People, especially the theistic, will have a hard time seeing humanism in the Torah, but in Pirkei Avot (5:22), "Ben Bag Bag says: Search in it and search in it, since everything is in it." "Everything" here needs to be qualified. Pirkei Avot was compiled after the first 200 years of the common era. Ben Bag Bag didn't live in the Internet age. Information was less abundant. It didn't travel on cyber superhighways and was not put through the rigors of scientific inquiry or accountable to reason. What Ben Bag Bag could have been saying is, "Everything we know to be true is in it." Maybe the Torah was the Encyclopedia Britannica of its time, or maybe he wanted to build a wall around knowledge and was creating his ancient version of the New York Times tag line, "All the news that's fit to print," which is a great analogy because it has become archaic like some readings of Torah.
In theory, these days, when news doesn't need to be restricted to newsprint, the key operative word is "fit." Most likely, Ben Bag Bag's "everything," was what the people in power, the redactors of Torah, and the "official" interpreters of it, saw as "fit" for their system of beliefs and their adherents. That doesn't mean that there is no humanism in the Torah. It just depends on how you read the text. Rabbi Yisrael ben Eliezer, often called Baal Shem Tov or Besht, would say that when he reads Torah, he is not limited to the letters on the page. He also reads the white spaces. Rabbi Akiva, according to the God character in the Babylonian Talmud (Menachot 59b), was supposed to be able to, "derive heaps and heaps of halakhot [Laws] from," the taggin, the crowns on the letters in a Torah scroll.
When I read Torah, not only do I use a humanistic lens, I also read as a constructivist. Constructivism is a theory that basically says that people construct personal understanding and knowledge of the world through experience and reflection. Constructivism is often used as a justification for a progressive approach to education. As John Dewey said, "“We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.” The great Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, would say that literacy is the ability to read and write the world. This is how I want to understand Ben Bag Bag's "everything." As we encounter Torah, we reflect on our experience with it and have the freedom to construct our own meaning from it. For me, that construct is humanism.
In theory, these days, when news doesn't need to be restricted to newsprint, the key operative word is "fit." Most likely, Ben Bag Bag's "everything," was what the people in power, the redactors of Torah, and the "official" interpreters of it, saw as "fit" for their system of beliefs and their adherents. That doesn't mean that there is no humanism in the Torah. It just depends on how you read the text. Rabbi Yisrael ben Eliezer, often called Baal Shem Tov or Besht, would say that when he reads Torah, he is not limited to the letters on the page. He also reads the white spaces. Rabbi Akiva, according to the God character in the Babylonian Talmud (Menachot 59b), was supposed to be able to, "derive heaps and heaps of halakhot [Laws] from," the taggin, the crowns on the letters in a Torah scroll.
When I read Torah, not only do I use a humanistic lens, I also read as a constructivist. Constructivism is a theory that basically says that people construct personal understanding and knowledge of the world through experience and reflection. Constructivism is often used as a justification for a progressive approach to education. As John Dewey said, "“We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.” The great Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, would say that literacy is the ability to read and write the world. This is how I want to understand Ben Bag Bag's "everything." As we encounter Torah, we reflect on our experience with it and have the freedom to construct our own meaning from it. For me, that construct is humanism.