Jonathan Sacks Quote
To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology – be it science or myth – answers the question: how did it happen?[...]if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah – as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live?[...]Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis – as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out – is the necessary prelude to science: it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious.
To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology – be it science or myth – answers the question: how did it happen?[...]if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah – as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live?[...]Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis – as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out – is the necessary prelude to science: it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious.
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