Way back in 1926, Martin Buber wrote an essay called “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible.” Eighty years later, we are still tackling this subject.
Buber wrote: “Certainty of faith is not accessible to the Man of Today, nor can it be made accessible to him. But he is not denied the possibility of holding himself open to faith. He too may open himself to the Book and let its rays strike him where they will.”
Buber was entitled to his doubts, but the Torah is the only book of antiquity that is still in living use, and we owe our survival to it. I believe very much in a statement from the Kaballah: “The effort from below calls forth a response from above.”
I read recently that over the past 30 years more than 100,000 people have returned to their Jewish roots; here in Jerusalem, Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach alone have helped 25,000 young people find their way. That is surely reason for optimism.
So are we still the people of the book? I can’t answer a simple “yes” or “no” to the question. I will only say that some of us still are, and I’ll close with a Judaic epigram: “To the believers there can be no questions and to the non-believers there are no answers.”
