USCJ Review - Spring 2003
The Importance of Orientation: Etz Hayyim and the Conservative Jewish Perspective
In March 2002 there appeared in The New York Times an article by a freelancer named Michael Massing entitled "New Torah for Modern Minds." The article was about Etz Hayyim -- the new Conservative Movement Torah commentary -- and it set off a certain amount of discussion and controversy.
Massing set out to raise one particular issue: the ways in which the commentary and essays in Etz Hayyim raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Torah's narratives. He left the reader with the impression that there were basically only two kinds of Torah commentaries in the modern age. One is exemplified by the Stone Humash, which is increasingly standard in modern Orthodox synagogues. It is a commentary that avers up front that “every letter and word of the Torah was given to Moses by God.” And to quote the Rabbinical Council of America: "One cannot question this view of the Torah without questioning its eternal relevance or its unalterably Godly source."
Following this logic, the only other kind of Torah commentary that Massing recognizes is a commentary that sees the Torah as merely a human creation. Here are Massing's words about Etz Hayyim: "it represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document." It is, in other words, one or the other. And so, the only other kind of commentary recognized in this view is one that treats the Torah's narratives as a human creation flowing from purely human motives - i.e., to invent a past, whether one of victimization or of glorious victory, to justify a legal order, or to legitimate the role of a particular tribe or royal house. It is white or black. Divine or human. Eternally true or a relic of an outdated past. A morally and legally binding guide to life or just an archaic code that died with the human powers it served.
Massing even grossly distorted, by incomplete reporting, the points of view actually represented by the contributors to this commentary. For example, he quotes Rabbi Robert Wexler, who writes that, with all the parallels to Mesopotamian myths, it seems "unlikely that the Genesis story [of Noah and the flood] originated in Palestine." But what Massing didn't report is that Wexler also wrote that the most likely hypothesis is that both the flood story in Genesis and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh drew their material from a common tradition about the flood.
Now when I was young, and being raised on the Hertz Humash, my Orthodox teacher in high school knew all about Gilgamesh. And he took this precisely as a confirmation of the biblical account. That is, how would so many cultures know about the flood, and tell their own stories about the flood, if it hadn't actually happened? An insistence on reading texts in their wider context is not ipso facto a claim that they are not factual.
In fact, what the Times article portrayed as a tendentious verdict on the historicity of the Torah's narratives was nothing more than an insistence that the evidence, or lack thereof, must be weighed honestly, in the same way that we would do in the pursuit of knowledge in any field. And because of that, the view expressed by some Orthodox leaders that exposing Jews to this kind of open-minded assessment of biblical history might turn young minds against Judaism may be exactly backwards.
Except for the one exceptional teacher I have already referred to, I was mostly shielded from the results of historical study and analysis of the biblical text until I reached college. And there I was, learning things from worl d experts that had been simplistically put down as mischievous falsehoods by the Hertz commentary. No wonder I had a brief crisis of faith. Why did these scholars seem to know more about the Bible and its history than all my teachers knew? How much better for our youth to learn about the ambiguities of archaeological evidence, and even the internal contradictions in the biblical text, in their synagogue, from their Humash and from their rabbi, than to encounter it for the first time in college and then wonder why their rabbis and teachers conspired to hide all this from them.
If Massing’s dichotomy is wrong, then we must ask what it could mean for the Torah to be divine and also not be an infallibly correct account of actual events. So imagine that you are picking up a new book, one, say, with no title on the cover, so that you begin to learn about the book only upon opening it. You first read a preface. It says the following: "The volume before you is the result of relentless investigative reporting, and though its claims may at times seem incredible, they are all thoroughly documented." So you read on, and are fascinated, perhaps even shocked, to learn facts that you never knew. It changes your life and the way in which you look at things, and you eagerly pass it on to others so that they may know these facts as well. Then one day you discover that the book that so profoundly moved you was actually quite shoddy and was based on very fallible sources. Some of it was even just made up. How do you feel? You feel betrayed. The author has made a fool of you. He claimed that the work was factual, you let it affect you accordingly, and you were duped.
Now on another occasion, you might open a book and find a preface that says, "What follows is a parable.” Or better, "This is a work of fiction, although it is based on fact." You now have a different orientation to what you are about to read. You read it, and you find it to be one of the most moving and true books you have ever read. It also changes the way in which you look at the world, yourself, and your place in it. You live somewhat differently because of it. Now someone comes up to you and says, "You know, what [the author] said in that book didn't really happen, certainly not the way in which he describes." How do you feel now? Would you not say to this person, "I never assumed that it was all perfect fact. And the book's power to change my life had nothing to do with a perfect historical fit."
Orientation is critical. Even outright fiction, let alone legends based on actual events and experiences, can have enormous impact. The Rabbis themselves said this. Long ago, in the Talmud, they said of the biblical book of Job: "There never was such a person as Job. His life is a parable." None of this is dishonest or manipulative. It is the way words create and re-create worlds. Now what is the difference between the Torah and the two examples I've just given you? It is simple. The Torah has no preface; it just begins with a narrative. And thus, the orientation is up to us.
Etz Hayyim represents our [Conservative] orientation. It is legitimate because there is no preface that tells us that all reported in Genesis through Deuteronomy is historical fact. It is legitimate because of another crucial fact: that the Torah, in the entire five books, never makes the claim that it was given all at once to Moses at Mount Sinai. On the contrary, the plainest meaning of the Torah, which tells a narrative over forty years, and even a bit beyond Moses's death, is that it is a chronicle of an unfolding encounter with God by the people and its leaders.
There is a crucial thing to understand: We do not get belief in God from the Torah. Our faith comes from elsewhere. The Bible itself will not convince an atheist. If the Bibleis to have a hold over us, we must have a belief in God and a belief that this book reveals something about God. But if we don’t believe that it is a verbatim transcript of God’s revelation at Sinai, why should we see the Torah as a holy book? How might we imagine a Godly but also human Torah coming to be?
Consider this: The first two chapters of Genesis tell different tales of creation. If we accept that we have an edited compilation of different na rratives, does that mean we must believe that the world had no Creator? Or does it not rather mean that what we have in the Torah are different versions of the same belief that we are God's creatures, but told in different ways, with different emphases, including very different understandings of the role of women in the world, produced by believers in different places and different times?
Is what I have sketched out here not a possible way of understanding God’s revelation to us? Moreover, it contradicts nothing in the Torah. It helps us to understand why the accounts in the Torah are not literally infallible. And it also helps us to understand why the Torah's laws have a hold on us, why we take them as binding on us, and yet also understand that under the right circumstances, those laws may evolve and change.
We have long since accepted something similar to this for the Torah's assertions in Deuteronomy that we will be punished if and only if we sin. That is how we accommodate to the reality of innocent suffering. We recognize, or should recognize, that the Bible can't be taken literally when it says that only sinners suffer. So why is the suggestion made that the Exodus, or the conquest, or David's or Solomon's reigns, must have happened as the Torah says, or we have become heretics?
The Bible itself describes how Job came to a different understanding of sin and suffering – that they are separate, that righteousness should be pursued for its own sake and not because it guarantees immunity from pain. And God credited Job with an insight greater than that of his more conventionally pious friends. His experience taught him a deeper truth than Deuteronomy had originally expressed. That is a profound statement in the Bible itself of how we are part of the unfolding of God's truth. And we should be able to recognize God in our quest -- a God who continually raises the bar for us, by giving us the ability to see and understand more, to date archaeological finds, to compare ancient languages and literatures, and to reflect on millennia of human experience.
Some Jews take God as the sole and final religious authority. Some Jews take the thinking autonomous self as the sole and final religious authority. It is the particular characteristic of Conservative Judaism to insist that religious authority is a partnership, that it comes from the reality of a revealing God and the equally inescapable reality of a seeking, evolving community through which God's words get expressed over time.
So let's be proud to have Etz Hayyim in our pews. And above all, let's pray that all Jews, however they read the Torah, will come to understand the deep brotherhood and sisterhood of faith that we ultimately share.
Rabbi Tucker is the spiritual leader of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. The article is adapted from a talk delivered at the synagogue in May 2002.
