From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Subject: Re: The differences, again
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 14:59:24 GMT

In article <9212292228.AA27155@cyclone.sbi.com> <gertler@cyclone.sbi.com (Don Gertler)> writes:
>hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>> <gertler@cyclone.sbi.com (Don Gertler)> writes:
>> >hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>> >> starr-daniel@yale.edu (Daniel Starr) writes:

>> >> The Reform position is not that of laxity, but of study and interpretation.
>> >> It does differ in that the Oral Law is not considered to have been given to
>> >> Moshe, and I do not see why such a body of law would not have been written
>> >> down if it were from God, and my own reading of the Sefer Torah is that
>> >> there are parts in which God must at least have been misquoted.  But Reform
>> >> does not say that the sages are not to be considered, just that they are
>> >> not to be followed as if their words came from God Himself.

>> >But is the Torah itself to be followed as if the "words came from G-d
>> >Himself"?  Simply put, does Judaism contain a legal system?  Reading
>> >what you want, when you want to, and then doing what you choose does
>> >not constitute much of a legal structure, IMHO.

>> Read what I said, and which you quoted.  If I conclude that there are
>> parts which cannot be the literal word of God, it follows that I must
>> use all relevant information I can find to try to ascertain what God
>> wants us to do.

>I reread it.  My problem is that you mix the R approach with your own.
>You said that R differs (I assume from O) "in that the Oral Law is not
>considered to have been given to Moshe."  Fine.  On that I ask whether
>the Torah is in the same category.  If so, I would have expected you to
>include that point among the differences as well.  Since you did not,
>instead only adding your own view on this, I had ass-u-me-d that R does
>attribute the words of the Torah to G-d Himself.  Yet that is contrary
>to everything I understood about R.  Have I been that far off the mark?

Did God communicate even to Moshe in Hebrew?  This is not intended to be
other than serious.  There is no reason to believe that Hebrew was the
language of anyone before our ancestors went down to Egypt, and while
it is similar to the surrounding Semitic languages (I am using this in
the technical term referring to the language family), it seems to have
the closest similarity to a language, Ugaritic, spoken in the present
southern Lebanon and somewhat to the south of that.  No, I do not believe
that God gave Moshe the Sefer Torah as we have it.  If He had given Moshe
any manuscript which was even reasonably faithfully copied to the form we
now have it, it would not have the problems with literalness which have
been discussed here.

>> But why should a religion be so much a legal structure?

>Good question, possibly for another thread.  I was not asking whether
>it should be, but whether it is.

>> At the time of
>> Moses, nobody would think otherwise; it has been stated, and I believe
>> quite correctly, that the sacrificial rules in the Torah were there more
>> to reduce sacrifices, not to command them...

>All valid points.  Are they yours alone, or does R subscribe to them
>as well?

Again, I doubt that R has an official position.  These points have also been
raised by O scholars, such as Hertz.  The R version of the _Chumash_ does 
not convey as much scholarship as Hertz, but does have scholarship which 
he does not use.  To the extent that there is an R position on the divine
authorship of the Sefer Torah, I would suggest that their relatively
recent _Chumash_ cannot be read other than as saying NO.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@snap.stat.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)  
{purdue,pur-ee}!snap.stat!hrubin(UUCP)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish