January 1997

GENESIS

OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND SHADES OF BEARD

The Rabbis tell us (Pesachim
ll6:1) that the Passover Haggada opens in shame and closes in praise. We
start the account of our deliverance with the dual confession that We were
slaves in Egypt and that, Our ancestors were idol worshippers' We don't at
all attempt to hide the humble beginnings of our people, nor do we shrink from
acknowledging its less than auspicious spiritual origins. Our forefather, is, a
much, Terah who fabricated idols, as Abraham, the supreme iconoclast, who broke
them, and brought to man instead the idea of one G-d.

We don't clean up our
history. By the same taken we dare not distort it either. However, in the last
years with increasing ferocity there has been a concerted and scurrilous put
down of those incomparable spiritual heroes who founded our faith and who
remain the chief undergird of Jewish
belief and survival. It reached a high point of sorts with Bill Moyers' recent
and much touted Public Television series on GENESIS - Breishis - the
first of the Five Books of Moses, or the Chumash as we know it.
Unfortunately, it is not alone in this incredible assault upon the moral and
ethical bona-fides of the most hallowed personages of our tradition which is
calculated to provoke believers, Jews and Christians for that matter as well,
to rage. On of the opening volleys in this war against the righteous was an
editorial in a leading Jewish establishment publication of all places (Jewish
Week, 4/14/89).

From a straight reading of the
text, we learn that Abraham, the first Hebrew, was so selfish he twice put his
wife's honor in jeopardy to save his own skin. His son, from the little we are
told about Isaac, likely was a simpleton who jeopardized his own wife's honor in
similar manner and was easily manipu­lated. Then there was Jacob, the great
manipulator. All had been promised to him, yet he resorted to trickery at every
turn. His sons were no better, 10 sold an 11th into slavery (the boy was
obnoxious), one took his father's concubine to bed in an attempted coup and one
dallied with a woman he thought was a prostitute (thereby founding the Davidic
line). When their sister was raped, they killed the rapist, then all the men in
town seized the widows and orphans.

This humiliating genesis of Israel
continued through the Exodus. Jacob and his sons became yordim, leaving
the land for the fleshpots of Egypt. At first, Egypt was like heaven; soon, it
became their hell. It took a stuttering ex-prince of Egypt, who had trouble following
orders and who talked back to G-d, to deliver the people of Israel from slavery
and give the world the gift of freedom.

To paraphrase an old
commercial: Is this any way to create a national history?

Is the Abraham who gives up home and possessions and sets
out on an arduous journey to a strange land in unquestioning obedience to G-d's
command selfish? Is the Abraham who pleads, unafraid and possibly even
presumptuously, before G-d, to spare the damned cities of Sodom and Gommorah
from annihilation selfish? Is the Abraham who is prepared even to give up the
sacred ideal of uncrimped universalism which brought him to the recognition of
the one G-d in the first place and undergo the parochial rite of circumcision
selfish?

Is the uncomplaining acceptance
of martyrdom in the searing episode of the Binding of Isaac evidence of a
simpleton or, of a man of unmatched and unbridled faith?

(The treatment of the Akeda
by Moyers and company in particular seems to point to a mali­cious agenda.
They preferred to view Abraham as an ignorant primitive, not unlike his con­temporaries,
quick to obey the most horrific commands of an angry and insensitive deity and
one who is ready without qualm to sacrifice his only son, the innocent Isaac.
They could have more honestly perceived this same episode, as, indeed, it has
always been perceived, as a bril­liant stratagem which helped to fashion one of
the watershed moments in the history of human religious development. In one
fell swoop, it demonstrated that Abraham's commitment to G-d was no less
passionate and all-embracing than his neighbors for their idols even as it
demon­strated G-d's absolute abhorrence of human sacrifice which was the common
and not unstar­tling practice in Abraham's time.)

Does the digging up again of
the wells of his father Abraham in the face of the obscurantism of the King's
men, who find their life's calling in stopping them up, prove Isaac to be a sim­pleton?
Is the Isaac who planted a hundred gates, who set down stakes for a rooted
and sta­ble agricultural society in defiance of the nomadic way of life that
held sway until then, a sim­pleton?

And is the Jacob whom the
Torah itself denominates as a perfect man who dwells in tents a manipulator?
Is the Jacob who strives with G-d and man and prevails against them both a
manipulator? Is the Jacob who works faithfully seven years to win the hand of
Rachel and then another seven years in payment for her because of the chicanery
of his father-in-law Laban a Manipulator? And is it not outrageous libel to
hurl upon anyone of the patriarchs, whom G-d had culled out of the mass of
humanity as his special messengers and to whom he spoke almost as easily as we
speak to our neighbors, the epithet of selfish or of simpleton or
of manipulator?

All of this is only a
straight reading of the text, without resort to the oral tradition. But do we
not wrest the singular grandeur of what Judaism is about if we ignore or reject
this Tradition which provides the vibrant and detailed elaboration of the
written word, and which projects even more majestically and unequivocally these
G-d intoxicated giants who walked the earth then?

Can the Torah be telling us
that in the real world, flesh and blood saints meeting up with the Esaus and
the Labans and the Pharaohs that abound in every time and place have to do
things which may lay them open to the charge of manipulation; make them appear
selfish, and sometimes even ruthless in order to survive? Finally is there not
possibly some ulterior motive to this simplistic debunking of the Biblical
personality?

Probably the most influential
American historian in the last hundred years was Charles Beard who was the
first to examine the American experience through the glasses of a Marxist focus
which claimed that all of history could be interpreted by the doctrine of
economic deter­minism: That people arc, in the main moved to act by their
economic interests. He then pur­ported to show that the division among the
colonists, between those who advocated separa­tion from the mother country and
those who wished to continue the attachment to England, could be explained not
by high principle and purpose but by what was in it for them finan­cially. It
wasn't so much notions of independence and life, liberty and the pursuit of
happi­ness that spurred the Revolution as much as the ultimate profit what
would accrue to those who instigated it.

What Beard achieved with this
analysis was that he de-mythicized the
founding fathers. By doing this, their handiwork, notably the constitution,
could no longer be venerated as the awe­some and sacrosanct document in which
it was held until then almost universally, and which did not allow for easy
tampering or tinkering. Once it was shown that the constitution was the product
of selfishness it could readily be modified enabling change and progress. New
policies and legislation which previously would have been deemed
unconstitutional now had easy passage. What was profoundly saddening, however,
is that lately it was discovered, after examining his private archives, that
Beard, whose historical integrity until then was consid­ered to be
irreproachable, had actually skewered his evidence. He systematically withheld
any material that opposed his thesis. The Constitution, after all, was not
solely the creation of greedy pecuniary interests.

It is the same kind of
stripping away of saintliness and sanctity from the heretofore untouch­able
Biblical heroes, to whom we claim decendence,
that is now in full progress. If Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses can be
discredited then we no longer ought to feel very much bound to their teaching.
We become liberated from the harsh fetters of the old doctrines and can
creatively pursue our own superior moral and ethical inclinations.

In any event, there is a
profound difference between the Constitution and the Bible. One is of human
authorship, however exemplary, while the other is Divine.

To be sure the linchpin of
modern Bible criticism is precisely its denial of the single author­ship of the
Torah - thereby disastrously undermining its divinity.

Indeed, the Reform movement
in Judaism fifteen years ago issued a new Bible interpreta­tion and accompanied
its publication with an announcement, undoubtedly intending to give it
scientific credentials and convey total objectivity unfettered by religious
doctrine, that is based on the assumption that the Bible was the result of
collective authors and is not the work of a single Being.

Behold not a week after this
proclamation, Newsweek magazine, in its September 28th, 1981 edition,
highlighted the following news item in its religious section.

The cold-blooded precision of
technology may seem to be at odds with the mysteries of religion. But in a
computer study of  the Bible called the Genesis Project, the twain
have met and surprisingly the Good Book has won a vote of confidence from the
soulless machine.

At issue is the authorship of the Pentateuch, the first
Five Books of the old Testament. Traditionally, Jews and Christians alike
considered the Pentatcuch to be the work of Moses. But fo r the past hundred
years, liberal theologians have generally agree that the books of Moses are the
work of a variety of writers. The conclusion was based on

rigorous exegeses of the
contradictions, duplications and varying vocabularies in the holy text. One
notable example: the first two chapters of Genesis contain two over­lapping
versions of the creation of man and woman.

Enter the Genesis Project:
two computer experts and a Biblical scholar working at Israel's prestigious Technion
Institute. They fed the 20,000 words of the book of Genesis into a computer
programmed to conduct an exhaustive linguistic analysis of words phrases and
passages in the original Hebrew. The results, to be officially released next
month, were striking. Two narrative strains that the scholars have long
considered distinct because they employ different words of G-d turned out to be
lin­guistically indistinguishable when methodically compared by the computer...

His controversial conclusion:
It is most probably that the book of Genesis was written by one person.

To one deigned in the Moyers
series to mention this and even more sensational recent dis­coveries enabled by
the computer which buttresses the authenticity of Torah!

Rabbi Zevulun Charlop