Rabbi Brad Hirschfield has taken exception to my blog post on the Bible and abortion.  He calls it arrogant, and worse.  I sent him my reply, and am putting it here, below the fold.  He raises some issues that were not in our discussion, although ironically, I had addressed many of them in advance in my post on spiritual authority.

My thanks to Paul Raushenbush for finding this blog worth bringing to the attention of his audience. 

But if you have limited time, check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on TED. 

You got to love it when a Jewish blogger tells a Pagan blogger he should not make statements about Christian interpretations of the Bible.

Given that most Pagans in this country, myself among them, were once Christians and even studied the Bible, by Rabbi Hirschfield’s logic we might have more justification to comment than he. The force of his argument appears to be that only believers can address the claims of their religion, even when they seek to impose its conclusions on others? Interfaith becomes relations among billiard balls, each impervious to the outside, as we bounce off one another as external circumstances allow.

But those are rhetorical points, fun to make but not really addressing the deeper issues. Here are some that do.

Rabbi Hirschfield claims I “cherry pick” traditions. As I stated, I was surprised, genuinely surprised, that there was nothing explicit on the subject in the Bible, and that there was an explicit passage indicating that causing the death of a fetus by violence was clearly NOT murder. I had anticipated making a weaker claim in a manuscript on which I am working, one similar to Hirschfield’s – that the Bible is not clear. That would justify a blog on too much certainty in interpretation being arrogance – Rabbi Hirschfield’s comment against me, ironically. But it is pretty clear, and I believe some of the self-righteous confidence on the matter might diminish were this passage better known.

Like my upset Christian commentators, Rabbi Hirschfield does not address the rather detailed passage I cited. Instead he offers another, vastly shorter and more ambiguous, from Jeremiah as a counter example. THIS is interpretation? In my blog we have already discussed passages such as that. Briefly, if at any point along the line AFTER conception a fetus becomes a human being the passage does not support the hard core Christian right position. There are secular and spiritual interpretations that support this position. Therefore that passage is ambiguous in a way the one I cited is not.

I am intrigued that so many so-called interpreters of the Bible never address the passages that seem not to support their claims. That is not interpretation, it is assertion. I am not accusing Rabbi Hirschfield of this, he was trying to make a different point, that ambiguity is ubiquitous, one to which I normally am sympathetic.

But not in this case.

He tells us “After all, a book which is an infinite gift of an infinite God, should invite infinite interpretation.” A book with infinite interpretations does not say much, or it says everything and gives us no standards to decide between them. A book with a range of interpretations can say things of interest and principles of disciplined interpretation can help us uncover genuine value we would otherwise miss. That is missing in the abortion debate, and sloppy and arrogant interpretations have been used to justify murdering doctors and nurses, and caused unnecessary deaths among women and probably children.

Finally, Rabbi Hirschfield writes “When any of us reduce the abortion debate to what our reading of the Bible ‘proves’ or how the people who read it differently from us are ‘obviously’ wrong about the intent of scripture, we are no better than those who treat us that way.” But I did not attempt to reduce the abortion debate to that. Not being a Christian, how could I? I arrived at my position quite differently. To the limited degree I addressed this larger debate I indicated the issues were complex and painful, including for me personally, and ultimately the woman’s concern more than anyone else’s.