Judaism and Its Texts
If we seek to know Judaism’s ultimate values, we can do no better than to consider its scenes of martyrdom. What the rabbis were prepared to die for tells us eloquently what they sought to live for. In one talmudic passage1Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 18a. a rabbi, Jose ben Kisma, is lying ill. Jose is known elsewhere to have declared that “Were you to give me all the silver and gold and precious stones and pearls in the world I would not live anywhere but in a place of Torah.”2Mishnah, Avot 6:9. Nonetheless, his visitor gives him cause for concern. By his bedside is Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon who has been defying the Roman decree against teaching Torah in public. Jose warns him that he is risking his life. Besides which, he is flouting history. If God has allowed the Romans to destroy the Temple, then He has for the moment given them sway. Chanina refuses all such calculations. He says, “Heaven will show mercy.” It is the simple reply of a man of faith. But Jose is not convinced. “I,” he says, “am telling you plain facts and you reply, ‘Heaven will show mercy’! I will be surprised if they do not burn you and the Torah scroll with fire.”
The Talmud narrates the sequel. Rabbi Jose ben Kisma dies and is buried with honour. Roman dignitaries attend the funeral and deliver speeches in his praise. Returning from the graveyard they discover Rabbi Chanina teaching Torah in public. They seize him, wrap him in the Torah scroll, place bundles of wood around him and set fire to them. Not content to burn the rabbi and his Torah, they place tufts of wool soaked in water over his heart, so that he will die slowly. His daughter, witnessing the scene, is overcome with grief. Chanina consoles her: “If I alone were being burned, it would have been hard to bear. But now that I am being burned along with the Torah scroll, He who will have regard to the plight of the Torah will have regard also for my plight.” Chanina’s disciples too are present. They ask the dying master what he sees. Chanina replies: “I see the parchment [of the Torah] burning, but the letters are flying upward.”
The Torah – as divine word, as teaching to be taught, even as physical object, a parchment scroll – is Judaism’s holy of holies and its love of loves. Its letters are immortal even when its teachers and texts are burned. Prudence and theology can dictate caution at times of religious persecution. This is the case presented by Rabbi Jose ben Kisma, and it is rational and halakhically normative. There are cases when Judaism demands martyrdom rather than transgression, but none when what is at stake is not an act but an omission, discretion rather than transgression. But Chanina will not listen to such arguments. He may have believed that religious love transcends reason, or that this was a time when defiance was a necessary gesture of faith. Or he may have felt, with another rabbinic martyr, Akiva, that life without the study and teaching of Torah was inconceivable.3Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61b. But the passage reveals not just a, but the, central Jewish value: Torah as the foundation of Jewish existence.
For Judaism God is to be found not in a person or a place but in words, the words of the Mosaic books, Torah in its narrow sense. Neither Moses, the greatest of the prophets, nor Sinai, the place of revelation, have intrinsic sanctity. They were the vehicles of revelation, not its embodiment. That description belongs to Torah alone. Maimonides went further. The great miracles that accompanied the Israelites during the exodus and the years in the wilderness were not cruxes of revelation. They occurred because they were necessary, not in order to prove that God exists.4Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah 7:1. Even the greatest of miracles, the creation of the universe, was for Maimonides secondary to Torah. Creation itself could not be proved or disproved. There were alternatives – Maimonides had in mind Aristotle’s theory of the eternity of matter – that were coherent and consistent. We believe in creation, he argued, because we believe in the Torah and in its opening words, “In the beginning, God created…”5Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:25. Judaism begins not with the power or the presence but with the words of God. God is revealed through language. To seek God does not require the mediation of persons, places or events. It calls for study of the Text, so much so that the Jerusalem Talmud, in a passage of remarkable audacity, presents God as saying, “Would that they would forsake Me and yet occupy themselves in My Torah, for the light it contains will eventually bring them back to Me.”6Jerusalem Talmud, Chagigah 1:7. For the sages, Judaism is Torah. The rest is commentary.
In our journey through modern Jewish thought we have reflected on fundamental themes: the meaning of suffering, exile, redemption, peoplehood and Jewish law. But with Torah as revelation we reach the core of Jewish faith. For it was in and through Torah that all else received shape and definition. No challenge could be more fateful for Jewish destiny than an assault on the belief in what the sages called Torah min ha-shamayim, “Torah from Heaven.” This, for Judaism, was the greatest trauma of the Enlightenment. From Spinoza onwards, the Torah came to be seen by biblical scholars as a text to be analysed like any other, a human document, indeed a series of documents composed at different times and embodying different traditions, pieced together by a redactor. At first glance at least, no element of traditional Judaism could survive this order of biblical criticism. For if the Torah were indeed the work of human beings, its laws could not be divine commands, nor could its covenant carry certainty or authority. This was more than the shaking of the foundations. It was their destruction.
Nor could this be an academic issue only. The Koran had called Jews a people of the Book. But within Judaism itself, that is an understatement. Jews were a people only because of the Book. The Torah was the constitution of the covenant that turned them from a heterogeneous collection of tribes into a nation with a particular faith, a distinctive way of life and a historical destiny. The fate of the Book and the fate of the people were inseparable. A Jewish mystical text declares that “God, Israel and the Torah are one,”7See Zohar, Acharei Mot 73a. and that is a telling metaphor. As a result, the secularisation of the Book was the secularisation of the people. The fragmentation of the Book was the fragmentation of the people. The two processes are so intimately connected in modern Jewish history that it is difficult to disentangle them and say which was the cause, which the effect. To be sure, only a small part of Jewish thought for the past two centuries has been directly concerned with revelation and the authorship and authority of the Bible. Nonetheless its significance cannot be overestimated, for ultimately it affects every other debate in Jewish life. What then was the traditional view, and how has it fared in modern times?
Tradition and Torah
In aggadah, the theological dimension of rabbinic teachings, reverence for the Torah knew no bounds. Its words, for the rabbis, were the structure of reality, the architecture of creation. In the beginning, according to a midrash, God looked into the Torah and created the world.8Genesis Rabbah 1:1. Without it the heavens and earth could not endure.9Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 68b. “Be careful in your work,” said Rabbi Ishmael to the scribe Rabbi Meir, “for it is the work of God; if you omit a single letter [in the Torah scroll] or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world.”10Babylonian Talmud, Eiruvin 13a. The Torah, according to Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish, was written in black fire on white fire. It was, for Jewish mystics, not just words and sentences, narratives and laws, but a sequence of esoteric names of God, the code of being.11See Nachmanides, Introduction to Commentary to the Torah. Having an infinite Author, it held infinite levels of meaning. This was the reason, according to Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra [Radbaz], that the Torah scroll is not vocalised. “The scroll of the Torah is not vocalised, because it includes all the senses and all the profound paths. All of these may be expounded in each letter: faces within faces and secrets within secrets. No limits are known to us on this.”12Responsa Radbaz, 3:643.
Within halakhah, Jewish law, the Torah (specifically the Pentateuch) was the ultimate source of all authority. Even the prophets had no power to introduce new law except, as with the rabbis, on a temporary or protective basis. After Moses, said the sages, no prophet has the right to innovate. Indeed Maimonides explains that without the Torah there could be no prophetic authority whatsoever. “With regard to every prophet after Moses, we do not believe in him because of the signs he shows…but because of the rule laid down by Moses in the Torah that if a prophet gives a sign, ‘you shall heed him.’”13Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah 8:2. All laws in Judaism were traceable back to the Sinaitic revelation, for they were explicitly commanded by it or were derived from it by interpretation or were decrees or enactments designed to protect Torah law.
What then were the beliefs that defined the nature of Torah? A Mishnah rules that a Jew who denies that “Torah is from Heaven” forfeits his share in the world to come.14Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1. This is as near as rabbinic Judaism comes to formulating what Maimonides was later to call a principle of faith, rejection of which constitutes self-exclusion from the community of believers. Maimonides, on the basis of rabbinic sources, ruled that there were three kinds of “deniers of the Torah”: one who says that the Torah is not “from God,” even if he says that it is all divine except for one verse or word which was written by Moses himself; one who denies the authority of the Oral Law and its interpreters; and one who argues that God has revoked or changed the commandments so that “this Torah, although of divine origin, is now obsolete.”15Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 3:8. These three principles articulated the difference between Judaism and three of its rivals. The first negated Islam’s claim that the text of the Torah, though divine, had been corrupted by the rabbis. The second excluded the Sadducees and Karaites who repudiated Judaism’s oral traditions. The third was directed against the Christian claim that the “old” covenant had been superseded by the new.
The rabbis made a sharp distinction between the Pentateuch and the other books of the Bible. Only the books of Moses were the unmediated word of God. The others, even the prophetic revelations, contained a human element, and as a result “no two prophets prophesied in the same style.”16Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 89a. This distinction could be found in the book of Numbers: “When a prophet of the Lord is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses… With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles.”17Numbers 12:6–8. The rabbis restated it by saying that God appeared to Moses through a clear glass and to the other prophets through a dark glass.18Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 49b. According to Maimonides, Moses was “like a scribe writing from dictation.” The entire Torah “came to him from before God in a manner which is metaphorically called ‘speaking,’ though the real nature of that communication is unknown to everyone except Moses.”19Commentary to the Mishnah, Introduction to Sanhedrin chapter 10 (the eighth principle).
Spinoza’s revolution
The questioning of this entire structure of beliefs was the crucial chapter in the Jewish encounter with modernity, and it remains the fundamental divide between Orthodoxy and other modes of Judaism or Jewishness. It was Spinoza who set it in motion by conceiving of an impersonal God for whom verbal revelation, especially to a particular people rather than to humanity in general, was a philosophical impossibility. This led him to consider the Pentateuch as the product of human authorship, and to ascribe it in its final form not to Moses but to Ezra. His conclusion was that “the Word of God is faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent; that we possess it only in fragments and that the original of the covenant which God made with the Jews has been lost.”20Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, translated by R. H. M. Elwes, (New York: Dover, 1951), 165. The history of subsequent biblical scholarship and its evolution through the documentary hypothesis, form criticism and redaction criticism, will not concern us. What is of interest is how Jewish thinkers responded to the formidable challenge it represented.
There were two kinds of issue raised by critical biblical scholarship. The first concerned matters of historical or philological research. Did the events narrated in the Bible accord with what we knew from science, archeology and ancient history? Was the style and substance of the Pentateuch consistent with its having been written in the days of Moses? Did the received text require emendation in the light of other evidence, such as the early translations? These were the overt questions, and they were not different in kind from those faced by Jews prior to Spinoza. From mishnaic times to the medieval exegetes, Jews had reflected on textual variants, apparent contradictions within the Torah and discrepancies between the plain sense of biblical verses and the current state of historical, scientific or philosophical knowledge. In general, the rabbis found no difficulty in harmonising the various conflicts within the framework of traditional belief. The reason was simple. Precisely because God was the author of both the Torah and the world, one could expect to find harmony between them. Reinterpretation might periodically be necessary, but it was possible. Because God was infinite and eternal, His word carried many meanings, not all of them apparent at any one time.
The revolutionary issue was not the problems raised by critical biblical scholarship but the methods it used to solve them. Its unstated axiom was that sacred scriptures were texts like any others. The words of the Bible, whatever else they were, were phenomena of history to be explored by normal criteria of scientific research. Ideas like revelation, miracle and the supernatural had no place in this process. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is a seminal document, not so much because it anticipated the conclusions of later scholars but because, in three respects, it transferred the Bible to a new intellectual universe. Firstly Spinoza questioned the ideas of a personal God and verbal revelation. Secondly he insisted on applying to the Bible the procedures of historical and scientific research. Thirdly he rejected the authority of tradition in understanding sacred texts. It is, he said, “in every man’s power to wield the supreme right and authority of free judgement…and to explain and interpret religion for himself.”21Ibid., 119. The displacement of the supernatural by scientific rationality and the primacy of individual judgement over tradition mark the beginnings of an Enlightenment approach to the Bible and to the dethronement of Torah as divine word.
Two examples, both used by Spinoza, illustrate the difference between the traditional and “scientific” understanding of texts. The twelfth-century commentator Ibn Ezra had noted several Pentateuchal passages which seemed to point to a date of composition later than Moses, and described this as a “mystery.”22Ibn Ezra, Commentary to Deuteronomy 1:2. The traditional understanding of Ibn Ezra, reaffirmed in the nineteenth century by Samuel David Luzzatto, is that Moses wrote these passages prophetically, anticipating the future. Spinoza’s is that they were written not by Moses but by a later author.23Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, 120–27. A second difference arose out of Maimonides’s position, shared by other medieval Jewish philosophers, that where the plain sense of a biblical text conflicted with a proposition established by reason, this was sufficient to prove that the text should not be understood literally. Maimonides went so far as to say that had Aristotle proved the eternity of the universe, he would have reinterpreted the first chapter of Genesis accordingly. Spinoza rejects this kind of harmonisation. The meaning of the text is to be determined according to the rules of biblical syntax and semantics. The Bible means what it says, not what would render it compatible with later scientific discoveries.24Ibid., 114–19.
What is new, then, in post-Spinozist biblical scholarship is not its questions but its assumptions. Tradition took the divine authorship, and thus the eternity and inerrancy, of the Bible as axiomatic, and this governed scriptural interpretation. Critical scholarship took interpretation as an autonomous discipline, and thus saw texts as products of a given historical situation, no less dated and fallible than any other human document. In principle this revolution might have produced an outcome like the parallel encounter between religion and science. After an initial confrontation each side might have concluded that the two disciplines used different methods to explore different aspects of reality, and a peace treaty might have been concluded between them. That it did not happen in this way suggests that the issue was not an intellectual one only. A larger process had been set in motion. The forces that were reshaping scholarly perceptions of the Bible were also remoulding Jewish perceptions of Judaism.
The interplay between sociology and theology, between how we live and how we understand the way we live, is complex but real nonetheless. In the present instance, the nineteenth century had produced new forms of Jewish living, of which Reform and Conservative Judaism, Zionism and Jewish secularism were the most significant. None of these accorded with the traditional understanding of Torah, yet each claimed at least some measure of continuity with the Jewish past and therefore with the Bible, the formative document of Jewish history. It was biblical scholarship that offered a way of reconciling the two. Initially Jews viewed it with suspicion. Solomon Schechter called “higher” Biblical criticism “higher antisemitism.” But eventually it came to be seen by Jewish thinkers as an important source of legitimation for the break with tradition. In retrospect we can see how several generations of theologians recreated the Bible in their own image. No longer the self-sufficient source of authority, it could be tailored to fit the space available for it within the various ideologies of Jewish life.
Non-Orthodox approaches to revelation
The new approaches to the Bible, still dominant in non-Orthodox sectors of Jewry, were formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The central issue for non-Orthodox theologians was not biblical interpretation as such, but the concept of revelation that lay behind it.
Hermann Cohen, a leading philosopher of early twentieth-century German Jewry, understood revelation as the creative power of human reason, in particular in so far as it disclosed the categorical imperatives of ethics. God, for Cohen, is not a person but an idea, the idea which gives ethics its foundation.25Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, (New York: Ungar, 1972).
For Solomon Steinheim, an early nineteenth-century thinker, revelation could not be identical with reason, for its essence lay in the fact that it disclosed truth that could not be discovered by man alone. Nonetheless what is divine in the Mosaic revelation is not the Torah’s laws but its theological truths.26See Joshua Haberman, Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of S.L. Steinheim (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).
Ahad Ha-Am and later Mordecai Kaplan saw revelation as a human phenomenon. What was important for them, however, was not the individual personalities of the prophets but the collective character of the people who had given birth to the Book. Ahad Ha-Am spoke of a national spirit, Kaplan of an evolving civilisation. But for both, the Bible was a revelation not of God but of the Jewish people.27See Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1981).
With Martin Buber, Jewish thought turned again to the reality of God.28See Martin Buber, On the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1982). For Buber there was a crucial difference between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of things, the difference he famously expressed in terms of I-Thou and I-It relationship. Man encounters God as a person, never as an object. For this reason, Buber regarded revelation not as a unique historical event, but as a permanent possibility of the human situation. He was opposed to the idea that revelation disclosed law, for law is universal whereas contact with God is always particular and specific. Indeed, for Buber, revelation has no substantive content at all. In it, “Man receives, and he receives not a specific ‘content’ but a Presence, a Presence as power.”29Martin Buber, I and Thou )Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1959), 110. The Bible itself is a human response to a decisive encounter between Israel and God. But its words are the result of that revelation, not the revelation itself.
These were all attempts to preserve for the Bible a continuing relevance for Jewish life. But it was not the Torah of tradition. No longer did it yield commands, a covenant, a substantive code of holy deeds. Instead it revealed for Cohen, ethics, for Steinheim, theology, for Ahad Ha-Am and Kaplan, national character and for Buber, relationship. With hindsight it is striking how the Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality brought in its wake not objective religious truth but instead the deconstruction of textuality such that the Bible could be made to yield whatever meaning its interpreters had pre-assigned to it.
The influence of these views is still apparent. Thus, in a synthesis of the approaches of Buber and Hermann Cohen, a recent statement of the British Reform position declares that
The revelation at Sinai and the Hebrew Bible have been the sources from which Judaism has flowed and testify to a unique encounter between God and our ancestors. We do not, however, regard the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, as a document literally handed down by God to Moses but rather as our ancestors’ record of their encounter with God, a document itself revealing a process of inner development.
Its teachings are to be “ever-tested by the ethical insights of each generation” because “revelation is continuous.”30Anthony Bayfield, “Progressive Judaism: A Collective Theological Essay and Discussion Paper,” Manna 27 (Spring 1990).
The Conservative thinker, Abraham Heschel, developed a more theocentric view of revelation. The prophet experiences the divine pathos, God’s concern for man. There is a profound difference between prophetic and philosophical knowledge, between relationship and objectivity. God, for the prophets, “is encountered not as a universal, general, pure Being but always in a particular mode of being, as personal God to a person man, in a specific pathos that comes with a demand in a concrete situation.”31Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), 486. Nonetheless, in his three-volume work on the concept of Torah min ha-shamayim,32Abraham Heschel, Theology of Ancient Judaism [Hebrew], volumes 1–2 (London: Soncino, 1965); volume 3 (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990). Heschel’s own views are stated most clearly in the third volume, published posthumously, 1–22. Heschel intimated that a historical and critical approach to the Pentateuch was consistent with one strand within rabbinic Judaism. There were, he argued, two axes of thought in Judaism, which he traced to the mishnaic period and to the schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. The former was mystical, stressing the supernatural. The latter was rational, emphasising that “the Torah speaks in the language of man.” Evidently Heschel believed that modern scholarship was compatible with the stance of Rabbi Ishmael, perhaps taking only the Ten Commandments as the direct, unmediated word of God.
The most powerful exponent of the Ahad Ha-Am tradition was not a biblical scholar but Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. For Ben Gurion the Bible was Israel’s national literature, produced at a time when it had belonged to the arena of politics and power. The return to Israel was nothing less than a return to biblical Judaism after the apolitical, ahistorical spiritualisation of exile. Ben Gurion encouraged what became an Israeli fascination with archeology through which a new nation discovered its links with the biblical past. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the same time as the United Nations vote to bring the State of Israel into existence symbolised the drama of a past reborn. It was as if the Jewish people, like the scrolls, had lain inert for 2,000 years and had now emerged into sunlight and the open air. Ben Gurion epitomised an important feature of the nascent Israeli consciousness, the fact that a culture could be profoundly secular and biblical at the same time.33See Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 81–122.
A different but equally radical dialectic is present in the work of the late Gershom Scholem. Scholem, a historian of mysticism, argued that the Jewish mystical tradition had been the subterranean channel through which mythology had re-entered Judaism, rescuing it from the arid abstractions of philosophy. It had been able to do so without breaking away from Judaism (except in the Sabbatean and Frankist heresies) through its doctrine of the infinite meaningfulness of the divine word. It was thus able to read back its cosmologies into the biblical text. Building on a mystical commentary, Scholem suggests that what the Israelites heard at Sinai was only the first letter of the first of the ten commandments, the aleph, not in itself a sound but the beginning of articulation. The revelation at Sinai was thus “pregnant with infinite meaning, but without specific meaning.” It follows that “every statement on which authority is grounded” is “a human interpretation, however valid and exalted, of something that transcends it.”34Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1969), 30–31.
For Scholem, revelation only receives meaning in the constant process of interpretation it receives in a living tradition. It was the infinite fluidity which mysticism gave the divine word that led Scholem to believe that it was the most powerful Judaic resource in a secular age. He believed that “the binding character of the Revelation for a collective has disappeared.”35Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York, Schocken Books, 1976), 274. Nonetheless, the idea of a tradition unfolding through endless commentary remained valid. Indeed the mystical idea of tzimtzum, whereby God contracts Himself to make space for a finite world, gave paradoxical meaning even to secularisation. In the modern age God had contracted Himself “until nothing of Him remained revealed… But perhaps His last contraction is really revelation? Perhaps the disappearance of God into a point of nothingness has a higher purpose, and only in a world which has been totally emptied of Him will be where His kingdom is revealed.”36Quoted in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 153.
These views illustrate the dilemma posed by the loss of biblical authority. For if only parts of the Pentateuch are divine – the Conservative position – how shall we decide which? If conscience is to be our guide, then the answer will vary from one individual to another and from one age to the next. If none of the Pentateuch is divine but merely a human response to a revelatory experience – the Reform position – then Judaism has no authoritative content other than tradition conceived as historical custom. If the Bible is not religious but national literature then its normative force disappears entirely. And in Gershom Scholem’s mystical anarchism, heresy and secularity are consciously embraced so that there is no limit to the directions in which revelation can confer meaning.
The transformation of Torah in Jewish consciousness was both an effect and a cause of the deep social changes that affected modern Jewry. But the revolution was profound and took place with stunning speed. Within a single century, Torah had been historicised, secularised, and fragmented. It had lost its commanding voice. To be sure, the new approaches testified to the continuing power the Bible exercised over the Jewish imagination. None of them was willing to consign it, as Spinoza had done, to antiquity. After the dry rationalism of the nineteenth century, the experiential, existential thrust of Buber and Heschel’s thought gave new life to what Buber called the “encounter” with the text, while Scholem’s researches renewed interest in the creativity of tradition and interpretation. But Torah no longer spoke in a unified voice to a coherent covenantal community. Jews had branched out in divergent directions, each carrying with them a Bible that was, in essence, a different book.
Orthodoxy and revelation
Clearly these views are incompatible with Orthodoxy. Moses Mendelssohn had argued that Judaism was a religion without dogmas. But historically it was over dogma that Judaism’s great schisms occurred. The new theories of revelation reached all three of Maimonides’s principles. They attributed at least parts of the Pentateuch to human authorship, they denied the authority of rabbinic tradition and they implied that at least some of the commandments had become obsolete. Nor were these doctrines over which there was scope for latitude. At various times there had been differences of interpretation with respect to other principles of the faith: the precise nature of the messianic age, for example, or how far Judaism ruled out anthropomorphic beliefs about God. But Torah as the unmediated word of God stood at the very core of Judaism. None of the new theories accepted this principle. From the point of view of tradition, therefore, all were not merely false but even heretical.
Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great nineteenth-century defender of Orthodoxy, put the point uncompromisingly: “Let us not deceive ourselves. The whole question is simply this. Is the statement ‘And God spoke to Moses saying,’ with which all the laws of the Jewish Bible commence, true or not true?” The question was not merely one of truth but also of authority. By which standard was a Jew to live his life: by God’s command or by the spirit of the age? If belief in the divinity of Torah was genuine, then “This word of God must be our eternal rule superior to all human judgement, the rule to which all our actions must at all times conform; and instead of complaining that it is no longer suitable to the times, our only complaint must be that the times are no longer suitable to it.”37Samson Raphael Hirsch, Judaism Eternal, translated by Isidore Grunfeld (London: Soncino, 1959), volume 2, 216.
How then have twentieth-century Orthodox thinkers understood revelation? All by definition accept Maimonides’s three principles as the boundary conditions of Jewish belief. But within these parameters different lines of approach are discernible. One divide lies between monists and pluralists, those who believe in the essential unity of human knowledge and those who see religious knowledge as autonomous and sui generis.
The outstanding example of the first was Rabbi Abraham Kook. For Kook, all of nature, history and civilisation in some way represents a revelation of the will of God. For this reason he is able to accept one of the findings of modern biblical scholarship, namely the parallels between the Bible and other ancient cosmologies and codes, and invert its significance. It is not that the Bible is a human document. Instead, the parallels testify to a religious consciousness already present in man before the giving of the Torah – attested to in the Bible in such figures as Enoch and Shem.38Abraham Kook, Eder ha-Yakar (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1985), 42. This consciousness is diffused through other cultures and explains their points of contact with the Hebrew Bible.
Because God is revealed in history as well as in Torah, the authority of Jewish law resides not only in its divine authorship but also in the historical fact of its acceptance by the people of Israel. This certainly applies to the Oral Torah, and in some sense to the Written Torah also.39Ibid., 39. Here Kook turns Ahad Ha-Am’s approach to the Bible on its head. The Torah is, as Ahad Ha-Am said, the national possession of Israel. But it is not its human creation. To the contrary, it was the divine spirit active within the people that led to its natural affinity with, and acceptance of, the Torah as the basis of its collective life.
Because of Kook’s overriding sense of the unity of existence, and hence of knowledge, he was not opposed in principle to the scholarly study of the Bible, and believed that in the course of time it would vindicate the historicity of biblical narrative. There was no conflict between religion and science because the Torah was primarily concerned with the knowledge of God and the sanctification of life, not with astronomy or geology. When the prophets spoke in prescientific paradigms, they used them only as parables and analogies that would be understood by their generation. All knowledge, seen in its proper perspective, advanced mankind in its natural striving toward God. From this, Kook drew one of his most radical conclusions. Even denial of “Torah from Heaven” could be seen, in one sense, as a paradoxical expression of the desire for a more elevated conception of “heaven” than was contained in conventional theologies. Denial already contains within itself the germinating seed of faith.40For a scholarly analysis of Rabbi Kook’s views, see Binyamin Ish Shalom, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 98–115.
The opposite view is taken by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Soloveitchik makes a tantalising statement at the beginning of his essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith”: “I have not been perplexed by the impossibility of fitting the mystery of revelation into the framework of historical empiricism. Moreover, I have not even been troubled by the theories of Biblical criticism which contradict the very foundations upon which the sanctity and integrity of the Scriptures rest.”41Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 7:2 (Summer 1965), 9. The statement is tantalising because nowhere in his writings does Soloveitchik explain the reason for his lack of perplexity. Nonetheless, from what else we know of his thought we can construct the broad outlines of an answer.
The twentieth-century divorce of religion and science allows us to see both in their full distinctiveness. What we know is dependent on why we seek to know. The scientist, the sociologist and the poet each bring their different methodologies to bear on reality and as a result they see it in different ways, through different concepts. There may be a single unified absolute being at the heart of reality, but it is inevitably refracted through the several lenses through which we come to know it. Soloveitchik’s axiom is epistemological pluralism, namely that “the object reveals itself in manifold ways to the subject, and that a certain telos corresponds to each of these ontical manifestations.”42Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 16.
The modern crisis of religion, of which biblical criticism is a symptom, arises from the misapplication of scientific concepts like time as a sequence of causality to aspects of reality like revelation and faith to which they do not belong.
Covenantal commitment eludes cognitive analysis by the logos… The act of faith is aboriginal, exploding with elemental force as an all-pervading eudaemonic-passional experience… The intellect does not chart the course of the man of faith; its role is an a posteriori one. It attempts, ex post facto, to retrace the footsteps of the man of faith, and even in this modest attempt the intellect is not completely successful.43Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” 60–61.
In other words revelation, both at Sinai and in the heart of each believer, resists explanation in terms of prior causes and can therefore not be the subject of scientific or historical research.
The attempt on the part of science to extend its domain to the field of religion is not accidental. Analysing the two accounts of the creation of man in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, Soloveitchik suggests that man is an essentially divided being. He approaches the world “majestically” and “covenantally,” as the master of creation and its servant. On the one hand he seeks knowledge that is quantifiable and usable: he is drawn to mastery. As the second he seeks knowledge that is qualitative and awe-inspiring: he is drawn to mystery. For most of human history these two elements have been in a state of tense equilibrium, but in the modern world the first (the scientific) has gained dominance and sought to impose its rule on the second (the faithful). The crisis for the man of faith is not that the integrity of his vision has been shattered. It has not: it remains intact. It is rather that it has been marginalised in a world in which the only knowledge that counts is that which is “useful.” The question which perplexes Soloveitchik, therefore, is not “How can I believe in revelation?” but “What can a man of faith like myself, living by a doctrine which has no technical potential, by a law which cannot be tested in a laboratory…say to a functional utilitarian society which is saeculum-oriented and whose practical reasons of the mind have long ago supplanted the sensitive reasons of the heart?”44Ibid., 8.
Soloveitchik rejects absolutely the liberal conception of religion as pure subjectivity. To the contrary, religion is a form of objective, quantifiable knowledge with its own concepts, logic and rules. Judaism, with its body of canonical texts and determinate rules in the form of halakhah, represents objectification in the highest degree. Religious experience is a matter of travelling inward from this objective starting point. The fact that the biblical text, for example, contains apparent contradictions is not the result of its having being written by many hands, but rather evidence that it reflects and endorses conflicting dimensions of the human condition with which the religious personality has to struggle in ceaseless dialectic.
History, metaphysics and law
Beyond monism and pluralism there was the question of the status of the principles of faith as they relate to revelation. Are they true empirically, metaphysically or halakhically? This issue was sensitively explored by Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn in a long responsum on modern biblical scholarship.45Chaim Hirschensohn, Malki ba-Kodesh, Part 2 (St. Louis, MO: Moinester Printing Co., 1921), 215–50.
Hirschensohn pointed to an ambiguity in Maimonides’s formulation of the principle of “Torah from Heaven.” In his Commentary to the Mishnah, Maimonides defined the eighth principle of faith as the belief that “the whole of this Torah found in our hands this day is the Torah that was handed down by Moses and that it is all of divine origin.” Which here is fundamental: that the Torah is divine or that it was handed down by Moses? In his law code, Maimonides defined the corresponding heresy as “he who says that the Torah is not of divine origin, even if he says of one verse or a single word that Moses said it by himself.” A later summary of Maimonides’s principles which found its way into many prayer books, however, reads, “I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah which we now possess is the same that was given to Moses our teacher, peace be to him.”
Two interpretations of “Torah from Heaven” are therefore possible. The first is metaphysical, laying emphasis on the divine authorship of the Torah. The second is historical, emphasising the role of Moses in transmitting the text. Maimonides’s law code focuses on the first, the prayer book summary on the second. On this basis Hirschensohn drew a distinction between two kinds of bible criticism. One sees the Bible as a human composition. The other, while not denying its divinity, suggests that some passages were transcribed by later hands. The believer must regard both as false, but in different ways. The former is heretical, the latter merely mistaken. Hirschensohn takes Maimonides’s law code as normative for Judaism and therefore sees the metaphysical belief (“Torah from Heaven”) as fundamental while the historical belief (“Torah from Moses”) is true but not a principle of faith.
A similar distinction could be made in the case of textual criticism. The eighth principle insists that the text we have now of the Torah is that which was given to Moses. But is this a factual belief or a halakhic proposition? Hirschensohn points to a talmudic passage which says that there were three Torah scrolls in the Temple court which contained slight textual variants. The correct reading in each case was determined on the principle that “we follow the majority.”46Tractate Soferim 6:3. There is, in other words, a theoretical difference between the historically original and the halakhically normative text. To be sure, the possibility should not be pushed too far.47See Zvi Yehuda, “Hazon Ish on Textual Criticism and Halakhah,” Tradition 18:2 (Summer 1980), 172–80, and Shnayer Leiman’s rejoinder, Tradition 19:4 (Winter 1981), 301–10. The painstaking care of successive generations of scribes ensured that variant readings were few. The point suggested by Hirschensohn however is that the emendations suggested by critics, as well as being historically tenuous, are also halakhically irrelevant, Judaism having long established for legal purposes its authoritative text of the Bible.
Orthodoxy and biblical criticism
With these distinctions in mind we can readily understand the three broad lines of Orthodox response to modern biblical scholarship.48I have been greatly helped in this section by Shalom Rosenberg, “Cheker ha-Mikra be-Machshavah ha-Yehudit ha-Datit he-Chadashah,” in Uriel Simon (ed.), Ha-Mikra va-Anachnu (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1979), 86–119. The first is reconciliation between Jewish belief and contemporary scholarship. This had been part of the medieval heritage from Saadia Gaon onwards. During the Middle Ages the challenges had come from Karaism, neo-Aristotelian philosophy and Christian biblical interpretation. Now it came from secular criticism. But the principle seemed essentially the same, namely that the challenge could and should be met on its own ground. This was the view adopted by the great German Orthodox scholar, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann. Hoffmann accepted rabbinic beliefs about the Torah as “dogmatic assumptions,” but he was concerned to defend them on scholarly grounds.49See Jenny Marmorstein, “David Hoffmann: Defender of the Faith,” Tradition 9:4, 91–101.
In his writings he argued vigorously against the theory that the “Priestly Code” was a separate document, composed after the book of Deuteronomy and indeed after Ezekiel. Martialling textual evidence that conflicted with the documentary hypothesis, Hoffmann argued that Leviticus was an earlier work than Deuteronomy and that Ezekiel was derivative of it rather than the other way around. His own belief, following a talmudic suggestion,50Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 60a. was that Moses composed the Torah in a series of scrolls during different revelations, and at the end his life redacted them into a single document. Throughout, Hoffmann was concerned not merely to defend traditional belief in the Written Torah, but also to show that the interpretations given by the Oral Torah were not arbitrary or forced but flowed from nuances in the text itself.51David Zvi Hoffmann, Sefer Vayikra (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1972). A similar though more overtly apologetic approach is apparent in the work of the British Chief Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz. See his Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Soncino Press, 1962).
Hoffmann wrote in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was followed by other Jewish biblical scholars, notably Benno Jacob, Yehezkiel Kaufman and Umberto Cassutto, who while not writing within the Orthodox tradition, nonetheless defended the unity and antiquity of the Pentateuch against its critics. More recently, considerable archaeological evidence has come to light supportive of the Bible’s historicity. The discoveries at Mari, Nuzi and Ebla allow us to place the patriarchal narratives in the context of their time, and scholars would now be far more reticent than they once were in subscribing to the main contentions of Julius Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis. One recent writer summarises the shift in these terms: “Whereas, fifty years ago, any early passage of the Bible was assumed to be mythical or symbolic, the onus of proof has now shifted: increasingly scholars tend to assume that the text contains at least a germ of truth and see it as their business to cultivate it.”52Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 7. As a result, one contemporary Orthodox writer suggests that “the believing Jew need have no fear of modern Biblical research… For the history of such research is bringing it inexorably toward some rapprochement with the divine Bible, if for no other reason than that all other avenues have failed.”53Emanuel Feldman, The Biblical Echo (New York: Ktav, 1986), 103. See also Max Kapustin, “Biblical Criticism: A Traditionalist View,” Tradition 3 (Fall 1960), 25–31; Joseph Grunblatt, “The Great Estrangement: The Rabbi and the Student,” Tradition 7 (Summer 1966), 66–73.
The strength of this approach is that it attempts to preserve a single frame of discourse between religion and critical scholarship. Its weakness is that the two disciplines, even if compatible, are differently motivated. The claims of faith lie beyond the scope of empirical enquiry. For this reason a different strategy recommended itself to a second group of thinkers who sought to emphasise not the connections but the differences between biblical criticism and a religious approach to texts. They do not seek to dismiss out of hand the integrity of the academic study of the Bible as an autonomous discipline, but they question its claim to determine the meaning of the Bible for the community of faith. Three figures are important here: Franz Rosenzweig, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Mordecai Breuer.
Franz Rosenzweig’s position was not an Orthodox one. But deeply troubled by Martin Buber’s idea of revelation as encounter without content, Rosenzweig wrestled with the question of whether the modern Jew can find his way back to revelation as experienced by Jewish tradition. His view, like Hirschensohn’s, was that two issues which had been brought together by modern thought were in fact separate: the historical one of the development of the biblical text and the theological one of the text as revelation. One might admit that scholarly views were correct on the first point, but that did not necessarily affect the second. In a letter to the orthodox rabbi, Jacob Rosenheim, he made his view clear: “Where we differ from Orthodoxy is in our reluctance to draw from our belief in the holiness or uniqueness of the Torah, and in its character of revelation, any conclusions as to its literary genesis and the philological value of the text as it has come down to us. If all of Wellhausen’s theories were correct…our faith would not be shaken in the least.”54Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 1970), 158. He is reputed to have said that he was prepared to accept the documentary hypothesis with one proviso, that where Wellhausen postulated a Redactor, he would substitute the word Rabbenu (“our teacher”).
The first distinction suggested by Rosenzweig, then, is between the metaphysical idea of “Torah from Heaven” and the historical assertion of “Torah from Sinai.” But there is another fundamental distinction implicit in his thought. We can best understand his approach as an attempt to understand not the giving but the receiving of the Torah. Though the Torah was given once it is received in every generation. The question was: Can it still be received in the twentieth century, distanced from it as we are by the sophistication of our historical knowledge? Rosenzweig’s answer is that it can, but not in a state of detachment. We “hear” the Torah as revelation only when we are engaged in living it. “One hears differently when one hears in the doing.” There is an experiential difference, in other words, between the secular act of reading a text and the religious act of listening to Torah.55Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, edited by N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1955).
For Rosenzweig revelation is not a fact of history but of personal encounter. For Yeshayahu Leibowitz it is neither. Instead it is a fact of halakhah.56Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yahadut, Am Yehudi u-Medinat Yisrael, (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1979), 13–37, 337–84. In a controversial analysis, Leibowitz turns the conventional relationship between the Written and Oral Laws on its head. We are accustomed to think of the Written Torah as the basis of Judaism and of the Oral Law as secondary and supplementary to it. The primary datum of Judaism is the Pentateuch, but since this needs explication and application, we are commanded to turn to the Oral Law and its guardians, the rabbis. It is this picture that Leibowitz is determined to reverse.
For him, it is the Oral Law in the form of halakhah which is primary, and the Written Law which is secondary. Why, asks Leibowitz, do we have a canon of scriptures? Only because of the decision of the sages to declare these books and not those, sacred. Just as it is the halakhah which determines that a certain day is holy, so it determines that a certain text is holy. The sanctity of the Torah is not intrinsic, nor can it be inferred from any property of the text considered in itself. Polemically, Leibowitz argues that as a work of poetry, the Bible is inferior to Shakespeare; as philosophy, it does not rival Plato or Kant. Nor is it a work of ethics, for ethics concerns the duties of man to man while the Bible concerns the duties of man to God. The only distinctiveness of the Bible is as “the words of the living God.” But this in turn raises the question, how do we know that it represents the words of God? The answer is that halakhah has so determined. The religion of Israel was not created by the Torah; rather, the Torah is one of the institutions of the religion of Israel. The Oral Law is therefore logically prior to the Written Law, or as Leibowitz expresses it: “the halakhah of the Oral Law derives its authority from ‘the words of the living God’ in Scripture, but determines what is the content, meaning and significance of the Written Law.”57Ibid., 21.
Leibowitz’s stance is paradoxical, but it accurately reflects one important feature of the place of the Pentateuch in Judaism, namely, its dependence on authoritative interpretation. Leibowitz is scathingly dismissive of any attempt, such as Ben Gurion’s, to read the Bible as an autonomous text. He describes this as Lutheranism and bibliolatry. To this he adds his characteristic theocentrism: the Bible exists not to serve human needs but to call men to the love and fear of God. As a result it is misconceived if it is seen as a source of scientific or historical information. The only proper route to such knowledge is not revelation but scientific enquiry. “The sanctity of Scripture is not a historical or scientific but a religious category,”58Ibid., 350. and is therefore unaffected by any discoveries in these fields.
Shalom Rosenberg has described Leibowitz’s approach as “Torah for the sake of Heaven” rather than “Torah from Heaven,”59Rosenberg, 113. and it lies at an opposite extreme from that of Mordecai Breuer. Leibowitz dismisses biblical criticism as irrelevant to Judaism. Breuer, alone among Orthodox scholars, accepts its findings as both academically warranted and of religious significance.60Mordecai Breuer, “Emunah u-Madda be-Parshanut ha-Mikra,” Deot, “Cheker ha-Mikra be-Machshavah ha-Yehudit ha-Datil he-Chadashah,” 11 (1959), 18–25, and 12 (1960), 13–27. See also Zvi Kurzweil, The Modern Impulse of Traditional Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1985), 79–91. In a strange hybrid of neo-Kantianism and Jewish mysticism, Breuer distinguishes between the Bible as phenomenon and noumenon, as perceived and as it exists in itself. There is the Bible as document and as Torah, much as there is the world as nature and as creation.61In this regard, Breuer is influenced by his uncle, Isaac Breuer. For a recent study of Isaac Breuer’s thought, see Alan Mittelman, Between Kant and Kabbalah (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). In one aspect it is understood through the network of causality, in the other as the direct revelation of God. That is the difference between the Bible as seen by Wellhausen – a palimpsest of documents composed and redacted over centuries – and as seen by Judaism: words written in fire on fire, preceding the creation of the world and representing a chain of mystical names of God.
We might expect Breuer to proceed, as does Leibowitz, to declare the two aspects non-interconnecting. Instead he does the opposite. Firstly he accepts the findings of critical scholarship, if not in detail then at least in broad principle. Then he insists that this must have significance for faith itself. For the believer must now ask himself why God chose this mode of revelation and no other, namely, a Pentateuchal text which bears all the signs of having been written by several different hands? His answer is that it is precisely this that God chose to reveal about the world, that it can be seen from different perspectives, each of which represents a religious reality. Breuer is particularly struck by the fact that the documentary hypothesis rests on the use, by different putative authors, of different names for God. He links this to the Jewish tradition that the different names refer to different aspects of God, like justice and compassion. Our experience of the biblical text is therefore like our experience of the world. It seems as if now one, now another attribute of God is operative. Only at the level of mysticism do we perceive the unity behind the various manifestations of the divine, and only at the level of the mystical meaning of the Torah do we see the unity of what otherwise appears to be a fragmented and multiple text.
Rosenzweig, Leibowitz and Breuer stand at the margins of Orthodoxy, and there are obvious problems in each of their positions. Rosenzweig makes revelation dependent on personal receptivity. But this is not how Jewish tradition did or could understand it. Among other things, the Torah revealed laws binding on the people of Israel for all future generations. For Rosenzweig, the Torah reveals commandments binding only on those who personally experience the call of God.
Leibowitz is open to the opposite objection. For him the Torah primarily reveals laws; indeed it is law itself, the halakhah, which determines the status of Torah. But can the Bible be so emptied of informational content? How, for example, would Leibowitz respond to the claim of some radical critics that the Pentateuch is mythic rather than actual history and that we cannot be certain that either the exodus or the theophany at Sinai took place? Doubtless he would reply that revelation is ultimately a halakhic, not a historical fact: we are bound to the Torah not because of what happened at Sinai, but because of the collective decision of postbiblical Jewry to accept the Pentateuch as sacred. But if the halakhah is no more than a collective human decision, what then happens to Leibowitz’s insistence on the theocentricity of Judaism? Authority, in his system, seems to rest with Jews, not with God.62See H. Ben-Yerucham and H. Kolitz (eds.), Shelilah Lishmah, (Jerusalem: El ha-Shorashim, 1983), for a collection of critical essays on Leibowitz’s thought. See also Peninah Ilan, “Al Kedushatam shel Kitvei Kodesh,” Deot 3; A. Ron, “Al Kitvei Kodesh ve-Informatziah Madait,” Deot 25.
Breuer’s position, too, is idiosyncratic. Accepting to the full the findings of biblical criticism, he rescues the unity and divinity of Torah only by resorting to Jewish mysticism. But mysticism is not central to, nor of unquestioned authority within, Judaism. What is more, it is a postbiblical development. And, as a number of critics have pointed out, consistency would require Breuer to accept historical criticism of Jewish mysticism as well. It cannot be the one point of faith invulnerable to critical enquiry.63See the responses of Jacob Katz, Uriel Simon, Joseph Heinemann, Meir Weiss, Dr. Halperin and Yaakov Zeidman in Deot 13 (1961), 14–23.
Faced with these difficulties, a third group adopts the approach of rejection.64This is the approach of the traditional nineteenth-century exegetes such as Malbim, Samson Raphael Hirsch and Mecklenburg. It is adopted in the recent, popular Artscroll commentaries to biblical texts. In one (The Book of Esther, x) the author states bluntly that “No non-Jewish sources have even been consulted, much less quoted. I consider it offensive that the Torah should require authentication from the secular or so-called scientific sources.” For more nuanced views see Louis Rabinowitz, “Torah min ha-Shamayim,” Tradition 7:1 (Spring 1965), 34–45, and Steven Shaw, “Orthodox Reactions to the Challenge of Biblical Criticism,” Tradition 10:3 (Spring 1969), 61–85. Torah is to be understood from within, not on the basis of external evidence and methodologies. If it is axiomatic to Jewish faith that the Torah is the word of God and that its authoritative interpretation is preserved in the oral tradition, no argument that proceeds from other premisses touches the Jewish understanding of the Bible, either by way of confirmation or refutation. The talmudic sages emphasised the difference between their receptivity to non-Jewish science and their rejection of non-Jewish readings of the Bible: “If you are told, ‘There is wisdom among the nations,’ believe it. If you are told, ‘There is Torah among the nations,’ do not believe it.”65Lamentations Rabbah 2:17. Precisely because the Torah is the text of Jewish singularity, its proper understanding lies within the community of faith and its received teachings. Jews had been long aware, through their rifts with Sadducees, Christians and Karaites, that a single document could be given a variety of meanings. It could authorise not only Jewish tradition but also radical departures from it. Guardianship of the meaning of Torah is therefore as important as belief in its divine origin. It follows that rejection of modern scholarship has ample precedent in the rabbinic sources.
A fateful meeting
The Jewish encounter with secular bible scholarship has necessarily run along different lines to its Protestant counterpart. In one respect the Bible is less central to Judaism, because of the Oral Law and rabbinic tradition. “Scripture alone,” a principle of Protestantism, is for Judaism a mark of sectarianism, the Sadducean and Karaite heresy. For that reason there can be in Judaism no equivalent of Protestant biblical fundamentalism. In another respect, however, the bible is more central because it represents not just evidence of revelation but the content of revelation itself. For Judaism the Torah is not merely a record of events (the exodus and Sinai) but the constitution of the covenant made on the basis of those events. In it God reveals not only His presence but also His will. What is important to Judaism, therefore, is not only what historically lies behind the text, but the text itself. For that reason, while Protestantism might survive the displacement of the text, Judaism cannot.
We have charted the various responses to secular biblical scholarship. But we have not yet set the problem in its breadth and pathos. For this was no mere intellectual encounter. We began the chapter with the martyrdom of Chaninah ben Teradyon in the second century CE. A half-century earlier Josephus, that complex Jewish historian, was moved to testify to his non-Jewish readers about
our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them… What Greek would endure as much for the same cause?66Josephus, Against Apion, in Works, volume 1, Loeb, 1926, 179–81.
That passion intensified during the long centuries of exile. Heinrich Heine called the Torah “the portable fatherland of the Jew.” Echoing him, George Steiner has spoken of “Our homeland, the Text.” 67George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi (Winter/Spring 1985), 4–25. Emil Fackenheim recalls “a picture from my childhood… Jews fleeing from a pogrom… The fleeing Jews in the picture are bearded old men, terrified, but not so much as to leave behind what is most precious to them. In the view of antisemitism these Jews would doubtless be clutching bags of gold. In fact each of them carries a Torah scroll.”68Emil Fackenheim, What is Judaism? (New York: Macmillian, 1987), 60.
Judaism was Torah. The rest was endless commentary. Prior to the nineteenth century, Jewish existence or identity without Torah would have sounded a contradiction in terms. Julius Guttman correctly noted that there is no precedent in Jewish history for the modern phenomenon of Jews who define themselves as religious while rejecting the traditional understanding of “Torah from Sinai.”69Julius Guttmann, Dat u-Madda (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1955), 259. Despite the fierce philosophical disputes of the Middle Ages, this was the unshakable grounds on which all Jews stood. That ground was split asunder by the earthquake of the Enlightenment. Since then, Orthodoxy alone has preserved the Torah of tradition into the twentieth century, while other groups have filtered its voice through independent and prior imperatives: ethics, autonomy, history or national culture. The Bible has not ceased to be part of Jewish consciousness. But it has lost its central, seminal authority as the constitutive document of a covenantal people.
A relatively small part of modern Jewish theology has been devoted to the question of “Torah from Heaven.” It is as if scholars have sensed that in confronting it they approach holy ground. For the fate of Torah in Jewish thought is little less than the axis on which the meaning of Jewish existence turns. At stake are the central terms of Jewish belief: textuality and history, interpretation and time, revelation and the covenant between God and a chosen people. In the next chapter, therefore, I attempt one way of understanding the problem in the larger context it deserves.