“I think there is something about Jewish unity that attracts people,” said Rabbi David Fine of Lake Park Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation on Milwaukee’s east side. Judging by the number of people who heard him say that Sunday at the final program of the community-wide Day of Discovery, Fine could well be right.
About 200 people, according to staff of the Harry & Rose Samson Jewish Community Center, crowded into the JCC’s community hall to hear Fine, Reform Rabbi Marc Berkson of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun and Conservative Rabbi Paul Kerbel of Congregation Beth Israel discuss one of the most potentially controversial topics possible: “Differing Views of the Authorship of the Torah.”
All three speakers acknowledged that it is rare today for rabbis of Orthodox and non-Orthodox movements to meet and discuss such topics in public. “There are few places in the world where this could happen,” Fine told The Chronicle afterward.
All three were open and clear about what they believed and the profound differences between their beliefs. Yet they also insisted that they were not having a “debate,” but rather a presentation and a discussion.
“What you see,” said Fine, “is not confrontation, but passion. There will be some disagreements, even vehement ones. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t respect each other as human beings and as rabbis.”
And when Fine said, “At the end of the day, there is more that we agree about than disagree about,” the audience spontaneously applauded. It also applauded when he suggested the possibility of doing something similar in the future.
Fine opened the discussion by presenting an Orthodox view. “If we believe that God wrote the whole Torah, we will act as a Jew differently than if we believe that people wrote it,” he said.
Fine set himself in opposition to the “biblical criticism” that arose in the 19th century, which pointed out inconsistencies and contradictions in the Torah’s text and claimed this to be evidence of human authorship and editing. He said traditional Jewish commentators were well aware of these, but insisted that such passages existed to teach us lessons.
“Nothing I’ve read [about biblical criticism] has been able to lead me away from the traditional theory the Jewish people had for thousands of years” that the Torah was revealed by God to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, Fine said.
Berkson proposed a metaphorical understanding of revelation: That God and the Jewish people had a wedding at Sinai, and “The Torah is the ketubah [marriage contract]” and a gift embodying God’s love for the Jewish people.
But the Jewish sacred texts “are the product of human understanding of revelation,” Berkson continued. The Reform movement “moves the emphasis from the Divine to … the human response to God’s reality…. ‘God speaks’ becomes ‘humans understand.’”
His own response, he said, is that “I am involved in a love affair with God, with all my heart, soul and might.”
Kerbel said he believed that “Sinai happened” but “I don’t believe every single word [of the Torah] was given to Moses at Mount Sinai.”
Based on his studies of archeology, comparative literature and biblical criticism, he said he has to acknowledge that “the ancient Israelites did not live in a vacuum” and were influenced in their religious literature and practices by other peoples.
Nevertheless, “I can tell you that the Torah is our heritage” and “Torah is still holy to me and observance is still holy,” Kerbel said. The Torah “is the record of what God said and our attempt to write down what we thought God wanted from us…. The text is holy because it has been passed down to us.”
“Each denomination,” Kerbel concluded, “is a way of struggling with what God wants from us. All of us are trying to do our best…. It is up to God whether at the end of our days we receive reward or punishment.”
The discussion brought to a climax a day of Jewish learning that lasted from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was co-sponsored by the JCC; the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation; and the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis. Rabbis, teachers and volunteers from throughout the community offered 61 classes, workshops, lectures and demonstrations. Sylvia Bernstein and Fine served as co-chairs.
Dorene Paley, JCC community services director who co-staffed the event with Lis Shapiro of CJL, estimated that some 450 people attended the various classes and workshops through the day. Paley added that this was the second year such an event has been held and “we would love it to be an annual event.”
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