I remember my first encounter with the Babylonian Talmud (BT) as a seminary student. It was during my second semester studying at a Protestant seminary in Berlin, with one semester of biblical Hebrew under my belt. A doctoral student taught a course on pereq heleq , the eleventh chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin that bundles the plenitude of messianic speculations and ideas of the rabbinic cross-generational and transgeographic collective into one long exposition. The didactic purpose of that course had been to explore the Jewish messianic expectations that supposedly produced Jesus of Nazareth, son of David, the anointed one.

At that time, I approached the talmudic text as a believer, as someone searching not just for historical knowledge, or merely out of crosscultural curiosity, but as someone who wanted to understand how the tradition I had grown up with (German Congregational Protestantism) could come to believe that this man from the hinterland region of the Galilee was the messiah, and even the son of God. Somewhere in those texts there had to be a secret that waited to be unlocked.

To this day, I am grappling with understanding the magic attraction that the talmudic text exerted on me in that first encounter. I have long since given up on the Christian myth, but my love of the talmudic text and, to a certain degree, even my naïve passion as a believer remain. And as with any magic — which is to say irrational or transrational attraction — it cannot be grasped in its totality lest it lose its hold.

But surely one aspect would be this: the willingness of the text to remain incomplete, to forsake authority, to leave the final word unsaid; and the insistence of the text that no one, neither Rabbi Akiva, nor Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nassi, nor Rav Ashi, and certainly no one of us — so many centuries later — will have the final word. And none of them, certainly not in pereq heleq , was granted the aspiration to or satisfaction of a magnum opus that says it all, not a City of God , no “life,” or “confession.” The truth does not abide with someone, with any one person; it is born from the principled discussion between two or more people. It is born from keeping the discussion going, restaging it. And this intuitive perception of the talmudic rhetoric, I experience as profoundly liberating. The Talmud gave me disagreement, dispute, and conversation where early Christian theologians gave me dogmatic claims to the truth.

Somewhere in that long eleventh chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin, the talmudic text records (or constructs) the following dispute about redemption between Rav and Shmuel, the earliest Babylonian inheritors (or promoters) of the Mishnah; one is from Sura, the other from Nehardea.

Rav said: All the predestined dates [for redemption] have passed, and the matter [now] depends only on repentance and good deeds. But Samuel maintained: it is sufficient for a mourner to keep his [period of] mourning. —BT Sanhedrin 97b

Here are two statements that express diametrically opposed views of the way of the world. Freely translating the language of redemption, ge’ulah , the Talmud remains committed to: either it matters what we do (repentance and good deeds), or it does not matter what we do (redemption will come about by itself, without human effort). In my first encounter with this passage, as a good Protestant seminary student, this dispute resonated deeply although not yet clearly, and I could easily read it as being born from profound theological sensibilities, potentially irreconcilable ones as we shall see in a minute.

But first this: the talmudic text, instead of lending authority to either Rav or Shmuel, proceeds to throw its weight behind the legitimacy of the disagreement itself, by underwriting it with an earlier, potentially more authoritative dispute, of which we will cite only a part.

A tradition from the time of the Mishnah taught:

Rabbi Eliezer said: “If Israel repent, they will be redeemed, as it is written, ‘Return, you backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings’ (Jeremiah 3:22).” R. Joshua said to him: “But is it not written, ‘you have sold yourselves for nothing; and you shall be redeemed without money’? (Isaiah 52:3).” Meaning, you have sold yourselves for nothing, for idolatry; and you shall be redeemed without money — without repentance and good deeds.

The Talmud offers as proof an earlier tradition in which two sages again dispute whether human effort (as in repentance) will make a difference. For one (Rabbi Eliezer) it absolutely does: redemption is linked to repentance — the state of the world to human behavior — and he cites the biblical verse to prove it: God responds to human action rather than following God’s own design. For the other (Rabbi Yehoshua) it does not: redemption will come about but it will come about regardless of human behavior. He also has the biblical verse to back up his position. The citation of biblical verses adds another dynamic to the dispute: not only do the sages themselves differ, but so does the Tanakh, or at least the biblical prophets, as to the significance of human action. Therein is the dispute anchored. Subsequently, the dispute evolves as a contest over biblical verses, with both sages volleying individual verses:

Rabbi Eliezer retorted to Rabbi Joshua: “But is it not written, ‘Return unto me, and I will return unto you’ (Malachi 3:7)”?  Rabbi Joshua rejoined: “But is it not written, ‘For I am master over you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion’ (Jeremiah 3:14)”? Rabbi Eliezer replied: “But it is written, ‘in returning and rest shall ye be saved’ (Isaiah 30:15)”!  Rabbi Joshua replied: “But is it not written, ‘Thus says the Lord, The Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to him whom man despises, to him whom the nations abhor, to a servant of rulers: Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship’ (Isaiah 49:7)”? Rabbi Eliezer countered: “But is it not written, ‘if thou wilt return, O Israel, says the Lord, return unto me’ (Jeremiah 4:1)”? Rabbi Joshua answered, “But it is elsewhere written, ‘And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and swore by him that lives forever that it shall be for a time, two times and a half, and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished’ (Daniel 12:7).” At this, Rabbi Eliezer remained silent.

This, then, is where we have been led: we enter the fundamental dispute through the conversation between the later Babylonian sages (Rav and Shmuel); and we are guided to the earlier dispute between the Galilean sages Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eliezer who negotiate the message of the prophetic literature in the dispute. The dispute appears as one that is multilayered text- and chronology-wise, and it appears open-ended in a circular way, since even though Rabbi Eliezer, our proponent of the importance of ethics, loses in the contest over biblical verses, the later Babylonian sages continue to disagree. The text turns us and turns us again, as we seek to find everything within it.

Emerging from this guided path through the never ending yet principled dispute, a resonance emerges more clearly. The debate between our two positions on the question of redemption starts to appear as one between Judaism and Christianity in toto . Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eliezer echo Paul’s dyad of faith versus works. Is it “faith” and faith alone — in Rabbi Joshua’s terms above, “you shall be redeemed without (good) works” — that will bring about one’s salvation (to use the term more familiar in Christian rhetoric)? Or, is it works, in this context, repentance? Rabbi Joshua appears in disguise as Paul, who argues vigorously and radically on behalf of faith, while Rabbi Eliezer upholds one of the deepest sensibilities underlying rabbinic Judaism (and to a certain degree, of course, the Torah), namely, the belief in the ultimate significance of good deeds and the moral fabric of the universe.

Cast in this light, the talmudic text appears as the condensation of a dispute that remains open even to this day, which more often than not we enter from a very different angle, but which the Talmud anchors in the deep folds of our textual heritage. Turning difference into discussion and debate that is to be carried on ad infinitum is one of the great gifts of the Talmud to our culture. After studying the talmudic exclusionary mechanisms (above all the principled exclusion of women) and its implicit dogmatics in all too many contexts, this profound humility of the Talmud in shaping the production of knowledge, of Torah, and ultimately of wisdom continues to exert its lasting hold on me.

The Talmud teaches that whenever the sage Abaye saw a young scholar finishing a tractate, he would make a festive meal for his students ( B. Shabbat 118b-119a). That meal was eventually designated a seudat mitzvah , a festive meal that marks the completion of a commandment. And the celebration marking the conclusion of studying a talmudic tractate has come to be known as a “ siyyum ,” a completion. A siyyum traditionally consists of a study session about the tractate, the reading of the last lines of the tractate, and the recitation of two special passages: the hadran and the kaddish de-ithadita , “the kaddish of renewal.” It concludes with a seudat mitzvah .

While it is striking that learning is an event to be marked with study, communal prayer, food, and drink, equally striking is what kind of study we usually celebrate — Talmud. We rejoice over the mastery of the central book of our oral tradition, a book that teaches us how to understand and live our written tradition, the Bible, the Tanakh.

When Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the 20th-century rabbinic authority for American Orthodox Jewry, was asked whether a meal marking the conclusion of studying a book of Tanakh could also be considered a seudat mitzvah , he responded that it could as long as the book was studied in depth along with authoritative commentary, and in a group setting over a significant amount of time.

Rabbi Feinstein’s comments are instructive. They point us to the idea that while a siyyum is a celebration of reading, it is a celebration of reading “Jewishly.” It is a celebration of reading in community and through the lens of our tradition. A siyyum marks not only the accomplishment of prolonged and in depth study, but also the engagement in the layers of commentary that make up our oral Torah. The siyyum teaches us that our own ideas are insufficient; we also need our interpretive tradition.

And yet as we engage the words of the past, we are bringing our current lives into the process, shaping the past through our study. This multivocal element of learning is ritualized in the hadran passage, which begins with the words, “ hadran alakh maskehet ‘x’ ve-hadrakh alan. ” “We return to you tractate ‘x’ and you return to us.” However, a more accurate translation is: “Our glory on you tractate ‘x’ and your glory on us.” The passage teaches us that as much as the Talmud has the power to glorify and beautify us, we also have the power to glorify and beautify the Talmud. This is a two-way process, where we shed light on one another. This dual conversation is essential to maintaining community and a living interpretive tradition.

Because a siyyum celebrates such deep engagement with our ongoing interpretive tradition, should we widen our conception of which books are appropriate to celebrate through a festive meal? Should we include the study of the Eish Kodesh , the teachings of the Warsaw ghetto rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira? What about the study of the book of Exodus along with Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Particulars of Rapture ? What about Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization ?

The ritual of siyyum challenges us to consider which books are so central to Jewish life that we should mark their study with a seudat mitzvah . It asks us to open ourselves to our tradition, to realize that these words — old and new — can enrich us now. It asks us to not take studying lightly, but to realize that reading is a Jewish communal process. By telling us to learn and eat and drink together, the siyyum teaches us that reading our books sustains our very lives.

Lots of people who don’t know Spanish have read Don Quixote; lots of people who don’t know Russian have read Anna Karenina. How did they do it?

The answer, of course, is that they didn’t. What they read was a book written by Edith Grossman or, l’havdil, Constance Garnett. But nobody ever talks about having read the new novel by Edith Grossman. Translators who stand in between the novelists and their English-speaking readers have, quite successfully, managed to disappear. You are reading a novel about Russians but, amazingly, all of the characters are speaking English.

Synagogues are full of Jews who argue about what “the Torah” is saying when they are really arguing with Rabbi Hertz, or some other translator/commentator. For the majority of us, “the Torah” is not what’s written in the scroll but whatever English translation happens to be available at our seats. We rarely ask whether we can trust the translators; mostly we forget about them.

As the creator, translator, and editor of The Commentators’ Bible series, I try to hide in plain sight. As a translator, I am not merely standing between Torah and its English-speaking readers; I’m also standing between those readers and the eleven commentators who are trying to be only slightly less transparent.

The commentator’s personality will determine his relationship to the text. Some commentators would like nothing better than to stand one step in back of the readers, gently guiding them with a hand on the back when the path through the text before them is not clear. Others hold up a large flag and a bullhorn, through which they can shout, “Follow me!” No offense to him, but Abraham Ibn Ezra strikes me as being this kind of commentator. He is the star of his own commentary. He will indulge in long explanations about astronomy (Leviticus 25:30) or explain with glee how he completely stymied a “Sadducee” (that is, a Karaite) who spent a month arguing with him about a point of tradition that the sages had long ago settled (Leviticus 7:20 in Hebrew editions, 7:23 and 7:26 in my edition).

At the other extreme, Rashi displays a much milder persona. My presumption is that this reflects his real personality, just as Ibn Ezra’s excitability reflects his. When Ibn Ezra intrudes between the reader and the Torah, his voice is obvious. But Rashi’s quiet presence has spoken much louder over the centuries than Ibn Ezra’s noise.

The commentators in The Commentators’ Bible wrote in Hebrew about a Hebrew text; I had to insinuate myself in such a way that the commentator could write in English about a text his readers would primarily encounter in English translation.

With regard to the Torah itself, the way to make the translation vanish was, paradoxically, to make it more visible. This I did by including two English translations, rather than one, and by having the commentators criticize one or both translations when necessary. This forces readers to be aware that it’s the Hebrew text that is Torah, not the English. (Visit shma.com for an example.)

Standing in between the readers and the commentators is trickier. It involves a certain amount of mimicry and quite a lot of chutzpah . As the English-language literary agent of Nahmanides, I have often had to tell him, “Interesting! But the readers I’m introducing to you aren’t ready to learn that.” The commentators in The Commentators’ Bible , therefore, are not the commentators themselves — they are being impersonated by me, just as Cervantes was impersonated by Edith Grossman.

Stated baldly, this sounds outrageous. So it’s worth remembering that the prophets, too, (according to Ibn Ezra and Abarbanel) were not simply channeling God’s message, but rather impersonating Him. The medium shapes the message, and that is as true for Torah as for anything else.

Click here to read a sample page of his commentary.

The crisis in American housing and financial markets started in February 2007 when a number of large mortgage lenders began reporting unexpectedly large losses on their portfolios of subprime mortgages, or securities backed by subprime mortgages. In human terms, this means that families were, and still are, unable to make the monthly payments on these mortgages. As they defaulted, the lenders foreclosed, and the families lost their homes. Since August 2007, the federal government has been working with private lenders to help these families stay in their homes in two ways: first, to enable homeowners to refinance their subprime loan into a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration that carries more favorable terms; and second, to encourage lenders to engage in “loss mitigation” — modifying the payments on the mortgage for a period of time, or modifying the loan itself so that the homeowner owes a smaller amount or has a lower interest rate.

A common theme in these efforts and in other proposals and public discussion generally, has been to make sure that only the “deserving” are receiving help. There is an effort to distinguish the family that is trying to make its mortgage payment but has run into problems beyond its control — a decline in property values, loss of a job, or illness — from the family that never had any particular intention of making payments on the mortgage.   This draws on a distinction in social welfare policy between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor,” reinforced by the concern of families who are paying both their taxes and their mortgages that their taxes should not go to help people who are not trying to help themselves and should never have bought a home in the first place.

This effort to identify the deserving is futile and counterproductive, for two reasons. First and more fundamentally, we do not know the intentions of these families; we cannot know what they were thinking when they bought the house two or three years earlier. As private citizens, we may be able to offer an informed judgment about the motivation of people we know well, but the government cannot and should not make these judgments; both arbitrary rules and discretionary decisions can be too easily abused. Consider a lower-income family hoping to buy a home for the first time: the terms of the transaction may indicate, especially after the fact, that the family may not to be able to make the payments over the duration of the loan; but the family itself may have relatives or friends who bought homes under similar terms a year or two earlier and the brother-in-law or the coworker is doing fine and the value of the home is rising. Is this family’s decision to buy a home, with a subprime mortgage, motivated by a desire to improve its economic position, or by greed — by good or bad intentions? Who can know?

This hypothetical example leads to the second reason. The process of buying a home, and still more the process of taking out a mortgage, is very complicated, and often bewildering to first-time buyers. People often fail to fully understand their commitments and the consequences of those decisions. (Indeed, a friend with experience in the mortgage business comments that lenders themselves often did not understand the loans they were making, but that is a different matter.) This is especially true for some of the new types of mortgage instruments that developed in recent years. One of the most common such subprime mortgages is the “2/28” — a 30-year loan with a very low interest rate for the first two years, which then adjusts according to rates in the prevailing mortgage market. These adjustments can be steep. A young man of my acquaintance bought a condo with such a mortgage: for the first two years, his mortgage rate was three percent; then it suddenly rose to nine and a half percent, and since then it has changed every month. The market rate over these years has been about six percent. He attempted to refinance into a market-rate loan, but the lender would not let him do so until he had paid the nine and a half percent rate for at least one year.

It can be argued that the young man got a “deal” for two years and has no real grounds for complaint: three percent for two years and nine and a half percent for one year is cheaper than six percent for three years. But the lender never explained the loan to the young man, and he didn’t know how to read the loan documents or what questions to ask. Such actions by a lender can be considered one type of predatory lending: if the lender does not fully explain the loan, the borrower cannot make an informed decision. Is this young man “deserving”? To my mind, yes; others may simply feel he should have known better. How does a federal government program decide the question?

Attempting to pass retrospective judgment on people’s motivations — the motivations of literally millions of people — is a moral and practical mistake. It is far better to base the decision as to who deserves help on the basis of objective information: the current financial situation of the homeowner and their efforts to meet their financial obligations. The determination of “deserving” should be left to a higher authority.

For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Rutgers
University Press, 2007, 164 pages, $22.95

Torah Queeries: Reading the Bible Through a Bent Lens, edited by David Shneer, Joshua Lesser, and Gregg Drinkwater; preface by Judith Plaskow, New York, New York
University Press, 2009

Reviewed by Mara Benjamin

When the Bible enters public discourse in the United States, it usually does so in the abbreviated form of the prooftext. Prooftexts are a dense form of communication; they import a biblical verse or passage into otherwise ordinary speech and thereby immediately conjure a shared set of cultural and literary references. In just a few words, a prooftext can transform our biblical textual heritage. The effect can be breathtaking. Recall Martin Luther King Jr.’s August 28, 1963, speech: after imagining “the sons of former slaves sitting down with the sons of former slave owners at the table of brotherhood” and a world in which his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King spoke the words of the prophet Isaiah: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” The power of the prophet’s words in King’s speech lay in the awesome chutzpah of calling forth the prophet’s vision and asking us to imagine that we could realize it.

But all too often, both public discourse and the Bible have been degraded when the prooftext is used as a rhetorical device. The prooftext can act as mere pious flourish; at worst, it can replace sustained thought and inquiry into the ambiguous, complex, and contradictory nature both of our world and of the biblical text. We who have survived the rapid ascent in recent decades of the Christian religious right (and the renunciation of religious discourse by the left), know all too well the dangers of a superficial encounter with the Bible. And yet we may shudder when contemplating the results of a deeper encounter with what can be a terrifying text. Perhaps, we think, the Bible is best locked up in the sober carrels of academe.

Three recent books, For the Love of God, Torah Queeries , and Whose Torah? , ask us to think again. Each offers a political, critical, and deeply personal engagement with Torah. Of the three authors, Alpert, who once proposed the “religious left” as an explicit counter to the religious right, focuses most explicitly on contemporary politics. She seeks to define a nuanced role for biblical and rabbinic texts in the political life of modern Jews. In this effort, Jewish textual sources appear as a set of underappreciated and valuable resources for modern political engagement. Talmudic and medieval concepts of abortion, for instance, suggest new possibilities for a “religious” take on this fraught political issue. But Alpert does not accept these sources as prima facie authoritative. In each case she considers, texts cannot speak for themselves; texts only speak when readers give voice and meaning to them. “Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20) forms the backbone of Alpert’s approach to contemporary public social and political life, but she recognizes that even this seemingly self-explanatory injunction yields a multiplicity of meanings.

Some of the most inspiring contemporary interpreters of Torah are those who return to it from a compulsion at once aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical. For the Love of God and Torah Queeries invite readers to bring precisely this unaccountable desire into the open — onto the page and into our public discourse. The diverse group of scholars and rabbis who have contributed to Torah Queeries ask us to bring the whole of our selves — our imaginations, bodies, and senses — to Torah. They collectively demonstrate that every parashah (Torah portion) can speak to us as embodied, conflicted, desiring selves and as cognitive individuals. Ostriker, uniformly elegant in word and thought, shows us a Bible that mirrors but also refracts our world and ourselves, bringing the disparate ends of ourselves together. Its texts speak to “our longing for a divinity we can love without fear” (page 31), to our inkling that eros and justice are interconnected, and to our contradictory and inexplicable selves.

The authors of and contributors to these volumes know that they walk a hermeneutic tightrope. Torah, they contend, is a profoundly complex text, yet at the same time it is “not in heaven”; we need it in order to make a just world. What these works suggest is that success in walking this tightrope occurs in moments of interpretive grace. With enough effort and courage — and with models like these — we may eventually enjoy a discourse with and about the Bible that goes beyond prooftexts.