Rabbi David D. Steinberg may not be a household name but many will be grateful for his sense of mission. He is the moving spirit behind TheTorah.com, the website that strives to bring academic research into classic Jewish texts to a wider audience, which celebrated its barmitzvah around Shavuot this year. It was an initiative that he put his career on the line to launch.
An extraordinary wealth of material on the Tanach and rabbinic literature is being produced by scholars in Israel, the USA and elsewhere but much of it remains out of reach – not just because most of us are not at university but because academic books are often prohibitively expensive.
The site attracts over 150,000 monthly viewers, with a roster of “more than 613 scholars” and a “library of more than 1,700 essays, spanning history, archaeology, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern studies, Semitic languages, textual criticism and literary approaches to the Bible”, Rabbi Steinberg says. It makes these freely available in a style that is accessible to lay people.
You can look up the weekly Torah portion and immediately find more than a dozen articles spanning all sorts of subjects. Go to Mattot, one half of this week’s double sidrah, and you can read pieces on the Moabite women who ensnared the Israelites, Transjordan’s place in the Promised Land, the war on Midian and a comparison between the Torah and the Mesha Stele, to mention just a few.
Academic study of the Torah remains suspect in much of the Orthodox world, not least because of the prevalent acceptance on campus that the Torah is a composite work of multiple sources over time and did not, according to traditional religious doctrine, drop into the hands of Moses from Heaven. In fact, says Rabbi Steinberg, who is from a Manchester Charedi background and who “has never taken a college course, ever”, he grew up “vaccinated” against the idea that anything could be learned about the Torah from secular institutions.
He is one of 10 siblings, whose father was a maggid shiur, a lecturer, at Manchester Yeshivah, which Rabbi Steinberg began attending full time at the age of 14. He spent 10 years in yeshivah, including in some of the most prestigious institutions such as Gateshead and Mir (in Israel).
When he moved to the USA in 2002, he began working for the Orthodox outreach organisation Aish. It was hardly a milieu which promoted academic investigation of the Torah but he encountered that online “in little bits… it sowed seeds”. And within him grew the sense that “there was something missing about the world I was living in”.
There might have been no eureka moment as such but one episode that made a strong impact came when a friend recommended a book by the Orthodox Harvard professor James Kugel, How to read the Bible: a Guide to Scripture Then and Now. “I put in it in my Amazon cart but I did not buy it the entire Ellul [the month preceding Rosh Hashanah], because I didn’t want to do it. It was too ‘heretical’. Ellul and the High Holy Days is a time of teshuvah,” he recalled. “But I was so curious, I kept looking to see where I could pick up excerpts of it and I kept reading whatever I could.
“That Yom Kippur I davened in a yeshivah minyan. I stood on my feet the entire day for 13 hours, I cried the entire day [because] I knew I was on this journey, I knew that something was going to shift. When I got home, I still had my tallit and my crocs on, I went upstairs to my bedroom and ordered that book.”
Driven by his thirst for knowledge, he consulted other Orthodox rabbis he believed would be sympathetic such as Rabbi Dr Norman Solomon from Oxford, author of the book Torah from Heaven. Eventually he found Professor Marc Brettler, a Jewish studies scholar who recently retired from Duke University in North Carolina; they took on Rabbi Dr Zev Farber, a leading figure in the Open Orthodoxy movement, as senior editor, and TheTorah.com began.
But Rabbi Steinberg found the new venture incompatible with Aish and sacrificed his job security to pursue it. Although he obtained a little seed money, it did not cover his own expenses. “I lived on my severance and off my savings and I went into debt because of it. It took me a year plus before I got some funding.”
When it started, the father of seven, who is 48, still belonged to a strictly Orthodox community in New Jersey but has since moved to more liberal Riverdale and identifies more with open Orthodoxy.
He has previously written that maintaining the belief in the literal transmission of the Torah from God to Moses is a chillul Hashem – a desecration. “When it comes to Judaism, I believe in God, I love learning Torah, I am driven by the meaning but I don’t believe it in a literal way,” he explained to the JC.
“When we reduce it to these stories that we know deep down if it was anybody else’s story it’s not true, you are saying God is not true.”
But he stressed: “My goal all along was to be a platform that allows academic scholarship to get to the masses. It was never about did God write the Torah or not. It was about how do we study Torah. I love studying Torah but I want to be studying it with my brain.”
And the site is reaching into unexpected places. One regular reader, who lives in a Chasidic neighbourhood in New York and who contributes to a Yiddish forum under the name of Shoshani, told the JC he had felt distanced from the Torah – “It was too far away.. I didn’t feel it spoke to me”. But TheTorah.com has given him a new way to connect that has restored his interest.
He said he had been recommended to it by another Chasid who gave the example of Copernicus who, when he first proposed that the earth revolved around the sun, faced a backlash but whose ideas were eventually reconciled with faith by the religious establisment. Similarly, the acceptance of evolution was gaining ground in the Orthodox world, the Chasid said, and so eventually would biblical criticism.
What Rabbi Steinberg had done was “beautiful,” Shoshani said. “He opened a whole universe for people who would never have had access to it.”
For more: see TheTorah.com
Read more: The rabbi behind the American Louis Jacobs affair
To get more from judaism, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.