Q & A with James Kugel

By Michael Orbach

James Kugel is the author of “In the Valley of the Shadow” and “How to Read the Bible.” A former chair of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard, Kugel is now the chair of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar Ilan University.

Michael Orbach: As one of the foremost Biblical critics, you’re also an Orthodox Jew. Don’t these two things contradict each other?

James Kugel: I certainly think there’s a conflict between modern Biblical scholarship and Orthodox Judaism, and I really don’t think it can ever be resolved. But I also don’t believe that most people are comfortable just ignoring it, hiding their heads in the sand. They want to know how to confront modern scholarship head-on and still come out an Orthodox Jew. That’s why I got into this field, and it’s what I tried to write about in the last chapter of “How to Read the Bible.” But that’s not all that I have to say about Judaism. Most of my readers probably don’t know this, but I also wrote a book about 20 years ago called, “On Being a Jew.” That book is really what I think about Orthodox Judaism.

MO: I find that the more you know the harder is to believe.

JK: I couldn’t disagree with you more. It’s true that most of us slide into a kind of routine Orthodoxy. There are all those mitzvot to do every day, and there’s Shabbat. So some people don’t ever go beyond the routine, in fact, some people are afraid of going beyond the routine. But there is this other thing to do, trying to understand the whole basis of Judaism. It’s a challenge, but in the end I don’t think it makes it harder to believe. Quite the opposite, really.

MO: Do you think Orthodox Judaism has gotten more extreme in recent years?