On the Way Back Home
Today we are sailing the Amalfi Coast on the way back to Rome – and a train home after 30 days on the ship.
No text investigation today. I need some recovery time. But I will leave you with a few citations from Jewish scholars that should encourage you to think about things.
“ . . . the decision to maintain a relationship with the God of Israel is not based upon pure logic, but on unprovable beliefs.”[1]
“The modern scholar thinks that he must find religious answers to his critical questions by means of peshat exegesis. In contrast, the sages believed that answers to critical questions should be proposed by means of derash. Like the Karaites, critical biblical exegetes since Spinoza based their faith on peshat, while the critical exegetes among the sages based their faith on a tradition that is not dependent on the plain meaning of the biblical texts, and interpreted the texts in accordance with their accepted beliefs and opinions.”[2]
“Academic studies seek truth by means of knowledge discovered by human intelligence. The Torah, in contrast, recognizes the existence of a level of consciousness above the human intellect, and integrates knowledge gleaned by means of human intelligence with knowledge derived from God’s revelation to humankind.”[3]
“Is it possible to base a relationship on unprovable beliefs? The answer is quite simply and clearly affirmative. All relationships are based on subjective beliefs that cannot be proven. I love my wife because she is the prettiest, nicest, gentlest, and kindest of all women. No reasonable person would ask me to prove this. Similarly, the decision to maintain a relationship with the God of Israel is not based upon pure logic, but on unprovable beliefs. These beliefs often stem from personal identity, and they require a certain leap beyond logic, and are therefore called ‘leaps of faith.’ I pity the lonely person who does not make at least two such leaps in his life, into faith and love.”[4]
Topical Index: The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible
[1] Shawn Zelig Aster, “A Personal Perspective on Biblical History, the Authorship; of the Torah, and Belief in its Divine Origin,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Studies Press, 2019), p. 193.
[2] Yehuda Brandes, “The Sages as Bible Critics,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Series Press, 2019), p. 210.
[3] Shawn Zelig Aster, op. cit., p. 192.
[4] Ibid., p. 193.
🙂 In fact, whether the ground of understanding is in critical academic studies or in accordance with the sages’ accepted traditional beliefs and opinions— or even (as is most often true if we are honest) an integration of various means of human intelligence and reason and critical interpretation— a person’s knowledge of God becomes relational with respect to him/her only by means of God’s own work and act of self-revelation by (his) spirit with and to/for (our) spirit in an inter-relational communion of responsive faith.
For human beings, this is step beyond logic, a step ventured into the realm of spirit, wherein the processes necessary for apprehension do not and cannot depend exclusively on the ground of one’s physical existence as ordered matter in space and time, regardless of any presumed origin.