by Rabbi Christine Matthews III
New York, October 7 – Countless people I meet make the same error: assuming that just because the Hebrew Bible came from within the Jewish cultural tradition dating back thousands of years, it somehow represents anything authentically Jewish. That assumption misses the mark in a number of important ways, chief among them that not once does the entire set of books exhort the reader to engage in that core mission expected of Jews collectively and individually, the promotion of progressive values known as Tikkun Olam.
In fact only once in the entire set of Scriptures does the root giving us the verb “tikkun” occur with the meaning “to repair,” as we use it, a fact that must immediately call into question whether the corpus as a whole represents anything we can claim as our own. That single instance, in the comparatively late book of Ecclesiastes, can hardly qualify as the source for the central tenet of our faith, or lack thereof, in this advanced, progressive age.
But perhaps even more damning of that erroneous assumption, the word “olam,” meaning “world,” never appears in that sense in all of Tanakh. When it does, with some frequency, it means “forever.” Only post-Biblical Rabbinic use of the word carries the sense of “world,” indicating how un-Jewish the Tanakh really is. In fact the earliest occurrence in writing of the phrase “Tikkun Olam” in any form dates to the ninth century CE, centuries after the Bible assumed its final form, where it is spelled with a root meaning “to establish” rather than “to repair.” Suffice it to observe that no one learns that as our mission at Hebrew Union College.
Many will find irony in the development of contemporary Judaism, which saw progressive movements focus more on the Bible, and more reactionary elements abandon Tanakh study in favor of more Talmud and Rabbinic writings. However paradoxical this may seem, however, it provides no contradiction to what we have stated here. Those early Reform scholars and writers in fact laid the groundwork for divorcing Judaism entirely from the shackles of the past, most importantly the Bible itself. We cannot, after all, claim with any integrity that we value progressive values when we cling to outdated notions such as finding eternal value in a book that not only condones, but endorses capital punishment, for example.
The most convincing argument, though, against the Bible as Jewish is the corpus’s recurring invocation of an attachment of Jews to their land, a principle that stands in clear violation of Palestinian supremacy – one of the progressive movement’s axiomatic assumptions. If Judaism=progressivism, as we know, then anything contradicting progressive values as we now define them must therefore not be Jewish. That perforce includes the Bible. QED.
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Chag Succot Sameach