Does faith create practice or does practice create faith? Does the authorship of a religious work matter most or is our personal experience of the work more important?
Last night, Jeremy Brochin, director of Hillel, and a small group of students tackled these questions in an hour-long discussion of the authorship and interpretation of the Torah entitled "Who Wrote the Torah?"
The students, led by Brochin, discussed the revelation of the Torah on Mt. Sinai as depicted in Exodus and Deuteronomy and commented on in the Midrash. The discussion focused on the individual nature of the revelation, a term which connotes that the Torah was presented by God directly to Moses.
They also briefly reviewed the history of biblical criticism, a movement which originated in the Enlightenment and which recognizes the idea that the Torah was not divinely revealed but rather written by a number of authors at different times.
The students discussed the ways in which the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements in Judaism react to biblical criticism and define revelation.
Aaron Roth, an Engineering freshman, said he enjoyed the discussion. "I've always been curious about this subject, so I was actually pretty thrilled that they had this discussion," he said.
The conversation was the latest in a series organized by Kesher, the Reform Jewish community at Penn. Topics for the semester are chosen by a survey sent out to the Hillel mailing list.
College freshman Danielle Fiorino said the focus of the discussion was interesting but unexpected. "I was thinking that it was ... who wrote the Torah. Instead, it was more about how everyone has interpreted the Torah over the ages."
But College junior Jessica Rivo, Kesher education director and program organizer, disagreed.
"These texts that we looked at are the academic basis of Judaism," she said. "You can't really isolate the spiritual from the academic in this kind of Judaism."
The Kesher discussion series will continue March 31 with "The Torah in 60 Minutes," presented by Rabbi Michael Uram, associate director of Hillel.
