Nach

One of the last things I did as a frum person was learn Nach. If I remember correctly, I had been skeptical of religion for a long time, and I decided to learn all of Nach to see if there was anything to my religion. You know, to give it one last chance to make its case before I dumped the whole darn thing.

In most yeshivas, you’re not supposed to learn Nach. It’s highly frowned upon (as is not learning until 11:00 every night). You’re not even really supposed to learn Chumash. It’s pretty much gemara all the way, folks. There’s a very strict set of what is learned and isn’t learned (usually decided by some rabbi) and I darn sure hope you like it, because hey, you don’t got a lot of choice, kid. And I should mention gemara is full of some pretty insane shit, and if I remember correctly, I didn’t learn a single teaching that might be considered moral in today’s day and age in all my years of learning gemara. So maybe before spouting your sacred myths that your religion is extremely *moral*, maybe crack open a damn book, goddammit.

Anyway, I remember being extremely excited for my new project. Opening my fresh Artscroll translated Tanach, I was going to delve into the ancient books of my religion and see if there was anything worthwhile there (as it turned out, there wasn’t much. Sure, it was a bit better than gemara, but it’s the narcissism of small differences).

I spent a few months poring over my artscroll Tanach. I went from the beginning right through to the end, reading mostly only the English side. I remember experiencing the whole gamut of emotions, from exhilaration to severe depression (okay, I’m overdoing it). Being shocked, appalled, and sometimes even surprised at what the “prophets” had to say. One hell of an experience, I assure you.
What really struck me was the power of the literature. Some beautiful, epic stories, and you could really see how some of them affected Western civilization and the Jewish people. Some really impressive stuff, and some really shameful stuff, too, I daresay. What really impressed me though, was the utter consistency of it, in that Divrei HaYamim (Book of Chronicles) was hardly distinguishable from say, Genesis. A lot of the books looked so similar internally, it was hard to tell who wrote what. I hadn’t been formally introduced to biblical scholarship and the Documentary Hypothesis beforehand, but it was almost obvious to me that the writing styles through so many of the books were practically the same, and there was hardly any reason to believe that, say, the Five Books of Moses, were written by God, or dictated by any sort of deity. Plenty of talented writes for thousands of years could have written the same kind of thing, and it would have looked just about the same. That was one of the things that really hit me, the linguistic implausibility of any of these books being authored by anyone other than human beings. Belief in TMS down the toilet.

What really really really blew away though was when I came across verses in II Kings 22:8 and Nechemiah 8:13 that said the Children of Israel “forgot” the words of the Torah for many years before people like Ezra “reminded them” of it. That really blew me away. I had often heard the Kuzari “proof” of the historicity of the mass revelation at Sinai. Essentially the argument goes: we have a chain going all the way back to Sinai saying that we received the Torah by revelation at Sinai. In front of millions of people! And why would so many people lie about such a thing? I had always bought the Kuzari argument (pretty much hook line and sinker) but here I had staring me in the face from the Bible itself problems with this. We all know a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and if the Children of Israel “forgot” the Torah for a while and then were “reminded” of it by a couple priests, what kind of mass tradition is that? So we don’t have a chain going back all the way to Sinai (though it sounds really nice). We have a chain going back at best to several hundred years *after* Sinai, and anything before that is really fuzzy. So what kind of BS is this?

Perhaps it is for this reason that rabbis don’t generally allow their students to learn Nach. Maybe it gives them a sense of irreverence for certain holy books, and makes them aware that most of Orthodoxy is just castles built in the air by rabbis over the millennia, and that there’s not much support for anything they say in Tanach, and Tanach could easily be used by any number of other religions, to say things wildly different than what rabbis say (I think Christianity does that to an extent, although I’ve always wanted to study the New Testament. Must stay on topic.) It’s ironic, because in the gemara the rabbi are always cherrypicking verses from Tanach to support what they say, or to attack someone else, or their opinion. They never quite in-depth study Tanach, instead they mostly dissect Mishnas, which are just the ramblings of other, older rabbis about mostly thing like halacha, and have even less to do with Tanach. Sure, it’s an ancient religion, and it’s about some old myths, traditions, and practices, but it would be nice if there was a truth factor involved, as well.

If your own holy books contradict your beliefs, what do you want from my fucking life?