The Fundamentalist Fallacy

This year’s High Holyday sermons all touch on some aspect of truth. Tonight we will focus on the truth of our Torah, our laws, our customs and celebrations.

           There are laws, and there are laws. There’s Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. There’s O’Reilly’s Law for young children: Cleanliness isn’t next to Godliness, it’s next to impossible. There’s Parkinson’s Law, that work expands to fill all the time allotted to it, and its corollary, that people rise to the level of their own incompetence. There’s Oliver’s Law: No matter where you go, there you are! [Pulpit Resource, #4, 1987 p. 22]. There’s Miller’s Law: Some people are educated far beyond the level of their intelligence.

Then there are our laws, the Ten Commandments that are the centerpiece of our Torah. From them follow all the rest of the Taryag Mitzvot, the 613 commandments that tradition counts as the rules and regulations of Judaism. What is our relationship to these laws? Are they immutable or subject to change? Who wrote them, God or humans? What is the truth?

There is no doubt that tradition treats obedience to Jewish law with the utmost seriousness. The standard explanation as to why there are 613 commandments says that there are 248 positive commandments, one for each bone in the body (the number’s actually wrong, but the idea stands), and 365 negative commandments, one for every day of the year. In other words, our adherence to the commandments is supposed to encompass our entire body, and be operative every single day.

The reason, of course, for this perspective, is the belief that God is the author of all the commandments. The implications of this idea are aptly summed up by the leading Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, who wrote:
One who says that the Torah does not come from the Almighty, even one verse, even one word, if he says that Moses said it himself, he is considered as if he had denied the entire Torah. [Mishnah Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, 3:8].

As Professor Seymour Siegel points out, “This outlook has led many, especially in Orthodoxy, to deny the legitimacy of liberal groups within Judaism...” [Judaism, Fall, 1988, pp. 492-3].

And deny us they do. I am not considered a Rabbi by the Orthodox establishment in Israel, or the more right wing groups here. I was once on a panel with one of the leading Orthodox Rabbis of our day, a very accomplished man who spoke multiple languages and was an international expert on Jewish medical ethics. He denied that I was a Rabbi by calling me Mr. Fass several times when we met before the panel started. I said to him, “Look, I am ordained just as you are. If you insist on calling me Mr. I can only assume that’s the way you wish to be addressed as well.” He called me Rabbi for the rest of the time we were together.

My victory, if victory it was, was short lived, because soon after that he declared in the local Jewish newspaper that Reform Jews weren’t really Jews at all. I responded, at length, then he did, then I did, but of course, nothing was decided.

He was, of course, completely incorrect, to say nothing of slanderous, in saying that we Reform Jews aren’t really Jews. But he was correct in thinking that we Reform Jews deny what for him is a crucial aspect of the Torah: its divinity. One of the founding premises of Reform Judaism is that the Bible is the result of human effort. The Torah was written, not all at once at Sinai, but over many centuries. Like our American Constitution, it was edited and amended not once, but many times. Those who did this work had neither haloes nor wings, but were flesh and blood human beings just as we are.

These ideas, it turns out, are neither so new nor so radical as they might sound. They’re actually quite ancient. Many of the teachers of the Talmudic age, fifteen hundred years ago and more, thought that the original Torah consisted only of the Ten Commandments [B. Taanit 4:8]. Rabbi Ishmael contends that Moses was given the generalities and the specifics of Torah law at some time after Sinai, indicating that the whole Torah was not originally given there [Siegel, p. 493].

A goodly strand of Rabbinic tradition finds that many of the words and concepts of the Torah are not to be taken literally because they weren’t meant that way from the outset. R. Jose says the language is figurative. R. Ammi says, in no uncertain terms, “The Torah used hyperbole, the prophets used hyperbole, the sages used hyperbole.” [B. Tamid, 29a].

In fact, the entire Bible is open to extensive interpretation. If each of King Solomon’s three thousand proverbs has 1005 separate interpretations, says the Zohar, each of God’s words must have innumerable meanings [Zohar Toldot, 135a]. Just as there were reputed to be 600,000 souls who left Egypt, says another source, so each and every verse of the Torah has at least 600,000 interpretations [Yalkut Me’Am Lolez, vol. 6, p. 104]. But that’s only on the surface level of meaning. There are 600,000 more on the level of allusion, 600,000 more on the homiletic level, and an additional 600,000 on the mystical level [Ibid.].

In the face of all of this, we Reform Jews are really saying nothing different. We are simply stressing an approach that’s long been part of our heritage. It is not possible to deny the literal truth of the Torah because there is not now and never has been one! Those who think there is are committing what I would call the “fundamentalist fallacy.” They arrogate to themselves a knowledge of God’s ways that humans can’t possibly have. By denying a literal approach we believe is impossible, we certainly do not deny the Torah or its central and sacred meaning in Jewish life.

Let us assume that the Torah is Divine, is God’s word. Is it not the height of arrogance to assume that any merely human intellect can truly understand God? The very best we can do is make our best guess, given the limits of our human understanding, as to what God wanted. Even that will leave much in the dark, given the complexity of God’s word, containing, as tradition figuratively suggests, (pun intended) almost 2 ½  million meanings for each word and verse! With our limited lifespan, how many of these do we even have time for, let alone the intellect to comprehend?

If we assume that instead of giving the Torah directly, God inspired humans to write it, we are even further from literalism. Once God’s word is filtered through fallible human beings like ourselves, how are we to know which of the words are Divine, eternal, and true, and which are the result of errors in copying as well as understanding?

Obviously, there is no way. Philosopher Franz Rosenzweig said that “Truth is a noun only for God.” When we insist that we know the Truth (with a capital T), we are actually making an idol of truth, something we were warned against in the Ten Commandments.

But if God’s word is so incredibly complex we can never fathom it all, if that word is always mediated through the agency of fallible human beings, if literal truth is totally beyond us and can be known only to God, then what is our relationship to these Ten Commandments and all the rest of the Torah? Why do we have to obey them?

We don’t. We never did. The “have to’s” are the creations of followers desperate to be told what to do and the tools of leaders who want to keep their subjects in line. The truth, as far as we are able to know it, is that religion, ours certainly, is an unsure, uncertain search for the divine and the sacred. The Torah is part of the record of that search. It has incredible things to teach us, ideas and ideals that our people created and gave as a blessing to all humankind.
But the Torah, for all its magnificence, is only a part of our truth. We have been adding to its wisdom throughout the ages, as the Torah itself instructs us to. In the passages about the revelation at Sinai one of the verses speaks to us about a blast of the shofar that grew louder and louder [Ex. 19:19]. One of our sages asks, “How can this be? When a trumpet is blown and the sound moves out into the world, its force diminishes and it becomes softer and softer. Why, then, the strange usage? To teach us that it is our task to take the message of Sinai and through our thoughts and our acts, see to it that its call for dignity, justice, and peace, does indeed get louder and louder.” [After Israel Levinthal].

This cannot take place if we slavishly obey the laws of the past. To make the results of our search for the sacred have a greater and greater impact, we need to add and to change, to shape, to create. Our tradition tells,

...the story of a king who had two servants. He gave each one a measure of wheat and a bundle of flax. The foresighted one wove the flax into cloth, and made flour from the wheat, ...baked it, and set the bread on the table on the cloth before the king returned. The simple servant decided that he dare not tamper with the gifts the king had given him. After some time the king returned ... and said to them, “My children, bring me what I gave you.” One brought out the table set with the bread on the tablecloth. The other brought out the wheat and the bundle of flax with it.” [American Rabbi, 2/88, p.32]

           Tell me, who has better obeyed God’s law? The person who, in fear and simplicity, left the raw materials of our past, our Torah, exactly as before, or the person with the courage to add human efforts to what God provided? The fundamentalists of all faiths are simply wrong, as well as arrogant. Their way leads to stagnation and decay and the abrogation of that most precious gift of our soul: our freedom. To truly obey God’s law is to have the courage to experiment, even to fail, in our search for more truth, more holiness, more divinity.

If we would truly obey 10 commandments, or 613 commandments, we must first of all obey the commandment on which all the others stand: the commandment of change. Only God is eternal. All else is temporary, especially us. May we who are here for so short a time help make God’s call sound louder and louder across the generations. May we make cloth out of flax to clothe the naked, bread out of wheat to feed the hungry, and out of our groping, error-ridden, always-changing search for truth, a world of peace.

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