It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, everyone of us who is here today. Face to face the Lord spoke to you on the mountain out of the fire. (Deuteronomy 5: 3-4)

Know, therefore, that only the Lord your God is God, the steadfast God who keeps His gracious covenant to the thousandth generation of those who love Him and keep His commandments, but who instantly requites with destruction those who reject Him - never slow with those who reject Him, punishing them instantly. Therefore observe faithfully the Instruction, the laws, and the norms with which I charge you today. (Deuteronomy 7: 9-11)

In every generation one must look upon himself as if he personally had come out from Egypt, as the Bible says: "And you shall explain to your child on that day, 'It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt' " (Ex. 13: 8). For it was not alone our forefathers whom the Holy One, praised be He, redeemed, but He redeemed us together with them, as it is said: "He freed us from there to bring us to, and give us, the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers" (Deut. 6: 23).

(2) The Nature of Revelation: Where did the Bible come from? Revelation? If so, how should we understand that? If not, then why did the men who write it call it the word of God?

I accept unapologetically the idea of the verbal revelation of the Torah. I do not take seriously the caricature of this idea which reduces Moses to a secretary taking dictation. Any competing notion of revelation, such as the various "inspiration" theories, can similarly be made to sound absurd by anthropomorphic parallels. Exactly how this communication took place no one can say: it is no less mysterious than the nature of the One who spoke.... How God spoke is a mystery; how Moses received this message is an irrelevancy. That God spoke is of the utmost significance, and what He said must therefore be intelligible to humans in a human context, even if one insists upon an endlessly profound mystical over plus of meaning in the text. To deny that God can make His will clearly known is to impose upon Him a limitation of dumbness that would insult the least of His human creatures.¹⁰.

Literary criticism of the Bible is a problem, but not a crucial one. Judaism has successfully met greater challenges in the past. Higher Criticism [applying literary analysis to the Bible] is far indeed from an exact science. The startling lack of agreement among scholars on anyone critical view; the radical changes in general orientation in more recent years; the many revisions that archaeology has forced upon literary critics; and the unfortunate neglect even by Bible scholars of much first-rate scholarship in modern Hebrew supporting the traditional claim of Mosaic authorship - all these reduce the question of Higher Criticism from the massive proportions it has often assumed to a relatively minor and manageable problem that is chiefly a nuisance but not a threat to the enlightened believer.¹¹.

As to the meaning of the commandments, even those that apparently have neither ethical nor doctrinal content, one must - as always- refer to the oral tradition, as well as to the continually developing philosophy and theology of Judaism. One may explain the ritual commandments according to Saddia's hedonism, or according to Yehuda Halevi's quasi-mysticism; according to Maimonides's rationalism, or Kabbalistic mysticism, or according to some more sophisticated modern religious philosophy or theology. The commandments, however, remain unchangeably binding.¹².

a) God in fact dictated His will at Sinai and at other times.

b) These revelations were written down by human beings, however, and hence the diverse sources of biblical literature.

c) Since the revelation to Moses was by far the clearest and most public, it is the most authentic recording of God's will.

d) From Sinai on, Jewish law and theology are to be identified with the ways in which the rabbis of each generation interpreted and applied the laws of the Torah.

e) Hence the authority of Jewish law is based upon the fact that it is God's will, as stated first in the Torah and then by rabbis of each generation. Rabbis are authorized to modify the law for their time, but only with extreme caution.

This position retains a direct, verbal revelation at Sinai, and, as such, it can claim that all of the laws in the Torah have the express authority of God behind them. At the same time, it openly asserts that God's word was recorded by human beings, and hence it can account for the variations in law, ideology, and language in the Bible. The latter feature qualifies it as a Conservative position, because it advocates an historical study of the texts of our tradition - or at least most of them. This is a "right-wing" view.^12a, however, because it claims that God communicated His will to Moses in a direct, verbal way; consequently none of the laws can be dismissed as a product of human error, however troublesome a given law may be. Therefore while advocates of this position often choose the liberal position among those available in the tradition, they are not willing to modify the law in the absence of a reasonably strong liberal precedent.

It is not the mere revealed Bible that is of first importance to the Jew, but the Bible as it repeats itself in history, in other words, as it is interpreted by Tradition. ^16.

But when Revelation or the Written Word is reduced to the level of history, there is no difficulty in elevating history in its aspect of Tradition to the rank of Scripture, for both have then the same human or divine origin (according to the student's predilection for the one or the other adjective), and emanate from the same authority. Tradition becomes thus the means whereby the modern divine seeks to compensate himself for the loss of the Bible, and the theological balance is to the satisfaction of all parties happily readjusted.

How long the position of this school will prove tenable is another question. Being brought up in the old Low Synagogue, where, with all attachment to tradition, the Bible was looked upon as the crown and the climax of Judaism, the old Adam still asserts itself in me, and in unguarded moments makes me rebel against this new rival of revelation in the shape of history. At times the new fashionable exaltation of Tradition at the expense of Scripture even impresses me as a sort of religious bimetallism [market based on two metals] in which both speculators [traders] in theology try to keep up the market value of an inferior currency [=tradition] by denouncing loudly the bright shining gold [= the Torah] which, they would have us believe, is less fitted to circulate in the vulgar use of daily life than the small cash of historical interpretation.¹⁷.

. . . "God spoke" is not a symbol. A symbol does not raise a world out of nothing. Nor does a symbol call a Bible into being. The speech of God is not less but more than literally real....

The extraordinary qualities of the divine word is in its mystery of omnipotence. Out of God went the mystery of His utterance, and a word, a sound, reached the ear of man. The spirit of His creative power brought a material world into being; the spirit of His revealing power brought the Bible into being....

The Bible is holiness in words Some people may wonder: why was the light of God given in the form of language? How is it conceivable that the divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels?... And yet, it is as if God took these Hebrew words and breathed into them of His power, and the words became a live wire charged with His spirit. To this very day they are hyphens between heaven and earth.

What other medium could have been employed to convey the divine? Pictures enameled on the moon? Statues hewn out of the Rockies? What is wrong with the human ancestry of scriptural vocabulary?...

If God is alive, then the Bible is His voice. No other work is as worthy of being considered a manifestation of His will. There is no other mirror in the world where His will and spiritual guidance is as unmistakably reflected. If the belief in the immanence of God in nature is plausible, then the belief in the immanence of God in the Bible is compelling.¹⁸.

In contrast to the inspiration of the poet, which each time breaks forth suddenly, unexpectedly, from an unknown source, the inspiration of the prophet is distinguished, not only by an awareness of its source and of a will to impart the content of inspiration, but also by the coherence of the inspired messages as a whole (with their constant implication of earlier communications), by the awareness of being a link in the chain of the prophets who preceded him, and by the continuity which links the revelations he receives to one another. The words that come to him form a coherence of closely related revelations, all reflecting the illumination and the sense of mission shed by the call. There is both a thematic and a personal unity of experience.... what is important in prophetic acts is that something is said. ... Prophecy is an experience of a relationship, the receipt of a message.¹⁹.

On the other hand, while God spoke words, the human beings who were prophets could not simply record them or even understand  them fully. Instead they recorded what they understood, and Heschel makes his belief in the human authorship of the Torah very explicit:

The prophets bear witness to an event. The event is divine, but the formulation is done by the individual prophet. According to this conception, the idea is revealed; the expression is coined by the prophet. The expression "the word of God" would not refer to the word as a sound or a combination of sounds. Indeed, it has often been maintained that what reached the ear of man was not identical with what has come out of the spirit of the eternal God. For "Israel could not possibly have received the Torah as it came forth from the mouth of the Lord, for. . .the word of God in itself is like a burning flame, and the Torah that we received is merely a part of the coal to which the flame is attached...."

Out of the experience of the prophets came the words, words that try to interpret what they perceived....

The Bible reflects its divine as well as its human authorship. Expressed n the language of a particular age, it addresses itself to all ages; disclosed in particular acts, its spirit is everlasting. The will of God is in time and in eternity. God borrowed the language of man and created a work such as no men had ever made.²⁰.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

The error of literal-mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning. The truth is that things and words stand for different meanings in different situations....

The meaning of words in scientific language must be clear, distinct, unambiguous, conveying the same concept to all people. In poetry, however, words that have only one meaning are considered flat. The right word is often one that evokes a plurality of meanings and one that must be understood on more than one level. What is a virtue in scientific language is a failure in poetic expression.

Is it correct to insist that Biblical words must be understood exclusively according to one literal meaning? It often seems as if the intention of the prophets was to be understood not in one way, on one level, but in may ways, on many levels, according to the situation in which we find ourselves. And if such was their intention, we must not restrict our understanding to one meaning.²¹.

. . . Israel's understanding of the word was not cheaply or idyllically won. It was acquired at the price of a millennia of wrestling, of endurance and bitter ordeals of a stubborn people, of unparalleled martyrdom and self-sacrifice of men, women and children, of loyalty, love and constant study. What modern scholar could vie with the intuition of such a people? The Torah is not only our mother, it is "our life and the length of our days; we will meditate (on her words) day and night" (Evening liturgy).

Without our continuous striving for understanding, the Bible is like paper money without security. Yet such understanding requires austere discipline and can only be achieved in attachment and dedication, in retaining and reliving the original understanding as expressed by the prophets and the ancient sages.²².

A theory of revelation must account for the fact that in classical Jewish teaching there is content in revelation, that is, not only do the people experience a Presence wherein God makes Himself manifest, they also hear the word. The denotation of the word is initially intelligible, and thus the word can become a matter of discourse in the community. "And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart. And you shall repeat them to your children and speak of them..." (Deut. 6:6-7). "For the word is very near to you in your mouth and in your heart to do it" (Deut. 30: 14).

Law as content presupposes discursibility and normativity. That which is by definition wordless can neither be communicated nor commanded. Of course, there is both preverbal and nonverbal communication. Surely a child communicates with his mother long before he can speak. Surely lovers communicate in more than words. But preverbal communication eventually gives birth to words; indeed it evokes words, as any sensitive parent can testify. Nonverbal or extraverbal communication also evokes words; a totally silent lover would be inhuman. In other words, discourse and law, and personal relationship and encounter, are not necessarily mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience. Why must they be so in the religious life?²³.

Revelation denotes a communication from God accepted by man. Such an event cannot be either proved or disproved by any critical discipline, whether physics or history, because it is posited as something sui generis, something without any empirical analogue. Therefore, one could hold a strictly fundamentalist attitude towards the Pentateuch - assuming that every word was written down by Moses himself - and still not believe in revelation. Assumptions about the Pentateuch are empirical models; beliefs about revelation are faith assertions. The former can well be challenged by biblical criticism; the latter cannot be, because they are outside the purview of empirical evidence....

"Higher" biblical criticism is concerned with the dating and composition of the biblical text. Even if one accepts the assumption common to all the biblical critics - namely, that the Pentateuch in particular is made up of various documents (J,E,P,D, etc.) which were written at different times by different authors - one can still view it as a unity because of the way it was accepted in subsequent Jewish history. Once the official text was finally agreed upon during the time of Ezra, the Jewish people had an indisputable point of reference for both law and theology. Thus, the theory which accepts both a possibly diverse origin along with a definite subsequent unity enables one to be a traditionalist without being a fundamentalist.²⁴.

a) Human beings wrote the Torah at various times and places. Hence the diverse documents, laws, and ideas in the Torah.

b) These people were, however, divinely inspired, and therefore their words carry the insight and authority of God.

c) Jewish laws and ideas may be changed for two reasons.

• First since the Torah is a combination of divine inspiration and human articulation, we must distinguish the divine and human elements in the Tradition and change the latter when circumstances require it.

• Second, divine inspiration did not happen once and for all at Sinai.

The Torah is the document on which Judaism is based, and it therefore has special importance for us; but divine inspiration continues on in the form of new interpretations of the Torah in each generation (not new revelations - cf. Sources #6 and #7 in Section C of this chapter).

d) When changes are made, they must be made by the community in the two ways described in Section (B) - i.e., through rabbinic decisions and communal custom. Only in that way can there be both tradition and change.

This position is widely held in the Conservative Movement, and you can see its advantages almost immediately. On the one hand, the assertion that people wrote the texts of the Tradition enables advocates of this approach to accept the results of historical research into those texts fully and openly. Nobody needs to pretend that the Bible derives from one source or that the Jews escaped the influences of outside cultures, and nobody needs to be intellectually schizophrenic in applying totally different methods of inquiry to the Jewish tradition from those he uses in understanding any other culture. Moreover, you do not have to blame God for everything in the Bible or claim that every passage there is divine. On the other hand, the fact that the Jewish tradition was divinely inspired gives its laws and ideas divine authority. In other words, with this approach you have the best of both worlds, the intellectual and the religious.

There is no contradiction between the discovery of a historical dimension in the sacred texts of Scripture and the belief that they are disclosures of God's revelation. The human and the divine commingle in all of life. The farmer tills the soil, plants, weeds, harvests, but this does not contradict a dimension of divine providence at work in the same process of bringing food from the earth. For the farmer did not create the earth with its power to fructify the seed placed in its womb, did not create the economy of nature on which his labor depends, he did not stuff the sun with energy, nor fill the clouds with rain, nor did he fashion the seed with its miraculous power to reproduce itself. Throughout nature we witness what is a cardinal belief in Judaism, that man is God's partner in the work of creation.

The partnership between God and man is similarly at work in bringing forth the truth on which our souls are nourished. Man receives a divine communication in the moment when the divine spirit rests on him, but man must give form to that communication; he must express it in words, in images, and in symbols which will make his message intelligible to other men. Out of this need to give form to the truth that is revealed to him the prophet places the stamp of his own individuality upon that truth. He draws upon his own experience, upon the idiom current in his time; he creates images that will be familiar to his people. Thus the truth becomes personalized; it takes upon itself the robes of the world in which it is to enter to perform its work of moral and spiritual transformation. In the process of expression and transmission truth takes on a historical dimension, which the historian can examine by the tools of historical investigation, but all this in no way invalidates the role of the divine factor, the initial "breathing in" on the prophet of the message which is called to proclaim to the people of his time. ^25.

What normally requires laborious reasoning, and, indeed what laborious reasoning cannot establish, is grasped intuitively and with an overpowering sense of certainty.²⁶.

Whether you have such an experience or not depends in part upon your own abilities, preparation, and sensitivity. This is no different from creativity in other parts of human life: the unskilled, unlearned, or untalented rarely invents something new. On the other hand, prophecy is not totally within the power of human beings to produce: some Jewish philosophers (e.g., Maimonides) say that you have to prepare for it. Others (e.g., Heschel) claim that no preparation is possible or necessary.²⁷. Both groups agree, however, that there can be no prophecy unless God wants to contact you. In exactly the same way, many people can train themselves assiduously for a given profession, but only some will be ingenious creators of new insights or techniques. Training alone cannot guarantee that. Similarly, in human relationships, you can do all in your power to become friends with someone else, but you cannot create the friendship by yourself: the other person must be willing to respond. When we talk about relationships to God, that has to be the case all the more so. Still, an ordinary person can have what Bokser calls a "secondary revelation" by reading the words of the prophet and imagining himself in the prophet's place:

The ordinary man may not sense the beauty of a sunset in a direct encounter. But when he reads a poem or looks at a picture glorifying the sunset, his perceptive powers may be ignited, and he too can begin to see and feel the haunting beauty which the sunset discloses. It is similar with the fruits of prophecy. The rest of mankind, not privileged to encounter the divine directly, may be introduced to it through confronting the words of the prophets. The divine haunts every utterance which issues from the prophetic experience. The prophet's words are "magnetized" with the divine power which initially sent them forth into the world. A secondary revelation occurs whenever we study the words of the Torah, and we too come under the spell of the divine.28.

We often use the term "inspiration" rather than "revelation." Inspiration means literally a breathing in. But who is it who breathes in upon the person and directs him to communicate to his fellow man? Every creative act where true inspiration is at work is a continuation of God's disclosure; it is a further unfolding of the light with which God began the order of creation.²⁹.

For those who regard God, as I do, as the sum total of those forces in the universe which make for goodness, for truth, and for beauty, any and every manifestation of these qualities is a revelation of God. When man becomes aware, as he frequently does, sometimes even in a blinding flash, of what "the Lord doth require of him" and it becomes consuming fire in his bones so that he must do something about it, he has received a communication from God. Man himself may verbalize this intuition and ascribe it to God, but it is a divine inspiration nevertheless. Every impulse to goodness, every quest for truth, every search for beauty is a communication from God; every deed of goodness, every discovery of truth, every expression of beauty is a fulfillment of God's commandments.³⁰.

On the other hand, Robert Gordis, Professor of Bible and Rapaport Professor in the Philosophies of Religion at the Seminary, claims that there is a difference in the scope of the message:

The superlative endowment that causes a Shakespeare to issue from some ordinary English farmers, and a Mozart from some moderately talented musicians, we call "inspiration." In restricting the term "revelation" to the sphere of religious and ethical truth, while using "inspiration" to describe other manifestations of genius, we are not yielding to convention. There is a qualitative difference between the two phenomena not to be ignored. God's creative power enters man's spirit in countless areas, such as science, art, music, literature, or the social order, each of which is a segment of our existence. All those whom He singles out for greatness in one area or another have been granted His authentic inspiration. But when God reveals a glimpse of His truth, not on one limited aspect of life, but rather on man's total relationship to the universe, when He grants insight into the character of man's nature and duty, the human being that God has chosen as His spokesman has experienced Revelation.³¹.

This, it seems, was the mark of authenticity: the fact that prophetic revelation was not merely an act of experience but an act of being experienced, of being exposed to, called upon, overwhelmed and taken over by Him who seeks out those whom He sends to mankind. It is not God who is an experience of man; it is man who is an experience of God.33.

The view I have sketched implies that not all 613 commandments are equally binding. Shot through with human appropriation and interpretation, both the Torah and the subsequent tradition which is oral Torah inescapably reflect the ages of their composition. But it also follows that it is both naive and un-Jewish to distill, as still binding, "eternal" commandments from a complex composed of both eternal and' 'time-bound" ones, the latter simply to be discarded. (This is done by old-fashioned liberalism, with its rigid distinction between the' 'principles" of prophetic ethics and mere external" ceremonial" laws, a distinction which derives its standards from external sources - Plato, Kant, Jefferson, and the like - and considers the standards by which it judges to be superior to what is judged by them; this is an inversion of the Jewish view in which God speaking through the Torah does the judging.) A modern Jew can escape his own time-bound appropriating no more than could his fathers; but his interpretation is Jewishly legitimate only if it confronts, and listens to, the revelation reflected in the Torah, which continues to be accessible only through the ancient reflection which is the Torah. Our modern appropriating is both possible and necessary because Sinai is not an ancient event only: the Torah is given whenever Israel receives it. But the act of present appropriation is mediated through the original Sinai. It is this listening appropriation which creates historical continuity.³⁴.

4) Conservative III

Advocates of this position assert the following:

a) Revelation is the disclosure of God Himself. It is not the declaration of specific rules or ideas, but rather a meeting between God and man in which they get to know each other. This meeting is asserted for different reasons and described in different ways by the existentialist and objectivist thinkers of this group. (These terms will be explained below.) In other words, there are variant understandings of the act of revelation.

c) Jewish law has authority for the Jew both because it represents the attempt of the Jewish People to spell out God's will, as revealed in the ongoing encounter with Him, and also because Jews are members of a covenanted community and have obligations under that covenant to God and to the Jewish community of past, present, and future. The divine and communal aspects of Jewish law make it a series of mitzvot (commandments), and not just minhagim (customs), in contradistinction to the position of Conservative IV (Reconstructionist) below. For Conservative III, both God and the Jewish community command a Jew to act in accordance with Jewish law as it is interpreted in each generation, and the Jew renews his own personal contact with both in so acting.

e) Moreover, because the Bible is the human recording of the encounter between man and God during times past, the specific ideas and laws contained therein reflect the practices, values, and attitudes of those times. They may no longer be an adequate expression of our own understanding of what God demands of us now. (Cf. Gillman on myth) We in our day have not only the right, but the responsibility, to make appropriate changes in the Tradition that has come down to us so that it will reflect God's will as accurately as possible and accomplish it as effectively as possible in the contemporary world.

One group within Conservative III depends heavily on the existentialist tradition in philosophy, which emphasizes the individual's experience. Thinkers in this group speak often of the personal encounters which individuals have with God. On the other hand, advocates of this position want to preserve Jewish law, which is communal in nature. Moreover, the most important Jewish contacts with God in revelation and history were interactions between God and the Jewish People as a whole. Therefore exponents of Conservative III often cite the work of Franz Rosenzweig, who emphasized the importance of having a relationship with God and also considered law to be an aid, rather than an obstacle, to that relationship.³⁵. Their traditional leanings, however, make them more communally oriented than Rosenzweig's thought is - although they often do not recognize that they differ from Rosenzweig in this way.

Both doctrines - that of tradition and that of "progressive revelation" - see revelation in propositional terms. According to the traditional view, God revealed certain propositions all at once, whereas according to "progressive revelation" theory He revealed them gradually. In more recent times a very different (and to many minds far more satisfactory) view of revelation has gained ground. On this view, revelation does not mean that God conveys to man detailed propositions at all, but rather that He enables men to have an encounter with Him of a specially intense form. It is God Himself who is disclosed in revelation. Revelation is an event, not a series of propositions about God and His demands.

The Bible is the record of how men were confronted with God....

For all the human colouring of the story, for all that Genesis is a book like other books and so amenable to literary and historical analysis, it is in this book that God is revealed. If God is, then He is to be found in the Biblical record; nowhere else in human literature is He told of so clearly. What applies to the Genesis narrative applies to the rest of the Bible. It is all the record of a people's tremendous attempt - the believer declares a successful attempt - to meet God. The various propositions are, then, not themselves revelation but are the by-product of revelation....

Revelation can thus be seen as the disclosure of God Himself. The rules and regulations, the Torah and precepts, provide the vocabulary by which the God who is disclosed is to be worshipped, in the broad sense of the term. They are a repertoire which has evolved in response to the impact of the original disclosure....

The precepts of the Torah are binding because they provide the vocabulary of worship - always understanding worship in its widest sense. God did "command" them, but not by direct communication - as in the traditional view - but through the historical experiences of the people of Israel. The Rabbis had what we would today call the "fundamentalist" view. They believed in the doctrine of "verbal inspiration". (But) the idea of a "command" through man - of God, as it were, giving the Torah not so much to Israel as through Israel - is not entirely foreign to Rabbinic Judaism so that a creative Jewish theology can build on it....

The great difficulty, as we have noted, for upholders of the binding character of Jewish laws is the leap from the intensely personal meeting with God, of which the Bible is the record, to the full acceptance of the detailed laws. These belong not to the actual revelation but to its fallible human recording. Why, then, should they be held to be binding?...

The final work with its contradictions and errors, is the result of a teaching process, frequently unconscious, in which the record was drawn up of Israel's quest for God and of God allowing Himself to be found. Such an understanding preserves the dynamic quality of the process. Revelation is still to be seen as God's self-disclosure, but what we have called the "vocabulary of worship" is as much a significant factor in the process as the original disclosure.

It need hardly be said that the view we have adopted is certainly not the traditional one. But it does preserve the idea - of the utmost significance for the Jewish religion - that to lead the good life is to obey God's will. The idea of the mitzvah, the divine command, can and should be maintained even though intellectual honesty compels us to interpret revelation in non-propositional terms.³⁶.

You will note in his exposition of the position, as in Jacobs', the elements of personal contact with God, interpreting the Bible in a non-literal way, covenant, the feeling of mitzvah, openness to change the specific contents of Jewish law, and a reference to Rosenzweig:

Judaism has its ground in the divine-human encounter, which is ordinarily called' 'revelation." This encounter occurred between the divine and the people of Israel. The divine self-disclosure to the community of Israel resulted in the covenantal obligation assumed by our ancestors. They were to be a "kingdom of priests and holy people," living their individual and communal lives in the presence of God.

One of the most important elements of the revelation is the system of mitzvot (commandments) culminating in the system of halakha. The purpose of this system is to make concrete the divine demand to be holy and to pursue justice. It is the natural result of the acceptance of the covenant. As the Mishna puts it, first one accepts the yoke of heaven and then one accepts the yoke of the commandments. Through the performance of the mitzvot, the Jew acts out his being set apart as a priest people and opens himself to the experience of the divine.. . . The process of reevaluating the mitzvot through interpretation goes on in the living community of the people of Israel. The mitzvot are not to be seen as a group of Platonic Ideas existing for all time in their perfect and unchanging character. They are the demands of God upon the community of Israel, which lives in time, and they are therefore subject to change, growth, and (all too frequently) decay....

Several theologians in the Reform Movement have also developed theologies based upon existentialism, especially in the mode of Rosenzweig, and it is instructive to note how their understanding and use of existentialism and Rosenzweig differ from those of the advocates of Conservative III. The Reformers who use this approach speak about the individual's identification with the covenant between God and Israel, but they assert and stress that in the end it is the individual who decide show the covenant is to be interpreted and applied, not the community. So for example, Jakob Petuchowski, Professor of Rabbinics and Jewish Theology at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, says

"Legislation" is something that is "on the books." A "commandment," on the other hand, is addressed to me personally. Now, it may well be that much of the legislation found in the Torah originated as "commandments" experienced by ancient Israel. But it is also true that, in the course of time, it did become "'legislation," and, as such, applicable only to the everyday life of a community governed by this legislation.

The modern Jew, as we have defined him, lacks the awareness of living in such a community, and, therefore, also the prerequisite for re-translating the cold letters of legislation into the personally meaningful and significant sounds of commandments. This is not to say that the modern Jew rejects the idea of "community" as such. Even the non-religious Jew in America is often very community-minded. But it just is no longer the kind of community which would accept a 16th-century, or even a 3rd-century, formulation of Jewish Law as its constitutional basis. . . .

By thus stating the diagnosis we have already hinted at the cure. In the first place, the modern Jew must regain the frame of mind in which he is able to experience the "commandment" addressed to him. It is a frame of mind which the Rabbis of old attempted to create, when they insisted that the Revelation at Sinai must be as topical to the Jew as if it had happened to him "today. " It is also a frame of mind to which the modern Jew can attain, as has been demonstrated by Franz Rosenzweig, both in his thoughts and in his way of life....

Of course, all of this will be marked by a high degree of subjectivity. There is in it none of the certainty which Orthodoxy promises its adherents, none of the matter-of-factness of complying with the established legislation of a body politic. One individual's observance of the Sabbath, for example, is unlikely to be identical with that of another individual. The former might consider that to be forbidden "work" which for the latter is an indispensable ingredient of his Sabbath" delight." But this is the price which will have to be paid. For the majority of modern Jews, it will either be this or nothing at all.

It is a state of affairs well described by Franz Rosenzweig, when he said that what we have in common nowadays is the landscape, and no longer the common road on which Jews walked in unity from the close of the Talmud to the dawn of Emancipation. The best we can do today is to work at our individual roads in the common landscape. Perhaps the future will again know of a common road, or, more likely, of a common system of roads.

There is, however, a limit to too much subjectivity, just as there is the need to preserve the "common landscape." In the first place, it must not be forgotten that the modern Jewish individuals, with all their diversities, will, if they are interested in Torah at all, share a common ground and a common aspiration. What does it matter if there are variations in the minutiae of observance, as long as there is a willingness to ' 'observe" at all?! It should be borne in mind that we are speaking of the modern Jew who is anxious to find his way back to the Torah, and not of him who is trying to run away from it.

The second consideration is that the very nature of Torah makes it impossible for the modern Jew to remain an isolated individual. Jewish living, in one form or another, is community living. The Jewish hermit is inconceivable. (The nearest approach we ever had to "hermits," the sectarians who shunned Jerusalem and went to live near the Dead Sea, lived there in highly organized communities. The now famous Dead Sea Scrolls arose within a community framework.) And, if the old form of the community has broken down at the beginning of the modern era, if its surviving remnants appear to be too artificial to command the modern Jew's devotion, a new form of the "holy community" is already in the making.

The Torah was given to the People of Israel. God's covenant is, as we have seen, with the "chosen people." Israel's task is to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy people. " But if the historical identity of Israel, in space and in time, is to remain intact, because without the people there would be no covenant, it follows that, over and above the "commandments" which the modern Jewish individual accepts as his personal obligation, there will be others to which he submits as a member of the People of Israel.³⁸.

We believe in the God who speaks to us out of Israel's experience; Israel, the covenant people, dedicated to God's service and the fulfillment of His purpose. We believe in the God who, as Frankel said, reveals Himself not alone to the prophets but through Kelal Yisrael, the Community of Israel, as it works out and applies the teachings of the prophets.⁴¹.

The Jewish ethical position not only ordains certain actions and forbids others; it also has a formal principle. That principle might be stated: Even though the rules may change, the idea of having rules does not change. The whole thrust of the Jewish tradition is nomian [structured by law]. The Jewish stress on reasoned change, tradition and its authority, ordered society, the equality of opportunity - not equality of rewards - are needed now more than ever.42.

The other group of thinkers of Conservative III are more in the objectivist tradition of philosophy - that tradition which tries to analyze experience in a detached, objective way, appealing to reason ("rationalists") and the experiences ("empiricists") that we all share as much as possible. That is not to say that objectivist thinkers deny personal, emotional experiences or that existentialists neglect reason and shared experiences entirely: both schools must account for both our detached, objective experiences and our involved, personal ones if they are to reflect human experience adequately. But each emphasizes and uses one type of experience more than the other in creating its interpretation of experience ( = its philosophy).

Some examples will make this clear. Jacob Agus, Rabbi of Beth El Congregation in Baltimore, highlights the aspect of holiness in our experience, which he defines as "the awareness of being part of a grand design in which our being is completed and also transcended," and then Torah is special because it brings the awareness of holiness to our daily lives:

...Our quest for reality must partake of the three realms of being - the rational, the ethical, and the aesthetic. And as this outgoing flow of spirit ebbs, we feel the glow of holiness, the awareness of being part of a grand design, in which our being is completed and also transcended. This is the meaning of Moses's injunction- "complete shall ye be, with the Lord, thy God."

On this view, the Torah, or the sacred tradition, mediates to us the spirit of holiness, and it builds up within us the power and dedication to ideal ends. Since revelation can be no more be verbal than God can be a physical being, we must regard literalism or fundamentalism as the disease of religion....

I believe that the non-rationalist components of our tradition are essential to the symbolical structure of the faith. We can sense the feeling of holiness only in an atmosphere which reflects the transcendent mystery of our existence as individuals and as a community. Thus, I value highly the texture of worship, the various laws of so-called "sanctification," from circumcision to the dietary regulations. But these regulations are not literally ordained by God; therefore they are subject to change in accord with the best judgment of the organized community.⁴³.

I consider myself to be a "modernist" for whom reason and experience are the touchstones of knowledge, and not the authority of a text or tradition, hallowed though it may be by centuries of saints and scholars. At the same time, I cannot accept the methods either of the behavioral scientists or of the philosophical analysts as adequate to an understanding of the condition of man. Nor do I believe that they can provide a way out of the egocentric predicament in which man presently finds himself. Moreover, I am impressed by the moral and spiritual insights which have resulted from authentic religious experiences, as well as by their power to move men and mountains, and reshape entire civilizations. Finally, while I freely recognize that ours is not an age which takes religious categories seriously, there is, in my estimation, an increasingly felt need for a "shared object of devotion" which the traditional God-faith provided, and a desire for some kind of community of faith, which will butress the individual in his search for meaning and significance in the friendless world in which he finds himself. . . .

Fundamentally, then, God, the source of all existence, is unknown and forever unknowable. At the same time, He does seem to reveal Himself in human experience in unexpected moments and in a variety of circumstances. In any case, He functions as the symbol of all human aspirations for self-transcendence as the ideal limit of man's notion of supreme value. He is "the 'beyond' in our midst," and faith in Him is an awareness of the ideal possibilities of human life, and of man's ability to fashion his life in the light of them....

For myself, I accept the notion of a religious law as being a corollary of, and flowing from, the notion of the covenant. A community must have rules and regulations to function; its individual members must be guided by norms, standards, and laws. Furthermore, since I do recognize the desirability of maintaining continuity with the past, as well as a measure of unity with Jews the world over, I am prepared to guide myself by those rules and regulations which have been accepted through the ages, provided they do not conflict with my ethical or aesthetic sensibilities. Beyond that, I am anxious to reexamine the whole corpus of Jewish law to point up, wherever possible, its relevance to contemporary social and personal issues- such as war and peace, the rights of minorities and of majorities - and to expand it so that it may speak to those questions for which the tradition offers no guidance to date.

I do this in full consciousness of the fact that I do not believe the law and its details to be of divine origin, but rather Israel's response to what it considered to be the divine call. On the whole, I think that this response was unexceptionable and that it has elevated and ennobled Jewish life throughout the ages. To the extent, however, that the development of the law became an end in itself, and the fundamental principles upon which it was based were forgotten, it did become necessary from time to time for courageous religious leaders and teachers to set themselves against the trend. They had to blaze new paths so that the fundamental respect of the people for the law would not be destroyed, and Judaism might remain relevant to the Jews' highest aspirations and meet the needs generated by new ages and new surroundings.

Ours, it seems to me, is just such an age.⁴⁴.

1) I would want to claim that man's moral, intellectual and aesthetic faculties should be viewed as a touch of the divine within man because those faculties distinguish man from the animals.

2) I would also want to claim that the structure of the world is an objective base which serves as a criterion for the evaluation of any philosophic or moral code; and since I hold that the world was divinely created in the sense that its creation involves powers beyond our control, I would be willing to say that God informed us about Himself and the world and gave us the Law in an indirect way, i.e., by creating the world in such a way that certain formulations of thought and practice fit the pattern of creation better than others.

3) I would aver, however, that the specific content of man's theological ideas and codes of practice is of his own creation and hence is subject to error and change. I would agree with William Temple's analysis that revelation occurs in events which human beings interpret to be revelatory of truths or norms of conduct, and therefore any event could be a source of revelation, although some may be more impressively so than others. I would also want to stress that, within Judaism, it is the Jewish community of the past and present which decides which events are revelatory and what the content of that revelation is, and that this communal check prevents revelation from being simply the figment of someone's imagination....

I would then observe Jewish law (i.e., Jewish Law would attain its authority for me) both because it is the law of my people and because of its own intrinsic wisdom as a program for satisfying human needs and maximizing human potential in the world as we know it. That entails a concerted effort to build the feelings of the community and peoplehood among our laity so that they will feel the need to observe the laws of our people. It also means that when the laws are not wise, I must be prepared to change them in consort with the rest of the Conservative community, taking due regard of the weight of tradition in the process....

Even though for lack of knowledge I must suspend judgment as to what actually happened at Sinai, there are elements of the texts attributed to that event which induce me to attach a divine quality to them. These include their scope, their inherent wisdom, and especially the demonstrated viability of the tradition which they fostered over the centuries and throughout many regions of the world. This clearly does not mean that Judaism's understanding of life is the only possible one. There are obviously other traditions which claim similar authority for their philosophies of life and which have undergone a long period of inter-subjective testing, too. Judaism itself recognizes the existence of prophets and saints among non-Jews and does not require Jewish belief or practice of non-Jews, even with regard to attaining a place in the world to come. But the amazing adaptability of Jewish law and ideology does indicate to me that Jews have apparently hit upon a pattern of life and thought that fits the structure of man and nature well - so well that I doubt that it could simply be the product of human minds. Consequently, although I cannot unequivocally affirm or deny belief in a verbal communication at Sinai, I do want to claim that the Jewish tradition embodies a degree of foresight, insight and sheer wisdom which is abnormal for human beings, even especially sensitive ones, and that in this sense at least it is a revelation of divine (super-human) truth and will.⁴⁷.

5) Conservative IV (= Reconstructionist tendency)

The fourth position on the source and authority of Jewish law within the Conservative Movement is this:

a) Human beings wrote the texts of the Tradition.

b) Those texts and the patterns of life and thought that they created are neither better nor worse than those of other cultures. Hence no divinity is ascribed to them, and all talk of a Chosen People is in error and dangerous.

c) Nevertheless, Jewish law has authority for us as the "folkways" (minhag, custom) of our People. In general, it should be observed in order to give our People continuity and coherence. If particular laws become offensive or fall into disuse, however, they should be changed.

d) If the Jewish community succeeds in organizing itself into a cohesive, active group as the Kehillah was in medieval Europe, then communal methods for deciding issues in Jewish law and communal sanctions for it would make sense. Until such time, the individual Jew will make these decisions. That is as it should be in an area of ritual practices, but it is not a desirable situation in the realm of moral norms, and we must strive to create a Jewish community with real initiative and authority in such matters.

Instead of assuming the Torah "to be divine revelation," I assume it to be the expression of ancient Israel's attempt to base its life on a declaration of dependence upon God, and on a constitution which embodies the laws according to which God expected ancient Israel to live. The declaration is spelled out in the narrative part of the Torah, and the constitution is spelled out in the law code of the Torah.⁴⁹.

Our position is that those mitzvot which, in tradition are described as applying "between man and God" should be observed, insofar as they help to maintain the historic continuity of the Jewish People and to express or symbolize, spiritual values or ideals, which can enhance the inner life of Jews. Their observance, however, should be reckoned with, not in the spirit of juridical law, which is coercive, but in the spirit of a voluntary consensus based on a general recognition of their value. We shall, therefore, refer to our approach to Jewish ritual observance as the voluntarist approach.

In advocating that approach to Jewish ritual, we are not taking an antinomian attitude [that is, one which argues for having no laws at all], as Dr. Gordis contends that we do. We insist that the concept of Jewish peoplehood which is basic to the whole Reconstructionist position involves the translation of ethical principles into concrete laws and institutions. We deplore and are endeavoring to correct the communal disorganization which has made the Jewish People impotent to enforce standards of ethical behavior in the relations of man to man....

To achieve the purposes of ritual, even from the voluntarist viewpoint, calls for a formulation of norms or standards. These norms must be determined by the twofold purpose of contributing simultaneously to Jewish survival and the enrichment of the Jewish spiritual life.... These considerations, rather than halakic precedent and legalistic interpretation, should, in our opinion determine the development of Jewish ritual for the Jew of today.⁵⁰.

Despite what the Torah claims or itself - and what some people still claim for it- I believe that it is a human document, reflecting the attempt of its authors to account for the history of the Jewish people, and for the moral and ethical insights which its geniuses acquired during the course of that history. It is "sacred literature" in the sense that Jews have always seen in it the source and the authority for that way of life and that view of history which gave meaning and direction to their lives.

I can understand why our ancestors believed the Torah (and its authoritative interpretations) to have been "divine revelation." For me, however, those concepts and values explicitly conveyed or implied in it which I can accept as valid represent discovery, partial and tentative glimpses into the true nature of human life. I find in the Torah adumbrations of ideas which I believe to be of enduring worth, and true insights into the unique laws which govern the relations of people and peoples.

Some of these ideas and values - that man is created in the image of the divine, that life is sacred, that man is his brother's keeper, that society must be ruled by law, that justice and compassion are the highest virtues, that moral responsibility is the most authentic form of ethics, that man must serve as a "partner to God" in perfecting this world, etc.-have exerted a tremendous influence upon Western civilization. I do not, however, infer from this fact that the Jews are the chosen people. I see no justification for ascribing metaphysical status to what is merely historical fact. Nor do I believe that the Jews are entrusted with any kind of "mission" in the sense of a preordained function in this world. I do, however, believe that Jews, as a people, have an opportunity to make a contribution to society which is uniquely their own.⁵¹.

... The Torah is the selective record of Israel's extraordinary religious interpretation of its collective experience during the formative period of its career. The origin of Torah lies not in an extramundane source which has cast down absolute truths upon a receiving people, nor is it the arbitrary projection of human inventiveness flung upward. Torah is rooted in the matrix of a living organism, in a people which discovers out of its experience with failure and fortune the powers of godliness residing within it and its total environment. Torah as revelation is the product of Israel's creative transaction with history....

The sanctity of Torah-revelation lies not in the perfection of its authorship nor in its absolute finality. The Torah is holy not because it is the last word, but because it is the first self-conscious word of Judaism which reveals the direction of its moral thrust. The holiness of Torah does not require that its contents be held as infallible or immutable....

To argue, as is fashionable among so many contemporary theological statesmen, that Torah admits of some human elements and then to offer no way of determining where divine initiative ends and where human interpretation enters, is to avoid the heart of the question. To claim that revelation occurs without commitment to follow what revelation demands, or to proclaim the will of God without offering grounds for distinguishing true from false revelation, is to offer a vacuous form-revelation without content or criteria. In my interpretation, the divine element of Torah revelation comes not vertically from a super-person whose will descends upon us, but horizontally from a people engaged in the process of complex interaction within history. Real events and ideal visions acting upon each other yield the sancta of Judaism, and these values named sacred are ever being validated in the experience of  this people....

While one can understand the psychological value of such belief [in Israel as the chosen people] during years of isolation and humiliation, one cannot on such pragmatic grounds justify its morality or truth. Modern attempts to hold on to the concept of "chosen people," but to redefine its contents remain unconvincing. There are those who explain that God-chosenness does not establish political superiority but only results in a noblesse oblige directive to lead a life of holiness; but this fails to recognize that such a claim to higher spiritual obligation remains an aristocratic conceit which demeans all other peoples by lowering our moral expectation of their behavior.

The effort at compensatory parceling-out of divinely designated racial or national gifts - e.g., philosophy to the Greeks, administration to the Romans, religious genius to the Jews - both caricatures nations and peoples and presumptuously offers the greatest prize to Israel as God's witness on earth.

The modern suggestion that God's choosing of Israel really means Israel's choosing of God is as valid a translation as turning X's owing Y money into Y's owing X money. The propositions are clearly not symmetrical. Moreover, if to be chosen means to choose, then which group holding a concept of God is not equally chosen by God?...

Rejection of the doctrine of chosenness in no way denies the uniqueness or value of a people, its style of life in theory and practice. Uniqueness must not be confounded with the theological claim that one people is distinguished by God from all others as He distinguishes light from darkness, the sacred from the profane, the Sabbath from the weekday.⁵².

6) Reform

In Chapter II we discussed the way in which the Reform Movement interprets Jewish history. You will remember that for them the essence of Judaism is morality and belief in God, a combination demonstrated most clearly in the literature of the Prophets. The legal developments during the talmudic period and the Middle Ages were temporary measures designed for those periods only; they have no authority today, when Jews no longer need laws to enable them to survive under governments hostile to Jews. On the contrary, the governments of Western Europe and America are fair to all because of the Enlightenment ideas on which they are based. We should respond in kind, taking an active role in modern society and embracing the Enlightenment emphases on the individual and on reason. Many of the rituals of Judaism should be disbanded because they hinder the integration of Jews into modern society.

Nature of Judaism -  Judaism is the historical religious experience of the Jewish people. Though growing out of Jewish life, its message is universal, aiming at the union and perfection of mankind under the sovereignty of God. Reform Judaism recognizes the principle of progressive development in religion and consciously applies this principle to spiritual as well as to cultural and social life.

Judaism welcomes all truth, whether written in the pages of scripture or deciphered from the records of nature. The new discoveries of science, while replacing the older scientific views underlying our sacred literature, do not conflict with the essential spirit of religion as manifested in the consecration of man's will, heart and mind to the service of God and of humanity....

Torah - God reveals Himself not only in the majesty, beauty and orderliness of nature, but also in the vision and moral striving of the human spirit. Revelation is a continuous process, confined to no one group and to no one age. Yet the people of Israel, through its prophets and sages, achieved unique insight in the realm of religious truth. The Torah, both written and oral, enshrines Israel's ever-growing consciousness of God and of the moral law. It preserves the historical precedents, sanctions and norms of Jewish life, and seeks to mould it in the patterns of goodness and of holiness. Being products of historical processes, certain of its laws have lost their binding force with the passing of the conditions that called them forth. But as a depository of permanent spiritual ideals, the Torah remains the dynamic source of the life of Israel. Each age has the obligation to adapt the teachings of the Torah to its basic needs in consonance with the genius of Judaism.

The Religious Life - Jewish life is marked by consecration to these ideals of Judaism. It calls for faithful participation in the life of the Jewish community as it finds expression in home, synagogue and school and in all other agencies that enrich Jewish life and promote its welfare....

Judaism as a way of life requires, in addition to its moral and spiritual demands, the preservation of the Sabbath, festivals and Holy Days, the retention and development of such customs, symbols and ceremonies as possess inspirational value, the cultivation of distinctive forms of religious art and music and the use of Hebrew, together with the vernacular, in our worship and instruction.

These timeless aims and ideals of our faith we present anew to a confused and troubled world. We call upon our fellow Jews to rededicate themselves to them, and, in harmony with all men, hopefully and courageously to continue Israel's eternal quest for God and His kingdom.⁵³.

Torah. Torah results from the relationship between God and the Jewish people. The records of our earliest confrontations are uniquely important to us. Lawgivers and prophets, historians and poets gave us a heritage whose study is a religious imperative and whose practice is our chief means to holiness. Rabbis and teachers, philosophers and mystics, gifted Jews in every age amplified the Torah tradition. For millennia, the creation of Torah has not ceased and Jewish creativity in our time is adding to the chain of tradition.

Our Obligations: religious practice. Judaism emphasizes action rather than creed as the primary expression of a religious life, the means by which we strive to achieve universal justice and peace. Reform Judaism shares this emphasis on duty and obligation. Our founders stressed that the Jew's ethical responsibilities, personal and social, are enjoined by God. The past century has taught us that the claims made upon us may begin with our ethical obligations, but they extend to many other aspects of Jewish living, including: creating a Jewish home centered on family devotion; life-long study; private prayer and public worship; daily religious observance; keeping the Sabbath and the holy days; celebrating the major events of life; involvement with the synagogue and community; and other activities which promote the survival of the Jewish people and enhance its existence. Within each area of Jewish observance Reform Jews are called upon to confront the claims of Jewish tradition, however differently perceived, and to exercise their individual autonomy, choosing and creating on the basis of commitment and knowledge.⁵⁵....

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