Jeremy Rosen
The Sinai Revelation: Did it Happen?

Jeremy Rosen - The Sinai Revelation: Did it Happen?

- Good afternoon, everybody. Today, I’m tackling a very, very controversial theological issue. In many respects, you might say it is the most controversial theological issue, because in mediaeval times, when Judaism, Christianity, and Islam began to formulate theological criteria for their religions, they tended to agree on most of the broad fundamentals about belief in God, that God cares about human beings, that God rewards and punishes, and that we should all try and love our neighbours. But the one area where they fundamentally, all three, disagreed, was on the issue of what we call revelation. Did God reveal himself, herself, or itself to the Christians in their way, to the Jews in their way, and to the Muslims in their way? Revelation in Christianity, of course, was to do with Jesus. In Judaism, revelation was concerned with the issue of Torah. Was the Torah the word of God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai? And if it was, what did that actually mean? To this very day, Judaism is dramatically split on this specific issue. It’s, in one way, a banal but fun way of differentiating between the orthodox, the ultra orthodox, the conservative, and the reformed Jewish movements. So for example, the ultra orthodox will believe that every word, every letter of the Torah as we have it today was revealed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. The more modern orthodox will believe that there was a revelation. And this revelation has evolved and been developed over time, but it is, in its way, God explaining to us how we should behave. The conservative movement will agree that this is the crucial document, the part of our tradition that lays down the fundamentals, but that it was written at a particular moment in time in a particular context. And as times change, we adapt to those changes and try to reconcile. The reform movement will say, well, this was a historical document, we no longer feel bound by it in any way. It might be interesting to study, but it should have no bearing on how we act today or if it should, only selected parts of it.

Now, that’s putting it in a nutshell to explain how wide the range is in Judaism of understanding what Torah is and where it came from. In the traditional Jewish way of looking at it, which I’m going to start with first, it doesn’t mean to say I’m going to necessarily end up that way, but I’m starting that way first, we talk about three things. We talk about Torah Min HaShamayim, Torah from heaven, we talk about Torah mi-Sinai, Torah from Mount Sinai, and we talk about Torat Moshe, the Torah, the law of Moses. Now, according to all of those points of view, the Torah dates back to a moment in time when God revealed his or her or its vision of how human beings should live, or at least how Jews should live, at this particular moment in time on Mount Sinai. But it doesn’t go in great detail to the actual process of what was delivered there. On the face of it, Moses was up on the mountain. He received the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone. He comes down the mountain with the tablets of stone, then sees the children of Israel worshipping the golden calf and smashes the tablets of stone on the ground. And then there’s a process of reconciliation, he goes back up the mountain and he, well, this time, he carves the tablets of stone and God writes on them. Was it the tablets of stone only that was revealed to Moses on Sinai? After all, if it was the whole of the Torah, all five books of Moses, then why doesn’t it say he came down the mountain with all five books of Moses with ox carts carrying them down, only the two tablets of stone?

But one way of looking at it is to say that Mount Sinai was an inspiration in which God revealed to Moses the way he would like the constitution to be written down. Moses comes down off the mountain and he relays this information, first of all, to Aaron, then to the priests, and then to the elders. And according to one version of the Talmud, this was then written down in stages during the course of the 40 years. Now, this transmission, is it a transmission of, as the Torah says, word-to-word, mouth-to-mouth, eye-to-eye, or was it inspiration, divine inspiration? And this is what people have been arguing about ever since. To make matters, if you like, more complicated, we have the wider issue as to when the Torah was actually written. The official ultra orthodox line is it was written at this particular moment in time, and not only was it written at this particular moment in time, but it was a revelation that everybody, the whole of the nation, experienced. And so, unlike other revelations, which are to individuals, this was to a nation, but I’m going to come back to that issue in due course when I talk about Rabbi Judah Halevi and the book called the Kuzari. But of course, most people point to the fact that the Torah has what appear on the face of it to be contradictions, inconsistencies of time and space and place, which leads the modern academic mind to say, look, there are so many contradictions and inconsistencies that we must assume that this was written by several people and it was compiled at some later date. And people argue about when that later date might have been. Most people know that it was a man called Wellhausen in the 19th century who produced this documentary hypothesis that suggested there were different authors, the author who liked using the word Yahweh, for God, or the author who preferred to use Elohist, Elohim, the author who wrote about the priestly codes, and the author who wrote the last book of Deuteronomy, which is a repetition of the earlier versions.

But of course, he wasn’t the beginning of this. Even Spinoza began to challenge the idea that the scrolls of law or that the Torah was not written by Moses all at one moment. Now, the fact is that the whole of the Christian world, until these developments, also believed, and many in the Christian world still do believe, that it was literally handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. The innovation of the rabbis of the Talmud was to say, look, first of all, this book is not like any other chronological book. It’s not necessarily meant to be chronological. And as they say, , there’s no chronological order in the Torah. Secondly, the Torah in itself, even its written form, leaves a lot left misunderstood or not very clear. So for example, when Moses says, “On the Festival of Tabernacles, I want you to take the fruit of a nice tree as well as the palms of the date, as well as the leaves of a thick tree,” what was a thick tree? What was a beautiful tree? How did people understand the law at the time? Or again, if you take something like an eye for an eye, how did they take it, did they take it literally or economically? And so whenever the Torah, shall we say, emerged, it emerged not only in the written text, but also in the way it was understood at the time. And then, of course, you have the obvious question. If this is a text that is supposed to be a constitution for the future, then why does it talk only in the language of the past? Why does it only talk about not stealing sheep and calves, why doesn’t it talk about not stealing computers and jet planes? Why does it talk about things that, even at a very early stage, became no longer relevant like the temple, like purity, like all these different laws that no longer apply?

And the answer of some people would be to say, look, parts of it were written at a very primitive stage at a primitive time. Others will say, not at all. It had to address the context, no book is written out of a context, every system of law starts within a context, and this was the context that was relevant at the time. And indeed, as Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher, said a thousand years ago that there were laws that were given for a particular period of time for a particular purpose. Now, what do we actually know about the origin of the text? Not very much before two and a half thousand years ago, because roughly two and a half thousand years ago, we already have references to this text. And a couple of hundred years afterwards, we have the first, if you like, translation of the text into Greek and then into Latin. And it is quite true to say that there have been variations, minor variations, between the Samaritan text, between the Dead Sea Sect texts, and between what later became known as the final Masoretic text, the text that we have today that we read in our synagogues that was finally a reconciliation of the variations that have been found beforehand. So this is a document that has existed without any question for two and a half thousand years. The question is, where did it start? And this is where opinions vary. And some people say it already began in the period of the kings. Some people say it began before that, because during the period of the kings and the part of the Bible written then, there are references to earlier situations. And others will say, no, it was composed in Babylon by the scribes and then it expanded from there. Either way, either way, this has become the core of the Jewish religious tradition, and therefore today, we try to discover how we relate to this and in what way we relate to this. Do we take it literally or do we not?

If we look at the Torah sources, they themselves have different variations. There are three different versions of what happened on Sinai in the Book of Exodus, in chapter 19, in chapter 24, in chapter 34, each one is slightly different. Each one has different people going up the mountain and how far do they go up. They mention different individuals as being with Moses, halfway up the mountain, at the bottom of the mountain, standing in between Moses and Aaron and the priesthood and the nation, and then there’s Joshua making an appearance. And in each case, there’s a disagreement as to what was given. Was there a book of the Covenant that was given, which was the deal between God and the children of Israel before the Ten Commandments? Was the book of the Covenant given after the Ten Commandments in order to clarify what was required? The Torah itself says that God says to Moses, I’m going to give you the Torah and the mitzvot and the statues and all the details. Were they given in written form, in oral form, in inspirational form? It’s not explained, all we know is that Moses was 40 days and 40 nights up the mountain getting a clarification. And we also know that the Torah uses anthropomorphism, in other words, treats God and the way God communicates in forms that humans understand, so when God talks, is God talking in a language? In which language? And if God is seeing, is God seeing with an eye, in which case, what kind of an eye, or the finger of God or the hand of God? So even those who call themselves fundamentalists, who take the Torah literally, can’t take it completely literally.

Otherwise, they’d expect to see the finger of God or the hand of God in literal form. And similarly, the question of was this a transmission over a 40-year period? That is to say, over time, there are things that change. And indeed, in the Torah itself, there are occasions when Moses goes back to God to clarify something that he wasn’t certain about. So all these questions are questions that are problematic. If we take the Torah as a book, like a modern historical, technological historical book, which clearly it is not because it also describes itself as a poem and as a psalm, which is very, very different to, shall we say, a book of laws. And it contains within it this combination of laws and narratives and ideas. So somewhere during the Talmudic period, this looseness of what was defined wasn’t considered important until the development of a credo, a system of what do we have to believe? And remember, I’ve mentioned this before, the Torah nowhere says you must believe. It makes assumptions that there is a God, that there are obligations to abide by God’s law, but there is no formulation of this is what you believe, that doesn’t appear until the late Talmudic period in the book of Sanhedrin. It is true that in the Mishnah, which was written in the first century, it says . That is to say Moses received the Torah from Sinai from a moment in time, but doesn’t go into greater depth to explain what that meant. So the Talmud talks about the fact that it is a requirement, it is an obligation, but how does it frame this obligation to believe that the Torah comes from heaven?

In other words, the Mishnah in Sanhedrin doesn’t say the Torah comes from Sinai, doesn’t came the Torah comes from God, it says Torah comes from heaven, Torah mi-Sinai, and says that anybody who doesn’t think that the Torah comes from Sinai, they have no portion in the world to come. Well, you know, that’s a very interesting formulation, what does it mean, have no portion in the world to come? They don’t say he’s an epikoros, an epicurean, a heretic, which is applied in that same Mishnah to somebody else, to somebody who doesn’t agree with scholars, the Torah scholars, that’s what an epikoros is. And you might say that includes this, but essentially, what it’s saying of, you don’t think that something is this way, well, then you simply exclude yourself from, shall we say the community of people who do think that way. This idea then gets expanded by Maimonides, who compiled these 13 principles of faith in the first millennium post the common era, in which he says in his principles of faith, “I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that we have now is the one that was given to Moses, our teacher.” So now we have what is the official position, the Torah was given by God to Moses, our teacher. And this is where the debate came in with regard to what that meant. Because naturally enough, people turned around and said, ah, how do we know? And who was there at the time? Rabbi Yehudah Halevi, who was a great scholar, poet, lived in Spain, first millennium, from I think something like 1075 to 1141. The man who passionately wanted to move from Spain to Israel, great Zionist, if you like, the first Zionist, you might say. He wrote a book called the Kuzari.

And the Kuzari was based on a tribe in the Caucasus called the Khazars who converted to Judaism somewhere in the ninth century. And they survived there for a couple of hundred years before they were wiped out by the Kiev Rus, and the Kiev Rus, at that stage, there wasn’t Russia as we know it it, but it was a mixture of Vikings coming down from the Baltic, from the north down to the Black Sea, and they established a colony there, just as they did in France and in England and in other places where they invaded. And it was the Kiev Rus that destroyed them. There is a myth, as you might know, of Arthur Koestler, and it’s been repeated by certain modern-day Israeli sceptics who claim, you know, the Jews in Russia, the Ashkenazi Jews, they never came originally from the Jews in the land of Israel. Really, they were Khazars who came from the Caucasus, and when they were displaced, moved up into Russia and from Russia into Poland and Poland to Germany. Now, you know, the fact is, that’s rubbish from lots of points of view. The language of Poland and Russia was Yiddish, which was a Germanic language, it came from west to east, not the other way round. And the number of Khazars were not very many anyway and they were closer to the Islamic Asian tradition than to the Ashkenazi West tradition. But there was, interestingly, correspondence between Ibn Shaprut, who was the Jewish advisor of the Mohammedan prince of Cordova in Spain. And Ibn Shaprut actually had a letter from the Khazars in which they said, please, come and help us, we’re being invaded. And there was some correspondence between them, which we have copies of, and we don’t know what the result was from the point of view of Spain, whether they or the Mohammedans wanted to support them or not, but the Khazars disappeared.

And nevertheless, Yehudah Halevi wrote a book called the Kuzari in which he imagined this conversation in which the king of Khazars was visited by God who said, your intentions are good, but your way of carrying out your intentions are bad. And what I want you to do is to find a better way of worshipping me. And so the king of Khazars called in a Jew, a Muslim, a philosopher, and he questioned them all on their religious belief. The philosopher he dismissed right away because this was abstract and he was looking for a way to behave. And when it came to the Muslims and the Christians, they both agreed that they had originated in the Jewish tradition, but moved on from there. So he said, okay, well, let me go back to the origin. And so began a series of debates and discussions between the interlocutor and the king of the Khazars over what the best religion was. And one of the strongest arguments that Yehudah Halevi produced to the king of the Khazars was, look, the revelation that came to Jesus Christ was private or that St. Paul encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, it was private, it was personal. The revelation that came to Mohammed came to him personally, whether it was in a dream or inspiration. But the revelation that came to the Jewish people was to a whole people on Mount Sinai, they were all gathered there. So, you know, you could pull the wool over the eyes of some people and pretend it happened, but how can you pull the wool over the eyes of a whole people and claim that it happened? And this is an argument that you still hear today. The trouble with that is, of course, we know you can, you know that historians can years later falsify events or invent events. And we also know that lots of people have visions and dreams when God appears to them and stand and see either Jesus or some other God in the sky and feel that this is being conveyed to them as a mass, you have mass hysteria.

So the truth of the matter is that’s no proof if you want a rational proof. But we are not really talking here about rational proofs. We’re talking rather more about how we relate to an amazing document. Do you relate to it as a poetic document, as a factual document, historical document, a mystical document, a poetic document? And the fact is that we all tend to look at this book in a different way, but the one thing that we can agree on, it has become the, so to speak, constitution of the Jewish people onto which we have added the contribution of the oral law, the Torah Sheba'al Peh, the Torah of the mouth, oral, as opposed to the to the Torah Shebichtav, the law of written, what was written down. And in fact, for many years, they refused to write down the oral law because they said, if you write down an oral law, it becomes structured and fossilised. But we want to go on reinterpreting and developing it to meet new situations. The ultra orthodox position says precisely, this is what we do. The oral law is constantly reinterpreting the constitution and therefore, we can take what Moses says with regard to stealing cows and sheep and apply it to computers and jet planes and motor cars. We can take certain things and say they apply now, so we can say the idea of making Shabbat a very different day can also include not involving modern technology and trying to create a more spiritual day than one was before. And we can, as happens in Israel, interpret Jewish law to deal with the armed forces, with laws of fighting technologically, with issues that deal with industry functioning on a Shabbat and not being able to close down.

And so this is a process that we rely on the Torah and the development of the oral law to guide us both morally and behaviorally, because the Torah combines the moral code together with a behavioural code. And so whenever there is a new issue that we haven’t faced before, we go back to the beginning of the constitution, we then go through the modifications to the constitution, as we have in America, and we move on in each generation to tackle new issues. Some issues get tackled well, some issues get postponed, all legal systems move slowly and all conservative movements that are interested in conserving tradition also move slowly. So I would say, even though I’m totally committed to the Torah and the oral law, I want to see change come within it. And if it doesn’t move as fast as I’d like, I’m sorry about it, I regret it. But if you have a system either based on a Supreme Court or based on consensus of opinion of scholars, then the individual makes individual choices, but the system remains the system. And so there, we have the distinction that I started with, the difference between the orthodox being bound by the Torah, the conservative taking it very seriously, but at some stage saying, look, we don’t agree with the consensus, we have our consensus, and the reform that says interesting, historical, but not relevant or not entirely relevant. The way somebody with a rational mind can deal with this is to say, throughout the Talmud, throughout the Talmud, there are statements using the term ke-ilu, as if. So somebody who, if you like, breaks Shabbat, it is as if he has rejected God.

Or somebody who keeps one law of the Torah, it’s as though he’s kept all of the Torah. On both sides, you have as if. And so this term as if, which originally was a psychological term developed in the last century to deal with people who have certain mental illusions, was not to try to say you are wrong, but to act with them as if what they’re saying works for them and you will help them cope with it. And so many people take the view that, however the Torah emerged, whatever the process on Sinai was, it is as if, as if, God is speaking to me. So that, when I want to try to get closer to God, this is the channel I choose to take, others will choose other channels, other ways, other forms. So the Torah is as if God is speaking to me. But there’s another way of understanding it, and the other way of standing it is, I choose, I choose to accept this as the structure of my religious life. This has been handed down, father to son, over thousands of years. It has been examined, it has been challenged, it has been added to, it is constantly being added to. In Israel today, every year, there are almost 20,000 books being produced, new books, innovating on matters of Jewish law, religious law, both in terms of the courts of the land and in terms of the yeshivot and academies of the land. It’s constantly being expanded. Now, we might not agree with the people who apply the law.

For example, the law, sorry. The Torah itself says very clearly, we should not be superstitious, something I’m going to talk about later on, and yet so many of us are some superstitious. It says that the power to permit something is superior to the power to ban something, because any old fool can say it’s forbidden, but if you want to permit something, you’ve got to produce arguments to justify it. But nowadays, we live in a world where things are constantly getting stricter and stricter. There are areas which clearly do need addressing in terms of egalitarianism. But these are things that happen and are happening, even the most ultra orthodox world, they are happening at this moment in ways that often don’t appear as clearly as we would like them to appear. So for me, it is a personal choice in which I am saying this works for me and it’s my guide. The third version is to talk about tradition. If you are committed to the idea that the Jewish tradition has something to offer humanity and us, then preserving its core texts is absolutely important. The one thing you don’t want to do is do what’s now current, which is to rewrite texts. Even, I’m glad to say in one way, writing Roald Dahl, not because he was an antisemitic, but because he said certain things that were anti or sexist and offended current woke ideology. Now, you know, I honestly don’t believe one should eradicate the past, even if they include a lot of rubbish. I don’t believe we should eradicate all those novels and stories written during the period of the British Empire or just because they were written by a white male. But one adds new stuff, you add new stuff and you choose to teach the new stuff maybe more than the old stuff. But what you don’t do is you don’t fiddle around with a text.

And so for example, there are things in the prayer book that I don’t particularly like, if I’m rational for a moment, I pray three times a day for the house of David to be restored, whereas I don’t really want to see the monarchy back again, and I’m not certain that the kings of Judea were such a good example. But when I say them, I interpret them in both a therapeutic and historic and a nostalgic way and as a reference to our past and a nod in the direction of our past. And so for me, maintaining this as the word of my tradition, of my people, and as of my God enables me to live in a world in which, on the one hand, I am determined because I choose to be determined by Torah. But at the same time, my mind is free to inquire, to challenge, to read some interpretations of the Torah that are fundamentalist, some that are academic, some that are critical, and some that are, if you like, attempts at compromise. So this is the magnificent source of our tradition. I wasn’t there at the time, so I don’t know what happened. Frankly, I don’t think we can ever discover what happened and therefore, all we have, to use Derrida, a modern French philosopher, is the text in front of us. And the text in front of us for me is holy and I treat it as holy. Doesn’t mean to say I can’t see certain things that say like slavery or mistreatment of women or other groups or anything like that are not, if you like, per se, but just because some of it is doesn’t mean all of it is. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the case for the defence. And now I’ll open to discussion and see where this is going to take us.

Q&A and Comments:

Romaine says that revelation as a means to an end has sadly become a competitive issue. The truth is everything’s a competitive issue. You know, let’s take, for example, Christianity. When Constantine in the fourth century, the Council of Nicaea decided there’s only be one interpretation of Christianity at the Council of Nicaea, and that was that Jesus was the son of God and was of God, half the Christian world disagreed with him, whether it was the Arians or whether it was other sects of Christianity that saw, if you like, Jesus as a great man. And then they proceeded to kill each other. And in fact, the Christians killed more Christians, actually, than they killed Jews, if you take period of time and all the Inquisition and all the persecution that went on there. So competitive issue, yes, because within all groups of human beings, there are different ways of interpreting things, different ways of thinking, some people are rational and some people are mystical.

Esther says, “I think we chose a small mountain to show humility.” Well, that’s a nice idea. It is a nice idea. There are, of course, as you know, different versions as to which mountain it was. And humility is important. But there, you have an example of what is called midrash. Midrash is the process by which the rabbis continued to interpret the Torah in such a way as to make it a vehicle for education, something that can teach morality and ethics and give information, and they created ideas around it. And that’s why so much of the writing about the Torah is writing around it and interpreting all kinds of aspects of it, which makes it so amazing. And so one of them was the idea that humility is very important, Moses was described as the most humble person. The mountain then, not in the Torah, is described as small, but Moses described as small, and that’s part of our transmission of values through the process of reinterpretation.

Q: In what way did it differ from the Hammurabi code except the reference to the God in the Torah?

A: Well, in two ways. The most important way to us now is that the Hammurabi code drew a distinction between civil rights of men, women, upper class, middle class, lower class. Whereas the Torah very clearly treats in civil terms everybody the same. A female life is the same as a male life, a servant’s life is the same as an aristocrat’s life. So the one area fundamentally was, this was, the Torah was the first, in a sense, universal code of law, which also laid down laws of how you have to treat the stranger and the foreigner and so forth. But it wasn’t just the idea of the God of the Torah, it was the idea of how the law was transmitted. Because whereas the Hammurabi code came just from the leader, with the authority of the leader, here you have a code in which the interpretation is passed on to elders and to priests and to prophets and to judges, all of whom have a hand in the actual transmission. So in the Torah itself, it says, if there’s anything you do not understand and you have a problem with, you go to the leaders of that generation, of that generation, and ask them to explain it. So built into the Torah is the process of ongoing explanation, ongoing clarification, which you do not find in the Hammurabi code.

HP says, “There’s a theory that two books were joined, the book of the Israelites leaving out of Egypt and the book of Adam to Joseph’s story.” Well, not just two books, HP, there’s a theory that there are a lot of different scrolls that were all collected at some time and put together, written maybe by different people, maybe not by different people. And, you know, you might even say that, if something was written down over a 40-year period, all of us change our language during this time, the way I write now is not the way I wrote 40 years ago. So it’s not surprising that there are changes and it is possible, it is possible, that there were other people who contributed. The point is that, for the last two and a half thousand years, we have had one combined text. And this combined text is our text. And this combined text might have been dictated by God, it might have been conveyed by God, it might have been inspired by God. We don’t know for certain, it becomes a matter either of conviction or faith or a decision to say, I’m accepting this as it is.

Now, HP also says there are variations of commandments. Yes, there are. And one of the reasons why there are variation commandments is because there’s a limit to what you can say at one moment in time. You cannot, for example, say two words simultaneously. Let me give you an example of this. In the Ten Commandments, you have one version of the Ten Commandments which says, remember the seventh day, zachor, another version of the Ten Commandments which says shamor, keep the seventh day. And therefore, because you can’t say two words simultaneously, which one’s going first? I mean, in writing, you can put one before the other, but then you make a decision, and I’m going to come back to that in a minute. That is why, very often, laws are repeated as they go on to fill in certain things that were left out. We want you to remember the Shabbat, but not just remember it, we want you to keep it. Or why in one version does it say, honour your father and your mother, and in the second version, it says, respect your mother and fear your mother and your father? Why reverse them? And there, again, you can say, because you saw there was a problem, people thought, oh, father comes before mother. And so they decided to expand it, if you like, or Moses expanded it to convey, no, both have to be treated equal in its sequence.

Sometimes, the Torah refers to the lost ox of your neighbour, sometimes, it refers to the lost property of your enemy in order to include both of those, that we include not only people who you’re friendly with, but you’ve got ethical responsibilities to people who you’re not friendly with. So these variations, you can argue, could be a different author, but they could be placing texts in such a way as to expand and add extra dimensions. Sometimes, the laws of the Torah talking about festivals are talking about the family celebration. Sometimes, they’re talking about the community celebration, sometimes, they’re talking about the tabernacle and the temple and the sanctuary celebration. So instead of, as we might want to put them all together, the Torah, if you like, spreads them out during the whole of the text, which in itself is another way of creating a unity of purpose. But you have to understand, you shouldn’t take it at face value and say, oh, here, I see a contradiction, therefore. Thank you, Romaine, for the logic helping.

Now I come to Yona and Alfred. We don’t even know whether a number al bahim means literally 40 or general meaning attesting to earlier, later. You are absolutely right, we don’t know what the numbers were, not only the numbers of 40, which keeps on recurring, 40 as a generation, 400 years, kings reigning for 40 years, 40 days and 40 nights. 40 days touring around in the spies in the Holy Land. We don’t know what the numbers meant, did Methuselah live 900 years? Because when the Torah was written, there were so many different calendars. In Babylon, there was a calendar based on even numbers and on odd numbers, which is why you have eight as a holy number for circumcision and seven as a holy number for Shabbat, seven would be the God calendar, eight would be the man calendar, the human calendar. Look at how many calendars there have been over time, even in the Western world, even since Julius Caesar. So the fact of the matter is, no, we don’t know for certain how they understood numbers. Did they understand generational, and 40 was a generational? did they understand 400 was a large number or 600,000 was a massive, massive number? And very often, the numbers are used loosely. Sometimes, in the Torah, numbers are rounded up when you number the membership of the tribes and sometimes, they’re numbered down. So the truth of the matter is that, yes, numbers are used in many different ways in the Torah itself and we have to recognise that that might be a way of incorporating different approaches and different calendars they had then. Remember, at the time of the Torah, they disagreed as to when, if you like, was Nisan the beginning of the year in the spring or was Tishrei, Rosh Hashanah time, the beginning of the year, so lots of disagreements go on, that’s the genius in my view, the variety and the genius and the complexity of the Torah, which is even a stronger argument for it being something that we should really value.

Brian says, “I don’t believe we need a definitive answer as to when and where the Torah was originated. It provides in the main great stories, wonderful source of study, which has attracted students for millennia.” I couldn’t agree with you more, Brian, 100% agree with you.

Q: Shelly says, “What about the current idea in the orthodox world that the oral Torah was also given to Moses on the 40 days he was on Mount Sinai? When I was in college, the orthodox view of oral Torah was it was from the rabbis, your view?”

A: Well, look, it’s the rabbis who wrote down the oral law. The oral wasn’t written down until the rabbis of the first, second, and third century CE. But there must have been some sort of oral law at the time, as I mentioned earlier. How did they understand what was written in the Torah at the time? How did they understand the fruit of a nice tree? How do they understand sort of a toothless man putting out the tooth of a normal person? Did that mean he got away scot-free? So the fact of the matter is that I think it is perfectly conceivable to say that a person or persons or person receives or is inspired to compile a system of legislation that may have been inspired within that time and written down later. That may have been started in that time and then developed. But it makes sense to say there was some kind of oral law at that time because after all, in the Books of Kings and then the period afterwards, before the Babylon exile, they’re referring back all the time to laws that were in the Torah and requirements of behaviour that were written in the Torah. Kabbalah was a vision.

That’s interesting, that’s interesting. There are some Kabbalists who thought they had a vision given to them, whether it was a positive one or a non-positive one. The truth of the matter is we don’t know where the Kabbalah came from precisely, because although there was mysticism long before the book of the Zohar, which is the major book which didn’t appear until roughly 1000 years ago, the Talmud refers to Rabbi Akiva having a mystical experience and others having mystical experience. So yes, it was, mysticism can be described as a vision. But I’m sure you know the famous joke about mysticism, that it starts in a mist and it ends in a vision. And who is to know whose vision was right and whose vision was wrong? And that’s why, again, all we have is the text. That’s why it is the Zohar which is the inspirational text of the Kabbalah, although there was an earlier book and earlier traditions that moved into it and may have started at the period of Shimon bar Yochai, the Talmudic period, although it’s certain that the Zohar was not written in the language that he was familiar with, but that doesn’t mean to say it couldn’t have drawn on earlier ideas. But that’s one of the reasons why initially, when Hasidism drew on the Kabbalah as its inspiration, the Misnagdim, the opposition to Hasidism, actually put a ban on it for a couple of years ‘cause they thought that this was problematic, the way they were interpreting these earlier texts. I mean, the Vilna Gaon, who was the greatest scholar of the generation and was opposed to Hasidism, it’s not as though he didn’t read the Zohar, he did, but he wouldn’t be somebody we would call a mystic. Thank you, Barry, excellent.

Q: Are we like Zoroastrians, what are Zoroastrians?

A: Zoroastrianism, something I will note, not in this course, talking in a course I give on Jewish history, Zoroastrianism is a Persian religion of origin that goes back a long time, goes back to the period you might think somewhere around Mordecai and Esther, which basically believed in two forces in the world, the force of the God of good, the force of the God of bad, and worshipped fire. Fire was, if you like, the way of communicating with God. Now, Zoroastrianism was just one of many different religions in the Persian Empire, it was only towards the end of the Persian Empire during the Sasanid dynasties that it became the religion of this Persian Empire. And as it grew power, as with Christians getting power, they began to persecute the Jews 'cause they didn’t like the Jews who didn’t agree with them. And there’s reference in the Talmud to the Zoroastrians forbidding the Jews to light candles in their home or fire in their home because they could only do it in the temple and problems with them. But by and large, they died out, they were no longer the main problem. At that stage, if you want to talk about a problem, the problem came with Christianity because it harnessed the energy of the Roman Empire to persecute Jews and therefore turned into a much greater thrust. But Zoroastrianism now is no longer significant, although there are still Zoroastrianisms. And in many respects, the Baha'i faith has absorbed a large number of the remnant of Zoroastrian religion.

Q: Mark Tanaman, “Can you recommend a book or two that reviews the essence of your presentation for the modern reader?”

A: That’s very good, Mark. I’ll have to think about it because the truth of the matter is that most explanations I’ve come across I find very disappointing. But there are, there are some books. If you give me your email, I’ll give you a list of books that I recommend. Email me at jeremyrosen@msn.com and I’ll do my best.

Q: Marian asks, “Is it humans, whoever they are, that are making decisions, opinions, new rituals?”

A: Yes, it is, indeed. But they are going back to the constitution, in the same way now, the Supreme Court makes decisions going back, as they see, it to the constitution. They are divided between the originalists who want to take, how did we understand it at the time, how did they understand it at the time, and the evolutionists who say, but how should we understand it now? So in every legal system, there is a progression from the original to the development which is made by humans. And not only that, but the Talmud actually records cases where they say God intervened in a debate between the rabbis and the rabbis replied, God, stay out of this. You gave us the original, now it’s up to us. So it’s we who make the decisions, not God anymore. That’s an example of midrash, but it’s mentioned in the Talmud and shows that the rabbis were conscious of the fact that they were the guardians and those who had to protect and advance the text.

Q: David says, “It says in Exodus that whoever touches the mount shall surely be put to death. How is a mountain defined, does it include the foothills leading to Mount Sinai?”

A: Well, in one of the versions, the first version of the Ten Commandments as given in the Torah, it says fence off the mountain so that people wouldn’t come up. So the Torah explicitly says they fenced it off. They didn’t want people running up to see, well, what’s really there, is there anything up there? But the Torah also said, as they were standing there, they were so terrified by the sounds and the lightning and the thunder that, although it seems that the intention was to declare the Ten Commandments to everybody, in the end, they said, according to the text, no, Moses, you go and speak to God and then come and tell us 'cause frankly, we’re not up to it. Progressive religious Judaism does take Torah, particularly the moral laws, very seriously in approaching human conflict today, moral laws very seriously. Well, Reva, you know, I don’t think they do, they might use it as a basis to begin with, but in many ways, they disagree with some of what we would call moral laws. But nevertheless, nevertheless, once you begin to pick and choose what you do keep and what you don’t keep, then it becomes a free-for-all. And the disadvantage of that is, as you know, that in many progressive synagogues, they have such differences and they range in what goes on in them that they lack the cohesion that you have in a traditional synagogue where you know, if you’re going to pray, everybody’s praying with the same text, you might not like it, you might not like the words, you might not want to interpret them, you might want to add your own, if you like, which, of course, you can do. But the fact is that, once you, if you like, you dispense with the cohesion of the constitution, you no longer have that unification that you should have.

The truth is, you have disagreement very much within the orthodox world between the different Hasidic sects, between orthodox and modern orthodox, scientific orthodox, all kinds of things. But the one thing that they all have in common, however much they disagree and however much they’re dressed differently, is they all have, they all keep Shabbat in the same way, they all have the same basic structure. And so that’s a big advantage. I’m all in favour of people choosing. I’m all in favour of being, if you want to be reformed, you want to be conservative, you want to be reconstructionist, you should be what works for you. But there is an advantage to having cohesion, which is why I respect the cohesion of the Torah and do not venture when there is, if you like, when I feel like it, putting it simply.

Q: Mark, “You mentioned woke ideology. Can you find what is about wokeness that is thought of negatively? If wokeness means becoming aware of this, that, and the other, how can that be negative?”

A: Oh, no, I agree, but unfortunately, wokeness has become a term like political correctness in which you use it as a weapon, it has become weaponized. And so you have this in education going one way and then the other way, when you try to impose one ideology too much, the other one reacts back. And so I understand wokeness not as sensitivity to the feelings of other people. Not, I don’t understand wokeness as being, not trying to recognise what evil has been done and put it right. That is not wokeness to me. Wokeness to me means trying to impose your version of history on everybody else’s version of history or your version of what is right on everybody else’s version of what is right. It’s the way it has been used that upsets me, not the fundamental idea behind it. In the same way, I don’t like the fact that we are in a world in which, if you like, people are saying Black lives matter, Asian lives matter, Jewish lives matter, all lives matter. But we should campaign, just as much as we should campaign against antisemitism, we should campaign against any form of racism, any form of distinction based on skin or background. And where there have been discrimination in the past, we must do something to improve it. I don’t think that we can agree on how we should do that, but at least we should debate about that.

Q: Linda, “When do the Torah that’s in our synagogue today become fixed and not changeable?”

A: It was fixed by the Masoretic texts. The Masoretic text was produced by scholars in Tiberias in roundabout the year 900, 900 to 100, this was appeared of the Masoretic text. But I want to say that the variation between the Masoretic text and earlier text is minute. It really is minute. There are odd words here, odd words there. There’s a difference in how some words were written with big and some with small. So there are very few variations. And even with something going back to the text of the Samaritans, which they claim goes back to 800 before the common era, the time of the Assyrian exile of the Northern Kingdom, even then the changes, and there are, are not that significant.

Q: Gaines, “How could the ultra orthodox explain their belief of the Torah coming to Moses when it describes the met death of Moses? I really don’t understand what the problem is, you mean, if he gave it all, how come his death is mentioned?”

A: Well, the Torah, the Talmud answers this in two ways. The Talmud says, the last 12 lines of the Torah, which were written about Moses’ death, were written by Joshua. The other version is to say they were written by Moses, dictated by God, with tears running down his cheeks as he was writing about his own death. So in a sense, they were aware that this was a problem and they tried to find an answer to the problem that would satisfy them.

Tovah, “Polarisation is tying people up to the extent that they rebel and throw everything off. Baby with the bathwater, so upsetting,” you are so right. And not only polarisation, but compulsion, being forced. The involvement of state with religion I find also drives people off. And that’s why actually, in some respects, the mood in parts of Israel is much more anti-religious than it is in the diaspora. The diaspora, by and large, is assimilating, leave me alone, I don’t care about, I’m not bothered with it, it’s not me. In Israel, it’s, I hate this, this is getting in my face, I can’t stand it, I want to get away from it. And so I agree that it is very, very dangerous. Having said that, the case for the defence is, but look how the orthodox world is expanding and it’s surviving, whereas everybody else, in a sense, is assimilating. Maybe not all in one go, maybe not all to the same extent. But yes, this is a problem and polarisation is a problem, look what’s happening in Israel over the reforming of the Supreme Court. This is polarisation in another form because in every country, even in America, we’re not happy with every aspect of the Supreme Court. So in Israel, we’re not very happy about it, why shouldn’t each country make its own decision? But, you know, these things bring anger out into the street of demonstration. And that’s the weakness, in a way, of the democratic system. But it’s also its strength because a new guy can come back next time, there will be a new government, and they can reverse it.

Robert Turn says, “I visited the Sinai with Aluf Dayan in 1970s, rode a camel halfway up, hiked the rest of the peak. German woman was in meditation there because she said, go ask if to do so to bring Israelis peace.” Well, hasn’t got any yet, nice thought, I pray for peace every day, but God’s not listening to me on that one yet. “Only way to bring peace is by giving Palestinians the nation of Gaza and Northern Sinai, a two-state solution, but no one giving Judea and Samaria outside of Israel.” Well, first of all, at this moment, Robert, nobody can agree. if only there was some form of agreement, of course I want a solution, of course I’d like to see the Palestinians in a state of their own, but I can’t see anybody agreeing to it. And they won’t agree to it at this moment, for example, they’re insisting that all Palestinian refugees should come back, and not just come back to the Palestinian area, but to every area. So I know realistically, there’s not going to be peace in our time because the gangs are so strong on both sides. The support for getting rid of Israel is so strong on that side that, of course, we have to defend ourselves against enemies, and that means being tough on people who threaten us. And the strength on the other side is that there is a need for a Jewish state or that Israel is an important contributor to so many aspects of the modern world that it has a right to exist on its own, so I love it, but I can’t see it.

“Honour parents is conditional, you don’t honour an abusive parent,” ah, Esther, you are stepping into a debate in the Talmud as to how far respect for one parent go. But the law is, if your parents tell you to break the law, you don’t listen to them. And if your parent is abusive, you can stay away from them. The only thing that you might have to do is, if they’re in a state of desperation and need support, you might have an obligation to help them, it doesn’t mean necessarily to live with you, but just make sure they’re taken care of. But there’s a good example of where the oral law interprets the written law, which says honour your father or respect your father or fear your father and mother and says, no, you don’t if they’re telling you to be a bad person. Swiss theologian Karl Barth, great man, says when he reads the Bible, he isn’t actually listening to the word of God, but he’s listening for the word of God. Nice idea, nice idea, it’s another one to add to the various options. I happen to feel actually something spiritual within the text and therefore, I treat the text, as I said to you before, as if God is speaking to me, so to speak.

Lawrence, “Writing down the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone was a clever stunt. More impressive would’ve been coming down the mountain with the Lord’s print on sheets of plastic. That would’ve been a real miracle.” Ah, yes, but that it would’ve screwed up the environment, wouldn’t it? At least stone isn’t destroying everything the way plastic is. Graham, “How could Moses have read the Torah to Aaron, et cetera, tells, for example, that the sons of Aaron would be killed for making bad sacrifice, they should have known not to do it.” Well, you’ve got two things there. First of all, he doesn’t say he read the Torah, it says he taught the Torah, and there were certain things he didn’t teach. You could argue, and again, the oral law argues that the two sons of Aaron took the law into their own hands. They thought they could do something that they shouldn’t have done and they were taught a lesson.

Q: Michael says, “While customs,” by the way, I don’t mind going on to the end if you don’t mind listening a bit longer, but anyway, “How could, while customs, minhag, may differ between people and may change over time, is one obligated or obliged to change a custom after it’s been approved? If conservative movement just ruled Ashkenazi may eat kitniyot, are conservative Jews obliged to eat kitniyot? Also, if it’s been approved that women may be included part of a , is it obliged that they be included?”

A: Well, if they are, I suppose you could say members of the conservative movement, then I suppose they should listen to what their rabbis tell them to do. And if the rabbis say they could, they could. It’s true, there are some people even in the orthodox world who say that kitniyot is an example of a custom that doesn’t need to be maintained, but still, the tradition is, we’ve maintained it for so long, we might have maintained it a little bit longer. But in general, I think people choose what customs, I don’t choose to wear a fur hat on my head on Shabbat or at other times in the year. I don’t choose to wear my tzitzit on the outside, I prefer to keep them on the inside. So we all do choose customs that we want to adhere to and others we don’t. Origin of angels’ names in the book of Enoch. Yes, Enoch is a book of, one of the books of what are either known as the apocrypha or books that were found amongst the Dead Seas Sects. And they’re very keen on angels, there’s some reference to angels in the Bible, of course, but in the Bible, angels tend to be Malachi, which are messengers, another word for messenger, a human being who is, shall we say, carrying out the instructions or playing a part in the instructions of God being seen through to the end. But angels that are then and they become so much part of the mystical tradition with an angel for this and an angel for that. And they just, they’re the weak and one thing and another, this is a much later arrival, again, gutting an impetus, partially, partially from the Talmud, which have a limited number of angels. But by the time you come to the Kabbalah, you have hundreds of them.

Q: Shelly, “What about the ideas that the Avot kept the Torah before it was given on Sinai, how is it possible?”

A: Well, of course it’s not possible if you take it literally. First of all, you can’t say that everybody kept all the laws of the Torah at any stage, because the fact is that one third of the laws of the Torah only apply in a temple. Another third of the laws of Torah only apply to purity and impurity and other things that happen. Another 50% apply to agricultural laws, very few of which land, some in the land of Israel and some outside. The numbers of laws that actually apply to us are very few, and even about those, some only apply to a murderer, if you’re a murderer, or an adulterer or some of these other things. So, you know, you can’t say keeping all, what you can say is keeping the spirit of being a good person who tries to be a spiritual person as well, and I think that is what is meant when people originally said the Avot kept the whole of the Torah or that the Torah was there before the world was created, it was saying that humanity needs a structure and this is the structure and they were morally within that ambit.

Jennifer, “Zachor seems more personal than shamor, as if we are motivated out of love of God, remembering on what’s so important, shamor seems rooted in the commandments themselves.” Yes, absolutely, and they are both necessary.

And thank you for making that point on which we will end for today. Thank you, everybody. Hodesh tov.