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Is There Validity to The Torah? (click here)

It’s amazing to me that even secular Jews will often defend their faith to the death or at least to the last beer! Why is it that someone who hasn’t even been to a synagogue in decades will still insist that their religion is the one true religion and that indeed there really is a god? Why don’t they practice it?

For me, atheism is much more relaxing and comforting. I’m responsbile for my own actions. There is no god or satan or other spiritual creature out there waiting to pounce on me when I screw up! I suffer my own consequences here and now in this life on this planet! End of story.

If I’m wrong and their is life after death, so what? I’ll worry about it when I get there. If not, I won’t know the difference.

1. I am happily married and have been so for the past 18 years. While my wife appreciates my music she is not interested in being part of the publicity that sometimes comes along with it.

2. At this point I do not have a congregation. In fact I have never had one. I am a teacher. I run a Yeshiva in New Jersey and that’s how I put food on the table. While it is no great secret as to who I am – the Yeshiva prefers at this point that my music career be kept low key as it might not be so good for recruitment. If you are interested in more specifics – I have nothing to hide – just e-mail me privately through my website…

I do have a question Rav Shmuel…feel free not to respond if it’s too personal or an issue you’d rather avoid, since it’s just nosy curiosity on my part. You have six children, but you don’t seem to have a congregation. How do you make a living? Also, your site makes no mention of your wife, but I presume there is a wife bearing the children. Yes?

You are right. We cannot know if the connection to the source is severed. But, we are not so much required to constantly believe in a historical connection to the source as we are to constantly attempt to make a connection.

To me, a religious system which eschews the material world is unrealistic and denies the beauty of creation and enjoyment. On the other hand, a religious system which focuses on getting into heaven and avoiding hell is self-serving. Judaism does neither. It accepts and legislates material dealings, embraces the beauty of the physical world, insists on the need for humans to complete and improve on creation, and sets a group aside to promulgate these beliefs. Judaism even gives us a set of behaviors which help turn our minds towards God and helps keep us focused as the human world has developed through the millennia. To me, that system makes a lot of logical sense. Therefore, I accept it as a marvelous and authentic product of human-Divine interaction. At what level of interaction the writing of the Torah took place doesn’t seem particularly relevant.

Nothing like the external check part exists when it comes to halkha (sp?) In particular, if halkha is just a product of man’s imagination or a record of practices people held sacred at the time, I don’t see any reason to believe that we are getting closer or interacting with God. Perhaps we are attempting to but interaction is a two way street and I don’t see how you can make any claims about success in interaction unless there is an external check (i.e. God’s approval). For all I know, God hates pigs and his will, if done, would involve me slaughtering them in the most cruel way possible and then eating bacon every morning. Now, were we to know, or at least not have counterevidence, that the torah was at root a document written or at least approved by divine authority, the basis for interaction WOULD be there: it would be there in that it was approved by God so we’d know that following it would put us in line with what God’s will. We have no way of knowing that if the connection to that source is severed. To bring the analogy home, we have no friction against God where we can tell if we are doing well or badly, unlike science where we have the friction of the world providing data to tell us how we are doing. At best, if the torah and so forth are just products of the human mind, it strikes me as just another lame attempt towards transcendence that we seem to need, desire but ultimately should realize we can’t have.

I think that, to some extent, your disagreement with me is a misunderstanding. (Isn’t it always that way?) We really have to clarify what “a Divine source” means. We cannot understand God in any complete way. Rabbi Yishmael felt that even the Torah had to be written in the language of man. I would propose that “in the language of man” is much more than a linguistic statement. It means that our understanding of God, even through the Torah itself, is never a clear image of the mind of God. Instead, we get a “feel” for God and the Divine will put into the context of our historical “wrestling” . Jacob wrestled with a divine being (see Alli’s Bat Mitzvah parsha ). Come morning time, he didn’t know his adversary’s name nor who he really was. The whole thing was quite abstract, its meaning unclear. Nonetheless, we understand it as a life-changing interaction with God. We don’t have to look God in the eye to know that we need to look for God. Rav Shmuel is right. If we were to know God in any complete way, or even know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Torah and halakha are pure and direct from heaven, we would lose our free will. A solid belief in halakha as the direct will of God only provides a stronger motivation for observance, not a logical basis for the system itself. It is simply a very logical, meaningful, and effective means for physical humans to reach out to God, something we seem inherently driven to do.

Again, I will relate these ideas to science (I have to do something physics-related at work). Our modern theories of physics are, without exception, products of the human mind. Nonetheless, we believe them to reflect something very real about our universe. They reflect a very real interaction between the universe and the human mind which struggles to understand. The whole scientific endeavor reflects the drive by humanity to understand and make sense of the universe. Even if the Torah or Rabbinic Judaism are products of the human mind, they, too, reflect (I believe) a very real interaction between God and the human mind which struggles to make sense of God’s creation. That interaction, as in science, must be recorded or play out in ways that humans can comprehend: math, language, actions, behaviors, etc. The important belief is not about the hand that wrote the law but in the value of the law as a true way to bring ourselves, and the whole world, closer to God.

1. If it were possible to prove conclusively that the Torah was the direct word of G-d then Free Will would presumable be diminished somewhat – no?

Ummmn, well, so far as the Muffti can tell, decidedly no. And the Muffti is a little confused as to how it could possibly matter to free will whether or not God wrote the Torah. The problem of free will is a deep and thorny one; but the Torah seems (with appologies for the reductive overtones) a book of history, poetry and laws. Surely whatever history we have isn’t relevant to free will; Surely whatever the value of the poetry in the Torah doesn’t affect our free will; and surely whether or not the laws come from a divine source doesn’t affect our ability to choose whether or not to follow them. So perhaps Rav Shmuel would kindly elaborate for the Muffti is too dumb to follow his line of reasoning.

Even more confusing to the Muffti is:

2. If the style of the Torah were more straightforwardly consistent in style and sequence there’d be a lot less to analyze discuss and debate about. Few people would read it and it could not have spawned the scholarship across so many religious borders that it has.

I don’t know how to evaluate counterfactuals like this one. I suppose if the bible contained less contradictions, fewer appologists would have tried to set them straight. And I suppose that if the bible didn’t seem to be written by multiple sources, fewer books like Freidman’s would have come out attempting to discover the identity of the authors. But, on the other hand, perhaps more people would actually believe that it was a divinely inspired book rather than a few chronicler’s primary-sourceless, politically inspired tales about the a) history of the jews and b) amazingly, the creation of the universe, and the generations that preceded an apparent flood that wiped away all signs of history occuring before said flood. heh. Then again, now that i read the last part this post, I realize that perhaps I’m just proving your point…

1. If it were possible to prove conclusively that the Torah was the direct word of G-d then Free Will would presumable be diminished somewhat – no?

2. If the style of the Torah were more straightforwardly consistent in style and sequence there’d be a lot less to analyze discuss and debate about. Few people would read it and it could not have spawned the scholarship across so many religious borders that it has.

So maybe it’s the question that’s important – much more important than the answer. G-d/Someone/The Comittee – whomever – has forced us to confront ourselves on a daily basis in every age. Not too many books around that can do that…

I’d like to be clear that although I am an Orthodox Rabbi I am not writing a ‘position’ paper when I post here – just musings along with the rest of you. My personal belief system is in constant flux driven by the input I receive from sacred and secular texts, students, friends and sometimes even bloggers.

Anyhow, let’s assume the hypothesis correct. The interesting theological question, as far as the Muffti was concerned, is whether it matters or not. This is where agreement with Fineline comes to an end I’m afraid. After all, if Halkcha is another construction of a human mind that records tradition, what evidence do we have to think that the religion is vindicated by a divine source? And if it doesn’t terminate in a divine source, why should we think it is a great way to get in touch with God?

But, given the inability to prove one way or another, and my above claim that the Torah as a record of human-divine interaction is independent of its specific author(s), I still declare the argument semi-irrelevant to faith. Halakha is a brilliant system for connecting the human to God, the finite to the infinite. Rabbinic Judaism is another form of human-God interaction which developed from our written texts, independent of their authors.

And Laya? Inner pluralist? Hardly. I fully embrace pluralism, why some of my best friends are totally misguided spiritual retards …