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are taking place before our eyes. We do not have our rebellious or overfed children stoned to death (Deut. 21:18-21). We will not kill a betrothed woman who has relations with another man, despite our high regard for marital fidelity (Deut. 22:23-24). “Honor killings” are not the Jewish way, despite the text. To these already ancient modifications of tradition, we add our own. We do not believe any person may own another, male or female, Jew or Gentile. We are horrified at the examples of massacre or even genocide that the text seems to prescribe for certain nations that resisted the people of Israel on their journey into the Promised Land. In an era when Jews have regained power, including military rule over others, we shudder to think that such passages might be treated as precedents for deeds no Jew should contemplate. We do not believe that homosexual acts are an “abomination,” and will not accept treating gay people as though they were. We do not delete those Leviticus verses from the text of our Torah, but we rise up regularly “to preach against them.”56 When we are convinced that our struggle with the text demands the courage of radical rereading, we stand ready. There is a real danger, however, that all of these discomforts might serve to push us away from the text and make us prefer those versions of Torah that are infinitely larger (all of wisdom) or smaller (a single aleph).

But we are Jews and this is Torah. The text simply will not go away. This is the Torah we read in the synagogue each week, bless, kiss, raise up, and march around. As loyal Jews we love this text, even as we give vent to considerable anger and frustration with it. It is the place from which we come, something like ancient childhood memory, partially repressed and reshaped by sublimation, but nevertheless present within us, not to be denied. Fortunately we inherit the text together with a highly developed apparatus for reinterpretation, offering our generation, like all generations that have preceded it, a chance to participate in that text's ever-evolving meaning. The textus receptus may indeed be a verbal embodiment of God's presence in our midst.57 Yet the text is never read without commentary. Khumesh mit RaShI (“the Pentateuch with commentary”) was the subject of elementary education in the traditional kheydr (Jewish elementary school), not the Torah text alone. We may add to eleventh-century RaShI at least sixty-nine more commentaries of our own choosing to make up the Torah's “seventy faces” as we present them to the reader.58 It is not the specific content of RaShI that is most important to convey; it is the example of RaShI, the tradition's daring to reinterpret. The Hasidic masters insist that the Torah must have new interpretations in each generation, in accord with the generation's spiritual character.59 Only in this way, they clearly state, does Torah, eternally belonging to God, historically belonging to Moses, become our Torah.

In choosing to live with an ancient text in this way, keeping it alive through a constant process of creative reinterpretation, we stand in open conflict with Spinoza's insistence that the Bible must be treated just like any other document, its words meaning what critical scrutiny seems to indicate, and nothing more.60 As a community still committed to a sacred canon, we privilege those texts to bear, and to transport us to, infinite other realms of meaning, the “inner palaces” of Torah. We thus make the same claim for Torah that we make for the natural world itself: remove the veil of surface impressions, go deeper, and you will find there something profound and holy. To get there we may use all the methods suggested above, and perhaps some newer ones as well. In doing this, we should realize that we are using the text as a pathway to insight that leads beyond text, and ultimately beyond language itself.

It may seem surprising to hear a heterodox Jew— that is, one who does not claim to believe literally in the revealed nature of the text — make such assertions. The right to interpret so daringly was