Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text

Three - Rabbis as Readers

Chapter Three RABBIS AS READERS he long, slow ascent of the elevator in the classroom building of the Jewish Theological Seminary gave rise to an occasion in my theological education. I was witness to a confrontation between an otherworldly, bookish, pious professor and a senior rabbinical student about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Jewish community. This student had a reputation for never preparing for his classes, and not because he was so brilliant there was no need to. This joker simply had a very high embarrassment threshold and was unfazed session after session when he made a fool of himself before his classmates . "You know, Professor," said the student, oblivious to his mentor's cringe, ''I'm graduating this May:' "1 know," lamented the professor. "You know," the student continued, "here I am, finishing my seventh year of rabbinical school here, and just recently I realized that I don't know anything." "I know," returned the professor with no change in his tone. "But, you know, it finally dawned on me," the student blathered on. "Why should my congregants listen to me?" At this the professor wheeled around on the student, trap- 41 .......................... RABBIS AS READERS ping him in the corner of the elevator. This teacher, normally hunched over his books, now pulled himself up to his full height of over six feet and literally screamed at the would-be rabbi in the narrow confmes of the elevator, "Because you tell them sol" With impeccable timing the doors to the elevator slid open at the top Boor and the professor turned heel and marched out. I exited as quickly as I possibly could and turned to see the doors dose on the student, who now began his descent. For the first time in my life I understood the term "ashen complexion." Later that day I saw the rabbinical student in the cafeteria. Though I had never spoken with him I felt compelled to go over and offer a word of consolation. "I saw what that professor did to you in the elevator earlier today. I'm really sorry," I began, but he cut me off. "You know," he said, ''I've been here seven years, in what's normally a six-year program, and today was the first practical thing I learned about being a rabbi." I was confused by his response and asked him to explain. "The professor was right to do what he did and say it the way he said it. That's the whole ball game. Only the force of personality gives us clergy any power. Only by instilling fear, or at least the will to listen to the rabbi, can Judaism have any authority in this day and age. He taught me the secret I needed to know: now I can be a rabbi." The moral of this story is no secret to any clergy member, nor to any congregants who sit on the boards that hire and flre. The authority of the clergy no longer rests in the Bible which he or she wields. The authority of religion only extends as far as the first time a member of the flock says no. What is astonishing is that this isn't merely some twentieth- REA DIN G THE BOO K. • • • • • • • • • • • • • . • • . . . •. 42 century postenlightenment phenomenon. Millennia ago, shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem , the Rabbis confronted this reality. When the Jerusalem cult was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., the sacrifices spelled our in Leviticus came to a halt. The insistence of Deuteronomy, that the Jerusalem Temple be the exclusive place where God's name would rest, now became a dilemma in the face of Roman troops tearing down the city and plowing the rubble into the soil. How was a theology which proclaimed God universal to fmd authority in a Scripture which consistently mandated blood sacrifices in a now defunct Temple? In the decades following the destruction of the Temple and the concomitant stripping of authority from the words adrift on pentateuchal parchment, the Rabbis set about to reconstruct . What they reconstructed was not the Temple, but rather a Judaism which generated the careful and critical view of the Bible outlined in the previous chapter, and a means of interpreting that Bible in order to keep it alive beyond the sacrificial cult. This means of interpretation was called Oral Torah, and as I recounted in...