The Torah as a Way of Wisdom

Torah as a Way of Wisdom
How I Bring Torah to You
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, Temple Beth Shalom
Shabbat Devarim 7/21/07

In selecting me as your rabbi, you have entrusted to me the interpretation of the Torah. I serve as your mediator between the tradition and yourselves. That is the classic role of the rabbi, a teacher who makes the Torah relevant, meaningful, and authoritative in the lives of each generation.

Given this role you have asked me to fill in your lives, I thought it wise to share with you a bit of my approach to teaching Torah. It is Chutzpadik of me to just start giving you sermons and Divrei Torah without sharing with you how I approach teaching and interpreting the Torah. How do I mediate this vast tradition to you? And what makes my approach different from others who seek to make this text relevant and meaningful to people?

We live during a time when the Bible has again become a controversial book. Recently I heard an account of the new creation museum in Kentucky. The $27 million museum was funded by evangelists and features the same set designer who developed the Jaws exhibit at Universal Studios. The museum is the reverse of a natural history museum. Its purpose is to present the biblical account of creation as fact using quasi scientific justifications. Its primary purpose is to show that the world is 6000 years old (or to be more precise it is 5767 years old. (Read the NY Times Review of the Museum) It is a monument to the literal reading of scripture which rejects other ways of knowing nature, history, and the human experience.

The website of the museum states proudly, “The Bible speaks for itself at the Creation Museum. We’ve just paved the way to a greater understanding of the tenets of creation and redemption. Our exhibit halls are gilded with truth, our gardens teem with the visible signs of life.” (Read Creation Museum Website)

There are many in our country and around the world who read scripture with piety and absolute faith that the text is never wrong and its truth overwhelms all other claims to truth. This is because the Bible, according to these readers is unlike any other book; it is the product of a divine hand. Of course, each group of readers denies the truth of other groups of pious readers. Each group of readers thinks its reading is the only way to read the text.

On the other side of this view of the Bible stands a newly strident group of antagonists, culture warriors against the Bible. Popular books like the End of Faith and the God Delusion pummel the Bible as a book of dangerous folly and antiquated world view. This is not new. The attempt to criticize the bible, to diminish its sanctity, and to reduce its cultural and religious influence began with Spinoza in the 17th century.

In a skeptical secular culture the Bible can at best teach us parochial and historical truths about the beliefs of the ancient children of Israel. It is the Jew’s national book, which is in fact, how it is taught in Israel in the secular schools. But the more radicalized critics in our time, especially since 9/11, see the Bible and other religious scriptures such as the Koran as lethal sources of fanatic faith and religious narrowness. This view is held so strongly that a recent attempt to offer a course on religion and faith at Harvard University was defeated by a faculty protest.
Ultimately this view leads to the rejection of the Bible as an essential book for a literate person.

A few years ago I was asked to give a lecture about Judaism at an elite private high school in Seattle. One of my kids from the youth group was a student there. She warned me that the kids did not know the Bible at all. I taught one of the Genesis stories about Abraham, and indeed, outside of my student, the 60 others in the class did not know who Abraham was.
Our culture is polarized over the bible, with one side reading it with super reverence and the other disparaging and dismissing its relevance. One side elevates the bible to infallibility while the other rants about its folly.

We are reading the Torah at this present polarizing cultural moment. We cannot take the Torah for granted. But then how should we read and study it? What role does it play in our lives?
I was inspired to do this teaching from Leon Kass’s excellent book, Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Kass argues that we must read the Bible as a source or wisdom. It is much broader than the narrow role claimed by biblical antagonists but it is not the singular source of truth claimed by the pious reader. He calls for a philosophic reading of the Bible by which he means an effort of wisdom seeking and wisdom loving. This is a way of reading the Bible in which we “single mindedly and whole heartedly-yet thoughtfully and self-critically seek to discover the truth about the world and our place within it and to find thereby guidance for how we are to live. “ (p. 1)

Kass adds that the Biblical narrative is a “vehicle for conveying the timeless psychic and social elements of principles of human life in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast a powerful light, for example on the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, shame, guilt, anger, and the human response to mortality. The Bible shows us not so much what happened as what always happens in the realm of human experience. By holding up a mirror in which we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings often get it wrong.”
The Bible is concerned with this key question according to Kass:

Is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life, responsive to both the promise and the peril of the human creature, that accords with a human’s true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?

The key term here is “way of life”. We seek guidance on how to live. As a rabbi, I am dedicated to helping people live lives of meaning and self awareness. Such a life must lead to action and to building full and meaningful relationships with a large web of others, partners, families, communities, peoples, strangers, and enemies.

The question is not merely meant for religious people. My teaching is for both secular and religious people, more precisely to anyone who seeks a broader and deeper life, anyone who is asking serious questions about life, and anyone who fights against falling into the pit of purposelessness, cynicism and hopelessness.

How then do I approach teaching Torah?
1. I try to understand the text in its own terms, but also try to show how such an understanding may address us in our real lives.
2. That the Torah and the bible in general when fully understood helps to illuminate the most important and enduring concerns of our experience as human beings.
3. That the Torah and the Jewish tradition have a unique approach to the questions of how to live an ethical and spiritual life which is not only worth preserving but should be more widely known.
4. I open the text as a possibility and entertain different readings and interpretations with the conviction that the multiplicity of readings gets us closer to the truth. This is also a distinct and honored Jewish approach.

Is there a prerequisite for reading the Bible? Ironically the fanatic believer and disbeliever agree. The believer argues that a blind faith must be prerequisite to know the Bible’s teaching. The unbeliever agrees and declares the Bible irrelevant because his he regards his faithlessness makes the Bible a closed book for him.

I ask every reader, everyone who bothers to come to shul and to listen to the Torah, to try a third option: to foster an attitude of thoughtful engagement, to suspend belief in the truth of any biblical text, and to be open to where the text may take us when we explore it deeply.
Biblical texts when read in this way offer a gift which makes reading them a great and unexpected pleasure. The Bible is a sparse text, filled with “ambiguity, reticence, and a lack of editorial judgment” that invite us to interpret and argue over its meaning. This is truly Judaism’s unique way of understanding the Bible. We have always recognized the open form of the biblical text. We can sense its reluctance to offer us final and indubitable interpretations. The Bible and subsequent Jewish literature help to cultivate and openness, thoughtfulness, and modesty about our own understanding. This according to Kass is the hallmark of the pursuit of wisdom.

Do we want to devote our lives to the pursuit of wisdom? Where do we find wisdom in our world today? What are the choices and what are the paths? The mindless life is the choice of most, awash in a sea of chattering media and numbing entertainments. My job is to make it easier for you to find wisdom in the cacophonies of modern life, to focus on this book as the say in Long Beach-an oil well-a source of rich wisdom hidden deep within our ancient text. May I be able to inspire in you a return to this book and the capacity to share its insights with those who you encounter in your journey of life.