Episode 7: Judaism, Interpretation, and the Nature of Scripture | Dr. Jon D. Levenson, Harvard University

In this episode, I speak with Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard and one of the most influential scholars of Jewish theology and the Hebrew Bible.

Our conversation explores core features of Judaism that are often misunderstood and its emphasis on covenant, law, and lived practice; the central role of interpretation in texts like the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition; and the way Jewish theology resists being reduced to a fixed set of doctrines. We also examine how Jewish and Christian traditions have historically diverged in their readings of shared texts, and what serious interreligious dialogue requires beyond surface-level tolerance.

We also reflect on Dr. Levenson’s early academic work, his engagement with figures like Dante, and the role of scholarship in challenging inherited assumptions and clarifying what is actually at stake in theological disagreement.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, I'm Rhea Wilson and welcome to Mapping the Divine. In each episode, we'll explore universal themes and questions through the lens of different religions. Please follow and like this page to stay up to date with our latest conversations. Happy to have you here and thank you for listening. Welcome back to Mapping the Divine. I'm Rhea Wilson, and today we have the great privilege of being joined by Dr. John Levinson, one of today's most influential contemporary scholars of Jewish theology and the Hebrew Bible. John Dr. Levinson is an Albert A. Liszt professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. His work and teaching has done much to disabuse Christians and other non-Jewish people of inaccurate stereotypes about the Jewish religion. In fact, his definition of what interreligious conversation should be has shaped how I would like to think about this podcast's goals, namely to help us better understand ourselves and our religious beliefs or lack there or lack thereof by acquiring better knowledge of other religions, for which we would like to hold not only ignorance, but also for which we likely hold not only ignorance, but also self-serving stereotypes or caricatures. So thank you, Dr. Levinson. Your clear thinking and deep knowledge has already influenced me before we've even started this interview.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Well, thank you so much, Ms. Wilson. That's a very generous introduction. Thank you so much for having me today.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Well, I'm not done yet. Um while Dr. Levinson has aptly noted in regards to canonization that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures did not come with their own inherent table of contents. Dr. Levinson's scholarly work is so vast in breadth and depth. His CV does come with a table of contents. Hopefully, we can touch on some of his many books during our discussion. And please do help me reference them, Dr. Levinson.

unknown 2:03

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Okay, I'll be glad to do that. In fact, people don't need even to read those books, they just need to buy them.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

That's a nice compromise. Don't read them, just buy them.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Yeah, that's pretty convenient. But because I don't want to waste too much time listing your intimidating leak sense of work, I'd like to dive right into some questions. And to start off, I was hoping to hear about one of your very first works for which you received public accolades. As an undergraduate, you majored in English at Harvard, and your CV says that before you became the giant of Jewish studies you are today, you in fact won first prize in the Dante Society of American Essay Contest in 1970. Can you tell us about the essay? And then perhaps if you have any thoughts on Dante and whether he deserves the label that many have many have given him being an anti-Semite?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Oh, that's a big subject. Well, when I was in college, uh for whatever reason, I did I concentrated in English. I did a lot of medieval and renaissance English, especially Renaissance. And I also took a lot of Italian, interestingly enough, and even spent a summer studying in Florence. So my third year in college, I took a uh a course in Dante, in which we read uh major portions of the uh divine comedy in Italian and the commentary was in Italian, but the uh lectures were in English. However, the professor was from Italy and his English was not great. You really had to know a fair amount of Italian to understand his English. For example, he didn't know there was a word to name, a verb to name. He would always say to nominate. So you would think you were at a political convention all the time because Dante's nominating this person, Dante's nominating that person. But uh I wrote uh an essay uh which I'm probably a little embarrassed about now, uh, which was actually not the essay for his uh class, uh, but he encouraged me to uh submit an essay to that uh contest, and it kind of compared certain views of communication in one of the cantos of the Divine Comedy of the Inferno of the first uh section of the Divine Comedy to some theories about language and human communication of the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. And I'm sure today I'd be ashamed of reading this piece of juvenilia, you know, uh nearly 60 years later. Uh but somehow or other that won that contest. I was very honored. The the uh prize for winning was that it was published in a journal called Forum Italicum, uh, no other prize other than that. Uh at the time I wondered how many other people entered the contest, perhaps nobody. Uh I wondered that at the time, I wonder that now, hearing you ask the question. But that's the background. As to whether Dante was an anti-Semite, this gets us a very uh complicated question of what you mean by anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism. Certainly Dante was uh a devout uh uh uh person of the in the Latin Church and what today you would call the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, which had all kinds of uh attitudes and uh convictions and uh and doctrines uh and practices which would be odious to any Catholic today speaking, uh seeking to have good relations with the Jews, and would be really quite condemned by probably 98% of the Catholic authorities in the world today. But that's only to say that he lived some, I don't know, 700 years ago. And uh so uh to use modern terms like anti-Semitism to describe that is dangerous, but certainly he had no conception at all of a fair objective view of religions other than his own, including of Islam, which he also presents rather uh negatively. But that's just that goes with the world of the Middle Ages, and Jews did it too. Jews do not generally have terribly accurate views of Christianity uh in the Middle Ages. Uh, that's simply the nature of the pre-modern world. I don't think it should uh disqualify people from appreciating his art, but at the same time that there is uh a particular worldview behind it, which is not uh defensible today, it's something that people need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Yes, thanks. Thank you for um clearing that up. And I'm glad you did nominate um here I say to that competition because it does sound very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Um, but listening to your more contemporary work has inspired me to be aware of how I think of Jewish tradition through modern Christocentric lenses. I understand Jewish people refer to what we Catholics call the Old Testament as the Tanakh. Please correct my pronunciation. Or I'll go on. I know that don't worry about it several theories about who actually redacted or wove together very ancient writings to form the Tanakh. For example, some Catholic scholars believed it was the work of the biblical figure Ezra and the great assembly he founded. For those scholars who ascribe to this theory, would the compilation have taken place when Ezra went back to Jerusalem from Babylon, or had Jewish people brought writings that would ultimately be used for the Tanakh with them into exile?

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Well, that's a complicated uh question. Um I think most scholars today would say that what we call the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh or the Old Testament came into existence over the course of about a thousand years. There certainly were traditions oral and written before the exile. It's also the case that after the exile, in other words, in let's say the fifth century when Ezra would have lived, you have increasing references to uh what looks like a literary corpus that's being uh publicly uh read. Uh, what exactly it consisted of, what his Torah consisted of, is not uh completely clear. So that he played some central role in that whole period of the return from Babylonia and the re-establishment of the temple, the second temple uh established in the land of Israel, and in that case in Jerusalem in the fifth century. The whole question of uh of that was that was a very uh uh vital, vibrant uh period in Jewish history. So I think Ezra played a role in that, but I think that that's quite likely. But uh the assembly of the of the Hebrew Bible continued after his time and uh uh was uh well underway before his time. And with any given book, uh it probably has a complicated compositional history. And uh spent a lot of time, maybe too much of the time, trying to reconstruct that compositional history that lies behind each book and the and the gradual assembly of what today we would regard as a canon of scripture.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

So that's the theory about the compilation that you would personally bet on as being most likely true, or is your something, or do you have a different theory?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Well, I I tried to be as vague as I possibly can. So having been that vague, if I succeeded in being as vague as I was trying to be, yes, I would bet on it because there's nothing terribly specific in it. But I don't think that uh most of let's say Deuteronomy and the books that are heavily influenced by Deuteronomy, which is to say Joshua through 2 Kings, uh I don't think those books originate uh post-exilically in the Persian period and let's say the fifth century uh or later. I think those are around in some form uh early in the exile and have uh roots in uh literature and Deuteronomic literature that goes back to at least the seventh century BCE. So uh in that sense, uh there's a long, complicated uh process here. And uh one should not assume the Bible all comes into existence at once. It doesn't, uh any given book necessarily comes into existence with one shot, many of them uh I think evidently don't. But the process is complicated and confusing and controversial enough or hard enough to reconstruct that uh I wouldn't bet my life on any specific model, but the general statement of the way which these literatures originate and uh come to be combined, uh I I would stand by what I said.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Does understanding how and when the Tanakh was compiled enrich your faith or your experience of Judaism in any way?

SPEAKER_00 11:03

I think it enriches it, at least it makes it more intellectually defensible. Uh contradictions and lack of harmony, inconsinities between different parts of scripture can be uh understood and appreciated uh better if in fact we understand them the source to be different periods, different authors writing in in different periods, the evolution of tradition over time. But if one only looks at the material historically, diachronically, as an evolution over time, one is always therefore in the past tense. One of the great problems of historians is they can only speak reliably as historians in the past tense. And if one's talking about one's own particular affirmation of a religious tradition, guess what? The past tense is not adequate. You have to be able to talk about the present tense. You have to talk about what it means, not just what it meant in the 7th century BCE or the 5th century BCE or whenever. So, in that sense, it doesn't necessarily enrich faith, uh, but uh because the the goal of historical criticism is not really the enrichment of faith, it's historical understanding and the explanation of contradictions in considential and changes in the Bible uh through historical explanation. So it enriches in an historical sense. I don't think it necessarily fortifies in a devotional sense or strengthens uh in a devotional sense, but the danger to the religious believer of ignoring historical criticism, ignoring the historical process, is a kind of uh special pleading, a kind of uh premature harmonization, uh strained exegeses to obviate contradictions in the text rather than saying, well, those are different sources with different views. And uh that that I that lack of intellectual uh integrity on the part of some traditionalists, I think, is a very problematic, uh problematic uh phenomenon. In other words, I'd like to think that religiously devoted people would want to be intellectually honest, to the point that they could say, well, there are differences in in sources which the pre-modern tradition before the appearance of modern historical thinking simply did not adequately reckon with.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Yeah. And I think that that phenomenon is probably applicable to to many religions.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Absolutely. Historical criticism and the awareness of change over time applies really to all religions.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah. Um, in preparing for your visit, I also learned that most Orthodox Jews read rabbinical literature more than they read the Tanakh, their holy scripture, and that even their knowledge of stories and prayers from the Tanakh comes mostly from what they read about them and the rabbinic rabbinical writing, the Mishnah, the Talmud, etc. I also understand these rabbinical writings are about 2,000 years old. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Who were their authors and what purpose and audience did they write? And why is rabbinical literature more prominent in the lives of religious Jews today than the Tanakh itself? Was there ever a time or place where this wasn't the case?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Well, um, you'd have to go to late Second Temple Judaism, Judaism, the third, second century BCE, uh, to begin to see the roots of Jewish sectarianism, maybe some of it existed earlier. Uh and to realize that uh the Hebrew Bible has spawned many different sects of Judaism, several different sects of Judaism, and several different religions other than Judaism. It spawned what today we call Judaism, and what today we call Samaritanism, which is still around, not too many Samaritans, but there's still some around in Israel, various places in Israel. Uh, and uh also it spawned Christianity. More distantly, it spawned Islam. But certainly by the close of that Second Temple period, by the time the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 of the Common Era, there were Jews, Christians, and Samaritans uh already around, and then different sects of Jews, Christians, I suppose, Samaritans as well. So what we call rabbinic Judaism uh is uh a particular uh phenomenon of uh you know late Second Temple period. Maybe, maybe it's around the roots of it uh are maybe the first century BCE. Uh, it traces itself back in its own self-explanation, all the way back to Moses and to Moses receiving on Sinai a Torah uh by the mouth, the Torah Sheb al-Pah, an oral Torah, along with a written Torah, which would be the Pentateuch. So uh rabbinic tradition claims to have a continuing authority of interpretation of scripture and uh andor an ability to promulgate laws and norms and theologies that are not in the written scripture, but are nonetheless authoritative. Again, it's hard to say when it begins, it emerges out of many uh uh predecessors and and and and uh cultural currents. And when does it end? Well, it never ends. In a certain sense, it's it's it's around to this day. People are legislating, uh uh religious courts are meeting, uh the the the world of s of the sages continues uh to this day in some some circles. So but I would say the heyday, what we mean by classical uh rabbinic Judaism would have been late first century of the common era, maybe through the sixth, seventh century uh of the common era, partly in the land of Israel uh and partly in Babylonia. And uh this has given us uh different collections of literature, different uh collections of the uh different forms of the Talmud, uh different formulas and Midrashic literature, say literature that interprets the Bible. Midrash is the rabbinic interpretation of biblical verses. And so really uh the corpus of rabbinic literature is much, much bigger than the Bible itself. And you shouldn't approach the uh shouldn't approach Judaism through a kind of Protestant lens in which everything is supposed to be uh focused exclusively on the Bible, or some sort of Protestant lens that prefers scriptura scripture to traditio to tradition, because in point of fact, uh that's uh both scripture and tradition are affirmed in uh in rabbinic uh Judaism. Uh when when Orthodox Jews, who you mentioned, and most traditional Jews, uh, if not formally Orthodox, approach the Bible, they approach it in light of those Midrashim, those rabbinic interpretations, and a whole corpus of medieval Jewish interpreters. In other words, the rabbinic Bible doesn't just present a Bible, a biblical chapter, let's say, on a page, but it presents a relatively small part uh uh of uh of the Bible on the page, surrounded by a much larger selection of commentaries. And uh those commentaries aren't all agreeing with each other. The heyday of the commentary writing is probably, oh, I don't know, 11th through 13th, 14th century, something like that. But again, that continues even in a traditional mode to this day. There are people that that certainly write commentaries who are largely uninformed by modern historical or archaeological sciences. So the um one would have to say rabbinic Judaism uh esteems the Bible and continually goes back to the Bible, continually argues, continually argues about the Bible, but it does so in dialogue with and through applying post-biblical traditions. If a person says they're learning, they're studying in a traditional Jewish mode, the major focus of what they're studying almost certainly is the Talmud. It's almost certainly Talmudic literature and not the Bible per se. There does develop in the Middle Ages a sense of the shot, the plain sense of the Bible, the narrower contextual, more linguistically uh defensible, scientific, so to speak, understanding of the uh biblical text. But that's always one sense of scripture in uh dialogue with and contrast to other senses of scripture that derive from rabbinic literature and uh and uh have a life of their own that's quite uh powerful in the continuing Jewish tradition.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

So would it be fair to say that especially the um more old interpretations of the Tanakh itself would be considered uh almost prophetic or sacred act in Jewish tradition? Or are there in general too many of those interpretations to make that more you know general?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

I wouldn't I wouldn't use a word like prophetic, I would say authoritative in the sense that people need to respect them and reckon with them and learn them and know them. But of course, those interpretations are an argument with each other. If you ever open a page of Talmud, it's you know, it's whatever, 63 volumes of argumentation. So it says I'd hesitate to call it authoritative in the sense you open up the Talmud and you discover what the Bible means. There's a wide range of uh of argumentation and interpretations uh in uh in Tolmidic literature, even about what the Bible itself means. But they're certainly a they're not canonical in that sense, they're not sacred, they're certainly not prophetic in that they don't claim to have been divinely revealed. They don't claim to be the fruit of the Rucha Kodesh of the Holy Spirit the way prophecy uh claims to be. But they uh are uh necessary and authoritative, and they are define the stance of the traditional Jew when approaching the the Bible, trying to understand what the Bible is saying.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Um switching gears here, Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often runs. As a Catholic, our gospels are a lot about storytelling. Jesus is recorded as speaking much in parables as he does in any other mode of speaking. I actually did a paper on Martin Luther. King and was struck by how often he used symbolism from the Israelites' escape from Egypt when he was trying to capture the imagination and motivation of people in the civil rights movement.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Yeah. Um, having yourself been an English major major and a veritable stand-up comedian, which is itself not a stand-up comedian.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

I I maybe I could be, I probably need would need to do sit down because I I have bad feet. Even talking to you now, Ms. Wilson, my feet are on their last legs.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Well, feel free to sit down at any point.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

I'm actually sitting down, my feet feel as though they're on their last legs.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Um, but in any way, can you speak to the story of the power of storytelling in the human psyche and in the redaction of the Tanakh itself? And um forgive me for sounding like a biased evangelical. Would Jewish people agree that this capacity for storytelling is one way in which we are what Genesis refers to as made in the image and likeness of God?

SPEAKER_00 23:12

I think that storytelling is a central part of the Bible. The Bible is primarily about storytelling. Most of the books are focused on storytelling. Uh, some have laws, some have uh wise sayings and advice. Um, I'm thinking of Proverbs there, some have lyric and poetry of various sorts, such as Psalms. But certainly a major part of the Bible is uh involves storytelling. In other words, one doesn't really uh understand what the Hebrew Bible is about if one opens up to try expecting to find a list of propositions, a list of dogmas. It doesn't really function that way. In that sense, narrative is is in some sense primary over theology. It has its own implicit theology, but the theological propositional statement is a second-order reflection on narrative and on other forms of of speech uh in the Hebrew Bible, such as law. So, in that sense, I think I think narrative is very, very essential, and and uh human beings that construct their own lives and understand their own lives, understand their relationship to God, and certainly to other people, in terms of stories. And uh it makes sense that there is uh there's a major uh component of storytelling in the Hebrew Bible, or as you say, in the New Testament, or a great deal of the uh literature of the world. What always worries me when people say something like what I just said is the notion that, well, you know, stories don't really have a truth or falsehood dimension to them. In the Hebrew Bible, I remember one of my professors in grad school said the great problem in the in the Bible for moderns is that uh that culture, ancient Israelite culture, doesn't distinguish uh distinguish between story and history. And uh moderns tend to make a distinction. Some moderns have the idea that a story is only true if it can be shown to be historical, in other words, to conform to some sort of objective uh historicity and uh uh some objective set of historically ascertainable, independently ascertainable facts. And I think uh if that's your conception of truth, then you're going to have a very, very hard time understanding a story-based theology like that of so much of the Hebrew Bible. Not all the Hebrew Bible, but so much of the Hebrew Bible. But uh there are places where the rubber hits the road. It's not just endless interpretation of narrative. I mean, there are laws uh in rabbinic literature. There are many, there's a great deal of disagreement, open-ended disagreement about the meaning of biblical verses and stories upon stories upon stories. But there also that is the dimension of rabbinic uh that the rabbis call uh agatah, storytelling, uh or or whatever, non-legally based ethics. But uh a great deal of the Talmud, a great deal of rabbinic literature is focused on another dimension called halakha, which does have a bottom line. The rubber does meet the road. There's certain things the Jew is required to do, certain things the Jew is forbidden to do. And it's not just open to endless interpretation or endless uh debate. It's not just telling a story, it's also doing a deed and understanding that deed to be commanded by God or abstaining from a deed, understanding that abstention to be uh the obedience to a commandment from God. So uh I agree with you about stories. I'm just nervous about people thinking that, well, we just sit on telling stories and never come to a conclusion, and a kind of open-ended, endless uh uh act of interpretation, rather like many of the postmodernists and deconstructionists would do. That's that does justice to a religious reading of scripture. And I would say it does not do justice to a uh religious reading of scripture. It doesn't even do justice to the way the people involved in the writing and the compilation and the handing down of those scriptures understood the text that they're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Yeah. Um and speaking of stories, Dr. Lovinson, are you familiar with The Golden Thread by a former colleague of yours at Harvard, Dr. Hankins?

SPEAKER_00 27:34

I'm familiar with it. I haven't uh read that book.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

That's okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

I can pretend to, being a professor, I could pretend to have read it.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

That would be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

But I read about it, and I I certainly uh I know who the author is as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

In any case, I don't know it like the back of my hand either. Having threaded the title is a little bit misleading because it's quite disguised. Um, but his chapter on ancient Israel summarizes the Tanakh as essentially a story about Abraham being promised a certain land by God, and that the covenant God entered into with Abraham's descendants was about laws that governed how they were supposed to live as a nation when they were in the particular land God was going to give them. I thought that the Tanakh's covenantal rules, by the way, made the social teaching of Catholicism seem sometimes weak in comparison. It's rules about clearing debts after a few few years and the treatment of indentured servants being particularly impressive. Um, but when I read Hankin's summary of the Tanakh and thought about the theory that Ezra, who was about to go back into Jerusalem, is believed to be influential in the Tanakh's redaction, I wondered whether the redactors would have had the goal of getting exiled Jews pumped up about going back to Jerusalem from where they may have grown comfortable being in Persian Babylon. For example, when the redactors included the story of the Israelites grumbling about missing their flesh pots in Egypt, was that possibly a jab at exiled Jews who might not have been adequately enthusiastic about going back to rebuild Jerusalem and its second temple?

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Well, that again is a very uh very, very intelligent and sightful question on your part, and also a very difficult one to answer, as the rabbis would say, or as the Talmud would say, uh, standing on one foot. Uh, even if I didn't have bad feet, that would be hard to do, standing on one foot. But if you look at texts like uh Isaiah 40 through 55, or maybe 40 through 66, you might say the second half or or third third of the book of Isaiah, uh, it rather clearly relates to the uh return of the Judahite exiles from Babylonia, and therefore would have been written probably some point uh late in the 6th century uh BCE as the Babylonian exile is coming to an end after the Persians did in the Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian Empire uh in 539 BCE. And you can see that they face a great deal of resistance. As you can see, they have to urge people and make enormous promises. Get up and go, come back. I'm gonna do miracles to enable you to come back. Uh uh, and we know for a fact that a very large number of Jews did not come back, a very large number of Jews stayed in Babylonia, there were a large number of Jews living in Mesopotamia, into pretty pretty much about the time I was born. Uh, I think that Baghdad, which is in Iraq, and was in you know, which would have been ancient Mesopotamia, I think Baghdad was something like I don't know one quarter, one-third Jewish and till maybe 1920, something like that. Now there are effectively no Jews there at all. Uh so uh the theory some people have is that exactly as you indicate, that maybe in fact this notion of Israel originating in Mesopotamia with Abraham, and Abraham is risking everything to leave uh and uh go to this uh dry, obscure place to the west, reflects uh the uh this movement from Babylonia, from Mesopotamia uh in the 6th uh century, late 6th century uh BCE. That's a theory that people have, and it's interesting to wonder where that flesh spot and the longing to be back in Egypt and so forth also reflects uh an exilic or early post-exilic uh uh situation. Uh there are people that believe that, and it's very hard to ascertain whether that's that's true or not. Uh, there are those who think that uh there's there are old archaic elements in the story of, let's say, Abraham that uh would not have been understood later in Israelite history, certainly not in the exile. And so it's and again, even those narratives have a complicated history. We can't say they're all written at the same period. So if you add all that together, I think we have to put a kind of question mark around after that theory. It's tantalizing, it's interesting, uh, it's potentially enlightening. My own guess is we'll never really know whether it's valid, and therefore people shouldn't insist on it. But uh there may well be some be something to that, to the notion that uh the uh some of the Pentateuch itself may have been shaped by uh a uh uh need to persuade the Jews of Mesopotamia to return, which you know, which we know in fact that many, many did not. The famous figure of Hillel uh who shows up in Jerusalem maybe uh late to first century BCE, uh he originates in Babylonia. In other words, he's from a Babylonian Jewish family. How does someone from a Babylonian Jewish family have so much traditional Jewish learning and lore behind him if if in fact the stories about Hillel are historically reliable? How does that happen? Well, probably it happens because there was a vibrant Jewish community in Babylonia. And uh question is did that same community hundreds of years earlier uh also author literature trying to persuade their compatriots to come back, or other people trying to persuade them to come back. We don't know. Ezra, again, we really don't know what Ezra personally had to do, whether much he uh composed or compiled, or we really don't know. Uh but certainly there are strong reasons to think that he uh had a role in the uh in the compilation and normal stabilization and normalization of the uh of the Pentateuch.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Okay, so whether that you know theory is a uh you know far-fetched assumption or not, can you comment on whether Zionism is an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the redaction of the Tnach, as well as some thoughts about the difference or line between anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism, which is often talked about today?

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Oh, those are also again very, very big subjects. Uh well, uh certainly it's clear in the Hebrew Bible, certainly in that Abraham narrative that you mentioned, that uh the land that they call there, Canaan, uh the name Palestine and even Ares Israel are later terms, land of Israel is a later term, Palestine's a still later term uh imposed by the Romans, Syria, Palestina. Uh it's clear that this that Abraham through his descendants is is promised that land, and that uh the ancient Israelites uh lived in that in that land uh long before the Greeks or Romans, or much, much later the Arabs uh lived there. Uh and so that is a central part, the land of Israel and the sacredness of the land is a central part of the Jewish tradition. Now, to what extent that means the Jews are required to live there, that it's a mitzvah, it's a divine obligation, a commandment to live in the land. That's a big uh a big question that's debated by classical sources. Uh, but certainly a concern with Zion, meaning the land of Israel, and especially Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, these are certainly major foci of uh of uh classical Judaism and uh concern with such things pervade almost all forms of Judaism today. Whether Zionism, meaning uh Jews setting up a secular state, reclaiming sovereignty in their historical homeland through a sovereign state, which is a secular state, uh, whether that is actually religiously mandated, well, that would be much more controversial. That it's practically, in practice, a a good thing that has enriched uh uh Jewish life and helped save Jewish lives, I think is beyond dispute. But whether it's uh religiously mandated, well, that's debated uh in all most forms of Jewishism, certainly in orthodoxy and in reform, that that that's in different idioms, that issue is is debated. As to the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, well, that's a huge, huge question. Uh uh Natan Sharonsky, who was a prisoner of conscience in Russia, then uh finally uh was released and uh uh moved to Israel, talks about the three D's, uh delegitimation, delegitimation, uh, demonization, and double standards, where Israel is is delegitimated, in other words, it doesn't have a right to exist as a as a state, or where it's demonized, it's seen as a source of great evil and uh and only evil in the world, uh, or where the double standards where it's judged according to norms that are not applied to other states, uh, he says, Well, now we're talking about, as I recall, anti-Semitism, not just anti-uh anti-uh uh Zionism. Isn't we're not just critical of the state of Israel, in other words, we're critical of the Jews-only state, uh, the only Jewish state in the world, uh, in a way that is is uh is not fair and suggests uh that we're simply reenacting uh ancient uh prejudices. And I think that's largely true. I think there's a huge upsurge of that, certainly on campus uh today, an upsurge of, I would say, classical anti-Semitism in its socially accepted form, especially socially accepted uh among uh liberal intellectuals, progressive intellectuals, namely singling out the Jewish state for a special censure uh according to double standards, and with very, very uh heightened and uh rather irresponsible rhetoric. Uh, certainly that's that's a uh a very common thing, uh very common phenomenon today. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. I may have gone on so long I've forgotten what the question was.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

No, you did answer it. Um very well, thank you. Um and I have several more questions I'd love to ask you. Sure. But before we run out of time, I want to make sure, as promised, that we get to talk about your latest book, whose title alone is beautiful enough to make one run out and buy it.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

In multiple companies, I would think.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Hopefully. Israel's light, Israel's Day of Light and Joy, the origin, development, and enduring meaning of the Jewish Sabbath. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me a few reads before I got the joke in your book's introduction that you were working on the Sabbath six days a week. Meaning for our listeners who are as slow as I, that you were working on a book about the Sabbath six days a week. But we always savor more of the jokes it takes us a while to get. I know I will savor this book, which is clearly a product of not only a lot of hard work on the topic, but also a culmination of all you've made your own in biblical scholarship and how you have, as you put it, a foot in both camps of religious belief-oriented and more critical scholarship on the Tanakh. So I congratulate you on your work. Unfortunately, I can't show our listeners.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

Thank you, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

You're welcome. Um, I can't show our listeners your book's charming cover because I own it on Kindle. But I'd like to read for them the prayer from its epilogue, a traditional prayer that is said on Friday evening at the beginning of the Sabbath. This day for Israel is light and joy, a Sabbath of serenity. Dr. Levinson, we could all use some serenity. Can you share with us about why you wrote this book and one of its thesis that the Sabbath helps us reclaim our humanity that has been disfigured by technology?

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Well, that's a uh that's a good question. Um there are a lot of books about the Jewish Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath is a major holiday. People ask me when is the uh when are the Jewish holidays this year? Well, the answer is there's one every week. A major essential Jewish holiday, no less important than any other, occurs every week after every six days. And there are a number of uh books that uh uh are uh have been written and are inspirational and devotional and provide provide profound insights into the Sabbath. The first one that comes to my mind is Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, Its Meaning for Modern Man, which is a beautiful little book uh written, uh published in 1951. Uh the problem with a lot of these, and that's one category, devotional books. Another category are how to do it books, books written for Jews about how Jews are supposed to observe the Jewish Sabbath. There's no expectation in the Jewish tradition that non-Jews should observe the Jewish Sabbath or observe Jewish laws of the Sabbath. And uh those books, how to do it, are essential. They're what's required, what's forbidden, uh, and the whole realm of Jewish laws applies to the Sabbath, an enormous, enormous subject. What they don't seem to be are books that are historically informed, that talk about change over time, that are knowledgeable about the ancient Near Eastern world and the Greco-Roman world, in which these Jewish texts, uh classical Jewish texts, uh took shape, and are fair in their descriptions of other religions and possible antecedents and parallels to the week and to the Sabbath, but at the same time have a theological focus, are not shy about talking about religious ideas, and are even willing to go uh beyond the historian's uh safe zone of the past tense and say something about the spiritual vision uh that is uh implied by uh the Sabbath and ideally realized in the observance of the Sabbath. So I've tried to do that. I've tried to put that together to write a historically defensible book that's fair about other religions in the general uh ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds, without stereotypes or sort of civil-minded caricatures uh uh of other traditions, but at the same time uh acknowledges what uh what these texts uh are trying to uh to get at uh spiritually and and devotionally. I don't know whether I've succeeded, but I've tried uh tried to do that. Um Hesel stressed in his book, already in 1951, is the danger of what today we might call technocratic thinking, where uh we uh are unable to accept our status as creatures. We only see humanity as creators, where we're always trying to change the world, to master the world, to master nature. And uh the danger that has, in his opinion, to the spiritual life. And he sees the Sabbath with its focus on something intangible and unmeasurable may. Unmeasurable, like time, something that you don't see, you don't master, he can't get control of. He sees that that focus on time as revealing something of the spirituality that brings one in connect into connection with the intangible, invisible deity. And uh so to him, there's a strong focus on the on time over space. He associates space with uh idolatry. I think that's wrong. I think spatial, the spatial dimension, the dimension of location, uh, the locative dimension, so to speak, uh of the Sabbath is essential to it. But uh nonetheless, uh if you fast forward 75 years since that book came out, a lot of people now find themselves addicted to technology. The technology is supposed to liberate us, the people find they can't stay away from the technology. The average person, uh uh probably your age, but uh even some my age are are checking their phones dozens and dozens of times a day. The people who can't uh can't stand to walk down the street without the phone in their hand. They can't just have the phone in their purse, in their pocket, whatever. They have to have the phone in their hand. And so this makes it possible to work constantly. When I was a boy in the Middle Bronze Age, you could uh you could, if you didn't go into the office or whatever, the office, the factory, wherever you worked, if you didn't do that, you weren't working. You might have some work you could take home, but not a lot. But today, a very large number of people take all their work home. All their work is in their pocket, the work is on the phone, they can they can work anytime they want. And this work that uh these devices that are supposed to be labor-saving in some ways save us labors, but also generate new labors and take up more and more of our time, to the point that people go into something like withdrawal symptoms if they have to go a few hours without checking their phones. So um I there are those who have come up with the notions of a digital Sabbath, a technological Sabbath. I talk about this in chapter eight, uh, all of which I think are desirable sorts of developments, but none of which I think is likely to work too well, because the Jewish Sabbath I think has endured for uh, you know, 3,000 years, let's say, um, or more, maybe less, because uh it is thought to be divinely commanded, and it has a theological structure authorizing it, and it is communal. There's a communal force, it's not just an individual deciding he's going to give up his phone or his unplug for a day, which is in the nature of a New Year's resolution, most of which don't work. It's a social institution. The Sabbath is a social institution that defines and is carry and differentiates the Jews from the great mass of the world, which is not Jewish. And so the uh the um I saw the the in in the Sabbath a kind of uh, and I think building on Heschel, a kind of uh spiritual uh exercise which is especially relevant in a time in which people uh have uh become completely overwhelmed by technocracy and the kind of instrumentalized thinking that underlies technology and technocracy. Uh so I know that that answers your question, but that that uh that I think is a very important dimension. Does it help us uh reacquire our humanity, or however you uh nicely put it? Well, I don't know who the us is. I mean, Jewish or Jewish law, the Jews are supposed to observe this Sabbath. It's not for non-Jews. Non-Jews have their own analogies. To some degree, the Christian Sunday is, or at least once was, a decent analogy, not uh uh exact, not precise, but analogous to the uh Jewish Sabbath. Uh but that's largely been lost. I think it's largely been lost. I'm sure if you went to some communities, uh you would find uh the uh the Sabbath still uh the Sunday Sabbath, Sunday interpreted as a Sabbath uh still practiced. But for my average Christian, I think that's not the case. I think the average Christian, the uh Sunday is a day when you go to church, you go to a service, you spend an hour or whatever in church, and maybe you knock off from work that day, or maybe you don't, or maybe you do a little work. Otherwise, you have fun with the family and do whatever you want. You want to go fishing, you want to play tennis, golf, whatever you do, you can enjoy it. Whereas the Jewish Sabbath was is not like that. It's a it's a different phenomenon. It's not primarily or exclusive, it's not exclusively focused on public worship. Public worship is an important part of it, but it's also very much a home-centered uh observance with certain structured meals, three meals uh that are mandatory. It's not breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's a meal on Friday night after the after the services, a long, leisurely festive, celebratory meal with the best where one wears one's best clothing and and eats one's best food. And then another one after services on Saturday morning, uh similar, and where there is, again, singing and celebration and guests and hospitality, and also words of Torah exchanged at all these meals. And then another one late in the afternoon on Saturday, which is uh uh uh a uh kind of might be an early dinner or whatever, but it's before the Sabbath is let out. Three meals that uh are focused on on home or in someone else's home where everyone's invited. Uh it's not just a a uh something one does in the synagogue or uh the temple, it's a different uh a different phenomenon. And uh so uh, you know, it it's a a day set apart from the other six of the week, a 25-air hour period set apart from the rest of the week in ways that uh are uh uh point to its sacrality, to its theological message, to God as creator, to God as the liberator from slavery, uh and uh cannot just be equated to someone decided to unplug for a day. Maybe our family every every Tuesday or whatever will unplug and try to try to uh get to know each other and maybe have some spiritual thoughts uh uh without being distracted by our devices. Uh I think one of the things that's uh also an eclipse, as far as I can see in American culture is the family family dinner, family meals. Often, you know, both members of the couple are working, they have different work schedules, but even if they're all together, and the kids at the table, they're on their phones, their iPads, whatever, and the the the uh parents may be checking theirs as well, and has kind of a disparate sense, and people come in and out and grab some food and go and go to their rooms. Uh a structured ritual occasion like the Sabbath helps prevent that from becoming the absolute unchallenged pattern. And I think that uh a great deal is lost when that particular mode uh becomes the absolute unchallenged pattern of family life.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

Yeah. Um, and a little bit earlier in your um answer, you mentioned about the evolution of the Sabbath in some ways. Could you give us a further synopsis of the two different depictions of the Sabbath's purpose and context in the Tanakh that you eloquently wrote about in your book?

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Oh, I don't know how eloquent it was, but I guess you probably mean the two different versions of the Decalogue. There's the Decalogue, which people tend to refer to as the Ten Commandments, both Jews and Christians tend to use that English term, the Ten Commandments. I'm kind of quirky in that I don't like the term the Ten Commandments, uh, because in traditional Jewish thought, the Pentateuch has 613 commandments. That's a figure that was uh uh proposed early in rabbinic uh uh times and has become kind of a normative idea in Judaism. 613 commandments. Not all of them are practicable in the absence of the temple, not all of them practicable in the diaspora. Uh and uh, but nonetheless, in theory, there are 613 commandments, all of which should be uh studied as if they're going to be observed, even if they can't currently be observed. So to talk about just ten commandments is uh is really misleading, especially since the biblical term isn't really commandments, isn't ten commandments, it's ten declarations, ten utterances, ten words, which is where we get this Greek term, where this term of Greek origin, decalogue, ten to ten words. Well, in the version in Exodus 20 of what I just said should not be called the Ten Commandments. There is uh commandment that says, uh, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and you remember it in imitation of God, who uh created the world in six days. On the seventh day he stopped and he rested. And therefore you should stop and rest. It's kind of imitatio dei, imitation of God, uh affirming creation. Uh in Deuteronomy 5, you have uh uh a very different commandment. It's uh not Zahor, uh uh remember the Sabbath day, it's shamor, observe the Sabbath day. And you observe the Sabbath day. For six days you do all your work and you stop on the on the seventh, and and so you can rest, and you and your slaves, and I don't know, farm animal and the the uh the resident alien living in your midst who's not really a member of your community, all can rest. And what you remember in the Deuteronomic form is not the Sabbath. What you remember in the Deuteronomic form is that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. That's why I command you to do this. So there's a kind of humanitarian dimension to the version in in uh Deuteronomy 5. Uh you uh have the Sabbath, you have a day off uh because you know what it's like to have to work all the time, and you don't you should not work all the time, and your your slaves and servants and family members and even farm animals should not be working all the time. Uh, there should be uh a day off. That's what you need to remember. So it's a testimonial to the exodus, and it corresponds with other humanitarian laws that you have in the Hebrew Bible, such as the so-called sabbatical year, uh or the notion that a debt slave, uh, the so-called Hebrew slave uh goes free after six years of service, and the seventh year he goes free. See this in Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15. So the uh that there's substantial differences, right, within the Bible. Of course, as time goes on, the Sabbath acquires many, many meanings in a very rich symbolism uh accompanies that it's symbolized as a queen, Shabbat Malkat, the Sabbath queen. Uh one dresses up on the Sabbath, it's not a day to dress down. It's not a leisurely day in that sense, uh, because one's in the presence of royalty and showing uh uh respect to the queen. Uh it requires all kinds of rich uh symbolism, mystical symbolism, and so forth, because of that uh queen notion, other notions that it develops. But within the Bible, within certainly within the Pentateuch, those are two dominant notions: Sabbath as testimonial to God's creation of the world, imitating God uh uh and therefore connecting to the pattern you've seen in Genesis 1, or uh uh Sabbath as a testimonial and a reminder of the Exodus and the importance of a humane attitude towards underlings who should not have to work all the time.

SPEAKER_01 56:18

Yeah, that's a really um interesting example of biblical interpretation and action. And I really enjoyed reading about um and something that I wouldn't have known otherwise, how how the Sabbath was first tied to the creation story and then um to the Exodus story.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah, I don't know that historically one is earlier than the other. If I had to guess historically, put on my historian's hat, I would say the Exodus humanitarian dimension may have been chronologically earlier than the connection to creation. But either way, uh for the religious Jew, they're equally canonical, equally authoritative. And in fact, there's a famous text in rabbinic literature, it occurs in different places in rabbinic literature in different forms, that say those two words, remember and observe, were actually said at once, simultaneously, something that human beings can't do. The the human mouth cannot utter that, the human ear cannot hear that. God said, observe the Sabbath day and so it said, remember the Sabbath day and observe the Sabbath day in one utterance. Uh and so there, it's not that one is to be preferred to the other, one is to be seen as earlier and the other is later. And they somehow, in some higher divine mind, are a unity and both have to be observed. And that's why in Jewish liturgy, both those forms of the Decalogue of that Sabbath commandment uh appear uh in the liturgy. But uh in a deep sense, I think they're probably less far apart than first seems to be the case in uh some Babylonian literature. The uh creation of the human race is seen as liberating the lower ranks of gods from drudgery. The lower ranks of gods are thrilled that they now have been liberated from uh hard surface, hard work because human beings have been created. So, in a certain sense, creation does connect to liberation or emancipation. Uh but what's interesting in Genesis 1 is that human beings are not being presented as those charged with doing the drudgery, the dirty dirty work. Uh they rather in the um in the uh version of creation you have in Genesis 1, human beings are uh created in the image of God and given a kind of royal commission to fill up the world and conquer it and rule over the other animals. So human beings are in a sense godlike, even that creation story. They're like the gods, they're created in the image of the gods or the image of God, and uh they uh they they uh are uh noble creatures in and of themselves, and therefore fit to imitate God and to carry on and body forth his presence the world by imitating him. But at the same time, the creation of him is a kind of liberation, the creation is a kind of something to celebrate. In the Psalms, you often see uh the uh uh what should I say, uh, invocations of or calls to joyous praise and clap your hands and so on and so on because God has created his acted. And so there's something to celebrate in the fact that God creates the world, and uh uh the creation of the world uh raises in Genesis 1 what you might have thought of as the status of man, unlike Genesis 2, where he's a humble uh creature created from the dust of the earth and very fragile and having to work hard in the garden, having to work, having to tend the garden and then then uh expelled from the garden and having to work even harder.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

Wow, that's very interesting. Thank you for that correction. Um, Dr. Levinson, I can't thank you enough for joining me today. I've learned so much from you, your from your work, and I feel like we could continue this conversation for hours. Or you could continue to speak and I would just try to soak in what I can.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:28

Or I could just continue to speak and you wouldn't even be there at all. I would just be talking to myself, which wouldn't be a lot of time. I do that a lot of time anyhow.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:35

Well, that that'd probably um be the be the most interesting, but I'll close with one final question.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:42

Other than listening to your lectures and reading your work, are there any other literary works by or about Jewish people that you would recommend? Would you say that Tevya and his daughters, for example, is a good place to start? And are there any others?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:59

Oh, that's a big question. Offhand, I really would not want to narrow it down or try to think of what I would recommend in the way of reading. I don't even know what I'd recommend my own books. I uh as I say, I think I recommend people buy them. I don't necessarily recommend they read them. Well, I'll recommend they read them. I probably don't have a specific recommendation. If I if I gave one, I would five minutes later say, why don't I give that one? And I think of this one. And I'd I'd I'd uh be uh annoyed with myself for the rest of the evening.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

Okay. Well, thank you again for this conversation. Um, anyways, your deep insights into scripture, Jewish theology, history, and the importance of interreligious conversation, not for the purpose of conversion, but for correcting stereotypes that we don't realize we even hold, have been very powerful for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:50

Yeah, I would say not only correcting stereotypes, but enabling fruitful and productive human communication across religious boundaries, without erasing the religious boundaries or pretending that the religious identity doesn't make any difference. I'm critical of people who engage in interfaith dialogue where, as has been put, their uh the content of their own religious commitment is limited to the hyphen in the word interfaith. Yeah. I I think that uh one should be able to maintain one's own identity and even to practice uh faithfully and enthusiastically one's own religion while being respectful of others and uh genuinely open to uh learning about the others and to appreciate the humanity and people outside one's own community.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

Yes, thank you. Um, to our listeners, thank you for joining us also on Mapping the Divine. If today's episode sparked your curiosity about Jewish theology or the Hebrew Bible, I encourage you to explore or buy Dr. J Dr. Levinson's work and to engage in learning about your own misconceptions and ignorance about the Jewish faith in scriptures. Dr. Levinson, thank you again for being with us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:04

Thank you so much, very perceptive and uh interesting, stimulating questions.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:10

Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you for listening to another episode of Mapping the Divine. Please make sure to comment, like, and follow our social media accounts to be notified when a new episode releases. See you next time.