When You Love Something, You Have to Learn to Let it Go

I like Tanakh - she's coo.

But, let's be honest, not every part of is, well, immediately cool. And, we're all aware of some passages that are, well, immediately sorta troubling or scary.

This doesn't usually bother me all that much - over all, its really great, and we're pretty adept at making big deals about the parts that are cool and sorta glossing over those chapters that seem to us arcane or archaic. Not quite selective reading - more like a selective consciousness.

That's fine. I'm down.

But for the sake of intellectual honesty, suffer me a little mind-experiment:

For whatever ridiculous reason, civilization is about to be wiped out and, except for 1,000 survivors and whatever you can rescue from the flames, humanity will have to be rebuilt from the beginning. So - would you save humanity's last Tanakh (and tell people that its holy and Divine)? Remember - all that Amalek, and eye for an eye, and chosenness, and animal slaughter, and stoning, and subservient women, and whatever else you might struggle with . . . It's your call: lots of lives riding on this decision.

Or better yet, if you did save it- would you maybe tear out a page here or there? Just a couple? Fate of humanity on the line here . . .

Or better yet, let's say each additional perek had a cost - 10,000 bottles of fresh water destroyed for every additional perek saved. So maybe you'd keep Eden or Akeida or Shir HaShirim - important theological touchstones - but how important would it to be for you to make sure humanity has an eternal copy of the Breishit genealogies, or the 118th chapter of Psalms?

Scary thought?