I present here an excerpt (lightly edited) from chapter 6 of my Come Now, Let Us Reason Together. This text argues that the many apparent contradictions and inconsistencies found in the Tanakh (the 24 books constituting the Hebrew Bible) show that authentic Judaism is open-minded, pluralistic, and esteems controversy as a uniquely valuable tool in truth-discovery.
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[T]his chapter will focus on intertextual conflicts, as they represent a striking display of Judaism’s fruitful use of disagreement. It will pursue this project across three distinct dimensions of Tanakh: (i) conflicts within the Pentateuchal texts regarding (a) halakhah and (b) gender roles; (ii) disagreements between the views of the literary prophets and the Pentateuch regarding the relative importance of ritual and ethics; and (iii) the Writings and Prophets’ many revisionary challenges articulated to Judaism’s longstanding principles regarding the nature of divine justice, particularism, Jewish identity, and other matters….
[In my analysis of (iii) above, I pay special attention to the books of Jonah and Job. Regarding the latter, I write that to understand this provocative and disturbing text, we must focus on:]
the human attribute of moral autonomy discussed in chapter 2. The beauty of God’s creation, its “order and harmony” (in Gordis’s words), rests on his solicitude in providing for the unique needs of all the species in the natural world, of which human beings are just one. However, in sharp contrast to all the other animals, human beings do not live “by bread alone.” Only persons can sensibly be said to have free will, and thus moral agency. Humans are the only beings that can self-consciously sacrifice their own well-being for the greater good, but the price of this freedom is that some persons will act viciously. Like the poor, to some extent, evil and injustice will always be with us.
Accordingly, it would not merit a Dayenu! if only our physical needs are satisfied. The special and precious gift that God has bestowed on humans is the opportunity to obey the Torah’s command: “justice, justice, shall you pursue.” However, God cannot, as a matter of elemental logic, ensure that the Aristotelian ideal of justice is satisfied, that everyone gets what they deserve, while simultaneously upholding free will and the laws of nature.
Thus, what Job gets right is his bitter complaint that the old bromides offered by his friends and by tradition are insulting. The world is morally chaotic, and terrible things happen to virtuous people, while evildoers live long and prosper. He is convinced by God’s majestic defense of the world as the best one possible, given the constraint just mentioned. This interpretation has the virtue of crediting the Almighty with a meaningful reply to Job, and one that is consistent with the Torah’s essential philosophy.
Hopefully, this book’s brief and limited review of the canonical texts is sufficient to show that, far from preaching dogma, they present divergent positions on critical ethical and theological questions, stimulating and challenging the attentive reader to think through these issues for themselves. As Moshe Greenberg (1928–2010), a leading rabbi and scholar of the Conservative movement, has written, the canon contains contradictions because “[t]he religious sensibility absorbs or even affirms the contradictions embodied in these books. That may be because these contradictions are perceived to exist in reality.”
Or, as James Sanders (1927–2020), an influential Christian bible scholar, puts it:
Honesty demands recognition of the Bible’s internal dialogues . . . how impossible it is to limit God or reality to any one set of propositions. To insist that the Bible is harmonious or even homogeneous had led to diabolical abuses . . . How the Jewish canon came together formally as a closed collection of texts, and how these texts were read with and against each other evolved over centuries.
Scripture teaches that humans are endowed by our Creator not only with certain unalienable rights but also with the capacity for empathy, a love of justice, and an aptitude for moral reasoning. It seems that multiple biblical voices are calling on humanity to achieve our divinely inspired ends by constantly questioning the received wisdom in search of something better.
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I have much more to say about authentic Judaism’s liberal (classic sense) character in my book, which I hope you will check out.
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