‘A Torah of human rights’ – Judaism, genocide and interpreting the text

My book, Judaism, Education and Social Justice, is coming out in paperback in May. If you like the sound of a challenging, academic, philosophical read about faith, education and progressive politics, this is the book for you. It’s available here with a 20% discount if you pre-order – use code GLR AT5.

Here’s today’s extract. If it whets your appetite, please be in touch (I’d love to discuss!) and share with friends and colleagues.

Student rabbi Rachel* acknowledges a conflict between her conception of the essence of Judaism as a ‘Torah of human rights’ and the empirical observation that the Torah includes an injunction to commit genocide (e.g. Deuteronomy 7:1-5).

She reflects that she has ‘red lines where I think what Torah is and what Torah isn’t. Like to me, Torah doesn’t instigate violence.’

At the same time, she acknowledges that rabbinic tradition is a culture of controversy in which conflicting opinions are preserved. Citing a well-known talmudic discussion about a debate between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, she comments that while the text accepts both schools’ teachings as authentic ‘words of the living God’, it regards the school of Hillel’s legal rulings as authoritative or ‘true’.

She adds, ‘I think there’s something in … the way that I view Judaism is what I think is a true Judaism, the true Judaism, but yet everything else is authentic’. Rachel implies that ‘authentic’ traditions are those which are empirically part of Jewish literary culture, regardless of the truth value of their content, whereas ‘true’ Judaism is restricted to those aspects of the tradition which accord with certain theological or ethical criteria.

When asked how she ‘reads out’ those aspects of Torah which she considers to be ‘authentic’ but ‘untrue’ (i.e. they are in the text but do not accord with her conception of Judaism), she responds by talking about one of her teachers:

He’s got quite a specific understanding of God, but that he knows what God is, and what Torah is, and through that he knows that that can’t be part of Torah. As in the principles that he has, or that the Torah has, or that God is, which is love and justice and compassion … when you read the text through that you know it can’t be that.

While this statement implies that the truth of Torah is to be understood by filtering the text through a set of extrinsic criteria, Rachel muddies this position somewhat through a subsequent comment:

If there are two things that conflict in the Torah, and you’re stuck with them, you realise that one has to be the right way. So you just wrestle with it, basically, until you get to an understanding of it. So that’s what I feel, you know, Israel being the struggler with God, that kind of thing. It’s about testing what the red lines are as well, it’s a good exercise.

The suggestion here seems to be that the truth of Torah is to be worked out not through the prism of clear, extrinsic criteria but by struggling with the internal tensions between contradictory passages, all of which must be taken into account but only some of which will eventually be judged to be true, presumably on the basis of values and intuitions which emerge from the interpretive process.

*All names are pseudonyms.