Rosh HaShanah Day 2: The Record of Revelation
(This sermon has been modified from its original version — it has been optimized for written form.)
I will be speaking this morning on Torah as scripture, as the authority in our religious lives and on the nature of its holiness. Some of what I say may strike you as controversial. That’s ok, and you should know that almost everything I will say is a mainstream opinion within Conservative Judaism. My goal today is for you to leave feeling that you have grappled with the concept of Torah and have new perspectives by which to view it. You do not need to reach a conclusion, but I hope you will be inspired to continue learning Torah and about Torah, and that you move into a deeper and more complex relationship with Torah the revealed, and HaShem the Revealer.
Today will be taking a number of trips back in time, to see how the Torah was received and how it was perceived; is it holy? Divine? Man-made? There are surprising possibilities from within our tradition. I should remind you as we embark on this journey, of the “Two Torahs” tradition, that Moshe was given both a Written Torah and an Oral Torah at Sinai, one was in fact written down as stated in Deuteronomy, and the other was passed verbally in an unbroken chain of tradition from Moshe to the rabbis and eventually to me, and from me to you. The nature of the Torah (both written and oral) has major implications for us today on how we interpret, apply, and occasionally, even change it.
Let’s go back to the time of the Mishnah, to Pirkei Avot, which begins:
“Moshe received the Torah at Sinai, and transferred it to Joshua, Joshua transferred it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, the Prophets to the men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in judgement, make many disciples, and make a fence round the Torah. ”
Notably, this Mishnah does not say that Moshe transferred the Torah to the People of Israel, as it says in Deuteronomy that Moshe gave the book of the Torah to the elders and commanded them to read aloud to the entire people of Israel, every seven years on Sukkot. This led to the prevailing opinion that “the Teaching” that was passed through the leaders of every generation was the Oral Torah, the set of principles and methods of interpreting Torah, as well as clarifying laws and details of commandments.
Dr. Rabbi Joshua Kulp, of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, wrote in his commentary on this Mishnah,
“One of the most basic tenets of Judaism is related in this mishnah: that Moses received an oral as well as a written Torah and that there is an unbroken chain connecting the Rabbis with the revelation at Sinai. Therefore the oral Torah, observed and studied during the time of the Mishnah (and in subsequent generations as well) is not the creation of human beings, but is actually as divine in origin as is the written Torah. Now this an extremely significant claim, about which many, many books have been written, and indeed some fierce battles were... There are many sub-questions that require further resolution, most importantly what was the nature of the oral Torah received at Sinai. Did Moses receive every detail of observance and belief that any Jew would ever need to know? If so then all of the debates in the Mishnah and Talmud are attempts to recover what was originally known, and for some reason lost (this is Rav Saadiah Gaon’s position). Alternatively, were only the principles given to Moses, and perhaps rules by which later Jews could create new laws, laws that would have roots at Sinai but not have been specified at Sinai? If so, then the Mishnah and Talmud contain actual creativity in advancing and expanding the oral Torah (this is basically the Rambam’s position).”
Today, following the opinion of a good number of thinkers, including my professor Dr. Benjamin Sommer, I want to open you to the possibility that the second option is correct, and furthermore there is no Written Torah, only Oral Torah… and the Written Torah, like the Mishnah and Talmud, is Oral Torah that was just written down earlier. This understanding will have profound implications for us today, and is one of the most important distinctions of Conservative Judaism, which I hope to show you ties us to tradition, yet empowers us to grow.
Before we go further, we need to try to understand what the movement has thought about the nature of Torah previously.
Let us go back in time again, to 1956 when Abraham Karp wrote in “Toward a Theology of Conservative Judaism:”
“Torah is the record of Revelation — the continuous unfolding of God’s design for man’s fulfilment of his responsibility in the Covenant relationship. Torah is the historic record of man’s response to his continuous creative discovery of God’s will. It is the saga of man’s commitment, through life experiences, to the reality of God.”
Pay close attention to his wording here. “Torah is the record of Revelation.” Not, Torah is Revelation. It is “the continuous unfolding” not a past occurrence, but an ongoing process. This is a very intriguing idea, and it was continued in 1962, as Seymour Siegal concurred in his paper “Theology, Torah, and the Man of Today,” saying:
“…Torah is the medium of revelation — for through it we are made contemporaneous with the generation that stood at Mount Sinai, and also the record of revelation — that is the written witness to the experience of our forefathers to whom G-d came as a bridegroom…Torah is a human record of G-d’s revelation and thus is subject to investigation and error as are all human deeds. But it is a record of revelation and thus made an absolute claim upon us. ”
Siegal introduces us to an earlier idea that has been used by Orthodox leaders for many years to call us heretics — that the Torah was not written by the hand of Moshe word-for-word from the mouth of G-d. In Siegal’s words, “Torah is a human record of God’s revelation.” It is connected to revelation but is not the revelation itself in its entirety. If we are willing to accept that the Torah is the work of human authors, perhaps over centuries, not days, or even years, then we might risk losing the authoritative nature of the Torah to lack of divine transmission.
Ismar Schorsch, former chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary, in his highly influential “The Sacred Cluster: The Core Values of Conservative Judaism,” wrote in 1996,
“The sense of individual obligation, of being commanded, does not derive from divine authorship, but communal consent. The Written Torah, no less than the Oral Torah, reverberates with the divine-human encounter, with “a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation.” ”
Schorsch stops short of saying the Written and the Oral Torah are the same, but emphasizes the divine-human partnership in what we would call the Written Torah. This is because for us, the partnership is what makes the later works of the prophets and the rabbinic teachings in the Talmud so compelling. They aren’t just instructions from a distant God, but debate and working together to understand and create tradition — for me, God is found in the space between the partners of a chevruta, and between a teacher and student.
Dr. Benjamin Sommer, my teacher, says in his incredible work, Revelation and Authority, published in 2015,
“Both biblical criticism and the work of theologians like Rosenzweig and Heschel prompt the realization that for modern Judaism, there is no such thing as Written Torah; there is only Oral Torah, from which the Bible itself emerges and to which it belongs. ”
Later Dr. Sommer continues,
“Once we realize that the Bible is a part of Oral Torah, the sting of biblical criticism… loses all its force. We recognize that the Bible is not entirely divine in origin, that its verbal formulation may be entirely human. But for Jews… this realization need not shake any foundations. Judaism has long recognized a realm of religious authority that is a mix of human and divine elements, and that realm is the main source of Jewish religious practice and belief. ”
There are so many other examples of how scholars and rabbis have understood the divine-human nature of Torah, and unfortunately according to Erin and Matthew, I do not have the time to explain all 400 pages of Dr. Sommer’s book, so allow me instead to turn to my own understanding, and why I think it would beneficial for us to consider Torah in a different light.
Actually, that’s a good metaphor — Torah has long been described as light, as Proverbs says, “Ner mitzvah v’Torah ohr” the commandment is a lamp, and the Torah is the light. Perhaps light can be a further aid to our understand of the nature of Torah and how we can hold both historical-critical scholarship and religious-metaphysical interpretation of the text.
Rabbi Neil Gillman said,
“I no longer believe that my ancestors were slaves in Egypt who were removed from slavery by G-d’s intervention—which is what we celebrate at the Passover seder. But when I sit at the seder with my family, friends, and colleagues and say that we were slaves in Egypt and the Lord redeemed us from slavery, even though that is not historically true, it nevertheless remains mythologically true, and it is true in a very different sense of truth. It still provides me with a goosebump experience as I recite those words in the context of the seder. There is a term for the revival of a myth precisely in mythical terms: second naïveté. ”
Second naïveté in Gillman’s life is a belief in the myth, the truth behind the story, without necessarily believing every fact presented by the story. We understand the truth behind the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, which is to teach that George Washington was an honest man of integrity and not to teach that he chopped down a cherry tree.
As Jews in the Conservative movement, we are called to do the difficult thing — to engage with Torah as Torah Ohr, seeing the light of Torah in every facet, perhaps to see the Torah in the light of second naïveté.
There is a famous experiment on the nature of light, called the double slit experiment. This experiment was set to investigate the nature of light, if it is a wave or a particle. To extremely oversimplify and probably deeply offend any scientists reading: basically what was discovered was that when light photons were shot through two slits onto a sensor, it created a interference pattern as a wave, yet each photon was also measurable as a particle (seemingly contradictory measures). There are more complicated and extremely interesting versions of this experiment, but the simplest will suffice for us.
In the end, Light was shown to be not just a wave or a particle but to have wave-particle duality. And if the Torah is light, then it can also have a duality – the divine-human duality I mentioned before, and the historical critical-mythological duality.
While Rabbi Gillman’s use of second naïveté can be helpful, I do not think we need second naïveté to believe in the mythos of Torah, I think we only need to recognize that sometimes light is a particle and sometimes a wave—and always both. The Torah is sometimes best understood through engagement in the historical critical method, applying source criticism, contextualizing for culture of place and time, and seeing the Torah as an on-going development of the relational covenant of the Jewish people and HaShem. Sometimes, like on Pesach, or Yom Kippur, we need to see the wave, not the particles or particulars; we need to engage with the text on the level of what it is presenting, uniting with our ancestral story in the ritual and mythos of the day and rising to the truth of spiritual reality.
This perspective is not a weakness in the Conservative Movement’s philosophy—it is our unique ability and distinguishing factor. Torah is relevant because it is ever-becoming, like Godself, and authoritative because it is a record of the revelation and relationship of the Jewish people and HaShem.
When we read in the Torah this past shabbat, the line, “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the LORD our God and with those who are not with us here this day.” I read this backwards, not Moshe relating God’s words in the distant past, speaking about those generations yet to come, but God through the Torah speaking to us here today in Aberdeen NJ; making a covenant with us as was made with “those not here today”, i.e. the chain of tradition reaching into the distant past, yet holding us close. Our ancestors are reaching through time to comfort, encourage, to rebuke and to praise us, commanding us to be strong and continue the project of Judaism: to make the world more beautiful, caring, and just by living and growing in the laws, customs, and traditions that we have received and those that we are creating.
I will conclude today with a final teaching from Rabbi Hillel who taught, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor, that is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary…” We often leave off the end of this quote, but it is the most important — “now go and study!” This year, I hope you will join me and make this year a Shana Tovah, a good year of learning and growing with the Torah and each other.
