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Still Timid afterAll These Years
Philip Graubart
The Conservative movement�s new humash is a strong defense of the mind-over-the-heart approach to Judaism. But will it speak to the many who seek spirituality and the meaning of God?
THE FIRST THING TO SAY about the Conservative Movement�s new Torah commentary is that it is a great improvement over the old one. The Hertz humash, until very recently found in the pews of most Conservative synagogues, was last revised in 1936, which meant that Conservative Jews seeking theological guidance from the Torah on the most momentous events of our time -- the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel -- had nowhere to go.
J.H. Hertz, the first rabbi to graduate from the Conservative movement�s Jewish Theological Seminary, in 1894, conceived of his Torah commentary as an apologetic -- a defense against Christian attacks on the morality of Biblical society. That may have been the right approach for his time, but nowadays few Jews feel any need to defend the behavior of ancient Israelites. Hertz also strove diligently to disprove the documentary hypothesis: the theory that many different human authors composed the Torah, now widely accepted by most academic Biblical scholars, including those who have studied at the Seminary -- and by the vast majority of Conservative rabbis in the congregations.
Finally, the Hertz edition used the old Jewish Publication Society translation of the Bible. The archaic English turned Torah study into a chore and discouraged all but the most committed congregants.
The new Etz Hayim humash, on the other hand, uses the eminently readable revised JPS translation. The commentary itself is lucid and, for the most part, avoids apologetics. Best of all, it contains over 40 fascinating, erudite essays, on topics as diverse as "Biblical Archeology," "The Nature of Revelation and Mosaic Origins," "War and Peace," "Women" and "Reward and Punishment."
Because of these improvements, many Conservative Jews will enthusiastically welcome the new commentary. But many more American Jews will evaluate it not just for its effectiveness in teaching Torah, but for how it defines contemporary Conservative Judaism. Etz Hayim was long in the making -- according to General Editor David Lieber, he first came up with the idea of a new hu-mash in 1969 -- but it was worth the wait, not least for the picture it paints of Conservative Judaism today, with all its strengths and its many weaknesses.
The humash offers two Biblical commentaries at the bottom of each page: pshat, or the simple, contextual meaning of the Biblical text, which appears above a line; and drash, the homiletic, overtly religious meaning, drawn from both ancient sages and scholars of today, which appears below. Consciously or not, the editors make a statement with their placement of commentary. By putting pshat before drash, the volume implies that for Conservative Judaism today, the head seems to come before the heart. Lieber writes in his introduction that "the study of [the Torah�s] words and their meaning is at the core of Jewish religious experience." For the movement, then, placing pshat before drash defines the nature of that core religious experience. In Etz Hayim, Torah study as a spiritual discipline first involves the purely intellectual exercise of puzzling out the original meaning of the text, and only later, the more emotional experience of using Biblical words as moral and spiritual guides.
More striking is the clear reluctance to seriously explore the nature of God. One of the first drash comments claims that "Jewish theology generally has been concerned with discerning the will of God rather than... probing the nature of God." In fact, however, much of Jewish theology, including Kabbalah and Hasidic thought, is obsessed with probing the nature of God. But Etz Hayim presents the Conservative approach, which is, and always has been, wary of mysticism.
Even with passages that cry out for sustained analysis of how human beings experience God, Etz Hayim stays mostly on the surface. Commenting on Moses�s encounter with the burning bush, the drash offers several lovely homilies. It suggests that God asked Moses to remove his shoes as a way of saying "remove from yourself everything that would keep you from identifying with the suffering of your people." God appears in a thorn bush to teach that it�s sometimes easier to get into trouble than out of it. The bush burns without being consumed to teach that it�s important to notice the miracles happening all around us. But about the God encounter itself, the drash has little to say. It proposes again that Jews aren�t much interested in theology. "Jews have involved themselves in speculating on the nature of God..." the drash suggests, not as a way of becoming close to the divine, but rather "...to understand the ways their faith differed [from others]."
In explaining the way God introduces Himself to Moses, Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh ("I will be what I will be"), the commentary suggests that God is saying, "You cannot understand my nature." On the fiery revelation at Sinai, the drash admits that the Torah portrays the relationship with God as fraught with danger, but doesn�t ask why this should be so. Why does God appear in fire? Why would a relationship with God be fearsome or dangerous? What exactly does it mean to have a relationship with God in the first place? For the most part, Etz Hayim avoids these questions, focusing instead on prac-tical moral lessons.
Similarly, the commentary mostly avoids confronting the stories in the Bible where God acts cruelly, or arbitrarily. There are surprisingly scant homiletics on the story of the binding of Isaac. What little there is suggests that fathers should communicate with their sons; that Abraham should have argued on behalf of Isaac as he argued for the Sodomites; that tribes often subject adolescents to cruel coming-of-age experiences. But nothing probes the character of a God so cruel that, for whatever reason, He would command a father to kill his son. In one of its few directly theological comments, at the end of the story the drash claims, "we come to see God... in our peak experiences of love, marriage, parenthood, personal success, and being delivered from danger." That may be true, but it�s an odd statement coming after a story where God tortures both Abraham and Isaac.
In the same way, the humash seems reluctant to address issues of doubt or crises of faith. In one of the few statements on the Holocaust, the drash, commenting on Cain�s murder of Abel, claims, "the challenge of the Shoah is not, �Where was God? How could God have let this happen?� The challenge is, �Where was Man?�" But, of course, for many Jews "Where was God?" is precisely the question emerging from the Holocaust -- a question that immediately generates a crisis of faith.
THERE�S NOT EVEN MUCH room, in the commentary at least, to question whether God wrote the Bible. Neither the drash nor the pshat sections, the text most people will read when using the humash, suggest the existence of several human authors. Conservative thinkers Jacob Milgrom, Benjamin Scolnic and Elliot Dorff, in their essays, all mention the documentary hypothesis. Milgrom and Dorff speak of the Torah as a "divinely inspired" work of human beings. But these ideas don�t make it to the commentary. Instead, the drash states quite clearly "what God said [at Sinai] will be the content of the rest of the Torah." Etz Hayim is obviously not an Orthodox work, but it leaves little room for Jews -- including many Conservative Jews -- who question the very idea of direct revelation, or the historicity of the moment at Sinai.
Will the Conservative movement�s new humash speak to the religious longings of American Jews? Etz Hayim, like contemporary Conservative Judaism, is lucid, intelligent, scholarly, thorough, traditional, mostly egalitarian, and conservative (with a small "c"). It�s also theologically cautious, avoiding speculation and downplaying mystical experience. Without doubt, there�s a constituency for such a humash in the American Jewish community, quite possibly a large constituency. But Etz Hayim will leave many people out.
Americans, Jews included, have recently shown a profound curiosity about God. Best-selling books by Jack Miles and Karen Armstrong probe God�s character in the Bible, and the nature of the human relationship with God. The success of Jewish Lights Publishing, the Eilat Hayim meditation center in Woodstock, New York, and the Jewish Renewal movement testifies to the non-Orthodox world�s increasing attraction to neo-mystical ideas. This population will not respond well to a humash, or a religious movement, that discourages spiritual and theological innovation. Many non-Orthodox Jews harbor serious doubts about the divinity or even the morality of the Bible. These potential adherents to Conservative Judaism would welcome the suggestion that it wasn�t really the God of Israel who commanded slaughtering the Amalekites, or expelling all the Canaanites, or executing homosexuals, but a flawed, misguided human author.
The leaders of Conservative Judaism have produced a fine volume for the many Jews who already attend Conservative services on a regular basis. Jews with strong faith, who have avoided spiritual crises, who have little interest in mysticism will celebrate the new humash. But the larger group, who show up only occasionally -- because of a bar mitzvah, or a Yahrzeit, or because of deep and sudden yearning -- may be disappointed. Until recently, Conservative Judaism was the largest and most important Jewish movement in America. For many reasons -- among them rising intermarriage rates and the resurgence of Orthodoxy -- the movement has lost both members and momentum over the last 20 years. It�s hard to see how Etz Hayim, for all its muscular erudition and lucid scholarship, will reverse the trend.
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Rabbi Philip Graubart was the spiritual leader of the Conservative Congregation B�nai Israel in Northampton, Massachusetts for over a decade, and is now director of education and programs at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.
(March 25, 2002)
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