I received a letter from someone, actually a former Muslim who has evidently converted to Judaism. And his question was about the authorship of the Torah. He said, he wanted to know whether or not we believed in the documentary hypothesis and if so, which is the theory that many people wrote the Torah, was not written off from God to Moses at Sinai. And if that is true, then, what does it do about the rest of Jewish tradition?
So I answered in the following way, I told him the story about when I was a sophomore in college, at the University of Chicago and I signed up for a course, I was major in religion, I signed up for a course in the Divinity School. This was taught by a German Presbyterian Old Testament professor named J. Wilcox and I told him because I thought, I knew the Bible would be an easy A. Basically in orthodox education, until that point, I never heard of the documentary hypothesis. But the class is full of graduate students in Divinity and I wonder if the class, whose professor is talking for the first 15 minutes about what everybody else in the class knew it but me, which is his starting assumption that the five books of Moses, that we call the Torah, consisted of several different documents written over many hundreds of years and were adapted much later on, about 500, 800 years after Moses, and that is what the Torah was.
Well, I was totally shaken, I could not believe what I was hearing. So immediately after class, I ran to a local synagogue where I was the youth director and it happened to house an orthodox base school that I have attended as a kid. So I bumped into the principal who is an orthodox Rabbi and asked him what I heard and he said all that was all anti-Semitism, it was not true, and of course the Torah is written from Moses to Sinai, at Sinai.
So I said “Well, does not the Talmud say actually that the last eight verses were written by Joshua because Moses is dead?” And he said “Well, that is one view.” And I said ‘It could have been nine verses. It could have been more that forty years in the desert.” Because I knew that the most liberal orthodox view was that it was written during the forty years in the desert. He said “No!” so then I went up to see, just in case that was not the only view in Judaism, I went up to see the conservative rabbi of the synagogue, this is a wonderful Rabbi, about Simon who is no longer alive, sadly. And he told me that what I had heard from college from Professor Wilcox was basically the starting assumption of the faculty of the Jewish illogical seminary. They had some differences, but basically that was true. I said, “Well then, what does it do about the rest of Judaism?” And he gave me a lot of books to read and basically said that the Torah itself was not word for word record of what God said and it was all for hundreds of years. And there is so many problems in the text, for example, just read Genesis chapter 1 and appear carefully in Genesis chapter 2 when you see that it is contradictory in how it is organized and they have different for God most of the text and hundreds of examples like that.
So it is more of a Midrash, on what God said to Moses and what our ancestors understood. It does not mean it is not divine, it is divinely inspired but it is not a record, like you have made a tape recording like I am doing right now, and that is the basic difference between the orthodox and the fundamentalists and the rest of the non orthodox and fundamentalists Jews and Christians, a critical point and I hope satisfactory, makes it more difficult. It is easier to believe in some ways, that if everything is from God directly, then it is clear. In fact, there is a very famous neo-orthodox rabbi named Rafael Shimshon Hirsh. And he once said, something he wrote that either it is true that the Torah says God commanded Moses to say blah, blah, blah or it is not true, if it is true, you have to do it, if it is not, then the whole thing is silly. Well it is obviously most of them have to do that and in discerning people, you have to carefully read the text and understand how our tradition viewed it and see it as holy. It is the holiest text we have, believe it divinely inspired and live our lives in that basis. So it is not as easy as a simple black and white fundamentalist, but in our hand, it is true, it is true and the other is not, we have to live our lives based on that real consequence.
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