From the Ritual Chair

Torah and Revelation in Conservative Judaism, by Jonathan Cohen

V’zot haTorah, asher sam Moshe, lifne B’nai Yisrael, al pi Adonai, b’yad Moshe.

“This is the Torah which Moses placed before the Children of Israel, from the mouth of God by the hand of Moses.”

I am sure that most of you are familiar with this phrase, which we recite when the Torah is scrolled open, lifted and shown to the congregation. You have probably heard it uncountable times, but have you ever really considered what it means? Recently, I was in shul watching the Torah and reciting this line when it occurred to me . . . that I could finally get the Shaliach editor off my back. Ever since I became co-chair of the Ritual Committee, she has been bothering me to submit an article – and she’s very persistent. (She’s also my mother which adds to the pressure.)

So, while sitting in shul it occurred to me that Ritual Committee articles could not only elucidate what Jews do in various situations, but also why we do those things and what they mean, especially from the viewpoint of Conservative Judaism. So what do Conservative Jews believe the Torah is? What do we believe about the above, often-repeated statement on God’s Revelation at Sinai? The quick answer is, of course, a lot of different things.  Here, however, I will group them into three main categories: traditional, naturalist and cooperative. 

Traditional: The most traditional view is that Moses went up to Mount Sinai and God dictated word-for-word God’s divine message, which Moses dutifully and perfectly wrote down. The phrase quoted above means exactly what it says: instruction went directly from God’s (symbolic) mouth to Moses’ pen (or chisel) as the Written Torah.  (Anything Moses heard but did not write down was also directly from God and is called the Oral Torah, or Talmud.)  Although this is usually the first (and simplest) version of Revelation that we learn as children, I suspect that only a very small number of Conservative Jews hold to this idea. A more common approach among the “conservative” Conservative Jews was espoused by Rabbi Joel Roth when he spoke at OJC a few years ago. This approach also insists that God verbally dictated God’s will to the Jewish People on Mount Sinai (as well as at other times).  However, this divine will was dictated to people and people wrote down the message, thus accounting for the internal variations in the law, ideology, stories and language of the Torah. But since the Revelation at Sinai to Moses is the clearest and most complete description we have of God’s will, it is thus the most authoritative.

Naturalist: At the other end of the spectrum sit the views of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. Although Kaplan was the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, he taught at Conservative Judaism’s Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) for 50 years and his thought continues to influence today’s Conservative rabbis and laypeople. In the naturalist view, the phrase quoted above is purely symbolic and is only sung today for its ancient, mythic imagery. Humans wrote the Torah. And although these human writers were attempting to capture sacred ideas, these ideas were purely the thoughts of the authors, not of any divine being.

Cooperative: For those not satisfied with either of these polar positions, there is a wide-ranging middle ground that I will call the cooperative approach to Revelation. This is the idea that Revelation was neither exclusively divine nor exclusively human, but a combination of the two. Both God and the Jewish People were involved in Revelation, although there are many ways to look at this scenario. The two most famous exponents of this idea are the 20th century philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. According to Rosenzweig, there was a Revelation at Sinai, but the only thing that God actually revealed was Godself, creating an intimate relationship between God and the Jewish People. In Exodus, at the section describing the giving of the Ten Commandments, God comes down onto the mountain and, for Rosenzweig, that is the end of Revelation. Everything else – the entire Torah included – is Israel’s response to this personal Revelation. That is the “Torah which Moses placed before the Children of Israel.” Heschel has a slightly different take on this cooperative idea. He states that at Sinai, two separate actions occurred: God gave the Torah and Israel received it. While God may have revealed God’s will at Sinai, what we have in the Torah is the human understanding and recording of that message. Thus, he called Torah a “midrash” on Revelation.

These descriptions and groupings are vastly oversimplified here and the range of Conservative Jewish thought on Revelation and the Torah is far more diverse than can be addressed in one Shaliach article. But the next time you rise and sing “V’zot HaTorah” I hope you’ll give some thought to what you actually mean when you say those words.