Things you get asked - What Does Masorti Judaism Think About Torah

Things you get asked as a Rabbi - can I have 150 words on this by ... [very soon]. but it's a good question.

Here's how I felt about it today.

At its most limited Torah is the Five Books of Moses - the Humash. More broadly Torah includes the rest of the written Hebrew Bible, and also the Oral Torah - with the latter including not only the collections of Talmud and Midrash but also, “that which a committed student will innovate in the future,” even that, “was already said to Moses at Sinai.” (TY, Peah, 17b). More broadly still Torah is the path by which Jews make lives of meaning - that’s something beyond quill and ink and even beyond  Reish Lakish’s eloquent image of black fire carved on white fire (TY, Shekalim 49d). Ultimately, Torah is the will of God, an ineffable, infinite complexity beyond human ken. Midrash Bereshit Rabba 1:1 suggests Torah was the blueprint from which God created this world. The broad conceptions should draw some of the sting out of the old arguments about Divine authorship - it’s not really the point.