Teaching Torah in the Twenty-First Century: Three Jewish Bible Commentaries

In recent years, there has been a boom in adult Jewish learning in general and text study in particular. Many Jewish adults, from a range of backgrounds and with a wide range of prior knowledge, are joining Torah study groups and Bible classes or are reading the Bible independently. Two recent commentaries, Etz Hayim:Torah and Commentary, which was produced by the Conservative movement, and Richard Elliott Friedman's Commentary on the Torah, are both geared toward this newly expanded audience of readers who are largely well educated but are often unfamiliar with the Torah text and its scholarly and traditional interpretations. A third commentary, The Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, is designed both for this audience and for use in academic classroom settings. In very different ways, each of these volumes participates in a common project: the integration of academic biblical scholarship and Jewish interpretive traditions into the study of the biblical text. Each is an attempt to articulate biblical scholarship in a Jewish key.

The Etz Hayim Torah commentary is a valuable and crucially important book. The commentary, which is the product of many years of labor by a large group of scholars and rabbis associated with the Conservative movement, is designed to be both a synagogue commentary and a commentary for private use. As a synagogue commentary, it will replace the Hertz Pentateuch, which has served as the standard synagogue commentary in most Conservative synagogues for nearly seventy years.

The Hertz commentary was published by Joseph Herman Hertz, the chief rabbi of Great Britain and a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in 1936. When it was first issued, the Hertz commentary was an important innovation. It was the first Torah commentary written in English by Jews for Jewish laypeople. The goals of the commentary were explicitly pedagogical, homiletical, and devotional. Hertz wanted the commentary to "embody everything of lasting appeal in Rashi and the Jewish commentators, as well as to utilise modern scholarship, fully to bring out the moral and spiritual teaching of the text."¹ The goal of the commentary was also apologetic. Hertz was concerned that the combined forces of biblical scholarship and liberal Judaism were contributing to the erosion of Judaism and the disaffection of modern Jews from their tradition. He hoped that his commentary would justify and vindicate Judaism and its spiritual authenticity.²

At its time of publication, the Hertz commentary made centuries of traditional Jewish commentary, as well as some of the new advances of critical biblical scholarship, accessible to English-speaking Jewish laypeople. However, in the decades since its initial publication, the Hertz commentary has become quite dated; its blatantly apologetic stance and its reliance on century-old scholarship have become increasingly problematic for the Conservative movement as a whole and for individual lay readers.

A new Conservative Torah commentary was long overdue, and Etz Hayim is a vast improvement over the Hertz Pentateuch. The volume consists of: (1) the Hebrew text of the Torah, accompanied by the JPS translation and a commentary, which is divided into three sections: peshat, derash, and halakhah lemaʿaseh; (2) the Hebrew text of the haftarot accompanied by the JPS translation, introductory comments, and a brief running commentary; and (3) a collection of forty essays, which are divided into four categories: Biblical Life and Perspectives; Biblical Religion and Law; Worship, Ritual, and Halakhah; and Text and Context. The peshat commentary was adapted by Chaim Potok from the five-volume JPS Torah commentary, and the commentary on the haftarot is an abridged version of Michael Fishbane's larger commentary on the haftarot. The derash and halakhah...