Jewish Origins Without Revelation (Part 3, final)

~ Walter

More remains to be said about this alleged God who supposedly made promises to Abraham and his progeny’s future conquest and possession of the land of Canaan which, at the time of king David had become a fait accompli. Who was this God and where did he come from? What about his becoming the one and only and unique God of Israel?

In a polytheism practicing religious environment such as was the ancient Near East in the second millenium BCE, the god who allegedly demanded the people’s obedience and worship, as well as recognition of him as the dominant God of the already existing pantheon, had to be properly identified so that his authority be respected by all.

To accomplish this feat, king David’s royal historiographers looked into the mythologies of the countries adjoining Canaan, north and south, Mesopotamia and Egypt. In both those areas they found myths and holy stories that lent themselves to re-interpretation in the light of the Hebrew tribes’ experience in the Exodus-cluster of events. It is probable, given Moses’ experience at the Egyptian royal court, that he remembered what he had heard there and shared this mythological material within the circles of the liberated Hebrew slaves, after Exodus and before his death.

King David, in an effort to justify the conquest of Canaan may have “unpacked” Moses’ Egyptian legacy and with some modifications, introduced it into Israel’s nascent constitution, the Torah.

One of several Egyptian creation myths was contained in what is known to us as a part of the Egyptian Memphite theology. This myth may have served king David’s purpose. Its theme consists of the mechanism of creation which reverberates in the Jewish Bible story of creation.

The myth tells that before creation there existed a watery void, accompanied by darkness, formlessness and invisibility. This sounds very much like the tohu vavohu in Genesis 1:2 which translates as “the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Then, just as the flood waters of the Nile subside and small hillocks of mud appear, the annual event making agriculture of that inundated area feasible, so also according to the creation myth, the primeval waters subsided and the first hillock of earth appeared in the middle of nothingness. On that hillock sat the creator god Atum whose name means that he was “all within himself.”

The phrase “all within himself” resembles the Jewish liturgical text, kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, adonay tseva’ot, melo kol ha’aretz kevodo, or in English, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory,” (Isa. 6:3)

Note: In Christian Church liturgy this acclamation of the divinity is called the “trishagion” (Greek: thrice holy).

God Atum then brings the other gods into being by naming them. That mode of creation sounds similar to the biblical text in which the biblical God brings animals to Adam, the first human being, so that Adam name them.

The Memphite theology goes even further in terms of being a prototype, as it were, for the biblical creation text. It states that Ptah, the god of Memphis, then the capital of Egypt,was “the heart and tongue of the gods.” Heart and tongue was the Egyptian pictorial way of saying mind and speech. “Indeed, all the divine order came into being through what the heart thought and the tongue commanded.” Interestingly, the biblical creation text echoes this Egyptian concept, “And God said, ‘Let there be light! And there was light.’ ” Creation, in the Genesis text, happens by means of the spoken word of God.

It is worth mentioning here that the Memphite theology precedes early Greek and Hebrew thought by 2,000 years!

It was clever on the part of David to refer in the Torah, Israel’s Constitution, right at its beginning, to the creation event and to credit Israel’s God, elohim, with that accomplishment. Interestingly, the name of the Canaanite chief god was el (plural elim or elohim). In the Genesis text, it is this elohim who is the creator of the world but in the Abraham- related narratives, beginning in Genesis 12, this god has acquired the unpronounceable name YHWH (often pronounced Yahweh, when probable vowels are added to the four consonants). Here lies a contradiction, in as much as the name YHVH, according to the biblical narrative itself, does not become known/revealed until the episode at the Burning Bush in Exodus 3:15 where God introduces himself as YHVH to Moses, an event, in all probability 500 years or more after Abraham.

In many Bible narratives the two names are joined to read YHWH-Elohim. By doing this, the creator God, the God who promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and the victorious God of the Exodus who defeated not only Pharaoh but also the Egyptian gods, are now united into one supreme divinity. No greater god than Israel’s God can now be invoked by anyone to quarrel about Israel’s having taken possession of Canaan. And scrolling forward in history, this also is this very god who has an intimate relationship with David, Israel’s king and author of the new Constitution, the Torah.

For David, the new monarch of the geo-political state of Israel, a state consisting of a number of tribes with each one having its own historical and religious past, unification was of utmost importance.

For Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE) about whom Moses had undoubtedly heard while at the Egyptian court, this too was a concern. His solution to the problem was the introduction of what we today call monolatry, the rule of a single supreme god. This was not elimination of the pantheon of gods but merely the multiple gods’ demotion to a lesser status. Akhenaten promoted the god Aton (or Aten) to the supreme position and incorporated the god’s name into his own: thus Akhen-aten meaning, “successful for Aten.” or something very similar. The symbol of Aten was the disk of the sun with each of its rays ending in the Egyptian symbol of life, the ankh.

From monolatry to monotheism it is only one step. It is an all important step. Promotion of one god to a supreme position and worship of that one god by all twelve tribes as the one and only true god would undoubtedly encourage and eventually establish unity, a precondition for the establishment of the United Kingdom under David. E pluribus unum.

How can this be accomplished? It is here that we discover David’s genius. Transforming the name el (singular) into elohim (a plural) but having this plural followed by both verbs and adjectives in the singular rather then in the plural, as is grammatically required in Hebrew, the MANY [gods of the tribes] are now changed into ONE [god].. This grammar-related process accomplished the transition from monolatry to monotheism.

The codification of the above grammatical procedure for religio-political purposes is clearly evident from the shema, the single faith affirmation of Judaism to this day. Stemming from the time of Judah’s king Josiah (640 BCE). It was he who instituted the so-called Josianic Reform which consisted of centralizing worship in Jerusalem. The text of the shema is found in Deut. 6:4 and reads in Hebrew, shema yisrael yhvh eloheynu yhvh echad. The literal translation of this text is, “hear Israel YHVH our gods YHVH one.”The usual English rendering of the sentence is, “hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.”Without going into the intricacies of Hebrew grammar, the shema can also be translated as, “Hear Israel, YHVH is our gods, YHVH is one.” What might strike the reader is that the verb “is” cannot be found in the Hebrew text. Reason for this is that the verb “to be” in conjugated form does not exist in the present tense in biblical Hebrew. An example: to say “I am a woman” is in Hebrew ani ishah or “I woman.” Both the “am” and the “a” (the indefinite article) must be supplied by the reader.

The tradition calls for a circumlocution for God’s name YHVH. Why so? Because the name consists of four consonants only. Written biblical Hebrew consists of consonants only. The vowels must be supplied by the reader. This makes the reading of Hebrew biblical texts tricky and difficult. Besides, there was reluctance to pronounce God’s holy name. This explains the circumlocution adonay employed when the reader of Torah texts encounters the four holy letters of God’s names. The term adonay literally means “my lords” (1st person plural, possessive of adon, meaning “lord” ). Eventually, the term’s usage transformed it into a singular, followed by verbs and adjectives in the singular. It follow that in the shema two nouns in the plural are, on the basis of religious tradition, considered singular and treated as such. Once again, E pluribus unum.

Finally, where did the four holy letters of God’s name, YHVH (also called the tetragrammaton) come from? As far as the Bible is concerned, this was God’s name revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush in the Sinai. Among Bible readers it is rarely known that YHVH was not a complete newcomer to the Near Eastern pantheon. Excavations in the eastern Sinai at Kuntillet Ajrud in 1975-1976 yielded several inscriptions dated to the 9th and 8th centuries BCE in which blessing formulas involving the name Yahweh and Asherah are mentioned. On the wall of a tomb at Khirbet el-Quom the excavators found an inscription reading, “May Uri-Yahu be blessed by Yahweh my guardian and his Asherah.” Also ancient sanctuaries with primitive statuary identified as Yahweh with his consort Asherah were found in that general geographic area.

How and why this particular pagan divinity was adopted by Israel as her God and adapted into playing the major role in certain major historical events, we do not know. Much work dealing with these issues remains to be done.

The term Asherah occurs in the Torah text a number of times. While in the above mentioned excavations, Asherah is identified as Yahweh’s consort, the Torah speaks of it as a sacred pole that stood near Canaanite religious locations to honor the Ugaritic mother-goddess Asherah, consort of El. The biblical texts condemns these poles. So for instance Exod. 34:13 states, “Break down their [Canaanite] altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherim [Asherah poles].”

It might be of interest to mention that echoes of monolatry within ancient Israel survive within the Jewish siddur (prayer book) such as, mi khamokha ba-elim adonay, “who is like you among the gods, Adonay? In the amidah, the standing prayer, we read, barukh ata Adonay, Eloheynu melekh ha-olam, ha-el ha-gadol, ha-gibbor, ha-norah, el-elyon…:”Praised are you Adonay, our God, king of the world, the great God, the powerful God, the awesome God, the highest God…” Both texts suggest the existence of gods other than YHVH. Are these “errors” in monotheism caused by carelessness of editors?

To summarize, it is my belief that Torah began with King David’s plan to create a founding document for the United Kingdom. In trying to establish justification for the Hebrew tribes’ invasion and taking possession of Canaan and adjoining territories, he invoked God’s promise to Abraham, the head of a tribal group, to take possession of the land of Canaan. To establish this God’s absolute superiority overl the other gods in the tribal and Canaanite pantheon, he appropriated and adapted Egyptian myths of creation and combined these with tribal reminiscences/sagas, forming a pre-history that explained and justified ancient Israel’s hegemony over the defeated local population.

By conquering the city of Jebus, a city previously not conquered by any of the tribes, renaming it Yerushalayim or “Inheritance of Peace,” establishing it as capital and religious pilgrimage center of the newly formed kingdom, he succeeded in temporary unification of the tribes into a quasi-homogeneous geo-political entity.

The United Kingdom did not survive the reign of David’s son, king Solomon. It split into two entities after Solomon’s death, the northern kingdom of Israel, consisting of ten tribes and the southern kingdom of Judah, consisting of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.

Following the reign of 20 kings in the north, that kingdom fell to Assyria under king Sargon II in 722 BCE. Little or nothing is known about the fate of the conquered northern tribes.

Judah, in the south, following the reign also of 20 kings, was conquered by Babylonia in 586 BCE under king Nebuchadnezzar and a large part of the population was exiled to Babylonia. With the fall of Babylonia to Persia under Persian king Cyrus (538-529 BCE) the Judean exiles were allowed to return home and to rebuild the walls and the Temple of Jerusalem shortly after, but Jewish independence had been lost. With the exception of the roughly 100 years of the Maccabean Kingdom (165-64 BCE) the Jewish state ceased to exist until its rebirth as Eretz Yisrael, the modern State of Israel, in 1948.
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Through the many centuries of Jewish exilic existence, Torah not only has survived but has kept its relevance and even religious authority for many Jews.

Much in Torah draws on the supernatural. As a person bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, I find it impossible to join in my superstitious ancestors’ belief systems. I fully realize, however, that had I lived in their times, I probably would have been on the same page with them. I find it simplistic to criticize past world views from the viewpoint of our times.

I do stand in awe of some of these ancestors’ insights. In my studied opinion the Torah did not originate in heaven and was brought down to us humans by a god or his angels. As I see it, our ancestors recognized certain truths, saw these as critical for the maintenance and well being of their society. As it happened, that wisdom was handed down to us as advice for the viability of future societies.

It was our ancestors’ observation of events and their consequences that helped them arrive at conclusions certain of which, if followed by us today, would undoubtedly improve the lives of many and perhaps even slow down, stop and possibly reverse our descent into planetary human self-destruction.

Reliance on some kind of a future supernatural intervention into human affairs to stop our tendency to self-destruct is counter intuitive and downright dangerous. It will not happen!

As I see it, the purpose of Torah, originally the Constitution and By-laws of a newly formed nation, is not so much about giving us information allegedly relevant about God but rather about a community that considered itself destined to bring enlightenment to the nations, something that remains to this day Judaism’s task and mission.

I continue to be impressed by a text from the Yerushalmi, The Talmud of the Land of Israel (Tj chag. 1:7) in which our sages (z”l) quote God as having said, “Would that they forsake me, but keep my Torah.”

This ends the mini-series.

 

Please send questions and/or comments through email. Thanks.

Jewish Origins Without Revelation (Part 2)

~ Walter

I will begin this essay by dealing in abbreviated form with Jewish origins. To ask about origins is to ask the question: where do we Jews come from? Where are our historical roots? What is the first documentary evidence about Israelite existence? Since the heart of Judaism’s existence is Torah and Torah is our source for the existence of God and his alleged special relationship with the Jewish people, we need to inquire about the Torah’s origins.

I will try to respond to the above questions drawing on both Jewish and non-Jewish scholarship.

It should be clear that in my effort at a non-supernatural reconstruction of Jewish history I will not deal with phenomena such as divine revelation or divine interventions in human affairs because, these belong into the realm of faith and not documentable historical events.

But even documentable historical facts call for interpretation and interpretation is not mathematics! It is always, at least to some extent, subjective because, like everything else in life, it is human and thus suffers from human existential limitation.

Let’s scroll back to the Near-East in pre-biblical times. In an extant letter within a correspondence between the ruler of a Canaanite city-state and his powerful overlord, a pharaoh in Tel el-Amarna, probably pharaoh Akhenaten (d. 1336 BCE), in Upper Egypt, we read, “There are marauding habiru tribes here who cause damage to our land and its farmers.”

While we do not have a response from this unnamed pharaoh, this sentence introduces us to the term HABIRU which, even without sophisticated knowledge of linguistics, corresponds by and large to our term HEBREW. The Canaanite letters forming the term Habiru are related to the Hebrew term ‘ivriy from which our word “Hebrew” is derived. Interestingly, the Hebrew ‘ivriy, in turn, derives from the Hebrew verb ‘avar which means “to move, crossover, pass over.” What do semi-nomadic tribes do? They move, they cross over, they pass over land.

The Habirus were semi-nomads. With their cattle they crisscrossed the land looking for fertile areas, settled here and there, let their cattle graze, and when nothing was left for the cattle to eat, moved on to the next fertile spot. No wonder that the local Canaanite farmers considered them intruders and asked pharaoh for help to keep the Habirus and their herds away.

It is likely that the earliest historical ancestors of the Hebrews were these Near Eastern semi-nomadic Habiru tribes. Avram, later to become Abraham, (approx. date between 2,000 and 1,700 BCE), who with his family and tribe had moved from Ur of the Chaldeans to Haran in Syria and settled there was subsequently told by the LORD to move on.

Genesis 12:1-3 is a seminal chapter for my thesis. It is here that the LORD (i.e., YHWH, name of God allegedly revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush in the Sinai peninsula) ordered Abraham to

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you…”

And so, according to Gen 12:4, “Abraham went, as the LORD had told him.” Thus, from Haran in Syria, Abraham’s family/tribe traveled south, to the Land of Canaan, allegedly guided by the LORD.

Some scholars suggest that the person of Abraham is a personification of a migratory movement. Semi-nomads migrate, remember! It is a well established fact that different Near Eastern tribes worshiped and followed their particular God. The time frame we are considering here is one in which polytheism was the generally practised form of religion in the Near East.

In the Bible, the stories about Abraham are followed by the tribal stories of Abraham’s son Isaac and his wife Rebecca. These, in turn, are followed by the stories covering the exploits of their son Jacob and his wives Leah and Rachel whose twelve sons become the eponymous ancestors of the so-called Twelve Tribes of Israel. Their daughter Dinah did not become ancestress of a tribe.

Now to a quick forward in biblical history. The book of Genesis reports that the Twelve Tribes, during a devastating famine in Canaan where they had settled, migrated south to Egypt where there was food available and where they established themselves under favorable circumstances. Without going here into the details of many associated stories like, for instance, the Joseph narratives, we are told that eventually they became enslaved in Egypt. How so?

Upon arrival of the Hebrews in Egypt, an unnamed Hyksos-related pharaoh ruled over Egypt (the Hyksos invaders’ reign in Egypt: 1730-1570 BCE). The Hyksos people were of Semitic ethnic background, (like the Habirus/Hebrews), which explains the favorable welcome they extended to the Twelve Tribes, by now known as Israel. When the Hyksos’ relatively brief dynasty was terminated by one Ahmose who expulsed them and re-established the pre-Hyksos native Egyptian royal dynasty, the Israelites fell into disfavor. The biblical narrative conveys this development rather laconically: “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Exod. 1:8f.) This unnamed new Pharaoh was in all probability Ramses II, a ruler generally considered to have been a megalomaniac, suggestion based on the ubiquitous statuary of his person found all over Egypt.

This is not the proper place for a detailed account of Israel’s slavery in Egypt. Based on biblical chronologies which do not agree with each other, approximately 400 years.

As a result of the alleged Ten Plagues which God brought down on Egypt, the last of which was the death of the Egyptian firstborns which included Pharaoh’s son, the slaves were released and traveled toward the land of Canaan, located north of the Nile Delta. Still scrolling forward, the liberated slaves stopped over at the Sinai desert where, on Mount Sinai, (exact location to this day not identified), according to the tradition, Moses received both the Written and the Oral Torah, containing among other laws, the famous Ten Commandments.

After Moses’ death, the liberated slaves under the leadership of Joshua, followed by the so-called Judges (military leaders), engaged in the conquest of the land of Canaan whose possession had been promised to Abraham and his posterity. According to Deut. 7:1-5, God’s promise of giving to the Israelites the land of Canaan took place as prophesied. It was fulfilled by means of what in our time would be called “ethnic cleansing” or the destruction of the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. It would seem that despite temporary setbacks here and there, in the end everything went as planned and the liberated Hebrew tribes, by slaughtering the natives in their land with God’s help, achieved God’s plan of coming into possession of the land of Canaan. It should be noted that apart from the biblical witness to these events, none is preserved in extra biblical documentation.

The two biblical books of Samuel tell us about the transition of the liberated tribes from functioning as a loose confederation to a monarchy, first under king Saul and subsequently under king David who became the intermediary between God Yahweh and the people Israel. The previous direct theocratic rule of Israel was now modified.

David was a very astute politician. Having conquered the city of Jebus, capital of the Jebusites, he established it as the political capital of the newly conquered country, as well as its religious center. This was accomplished by bringing the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments from Sinai, previously held by the various tribes in rotation, to this city and renaming it Yerushalayim, “Inheritance of Peace.” It was a brilliant move in as much as it brought the Twelve Tribes into a closer relationship with each other, both politically and religiously, the latter by means of designating the city as the pilgrimage center for the three ancient Israelite pilgrimage festivals of Pesach, (Passover), Shavuot (lit. “Weeks,” commemorating the giving of the Torah) and Sukkoth (Feast of Booths, a reminder of Israel’s desert wanderings).

Solomon, David’s son and successor, built the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem that took the place of the movable desert sanctuary (‘ohel ha-mo’ed or Tent of Meeting). This was undoubtedly a further effort to unify the tribes and to strengthen the newly created geo-political nation. As presented in the Bible, it was done in response to God’s desire to dwell in a house.

After Solomon’s death, the misbehavior of his son Rehoboam, resulted in separation of the northern and southern tribes and the formation of two distinct countries.

Note: The ten northern tribes, calling themselves Israel, fell to an invasion by the kingdom of Assyria in 722 BCE whereas the remaining southern tribes, calling themselves the kingdom of Judah, fell to an invasion of Babylonia in 586 BCE.

Back to king David now and my reconstruction of Israel’s history.

A newly established nation needs a constitution or founding document that conveys to its own country’s population, as well as to its geographical neighbors, the raison d’etre for its existence. Such a document explains the justification for its incursion into and its establishment in the geographical and political space held by its previous owners; the salient events in history that led to and legitimize the conquest; the civil and religious legislation that would from here on guide its society in its pursuit of daily life; last but not least ,the relationship between God, king, nation and each individual.

It is here that king David’s and king Solomon’s historiographers went to work. By combing through the Hebrew tribal records, oral and perhaps also written, they found treasures that lent themselves for such an undertaking. Scouring the oral and written histories of Mesopotamia, in the north, and Egypt in the south, as also the myths and legends of the conquered land of Canaan itself, turned out to be helpful.

Their most important discovery was the Abraham (the Habiru?) stories, beginning in Genesis at chapter 12. “Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… so Abram went as the LORD had told him.” According to Gen. 15, the commanding voice of the divinity said to Abraham, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess,” etc. And in Gen 15:18 a further promise, “On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land from the River of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kennizites, the Kadminites, the Hittites, the Perrizites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”

The divinity’s alleged promise to Israel now fulfilled, was incorporated into the country’s founding document or, as I call it, the Constitution of the new land of Israel – the Torah.

Note: If you would like to comment, please address them to me directly by e-mail.

Jewish Origins Explained Without Reference to Revelation: A New Approach

~ Walter ~ Leave a comment

Preface

The next few blogs will be dealing with the above indicated title. You may ask yourself why so. Certainly not in order to persuade anyone to understand Judaism as I do! I am not a Jewish missionary! However, from conversations with fellow congregants I have become aware that there are Jewish persons who, similarly to my understanding of Judaism, reject the supernatural elements in our faith but decided to maintain their Jewishness in terms of adherence to Judaism and membership in a synagogue congregation.

Now the question arises: is it possible to maintain one’s Jewish faith while jettisoning belief in a supernatural God as the Torah and TaNakh (Hebrew for Bible) present this God to us? Clearly this is impossible without one’s necessity to rethink Jewish origins and religious development.

In the following essays I will try to convey to folks who wrestle with this issue that yes, indeed, it is possible to remain a Jew, to read certain faith affirmations in the siddur without being a traitor to one’s faith, or a hypocrite. Jewish history and its resulting faith can be understood without one’s having to make intellectual sacrifices. One can be an agnostic (a person confessing lack of absolute knowledge, the preposition “a…” meaning without) or an atheist, (a person living one’s life and belief system without the biblical God).

Introduction

On the Jewish high holiday of yom kippur the Day of Atonement (in October 2013), during the worship service, after one of the Torah scrolls had been taken from the aron hakodesh, the holy Torah ark or holy Torah closet, there arose something like a collective gasp emanating from the congregation. Three Torah scrolls tumbled from the Torah shrine’s open doors with one of them partially unscrolled, touching ground and being slightly damaged.

Catastrophe! What next?

Why is such an accident considered a disaster? Because the Torah (the hand-written Hebrew text of the Five Books of Moses, (Genesis through Deuteronomy), is the centerpiece of Judaism without which the Jewish religion could not exist. Without the Torah and a minyan, (an assembly of a minimum of ten Jewish adults), public worship cannot take place according to Jewish tradition. Torah is the greatest treasure the Jewish people possess. Torah is referred to as etz chayiim, a “tree of life for those who hold on to it.” As a sign of contrition for having let this happen the tradition calls for a congregational fast of 40 days.

One of the earliest mentions of this practice is found in a responsum (a rabbinic response to a question submitted to a rabbi or a body of rabbis by a congregant or a congregation) of Rabbi Israel of Brunna (present day Brno, capital of Moravia in the Czech Republic, 15th century). According to this responsum the fall of a Torah scroll is something for which one must repent not just as an individual but by the congregation. Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai (18th century) known as the CHIDA explains that by fasting, the congregation repents for the lack of care and respect which allowed the holy object to fall. The tradition of 40 days of fasting is derived from the time that Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for 40 days while receiving the Torah from God, without eating or drinking. Even though in our time this quasi command is not exactly followed – the times they have changed! – people will perform alternate practices of teshuvah (repentance) such as offering monetary gifts to the synagogue or fasting a shorter length of time than 40 days. To have let this happen was a deplorable sign of disrespect for the Torah that demanded repentance as ordered by Jewish minhag or tradition.

Our synagogue leaders decided, rather than calling for a congregational fast, to use the following weeks for special education sessions concerning Torah, its origins, history, values and sanctity.

It was to be my honor to initiate this special educational unit by giving one or more sermons on Shabbat morning on the subject of Torah.

And so I did. My first sermon dealt with how the Near Eastern tribe of the Habiru developed into a theocratic nation presided over by Israel’s second king, David, around the year 1,000 BCE, something I want to deal with in the following essay very briefly. This was followed by a session dealing with David’s and king Solomon’s reign and the initial formation of Torah as the religious and civil constitution, as it were, of the so-called newly formed United Kingdom. It is here that my reconstruction of Israel ‘s history offers elucidations of much that has been puzzling to thoughtful Bible readers. I might add that my understanding of the beginnings of this first version of Israel as a geopolitical entity shows some resemblance to the formation of our country, its Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Before we go any further with this we need to agree that Judaism as well as Christianity teach that their respective religion’s origins came by way of revelation from the biblical God. So, for instance, as the Torah scrolls are about to be returned to the Torah ark, one of the congregants holds up high the partially opened Torah scroll for everyone to see its written text while the congregation chants in Hebrew, “This is the Torah that Moses set/placed before the people Israel [al piy adonay] by order of the LORD , through Moses.”

Note: The literal translation of the Hebrew in italics above is an idiom that reads “according to the mouth of.” When LORD is found written in English Bibles as used here it stands for the four sacred letters Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh usually transliterated as Y-H-W-H and representing the name of God as revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush. The tradition calls for the Torah reader to pronounce these four letters as adonay, the Hebrew word for “LORD” in 1st person plural possessive form or actually “my lords,” followed by a verb or adjective in singular. (More about this a bit later when we will discuss Judaism’s only faith affirmation, called the shema.)

It follows that the words “set, placed, given” in this literary context are synonyms for “revealed.” Based on this text sung in synagogue and found in many other biblical places that deal with God’s spoken conversations with Moses, the Torah was given to Moses for the purpose of its transmission to the people Israel in order to serve the people as instruction and guidance for life, as well as religious law. It follows that the word “Torah” when translated into English (or any other modern language) needs to be translated as one of the three nouns given above depending on the literary context in which it is found. Let me mention here that one of the gross errors found in the New Testament where reference is made to a Hebrew Bible text, the ever repeated translation of the word “Torah” is given as law.

It could be said that Torah in an ultimate sense is not just about religion but represents guidance to a way of life as, allegedly, demanded by the biblical God.

Note: Please direct your comments or responses to my e-mail, waziff at aol dot com. Thanks.

Pesach: History, Myth and Meaning

~ Walter ~ Leave a comment

Pesach, the Hebrew name for the Jewish holiday of Passover has come and gone and now offers me an opportunity to discuss its historicity, its mythological elements and its possible meanings for us moderns, as I understand it. It is in the Book of Exodus, the second book in the Hebrew Bible, that the story of Pesach (so called from here on) is told. For me, it is the Pesach story and the subsequent liberation and the Exodus (Latin for departure, in Hebrew yetziyat mitzrayim) from Egypt of the Jewish slaves that represents Judaism’s “root experience.” Given the fact that Christianity is Judaism’s religious offshoot and, as such, appropriated its antecedent Jewish history, Pesach is also Christianity’s foundation, witness the fact that the first part of every complete Christian Bible consists of the Hebrew or Jewish Bible containing the Book of Exodus. The Hebrew name of the book is shemot, meaning “names,” deriving its name from the first significant word in the first sentence of that book.

I have often been asked whether the Pesach story within the Exodus narrative is historical. Without going here into fine details, my response has been YES, albeit with a qualifying remark suggesting that as is the case with much religious literature, related events having an historical kernel, are often exaggerated and mythologized. Considering the time of origin of Exodus which in all probability is the middle of the 13th cent. BCE, this should not surprise us. The same kind of exaggerations are found in Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and other Middle Eastern religious stories. This said, we should not be surprised to find that the Jewish liberation story falls into the same literary milieu. This is not to suggest, however, that the Jewish story’s center, the liberation of the Jewish slaves, is not historical.

Remains, however, the question why what is described in the Bible as an incredible and therefore allegedly miraculous event is nowhere mentioned in Egyptian history of which we have plenty of documentation in terms of ancient monuments, wall, sarcophagi and papyrus inscriptions. One possible answer to this question might just be the ancient Middle Eastern rulers’ reluctance to make known to future generations their countries’ defeats, political mismanagements or miscalculations.

The fact is that Egyptian history nowhere mentions the Jewish slave’s departure from Egypt and thus their liberation from slavery. Given the number of slaves liberated, as indicated in the Book of Exodus having been six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children (Exod. 12:37) suggests that the total number of Hebrew slaves leaving Egypt was somewhere around one million eight hundred thousand people, considering three persons per family. This is an enormous amount of slaves in view of the total population of Egypt at that time having been estimated at only three million people. It is highly unlikely that 3 million people were able to maintain a slave population of say 1.8 million!

This problem’s solution has been found to lie in a possible mistranslation of the Hebrew word for “thousands” – alaphim in this particular literary context. Without going into the technical linguistic details here, scholars suggest that the number of slaves leaving Egypt was closer to 5,000 than 1.8 million.

Egyptian records consisting of correspondence between border guards in the eastern Nile Delta where border fortifications have been excavated, call for reinforcements to stem the flight of Egyptian slaves toward the land of Canaan. Could some of these slaves have been the Hebrew slaves referred to in the biblical story? Probability points in that direction. Based on this correspondence, the numbers of fleeing slaves in the low thousands make much more sense than the hundreds of thousands the biblical narrative suggests.

At the light of the above it can be concluded that the kernel of the Pesach/Exodus story is historical.

There is no need to dwell in any length on all  the miraculous elements in the Exodus narrative. Leading up to the actual departure of the slaves, there are the Ten Plagues, culminating in the death of all the firstborns in Egypt while the Jewish slaves’ children are saved when God himself slays the Egyptian first borns (Exod. 12:29). The parting of the Reed Sea (proper name for the body of water called in the Bible the Red Sea) is another alleged miracle from above, saving the fleeing Israelite slaves from the pursuing Egyptians. Rivers of ink have been spilled trying to explain what happened and Cecil B. DeMille’s cinematographic depiction of the miracle is, while admirably done, not very persuasive.

Is Israel mentioned anywhere at all in Egyptian historical writings? The answer is YES. On a victory monument of pharaoh Marneptah (1213 – 1203 BCE) discovered in 1896 at Thebes, also called the “Israel stele,” the hieroglyphs in line 27 are translated as “Israel.” The name Israel on the stele is mentioned as one among other enemies of Egypt, now defeated. The literal translation of the line reads, “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;” It is not clear just who this Israel was or where it was located. The text does not correspond to any such defeat mentioned in the Bible.

Let us now reflect upon the meaning of Pesach and Exodus.

In short, it is a celebration of freedom. Slavery of any kind has no legitimate place on earth. For religious people the mandate to freedom for every human being comes from God and the book of Exodus is the locus of this mandate for Jews and Christians.

As is the case with parables and legends both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, careful reading of the texts brings out contradictions and elements that do not make sense. This kind of literature was written millenia ago and our criticisms are often anachronistic. Had we lived “then,” we probably would have believed just as those ancients believed. This said, I am suggesting that parables and legends first have to be understood within the cultural context of their own time and secondly only in terms of how we, in our time, understand them.

The Haggadah our family used this past Pesach (The Concise Family Seder by Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch) suggests that the essence of Passover is a message for the conscience and the heart of all humankind about “the deliverance of a people from degrading slavery, from cruel and inhuman tyranny… of the tyranny of poverty and the tyranny of privation,

of the tyranny of wealth and the tyranny of war,

of the tyranny of power and the tyranny of despair,

of the tyranny of disease and the tyranny of time,

of the tyranny of ignorance and the tyranny of [skin] color.”

And so, although it is the unnamed Pharaoh of old who is the tyrant of the Haggadah, it is not he alone of whom we speak at the Pesach seder. There are other tyrants and other tyrannies from which and from whom we need liberation.

To make myself clear, let me give you two widely disparate examples of what I mean by “liberation.” I had a cousin in Haifa, Israel, who had never learned to drive a car. He yearned to be independent from his mother or father having to “sacrifice” some of their time to take him around. Requesting that I intercede with his Mom on his behalf, I did just that only to have the experience of speaking to a wall. Aunt Steffi’s response to my words was, “I would not be able to sleep knowing that George is out in a car by night. I would not have a moment of peace knowing that he is exposed to danger on a highway. The answer is NO. I never will allow George to get a driver license.” You, the reader of these words, should know that my cousin George was only two years younger than I! As I see it, this was a mother’s selfish tyranny from which George needed to come free to become a mature adult..

One other example should explain what I mean by Pesach’s invitation (or is it a mandate?) for us to liberate ourselves from acquired intellectual imprisonment. By now it should be clear to any Jew in this our great country that our “Number One” leader is not only a racist, a misogynist, a white supremacist and also a malevolent cretin. And yet there are organized groups of Jews who support and follow him. In my quest for understanding this phenomenon, I fairly recently asked a Republican friend how he finds it possible to remain a Republican, given the fact that his party has sold out to the devil. His response was, “I vote Republican because the Jews in the south have always voted Republican.” I regretted hearing this because this kind of answer is not an answer from a responsible Jewish citizen, in my opinion.

The examples range from the ridiculous to the very serious. Pesach is a time for responsible reflection, preferably within the physical context of fellow Jews, on issues ranging from the private to the communal. It is also an opportunity to get to know each other as we share our lives’ complexities with friends in an effort to better understand and to grow toward responsibly lived Judaism and so also toward responsible country and world citizenship.

If this past Pesach helped you in such a direction , I am happy for you. If it did not, make sure next year’s celebration will.

Lack of love or lack of solid education?

~ Walter ~ 2 Comments

Congratulations, Mr. Trump! You did it again. Thanks to special council Mueller’s recently released report, a 400 page document that at the time of this writing still has not been released to the public who paid for it, and thanks also to our newly appointed attorney general Mr. Barr who insists that a sitting president cannot be indicted and who, rather than releasing the whole document to the American people, decided to release his four page version of a summary of those pages to the public, Donald Trump comes out of two years of investigations of “Russia Gate” smelling like a rose to his political base and to the ethic-deprived Republican Party. No wonder! A morally corroded Republican government finds nothing wrong with its leader who might just be a moral cretin, as David Brooks, the Opinion Columnist of the New York Times (Feb. 28, 2019), suggests.

Will the population clamoring for the release of the entire report be responded to affirmatively? If so, how long will it be before this happens? Who knows? But if so, how will we be certain that important parts of the text will not have been deleted by a process similar to the famous Nixon tape erasures?

It is difficult not to become cynical about the goings on in Washington with a US president “desperate for approval,” blind to criticism thanks to his narcissism and insistence on living in a self-created unreal world. One is inclined to pity this creature were it not for this creature’s malevolence that is ruining not only our country but planet earth.

Having gotten the above off my chest, I return now to David Brooks’ excellent article in the New York Times referred to above. In this piece Brooks expresses wonderment about “who didn’t love Donald Trump?” Brooks continues with, “I often wonder who left an affection void that he has tried to fill by winning attention…He has turned his life into a marketing strategy…His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable to receive love.”

This kind of apology for our president and his deeply flawed behavior is tantamount to reading a tearjerker. David Brooks whom I admire as a fine Opinion Columnist, in entering the professional domain of psychology with the above mentioned article, has overstepped his competence, in my opinion. This said, I am not suggesting that the article does not contain material worth reading.

As an educator for the last fifty some years, I find Trump’s thuggish behavior which is totally unbecoming of a US president, rooted not in his having suffered from deprivation of love but rather from his lack of a sound holistic education and from his having been brought up in a surrounding of wealth from his earliest years, with a silver spoon in his mouth. The man does not understand a fellow human’s suffering. He is incapable of experiencing compassion. My purpose in what follows here is not an effort to discover in detail Trump’s failed educational development but rather to lament the decline of the quality of higher education in our country in recent years or even decades.

To be more specific, I attribute Trump’s a-morality or immorality to his having been deprived of an educational experience that could have provided him with a well rounded personality by means of helping him acquire at least a minimum knowledge of philosophy, best found in the classics and in subsequent similarly oriented literature. Needless to say, it is in philosophy we encounter minds and voices engaged in critical thinking, a discipline tragically absent in much of our population, as also regrettably absent in our president.

Trump has boasted about his lack of necessity to read. His alleged innate natural intelligence and knowledge suffices for him to make judgments and decisions that impact not only the US but our planet. It is quite possible that this narcissistic attitude and behavior may have already caused irreparable damage to our living sphere. The point of no return may have been reached and crossed and the future of the planet may have already been determined. All this because of one man’s ignorance and self-love. It makes me shudder!

Back to our educational system. The engine that promotes and drives the demise of the study of philosophy which, of course, includes the study of ethics is career-ism. Our nation and all other nations need an educated citizenry. While making a decent living by means of specialized skills is absolutely necessary and while schools providing such skills to our citizenry are provided in our educational system, it is critical also to provide for these folks an education in the humanities so that our population be an intelligent and humane population and not a nation primarily preoccupied with how best to make money even at the expense of hurting others or, in the president’s words “how to make a deal” in the art of which he considers himself to be the unsurpassed master.

It is depressing to learn that a small percentage of students in liberal arts colleges and universities take courses in philosophy. Permit me at this point to become personal. I studied mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, after immigrating to the US. The engineering curriculum is heavy and demanding. I flunked the course in thermodynamics and had to repeat it, coming out of the second attempt with a measly grade of “C.” Subsequent to graduation I worked for General Motors Corp. for six years and earned several US patents in automotive-related design.

The greatest impact on my educational life, however, were not courses in metallurgy or differential equations. What changed my life by setting it on a course of pursuing truth was an elective course in philosophy, two semesters, taught by professor Samuel Stumpf, a Jewish philosopher who opened to me new vistas on life. What he did for me was to help me ask the important questions, answers to which I may or may not have received until now when I just passed year 92. It is most important to ask the right questions, the Jewish tradition teaches. It is questioning that leads to a life of satisfaction. Needless to say, some frustration is part of such a questioning life as well, but I vote in its favor and have taught my students accordingly. No regrets!

I venture to say that it was not lack of love that formed Trump into the miscreant he is. Trump represents the person who has no education but for his alleged ability “to make deals.” So far his deals have been tragically counterproductive, in my opinion. Only the future will tell whether I am right.

It is, of course, true that there is no direct connection between say ancient Greek language and culture, on the one hand and steady employment and good income, on the other hand. But higher learning has the potential of leading a person into knowledge, understanding and wisdom, the Jewish education triad, a universally acknowledged path to being a humane human being and thus a critically necessary component of a democratic society. There is such a thing as the pursuit of truth for truth’s sake! I do not deny the importance of utilitarianism and the learning of skills that enable one to make a decent living. I appreciate very much the availability of plumbers and electricians, policemen and trash collectors, not to mention dentists and physicians! To be a creative society, abstract learning is critically important and the path toward such learning is contingent on how our educational system inculcates in our young generations the love of knowledge.

My wife and I recently witnessed on TV the abysmal ignorance of some American college students about their own historical tradition, let alone philosophy. It was embarrassing to watch how on two occasions reporters randomly interviewed students on the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania and at Texas Tech. This is not the place to quote the many questions asked and answers given. One of the answers, representative as it was of many other similar responses, was so ridiculous that it deserves mentioning here. The question asked was “Who won the Civil War?” After a lengthy pause the student hesitatingly ventured his response: “Americans?” This kind of a fiasco cries out for an explanation: how did this and similar students succeed in enrolling into prestigious schools of higher learning, to begin with? Surely these randomly chosen students did not get there by means of parents having bought their admission, as has been discovered in some recently discovered cases! Enough said!

It would be unjust to blame our president for this and other examples of our deeply flawed educational system,. On the other hand, it must be said that having a president of such an abysmally low intellect and no ethical acumen who in absence of a teleprompter seems to communicate by means of no more than 300 to 500 words, often repeated three or more times, certainly is not an inspiration or role model for aspiring college students.

That an education that is driven primarily by careerism without emphasis on philosophical content incorporating ethics can lead to an a-moral or worse, an immoral society, should be clear. In my opinion, we are finding ourselves these days sliding down a slimy and steep slope toward a conscienceless society, a threat to us and our planet.

It is high time to listen to one of our great Jewish teachers from the faraway past, rabbi Tarfon: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world] but you are not free to desist from it either,” (Pirkey Avot 2:16).

Good luck!