OMT Classic: Thoughts for Shavuos: Why I Gave Up Biblical Criticism and Just Started Loving...

My title is a bit misleading. For to tell the truth, I never was much for the Biblical criticism--that academic discipline founded in the nineteenth century, promising to tell the truth about Biblical authorship. There's been a lot of talk about Biblical criticism recently, with a new book claiming once and for all to provide a vision of the Bible "as it really was." The assumptions upon which Biblical criticism are based is that the methods of the sciences can be brought into the humanities, and that if we just occupy the right perspective, we can sift through all of the facts and evidence and have an objective picture of things. I'm a scholar, and I love evidence as much as the next guy, but I've never been compelled by the readings of Biblical scholars with their alphabet soup of authors--J, D, P--which in my view is just their way of not facing the complexities of a Biblical text with which they don't truly engage or understand. I certainly wouldn't want a Biblical scholar to help me read Milton's Paradise Lost; where Milton argues through paradox, they would just see contradiction and evidence for multiple authorship. Now is probably not the time to go into the way in which enlightenment beliefs in reason are also faith-based practices (Stanley Fish has written brilliantly on this as a columnist in the New York Times). Nor is it the time to cite those scholars in various academic fields (in both the humanities and sciences) who have called into question the whole conception of objective neutrality upon which the Biblical Criticism is founded.

When my wife and I began our paths to Torah, I remember someone (I think it was my father-in-law) saying that if G-d wanted to give a handbook to humanity, he would have given it in binary code. To him, this would have been a form of revelation that could be objectively understood, a crystal clear revelation requiring no interpretation at all. But the Torah in it's very first verse asserts itself not as an objective knowledge, but one that is based upon relationship--the relationship between G-d and His people, Israel. As Rashi explains the בראשית--"In the Beginning"--of the first verse is a contraction of ב-שביל ראשית b'shvil reshis, 'on behalf of the first.' And 'the first,' as Rashi shows from other passages in the Holy Writings refers to Torah and Israel. The world was created for the sake of the divine revelation through Torah and for Israel, the nation through which the divine revelation comes into the world. Torah and Israel are together the purpose of creation; without one, the other could not exist.

G-d did not choose Israel to be an objective observer, but he founded a relationship with Israel based upon love. "With an abundant love you have loved us"--so begins the second of the two blessings which precede the recitation of the Sh'mah in the morning. And in the evening blessings preceding the Sh'mah: "With an eternal love, you have loved us"--a love expressed through G-d's bestowing of "Torah--and mitzvot, decrees and law" to His people Israel. Torah and love are thus linked together. The morning blessing continues with an entreaty "to instill in our hearts to understand, to elucidate, to listen, learn, teach, safeguard, perform and fulfill all the words of Your Torah's teaching with love." That we ask that G-d grant understanding to our hearts (and not, for example, to our minds) emphasizes again that Torah founds a relationship based upon love. So the morning blessing concludes with the praise of G-d who brings Israel close to Him so that they can "praise his unity with love," and the benediction of "G-d who chooses Israel with love." A reciprocal relationship of love: the numerical value (or gematria) of the word אהבה is equivalent to that of אחד--love is based upon unifying. In this sense, the act of receiving the Torah is an act of union or love.

Our sages refer to the giving of the Torah as yom chasanatu, the day of our chuppah or marriage. The blessing from the marriage ceremony includes five קולות or sounds--the 'sound of joy and of gladness,' the 'sound of joyful wedding celebrations,' and the 'sound of youthful feasting and singing'--which correspond, the Talmud tell us, to the five 'sounds' that accompanied the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. That the sages compare the giving of the Torah to marriage is not merely a poetic embellishment; it expresses a deep philosophical truth. G-d chooses Israel with love, and we respond with acts of love. There is no external perspective, no possibility of disengagement, but rather learning Torah is an act of love. The Sh'mah begins: "And you shall love the Lord your G-d..." How, our sages ask, do we follow the injunction to love the G-d? For the answer, they turn to the continuation of the verse, "let these words which I command you today be your hearts." It is through 'these words'--learning Torah--that I express my love for G-d.

But even more than this, as Rav Yitzchok Hutner writes, the continuation of the verse in the Sh'mah further refines the definition of learning Torah: "Let these words...be upon your hearts, and you shall teach them to your children." The act of Torah study is only fully realized through teaching. Torah study then is an act of love which connects me to G-d, but is consummated in the teaching of children and students. There's a vertical relationship, a double connection, where with love I strive upwards to the divine, and complete that act of love through a corresponding downward movement--bringing Torah into the world through teaching the next generation. My love of G-d, realized through Torah study, reaches its perfection with the love expressed in "you shall teach your children." A double movement of connection and love.

In this dynamic, there is no external place of objectivity. As Jonathan Lear, the Chicago classicist and psychoanalyst, writes the position of objectivity and the so-called "neutral perspective" is just a myth, and attempting to occupy it leads to "developmental failure and pathology." We've all been there, even if not as Miltonists or Biblical critics--who forestall genuine engagement with texts through their flat and preachy readings. We've more likely occupied that perspective in bad moments as spouses, or equally bad moments as parents where we flee to a place of disengaged complacency and crabbiness (or self-righteousness) instead of engaging with those whom we love. So this Sunday night--z'man matan Toraseinu, the time of the giving of our Torah--we should give up that very contemporary and Western desire for objectivity and cool disengagement, and start loving a little--by renewing our efforts to connect, to make the Torah our own.

Twittered Torah?: Connecting on Shavuot

We've had soundbyte Judasim - now it's twitter Judaism. The Torah in 140 characters - or less.

But on Shavuos it's not the 10 tweeks which we commemorate, but the ten commandments. And the paradoxes implicit in matan torah certainly defy the best of twitterers, tweekers and bloggers.

Z'man Matan Tora-teinu - so we refer to Shavuos in our liturgy. Here is the beginning of the paradox. On Shavuos we celebrate the giving of the Torah - so let our prayerbooks refer simply to z'man matan torah! Instead we speak of the giving of our Torah. On Mount Sinai, G-d betows a gift which already belongs to us! This is another way of expressing the truth implicit in the sages' reading of the first word of our Torah - b'reishit. Not only literally, 'in the beginning,' but on a deeper level, as the sages learn בשביל - on behalf of - רשית - the 'first.' G-d created the world on behalf of the 'first' - referred to by our prophets as both 'Israel' and 'Torah.' Beyond the simple meaning of the verse lies the insight that there is no Giver without a recipient. There is no Torah without Israel - no giving of the Torah without those suitable to receive it.

So what is Torah - is it a divine absolute truth? or something that comes into the world through our reception of it? Is such a question the place where the wars over Torah begin? where, on the one side, Jewish fundamentalists claim to have the absolute truth, while, on the other, progressive Jews claim that Torah is a function of perception and interpretation?

The Rabbis were not philosophers, so when they address such questions, they do so not through philosophical precepts, but through stories:

Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Avitar were learning the Book of Judges, arguing about the meaning of a word in a verse. Their argument unresolved, Rabbi Avitar takes a break and finds Elijah the Prophet by the coffee machine. 'So what is G-d doing now?,' Rabbi Avitar asks. 'Funny you should ask,' Elijah replies: 'he's very busy now, learning Torah - actually the dispute between Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan.' 'And,' he continues, 'if you put your ear up to the walls of the Divine Study Hall, said the prophet, you will hear G-d learning: "So says my son Yochanan, so says my son Avitar."'

Like the verse about which the two sages were arguing, there are (at least) two ways to understand the story. In a version of a contemporary interpreter, the study hall of Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan serves a Mount Sinai in miniature: 'just as G-d placed the words of Torah in the mouth of Moses, so when the two stages where learning, they did not say their own words, but rather the Words of the Living G-d.'

In this understanding, the giving of Torah on Sinai is the model, and the experience of the two sages derives from it. Just as G-d revealed himself to Moses, so he reveals himself to the two sages in the beit ha'midrash. The Nefesh Ha'chaim, however, presents a different - and seemingly more modern and radical - point of view: 'Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Avitar were engaged in the study of Torah, and therefore G-d repeated their words.' In the first account, God as Giver of Torah takes precedence; in the second, the sages of Israel as recipients of Torah come first. One version emphasizes God and Sinai in the past, the other the house of study - the here and now - where Torah is learned and multiplied.

But does the argument about the interpretation of the story have to mark the beginning of the wars over Torah and Judaism - the difference between the belief in Torah as an ancient eternal truth and a contemporary Torah as a product of interpretation? Not if the dispute between the latter readers of the story is understood as a version of the kind of dispute in which Rabbi Avitar and Rabbi Yochanan were themselves involved. Of this dispute, the Heavenly Voice proclaims, 'these and these are the words of the living G-d.' Both perspectives are true, or rather partial truths - which the story itself conveys. The truth of the Torah is absolute, divine, and also a matter of interpretation. Don't tell such things to philosophers or academic literary critics - who instead of entertaining paradox, reject what - to their minds is - contradiction. The giving of Torah begins with relationship and connection - between the Divine Giver and the people of Israel, who in their receiving of the Torah bring the Torah into the world. There is no Torah without the people of Israel!

Torah study - toiling in Torah for its own sake - produces a kind of connection, which, whether in the time of Rabbi Avitar, or our own, links the Torah’s interpreters back to Sinai. So the Nefesh Hachaim explains, 'At every moment that a person is cleaving to the words of the Torah in the appropriate fashion, the words rejoice as if they were given from Sinai.' Rejoicing words - utterances of the here and now - share in the joy felt in the Revelation of Sinai. Z'man Matan Tora-teinu - the giving of the Torah to which we already have a claim, which is already ours. So, as in the liturgy, what the kabbalists call, the Nosain and M'kabel, the Giver and Recipient come together, as past and present do as well, when we sit in the house of study on Shavuos night and hear - if we are learning Torah for it's own sake - the voice of Sinai resound.

Can't twitter that.

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