More Questions for Heschel

In response to my earlier postings about Abraham and the Akeidah, Danny quoted from one of Heschel’s most famous works, God in Search of Man. So, in the hopes of better understanding what a modern, well-respected Judaic scholar would say about my recent musings, I took a look at this volume. In particular, I wanted to see what exactly Heschel says about the Bible. As you will recall, my departure point for all these musings was the fact that, regardless of what did or did not occur some four thousand years ago, what we know is that we have a text with various characters and events described within.

Here’s some of what Heschel says about the text: “If God is alive, then the Bible is His Voice.” (245, the cites being the pages in my 1976 First Paperback Edition) So far so good. Hard to argue with that. But here’s the more troublesome argument: “To deny the divine origin of the Bible is to brand the entire history of … Judaism … a colossal lie.” (247) And again, “The Bible has either originated in a lie or in an act of God. If the Bible is a deception, then the devil is almighty and there is no hope of ever attaining truth….” (247) I just don’t see how that follows.

First of all, I don’t understand why there are only two possibilities: either the Bible is the word of God, or it’s a lie. Why can’t the Bible be true at the same time that it was written by man (or as Bloom theorizes, by a woman)? And what does it mean anyway to say that these things in the Bible are ‘true’? The Bible purports to answer a host of questions which are, more the most part, essentially unanswerable. Why are we here? Where did we (meaning all of us, the earth, the stars, man, woman, child) come from? What is this thing we call consciousness that lets us read the Bible, talk to each other about Abraham, and just think about these topics? Now if one of us has an answer to any one of those questions, what could it possibly mean to say that the answer is ‘true’? Really, we have no idea what’s true or false in most of these realms.

Let’s look again at Shakespeare. Shakespeare addresses many of these unanswerable questions in his plays. And because Shakespeare sees the farthest, or the deepest, of any writer who has looked into these questions, we think of Shakespeare’s plays as true, not because the events in the plays happened in the manner described, but because the plays do the best job of describing the human condition, together with all its limitations. But can we say that Hamlet or Lear is true or false? What does that mean? Shakespeare’s Lear is a fictional character; he’s a creation from the mind of a writer. But King Lear is true, in the sense that it describes humanity, and our place in the universe, as well as any other description that we have, setting aside the religious texts, such as the Bible, for the moment.

Now I assume that there was a time, and a place, when some writer, or probably more than one writer, sat down to compose the Tanach. When that happened, I also assume the writer had some source of inspiration. Why isn’t it possible that the writer was divinely inspired but that the words of the Bible are not literal? For example, how literal did Heschel believe the creation story to be? Did he believe that everything was created in six ‘days’, in the specific order referenced? Or was this a poetic or philosophical representation of someone’s understanding of creation?

I’m not a person of faith in the sense that Heschel describes. I don’t believe that the Torah was given to Moses, word for word, letter for letter, on Sinai. I am however, willing to believe that something happened on Sinai, and that someone later wrote about that event, and that the description of what happened can be true, but not literal. And I guess I need to know why Heschel thinks that understanding is a colossal lie.