God told Moses to write the Torah as a poem. [Deuteronomy 31:19, Haameq Davar ad. loc.] Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook wrote in a letter to Moses Zeidel that the Torah s not a literal history book. Those who demand such a reading are able to show that this view of Torah was at different times popular but they cannot demonstrate that the view is a religious requirement. Those who read Scripture too literally are afraid of the people who tell them that God ma not be accessed except through them. A Bible that is too obtuse to be read is too remote to inspire.
My teacher, Rabbi Professor Jose Faur, argues that the Torah should be read as a novel. He is not saying that the Torah is fiction; he is saying that the Torah narrative is best read as if it were fiction.
There were pre-Biblical narratives which share cultural codes with the Bible and which view the human condition differently than the Bible. The act of writing creates worlds with worlds. Worlds plausible, possible, and magical compete with the world that is actual, the world in which we act and inhabit. The Torah provides a benchmark for redemption in the narratives of lives like ours. The human animal has its start-up software and a user guide, the Torah. The narratives provide the model for redemption, the laws provide the recipe.
Our lives may be haunted with quiet desperation or thundering with epic greatness. Most of us live the former and imagine the latter. We engage in impression management, we wear masks, we hide our ugly, dark side and reveal what we know to be good, what will be seen as good, and what we feel we ought to be doing as good. A book has a cover, the Torah a scroll, and the human narrative a birth, death, and resume and a mask lurking in-between. There is good in humankind. Jean Valjean and Moll Flanlders learned to forgive others and themselves, that worlds without rules are unruly; worlds without hope are hopeless, and good and goods, quality and quantity, all have their place.
The reading of the Bible is manufactured by the divine Author, with a rule that is both orderly, so there is right, and chaotic, so there is freedom to act and to make a difference, and the reader, who enters God’s infinite Mind with his or her own mind, to experience another possible, plausible and magical world.
A narrative lives between bookends; people live between cradle and grave. Gilgamesh had a journey is space and in life I order to come to peace with his own mortality. Odysseus made his voyage home to Penelope, his faithful wife. And Ruth endured exile, leaving whole and returning empty by God’s hidden and gracious hand. Life is not about endings and beginnings, about the owl of Minerva, it is about the narrative world we create with our dreams, character, and conscience.. Gilgamesh was absorbed with himself, Odysseus was strong, resourceful, clever, but not moral by Hebrew standards. Boaz is strong and kind; he orders the chaos with kindness. Because he is absorbed with good, he redeems and reclaims his world. Gilgamesh and Odysseus, like ET, come home. Naomi, because of the kindness of others, recovers home. In a cold, frosty world, home is where they have to take you in; in the redeemed, reclaimed society created by Ruth’s narrator, home is the warm hearth where the heart, like the door, never closes.
