Intro to Judaism - Week 2

This week's topic is about what I believe about the Torah. There are specific questions posed, but I'm better at sort of free-writing so I'm going to keep it at that simple summary and go from there.

I was so relieved to read about Reconstructionist Judaism, which I believe is the most recent denomination, if I remember correctly. The founder's view on who wrote the Torah fit like a puzzle piece for me, and actually made me panic for a nanosecond that maybe I should have explored Reconstructionism and what if it fits me more than Reform? Of course I continued reading and realized that Reform still most closely fits how I feel, think, and believe. But in Essential Judaism, it says of the founder: "The sacred texts, he said, are not the product of divine revelation but are the creation of the Jewish people. As such they represent four thousand years of Jewish aspirations towards God." As I read it, I got so excited - "YES, that!!!" This articulates a belief that I have struggled to explain even for myself, and validated a way of thinking that I wasn't sure would be accepted. It seems so...non-religious.

I'm self-conscious of my tendency to intellectualize my spirituality, as if to make it more palatable for myself, to change it to fit me rather than change myself to fit religious truth. But I digressed so much from religion for an entire decade that I can't just abandon my intellectualism in order to re-embrace it. Coming back to religion requires reconciling science and religion, and that is a huge part of why Reform in particular appealed to me. So even though this is a Reconstructionist view, Reform seems, in my limited experience, to allow freedom for this kind of perspective.

I have believed since the age of 19 or 20 that there is no absolute truth that humans can be aware of, and therefore no one correct way of perceiving and explaining God. This is why I sort of shed religion for a while - not because I was an atheist, far from it, but because I felt like I had no right to determine that any one path to God was right or wrong and therefore couldn't determine my own. How could I firmly assert that MY religion was correct, just because I had been raised with it? Wouldn't people in other religions feel the same? Why am I any different? Why am I so sure that I'm right? How can anyone be so sure? Okay, so that's where faith comes in - but then faith must come down to an active choice to believe over common sense, over a broader world view, that your path is the best one - or at least the best one for YOU. And that's how I began to develop mine.

I do believe that an interpretation of God depends on your culture and historical context. I believe that an understanding of God is filtered through the minds of humans who are desperate and eager to understand more than they are capable of. Does that make the stories fables of a sort? Not really. I believe there is truth and fact behind all of it, but that there is an undeniable spin on it that is a result of oral tradition passed down through many generations before being written down. I value these stories for how they have kept God alive for an entire community of people for thousands of years. I value the traditions as part of my wife's culture, which I don't yet feel I can call my own (will I ever feel that I can?), but which will be our children's. I do believe - at least right now, though my faith is constantly evolving - that the Torah is not "the product of divine revelation" but rather "the creation of the Jewish people," and deserving of as much respect and study as if I believed it to be God's own direct word.

The Jewish people have spent millennia studying and interpreting the sacred texts, and (with the exception of Orthodox?) attempting to disentangle the lessons from their historical context in order to apply it to their modern lives. I look forward to doing the same.