This week's Torah portion begins rather uninspringly: "It is eleven days' journey from Horeb unto Kadesh-Barnea" (Deut. 1:2) and then "in the eleventh month ... Moses spoke unto the children of Israel" (1:3).
And yet R. Hertz finds inspiration in these seemingly dry words. He notes that the word for "eleven" is different in each passage.
Some commentators might look at this inconsistency as evidence of the Torah been written by multiple authors, and thus perhaps being written by people (google "Documentary Hypothesis" for more info on this idea).
But Hertz, consistent with his general agenda of being a cheerleader for traditional Judaism, spins it "as proof that ... the Heb. Text has from the first been handed down to us with absolute accuracy, and that no attempt was made to 'harmonize' different forms of the same word or phrase." (In other words, two inconsistent phrases this close together is hard to overlook, so people wouldn't have handed them down without noticing the inconsistency).
Of course, both Hertz and the Documentary Hypothesis can be right. It does seem to me that whoever reduced the Torah to writing, whether it was Moses or Ezra 700 years later or someone else in between, was not obsessed with harmonization. If it was Moses taking dictation from God, his motive was obvious.
But what if it wasn't? Suppose some committee of sages 2600 years ago was confronted with a bunch of somewhat-inconsistent scrolls (which they perhaps combined into the Torah)? Why would they have not smoothed over inconsistencies?
Probably because they believed that each of these seemingly-inconsistent scrolls was of Divine origin, and they didn't wish to tamper with the word of God.
But how might they have viewed the inconsistencies? Either they
1) knew something we don't (about the Hebrew language perhaps, or about the context of the scrolls)
2) figured that whoever wrote those scrolls several hundred years earlier (whether it was Moses or some intermediate authority reducing oral traditions to writing) knew something they didn't.
Either seems plausible to me.
Of course, that doesn't answer the question of who really wrote the scrolls, and to what extent that writer was Divinely inspired.
On another note, something in the Torah's text may be of relevance to politics today. The Torah tells judges to "not respect persons in judgment" (Deut. 1:17). Interpreting this, Hertz tells us that a judge "must avoid everything that can possibly be construed as a bribe", telling us a story of a rabbi who was helped across a bridge by a litigant, and then disqualified himself from the litigant's case because this favor may have reduced his impartiality. By contrast, today judges routinely take campaign contributions from lawyers, including those who have business before the judge. A campaign contribution is not necessarily a bribe, since a lawyer might not know at the time of the contribution that he or she will have business before the judge. But like the bridge incident, it certainly might reduce impartiality.
