Community Corner

Rabbi: Don't Take the Jewish Bible Literally!

It's easy to miss what scripture's all about.

Rabbi Zalman Marcus of the Chabad Jewish Center in Mission Viejo recently shared the following:

"If you don't know what the oral tradition is, if you don't know how people understand it, you can't just quote me something. And all these people quoting the Koran, quoting the Bible—don't necessarily know how it is understood by the religion. Many times they're not meant to be taken literally.

"An example of this is a verse in the Jewish bible 'an Eye for an Eye.'

"There isn't any traditional Jewish scholar, any traditional Jewish group that thought it should be taken literally. It meant the value of an eye for an eye, but other people, other groups took it literally. That's a distortion of what the Torah ever meant. But you have people who read that and go, 'Wow, that's barbaric.'

"Every culture has their oral tradition. In America we have the Constitution, which is a written document, but then there's the 'what did they mean?' That's being debated everyday in America. What's the meaning behind it? What's the oral tradition? What did our early fathers of our country really intend with those words?

"So every time you write anything, you're immediately opening yourself up to 'OK, what's the meaning behind it?' A central idea in Judaism is the idea of an oral tradition that was given simultaneously with the written Bible. It came to clarify what was the meaning of these words, what was meant.

"Most people say well, I read the translation. Well, the translation by definition is already—you must give some kind of commentary. For example, let's go to the first word of the Bible. in the King James version of the Bible, it begins, 'In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth.' The problem with that is that's not what it says in Hebrew. 

The bigger problem with that is you can't translate it in Hebrew either. The first word of the Torah is not a common Hebrew word, and the sentence is not a common Hebrew sentence. There's really no way to translate that meaning objectively. The only way to translate it is to know what the writer meant when they wrote it.

"We have an oral tradition with multiple layers of meaning to that statement, and that is precisely why it was written so enigmatically, to lend itself to multiple layers of meaning that was passed along orally. The most common and basic one is, 'in the beginning of God's creating heaven and earth,' that's the first sentence. Earth ends as a continuation into the next verse. It totally changes it."


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