Submitting a thesis for Bible study
Hello Rabbi Michi,
You’re probably tired of addressing the above-mentioned field, but nevertheless, following reading columns 134-135, where you raised challenging and thought-provoking questions about Bible study, I thought I’d raise a thesis and ask your opinion on it:
Regarding Torah study, since Torah is God’s will, meaning His demands of us, there is no doubt that this is the most important and essential part of Torah study.
There is no dispute about God’s will for us to be moral. The division is what morality is (and the expansion of the question of whether morality is learned from the commandments or is it separate from the commandments, etc.).
My question: Is it also God’s will that we have a certain national identity? You raised the issue of national ethos in column 134 as some kind of anecdote, but you claimed that it is not necessarily important.
And if it is important to God? Maybe studying the Bible is what shapes our Jewish identity? The Bible tells us our story from its beginning to a certain period.
A period that our ancestors shared together, before the Babylonian exile and a little after it (and yes, I left out all the tribes of Israel because unfortunately they disappeared, and perhaps their remains are found, but that is not certain). A period in which God was present at the level of speech/prophecy, it was felt that He existed and intervened in the world and was not hidden.
Can’t we conclude from this some specific will of God that our national ethos be ingrained in us and that it is precisely the history written in the Bible, in this textual form, that will influence us on our national level?
Now, if it is important, how will it be expressed? As you said: values, can be learned from another place, maybe even better. Same with psychology and same with history.
But the combination of everything as a founding ethos, while dealing with the details, perhaps this builds some kind of spiritual-metaphysical level in the nation (I used the word “level” here, maybe someone will find another word) that God is interested in? That every individual in the nation will be obligated to deal with this and that this thing will be internalized within him?
Because, as you said, the text itself is sacred here, and therefore including and developing literary text analysis skills is the tool to reach the desired ethos?
This is, of course, a theory that is based on the assumption that if this text is indeed holy, and God wanted this text to reach us, then there is something God did with this text.
And since you ruled out everything else with good arguments, I stuck with this idea.
I didn’t see if they addressed this in the comments in columns 134-135, there were many comments.
Thank you and sorry if I’ve already dug into this topic too much.
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