Notes on the Torah – (impressions from reading Genesis)
In the beginning, there was a God: overwhelming, but a blind ‘unreasonable’ power. This power was pure, white, without any reason or ‘why,’ without any justification, without any direction or know-ability. God simply is (or was, depending on your perspective). Everything simply IS. From that point, comes a direction for our thinking about this god.
It is not about reason, or ethics, or purpose, but the blinding rush of power, the exertion of force, a huge and overwhelming BEING – this being is a blinding God who acts without reason. This God is abrupt. Imposing. In other words, the Hebrew God is not a philosophical God – he is not out there discussing anything with people. There is no need to justify anything or argue about anything, except later under the pressure of competing tribes.
This is God quite different than our taste – we prefer an easy-going god, one that we can talk to, one that we can go on a lunch-date with. Yet, paradoxically, the Hebrew God is still a dominant aspect of our theological thinking. This paradox will be a central strand in my reading of the Hebrew Bible.
Reading the Torah is a paralyzing weirdness –
Reading the Hebrew Bible is, as the clich̩ goes, like discovering where you lived, like returning to your home. No one reads it, of course, let alone actually talks about it Рso you find this is a weird home.
Reading it again after years is a paralyzing weirdness because you find that everything you thought you’d remembered about it turns out to be a cloudy mystery. Instead of finding immediate familiarity, I found myself confronting weird problems, memories and paradoxes. The reason is that I’m reading in a very different context than how I once read it. And the big difference in context is that I’m reading it almost as an anthropologist, and not as a Jew living and breathing the words of this book.
We don’t LIVE with the book, we do not saturate our lives in it, and thus things do not make sense to us the way they might. We live in a secular age in which books do not have a sacred meaning to us. (Not only that – nothing has a sacred meaning to us.) Thus, in our smugness, we read them in colleges and attack them with the same kind of academic squabble we would with anything else. The Torah is another text among many. It is not that I want to separate the Torah from all other books and read it as sacred literature – I don’t treat any book as some magical piece of the canon - but that I think any book worth really reading should be read the way the Hebrews read the Torah.
Meet an orthodox Jew, and you will be paralyzed – by what? By someone who actually believes something, someone who actually has real conviction, someone who places belief above reason …
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To ‘problematize’ my relation to the Torah
So, I’m not going to read the Text as anyone else would read a book. I treat it as a secular son would treat his religious mother on her death-bead. You know? There is a kind of respect and politeness that is necessary in culling meaning from a being. However – and this is a big however – in a weird way I find myself in a lineage of great Hebrew scholars because my objective is also to problematize this work. That is something unique to the Hebrew tradition: the capacity to tear apart what you love.
This leads me to say this about love:
Love – in the Torah, is hard, abusive, and punitive. There is rarely a second chance, and if there is it is at a great cost. This is something that middle-class Americans – those who’ve grown up in a cradle of love, of forgiveness, do not understand. The Torah appears too cold and hard for most of us. And if you ask any normal person about the ‘old testament’ there is a good chance they will lament its overbearing harshness. Thus, inversely, the sham comfort of American Liberal culture is equally annoying to the deeply religious Jew.
What I imagine a Jew saying is something like: You do not understand rage, hunger, exclusion, alienation. And thus, you do not get the Torah. You do not bear the mark of Cane.
The Hebrew Bible - for most orthodox jews – is not just a sacred text, but the The Truth about this suffering and pain. And a truthful life is lived in relationship to that text – you must wrestle with it, tangle with it, and suffer in an attempt to get at it.
The Torah, or I should say, the Hebrew Oral Tradition, and its emphasis on intellectual commentary on the Torah as the principle purpose of a persons life, is the beginning of an endless chain of discussion, a link of immortality, of which philosophy itself functions within. That you can say something is funny. You are not mute. That is unique. That is Torah.
I should say explicitly that I’m not a believer, but i believe in the greatness of the Hebrew Bible, the power of the literary word.
My Post-structural reading of the torah?
My theory is that human thought, rather than being ‘absolutely free,’ is necessarily constrained, circumscribed, defined within, only possible within, specific structures, specific semiotic / structuralist systems. You cannot just ‘think anything,’ and if you did it would not make any sense.
We do not know the ontological structure of human consciousness and thought, but we do know what we do not know, and that is enough to say something.
For instance, specific grammatical structures necessitate a specific orientation to what can be said and, equally, what can be heard.
These systems of thought (and I emphasize thought, not ‘language’ or grammar, as traditional semiotics has claimed, instead insisting contra structuralism and post-structuralism, that there is a thought outside of language, within, inside of language) have a history, are rooted in particular ‘frames’ that are born out of specific circumstances.
Thus, the relationship between language and reality is made problematic. With this acknowledged, perhaps the relation between thought and reality can be expanded to mean more than what we traditionally mean.
The end-thought of this chain is this: our linguistic and cultural relationship to ‘nature,’ to the environment, to one another, to fundamental problems, or whatever, has enormous possibilities, but cannot function in too many possibilities, but must lapse into one, not without reason, for human desire and situation is always a reason, and within this we have a specific relationship to reality.
The linguistic-cultural relationship to the outside (if we must make that distinction) is defined by the specific needs and situations we’ve found ourselves in.
My thesis is this: The Hebrew Torah is in a handful of ‘works’ that have worked to define to us what it means to be a human being, what kinds of thoughts are possible within our linuguistic-culural paradigm. To ‘study’ this, so much as that is possible in one life, is to give room to an understanding, to the articulation, of what we are against a backdrop of different, possibly more expansive, possibilities.
There is no essential structure to our relation to the world. It has a history. It has a reason. The Torah grants a specific relation to the environment, and to one another. The Torah needs to be read because it articulates a specific relationship to the world. There is no universal truths about human beings.
(He1.0) A HEBREW PRIMER: Why Study the Hebrews? --
In this video I will be introducing some reasons for studying the Hebrew Torah, and then I will be giving an overview of the ‘general contributions’ of the Hebrews to Civilization. IN the next videos I will be looking at the historical context within which the Hebrews bloomed, and then the next videos will be a close reading of the Hebrew Bible.
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I will be studying the Hebrews not to have a better understanding merely of their general contributions to Western thought, but as a means of understanding the general parameters of our own thinking. What does this mean? It means that human thinking – rather than being some natural or neutral element - is actually heavily conditioned, influenced, by the thinking that came before it. The Hebrews have had a gigantic effect on the way we think and think about thinking.
In other words, I will be seeking out the ways in which they Hebrews helped cast our distinctive way of thinking. Human thinking, it seems, has not changed much since the early part of the first millennium. Thus, we are exploring our own mindset, as though standing in front of a mirror. It is quite surprising, but true, that the general perimeters of our thought were set in large measure by the interaction of three large-communities: the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, between 1500 bce and about 620, with the rise of Islam and the solidification of Western thought. I will be exploring each alone, and am starting with the Hebrews.
In other words, I am not studying where we came from – I am studying who are.
I believe human beings must undergo a fundamental change if it is to survive the crisis facing us – a social crisis, ecological crisis and potential Armageddon that looms over us perpetually. The first step to change, is knowing yourself. To study the Hebrews, Greeks or Romans, for the average American, is to study yourself. I will be looking at the features which constitute the intellectual toolkit that has been characteristic of western culture – with the aim of both understanding and potentially ending that culture.
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(He2.0) A HEBREW PRIMER: The contributions of the Hebrews …
So, what have been the general contributions of the Hebrews?
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(He3.0) A HEBREW PRIMER: A Brief Historical Context for the Hebrew Bible
Brief introduction to the Torah -
Although archeology from the 18th and 19th century has certainly revolutionized our understanding of what the ancient near East was like, most people still maintain the 17th century view of it …
So let’s look at a small kingdom that archaeological only recently has come in contact with – Canaan – which appears to have stood strong around 1000 BCE. This was a powerful kingdom. However, it soon divided into the Northern Kingdom of ‘Israel’ in 922 (with 12 of the tribes of ancient Israel) and the Southern Kingdom being Judea (what appears to me to have been a somewhat unified ‘state’ of sorts). These titles are confusing because what we take to be the ‘Israeli’s’ is actually the Southern Judea.
The Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722. The southern Kingdom of Judea was sacked by Babylonia in 586, destroyed and sent into exile.
This should have been the end for Southern Judea …
Conquest, exile and devastation would normally destroy a group, especially in antiquity, where the conquered tribe would trade its god for a new one. Then there would be a massive cultural assimilation and distinctions would blur. After the colonization you could not tell the difference between the colonizer and the colonized. This is what happened in the Northern Kingdom, for instance, in 722 after the attack by the Assyrians. The smaller kingdom of Judea, however, would not only survive their destruction by Babylon in 586, but would emerge to have the largest influence of any tribe in the past.
In other words, the Southern Judea was conquered, but they were not assimilated by the Babylonians.
As I said, archeology has revolutionized our understanding of the ancient Middle East. Now, what has become most apparent in this revolutionary understanding is that the power of the Hebrews – from a secular point of view mind you – came not from any ultra-metaphysical god or superiority of strength. Their power did not manifest itself in any monolithic monuments, or strong nationhood. Their power came from the power of their ideas.
What ideas?
Although the ancient Israelites certainly accepted and practiced animism and occultist practices, out of their culture the notion of an utterly transcendent God would emerge. This would be a fundamental idea that would empower them. This was a God who was outside of space and time, and, therefore, had absolute control.
What this idea did was enable the Hebrews to take any event and see it as created by God, and, therefore, empowered them to see anything as being necessary and good, even the destruction of their capital and exile.
Nothing was accidental; there was a large plan behind everything.
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These Israelites left all their records in the form of the Hebrew Torah.
These records are as equally complex as the people who composed them. Thus, there are a lot of different approaches to the book. You must be a broad and expansive reader. Sometimes you need to be a historian, sometimes a philosophers, and sometimes a literary critic. It is not a book – it is a library.
Before reading the Torah, I would like to clarify my views on what you would call God. 1) I am what you would call a-theistic, in that I don’t agree with the ontological or metaphysical or moral claims of theist; 2)however, I am an aesthetician, and am more interested in the capacity of the Torah to help us dig at a deeper understanding of our existence -----
… the Torah poses some interesting responses to some deep questions.
Certain Rabbi’s I’ve spoken to – and this is, by no means, irregular or unheard of – have stated that even though they do not believe in God, yet “It” is the most important entity in their life. I wonder, how could they believe in something so much and believe it is not real? This is not about being incoherent or about me accusing anyone of not being ‘consistent’ in their beliefs. Rather, it is revealing on many different levels. Through a close reading of the Torah, through developing my own position, I hope to elucidate this claim by the Rabbi.
To say, “I believe in God” has no objective meaning – it only has meaning when it is applied to a context. Each generation and, obviously, each person or group of people, mean something entirely different by the word ‘God.’ Is this a bad thing? I don’t think it is. The idea of “God” would not have survived for as long as it has if it didn’t have this interesting capacity. ‘God’ is an idea which can abandon its substance at will, and that is the remarkable power of ineffable ideas.
Thus, here Karen Armstrong has been an influence on my theistic thinking:
When a conception of God becomes meaningless or irrelevant it is quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. None of this is explicit of course. My opinion is that people do not ‘believe’ things because they make intellectual sense, but instead believe things when they ‘make sense’ to them on an intuitive level, when it, to use Heideggerian language, ‘works for them.’ When a conception of God ceases to ‘work’ for people it is abandoned. “God” has to make a deep kind of sense inside a person. Even Atheist have different conceptions of God. They conceive of a ‘God’ and they reject it. Do you reject the God of Abraham or the God of the Philosophers? It is interesting that, historically, those who have abandoned a conception have been labeled ‘atheist’ by the theist, but those who abandon essentially move on to create or manifest a new God. It has been argued that the current movement in atheism is not new, but is common historically, a common lapse in making room for a new God that ‘makes sense’ to people, that works for them in a dramatically new context. It is strange to think of the atheist out there who are completing the work of creating a new god.
More from Armstrong:
Religion is very pragmatic. Conceptions of God have to work for people. ‘Working’ does not mean that it is scientific or intellectually or logically sound. It has to match their visceral relationship to the experience of the world they embody.
I want to show that theology is not boring or removed from us. Instead, the history of God, the history of Theistic literature, is full of pain, intensity and suffering, from Abraham to Augustine. Theism, theology, is not a intellectual, at least not till late Judaism. It is a history of conceptions of God being experienced in states of extremity. It is traumatic. There is an inherit strain that has to be heard.
Thus ...
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