Bronze Age Mythology and the Search for Truth.

Arnie Eisen, Chancellor of JTS, has an article in (on? at?) The Huffington Post (which has a pretty interesting religion section actually). He waxes on about Har Sinai, I assume in a mythological way, though many of the commenters there seem to think he's a fundie and means it literally. But one comment caught my eye - that Bronze age mythology just isn't going to cut it nowadays. (To be precise, more like Late Bronze Age).

And when you think about it (or at least when I think about it), I have to agree. Eisen (and other LWMO and many Conservative types) seem to have no choice but to re-interpret the legends / myths of Judaism, to stay within the tradition. To be sure they don't take it literally, but the very fact that they are forced to have to re-use these old legends produces two significant problems. 1) Until relatively recently it seems very likely that the purveyors of these legends actually believed they were true, so it's not very authentic, and 2) it just seems incredibly contrived and fake.

Then you have the MO, who hold the bizarre position that all these myths are indeed myths, but yet they were written by God, because that's what people believed back then, and so God just had to go with the flow. Because of course, if God had told people that the world was millions of years old, they wouldn't have believed God. Or maybe their brains would have exploded, or something like that. Or if they had been told the world was round, they would have been afraid to stand up. For fear of falling over. So God had to write non true things in the Torah. Seriously, that's what these people hold.

But wait! There's more.

The intellifundies are fond of saying 'The Torah isn't a science book. It's only trying to teach you spiritual truths". Firstly, this is patently untrue, the first half of Breishis is full of etiological stories. And secondly, even if it was true, that's still not a good reason for the Torah to contain untrue stories. The again, you can't question God.

But it gets worse. Because if you follow this logically, you end up with Chazal believing the stories literally, though now we know they were myths, so it turns out that Chazal didn't even know Torah. But that's not a problem say the intellifundies, Chazal did know Torah, because Torah (back then) was mean to be understood literally, so therefore it turns out Chazal DID know peshat in Torah as they were supposed to! Amazing! It's only later that the peshat changed.

But when did the true peshat in Torah change? I guess about the same time it became obvious that none of it was true. At which point some Gedolim (e.g. Rav Kook) turned out to be real Gedolim, but the rest of them turned out to be idiots. Or maybe not idiots, but rather super smart Talmedei Chachomim, just that they don't know basic peshat in Torah.

But that's not a problem either see, because it's perfectly OK that all the world's Gedolim don't know peshat in Torah (and are also not so nice people). I mean it's a shame, but that's all.

And it's OK that Chazal knew nothing much about Science, or History, and it's OK that most of the stories in the Torah are not in fact true, (though let's not talk about Shemos or even Noach too much), and all this is not a problem. Not even when discussing life and death questions like brain death, because of course we all know that Chazal represent the will of God. Because errm, well just because. Or maybe because if they didn't, then OJ is total BS. And OJ can't be total BS because of the amazing history of the Jewish people. Or maybe OJ could be total BS, but we likes it anyway. Or maybe Chazal don't represent the will of God, we just pretend they do because that's what Orthodoxy is? Could be.

And anyway, we're helping otherwise religious people accept science and to some extent modern morality, so that must be a good thing, right? After all, we wouldn't want people to wake up to the fact that maybe their religion isn't true. That would be baaaaaaaad. I mean, just look at the Reform Jews! Actually, statistically speaking, religious fundies do indeed live happier lives. So in reality we're helping people have happier lives! Unless it makes them happy to believe in the Gedolim, in which case we're against that, because they don't hold of science.

So the bottom line is this (I think, H for Heteredox can you confirm). Of course it's all BS, but it's important to (pretend to) uphold the myth, because MO is (a) a good society and (b) much better than Chareidim or Reform. But we can't tell people we know it's a myth (except in secret), because then it all falls apart. Plus it's bad for our reputation.

Gosh. This search for truth is mamash exhausting. I think I need to go lie down.