There is a story in the Talmud, Tractate Makkot 24b, about Rabbi Akiva walking with other leaders of the Jewish people along the destroyed streets of Jerusalem. When he saw the Rabbis crying as they viewed the destroyed temple in ruins, he began to laugh. When his companions asked in astonishment why he was laughing, he asked in response why do you cry? They responded “A place [so holy] that it is said of it, ‘the stranger that approaches it shall die,’ and now foxes traverse it, and we shouldn’t weep?”

Rabbi Akiva said in short, Just as the prophetic verse of the destruction has come true, so will the verse from Zachariah who said “Old men and women will sit on the streets of Jerusalem…and the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in the streets.” (Zachariah 8:4)

The Rabbis responded “Akiva you have consoled us”

I’d heard that story many times over the course of my life and yet it wasn’t until relatively recently when I too was consoled like the Rabbis walking with Rabbi Akiva.

Throughout my life, I was constantly reminded that stories like that one from the Talmud don’t happen anymore. I was told they were fables of ancient days when the Torah and the Talmud may have served a purpose, but have long since passed their usefulness. Thoughts and ideas from these archaic volumes no longer apply in today’s enlightened, fast-moving, hyper-aggressive, progressive, instant information world that we live in.

Think about all the knowledge we have at our fingertips, which should make those of us living today the most intelligent beings to ever walk the planet. If only theory were reality. Ironically, with all that knowledge in our pockets, we are raising the most mentally weak, intolerant, ignorant generation in history. Never has such vast information been so readily available; information which not only has enlightened us, but has “proven” that the Torah itself is a collection of different documents, with five or more different authors who wrote so incongruently, it is not possible one person could write with such confounded grammatical inconsistency. Our scientists have “proven” the Big Bang theory is a historical fact and the evolution of the species is now the accepted narrative for creation, and the vast knowledge contained therein.

I have chased every theory and heard them all. The Hammurabi Code and the tales of Gilgamesh. The carbon dating of trees and the actual age of the universe. The Torah, which was once the most revered volume in the world, has now become an object of scorn, late-night comedic fodder and the enemy of all that is scientifically “proven”. I have deeply delved into each argument and subject matter and some indeed gave me pause.

I found that unlike the enemies of Torah, my need to understand their arguments instead of dismissing them out of hand became overwhelming. I looked everywhere and listened and read more than I probably should have. What I did find was most of the arguments tended to be general without addressing the uncomfortably specific and almost all of them ignore the oldest scholarship and the most peer-reviewed documents in the world, Jewish scholarship. After all, the Torah was given to the Jews and Jewish argument begins on the very first verse of the Torah and has continued on each verse thereafter until this very day. To be fair, with Christianity being the dominant voice of the “bible”, the christological flaws exposed the actual Torah to misunderstanding based mostly on mistranslations or a lack of depth the church never choose to delve into. I can dig far deeper into this last sentence, but that is not the purpose........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)