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<\/a><\/p>\nSometimes I feel like I must be missing some kind of Jewish gene that enables so many other liberal Jews to comprehend ideas that seem completely meaningless to me. This is how I felt while reading the Forward<\/em>\u2019s latest installment<\/a> of \u201cGodology,\u201d\u00a0a conversation between columnist Elissa Strauss and Scott Perlo, a Conservative rabbi. \u201cGodology\u201d is a monthly series \u201cin which they explore what it means to be \u2018Godish\u2019 \u2013 to kind of, sort of, believe in God.\u201d<\/p>\n The first thing I did was to Google \u201cGodish.\u201d I feel so lost when I read these kinds of exchanges that I wanted to make sure that I wasn\u2019t also missing out on some brand-new exciting theological trend. Unfortunately, the internets have not heard about it. A search for \u201cGodish\u201d got me only as far as Dish TV (\u201cGo Dish!\u201d).<\/p>\n Their back-and-forth dealt with one of my favorite topics: the meaning of the Torah. Elissa asked\u00a0how \u2013 given that we more or less know who wrote the Torah, why, and under what circumstances \u2013 she was supposed to celebrate Shavuot<\/a>. After talking about the basic irrelevance of the holiday\u2019s meaning\u00a0for her, she tells Rabbi Perlo:<\/p>\n \u2026this isn\u2019t to say that I don\u2019t love the text, because I do. It\u2019s just that, for me, its gravitas comes not from divine-inspiration, but from our attempt to infuse it with divinity for so long. Basically, it feels holy because we have used it to pursue the divine for so long \u2013 not because it was divinely inspired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Rabbi Perlo acknowledges the fact that the Torah is a composite text. He even recommends Richard Elliott Friedman\u2019s Who Wrote the Bible?<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Yet somehow, even in the face of this acceptance, he can still say this:<\/p>\n \u2026 it is our ancestors\u2019<\/em>\u00a0[emphasis in original] best attempt to communicate what happened at Sinai. I believe, as an aside, that the Divine did reveal itself to us at Sinai, and that the Torah is our attempt to capture the experience and the intent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you\u2019re going to accept the findings of biblical criticism and archeology, you cannot simultaneously believe that there was a revelation at Sinai. It did not happen.<\/p>\n He\u00a0goes on to talk about the importance of \u201cOral Torah,\u201d the interpretive process invented by the ancient rabbis which\u00a0they claimed to be a parallel Sinaitic revelation. This process of interpretation, also known as midrash<\/a>, was the rabbis\u2019 way of projecting their values onto the text. I understand that this is religiously meaningful to him and most rabbis, but for me and many other modern Jews, this process does not make the study of Torah and other Jewish texts\u00a0more compelling.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean to say that studying Torah is not\u00a0interesting<\/em>. It is profoundly interesting because in a certain kind of way it is revelation. Not revelation of God\u2019s word. Revelation of how our ancestors \u2013 philosophically and scientifically unsophisticated though they were \u2013\u00a0teased meaning out of texts that they believed were divinely inspired. This has\u00a0historical significance. And it is the reason why I spend so much time on these texts. (I teach many classes about the Jewish interpretive process and about who wrote the Bible and why.) It informs us about the past in some very significant ways.<\/p>\n It is the practice of using these texts to find answers to our modern-day\u00a0questions that eludes\u00a0me and so many others. The rabbi explains how it works for him:<\/p>\n \u2026I think that not to seriously, reverentially incorporate our historic spiritual connection into contemporary spirituality is, well, to somehow cut off the new buds from the roots. But more to your question, I think that reading, for Jews, is a fundamentally holy act. Many people meditate, many pray, but in Judaism, reading is reverence. Interpretation itself brings us to God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agree with him that reading is very important to Jews and knowing these texts really can help us feel connected to our roots. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger wrote eloquently about this in Jews and Words<\/a><\/em>, a book about how secular Jews\u00a0might appreciate our literature. What confounds me is this\u00a0rabbi\u2019s\u00a0desire to play in a pre-modern sandbox as if we were pre-modern people.<\/p>\n Literature has the power to transform our ways of seeing\u00a0the world. Whether we are reading fiction (like the Torah) or tendentious history (like much of the rest of the Bible) ancient literature\u00a0helps us understand who came before us, what they considered important, and how they dealt with their own very different realities.<\/p>\n But I think we actually demean our ancestors and ourselves when we infuse our literary treasures with the magical \u201cDivine\u201d power to guide our search for answers to\u00a0the big questions of our day. Are they going to teach us how our society should relate to women? To lesbians, gays and trans people? Are they going to teach us the importance of proper sex education? Will they help us to understand how to construct fair and equitable economic systems? To save our environment? To fashion a sensible foreign policy for our nation?<\/p>\n We have before us\u00a0many\u00a0more relevant paths to travel as\u00a0we consider these questions. The answers will not be found in the stories and interpretations of ancient Israelites or the rabbis who succeeded them. Maybe it\u2019s because I\u2019m not seeking closeness to God, but I really do think that we could generate a lot more interest among contemporary Jews in learning about Torah and other Jewish texts if we taught them as the wonderful artifacts of history that they are and stop trying to dig meaning out of them for 21st-century Jews.<\/p>\n