Holiness and Zionism
Friday May 10, 2024
Shabbat shalom everyone. Before the end of my sermon this evening I will have a word to say about Zionism. But I’d like to begin tonight with an old question. “Who wrote the Torah?”
For most of Jewish history, our ancestors believed that the entire Torah was revealed by God to Moses, who received the entire thing in a series of mystical trances, and wrote it down and passed it down to his disciple Joshua, who then passed it to all later generations. This was the understanding of the great sages of the Mishnah and Talmud 1,500 years ago and also of the medieval rabbis in Spain, France and Germany 1,000 years ago.
The first scholar to openly suggest that the Torah was written by human authors was Baruch Spinoza in mid-17thcentury Amsterdam, and they excommunicated him. Only in the past two hundred years have many Jewish scholars have taught that the Torah was written by many different people, over the course of hundreds of years, and eventually compiled into a single document.
I have often been asked over the years about my own view, and I always used to answer “I think of it like a frog. There are many ways of studying a frog. You can go out into the wetlands and watch the living frog in nature, and carefully observe its behavior. How it eats, and sleeps, and travels and reproduces. That is one way to study a frog. Or you can pin it down on a dissecting board, as we did in 10th grade biology, and cut it open, and examine all of its inner organs. That is another way to study a frog. Both methods will reveal some truth to you about the frog, with the one difference that after the dissection, you are left with a dead frog. Same thing with the Torah. You can pull it apart and identify the different documents that make it up. But in the end you are left with a dead Torah. I prefer to study the Torah as it has continued to live, in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people, for three thousand years. I want my Torah to stay alive.”
Just a few years ago I came across a book that expanded my mind, entitled The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices, by Israel Knohl, who lives and teaches in Jerusalem. In his book, Professor Knohl… a religiously observant Jew…argues that the Torah originally had multiple authors. More than any other teacher I have ever encountered, Israel Knohl has entered so deeply into the study of archeology and ancient near Eastern languages and texts, that he truly inhabits our three thousand years ago past. In that distant far away time, he explains, there were different literary traditions.
Beginning around the time of King Solomon’s Temple around 950 BCE and continuing for the next 400 years, these different traditions reflected different notions of God, of human beings, and of holiness. There were priests and there were prophets. There were kings and there were farmers, some living in times of peace and prosperity and others in times of war and upheaval. And after the greatest upheaval of all, the exile in Babylonia, the Jews who were attempting to rebuild a new society felt the need to gather all those literary traditions into a great collection….which became the Torah as we know it.
Knohl comments simply: “The editors recognized that God’s word is not uniform, but that God speaks in many voices and people hear God in many ways.” From Israel Knohl, I learned that one can listen to the many voices in the Torah and hear it all as the voice of the living God; what he calls The Divine Symphony.
One of Knohl’s arguments, which has become widely accepted is that at a certain time in ancient Israel, two of these voices clashed with each other, producing this week’s portion. Kedoshim, or the Holiness Code. One very early voice in the Torah, says Israel Knohl, was the Priestly Torah. The exclusive literature of an elite priestly class, the Kohanim, who lived apart from the rest of the people, and who developed a strict code of purity and impurity, and controlled the precincts of the holy Temple. Their world was a realm of mystery, and sacrifice, and silence. And their view of God was impersonal, with a name that was almost never pronounced. The Holy of Holies at the very center of the priestly Temple was almost never entered. We recognize this priestly voice in the Torah as the voice of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah, with its preoccupation with purity and sacrifice and holiness, as well as other sections of the Torah which depict God as transcendent, mysterious, remote and inaccessible.
Knohl then tells a story of a time in which a new group arose in ancient Israel, the prophets…especially Isaiah and Amos and Micah. The 8th century BCE was a time of both prosperity in Israel and increasing inequality. The voice of the prophets rang out declaring God’s anger at injustice, and oppression and mistreatment of the poor. We read the prophets every year before Rosh Hashanah and at Yom Kippur, Isaiah channeling the voice of God declaring: “I hate your sacrifices! They make me sick! You sacrifice, you fast and you pray, but you oppress your worker, and you are dishonest in business. You neglect the poor.” The revolutionary teaching of the prophets, that still shakes our conscience two thousand five hundred years later, was that the sacred without morality is meaningless.
In response to the prophets, according to Israel Knohl, a new voice emerged in ancient Israel. The Holiness School, which taught that holiness requires both ritual and ethics. This week’s Torah portion. “You shall be holy for I Adonai your God am holy. Respect your parents and guard My Sabbaths. Offer the sacrifices correctly, and set aside the corners of your field for the poor, the widow and the orphan. Do not worship idols and do not oppress your workers. Be honest in business. do not take revenge. Love your neighbor as yourself.” All of this is the new definition of holiness. It was a revolution, a complete and utter departure from the earlier, priestly conception of holiness as distinct and separate from the rest of life. Holiness was no longer the exclusive domain of the priests. Because holiness was now a combined system of ritual and ethics, it became everyone’s responsibility.
We have carried that notion of holiness down through the centuries, never allowing ourselves to forget that real holiness is expressed in both ritual and in ethics, how we care for the poor, how we treat the stranger, how we structure society.
During the past one hundred years of Jewish history, our people have been attempting to carry out this holiness revolution in our ancient homeland, the land of Israel. God knows and we know that it has been far from perfect, but this is the meaning of Zionism as I understand it. The Jewish people…which includes all of us….is attempting to create a just and compassionate society in the land of our ancestors. A society which celebrates Shabbat and our Jewish sacred times, in which our sacred texts come alive through study and song, and also….equally importantly… a society which strives for justice, and peace, truth and compassion for all of its inhabitants.
It is a human endeavor, so it will never be perfect, but it has been at many times a beacon of hope and democracy and freedom. And it is still. This for me is the meaning of Zionism. Like many of you, I was deeply moved by the letter written and signed by 540 Jewish students of Columbia University, who wrote the following in response to everything happening on their campus:
We are proud of Israel. The only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is home to millions of Mizrachi Jews (Jews of Middle Eastern descent), Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Central and Eastern European descent), and Ethiopian Jews, as well as millions of Arab Israelis, over one million Muslims, and hundreds of thousands of Christians and Druze. Israel is nothing short of a miracle for the Jewish People and for the Middle East more broadly.
Our love for Israel does not necessitate blind political conformity. It’s quite the opposite. For many of us, it is our deep love for and commitment to Israel that pushes us to object when its government acts in ways we find problematic. Israeli political disagreement is an inherently Zionist activity; look no further than the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms – from New York to Tel Aviv – to understand what it means to fight for the Israel we imagine. All it takes are a couple of coffee chats with us to realize that our visions for Israel differ dramatically from one another. Yet we all come from a place of love and an aspiration for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Those students give me hope for the future.
We Jews will continue to strive, sometimes falling short but sometimes managing to be a beacon of light….working to be a holy people, bringing holiness into this broken world.
Shabbat shalom.