Our Sunday night Hebrew Bible session at WECSOR was labeled Hebrew Bible II but was really a special thematic session focused on the Jewish Publication Society’s 2006 release The Contemporary Torah: A Gender-sensitive Adaptation of the JPS Translation. As the subtitle states, this new English version of the Torah is not a new translation, but a revision of the JPS Tanakh driven by the desire to be “gender sensitive.” For the editor, David E. S. Stein, “gender sensitive” does not mean “making everybody feel good about gender by obliterating gender distinctions.” Rather, as David himself told us in the first paper of this special session, “gender sensitive” means paying very careful attention to when the wording of the text seems to be inclusive or exclusive. In most cases, The Contemporary Torah—hereafter CJPS for “Contemporary Jewish Publication Society version,” as David suggested—is indeed worded in a more gender-inclusive way than the mid-20th-century JPS Tanakh—hereafter NJPS for “New Jewish Publication Society version.” In some cases, however, the CJPS is actually more gender-specific than the NJPS, when the editorial team of David, Adele Berlin, and Carol Meyers felt it was warranted by the wording or context.

In the first paper of the evening, David Stein laid out some general considerations regarding the editorial process. He explained the goals of the revision and its procedures. Much of this information you can find in a printed form in the preface to the CJPS, but David did not just read the preface. He really took us inside the minds of the editorial team to help us understand the types of questions they asked as they put the CJPS together. What he described was quite a daunting (to me) act of balancing accurate representation of the text with the needs of a contemporary Jewish audience (the CJPS is unabashedly a Jewish translation with a focus on serving today’s Jewish readers). See below for one particular area in which this dual focus might be very hard to carry through.

Our first respondent was Adriane Leveen from Stanford. I did not know Adriane before inviting her to be on the panel, and maybe I should let you in on a little of the behind-the-scenes of putting this panel together (which is probably not that different from how a lot of these low-budget—as in, can’t pay travel expenses or honoraria—panels get put together). I received a paper proposal for WECSOR from David Stein, but I thought the book was significant enough that I wanted to draw extra attention to it. Thus I conceived the idea of a special session with David’s paper plus responses. I immediately contacted Ronald Hendel (see below), but I was not quite sure who else to include. The problem is that although I have been in SoCal for almost four years now, I’m still just getting plugged into the larger social network of scholars who live and work in this region. I had a small list of people I thought would be good, but for various reasons (travel and other projects) these were not able to participate. At this point in the process, Adriane was not really on my radar, as we had never met and she was largely an unknown quantity to me. But Adriane was recommended to me indirectly by people whose judgment I respected, so I “took a chance.” And what a great recommendation it turned out to be!

Adriane gave a simply wonderful response to the CJPS and to David’s presentation. She began with generalities about the translation task, and applied these notions to the CJPS in a very complimentary way. One of Adriane’s key questions was, “To whom is one faithful when one translates?” This question (which I think Adriane derived from another writer, but I didn’t get down the bibliographical information) points to the twin “constituencies” to which David referred: the original audience and the contemporary audience. In Adriane’s judgment, the CJPS does a good job of remaining sensitive to both audiences. Adriane did offer a subtle criticism when she said that the CJPS “aims high,” and that David as its editor assumed that language can be clear. It seemed to me that maybe Adriane was not as optimistic as David on that particular note. One of the things that David is particularly proud of (and rightly so, I think, even if one doesn’t agree with all the specific decisions) is the sensitive and varied handling of the word איש. Adriane offered three passages as a kind of “test case”: Genesis 18, where Abraham is visited by three אנשים; Genesis 32, where Jacob wrestles with an איש all night; and Genesis 37, where an אישׁ finds Joseph wandering around looking for his brothers. CJPS renders איש rather differently in each case, but Adriane made a case for a greater degree of consistency in these particular cases, following a line of interpretation that sees the איש in each passage as a divine appearance.

Our other respondent was Ron Hendel, who teaches at UC-Berkeley and, among other accomplishments, heads up the Oxford Hebrew Bible project. Back in the day, I clashed with Ron a little bit over what I wanted to do in my dissertation (while Ron was at SMU, before he moved to Berkeley), but his input, although I didn’t want to hear it at the time, made my dissertation much better than it would otherwise have been. Among other things, Ron has an uncanny ability to make textual criticism interesting. In our session last night, Ron’s main point was that the CJPS project “runs into dizzying complexities” in certain places. For example, the modern contemporary audience doesn’t want God to be gendered, and it’s appropriate for the CJPS to translate using references to God that aren’t marked for gender. However, Ron found problems with David’s notion that in ancient Israel God was thought of as “beyond gender.” Ron agreed that such a notion can be found in Deuteronomy, but not in, say, J or E. To paraphrase Ron: we might prefer the Deuteronomistic view of the invisible God, and indeed that’s the view that won, but if we want to be historically accurate, we ought not efface biblical traditions of God’s visibility as in J, E, Isaiah, etc.

David’s response to Ron’s “problem” was interesting and quite revealing. David pointed to Genesis 1, which seems to work hard to avoid a gendered God, as a “control” on the way deity is read throughout the Torah. In other words, Ron’s criticism (and overall he was appreciative of the project, so don’t get me wrong) was historically oriented, toward the sources, while David’s response was canonically oriented, toward the whole. It’s not that they were talking past each other; both fully understood what the other was saying. But this recognition does point up the delicate balance attempted in the CJPS, and the possible impossibility of being “faithful” (to go back to Adriane’s terminology) to all of the relevant constituencies. It’s possible that it’s impossible to translate in a way that is both “faithful” to J and “faithful” to the final redactor at the same time, and so on. Truly a “dizzying complexity,” as Ron put it.

This morning, one of the conference organizers expressed the opinion that “the only thing wrong with that session was that the room wasn’t packed.” Indeed, it was a very rich and rewarding discussion, and I’m disappointed that it didn’t enrich and reward more people. Those of us there, though, had a great session.

Update: David Stein has informed me of the relevant bibliography for Adriane’s response:

The analysis of translation that Adriane referred to was that of Naomi Seidman, who is on the faculty at GTU. The book is titled Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. See: http://www.gtu.edu/about/academic-centers-and-affiliates/richard-s-dinner-center-for-jewish-studies-1/faculty/faithful-renderings-jewish-christian-difference-and-the-politics-of-translation