What is striking about Judaism is that argument and the hearing of contrary views is of the essence of the religious life. Moses argues with G_d. That is one of the most striking things about him. He argues with Him on their first encounter at the burning bush. Four times he resists G_d’s call to lead the Israelites to freedom, until God finally gets angry with him (Ex. 3:1–4:7). More significantly, at the end of the parsha he says to G_d:
“Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Why did You send me? Since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has brought trouble on this people, and You have not rescued Your people at all.” (Ex. 5:22-23).
This is extraordinary language for a human being to use to G_d. But Moses was not the first to do so. The first was Abraham, who said, on hearing of G_d’s plan to destroy the cities of the plain, “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Gen. 18:25).
Similarly, Jeremiah, posing the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people, asked: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” (Jer. 12:1). In the same vein, Habakkuk challenged G_d: “Why do You tolerate the treacherous? Why are You silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?” (Hab. 1:13). Job who challenges G_d’s justice is vindicated in the book that bears his name, while his friends who defended Divine justice are said not to have spoken correctly (Job 42:7-8). Heaven, in short, is not a safe space in the current meaning of the phrase. To the contrary: G_d loves those who argue with Him – so it seems from Tanakh.
Equally striking is the fact that the sages continued the tradition and gave it a name: argument for the sake of heaven, defined as debate for the sake of truth as opposed to victory.
The result is that Judaism is, perhaps uniquely, a civilisation all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. Midrash operates on the principle that there are “seventy faces” to Torah and thus that every verse is open to multiple interpretations. The Mishnah is full of paragraphs of the form, “Rabbi X says this while Rabbi Y says that.” The Talmud says in the name of G_d himself, about the conflicting views of the schools of Hillel and Shammai, that “These and those are the words of the living G_d.”