We're buying more Bibles, but are we really reaching higher? - Vayyetze 5785

Complexity should be the goal, not merely sales figures

I am naturally suspicious of TikTok trends, mostly because they tend to come and go before I even am aware of them. I don’t use TikTok. But something very curious caught my attention this week. It was a story in the Wall Street Journal about how sales of (get this!) Bibles are up 22% this year as compared to last year. And it’s not like people are buying more books in general - sales of other books are up only 1%.

And even more curious, the WSJ article suggests that TikTok influencers may have something to do with the sales bump, although the article also mentions “rising anxiety” and “a search for hope,” and notes that, by the way, American society is still trending towards secularism. Notably, much of the growth in Bible sales appears to be among Gen Z and college students. Millions more copies of the Bible are being sold than just a few years ago. It is not clear if Tanakh sales (that is, the Hebrew Bible) have increased.

Just a brief explanation of terms first: “Tanakh” stands for Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim - the five books of the Torah, the books of the Prophets, and the Writings, which include all the miscellaneous books like Job and Esther and Psalms and so forth. We generally prefer to use the term “Hebrew Bible” or “Tanakh” rather than “Old Testament,” because “Old Testament” has a whiff of Christian supersessionism about it. That is, some Christians espouse the belief that God took the covenant away from the Jews and gave it to the Christians, so the “New Testament” has replaced the “Old Testament.”

Furthermore, much of what Jews do today, while having a basis in the Torah, is quite different from the ancient Israelite religion described therein. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE, a group of scholars known as “rabbis” set to the task of re-envisioning Judaism as a non-hierarchical, non-sacrificial tradition based on prayer and study and the performance of mitzvot. That is what is enshrined in the Talmud and other rabbinic literature, and that is what we practice today. Put another way, with the expulsion of the Jews from our homeland in the first and second centuries, our sages forced an evolution of Jewish practice - a paradigm shift - making it text–based and democratic, and replacing the dynastic leadership of kohanim (priests) with scholars who interpreted the Tanakh for our contemporary circumstances.

So, we might ask, “Is a dramatic jump in Bible sales today a good thing? I am all for greater knowledge of, if not practice of religion. There are many positive benefits for religious observance, both for individual physical and spiritual health as well as for our society.

However, we Jews generally do not fall into the category of “Bible-thumpers” - that is, we understand that while the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and particularly the Torah (the letter “tav” in the acronym “Tanakh”), is the foundational document for Judaism, the real key to understanding the Judaism of today is actually in the pages of the Talmud and other rabbinic literature, rather than the Torah. Those who quote the Bible without context, in whatever tradition, are missing essential parts of the story.

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Just curious: is anybody else feeling anxious right now? Is anybody here searching for hope? Yeah, me too. So how many of us are looking in the Torah for answers?

We do not thump our Bibles because the Tanakh does not describe the Judaism we know. If we were to “thump” anything, it would be the entire rabbinic bookshelf, starting with 63 tractates of Talmud, and then the many, many medieval commentaries and collections of midrash and halakhic responsa literature and all of the Jewish discourse of the last two millennia.

And that is not to discount the fact that there are many great stories in the Bible, Jewish and Christian, as well as in the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, and other such traditional holy books. And we should learn from them. Among the greatest values which we might learn from what we read today in Parashat Vayyetze is the power of forgiveness, from the moment when Ya’aqov and his father-in-law Lavan agree to part ways amicably, having talked through their disagreements. We also learn in these chapters of Bereshit / Genesis, from the foibles and failings and imperfections of Avraham, Yitzḥaq and Ya’aqov, that while humans often aim for perfection of our behavior and our choices, that life rarely works out the way we hope or expect.

And usually, the simplicity of Biblical stories, however human, belies the complexity of our lives. Consider, for example, the beginning of Parashat Vayyetze, when Ya’aqov is fleeing from his brother Esav after having taken the latter’s blessing from their father Yitzḥaq. He stops for the night to rest, and he has a dream about angels going up and coming down a ladder, which stretches into the sky from a base which is, in Hebrew, מוצב ארצה / mutzav artzah - fixed in a stable way to the ground. And there are angels climbing up and down this miraculous ladder.

And then God appears, and says (Bereshit / Genesis 28:15),

וְהִנֵּ֨ה אָנֹכִ֜י עִמָּ֗ךְ וּשְׁמַרְתִּ֙יךָ֙ בְּכֹ֣ל אֲשֶׁר־תֵּלֵ֔ךְ וַהֲשִׁ֣בֹתִ֔יךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את כִּ֚י לֹ֣א אֶֽעֱזׇבְךָ֔ עַ֚ד אֲשֶׁ֣ר אִם־עָשִׂ֔יתִי אֵ֥ת אֲשֶׁר־דִּבַּ֖רְתִּי לָֽךְ׃

Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Does that sound familiar? We have been saying these words as part of the prayer for the hostages held in Gaza now for 430 days. We have pleaded with God to bring those folks home, and, sadly, the only news we have had recently is of hostages who are already dead. The news of the death of Omer Neutra, an American citizen who grew up attending a Conservative synagogue on Long Island and had been a leader in his USY chapter, hit me hard. He was killed on Oct. 7, 2023, but we, and his family, did not know that until this week. Omer was one of us. He could have been any of our bright, smiling kids who chose to serve in the IDF. He was family.

For Ya’aqov, God fulfills his promise. For Omer Neutra, not so much.

It would be easy for me to say, “Look for the angels, and God’s promise to protect us wherever we go and bring us home to our land will be fulfilled.”

But of course we know that life does not always work like that. Our lives are far more complex. Sometimes promises are not fulfilled. Sometimes things do not go the way we hope. Sometimes, reality crushes our dreams.

The 12th/13th-century Provençal commentator Radaq, Rabbi David Qimḥi, cites a theory about the meaning of the dream. He says,

מוצב ארצה וראשו מגיע השמימה, באותו מעמד היו יחד העליונים עם התחתונים ומלאכי א-להים עולים ויורדים בו, העולים הם משה ואהרן, והיורדים הם המלאכים העליונים

מוצב ארצה וראשו מגיע השמימה, at the revelation of Mount Sinai the angels and the Jewish people were of the same spiritual level, even though Moses and Aaron are described as ascending towards heaven, whereas the angels were descending towards earth.

Radaq is telling us that Ya’aqov’s dream is a vision of receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai, and that even though THAT scene, which of course will be hundreds of years after Ya’aqov, is depicted as people going up and angels coming down, the suggestion is that the ladder is actually making it possible for all to be on the same level. That is, as people we are fixed on the Earth, but we aspire to stretch ourselves heavenward, like angels. We seek to be holy; we yearn to be near to God; we desire to bring our physical in line with our spiritual.

In other words, the challenging nature of our lives, our anxiety, our missing the mark or not achieving desired outcomes, is a call to reach higher. That people can, always, reach higher, to climb the ladder of spiritual growth and complexity. To look for those angels, to seek God’s promise of protection, even though we know we may not find them.

Sometimes, we need to be just grateful for being מוצב ארצה / mutzav artzah, fixed to the ground. And sometimes we may need to be מגיע השמימה / magia hashamaimah, striving for loftier goals, extending ourselves upward.

The way that we have done this as Jews has always been to read and study and even disagree about our holy texts, to seek out the complexity of the lessons they teach, to look past the simplicity of the plain text to the deeper and higher meanings to be gleaned therefrom.

I would never pooh-pooh a person’s choice to buy a brand-new Bible, nor of course to read it, which is even more commendable. But I would then challenge them not simply to read, but to strive to see the complexity within, to seek out the wisdom which might help us navigate a range of circumstances. And that requires more than watching a TikTok video. It necessitates deeper, holier, more thoughtful work.

Shabbat shalom! May we soon see the safe return of all the hostages, and peace in the land of Israel, unto all the inhabitants thereof.