What is Torah? Part 2 - Translating the Claim for Divine Authorship
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...