What’s the story of the Torah

QUESTION: Masters, many of your daily and weekly answers conflict with what I was taught, which is that the Torah was written by (or at least with the help of) God and that a Jew should finish God’s work of creation and bring God and holiness into this world by performing the Torah’s commandments. I saw God’s hand in the Torah because many commandments complicate life, are revolutionary, or wouldn’t make sense for humans to write for themselves. The stories are also full of human shortcomings, and outsiders are sometimes cast in a better light than the Jewish protagonists (both unusual literary devices for the time). But I don’t think the God you describe would want to regulate the behavior of humans. So was God involved in the writing of the Torah (and if not, who was it)? Does God care about holiness and ethics, or only that we learn lessons? ~Alissa, USA

ANSWER: The Torah is a teaching aid for a religious organization and a nationality of people. For those who accept its authenticity and authority, it creates a set of rules and regulations for daily life. This is the basis for the belief systems of most Jewish people. It is centuries old, and scholars study it for decades and still don’t agree as to the meaning of the verses.

The original writings were hand copied by learned men who sometimes were unaware of the meaning of what they were doing, and some passages got modified unintentionally by them. Some of the stories were not contained in the first documents but were added later as a way to help explain the rules to those who were not literate.

God, as you define here, is a figurehead religions use to describe the ultimate master to whom all owe allegiance. This person is judgmental and passes out rewards and punishments to those who follow or break the rules. Since this concept is a duality of negative and positive actions, it is not found anywhere but on planet Earth.

When we speak of Source, the origin from which all souls derive, we speak only of an energy of unconditional love existing in perfection. It broke off the pieces of itself that are called souls because it desired to better understand the possibilities of life in a duality. Earth was created to provide the stage for that learning process.

Source observes what each soul does when in a body. It does not intercede, take sides, nor judge. It encourages all souls to exercise their freedom of choice to make their own Earth journey and return Home to unconditional love, where all souls are honored for the trials and tribulations they experienced.