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?
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3 comments:
Are you taking Talmud with you too? Tanakh doesn't stand alone.
this is a strange thought experiment. from a strange dude.
Sure, Talmud too.
Though, by its nature, Talmud leads to a less scary thought experiment.
After all:
a. We do not generally assume the Talmuds to be divinely authored/inspired.
b. We recognize in the Talmuds multiple voices and multiple levels of authority. So instead of letting a "problematic" text be destroyed (and, for the record, there are not more than a few in my mind), let it be recognized as a minority opinion or uncommon strain or non-binding element.
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