When I was younger and I started having doubts about TMS I went to talk to a kiruv Rabbi about it.I was pretty haughty at the time and I said to myself "If he can answer my questions then I'll stay frum, if he can't I'll go OTD" I guess I was kinda figuring he would be blown away by my questions and would admit that he was living a lie. I blasted him with DH and anachronisms and everything I had up my sleeve and .....
lo and behold he had answers! But oh what bitter answers they were because they were all kvetches! Dirty stinking kvetches. Almost every "answer" he gave was preceded by the famous words of any self respecting kvetcher "It depends how you look at it" It was fairly annoying that this guy didn't take off his kippa and say "YOU'RE RIGHT!" I was hopeful for about two seconds that this guy had anything worthwhile to say and then gave up.
but I did learn something very important which made the whole thing worthwhile. You can always explain all the problems away. No self respecting Rabbi doesn't have the "answers". However the question is does he have GOOD answers or BAD answers. ALMOST ANYTHING IN THE WORLD CAN BE "INTERPRETED" TO FIT YOUR VIEWS!
So with this all in mind how should you read the Bible?
When one gets to a troublesome verse one can kvetch till one's lips are blue but it still will not be an honest approach. What you really have to do is say if I was reading say the Odyssey and I came to a passage like this how would I read it? Would i seriously apply kvetches or would I read it LIKE IT SOUNDS? That's the key to accurate Bible reading drop your preconceived notions (as the Shadal advises) and read it the way it SEEMS. Thats the difference between how skeptics read the Torah and believers read the Torah. The skeptic (at least an honest one) reads the Torah simply and says what do these words mean? The believer reads the Torah and says what do I want these words to mean? Its all about realizing the simplest most obvious explanation.
Of course if you have a good reason (besides emotional attachment to TMS) to change the simple meaning then by all means do! But then you also have to explain why the Biblical author expressed it in such a strange way and THAT is what almost all kvetches fail to do!
"But the DH also has preconceived notions", says the believer. Yes it does you're right don't just follow everything Kugel and Friedman say. However one must be equally devoid of preconceived notions when evaluating Mosaic authorship. In my next post I'll try to tackle specific examples of things that although they are kvetchable read simply suggest non-Mosaic authorship and also maybe the DH.
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