A curious soul once walked into my office while I was the student Rabbi in Beckley, West Virginia. He was a good Christian who knew his Bible backwards and forwards, including the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament as he called it. I don’t think this man had ever met a Jew before, and his assumption about Judaism was that it was the religion of the “Old Testament.” He was genuinely curious, and wanted to understand what Judaism was. I patiently sat and answered his questions.
“Do Jews still celebrate the Jubilee year that it asks about in Leviticus 25?” “Well, no,” I answered, “there isn’t even a recorded history of the Jubilee year ever being celebrated.” The questions continued, “do Jews not eat pork or shellfish as it commands in Leviticus 11?” I tried to explain how I keep Koshrut, but for a lot of my congregation, the dietary laws weren’t so important. Then came an interesting question about membership dues, “Do Jews still tithe, that is give a tenth of their income annually to the synagogue?” With a big grin, I responded with a chuckled, “I wish!”
As the questions went on, I began to shift the conversation to explaining the essence of Judaism, instead of trying to explain Jewish positions on the Bible. The Torah and the rest of the Bible are starting points for Judaism. They record what it meant to live as an Israelite thousands of years ago, but the religion has changed significantly. In the transitions from desert wandering, to living in the Promised Land, to the monarchy of Israel, to the the destruction of the Temple, to exile, to return, and back to destruction again, Judaism has evolved. And then came a big philosophical question that couldn’t be answered with a simple response:
“How much can something change and still be the same thing?”
To begin to answer this philosophical question, we go to the ancient Greek thinker, Plutarch, who poses the thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Thesus was a Greek mythological hero, founder of Athens, slayer of the Minotaur, and experienced sailor. According to Plutarch, the ship of Theseus was mended over time. Each and every plank of the ship was eventually replaced. Thus the famous question, “Was it the same ship, or a new one altogether?” I’m not going to leave the question open-ended, I believe that we can answer this conundrum.
We might first turn to the Talmud, which offers us a parallel example of the Ship of Theseus using a sandal. The rabbis suppose that a sandal that is ritually impure, is not made pure by replacing one of its two straps. However, if both straps of the sandal are replaced, the sandal is considered a new entity all-together (Eruvin 24a). By this logic, Theseus has a new ship, not the same one that he had before.
If we were to think of the Ship of Theseus in regard to identity, we might point out that every seven years, the human body has replaced nearly every one of its 50-75 trillion cells. Certain cells die off after a few days, and are replaced by new ones. Colon cells last about four days, skin cells two or three weeks, red blood cells about four months, and white blood cells, about a year. Might that mean that I was a completely different person seven years ago than I am today? I would like to think that I’m still the same person.
The Ship of Theseus
In fact, many modern philosophers assume the view that the Ship of Theseus remains the same object because of what they call “spatiotemporal continuity.” When an object, person, or idea, continues to be used consistently, even though it is evolving incrementally over time, it holds spatiotemporal continuity, and is thus the same object.
One way to paint a picture of spatiotemporal continuity is through the metaphor of a rope. Dr. Michael Meyer, my professor at Hebrew Union College, equates Jewish history to a rope. There are strands at one end that are connected to the stands at the other end. But if you understand how rope is made, you’ll know that no strand at the beginning is the same as at the end. You’ll see that strands fray after mere inches or feet, yet they are interconnected and a part of the same whole. The strands at the beginning and the end are indeed, the same rope. This is spatiotemporal continuity.
In other words, Judaism might have been radically different in the time of Abraham, Moses, and King David, but it is still the same Judaism that we have today because of spatiotemporal continuity. Arcane sections of Torah might seem irrelevant to the modern day Jewish experience, but they are a part of the Jewish Ship of Theseus. They are a strand of Judaism that frayed long ago, but are still interconnected to the Judaism of the present. By the same token, we are the same Jewish people of the Bible, and we practice the very same Judaism of our ancient ancestors. Even thought it may look different, it is, the same.