Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

4. Bible and Torah: What Is the Difference?

25 4. Bible and Torah: What Is the Difference? Perhaps you have noticed that throughout this discussion so far I have freely interchanged the terms by which I have referred to the texts we are concerned with here. Sometimes I have called the five books on the Torah scroll the Pentateuch and sometimes the Humash or the Torah. Sometimes I have called the whole collection of the 39 books “the Bible” and sometimes “the TANAKH.” The time has come to note that these different terminologies bespeak two very different ways of talking about the same material, two different discursive modes. Each one has its own set of assumptions about this material and each one has its own separate way of dealing with it. Can you sense the difference between referring to the five books as the Pentateuch and calling them the Torah? The former has a more objective ring to it. It puts some distance between us and the material. This is appropriate for a discipline like academic Bible scholarship that seeks to read and examine and understand the text dispassionately. Like any text, the books of the Pentateuch, and the entire Bible, are susceptible to critical analysis. All questions about them are admissible: their authorship, their authority, their meaning and implication. But calling or understanding these books, be they the five or the 39, “Torah” is to assign to them a special status and to read them in a different light. Now there is a distinct preunderstanding about them: that they are not secular but holy texts. They have, in one way or another—and there is substantial and profound disagree- 26 PRELIMINARIES: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? ment among different Jews and Jewish reading communities on this point—a claim on our Jewish self-understanding, on our values , and, above all, on how we live our lives from day to day. To be sure, in this discursive framework these texts can be analyzed and interpreted, too. But here the analyses and the interpretations are all governed by the overriding conviction that they represent the will and/or concern of God, specifically as they pertain to the Jews as a collective entity and to the Jew in his or her individuality . Jewish tradition and Jewish thought, ancient, medieval, and modern, have many differing, and sometimes conflicting, understandings of this central belief. Briefly put they range from • a certainty that God revealed His14 will in the Torah and/or initiated His covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai as described in chapter 19 of Exodus (Torah portion Yitro) • to an affirmation that there was at Sinai an encounter and a covenant between God and Israel, but that it may not have happened exactly as the account in Exodus tells it • to a hallowing of these texts not because they were divinely revealed but because they represent the collective memory of the People of Israel and their millennial self-understanding, values , and aspirations. This is, of course, a capsule description of very complex matters that are beyond the scope of this discussion. But even in this shorthand version, note the progression, the ratcheting down of assumptions made about the role of God and, correspondingly, what religious thinkers would call the ontological status of Torah. The trajectory is from an unabashed supernaturalism to a principled humanism. In the first view God is the preeminent agent in the divine-human encounter; He revealed His will to the People of Israel. In the third view, man is the preeminent agent; he discovers God’s presence in the text by his own lights. In the second view there is a conscious equivocation about the nature of the interplay between God and man. Yet these differences—and they are profound differences— notwithstanding, all these perspectives share the conviction that the books and the texts that make up the TANAKH are Torah, are holy, and have a claim on us as Jews. They may differ in the na- 27 BIBLE AND TORAH: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE? ture and the details of that claim but they are all clear that the TANAKH is something more, much more, than a great and abiding work of literature. In the end, when the supernaturalists and the humanists and the equivocators all assemble in their respective and diverse synagogues or prayer groups on Shabbat mornings, it is a reading of a portion from the Humash that they see and hear in...