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.