Louis Jacobs - We Have Reason To Believe

Most of Jacobs’s book We Have Reason to Believe deals with such topics as proof of God’s existence, pain, miracles, the after-life, and the idea of a ‘Chosen People’, ideas which were not in themselves controversial. Debate on the book was eventually to centre on chapters 6, 7, and 8: The Torah and Modern Criticism, A Synthesis of the Traditional and Critical Views and Bible Difficulties.

In these chapters Jacobs took on discussion of ‘Modern Criticism’ of the Bible, more specifically textual analysis of the Torah known as the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’, which suggests that its texts derives from multiple sources, rather than having been given, as Orthodox Rabbinical traditions have it, complete in its present form by God to Moses during the period beginning on Mount Sinai and ending with Moses's death.

Jacobs comments: 'While Judaism stands or falls on the belief in revelation, there is no ‘official’ interpretation on the way in which God spoke to man'. He points out that ‘according to some Rabbis, was given to Moses at intervals during the sojourn in the Wilderness’. But he also points out that given the arguments of textual criticism ‘no work of Jewish apologetics, however limited in scope, can afford to fight shy of the problem’. Here there is an implied rebuke of the tendency of many Jewish authorities of the period simply to gloss over the inconveniences of the thoughts of the ‘modern critics’ – a rebuke which perhaps rankled with some.

Jacobs concludes ‘there is nothing to deter the faithful Jew from accepting the principle of textual criticism’. He is aware that ‘to talk about ‘reconciling’ the Maimonidean idea and the Documentary Hypothesis is futile, for you cannot reconcile two contradictory theories. But to say this is not to preclude the possibility of a synthesis between the old knowledge and the new knowledge’.

Jacobs provides numerous examples from the Talmud and from other rabbinical writings indicating acceptance of the idea of Divine intervention in human affairs, with ‘God revealing his Will not alone to men but through men’. He concludes that, even if the Documentary Hypothesis is partly (or even entirely) correct,

God’s power is not lessened because He preferred to co-operate with His creatures in producing the Book of Books We hear the authentic voice of God speaking to us through the pages of the Bible and its message is in no way affected in that we can only hear that voice through the medium of human beings.