Eikev: Stuck Between Belief and Baloney

I'm having a fight with my Bible class. It's true! Well, maybe it's not so much a fight as it is a disagreement, or perhaps a recurring exchange with some mild pretend-frustration... but "fight" just sounds better.

Every Wednesday morning, I sit with a wonderful (but rowdy) group of congregants, and we dissect the text of the Torah. Now, I don't pull any of my punches. I studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary - home of source-critical, documentary-hypothesis, positive-historical, Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholarly study of Jewish text - so yeah, the class gets the unfiltered stuff. And as a result, we regularly wrestle with THE big question: "Who wrote the Bible?" And it's true, sometimes we fight. Sort of.

Several students in the class (who shall remain nameless), often ask variations on the same questions: "Is the text of the Torah TRUE?" and if it isn't, "Is all this stuff just made up?" Full disclosure; I can't easily answer either of those questions. We are MEANT to struggle with them. I hear my congregants

stating a black-or-white, either-or problem; either every word in the Torah is true and factual and Divine... or it's all just a bunch of baloney. And I just don't see it that way. This week, I believe the Torah agrees with my refusal to choose one or the other of these options. Deuteronomy, chapter 11 states (and I'm editing the quote a little): "Take thought this day that it was not your children, who neither experienced nor witnessed the lesson of Adonai, your God - God's majesty, mighty hand, outstretched arm, the signs and the deeds... what God did to Egypt's army... what God did for you in the wilderness... and to Datan and Aviram... - but that it was YOU who saw with YOUR OWN EYES all the marvelous deeds that Adonai performed" (11:2-7, all-caps my own).

Ok, so here's the problem: I wasn't there. Were you? We can, of course, wax poetic about our souls all being at Sinai, and that spiritually we are all interconnected with one another and with our ancestors. Yes, yes,

we get all of that. But I don't remember standing at Sinai. I don't feel like I, Jeremy Gerber, am IN this story. So I feel stuck. I'm not at one extreme end of the spectrum, wholeheartedly and cosmically connected to the Sinai experience; but I'm also not at the other end, dismissing the Torah's assertion as ludicrous or irrelevant. I WANT to make sense of it, to feel connected and represented, to believe that the text is speaking to me. I too want to be blessed by it! And maybe that, right there, is the key. My desire, my caring about the text and wanting to connect to it. That realization gets me just a little bit un-stuck.

This bit of insight - the importance of our own effort - is actually critical for the upcoming High Holiday season as well. You see, even the very first audience hearing these verses from Deuteronomy, they probably were living hundreds of years after the

Exodus as well! They had no personal experience of Sinai either. And yet, the Torah says "you were there!" But we suspend our disbelief, as they did. We accept the theatrics of it - even just for a little while - and we (briefly) let go of our skepticism. We have to make meaning of the text ourselves. When we WANT this thing, this Jewish enterprise, to work, we have to make it so. No one can make this meaningful FOR you. I can't assuage all the frustrations of my Bible class students. Meaning-making is very personal, it's unique and complex for each individual. What I want you to hear in that Biblical quote is not fact or fiction, but rather a yearning for relationship. A hand stretching out, desperately yet lovingly, for someone to reach back. Before you can do anything else, you have to let yourself SEE that hand... then the next move is up to you.

Photos in this blogpost:
1. CC image courtesy of Evan-Amos on Wikimedia Commons
2. CC image courtesy of LI1324 on Wikimedia Commons
3. CC image courtesy of Mielon on Wikimedia Commons
4. CC image courtesy of James Hill on Wikimedia Commons