Originally published in Masorti Matters, March 1995, pp. 1-4.
“I challenge the Chief Rabbi to state clearly and unambiguously that he believes Moses to have written every word of the Chumash at the dictation of God and that he rejects totally all modern biblical scholarship, not only the Documentary Hypothesis.”
I want to reply here to some of the points made by Rabbi Yitzhak Schochet, in a lecture held at the Mill Hill United Synagogue on Wednesday 8th February. It is impossible in the space I have to deal with the whole of Rabbi Schochet’s lecture. Instead, I first give what I consider to be his main arguments in his own words, from a transcript he supplied, and then give my replies. I would have not have thought it necessary to offer this response were it not that, so far as I can tell, Rabbi Schochet speaks for all his Orthodox colleagues, including, it would seem, the Chief Rabbi. I challenge the Chief Rabbi to state clearly and unambiguously that he believes Moses to have written every word of the Chumash at the dictation of God and that he rejects all modern biblical scholarship, not only the Documentary Hypothesis.
Rabbi Jacobs
Rabbi Schochet
This is the crux of the difference between the Masorti philosophy and the Orthodox philosophy. If one assumes that the Torah was written by man, then all the laws contained therein are products of the human mind. In that case, the laws have no absolute value. They are not inherently beneficial for all Jews in all situations. Instead, as products of a finite intelligence, they have limited applicability and depth. If one believes the Torah to have been authored by G-D [this spelling is Rabbi Schochet’s], however, then all its laws are products of the Divine intelligence of an Infinite Being for all time, in absolute justness and perfection. In which case, even if one does not understand the reasons for a particular law, one knows with certainty that it is designed for the benefit of each and every individual throughout the generations. If one believes for example, that the kashrut laws were simply a man-made attempt at a healthy diet, then if it appears that a non-kosher food is more healthy, there would be no reason to deny it to oneself. As the innovation of a subjective mind, kosher food would have no overriding benefit or spiritual imperative. However, if Torah was written by G-D, who created all of mankind and gave the Jewish people a prescription for the best possible physical, emotional, and spiritual well being, then the same kashruth laws take on a completely different meaning. Even if a non-kosher food seems to be more healthy, this does not change the absolute reality that kosher food is better for us—even if we do not perceive its benefits.
Rabbi Jacobs
‘Crux’ is an unfortunate word to be used in a discussion of Judaism. Rabbi Schochet should look up the word in a dictionary. Rabbi Schochet’s dichotomy between ‘authored by God’ and ‘written by man’ ignores completely the Masorti contention that there is both a divine and human element in revelation; God gave the Torah (a term which embraces the whole of Judaism, not only the Chumash) not to Israel as passive recipients, but through Israel as active participants in the whole process. Many of the kashruth laws are of Rabbinic origin. Does Rabbi Schochet believe that God ‘authored’ Rabbinic law? And why does he first use the term ‘authored by God’ and then ‘written by God’? There is no traditional view that God ‘wrote’ the Torah. For Masorti as well, kashruth is a divine imperative, conveyed through the historical experiences of the Jewish people. Kashruth is an important part of our religion and we do not observe it for any other than the religious reason that it is one of the ways in which Jews worship God.
Rabbi Schochet
If G-D were going to introduce Himself to an entire people, and establish a religion for all time, which method would make more sense: To transmit it clearly for one and all to hear, or to relay it to a prophet and ask him to transmit it over to the people? Obviously, if His concern was to instill unshakable belief in His authority, He would give it to all the people. Revealing Himself only to a prophet would give the people no foolproof way to determine whether the revelation really happened or not, the people would have to take the prophet’s word for it. There is of course a third option. Namely, the fact that G-D can substantiate the prophet’s claim. In other words, if the prophet comes forth making a claim and the eyewitnesses see that this claim has been verified, they can now trust in all that the prophet says. In our case, Moses told the Jewish [sic] people that they were going to receive the Torah [sic] on Sinai. He told them that G-D was going to appear to them. There were two million eyewitnesses who saw G-D appear to them. Thus, even if the main substance of the Torah was transmitted to the Jewish nation through Moses, the fact remains that G-D verified to all of them that Moses is a true prophet and that all the words he will be giving over to them, come in fact from Himself.
Rabbi Jacobs
I was under the impression that Rabbi Schochet believes that the whole of the Chumash was ‘written’ by God so that no ‘verification’ of the words of Moses is required since God wrote the whole of it. How does Rabbi Schochet know that two million people saw the verification if not from the Chumash and it is precisely this that he is trying to prove, that the Chumash was ‘written’ by God. If, as almost everyone who has studied the question maintains, the Chumash is a composite work, produced at different periods in the history of the people of Israel, the issue is whether the account of the two million is accurate. If Rabbi Schochet retorts that the account must be accurate since the Chumash is authored by God, this is question-begging with a vengeance. No Masorti theologian, to my knowledge, has ever argued that the Chumash was ‘made up’ by Moses. This is to say nothing of the Rabbinic interpretation of the Chumash. Jews are not Karaites who believe in the literal meaning of the Chumash. Does Rabbi Schochet believe that the Rabbinic interpretation of the Chumash was itself foretold by God to Moses at Sinai? If he does it is on the basis of Rabbinic sayings so that, if his argument is to hold water, he must affirm this completely unhistorical and anachronistic view, which runs contrary to all modern Rabbinic scholarship. Has Rabbi Schochet never heard of Zunz, Krochmal, Rapoport, Frankel, Graetz, Louis Ginzberg and countless other scholars and their views on the development of the Jewish religion? Has he even read Heschel’s book: Torah Min Ha-Shamayyim? What Masorti theologians have been trying to do is to show, granted the massive researches and the very plausible conclusions of the historical school, that we can still retain the essentials of the doctrine of Torah Min Ha-Shamayyim.
Rabbi Schochet
The Torah tells us that an animal must have split hooves and chew its cud in order to be kosher and edible. From here I can logically deduce that anything lacking that criteria [sic] would not be kosher, yet the Torah does not stop there. The camel, the shafan, the arnevet, all chew their cud, but as they do not have split hooves they are not kosher. The pig, says the Torah, has split hooves but does not chew its cud and remains therefore non-kosher. Question: If the Torah already gave us the specific signs to identify a kosher animal, why list the four exceptions? What is this new information adding to something I already know? Furthermore, the Torah explicitly states that these are the only four animals which have one of the signs without the other. Implying that there are no other such animals walking the face of this earth. How could a human being know that? Was Moses on one of these television shows exploring the back waters of Africa? Zoologists have identified over 5,000 species of animals. Today there is no geographic area in the world that escapes man’s dominion. And yet, after all this throughout the entire universe [sic], man has never found an animal that has one of the two kosher signs without the other, other than those stipulated already in the Torah. If the author of the Torah was a human being, with a limited understanding of the world and the animal kingdom, how is it possible that 3,300 years after the Torah was written this claim has been proven to be entirely accurate? We know that at the time, it was impossible to know every animal in the world, let alone the fact that many corners of this earth had never as of yet been explored or discovered? Why would a human being put the credibility of the Torah on the line by making such a statement?
Rabbi Jacobs
The ‘Question’ is no question. The Torah, after stating that an animal to be kosher must have cloven hooves and must chew the cud, goes on to say that both are necessary and animals which have only one of these signs are not kosher. These four exceptions were known at the time. There is no suggestion that only these will ever be found and no putting of the credibility of the Torah on the line. Zoologists tell us of the distribution of animals in various parts of the world and the vast majority of these animals have neither one sign nor even two. If none have been found that have only one sign, other than the four mentioned, of what relevance is this to the argument? In point of fact, as has long been noted, the shafan and the arnevet do not chew the cud but only appear to do so. I can understand someone arguing that the Chumash, as the word of God, is infallible and him accepting this on faith, refusing to accept any argument for its fallibility. But how can Rabbi Schochet adduce this extremely tenuous argument for the infallibility of the Chumash thereby admitting that it is not a matter of faith but of reasoned argument and yet ignore all the evidence of fallibility? If the Chumash can provide us with accurate knowledge about zoology, why is it not ‘up to date’ on such questions as the age of the earth and mankind upon it and why does it give the impression that the universe is geocentric as it was understood as stating until the anthropologists, the geologists, Copernicus and Galileo came along? There is little point in introducing the old science versus religion controversies. To repeat, Masorti, and a host of other Jewish thinkers who pursue the same approach to revelation, are not bent on showing up the inaccuracies of the Bible. On the contrary, they try to show that the best way of coping with these problems is to accept that the Bible was produced against the background of its time and had to be expressed within the confines of the scientific knowledge of its day but that does not affect the sublimity of its message, Of course, if this approach is adopted, the doctrine of verbal inspiration has to go but the Chumash itself, for example, makes no claim that it is verbally inspired. It was only Christian fundamentalists who insisted that the Bible is completely accurate in scientific matters. Most educated Jewish believers see no reason why the new scientific picture should not be accepted without this destroying in any way the essential truths taught by the Torah. It is disconcerting to find Rabbi Schochet rehashing the old, fundamentalist views. Does he believe that the world is only 5,755 years old and that God, as the late Lubavitcher Rebbe zt’l said, put the fossils there for reasons of His own? Masorti thinkers are no brazen iconoclasts. They are trying to make sense of the Torah in the light of our present state of knowledge, instead of treating the Bible as a kind of Old Moore’s Almanac or a Nostradamus purporting to foretell the future in detail. We reject Rabbi Schochet’s approach in which the Bible is treated as a magical book. We are struggling, against obscurantism, for a refined, sophisticated view of the glory that is our Torah.
Rabbi Schochet
If religion is all about values in order to make a person feel closer to G-D, well the Christians also abide by a religion which helps them feel closer to G-D. The Muslims have a religion which helps them feel closer to G-D. Why select one over the other if they are all working towards the same means and goals? Wherein lies the difference? The only difference would be in the claim that G-D gave this religion. He mandated the laws and gave them personally to the individual sect.
Rabbi Jacobs
Both Christians and Muslims admit that God gave the Torah to Israel but Christians claim that the Torah has been superseded by the New Testament and Muslims that it has been superseded by the Koran. Jews do not believe that the Torah has been superseded and they reject the claims of the two daughter religions. Rabbi Schochet seems to be saying that Jews have no right to do this unless they believe that God wrote the Chumash. Every Masorti thinker affirms, of course, that God has given the Torah for all time through the Jewish people. We reject the bizarre implication that there is no intrinsic truth or value in Judaism which makes it superior to Christianity and Islam. I find this whole argument extremely odd, especially when Rabbi Schochet follows it up by saying, according to his transcript, ‘how does one rationalise the commandments relating to a Ben Sorer Umoreh?’ If this means anything at all it implies that it is indeed irrational to keep the law that a rebellious son be stoned to death but that this law must be obeyed because God has so declared. Rabbi Schochet must know the Rabbinic view that the whole law of Ben Sorer Umoreh was never intended to be carried out. A modernist understanding of this view would be that, in the historical experiences of the Jewish people, certain laws had become obsolete precisely because they were seen to be irrational or immoral. Rabbi Schochet seems to suggest that the more irrational a precept the greater the evidence that it is God-given. He also refers in his transcript to the ‘irrational’ laws of the Red Heifer and command to exterminate the Amalekites, men, women and children. When did Rabbi Schochet ever see a Red Heifer or an Amalekite?
Rabbi Schochet
If I ascribe to orthodox belief, then even if I may be non-observant of the laws—I would be an obvious hypocrite, but I can still be considered orthodox. At least there would be an obvious conscience factor. If however, I ascribe to a different sort of belief, then irrespective of how many mitzvoth I keep, I can not be considered orthodox.
Rabbi Jacobs
How does one ‘ascribe to an orthodox belief’? Does Rabbi Schochet mean, by belonging to an orthodox synagogue? If he does, how does this belonging demonstrate that the belonger ascribes to an orthodox belief? Do the forty percent of members of the United Synagogue who, according to the Kalms Report, have doubts about the existence of God, ‘ascribe to orthodox belief’? Rabbi Schochet first defines Orthodoxy and then implies that every member of an orthodox synagogue agrees with his definition, which is patently untrue and, again, question-begging. Many people, perhaps the majority, belong to an orthodox synagogue because they like the service or have friends there or because their parents belonged to it. Is there any kind of test for membership such as: ‘Do you believe in the Jewish religion as understood by Rabbi Schochet?’ After all, orthodoxy is only a word, taken, incidentally, from Christian theology. In my innocence, I had imagined that my views of Judaism as a developing religion and my rejection of fundamentalism were fully compatible with orthodoxy as hitherto understood in Anglo-Jewry at least. I had thought that a modernist position was possible within Orthodoxy. Now that Orthodoxy is defined in a fundamentalist way, members of the Masorti movement roundly admit that they are not orthodox, which is why we chose the name Masorti, meaning traditionalist but not fundamentalist. Our argument deserves better than to be attacked (forgive me Rabbi Schochet) by the nonsense about cloven hooves in Africa. As I have tried to show in this response to Rabbi Schochet and in my other writings, this view is certainly not to be equated with Jewish secularism. Masorti believes in God. Masorti believes in His Torah. We keep His commandments to the best of our ability. We also believe, without, I hope, it seeming too pretentious, that intellectual honesty is highly significant since, as the Rabbis put it, ‘truth is the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He’.