What next? From the God of the philosophers to the God of the Torah

We have come a long way. There is a first cause. There is someone who wrote the laws. There is someone who built us so that we understand the world. And there is a source of the good. The first three arguments established a philosophical God: a creator, a designer. It is not certain that this is the same entity, but it is reasonable. And the last two arguments added something important: God saw to it that we could understand the world, and he wants us to do good. In other words, this is already a good and involved God, who expects something of us.

But something is still missing. Philosophy cannot tell us what exactly God wants, nor decide between the religions. From these arguments one cannot get to Shabbat and tefillin. For that, revelation is needed: that God “speak” with human beings and tell them what he wants.

Why expect a revelation?

One may ask: perhaps morality is all that God wants? If so, no revelation is needed. But think of it this way. Before creation there were three possibilities: not to create a world at all, to create a perfect world with no choice, or to create a world in which there is choice. God chose the third. If the goal had been only that we improve ourselves morally, it would have been better not to create us at all, and to spare all the suffering. So the goal is connected to our choices, but it lies beyond the world. There is a Chinese parable about a poor man who bought, with his last two coins, a slice of bread and a flower. “The bread, in order to live. The flower, so that there is something to live for.” Morality is the bread. There is also a flower.

And that flower, the religious goal, we cannot discover on our own. So it is to be expected that God would reveal himself and tell us. And once it is already clear that there is a God who expects something of us, revelation is something expected, not absurd. Some say “where philosophy ends, faith begins,” and Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, said “I believe because it is absurd.” Here the move is the reverse: belief in revelation is a result of thinking, not a substitute for it.

The witness

The Jewish tradition testifies to such a revelation, to an entire people at Mount Sinai, and not to a single person. The Torah itself stresses this: “Ask now of the days of old… Has any people heard the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and lived?” On whom is the burden of proof? A tradition is considered reliable until proved otherwise, not the reverse. That is how we treat everything we know about history: we rely on what was told and written, unless there is good reason to suspect it. If we demanded proof for every tradition, we could know nothing about the past.

And there is a difference between someone who saw and someone who heard. Shimon looks at the clock and sees that it is two o’clock. Reuven, blind from birth, says to him: “Perhaps your eyes are deceiving you?” Shimon will not be impressed. He saw. The doubts are “the lot of the blind,” of those who did not experience it themselves. We, the later generations, are in Reuven’s place. Our question is how much we trust those who saw. The stranger the thing reported, the more trust is needed. But after the philosophical arguments, revelation is no longer so strange.

“But miracles don’t happen”

Here comes the most famous objection. It was formulated by David Hume, whom we already met in the introduction. Hume was one of the most famous skeptics in history and a sharp critic of religion, and he said: when someone tells you of a miracle, ask yourself what is more likely, that the miracle really happened, or that the narrator erred, exaggerated or lied? Suppose a friend tells you he saw a dead man come back to life. Clearly you will think he got confused. People err and exaggerate all the time, and the dead never come back to life. Therefore, said Hume, it is always more likely that the story of the miracle is wrong.

Often Hume is right. Believers too do not accept every story of a miracle. And there is also something right in the demand to weigh both sides. In Britain, a woman was once convicted of murdering her two babies, on the basis of a calculation that the chance of two babies dying of “cot death” is one in 64 million. But they forgot to weigh that a double murder of babies is also very rare. Both sides must be weighed. And yet there is one big problem with Hume’s claim, and it is worth understanding it well.

Hume assumes what he wants to prove. “The dead do not rise” and “miracles do not happen” are true only if there is no one who can perform them. And there is a vicious circle here: we will never accept testimony of a miracle, and therefore “there has never been testimony of miracles,” and therefore we go on not accepting it. An example: thirty years ago, if someone had told you “a Black president of the United States passed a major health reform,” it would have sounded like a story about aliens, and no one would have believed it. Today, when everyone knows there was such a president, the report of the reform sounds entirely plausible. Exactly the same story, but what we already know completely changes how plausible it is. So too here. Whoever has already reached, through the previous arguments, the conclusion that there is a God who created the world and expects something of us, does not think revelation is absurd. For him, the story of Sinai is a story about something that was expected to happen.

And how does one check the reliability of testimony at all? Not by calculating probabilities. A court of appeal does not examine the credibility of witnesses. That is done by the judge who heard them, from his impression. The appellate court checks only the procedure. So too here: we cannot “calculate” the reliability of the revelation at Sinai with a formula. What we can check is the chain of transmission: was the story passed on continuously, from generation to generation, in an entire people, and not invented at some stage? That is the subject of the following paragraphs.

Why this tradition is reliable

It must be said honestly: this is the link that critics attack most. The philosophical arguments lead to God, but the move from God to a particular revelation, at Mount Sinai specifically, rests on a historical tradition, and a tradition can always be doubted. So the considerations here are considerations of plausibility, not of proof. There are several that strengthen the tradition of Sinai. None is decisive on its own, but together they are significant.

First, there are no similar stories. If an entire people could “invent” for itself a story of mass revelation, we would expect to find more such stories in history. There are none. Even Christianity and Islam accept Sinai, and do not claim a mass revelation of their own. The revelations they tell of were personal, to one person. In this sense, Sinai is the “Big Bang” of the religions, and all the others accept it. It is they who must prove that God changed his mind afterward. And what of other mass “revelations”? People mention, for example, the apparition at Fatima in Portugal, reported by crowds in 1917. But these are local and late events, with no entire people behind them bearing them as a continuous tradition of thousands of years, and with no commandment that an entire people took upon itself and passes on.

Second, the commandments themselves. A large part of the mitzvot have no clear benefit, moral or otherwise. Why would anyone invent such a system, and why would an entire people accept it?

Third, the question everyone can ask himself: if you wanted to preserve the memory of an event for thousands of years, what would you do? You would record every detail, dates, names, places, and establish rituals that reenact the event every year. That is exactly what the Torah did: Passover, the Seder night, the daily remembrance of the exodus from Egypt. And yet, skepticism can always win. There are people who deny the Holocaust, despite all the documentation.

And there is an objection from the Bible itself, which is worth anticipating. The book of Kings tells that in the days of King Josiah the book of the Torah “was found” in the Temple, and when it was read, the king tore his garments. Does this not show that the Torah had been forgotten, and perhaps was even written then? But the verses describe a different situation: there was a Temple, there was a High Priest, there were sacrifices. The people knew of the Torah; they simply did not obey it, and the copy of the book in the Temple had been lost. This is delinquency, not forgetting. And there is a further point here: a late editor who was fabricating a story of continuous tradition would not have left such an embarrassing chapter in it. He would have deleted it.

And there is more. Our Sages list the signs of a madman: he goes out alone at night, sleeps in the cemetery, tears his clothes. For each sign on its own one can say “perhaps he has another reason.” But when all the signs appear together, it is not plausible that each has a different reason. So too here. Each argument on its own can be rejected. But all together they are stronger than the sum of the parts. This people brought to the world, in an age of idolatry and child sacrifice, belief in one God and the idea that every human being is created in God’s image. It survived thousands of years of dispersion and persecution. And there are also prophecies. In the section of rebuke in Deuteronomy, the Torah describes, almost a thousand years in advance, that the people of Israel will be torn from its land and scattered “from one end of the earth to the other,” that it will find no rest anywhere, and that it will be an object of mockery and hatred in all kingdoms. Such systematic and lasting hatred, without reason, is a phenomenon hard to match in the history of nations. The Torah also describes that the nation that will exile us will come “from afar… as the eagle swoops,” and that we will not understand its language. The emblem of the Romans was the eagle, and their language, unlike that of all the other conquerors from Greece or the East, was not known in the region. And it adds an unexpected detail: “The Lord will bring you back to Egypt in ships… and there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as slaves.” What is the connection between the Roman exile and Egypt? But that is exactly what happened: the Romans exiled Jews to Egypt in ships and sold them as slaves. And further: “The stranger who is among you will rise higher and higher above you.” In the Roman period, kings descended from converts, the Herodian dynasty, ruled over Israel. These are exceptional and rare events, and all were foreseen in advance.

Here one must be careful about honesty, and not everyone is careful about it on this subject. For a prophecy to be the basis of an argument, several things must be checked. First, what counts as “rare”? Exile, for example, happened to other peoples too, though not on this scale and without a return to the land after thousands of years. Second, how unambiguous is the wording? There are general expressions that can be interpreted after the fact according to what happened, and that is how the oracles of ancient Greece and the “mediums” of our day operated as well. Third, how many prophecies are there in the Torah, and how many of them were fulfilled? Some are phrased as conditions (“if you do not listen, this will happen”), and not as certain prophecy, which reduces the risk of their being refuted. And there are promises of which it is not clear that they were fulfilled.

So the conclusion is balanced. There is no prophecy in the Torah that is known for certain not to have been fulfilled, but there are vague prophecies whose degree of fulfillment is unclear. On the other hand, there are prophecies that were fulfilled, and some of them are singular and rare. And beyond the events themselves, there is here a prediction in advance, and that is a significant reinforcement. And another point: the very fact that the Torah wrote prophecies, and took the risk that they would be refuted, instead of “neutralizing” the risk and contenting itself with commandments, testifies to confidence in knowledge of the future. And the risk was real, since over the generations there were those who left the Torah because of prophecies they did not see fulfilled. So it is right to give the argument from prophecies significant weight, but not crushing weight, as many do. It joins the other considerations, strengthens them and is strengthened by them.

And what about the other religions?

Here comes the question almost everyone asks: “This whole description is subjective. It is colored by the education you received. Had you been born in a village in Poland, you would find the same charm in Christianity.”

The answer comes in two stages. First, the impressions presented here are not merely subjective. They rest on arguments, and they are far stronger than a personal feeling. There is also a consideration of priority. All the monotheistic religions (belief in one God) accept the revelation at Sinai. Christianity and Islam do not deny it. They claim that God revealed himself again, later, and changed the requirements. But the revelations they tell of were personal, to one person, and not to an entire people. And the burden of proof lies on whoever claims that God changed his mind. Sinai is the “Big Bang” of the religions, and all of them start from it.

But the second stage is no less important, and here we will say something that departs from what is usually said. Even if we and our faith are right, a reasonable person born and raised in Poland, in Ukraine or in the Sahara believes with the same degree of devotion and the same good faith in the faith he was raised in. And had any of us been born there, he would probably have grown up to be a believing Christian, convinced that he holds the truth. This is neither skepticism nor relativism: the Pole is wrong. But on the assumption that God does not hold it against someone who acts reasonably and according to the best of his common sense, the conclusion is that this Pole will receive fitting treatment from God, exactly like us.

Hence the conclusion about what may be called the “exclusive discourse” (the discourse of exclusivity), on which we all grew up: as if we held the pure and only truth, and all the others were mistaken, misleading, and would even be punished for their heresy. This is a discourse for internal purposes. It is meant mainly to nurture the self-confidence of believers, and not to express a theological conception in its own right. And let us ask: is it reasonable that God determines a person’s fate only by the place where he was born? His conception is to a large extent forced on him, and each of us in his place would have acted similarly. It is not reasonable to punish a person who acts in good faith for something that does not depend on him. And a God who acted so arbitrarily is not the God our tradition describes.

So two possibilities remain, and neither of them is relativistic: either different revelations are possible, with different requirements for each society, and each society received what is expected of it; or there is one religious truth, and we are the ones who are right, and yet it is clear that others must receive reasonable treatment, from us and from God. And what about the harsh attitude of halakha and of the Sages toward other beliefs and toward those who hold them? The explanation is that this attitude was born in a different world, in which the other beliefs were of a lower human level, and perhaps there was also an assumption that everyone understood in his heart that the God of Sinai is the truth. Today the situation is different: these are normative people, who from their point of view have no reason to think their faith is mistaken, and so their holding of another faith comes from a genuine place. Such a situation calls for a different attitude.

And finally, a word about the streams within Judaism. Reform does not believe in revelation and in the obligation to halakha as it was handed down in the tradition, and so engaging with it is engaging with a secular conception, not with another religion. Conservative Judaism is not fundamentally different from Orthodoxy, since both are committed to halakha, and the dispute between them is about interpretation. Karaism does not recognize the Oral Torah, and it is a relatively late stream, so it is not reasonable to see it as an alternative tradition. What matters for the discussion here is only that each person must choose one of them as the authentic continuation of the revelation.