CHULA VISTA, California –Avraham Burg is an interesting personality. He challenges the religious sensibilities of the Orthodox and Jewish world. Burg is also a leader in the Israeli peace movement. He served two terms in the Israeli Knesset. Over the years, he has emerged as one of Israel’s most articulate advocates for religious pluralism, women’s rights, ecological issues—not to mention—Israeli and Palestinian peace. At times, Avraham Burg almost sounds like a modern day biblical prophet.
His newest book, Very Near To You: Human Readings of the Torah (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2012) captures many of his seminal ideas on the weekly Torah portion. Burg calls it the way he sees it. His philosophical insights expose a part of the text that towers above his competition. Whereas many of today’s rabbinical scholars extol the virtues of midrashic expositions, Burg challenges the reader to question everything—including the sacred text itself. He does not slavishly accept traditional sources simply because they are canonized as “traditional.”You will not find Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik or Nechama Leibowitz engage in the type of postmodern deconstructions of the biblical text that Burg does in Very Near To You.
Burg’s honesty is refreshing. He is not afraid to say that certain biblical stories strike today’s readers as morally problematic for a contemporary sensibility.
So, in the interest of brevity, let us examine one well-known biblical story Burg analyzes that characterizes his original thought: The story of Noah. Burg admits in the beginning, that he really didn’t care that much for Noah. Rabbinical wisdom teaches that Noah pales in comparison to other biblical personalities who, “spoke to God, fought with Him, complemented Him”…compared to them, Noah would not have been ‘considered at all’” (p. 12). However, Burg comes up with a wonderful novelty, “Noah is neither a lawgiver or a prophetical voice. Noah belongs among people who build and do. Noah is a pioneer, not an intellectual, a manual worker rather than a noted philosopher…”
Noah’s greatness is precisely because of his humanity. The Torah describes Noah as a “righteous man,” which happens to be an awful translation. The Hebrew term ish tsadik really means, “a man of integrity,” or simply, “a just man.” Since the time of Webster’s Dictionary, the term “righteous” implies piety, but it really connotes someone who acts with total and complete integrity. Hassidic and Haredi tend to focus on Noah’s religious piety, and overlook the significance of Noah as a “a man of integrity.” As Jewish ethical literature teaches, the acquisition of personal integrity must come before one attains piety.[1] When you consider the violent and unjust times Noah lived in, his moral achievement was no small accomplishment. To use a modern example of Noahide integrity, imagine a Palestinian standing up for Israel in the streets of Gaza–that’s the kind of moral fortitude Noah possesses. He may not be a prophet, but his dignity and personal integrity stand out in a crowd.
Noah’s realism and love for the earth enables him to save it from destruction. “Without Noah,” contends Burg, “there can be no Abraham.” Burg cites the well-known Mishnah, ‘If there is no flour, there can be no Torah—that is, learning and culture cannot survive without the bare essentials of life. By this measure, Noah was the flour; only in his wake could Abraham come with his Torah, his message of revealed truth” (p. 14).
The best part of Burg’s exposition of Noah is how he compares the Flood narrative to the Holocaust. Personally, I have always found this part of the narrative most disturbing. Let’s be honest: Noah probably thought God was a mass-murderer! How can anyone relate to a Deity, Who is deeply out of control with His emotions? Burg is certainly aware of the moral problems posed by the ancient biblical text. As to be expected, Burg totally rejects any effort to view the Flood story as historical truth. For him, it is all about metaphor that depicts God’s relationship with Creation. Burg makes a stunning observation and claims that God behaves “childishly” by creating man to be an automaton, who obediently responds to God’s every command:
- When man deviated from his assigned path, God became enraged and banished him. He took the ball back and didn’t want to play anymore, so to speak. In this week’s portion that process repeats itself on a global scale. The creator rebukes himself, regrets the creation and, saddened to his core, lashes out murderously: I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth’ (Gen. 6:7). Only much later does God mature, change, relax, and become the God who is patient with his world and his faithful. At this stage every solution that occurs to him is violent, homicidal, and vengeful: the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the killing of the firstborn sons, and so on.”
Burg goes on to mention how some (actually many!) rabbinical scholars liken the Holocaust to the Flood. However, Burg contends that the scholars are mistaken for, “In the Flood, humankind had nothing to say because God wasn’t listening. By contrast, the Holocaust was not an act of God, but a destructive act of man who did not hear a thing. How is the God who once utterly destroyed the world by flood different from the God who didn’t intervene in Hitler’s flood?”
The questions he raises are wonderful. In my new volume on Genesis 4-11, I raise similar questions. There is a theological message that might have made Burg’s exposition of the Flood narrative that much more compelling. Simply put, “The Torah speaks in the language of humankind.” Why is this relevant? When the Torah says, “And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth,” this is an example of how the human mind imagines the workings of the Divine Mind. The biblical statement really says more about our flawed image of God.
The 18th century Italian commentator and thinker, Shmuel David Luzzato offers a remarkable perspective that deals with Burg’s straightforward questions. Luzzato contends that when the prophet wrote this narrative down, he spoke in an idiom that the people of his generation could understand.” This is a bold statement, for Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, and Philo of Alexandria arrived at the same conclusion. Moses evokes the imagery of curses and calamity because he wants the Israelites to walk the straight and narrow path.
Remember: our ancestors were not philosophers, nor were they theologians. The carrot and the stick theology found in Deuteronomy’s list of biblical curses were written for an unsophisticated generation. When you hear religious leaders evoke the “wrath of God” theology when speaking about the Holocaust, Katrina, the Tsunami, or whatever–you get the impression we have not evolved very much since the days of Noah and Moses.
As people evolve, so too does the concept of God also evolve. As the Sages say, “The Torah speaks in the language of man.” Language is never static; it is dynamic, communicative, alive and capable of eternal expression.
Abraham Isaac Kook’s insight about the nature of God language says much about the evolutionary direction that differentiates the God of the Flood vis-à-vis the God of Psalm 23, who is described as a shepherd and companion. Kook notes, “All the ideological arguments among people and all the inner conflicts that every individual suffers in his own world outlook are caused by a confused conception of God . . . .One must always cleanse one’s thoughts about God to make sure they are free of the dross of deceptive fantasies, of groundless fear, of evil inclinations, of wants and inadequacies. Faith in God must enhance human happiness . . . . When the duty to honor God is conceived of in an enlightened manner, it raises human worth and the worth of all creatures, filling them with largeness of spirit, combined with genuine humility. But a crude conception of God tends toward the idolatrous, and degrades the dignity of man and of other beings . . .” [2]
Does this mean that the God of the Flood is hopelessly incompatible with the God of Psalm 23, Abraham Isaac Kook, or for that matter Maimonides and the mystics? Well, sort of . . . As Burg intimates, the story of the Flood is really a parable. Although Burg does not always make it crystal clear what the parable represents, this ancient story really says a lot about the human conception of God. and how it has evolved. By the end of the story (Gen. 9), God rescinds much of his authority to accommodate human freedom.
Erich Fromm has often said, the story of Noah reveals how an impetuous God becomes a constitutional monarch, who learns to rule by law. In his periscope on the Flood, Burg mentions nothing about the covenant God makes with Noah after the Flood. This is an unfortunate omission on Burg’s part. God enters into a covenant with humankind that obligates both parties to work out their differences. Human responsibility represents the new standard for justice. Human beings– from this point forward–are and will forever be responsible for human generated evil that exists in the world—and not God.
Burg’s concluding remarks presents a vision that I wholeheartedly endorse; he writes,
- The new Torahs that emerge from the Holocaust must point the way toward the shaping of a better humanity, toward teachings that do not give rise to victimizers like the Nazis nor permit victims to be destroyed as were—as the Gypsies, gays who were there with us, as the Armenians before us and the slaughtered of Rwanda and Cambodia after us. The new theology, particularly, the Jewish one, must break through the boundaries of the old faith . . . The time has come for the faith of Noah and his commitment to repairing the world; the time of beliefs in destruction, whether divine or human, is over (p. 17).
Burg’s treatment of the Akedah (“Binding of Isaac,” see Gen. 22) is also interesting; he names that sub-chapter, “Abraham’s Great Failure.” This section did not reveal anything new that I did not hear before. Burg accuses Abraham of failing the test, and he uses an old but familiar approach championed by Kant, the Sefat Emet, Emil Fackenheim, and more recently—Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. Like the others, Burg claims that after the Akedah, God never spoke to Abraham again. I often wonder: How can modern scholars claim to understand the mind of a biblical narrator, or for that matter–God? The Torah only contains a partial disclosure of Abraham and God’s relationship–and nothing more.
As one who has also written extensively on this topic, I believe there is much more to the story of the Akedah than what the postmodernists are willing to admit. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we will have to tackle this topic at some future date.
Many of Burg’s expositions are wonderful and the way he engages the biblical stories will challenge and renew your spirit. There is a great prophetic and ethical message he brings to the sacred text. What more could you possibly want from such an outstanding book?
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Notes:
[1]See Rabbi Moshe Hayim Luzzato’s Path of the Just, where the author writes “A man must exercise caution in his actions and his undertakings; that is, to deliberate and watch over his actions and his accustomed ways to determine whether or not they are good, so as not to abandon his soul to the danger of destruction, God forbid, and not to walk according to the promptings of habit as a blind man in pitch darkness.” Spirituality demands that we mindfully live our lives according to the higher dictates of conscience.
[2] Ben Tsion Bokser, Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, the Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 171.
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Rabbi Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom in Chula Vista. He may be contacted at michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com