How shall we know what God wants of us? After all, if we do not have a clear message from God, and if we cannot be confident in the ways of discerning God's will that we do have, the very foundation of Judaism as a religion founded on God's word is undermined. So how can we know God's will on any specific question?
Fundamentalists choose their text -whether it be the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or anything else - and affirm both that this text articulates the authentic word of God and that they know how to interpret and apply it. Just ask them!
Several passages in the Torah, however, including two in this week's Torah reading, indicate that our tradition understood that the answer to our question is not so simple. The Torah tries twice, in fact, to distinguish true from false prophecy. Deuteronomy 13:1-6, which we read last week, maintains that criterion for true prophecy is a function of the content of the message: prophets who tell you to obey God are true prophets, while those who tell you to follow other gods are false prophets. Fine, but then the prophet presumably does not tell you anything that you did not already know -- although good preaching always has its place!
Deuteronomy 18:15-22, which we are reading this week, makes true prophecy depend instead on whether the prophet's predictions came true. That is a clear, testable indication, but some of the prophets accepted as true in the Bible predict things that do not come true. Ezekiel, for example, predicted the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia (Ezekiel 26:7-14), but he himself later acknowledges that the king's siege of the city was unsuccessful (Ezekiel 29:17-20). Both Haggai (2:21-23) and Zekhariah (4:6-7) predict glorious accomplishments by Zerubbabel, but they never materialized. To make matters worse, a true prophet might be misled by a false one (I Kings 13), and false prophecy might even be inspired by God to deceive and entice Israel (I Kings 22:2ff).
The problems get even worse when law is involved, for theoretically a prophet could come at any moment and change the entire structure of Jewish law. This is especially disturbing because, despite this risk, some passages in the Torah indicate that the way to find out what God wants of us is through asking God directly (e.g., Leviticus 24:10-23; Numbers 15:32-36; 27:1-11).
The problems inherent in identifying true prophecy soon led to a distrust of prophecy as the medium through which we can discern the will of God. Zekhariah, who lived at the end of the sixth century B.C.E, says this:
In that day, too - declares the Lord of Hosts - I will erase the very names of the idols from the land; they shall not be uttered anymore. And I will also make the "prophets" and the unclean spirit vanish from the land. If anyone "prophesies" thereafter, his own father and mother, who brought him into the world, will say to him, "You shall die, for you have lied in the name of the Lord"; and his own father and mother, who brought him into the world, will put him to death when he "prophesies." In that day, every "prophet" will be ashamed of the "visions" [he had] when he "prophesied." (Zekhariah 13:2-4)
Thus 2500 years ago prophecy was already declared a bad profession for any Jewish boy or girl to pursue! The Rabbis (B. Sanhedrin 11a) later declared that prophecy ceased with the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.
If we cannot hear what God wants directly through prophecy, then, how shall we determine what God wants of us? To answer that critical question, the Rabbis, who shaped what we know as Judaism today, made a passage in this week's reading - namely, Deuteronomy 17:8-13 -- the cornerstone for how we should identify God's word in our day. This passage speaks about taking baffling cases to judges at the time, and "When they have announced to you the verdict in the case, you shall carry out the verdict ... You must not deviate from the verdict they announce to you either to the right or to the left." Furthermore, the penalty for disobeying the court is death! In other words, God still reveals His will to us, but it is no longer through dreams, signs, and wonders; it is rather through legal interpretation of the one accepted document of revelation, the Torah, together with the oral tradition that has accompanied it from time immemorial (B. Bava Batra 12a). The Rabbis even insist that we not complain that contemporary judges are of lesser quality than those of times past; even if they are, the Rabbis say, we are duty-bound to adhere to the decisions of the judges of our time (T. Rosh Hashanah 1:18; B. Rosh Hashanah 25a-b).
Rabbis, though, have often disagreed with each other in their interpretations of the law, and they do so today as well. How, then, do we know which ruling articulates God's will, and which is only the individual rabbi's opinion? Ultimately that depends upon the degree of acceptance of a given ruling by the Jewish people. That is, Jewish law is now, as it has always been, the product of the interaction between what the rabbis say and what the people do. This is not an easy criterion to use, for sometimes what the people do (e.g., ignore the dietary rules) does not become Jewish law, and sometimes (e.g., the way in which a contract is confirmed) it does. Nevertheless, identifying the divine input into justice today requires us -- just as it required our ancestors -- to interpret the Torah and later Jewish tradition and then to judge among the various interpretations proffered in determining how we should identify God's demands and respond to them.
This will mean that as Jews we must develop a high level of tolerance for listening to opposing opinions and a high level of skill in analyzing their relative strengths and weaknesses. The anal-compulsive component of all of us yearns for a much easier, clearer, and secure way of knowing what God wants, and hence the popularity of fundamentalism in many religions, including our own. The Rabbis, though, were wiser: they knew that human beings can only have limited knowledge, that we are not omniscient as God is, and that the best that we can do to learn the truth is to "make our ears like a grain funnel and acquire a heart that can understand the words of the scholars who declare a thing impure as well as those who declare it pure, the words of those who declare a thing forbidden as well as those who pronounce it permitted, and the words of those who disqualify an object as well as those who declare its fitness... Although one scholar offers his view and another offers his, the words of both are derived from what Moses, the shepherd, received from the One Lord of the Universe" (Numbers Rabbah14:4). This is both a theory of knowledge and a theory of education: we are to learn about God and the world not through accepting what is told to us, but through having an open mind and heart to listen to others, an acute mind to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the various positions proposed, and a willingness to engage in a respectful, but deep and far-ranging discussion about what is really true and right.
May God help us open our minds and hearts truly to listen to others with both respect and empathy, and may God help us then to develop the skills to discern what God expects of us through an open mind and a compassionate heart.
Shabbat Shalom