How to read the Bible

A few years ago, Rabbi David Wolpe got into a heap of trouble after he gave a sermon on Passover. I honestly don't remember whether the question that got him in trouble was, "Did the Exodus happen?" or "Does it matter if the Exodus happened?" I'd be more inclined to ask the latter than the former. Regardless, the reaction of many was fierce and swift: "Off with his head."

The thing is, Wolpe is right to ask the question. And now that we find ourselves in an historical moment with the notions of faith and history, belief and science, are at odds; when the idea of faith itself is subject to all sorts of understandings; and when the clash-of-civilizations-that-doesn't-exist (ahem) is consuming lives and resources--it is a prescient question, an important and central question as we prepare to observe Passover.

Let's cut to the chase: It doesn't matter whether there is archaeological evidence to support the Biblical account of the Exodus, just as it frankly doesn't matter if there is cosmic evidence to support the Biblical account of Creation. I'm with Leon Wieseltier and the many others who less pugnaciously say that to subject faith to science cheapens both faith and science. The point of the Exodus is less whether or not it happened than the fact that the Jewish people has made the story of its enslavement and liberation the central story of its existence. Yosef Yerushalmi wrote a whole book on this subject, the difference between history and memory (Zakhor, which if you haven't read, you should immediately). It is memory, the stories we choose to tell ourselves, that motivates faith and the world of the spirit, not its confirmation in the world of fact.

This review of Garry Wills's latests book, What Jesus Meant, eloquently makes the point: 'To read the Gospels in teh pirit with which they were written, it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said,' Wills writes, 'We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange words and deeds... Trying to find a construct, like the historical Jesus, is... mixing categories, or rather wholly different worlds of discourse. The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith. If you reject the faith, there is no reason to trust anything the Gospels say.'

Okay, so replace 'Jesus' with 'Moses' and 'Gospels' with 'Torah.' The point remains: It's all well and good to study the history of the Exodus or the Israelites. In fact, it's important, and it informs our reading of the Bible. But, that's not the stuff that motivates faith. It is not the stuff you put at the core of religious experience, as the Conservative movement has all to painfully learned over the last generation. As one of my teachers used to say, "It's religion--it's supposed to be spooky." Or as another said, "At the center of religion must be religious experience." It's about God, it's about the spirit; it's about the complex stuff that lies beyond language, beyond numbers, beyond facts.

The theology of wikipedia?

Wikipedia, the open-source knowledge base that has become the most-used encyclopedia in the world, has been in the news a lot of late, with a number of stories about the limits of open-sourcing knowledge. This article from today's New York Times is just the latest to mention some of the issues.

The idea behind wikipedia is open-source, a concept that works well in the software world, in which a software writer allows his or her product to be tinkered with and improved upon by anyone and everyone in an attempt to create the most usable product possible. Wiki just takes it one step further--rather than open-sourcing computer code, it open-sources knowledge. Why have a single editor when you can have millions of people responsible for the content of a shared knowledge base?

There are some major philosophical, and even theological issues, raised here. In many ways the wiki movement represents the apotheosis of modernity--we have shaken off the shackles of religious and political power concentration in the hands of the few, and now we set our sights on knowledge itself. Knowledge has become democratized. Wonderful.

But, as any number of stories in recent months have illustrated, this is not a failsafe system. Like any large organism, there are unwanted parts that impinge on the purity of the wiki enterprise. Not to mention the question of the individual user, who has to ask, "Do I trust some guy in Kansas City to tell me about the history of Rhodesia or the molecular composition of feldspar?" We presumably have to ask the same question about the editor at Brittanica, too, but someone's livelihood is at stake in that case, so presumably we can put more stock in what they have to say.

From a theological perspective, one wonders whether the Wiki phenomenon represents the fruition of the understanding of the Revelation at Sinai conveyed in the midrash: That God spoke to 600,000 people simultaneously, and yet everyone heard the voice of God in the voice appropriate for them--old people in the voice of old people, babies in the voice of babies, etc. Or, as the Talmud mentions, the notion that the voice of God was the voice of Moses. Does Wiki mark our entrance into a world in which the subjective and objective are joined? Where knowledge--which we have for so long thought of as objectively true or false--is still true or false, but dependent, and indeed the product of, thousands of human minds?

The benefit of believing in revelation, when it comes to stuff like this, is that it posits the existence of some absolute in which to ground our knowledge (and our morality). Does Wiki represent a step towards or away from God? Is it a a moment of Sinai, or a new incarnation of the Tower of Babel?

Edah Editorial on Dialogue

My apologies for the lack of posts in recent days. I have a backlog of material to get through, so there should be a lot coming in the next week.

To start with, here is a piece of mine that appeared as this week's "Edah Editorial," on the necessity of dialogue.

The Four Sons: Foreign Policy Edition

As we approach the Passover season, this piece from New Republic Editor Peter Beinart is well worth a read. We often spend lots of time at our Passover Seders talking about the Four Sons--The wise, the wicked, the simple and the one who does not know how to ask. The point of the exercise, in many seders, is to develop typologies of learning, to emphasize that one size does not fit all.

Now why does a foreign policy piece in TNR remind me of the Seder? Beinart paraphrases Walter Russell Mead and brings the following typology:

"Wilsonians believe America must make the world safe for liberty. Hamiltonians believe America must make the world safe for commerce. Jeffersonians fear that both of these crusades threaten liberty at home. And Jacksonians believe in destroying America's enemies and defending America's sovereignty, no matter what the rest of the world thinks. "

In the aftermath of 9/11, nationalism (Jacksonianism here) was rampant. But, "when it turned out Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, the Jacksonian rationale for war collapsed. The Hamiltonian one--that we needed Iraq's oil because we could no longer rely on a decaying Saudi Arabia--dared not speak its name. So Bush drifted in an increasingly Wilsonian direction. By 2005, freeing the Middle East had become his central rhetorical thrust. And, ever since, Bush's foreign policy has had three characteristics: Wilsonian (the crusade for democracy), Hamiltonian (securing oil), and Jacksonian (doing "whatever it takes" to defeat the terrorists, civil liberties and international opinion be damned). "

Which brings us to the Dubai ports deal that fell apart for good this morning: "for Jacksonians, it is never worth sacrificing concrete U.S. interests to make foreigners feel better. A couple of years ago, that was the dominant sentiment in Bush foreign policy. Today, however, with Cheney's influence waning, Condoleezza Rice trying to mend fences with U.S. allies, and Bush obsessed with spreading freedom, the administration's Wilsonianism seems to be eclipsing its Jacksonianism.

"Considering that Jacksonianism has been Bush's political trump card since September 11, this is a big change. And it has created exactly the opening that Mead envisioned at the end of his book: for Jacksonians to make common cause with Jeffersonians and turn the foreign policy coalition of the '90s on its head."

The appeal to the Four Sons is obviously a cheap one. But there are some deeper questions of Passover that all this raises, for Passover is the holiday of Jewish nationalism, the day on which we focus on indoctrinating our national story to ourselves and the next generation. Foreigners are not allowed to eat of the Passover sacrifice, according to Exodus. So Passover is our most particularistic holiday.

And yet, the messages of Passover--liberation, freedom, human rights--have become the bedrock of liberalism and democracy. How then is that story a Jewish story? Does particularlism necessitate exclusivity? How do we maintain our specialness as Jews while integrating ourselves into the world? These questions are very much alive and well (Zionism is still in need of defense), and they percolate here in the background.

Bring Back Shabbat

So far I have used this blog primarily to talk about political stuff, eschewing the religious. But I'm a rabbi, after all, so it was only a matter of time before I wrote something about Judaism and not only Jewishness.

Over this past Shabbat there was a moment when my wife and kids were having a relaxed lunch together, and I turned to Natalie and said, "You know, this (family time, that is) wouldn't really be possible without the way we observe Shabbat." By which I meant that, without our commitment--yes, religious commitment--to not turning on the TV or answering the phone or using the computer or going out places, our regular instincts to do those things would most certainly overtake us. In the world in which we live, in which our many relationships with other people and things drive so many of our lives, the holy space made possible by Shabbat really is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel called it, a palace in time.

A few years ago, on this weekend, the New York Times ran a piece by Judith Shulevitz called "Bring Back Shabbat." The whole text is available here (or at the NYT website, for a fee). It's a wonderful essay, and the following paragraphs are especially worth reading:

"The Israelite Sabbath institutionalized an astonishing, hitherto undreamed-of notion: that every single creature has the right to rest, not just the rich and the privileged. Covered under the Fourth Commandment are women, slaves, strangers and, improbably, animals. The verse in Deuteronomy that elaborates on this aspect of the Sabbath repeats, twice, that slaves were not to work, as if to drive home what must have been very hard to understand in the ancient world. The Jews were meant to perceive the Sabbath not only as a way to honor God but also as the central vehicle of their liberation theology, a weekly reminder of their escape from their servitude in Egypt.

"In other words, we have the Sabbath to thank for labor legislation and for our belief that it is wrong for employers to drive their employees until they drop from exhaustion. So what do we do, today, with this remarkable heritage, which in the last century expanded to a generous two days, rather than just one? Much more than our ancestors could ever have imagined, and much, much less. We relax on the run and, in rare bursts of free time, we recreate. We choose from a dizzying array of leisure options and pursue them with an exemplary degree of professionalism and perfectionism. We rush our children from activity to activity, their days a blur of tight connections.

"And yet there are important ways in which even our impressive recreational creativity fails to reproduce the benefits of the Sabbath. Few elective activities will ever rise to a status higher than work in our minds, and therefore cannot be relied upon to counterbalance our neurotic drive to achieve. Most of us will jettison plans to go skiing if a deadline looms near. We will assign a high priority to a non-work-related hobby only if we have committed to it in some public manner, as we do when we join a volleyball team or a choir. (Oddly, one of the few times a parent can truly relax is when lingering on the sidelines of a child's baseball or soccer game; there is nothing like being forced to be somewhere and do very little for an hour and a half to declench the muscles of the mind.)"

Shulevitz goes on, and it's worth reading the whole piece. But my point is simply that, in whatever way you observe Shabbat, observing Shabbat religiously is important, perhaps more important than ever.