ABSTRACT
On May 24, 2001, the Jerusalem Post printed an article entitled ‘THINK AGAIN: God didn’t say “You might want to . . .” ’. In this article, ‘ultra-Orthodox’ columnist Jonathan Rosenblum castigates a prominent Conservative rabbi for asserting that the exodus from Egypt did not in fact occur. ‘No plagues, no splitting of the sea – all a fairy tale’, as Rosenblum puts it. He suggests that what the Conservative rabbi is actually saying is that ‘It doesn’t really matter that the Torah’s claim to be the word of God to man is false’, because the Torah is nevertheless ‘divinely inspired’ and embodies important ‘spiritual values’. Rosenblum asks why should Jews look to the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) for moral guidance if it consists of ‘some really huge whoppers – the Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the stories of the alleged Patriarchs’. Rosenblum notes that the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the principal seminary of Conservative Judaism, which is in fact less conservative than Orthodox Judaism, has dismissed the book of Leviticus as having being superseded by our ‘modern sensibility’. Rosenblum observes that if the Torah is simply the product of human authors, and if Jews can discard those parts of it they regard as incompatible with their ‘modern sensibility’, they can pick and choose those aspects of religious law they want to follow much as shoppers pick and choose in a supermarket. The result is moral chaos. This critique of Conservative Judaism would be qualified by many as ‘fundamentalist’ insofar as it insists on strict conformity to a sacred text believed to be in some sense the word of God.
