The Tanakh and Tradition

The other day in my Jewish History class (which meets for three hours every day) we learned about the Tanakh, which is a Jewish combination of the Torah (Five Books of Moses), the Nevi'im (The Prophets), and the Kethuvim (The Writings). The Tanakh is the basis for how to live a "Jewish" life according to tradition. The combination of the three writings has created this large, basically history of the Jewish people. A major issue in reformed Judaism is weather or not the Tanakh can be credible and if we should believe everything that is written in it. Some of the key flaws in Reformed Judaism is that we are given the option to choose what we want to believe in and how religious we want to be. As a child, I loved hearing the stories of the Torah and having them gave me a sense of connection to my ancestors. I believe in the stories that are written in the Torah and Tanakh, but I think that some of them are exaggerated a bit, and the truth is stretched. However, the main premises for the Tanakh is what moral lessons we learn from reading it. I think that for the most part, a lot of cultures have ethical views that can be displayed in special books of that religion, and for the most part, they all have good insight on ethical values that can be passed down for generations. What makes us all different is how we interpret our stories to make our lives more meaningful. Over the course of this semester, I hope to wrestle with this question more, and the broader question of what it means to be Jewish.