While the Jewish community is energetic about replying to perceived slurs against Jews or the State of Israel, we are remarkably passive when it comes to answering insults against our religion or our God.
For example, best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins mocks the God of the Hebrew Bible as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Dawkins’s book, “The God Delusion,” is devoted to excoriating Judaism no less than Christianity. An Oxford University biologist and celebrity evolutionist, Dawkins has now been on The New York Times best-seller list for 28 weeks.
Another aggressively atheist author, Sam Harris, joined Dawkins at the top of Publishers Weekly’s list of “religion best-sellers” last month with his crudely effective polemic “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Despite the title, the crudest caricature he draws is of the Hebrew Bible.
The title of another atheist tract, written by journalist Christopher Hitchens and due out next month, gives you a sense of what view the author will take of the God of Israel: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” As the entertainingly acidic Hitchens writes, “monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.”
Interestingly, Harris and Hitchens are both Jewish by birth. But Jews are accustomed to confronting other Jews about their objectionable views.
In calling for confrontation, I most certainly do not have in mind demands for retractions or apologies. Instead, consider the popular Christian tradition of “apologetics.”
The term doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. To be an “apologist” means to defend your faith before a general public in a sophisticated literary mode. C.S. Lewis, an Oxford scholar and author of “Mere Christianity,” is perhaps the most beloved modern Christian apologist.
Today, Jews do nothing remotely like that. We once did, however, with gusto. Maimonides’s “The Guide for the Perplexed” is a classic apologetic book, championing Torah against doubts raised by then-modern skeptics.
In fact, the Mishnah makes it every Jew’s obligation to be an effective apologist, an obligation that most of us ignore nowadays: “Know how to answer an unbeliever” (Pirke Avot 2:14) — with the word for unbeliever being apikorus, a follower of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher.
Epicurus is known as a primary exponent of materialism, the belief that material reality is all there is in the universe. And materialism happens to be one of the most serious challenges that religion is up against today.
There are other challenges, like the idea, taught in many university religion departments around the country, that the Torah is in effect a literary fraud. According to more than a few secular scholars, the Five Books of Moses weren’t authored by Moses, as the Torah claims, but rather were stitched together centuries later from works by other writers.
Richard Elliott Friedman’s book “Who Wrote the Bible?” gives a popular-level rendition of this theory. No one in academia that I’m aware of has been bold enough to directly call the Torah a fraud. But surely if we were talking about any nonsacred book, that is what the conclusions of modern biblical criticism would add up to.
The same academic viewpoint designates the Zohar, the Bible of Jewish mysticism, as a cynical medieval hoax masquerading as the more ancient work it purports to be.
That the Zohar was authored not in the second century by Shimon bar Yochai but instead in the 13th by Moses de Leon — who allegedly thought no one would buy his work if it appeared under his own name — is the accepted secular scholarly view and is approved by authorities in the field, such as Gershom Scholem and Isaiah Tishby. If you’ve got a kid in college, just check his Judaic studies syllabi; no class on Kabbalah would be complete without Scholem.
We hardly even consider that these opinions present our faith as nothing better than, to quote Hitchens, “a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.”
Traditional Jews may see the problem, but they do virtually nothing to address it. The Orthodox community, to which I belong, invests generous resources in Torah for consumption by other Orthodox Jews. That’s wonderful. But we don’t see the need when it comes to defending Judaism’s honor before the world — as the future King David did in facing down Goliath, who had “disgraced the battalions of the living God” (I Samuel 17:36).
In the case of David, the other Jews were too timid to face down the blaspheming giant. But at least the young hero had the sponsorship of the king, Saul, and thus the blessing of his fellow citizens. We have no David and no Saul.
Liberal Jews may not initially see the problem. Judaism’s assailants aren’t born-again Christians, after all, and the Jewish community has been conditioned by an irrational prejudice that the primary domestic threat worth worrying about is from born-again Christians.
But the children of liberal and traditional Jews alike will grow up in a world where God is routinely dismissed in academic and media venues as a fiction and a fraud, and where these charges go unanswered in the wider public by any Jew.
We thus teach our children, implicitly, that their religion is either indefensible or not worth defending. For anyone concerned about the future of the Jews, that is an utter disaster.
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is the author of the forthcoming “Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril” (Doubleday).
David, sometimes I like your stuff, but you are just being silly here. The reality is that our communal resources are short and spread very thin, and we have to pour everything we've got into building and strengthening our Torah institutions. We don't have the time or the money to go swatting after every Tom, Dick and Harry out there in the non-Jewish world seeking to draw attention to himself by attacking our religion. We have to stay real and stay focused. If you want to do something worthwhile, valuable, germane and to the point, put your energies into donating and raising money for our yeshivahs and other religious institutions.
We are told this type of slander is one of the worst forms of loshon hora. Further, we are to have nothing to do with those who spout such ideas. Makes sense, especially since they are not even familiar with the (hebrew) texts and traditions. They are just not worth speaking about.
Perhaps its so painful because its true. The god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is all that Richard Dawkins describes and more. Worse could be said of some of the patriarchs of Judaism. This does not mean that they were not valid leaders and authorities for the time they lived in. Time, however, has definitely passed them by. All things grow and change. Our understanding of how the world works has grown and matured in the centuries since biblical times. Denial, self deception and delusion are powerful tools of the human psyche to make the complicated easier to understand.
all this stuff about the zohar. maybe its because we do a terrible job making most of the other jewish texts accessible, such online full translations of the talmud or other such things that could help. i've never seen talmud volumes in a mainstream bookstore, but have seen bilingual zohar volumes there. also, i don't think this view of Judaism is so popular anymore. we don't fit in the box of the western concept of a religion or a nation. bringing these two sides together in a world defined by this dichotomy is very difficult but we must remain neither a religion nor a nation, but a people. saying when one thinks a book was written doesn't alienate one from their people.
Believing that the Zohar was written in the 13th century is blasphemy? In what code of halakha do you see this? Please - don't make a caricature out of Jewish belief!
"But the children of liberal and traditional Jews alike will grow up in a world where God is routinely dismissed in academic and media venues as a fiction and a fraud, and where these charges go unanswered in the wider public by any Jew." That is one of the truest statements I have ever read and that condition is exacerbated by a Jewish leadership that is part of the news entertainment industrial complex and a tail on the kite that is the Democrat Party. These canards about Judaism go unanswered because those charged to do so are incapable of doing so.
Perhaps, one factor to consider is that is highly unlikely that either Hitchens, Dawkins, et al have ever studied the Torah in a sophisticated, adult like manner-as was the case by our Rabbis of sainted memory and all of the classical commentaries.
Perhaps, one factor to consider is that is highly unlikely that either Hitchens, Dawkins, et al have ever studied the Torah in a sophisticated, adult like manner-as was the case by our Rabbis of sainted memory and all of the classical commentaries.
Yes, like those professors I believe that the Torah was not authored by Moses, as the Torah itself claims, but rather were stitched together centuries later from works by other writers. And that does not make the Torah a fraud; it makes the Torah a spiritual text with which to connect to the spiritual roots of our tribe and from which to connect to G*d. And, oh yes, I'm a rabbi, too.
Liberal Jews don't see the problem because liberal Jews agree with these academics. The biblical critical theory (that the Bible was stitched together from other sources) is practically a point of theology for Reform Judaism, and is optional for Conservative. I have heard both Reform and Conservative rabbis routinely preach biblical criticism from the bimah. You can see that attitude clearly in some of the responses here.
Defending the Faith? Recently the Forward (Friday, April 20) carried an essay by David Klinghoffer entitled Defend Your Faith When It Is Blasphemed. I’ve read D.K. for quite a while and rarely do I agree with him, principally because of his conservative politics. However, I tend to read him because it’s good to get the other side of things. After all, for the most part, I am surrounded by mainly liberal news media, the company I keep tends to be liberal and quite frankly it can wear you down. So reading D.K. is a good antidote to all of the liberal press and opinion I’m exposed to. D.K. is upset because Jewish traditional (orthodox) intellectuals aren’t confronting the recent spate of books which are attacking organized religions. Specifically he’s upset that scholars and atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins mocks the Hebrew God referring to him as misogynistic, homophobic, racist etc. He’s upset that there aren’t intellectual/rabbinic leaders a la Maimonides who will take up the banner and defend the honor of the Hebrew God. We have nothing to be ashamed of and we have nothing to defend. We have done nothing wrong, and we aren’t accused of doing anything wrong. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have their point of view and they expressed it very eloquently in their respective books. I’ve read their books and would recommend them to anyone who takes their religious practice seriously. It is important to hear, know and pay close attention to what others are thinking and saying. We can learn much from what they say. Not everything they say is true, but not everything they say is false. Have we been accused of being genocidal? Yes. Are we? Maybe. That all depends on how one interprets the Amalek text. It also depends on how one understands the text in Samuel when it is made known to King Saul that he has lost favor with God. How are we to interpret the text, and how are we to interpret the commandment to wipe out Amalek. Why is it so upsetting to D.K. that Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins points out and exposes this seemingly genocidal feature of our text to the world. The Christian world bases their new testament on our sacred text and incidentally, our cousins revere our sacred text as well. D.K. reminds me of Don Quixote. Rather than be proactive he has chosen the reactive approach which never is effective. The Harris and Dawkins books are best sellers and coming out with a reactive text won’t make a dent. Those who believe in Torah aren’t really affected by what intellectuals of that ilk happen to think or write. Those who share their sentiments won’t be influenced by anything written which is reactive. Another issue I have with D.K. is his conservative propensity to be less than tolerant when it comes to those having an opinion that doesn’t fit their world view, or in this case, Jewish view. Frankly I find it refreshing to hear another opinion other than the one I personally subscribe to. It gets you thinking and keeps you on your toes. For those who don’t want to be challenged or tested, don’t read the material. For folks like me who love the challenge and the curiosity about what others think I don’t see the problem. Nor am I personally offended by what others think of my faith and religious practice. Last year the Muslims had a “fit” when their God was cartooned by a non – Muslim. I never had a problem with that. I certainly don’t have a problem if someone cartoons an impression of the Hebrew God. What do I care? He is entitled to his opinion and thankfully he can express it. I may disagree, but that is the beauty of living in a free and open society. Maimonides and others during the middle ages were called upon to defend our faith not for intellectual gymnastics or entertainment but because our future was at stake. We could have been driven out of countries, super taxed, accused of blood libel, or worse. So there was a necessity to defend our faith. The circumstances today are somewhat different. The traditional Jewish community has a bumper crop of books published on Jewish Thought, Jewish Philosophy, Tanach etc., many of them presenting traditional Jewish practice and belief in a sophisticated, articulate and intelligent light. There is, not to forget, the power of the World Wide Web and the blogoshere. There are even numerous radio talk shows which do an exemplary job of defending “old testament values and morals”. So anytime D.K. wishes to defend us against the likes of Dawkins and Harris he has the opportunity and venue. In fact I challenge him do so. It would be a daunting, but something I’m sure he can handle.
Although i agree with much of what was written by the author of the article. I must protest at the implied comparison of the gravity of rejecting the Divine authorship of the Torah with rejecting the traditional authorship of the Zohar. The former places one out of the pale of judaism while the latter has been an opinion considered seriously by some of the greatest Sages in the past 800 years. Read "Medidation & Kabbalah" by the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan for a discussion on the subject.
Just passing through. Very interesting article and comments. Thought I'd add my 2cents. I'm a Christian and it seems odd to me that Judaism doesn't have apologetics like Christianity has. I didn't know this til now and I just assumed there were strong apologetic Jewish writers just like there are Christian. The internet has caused an explosion in the availability of Christian apologetic material ranging from the scientific to the philosophic. I find the good apologists being springboards for closer examinations & understandings of my faith. I'm sure Judaic apologists would have the same positive impact on the faith of Jews. I've read that some Jews are concerned about the Jewish assimilation rate and alarmed at how many less Jews there are. I would think good apologists could help reverse this trend.
I couldn't agree more. I used to be very non-observant- In fact, at one point I considered myself to be an athiest. Today I am a servant of the HASHEM the Most High G*d of Israel. I do my best to obey G*d and fullfill my duty to him, but I am frustrated. I am in the process pf making Aliyah to live with my famiy in Israel this year, and I know that HASHEM's is the Master of all and the knower of mysteries- I just want other people who (by the etruscans/romans) are called "Jews" to recognize their potential to do good- and to understand that we should be courageous enough to defend ourselves from that which tempts/seeks to destroy us. I am not "relogious"- religous is a word to describe how we want "other nations" to perceive us- I am of Israel, a Hebrew, and an,"AVDEY YH**"/ Slave of HASHEM. I hope that I never have to resort to violence, but if the need should arise, I would end the life of the human enemies of G*d- I am not going to let anyone challenge Our G*d, HASHEM, Master of Legions - and not go un-challenged! I pray that we will get our act together- and that HASHEM has patience with us. If we would only unite for the greater good of all Mankind, The nations will proclaim HASHEM reigned/reigns/will reign forever! Please fellow Jews, be good! it is much better than the alternative- believe my testimony in that respect--Joshua Cherney