It isn’t surprising that, in our most recent book, my co-author and I include chapters on economics and on literature. I am a professor of economics; he is a professor of Russian literature. But after years of imploring our students to get out of their comfort zones and take chances, wisely or not, we took our own advice and included a chapter titled “Searching for Eternal Truths: Religion and Its Discontents.”
Our focus there is on when we should abide by the Bible’s commandments and when instead we need to update them to reflect today’s values or a new understanding of the world. We argue that any reinterpretation of the holy texts should be infrequent and done with great care, and we illustrate that point by telling a story I once heard in an especially memorable sermon from Annie Tucker, at that time the rabbi at Beth Hillel Bnai Emunah in Wilmette, Illinois.
A visitor observed a workman raising a clock in the village square far above eye level. She wondered whether this was being done to increase its visibility. No, a villager replied; it is to place it beyond arm’s reach. Folks would walk by and continually adjust the hands of the clock. If a person’s watch said 11:02 and the clock said 11, the passerby would change the clock. The next person who would come by did the same, until it turned out that there was no reason to believe that the clock told the true time. After the clock was raised, people instead started adjusting their watches to the clock, thereby agreeing on a common time.
People of faith should never adapt that faith for the sake of convenience. A standard that changes arbitrarily is no longer a standard. The Ten Commandments are not 10 recommendations. They convey timeless wisdom with which to measure contemporary preferences and beliefs.
May we have the wisdom to know when to accept biblical edicts and when to update them.
Sacred texts remain of consequence precisely because we cannot make them mean whatever we choose. They somehow manage to say something pertinent today, and yet speak with a voice outside normal discourse. The brilliance of the Bible is that it is both intelligible and unfamiliar, relevant but not already present.
The stunning thing about the holy texts is how meaningfully they endure, despite their origin in another world with very different concerns. We all respond to the verse from the Book of Isaiah, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” even though most of us live in cities, and no one uses ancient agricultural implements. Should we revise the text to “they shall retrofit tanks into tractors?”
Society has changed in unimaginable ways, but some truths seem eternal.
But what if they aren’t? What do you do about passages that we find highly objectionable? There are many examples, but Leviticus 20:13 stands out: “If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death …” Such words have been used in support of the recent implementation of homophobic and transphobic laws in this country and abroad. How shameful to use the Bible to justify hate and bigotry.
What we take to be truth is not inviolable. While it is important that changes in liturgy and ethical tenets be rare enough so that they don’t become mere echoes of our own shifting beliefs, if religion is to remain an integral part of our lives, we must enter into dialogue with it.
The parable about the village clock demonstrates this beautifully. The clock has been mounted out of reach so it cannot be easily altered. Yet, on occasion, a workman needs to climb up and adjust its hands since, over some months, the clock invariably loses time. Those adjustments are sporadic, but they are crucial.
May we have the wisdom to know when to accept biblical edicts and when to update them. This is a high stakes set of decisions – but they are unavoidable. If we choose not to wrestle with such choices, we undermine the very faith we cherish.
Morton Schapiro is the former president of Williams College and Northwestern University. His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson) is “Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”
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