Many Jews revere the Torah but don't know the first thing about it. I wrote a whole book about the Torah, the purpose of which was to de-mythologize and de-mystify it.
A few facts
Let me re-cap a few facts about this most misunderstood and overrated document (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible):
Science (linguistics, history, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines) tells us that God didn't write it. Moses didn't write it. There were at least four authors - that much is obvious from clear differences in language and content - and the four texts were put together, by a fifth person, to create the basis for the document we have today (Deuteronomy is the work of one person, while the other three texts were interwoven to create the first four books of the Torah.)
I say "the basis" for today's Torah, because no one knows exactly what the original said. Some 1300 years elapsed between the first consolidated, edited Torah and the 10th century manuscript that we use today. (The Dead Sea Scrolls, still being interpreted, include all the books of the Torah, though not [as I understand it) edited together into a single scroll.)
Just think of all the scribal errors and on-the-fly edits that must have taken place during those 1300 years. Inadvertently changing one letter could change the whole word and perhaps the meaning of a whole passage!
Simply translating the document, with all of its obscurities and inconsistencies, into English (as the Jewish Publication Society has done) or any other modern language is a marvel of scholarship and hard work.
How rabbis and other clerics can start with that and then presume to tell us what the document "really means" is utterly beyond me. And to go even farther and find mysterious numerological and other coded "messages" in the text is just nuts. It has about the same intellectual depth as solving a crossword puzzle.
Ninth Century B.C.E.
Once again: The Torah is an ancient text from the NINTH CENTURY B.C.E. It comes from an Iron Age shepherd society. It gives us an important picture of the way our ancestors viewed the world, but its content is exactly what we would expect.
Most of its penalties are death or excommunication (you're lucky if you can make it to one of the cities of sanctuary). Women have almost no rights. There are rules for how to treat your slaves. There are long passages of religious and behavioral rules and regs, as well as extensive, gruesome threats as to what will befall those who don't follow God's multitudinous commandments or produce his long shopping list of tributes and other goodies.
God himself is for the most part a vindictive tyrant (just like most of the rulers the Torah writers knew), hardly worthy of our respect, much less worship.
Selective quoting, quoting out of context, inaccurate paraphrasing, and even invention of material from whole cloth (see below) - these are the strategies by which clerics make their sacred texts palatable and relevant to modern people. For those delusionals who take it all literally, of course, little or none of this spin is required.
Riffing on the Torah
A friend told me that at a service she attended, she witnessed what I would call "oral rabbinical spin." These rabbis get up there and riff on the Torah, just like jazz musicians. They start with what's there and create something entirely different.
This is OK as some sort of performance art, but it falls far short of religious instruction or inspiration. The rabbi is being fundamentally dishonest when he/she fails to distinguish between "what the text says" and "what I say it says."
In the service I heard about, the rabbi was contrasting the devious Jacob and the naive Esau, who was tricked out of both his birthright and his father's blessing. The rabbi characterized Esau as an innocent, bookish sort of guy, a "Torah scholar." I am not making this up. How in hell could Esau have been a Torah scholar? The Torah wasn't even written!
This is the kind of bull that non-humanistic rabbis regularly get away with. Pretending that these characters actually existed, then going on to make up stuff about them is intellectual felony, along with willful self-delusion.
Having it both ways
Some humanistic congregations commit another offense which is equally malodorous and cowardly: they try to have it both ways by denying belief in God but affirming the value of the Torah and the persona of God as sources of moral inspiration.
As I explain in my book, you cannot do this without a lot of spin. Yet this is what I found when I came to Chicago (after 12 years at The Birmingham Temple, Secular Humanism's founding congregation, where the Torah was in the library) and tried unsuccessfully to affiliate myself with so-called humanistic congregations here. They were actually reading the Torah at services!
