Welcome to Part 8 of My Jewish Learning's introduction to Jewish text study. Today's email tackles a question that many people have as we wrestle with ancient texts: How should we treat text that reads as problematic to a contemporary learner?
In Deuteronomy, God commands that the inhabitants of a town be killed indiscriminately if some among them have been corrupted by false Gods.
Exodus grants a father the right to sell his daughter as a slave.
And Genesis records the story of God instructing Abraham to sacrifice his son.
How should we handle these and other troubling passages in the Torah?
Modern readers are understandably horrified by the Torah’s apparent sanctioning of terrible acts. How could a kind and loving God make such cruel demands of people? Where is God’s morality?
Particularly for those committed to Orthodox belief, these questions are not easily resolved. Commandments that challenge our sense of right and wrong cannot simply be excised from the text or assumed to have been inserted by anyone other than God.
There are multiple ways to address this problem. One of them is to circumvent it, rather than solve it.
Read on as Ysoscher Katz, chair of the department of Talmud at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, discusses how to reconcile our modern moral understanding with problematic Jewish texts.
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Share Your Thoughts
This email concludes the Guide to Torah Study series. We'd love to hear what you thought about it. Please answer a few questions about the email series in this short survey.
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Review the Topics
The Guide to Torah Study email series provided instructions and suggestions for getting started with deep engagement with Jewish texts. Review all the topics covered here:
How Torah Can Sharpen the Mind
What Are the Main Jewish Texts?
Discover Torah Commentator Nehama Leibowitz
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