Relevance or Reverence in Traditional Interpretation of Jewish Bible?
Relevance and Reverence in Traditional Interpretation of the Jewish Bible
Rabbi Samuels asked our class to read a couple of articles that asked should we teach the Jewish Bible with relevance to our times. One article says that the fantastic fantasy of dinosaurs is enchanting to children and that there is no need to make the Torah relevant by attempting to read into it the current values of modern western society. The other article by Rabbi Jonathan Sachs teaches that we live by the cycle of the Jewish calendar the the weekly Torah portion.
Relevance or Reverence? Make Torah Fit Modern Western Values or Dismiss it as Pure Fantasy?
Clearly, the Sages disagree with the presumption of the first author that the alternative to coercing the Torah to be in harmony with modern values is to enter a fantasy land of the ‘then and them.’ The approach of reading modern values into the Torah can be argued to be insidious, because people who learn might think that is what the Torah actually said. However, educating our children that the Torah is about ‘them and there,’ that has no relevance for us, ‘here and now’ is leading that form of Judaism in the direction of the dinosaurs. Most of those Jewish children leave their Temple after Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah never to return in their generation. My teachers and my extensive market research both agree that the gatekeeper issue is reverence before relevance.
Our Sages in the Story of Passover teach that everyone is obligated to view oneself as though one personally went forth from Egypt. The son who excludes himself from the community is as though he was not delivered forth from Egypt.
Relevance + Reverence: Read Our Daily Lives in Light of Torah’s Values
Our obligation is to read the stories of the Torah to inspire how we lead our daily lives. We eagerly invite guests like the house of Abraham. We listen and interpret the dreams of others before our dreams will come true. We have patience and empathy to guide our brothers from a sense of hatred and guilt. We enable our brothers to demonstrate to themselves and others that they have changed. Then, we forgive and explain how we were sent on a mission before them so that the family would survive.