Torah and Absolute Authority

There is reading and reading. We speak even of reading body language, by which we typically mean that we understand something to be said and communicated by the posture one adopts, apart from the words that are being spoken and the meaning that the speaker intends to impart by them.

Poetry and prose are different. With a poem, the form is, in part, the content, and is to be savored, the texture of the language used being sensual, which is why good poetry is always about nature, or else a critical examination of this needful choice of subject-matter. The prosaic presumably communicates content directly, with no adornment, and may be understood ultimately to be reducible to computer code of yes or no. Philosophy, in Plato, aims to convert poetry into prose, to make comprehensible a stream of phenomena that would overwhelm us if we could not reject some of what we would call superfluous to the sense-making we would like to generate out of it; his allegory of the Cave points the way out of allegory allegorically.

Torah is our native Oriental truth, rulership by the superlative as such, with respect to which we throw ourselves to the floor in supplication of mercy, knowing ourselves endemically to fall short of the mark. And this can be reinforced through our reading of the story of Moses at Meribah. A simple Jew will say, in defiance of what common experience teaches us to regard as possible, that Moses struck the rock at Meribah, and the stone gushed water. A discerning Jew will relate to his hearer that this is what the Torah says, and thereby relate a fact with which not even an Englishman could argue. A good Jew, however, will teach that, because God asked Moses to speak to the rock, and he struck it in anger, instead, he is punished because he deviated from the appropriate Jewish character trait of humility. There is no direct communication of this by the Torah, but it is rather an indirect support of the teachings of Moses. Even Moses fell short. I read a conservative commentator on Biblical criticism say that Biblical criticism is dangerous because it teaches us that those whose character traits we hold up for emulation in the examples of the Patriarchs never existed. If the Torah serves to credential us, then it is unclear to me that the existence or non-existence of the Patriarchs affects the lessons we are to draw from the examples we are taught to emulate. The healthful effects of good conduct are real, irrespective of the objective reality of the people of whom the story is told.

Indeed, there is no objective standard to which we can appeal in relating that good character traits are good, and bad character traits are bad. They are right who say that it is possible to regard good and bad as taught by convention, rather than bearing their worth inherently. But though it is possible to regard this as the case, and certainly serves as an explanation for why the fates of peoples are variable, ruled now by peace and now by war, doubtless the example of peace teaches that it is good to follow; we do claim that it bears its worth inherently, and we do so on our own authority, which is that of experience. Children are notoriously cruel, as well as frank, because they are innocent both of civilization and of guile. The most civilized are guileless in professing the groundlessness of their civilization, as well as its preferability to the alternative. Piety can exclude belief in God as he is popularly imagined to be, but it is respectful of what is called divine. Colloquially, the word “divine” is reserved for aesthetic judgment, but we have a sense of the origins of moral authority as obscure and attributable to something beyond the power of human design. A critical theorist would call it born of the unconscious forces of nature, but the salvific benefits of guidance by a good structure, a well-organized polity, are indubitable, irrespective of their chance origins. Every authority which we regard as legitimately constituted is born in historical time, as we must conclude from what the sciences teach us about the age of the earth. That is to say, every authority which we regard as legitimately constituted is ultimately arbitrary in its foundation, being composed of circumstances which gave rise to it. To conclude from this that it is an unwelcome imposition on an alleged native freedom is to deny the reality that we are unfree from circumstances, and best guarded by sage authority that confesses its inability to ratify its authority by an objective standard and welcomes ascension into its ranks of those who would participate in the perpetuation of what they, too, bodily sense is benevolence. There is no appeal to anything but the sensual as the ground of what is good, and moderation and regulation by order are so judged by tasteful men of experience. The criticism of authority is regarded as a threat to good order only by those who care to be guided by blind faith, and are too intellectually insecure – which is excusable – to admit truths objective by convention to be colored by arbitrariness, as Roman Catholicism historically regarded the Judaism of Jesus as a scandal.