How to read Rashi
Rashi's commentary looks cryptic before you know the trick: his comments are answers to questions he never states out loud, so reading Rashi well means reconstructing the question first. Once you know to look for it, his famously terse notes turn from a wall of unfamiliar script into the clearest running commentary in the Jewish library, which is exactly why his commentary has sat on the same page as the Torah and the Talmud for nearly a thousand years.
Why Rashi looks hard at first
Three things make a first encounter with Rashi harder than it needs to be. His commentary is traditionally printed in a distinctive semi-cursive Hebrew typeface, now called "Rashi script," that Rashi himself never actually wrote in; it's simply the font early printers used for his commentary, and the name stuck. His Hebrew is extremely compressed: a full thought in three or four words, with no wasted language. And he almost never says which question he's answering; he just gives the answer, trusting the reader to notice what prompted it. (Who was Rashi? has more on who he was and why his approach became the standard.)
A word on who wrote these comments
Rashi, an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, was born in 1040 in Troyes, in northern France, and died there in 1105. As a young man he studied in the great yeshivot of Mainz and Worms in Germany before returning to Troyes to found his own school. He wrote commentaries on nearly the entire Tanakh and on almost the whole Babylonian Talmud, and both became so central that they've been printed alongside the base text in nearly every standard edition ever since. (Who was Rashi? covers his life and influence in full.)
The method: find the question, then read the answer
- Read the verse on its own first, before looking at Rashi, so you notice what's plain and what isn't.
- Ask what's bothering him. Rashi almost always comments because something in the verse is repeated, missing, oddly worded, or contradicts something said elsewhere. His comment is the answer to that specific irritation, not a random aside.
- Read his words as a direct answer, not a stray fact. If you can't see the question, reread the verse looking for the exact word or phrase his comment is anchored to; it's usually right there in the word he quotes before the comment.
- Check the source he's drawing on. Rashi is almost always quoting or condensing an earlier Midrash or Talmudic passage, not inventing an interpretation from scratch, so his comment is often a doorway into an older text.
A worked example: Rashi on Genesis 1:1
The Torah opens: "When God began to create heaven and earth..." (Genesis 1:1, JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition, via Sefaria). Rashi's very first comment on the Torah, on the word bereishit ("in the beginning"), doesn't explain the word at all. It asks a much bigger question: why does the Torah, which is supposed to be a book of commandments, begin with the story of creation instead of the first mitzvah given to Israel?
In the original Hebrew, Rashi opens: "אמר רבי יצחק, לא היה צריך להתחיל את התורה אלא מהחדש הזה לכם." In the classic English rendering (Rashi on Genesis 1:1:1, translation by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, via Sefaria), the opening line reads that "the Torah should have commenced with the first commandment given to Israel," meaning Exodus 12:2, the law of the new moon, the very first mitzvah given to the Jewish people as a nation.
Having raised that question, Rashi answers it, drawing on Psalms 111:6: the Torah opens with creation to establish, before anything else, that the whole earth belongs to God. So when the nations of the world one day accuse Israel of having stolen the land of Canaan, Israel can answer that God, who created the earth, gave it to whomever He saw fit, and gave it to them. The comment isn't a note on grammar or vocabulary; it's Rashi explaining why the entire book starts where it starts, and it sets the tone for everything that follows him: every comment is there to solve a real problem in the text, never to fill space, which is exactly why learners keep returning to him first even after they've met a dozen other commentators.
Reading Rashi across the parsha
The same method scales up: read the week's portion first, then go back through it slowly with Rashi, pausing at each comment to ask what prompted it, the same question you asked on Genesis 1:1. How to learn the parsha with commentary walks through that weekly rhythm step by step, and the major Torah commentators shows how Rashi's voice sits alongside Ramban, Ibn Ezra, and the others once you're ready to add a second lens to the same verse.
Where you'll actually meet Rashi
Rashi's commentary shows up in two very different layouts, and it helps to know which one you're looking at. On a printed page of Chumash, his commentary usually runs in a column beside or below the Torah text, keyed to specific words. On a standard page of Talmud, his commentary runs along the inner margin, closest to the binding, wrapping around the Gemara text itself. How to read a page of Talmud shows exactly where Rashi sits on that page and how to find your way around it.
Reading Rashi on your own
You don't need a teacher in the room to start. Derekh Learning's Rashi Reader paces the weekly Torah portion the traditional way, one aliyah a day, and lets you tap any verse to open Rashi's actual words on it, not a summary, so you can practice the method above on real text every day of the week, on the actual page, in the actual script, rather than a paraphrase of what Rashi said. For the full daily and weekly learning experience, with a cited chevruta for the questions Rashi's terseness leaves you with, start learning with Derekh Learning.
