By Zofia and Dan Meler and Moshe Granot Tammuz Publishing House, Tel Aviv, September 2002 P.O.D. 23001 Tel Aviv 61230
Avi Blizovsky
Direct link: http://www.haydan.org.il/tora041102.html
The Bible is the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, a huge work that combines mythological stories with chapters of the history of the Jewish people, a system of laws combined with thought, fiction and poetry - all works that were collected and written for over a thousand years, until they were signed as an official codex at the end of the Second Temple, and since then they have become a tradition and a cultural infrastructure of the Jewish people for its diasporas, and not just its own.
Since its signing, countless layers of midrashim and commentaries have been added to the Bible, starting with the Talmud and ending with the last books of the modern age, compiled by the great thinkers and intellectuals of the Jewish people. As far as interpretation is concerned, the question of their legitimacy arises - their acceptance, validity or rejection. Due to a fundamental error in approach, the Bible is accepted by the majority of the public as a religious property, seemingly belonging exclusively to the religious domain, and its legitimate interpretation is only religious. This is the reason why most of the written material dealing with the interpretation of the Bible comes from a religious point of departure, when "God" is, so to speak, an existing fact that cannot be challenged or doubted, and everything else follows from it as binding instructions and commands.
Ever since biblical criticism appeared, at the end of the 19th century, more and more people dare to criticize - humanely and morally - the biblical text, examining the "slaughter of sacred cows" - something that in Jewish society, including in Israel at the beginning of the third millennium of the world, is unacceptable Acceptable, and considered, even in our places, absolute heresy. However, in modern thinking, in a free society, a society in which equality between human beings and human morality are among the most important values for a person, the right to interpret any text, including a religious text, is legitimate, as long as it rests on the factual basis, or in the case of the Bible - on The Torah itself.
Whoever feels free from the shackles of belief in some god, does not have to sanctify the scripture, even if it bears the express name of God and his word. As moral human beings, it is our duty to examine the biblical scriptures in the light of our own time, precisely and especially because the Jewish-religious establishment binds us all to the biblical scriptures as obliges every Jew even for this time. The authors of the Torah, and the entire Bible, who claimed to know the thoughts of God, His intentions and His commandments to mankind, and those who follow them to this day, who even today claim to know God's will, made these scriptures an authority in every area of the lives of each of us, And sealed any chance of change also in the private and personal areas of the day-to-day life of each of us.
The authors of the book "From the Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge - Parshas of the Week in the Hour of Time" in their book Ilili Netzach, and present the Bible in the light of contemporary legitimate criticism. Any interpretation is legitimate, they say, and do. They do not cancel the past, and they do not invade the life and soul of the believing Jew. A man by his faith shall live. But next to faith and religious interpretation they place a different worldview and a different interpretation, no less legitimate than the previous one.
In their book, the authors address the free public, to all those Jews for whom human rights are important and precious, and for whom the moral values of today precede the beliefs of the past. Pointing to the negative is not the goal: the Torah will remain forever as it is, for better or for worse. The purpose of the authors is to disconnect the Torah as an ancient book, wonderful as it may be in the eyes of its lovers and admirers, and our own lives here and today - a life based on human morality, social justice and the equality of all human beings - woman and man, Jew and non-Jew, child and adult, heterosexual and homosexual - all of them , without difference and without exception.
Step by step, the authors take the reader along the paths of the Five Pentateuch of the Torah, and on a journey of study and reflection on the parshas of the week, according to their order and time, as is customary in the Jewish tradition, pointing out the beautiful and interesting in the parshas of the week, as well as the immorality, social injustice or human injustice, which are found They are also in the same cases. This is in order for all of us to be able to free ourselves from fixed thinking patterns, and to accept the biblical text in the way that any written text is accepted - by criticism and from free thinking.
The message that emerges from reading this book is that we should know how to recognize the positive and the beautiful in the Bible, and separate it from the bad and the negative, so that every Jew, even secular and atheist, will return this book to its rightful place on the main shelf of his bookcase.
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Hatanakh - there is no evidence in the field
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