Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg on writing his latest book about teachings and reflections on the Torah

Writing Listening for God in Torah and Creation was the anchor of my sanity and solace during the lockdown and Covid years. I felt in part like the figure in Chagall’s Solitude, clasping the Torah as his strength and music, while behind him smoke rises. And in part I identified with Isabel Allende’s description of writing as "the witching hour", set aside in the magic landscape of creative imagination. Only, my ingredients were the Hebrew Bible, Rashi (the medieval French rabbi) and the other great commentators, and my spells were the magic of Hasidic insights and poetry from any source I knew.

I wrote for Jewish readers and people of other faiths, especially Christians with whom we share the legacy of the Hebrew Bible. I was mindful of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s pithy definition of an idol as "Any god who is mine but not yours, and god concerned with me but not with you…". I’ve never thought of God as Jewish, but always as universal, the God of all life, present though concealed, the hidden vibrancy that animates all life, people, animals and trees. I often think of the teaching of Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro, rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, in which he declares, despite the horrors around him, that God’s speech descends into this world through two channels, Torah and Creation, yet God’s voice is ultimately one.

It was important to me to embrace critical scholarship; no text can be understood without context. This applies especially to foundational religious texts, in which it’s easy to think that we have access to God’s unmediated word, when what we really have is the biblical authors’ understanding of God’s will in their place and time. The rabbinic tradition has always been radical; there has always been the courage to reinterpret. A historical perspective allows even more latitude in reconsidering such central issues as, for example, the position of women or the attitude to war.

Yet it mattered to me no less to take off my critical spectacles. If we stand outside the Torah, looking in like spectators, the Torah cannot form us or deepen our spiritual and moral sensitivities. Judaism has always understood us as subject to the Torah, not the Torah as subject to us.

My book is structured according to the weekly Torah readings, with short essay-style reflections on each portion. But there’s also a thematic index for those wanting to follow key themes: environment, healing, justice, spirituality.

I hope the book occasions much reflection and debate. It’s the responsibility of every generation both to receive the Torah as our ancestors understood it, yet also to appreciate the Torah as our contemporary.

By Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Listening for God in Torah and Creation: A Weekly Encounter with Conscience and Soul is out now (Hodder & Stoughton, £30). hachette.co.uk