Torah came from Sinai.
Torah min haShamayim. Orthodoxy holds the written text was dictated to Moses and the oral law given alongside it; Conservative Judaism reads revelation as real and humanly recorded; Reform reads it as Israel's response to encounter rather than its transcript. This one sentence is the fault line between the movements.
This is the sentence the movements split over, and each of them knows it. Orthodox Judaism holds that the entire Written Torah was given to Moses letter for letter and that the Oral Torah — eventually Mishnah and Talmud — was given with it, which is what makes rabbinic law binding rather than merely wise. Conservative Judaism, following Zacharias Frankel and later Louis Jacobs, holds that revelation is real but that human hands shaped the record and the law therefore develops; Jacobs lost a British pulpit over saying so publicly in the 1960s. Reform Judaism treats Torah as the record of Israel's encounter with God and takes the ethical commandments as binding while leaving the ritual ones to conscience. Reconstructionism goes furthest, describing Judaism as an evolving civilisation with no supernatural revelation at all. All four read the same portion on the same Shabbat from the same kind of scroll, and disagree entirely about where it came from.
The same ground, other faiths
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