Rabbi Phil's Almost Weekly Message

If we read the Torah with a discriminating eye, we might find ourselves bothered by some of what we read. Now to be clear, much of what the Torah teaches contains much great moral and spiritual power.
But as to what might bother us: It seems that in the Torah God is a trifle too willing to punish evildoers rather excessively. Such as, for example, sending a flood to destroy the world save for one family on a boat loaded down with pairs of animals from all over the world.

When you stop and consider these instances of Divine punishment in the Torah, you might wonder as to the nature of that God. And for certain it’s a quandary. Does this activist and occasionally angry God accord with our understanding of the Divine? To this quandary I have something to say.

A critical part of belonging to the Jewish Tradition is that it’s a, well, it’s a tradition, one that is more than three millennia old. And over those many years the literature promulgated by its scholars, poets, philosophers, mystics, and legalists has undergone analysis both explicit and implicit. Over many years, our understanding of the Torah undergone change, considerable change. Much of this is related to
context; time, location. Change comes about through thoughtful challenges to the plain meaning of the text. 

Different historical contexts yield different understandings of how to interpret the words before our eyes. One of the revelations that came to me some years ago when I wrote my first graduate school paper in Jewish philosophy, a study of the philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916-2003), is that Judaism is a
developmental phenomenon. The Tradition undergoes this kind of change I’ve been speaking of through various kinds of challenges, and adapts according to the spiritual-intellectual atmosphere of the day.
One important example of what I’m talking about is the Tradition’s attitude toward capital punishment.

The Torah commands execution for a variety of crimes, including desecrating Shabbat. But when the rabbinic tradition confronts the problem of when to execute a criminal, it narrows the rules as to when capital punishment may be required. Only murder is under consideration, and two witnesses have to observe the murder as it is committed. And more, these witnesses have to warn the prospective murderer against committing the crime. These two conditions have to be fulfilled if the court trying this individual is to be condemned to death. Those are some stiff rules and they lead to a situation in which capital punishment can hardly ever be implemented.

Since the inception of the Reform movement in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Germany, those of us who ascribe to the general tenets of Liberal Judaism take greater liberties than the Orthodox stream of Judaism when addressing some of the more objectionable elements of the Tradition. The ways Orthodoxy addresses the role of women and the place of LGBQIA+ people in society are two such situations. In these cases, those within the Liberal Jewish framework recognize that we needed to go beyond the traditional halakhic framework to grant civil rights to these folks. In such cases, we employ our reason to ascertain when disagreement with the Tradition demands change.

And yet as Liberal Jews we insist on maintaining our fealty with the Jewish Tradition, albeit with some critically important ethical changes. We recognize the fact of and need for progressive developments throughout our history, and see this as an important way of understanding the nature of God. 

All of which brings me back to the punitive God of the Torah. We can, we ought to, allow ourselves to be bothered by the images we see in the stories, yet and understand that the overall thrust of our Tradition leads us to righteous places whose contours are so powerful and good that it’s not difficult to realize
why we ought to remain with its fold.

Shabat shalom,
Phil

Rabbi Phil Cohen- PhD