Rosenzweig, Fackenheim, Plaskow
Date
1886CE
1886–2003
Modern Jewish thinkers tried to remain loyal to the Sinai covenant while accepting historical criticism, the experience of the Holocaust and new values, with very different answers.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
6 statements
01The challenge
Modern Jewish thinkers who remain loyal to the Sinai covenant while accepting scholarship face a daunting puzzle: Sinai describes an event that clashes with a scientific picture of the world. A supernatural being stands at its center, and even the more believable details, like a mountain called Sinai or a prophet called Moses, cannot be checked against history. Some biblical scholars hold that the whole Sinai story is invented and was inserted into the Torah at a later stage. Apart from historical difficulties, modern experience and modern values collide with the account. The mass murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, religious and secular, cast doubt on the pledge made to Israel at Sinai. Feminist Jews take issue with the Torah for different reasons: women are pushed to the margins of its stories, and its laws and rites shut them out and have even been used to excuse mistreating them.
02Responses
One response was to play down Sinai as a historical occurrence and highlight what it does inside the mind, in how it is lived, felt and remembered. The German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886 to 1929) held that the Bible captures something real, yet it scarcely mattered to him whether the Israelites truly passed through the Red Sea as told, since an unusual natural event could lie behind the story. What mattered was the spiritual and psychological truth in the stories: sensing life as a gift from beyond oneself (the heart of the Creation account) or sensing oneself under command (the root of Sinai).
Rosenzweig did not treat religious experience as only something the mind projects; in the Bible he found a real disclosure of God. Yet in his view revelation came without words, and every word in the Torah was human-made, a position shaped by modern biblical criticism. That criticism's attack on the account's historical accuracy did not bother him, because reading the Torah was in itself a religious act that brings its readers face to face with God through the force of its stories.
Others adapted traditional methods of reading such as midrash, which discovers meaning in what the biblical text leaves unsaid. Emil Fackenheim (1916 to 2003), a philosopher who fled the Nazis, boldly described the Holocaust as a second revelation: it endangered Jewish faith in God but also commanded Jews to stay loyal to the Sinai covenant and so to deprive Hitler of any victory after his death. The feminist theologian Judith Plaskow, drawing on midrash, imagines Sinai anew, dropping the Bible's masculine image of God and making women full participants in revelation.
Many Jews consider such efforts irrelevant. Some observant Jews do not admit that scholarship poses any problem, or do not know of it, and secular Jews may find no point in saving a tale they regard as myth. A good number, though, stand somewhere in the middle between religious tradition and secular attitudes, and the reinterpretations above grew out of their effort to reconcile those opposed outlooks.
§ 03Historiography
What scholars debate
Scholarly debate · 01
How do modern Jews relate to the revelation at Sinai?
4 positions · no single answer · take a seat →
- A
Revelation without verbal content (Rosenzweig)
Franz Rosenzweig
The Bible registers something genuine, but what matters is what the experience stirs, not whether the facts occurred: all the Torah's words are human, and reading the Torah is an encounter with God.
- B
The Holocaust as a second revelation (Fackenheim)
Emil Fackenheim
The Holocaust threatened to destroy faith in God but also issued the command to stay faithful to the Sinai covenant, denying Hitler a posthumous victory.
- C
Women as full partners in revelation (Plaskow)
Judith Plaskow
Using midrash as precedent, the theologian reimagines Sinai by setting aside the male-centered description of God and including women fully.
- D
The efforts are beside the point
Religious Jews who do not acknowledge scholarship, and secular Jews
Some do not admit that modern scholarship raises challenges; others see no use in rescuing what they take to be myth.
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Benjamin Sommer, Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
How Jews have understood the Bible across different historical moments · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 61
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 56inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.