May 28, 2009
When the Torah scroll is raised during the synagogue service, the congregation chants ‘V’zot haTorah asher sam Moshe lifnei b’nei Yisrael al pi Adonai b’yad Moshe’ (‘This is the Torah that Moses set before the Israelites by the command of Adonai through Moses’). Is that statement truly believed?”
This quotation and question can be found in the Etz Hayim Humash, posed by Jacob Milgrom in his informative essay “The Nature of Revelation and Mosaic Origins.”
Whether one is a secular, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or even Modern Orthodox, it is impossible not to be engaged with the complex problem modernity has handed us: Knowing what we know from contemporary Bible study, in what sense, if any, can we believe that zot haTorah asher sam Moshe lifnei b’nei Yisrael al pi Adonai, b’yad Moshe?
The dramatic narrative describing the revelation at Sinai read on Shavuot stands at the center of the classical Jewish religious experience. From the affirmation that the Torah itself contains God’s direct communication comes the compelling case for complying with the commandments that derive from both the Written Torah and Oral Torah.
But if there is anything that differentiates contemporary Judaism from its premodern incarnations, surely it is the awareness that the tradition — in particular the foundational texts such as the Torah — are not the product of a literal and timeless revelation from God that has been transmitted without change from Sinai.
Despite what we say at hagba’a, we know the Torah is the result of centuries of literary and spiritual development, embodied in voices that scholars know only by initials — J, E, P, D, H, among others — voices that have been brought together by anonymous spiritual giants whose editorial acumen continues to dazzle us.
In Rabbi Elliot Dorff’s essay on “revelation” in the Etz Hayim Humash, he suggests four ways in which contemporary Jewish thinkers have tried to retain the concept of revelation, while accepting and working with the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship.
1) “Some,” Dorff writes, “conceive of revelation as God communicating with us in actual words.” (The Torah is a record of what God said to us.) 2) “Others believe that God, over time, inspires specific individuals who then translate that inspiration into human language. Revelation thus consists of both a divine and a human component.’ (The Torah is a record of what God said to us and what we said back to God.) 3) “Still others,” Dorff continues, “conceive of revelation as the human response to encounters with God.” (The Torah is the record of how (they) (we) reacted or responded to the real presence of God — it is God’s self that is revelation, not the content of God’s communication.) 4) Finally, there are what Dorff dubs “the rationalists,” who “conceive of revelation as the ongoing human attempts to discover truths about God and the world.” (The Torah is what our ancestors said about God.)
Rabbi Neil Gillman contends that when religious traditions come up against the challenges of modernity, there are only three fundamental options. Adherents of a religious tradition can simply reassert the fundamentals of their faith, denying the validity of what contemporary scholarship and science teach.
The second option is to abandon a religious tradition. If the story isn’t true — if the Torah is not the word of God — then why bother at all?
The third option is to step outside the traditional understandings, examine them critically, and then step back into the life of the community and re-embrace, albeit on somewhat subjective terms, the texts, rituals, and traditions that comprise Judaism and the Torah tradition. It means accepting that the stories of the Torah do not need to be taken literally in order to be taken seriously.
What Dorff calls the “rational response” — the understanding of revelation as the “ongoing human attempts to discover truths about God and the world” — seems to me to hold the most promise. When we focus on “discovery” rather than “revelation,” the emphasis shifts from what God “said,” to what our ancestors said about God.
In a world increasingly threatened on so many fronts by religious fundamentalism, from the perverted piety of terrorists to the smarmy smugness of the warriors of cultural conservatism, we might do well to inject some humility and tentativeness into our religious conversations about what God allegedly did, said, or wants.
For generations, our sacred texts have been understood as the definitive statements of what God said, of what God wants of us, and of what we are expected to do in response to God. For better or worse, with enthusiasm or grudgingly, we have landed in a time in Jewish history when the old assumptions are now inverted: Our sacred texts, most notably the Torah, turn out to be not the end of the matter — but rather the place from which sustained, passionate, and productive spiritual conversation now begins.
Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.
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