<\/p>\n
There was a line of ants running up and down the face of the
\naboveground crypts of the huge necropolis, a city of the dead with story upon
\nstory of stacked crypts rising over the 405 freeway south of Los Angeles. My
\nfather and I were there at the well-known Jewish memorial park dominated by the mausoleum of Al Jolson, because my mother had just died after a long struggle with
\ncancer. We were being shown around the facility where she would be buried. I
\nremember asking the man from the memorial park about that line of ants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n
I didn’t know it at the time, but for very good reasons that
\nI’ll get into in a future post, Judaism forbids above ground burial. It insists
\non the dead being buried in the same ground from which the first human being,
\nAdam, was formed. But even being the na\u00efve college freshman and simple,
\nuntutored Jew I was, something about that display of orderly insect vigor
\nstruck me as somehow not right in this context. I asked the man from the
\nmemorial park about the ants.<\/p>\n
\n
“Oh,” he reassured me, “don’t look there.”<\/p>\n
\n
Since then, over these past 25 years, I’ve often thought of
\nhis words — “Don’t look there” — as the motto of modern culture when it comes
\nto the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible.<\/p>\n
\n
I don’t simply mean that people are ignorant of the Bible. I
\nmean that even if they are professionals involved with religious communal
\naffairs, there is a tendency to look away from challenging and often totally
\nunfamiliar truths embodied in the very heart of Scripture, the Hebrew Bible —
\ntruths not merely about practical religious observance but about the worldview
\nthat the Bible with its commandments and narratives embodies.<\/p>\n
\n
The degree to which Jews and non-Jews do not know what they \n Offers us all<\/i>, I <\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is an uncomfortable Biblical truth from which the \n That’s not just my interpretation. The classical commentator \n There’s much, much more to say on the theme of the Jewish \n Certainly, the world is ready for it. The world’s need for \n Rabbi Hirsch lived to see Darwin’s influence spread rapidly \n Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most \n Yet observations like these, that leap from the pages of the \n It’s funny, as I am writing this, I’ve just received an \n Let me be clear. Although I write about the Hebrew Bible and \n
\nare looking at when they gaze on the Hebrew Bible is a fundamental insight I’ve
\nreceived in the course of my own spiritual journey from secularism to Orthodox
\nJudaism. Ever since I left a comfortable position at the conservative magazine
\nNational Review<\/span> ten years ago, I’ve made it my mission as a writer to
\nreacquaint readers with the fascinating, uplifting, but challenging picture of
\nreality that the Hebrew Bible offers us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nshould add, not just Jews. Which brings us to the name of this blog. Readers of
\nmy books and articles, and anyone who knows the book of Exodus at all, will
\nrecognize “Kingdom of Priests” as a phrase from Chapter 19, verse 6, where God
\nis directing Moses to prepare the Jews to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai. God
\nsays that Moses should tell the Jews, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests
\nand a holy nation.”<\/span><\/p>\n
\nJewish community for the most part turns away: Jews are called on to be
\npriests, ministers, teachers and counselors. Just to each other? No, there is a
\nspecial hereditary caste of Jewish priests (kohanim<\/i>), descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, for that.
\nThe Jewish people as a whole are meant to minister <\/span>to the world<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nOvadiah Sforno (1475-1550) gives it as the plain meaning of that verse,
\nexplaining that Jews are called on to teach humanity about God. Not later. Now.
\nThis idea comes out again and again in the commentary of another highly
\nrelevant, later interpreter, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), of
\nwhom you’ll hear a lot about in this blog.<\/p>\n
\nmission to the world, and please God, I’ll have an opportunity to get into it
\nwith you in detail in the future. For the time being, it’s enough to say there
\nis such a mission, that it’s what makes Jewish existence meaningful, and that
\nit has been grossly neglected. I hope, to some small extent, to remedy that.<\/p>\n
\nHebrew wisdom meets me at every turn in my daily and professional life. I work
\nat the Discovery Institute, a think tank well known — or maybe better to say
\nnotorious — for its support of intelligent design theory and for the
\nscientific critique of Darwinism. The debate about Darwinian evolution
\nconfronts us with nothing less than the question of what it means to be
\nhuman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nacross Europe in the decades after the Origin of Species<\/i> appeared, exactly 150 years ago. In his Torah
\ncommentary, Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian
\nthought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we live.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
\ngrotesquely animalistic fashion (mixing defecation with sexual intercourse),
\nHirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely “the kind of Darwinism that revels
\nin the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of
\nits divine nobility, learns to consider itself just a ‘higher’ class of animal”
\n(Numbers\u00a025:3).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nclassic interpreters of the Hebrew Bible, are precisely those from which most
\nof our communal and religious leaders prefer to turn away. They assure us that
\nbetween God and Darwin, there is no radical choice to make.<\/p>\n
\nemail from a fellow in Israel who wants me to read over his essay titled “Jews
\nand the Invention of Consciousness.” He addresses me as “Dear Rabbi
\nKlinghoffer.”<\/p>\n
\nits view of the world, I’m a journalist and I do so as a journalist.<\/p>\n