This evening, I re-read the research proposal that I wrote back in April for this project. In the proposal, I included a short paragraph about the two novels that originally got me thinking about all of this stuff: The Chosen and The Promise, both by Chaim Potok. These two novels are my two favorite books for a myriad of reasons (for one, I think that the main character’s father, David Malter, is rivaled only by Atticus Finch in the category of most profound literary parent-figures). However, one moment from the second book, The Promise, is worth mentioning specifically here.
A major issue throughout both novels is how exactly one can treat and study the Talmud (the collection of rabbinic discussions of Jewish law, ethics, and customs). The main character, Reuven, and his father accept textual emendation: they believe that the text may be changed where there are grammar errors and other small mistakes supported by other sacred sources and still remain a sacred, authoritative work. Reuven’s best friend’s father (a Hasidic Rebbe) and many of the Talmud teachers at the college yeshiva believe that such scholarship defames the Talmud. The conflict comes to a head when Reuven takes his smicha (ordination) examinations and refers to a Talmud passage as a “text,” therefore questioning its ultimate authority and unchangeableness, and by extension questioning what, exactly, it is that makes a written work sacred. I am not sure what the opposite of “text” is – I don’t know how Reuven’s teachers would describe the written work, if calling it a “text” is defamation. I wish I knew.
Chaim Potok spoke at length about how Reuven’s character deals with the advent of scientific text criticism (what we might think of today as historical-critical method). Essentially, Reuven creates a hierarchy of texts: the Torah, which he accepts as literally revealed, he does not touch. However, the Talmud, which he accepts as sacred but, “containing almost a thousand years of ideas and traditions that were in flux; we saw the text as fluid, alive…with many tributaries” (Potok, The promise 329). Reuven states that he does not see the Talmud as sanctified exactly as the Torah is. The Talmud yeshiva teachers operate from a definition of “sacred” that is bifurcated: something is either sacred or it isn’t. Reuven operates from a definition that sees a continuum of sacred-ness.
Interestingly, Paul Ricoeur makes a statement similar to that of Reuven’s Talmud teachers. In “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community,” Ricoeur asserts that as soon as an academic gets a hold of a sacred text and produces a “critically edited” edition, the text is no longer the community’s sacred text, but is now a scholarly text (Ricoeur 68).
Here, texts can become not sacred by scholarly treatment – quite the opposite of Heather Walton’s situation (see the previous post), in which she saw scholars using literary texts in ways that made them “sacred.” Walton, and to an extent Ricoeur, come to a definition of “sacred” through looking at how texts are used, and Walton in particular has trouble seeing texts as both sacred and scholarly. For her, “sacred” = limited in use and interpretation (Walton 91). Potok’s character Reuven, however, has been able to maintain that a text can be both sacred and scholarly.
Further reading into the Ricoeur chapter reveals a more complex definition of sacred – one that resonates with Reuven’s. Like Reuven, Ricouer also gives specific attention to the relationship between the academic/critical scholar’s work and the religious community. The community could be renewed, it could use the scholarship to read the text in a different way, or it the scholarship could “kill” the community (exactly what Reuven’s yeshiva teachers are afraid of). Or, the community could tell the scholars to keep their mitts of the book (Ricœur 70).
It would be interesting to put Ricoeur and the fictional Reuven at the dinner table together: they have many of the same concerns. Both specifically refer to sacred texts as “not frozen” (Ricœur 72), (Potok, The promise 329), but as complex, live works. Reuven and Ricoeur recognize the potentially destructive power that historical-critical or “scientific” methods have for the faith communities, and yet neither one is prepared to simply disengage from such study. The conclusions that they draw in this area are quite different. Ricoeur states that he is frightened by the word “sacred.” He would rather not use it at all, but prefers to think of texts as “revealing.” Reuven instead adjusts his definition of “sacred” to allow for gradations. Then, he carefully applies scientific text criticism to those he does not accept as literally revealed.
In a college lecture on many of his most popular works, Potok stated, “To tamper with the sacred text is to do violence to the core of a tradition” (Potok, “On Being Proud of Uniqueness”). This statement, read alongside The Promise and Ricoeur’s “The Sacred Text and the Community,” aid in understanding how sacred texts function in their communities, and also aid in explaining why many communities feel threatened by scholarly work: it threatens the divine authority, and the very “sacredness” or the ‘set-apartness’ of the text, and therefore has the potential to threaten the community.
Potok, Chaim. “On Being Proud of Uniqueness.” 20 Mar 1986.
---. The promise. 1st ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Print.
Ricœur, Paul. Figuring the sacred : religion, narrative, and imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Print.
Walton, Heather. “Our Sacred Texts: Literature, Theology, and Feminism.” Reading Spritutalities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing House, 2008. 85-98. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment