July 19, 2010
Taking Judaism Seriously Again
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Jonathan Zasloff’s article “What
Are You Doing for Asarah B’Av?” might have come as a shock to some
readers of the Jewish Journal. Opening with the provocative summons
to have a Jewish hoedown on the 10th of Av (a day, not incidentally,
when our Temple continued burning, for which reason certain halachic
restrictions remain in force on the morning of the 10th of
Av), Zasloff writes: “The time has come for us to acknowledge the
dirty little secret of Tisha B’Av: The destruction of the Temple was
one of the best things ever to happen to the Jewish people.”
He adds: “Had the Temple actually survived,
it would have meant the destruction of the Jewish religion. Our religious
and spiritual practices would have centered not on Torah, but rather
on bloody sacrifices,” when Judaism was a cultic worship propagated
by a “priestly cult,” making Tisha B’Av “not a tragedy but more
akin to our people’s bar mitzvah.”
There is nothing in these sentiments
that should surprise anyone; they reflect the well worn beliefs of progressive
Judaism and its outlook on the Torah, i.e. the idea that the Torah is
a fraud that is not what it purports to be. For roughly 200 years there
have been just two mutually exclusive perspectives regarding the Torah.
(1) The Torah was written by Moses; or (2) the Torah was originally
written by multiple authors who never met each other, who contradicted
each other, who even hated each other, and who invented their stories
for political purposes.
The first perspective is generally accepted
by Orthodox Jews and the second perspective is believed by academics
in universities throughout the Western world and liberal Jewish rabbis
who teach or are taught that the Bible is an amalgamation of contradictory
sources and myth, jam-packed with ancient and outdated practices.
So which of these competing views is
correct? The answer to this question matters a great deal to religious
and secular Jews, and to anyone who loves truth. If the Bible had multiple
authors, there is no reason for anyone to take it seriously since, at
a minimum, multiple authorship would establish that the Torah is untruthful
about its own claim that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, led
them to Mount Sinai where they heard the Ten Commandments, and then
wrote the entire Torah over a 40-year period.
And if the Torah is not the book that
Moses wrote (by Divine dictation), but rather a book that Hebrew politicians
— or members of a priestly cult — wrote to feather their ancient
nests, why should you or I live by its onerous demands? Let Zasloff
and his friends chant Rambam in Arabic (as he proposes) to the tune
of Kumbayah. We (who are Orthodox Jews) will take off our kippot and
drive to the beach on Shabbat, or catch a movie, or something other
than sit in shul all day and learn difficult texts in a foreign language
— if Judaism is nothing but a bunch of made up fairy tales
The destruction of the Temple was a great
national tragedy. The great leaders and Torah sages of the time instituted
observances that would help us focus on the underlying reasons for the
destruction — the baseless hatred, the failure of our people
to love our fellow Jews as ourselves (news flash to Zasloff: our religion
was based on Torah, not “bloody sacrifices,” as his own citation
of Rabbi Akiva’s scholarship makes abundantly clear). Zasloff would
be closer to the mark if he said only that we can derive good from this
tragedy by learning these lessons and uniting according to Torah precepts
and values.
The biggest barrier to doing so today
is the fact that many, if not most, Jewish religious leaders no longer
believe in the Torah’s authenticity. If progressive Jews, following
the academic view of the multiple authorship of the Torah, are correct,
then the Torah is fictitious, unreliable and unworthy of the demands
it makes of us. Caught in the crossfire are synagogue members and college
students who trust in their leaders (clergy or professors) a little
too much, fearing to delve into esoteric concepts and make up their
own minds.
Contemporary American Jews owe it to
themselves to investigate whether or not the Torah is a fraud, and to
ask their religious leaders their answer to this question. Then they
can decide for themselves whether they want to gyrate to the Kaddish
d’Rabbanan with Jonathan Zasloff, or take Judaism seriously.
Eyal Rav-Noy, director of the Jewish
Learning Academy, an outreach center in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood,
and journalist Gil Weinreich are authors of the new book Who Really
Wrote the Bible: and Why It Should be Taken Seriously Again. They
can be reached at www.WhoReallyWroteTheBible.com
