Q&A: On Studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
On Studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Question
I know your position on studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and I completely understand that in truth you can read all kinds of things into verses, but still, sometimes something really does seem to be the plain meaning of the verse.
Everyone struggles with the Book of Job. All his friends give him various explanations, but he doesn’t accept them until the Holy One explains it to him, and suddenly he understands and accepts it. Seemingly, God didn’t answer him at all; He just explains various phenomena and laws of nature, etc., without giving any explanation for why he is suffering.
I read your articles on divine involvement, and suddenly I understood that maybe that is what God is explaining to him: there are rigid laws, and I am unable to intervene. Job accepts that.
Also, I understand in light of your writings the Talmudic statement that a person is obligated to bless for the bad just as he blesses for the good.
What bothered me was: why do we have to give thanks to the same degree? If we need to accept the decree, fine—but why make a blessing exactly the same way as for something good?
But if it is true that God does not intervene, and the thanksgiving is for the laws that allow us to receive the good, then of course we also need to give thanks for the bad that will necessarily come into being.
Sorry in advance if my Hebrew isn’t precise and I didn’t explain myself well enough. I speak English day to day, and I know Hebrew from a year and a half that I studied in Israel a few years ago.
Thank you
Answer
These are possible interpretations, but you would not have adopted them if you had not already thought this way yourself.
Discussion on Answer
I wrote that this is certainly a possible interpretation.
(Especially in the sense you just explained, of an interpretation not intended by the original speaker.)
I would only note regarding Job that in the biblical period divine interventions in the world were far more common, as were miracles that departed from the laws of nature. So it is hard to accept such an interpretation of Job, unless the point was to teach us about the future (in our generations, when there is no longer divine involvement and the world is conducted according to the laws of nature).
I understand, but maybe this really is the “midrashic” commandment of Torah study? Meaning, just like what we do in Jewish law, where we explain the reasoning of Abaye and Rava—and like you explained somewhere about some principle of Rabbi Shimon Shkop, where it is hard to believe that this is what the Talmud actually meant, but sometimes later generations explain the matter better than the previous generation.
It’s as if the Talmud had a good intuition that something was true even without explaining why.
You explained that it is hard to assume Rabbi Shimon knew quantum theory, but if we were to assume that he did know it, and then it gave him the brilliant idea to explain the Talmudic passage about the Temple and two sisters—and surely the Talmud itself did not know that—then what would be wrong with that?
So why shouldn’t we do the same thing in the midrashic part of Torah? We simply explain it according to the information available to us. I think there is a Rashbam who says something like this.
Once, jokingly, I said to someone that it always bothered me how the commentators explain the verse “He hangs the earth upon nothing,” as though it is a compound of two words: “without what” (meaning: on nothing).
I explained to him that they were following Newton’s approach, where there really is no explanation for why there is gravity, etc. But a verse never departs from its plain meaning, and the word means “stopping” or “holding back,” exactly as Einstein explained it in relativity—that space is curved and the earth is simply “stopped” by the curvature. 😀
I hope I translated them well, because I read physics books in English, and I also hope I didn’t ramble too much.
Have a peaceful Sabbath
Thanks,