The Pilgrim's Progress:

I'm really fed up with Judaism. About a month ago I began looking in an orthodox synagogue to become more involved with "my heritage" but the more I discover the more it seems to be all lies and circumlocutions.

To me, Judaism approaches a book (Torah) with principles that are seemingly derived from that book. Torah cannot then disagree with the principles, so in the instances where it does (sorry, seems to), elaborate explanations are devised to show that the contradiction is, in fact, *not* a contradiction at all, but a hidden teaching. And we, the poor laymen (to say nothing of the women), are to sag under the weight of this convoluted burden until it crushes us, taking it on faith; for to disbelief is to sin against G-d (to be polite, I will use the ridiculous hyphenation).

And yet despite all this, Judaism offers no good argument (that is, an argument that doesn't sound like fundamentalist raving) to the documentary hypothesis posited by very able scholars that the Torah is a redaction of a number of sources. Oh sure, there's the cute little "everybody received it on the mountain, you can't contradict a tradition like that," and then there's the even more adorable, "but the Torah says they received it on the mountain..." (all the Greeks believed that Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, but no one takes a claim like that seriously in the classical world; traditions can and have been wrong, look at popular philology, for instance) and I'm sure there are any other number of other circumlocutions and bizarre explanations that completely disregard and turn against historical and logical arguments which are not simply posited out of antagonism to the Jewish faith (because the whole world is filled with people who concern themselves solely with inflicting as much damage on our poor little faith as possible because they have nothing better to do), but actually operate on the basis of firm and sound reasoning.

To be fair, I am not offering here a defense of the documentary hypothesis against whatever claims orthodox rabbis have brought against it, but that is because one can only rail against flawed logic in the synagogue for so many weeks before one wearies of thinking about it even outside of the synagogue.

So if, as I believe, the Torah is a redacted source (occam's razor, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one...which is to say that this theory much more readily explains contradictions in the document than the "hidden teachings" explanation...instead of pages of Talmud to explain why there are two creation accounts, that give different orders of creation, why not..."Hey, they're different documents") then the entirety of Judaism is...a culture. No divine reasons to follow it, no neccessity of studying it.

Well this is what absolutely enrages me! Because without the hand of God behind its principles and "ethics" and "philosophies", Judaism has NOTHING to offer to the non-believer. It is not as advanced or sophisticated or as deep as Western philosophy, which offers LOGICAL PROOFS AND CONSIDERATIONS for the ideas it presents. In fact, it is a tradition that, to me, seems to openly oppose logic in the event that adherents might begin to think for themselves and challenge the Jewish tradition. And then there's always excommunication to those who actually are somewhat intelligent and can devise there own opinions -- Baruch Spinoza, now wasn't making him an apostate a bit of a mistake?

And yet, the entire orthodox world affirms that the Torah is from God, and oh...our Oral Law is too (how convenient) like Kabbalah (how convenient); so study it all and learn it *by rote*, because it is more important to memorize a page of the Talmud than it is to ever possibly question why sages are arguing about issues which, though they might once have been charged with life, are now today useless and irrelevant to the reader; they are, indeed, "sages", as the tradition would have it, and far wiser than you and me.

In short, in an age when religion has an ever more and more tenuous claim to authority, here is Judaism, sitting with its little fence around the Torah, persisting in error, refusing to accept that a detractor's opinion could ever be valid, and so we wonder why half of the world despises us and would have us out of the way as soon as anything else. I sometimes wonder if those of us who try to believe are not like a mass of people who have fallen into a pit and are writhing and struggling with each other to get out.