Elliot Cosgrove, PhD May 14, 2010
If every single Jewish studies professor, from every campus across North America, were to get on an airplane that took off, flew away, and never came back again, would Jewish life change at all? Our synagogues, our Hebrew Schools, our Jewish summer camps, our UJA’s, our relationship with Israel – if there were no Jewish studies departments on campus, would it have any effect on the Jewish community? I remember being asked this question by a Jewish communal professional some time ago while I was working on my doctorate in Jewish studies. He conjured up this scenario to illustrate that the impact of such a development on Jewish life would be negligible. He felt that Jewish studies professors, Jewish studies departments, the scientific study of Judaism – in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums – has absolutely no positive impact on religious life whatsoever.
I ruminated on this question this past week as I led a discussion of Jewish studies professors under the auspices of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. This year I was appointed to the North American Scholars Circle, involving bimonthly conference calls among Jewish academics from across North America, an honor made that much more humbling as I am the only pulpit rabbi in the group. The academic discussions, which will culminate in a week-long seminar in Jerusalem this summer, serve as an opportunity for Jewish studies professors to learn together, to reflect on and sharpen their craft, build dialogue, and address some of the most pressing Jewish questions of our day.
Last week, it was my turn to present. I chose to teach a debate taking place in the academic world specifically on the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR), a debate that I think goes to the heart of my colleague’s airplane question. Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t heard about it – JQR’s readership is slightly less than Time or Newsweek.
James Kugel, one of the most well-respected professors of Hebrew Bible, wrote a book a few years ago called How to Read the Bible. What makes Kugel and the book interesting is that Kugel is an Orthodox Jew, yet he has spent his entire career studying the Torah as a critical scholar. As a Jew he treats the Torah as a sacred text, to be read reverentially and approached devotionally, reflecting the will of God. In fact, much of his career has been devoted to studying how the Bible has been read over the ages by religious communities, Jewish and otherwise. Yet, as an academic, Kugel publishes and teaches that the Bible is of human origin, a product of the Ancient Near East, full of contradictions, flawed and imperfect. So there are two Kugels, the Kugel who treats the Bible as an artifact of the ancient world and the Kugel who treats the Bible as a divinely given text. For Kugel, the controversy of his book is that he believes that these two worlds, the world of scholarship and Bible as artifact and the world of devotional study and Bible as sacred scripture, can never be reconciled. The claims of one impugn on the other. In fact, to mix the two undercuts the integrity of each project. True scholarship cannot be bound by religious commitments as it must be objective, unbiased, and without an end in mind. Religious life operates on opposite principles; it cannot accept any findings of critical scholarship that may dethrone the place of Torah in the Jewish mind.
In comes Benjamin Sommer, a JTS professor, a fine scholar and a religious Jew, who published an article this past spring in JQR taking Kugel to task for his approach. Sommer accuses Kugel of having a bifurcated soul. Sommer argues that scholarship can and should inform religious life, that proving the human hand in the Biblical text does not undercut religious life, rather, it enhances it. Kugel, Sommer claims, does his readers a disservice by insisting that one cannot treat the Bible as an artifact and as sacred scripture at the same time. To use but one example from Sommer’s work, some time ago he wrote an article about the book of Numbers, the book of the Bible that we began today. He demonstrates that within this book, there are series of inconsistencies and internal contradictions, about Moses’ character, about the nature of God’s holiness, about many things; contradictions that prove that the text was written by many hands. Yet these contradictions are not whimsical, they are purposeful, they are retained by a careful editor, intent on maintaining certain tensions within a unified text. For Sommer, the scholarship informs the sacred character of the text. In fact, Sommer explains in an unusually personal footnote for a scholarly article, it was exactly when he learned that maybe the Torah is not from God, that he stopped eating cheeseburgers. In a somewhat unexpected logic, to learn the Torah is only human can actually bring you closer to the divine voice behind it.
In such a short time, it is impossible to delve into all the particulars of the debate, and I am giving them short shrift as it is. The essential element is the airplane question with which I started. Does scholarship inform Jewish life? Sommer says yes, it actually enhances, deepens, and elevates our relationship to Torah and Judaism. Kugel says no, scholarship and Judaism must exist as separate spheres. For Sommer, all those Jewish studies professors can, at least theoretically, contribute mightily to the Jewish community. For Kugel, that airplane of Jewish professors, while costing him his day job, would not impact the devotional study of Torah.
The debate is not an abstract ivory tower discussion. The debate goes directly to the guts of who we are as a community, what we believe in, and how those beliefs should be communicated. Just this week, one of the teachers in our schools stopped me in the hallway. The children are of course preparing for the festival of Shavuot, the holiday that commemorates God’s giving of the Torah to Israel at Mount Sinai. The teacher confided in me that she knew what the traditional explanation of the festival was, but she also knew her history, and she didn’t feel comfortable teaching her kids a story that contradicted everything she knew from biology, geology, anthropology, psychology, to name just a few contemporary disciplines. How should I answer her? Does a parochial religious education require that you, as Kugel would advise, put your intellectual commitments on hold? If we teach a secular truth, will our children grow up with no reverence for their heritage?
It is a difficult question, one that has a long history with implications that range from how to teach the Torah and campus life to Jewish philanthropy. Jewish studies is a relatively new discipline – only about 200 years old. When the academic study of Judaism began in 19th-century Germany, it was part of the project of Emancipation, an attempt to make Jewish study kosher, as it were, in the eyes of the non-Jewish world. Judaism could be studied objectively, and professors of Jewish studies could be full and dignified participants in Western intellectual life. Two hundred years later, the landscape is vastly different. There are Jewish studies departments everywhere. Jewish philanthropists give huge amounts of money to endow chairs of Jewish study to keep the study of Judaism vibrant and to give our undergrads a place to study their heritage on campus. In my years at the University of Chicago, Jewish kids would ask me all the time how it was that I, a religious Jew, could teach the “Who Wrote the Bible?” class. And remember, what gives Jewish studies professors tenure is not how many Jewish souls they’ve saved, but how many papers they’ve published and how many conferences they’ve attended. I wouldn’t be the Jew I am if it weren’t for the Jewish studies departments at the University of Michigan, at the University of Chicago, and beyond. But consider the irony: Jewish philanthropists support academics in order to passionately revive Jewish life – the same academics who live or die by being dispassionate with their material and their students.
I don’t have all the answers, not even close. Kugel and Sommer are a lot smarter than we’ll ever be. If they are out there debating, then I am not sure we are going to resolve this question. That said, we are responsible for this institution; we are responsible for the Torah that is taught here. On the one hand, I understand Kugel’s position. The moment a scholar ceases being totally objective, he ceases being a scholar. Moreover, the moment a Jew allows for the presence of a human hand in sacred texts, the genie is out of the bottle, and the white knuckle grip the Torah has on you is, inevitably, a little looser. That said, there is simply no way I could ever preach, teach, or construct a model of Jewish education that did not allow for the asking of any and every question, for grappling with the answers to those questions, and for the answers to inform our vision of Jewish life. As Sommer, Krochmal, and others have argued, if I discover that “By the rivers of Babylon” was not really written by King David or that Isaiah did not write “Comfort ye, comfort ye My people,” then so be it. A lobotomized faith is not an option for me. I choose a mature, textured faith; a messy, unresolved faith with all its internal contradictions; a faith that seeks to come to grips with the competing tugs at my identity, my heart and my mind, the academy, and the pulpit, the human and divine elements of our tradition. When it comes to faith, the mark of integrity has nothing to do with being neat and tidy. The mark of integrity is standing before your God knowing you have brought every question you have to the table.
In the days before Shavuot, as important as it is to ask these questions, we can also be satisfied without having definite answers. However, we do need answers or at least the right way to model them. In the end, the answer that I gave the teacher, and really all our schools was an unexpected one, one that had been fortuitously planned by Rabbi Rein and our schools.
This past year, we discovered that owing to wear and tear, some of our Torah scrolls needed repairs. Rabbi Rein hired a sofer, a trained scribe, to fix our Torah scrolls. But instead of doing what a scribe normally does – taking the scrolls to his own workshop, or setting up shop in a hidden classroom – our sofer, Jay Greenspan, asked to sit in a high traffic area. He set up his workspace outside the elevator on the second floor. Over the last week, every class, every student – from the ECC through the Congregational School – had the opportunity to watch him and to learn from him about his work.
That is my answer to the teacher and her students. That is my answer, because I imagine that in seeing the scribe at work, our children took in, without words, and in an age-appropriate way, the exact message they needed to hear. They saw the Torah up close, a covenantal document given by God, written by humans, handed down through the ages, kept up and cared for by every generation. This is what was taught this week in our schools, this is my answer to the teachers, to Kugel and to Sommer. The rest, as they say, is commentary.