Yesterday Rabbi Norman Lamm, a scholar and theologian who served as president of Yeshiva University from 1976 to 2003, died at the age of ninety-two. In 1966, Time magazine published its infamous cover posing the question “Is God dead?” To craft a Jewish response, Commentary magazine posed a series of theological questions to several rabbis of various denominations. Lamm, as one of the respondents, submitted an essay that displays his erudition, intellectual courage, and clarity of thought and expression. On revelation, he writes:
I accept unapologetically the idea of the verbal revelation of the Torah. I do not take seriously the caricature of this idea which reduces Moses to a secretary taking dictation. Any competing notion of revelation, such as the various “inspiration” theories, can similarly be made to sound absurd by anthropomorphic parallels. Exactly how this communication took place no one can say; it is no less mysterious than the nature of the One who spoke. The divine-human encounter is not a meeting of equals, and the kerygma that ensues from this event must therefore be articulated in human terms without reflecting on the mode and form of the divine logos.
How God spoke is a mystery; how Moses received this message is an irrelevancy. That God spoke is of the utmost significance, and what He said must therefore be intelligible to humans in a human context, even if one insists upon an endlessly profound mystical over-plus of meaning in the text. To deny that God can make His will clearly known is to impose upon Him a limitation of dumbness that would insult the least of His human creatures.
On religion in contemporary society:
The restriction of religion to worship and cult was accepted quite naturally by the ancient pagans, and the confinement of the spirit to cult in modern times, despite all gallant attempts at developing a “social gospel,” is one of the sad triumphs of secularism. We have cornered God, locked Him up in little sanctuaries, and now complain that we cannot find Him in “the real world.” Judaism’s unique contribution to modern man may well lie in its insistence that God is very much alive, that He is not absent from society (even “secular” society) for those who invite Him in, and that the best way to achieve this goal is to release Him from His incarceration in our barren and desiccated temples. In a word: halakhah!
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/jacob-agus-2/the-state-of-jewish-belief/