Sam2,
Your question in the title of this thread is beyond my pay grade for sure.
I’m not sure if this is just sucking up to the Frum community because it contradicts just about everything he said before this, … Maybe.
I don’t think what you quoted above contradicts anything he said earlier. Rather, it is a very clever but disingenuous attempt to make it look like he upholds the same faith as other Orthodox Jews. Whether he actually does or not remains a mystery. I’ll elaborate below.
I believe in Torah Min Ha-Shamayim, that the Torah is from heaven, and that the entirety of the book is nevua (prophecy) and represents the encounter between God and the people of Israel
We would have to ask him what “from heaven” and “nevua” mean to him, because it is likely he defines these things in a different manner from traditional Jewish understandings. We’ll see one of these strange definitions in the very next quote.
I believe in Torah mi-Sinai, meaning the uniqueness of the Torah as being of a higher order than any other work in its level of divine encounter.
That’s a very convoluted definition of Torah mi-Sinai, since nothing about Sinai is even mentioned. Torah mi-Sinai simply means “Torah from Sinai.” He says nothing about Moshe Rabbeinu or his actual receipt of the Torah as a historical event, which is the only aspect of Torah mi-Sinai that would posit the Torah’s superiority over any other prophecy. Without Moshe Rabbeinu speaking to G-d “face to face” and receiving the Torah directly from Hashem, there can be no argument made for “the uniqueness of the Torah as being of a higher order than any other work in its level of divine encounter.” It would just be a book written by “divinely inspired men” on the shelf with all the other books written by “divinely inspired men”, G-d forbid. A strange omission indeed.
The story of the revelation at Sinai in the Torah I understand as a narrative depiction of a deeper truth
A cloaked way perhaps of saying “not to be taken literally”…
Finally a true statement, but he doesn’t arrive at this result from Torah mi-Sinai, so I honestly can’t say how he does arrive at it, or even whether his definition of “G-d’s book” is the same as mine.
This is perhaps the most disingenuous statement in the quotation you provided. Note “meant to be as it is today” is NOT the same thing as “I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that we now have is that which was given to Moses”, and “I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be changed, and that there will never be another given by G-d” (quotation of the ikkarim emunah are from the OU). In fact, by utilizing the word “meant”, the implication is very clear that he holds the Torah has changed, G-d forbid.
What on earth does he mean by “develop organically”? It certainly does not seem to equate with the traditional notions of mesora.
The only salient point I could garner from these quotations is that Farber thinks the Torah is spiritually special. We can not derive that he thinks the Torah was authored by G-d and not Man, nor can we say that he believes there was any kind of literal encounter between the Divine and Israel at Har Sinai.