An Age-Old Question: From Midrash to Maimonides to Krochmal

The attempt to resolve the conflict between scholarly consensus on the origins of the Torah and the belief in “Torah from Sinai” constitutes a new reincarnation of the age-old conflict between faith and philosophy. The conflict lies between what is perceived to be the Torah’s authority—revelation and transmission—and the authority of intellect, culture, and science.

Mosaic Prophecy : Maimonides

At the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides presented this seemingly disturbing dilemma requiring the choice between philosophical validity or Torah truth. He then denied that such a dilemma existed, arguing that the contradiction stemmed from a misunderstanding of both Torah and philosophy, as well as from the erroneous assumption that the plain meaning of Scripture obligates us to abandon the science of the intellect and its insights.

In his discussion on the principles of faith,^[1] Maimonides—under the protective camouflage of a bevy of conservative statements asserting that every letter in the Torah is “Torah from Heaven”—explains that this phrase does not at all mean that God “spoke” to Moses. Only Moses himself, a prophet unlike any other, understood how the Torah had reached him, but in order to provide an explanation comprehensible to normal human beings, Moses opted to graphically describe the process as “speech.” That is to say, every verse beginning with “And God spoke to Moses,” not to mention every narrative depicting God speaking with the entire nation, serves only to proffer an image to the people. The true meaning of these is that the Torah that Moses wrote is divine.

In that same section, Maimonides clearly hints that Moses is the author of the Torah, its laws and stories, from his own mind and knowledge, by simultaneously claims that Moses is not merely a scribe, someone who according to the midrash transcribes the Torah as God dictates it verse by verse (see, for instance, Genesis Rabbah, 8:8), while at the same time declaring Moses to hold “the elevated role of a legislator.”

Torah Evolved: Nachman Krochmal

Under the influence of early biblical criticism, which blossomed in the generation following him as the Documentary Hypothesis, Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840), a spiritual successor of Maimonides, hinted that the Torah continued to evolve in the generation after Moses and was redacted by the prophet Samuel.

In his book, Guiding the Perplexed of the Modern Age [Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman], Krochmal redirects his attention from Moses and his singular greatness to the nation forming at that time, with the unique spiritual character (in his words, “the spiritual share”) at work in its development. In describing the wilderness generation, Krochmal transformed the biblical narrative regarding the miraculous exodus from Egypt and the Giving of the Torah at Sinai, with the following laconic statement:

When the “time of love” (Ezek 16:8) arrived, the counsel of the supernal directorate was [as follows]: Their departure to freedom with much wondrous might as is elucidated in the Torah… and similarly, God almighty strengthened and encouraged the bond of the people when He gave them in a most wondrous and exalted manner righteous and comprehensive teachings, rules, and laws that complete both the individual and the collective in the best way possible. ^[2]

Krochmal eschews not only the emphasis on overt miracles, he even clearly hints at the narrative in the book of Deuteronomy (4:5-14) which highlight not the events that took place at Mount Sinai, but the superior quality of the laws and commandments that Moses was called upon to teach them.

For both thinkers, these insights clearly fail to erode belief in the divinity of the Torah. On the contrary, these insights provide the conditions necessary for holding on to faith in an appropriate manner.

Revelation Filtered through Human Interpretation

Both guides for the perplexed followed an even older scholarly tradition. The midrash opines that different people hear the voice of divine revelation differently, consistent with their individual human abilities or “strengths.”^[3] Every depiction of the voice in the text, every segment of speech granted the reader, therefore represents an interpretation derived from his or her human ability to accommodate and apprehend it.

The Kabbalah taught that, in truth, the Torah is the self-revelation of God. Accordingly, all layers of meaning attributed to the Torah (the plain meaning, the homiletical one, and even the mystical one) merely serve as human vestments for the internal essence.^[4] Benjamin D. Sommer, a contemporary Bible scholar, points out that even the Elohist source of the Torah ostensibly understands revelation this way.^[5]

Paradoxically, the Torah’s divinity and the authority of the revelation are founded upon and strengthened by apprehending that the biblical text was written wholly by human beings. That is to say, the entire Torah is a product of human culture, spanning its generations and traditions, standing before God, formulating and reformulating what they regarded as words of the deity, crystallizing and developing what they understood to be the divine commandments and the Torah of life.

Franz Rosenzweig, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and readers of Bible in the twentieth century, knew this truth very well. He too considers the Bible, the Torah, to be the product of human development and redaction, of reading and writing, interpretation and creativity. For its readers, “the days of their lives” are what illuminate the sanctified text on their behalf. Some brief moments might briefly illuminate “through the human actions in the Bible that which is super-human…. And for the duration of one heartbeat, the Divine encapsulated in that human writing will be absolute and clear” for its readers.^[6]

This is Torah from Sinai; this is the Torah of life; this is the study of Torah, using the finest tools made available by scholarship and science–interpretation and tradition, love and awe.