It en't true. Is it?

We teach our children about Adam and Eve and Noah and the ark and Miriam dancing at the shores of the sea and eventually a child looks at us and asks if it is true. I was reminded of an interesting answer --- for adults, not children --- on a recent trip to visit my parents. My family drove to New Jersey listening to Philip Pullman's excellent novel "The Golden Compass". I won't try to summarize the plot but let me say that this is a work of "young adult" fiction that rewards the attention of older adults. Toward the end of the book, the 12 year-old heroine, Lyra, is discussing the Bible with her father and asks the question: "But it en't true, is it? Not like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true. There wasn't really an Adam and Eve." Her father's response, useful for only a limited number of 12 year-olds, is to "think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it."

At least by the time we are adults, the literal truth of the stories is much less important than what we do with the materials. This was illustrated for me in a different book that I happened to read on the same trip: "Who Wrote the Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman. This is a very clear and engaging description for a lay audience of the "Documentary Hypothesis" - the idea that different parts of the Torah were written by different authors known, in academic circles as J, E, P, & D. The details are laid out like a detective story in Friedman's book. The upshot is that by the time the first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, there were at least four texts written by different people with different agendas.

Some time later came the final step of taking J, E, P, & D and making them into the Torah. Friedman thinks this was done by Ezra, the scribe (as in the biblical book of Ezra) during or after the return from the Babylonian captivity. This was not a matter of stitching one scroll to the next. The texts are tightly interwoven. Sometimes the beginning of a single verse is held to come from one source and the end from another.

Now, when we think about the meaning of stories in the Torah, the sequencing is important. For example, in the Torah, the death of Sarah comes immediately after the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. Much interpretive calculation has been based on that juxtaposition. Perhaps, we speculate, the shock of Genesis 22 kills Sarah in Genesis 23. In modern commentary, this has been used to derive any number of candidate truths about the relationship between husbands and wives. However, if we are to believe Friedman's version of the Documentary Hypothesis, the Binding of Isaac comes from the E source and the story about the death and burial of Sarah comes from P. Interpretation is derived from proximity and proximity might have been not much more than editorial convenience. It is a bit like my marriage (like most of our marriages, I imagine). We are not an editorial convenience, but if Julie and I had not been brought into proximity by going to the same college, much "interpretation" --- our three sons, for example --- would not have followed.

I think it is possible to appreciate Friedman's scholarly detective work and still to find hints of the Divine, even in the juxtaposition of sources. After all, if we can consider the author of a text to be 'inspired', why not an editor - especially and editor who worked so cleverly to weld disparate sources into our Torah.

None of this helps much when your nine year-old asks if a story is true. This is not a nine year-old's sort of reasoning. Rather, it is an invitation for adults to move beyond our religious school education. Many of us figured out in early adolescence that it "en't true like Chemistry or Engineering", and we never looked back. That is a pity. There are a lot of topics, abandoned in 10th grade, that reward adult study. In the matter of those Bible stories, it remains interesting to ask if a real Moses actually led anyone through the wilderness or if there ever was a golden calf. However, the adult work goes on to the "calculation of all manner of things". Being a member of this congregation is not about taking some position about this story or that one. It is about what kind of math you do with those imaginary numbers.

An option for action: Rabbi Vogel's Saturday morning Torah study meets from 9 to 10:30 on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. Hope to see you there.