Friday, May 28, 2010

If only we had meat to eat . . .

This week's Torah portion, B'haalot'cha, states: "The people took to complaining bitterly before the Eternal . . . The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, 'If only we had meat to eat!" (Numbers 11:1, 4)  God replies, "The Eternal will give you meat and you shall eat.  You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it come out of your nostrils and becomes laothsome to you.  For you have rejected the Eternal who among you by whining . . ."

God gives the people quails, and they eat so much that a plague kills many of them.

I have been thinking more and more about vegetarianism.  I will try to blog on that later. 

Shabbat Shalom

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Mitzvah as Commission

The other day I listened to a podcast of a pucblic lecture from the Jewish Theological Society about translating the Psalms.  One of the speakers was the bible scholar Stephen Geller.  One thing that really stuck with me is that he said that we should not translate the Hebrew word mitzvah as "commandment" but as "commision."  I think the word "commission" gives the idea of mitzvah as a holy undertaking in partnership with God, rather than just following orders from a hierarchical master.      

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Blessings from the High Priest Leonard Cohen

In honor of this week's Torah portion, Naso, Leonard Cohen using his Kohen status to conclude his Tel Aviv concert.  Enjoy!

Friday, May 7, 2010

Omer Counting Day 38

Since we are winding down our counting of the Omer, and we are almost at Shavuot, I have been ruminating a lot on revelation.  Do I need a firm belief in the revelation of Torah from God to celebrate Shavuot or to be a believing Jew?  I rationally know that the Torah was written and compiled by people over a period of several hundred years, but can I also believe that it was given by God? 

To help me think about these questions, I turn to a symposium in the pages of the August 1966 edition of Commentary Magazine called "The State of Jewish Belief".  (I didn't just happen to come across it while reading old Commentary magazines in a library, it is a pretty famous symposium in the Jewish thought world.  They did it again in 1996)  In the symposium, the respondents were asked a serious of questions about Jewish belief.  The first question concerns us here: In what sense do yo believe the Torah to be divine revelation?

I want to look at a few approaches to this question.  The first is from Norman Lamm, who in 1966 was the rabbi fo the Jewish Center in New York City, and is now the Chancellor of Yeshiva University.  In answering this question he writes:
I believe the Torah is divine revelation in two ways: in that it is God-given and in that it is godly.  By 'God-giver,' I mean that He willed that man abide by His commandments and that that will was communicated in discrete words and letters . . . Language, though so faulty an instrument, is still the best means of communication to most human beings . . .  Hence, I accept unapologetically the idea of the verbal revelation of the Torah.
At the time, Norman Lamm and Yeshiva University were at the center of Centrist Orthodoxy.  I cannot accept this premise that the Torah was litterally spoken by God to Moshe because I am persuaded by the historical arguments of biblical criticism.

So, on to another respondent.  Mordecai M. Kaplan, perhaps the most important American Jewish thinker of the 20th century: 
Instead of assuming the Torah "to be divine revelation," I assume it to be the expression of ancient Israel's attempt to base its life on a declaration of depndence upon God, and on a constitution which embodies the laws according to which God expected ancient Israel to live.  The declaration is spelled out in the narrative part of the Torah, and the constitution is spelled out in the law code of the Torah.
Kaplan wrote in his journal something even more radical:
The problem of Judaism would not be so acute if the traditional doctrine of revelation were merely obsolete. The trouble is that to cherish that doctrine is as unethical as being guilty of bigamy. To believe that we are in possession of the authentically revealed will of God is incompatible with religious tolerance to say nothing of religious equality.
I cannot accept Kaplan because I think he has moved God to far out of the picture.  Torah isn't simply a book that records our people's ancient stories and law codes.  I sense something divine, whatever that means, there.  Also, I don't think it is unethical to believe that God had a special revelation for Jews.  It doesn't mean that other people do not have their special revelations.

So, one more thinker, Jakob J. Petuchowski who was a very influential teacher of many of my teachers.  He was a professor at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
I believe that the Torah is a document of revelation; but I am not a fundamentalist.  I believe that the words we read in the Torah were written by men; yet I am not a non-theistic humanist.  The men who wrote the Torah wrote it under the impact of a religious experience--an experience of God's concern for Israel, of God's incursion into history.  And not only the men who wrote it.  The experience was shared by the men who accepted it--or there would have been no such acceptance. 
For Petuchowski, Torah is not simply the text in the scolls in the ark, it is what results when we hear God's command and sense God's commanding presence.  For me, this is the revelation we celebrate on Shavuot.  Sinai is where the Jewish people entered into a relationship after experiencing God.  As W. Gunther Plaut writes in the symposium:
Divine revelation is a self-disclosure of God.  It requires God as well as man to give it reality, for all revelation is a form of communication.  To reveal need not imply speaking-and-hearing--perhaps it never does; it always means the communicaiton of selfness and essence.  Divine revelation is God's-accessibility-and-man's-knowing.
Have a Shabbat Shalom.