I remember learning in day school, at the North Shore Hebrew Academy, that at midnight on Shavuot the heavens open up. At a time when I rarely stayed up past 10 p.m., I was determined, though I was but 9 or 10, to stay up to midnight and watch this phenomenon. I was disappointed: I stayed up and the heavens remained shut. Next morning the parental explanation was: I blinked. How disappointing. And so the following year, with even greater determination, I stayed up to midnight and as the midnight hour approached held my eyes wide open to ensure that I wouldn’t miss the view of heaven. But again, I had no view of the heavens; only of a beautiful start lit sky. New explanation: we were on Daylight Savings Time and midnight really was 1 a.m..
By the following year I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I had concluded that it probably was a bubbe meisah and the sky really didn’t open. And yet, even decades later, there is a part of me that would like to believe that indeed even for a brief moment the sky parts and we mortals can see into the heavenly dimension. (This shows a more sophisticated view of heaven: that the sky is not just a curtain in front of heaven; but it inhabits another dimension. Shades of sci fi!) If we can’t jump back in time and witness the revelation at Sinai which is now commemorated by Shavuot, surely we can have a glimpse of from whence the Torah came.
We want something in which to root our faith. For well over a century Jews have wrestled with the implications of modern Biblical criticism. This scholarship has suggested that the Torah was not given in a single revelation at/in Sinai, but rather unfolded over centuries and reveals multiple hands at work. How do we retain belief in this foundational document and yet simultaneously assent to the findings of Biblical studies? One way is to compartmentalize: research and scientific study in one part of the brain; Judaism as transmitted in another, with an impenetrable barrier between the two of them. The former does not impact upon the latter. It is a rare person—and some of my teachers at the Seminary were among the few—who could lead such bifurcated lives, wherein their scholarship did not impact upon what I would term orthopraxy.
A second approach is suggested by my colleague Rabbi Gordon Tucker in his responsum on homosexuality. And let me quote him at length.
[The] assumption (that the Torah is the direct and complete expression of God’s will) is one that, for all its currency in parts of the Jewish world, is not accepted in our Conservative Jewish world. And it is not accepted for good scholarly and theological reasons. We should be clear that this is not an assertion that the Torah is not divine, or that it is merely human. Heschel famously wrote that “as a report about revelation, the bible itself is a midrash.” We quote this phrase often enough, but perhaps don’t sufficiently appreciate that its far-reaching implications both free up our religious thinking and tie us to traditional theological categories at the same time. It is, in other words, possible to (a) believe in God; (b) believe in revelation; (c) believe that it is meaningful to speak of a divine will for the world; and (d) to have faith in the idea that the Torah is our first (and thus, in an important sense, most sacred) expression of God’s will in human language, and still insist that the sacred text of the Torah does not perfectly and infallibly express that will. Heschel also wrote that “…whatever hand wrote the Torah included the ‘finger of God…..”. But the question as to whether the Pentateuch was entirely written in forty years or in eighty years is a temporal question asked in the context of the problem of eternity.” This is a view of the Torah that conforms to scholarly discoveries about its text, and at the same time presents to us a most compelling theological image of human-divine partnership. That is, the non-acceptance of biblical infallibility is not merely a negative verdict on the divine authorship of the Torah born of academic skepticism; it is a profound and inspiring positive message about the ways in which God and humans find each other on the stage of history onto which we have been placed.
Tucker proceeds in his tshuvah to make an argument for this theological approach to the subject before turning to the halachic, Jewish legal, arguments. It is a compelling approach: intellectually honest and yet fraught with uncharted dangers as one navigates the currents and balances the “truths” of historic and linguistic inquiry with the eternal verities of Judaism.
At times like this, a heavenly vision, if not a heavenly voice of reassurance would be welcome. And yet we are left to our own devices to struggle, qua Heschel, with a “midrashic Torah.”
Shavuot is marked this year beginning on Tuesday evening May 18th. Heaven probably won’t reveal itself, but perhaps the echo of Sinai and the moment of revelation will still be heard. Join us for services that evening and on the two days that follow.
