When I Stopped Seeing the Bible Only as Good, It Got Better

When I was a young rabbinical student, newly awakened to more traditional Jewish faith and observance, I loved that all the new practices and texts I took on felt deeply familiar, like extended family you just meet and can’t help but seeing all kinds of familiar family characteristics. It’s as if you knew these perfect strangers your whole life already. So it was with the Torah and Tanakh.

I encountered a myriad of terms, practices, stories and figures I had never been exposed to in my childhood and teen years (or, if I was, I wasn’t paying attention). Strangers though we were, they conveyed an ethos and a voice that felt familiar and comfortable. I loved that. But the familiarity was deceptive, a domestication that blinded me to Scriptures’ true depth and vitality—and most importantly, the challenges.

It was a bit of a surprise when I started to dive deeper into the traditional and academic study of Judaism’s classical texts, Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, Codes, that I kept bumping into:

Stories that shocked—Jephthah’s filicide, Pinchas skewering a Hebrew and his Midianite lover in flagrante delicto.

Laws that were cruel or unjust—no emancipation for a Canaanite slave, women and people with disabilities unable to testify in court, shooing a mother bird to take her eggs, rampant killing of Canaanites for the wrong kind of worship, not to mention that whole abomination stuff about male/male sex.

Passages that were simply bizarre—Moses’ forced circumcision as a bridegroom of blood, the giants in Genesis 6 who mated with early humans.  

These stories, imperatives, and prohibitions struck me as cruel, unjust, often inhumane.

Reading Only the Good Parts Became Impossible

My first few years reading through these Scriptures, honestly, I would mostly skip over them or minimize them without any real confrontation. I would leap over them to focus on stories and passages that were more compatible with my own ethos and values. For a while, that avoidance mostly worked, as I was simply so in love with the “good” parts that that avoidance remained possible (as a student, anyway).

At around the middle of rabbinical school, as I dove deeper into Tanakh and rabbinic law, and I had access both to modern academia and to traditional parshanut, I kept finding passages impossible to domesticate. At this point, my original strategy started to fail me and I could no longer ignore those passages, as their flaws and their human cost across the ages became clear to me.

This challenge is easier (for me) in the troubling narratives than in the imperatives and prohibitions. Nowhere does it say I have to approve of every choice King David made or the way Lot treated his daughters. Intrabiblical criticism offers abundant critique and dissent,^[1] and the rabbis and sages expanded that tradition manyfold. If we want to practice the religion of the Sages, then we have to be willing to exercise the same leeway as they did. The survival of Judaism requires each generation to step up, and this is doubly so when it comes to halakha.

Were it not for the precedent of the classical rabbis exercising their right to interpret laws in a manner vastly different than their biblical context or outcome, we would be stuck with the original meaning, but that is not the case.^[2] We have ample tools for reinterpretation, gifted to us by the Talmudic sages themselves.

Judaism’s Attitude Towards Homosexuality

The first such issue that I had to face squarely and without equivocation was the burning question of gay and lesbian ordination and marriage. The year was 1985, a beloved family member had come out. I could not honestly justify the traditional position except by brute authority (“the Torah says so, that settles it”).^[3]

My love for my relative (and the obvious beauty of her love) demanded more of me than that, so I spent a semester working on a teshuvah that ended up shaking and transforming the Conservative movement, eventually shifting its policies and the admission policies of all its seminaries around the world.^[4] The solution was to face the verses honestly—the verse was the verse—but rely on the rabbinic capacity to interpret its context and application for today anew.^[5]

Divine Cruelty

Since then, I’ve applied this approach to many of the problems I come across in our literary tradition. For instance, in the story of the exodus, I refuse to see the will of God in the bloodshed, cruelty, plagues and drowning; this recognition forced me to accept that an Iron Age document would not perfectly accord with 21^st century ethical sensibilities.^[6] In this case, learning that the texts that formed the Bible have editors and history was liberating.

Of course, historicizing can be a superb way to avoid real confrontation, intellectualizing the moral issues with context. Moreover, leaving it at the historicizing level means treating the Torah as just one more ancient document. For those of who see Torah as scripture, historicizing must be only a first step on the way towards reinterpretation on the level of derash.

Religion’s Interpretive Process: Grains Becoming Pearls

Judaism is a rabbinic religion, more than a biblical one, and religious and spiritual direction are to be found in the masorah as it unfolds. The Torah launches the conversation across the the generations, but Jewish interpretive tradition – mishnah, midrash, talmud, codes – continue this developing discussion, that has yet to conclude. The Torah demands to be an Etz Hayim, a living tree, and it is an act of Jewish loyalty to join the conversation as a participant.

Life has a way of growing us past “happily ever after” and a fairy tale perspective. The complexities of relationships, the realities of our biology and happenstance, the random relationship between power and goodness, all gnaw at our childlike filters that perceive only a morality play. At some point, we put away childhood things, and see the world as it is: untamed, wild, risky, and beautiful.

The Torah is no cultivated garden, no pleasance. It is a wadi of spontaneous flows of unchanneled water, desert blooms of unimagined flowers and pointed barbs, stories that speak, deeper than words, by pricking our hearts, alarming our senses and disturbing our sleep. Only in the wild, does the Holy erupt in flame and speech.

I find myself drawn to the disturbing grains of sand that make possible the making of a pearl. It is precisely those encounters, often painful and disruptive, that can produce the greatest insight and growth. I viewed the apparent injustices not as morally binding precedent, but as catalysts to learn, to interpret, to understand, and to transcend.

There is danger in the uncertainty, yes. But there is also great opportunity: to live an expansive life, brimming with curiosity precisely because of the unexpected. We are invited to rise above, not because we don’t stumble on the way, but because the stumbling is real. And it hurts. But only in the stumble do we discover our resilience and have a chance to assert our own decency, extending that compassion in expanding circles of humanity and godliness.

So it is when encountering Tanakh and rabbinic literature through the eyes exposed to life’s pitfalls, we can address those challenges and disappointments with a spirit fortified not by numbing platitudes, but by our ability to forge meaning and connection despite the pain. Such moments are soul building.

The Good in the Bible Still Takes My Breath Away

And just as importantly, honestly seeing the negative aspects of parts of our traditional sources didn’t prevent me from cherishing the preponderance of texts, stories and guidance, that took my breath away with their compassion, insight, humanity, and holiness. We elevated the Abraham who said, “Don’t destroy the righteous with the wicked,” with the Moses who challenged God not to wipe out the disappointing Children of Israel, but to mold them better. We thrill to the daughters of Zelophehad who had the integrity to say to Moses and the Elders, it may be the law, but it isn’t right. And God loved that too.