Open Letter to The Academy

Shalom,

I'm an Orthodox Rabbi by training and ordination but an autodidactic skeptic by inclination.

In attempting to serve as a translator between cultures I'm currently living in Egypt where I continue to post videos to various demographics.

My latest video is a reading of the Christian Bible for Orthodox Jews...or something like that.

See, I know that my desired audience isn't likely to come across my video and have the emotional tolerance necessary to watch it from an interested and open perspective so it's more a show for others with an interest in the Bible to enjoy watching what I would say to Orthodox Jews (if they were watching).

I have no academic training and I'm somewhat ambivalent about the field from my few encounters with that world.

There seems to be too much delight in denigrating the interpretation of ancient texts which bleeds into denigrating of the texts as well, neither of which I think help us relate to the authors of those texts as serious Ancient Forebearers who deserve to be taken seriously, even if to disagree with.

I also feel that there's a tendency to get lost in the trees and losing sight of the forest.

I consider this terribly unfortunate because a dispassionate non-worshipful reverence is what ancient sacred texts require but while academia has that ever-important ingredient of non-worshipfulness in spades, it seems to be short on that (obvious) reference worth having for texts that were taken SO SERIOUSLY by generations of our smartest forebearers that they have been able to survive a dozen as many generations of being read foolishly without being "classed out" of the curriculum.

My 30 second pitch on that:

https://youtube.com/shorts/f1DBLHLw3kQ?feature=share

In my new show I attempted to do a little translating between the various communities of people who already have strong feelings or knowledge about the Bible, as well as to try and argue for at least a moment's attention from those who have hitherto lacked such sentiments.

Is there a way to get past our inherited tendency of tosafistic hairsplitting about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin to contribute our minds to the cause of taking the Biblical points of view seriously (but not worshipfully)?

We ought to do this with other great written legacies from the past as well of course.

What the ancients offer us is an intelligent adult view of things from the perspective of those whose odd biases are no threat to us but can offer as a managerial check on our own biases.