Having said that, a brief encounter from Sunday has stuck with me all week and I wanted to share it here.
In between appointments, a harried-looking Sunday School teacher arrived unannounced at my office with a towheaded second-grade girl in tow. Their body language bespoke an impasse. The teacher asked, "Do you have a minute for a question?" I said, "Literally, a minute: It's 10:14 and my next appointment's at 10:15. So it depends on the question." The teacher replied, "Perfect! I'll leave the two of you alone!" and fled like she was abandoning an unpinned grenade.
The girl stared at me, her eyes squinting just slightly. She was not smiling.
I said: "What's on your mind?"
She did not pull any punches: "How did the Red Sea split?"
I said: "Do you want me to tell you what the Bible says or what I think? ... or both?"
She stared at me.
I said: "Well what do you think?" (Every rabbi's favorite answer. Adults usually open up to this kind of inquiry. She said, "I dunno.")
Now had I been more reflective in the moment - and had I not kept peeking out the window for my next appointment - I might have taken the opportunity to dig a bit more deeply into what had gone down in that classroom. An argument? A barrage of unanswerable questions? My guess is that the teacher suddenly felt out of her league when a student asked a reasonable question with a difficult answer no matter what the teacher said. She had been backed into a corner because we have been trained to view faith and reason as antagonistic. Either the teacher responds with the boilerplate response of Faith - i.e., to cite chapter and verse of the Bible and implicitly impels the student to suspend her disbelief, or the teacher appeals to Reason, and thereby discredits the supernatural element of the story -- inviting the student to disavow the so-called "truth" of the Torah.
Or so I conjecture. Maybe the kid was just being a brat.
It should be noted that many congregants' questions of a quote-unquote religious nature are often thinly veiled invitations to a pastoral encounter. That is to say, congregants bring their doubts and fears and anxieties to their rabbi in the guise of religious language, but the emotional motivation that brings them to that office is often a human desire to be heard and understood and valued. So a bereaved congregant might ask a rabbi, "Why is God punishing me?" and a sensitive rabbi will know not to respond with a theological discourse but with a compassionate heart and two very open ears.
Having said that, I'm not sure that the student in question was in fact looking for a pastoral meeting. I think she really wanted to talk about the splitting of the Red Sea. And she didn't seem bratty at all.
So I took her question at face value.
It's a great question for this week, by the way. This week we read the selection from the Torah called Parashat Bo (Ex. 10:1 - 13:16) which depicts the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. The actual splitting of the Sea comes in next week's Torah portion. I reviewed with her the Biblical account in which Moses extends his staff over the waters and with God's power the sea separates - massive walls of water framing a dry corridor through which a ragtag band of slaves walked the sandy road to freedom. She nodded. She knew the story.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"What do I think?" I echoed. Stalling.
"What do I think? I think that sometimes the Torah did not set out to tell history, but to tell an amazing story ...with important lessons for us today."
By this point I had forgotten about my next meeting. I asked her to tell me about the books she's reading in school and at home, and if the stories she was reading were "true" and historical (non-fiction) or not literally true (fiction). She had read Aesop's Fables and was able to understand that a story about a talking fox serves a purpose other than to convince its readers that foxes can talk. She said that the important thing was that the story had a moral.
She's a damn smart kid. Could we please have more adults like her?
She asked if I believed that God wrote the Torah.
I upped the ante. I said, "I don't believe that God wrote the Torah. But I still believe that the Torah is the most special book we have. I believe that our ancestors wrote a book, over years and years and years, that had so much to teach ... not only for the people of their time, but for future generations too. I believe that part of what makes being Jewish so wonderful is the opportunity to study the Torah and discover what it has to teach us - and that each person can learn something unique and different from it."
The time rolled on. We talked about science and how some scientists are looking for a scientific explanation for what happened at the Red Sea. I remember a special on the History Channel that ran this summer ("The Exodus Decoded" - a lavish Canadian documentary narrated, in part, by director James Cameron) proposing the explosion of the volcano on Santorini as the root of the plagues and the spectacle at the Sea. She seemed intrigued by these theories. I am too. Maybe science and the Bible stand side-by-side, harmoniously, at least in some places. At the end of the day, however, the authors of the Red Sea narrative were not trying to offer a scientific explanation for the Israelites' freedom. They saw the world through God-dazed eyes and the gift of human freedom as an expression of God's power and God's love. An inspired, and inspiring message.
My congregants showed up late for their appointment, so I had time to ask our sweet skeptic, "Well, what do you think?"
She said, "I like your ideas."
I said, "They're not my original ideas, but I'm happy to share them with you."
It felt like the best compliment I'd ever received.
