An Open Letter to Professor Moshe Bernstein
Dr. James Kugel
Dear Moshe,
I was heartened to read your reflections in The Commentator on the
controversy surrounding my recent visit to Yeshiva University. Your
thoughtful tone and reasoned attempt to grapple with some of the issues
were most welcome. Still, you seem to have missed a major point about my
recent book, How to Read the Bible, so it might be worthwhile for me here
to try to set the record straight.
It was no doubt inevitable that How to Read the Bible appear to some
casual browsers as if it were urging them to adopt wholeheartedly the
approach and conclusions of modern biblical scholarship. But my book
actually took a very different position on the matter, specifically
insofar as Orthodox Judaism is concerned. That position ought to have been
obvious to any careful reader from the start (see, for example, page 46),
and certainly long before it was stated in the clearest terms in my last
chapter: "My own view, therefore - though others may disagree - is that
modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are and must always
remain completely irreconcilable... Nothing in the present volume is
intended to suggest otherwise" (p. 681).
If, nevertheless, I went to the trouble of writing a book that surveyed
the work of modern scholars in great detail, I did so for two reasons.
First, I wanted to show that their research was a serious undertaking, one
that could not be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Scholars still
disagree on many individual points, but the past century's intensive study
of nearly every aspect of the Tanakh has produced a surprising degree of
unanimity on basic issues - a unanimity that is quite at odds with some of
Judaism's most basic tenets. At the same time, however, I tried to show
that all this research was itself predicated on, and motivated by, a
mistaken assumption, that by separating the biblical text from its great
traditions of interpretation (and the set of four basic assumptions that
stand behind them), Scripture would somehow be "purified" and some
pristine, unsullied Bible would emerge. As I showed in chapter after
chapter (this was not a particularly subtle point), the interpretations
that modern scholars have come up with leave them with a rather
un-biblical Bible, one that is hardly suited for the role that it had
played in the past in both Judaism and Christianity. It is precisely to
this dilemma - the fact that modern biblical scholarship's arguments are
indeed the result of careful, scientific research, but that those
arguments, indeed, the whole approach of modern scholarship, have only
served to undermine the Bible's traditional standing and role - that my
book is addressed.
How to Read the Bible was not merely a presentation of the problem,
however, but an attempt to articulate, in broad outline, a solution. Even
if I could summarize the argument of a 700-page book in a few sentences
here, I am not sure that this would be a useful undertaking. It takes
time, I think, to absorb what modern biblical scholarship is all about,
and still more time to start to grapple with its implications. I have no
doubt that there were some readers (perhaps you among them) who, having
read my book through to the end, went away dissatisfied: they would have
preferred something that, with a snap of the fingers, simply makes modern
scholarship and its disturbing findings disappear. But I hope that
thoughtful readers will eventually come to see that the only honest way to
confront this scholarship and yet uphold the fundamental truth of Judaism
and its way of life - avodat H' - is basically that outlined in my final
chapter.
Such in any case was my hope in writing How to Read the Bible. I
certainly make no apology for dealing with modern scholarship as I did -
in detail, and with as much understanding and sympathy as I could. I think
it was especially important for an Orthodox Jew to do so; some such
serious engagement with modern scholarship is long overdue. It is true
that many people in the past - including many Orthodox Jews - have
preferred to ignore the subject. But that stance is becoming increasingly
problematic. The writings of archaeologists, ancient Near Eastern
historians, and other university scholars are regularly aired in the NY
Times Sunday Magazine and similar publications, as well as in radio and
television specials; they are all over the Internet. People, especially
young people, want to know how to react to all this. I knew well the
answer you propose even before you wrote it in your article in The
Commentator: "When we confront the problems raised by modern scholarship
(and I do not deny that such problems ought to be confronted), we answer
those that we can, and allow the rest to remain with tzarikh iyyun gadol,
hoping that in the long run, with continued study, investigation and
analysis, more and more answers, solutions and resolutions will be found."
Forgive my frankness if I say that, as a matter of fact, I don't see you
confronting very much at all. On the contrary, your attitude, with all its
"borders" and "limits," amounts to shutting your eyes to almost all of
modern scholarship and waiting for it to go away. It won't.
Such a stance may be dignified with reference to this or that source, but
it basically amounts to sticking one's head in the sand. It may satisfy
some people for a time, but in the end taking this position seems to me
far more dangerous to Orthodox Judaism than anything I reported on in my
book, since it suggests that to be an Orthodox Jew, one must be prepared
to hide from certain disturbing ideas, lest one come to know something -
something widely discussed and accepted in other circles - that might make
one's whole religious world collapse.
Quite apart from the intellectual dishonesty involved in adopting such a
stance, it does not have a particularly impressive track record. It has
been adopted many times before, and it has always failed. The essence of
Rabbi El'azar's famous dictum, "Know what to respond to an Epicurean
[apikoros - in the sense of: anyone who espouses heresy]" is not "Hide
from Epicureanism, pretend not to know anything about it," but confront it
head on, with enough confidence in the bedrock of Yahadut to know that you
have nothing to fear from it. Ideas that challenge traditional Jewish
beliefs - in particular, Greek philosophical doctrines (filtered through
the Arabic tradition) - were frequently discussed in medieval times by
Maimonides and others. I'm sure you know that many people in the Rambam's
own day accused him of heresy in so doing, but today it is his ideas, not
theirs, that have the stamp of orthodoxy.
Indeed, in general, the "Know-Nothing" party has never fared well. It has
backed the bishops and cardinals who denounced Copernicus as a heretic and
threw Galileo into jail for maintaining that the earth circles around the
sun and not vice versa. It has doggedly ignored (indeed, in some places
still continues to ignore) dinosaur bones, geology, astrophysics,
evolutionary biology, and so forth - without any notable success. It
cannot succeed, because in the end, people - all people - simply want to
know what's true and build on that, rather than hide from the truth and
build on willful ignorance. One does not need to be a prophet to know that
in regard to modern biblical scholarship as well, those who urge us to
stick our heads in the sand will ultimately prove to have been on the
losing side of the argument.
Of course, this is not to say that modern biblical scholarship is to be
embraced in some new form of Judaism. I believe I quoted myself a few
paragraphs ago as saying that I believe such scholarship and traditional
Jewish belief to be altogether incompatible, and I have not changed my
mind in the interim. Nor, therefore, do I think it is the duty of Jewish
educators to lead their students by the hand to the works of Wellhausen
and Hermann Gunkel - or even to assign How to Read the Bible to their
classes. But I do know from a great deal of e-mail that I have received
since my book's publication that there are quite a few Orthodox Jews who
have been troubled by the questions raised by modern scholarship, and I
doubt that their numbers will decrease in the foreseeable future. It was
in no small part for them that I wrote this book, and I hope that they
will find in it (as some have already written to me) some help in trying
to think through this difficult issue.
I don't wish to close on a sour note, but I find particularly disturbing
the notion that allowing someone to speak at a university on a subject of
particular importance can be dismissed as "hiding behind the motto of free
inquiry and academic freedom." What a grotesque reversal! The hiding is
being done entirely by the other camp, those who say that certain subjects
are too sensitive to be discussed openly on a university campus. What good
is free inquiry if it is limited to exploring trivialities or expressing
ideas that are already accepted by most people? I have always thought of
YU as a place of torah u-Madda, traditional learning and scientific
inquiry. These two are not always comfortable bedfellows, but it is
precisely the mission of such a university to pursue both at once, indeed,
to pursue both without trying to segregate one from the other.
- James Kugel
James Kugel is chair of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at
Bar Ilan University and the Harry M. Starr Professor Emeritus of Classical
and Modern Hebrew Literature at Harvard University.
