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Permission to Receive
Four rational approaches to the Torah's Divine Origin, for those who value both intellectual integrity and the Jewish spiritual inheritance.
231 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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94 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Kelemen
10 books14 followersLawrence Kelemen is the founder and current Rosh Kollel of the Center for Kehillah Development, a leadership development project devoted to the growth and wellbeing of Jewish communities worldwide. He also created the International Organization of Mussar Vaadim, a network of self-development organizations focusing on character development in more than two dozen communities in Israel and North America. He has been honored as a visiting scholar at universities and communal organizations around the world. During his decade-long tenure at Neve Yerushalayim in Jerusalem, Rabbi Kelemen influenced thousands of students. He is also the author of many journal articles and books, among them: Permission to Believe (1990) Permission to Receive (1994), and To Kindle a Soul (2001), and he is the translator of the classical text of ancient pedagogical theory, Planting and Building (1999).
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September 5, 2016
Overall, this book isn't going to make any informed skeptic a believer, but that's not what it's meant to do. It is meant to make the average religious Jew who might want to strengthen their faith more confident in their beliefs, and it may do that just fine. However, the rabbi often appears to be very deceptive, in a few ways, and I really dislike that. First, Rabbi Kelemen presents himself as though he is a skeptic and really trying to present an unbiased case, and that is not at all the case. If he is going to be so biased, he should be honest about that and not suggest he's really being objective. Second, throughout the book he misrepresents Judaism, other religions, and scientific facts. In my view, this could have been a much better book by making more sound arguments and more honestly addressing problems and presenting apologetics. Third, his arguments are often complicated with hidden fallacies. I will try to address his main points and then point out some of the misleading things he says.
This book is divided into four chapters. The first two present arguments for Judaism being true (Deductive and Incunabular), and the second two claim to address the main arguments against Judaism (the Empirical Issue and the Ethical Issue).
CHAPTER 1: In the first chapter, Rabbi Kelemen presents a proof for Judaism as a deductive argument. This chapter does, however, have a number of problems, and the premises are supported by weak arguments and specious reasoning, some of which I will touch on as I continue.
His basic argument goes like this: 1. A good, monotheistic God like the Jewish one is presumed to exist. 2. God presumably wants to do the best good he can for people. 3. The best good is presumably to give people a job, laws to follow to earn reward. 4. The job assignment should be somewhat accessible to humanity. 5. All accessible monotheistic religions depend on the Torah being true. 6. The Torah says that it is eternally applicable. 7. Other monotheistic religions nullify the Torah. 8. Therefore no monotheistic religion other than Judaism can be true. 9. Judaism is therefore true.
All seven premises are questionable. Among the shortfalls in the argument, it depends on an existing strong belief in, essentially, a Judeo-Christian God that stands independent from belief in Judaism, which is half way towards assuming the conclusion. Granted, most of his readers may not be bothered by that, and Rabbi Kelemen does recommend reading his other book which attempts to prove God's existence. But it still isn't a universally accepted assumption, and for many readers, the argument will fail here. Another of Kelemen's unjustified assumptions is that God, in order to do good for people, would give a nation a divine task to earn reward. That might be plausible, but not necessarily right. Or, is it a reliable premise that God is trying to do the best that he can for people when so many innocent people, including children, are suffering? Is it true that no non-Abrahamic monotheistic religion is accessible? His premises might all be right, but as long as Kelemen asserts that a premise is true without adequately defending it, no matter how reasonable the premise is, the proof will fail.
Kelemen is also far more forgiving with Judaism, applying a different standard than he gives for all other faiths. In the beginning of the chapter, he goes through a short analysis of other religions, scrutinizing them and dismissing them at the first sign of a flaw, but proactively sidestepping any actual critique of Judaism.
After Kelemen’s first deductive argument, he then performs what he calls an external check, to see if Judaism really stands up to scrutiny. Again, his reasoning is poor and full of faulty premises, and it's just an opportunity for him to act like he is really trying to check if there's any reason to reject Judaism. The argument goes like this: 1. God wants to do the most good he can for us. 2. The most good he can do is to give us a job that earns the most possible reward. 3. God would consider a job that has ethical and complex instructions with room for creative interpretation to be worthy of the most reward. 4. The Torah is not divine unless it has a job requirement that encourages ethics, has room for creativity, and is complex. 5. The Torah teaches people to be ethical. 6. Vague commandments in the Torah allow for creativity. 7. The number of laws is immense, and therefore, it is complex. 8. Judaism stands up to scrutiny. However, even if his self-selected criterion for the one true religion were good and his logic sound, there would still be many other criterion for the one true religion that he doesn't consider, and so many false religions would pass his external check.
Another problem in his arguments is that he cherry-picks facts. For example, where he says that the scriptures of the true religion should instruct people on being ethical (as if that’s not common to religions), Kelemen produces a list of several crimes that are prohibited by the Torah, like property damage and manslaughter. But he doesn't mention the apparently unethical details in the Torah, like permitting enslavement and forced marriage of conquered people (Numbers 31:17-18, Deuteronomy 21:10-13), stoning a goat on Yom Kippur (Talmudic interpretation of Leviticus 16:10 in Yoma 63a), indiscriminate slaughtering of even the infants of Jewish enemies (Num. 31:17, Deut. 7:2, 25:19, Joshua 6:21, 11:7-15), and stoning someone for cursing a parent (Ex. 21:17) or collecting sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32-36), and so on. Is the Torah really a good ethical guide? If it is, he has not completed his job in arguing his case; he just painted a one-sided picture with cherry-picked facts.
Also, if Kelemen is granted permission to assume what God would do, and thereby easily presume Judaism true and other religions false, I should also be free to presume things. I can, for example, presume that God wouldn't make the true religion something that almost all of humanity wouldn’t follow and thereby disqualify Judaism as a possible true religion. After all, if less than 0.01% of humankind follows God’s job assignment, then God would have failed in maximizing reward for people. So his type of reasoning, applied by someone else, can invalidate not just other religions but Judaism too.
CHAPTER 2: In the second chapter, Rabbi Kelemen presents his version of the famous “Kuzari” argument. The basic argument is that a national revelation can't have been faked because nobody would believe it if it wasn't something they could confirm with the previous generation. There are several, typically problematic, components to the argument, his line of reasoning is relatively disorganized making it harder to see the flaws, and the chapter is generally plagued by false or twisted information. I will try to sort this out; on to the problems.
Firstly, he misrepresents how religions other than Judaism start by suggesting they depend on the word of one or two people who start a following. However, many religions, such as Shinto, Hindu, ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Canaanite religions, or the beliefs of Aboriginal Australians and tribal peoples everywhere, start through natural cultural and mythological development. The reason he wants to portray other religions as starting on the words of individual prophets is likely just to simplify his argument, which is that a religion starting like that is not verifiably true, while Judaism, which he argues started with a mass revelation, is verifiably true. I’ll get more into that later, but for now I want to point out a nuanced difference that he kind of obfuscates: For the religions that start on the words of one prophet, the prophet is usually externally known by at least circumstantial evidence, as is the case with Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, and the beliefs of those religions do often include public miracles. For Judaism, the existence of those millions of original witnesses is not externally known, but the existence of certain influential individuals like King Josiah (according to II Kings 22-23, he reintroduced monotheism and Jewish practices to the Kingdom of Judah during the late First Temple period) is externally known by circumstantial evidence. So his distinction of verifiability starts out smaller than he claims.
Kelemen’s bias shines through next as he criticizes Christianity with one standard but doesn’t apply that standard to Judaism. He is bothered that details in the New Testament, like if Mary was a virgin, would only have been known to one person (though actually Christians say Joseph learned about this prophetically and that there were other public miracles that attested to Jesus being special) and that the New Testament accounts contradict, e.g. that Jesus appeared only in Jerusalem or only in Galilee. But he ignores the sections of Tanach about thoughts or private events, and he has no problem with the many contradictions in Tanach, such as where it was that Aaron died and was buried (Num. 33:38 vs Deut. 10:6) or the differences between Chronicles and Kings, among many others. He just says that the Talmud discusses contradictions in Tanach, presumably better than Christian apologists deal with contradictions. Of course, he fails to include any substantial defense for his distinction.
He next moves on to Judaism. Kelemen acknowledges that secular historians say Judaism and its associated stories of national miracles such as in Egypt or at the Red Sea developed over time as it does with religious and mythological development in other cultures. The historians suggest a gradual evolution of Canaanite religion (which had many practices and myths similar to things in the Torah, even their head god El) along with changes caused by individual leaders (e.g. King Josiah finding the Sefer Torah requiring a rejection of all but the main God, or Ezra redacting and compiling new and existing holy texts for his followers). Kelemen rejects this theory, saying that even if stories like the splitting of the sea could naturally develop as mythology, the story of the revelation at Mt. Sinai describes an especially awesome event of simultaneous, universal, national prophesy as God spoke the Ten Commandments. Kelemen does not, however, defend the logic of this distinction.
Kelemen also overplays and oversimplifies what the Torah says happened at Mt. Sinai. Although some verses do say that the people heard God's voice, others suggest they only briefly heard it (Deut. 5:19-28), or that the people saw from afar thunder and fire on the mountain but that Moses was the intermediary for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:15-16, Deut. 5:5) and that the people were not allowed near the mountain as God delivered the revelation to Moses (Ex. 19:20-25). Add to this that after Mt. Sinai the nation is said to have repeatedly sinned, each time resulting in massive casualties (the Golden Calf in Ex. 32, dissatisfaction with the manna in Num. 11, national hysteria at the report of the spies in Num. 14, Korach’s rebellion in Num. 16, dissatisfaction with the food and water in Num. 21, and Baal Peor in Num. 25), and it sounds like maybe Mt. Sinai isn't quite the impressive event Kelemen makes it out to be.
Moving on, he argues that if the Torah wasn't true, all details about a national revelation must have been presented to the nation all at once, and he argues this couldn't happen since people would check with their ancestors. So first, this depends on the premise that there could not be a natural or gradual development of the traditions. His comments above about Mt. Sinai did not rule that out. Second, even the straw man he's arguing against could happen, since any cult could start with the most gullible fraction of a primitive population (an idea he dismisses), or after an alleged gap in tradition (which he also addresses next), or with the force of a king where practice is mandatory and expression of opposing religious views is met with the death penalty (which he does not consider). His argument fails here.
So now he briefly presents two main arguments against a human origin of the Mt. Sinai tradition. The first addresses the possibility that a leader introduced the story after an alleged gap in tradition. He argues that if this happened, the leader should be well known for having done so, and he says that there is no evidence of this missing hero nor of such a gap in Jewish tradition.
So first, he is misrepresenting how contiguous and robust the national tradition is. There are repeated examples in Tanach that describe weakness or gaps in tradition. To start, it reports massive plagues and die-offs during the 40 years in the desert (Ex. 32:26-35, Num. 11:33, 14:21-24, 14:26-45, 16:31-35, 21:6, 25:9). Next, Deut. 4:25-28 and 29:21-27 foretells national rejection of the covenant and that the nation would suffer calamity as a result. Then there are several examples where the nation forgot about God and rejected Judaism in favor of Canaanite religious practices which typically resulted in calamities followed by a righteous leader returning the people to God (this is alleged to have happened repeatedly, for example Judges 2:12, 3:7, 10:6). Or frequently in the books of II Kings, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, polytheism is shown to be pervasive. One of the last and most noteworthy examples from II Kings was the period from King Manasseh to year 18 of King Josiah's reign (75 years, well over the average human lifespan of the time) during which Canaanite religion was practiced and Judaism was so purged that it was a shock to discover a Torah scroll and reintroduce Jewish practices (II Kings 22-23). Meanwhile Jeremiah, unable to find people or even leaders loyal to God, was tasked to end polytheistic practices and reported to the people that they and their ancestors had rejected God for polytheism (Jeremiah 1-3, 5). Then, after Josiah died, his children restored polytheistic religion (II Kings 24). Or about a hundred years later, when Ezra and Nehemiah brought their followers to Israel from Babylonia to establish Second Temple Judaism and had to teach the people what the Torah said and reestablish lost traditions (Nehemiah 8, 13:1-3). Rabbi Kelemen alludes to a list he has (outside the book) of an unbroken chain of tradition which includes Simeon the Just, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, learning from Ezra, who lived in the time of Darius the Great. According to Jewish tradition those two kings ruled back to back, but there were in reality 155 years of other Persian kings between those two, and the chain becomes a stretch. Perhaps apologetics can address some of those gaps in Judaism, but his statement, "...nowhere do we find even the slightest hint that this fact [that God spoke to the Jews at Mt. Sinai] was lost and then later recovered," is an absolute lie, and his argument fails here.
His premise that there should be a single person more famous if he did claim to reintroduce core details of Judaism is also unsupported and probably wrong: Assume, for example, that just such a faked reintroduction actually happened. Let’s say King Josiah wanted to consolidate power during unstable times by reforming Judaism, outlawing worship of all but their main God, and making Jerusalem the exclusive seat of worship and sole pilgrimage site. (It wouldn't be the first time a king did something similar: Akhenaten of Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty outlawed all gods but Aten and himself. In the end his religious reforms did not go over well and were reversed by his successor.) Anyway, let's say King Josiah presented himself, after allegedly finding the Book of the Law, as the latest in a long line of Jewish leaders who had to push the wayward Jewish people back on track from polytheistic sins. He said monotheism had been so purged by his grandfather 75 years earlier that no traces of the covenant at Sinai had survived, but he fits some details of a divine revelation event into existing mythology. And let's say he revised the history that the pagan leaders had distorted to correctly show the monotheistic history of past Jewish leaders, how being devoted to God was beneficial, and what dangers happened when the Jews didn't follow the one true God. To top it off, he ordered all other temples and idols destroyed and outlawed worship of them on pain of death. So, sure, a leader like this might be subject to some praise for getting the Jews back on track (and praised he is, in Tanach, as being the best king ever). But as just one more leader to get the Jews back on track, with the resistance his prophet Jeremiah faced, considering how forceful the reforms would have been, and seeing that, as with Akhenaten, his reforms didn’t last (though they didn’t die out totally; Ezra and Nehemiah rose up out of the Babylonian exile with the belief that not following Josiah’s reforms was the problem and led their followers back with a redacted set of scriptures to establish Second Temple Judaism), my feeling is that such a king would not necessarily be considered a more prominent hero. The contention that a leader could never have said, "We forgot the Torah, and here it is," because we'd remember him more prominently is wrong, and his argument fails here.
Kelemen's second argument against a human origin of the traditions appears to be a catch-all to address a variety of natural explanations for the Jewish belief in a national revelation, from gradual development to a gullible population to a prophet claiming that he is restoring a tradition of an event from several generations earlier. He says that if it's possible for religions to start with national revelation stories, you would expect to see other cultures with similar stories, and he claims that there aren't any. (He includes a list of religions in the back of the book to make you think he knows what he's talking about.) Even if his claim was correct (which it isn't, there are and have been several other cultures with national revelation stories, including Aztec, Lakota, and Sioux cultures), the argument would not logically follow. Many cultures have unique mythologies, and many significant historical events were unique, but that neither validates those other mythologies nor disputes those historical events. So his argument fails here too.
Due to limited room I can't address all of his other points or discuss his third and fourth chapters (which use selective and twisted facts to argue that the external evidence proves the Torah true and that Jews are superior to non-Jews), though I discuss these on my review on Amazon.
IN CONCLUSION: Many Jews who already believe in Judaism and want more of a reason to do so have looked to this book to help them with that, and they get misled into thinking they've learned about the real strengths and weaknesses of Judaism. I personally did not find any good arguments for Judaism in the book. This book certainly does not deserve the fame it has. Even if you do not agree with all of my perspectives, I hope I've made you aware of how bad this book is, so you can look elsewhere, preferably to actual neutral, reliable sources, when pondering the basis for your belief in Judaism.
This book is divided into four chapters. The first two present arguments for Judaism being true (Deductive and Incunabular), and the second two claim to address the main arguments against Judaism (the Empirical Issue and the Ethical Issue).
CHAPTER 1: In the first chapter, Rabbi Kelemen presents a proof for Judaism as a deductive argument. This chapter does, however, have a number of problems, and the premises are supported by weak arguments and specious reasoning, some of which I will touch on as I continue.
His basic argument goes like this: 1. A good, monotheistic God like the Jewish one is presumed to exist. 2. God presumably wants to do the best good he can for people. 3. The best good is presumably to give people a job, laws to follow to earn reward. 4. The job assignment should be somewhat accessible to humanity. 5. All accessible monotheistic religions depend on the Torah being true. 6. The Torah says that it is eternally applicable. 7. Other monotheistic religions nullify the Torah. 8. Therefore no monotheistic religion other than Judaism can be true. 9. Judaism is therefore true.
All seven premises are questionable. Among the shortfalls in the argument, it depends on an existing strong belief in, essentially, a Judeo-Christian God that stands independent from belief in Judaism, which is half way towards assuming the conclusion. Granted, most of his readers may not be bothered by that, and Rabbi Kelemen does recommend reading his other book which attempts to prove God's existence. But it still isn't a universally accepted assumption, and for many readers, the argument will fail here. Another of Kelemen's unjustified assumptions is that God, in order to do good for people, would give a nation a divine task to earn reward. That might be plausible, but not necessarily right. Or, is it a reliable premise that God is trying to do the best that he can for people when so many innocent people, including children, are suffering? Is it true that no non-Abrahamic monotheistic religion is accessible? His premises might all be right, but as long as Kelemen asserts that a premise is true without adequately defending it, no matter how reasonable the premise is, the proof will fail.
Kelemen is also far more forgiving with Judaism, applying a different standard than he gives for all other faiths. In the beginning of the chapter, he goes through a short analysis of other religions, scrutinizing them and dismissing them at the first sign of a flaw, but proactively sidestepping any actual critique of Judaism.
After Kelemen’s first deductive argument, he then performs what he calls an external check, to see if Judaism really stands up to scrutiny. Again, his reasoning is poor and full of faulty premises, and it's just an opportunity for him to act like he is really trying to check if there's any reason to reject Judaism. The argument goes like this: 1. God wants to do the most good he can for us. 2. The most good he can do is to give us a job that earns the most possible reward. 3. God would consider a job that has ethical and complex instructions with room for creative interpretation to be worthy of the most reward. 4. The Torah is not divine unless it has a job requirement that encourages ethics, has room for creativity, and is complex. 5. The Torah teaches people to be ethical. 6. Vague commandments in the Torah allow for creativity. 7. The number of laws is immense, and therefore, it is complex. 8. Judaism stands up to scrutiny. However, even if his self-selected criterion for the one true religion were good and his logic sound, there would still be many other criterion for the one true religion that he doesn't consider, and so many false religions would pass his external check.
Another problem in his arguments is that he cherry-picks facts. For example, where he says that the scriptures of the true religion should instruct people on being ethical (as if that’s not common to religions), Kelemen produces a list of several crimes that are prohibited by the Torah, like property damage and manslaughter. But he doesn't mention the apparently unethical details in the Torah, like permitting enslavement and forced marriage of conquered people (Numbers 31:17-18, Deuteronomy 21:10-13), stoning a goat on Yom Kippur (Talmudic interpretation of Leviticus 16:10 in Yoma 63a), indiscriminate slaughtering of even the infants of Jewish enemies (Num. 31:17, Deut. 7:2, 25:19, Joshua 6:21, 11:7-15), and stoning someone for cursing a parent (Ex. 21:17) or collecting sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15:32-36), and so on. Is the Torah really a good ethical guide? If it is, he has not completed his job in arguing his case; he just painted a one-sided picture with cherry-picked facts.
Also, if Kelemen is granted permission to assume what God would do, and thereby easily presume Judaism true and other religions false, I should also be free to presume things. I can, for example, presume that God wouldn't make the true religion something that almost all of humanity wouldn’t follow and thereby disqualify Judaism as a possible true religion. After all, if less than 0.01% of humankind follows God’s job assignment, then God would have failed in maximizing reward for people. So his type of reasoning, applied by someone else, can invalidate not just other religions but Judaism too.
CHAPTER 2: In the second chapter, Rabbi Kelemen presents his version of the famous “Kuzari” argument. The basic argument is that a national revelation can't have been faked because nobody would believe it if it wasn't something they could confirm with the previous generation. There are several, typically problematic, components to the argument, his line of reasoning is relatively disorganized making it harder to see the flaws, and the chapter is generally plagued by false or twisted information. I will try to sort this out; on to the problems.
Firstly, he misrepresents how religions other than Judaism start by suggesting they depend on the word of one or two people who start a following. However, many religions, such as Shinto, Hindu, ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Canaanite religions, or the beliefs of Aboriginal Australians and tribal peoples everywhere, start through natural cultural and mythological development. The reason he wants to portray other religions as starting on the words of individual prophets is likely just to simplify his argument, which is that a religion starting like that is not verifiably true, while Judaism, which he argues started with a mass revelation, is verifiably true. I’ll get more into that later, but for now I want to point out a nuanced difference that he kind of obfuscates: For the religions that start on the words of one prophet, the prophet is usually externally known by at least circumstantial evidence, as is the case with Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, and the beliefs of those religions do often include public miracles. For Judaism, the existence of those millions of original witnesses is not externally known, but the existence of certain influential individuals like King Josiah (according to II Kings 22-23, he reintroduced monotheism and Jewish practices to the Kingdom of Judah during the late First Temple period) is externally known by circumstantial evidence. So his distinction of verifiability starts out smaller than he claims.
Kelemen’s bias shines through next as he criticizes Christianity with one standard but doesn’t apply that standard to Judaism. He is bothered that details in the New Testament, like if Mary was a virgin, would only have been known to one person (though actually Christians say Joseph learned about this prophetically and that there were other public miracles that attested to Jesus being special) and that the New Testament accounts contradict, e.g. that Jesus appeared only in Jerusalem or only in Galilee. But he ignores the sections of Tanach about thoughts or private events, and he has no problem with the many contradictions in Tanach, such as where it was that Aaron died and was buried (Num. 33:38 vs Deut. 10:6) or the differences between Chronicles and Kings, among many others. He just says that the Talmud discusses contradictions in Tanach, presumably better than Christian apologists deal with contradictions. Of course, he fails to include any substantial defense for his distinction.
He next moves on to Judaism. Kelemen acknowledges that secular historians say Judaism and its associated stories of national miracles such as in Egypt or at the Red Sea developed over time as it does with religious and mythological development in other cultures. The historians suggest a gradual evolution of Canaanite religion (which had many practices and myths similar to things in the Torah, even their head god El) along with changes caused by individual leaders (e.g. King Josiah finding the Sefer Torah requiring a rejection of all but the main God, or Ezra redacting and compiling new and existing holy texts for his followers). Kelemen rejects this theory, saying that even if stories like the splitting of the sea could naturally develop as mythology, the story of the revelation at Mt. Sinai describes an especially awesome event of simultaneous, universal, national prophesy as God spoke the Ten Commandments. Kelemen does not, however, defend the logic of this distinction.
Kelemen also overplays and oversimplifies what the Torah says happened at Mt. Sinai. Although some verses do say that the people heard God's voice, others suggest they only briefly heard it (Deut. 5:19-28), or that the people saw from afar thunder and fire on the mountain but that Moses was the intermediary for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:15-16, Deut. 5:5) and that the people were not allowed near the mountain as God delivered the revelation to Moses (Ex. 19:20-25). Add to this that after Mt. Sinai the nation is said to have repeatedly sinned, each time resulting in massive casualties (the Golden Calf in Ex. 32, dissatisfaction with the manna in Num. 11, national hysteria at the report of the spies in Num. 14, Korach’s rebellion in Num. 16, dissatisfaction with the food and water in Num. 21, and Baal Peor in Num. 25), and it sounds like maybe Mt. Sinai isn't quite the impressive event Kelemen makes it out to be.
Moving on, he argues that if the Torah wasn't true, all details about a national revelation must have been presented to the nation all at once, and he argues this couldn't happen since people would check with their ancestors. So first, this depends on the premise that there could not be a natural or gradual development of the traditions. His comments above about Mt. Sinai did not rule that out. Second, even the straw man he's arguing against could happen, since any cult could start with the most gullible fraction of a primitive population (an idea he dismisses), or after an alleged gap in tradition (which he also addresses next), or with the force of a king where practice is mandatory and expression of opposing religious views is met with the death penalty (which he does not consider). His argument fails here.
So now he briefly presents two main arguments against a human origin of the Mt. Sinai tradition. The first addresses the possibility that a leader introduced the story after an alleged gap in tradition. He argues that if this happened, the leader should be well known for having done so, and he says that there is no evidence of this missing hero nor of such a gap in Jewish tradition.
So first, he is misrepresenting how contiguous and robust the national tradition is. There are repeated examples in Tanach that describe weakness or gaps in tradition. To start, it reports massive plagues and die-offs during the 40 years in the desert (Ex. 32:26-35, Num. 11:33, 14:21-24, 14:26-45, 16:31-35, 21:6, 25:9). Next, Deut. 4:25-28 and 29:21-27 foretells national rejection of the covenant and that the nation would suffer calamity as a result. Then there are several examples where the nation forgot about God and rejected Judaism in favor of Canaanite religious practices which typically resulted in calamities followed by a righteous leader returning the people to God (this is alleged to have happened repeatedly, for example Judges 2:12, 3:7, 10:6). Or frequently in the books of II Kings, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, polytheism is shown to be pervasive. One of the last and most noteworthy examples from II Kings was the period from King Manasseh to year 18 of King Josiah's reign (75 years, well over the average human lifespan of the time) during which Canaanite religion was practiced and Judaism was so purged that it was a shock to discover a Torah scroll and reintroduce Jewish practices (II Kings 22-23). Meanwhile Jeremiah, unable to find people or even leaders loyal to God, was tasked to end polytheistic practices and reported to the people that they and their ancestors had rejected God for polytheism (Jeremiah 1-3, 5). Then, after Josiah died, his children restored polytheistic religion (II Kings 24). Or about a hundred years later, when Ezra and Nehemiah brought their followers to Israel from Babylonia to establish Second Temple Judaism and had to teach the people what the Torah said and reestablish lost traditions (Nehemiah 8, 13:1-3). Rabbi Kelemen alludes to a list he has (outside the book) of an unbroken chain of tradition which includes Simeon the Just, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, learning from Ezra, who lived in the time of Darius the Great. According to Jewish tradition those two kings ruled back to back, but there were in reality 155 years of other Persian kings between those two, and the chain becomes a stretch. Perhaps apologetics can address some of those gaps in Judaism, but his statement, "...nowhere do we find even the slightest hint that this fact [that God spoke to the Jews at Mt. Sinai] was lost and then later recovered," is an absolute lie, and his argument fails here.
His premise that there should be a single person more famous if he did claim to reintroduce core details of Judaism is also unsupported and probably wrong: Assume, for example, that just such a faked reintroduction actually happened. Let’s say King Josiah wanted to consolidate power during unstable times by reforming Judaism, outlawing worship of all but their main God, and making Jerusalem the exclusive seat of worship and sole pilgrimage site. (It wouldn't be the first time a king did something similar: Akhenaten of Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty outlawed all gods but Aten and himself. In the end his religious reforms did not go over well and were reversed by his successor.) Anyway, let's say King Josiah presented himself, after allegedly finding the Book of the Law, as the latest in a long line of Jewish leaders who had to push the wayward Jewish people back on track from polytheistic sins. He said monotheism had been so purged by his grandfather 75 years earlier that no traces of the covenant at Sinai had survived, but he fits some details of a divine revelation event into existing mythology. And let's say he revised the history that the pagan leaders had distorted to correctly show the monotheistic history of past Jewish leaders, how being devoted to God was beneficial, and what dangers happened when the Jews didn't follow the one true God. To top it off, he ordered all other temples and idols destroyed and outlawed worship of them on pain of death. So, sure, a leader like this might be subject to some praise for getting the Jews back on track (and praised he is, in Tanach, as being the best king ever). But as just one more leader to get the Jews back on track, with the resistance his prophet Jeremiah faced, considering how forceful the reforms would have been, and seeing that, as with Akhenaten, his reforms didn’t last (though they didn’t die out totally; Ezra and Nehemiah rose up out of the Babylonian exile with the belief that not following Josiah’s reforms was the problem and led their followers back with a redacted set of scriptures to establish Second Temple Judaism), my feeling is that such a king would not necessarily be considered a more prominent hero. The contention that a leader could never have said, "We forgot the Torah, and here it is," because we'd remember him more prominently is wrong, and his argument fails here.
Kelemen's second argument against a human origin of the traditions appears to be a catch-all to address a variety of natural explanations for the Jewish belief in a national revelation, from gradual development to a gullible population to a prophet claiming that he is restoring a tradition of an event from several generations earlier. He says that if it's possible for religions to start with national revelation stories, you would expect to see other cultures with similar stories, and he claims that there aren't any. (He includes a list of religions in the back of the book to make you think he knows what he's talking about.) Even if his claim was correct (which it isn't, there are and have been several other cultures with national revelation stories, including Aztec, Lakota, and Sioux cultures), the argument would not logically follow. Many cultures have unique mythologies, and many significant historical events were unique, but that neither validates those other mythologies nor disputes those historical events. So his argument fails here too.
Due to limited room I can't address all of his other points or discuss his third and fourth chapters (which use selective and twisted facts to argue that the external evidence proves the Torah true and that Jews are superior to non-Jews), though I discuss these on my review on Amazon.
IN CONCLUSION: Many Jews who already believe in Judaism and want more of a reason to do so have looked to this book to help them with that, and they get misled into thinking they've learned about the real strengths and weaknesses of Judaism. I personally did not find any good arguments for Judaism in the book. This book certainly does not deserve the fame it has. Even if you do not agree with all of my perspectives, I hope I've made you aware of how bad this book is, so you can look elsewhere, preferably to actual neutral, reliable sources, when pondering the basis for your belief in Judaism.
August 6, 2012
Without getting into a tit for tat on each point or quasi point that he makes, I'll just say that this book will only convince or reinforce the belief of someone who already believes and isn't looking to challenge the assumptions made in by the author.
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August 21, 2011Crap.
November 10, 2024
Like its counterpart, not a serious or rigorous work. Selective use of facts and sources to defend the ontological claims of the religious practice of 0.002% of the human population. Written as outreach propaganda. Don’t bother.
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February 11, 2020Hmmm...........
January 25, 2022
Imagine a book filled with cherry-picked facts and logical fallacies. Got it? Now this book is the times worse.
August 8, 2011
Well-written, but not as compelling as Permission to Believe.
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