Naomi Wolf, maharat of Torah

A progressive feminist icon's interpretation of the core message of the Hebrew Scriptures approaches the point quite nicely.

I came across this passage on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter below. It touches on a very careful note of Hebrew philology and upon the nature of Torah. I don’t know whether it is genuinely a quote from Naomi R Wolf or not (and authorship of Naomi Wolf quotes has been very much so an issue in the past), but I love it very much. I love it very much indeed. Please read below and enjoy.

Okay, so I was challenged below:

‘Read the Bible! God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.’

So… I may get crucified for this but I have started to say it—most recently (terrified, trembling) to warm welcome in a synagogue in LA:

Actually, if you read Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy in Hebrew—as I do—you see that God did not ‘give’ Israel to the Jews/Israelites. We as Jews are raised with the creed that ‘God gave us the land of Israel’ in Genesis—and that ethnically ‘we are the chosen people’.

But actually—and I could not believe my eyes when I saw this, I checked my reading with major scholars and they confirmed it—actually God’s ‘covenant’ in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy with the Jewish people is not about an ethnicity and not about a contract. It is about a way of behaving.

Again and again in the ‘covenant’ language He never says: ‘I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel’. Rather He says something far more radical—far more subversive—far more Godlike in my view.

He says: ‘If you visit those imprisoned… act mercifully to the widow and the orphan… welcome the stranger in your midst… tend the sick… do justice and love mercy… and perform various other tasks… then you will be my people and this land will be your land.’

So ‘my people’ is not ethnic: it is transactional. We are God’s people not by birth, but by a way of behaving that is ethical, kind and just. And we stop being ‘God’s people’ when we are not ethical, kind and just. And anyone who is ethical, kind and just is, according to God in Genesis, ‘God's people’. And the ‘contract’ to ‘give’ us Israel is conditional: we can live in God’s land if we are ‘God’s people’ in this way: just, merciful, compassionate.

And—it never ever says, it is only your land. Even when passages spell out geographical ‘boundaries’ (as if God does such a thing), it never says this is exclusively your land. It never says I will give this land just to you. Remember, these were homeless nomads who had left slavery in Egypt and were wandering around in the desert; at most these passages say, settle here, but they do not say, settle here exclusively. Indeed, again and again, it talks about welcoming ‘zarim’—translated as ‘strangers’ but can also be translated as ‘people/tribes who are not you’—in your midst.

Blew my mind, hope it blows yours.

Are there points where I could quibble with Ms Wolf’s interpretation of Torah? Sure. I don’t think Scripture actually posits that people have behaved in ways that are ‘ethical, kind and just’. The people who appear in Scripture, apart from some very specific (and rare) functional cases (Enosh and Isaac, for example, in the Hebrew canon; Jesus Christ in the Greek), are emphatically none of the above: that is why the prophets end up dead, and the people themselves end up, at the end of the Keṭubim, in exile. Literarily speaking, the Hebrew people are ‘cancelled’, just as Christ Himself is crucified at the end of the Gospel texts.

But Wolf’s understanding of Torah that it makes God’s ownership of the land of promise conditional on listening to His commands, and that those commands involve (among other things) merciful treatment of foreigners, economically needy and vulnerable people (of which the technical phrase ‘widows and orphans’ is meant to serve as an emphatic case), free those who are indebted, set at liberty those who are in bondage, and (I would also add) treat the land itself gently and humanely by not over-exploiting it—this is very much a fine and sensible interpretation that approaches the spirit of Torah.