Who Wrote the Torah? A Very Good Question.

The great Rabbi Akiba used to tell this story:

 

A fox once spotted a fish darting to and fro in the water. He asked the fish, “From whom are you fleeing?”

And the fish answered, “From the fisherman’s net.”

So the crafty fox offered, “Would you like to come up to safety on dry land?”

To which the fish responded, “Aren’t you a clever one! If I am in danger here in the water, how much more so if I remove myself from it.” (Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 61b)

 

In Judaism, water is a symbol for Torah. The lesson of the story is that we are strongest when we surround ourselves with the Torah and its learning. Reform Jewish life is based on this idea: We read from the Torah weekly; we study it regularly; we seek ways to incorporate its teachings into our lives.

 

So who wrote the Torah?

 

For most Reform Jews, Torah is not the literal “word of God.” That is to say, we mostly don’t believe that it was penned by God and handed down in its complete form to Moses at Sinai. In fact, critical scholars have taught us that the Torah contains many different voices and views. The first two chapters of Genesis tell two very different – and in some ways opposite – stories of the world’s creation. Genesis 6-9 seems to be a blending of two different stories of Noah and flood. And the many different names for God apparently represent different expressions of Jewish spirituality in ancient Israel...and they don’t always agree with each other!

 

So where is God in all of this? If the Torah was written by human beings, what makes it so special?

 

Rabbi Gunther Plaut writes in the introduction to his classic Torah commentary:

 

God is not the author of the text, the people are; but God’s voice may be heard through theirs if we listen with open minds. (Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Edition. Xxxviii.)

 

Judaism has always taught that God is to be found through the actions and ideas of human beings. In Avot 3:3, it teaches that “When two people exchange words of Torah, the divine presence rests between them.” In other words, “Torah” is not only a book, but an action – an act of study and learning, an act of seeking the divine amidst the mundane, an act of trying to bring the holy into an ordinary world.

 

And the book we call “The Torah” is no different. It is a divine book, but was written by human beings. It is the human side of an ongoing conversation between our people and God. To quote Rabbi Plaut again, it is “a book about humanity’s understanding of and experience with God.”

 

This makes the Torah different from Aesop’s fables or the writings of Shakespeare, because it is an attempt to express not only universal truths, but divine truths.

 

This also means that as liberal Jews, we have to read the Torah on two levels – as a literature that comes out of a certain time and place, AND as a timeless literature that speaks to our lives as well. To ignore either of those levels would be to sell the Torah short, to deny part of its essence.

 

Most of all, it means that we are called upon to surround ourselves with words of Torah like fish in water. Talmud Torah – Study of Torah – is our opportunity to engage with the ways that our ancient ancestors found God in the world, and it is our opportunity to add our own voices to that eternal dialogue.