Who Wrote the Torah?
Rabbi Lewis John Eron, Ph.D.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Katz JCC
Me’ah Rabbinic Panel
The Torah is the creation of Am Yisrael — the Jewish People. It is the product of almost 700 years of Jewish creativity, imagination, religious exploration, and spiritual development. As we have it now, it is a reflection on the formative period of Israel’s identity from the perspective of nearly three-quarters of a millennium. It expresses the needs, concerns, and understandings of our people as the period of Israelite independence was coming to an end.
In it, the sages and teachers of our people, the royal and priestly scribes of late First Temple Jerusalem, recorded their memory and understanding of the great events that formed their and our most ancient history — the myths of primal humanity, the tales of our patriarchs and matriarchs, and the epic of liberation from slavery and the journey home to the Promised Land. Within its narrative framework, these scribes explored the powerful spiritual motifs that bound our ancestors together as a people and described our people’s self-understanding of their relationship with God — election, and covenant.
Thankfully, their respect for the past preserved for us the voices they listened to model this unique work. If we read the Torah carefully and respectfully, we can see how they incorporated their various sources into their text. We can easily identify fragments of ancient epics and long-cherished poetic compositions, law codes, and narrative elements. With greater care, we can even separate the various traditional sources they bound together to form a thicker narrative.
Although there are still some questions yet to be solved with the tools of higher criticism, form-critical analysis, canonical criticism, and literary research along with ancillary tools coming from archaeology, sociology, folklore, comparative linguistics, and Ancient Near Eastern history and culture, we can reliably discuss the formation of the Torah. Within the Torah, as in the rest of the TaNaK, we can still hear the words of our ancestors still speaking to us over the centuries.
Our Torah is a book written by the Jewish people, for the Jewish people. Our Torah is a book bound together with one eye on the past and one eye to the future. The pious and faithful scribes compiled our Torah to preserve the richness of our past and to be a foundation for an unknown future in a rapidly changing world. This is the power of the Torah. This is what makes the Torah holy.
In the Torah, we meet our ancestors and share their discovery of God in their history, traditions, and personal experiences. We hear many voices and are presented with a variety of viewpoints. The Torah forces us to listen to them both separately and together, to confront each idea, statement, sentence, and word, and then to hold them together in a dynamic framework. The various voices, the striking juxtapositions, the matrix of viewpoints and the commitment to God, the people of Israel, and the holy and sacred words that bind them all together have given us a document in which we can continue to explore the fundament questions of meaning that connect us with Jewish people over time and space and reflect our essential humanity.
The Torah is more than a revealed text. Seeing it as a unity document and a product of Divine Revelation weakens its call and dishonors the spiritual strength of our ancestors. Any faith can claim revelation, and who can judge the validity of any of these claims. At best, we are left with a God who says different things to different people. At worse, we have the groundwork for religious polemics.
When we honor the Torah as the product of our people’s search for and discovery of the presence of God in our world and in our history, we free ourselves from the divisive, exclusivist, claims of revealed faiths. The Torah is not God’s gift to us, but our response to God — the expression of our people’s spiritual genius. It is our precious heritage, a product of our people and our culture, and our offering to the world.
Our love of our people’s creative spirit in faith as in other aspects of human expression — art, literature, philosophy, law, government, science — in no way diminishes our ability to appreciate, honor, and learn from the creativity of others. In fact, it enables us to say with great strength the blessing prescribed by our sages whenever we meet a person endowed with great wisdom, knowledge, and understanding as we acknowledge their own unique expression of these divine gifts.
When we honor the Torah as the product of our people’s search for and discovery of the presence of God in our world and in our history, we also free ourselves from the narrow, spiritual discoveries of one gifted figure and his or her closest followers. The Torah represents the collective wisdom of all of our ancestors. As we honor their individual voices singing in the chorus of Yisrael, we come to understand that we, too, can make our voice part of the strange harmonies that form our people’s spiritual symphony.
Yes, the Torah is a precious human document coming from our people’s soulful search and thrilling discovery of the power of the divine in our world and in our lives. With this understanding, it no longer matters that modern historical, textual, and scientific research has rendered older conceptions of the Torah as a unity, revealed document obsolete. Rather than weakening faith and devaluating the Torah’s spiritual worth, such discoveries have freed our spirits and propelled us into our own uncertain future with the same powerful tools created by those wise scribes of old that have guided us for centuries.