Introduction: Sharing Fate
Between October and December 1988, I recorded a series of broadcasts on Jewish spirituality for the BBC World Service series, “Words of Faith.” The texts form the first and longest chapter in this section. In them I try to give expression to the powerful and living relationship between a people and a book: Jews and the Torah, the Hebrew Bible.
That relationship is neither simple nor naive. Jews are not fundamentalists. For the most part, they have not read the Bible as a scientific text or a set of deterministic predictions, as if it contained factual information of a kind otherwise unavailable to the human mind. It is not a short cut to knowledge or a magical disclosure of the fate of the universe. That is not how Judaism understands the search for knowledge or the challenge of history.
Instead, reading Torah is a way of experiencing Jewish history as the interplay between a moral and challenging God, and the often disobedient but ultimately loyal people He chose to be the bearers of His special covenant. It is a particular way of seeing our fate and destiny – what happens to us and what we are called on to do in response. It is the Book which gave and continues to give shape to the Jewish imagination, and frames our interpretation of events. It is this which makes Jews a distinctive people, and gives Jewish history its special character.
To a remarkable degree, scenes that occur in the Hebrew Bible recur at critical moments in post-biblical Jewish history, and continue to do so to the present day. That is no accident. For human history, as we understand it, is not a blind sequence of events, operating on one another as causes and effects, as if human beings were billiard balls struck by others and striking others in their turn. It is made by how we understand what we suffer and what we do. And it makes a great difference when we set these events in the context of a narrative and a tradition, as if, far from being isolated individuals, we were characters in a drama that had its origins long before our birth and will continue far beyond our lifetime.
To be a Jew is, in part, to respond to the Hebrew Bible as the book of our destiny, the text which tells us who we are, where we came from, and what we are called on to do. That is what I was later to call a “covenantal reading” of the text. So long as Jews read and respond to the Hebrew Bible in this way, our history will continue to have the strange, even epic, character of an ongoing commentary to the Book. The past helps us to understand the present. The present discloses new dimensions in the past. That vital connection between text and life is, for me, what gives Jewish life throughout the millennia its singular character, and these talks are my portrait of Jewry’s “habits of the heart.”
To them I have added chapters on the Jewish ethics of business, the ecology, handicap and leadership, less to sum up Jewish teachings than to give examples of the feel of moral reflection in the Jewish tradition, and to show how this too is a matter of wrestling with texts in the context of life. The section ends with chapters on two of the more perplexing questions of our time: Jewish identity and Jewish reflection after the Holocaust.
The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hassidic movement, used to describe Jews as letters in a Torah scroll, and the image is as apt as any. A letter on its own has no meaning. But as it is joined to others in words, sentences, chapters, and books, it takes its part in something that has meaning – in the case of Torah the extended dialogue between God and the covenantal people that began at Mount Sinai and has continued uninterrupted ever since. Jewish life is part destiny, part fate; writing and being written in the narrative that spans our distant ancestors and generations yet to come: the scroll of the covenant. To be a letter in that text is what it is to be a Jew.