What is Torah? Part 2 - Translating the Claim for Divine Authorship
Posted Sep 30 2007 - 19:39 by Shai Gluskin
Mt. Sinai by Shar's Photos, taken on September 20, 2007
[An additional paragraph was added on 10/3/07, just after the 6th paragraph.]
At the end of my last post I asked the question,
How can a community maintain reverence for Jewish traditions and Jewish law while seeming to dispute the authority that stands at the core of those laws and traditions?
Jewish tradition, it would seem, makes a claim, that the "Oral Law," which forms the basis of Jewish Law, was authored by God and received by Moses at Sinai. (See the entry for Oral Law in the Jewish Encyclopedia from 1906 for an explanation of the Oral Law in line with an Orthodox approach.)
The meaning of a claim for divine authorship of a sacred text depends upon the cultural context from which it emerges. That claim cannot be imported into another cultural context without first attempting to translate it. When the rabbis say "The Written and Oral Torahs were authored by God and delivered by Moses" it means something different in our cultural context than it did in theirs.
When I traveled to China in the 1980's I learned about the importance of culture in understanding language. I remember attending a dinner hosted by a leading university administrator in honor of the foreign teachers. His wife began the meal by saying, "I'm deeply sorry that I have failed in providing even the humblest of dishes for this meal." The "truth" was the opposite. It was an elaborate feast.
The host's pre-dinner statement served as the functional equivalent of saying the ha-motzi prayer in Judaism. The ha-motzi acknowledges that God is the ultimate source of the food. My host's comment was a pro forma statement of humility which may subtley acknowledge, with not too much regret, the excess of the meal. Both statements attempt to express humility at a moment when credit would naturally flow. In both cases the statements are figures of speech, the meaning of the words cannot be learned by looking them up in the dictionary.
If the expression, the written and oral Torahs are the words of God delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai cannot be read literally, then what does it mean? I believe the Rabbis of the Talmud are pronouncing the deepest respect possible for the received tradition.
One of the reasons that the language of reverence needed to be so powerful was precisely because of the radical innovations which the Rabbis themselves were facilitating in the development of Jewish law. The Rabbis were masterful agents of change.
[added on 10/3:] I'm not suggesting that my "translation" of what the Rabbis said is the "right" translation. Another interpretation of their claim is that they did it for political purposes, trying to assert their own authority by claiming the authority of the divine. My goal is to encourage a renewed dialog with the Rabbis, not to proclaim an authoritative understanding of who they were and what they meant. [end of 10/3 addition]
I believe that liberal Jews can learn a lot from our ancestors on how to stay connected to tradition while enacting significant change. Maybe if we are able to see ourselves more like our Talmudic ancestors, we will engage more deeply with their legacy, even as we make it our own.
I know this kind of analysis won't cause the Jewish masses to rush to Sabbath observance. But I do think it is helpful to unpack some of the assumptions about what our tradition is claiming. By asserting that the tradition itself does not make a claim for divine authorship, as we would understand divine authorship in our era, I'm challenging myself and other liberal Jews to rethink what claim our inherited traditions make on us.
It's helpful to engage in translating our ancestor's words into a contemporary cultural context. But I'm also interested in translating their process into a contemporary paradigm. In free societies where personal autonomy stands at the center of decision making, we need to create new methods and new forms for communities to become coherent and intense, even as they remain open and affirm individual autonomy.
More next time...
Excellent blog. It is helpful to understand "oral and written Torah given on Sinai" as a figure of speech for holiness rather than historical fact. Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words and the elegant restatement in your own words.
Fascinating! The analogy from your Chinese host as well as the lesson you draw from it.
All translation is interpretation. And I think your interpretation honors the spirit of our rabbinic ancestors who were masters of language and reading!
Shai, your interpretation is cool, as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, I've found the rabbis' claim, as stated without interpretation, useful in responding to Christian proselytizers who say, "How can you base your religious beliefs on the work of men [sexism in the original], rather than the work of God?" (the implication being that the Biblical text is written by God, the Jewish law written by men). The response is that the oral torah is also given to Moses on Mt. Sinai by God. They don't buy it, but at least I find it important to rebut the fundamental insult to Judaism in the "bible-believing" evangelists' claim. I make the Orthodox Jewish claim, without explaining my own understanding, which might include "whether or not you believe it, and I myself don't take it as literally true, the terms of our tradition hold that...
On the other hand, we have occasion to dialogue with Orthodox Jews who don't interpret the claim the way you or I do. With them I might do a translation in my mind something like the one I thought I got once from Howie Langer. He once gave us a D.T. in which he reported on a dialogue with some Ortho's in Russia. They confronted him, as I recall, asking him if he believed Rambam's Thirteen Articles of Faith. He replied, "yes, but perhaps not 'be'emunah shelemah'" (with a perfect faith). My recollection was that Howie's reply maintained shalom bayit, while giving nothing away. That pretty well re-translates my belief -- yeah, I believe it all, *somewhat*.
I also remember a tale about Dan Kamesar, Z'L. Somebody in Jerusalem got sick or something, and he professed to believe the cause was that the mezzuzoth were blemished, so he arranged to replace all of them. Now Dan may have believed that was literally true, but I find that hard to believe. I take it that he meant what he said with a grain of metaphor, maybe even irony; and maybe if pressed he would have admitted that he didn't really have "emunah shelemah" about it being the literal truth. But like sending the men out to boil water during a childbirth, it was something to busy oneself with while waiting for the outcome of the person's illness, which was out of human control.
Finally, God is infinite and eternal in my understanding, and anything anybody says about him-her-or it must necessarily be other than the literal truth. Everything I ever utter about God -- including that he-she-or it did or didn't give the Torah on mount sinai is really ineffable and therefore incomprehensible in human language. So I'm not very concerned about any particular claim's "truth."
With regard to the claim that the _h_azal guys meant what they said one way or the other (except when you're talking to people who already believe as you do), I think it invites an endless dispute about the authority of one's claim. I'm personally not up for such, but if you are, be my guest.
Those are some of the ways I deal with this stuff.
Best, Steve
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the robust reply! I loved the Dan Kamesar z"l story. You wrote:
Amen, well-stated!
You wrote:
My goal in writing this stuff out is not about convincing those for whom it doesn't resonate. (However, I would like to give examples and put more "meat" in the argument that proposes that the Rabbis made the claim of divine authorship for the written and oral Torahs with "a wink and a nod".)
My main goal here is to begin a conversation with other like-minded folk about the role of Jewish Law in our lives. In a future post I'm going to write about the generic benefits of being obligated to a set of behaviors that train one in the delay of gratification as well as the art of celebration. In another post I want to challenge myself and other like-minded liberal Jews to take halakhah out of the closet and define our relationship to it. What I've tried to do in these last two posts is lay a foundation to reject a dismissal of halakhah that is based on theological grounds.
Thanks again for your comments.
Hello! I don't remember that particular toast. But as you kept a journal, you must have a lot more recall!
I think the things you talk about are very relevant in Buddhism too. How to interpret things written in a very different time to a very different audience. My children love the story of how when the Buddha was born, lotus leaves appeared in front of him. He took ten steps on the leaves, raised his forefinger in the air and said something to the effect of "I am the champion!"
As I re-read Shai's blog(s)and the subsequent comments, I am struck that what Shai is seeking for HIMSELF is the path or meaning of the treasure trove of Torah, not to try to convince others of the veracity of his thoughts, but to share his ongoing journey and to encourage us to do the same.