The Evolving Jew

Cool news from Israel. Hopefully it's not just PR and will actually happen. Israel announced, yesterday, a partnership in which a massive infrastructure for electric cars will be built over the next few years - see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22783747/ The most innovative part is this: (from http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9854591-54.html?tag=nefd.top ) Project Better Place, Agassi's organization, will try to build 500,000 electric service stations in the country, according to the organization. At these stations, attendants will swap out depleted batteries and put in fully charged ones. This saves the several hours typically required to charge a lithium-ion battery pack made for cars.

A comment on my last post got me thinking: There are 2 types of skeptics hanging out in this zone of the blogosphere. Skeptic type #1: I only believe what is proven by empirical evidence. There is no logical reason to believe in god or any divine source to Judaism, especially since one can trace the entirely social development of superstitious belief in gods or god in various cultures. Plus, in light of modern science, archeology, and historical research, the divine revelation and many other events related in the Torah could not have happened. The definition of a rational human being is one who bases belief on observation. I am such a rational being. It would make no sense for me to believe in something intangible like god. That is outside the realm of empiricism and therefore does not exist. The entire basis of Judaism is riddled with inaccuracies and ancient misconceptions. The Torah is clearly not divine. Therefore, the entire basis of the religion is a myth. Skeptic ty

Reading about the struggles of so many to find a balance between their Orthodox lifestyle and their skeptical outlook, I feel lucky. I'm pretty happy & comfortable where I am. I'm a quasi-skeptic who is happy with an observant lifestyle (with some social innovations) and finds divinity in what is probably a human-written Torah. I've always been fascinated with the ancient origins of Judaism. Now the human story of creating this religion actually is making it more meaningful to me than when I thought it was given as a complete product by Hashem. One always takes more pride in what one builds oneself. As a nation we can take more pride in what we or our ancestors built ourselves rather than it being handed to us all finished.

I went to Yeshiva day schools K-12. I started studying Gemara (Talmud) in 5th grade and accepted as a given that what I was told, that Torah She-ba’al Peh (the oral tradition) was given along with Torah She-bichtav (the written Torah) at Har Sinai and that it was a parallel revelation meant to explain the obscure language of the Torah itself. Except for occasional classes, I’ve neglected studying Gemara since my early 20’s. Instead, I concentrated my Torah study on Tanach on the one side, and pure Halacha on the other. Recently I’ve begun to go to a weekly gemara shiur again and it’s amazing how my perspective has changed. Since the last time I studied gemara seriously, I’ve grown much more questioning about the origins of Judaism in general, and have read up more on history and philosophy of the ancient world. In this light, the gemara seems to me to be much more of a struggle between two ancient traditions and the challenge of reconciling them. One was text-based and one was ha

First of all, I have to admit that I haven’t really studied the DH in any great depth, so I can’t speak with firm authority on its validity as a theory. But my gut feeling, based on a light examination of it, is that much of the DH is speculation. The specific attribution of particular parts of the Torah to different authors seems somewhat arbitrary and less than purely scientific. There seems to have been an orthodoxy established (if you’ll pardon the word) since the 19th century dividing up the Torah into these various hypothetical authors, and very little has changed in the DH since then. However, that’s just my opinion of the answers that the DH posits. Its questions are extremely valid. The inconsistencies, lack of archeological and geological evidence, anachronisms, are all strong contradictions of its word-for-word divinity. And as such, it seems unlikely that the Torah came, whole cloth (or parchment) word-for-word, directly from God. It seems that there were very likely se