burning. The olah is conventionally described as the sacrifice that ascends entirely to God, but the description conceals an important qualification: Its hide is removed before the flesh is burned. Leviticus 7:8 assigns that hide to the officiating priest.

The outside does not ascend with the inside. Nor is it discarded as refuse. It becomes priestly property.

This division complicates every easy metaphor about stripping away superficiality.

The skin is not worthless falsity. It is valuable, durable, transferable, and capable of an independent afterlife. Indeed, the physical Torah will itself eventually be written on processed animal hide. The surface removed from one body can become the material surface of sacred words.

The Mishnah and Gemara in Zevachim 103b–104a presents the hide’s independence as a legal problem. If an offering is disqualified before flaying, its hide does not go to the priests; after flaying, it may. But the Gemara refuses to let the physical knife settle the matter so easily. Does the hide acquire independent status through actual separation, through the acceptance effected by the blood, or when the sacrifice becomes fit to be flayed? One formulation reinterprets “before flaying” and “after flaying” as before and after the offering becomes eligible for flaying.

The Talmud thereby performs upon the Mishnah the very operation it is discussing. It removes the physical surface of the phrase and discovers beneath it a legal structure of time, fitness, blood, flesh, and ownership. Yet the physical meaning never disappears. The abstraction remains accountable to an animal body.

Rabbi Ḥanina, deputy High Priest, adds that in all his days he never saw a hide go out to the place of burning. Rabbi Akiva derives law from his testimony; the Sages reply, אֵין לֹא רָאִינוּ רְאָיָה—failure to observe something is no proof.

What appears, or fails to appear, on the surface of remembered practice does not by itself determine the law. Visibility is evidence, not verdict. The rabbis learned the lesson that tripped up Isaac and Jacob.

Pesachim 57a then narrates the social danger of the priestly remainder. Sacrificial hides were supposed to be divided among the serving priests, but powerful priests seized them בִּזְרוֹעַ, by force. Reforms failed; priestly grandees continued taking them. The owners finally consecrated the hides to Heaven, and their value became gold plates covering the Temple.

The cycle is astonishing: an animal’s outer surface is removed, becomes contested priestly property, is rescued from violent possession, and returns as the glorious outer surface of the sanctuary. Peshat is far from self-evident; it is a contested movement.

Every interpreter should feel the warning. To flay a text is to produce a valuable remainder. The priest-reader may mistake that remainder for private property, seize it, and confuse authorized service with ownership. At that moment the priest has become the hunter.

A new layer has come away. “Skin” cannot mean disposable superficiality. The olah’s hide is valuable enough to become priestly property, dangerous enough to provoke seizure, and sacred enough to return as gold upon the Temple. What is removed from the offering does not cease to matter. It begins another history. Peshat produces a remainder - the reading as a textual offering, an attempt to draw near the divine, but also as an excess.

The Tanner’s Smell

There is, however, a missing worker between the priest who receives a hide and the scribe who writes a Torah scroll on parchment - the animal’s interior, the netherside of the skin that deceives. A flayed skin is not yet parchment. It must be cleaned, treated, stretched, scraped, and processed.

The romantic metaphor of “getting beneath the surface” suppresses this material interval. The interval has a smell.

Rabbinic law is unusually frank about it.

Mishnah Bava Batra 2:9 groups the tannery with carcasses and graves and requires all three to be kept fifty cubits from the city. The tannery is necessary to urban life, but its odor determines where it may exist. Society needs the transformed hide and banishes the transformer to its edge.

The social cost follows the worker home.

Mishnah Ketubot 7:10 lists the בּוּרְסִי, the tanner, among the foul-smelling occupations that may justify compelling a husband to divorce. In the Mishnah’s final case, a woman whose tanner husband has died may refuse levirate marriage to his tanner brother: “I could endure your brother; I cannot endure you.” The distinction is intimate and devastating. A community may require tanning in the abstract while no particular body is required to bear its smell without limit.

The later rabbinic aphorism gives the paradox its cleanest form: the world cannot exist without the perfumer and without the tanner; fortunate is the one whose craft is perfume, woe to the one whose craft is tanning (Kiddushin 82b). Civilization requires both fragrance and stench, prestige and abasement. The fragrant scroll silently depends upon labor whose odor it does not retain. The process required for producing texts is literally disgusting. And peshat analysis comes closer to this material reality.

This changes the metaphor of peshat. The reader is not only a priest performing a bounded ritual or an anatomist exposing structure. The reader is also a tanner: an expert in peshitah whose craft is necessary, skilled, and socially unglamorous. Research is messy because the conversion of surface into writing surface is messy. The finished argument may possess decorum; the labor that prepared it handled decay, residue, contradiction, and material that respectable readers would rather not touch.

Not only this, but sacred writing appears not on the side of the hide that faced the world but on a surface disclosed by processing.

Shabbat 79b formulates the mnemonic for the split layers: klaf is written במקום בשר, on the side toward the flesh, while dukhsustos is written במקום שיער, on the side toward the hair. The precise identification of these layers became a dispute among later authorities, and manufacturing practices changed. But the governing material fact remains suggestive. Torah is written on a surface that an intact living animal never presented to the reader’s eye, it is the surface beneath the surface, the surface turned inward.

Peshat is not identical with klaf (scroll), as though “plain meaning” simply named the page’s visible exterior. Rather, the klaf itself is an achievement: hide flayed, inverted, divided or scraped, and prepared לשמה, for the sake of sacred writing. What looks like the immediate surface of the text is already the result of slaughter, separation, skilled labor, and consecrated intention.

One might be tempted here by the sonic resemblance between klaf and kelippah, parchment and husk. It is a suggestive pun, especially for later Jewish traditions in which kelippah becomes the name of an obstructing shell. The physical relation is stronger than the wordplay: the sacred surface is produced by removing, turning, and working what was once an animal’s covering.

The tanner also corrects the fantasy that flaying immediately reveals truth. Flaying exposes flesh; tanning makes skin durable. Between revelation and readability lies craft. Peshat is achieved not at the moment of the cut but when the removed surface has been worked long enough to receive writing.

Another layer has come away. “Beneath” cannot mean readable. The hidden side becomes a writing surface only through labor whose smell the completed scroll no longer carries.

The Depth of Peshat

The rabbinic maxim אֵין מִקְרָא יוֹצֵא מִידֵי פְשׁוּטוֹ—“A verse does not depart from its peshat”—appears in Shabbat 63a in an unexpectedly appropriate setting. The Mishnah is discussing whether a man may go out on Shabbat wearing weapons. Rabbi Eliezer calls them ornaments; the Sages call them a disgrace. A verse describing a sword as glory and splendor is offered in support of Rabbi Eliezer. Rav Kahana objects that the sword in that verse signifies words of Torah. He is answered: a verse does not depart from its peshat. The sword can bear an allegorical meaning without ceasing to be a sword.

The maxim about peshat emerges inside a dispute over something worn on a body: is the visible object a garment, an instrument, an ornament, or a shame? Rav Kahana has clothed the sword in allegory, making actual swords invalid as ornaments. The reply does not tear that allegory away as false; it prevents the allegory from consuming the concrete object that made it possible.

Rav Kahana’s response is more surprising still. He says that by the age of eighteen he had learned the entire Talmud, yet he did not know this principle until now. The passage concludes: דְּלִיגְמַר אִינִישׁ וַהֲדַר לִיסְבַּר—a person should first learn and afterward reason.

This makes little sense if peshat is simply the meaning apparent before education begins. Rav Kahana possesses extraordinary learning and has still not achieved it. Peshat is not intellectual infancy. It is a late discipline, perhaps even a recovery from the brilliance of one’s own accumulated interpretations.

The Talmud’s recurrent exchange פשיטא—צריכא, “that is obvious”—“it is necessary,” adds a nearby, though linguistically Aramaic, irony. Peshita does not end the discussion. It is an objection demanding that the text justify its presence: if the law is obvious, why was it taught? The answer, tzrikha, removes the appearance of redundancy by constructing the case in which the teaching becomes necessary. Even “obvious” meaning is therefore something the sugya pressures, cuts open, and rearticulates. What first looked self-evident becomes the material of a problem. Peshita, in rabbinic parlance, becomes the engine for discovering why the stripped away thing was not as simple or obvious as first seemed.

Rashbam makes this explicit at Genesis 37:2

, just as the Joseph story begins. Earlier interpreters, he writes, were drawn by their piety toward derash and consequently were not accustomed to עוֹמֶק פְּשׁוּטוֹ שֶׁל מִקְרָא, “the depth of Scripture’s peshat.” He cites Rav Kahana’s confession and reports that his grandfather Rashi acknowledged that, given time, he would produce further explanations according to הַפְּשָׁטוֹת הַמִּתְחַדְּשִׁים בְּכָל יוֹם, “the peshat readings renewed every day.”

Peshat, in this account, has depth and novelty. It is not whatever remains when interpretation has not yet happened. Rav Kahana reaches the principle of peshat after mastering the Talmud; Rashbam speaks of its depth and its daily renewal. Peshat is not where reading starts. It is what disciplined reading sometimes manages to produce.

The Second Surface

What remains after these layers have been removed? Now that we can begin to see the pshat of pshat?

Jacob beneath Esau’s garments is not a simple truth. He is both deceiver and bearer of the covenantal future. Joseph beneath his coat is not a stable essence but a naked young man about to be sold, renamed, reclothed, accused, imprisoned, and enthroned. Aaron without his priestly garments does not become more authentically Aaron; he dies. The olah beneath its hide is not yet ready for God; it must be divided, washed, salted, arranged, and burned. Even the removed hide acquires a new legal and economic identity.

Flaying therefore does not reveal an unmediated essence. It creates a new field of relations. It separates what had been joined so that body and surface can each be interpreted, assigned, and transformed.

That is the sense in which peshat may be called sacrificial reading. It does not strip the text in order to possess its secret. It removes one governing surface so that the textual body can be articulated into its parts.

The contrast between hunter and priest can now be stated precisely. Both know how to remove a hide. The hunter does so to make the animal his own. The priest does so within a procedure that ends in relinquishment. The hunter displays the skin as proof of mastery. The priest cannot burn the skin as though it were the offering, nor seize it without limit as though sacred service abolished law.

Readers face the same choice. Interpretation can become hunting: tracking the cleverest meaning, killing the text’s resistance, and carrying away a thesis as a trophy. Or it can become service, a mode of drawing close.

My argument began by calling peshat the skin of the text. Skin, it now becomes clear, names two surfaces. There is the exterior that Isaac touches: immediate, persuasive, and capable of being manufactured. And there is the surface produced by the priest’s cut and the tanner’s labor: removed, inverted, scraped, prepared, and capable of receiving writing.

The purpose of flaying is to make a second surface possible. To unconceal that which was never apparent, but only potentially so.

A peshat reading is neither the worship of exteriority nor the fantasy of a naked text, a pre-existent meaning.

It is writing made possible by disciplined reversal: what was inward becomes legible; what looked obvious is shown to have been constructed; and what was stripped away returns, transformed, as the place where revelation can appear.

Peshat is not the first surface of the text. It is the surface a reader earns. That is why even the greatest sages only learn to appreciate it as adults.

P.S. - if you found this essay meaningful, you can think further with Yochai about it here.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Before the opening bell on Thursday, July 30, the bulk of Leopold Aschebrunner’s a forty-five-billion-dollar book crossed to Citadel, Ken Griffin’s Miami…

Read more

Read more

The ad was the work of the Blue Squ…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Yaakov Mazeh, the crown rabbi of Moscow, the man kept on hand to speak for Russia’s Jews, was past sixty. Across the desk sat a man of forty who commanded five million soldiers. In the towns of Ukraine that year, 1919, tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in pogroms, some by the retreating Whi…

Read more

Read more

I’m deeply grateful to announce the public launch of Yochai - a new way to learn Torah. While this is somewhat of a launch email rather than an essay, I hope you’ll see that Yochai is both an expression of many themes I care deeply about, and one of the tools that I use to do research when writing my essays.

The printing press made the library portable and cheap.

Sefaria made the Jewish bookshelf free. And we’re deeply grateful to them for enabling us to build atop their treasure trove. Claude and ChatGPT now make information free. But texts by themselves don’t drive learning; information doesn’t drive transformation. And Knowledge isn’t “chiddush” (insight). The next frontier is personalized guidance through the library and the formation of deliberate practice.

Play around with lenses, to read the text with different types of questions.

Yochai is a Socratic AI “chevruta” or learning guide, powered by a foundational library of 1,000+ primary sources from the Jewish canon, (and a knowledge graph of 2.5M entities, and 16M entity relationships, 375,000 searchable passages, and 17,000 canonical concepts that we developed around our own ontology). Yochai, uniquely, takes you directly to the sources and pushes you to discover and articulate your own insights about them.

In addition to asking Yochai questions of life advice or intellectual and spiritual interest, you can read the texts with Yochai’s “lenses” in the margins, ask Yochai to produce lesson plans and source sheets, divrei Torah, textual outlines, and lit reviews, all backstopped by a verified library.

Yochai takes its name from Shimon Bar Yochai, 2nd century sage and purported author of my namesake.

Rather than AI replacing teachers and scholars, we see a world where AI enables more people to become teachers and scholars, a world in which there is no limit to what you can bake, as I argue here.

We used AI to translate several hundred texts in our library for the first time, including various Hasidic works. We’re also open sourcing our knowledge graph in the hopes that other developers can build on top of it. We focused our efforts on adult life-long learners, exploring their curiosity, but the knowledge graph offers the engine to target more specific use cases.

Speaking of new form factors, Yochai is also available on Whatsapp: you can direct message Yochai or invite Yochai to one of your groups: +1 (464) 219-7500 - have fun.

Building Yochai was a labor of love, enabled by my incredible Lightning Studios Team, Bobby George and Alex Jakubowski, Sam Mensah-Bonsu, Phil Galebach, Harrison Otieno, plus grant funding from the Maimonides Fund and seed funding from Infinity Constellation. I also benefited from many conversations with rabbis, scholars, and technologists of deep and diverse backgrounds.

Beyond building http://alexandria.wiki and Yochai, and other libraries of ancient wisdom, we work with mission-driven organizations (libraries and museums), gurus, and thought leaders, to create personalized learning pathways through their archives.

If you have a large body of work, or you’re sitting on a museum, or literary archive, and wondering what do with your embarrassment of riches, email me: zohar@lightningstudios.ai

We’ll work with you to develop an ontology, clean and organize your data, turn your pedagogy into code, and develop a voice and aesthetic that express your worldview, methodology, and desired educational outcome.

Read more

On the evening of March 11, 2008, a man in shirtsleeves stood in a television studio built to resemble a trading floor and told several hundred thousand people to relax. The set had foam bull heads on the desk and a soundboard wired to air horns and cartoon explosions. The man was Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager who had converted a talent for co…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Pick up a pen and write the Hebrew letter Yod. It is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, a single stroke, a dot with a tail. Watch what your hand does. The fingers gather. The palm closes slightly around the pen. The letter forms in the curl of a hand already half-closed around something it is about to give away. The Yod is small enough that you…

Read more

Ancient Israelite coins.

In Genesis 31, Jacob and his father-in-law Laban end a long quarrel by piling up stones.

Jacob has worked fourteen years for two wives, six more for his flocks, and watched his wages change ten times. He is fleeing in the night with his family and his herds. Laban catches up. They argue. They reconcile. They build a stone heap to …

Read more

Sometime around 1199, the scholars of Lunel sent Maimonides a list of twenty-four objections to his Mishneh Torah. The Mishneh Torah was the great new code of Jewish law, written in Egypt and circulated through the Mediterranean Jewish world over the previous two decades. It was unprecedented in its ambition. For the first time, every law in the Talmud …

Read more