Nov 30, 2007 6:06 PM
Rabbi Mordechai Breuer on Divine Inspiration and the Documentary Hypothesis_
There's an interesting book on TMS, called 'Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah' edited by Shalom Carmy. It basically talks about the issues of Biblical Criticism, and gives some responses. However, being that it's a YU book, they stick to the straight and narrow pretty much, and of course don't mention Tamar Ross, David Halivni, or anyone they consider too radical.
With one notable exception, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer.
So who was Breuer? Basically, one of the world's leading experts on Tenach. And not just an academic expert, but also a bona fide Orthodox semi-Chareidi Rav who was pretty much accepted, certainly in YU circles, and even in some Chareidi circles. Even Hirhurim wrote about him.
Still, even with all that, they were still obviously a little scared, and sandwiched Breuer's article between an 'Introduction to Breuer' from Shalom Carmyat the front, and a 'Response to Breuer' from Sid Layman at the back.
Breuer was famous for 'accepting' the Documentary Hypothesis. Not so much the conclusions (of course), but the fact that the evidence for multiple texts (J,E,P,D & R) was convincing. Breuer's response to this was a bit strange - he held that it must be that God gave J,E,P,D & R to Moshe, because no other option is available to a Frum Jew, and we can't ignore the evidence.
What's very interesting though is how he presents this theory. First, he presents a 'Divine Inspiration' theory, and then says that the reality is that this theory is not acceptable to Orthodoxy. To me, it sounds like he's saying that really he would prefer to go with it, but he just can't. Anyways, you can read this excerpt and see what you make of it.
What is also noteworthy is that he refers to many (presumably Orthodox) Scholars and their Talmidim who do indeed hold of the Divine Inspiration Theory, and yet are fully committed to Halachah.
[p162 and on - Note: I made the really interesting parts bold, and the really, really interesting parts in bold and a larger font. But please read it all, not just the bold stuff.]
....This paper will deal exclusively with the implications of this method [i.e. the critical method] of studying the Torah, by which I mean the Five Books of Moses (the Humash). This hypothesis [i.e. the Documentary Hypothesis] led to a new method of studying the Bible, known as "critical study of the Bible." This science, developed mainly by gentile scholars, achieved impressive results. The critics persuasively described the nature of the documents that, in their opinion, make up the Torah. Holding that the authorship of these documents by one person, as natural authorship is understood, is impossible, whether in Moses' generation or in any other, they inferred that several authors, differing among themselves in world outlook and literary style, wrote the Torah.
As we shall see below, when we look at the critical analysis of Genesis chapters 1 and 2, the author, called J, is distinguished by a sensitive, poetic soul. Another, dubbed P, was a man of law and order, of scientific mind-set, whose writing, exact and concise, lacks feeling and poetic flourish. The critics also characterized the other primary writers of the Torah, naming them E and D. These authors inhabit different spiritual worlds and different times and places. J came first, living in Judah at the height of the monarchy. Shortly afterward came E, who resided in Ephraim. Subsequent to and close to in spirit to E came D, who lived at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. P, the final writer, who had the most profound influence on the Jewish religion, lived either during the period preceding the destruction of the first temple or during the subsequent exile. Hundreds of years separate the first and last authors of the Bible. Yet these writers did not create their texts alone; they summarized and refined ancient traditions that reached them either through oral transmission or as written documents.
The transformation and development that made these sources into the Torah is often apparent between the lines. The editors exercised exquisite craftsmanship on centuries of tradition. The final stage of the Torah's composition is due to the redactor, R, who made an integrated text of these documents, which until then were distinct literary creations. When the redactor transcribed earlier documents without addition or subtraction, the strata are easily identified. When, however, he combined material from two or three documents, additions and deletions were necessary to avoid contradiction or repetition. Often the editor's patch-work does not disguise the gap between the original documents and the redactor's version.
The power of these inferences, based on solid argument and internally consistent premises, will not be denied by intellectually honest persons. One cannot deny the evidence before one's eyes.
As committed believers, we cannot ignore what human reason points to with confidence; we cannot pretend that falsehood is truth. Therefore we cannot regard God's Torah as the unified composition of one human author in one generation. Willy-nilly, the Torah contains several documents, which, viewed as natural products of human culture, must have been written by different people over the course of many generations before their final redaction. It is the implications for yirat shamayim of the study of the Torah based on this method that we must investigate. But this requires that we define what is meant by yirat shamayim.
The accepted meaning of yirat shamayim is fear of sin. One who fears God is diligent in obeying His commandments, as meticulous in fulfilling the "lighter as the more grave," rigorously adhering to all that the halakhic literature determines as law. He wholeheartedly believes this law to be God's word, that God is concerned with the "four cubits of halakhah," that defiance of God's will is inconceivable. This is what Jews mean by yirat shamayim. This definition engenders no conflict between the study of Bible and yirat shamayim, provided that the person who accepts the tenets of Bible Criticism truly fears God and scrupulously executes the obligations of Jewish law, dreading sin and joyful in the performance of the mitzvot. We might draw an analogy from Rav Kook's comments regarding the debate over the date of the composition of the Mishnah:
The sanctity of the basic measures of the Torah is the same, whether these units were transmitted to Moses at Sinai or decrees of a court of law, because it is the nation's acceptance that is significant, and it is due to their commitment that we fulfill in purity even matters that are only decrees of later generations, such as the decrees of R. Gershom. Likewise there should be no difference in our wholehearted loyalty to the oral law, whether it was completed earlier or later. (Iggerot HaRe'iyah I 194)
These comments about the Oral Law might be applied to the written Torah.
[Note: RMB presumably did not see the new Rav Kook sefer where Rav Kook explicitly makes this point regarding the written Torah]
We can imagine an individual who holds that it makes no difference to our attitude toward the sanctity of the written Torah whether Moses wrote the Torah or whether an editor at the time of Ezra compiled the text. The essential point, in the view of such an individual, is the commitment of the nation to accept as binding the words of the Torah in its present form. What obligates us is our tradition; our ancestors and sages declare that God commands us to follow the teachings of the Sages even when there is no clear source for this in the written Torah. And just as the Jewish people have always fulfilled the Sages' teachings, the individual we are considering is prepared to accept the demands of the Torah even though, for him, its authority is based on the Sages' affirmation.
From the perspective of this individual, there is no possible conflict between critical study and yirat shamayim: at worst, he will continue to observe the entire Torah faithfully based on the authority of the Sages. The Torah's power to obligate us is undiminished; it derives from God, who commanded us to abide by the Sages' decrees. This is enough to provide yirat shamayim. Just as the God-fearer would never mock the law of the Shulhan Arukh, the Jewish Code of Law, even when it encodes later decrees, just as, for example, he eschews leavened bread that had been owned by a Jew during the Passover as carefully as he avoids bread on Passover itself, just as he joyfully celebrates the second festival day of the Diaspora as he fulfilled the obligations on the previous day—so he will treat with sanctity the Torah whose origin, in his opinion, derives from a post-Mosaic redactor.
The previous discussion is not merely hypothetical. Quite a few scholars, and their students, identify with the findings of biblical scholarship, yet faithfully and reverently observe the full scope of halakhah, meaning that they adopt halakhic minutiae as determined by recognized rabbinic authority, even as they harbor no doubt about the late authorship of the Torah. This is because they see the acceptance by the Jewish people as the essential factor and they are committed to obeying the word of God, the halakhah, as transmitted by tradition.
If this position is true, then the contradiction implied by the title is nonexistent. But I do not accept it. The problem is not that of faithful observance, but rather of belief. And for this reason I cannot claim that the difficulties regarding critical study of Bible can be removed in this way.
The Liberal Solution
Belief is certainly no less important for Judaism than the network of laws and commandments. The framework of faith specifically includes belief in Torah min ha-shamayim, "the divinity of the Torah." At first glance it seems that this belief is compromised, if not totally destroyed, by the critical study of Bible. It is this contradiction between the scientific study of Bible and the belief in a heavenly Torah that must be addressed. For this purpose we must define the character of this belief. The observant scholars we are discussing might try to solve the problem by giving the divinity of Torah a relatively flexible, liberal, rationalistic interpretation. Divinity would then mean that the Torah derives from prophetic inspiration rather than human intellect. The author was not transcribing his own thoughts but acting as a "man of God," who saw divine images and heard God's speech. This Torah, we declare, is divine because a person who experienced the divine inscribed the heavenly directives.
This view does not, indeed cannot, assert that Moses alone wrote the Torah, as a human author composes a book. For even a prophet writing under divine inspiration retains his personality and style. The style of his prophecy manifests the depths of his soul; he hears God's word, but absorbs according to the nature of his soul. Nothing is revealed to him by God that his nature is incapable of comprehending. Moreover, when a prophet formulates what he heard and saw in his prophetic experience, he speaks in his own language, limited by his personality. Therefore Hosea could not have heard what was spoken to Isaiah, and Zephaniah would not utter the words of Jeremiah; it is inconceivable that Ezekiel's prophecy would have been transmitted to Amos or that Micah would speak Zephaniah's words.
By this logic Moses could not have composed all the documents included in the Torah since, as suggested above, their content and style indicate different authors at different times. If Moses is the author of the Torah, as we normally think of an author, it is all the more difficult to believe that he would contradict himself so frequently, as the documents appear to do. To view Moses himself as the editor of the Torah borders on absurdity: having composed conflicting accounts, he then, on this scheme, labored strenuously to disguise the discrepancies. Biblical scholarship has argued convincingly, according to the view we are discussing, that no individual person, neither Moses nor any other prophet, could have composed the Torah. Yet, according to that approach, this in no way affects Jewish faith.
That is because the view we are discussing accepts Torah min hashamayim as a belief that the Torah was transmitted through prophecy, not that Moses was the unique prophet who received the Torah from heaven. If Moses is to be viewed as the "author" of the Torah, in the conventional sense of the term, he should have written "And God spoke to me saying," like other prophets who wrote their own prophecies. The view we are now discussing would argue that only one passage in the Oral Law explicitly asserts that "Moses wrote his book" (Bava Batra 14b), and that it is nowhere stated that one who denies Moses' composition of the Torah loses his share in the next world as is the case with one who denies the divinity of the Torah (Sanhedrin 90a). Many of the greatest scholars in the medieval and early modern periods deviated, on occasion, from a rabbinic dictum, when it flew in the face of the text's simple meaning.' Using their example as precedent, one might take the liberty of disregarding the view expressed in Bava Batra, insofar as a reading of the biblical text does not support the view that Moses wrote the Torah in the manner of a conventional human composition.
The position we are discussing concedes that the Torah comprises several documents, written by different prophets in various eras. The documents are min ha-shamayim, because they are the words of the living God. There is an infinite gap between God, the source of the Torah, whose heavenly abode transcends space and time, and man, the recipient of prophecy, created from earth, who lives within the confines of space and time. The human intellect is limited; man cannot grasp or utter contradictory ideas. God is not bound by this constraint. Hence the one God reveals Himself in the world by exhibiting manifold traits and contradictory actions—like an old man seated at rest and a young man at war—with the attribute of justice and the attribute of mercy. The unity of God is disclosed through the encompassing of opposing aspects and actions. The one God who embraces justice and mercy can communicate seemingly contradictory prophecies, corresponding to these aspects of divinity.
The prophecies given to individual prophets at different times thus reveal paradoxical elements. One prophet, oriented to justice and whose generation is particularly suited to hear the providential perspective of justice, received and transcribed the prophecy of judgment. Another, oriented to mercy and whose generation is particularly suited to hear of a world guided by mercy, will receive and transcribe the prophecy characterized by kindness. The diversity of these two prophecies reflects different authorship; yet both emanate from one source and from one shepherd. The view we are examining treats the composition of the Torah like the handing down of prophecy just described. The editor of the Torah had before him the various sources. But the Torah is not limited, as would be the prophecy of the individual prophet, to the perspectives of law (din) or mercy (rahamim) ; rather the Torah expresses the quality of harmony (tiferet), combining law and mercy. By God's instruction, the editor inscribed the Torah, and this quality of tiferet governs the Torah as a whole. We shall have more to say about this further in this discussion. Now, however, we are still occupied with the liberal approach.
Except for its significant omission of the specific role of Moses, an issue to which we will return, the ideas already outlined avoid any conflict between the modern study of Bible and yirat shamayim. The scholars identify the documents that comprise the Torah and try to explain the centuries of development behind them, prior to the coming of the prophet who consolidated the sources. The religious student, for his part, recognizes the hand of God in combining the various aspects of His revelation.
So far we have described the discoveries of Biblical Criticism, not the beliefs of biblical critics. Our adoption of the discoveries of biblical scholarship does not, by any means, imply assent to the beliefs of the scholars. We must know that an iron curtain separates, not faith and scholarship, but many men of scholarship and men of faith. While the scholars view the Torah as a grand literary creation, composed by human beings, we believe that the Torah is from heaven.
This is not a debate between faith and science but rather a confrontation of faith and heresy. Science can only investigate what reason apprehends. The human intellect can-not comprehend God and is therefore unable to certify prophecy. Scholarly study of the Torah postulates the biblical text as the product of human agency, and as the product of human activity the Torah must reflect multiple sources. But this presupposition of the scientific approach, which enables the human mind to proceed, is not subject to confirmation or refutation. Scholars cannot prove that the Torah is a human product, because that is the assumption that underlies the entire enter-prise. At the same time it would be impossible to demonstrate that the Torah is divine, based on the assumptions of scholarship, because that belief contradicts the axioms with which the proof must be consistent; in any event, it would be an attempt to demonstrate something beyond the capacity of human reason. Whether the Torah is a human or divine creation cannot be decided by scientific reason, which has no authority over the domain that transcends reason. Where the intellect falls short faith responds confidently. Faith knows with certainty "the foundation of wisdom, to know that there is a first cause" (Rambam Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah 1:1) and it is a basic religious truth that God reveals Himself to man. An honest scholar acknowledges that this judgment is beyond his competence as a man of science.
In fact, scholars frequently reiterate their conviction that the Torah is a merely human composition, in no way different from other literary creations. But this claim already abandons the realm of science and enters that of faith. With this pronouncement they become spokesmen for a "faith," and its content is heretical. We who believe wholeheartedly in the divinity of the Torah must oppose them. But the debate about that which lies beyond science cannot be judged from within science. Only a heavenly voice acknowledged by all can resolve this conflict authoritatively.
Before addressing the role of Moses, let us summarize our conclusions so far. The position we are now describing is prepared to accept without reservation the views of scholarship so long as the scholars have not ventured beyond the limits of scientific method, which include the demarcation of the various documents in the Torah, the development that preceded them, and the editorial process that followed. Only when scholars deviate from the scientific framework and introduce heretical beliefs about the Torah's human composition must we reject their assertions and hold fast to our tradition. This traditional belief suffuses our personal lives. The Torah we study day and night is not a Torah propounded by human authors, but a divine Torah received by prophets who inscribed a vision revealed to them by God.
Everything we have articulated up to this point is compatible with the liberal definition of Torah min ha-shamayim, which ignores the specific role of Moses in transmitting the Torah. In reality, however, this definition of Torah min ha-shamayim does not prevail in Jewish thought. From antiquity, our Sages have never considered equating the Five Books of Moses with other prophecy. They regarded the equation, not as proper faith, but as utter heresy. The status of Moses is inherently different from that of all other prophets. The latter saw God in a vision, through a glass darkly; they heard His voice as a riddle that required clarification and interpretation. When they subsequently transmitted God's message to the people, when they wrote it down, they could not convey literally what they had seen and heard. Instead each adopted his own style and language....
Ad kaan Breuer (or at least ad kaan my scanning. There is more, maybe I'll scan it later. Anyway, Carmy reads Breuer slightly differently, and gives this little piece of apologetics:
Rabbi Breuer is unwavering in his insistence upon this dogma [i.e. literal TMS] as traditionally understood. If anything, he is convinced that the doctrine has been neglected by recent Orthodoxy, and blames much an unnecessary resistance to the phenomena discovered by modem scholarship on the failure fully to take into account the unique theological -literary status of the Pentateuch. Precisely because the Torah's divine origin transcends all categories of literature, contends Breuer, it accommodates conflicts and apparent contradictions that would, in the case of any other composition, drive us to hypothesize authorship by diverse hands.
This is Rabbi Breuer's position as it is repeatedly stated in the present volume and in his other writings. At our conference, however, the topic posed to him was not confined to his own beliefs: it extended to the general question of compatibility between modern biblical scholarship and piety. Here Rabbi Breuer was forced to acknowledge the existence of scholars whose standard of religious practice is conscientious, despite beliefs that are incompatible with traditional doctrine. In an effort to understand the meaning of piety for such scholars, Rabbi Breuer entertains alternatives to the principles to which he is firmly committed. In the opening section of his discussion he suggests that observant scholars who nonetheless deny Torah min ha-shamayim may justify their position by transferring to the Jewish people the authority to command that traditional religion invests in God. This position, in effect, is orthopraxy, as it severs normative behavior from normative belief.
Next, (in section II of his paper) Breuer formulates a "flexible" version of Torah min ha-shamayim. This view subscribes to a normative theological belief in the divine origin of the Torah, but dispenses with the unique role of Moses, thus allowing one to follow the critical approach respecting the Torah's provenance. Rabbi Breuer immediately rejects this option as well (section III of his presentation), on grounds of theological truth. He does not deny that an individual adopting this view may be studying the Bible in order to serve God, with the kind of subjective fervor that we associate with fear of heaven (yirat shamayim), and with an awareness of its divine origin. I have taken the trouble to rehash this part of Rabbi Breuer's discussion because many readers, unaccustomed to intellectually honest theological deliberation that attempts, empathetically, to present objectionable, even heretical, opinions, in the most tolerable light, are liable to become confused and irritable, carelessly attributing to an author the very ideas that he has so vigorously repelled.
Nov 30, 2007 6:06 PM
Is Rabbi Mattisyahu Solomon a Kofer?_
Wow. I was reading Rabbi Shmuel Waldman's book, 'Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' yesterday. The book is highly entertaining, probably one of the best kiruv clown books ever. Better than Avigdor Miller (Waldman is a Miller talmid), though not quite as fantastical as Rabbi Dovid Brown's Mysteries of Creation. (I don't advise that littlefoxling read this book though, he would probably have a heart attack.) Anyways, in the Appendix on Evolution, Rabbi Waldman has a chapter on the age of the universe, in which he writes that the evidence for an ancient world is not a problem, because our count of 6,000 only starts from Adam, and it could easily be that the world and the universe is much older. And Rabbi Mattisyahu Solomon gives a haskamah at the front of the book, saying what a great and worthwhile book it is, and he can testify to that because he hinmself gave it to a teenager who had doubts!!! What a kofer.
Nov 30, 2007 6:06 PM
Are Kiruv Pros okay with the 'Divine Inspiration' theory?_
I sense that in some Kiruv quarters, there may be a desire for the 'Divine Inspiration' theory. In other words, kiruv pros are sometimes confronted with potential BT's, who like the idea of Halachah, who like the values of the Orthodox Community, are looking for a committed and passionate Jewish community, but who just can't buy the 'God dictated the whole Torah' model. So what does a kiruv pro do in such a case? He pushes the 'Divine Inspiration model instead. Or at least would like to, and maybe hints at it. I don't have any concrete evidence that this is going on, but I think it might be.
Nov 29, 2007 4:57 PM
A tough question on Divine Inspiration_
S asked me a good question on the ‘Divine Inspiration’ theory of Judaism, which I shall paraphrase as follows.
Even if we all agree that Halachah is a beneficial system (even though the Torah was ‘only’ Divinely Inspired), and even if we all agree that we should follow the traditional Halachic process, and even if we all agree that people would still be committed to Halachah even if they are not fundamentalist, but why would you want to leave Halachic decision making solely in the hands of the fundamentalists, who think that the mythology is literally true? Surely we would be better off if we follow a halachah that is decided by our fellow non Mythology believers?
Hmmm. This question also has other aspects, for example, why should we Halachic people want to stick with the Orthodox fundamentalists, since they have such an incorrect conception of Judaism.
Or to put it another way, why would we want to be a part of a system where people believe the fantasy is literally true, whereas we know, that while there is certainly much truth in it, it is metaphorical truth as opposed to literal truth.
I don’t have a great answer right now. But my answer would be a long the following lines:
The fundamentalists are the ‘engine’ that drives the show. They are the garbage collectors, the street sweepers, the bus drivers that keep the system going. Does my garbage man have a good vision of democracy and foreign policy? No I don’t think so. But neither does he have to. The masses are never going to be sophisticated enough to fully understand reality. They live in their delusional bubble. But it is their delusional bubble that enables them to get on with living their lives, and keeping the system running. Would you or I ever be happy being a garbage man? No, but if no one could live like that our cities would stink to high heaven.
Where this analogy falls down is that we do need a Supreme Court who is smart. Maybe one of my readers can help me out here. What’s the answer?
Nov 29, 2007 4:57 PM
Could AishDas/Areivim pass thru a Chareidi Internet Filter?_
My sources tell me that a Chareidi Internet company have contacted AishDas/Areivim, asking if they could remove any pictures of women from their web site, so that it could pass through their filter and be accessible to frum Jews.
What? Does AishDas have porn on their web site? I mean I know there was a (short lived) alliance between key AishDas personnel and a porn guy, but surely they don't have links and porn pics on there? It turns out that these were just pictures of women at the AishDas Melaveh Malkah, very tzniusly dressed. But even tzinusly dressed women can be a taavah, especially if they are wearing a Clary's Sexy Sheitel.
But these Chareidi Internet people are clearly clueless.
It's not the pictures of the be-sexysheiteled women at the AishDas Melave Malakh which need to be filtered out. Rather, it's all the skeptics pretending to be frummers populating the Aish Das forums, and promoting (ever so carefully) their Neo-Haskalah worldview which is dangerous.
On second thoughts, perhaps I should keep quiet about that.
Nov 29, 2007 4:57 PM
A few commenters, RJM, Dude and Trapper Joe especially, took me to task for writing that the Rambam didn't believe in Angels. I based my writing on a review by James Diamond of Menachem Kellner's book on the Rambam, which appeared in the new issue of Meorot. I had 'faith' that Diamond was correctly interpreting Kellner, who in turn was justified in his interpretation of the Rambam. Considering the article appeared in a respectable magazine, I assumed it was respectable.
However I must admit I have not yet read the book (I ordered it and should have it by tomorrow). As soon as I get it I will summarize (or maybe scan) the full argument as Kellner states it. Kellner is a well known scholar and so I doubt the theory is totally 'bogus', but there may be room for debate.
In general, I think the yeshivish types would be amazed at how the academic world reads the Rambam. The prevailing view (I think promulgated by Leo Strauss), is that the Moreh Nevuchim represents the Rambam's real views, intended for the 'elite', while the Mishne Torah is 'just' a description of normative laws intended for the simple 'masses'. This is almost the opposite of how the Yeshivish world views the rambam, paying very little attention to the Moreh Nevuchim, and elevating the Mishne Torah to a text where every little contradiction or ambiguity can be darshened Brisker style. But maybe this makes sense, because when it comes to philosophy, the Yeshivah world are the 'simple' masses.
Not only that, but the academics say that the Moreh itself must be read very carefully, as the Rambam hides his more controversial viewpoints in the text, and even seemingly says the opposite of what he means sometimes. You really can't just read the Moreh simply. You need Straus, Faur, Seeskin and all the rest as your guide. Many of the Rambam's terms are precise Arabic / Philosophical terms which have specific meanings.
Anyway, here is the relevant passage from the review. Next week we will see if it justified:
Another fundamental of mystical theurgy and, ipso facto, of popular folk religion that Maimonides saw a need to address involves angels. Alongside God’s names on the kami`ot that adorn many synagogues to this day are those of a myriad of angels. There would be no sense in appealing to or calling on figments of the imagination. For Maimonides this would make even less sense, since they are the boorish fantasies of ignorant minds. Maimonides’ world is indeed populated by “angels” because they are metaphorically representative of all causal forces in nature. Since the Hebrew term mal’akh simply means “messenger,” all of nature can be said to operate via angels since nature was initially activated by God and therefore is ultimately an expression of God’s will. Angels are the elements, what propels animals, the catalysts for all physical functions, the inspiration of mental activity, and indeed “all forces are angels.” (Guide II:6; Pines, pp.262-3). By having angels represent everything, they represent nothing, so thoroughly subverting the term as to drain it of all meaning. Angelology is much more attractive for public consumption than science because it relieves human beings of the rigorous intellectual undertaking required to truly understand the world. Angels reassuringly qualify everyone as a scientist, when in fact such a worldview amounts to surrender to “the blindness of ignorance” (Guide II:, Pines, p. 263).
This “confrontation” has sweeping consequences theologically, halakhically and exegetically. For Maimonides, the ultimate goal in life is to know God, and the sole means by which one can do so is through knowledge of His creation. In fact, the very pinnacle of human knowledge—and, consequently of perfection—is typified by Moses at the top of the mountain; Moses’ glimpse of God’s “back” constitutes an all encompassing apprehension of what “follows necessarily from My will- that is, all the things created by Me.” (Guide I:38; Pines, p. 87). This comprehension entails the mutual connections among all existing things (I:54, p. 124) and can emerge only from the painstaking curriculum of what today would be termed the “outside” knowledge Maimonides expected of his true disciples (Guide, Epistle Dedicatory; I;34; Pines, pp. 3, 73-77).
Theologically, every replacement of natural causality with an angelic entity is a step further away from God and human perfection, since it egregiously misperceives the creation, the singular route toward knowledge of God and, thereby, intimacy with Him.
Belief in angels can also seriously undermine halakhic observance. The widespread practice of inserting angelic names in mezuzot was harshly condemned by Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah. His criticism is instructive, for it reflects an overarching conception of mitsvot that courses through all the subjects in Kellner’s book. More than simply a useless gesture to fictitious entities, inserting angelic names expresses a self-centered degradation by “asinine” people (tipshim) of a “paramount mitzvah geared toward the unity of God and the love and worship of Him” into “an amulet (kami`a) for self-gratification” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefillin u-Mezuzah, 5:4). An apotropaic view of mezuzah as a kind of religious house and health insurance is far worse than simply nonsense; it transforms a God-directed action into one of narcissism. As Kellner notes, the holiness of mezuzah (as well as of tefillin and tsitsit) lies in its religious utility, not its ontology (p. 120). Maimonides’ theology would preclude any attempt to blame human fortune and misfortune on the kashrut of a mezuzah, regarding the effort as defeating the very raison d’etre of the mitsvah.
Trapper Joe wanted to argue that since the Rambam viewed all physical forces as angels, and furthermore since the Rambam believed that physical forces and entities (e.g. the planets) were 'spiritual beings' with 'intelligences' then in fact the Rambam DID believe in angels, and even made things like the planets into 'Angels'. The Rambam had more angels, not less.
But, (at least according to Kellner), this is exactly backwards. By saying that physical forces were angels, the Rambam was trying to remove the entire category of angelic beings which people popularly believe in. It is true that the Rambam thought that the planets had intelligence and spirituality, and obviously we no longer believe that, not even Chareidim (and I assume were the Rambam alive today neither would he). But that is besides the point - according to the Rambam (according to Kellner), there is only God and the Universe. There is no other category of 'angelic beings'.
'Can you concede that G-d can create a force/being named Gavriel?' asks Trapper Joe.
I say, I can concede that G-d can create a force/being named Gravity. And that's exactly what the Rambam holds. According to Kellner. According to Diamond. According to me.
Nov 28, 2007 6:28 PM
Orthodox Judaism is a mistake!_
All this time I have been laboring to preserve the term “Orthodox”, and I have been stressing over the fact that ‘dox’ implies beliefs, and it was all for naught. Now I see this passage from no less a fully ‘Orthodox’ publication than Tradition:
As is commonly known, there was only one brand of Judaism in Europe before the struggle for emancipation started in earnest in Germany during the turbulent early decades of the nineteenth century. This of course was traditional Judaism, described as “Orthodoxy” since the final years of the eighteenth century. This term, it should be observed, is a misnomer when applied to Judaism, for it is derived from the Greek and means correct belief or opinion. It may be a suitable adjective when used in connection with Christianity, in which creed and dogma play an important role; but not so in Judaism which is essentially a praxis, consisting of mitzvot and stressing action and conduct. The idiom “Orthodox Judaism” appeared for the first time, it seems, in a Berlin periodical in 1795, as a pejorative term alluding to the majority of Jews adhering to traditionalism, whom the liberals regarded as backwards and obscurantist.
From Samuel David Luzzatto and neo Orthodoxy by David Rudavsky.
Tradition Magazine, Fall 1965
So it was all a mistake, and the word 'Orthodox' should never have been used in the first place. I think someone else used to tell me that, some other blogger, I forget his name. Anyways, he was right after all. From now on, let's just forget about the word "Orthodox".
Nov 28, 2007 6:28 PM
Will ‘Divine Inspiration’ kill Halachah?_
There seems to be a popular opinion amongst my commenters that the Conservative Movement is living proof that going with a fuzzy ‘Divine Inspiration’ model for Torah Min Hashamayim doesn’t work, and that you eventually wind up with Halachah being rejected entirely.
However this is not so clear. The Conservative Movement did not start out with a laity who were Halachic. On the contrary it started out because some elements of Reform Judaism were still somewhat traditional and were horrified at how far Reform was going. The famous story is that there was a Reform Convention where they served lobster and crab.
So, the movement started out with a membership who were not Halachic. They were traditional, but certainly not Halachic. Some of the Conservative Rabbinate was Halachic, but they never really pressured their congregants to follow. It was hardly a case of a bunch of Modern Orthodox Jews deciding to become Conservative, and then slowly giving up on Halachah.
So what would happen if you took a bunch of passionate Modern Orthodox Jews, or right wing Halachic Conservadox types, all committed to Halachah, and then made Torah Min Hashamayim a bit fuzzier? Would they all drop observance?
My theory (or hope) is that they would not. Just like we see plenty of Orthoprax people who voluntarily keep halachah. I think some of my commenters are in Brooklyn and Monsey and can’t imagine this. But I personally know people who are agnostic, have no family or communal pressure, yet still keep halachah and go to shul.
It all depends on how much value you place on observance. In theory, it should be entirely possible to have a Halachic community who value Halachah, even though every word of the Torah was not Divinely Dictated by God, and who want to remain with the Orthodox Halachic community to the extent that they will not substantially deviate from the standard Orthodox Halachic practice.
Nov 28, 2007 6:28 PM
Divine Will vs. Divine Inspiration_
We have neglected to discuss an important aspect of Divine Inspiration, namely that of Divine Will. This is actually more important than the method used to create the text. If the text was not dictated by God, but matches the Divine Will, then that’s all that matters. Conversely, if the text is 100% as God dictated, but somehow it gets misinterpreted, then it might as well not be Divine. Let’s illustrate this with two examples:
Example 1
Navi Ploney gets a Divine dictation, straight from God of a certain text. Maybe he hears an actual voice, or maybe the thoughts are implanted in his head. Either way, he writes down exactly what God intends, the words match God’s will exactly. However, over the centuries, the precise interpretation and intent of the text gets misconstrued, and we end up with people acting contrary to God’s true will, basing themselves on this text.
Example 2
Blogger Baloney is inspired by the idea of God to write a post on some topic, arguing for a particular course of action. By co-incidence, or possibly due to Baloney’s awesome sechel, the particular course of action that Baloney is advocating for is exactly what God ‘wants’. It matches God’s will.
So which is more ‘ Divine’, the text from Navi Ploney, or the post from Blogger Baloney?
Not so poshut anymore!
Nov 28, 2007 6:28 PM
Some commenters have complained that 'Divine Inspiration' is a fuzzy concept. Well of course it is! That's the whole point.
Because it's so fuzzy, there's lots of room in there for different people to have different conceptions of what it really means. We can all agree that 'Torah Min Hashamayim' is a founding principle of Judaism, yet we can still have radically different conceptions of what that actually means, from one end of the continuum to the other, as illustrated below. And since Orthodox Judaism is far more practice oriented than interested in parsing out exact meanings of theological concepts, this will work just fine.
And if you think this is some kind of crazy chiddush, it totally isn't. We all say 'Shema Yisrael' and affirm the one God. This is probably THE most foundational concept in Judaism. But the Rambam's conception of what God is, compared say to the Kabbalists conception, is night and day, one end of the spectrum to the other! The Rambam would consider the Kabbalist to be a heretic! Yet both daven with the same 'Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeynu Hashem Echod!', and both have a seat in shul. This has always been the case in Judaism. The greatest Rational Rishonim and the craziest Mystical Kabbalists might have been 180 degrees different in hashkafah, but they all kept the same shulchan aruch.
This is very important and is the key to my new Theology, realizing that concepts are very fluid (even while behaviors are less so). Just like there are multiple conceptions of 'Shamayim', there are multiple conceptions of 'Torah Min Hashamayim'.
Tamar Ross writes on a similar theme in her article 'The Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Statements: Rabbi A.I. Kook and Postmodernism':
In a discussion regarding doubters of the principle of "Torah from Heaven" (i.e. the divinity of the Torah) - R. Kook can accept such denials of faith which prefer to attribute the source of the Torah to the greatness of man's spirit, and even see in these heretical protestations a more substantial profession of faith than in rote declarations of belief which are based on weird and nonsensical conceptions of "Heaven" . Presumably this is because faith in the divinity of the Torah consists, in R. Kook's mind, not so much in a particular belief as to when and how it was delivered, or even by whom. It consists, rather, in recognizing the sublime and exalted nature of its content which, in keeping with R. Kook's pantheistic tendencies, bears greater relationship to the religious genius of man than to a very literal-minded and primitive conception of God standing over and above man and forcing His commands upon him from without. Of course man's autonomous spirit is not the full explanation of the Torah's source, leaving out as it does any notion of transcendence. But what R. Kook seems to be implying is that in modern times, the feeling of human connectedness to Biblical content is a more valid religious sensibility than the perception of Torah as a heteronymous imposition, antithetical to human nature, and forced upon man heteronymously by some foreign anthropomorphic source, because such a belief has a more beneficial effect upon the contemporary man's moral urge.
Some might object that this was never the way Chazal understood 'Torah Min Hashamayim'. Even Halivni (according to EvanstonJew) rejected it. But I'm not sure this is so clear. And anyway, things change, and the nation of Israel evolves to a more refined understanding of what things mean. Three thousand years ago, many (most) Jews thought that God had a body. Now such a belief would be regarded as ridiculous, if not heretical. Likewise the concept of TMS.
Nov 28, 2007 2:16 AM
Which of the following sounds more sensible?
Person A
I keep all Halachah but I don’t know of any rational (this world) reason or benefit for most of it. Why do I keep it then? Because I believe firmly that God dictated the entire Torah word for word, and all the Bible Academics are wrong. Also I believe the world is 6,000 years old, Adam was the first ever man, and all the Scientists are wrong. Furthermore, I can prove all of this with various proofs. And if anyone ever proved me to that these beliefs were false I would drop all of it in a minute. But of course that’s never going to happen.
Person B
I keep all Halachah because I can see the rational benefits of doing so, at least for most of it. As for the rest, it’s mostly minor details, and its perceived usefulness varies from person to person. Since it’s an ancient tradition that has been going for thousands of years, I’m very reluctant to mess with it. Was the Torah written by God? Probably not. Was it Divinely Inspired? Who can say? There’s no way of determining that. But Judaism has a long and venerable history, we have achieved great things, and I perceive Orthodox Judaism to be highly moral in general and a great community and lifestyle. Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative. The question of how exactly 'Divinely Inspired' it all is doesn't bother me, because either way it's a valuable system, and I'm extremely proud to be part of the traditional Jewish community, for rational reasons alone.
For some strange reason, a few of my commenters think that Person B is not viable or sustainable as a community, but Person A is going mechoyil ad choyil.
Very strange.
Nov 28, 2007 12:10 AM
Divine Inspiration For Dummies_
Some people just aren't getting it. Maybe a nice picture will help. Click on it to enlarge.
Nov 28, 2007 12:10 AM
Continuous Revelation and Divine Inspiration: Analysis & Critique_
The traditional understanding of ‘Torah Min Hashamayim’ (TMS) has always been a rather simplistic and literal one: that God directly dictated the entire text of the Torah directly to Moshe, word for word. Ancient heresies such as the Kaarites and Saducees focused on the authenticity of Torah SheBaal Peh or lack thereof, but did not attack the the written text. Virtually the only attack on the written text from ancient times (within Judaism) that we still have record of is that of Hiwi Al Balkhi from the 9th century.
More recently the concept of TMS has come under attack from various quarters, and a number of different approaches have been offered as a solution. This article examines two of these approaches, Divine Inspiration – suggested by Rabbi Louis Jacobs, and Continuous Revelation, suggested by Professor Tamar Ross. Both of these thinkers were raised in the Orthodox tradition. Although both approaches sound similar, they were motivated by different reasons, and there are some differences.
Jacobs was motivated by the academic doctrine of the Documentary Hypothesis (DH). Although an Orthodox Rabbi, educated in Gateshead Yeshivah, he came to the conclusion that the DH was correct. However, that did not deter him from continuing to desire and to believe in the lifestyle of Orthodoxy. To reconcile this seemingly contradictory stance, he suggested that while it is true that the Torah was written by multiple human authors over hundreds of years, this was all ‘Divinely Inspired’ and part of God’s plan in some way.
Tamar Ross on the other hand doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the DH. Rather, the issue she is trying to solve is the clearly patriarchal male dominated point of view of the Bible, which is offensive to her feminist egalitarian sensibilities. How could this be the eternal word of God she asks. As a solution she proposes that there is an ‘ongoing revelation’ to the Jewish people, and that later generations can alter the meaning of the Torah through a new revelation. Just as Ross is not bothered by the DH, likewise Jacobs was not (at least initially) bothered by the male centric text, certainly not in the 1950s when he wrote his first works.
We will examine these two approaches in light of the most common questions raised against them.
Question 1: The Bible itself states that God revealed the Torah to Moses.
Answer: Actually the Bible is very vague on this matter. The few references in the Torah talk about God revealing ‘Torah’ which simply means teaching. Nowhere is there any unambiguous statement concerning the 5 books. Nowhere. This is a non question for both Ross and Kellner.
Question 2: The 8th ikkar says that God dictated the Torah to Moshe word for word, exactly as we have it today. The 9th ikkar says it will never be changed.
Answer: The 8th ikkar is more of a question on Jacobs than Ross, since Ross can accept the Torah is the same. However the 9th ikkar is a question on Ross, since it implies we can’t ever change it.
However as Marc Shapiro has shown, there is much disagreement amongst the Rishonim as to what the ikkarim really are. Much of the Rambam’s theology has been rejected by Orthodoxy anyway. The ikkarim were accepted by Judaism, but this is more of a social contract than a halachic requirement.
Ironically, the ikkarim are a problem for Jacobs and Ross for another reason entirely. According to both Ross and Jacobs, the fact that the majority of traditional Jews have accepted the ikkarim should give the ikkarim a ‘Divine’ status, and therefore we cannot contradict them! I suppose they would answer that not everything that Judaism has accepted is Divine, just the Torah.
Question 3: If the Torah wasn’t written directly by God, why should we listen to it?
Answer: Firstly, even if the Torah wasn’t written by God directly, it is still Divinely Inspired and therefore should be listened to. It should in theory make no difference whether it was dictated word for word or just ‘inspired’. People are makpid on minhagim and derabanans which certainly were not dictated by God.
Secondly, most of our Halachah today is not at all derived from the written Torah, but rather from the oral Torah - Torah ShebaalPeh (TSBP). TSBP was always in the category of ‘Divinely Inspired’, there was no text. Therefore, positing Divine Inspiration for the written Torah should have minimal affect on Halachah.
Although in various places in the Talmud Chazal seem to derive laws from the text, and we have the famous 13 principles of exegesis of R Yishmael, there is a large body of analysis on this which claims that this was ‘asmachtah bealmah’, and really Chazal were trying to create support for laws which were already extant due to tradition.
Finally, from a purely pragmatic and social perspective, people can be persuaded to follow laws and rituals if they perceive a benefit. Since the Rambam holds that all the mitzvoth have purely rational benefits, it should (at least in theory) be possible to justify all the Mitzvos entirely through their rational benefits, without any reliance on Divine authority.
Question 4: If the laws are man made through ‘Divine Inspiration’, why shouldn’t we change them today at will. Aren’t we also ‘Divinely Inspired’?
Answer: This is a tough question, for both Jacobs and Ross. Once you open the door to Divine Inspiration or Continuous Revelation, how can you tell which sect of Jews today can legitimately interpret the Torah? If we go by the majority, then we will be forced to conclude that Reform or Secular Jews have the ‘Inspiration’ or ‘Revelation’, and we should follow them. Or perhaps the extremist Chareidim, being the most dedicated to the minutae of law are the one to follow?
I don’t have an answer from Jacobs or Ross, but I would answer as follows. Over the past two thousands years and more, there have been many factions of Judaism, the rationals, the mystics, the misnagdim, the Chassidim. But all have agreed on the same halachah. Any group which discards the halachah has faded into oblivion, from the Saducees to the early Reformers. Halachah is clearly what keeps the Jewish people together. It is inconceivable to have a viable Judaism without Halachah. The Halachic system does of course have flexibility, and could be changed with due process, but if the majority of halachic Jews do not accept these changes, then even in cases where it is entirely legitimate to make changes, doing so would be foolish and will lead to a split, and then oblivion.
For this reason I would argue that even followers of ‘Continuous Revelation’ or ‘Divine Inspiration’ make the utmost effort to remain ‘halachically compatible’ with their fundamentalist counterparts, at least until such a time where halachic non fundamentalist Judaism is more robust.
Question 5: How can you justify keeping man made laws if they are immoral?
Answer: This is a non question. Morality and values are subjective. We value the Halachic system and believe that it is genuinely a good system, and that other alternatives may well be worse. Of course there is always room for improvement, and it is legitimate to seek change where feasible, but only from within the system. Both Jacobs and Ross seem to follow this approach, though Jacobs in later years seemed more flexible in Halachah than Orthodoxy would permit.
Question 6: These approaches have been tried before, but have never succeeded. Once you reduce the force of the direct connection to God, people invariably become lax in their observance.
Answer: Past results are not always indicative of future performance. Times have changed, the world has changed, culture has changed. What didn’t work a century ago might work today. Since without any Halachah al all it seems clear that Judaism will vanish, and since it is likewise clear that the Torah is a composite document, the only alternative is to focus on reconciling these two facts within some ideology.
Conservative Judaism may have failed because they made too many changes too quickly, without following due process. In addition, and more importantly, the bulk of Conservative Jews were never halachic to begin with, only the Rabbinate was. Over time the people’s desire won over the movement. Jacobs and Ross are both coming from a strictly Orthodox background and would assume to start out with a clear commitment to halachah from all quarters.
Nov 27, 2007 6:12 PM
Important Article: Revelation for Moderns_
A Review of 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt' by Rabbi Louis Jacobs
By David Singer
[This is an excellent article, which nicely articulates the issues with my ‘Divine Inspiration’ theory. I shall have to answer all these objections better than Jacobs did to be credible. My comments in square parentheses.]
The "Jacobs Affair," which took place in England 40 years ago, caused a stir in Jewish life that still reverberates today. In immediate terms it involved an institutional struggle within British Orthodoxy. But its true significance was religious, lying in the confrontation between the contending forces of tradition and modernity and going to the very foundation of Jewish belief and practice.
The "affair" began in 1959, when Louis Jacobs, a brilliant and dynamic young Orthodox rabbi, was appointed tutor at Jews' College, the seminary for modern-Orthodox clergymen in England. Jacobs, in fact, was slated to become head of Jews' College, but he ran afoul of a campaign of vilification centering on theological heresies he had allegedly committed in his 1957 book, We Have Reason to Believe. In the end, he was forced to depart from Jews' College and then left the Orthodox rabbinate altogether, entering upon a dual career as a pulpit clergyman (at a breakaway congregation) and a prolific author of books on Jewish law and theology. Today, Jacobs and his congregation are affiliated with Conservative Judaism.
Although Jacobs was accused of heresy, the irony is that We Have Reason to Believe was written as a defense of Orthodoxy in the context of modern thought. Jacobs's views about God, the chosen people, miracles, and the afterlife passed without a murmur; what got him into trouble was his discussion of revelation .Taking note of modern biblical criticism, which challenges the idea that the Pentateuch, and hence the religious observances mandated by it, are Mosaic in origin, Jacobs urged Orthodox Jews to keep an open mind, arguing that in any case the historical status of the commandments is a separate issue from the question of their binding nature. Even absent a direct revelation of the Torah to Moses, observance of halakhah, religious law, would continue to be obligatory for Jews. [YES!]
Today Jacobs acknowledges that he was "naively trusting and optimistic" in imagining that he could put forward a modernist conception of revelation without provoking the wrath of mainstream Orthodox Jews. After all, the Bible itself states that God revealed the Law to Moses [OH NO IT DOESN”T], and no lesser a figure than Maimonides includes this idea among the "essentials" of Judaism [FEH]. Clearly, in enunciating his views, Jacobs was entering a theological minefield. [TRUE]
But now, more than four decades later, Jacobs has returned to the fray in a book that is billed as a direct sequel to We Have Reason to Believe. If in the intervening years he has altered his views about some minor elements in the Jacobs "affair," he is as insistent as ever on his central contention, namely, that openness to biblical criticism and commitment to Jewish religious law are fully compatible. [YES!] The difference is that he no longer seeks to validate his position as Orthodox but instead identifies with the "historical school" of Conservative Judaism. [NO!] From that standpoint, he polemicizes against Orthodox "fundamentalism" and in favor of his own theological stance, which he labels "liberal supernaturalism." [NEEDS A BETTER NAME]
The heart of Jacobs's critique of Orthodoxy finds expression in the words, "beyond reasonable doubt." Modern critical scholarship, he maintains, has authoritatively established that the Pentateuch is a "composite work produced at different periods in the history of ancient Israel." Yet Orthodox Jews simply ignore this incontrovertible finding, clinging instead to a fundamentalism that is both "unscientific and unhistorical”. Jacobs finds such a position quite incredible, especially when it is embraced by modern-Orthodox Jews who in all other respects "embrace [secular] learning wholeheartedly." [YES YES YES!]
Pointed as is Jacobs's critique on this matter, it can hardly be said to break new ground.
What is vitally fresh in Beyond Reasonable Doubt is, rather, his attempt to tease out a positive theological program-liberal supernaturalism-centering on a Judaism that moves "beyond fundamentalism" but is at the same time rooted in halakhic commitment. The Jew who is a liberal supernaturalist, Jacobs writes, is liberal in that his reason compels him to adopt the historical critical approach and its implications, even though this involves a degree of rejection of the traditional view. He is a supernaturalist because he sees no reason to deny the supernatural elements of his religion.... God is for him the living God and the precepts of the Torah divine commands, albeit these are conveyed indirectly and with human cooperation. [IOW, DIVINE INSPIRATION]
But what exactly are "divine commands ... conveyed indirectly and with human cooperation"? As a theological liberal, Jacobs does not anchor revelation in the text of the Pentateuch. Instead, he anchors it more generally in the historical experience of the Jewish people. [A LA RAV KOOK] For him, the term revelation applies to the "sum total of Jewish teachings, in which our ancestors reached out haltingly to seek God's will and to be found by Him." Or, as he puts it in a succinct formulation, "God gives the Torah not only to the Jewish people, but through the Jewish people."
[Actually a better quote is ‘The Torah is man’s account of ‘Divine experience’ (or something like that]
By placing the historical Jewish people at the center of his theory of revelation, Jacobs is able to present Judaism as an evolving religion, something that clearly makes sense from the modern standpoint. In addition, he is equipped to account for certain inconvenient features of Jewish tradition-like biblical slavery, or the position of women in ancient Judaism-by attributing them to historical contingency.
Most crucially, Jacobs's people-centered perspective enables him to provide a rationale for religious observance that sidesteps the issue of biblical criticism and the direct communication of the commandments to Moses. "Practical observances of Judaism have as their sanction that this is how the Torah has been developed by human beings in response to the divine will," Jacobs argues, adding, confidently, "God is behind the whole process."
This may sound as if Jacobs has moved closer to the position of Reform Judaism, but that is emphatically not so. Despite his differences with Orthodoxy, he remains a traditionalist, both intellectually and temperamentally, and continues to place an absolute priority on religious observance. Reform, as Jacobs sees it, has gone too far in its "accommodation to the Zeitgeist," in its lack of "fixed Jewish ethical standards," and in its rejection of the halakhah as "essentially binding." As a lived religion, Jacobs bluntly asserts, Reform lacks "any real appeal from a Jewish point of view."
Like other books by Jacobs, including Principles of the Jewish Faith (1964), Theology in the Responsa (1973), and A Tree of Life (1984), Beyond Reasonable Doubt brims with scholarship and is powerfully argued. Jacobs's mastery of the full range of Jewish religious sources-legal, philosophical, and mystical-is apparent on every page, and is well deployed in making his case for liberal supernaturalism as a breakthrough religious synthesis. And that case is a timely one, for Jacobs is hardly alone in hungering for a form of traditionalism that can combine halakhic observance with an open intellectual outlook. [EXACTLY]
Indeed, this is today the shared meeting ground of the right wing of Conservative Judaism and the left wing of the Orthodox movement. Still, it needs to be recognized that Jacobs's own working-out of the issues remains highly questionable. At several points in Beyond Reasonable Doubt, he himself notes that "liberal supernaturalism also has its problems." Truth to tell, they are very severe. At the level of practice, and also of religious psychology, indirect revelation proves no substitute for direct revelation in generating loyalty to the details of Jewish law. Jacobs himself explains why this is so, although he fails to think through the implications: Psychologically, it is undeniable that a clear recognition of the human development of Jewish practice ... is bound to produce a somewhat weaker sense of allegiance to the minutiae of Jewish law. [The Orthodox Jew] will go to the utmost limits ... to keep every detail ... since they are part of what God has directly commanded him to do. But the Jew who sees the ... laws as having evolved, although he too, may acknowledge them, in a sense, to be divinely ordained ... will find it more difficult to be so scrupulous.
[XGH: This is isn’t as huge a problem it is made out to be. Plenty of Jews keep minhagim and clear drabbanans and takanas with plenty of devotion. It is all dependent on how people are educated as children].
Liberal supernaturalism also opens the door to selective observance. If one believes, with Jacobs, that Jewish law carries the mark of history, is it not reasonable to assume that elements of that law may be deemed out of date or primitive from the standpoint of the present? And if so, should not the observant Jew of today, acting out of sincere religious conviction, feel free to set them aside?
[XGH: This is a better question. If Judaism is man-made, then why not change it whenever we want to? I would answer that a commitment to the Halachic process and ‘one halachah’ is paramount, and we need all Halachic Jews to agree to any change. Of course anyone is free to change anything at any time they like, but if they are doing it alone, then they will separate themselves from the community, and reap the consequences.]
Amazingly, Jacobs embraces this very position, arguing that for those not caught in the "fetters of mechanical fundamentalism," a degree of selectivity is inevitable. (The example he gives is of an individual who will turn on an electric light on the Sabbath but refrain from using electricity to cook.) Although he acknowledges that a Jew who behaves this way is "not operating within the boundaries of the halakhah," his actions should still be deemed legitimate.
It is at the level of theory, though, that liberal supernaturalism is in danger of unraveling completely. The main challenge confronting Jacobs is the secularization of contemporary Jewry. What does this phenomenon mean for his people centered theory of revelation? If a majority of Jews today reject not this or that particular of Jewish law but the system as a whole, is that, too, to be deemed a species of revelation? And if so, is Jacobs prepared to discard vast sectors of the law that are without meaning for most present-day Jews? Or does he propose, alternatively, to deny these Jews their voice in determining the halakhic consensus?
[XGH: This is probably the best question of all. In other words, Are Reform or Reconstructionist Jews not also ‘Divinely Inspired’ ? This question equally well applies to Tamar Ross’s theory of ‘Continuous Revelation’, which is basically the same kind of idea as Jacobs. I would say the answer is based on values. More later.]
A similar question arises in considering the wider social and cultural values espoused by many if not most non-Orthodox Jews today. To Jacobs, it is "hard to see how homosexual 'marriages' can be condoned if Jewish values are taken into consideration." Yet the Reform movement is set to endorse just such a step, even as the Conservative movement considers it with increasing sympathy. In both denominations, advocates of this move validate their stance by invoking, precisely, Jewish values, and they appear to be fully sincere in doing so. Is this, too, the voice of revelation speaking through the Jewish people?
[Same question as above.]
Looking back after more than 40 years at the factors that precipitated his "affair," Jacobs writes that he "found no real difficulty with Orthodox practices. It was only the theory behind fundamentalist Orthodoxy that I could no longer accept." [YES!] Alas, his determination to seek a form of robust but non fundamentalist traditionalism that will fully satisfy "both mind and heart" has led him into a theological no man's land. This is a matter of deep regret.
In day-to-day terms, obviously, traditionalist Jews of the non fundamentalist stripe will continue to work out, with varying degrees of success, their accommodations with modernity. But what their traditionalist endeavor desperately lacks is a conceptual framework that will justify it both intellectually and religiously, establishing its legitimacy within the context of Jewish belief and practice and guiding its future development. If the brilliant and pious Louis Jacobs has been unable to provide such a framework, is there reason to believe that anyone else can?
[YES! I can. I’m brilliant and pious too, and I followed much of the same trajectory as Jacobs. But I have one thing that Jacobs didn’t have: A blog, with access to hundreds of smart people who are going to help me out. Together we can succeed where Jacobs failed! Onwards and upwards!]
Nov 27, 2007 6:12 PM
UPDATE: Some people questioned my sources, and accused me of making this up. Chas Vesholom! All the sources are in these two articles in the new edition of Meorot (YCT/Edah)
Farteitcht un Farbessert (On "Correcting" Maimonides)
Maimonides Contra Kabbalah: A Review of Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism by Menachem Kellner
Although Rambam was a fundamentalist, and hardly a free thinker or skeptic, he did hold some quite rational opinions, which are all the more remarkable considering the environment in which he lived. Here are some examples, taken from the new edition of the Meorot / YCT magazine, all from the Kellner article, or from the book review of Kellner’s new book.
Shame the Rambam didn’t include these with the rest of the ikkarim. What an incredible wasted opportunity.
Ikkar 14: Hebrew is just a human language
The Rambam holds that there’s nothing special about the Hebrew language, it evolved just like any other language and was invented by humans. The only reason it is called ‘Loshin Hakodesh’ is because it doesn’t contain any rude words. In one go, Rambam destroys about half of Chassidus, Mysticism and all of Rav Moshe Shapiro’s ‘derashot’. Also gone are mystical names of God, sefer Yetzirah, Gematriyot, and in fact anything at all which bases any relevance at all on Hebrew words. A very cool move by the Rambam, though as Kellner notes, not one which ever achieved any acceptance by Orthodox Judaism.
Ikkar 15: Angels don’t exist
The Rambam holds that Angels are simply ‘forces of God’. In other words, every ‘force’ in nature can be called an Angel. In other words, ‘Angels’ is just a metaphor for God’s action in the physical world. There are no actual angels, they don’t have names, they are not beings. Not sure what the Rambam makes of Kedushah though.
Ikkar 16: There’s nothing special about Jews
There is no difference in essence between Jew and gentile, and the Jew per se enjoys no superiority over the gentile per se. The difference between Jew and gentile is grounded solely in the Torah: A Jew who observes the commandments thereby has an advantage over an ordinary gentile; but a moral and learned gentile certainly has an advantage over a coarse, ignorant Jew. The Jew, per se, has no quality of the sort referred to in various quarters as “noble soul,” “closeness to God,” or “der pintele yid” that distinguish him or her from the gentile per se.
Ikkar 17: Am Hanivchar is a ‘historical accident’
Israel’s election is the result of a historical accident, plain and simple: it was Abraham the Hebrew who discovered God. Had a Navajo Indian been the first person to discover God following the decline in humanity after the generation of Adam’s grandson Enosh, that person’s tribe would have become the chosen people; the Torah would have been given in the Navajo language; the historical parts of the Torah would have dealt with Navajo history; and the Promised Land, presumably, would have been in Nevada.
Ikkar 18: The Torah is for everyone
Israel’s Torah, when all is said and done, is meant for all humanity; it was given to Israel to preserve (and observe) until messianic times, when all will be ready to accept it. At that time, all people will worship God “with one consent,”as equals in all respects.
Nov 27, 2007 11:09 AM
Five Models of Meaning in the Torah_
1. Jewish Rational Traditional
Torah is dictated by God. Since God wrote it, He was able to include multiple meanings in the same text, depending on how you read it. No human could have achieved this literary feat so well, and in fact the multiple meanings in the text is somewhat proof that the text is God given. Jewish tradition says that there are (at least?) 70 meanings in the text of the Bible (at least the first five books), though the number 70 maybe somewhat metaphorical. Either way, the text certainly has a basic (though not necessarily literal) meaning, as Chazal say ‘Ein Mikro Yotzeh Midei Peshuto’.
2. Jewish Rational Modern
The text of the Torah did indeed develop over hundreds of years, at the hand of various human authors and editors. However, the whole enterprise was 'Divinely Inspired', and whatever meanings that have accrued to the text via the traditional, faith based community are the Divinely Inspired meanings that we should study.
3. Jewish Mystical
While the basic text of the Torah does give a simple meaning (or maybe even multiple meanings), this is just for the masses. The wise sages who are aware of mystical traditions are able to discern worlds and worlds of spiritual meaning encoded in the text.
4. Critical – Minimalist / Modern
There is no meaning in the text. Centuries of editing, adding, subtracting and redacting by hundreds of people, all with differing agendas have basically combined to create a mess. Finding the ‘original intent’ is impossible. Any meaning we assign is being ‘read in’ to the text. Exegetes who highlight differences and other anomalies in the text and thereby derive ‘explanations’ and meaning based on these are in fact missing the point entirely – these anomalies are simply the result of careless (or otherwise non planned) editing.
5. Critical – Maximalist / Post Modern
‘Meaning’ is always supplied by the human community. As the Text of the Torah has developed over hundreds of years, and the text has been explained and commented on for thousands of years, vast amounts of ‘meaning’ now lie within the Text. By surveying thousands of years of commentaries, both ancient and modern, we can determine the ‘meaning’. And of course new meaning will continue to accrue to the text as new commentaries are written and new communities of people engage with the text.
Nov 27, 2007 11:09 AM
The OSI 7 Layer Model of Fantasy_
Nov 26, 2007 6:38 PM
Paul Davies is sort of a non Jewish Gerald Schroeder (or maybe Gerald Schroeder is a kind of Jewish Paul Davies, or maybe they’re just two very different people with some similar interests and books), and a favorite of the Science & Torah crowd. This week he has an article in The New York Times, which contains one okay argument and one lousy argument.
First the lousy argument. Davies argues that Science is like religion in that it too requires faith:
Science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order.
OK, all this is true. But then he himself refutes his entire argument with his very next line!
And so far this faith has been justified.
Well duh! If it’s been justified, then it’s hardly blind faith, is it! The whole reason why people are skeptical of religious faith is that it is never ‘justified’. None of the religious faith beliefs have ever been proven. However Science ‘proves’ that the Universe is rational every single day. The fact that ‘so far this faith has been justified’ is the whole point.
Maybe you could argue that the very first Scientists had a kind of religious faith to even begin the entire Scientific enterprise, before anyone knew that Science worked. And in fact, this is quite true. The first scientists were motivated by the belief that God runs the universe, and it is a Godly task to uncover ‘His laws’. So, somewhat ironically perhaps, Science does owe some debt to religion. But that is just a historical curiosity, and no proof of anything at all, except that (from a skeptical POV), even myths can have their usefulness.
However to equate the ‘justified faith’ of Science with the unjustified Faith of religion is just plain disingenuous. Nobody has an issue with justified faith, and having faith that the universe is rational would seem to be a sensible proposition, given what we currently know.
His second point however is a good one, or at least a slightly better one. Given that the universe is indeed orderly and rational, doesn’t that posit the existence of a rational Designer? This is basically the argument from design, and many people find it convincing. The standard rebuttal is ‘If designed / complex things need a designer, then who designed God’, to which the standard response is ‘God is simple, He doesn’t need a designer’. Not a very satisfying debate all around and it’s hard to make any progress.
Another angle to this argument, sometimes called the “Anthropic Principle’ is better still. The laws of the universe seem fine tuned to create life, any difference in the laws, even some minute changes, and we wouldn’t exist. It seems too convenient to be just by chance. There are a few standard answers to this point:
(1) No matter what the laws were, it is quite possible that something intelligent would eventually have resulted even from very different laws (maybe a super intelligent shade of blue), and then that being would be talking about the anthropic principle for them.
(2) The vast majority of the universe is totally uninhabited and even uninhabitable. The earth is one tiny speck. You can hardly claim the universe is tuned for life!
(3) In an infinite universe / Multiverse, eventually a universe and a planet would arise in which life exists, and obviously on that planet the living beings would marvel at the convenient and serendipitous events leading to their creation.
However, none of these answers are so great:
(1) Seems a bit far fetched, since it does take a lot to create an intelligent being. Of course we could have had 6 arms instead of 2, and be lizard like, but it still takes a lot to create intelligent life. So either way, whether we are human beings or lizard beings, anything intelligent enough to ask the question is already highly improbable.
(2) is an interesting response. On the one hand, it is true that the vast majority of the universe contains no life (that we know of). On the other hand, this does make the existence of life on our tiny planet even more amazing. I think it’s a tie.
(3) scares me. Because by this same exact logic, we are all just computer simulations or brains in vats. How so? Well, in an infinite universe (or even 200 years in the future in our universe), it should be quite feasible to run a complete simulation of life using some sophisticated computer power. All you need is a brain, a vat, 5 sensory feeds and a laptop. What’s the resolution of our eyesight? XGA? SXVGA? Whatever it is, it will almost certainly be simulatable. Even today doctors can implant sensors in visually impaired people and give them some semblance of vision. At the rate of technological progress, it should be quite possible to eventually simulate this perfectly. Same for all the other senses. So given an infinite universe, it is logical to assume that the amount of simulated lives will vastly outnumber the amount of real lives, since a real life takes up space and resources, whereas you can run 10,000 simulated lives on one Windows 29759365264498984376 (release 3) PC with 1 32,000 CORE CPU and 128PBs.
Therefore in all probability, using the exact same arguments as (3), we’re all just computer simulations, which means we should be more existentially afraid of Windows bugs than death. And that’s really scary.
Some responses to Paul Davies here.
Nov 26, 2007 6:38 PM
Atheist Cheder Makes A Mockery of Skeptics_
This article in Time Magazine talks about how Atheist families are increasingly sending their children to Atheist Sunday Schools. Money quote:
"Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it's O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have."
I wonder if Dawkins and the skeptics would be ok with this, or they say that this too is child abuse, indoctrinating err I mean reinforcing morals and values into children?
I mean, if morals and values are evolutionary derived, and innate to people, why would you need to 'reinforce' your particular values and morals into your children? Unless...there is really a huge potential array of values and morals that a child could pick up, including some very unsavory ones, and these parents realize that.
But if it is entirely possible that your kids could end up with 'bad' morals and values, then what does that say for the evolutionary argument?
Skeptics answer: Silly! All the bad morals and values come from religion of course. Skeptics need to teach their children the 'innate' evolutionary derived morals and values to counteract the evil influence of religion. If religion didn't exist, we wouldn't need to indoctrinate our kids with 'good' morals. Could be.
Nov 26, 2007 6:38 PM
I never cease to be entertained at the ability of Modern Orthodox Academics to be able to entirely obfuscate around an issue. In this article from the new Meorot (formerly Edah Journal) magazine from YCT ; 'Authority and Validity: Why Tanakh Requires Interpretation, and What Makes an Interpretation Legitimate?', Moshe Sokolow discusses Biblical Criticism, whilst simultaneously not really discussing Biblical Criticism at all.
Sokolow discusses different approaches to interpreting Tenach without ever actually addressing the issue of whether it is Divine or not. And of course this is the critical question, because if the Torah is Divine (either 'via the Direct Dictatation Model' or via the 'Divine Inspiration' model), then we can assume that the Text does have (at least) one important, coherent meaning.
[Note how I stole a trick from the academics, it always sounds better to call things 'models' and give them nice names. You too can learn how to write like this, just buy my new book 'How to write like an academic', only $19.95. Order now and you'll receive a free copy of 'How to pretend to be a believer to your fellow shul-goers, whilst simultaneously pretending to be quite modern and sophisticated to your secular University colleagues']
But if the Text is not Divine, it may actually have no meaning at all, except for the meaning that later exegetes have read into it (eisigesis). If it is not Divine, the ‘original’ meaning of the text has become irretrievably lost, by centuries of additions, subtractions and editing, as Jacques Berlinbrau describes in the ‘Secular Bible’. The ‘doublets’, contradictions, ambiguities, lacuna and all the other issues in the text are the result of centuries of authors, editors and redactors adding, subtracting and changing the text. It doesn't have a meaning anymore. And even the original bits, if you could even isolate them, don't have much coherent meaning. And certainly not any relevant meaning (from a rational POV).
I suppose that even from a secular perspective you could argue that with a composite text, the 'meaning' is exactly that which has arisen out of it’s ‘compositeness’, as understood by the people supplying the meaning, but this is post modern 'meaning' , and not what Sokolow is trying to (pretend) to say. I would say sure, this is the meaning that we (and past generations) have decided to ‘give’ to the text, but let’s not delude ourselves here. Without the ‘Divine’ element it is no more than meaning that has been read into the text by different generations of agenda-driven and heavily biased exegetes. Christian Exegetes will obviously’ find’ very different meaning than Jewish Exegetes, and even within the Jewish tradition, rational or Reform exegetes will find different meaning than Orthodox Exegetes. If you want to wrap all this up under the banner of ‘shivim panim leTorah’ then that’s all very nice, but ultimately it just means a free for all.
Note that none of this is directly related to the question of whether the Torah is a composite document or not; one could argue (like James Kugel and myself), that the text is ‘Divinely Inspired’, and that even with centuries of editing and redaction it still retains a ‘Divinely Inspired’ meaning. But without the ‘Divine Inspiration’ aspect, there’s no real reason to assume the text has any coherent internal, important and relevant meaning at all.
Genesis I and II is a good example. If you believe that Genesis is “Divine’ (in any which way), then RYBS’s famous ‘Lonely Man of Faith’ peshat has some validity. However if the text is not Divine, then RYBS is simply fantasizing about potential meaning in the text. Of course, by some bizarre co-incidence or stroke of luck he might possibly be correct in some cases, but this is somewhat unlikely from a rational perspective. And the truth is, even from a ‘frum’ rational perspective there’s no real reason to assume that RYBS has anything like the ‘true’ peshat, unless you hold that RYBS had some Ruach Hakodesh himself.
However the article has none of this discussion in it, rather they take it for granted that the Text has some meaning. Sokolow writes:
There are two approaches to the questions of authority and validity in interpretation. The first is based on the principles which underlie medieval Jewish biblical exegesis—for which there are also striking correspondences in the thinking of some contemporary hermeneuticists—and we have categorized these views as "traditional." They stand in sharp contrast to the critical, philologically centered approach we have labeled "historical."
Two questions present themselves given this contrast:
(1) Which method can lay claim to greater validity? and
(2) Which method offers greater promise for religious education?
The first question can be rephrased, focusing on the aforementioned contrast, as: Does the biblical text have one original and recoverable intent, or is it necessarily multi-intentioned and dependent upon what has been called "the subsequent tradition of the believing community which created the book as Bible?
Historical inquiry, then, posits the existence, for each biblical text, of a single original intention which can be retrieved via the proper implementation of archaeology and linguistics.
Traditional inquiry, however, rejects the notion of a single original intention as inapplicable to the literature of prophetic revelation, due to the combined factors of its inherent multiplicity of meaning and its “fuller sense.”3Historical inquiry, in a word, seeks the “objective” meaning of Scripture via a method decried by its detractors as “mathematico-mechanical,”while traditional inquiry seeks the “subjective” meaning disparaged by its deprecators as “anachronistic.”
Each approach, in its own way, is capable of alienating the contemporary religious reader from the Biblical text. Historical inquiry does so by overly emphasizing the text’s remote origins; traditional inquiry does so by overly emphasizing its classical and medieval exegesis.
Well duh! Of course historical inquiry ‘alienates’ the religious reader. As for traditional inquiry, it ‘alienates’ the religious reader in the sense that if the religion isn’t true, then the traditional exegesis isn’t ‘true’ either. However if religion is true, and classical and medieval exegesis is divinely inspired, and if yeridas hadoros is true, then it is highly unlikely that a 21st century Bible Scholar such as James Kugel or (Chas Vesholom) a Goy like Robert Alter, could have a better peshat than the Ramban for example. And, even if by some stroke of luck, Alter does happen to get better peshat than the Rambam, the very act of admitting to such a thing would likely ‘alienate the religious reader’ from his very religion, never mind the the ‘text’. If modern academics can know better than the 'ancient sages', then you might as well chuck Judaism out the window, because the modern academics know that Judaism evolved from folk tales and legends, and Chazal were plain wrong.
Of course the MO academics would insist that we must ‘learn from everyone’, and ‘chochmah bagoyim taamin’ (I guess Torah exegesis comes under the category of ‘chochmah’ rather than ‘Torah’), but this is just typical Modern Orthodox fakery – they are happy to learn from modern scholarship, but only to a point. If modern scholarship says something cneged the ikkarim, then by definition it must be false.
Sokolow then cites a passage from Yehuda Elitzur, from an essay entitled "Faith and Science in Biblical Exegesis” (I assume the original is in Hebrew and has been translated), to illustrate this point:
A contemporary exegete is required, of course, to examine things in the light of contemporary knowledge....If he does so, then he is following in the footsteps of the ancients even if he disagrees with them in a thousand details. However, one who only copies the ancients, shutting his eyes to newly discovered facts and knowledge, is abandoning the ways of the ancients and is rebelling against them.
Funny. How is this any different from Douglas Rushkoff? To paraphrase Rushkoff:
We must follow in the footsteps of Abraham and be iconoclastic religious idol smashers! Abraham rejected the false religion of his ancestors, so must we! Only by discarding traditional Judaism can we be true to traditional Judaism!
Likewise Elitzur:
We must accept modern knowledge to understand the Bible, just like the ancients accepted the knowledge of their day! Only if we accept modern scholarship can we be true to Chazal!
Again, Sokolow neatly evades the main point. I guess he just takes it for granted that since he is writing in the Edah journal, all his readers assume that the Torah is Divine and there’s no need to even bring that point up.
But really, if this is his faith based proposition, then much of the article is pointless. Instead of quoting any modern academics, presumably to give an aura of academic respectability, he should just come right out and say that we have faith that our Mesorah is good peshat in the text.
Even from a critical perspective, I would assume that the Mesorah should be consulted occasionally, since it might shed some light on the Text, and maybe there is a point to be made here, that modern Scholars should consult the Mesorah more. But really, this is very far from what Sokolow is trying to say.
Anyways, he then goes on to quote Brevard Childs:
An almost insurmountable gap has arisen between the historical sense of the text, now fully anchored in the historical past, and the search for its present relevance for the modern age. …I am now convinced that the relation between the historical-critical study of the Bible, and its theological use as a religious literature within a community of faith and practice, needs to be completely rethought
Well duh! Once you deconstruct the text as the workings of many different people, rather than direct word for word dictation from God Almighty Himself, its ‘theological use as a religious literature’ is bound to take a bit of a hit. What a chiddush!
The obfuscation continues:
To limit interpretation to that which the original author intended to convey to his original audience, however, is to ignore two fundamental characteristics of the Bible as Scripture:
(1) that it exceeds the sum of its avowed prophetic intentions, and
(2) that this "fuller sense" can be reconstituted only through the medium of tradition in its function as the faith community's indigenous and authentic "development in the understanding of revelation”.
What the heck is this supposed to mean? In other words, we have faith that our peshat in Tenach is good, as it comes to us through the Mesorah. Yet still more obfuscation follows:
As Moshe Greenberg has acknowledged:
"We must hope that just as it is unimaginable to have a Bible scholar bereft of a fundamental knowledge of the ancient Near East, so it would be unimaginable to have a Bible scholar fundamentally ignorant of the 'Oral Law.’ The knowledge of the ancient Near East is requisite to evaluate the place of the Bible in its cultural framework...while a knowledge of the Oral Law and of exegesis—apart from their value in deciphering the meanings of Scripture—is necessary for the evaluation of Biblical values."
Again this totally depends on whether you believe the Torah is Divine or not. If you have faith that the “Oral Law” (i.e. TSBP) is ‘valid’ / ‘true’ then of course knowledge of the Oral law is important. However if you believe TSBP developed later in order to explain away difficulties in the (compiled) text, or to reconcile divergences between the received (invented?) practices and customs of the Pharisees with the extant versions of the texts, then no, the Oral law, whilst interesting, does not actually have anything ‘true’ to say about the text, except possibly by chance, that maybe in some cases TSBP can shed some real light on the text. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Overall, I found this article interesting, but completely fake. Sokolow should just come out and say what he really (pretends) to believe:
‘We believe the Torah is Divine, and we believe that we have a Mesorah from Sinai, and we believe the Torah has at least one meaningful meaning and maybe as many as 70 meaningful meanings. Furthermore we believe that Jewish exegetes working within the Mesorah have the best chance at recovering that meaning. We believe that Orthodox Jews should believe the Mesorah, and any meanings deriving from it, and should spend time studying this meaning. Also, since we are Modern Orthodox Academics after all, we also (like to) (pretend to) believe that we can sometimes get a nice peshat from a non frum Jew, or even a Goy, and even from people who do Biblical Criticism, but only of course where such insights (a) are from respectable people, and more importantly (b) don’t in any way contradict any of our ikkarim.
That would be a bit more honest I think. But then again, you can’t expect much honesty from Orthodox Academics. Either they’re writing in a Secular journal, in which case they’re gonna be real fake about their true religious beliefs, or else they’re writing in an Orthodox Journal, in which case they’ll be very coy about their non frum beliefs. Either way, it's very hard to tell what they really believe. And don't try emailing them and asking them, they tend to get upset by that. Of course I don't know Sokolow personally, so this is all generalizations. Maybe Sokolow himself is quite happy to very clearly state what he believes. But I don't think he does so in this article.
You know, instead of an article about the ‘true intent’ of the Biblical Writer, perhaps we should have an article about the ‘true intent’ of a Modern Orthodox Academic writer. Now that would be one difficult exegesis!
Nov 26, 2007 6:38 PM
New Scientist gets religion friendly(er) !_
[Wow, here’s a change of tune. Check out the editorial from last week’s New Scientist magazine, and accompanying article. These guys are finally coming round to my way of thinking!]
SCIENCE and religion: just seeing the two words in the same sentence is enough to make some people apoplectic. The commingling of the two has been one of the most contentious educational and intellectual issues of the decade. Can they live together? Can a rational person be religious? Or should scientists be campaigning to rid society of what Richard Dawkins calls these "juvenile superstitions"?
To address such questions, some of the world's leading scientists met in La Jolla, California, last week for the second Beyond Belief symposium. The idea was to see how rational thinking fits with the distinctly non-rational religious beliefs that billions of people hold. Last year's meeting resounded with rallying calls from atheists determined to replace faith wherever they found it with a scientific world view. This year things were more conciliatory, with speakers recognising that we need many tools to make sense of the world besides the strictly rational (see "God's place in a rational world?").
The change of tone is welcome. While the overbearing influence of religious groups in politics, especially in the US, is worrying and needs tackling, the idea that science can simply replace religion in the public consciousness is not only fanciful, it's also bad for science. Trying to tell people how they should think is likely to alienate them.
There is still a tendency among some scientists, however, to view religion as an irrational distraction and to presume that eradicating it would end a host of abuses. Witness the claim, repeated by one participant in La Jolla, that religious schools are more likely to produce extremists, and the refrain repeated ad infinitum since 9/11 that religion is a sufficient incentive for suicide bombing. Such talk should be discouraged. It is based on no evidence whatsoever. True, terrorists tend to be more educated in religion than most in their community, but they are more educated in everything. Religious education is rarely a key radicalising factor. Likewise, it has been shown over and over that the political aspirations of terrorist groups play a far more critical role in suicide bombing than religion.
Moreover, religious belief is just one of many irrational human tendencies. Our sense of fairness and morality is hardly based on rational thinking. There is a growing conviction that such behaviours are largely innate, and that they evolved because they have survival value in an unpredictable world. Likewise religion. To borrow from a popular biblical saying, humankind cannot live by rational thought alone. To want to cleanse society of religion before understanding its evolutionary roots and purpose seems strangely unscientific.
The problem is not with religion per se - it's with the prejudice, discrimination and backward thinking that can derive from it. The subjugation of women and opposition to condom use are good examples. Far better to tackle these issues as they arise than try to eliminate a belief system in its entirety.
Does God have a place in a rational world?
• 11 November 2007
• Michael Reilly, La Jolla, California
WE'RE on the Pacific coast, miles from southern California's still-raging wildfires, but talk of conflagration fills the air. Some of the best minds in science are gathered here at the seaside resort of La Jolla, together with some of the world's most insistent non-believers, to take a fresh look at the existence or otherwise of God. And one thing is clear: the edifice of "new atheism" is burning.
The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Religion is not going away," he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs.
Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are universal come from? "Humans' rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity," he told the audience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. "You can't do a CT scan to show where humans' rights are, you can't cut someone open and show us their human rights," he pointed out. "It's not an empirical thing, it's just something we strongly believe. It's a purely metaphysical entity."
This is a far cry from the first "Beyond Belief" symposium a year ago, at which many militant non-believers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and author Sam Harris, came together to hammer home the virtues of atheism (New Scientist, 18 November 2006, p 8). That gathering made much of the idea that humans can be moral without believing in God, and that science should do away with religion altogether.
The mood at this follow-up conference was different. Last year's event was something of an "atheist love fest" said some, who urged a more wide-ranging discourse this time round. While all present agreed that rational, evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we live our lives, it was also conceded that people are irrational by nature, and that faith, religion, culture and emotion must also be recognised as part of the human condition. Even the title of this year's meeting, "Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0", suggested the need for revision, reform and a little more tolerance.
Such was the message from evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, New York. He suggested that humans' religious beliefs may have evolved over time, thanks to the advantages they conferred as a sort of social glue holding together groups that developed them.
Wilson was not saying religion is good or bad, simply that it has evolved to be hard-wired into our brains, and therefore cannot be ignored. "Adaptation is the gold standard against which reality must be judged," he said. "The unpredictability and unknown nature of our environment may mean that factual knowledge isn't as useful as the behaviours we have evolved to deal with this world."
Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Canada, an expert in complex systems and the origin of life, took that argument and ran with it. No matter how far science advances, there will be aspects of nature that remain unknowable, he said. As an example, he cited Darwinian pre-adaptations - in which organisms evolve traits that end up having beneficial side effects - which are so random as to be completely unforeseeable.
Fact-based knowledge can never provide all the answers, he concluded. "If we don't know what's going happen, we have to live our lives anyway... We live our lives largely not knowing. That means reason is an insufficient guide."
Though Kauffman declared himself an atheist, he argued from this that it may be apt to invoke the concept of God as a proxy for such gaps in our knowledge. "I'd say that it's wise to use the word 'God'", he continued. "I know it's very freighted, but it also carries with it awe and reverence. I want to use the God word on purpose, to reinvent creativity in the natural universe. The natural universe, nothing supernatural."
Chemist Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford, one of the more hard-line atheists in the room, did not let this go unchallenged. He chided fellow participants for not being sufficiently proud about what science can accomplish. Given time and persistence, science will conquer all of nature's mysteries, he said. He even proposed that atheist scientists signal their intent to do just that by adopting a flag with a Mandelbrot set as its emblem.
So can scientific and religious world views ever be reconciled? Harris, author of The End of Faith, declared that they could not, and provided an uncompromising exposition on the evils of religion.
Away from the meeting, philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, told New Scientist that as irrational as human minds may be, calm, firm introduction of reason into the world's classrooms could over time purge them of religion.
For all its fiery rhetoric, this year's Beyond Belief conference razed neither the new atheist movement nor, of course, religion itself. But it certainly lit the touch paper.
Nov 24, 2007 11:31 PM
[This is a bit rambling, sorry. I never edit.]
Don’t Call Him The Man Upstairs
I was driving to what must be America’s earliest regular shacharis minyan, 5:50am, In my Avis rental car, listening to whatever the previous renter had programmed in. After some nondescript music finished, a fellow came on the air. In passionate tones, he told me that I shouldn’t be afraid to call God by his real name; I shouldn’t call Him ‘the man upstairs’ (OK I thought, that kinda makes sense), I shouldn’t even call him ‘Creator’ or ‘Lord’ (hmm, I thought, why not?), but rather I should always call him by his real name – Jesus Christ. I should realize that Jesus died for us, Jesus loves us, Jesus can save us. He went on about Jesus in a convincing and passionate way until I reached shul.
At first I thought, how silly is that. Then I thought, wow, millions, even billions of people passionately believe in that, but it’s all pure fantasy. Then I had an epiphany.
Guess I'll always have to be, living in a fantasy
People love fantasy. We watch movies, and cry real tears at the sad parts. We scream in genuine fright at the terrifying bits. We desperately root for the hero in the fight scene. We do the same with books and plays, and this has been going on for thousands of years. Of course at the back of our minds we know the characters are just actors, the plot just a story, the scenery just special effects, yet still we connect emotionally and intellectually and genuinely.
Why are human beings so into fantasy? A simple answer is that many people live nasty short lives of quiet desperation. But this isn’t the whole answer, since many successful wealthy people live in fantasies too. Everyone, even the super wealthy and super privileged and super thin seems to need a good deal of fantasy in their lives. Look at how many movie stars are into Scientology (or kabalah).
I think a more complete answer involves meaning. It’s just not that satisfying to think of yourself as an insignificant carbon based life form, one of billions of others, living on some remote miniscule planet, in a vast universe. But being a re-incarnation of the Goddes Ra, or one of a select group of people saving the planet from Klingons, well that’s a lot more meaningful and satisfying.
Imagine you knew nothing about Judaism, and someone told you that they were a member of a small tribe who had been selected by God as his people, and that ultimately God would change the world into some kind of heavenly place, complete with resurrection of all dead people, and that they and their tribe were the main players in this whole cosmic drama. And furthermore their soul was actually present when God gave his personal instructions to this tribe 3,000 years ago.
What would you say? Pure fantasy! Yet we call this religion.
More Than A Feeling
But still I don’t think this is the whole answer. If religion was nothing more than fantasy it wouldn’t have the powerful pull that it has. There’s an experiential aspect of religion which goes beyond what you feel playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching The Matrix, or re-enacting the battle of Gettysburg. It’s hard to put an experience into words, but it’s a kind of a high, a buzz, more than a feeling.
It’s a feeling that I’ve only experienced via religion. Maybe sex and drugs and rock and roll come close in terms of pure pleasure, but those are more selfish highs, unconcerned with the other. Yes, I know certain drugs can make you feel full of love for everyone around you, but again it’s more of a selfish love. The religious high (done right) is more of a selfless love for your fellow man. Certain religious figures were perceived to ‘radiate’ goodness and love for their fellow man, and that was without the benefit of any mind altering drugs.
Conversely, many of the chief skeptics seem rather curmudgeonly. Few have any great ethical insights, and spend their time hurling insults at anything religious. They seem to lack this religious high. But, they do seem to have a great faith in human nature, an optimism about what humanity can achieve (especially after we get rid of religion). Even though they don’t believe in an afterlife, they still seem to be filled with hope and a positive attitude, rather than becoming nihilists as you might expect. In fact, in some ways, they seem to be superior than the small minded fundamentalists, who often don’t seem to be very enlightened at all, and who certainly don’t ‘radiate’ goodness. So what gives?
Radical Rav Kook
All these thoughts were spinning through my mind today when I sat down with my chavrusoh. We opened a random sefer, which turned out to be the collected writings of Rav Kook, to a random page, which by amazing no such thing as a coincidence turned out to be an article about Emunah. Rav Kook says Emunah is not an intellectual thing, not just a feeling, but rather something deeper, emanating from the soul.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Rav Kook is implying, but my Chavrusoh, an expert in Rav Kook, felt that he wasn’t talking about what we traditionally mean by Emunah, i.e. belief in certain propositions. Rather, Rav Kook was talking about emunah as a connection to the Divine, a kind of higher (and better) state of existence, where we can rise above our petty material bodies and feel our souls.
Rav Kook says there are three types of emunah: emunah tiv’it, emunah mesorit, and emunah from our core. The first type of emunah comes from our contemplating our surroundings, the second, from contemplating our Tradition and Torah, the third comes from (contemplating?) ourselves. He then goes on to say that each emunah type without the other isn’t so great, and that you need all three combined.
Rav Kook is a little cryptic at the best of times, but here is my take on what he is trying to say.
One of the main aspects of emunah, and its manifestation as Theism, is a kind of hope and optimism about the Universe. These are the themes that Rabbi Sacks always writes about, and about how Atheism leads to lack of hope. In the past I have been less than impressed with this line of argument, because le’maaseh we know of great Atheists who seem very optimistic, give charity and are far from being hedonistic nihilists.
But using Rav Kook’s model of emunah, we can see that these people have emunah tivit, a kind of natural faith. It enables them to act very positively in the world, but they still seem to lack any inspiring spirituality. Bill Gates may have given billions to charity, but how many people find him personally inspiring? Not many. Meanwhile we see that there are many great Rabbis who certainly have emunah mesorit, but still seem to lack a certain something. (Perhaps the Dalai Lama is an example of the third type of personality, with the inner emunah.)
How did Rav Kook arrive at this thesis? Presumably based on his experiences. He saw the secular atheist Zionist pioneers imbued with a deep sense of faith, optimism and energy pursuing their goal of rebuilding the land, while the Old Yishuv sat on benches subsisting on charity. Meanwhile, the old yishuv were refining their moral and ethical sensibilities, whilst the new pioneers were rather a down to earth bunch. He saw each group having a certain type of ‘emunah’, but lamented the fact that each group was lacking in integrating these two types of emunah.
Free my soul
Seems to me, that for whatever reason (Divine Beneficence or evolution or both), we have ‘souls’. We are able to transcend the daily struggle and become highly moral, ethical and faithful. This is a unique capacity of human beings. (Yes, I know some animals can display rudimentary ethical behaviors. Good for them, maybe they can evolve into higher beings themselves some day).
Should we indulge our souls? Should we cultivate our souls? Should we encourage our souls? I think so. That’s part of being human. The question then becomes, how? And fantasy seems to be a large part of the answer. Is fantasy bad? Well, everyone seems to live in some kind of fantasy, even if it’s just a fantasy of how they look. Fantasy is created in the mind of course, but then again, so is reality.
Skeptics will say that our perception of reality is ‘better’ than fantasy because it conforms to the actual reality which is out there, whereas fantasy is all made up. But why is an accurate perception of reality ‘better’? Skeptics will go on about the value of ‘truth’, but is this really their motivation? It could just as well be that humans have evolved a desire for ‘truth’ (under certain circumstances) simple because having an accurate perception of reality is useful, for example when encountering a saber toothed tiger. However when it comes to the big existential questions, it seems that our capacity for ethical moral and spiritual ‘fantasy’ has evolved there to suit our needs.
Skeptics will argue that the world would be better off without religious fantasy. But is this really the case? We have no evidence for this at all. And, considering our evolutionary need for fantasy in every area of our lives, it seems highly unlikely that humanity will ever be able to live without it. In fact this belief seems to be somewhat of a fantasy itself.
Even the skeptics partake of fantasy – they have strong moral beliefs, and they educate their children that human lives have value. Of course this isn’t reality, it’s all pure fantasy (from a skeptical POV), but they live it as if it is real. The skeptics don’t tell their kids ‘Yes, really people are just random collections of atoms but for the good of humanity we’re all going to pretend we have value’. No, on the contrary, the (moral) skeptics insist that we all have value, and they live this as if it was reality.
Sure, maybe they’ll claim that this is because they have been programmed by evolution to feel that way. Well great, so most people have been programmed by evolution to feel religious too. Evolution answers everything about human behavior in every which way, and therefore it answers nothing at all.
But, maybe you’ll ask, just because evolution has programmed us for fantasy, does that make it ‘right’? Shouldn’t we try to evolve beyond fantasy into reality? That’s a tough question. Too much reality can be depressing, and maybe not so good for humanity. And anyways, who knows what the real reality really is? We are all bound by our subjective conceptions of reality. There’s no solid evidence to suggest that we will be better off as humans if we turn off that ‘emunah’ in an objectively meaningful universe.
I subjectively feel that there is value in some level of fantasy. As with everything, it can be taken to extremes, and should be moderated. But a moderate level of fantasy can be useful, even necessary, for a full healthy life. Fantasy about things we can’t know the reality of, for example the ultimate question, would seem to be okay, and I would call that faith. However we must acknowledge that there’s legitimate, healthy faith. And then there’s fundamentalist religion.
Fundamentalist religion abuses the notion of faith by taking things too far, by insisting on the truth of things which we know are untrue. This isn’t healthy, and leads to all sorts of problems as we have seen. Even worse, this kind of overdose of fantasy can lead to severe counter-reactions in some people, leaving them in an ‘obsessed with reality’ state.
So where should we draw the line between ‘faith’ (emunah), and fantasy? I am tempted to say (somewhat simplistically) that if the evidence is against a belief, then believing that belief is fantasy. But this would be clearly wrong, and isn‘t in fact how people live in real life. What about the parent who has faith in their child even against all odds? Or many similar situations. Faith and hope and optimism and all good feelings are surely legitimate even despite overwhelming odds to the contrary. It can’t be as simple as just objectively assessing the evidence. Feelings and just pure, raw human spirit come into play as well.
Imagine all the people living life as one
All of us here, from the Chareidim to the Skeptics, seem to have a strong faith. The Skeptics have the ‘emunah tivit’ that Rav Kook talked about. Although I have mocked them for this incongruity in the past, they have do have a strong optimism and hope in human nature, ability and value, and this is a good thing. Likewise the believers have a strong faith in humanity’s ultimate redemption and objective meaning and purpose. A cynical nihilist might call both of these worldviews ‘fantasy’, but I prefer to call them faith.
Mark Twain famously wrote that ‘Faith is believing in things you know ‘aint true’. But I think that’s way too cynical. The skeptics argue that faith is always a bad thing, and is never ‘allowed’. But this seems to a subjective values discussion, it’s hardly a universal ‘law’ that faith is bad. I have dismissed faith in the past far too quickly, it is time to re-evaluate what faith is.
Seems to me that Christians have spent more time focusing on what faith is than we have. This maybe because we have traditionally been more concerned with actions than beliefs, or maybe because we have always been convinced that our faith is rational and provable, whereas Christianity has never had the ability to promote a kuzari proof. Either way, there is some good content out there on faith, for example by Paul Tillich and others.
So far, apart from the Rav Kook above, I haven’t seen much contemporary Jewish writing on faith, and what I have seen is more about what we are supposed to believe in, rather than faith itself. The standard approach is that Judaism doesn’t really require blind faith, and that this is a Christian concept, due of course to the fact that they must require blind faith, whereas we don’t need to.
I think this is really the crux of the whole issue. What is faith and what is fantasy, and when is either legitimate, or perhaps even necessary?
Nov 20, 2007 6:21 PM
I'm closing up shop for a few days. Happy Thanksgiving!
Nov 19, 2007 8:03 PM
[Some awesome comments from AgnosticWriter and Kendra]
How do we stop clever religious zealots from convincing themselves that some dangerous belief (or action) is actually God's will?
The answer in both cases (secular or religious extremists) is the influence of fellow humans who, it may be hoped, will have decent values, and will be able to exert a restraining or moderating influence upon those with dangerous tendencies--either by social pressure or the force and arms of law. The thing is, that with the wild card of "God told me; so nobody can talk me out of it, or even threaten me with anything that compares to my confidence in the reward awaiting me in paradise," it's a little harder to wield persuasion of any sort.
If all you care about is a world without atrocities, why not chop off the arms and legs of every infant? Or better yet, sever everyone's spinal cord. Within a generation or two, it would be rather difficult for much violence to take place. And if you find it distasteful to mangle the human body, why be so sanguine about mangling the human mind and spirit, by slicing through the tender eyes of reason with the superstitious blade of faith?
To paraphrase a children's book, many people believe six impossible things before breakfast--yet never commit atrocities. (I do believe, however, that those based in a supernatural model are harder to persuade into moderation than those based in earth-based considerations.)
The reasons not to base one's life on propositions with flimsy evidence and poor argument are not limited to precisely predictable pragmatic outcomes. It's an axiom of existence that reality is king, that what is is, and what is not is not, and what probably is not shouldn't, by anyone taking his existence seriously, be treated as anything better than probably not (true). These are not laws passed in a legislature, they are inherent in reality. One could argue that what is not real is as good as what is real, or that death is as good as life--but these reject the reality within which we live, and upon which our existence is based. They are, therefore, an attack upon life and upon the human spirit.
..I don't see it as legitimate to equate the proposition "that human life has value," with the proposition that we know x, y, or z, about God or His will. That human life has value is a necessary premise of human life --which is, evidently, the endeavor into which all of us are born, and so long as we discuss such issues, are a part of. By contrast, the notion that we have knowledge of things supernatural is quite superimposed on what is what is necessary for human life.
And basic guidelines such as the Golden Rule are straightforward and reasonable rules based on readily observable human nature--guidelines that clearly promote more harmonious and socially constructive living. Besides, one need not teach one's children the Golden Rule as some metaphysical truth, analogous to religion's teachings of God's Word. Instead, one can simply teach those as norms for wise, socially constructive, socially virtuous, and usually successful, living.
[Ad caan Agnostic Writer.]
I think there is a point being missed here. Humans do not generally succeed at complex endeavors involving inter-related systems. The natural sciences have poisoned our thinking (to a degree) by making us believe we can set out to manage a physical environmental system or to "reform society" with the surety and precision of building a bridge. Yes, the scientific approach emphasizes recursive self analysis. But so does Judaism (and some other religions, I suppose, I'm not educated enough on them to say which aspire and discernibly succeed). Both sides are hamstrung by systematic biases. It's easy to be unbiased when studying the motion of ball bearings on an inclined plane or comparing chemical reactions. Once humans are involved, there is a melange of mistrust, old hurts, fears of the future, and general endemic misunderstandings.
We do not see human affairs half so clearly as we think, even with attempts to gain rigorous data. ... Being a scientist doesn't prevent emotional bias and the instinct to distort the world into a shape one emotionally needs or prefers. It just channels this process and sometimes slows it down.
Theoretically, science could pierce this web of bias in its own process. But I think this success is unlikely or at least extremely distant. The problem is, science looks for magic bullets and clarifying laws. Any principles that successfully govern a chaotic system like human society are going to be complicated, non intuitive, and difficult to see "the big picture" of.
The scientific worldview keeps going back to describe, confine and control _just as much_ as religion. It just has different customs as to how these urges are expressed. The average scientist isn't going to be satisfied by answers they can't grasp in their head. More importantly, it will be extremely hard to coordinate and make consistent a theory that no single person can quite understand. Even if you code it into a computer all you do is create a new hazard: since no one can grasp the whole process, some synergy or interaction could be neglected and GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) will rule.
On the other hand, Judaism teaches a heuristic of tolerance, peace, and respect. The typical sort of person who goes in for science will not accept such vague, gradual answers, and will keep trying for a simple, draconian solution, confident that "the data can't be wrong". I've seen this in people with all manner of intentions: people using science to support agendas dear to my heart, people using science for the causes I categorically reject. I think that these qualities of tolerance, peace, respect, and harmony are the essential preconditions to "solving the human problem". And Judaism inculcates and nourishes them much more effectively. Yes, this is very much a one eyed beating the blind comparison. But when progress is tiny, distinctions do matter.
Yes, Judaism has its own problems, to say the least. The question is what you think are the most important habits in addressing this urge to distort. To me, secular humanism tries to take a shortcut to the goal of clarity and doesn't recognize the terrain it's crossing is so rugged that it won't save much time. Cooperation, respect, harmony, and truth are all highly valued in Judaism. However, every generation, Jews can look and see the radical shortcomings between the vision and the reality. So they keep tinkering with it. Even the "swing to the right" in Orthodox circles is just a reflection of this urge: they sensed the destruction of tradition and so set out to reconstruct it through logical stringencies. However, this attempt has not worked. I think that Judaism's remarkably genius lies in it's way of advancing slowly on multiple fronts. Nothing is neglected indefinitely. It's a broad view and a patient commitment. Moreover, it really strives to drag the whole people forward. Yes, there is a Rabbinic elite but the point is that in the end, everyone should be educated, everyone should be attended to. This particular tendency has suffered a lot of neglect (or opposition) in the last three or four centuries, but it's still there, waiting to be revisited. "You shall be a nation of priests". Everyone must know why and what and live for it as their overwhemling priority.
Motivation is the key. The scope of the task of figuring out how to "fix" human society is so overwhelming. To confront despair and resist the urge to look for shortcuts requires deep wells of hope. To prevent self deception requires a passionate commitment to doing right. Scientists _can_ arrive at these states of mind. But I think it is less common. The secular humanist idea is of detached, rational individuals collaborating for shared goals. Humans naturally seek togetherness and interconnection. We just don't know how to make this union work. Science (in my experience) sees this urge to togetherness as a problem. What I've seen is secular humanists trying to use "the facts" to compel in lieu of feelings. I think it is safer to try and learn to manage feelings than to try and manage reality directly without them. Because everyone has strong feelings. Because everything we prescribe as normative affects peoples feelings. No one can escape them. Scientific detachment is impossible when studying humanity itself. Yet without striving for detachment, the scientific method fails.
[Kendra]
Nov 18, 2007 10:27 PM
Religion vs. Rationality. Which is better?_
It's time to re-evaluate Faith and Reason.
Knowledge is when you have good reason to believe something. For example, everyone agrees the sky is blue, we all see it as blue (assuming that what we all call blue appears as the same blue, which is actually impossible to ever prove), and so we have knowledge the sky is blue. One doesn't need to have faith that the sky is blue.
Faith on the other hand, is when you don't have reason to believe, but you believe anyway. If you had good reason to believe, then it wouldn't be faith, it would be knowledge.
Is it 'okay' to have faith in unproven things? How about things which have been proven false?
Since beliefs are all 'actions', there's no philosophical, logical or rational way of proving that someone 'ought to' hold only proven beliefs. A person can do whatever he wants. However most humans do have a well developed sense of right and wrong, true and false, and few people would consciously want to admit that they hold beliefs which they know aren't really true.
The Skeptics however seem to think that there is a law that one mustn't hold any unproven beliefs (chas vesholom). They usually take this for granted. When pushed, they then try to justify this, often by quoting Voltaire - 'Those who believe in absurdities will ultimately commit atroctities' (there are a few different girsaot here). Or, something similar.
In other words, the Skeptics believe that allowing people to believe in unproven things is very bad for humanity, and could lead to very bad things. However, were everyone to be completely rational, nobody would ever commit any heinous crimes, and the world would be better off.
I say, this is abject nonsense, for a number of reasons.
1. Billions people on this planet are convinced of the truth of all sorts of nonsense. What's the lesson to be learned here? People are stupid, and will often believe anything. Now, the skeptics might argue that this is because religion has trained people to be stupid, and if we got rid of religion people would be smarter. I don't see any evidence for this. But I do see lot's of evidence for people being stupid.
2. OK, say the Skeptics, most people are stupid. But the smart people are usually in control, and if only the smart people would get rid of religion, and base their decisions on rationality, the world would be better off. But again, this is abject nonsense. Even clever people have yezter horas. And as the Chief Skeptic, Michael Shermer, himself has shown, Smart people are extremely capable of believing (and doing) stupid things, because they are very smart at rationalizing what they want to believe (and do).
3. What's really silly about the skeptics credo of 'If only we were all super rational the world would be a better place' is that what would actually make the world a better place is if people were really moral, and committed to morality, and were passionate about morality. But according to the skeptic manifesto, there's no real reason to be like that. Sure, some people get lucky and have a powerful morality gene, but for the average person, why bother? The skeptics have no good answer. Religion does though.
So, if we want to make the world a more moral place, the obvious way to achieve this is to make people more moral. Will refusing to allow faith make people more moral? I don't think this has been proven at all. Even if we all agree that the world is 'better' now than in the past, it's almost impossible to show why. Was it really due to the enlightenment? Or was it bound to happen no matter what? Are we truly more moral nowadays, or is it simply that the underlying realities of our existence have changed?
Everyone assumed that after the enlightenment, God and religion would die, and the world would be a better place. Not only did this not happen, but the 20th century had a horrific amount of violence, very little of which was due directly to religion. The skeptics want to argue that all the violent movements of the 20th century were ultimately due to some irrationality somewhere, even if not religious in nature, and that this only proves their contention. But the leaders of these movements were not stupid people. Why at the time did they believe in their ideology? It's exactly as Shermer says, smart people are very good at believing stupid things. Even smart people trying to be 'rational'.
We all believe that the Nazis were irrational, thinking the Jews were the problem. But did the Nazis think they were acting irrationally? Of course not. It is always easy in hind site to look at an ideology and declare it to have been irrational, at the time though, it is an entirely different story.
The important question therefore is, in future, how do we stop clever skeptics convincing themselves that some dangerous belief is actually rational?
That's the real problem, and it has always been the problem. The ignorant masses can be controlled. It's the clever leaders, tyrants and demagogues who need to be watched. I don't know any good answer to this question. People have a propensity for evil, and possibly always will have. Maybe there will come a day when our moral sensitivities are so highly trained that we would never commit any atrocities.
But how do we train ourselves to be highly moral? I think OJ provides a fantastic example. We train our children to do chessed. We train our people not to talk loshon horoh. Little kinderlach in kindergarten give tzedakah and learn about middos tovos. We learn Mussar. We respect our elders.
Of course other religions and other cultures do this too, and that's great. But we do it very well, and that's very great. I don't see that we can ensure the end of atrocities by insisting that everyone be 'rational'. But I can see the possibility of this happening if we insist that everyone is religious.
At worst it's a tie. Maybe, since we're talking about an investment in the future, we should diversify. I don't know. But to think that if everyone followed the one true religion of rationality all the world's problems would be solved is an emunah peshutah that I simply can't share.
If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that its all true
Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried
Still I look to find a reason to believe
Nov 18, 2007 10:27 PM
Avi Shafran: No, Yes, I'm sorry, Not Jerusalem, Yes Jerusalem, I'm confused_
Avi Shafran's latest article on CC, about not giving up any of Jerusalem, makes little sense. He starts off by describing how many times we daven about Jerusalem, and writes:
It is hard to believe that any people, entity or government could arrogate to claim a closer connection than the Jewish one to the city nestled in the Judean hills, the city toward which praying Jews for millennia have faced thrice daily, and face to this day.
And it is even harder to believe that a government of a self-described Jewish State would even consider, much less announce, its contemplation of placing Jerusalem on the cutting block of negotiations with an enemy.
OK, so that makes sense, even if I don't agree with it. But then he writes:
Many of the religious leaders of the haredi world, however, have clearly stated that political sovereignty over land does not trump the attainment of peace and security. None of us haredi Jews deny, G-d forbid, the holiness of any part of the Jewish Land. But we know that the true, complete (territorially as well as spiritually) “Jewish State” will arrive only when the Messiah does, and that the Third Holy Temple will be built by the hand of not man but G-d. Thus, the reflexive form in our prayer: “May it be Your will that the Temple be [re]built.”
So now he's saying that the Gedolim ARE willing to give up Jerusalem, if it will attain peace. Didn't he just contradict himself? Then he goes on a rant about what a bunch of murderous lying bastards the other side are, and then he says:
One can only add to our prayers the hope that those political leaders somehow experience some flash of recognition of what they are contemplating. That they blink a few times, shake their heads and remember just what Jerusalem means to the Jewish People. That they come to open a Jewish prayer book and not only read the words but pay attention to them; and say the grace after meals, doing the same.
And that they then turn to their adversaries and say, without rancor but with full determination: “No. We’re sorry. Not Jerusalem.”
Err, what? You just said that the Gedolim would in theory be willing to give back Jerusalem. Now you're saying no way, and that the Government need to open a siddur and then the'll realize how percious Jerusalem is. So do the Gedolim also need to open a siddur? Which is it?
Then, just in case you happened to miss how very confused Shafran is, he states his confused opinion in the final paragraph, yet again:
To be sure, from a haredi perspective, it doesn’t make any inherent difference what temporal flag flies above the hewn stones of Jerusalem’s walls. The city’s holiness is neither heralded nor preserved by such banners. But it is a fallacy of the most dangerous sort to imagine that the cause of peace could possibly be advanced by surrendering the heart of the Jewish People.
Again, if the Gedolim's position is that Jerusalem is negotiable, then what is Shafran going on about? I think he's confused. And it wouldn't be the first time.
Why am I bashing Shafran? Because apart from the fact he's confused, the opinions he's presenting is dangerous. There are very few things I blog about where real lives are at stake, but this is different. Moshiach hasn't come yet, and even the Gedolim say territorial compromise is good if it produces peace. Yet here we have a bunch of American Jews, who have no intention of making aliyah, going on about how important Jerusalem is and how we can't possibly give it back. And we're not even talking about West Jerusalem, but East Jerusalem! Who the heck goes to East Jerusalem anyway?
I don't know if we can ever create peace, and I don't know if we can trust the Palestinians. But there's nothing special about East Jerusalem. If they want it, and it makes sense, then give it to them. Even Har Habayis.
Nov 16, 2007 6:08 PM
Why I disagree with Agnostic Writer_
AW has been writing some absolutely awesome and well written comments. But I still disagree with his basic thrust. He argues that the Torah contains some immoral bits, and since OJ is based on the Torah that makes it immoral too.
I say no. Judaism is what the Jewish people do, not what some text says it is. The Torah could be full of immorality (it isn't), but if the Jewish people are highly moral, then obviously the system works (somehow). The Torah might emphasize the destruction of Amalek, but the fact is we don't have Judaic Fundamentalists preaching death to Islam. The Torah might allow slavery, but we don't have Chareidim owning slaves (cue jokes about Chareidi owned businesses).
The proof is in the pudding, not in the text. The text can be re-interpreted a million different ways. As Sholomo Halbertal writes, once Tenach was canonized, the focus shifted to interpretation instead.
I used to be upset at the thought of non literal TMS. I thought, how can I learn Torah seriously if every word isn't directly dictated by God? How can I learn a lesson from a story in Breishis, if it's just mythology? Now I realize how wrong headed this is. Even if you believe in a literal TMS, you can spin the Torah any which way. I have seen Reform and Orthodox Rabbis learn entirely different and contradictory lessons from the story! And even amongst the traditional meforshim you see huge ranges of opinion. It makes no difference, you learn what you want to learn. But somehow the system works. Is this proof of Divine Inspiration? Could be!
AW says its unacceptable to continue to revere the Torah, considering all it's immoral bits. But what's the alternative? Throw the religion out of the window and start fresh? Like that's going to be any better? Or maybe he wants us to edit or censor the Torah? On the contrary, I think the current approach is the best - we live in everything and we re-interpret. And we base our practice on the re-interpretation, not on the original.
So AW can go on about how immoral various bits of halachah or the Torah are, but it makes little difference. The reality on the ground (and historically) is the only worthwhile measure. If you can show me that Jews are LESS moral than the surrounding culture, now and in the past, then I will agree with you. Until then, I will go with the consensus, which agrees that Judaism has been a highly moral movement which has contributed greatly to humanity.
If you have a better system for the future (Secular Humanism? Christianity? What is your plan Agnostic Writer?) then by all means present your approach and we can debate which is better. May the best approach win!
Good Shabbos.
Nov 16, 2007 6:08 PM
Skeptics Need to Put Their Cards on the Table_
I had a rather rancorous and not very helpful debate with one of the chief skeptics yesterday, which had one advantage in that it sharpened my thinking on some important points. After three years of debating skeptics, I have come to the following conclusions. YES - I am generalizing and stereotyping and projecting and not talking about any one specific person.
1. The skeptics are a bit one dimensional when it comes to 'beliefs'. This is understandable, they have been so badly burned by all the fundie nonsense they were taught as kids, that anything which isn't 100% proven is no good, and any attempt at any extra or non rational thinking is derided as 'PoMo' and 'no can do'. Now, I fully agree that believing in things contrary to all known evidence is most likely silly. But not always. And certainly beliefs such as 'God' (in general) and 'Divinely Inspired' are so non falsifiable that how could there ever be any evidence against them (or for them) ? Is there some rule that a human being cannot have faith in something unproven? Of course not. But listening to the skeptics talk you would think there is.
The skeptics themselves have their own beliefs - for example morality, or the value of human life. True, they don't base these on the Torah or any other 'mythology', but they 'believe' in these values no less passionately, even though there is no real basis for them. The skeptics will insist that there is a difference between passionately upholding a value, and believing in facts which aren't proven. But really the difference is not so great. It only seems monumental to someone with a one dimensional obsession with the 'truth'.
Again, this is not an argument for believing in any old crap. But I think that (some of) the skeptics take it too far the other way.
2. The Skeptics pretty much spend most of their time bashing Orthodox Judaism and religion in general. Which is fine, criticism is important. But they rarely offer any alternative. In fact, I think some of them consciously avoid offering any position at all, because they know they can get bashed equally well. For example, a skeptic may go on about how immoral Judaism is (and religion in general). But when asked why they believe murder is wrong they go quiet. There is a time to destroy, but there is also a time to build. For me, the destruction is over and I want to build. If the Skeptics want to continue to criticize, that's fine. But they need to offer an alternative. We need to figure out which 'building' is best. The alternatives could be anything from Chareidi Judaism, to Reconstructionism, to Secular Humanism, to Nihilism. But there needs to be an alternative. A Skeptic who just criticizes but offers no alternative plan is not that helpful to me. If your position is straight up Secular Humanism, and you think that's a better 'plan' than Rational Orthodoxy (or whatever the heck we are calling it these days), then fine. But say so, and then we can compare and contrast the two approaches.
In other news, I applied for the Bronfman prize. I don't really expect to win, but who knows! I didn't expect my blog to take off either.
Nov 15, 2007 9:52 PM
The Mabul is real after all! Skeptics around the world get frum again_
_Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?
11.15.2007
The universal human myth may be the first example of disaster reporting.
by Scott Carney
The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.
In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected.
Masse’s epiphany came while poring over Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they might reveal about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements and create new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian genealogies. The result: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse theorizes, hold similar clues.
Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat and moisture blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal event in history.
Why, then, don’t we know about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost every culture has a legend about a great flood, and—with a little reading between the lines—many of them mention something like a comet on a collision course with Earth just before the disaster. The Bible describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the water subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar of black smoke on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week. Afterward, a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures also tell of a great flood.
“These stories are all exactly what you would expect from the survivors of a celestial impact,” Masse says, leafing through 2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all shapes and sizes. “When a comet rounds the sun, oftentimes its tail is still being blown forward by the solar winds so that it actually precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology mention that they are wearing horns.” In India, he notes, a celestial fish described as “bright as a moonbeam,” with a horn on its head, warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man.
Among 175 flood myths, Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has happened only once in the last 5,000 years, according to computer simulations, and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking historical records with astronomical data, Masse came up with a date for his event: May 10, 2807 B.C.
On its own, the mythological evidence is weak, as even Masse recognizes. “Mythology can help us hypothesize about events that might have occurred,” he says, “but to prove the reality of them, we have to go beyond myths and search for physical evidence.”
In 2004, at a conference of geologists, astronomers, and archaeologists, Masse outlined his evidence for a world-ravaging impact in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, was intrigued and enlisted the help of Dallas Abbott, an assistant professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. In 2005, they formed the Holocene Impact Working Group (referring to the geological period covering the last 11,000 years) to seek out the geological signatures of a megatsunami. If a 600-foot-high wave ravages a coastline, it should leave a lot of debris behind. In the case of waves generated by asteroid impacts, the debris they leave in their wake is believed to form gigantic, wedge-shaped sandy structures—known as chevrons—that are sometimes packed with deep-oceanic microfossils dredged up by the tsunami.
When Abbott began searching satellite images on Google Earth, she saw dozens of chevrons along shorelines and inland in Africa and Asia. The shape and size of these chevrons suggest that they might have been formed by waves emanating from the impact of a comet slamming into the deep ocean off Madagascar. “The chevrons in Madagascar associated with the crater were filled with melted microfossils from the bottom of the ocean. There is no explanation for their presence other than a cosmic impact,” she says. “People are going to have to start taking this theory a lot more seriously.” The next step is to perform carbon-14 dating on the fossils to see if they are indeed 5,000 years old.
Meanwhile, Bryant contends that chevrons found (pdf) 4 miles inland from the shore of Madagascar were formed by a wave that traveled 25 miles along the coast, moving almost parallel to the shoreline. “Neither erosion nor any other terrestrial process could have caused these formations. The biggest marine landslide ever recorded happened 7,200 years ago off the coast of Norway, and there was a tsunami, but it was a far cry from leaving deposits 200 meters above sea level,” Bryant says.
Not everyone is convinced, to say the least. “I don’t believe the evidence of a crater off Madagascar, and the impetus is on Abbott to prove it,” says Jay Melosh, an impact expert at the University of Arizona and an outspoken critic of the theory. To make a case for the impact, Melosh says, Abbott “should be finding layers of glassy droplets and fused rock in sea-core samples, the sorts of things we find at all other similar impact sites.”
On the other hand, a lot remains unknown about impacts. As recently as 60 years ago, some geologists believed that the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona—now considered the prototypical impact scar—was caused by a volcanic explosion, and they regarded impacts as a minor if not inconsequential influence on Earth’s history. Just 25 years ago, Luis and Walter Alvarez raised eyebrows with their idea that an asteroid collision helped kill off the dinosaurs. So Abbott continues to hunt for evidence that will clinch the idea that Noah’s flood was yet another example of extraterrestrial meddling. “It is still up to us to prove it, but if we have unequivocal impact ejecta,” she says, Melosh “is going to have to eat his words.”
Nov 15, 2007 5:43 PM
By Neil Gillman
When I was a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, theology was taught as a dimension of Jewish intellectual history, what the great Jewish thinkers of old believed. With the notable exception of Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel, our teachers were not overly concerned with what we or our congregants-to-be might believe. When I began to teach, I felt it was my responsibility to help my students develop a personal theology that would cohere with the rest of their Seminary education and shape their teaching and preaching as Conservative rabbis. But then, they had the right to expect that I too would share my own theology.
My first encounter with the theological uses of the term myth was in Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. I first read Tillich for my doctoral exams at Columbia, but it was only when I began to teach theology to JTS rabbinical students that I felt the full impact of his thought. That slim book remains central in my teaching and writing to this day.
My core issue was revelation. It continues to be, for me, the central theological issue: how one understands revelation determines how one deals with the authority of Torah on all matters of Jewish belief and practice.
My Seminary education had successfully subverted any literalist understanding of the central Jewish revelational event as described in Exodus 19-20. I was taught that the Torah was a composite document, edited around the 5th century C.E., borrowing from the literature of the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures. That "critical" approach to the study of the Bible also questioned the historicity of the biblical narratives, including the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai. The evidence for these conclusions struck me as persuasive. In addition, I had begun to question the very possibility of any human attempt to capture God's nature or activity in literal terms. I could no longer believe that God literally "descends" on Sinai or "speaks" the words of Torah. If God were truly God, then God could not literally "speak." But then what was Torah? Whence its sanctity? Its authority? More broadly, what was the epistemological status of any theological claim? Finally, as a rabbi, how could I justify teaching and advocating the bulk of Jewish practice which, I continued to believe, remained central to any authentic understanding of Judaism? It was in this context that I reverted to the notion of myth.
To this day, my use of the term troubles many of my students. The main problem is that, in American parlance, a myth is synonymous with a fiction, a fairy tale, or worse, a lie - as in the common practice of contrasting "the myth" with "the facts" or "the reality." That conventional use of the term haunts me whenever I use it. When I teach "revelation," I provide my students with a wide range of options, including the traditionalist literal understanding of the issue, along with the more liberal positions from the writings of Heschel, Kaplan, Buber, and Rosensweig. I also teach my own position - that the biblical account of the event at Sinai should be understood as myth. This is what I mean by the term.
1.There is no totally objective, human experience of the world. We construct reality from our simple perception of an apple to our most complex scientific theories. To this task we bring everything that makes us who we distinctively are, our genetic make-up, our educational and cultural baggage, and our intuitive, almost pre-conceptual, assumptions about what the world looks like. We perceive the world not through our eyes but through our brain, which applies interpretive structures to what is transmitted to us through our senses. Those structures are analogous to myths. Structural myths are often accompanied by narrative myths; the former describes the structure, while the latter tells how it came to be. Freudian psychoanalytic theory combines both, as does astronomy; Genesis 1 and Exodus 19 are classical narrative myths.
2. Myths, then, are not to be contrasted with facts. Instead, myths are the means by which we identify the significant facts. The more elusive the facts, the more the data elude direct human perception, the more inevitable and indispensable the myth (as in string theory, psychoanalytic theory, the biblical account of the Exodus, creation, and eschatology). In all of these cases, the myth posits an invisible world to account for what it is that we do see. Myths then inform the work of scientists, historians, and theologians.
3. Myths are the connective tissues that knit together the data of experience, thereby enabling these data to form a coherent pattern and acquire meaning - what Rollo May, in his The Cry for Myth, calls the beams of the house that are themselves invisible but without which the house could not stand. To use another metaphor from our childhood, myths are the lines that connect the dots on the page so that we can see the bunny rabbit, except that now the dots are not pre-numbered. We have to choose the dots that we want to connect (i.e. the "facts"), then assign the numbers, then draw the lines. Sometimes, there are different connections to be made, each of which yields a different pattern (Copernicus vs. Ptolemy, Freud vs. Jung, white vs. black perceptions of American life, or Zionist vs. Palestinian perceptions of Middle East politics). It is precisely because these connecting tissues are themselves invisible that myths are frequently viewed as fictions.
4. Myths can be "living," "broken," or "dead" (Tillich's terms). A living myth is one that works for us, that we embrace as "true," that makes sense of the world as we perceive it. A broken myth is one that has been exposed as our subjective, human construct. Sometimes broken myths die; the contrary data have become overwhelming. (See Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the life and death of scientific paradigms. Kuhn's paradigms function as myths.) Many adults experience the death of their personal myths; for many Americans, Vietnam killed the American myth. But broken myths don't have to die. It is possible to embrace a broken myth as still living. That's what I try to help my students achieve. The key step is Paul Ricoeur's felicitous term, "second" or "willed naivete" (in contrast to the pre-critical stage of "primary naivete"). By consciously stepping back into the myth (as, for example, at the Passover seder), we restore its power, even though it is broken. That is by no means an easy step to take, but it is indispensable.
5. Finally, what makes a myth "true"? Clearly not because it corresponds to the facts, simply because we have no independent perception of those facts to compare it with. We cannot escape our humanness. But one myth may do a better job of integrating what we do perceive to be the data of experience; it accounts more adequately for more of what we perceive. For Jews, that myth is canonized in Torah. Myths are singularly tenacious. They also enjoy a certain "plasticity"; they can be reshaped to account for apparently discordant data. (Jews call that process midrash.) Finally, religious myths are existentially true; we make them true for us, they become true when we embrace them and live them. For me, the acid test is liturgy and ritual. Liturgy articulates the myth and ritual brings it vividly alive. My myth is true because I can daven from the traditional liturgy, and because Jewish ritual works brilliantly for me.
I can't count the number of times colleagues have suggested that I use some other term: midrash, construct, metaphor, paradigm, model. But each of these raises its own problems. The term myth works for me, as does my myth, and I will continue using both.
Nov 15, 2007 5:43 PM
The Conservative movement has placed such stress on Scriptural analysis that it needs to re-mythologize our sacred texts so that they are again considered holy.
Rabbi Joel Roth, JTS
Unfreezing the concept of revelation from the simplistic dictation metaphor does not require a non-traditional theological framework. The blurring of boundaries between the divine word and the human interpreter is already evident.
Tamar Ross, Bar Ilan
Nov 15, 2007 1:27 PM
Why I reject the Skeptics take on Judaism's morality_
I have never agreed with the skeptics about the immorality of Judaism. Even when I was in my 'Amalekite Baby' phase, it just didn't feel true. Why? Because the proof is in the pudding, and apart from some silly and mostly harmless 'racist' attitudes amongst deep Chareidim, Judaism's morality and more important, Jewish people's actual moral behavior, compares very, very well.
So when skeptics go on about how the Bible 'teaches slavery' I just say that's a load of baloney. The Bible has some comparatively moral slavery laws, and slavery was a fact of life back then, no culture didn't have slavery. And it was an entirely different type of slavery than what went on in the deep south. To judge laws relating to a 3,000 year old culture from today's cultural vantage point is just silly.
The skeptics will immediately respond that if I want to say that, then I can't argue that Judaism's values are timeless. But the facts are that Judaism hasn't committed any moral atrocities for thousands of years. As for the stories in the Bible about Genocide, we have no idea what really went on then.
Skeptics will accuse me of being biased. Maybe so, though I haven't shirked away from severely criticizing any other sacred cows of Judaism, and my attitudes and behavior I would think have shown me to be a fairly objective and rational thinker, willing to change my mind if shown a good argument. But I haven't (yet) changed my mind on this topic, because I have not yet seen any good arguments. If anything, I see the critics as being biased, typically these charges come from formerly frum skeptics or anti-semitic hate sites.
You can jabber on all day about Slavery in the Torah, or about the destruction of Amalek, and all the other terribly immoral and awful things in the Bible and in Halachah, yet this only increases the kashye against the skeptics. If the Torah is really so so bad, how come Jews have always been tolerant pacifists? The obvious answer is that however it works (and I don't claim to know how exactly it works), but however it works, there is something very good about the overall balance of ideals and laws in Judaism which produces a very balanced (and moral) result. Those are the facts.
Agnostic Writer has been debating with me very eloquently on this subject, so I will address some of his comments here:
"I have no significant quarrel with the behavior of Jews vis-a-vis "others" for the past many hundreds of years. My problem is with some of the foundational documents of Judaism (as well as later Halachic authorities) that teach horrific behaviors--and, if these documents are to be believed, with some atrocities Jews committed, by religious directive, long ago."
I'm sorry, but I see no evidence of 'horrific behaviors' amongst contemporary MO Jews, or even the vast majority of Chardeidi Jews. And you seem to agree. And we take our laws and our Torah very seriously. So in what way does the Torah 'teach horrific behaviors'? This is an unwarranted allegation. Of course there are some thugs and bad apples, but no society is perfect. If you compare Judaism with any other major religion, or you compare the Jewish Community with any other society through the ages, we compare very, very well. And that's what counts. So your hysterics about 'teaching horrific behaviors' simply doesn't jive with the facts on the ground. I call bias.
Second, I don't see how you can have it both ways--venerate the Bible and its God, and Halachah, as an excellent basis upon which to transmit positive values, and yet be complacent about this very Bible and this very God commanding and condoning the worst atrocities of which humans are capable--genocide, mass murder, slavery, etc. Again, it's not about what MO does or doesn't do; it's about what their Bible (and to a lesser extent, Halachah) teaches. If you really think a God and Bible and Halachah are necessary to transmit values, then the negative lessons this God and Bible and Halachah teach should influence the people. And if it doesn't influence the people--hence your complacency--then your premise that a God and Bible and Halachah are critical to transmit values...this premise seems rather weak.
So this is a slightly better point, but one which I continue to reject. It's absolutely about what we actually do, and far less about nitpicking some passage in the Bible. Judaism is an evolving religion (like all religions). For all the fealty to the timeless Torah etc, the fact is it does, it has, and it will, continue to change.
I don't see anyone in OJ condoning Genocide except in the most abstract of circumstances, and only then because Amalek are viewed as pure evil. Again, nitpicking individual points while ignoring the whole picture is dishonest, not to mention silly. And the whole picture is that the overall moral balance of Judaism has stood up very, very well, over hundreds and even thousands of years, in many different societies.
Of course at this point it gets somewhat subjective. What can you say to someone with an anti-religion or anti semitic vendetta, who refuses to see any good in Judaism or the Jews, or who magnifies every bad thing and ignores every good thing? My personal experience, and rock solid conviction, is that Judaism and Jews overall compare extremely well, and always have.
What people need to start doing is to compare like with like. People compare Chareidi extremists with upper middle class secular humanists and think they have made a decent comparison. This is dumb. Go compare Chareidi Extremists with their Islamic or even Christian counterparts. Go compare MO charity rates with Modern Christian charity rates. I remain absolutely unmoved from my firm conviction that the balance of values in Judaism as a whole, an OJ in particular, compares very very well.
Resist the temptation to false choice. We are not forced to choose between Judaism (with its atrocity-laden, miracle-claiming Bible) and some other more dishonest and more atrocity-laden tradition. Instead, we can attempt the novel path of admitting that we have no reliable knowledge about things supernatural and the possible will of any God--and that we must shoulder the necessary burden of determining ethics, based not on relics and vestiges of superstitious tribalism, no matter how familiar and poignant, but rather on standards that do not lean for support on ancient prejudice or sacred lies.
This is just wrong. What standards are you talking about? What are the basis for your standards? The value of human life? The value of equality? Where did those standards come from? These are basic religious standards? No doubt you will argue that all the good standards in Judaism are leeched from evolution, whereas all the bad stuff is of course entirely due to religion. Please explain the rational basis for your values or standards - it doesn't exist.
We can argue standards and moral theory all day long. But the proof is in the pudding, and the biggest indicator of morality is ACTUAL BEHAVIOR throughout history and currently. When I look at history, and when I look at contemporary society, I see very good things in OJ. I see an emphasis on modesty, on chessed, on charity, on family values, all good things. I don't see any Rabbis preaching genocide or slavery.
And as much as you'd like to separate "Judaism" from its Bible, I don't think that holds water. The Bible says what it says, and it says it in the name of the Jewish God. If you reject the passages teaching genocide and slavery, etc., then have the courage to stand up and say so--and remove those passages from the Bible of your proposed new creed/sect. And if you won't do so, have the integrity to admit that you are choosing to perpetuate in God's name, and in Judaism's name, these directives for genocide and slavery, and other choice evils...with the supreme and tortured irony of claiming that this represents the best way to transmit positive values.
More unwarranted hysterics. Nobody is 'teaching' slavery. The Torah provides some guidelines for its regulation. Are there some things in the Torah which nowadays would not be considered acceptable? Of course! But so what? That was 3,000 years ago! The system as a whole works very well, and we have spent the last 3,000 years refining it, and explaining away (or in some cases doing away) with any of the bad stuff (and no doubt that will continue to happen).
Your refusal to consider actual real life behaviors, and your insistence on focusing on certain problematic passages, reeks of bias. The proof is in the pudding. And the pudding is good.
Nov 15, 2007 12:03 AM
Sheitels are stupid. Wasting precious time talking about sheitels is even more stupid. I have banished the sheitels to 1999, if you want to discuss sheitels, then go there. I have lost interest, it is shtuyot. The only good thing that came out of this is that I quit WebAds. Sorry guys, I wish you hatzlachah and parnasah, but I was never really comfortable with the ads, it always felt like I had sold out. Plus there was hardly an ad that I liked anyway. Most of them were for shtuyot.
So what isn't shtuyot?
Really only two things, one of which I have been blogging about for close to three years, and one of which I hardly ever mention. The former is Torah Min Hashamayim and the whole question of religion, faith and reason, and the latter is the Shoah and the whole question of evil.
Why do I only blog about the former? It's a lot easier. The latter is beyond comprehension and too disturbing, but I really should focus more on it. There's a book I have been meaning to read for ages, a very disturbing book. It's called 'Facing the abusing God', and it's by David Blumenthal, whom I know slightly.
Anyways, in the waning days of this blog, I will try to focus on the important stuff. I know the light hearted posts can bring a smile to people's faces, and that is certainly worthwhile, but that's just not what I want to do when I really think about it seriously.
Nov 14, 2007 5:56 PM
According to Rabbi Safran:
“If you choose to dress so that your clothes draw attention to your body, the message you send out is, ‘Look at my body. I am a physical being.’ But if you choose to dress so that your clothes draw attention to your inner self, then the message you send out is, ‘I am a spiritual person. I care about my relationship with God and with the world.’”
That's fair enough. But how on earth do you dress to draw attention to your inner self? Do you wear a T Shirt which says 'I am a spiritual person' !? I just don't get it. And which of the Clary's sheitels draw attention to the inner self? I can't tell. I think the Clary Wigs web site should have a section for 'Inner Self Sheitels'. Also, instead of calling them 'Fairy Tale' and 'Pretty Woman', they should be called 'Spiritual Quest', or 'Kvudah Bas Melech Pnimah' or something like that.
What do you think? This could be a money maker!
Nov 14, 2007 5:56 PM
Jo Settler reports on the meaning of the phrase 100% virgin European Sheitel hair:
“virgin” means the hair has not been colored or dyed, and that is hasn’t undergone any treatment or process to make it artificially straight, wavy, or curled, or softer.
OK, that makes sense. But now I have a bigger problem. If 'virgin' simply means the hair hasn't undergone any treatment, but is not a reference to the original wearer of the hair, then what kind of hair am I getting, and who am I getting it from?
I mean, if I'm with my wife, and I touch her sheitel hair, what am I touching? If it's the hair off some hot babe, then OK, I can live with that. But what if it's hair off some dead, lice infested crack whore? I'm thinking that's not so great.
Also, no one actually addressed my original question. Are sexy sheitels tzanuah? Doesn't seem so. Has anyone read Rabbi Safran's new book? What does he have to say about Sexy Sheitels? Is he ok with them?
Nov 14, 2007 11:44 AM
OK, I'm gone from WebAds. If Rabbi Safran wants to sue me (for what?) then go ahead. WebAds have nothing to do with me.
Nov 14, 2007 11:44 AM
BREAKING NEWS: XGH and WebAds being threatened with legal action!_
Wow. Seems Rabbi Safran is seriously upset over my Sheitel posts. He is threatening legal action against WebAds and me. Of course this is INSANE and he has absolutely NO CASE whatsoever. And for a Rabbi, this is rather disapointing and pathetic behavior. Have you no sense of humor? Evidently not. (Can I get sued for that too?)
This all sounds very much like the OrthoMom thing.
However WebAds has asked me to take the offending posts down, and I like the WebAds people. What should I do? If I give in, is this is defeat for free speech, and a victory for intimidation? Or is it just doing the right thing?
Your opinions please ASAP.
Nov 13, 2007 11:04 PM
Ooops. Seems I insulted Rabbi Safran and his wife when I wrote:
"But if you have a wife who owns a sexy sheitel company, maybe writing as book on tznius is not the best idea? Then again, maybe that's exactly why he wrote it. And if so, he has my sympathies."
I didn't mean any harm by that! I was just projecting a little, I'm not a big fan of sexy sheitels and I thought maybe he wasn't. Anyway I was completely wrong, because my wife informs me that she actually owns a Clary and she likes it very much, and it's not sexy at all. Not at all. Not frumpy either chas vesholom. But not sexy. It's exactly as Rav Falk would say: 'Dignified and elegant, as befits a true Bas Yisrael'.
Also, when I wrote:
Another wig is called 'Pretty Woman', and they write 'that its 'Inspired by the motion picture'. Great! A sheitel inspired by a prostitute.
I was clearly out of line. We all know the plot of the movie: Julia Roberts does teshuvah, and ends up marrying a nice guy. She's a genuine role model, especially for today's picky singles, and it's an honor to have a sheitel named after her.
Oh, and do me a favor. Buy the man's book! And a Clary sheitel or two for the wife. Nothing says 'I love you' more than a sheitel. Actually, a sheitel says more than just 'I love you'. A sheitel says 'I love you, now go cover your frizzy mousey mange with finest quality 100% virgin European human hair'. And what could be better than that? I mean, your wife may not be a 100% virgin European, but her hair sure can be!
Also, that rumor about sheitel hair coming from Indian avodah zarah is totally false. No truth in it all. Also, they don't use the hair from dead people, or people with AIDS or any other nasty diseases. Or lice. And the hair is completely new, never been used before. It's 100% virgin, as the web site says.
Or maybe the person donating the hair was 100% virgin, I can't tell. Or maybe both the hair and the hair owner were 100% virgin? Could be.
But what does it mean to have 100% virgin hair? Never been washed? Can't be. Never been used for a wig before, and then recycled into a new wig? Doesn't make much sense. Elah may? Must be peshat is that the hair isn't virgin, but the hair wearer was a virgin. Is this important? I guess so, because we wouldn't want anything icky to have happened while the original hair wearer was wearing that hair. That would give me cooties.
So, you can be guaranteed that the original wearer (and owner) of the hair was:
a) Clean
b) Free of disease
c) A virgin
d) European (not Asian chas vesholom)
e) Very poor.
No wait! Not poor, but comfortable and well educated, and very clean living.
Ahh, so why is she selling her hair? It's bichlal not a kashyeh! She grew it long to donate it to a friend who had cancer, but then sadly the friend died, so she sold it to a sheitel macher, and then used the proceeds to start a charitable foundation!
Nov 13, 2007 2:55 PM
Yehudi Hilchati asked me to define LW MO, since I stated that I was comfortable with LW MO's take on Halachah. So who is an example of a reasonably well known LW MO Rabbi or Posek?
This is a tough one, and I'm not so up on all the politics. No doubt Gil or AddeRabbi could furnish a more complete list. But here is my first attempt (in no particular order).
US
Rabbi Avi Weiss
Rabbi Dov Linzer
Rabbi Saul Berman
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg (borderline)
Rabbi Michael Broyde
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz (deceased)
Rabbi Marc Angel
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein
Rabbi Barry Freundel
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky
Rabbi Kenneth Brander (?)
UK
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen
Israel
Anyone in Tzohar (Rav David Stav?)
Rabbi David Hartman (borderline)
Rabbi David Halivni (borderline)
Rabbi Nathan Lopez Cardozo
Nov 12, 2007 11:43 PM
Non Fundamentalist Orthodoxy: FAQ_
Isn’t your new Hashkafah just Orthopraxy? What is the difference?
Orthopraxy typically means keeping the halachah (at least publicly) because one likes the Orthodox community and lifestyle, and finds it easier to ‘go with the flow’ than leave, however the Orthoprax individual has no beliefs. My Hashkafah differs in that it attempts to provide a theological and even traditional basis for the Halachic lifestyle.
In the same way that nowadays many Modern Orthodox no longer believe in a literal ‘Adam Min Hashamyim’ (AMS), my argument is that Torah Min Hashamayim (TMS) is similar.
In fact, the parallels are striking. From the dawn of religion until recently, AMS was accepted as standard dogma. It was inconceivable that man wasn’t created directly by God. It was even inconceivable that the earth wasn’t at the center of the universe. Whilst these beliefs were never codified, this is not because they weren’t considered foundational, but rather because no other religion argued with this, and therefore there was no need to codify them! Even today, amongst the extremist Chareidim, they view AMS as sacrosanct, and cannot possibly accept the idea of evolution.
Yet, as many people in the Modern Orthodox (and even LW UO) world have been saying, evolution can be perfectly compatible with Orthodoxy, as long as you see the ‘Divine Inspiration’ behind the evolutionary process. Likewise with Torah, there is no reason to say that by definition an evolved Torah cannot be ‘Divine’. Indeed Rav Kook accepts that it could, and so have some contemporary Rabbis. As I noted a long time ago, and as James Kugel noted too, Halacha is only very loosely based on Torah Shebichtav. Even Rabbi Micha Berger recently said that the DH (i.e. a composite Torah) is not technically a threat to Yahadus (only socially so).
But the Mesorah has always held of a literal TMS. How can you change that?
The Mesorah has held of a lot of things literally. The question is when did this literalism start? It seems that there were different viewpoints in Chazal and Rishonim, as AJ Heschel shows in his monumental work, Torah Min Hashamayim. I believe that a non literal understanding of TMS is in keeping with Judaism, an represents an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary step forward. The Rishonim were willing to accept that parts of Torah came later, and Rav Kook goes even further, and says even if you hold the (wrong) idea that 'Ayzeh parshiyot' came later, the Halachah is still binding because the kedushah of the Torah comes from it's acceptance by klal yisrael (and not because it was divinely dictated at Sinai). The obvious progression is that perhaps many parts came later, or as David Halivini theorizes, some parts became various separate traditions, which were then later recombined.
OK. So Torah is ‘Divinely Inspired’, and is in fact a composite document. But what does that mean? Are you saying that instead of God dictating the Torah to Moshe at Sinai, He instead dictated it to many people over hundreds of years?!
No! Divinely Inspired is a continuum. It can mean anything from ‘Inspired by the Divine’ to ‘God dictated the actual words’. Our tradition says that Moshe was inspired, though the text of the Torah is extremely vague about what parts of the text are included in that, and also what the process actually was.
An extremist literal understanding of this tradition will say that God dictated the actual words. However this is not necessarily the only understanding. There are Rishonim who say that Moshe heard the concepts, and then used his own words. There are midrashim which say that the Avos wrote Breishis using Ruach Hakodesh.
But what is ruach hakodesh? Did Einstein discover this theories with ruach hakodesh? Is this article written with Ruach Hakodesh? Obviously there is no way of knowing. Ruach Hakodesh could mean anything from inspiration to God planting the actual words.
But Judaism has been going strong for thousands of years, with an excellent track record, and many inspiring and world changing ideas. More importantly, Judaism provides a framework for spirituality, morality and a relationship with God. Just like the Rambam says with ‘Loshon Hakodesh’ – why is it called Loshon Hakodesh? Because God invented it? No! says the Rambam. It’s a normal language like every other language, it evolved over time. But it’s ‘kodesh’ because it contains no rude words. And yet we feel it’s a special language. Likewise Torah. Is it Divine because God dictated it word for word? Of course not. But it’s certainly Divinely Inspired (in general). How far along the ‘Divinely Inspired’ continuum you want to go is at your discretion.
So why aren’t other religions Divinely Inspired? Don’t these arguments work just as well for Christianity?
Of course! As Rav Kook says, all religions are Divinely Inspired to various degrees, even Avodah Zarah! However we believe in our religion, that it’s Divinely Inspired and a good framework. And history confirms this. But this of course does NOT mean that Judaism is the one true religion. It doesn’t even have to mean that Judaism is necessarily the best religion (though Rav Kook argues that it is, and I would too). All it means is that it’s a GOOD religion. What more do you need? And, if you think you have found a better religion, and can back that up with good arguments, then go be happy! Though I would still argue that you have a responsibility to your own people first.
So let me get this straight. OJ is Divinely Inspired to some extent, but God didn’t actually write the Torah. So why should I bother keeping all the halachot? They are too difficult!
The halachot all have rational reasons behind them. Some have ethical concerns, some are there to ensure that Judaism remains distinct. Some are relics of anti avodah zarah legislation, and some deal with the spiritual. But all of them have perfectly rational and worthwhile goals. It makes no difference whether God specifically commanded each detail, or whether they are all Divinely Inspired. We keep them because it makes sense, and because we believe that this is the kind of thing that God ‘wants’ kaveyochol.
But where's the motivation?
People are motivated by all sorts of things. People give up their lives for love, or for other ideals, none of which have anything to do with God. If you value something, you will sacrifice for it. It's as simple as that. Divine Dictation not required!
OK, so I keep halachot because I see there is value in them, and they may even be Divinely Inspired to some extent. And let’s say that you could even re-interpret most of Chazal to fit with this, like Heschel does. But is this sustainable?
We have very little data on what is sustainable and what isn’t. Ever since the enlightenment, the secular world has been expecting religion to crumble, but so far it has gone the opposite way. Nietzsche famously wrote ‘God is dead’. Meanwhile, Nietzsche is dead and God is alive and well. You might say thats only fundamentalist religion, and that non fundamentalist religion has no hope. But this is clearly not true, and recently even non fundamentalist religion seems to be getting ‘frummer’. Non Halachic Judaism certainly doesn’t seem to last. But Halachic Judaism with a non literal TMS? That could work. Only time will tell.
I'm convinced! So what’s next?
A new blog. A book. A lecture tour. Fame and fortune! But seriously, this is the ideology I have been working towards for two years. And I am getting closer and closer to it with each iteration. Baruch Hashem.
Nov 12, 2007 11:43 PM
_One of the ads running at the top for the last few days has been for a new book on modesty, 'You are what you wear' by Rabbi Eliyahu Safran. OK, so that's not a bad thing.
But then I see that Rabbi Safran's wife is the designer for Clary's wigs, and then I see that Clary's wigs includes a full line of sexy sheitels!
Unbelievable.
Here's one wig called 'Fairy Tale'. And another wig is called 'Pretty Woman', and they write 'that its 'Inspired by the motion picture'.
Great! A sheitel inspired by a prostitute.
_
Sexy Sheitel what have you done
You made a fool of everyone
You made a fool of everyone
Sexy Sheitel ooh what have you done
Sexy Sheitel you broke the rules
You layed it down for all to see
You layed it down for all to see
Sexy Sheitel oooh you broke the rules
And not only that, Rebbetzin Safran's wig expertise has a haskamah!:
"Klari Guttmann Safran’s reputation as a renowned, trustworthy and highly regarded expert in all facets of human hair analysis, has been further corroborated by the gracious acknowledgement of some of the most prominent Rabbonim throughout the world."
What the heck does that even mean? The mind boggles. Anyways, I'm sure the Safrans are wonderful people. But if you have a wife who owns a sexy sheitel company, maybe writing as book on tznius is not the best idea?
Nov 12, 2007 6:58 PM
Looking for Chizuk in all the wrong places: An apology to many people!_
Dedicated to Holy Hyrax, Littlefoxling, Rabbi Joshua Maroof, EvanstonJew, and a whole host of others.
There is a disease that infects frum skeptics, especially those coming from a chareidi background. I know, because I had it too. Ironically, the disease manifests itself as a kind of simplistic fundamentalism, the very thing that the skeptics usually decry. For example, a frum skeptic recently wrote:
'It's either chareidi or bust, and it ain't chareidi!'
In other words, either Chareidi Judaism is 100% true, or else all religion is total nonsense. This is why we see many formerly frum skeptics not just giving up Chareidi Judaism, but also giving up religion altogether, including any belief in God. They have been conditioned to believe that Chareidi Judaism is the one and only true religion, and once they realize that's not true, nothing else will do.
Running in tandem with this is another even more pernicious attitude, that of 'realism', 'logical positivism', 'evidentialism', or whatever you want to call it. Formerly Frum Skeptics have been so theologically and intellectually abused by false arguments for the truth of religion, that they become extreme fundamentalists in the opposite direction, refusing to believe in anything at all unless backed up by solid and reliable evidence.
I call this problem 'Binary Simplistic Evidentialism', or BSE for short. And I know more than a few skeptics who are quite mad with it. I certainly was.
Of course, believing in things contra any known evidence is often quite silly. But not provably so, and more importantly, not always so. What to make of people who have faith in their own abilities, or their children's abilities, even though the odds are stacked against them? Or the famous scientist who, despite the ridicule of all his colleagues and the weight of evidence against him, presses on with his theory undaunted? To insist that we only believe in the provable is quite silly. There is no such 'law'. Not only is this silly, but quiet hypocritical too, coming from the skeptics. As if there was some grand moral law that we 'must' act in a certain way!
The human spirit clearly includes a very strong spiritual/religious aspect, declaring this to be a 'waste of time' is as silly as declaring the love of music or art to be a waste of time. It is part of what makes us human. Is this spiritual / religious drive 'evidence' that God exists? Probably not, but that makes no difference. To be human means to fully expand and experience all of our unique human abilities. That is the essence of humanity. At the very least, all the world's religions are attempts by humans to put shape and form to their spiritual feelings.
Frum Skeptics however have a hard time appreciating any of this. Burned by the realization that their fundamentalist religion isn't 'true', they embark on a crusade for Scientific evidentialism in every area of their life, as if this was somehow 'required'. Any philosophy or theory which gives the tiniest support to extra-rational thought or modes of being is mocked. Post Modernism is rejected in toto, for being associated with the (extreme) idea that all truths are equal, and that everything is subjective. Of course, at some level, everything IS indeed subjective, it has to be. There is no way out of that.
Some Frum Skeptics however, are still struggling to make sense out of life and religion. These people, and I was one of them, are seriously conflicted. On the one hand, they are heavily infected with BSE, on the other, they still hope to meet the Rabbi in Shining Beckishe, who can prove to them once and for all that Orthodox Judaism is the one true religion. Of course this is never going to happen, and the more they search for this the worse the pain gets.
I see this playing out all the time. I pinned my hopes on Rabbi Joshua Maroof, who, coming from the Chaitian sect, firmly believes that Judaism is 100% provable (at least to any reasonable non biased person). But the more I debated with RJM, and the more I found him unconvincing (to me personally), the more frustrated I got, and I took out my frustrations on him. (Sorry RJM!)
I saw the same thing happening with littlefoxling too. Someone had convinced littlefoxling that the answer to Life, the Universe and Orthodox Judaism was contained in Reb Elchonon Wasserman's kovetz maamarim. Foxy got all excited, but then his hopes were dashed as he saw what a load of nonsense it all was, at least from an evidentialist perspective. I was actually amused by all this, since even from Yeshivah days I had known that Kovetz Maamarim was silly.
Witness too Holy Hyrax, on his never ending search for the answer, and his frustration at not finding it. And of course I personally played out this little drama too.
The problem with this, of course, is that the proofs for Orthodoxy don't exist, at least not from an evidentialist perspective. From a rational, objective, perspective these proofs do not convince anyone not already convinced. Even more importantly, the people promoting the proofs wouldn't themselves find the proofs convincing, were it not for the powerful, personal subjective feelings that they already have that Orthodoxy is true.
Occasionally, the proofs do make an impact on someone, but this is usually due to shock value. In the same way that reading 'Who wrote the Bible' can be so shocking that a frum person can turn skeptic overnite, likewise having an uninformed skeptic suddenly be exposed to a full range of Aish style proofs can equally provide a shock in the opposite direction. Apparently Anthony Flew, famous lifelong atheist, had such an experience when exposed to Gerald Schroeder's theories of Breishis.
But, these anomalies aside, the informed and intelligent frum skeptic is never going to be convinced by these entirely subjective arguments. Even worse, the disappointing process of debate will push the skeptic even further away from religion and spirituality. The frum skeptic is in fact looking for chizuk in all the wrong places. The worst place for a skeptic to look for chizuk is with a Chaitian, or similar Kiruv Rabbi with 'proofs'. This will go nowhere, and will only end in tears for all concerned.
What the frum skeptic should do is to look in another place entirely - they should look to religiously inspired personalities who are fully cognizant AND ACCEPTING of modern science, Biblical criticism and all the rest. The biggest chizuk to me are the various Rabbis (and bloggers) that I know, many of whom come from Conservative or even secular backgrounds, who know and accept Science, Archeology, Biblical Criticism and all the rest, and yet still find religion in general, and Orthodox Judaism in particular, to be noble and inspiring, and even 'true' in some sense.
The BSE infected Skeptic's gut reaction to this is most likely nausea and/or incomprehension. How can one possibly value Orthodox Judaism as being 'true' in any way shape or form, if it in fact isn't? The skeptic will mock, the skeptic will dismiss this as 'PoMo', or as the deluded rationalizations of someone with cognitive dissonance, but there is more going on here. Much more.
Of course the fundamentalist claims of certain historical events happening are not true. We know that man was not created fully formed 6,000 years ago. We know that man evolved over millions of years. We know that the Torah text we have was not created fully formed 4,000 years ago. We know that the text evolved over hundreds of years. We know that the Halachic System was not created fuly formed, but it too evolved over hundreds of years. As one skeptic's mantra goes: 'Orthodox Judaism isn't true'. Yes, from a simplistic evidentialist perspective, we know that.
But now it is time to move on. Just because the fundamentalist claims are untrue, doesn't mean everything is untrue. There are thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Jews who don't believe the fundamentalist claims, but are nonetheless passionately committed to the religion (as they see it). One of my Rabbis tells me he teaches Reform students at a college level, and many of them have deeply held Chareidi conceptions of God and Providence! Of course this is no contradiction, and is only incomprehensible to the Frum Skeptic with BSE.
The bottom line here is that the Frum Skeptic needs to move on from the realization that OJ's central tenets are not only NOT provably true, but are more likely provably false. There are very few of the 13 ikkarim which are provably true, if any, and many are either provably false, or at the very least an analysis of the evidence shows how these beliefs evolved over time, or were copied from other religions. That much is obvious. Now move on.
How to move on?
Not by a constant search for the 'proof'. This is a waste of time. Not by rejecting all religion and spirituality, this is a bad move. Not by engaging those still in the grip of fundamentalism, you will only get frustrated, and so will they. But rather, by seeking out like minded people, people who 'get' the value of religion, even without the fundamentalist beliefs. Those people are not very numerous, but they do exist. They exist in LW MO, and they exist in RW Conservadoxy. There are also certainly individuals in RW MO and even LW UO who think like this, but due to social pressures they keep their true views very well hidden. I know some of these people personally, which is a blessing for me, but they may not exist in your community.
So, the task for the Frum Skeptic, and by that I mean the individual who is genuinely frum yet also genuinely skeptical, is to realize that these two modes of being are not necessarily contradictory. This is very difficult, especially for people with the 'Chareidi or bust' indoctrination. Or for 'Engineers' (as DovBear likes to say). Difficult, but not impossible.
Please understand that this is not an appeal for believing in any old thing, or for PoMo. This is an appeal to realize that there is more to life than BSE.
AJ Heschel and Louis Jacobs, to cite some recent examples, were two individuals who knew full well the Documentary Hypothesis and similar challenges to the ikkarim, Yet both were passionately religious. Were they fools? No, of course not. They were two gifted people who let their intense subjective experiences guide them in life, which is after all, what we all do at some level. Even Spinoza was called 'God intoxicated'.
So, I apologize to all the people that I insulted when I was suffering from my disease. I apologize to RJM, to evanstonjew, to all these people. My only excuse is that I was suffering, genuinely suffering. I was a mad cow skeptic.
But hopefully, I am on the way to a cure. And I will be posting about how you too can cure yourselves. If you want to.
Nov 9, 2007 7:06 PM
Beware! The Age of Curious Children Is Upon Us_
Cast
XGH Junior, age 5
XGH Juniorette, age 3 (three and a half, daddy)
XGH Senior, age too old
Place
In the minivan, driving home from the local Kosher Chinese place
Junior: (Totally out of the blue) Can I see God?
XGH: (Thinks: Oh no, here we go) No, you can't see Him, He's invisible.
Junior: But if I go into space I we can see Him, right?
XGH: No, He's invisible everywhere, even in space.
Junior: How does He get invisible?
XGH: He has a special power, you know, like Superman.
Juniorette: God is Hashem daddy.
XGH: That's right honey, it's just two different names.
Juniorette: Is God a girl or a boy?
XGH: Wow, that's a good question! God isn't a boy or a girl.
Juniorette: What is God?
XGH: (thinks furiously) God isn't a person at all! God doesn't have any arms or legs. God is something very special which isn't a person.
Juniorette: Can we watch Ratatouille when we get home?
XGH: (phew, close call) Yes, as long as you get into your pjs and brush your teeth first.
(OK, OK, I lied. That last line clearly wasn't me, it was the Rebbetzin).
Nov 9, 2007 1:33 PM
Is reality analog or digital?_
This is a key question.
It should be clear to most that reality is actually analog. We impose a 'digital' map over reality, and quantify size, weight, speed and other dimensions using a digital system, but these are only approximations of the underlying analog reality. And this is not just true in the case of dimensions, it is equally true when considering matter itself. We may talk about atoms, particles, electrons, but underneath all of that is a vast space-time-matter-energy-string fabric. And underneath all of that is a mystery.
Halachah works in a similar way. Is a Mikveh of 40 saah minus one H20 molecule really less capable of being metaher than a Mikveh of 40 saah? Does the additional molecule really make a difference? The answer, baring any mystical explanations, is that for Halachah to work it simply must impose a digital framework over analog reality. 40 saah is good, anything less isn't.
Another example: In the old days, we simplistically talked about whether people where heterosexual or homosexual, as if these were two binary states that one could only be in on eor the other. Nowadays of course it is recognized that there is a continuum, an infinite number of states between homosexual at one extreme and heterosexual at the other.
The same is true of pretty much everything else in the world.
We impose our digital framework on analog reality. So, dividing the world between 'Atheist' and 'Theist' is likewise incorrect, there is a continuum. Actually, in the case of beliefs and thought in general, the reality is so analog that even imposing a digital map over that becomes difficult. How do we measure whether someone is sufficiently on the 'Theistic' end of the God belief continuum as to be deemed a Theist?
Fundamentalists like to think in digital terms, even binary terms; there is only black or white, true or false, kosher or treif. There is no grey and no maybe. But of course reality is much more complex than that.
But let’s get back to fundamental reality.
Judaism has always maintained that there is a Unity underlying everything. Science certainly doesn’t disprove that, and in fact the quest for the single unifying scientific theory of everything would seem to be a signal that Science actually agrees with this theory.
What is this Unity? In the Torah, it is given various names, and even anthropomorphic features. The Rambam famously came along and said that all this was metaphorical, for weak minded people, and really we cannot possibly conceive of it, except through it’s ‘actions’.
But clearly we cannot see or in any way perceive this Unity performing ‘actions’, so in fact what the Rambam is really saying is that we can understand this Unity by reflecting on reality, how reality is constructed (Science and Nature), what happens in this reality (History), and perhaps just as importantly, what goes on in the subjective reality of our minds (ethics, morality, spirituality, yetzer tov, yetzer horah etc).
So, it should be clear that any concept of this Unity is derived entirely from studying our reality. Of course this is subjective; reality itself might be pretty straightforward and objective, but how we perceive this Unity might differ from person to person. One person may look at all the evil in the world and say that the underlying Unity is evil, another may say that the underlying Unity is indifferent, has no consciousness, cannot be termed either ‘good or evil’.
Of course none of this is provable, nor is it likely to ever be. And your conception of this Unity runs along a continuum of multiple dimensions. More fundamentalist types prefer a very concretized conception – they want to name the Unity, declare it’s likes and dislikes, claim to know exactly what it is ‘thinking’. Those who prefer to call themselves Atheists or Agnostics just say the Unity is a ‘mystery’, and refuse to think much more about it.
Somewhat orthogonal to the continuum of abstract vs. concrete conceptions of the Unity lies another continuum – that of relationship. These two continuums do not necessarily correlate – you may have someone with a very concrete conception of the Unity as a particular named God, but who doesn’t spend any time at all thinking about his God, or relating to it in any other way. Conversely, you may have someone with a rather abstract conception of a Unity, but who spends all his waking hours meditating on it, or acting in ways he things are required by it’s existence.
Judaism of course provides a name for the Unity, actually it provides many many names, signifying that the name itself is not so important. And in fact even the main name, YHWH, really doesn’t mean anything at all. Even the letters are rather intangible, floating into non existence.
Judaism also claims that we see God acting in the world. But how is this possible? The Rambam visualized this through the spheres – the Divine ‘flow’ flows through the various planets, through the moon, and down to earth. In the Rambam’s worldview, the planets were in fact spiritual objects, and through their various movements God controlled the world.
Nowadays of course we know this is all nonsense, the planets are cold, dead rock, gas and ice. They are not spiritual beings. But we have a new possibility; maybe God controls things through the Quantum level. No doubt in the future this will also seem like nonsense, as our knowledge of the quantum level deepens.
The key point here is that even though we have no idea what the mechanism is, Judaism sees the world as being under Divine providence, though there are many arguments as to the finer details. This is in line with our conception of God as a supremely good God, and a God who wouldn’t just desert humanity.
Is Judaism’s view of the Unity true? Of course there is no way of knowing that. We can debate certain historical doctrines, whether the Bible was indeed written down all at once, under a flash of Divine Inspiration, or whether it formed over many centuries. But the time and manner of the Bible's compilation is almost irrelevant (except to fundamentalists). The more important question is what level of Divine Inspiration was involved.
How can we measure Divine Inspiration?
Again this is a continuum, and depends on your view of the underlying Unity. There is no possible way of proving or measuring this, it’s something you either believe in or not, to various degrees. Were the Biblical Writers Divinely Inspired? Was Shakespeare? Was Einstein? Nobody can know these things, they are not subject to proof or disproof.
What is Divine Inspiration? Do we mean the Divine came down and planted ideas in someone head? They heard voices? They were simply inspired by the idea of the Divine? Again, a continuum, with an abstract end and a highly concrete end.
Ultimately it boils down to choice: What particular conception of the world do you choose to have? Do you look at reality as a somewhat random, purposeless sequence of events, or is something deeper going on? We cannot see the depth, we can only imagine it.
Evolution provides a good example. Believers in God who accept Evolution see a deeper plan behind it. Atheists however see Evolution as an example of a random unplanned process. To both groups of people, the underlying process happened in exactly the same way from a physical perspective, it is one reality, yet two entirely different frameworks are imposed on that reality. And both frameworks work equally well, given what we know currently.
In the same way that man has evolved, religion and religious texts have evolved too. This much is obvious. We can examine the vestigial organs in our religious texts as easily as we can see them in man. But that is not the question.
The question in both the evolution of man, and the evolution of religion, is the same: Was this Divinely Inspired? The answer is entirely up to you. And perhaps more importantly, the answer isn’t digital. It’s analog.
Nov 9, 2007 1:33 PM
Chaim tries to understand anachronistic peshat_
There has been a series of highly entertaining posts over at Divrei Chaim, as Chaim B tries to wrap his mind around all the various anachronistic peshatim that we find on the Torah, for example Lot eating matzah and things like that. Chaim B writes:
But if one dismisses these approaches as overly literalistic, as anachronistic, as pilpul shel hevel, what is one to make of seforim like the Parashas Derachim… the Chasam Sofer… the Hafla’ah… the Netziv…the Yismach Moshe… the Meshech Chochma… and so many others which engage in these type readings?
In the same vein, what is one to make of Chassidic seforim which impose an entire system of meta-halachic concerns for tikunim and birurim on the acts of the Avos? Isn’t this an anachronistic reading as well, an imposition on the text which could not possibly be pshat or inherent in a “rational” understanding of the text?
He then goes on to talk about a concrete example, that of Lot eating Matzah:
When the Angels come to Lot we are told that he served them matzos. Rashi comments (19:3): “Pesach haya” – it was the holiday of Pesach. ... Rashi seems to be addressing a simple textual question – why mention the seemingly insignificant detail of what bread was served. If you dismiss Rashi as “derash” and not pshat, what does that mean? – did Rashi waste his time composing “fictional” answers to explain troublesome details in the text? Or to put it another way, if Rashi knew it was irrational or improbable for Lot to have really kept Pesach and eaten matzah, then hasn’t Rashi failed to answer the textual question he posed?
LOL. Based on all the Rashis I have seen, somehow I don't think that a major concern of Rashi was if certain peshatim were 'improbable' or 'irrational'. Rashi probably believed that Lot actually ate Matzah. Chaim, you need to stop thinking like this, it's a very slippery slope you know. Next you'll be telling us how it's improbable and irrational to say that 2 million people left Egypt!
Anyways, after musing about this for a while, Chaim finally hits upon an answer:
Just like 2+2=4 is true in all possible times and places, once halacha declares lo ba l'olam an invalid kinyan [talking about how Esav could sell the bechorah] it cannot exist **as a unit of text** in a Torah which is true at all times as places. In other words, the issue is not how historically a sale of something which is lo ba l'olam could occur, but rather how Torah as a timelessly true could text contain such a phenomenon.
Somewhat of a strange PoMO peshat there. Chaim concludes with the following:
I appreciate the difficulties with this approach raised in the comments, but I don't see another model that would explain what these meforshim are doing.
Well, I have another model. These meforshim were not concerned about rationality. They truly believed that the Avos kept Kol Hatorah Kulah. I don't understand why that's so difficult for you to comprehend. After all, there's plenty of other crazy, irrational and highly improbable stuff in OJ which you accept without a thought, why are you so stuck on this?
Anyway, tune in next week when Chaim suddenly realizes that all the world's animals on a little boat is 'improbable and irrational', and spends 5 posts wondering why Rashi didn't pick up on that.
Nov 9, 2007 1:33 PM
The Chief Rabbi's evolutionary secrets
09/11/2007
By Simon Rocker
The Secret of the Twelve sounds like the title of one of those religious thrillers made fashionable by The Da Vinci Code. In fact, it is a phrase drawn from the world of biblical commentary and in particular, from one of its greatest exponents. In a gloss on Deuteronomy, the 12th-century Ibn Ezra writes: "If you understand the secret of the twelve you will know the truth."
This is an allusion to the concluding 12 verses of the Torah about the death of Moses, which has posed a conundrum for some commentators: if the Torah was transmitted by God to Moses, then how could Moses have written about his own death? Ibn Ezra's cryptic comments, according to some interpreters, suggest that he believes that these verses as well as a number of others in the Torah were added after Moses. But such controversial thoughts could be the subject of only veiled hints, rather than spelt out.
A few days ago I was contacted by a reader who thought he had detected what you might call a secret moment in the Chief Rabbi's new book, The Home We Build Together. Sir Jonathan's attack on multiculturalism as socially divisive has already caused a stir in some circles and the arguments will no doubt continue to rumble on in the book pages of journals and newspapers.
But the book's main thesis is not what caught this reader's attention: instead, it was a particular phrase that he spotted in an extract from the book, which appeared in The Times. The relevant passage runs:
The authors of the Bible were among the first historians. Two-thirds of the books of the Bible are historical. Yet biblical Hebrew has no word for history. In its place, the Bible uses a significantly different word: Zakhor, 'remember'. It appears no less than 169 times in the Bible. Above all, there is the reiterated refrain: 'Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.'
What struck my correspondent were the words, the authors of the Bible. Do they not imply that the Chief Rabbi believes the Torah was, at least, in part a work of human composition?
The Chief Rabbi's writings have landed him in hot water before, most notably with his book The Dignity of Difference, an appeal for religious tolerance published five years ago. He was forced to amend it after an outcry from other Orthodox rabbis who accused him of suggesting that other religions possessed revealed truths apart from the Torah.
But on this occasion, the phrase authors of the Bible looks fairly innocuous. Almost certainly, the Chief Rabbi was thinking of books such as Kings or Chronicles, without including the Five Books of Moses. So far there has been no harrumphing from the sages of Gateshead or Stamford Hill.
One curiosity, however, does lurk within the passage. If you add up the historical books of the Bible ” Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, along with Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Chronicles ” they do not amount to two-thirds of the canon. You only come near that figure if you include the Torah books. So a secular reader ignorant of Orthodox doctrine might assume that the Chief Rabbi believed there was a human hand behind all of the Bible. Nonetheless, a clinching argument against such an interpretation is that the text was vetted by the London Beth Din and they would hardly have let through anything theologically contentious (the registrar and dayanim are thanked in the book's acknowledgments).
There is another passage in the book worth mentioning for a different reason. The faultline between groups is not, as it has so often been thought, an inexorable fact of human nature, hardwired into our genes, the Chief Rabbi writes. We do indeed feel hostile to the outsider, the other, the stranger, the alien. That is written into our evolutionary psychology, and it will surface whenever it is given the chance.
Evolutionary psychology is a modern discipline which traces the development of the human mind to our ancestors struggles for survival. Today, many Orthodox rabbis believe that evolutionary theory is compatible with the story of creation in Genesis. But consider this.
In the original edition of The Dignity of Difference, the Chief Rabbi could at one point write:
The sense of belonging goes back to prehistory, to the hunter-gatherer stage in the evolution of mankind, when homo sapiens first emerged. Being part of the group was essential to life itself. Outside it, surrounded by predators, the individual could not survive. Some of our deepest, genetically encoded instincts go back to that time.
By the second, revised edition, this has been rewritten as:
The sense of belonging goes back to the dawn of humanity, when being part of the group was essential to life itself. Outside it, surrounded by predators, the individual could not survive. Some of our deepest instincts go back to that time.
The explicit reference to evolution has gone.
Why the mention of evolution is admissible in the latest book, but was cut from Dignity mark two, is an intriguing question. But then evolution is still a potential minefield: remember the Zoo Rabbi, Manchester-born Natan Slifkin and the ban on some of his books by several of the world's leading strictly Orthodox rabbis.
It is one thing vaguely to agree that Genesis and evolution are reconcilable. It is another to produce a systematic account which details how scientific and religious teachings can sit happily together. Evolution sets off a chain of queries. Does the biblical figure of Adam represent the first human being with the consciousness to perceive God? But if he is the product of evolution, then it is less plausible that he is immortal, which means reading the story of the Tree of Life partly as fable. And if one part of the Torah may be read as poetic rather than literal truth, then why not other parts?
All in all, social policy seems safer terrain for rabbis, especially Chief Rabbis, than theology.
Nov 9, 2007 1:33 PM
Britain's Jewish Chronicle questions whether Chief Rabbi believes in Torah Min Hashamayim!_
Wow. This just in. Apprently there is a long article in the JC this morning which questions whether Chief Rabbi Sacks actually believes in Torah Min Hashamayim! I hope to have a scan later.
I know an MO Rabbi who told me that he always keeps in the back of his mind that he would be ok with it if it turns out the Torah was a composite document, though he hopes it isn't true.
[UPDATE: I posted the article. It mentions evolution too.]
I think there are a lot of parallels to evolution here. The chareidim believe in a literal AMS (Adam Min Hashamayim). God created Adam fully formed, and plopped him into Gan Eden. Chareidim just cannot accept evolution, because the 'Divine Guidance' behind it is much more obscure, and hidden. Likewise TMS. Chareidim must believe that God created the whole Torah in one go, and handed it over to Moshe fully formed on Har Sinai.
But any Jew who is comfortable with evolution should see things differently. With evolution, many kiruv Rabbis have argued that it makes no difference if the process seems random, with all sorts of false starts along the way, guided by various naturalistic happenings (e.g. Yucatan meteor wiping out the dinos). We believe God was behind evolution, and that was always the plan from the beginning. Evolution was DIVINELY INSPIRED. AMS is true, but not in the simplistic literal way that the chareidim think.
Likewise with Torah. It doesn't matter if the text came together in some composite way, with all sorts of naturalistic influences. We believe God was behind it all the way. The Torah was DIVINELY INSPIRED. TMS is true, but not in the simplistic literal way that the chareidim think.
If it works for Man, why not for Torah?
Nov 8, 2007 9:57 PM
[Abraham Joshua Heschel's Torah from Heaven is an awesome looking book. Several hundred pages long, an exploration of Chazal's attitudes to TMS. Heschel wasn't stam some Conservative nobody, he knew Tenach and Chazal backwards, so I assume that his analysis of Chazal and his conclusions are at least reasonable, if not convincing. I have this book. I must read it. It's a very long book. Maybe I should start a chavrusoh in it? There might be some real gems in there. Why isn't it more widely known and read? A few reasons: 1) The frum olam won't read it because Heschel is treif 2) It was only translated recently, for many years you could only buy it in the original Hebrew, 3) It was written in a difficult Hebrew , so the Conservative types probably didn't read it much either. Is it a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered by the frum skeptics? Could be! Here is a review I found online.]
Heschel's "Torah from Heaven"
Arnold Jacob Wolf
SUSANNAH HESCHEL WRITES IN HER FORWARD TO "Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations":
"It seems clear that, for my father, Torah min Hashamayim was not simply another tome, nor was it a conventional work of scholarship. Rather it was a 'sefer', a work of religious inspiration that was intended not only for scholars of rabbinic Judaism but also for Jews seeking theological guidance ... he was pleased to find differing viewpoints.... As typical of my father, in his writings he sought to illuminate parallels in the theological and spiritual problems that faced Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all people of faith.... Commonalities on the level of what he called "depth theology" were important to him, not the doctrinal difference that set people of faith apart. He hoped that Torah min Hashamayim would be a source of inspiration that would illumine the richness and depth of Jewish theology. In fact, he always told me that this was the book he hoped his readers would study the most thoroughly" (pp. XVII ff.).
Continued here.
Nov 8, 2007 5:00 PM
Dark Blue Hat Conspiracy Time - Are The Chareidim using Science & Torah as a ploy to discredit MO?_
Here's a thought. When the Science & Torah debate first started, and R Elyashiv paskened that an ancient earth was kefirah, a lot of people were horrified. 'Don't the Gedolim realize the implications of this pesak?' they cried, 'Half of MO are now kofrim!'.
But maybe...maybe that was the whole point! The chareidim have been trying to 'pasel' the MO for a while, but it has been hard to do. Even though MO is lax in halachah, thats the lay people, not the 'official' position. It's hard to pasken that MO is treif, or apikorsus.
However the Chareidi leaders know that MO are dangerous. MO is attractive, and could take the power away from the Chareidim. As Rav Gifter memorably said many years ago - 'The Conservatives are not the enemy, everyone knows they are treif. The enemy are the MO'. And this was echoed by R Shimshi Sherer, when he said that the 'MO are the new misyavnim'. The MO are the enemy! And they must be shown to be 'treif'.
The Science and Torah debate is a perfect opportunity for the Chareidim. It's clear that none of the science is a good fit, and all the 'tirutzim' are rather suspect. And, it's clear to the Gedolim that no way could the MO Rabanim reject Science, their constituents wouldn't accept it. So the MO Rabanim are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's a perfect situation for the Chareidim to exploit.
This is the real agenda here. This is what is going on when R N Eisenstein spoke at the EJF conference. It's the first step to the destruction of MO.
DBH, where are you? We need you!
Nov 8, 2007 5:00 PM
Important clarification on the new TMS book_
Some people seem to be confused as to the goals of the new TMS book. The skeptics are skeptical that the approaches (answers) to the challenges will be any good and think the book is a waste of time. Well, of course if you are a hard core skeptic they won't be any good, from your POV! Likewise the believers are skeptical of the challenges.
But this is the whole point guys. If I just wrote a Kiruv book, like Shmuel Waldman, or some other recent Science and Torah books I could name, it won't have any integrity or credibility, because clearly the whole book starts out with the assumption that the 13 ikkarim are sacrosant, and no real doubts on them are allowed.
If you remember, there was a Talk reason review of a recent Science & Torah book, where the reviewer criticized the book for assuming Divine Authorship of the Torah without question. Of course this criticism was silly, since that particular Science & Torah book was never intended to be an objective, rational book, but rather was a kiruv book for people 'struggling' with emunah doubts caused by science. And by 'struggling' I mean the non objective struggle type, the one where they want the answer to be emunah. So of course this type of kiruv book is never going to be objective.
So, this new book needs to honestly present the challenges. The way to do this is to have the skeptics write the chapters on the challenges, ALL the challenges - not just Science but also the DH and historical challenges too. This is why the recent Science and Torah books are a failure (from a rational, objective POV), because they don't give you the full picture, they don't even attempt to argue that the Torah is Divine, or consider the possibility that it isn't. As one such author told me - 'My book is for people who already have faith in TMS, and want to know the answers to these questions posed by Science'. Well, that's all very nice, but it's not an honest approach (from a rational objective POV), and it's not going to convince any skeptics.
On the other hand, if all we do is present the skeptic's view, then there will be nothing there for the believers. Why would any one be interested in another book which bashes religion? There are hundreds of such books out there (Dawkins and friends). Plus, those books are pretty one sided too. They bash religion with an almost fundamentalist mentality. I just got hold of Hitchen's latest book, 'The Portable Atheist', and even on the first page I found a major fallacy. And he wastes no time mentioning Baruch Goldstein, whose name appears on page 2. Ridiculous.
So, what is needed is a fair and balanced approach. The skeptics will present all the challenges, and then we'll have the believers present all the approaches (Heschel, Breuer, Ross, Rav Kook, Kuzari) etc etc.
Obviously, from a deep chareidi POV, even many of the believers are nowadays counted as kofrim, so clearly this book will be from a MO perspective. I don't expect any Chareidim to be too happy with it (except maybe some Frum Skeptics).
But from an MO perspective, the book will lay out all the challenges to TMS, and then lay out all the potential solutions and approaches, and also provide some analysis as to why (or if) any of these approaches are 'compatible' with todays OJ and which of them have 'merit'. Obviously that last part will be somewhat subjective (and agenda driven), so maybe we will seperate that out into a separate section (like Kugel's recent book).
Will the book be convincing? I assume the hard core skeptics will be convinced that the challenges are better than the answers, while the hard core believers will be convinced that the answers are great (or at least some of them are).
As for the rational, honest, open minded types - I'll leave them to be the judge.
This is the most honest and credible approach I can think of. If you have any better ideas, let me know!
Nov 8, 2007 5:00 PM
Holy Moly! Chareidim say MOs are Kofrim!_
[From a comment]
I just received a report from a friend of mine who attended the Eternal Jewish Family (EJF) conference here in Washington, DC. According to EJF's website, the goal of the conference was to discuss the creation of "universally accepted conversion[]" standards (see: http://www.eternaljewishfamily.o...gton/index.htm) . (Incidentally, I'm curious about who gave them the hetter to use the Internet.) This is my summation of my friend's report (to the best of my recollection).
First, in attendance were many of the "who's who" of "g'dolim" including, but not limited to, R. N. Eisenstein, R. R. Feinstein, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, in addition to many other well known dayanim and roshei yeshiva from America and Israel. Notably, the conference apparently was boycotted by several members of our local (greater Washington, D.C.) Va'ad (neither R. Anemer or R. Winter were in attendance, and the latter was maligned from the podium in front of hundreds of people for not supporting EJF's mission). On the other hand, several local rabbis, who serve in various capacities, were in attendance for various durations (hopefully, they were duped into showing up).
In any event, my friend tells me that R. N. Eisenstein declared, FROM THE PODIUM IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE CONFERENCE, in the name of R. Eliyashiv, that anyone who believes the world is older than 5000+ years is a kofer b'ikar, and is therefore unfit to serve as a dayan on a beis din, and that consequently any rabbi that holds such a view cannot perform conversions, not to mention that all of his conversions would be posul.
Similar such pronouncements were made about anyone who maintains that Chazal made any error in science or metzeius. Another "distinguished" speaker lamented that he saw a "supposed" dayan actually wearing some "brown" article of clothing and "smelled of cologne"; the EJF speaker commented something along the lines of, "can you imagine such a person serving as a dayan?"
In sum, the conference was not about establishing universal standards for geirus, but rather about establishing who's fit to be a dayan, and by extension, what does it mean to be an orthodox Jew. Indeed, in a private conversation with my friend, R. Eisenstein did not dispute that the effect of his pronouncement, in practice, would mean that no modern orthodox rabbi could sit on a beis din due to his philosophical, scientific, or historical beliefs, no matter how observant the rabbi is in all other respects.
Anyone who heretofore believed that the Israeli charedi g'dolim were not interested in imposing their standards and philosophy on Jews in the United States better wake up before our religion is hijacked by people who resemble those running Iran. But, such pronouncements also raise a broader philosophical problem -- who has the authority to define what Judaism is? This is a question I'm betting that most orthodox Jews always confidently pose and answer when talking to our non-observant, Conservative and Reform affiliated friends and relatives. What happens when the table is turned and those on the charedi right label us as kofrim? Are we going to continue to send our kids to their yeshivas and seminaries in Israel? Are we going to continue to hire the talmidim of the above speakers and conference attendees to teach our kids in our elementary and high schools? Are we going to put our heads in the sand and say "eilu v'eilu" about them while they will most certainly not say the same thing about YU?
Nov 7, 2007 8:50 PM
English Books which talk about Torah Min Hashamayim_
These are the relevant books that I can think of. We would need to review/summarize each for our new TMS book. I own all of these, but have not necessarily read them all. I don't know of any book which surveys all of these. And that's why I'm writing it!
Books which explain Biblical Criticism
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman
The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard E. Friedman
The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices by Israel Knohl
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously by Jacques Berlinerblau
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel
How to Read the Jewish Bible by Marc Zvi Brettler
Prolegomena by Julius Wellhausen
An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament by S. R. Driver
The Nature of Biblical Criticism by John Barton
Books which attempt to provide an ‘answer’ to BC
The Documentary Hypothesis by Umberto Cassuto
Heavenly Torah As Refracted Through the Generations by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses by David Weiss Halivni
Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah (Orthodox Forum) by Shalom Carmy
Between the Lines of the Bible by Yitzchak Etshalom
On the Reliability of the Old Testament by K. A. Kitchen
Other approaches to understanding the Bible
The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter
Understanding Genesis (The Heritage of Biblical Israel) by Nahum M. Sarna
Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel by Nahum M. Sarna
From Adam to Noah: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis I-VI by U. Cassuto
From Noah to Abraham: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis Vi-XI by U. Cassuto
Commentary on the Book of Exodus by U. Cassuto
Books which include very relevant discussions of TMS
Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Brandeis on Jewish Women) by Tamar Ross
Principles of the Jewish Faith by Louis Jacobs
The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbi's of the Talmud by Ephraim E. Urbach
Revelation and the God of Israel by Norbert M. Samuelson
The Limits of Orthodox Theology by Marc Shapiro
What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel by William G. Dever
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? by William G. Dever
101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History by Gary Greenberg
Please submit any other good books which discuss TMS (from any viewpoint, frum or kefiradick). Thanks.
Nov 7, 2007 8:50 PM
Some people have expressed skepticism about this new book idea. I'm not sure why. I've practically written the darn thing 10 times over already. I have multiple relatives who have written plenty of books, who are no smarter or better writers than I am. (OK, maybe a little smarter, but not better writers).
And its only an ebook for goodness sake! It's a freakin pdf file. And even getting a book published these days is EASY. I'm not talking about getting a contract with Random House with a $1m upfront payment. It's called vanity publishing guys, its easy as pie. You just need a little cash. With some outfits, you don't even need that because they do 'print on demand'.
And a book which goes in depth into TMS will be in demand, believe me. At least as much as any other of the books in this genre. If R Shmuel Waldman can get 'Beyond a reasonable doubt' published then anyone can get anything published. It's really not that difficult.
The title I am leaning towards is 'Torah Min Hashamayim: Challenges & Approaches', but I'm open to suggestions. Another option is 'The Challenge of Biblical Criticism', with maybe a scary picture of Wellhausen (or Richard Elliott Freidman) on the cover.
The big question of course is whether it will be 'just the facts', i.e. a non biased review of all the challenges to TMS, and the responses to them, plus the various approaches that are out there (Halivni, Breuer etc) OR will the book have an agenda, i.e. try to motivate people to a particular approach.
Or, I could make like Kugel, and leave the motivational stuff till the last chapter. Maybe that's the best approach.
Nov 7, 2007 12:27 PM
_
How did I miss this one?!
Remember that kashrut scandal a few months back with Le Marais, where the Mashgiach accused the restaurant of being treif? Well the Mashgiach was none other than Isaaac 'Jacky' Bitton, famous French rock superstar of the 60s and 70s rock band 'Les Variations', who toured the US with Aerosmith, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and others.
Not only that, but Bitton became a BT, left Les Variations, and went on to form Rayaa Mehemna, a heavy Chassidic rock group. Man, I love those guys! I once saw them in concert with Mordechai Ben David, it was a riot. "He was a holy man, da da da da, he was a holy man!".
Bitton's son was unfortunately badly wounded in the Crown Heights Riots. Anyways, it's all there in Wikipedia, and also this New York Post article. Also interesting, Bittons's daughter works as a counselor for Lubavitch girls who are going OTD. Just play them some Raaya Mehemna, that'll show 'em!
For an article on other Jewish rock stars, read this. And if you want to support the Bittons, go buy Raaya Mehemna's album, now called 'Songs for a brother Vol 1'. Rock on dude!
Nov 6, 2007 3:10 PM
Eureka!!! We should do an e-book on TMS and Orthodox Judaism!_
I just figured out what we should do. We should create an e-book on Torah Min Hashamyim, the challenges to it and our suggested responses. The point of the book will be to retain a neo or semi Orthodoxy, yet accept such obvious truths as Biblical Criticism and Science. It would be similar to some recent books on Science and Torah, except that we would have a much broader perspective, and be more honest about the challenges.
I envision the following outline:
Section 1: The Doctrine of TMS
This section will lay the foundation for the book, tracing the development of the TMS doctrine through the ages, from an Orthodox perspective.
Chapter 1: TMS in Tenach
Chapter 1 would trace the doctrine of TMS as it appears in Tenach. All references to Torah, Sefer, Toras Moshe etc would be analyzed. For fairness, we would bring down both the traditional exlanations of the various passages, and also the 'critics' explanations.
Chapter 2: TMS in Chazal
In Chapter 2 we would trace the development of the TMS idea in Chazal. All relevant Gemaras would be cites and explained.
Chapter 3: TMS in Rishonim & Acharonim
Again, all relevant passages, especially those which argue with 'classical' TMS.
Chapter 4: TMS in Modern Day Orthodoxy
A survey of modern day approaches to TMS within Orthodoxy, ranging from extreme right wing approaches to Tamar Ross and the LW MO.
Section 2: Challenges to the Doctrine
This section will lay out the best of the arguments AGAINST the doctrine of TMS.
Chapter 1: Biblical Criticism
A survey of all the main (and best) arguments from the various schools of Biblical Criticisim. In each case we will also present the 'traditional' view, and show why it is not convincing.
Chapter 2: Challenges from Science
All of the standard Science and Torah criticisms would be presented here, together with the various 'reconciliation' approaches, and why these are not very convincing.
Chapter 3: Other Challenges
Challenges from Ethics, Morality, Reason, History etc. The point is not to bash Judaism, but rather to show that a strict interpretation of TMS is just not tenable.
Section 3: Alternative Approaches
This section would detail existing alternative approaches to TMS, and provide a critique of them where applicable.
Chapter 1: Ancient Alternatives
This chapter would detail Kaarites, Saducees and any other ancient deviations from standard TMS.
Chapter 2: Reform
Talk about what Reform Judaism did to TMS, and what's wrong with that (from an Orthodox perspective).
Chapter 3: Conservative / Masorati
Talk about Heschel, Jacobs etc etc. What their approaches were, what worked, what didn't.
Chapter 4: Breuer / The New School
A summary of Breuer and the new school of apologetics, and why they don't work either.
Section 4: A New Approach
Section four will outline our new approach to TMS
Chapter 1: Rationale
Provides the reasoning begind pursuing a new approach.
Chapter 2: Description
Describes the new approach in detail.
Chaper 3: Motivation
Why the new approach should work well and is important.
Chapter 4: Organization
How we can promulgate this new approach and have it validated or at least acceptable within (LW MO) Orthodoxy.
Much of this book has already been written, in my blog and elsewhere. I have extensively covered all the challenges from Science, and littlefoxling and mis-nagid have written volumes on the DH. Section 2 is almost complete! Section 1 will require some effort and research though. Section 3 will be fairly easy. Section 4 will obviously be the toughest part, and the book will stand or fall based on how convincing section 4 is. However, as with most books of this type, even if Section 4 is lame, the book will still be extremely useful for many and varied reasons. We can all think of similar examples.
So, the plan would be to compile this book as a group effort. First, lets discuss the outline, and see if we can all agree on what it should be. Then, once that is agreed upon, we can dole out the various sections and chapters to different bloggers.
I expect this to be an iterative and evolving work.In other words, we won’t wait till it's perfect till we publish it. Rather, we will continually update the various sections and chapters (kind of like a Wikipedia but with more restricted authorship). I envision a special site, maybe a blog, where we can do this. Each post can be a different chapter, and comments on the post will help to regfine the chapters.
We should have an automated script which creates a 'build', i.e. at a certain point in time (maybe bi-monthly) takes all the posts i.e. chapters and creates the e-book pdf. We should also keep a top post which details whats new in each revision. It shouldn't be a problem to ultimately create quite a substantial book.
If we all agree, I will start to work on this asap. Maybe this will even supplant the other new blog idea I had.
Nov 6, 2007 3:10 PM
The comment thread on that Kugel post continue to be awesome! A must read. Forget everything else and just go read those comments. Possibly some of the best comments ever! Thanks guys! (And girls. And especially guy/girls.)
Nov 6, 2007 3:10 PM
Strategic initiative to assess the feasibility of accepting Middle Criticism in Orthodox Judaism_
First, in order to avoid allowing the fakers to fake us with their fakery, let's be clear what we are talking about.
Lower Criticism
Slight textual criticisms and consequent amendations of the Biblical text; typically letters (spelling), some words, a few sentences at most. Goal is to re-establish what the original correct text was.
Higher CriticismFull blown Documentary Hypothesis - claiming that the Biblical text is a human composite, and trying to figure out what were the motives of the various authors.
Lower Criticism (LC) is hardly kefirah. In fact we have plenty of Rishonim and Acharonim who indulged in lower criticism, though in todays extremist circles no doubt even that would be 'censored', or delared a forgery. I'm not concerned with those extremist circles.
Higher Criticism (HC), of the type which declares the Torah to be absolutely man made, and not from God at all, and conmpletely devoid of any 'sanctity' or religious significance is obviously never going to be compatible with OJ, so I'm not concerned with that (at least not here).
So, what we are talking about here is something in the middle, what I will call 'Middle Criticism' (MC). What is MC? MC would argue that there was some core revelation which was authentically Divinely Inspired, but that the text of the Torah is indeed a composite, of various versions of the Israelites conception of what the revelation was. Various scholars have voiced similar views, from Heschel's famous phrase 'A minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation' and 'The Torah is Medrash', to Louis Jacobs formulation that the Torah 'reflects man's attempt to document his encounter with the Divine'. James Kugel presented a similar approach, which was endorsed by DovBear and others.
Rejewvenator writes:
I believe that the minimum Orthodox position is that Hashem spoke the first Aleph of Anochi to the people. Moshe then learned on Har Sinai only those things about which there is no machloket, and received at Har Sinai only the Ten Commandments. Later, Moshe wrote the Torah, which included material originally written by Adam, Noah, Avraham, (and passed down without those documents having necessarily been preserved word-for-word) etc. Yehoshua also wrote a few pesukim, and there were some tikunei sofrim. Finally, Ezra compiled a hybrid document that was not a replica of any of the three scrolls he worked from.
I think that's a good summary of the current Orthodox position. However the real question is what do we think could be the most liberal Orthodox position, for some LW MO community in the future?
I would think that technically Heschel or Jacobs would be fine, as long as you agree to abide by Halachah 100%. In other words, you can be as flexible with TBK as you like, as long as TBSP is not affected. Of course, as we have all posted many many times, there is a severe sociological problem with this, namely that once belief in the purity of TBK is damaged, TBSP invariably goes out the window too.
Now this doesn't have to be the case, we could well imagine a Judaism that evolved with a mesorah from Chazal that 5 Neviim wrote the Torah (JEPDR) and assembled it together. There's nothing wrong with that technically, and certainly even modern day OJ contains enough anachronisms and other internal contradictions that such a view, were it be the mesorah, would not strike anyone as overly suprising. After all, it would be the Mesorah, and you don't argue with the Mesorah!
The problem of course is precisely that: It isn't the Mesorah, and never was (except maybe pre 300BCE tee hee). So the question really reduces to the following: Can something not in the Mesorah become part of the Mesorah, and if so how?
Well, we have some examples. Here is a totally random list of different types of examples:
1. Zohar (and the Kabbalah of the Ari)
2. Chumros
3. Bes Yaakov education for girls
None of these are great examples though. (1) had a long tradition going back to Chazal, and the people pushing it were very very holy. (2) is just being more machmir, which is always ok. And (3) is a bit of a kulah, but there was never any serious halachah stating that girls could not learn Chumash, or cooking.
What we need are examples of where 'hashkafic yesodos' were re-interpreted (or eveolved) to be more liberal. I can’t think of any good examples though.
I think we need to address this issue on multiple fronts - divide and conquer! We need to structure this as a 'Program Approach', with multiple work streams. The various work streams that we require are as follows:
1. Mining Chazal, Rishonim and Acharonim for relevant quotes which
A. Cast doubt on the concept of TMS in general.
B. Cast doubt or argue with the Rambam and others who insist on this ikkar
C. Any other relevant quotes.
2. Show that Hashkafic change is possible, by:
A. Finding relevant examples
B. Arguments using sociological, historical or other methods, possibly with examples from other religions.
3. Provide motivation to keep TSBP even if MC is true:
A. Research various Conservative and other approaches.
B. Develop new neo-Orthodox approaches
C. Explain why this effort will be successful even though Conservative Judaism wasn't very
4. Build concensus and community
A. Blog about this topic, write articles, agitate etc etc.
B. Develop support within laymen and also sympathetic Rabbinic figures and institutions
C. Find current MO Rabbis who are willing to lend their name to this initiative.
5. Show why this is neccsary
A. Show that MC has merit, and the apoogetics don't work.
B. Show that many people are going OTD because of this
C. Use R Yaakov Horowitz style scare tactics.
Nov 6, 2007 3:10 PM
Kennedy deserved to die for ending racism and slavery! Lincoln too_
_
Wow. Marc Shapiro brings our attention to a footnote in a sefer which reads as follows:
'When John F Kennedy, freer of the 'cushim' (negroes), was assasinated in 1963, Harav Moshe Yiztchak Gvirtzman? from Peshaversk? said that when Abraham Lincoln was killed because he abolished slavery, the writer of Divrei Yechezkel said that Lincoln deserved it, because he transgressed the curse in Noach - 'Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a slave to his brothers'. And therefore anyone who acts similarly (i.e. Kennedy), will come to the same end.'
So, anyone contemplating working for the ACLU, beware!
Nov 6, 2007 3:10 PM
Even great Torah scholars sometimes do weird things_
Thus writes Marc Shapiro on seforim.blogspot.com. He also documents various instances of Gedolim forging things and claiming them to be genuine, or the converse (which is more typical), Gedolim claiming that certain seemingly heretical writings from other Gedolim must be forgeries, for example Rav Moshe Feinstein and the Rav Yehuda HeHasid manuscript, and more recently Rav Moshe Shapiro claiming that certain writings of RSRH were forgeries, when they clearly are not.
What could posses an Odom Godol to make such clearly false claims? Silly question, all things considered.
Nov 5, 2007 11:44 PM
Crazy Fundamentalist Kills Herself, Crazy Doctors Just Stand By And Watch_
This is frikkin nuts:
A 22-year-old woman died within a few hours of giving birth to twins because, as a Jehovah’s Witness, she was not allowed to accept a blood transfusion, it emerged today.
Emma Gough suffered severe blood loss after giving birth to a boy and girl at the Royal Hospital in Shrewsbury ten days ago.
Doctors and medics begged her 24-year-old husband, Anthony, and other relatives to overrule a form she had ticked insisting that she should not be given blood because of her faith. But the family refused to do so.
Peter Welsh, the best man at the couple’s wedding on a beach in Barbados two years ago, told The Sun newspaper: “Everyone is devastated by what has happened. We can’t believe that she died after childbirth in this day and age, with all the technology there is.
“What makes it even more sad is Emma had time to hold and start to bond with her twins before the complications set in.”
Terry Lovejoy, spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Telford, said today that the local religious community had rallied round the bereaved family.
He said: “We are supporting the family - they are going through a very difficult time and we understand their grief.”
And this is even crazier:
A spokeswoman from the British Medical Association told The Times: “It’s a tragic case but its cut and dried from where we are standing. The doctors’ hands are tied. Competent adults have the right to refuse any medical treatment even if that refusal results in permanent physical injury or death. I am sure the doctors will have done all they can do to try to persuade this woman or her family to allow the blood transfusion but you can’t force someone to. To do so would be against the Human Rights Act.”
What? Did I read that correctly? They couldn't save her life because it would be 'against the Human rights act'?????? Unbelievable. Do these Doctors have a conscience????
Nov 5, 2007 2:46 PM
Does The Universe Have a Purpose?_
The Templeton Foundation has a very cool new feature; each month they ask a 'big question' to a variety of people; theists, atheists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, Jews, Moslems and Christians. Last month the question was 'Does the universe have a purpose?' This is quite a neutral way of asking 'Is there a God?' The responses are long and eloquent, and each is summed up by one word, or phrase. These are:
Unlikely
Yes
Perhaps
No
Indeed
Very Likely
Not Sure
Certainly
I hope So
My answer would be:
Nobody knows, but I hope so. Actually, not only does nobody know the answer, but nobody even knows how to think about the question (shades of THHGTTG). That's the bigger problem here. What does 'God' or purpose really mean? And how can we, stuck inside the Universe, without ever having seen another Universe, possibly know what is 'likely' or not 'likely' with respect to Universes having a purpose? Not only don't we know the answer, we don't have any data or experience with which to frame the question.
Some people act like Chachomim on this issue, some like Reshaim. But in truth we're all hovering somewhere between Tam and She'eyno Yodeah Lishol.
Nov 5, 2007 2:46 PM
Saw You At Sinai – But I’m not sure what happened there_
The comments on my last post are awesome, both from a ‘frum’ and ‘kefiradick’ perspective. A must read! (just like Reshimu). Each comment deserves a post in itself, but here are two good ones:
Yodeah
All is nice and fine to just go with the flow when it comes to non mal-adaptive halachot, like honor your parents, morality, and even some public holidays. In such cases, we can either 1) tell ourselves via delusions that it is God’s strict word, or 2) justify our “frumkite” for those that have essential kefira in the torah, by saying that living a certain way is a worthwhile exercise ala the parable that Kugel recites of the person who wants to be close to the king. I buy into that. I am glad to put my children in that framework.
The problem I have with frum society is that the myriad halachot and restriction do two things that are mal-adaptive in modern society.
First, halacha dilutes one’s focus on important things. Nobody has infinite energy or focus and as such a decision must be made where to apply a limited resource. In my opinion, it is better spent on “real stuff” such as relations between people and activities for the betterment of society, rather than ancient rites built on a house of cards. How much benefit does a kolel man bring to his family or society? In my opinion it is the epitome of selfishness to put your family in poverty under such circumstances.
On a personal level, we all know very frum people who have no regard for their fellow man. It is hardly unacceptable to be such a person in our society, where such personal characteristics are taken by the vast majority to be almost unrelated to religion. But try to not to make a beracha or bench, or go to the beach or eat treif! You will be considered “off the derech.” Does this make sense? This shows how misguided our orthodox religions is.
I have no doubt that if yeshivas focused less on minutiae and more on people, society and honesty that our society would be a very different place to live. But there is only so much time in a day. All of halacha is important, but the most important tenets are-by necessity, diluted by the minutia .
Second, our edifice of halacha is an unnecessary pain in the you-know-what, for those that would rather enjoy life than check for bugs and worry about where to eat every time they step of the house. In charedi/yeshivish-land it also is the cause of xenophobia, ignorance, lack of ability to be educated or economically prepared for life; leading to a life of public assistance, food stamps, section-8 and belief in myriad superstitions. For those looking for shiduchim, it makes life more difficult, because there is yet another area to be incompatible. How about the marital discord that so many of us on this blog no-doubt continuously have to live with. Is that a good thing that religion brings to us?
The torah is replete with promises to enjoy and have a good life as a payment for being a good Jew. The orthodox philosophy today, however, is focused on the good afterlife, while we all collectively search to deprive ourselves of opportunity via restrictions on almost every aspect of living. In this respect, we currently have more in common with fundamentalist Islam than Biblical Judaism.
The price of this deprivation is both too high and wholly unnecessary, even if we are to support kugel’s contention that it brings us closer to God. We can devise better ways to get closer to God, without running around with furry hats in August. [Anon Chassid: Yeah? Name one!]
Kugel's clearly has not been significantly restrained by orthodoxy. My heart bleeds a bit for myself, but greatly for lost generations of charedi/yeshivish people, especially for those who know better.
Kendra
I'm just fine with a fair amount of chukim. Declaring the whole lot of these to be "maladaptive" is a refusal to look at how Orthodox Judaism (to the degree it functions which is admitedly imperfect) works. People need to be inspired. Just telling them "be good; everyone's better off if you are" doesn't work. The Romans and Greeks tried it and it failed spectacularly. To the degree modern society is significantly different is largely because it received a dilution of Judaism. This essence was carried by the media of Christianity (black irony).
Doubt me? Look at China. It has never been touched in a significant way by ethical monotheism or indeed _any_ "spiritual" religion. What difference does that make? Under the communists, the Russians had the purges and the show trials. Under Mao, the Chinese had the Cultural Revolution. Under the Communists, Russian army troops at least occasionally refused orders to fire on unarmed citizens. Under Communists, the Chinese army obediently slaughtered hundreds at Tienamen Square. Not a huge difference, but I've met people raised in both societies and the Chinese just seem to have had (on average) far more of their spirit crushed.
It's largely about motivation and accountability. Jews have it hammered into them that they are accountable for what they do. Most of them skew their understanding of this and consider themselves "accountable" for ritual mitzvot rather than ethical judgement mitzvot. But it is better to feel accountable than not. With a sense of accountability comes the sense _others_ are accountable too. This is the basis of our political system. Bad as it is, the existing competition is worse. Indeed, the very idea of bureaucracy (which the Chinese brought to its apotheosis) clearly does not serve the common welfare of society without a "myth of accountability". Yes, even then, bureaucracy is still wretched at times. Mabye all too often this myth is just blather. But it has some effect in restraining people from being brutes. Hyprocrisy at least creates a standard of _some_ things that cannot be done because they contradict the myth too much. The myth is useful to enough people that it is maintained.
Secondly, its a bit like war: no one ever went over the top shouting "for a higher rate of GDP growth and a lower crime rate!" Humans are the story telling animals. The Jews hit upon the brilliant storytelling device of immersive narrative. Even though the majority of Jews don't know precisely _what_ mitzvah X's relation to Lore A is, they know there's a connection. They know everything they do has meaning. They know a few prominent points and extrapolate wildly (even inaccurately) from there. In a way, it's like Rocky Horror Picture Show: get the audience involved and they don't care about the disturbing bits in the story.
There are problems, of course. Aforesaid masking of disturbing bits. Bad norms are largely immune to critical review. But there are not so many of these, compared to the norms of other societies. Judaism is a work in progress. It just has to sell itself as the finished product because no one signs up for alpha testing unless there's no alternative...the project is still striving towards consistently getting everyone's attention on moral living and Torah literacy. So far, that's not doing too well. But it only took what 1000 years or so to stamp out idolatry? There were _Prophets_ who kept coming by saying "don't DO this" and pulling out the miracles for !!! (or being very good con men so that people believed the stories of miracles). For my part, I'm willing to accept the current phase of development can be a bit of a farce (and all too often it is) because at least the sociological project of Judaism is pointed in the right direction. It is at least possibly leading to something better.
Looking at other paradigms I find none that gives me more hope. I've seen all too many that depress me deeply. Remember, I'm raised goy as goy gets. I think I have a fair sense of objectivity here. I spent 20 years hard work looking for something in humanity to give me hope. All things taken together, Judaism compares well other world outlooks.
You don't like the chukim at all I can see. Well, I think the solution isn't to abolish the chukim but come up with a better way of making people understand things. To see that lives of t'shuvah are dynamic, ongoing affairs, not cookbook assembly of mitzvot. To educate people so that the general shape of Jewish history and lore is real and exciting to them. How many people had this sense of excitement killed by one year too many of gemara study? Moreover, the statutes can serve to help give a concrete and measurable element to behaviour. They give opportunities frequently each day to remember that one is committed to Torah. As long as Torah is understood in a broad sense _this alone_ merits having chukim.
I find it ironic that you and Ja have essentially the same point, just from different slants. You both think that if Judaism does not have 100% confirmation as Hashem's word it's worthless. All-or-nothing thinking is not the best way to confront major issues...
Nov 5, 2007 1:56 AM
James Kugel: What if the Torah is not Divine?_
[Question: One of us! Answer: James Kugel. From here.]
Question
Within the past 4 years I have read a number of your books. (Quick sidenote on my background – I am 33 years old, grew up in a modern orthodox household, learned in yeshiva, BA from Yeshiva University, MA in Jewish studies plus a law degree.)
I have always avoided studying biblical criticism because, although I am primarily an orthoDOX Jew (daven 3 times a day, shomer shabbat/kashrut), I have somewhat of a cynical attitude to many aspects of our tradition despite my love for Judaism and my commitment to live a "religious life" and raise my children as observant Jews. I feared that if I were to be convinced that the Torah is not a divine document, that the foundations of my faith (in halacha – not God) would be shaken and that I would not be able to take halacha seriously. Because if the foundational text that the entire halacha is based upon was not in fact divine – then chazal’s primary assumption no longer holds true. If Rabbi Akiva or Rav Ashi or Maimonides or Rav Feinstein all operated under the assumption of a divine Torah and that assumption is not valid (either in whole or part) - well.......
When I read your introduction to "How To Read" I was overcome with excitement about entering this journey with you. Despite my fears of delving into biblical criticism, to paraphrase you - I never enjoyed burying my head in the sand.
Reading your book merely confirmed my suspicions of what I felt I was likely to confront and armed me with some specific examples of "problematic” challenges to the belief in a divine text (and the four assumptions you listed – those same assumptions that our halachists obviously shared and took for granted).
I was hoping that your last chapter would lend some comfort or provide some solutions or set forth a framework for a religious person confronted with this information – but I did not find the chapter persuasive. (I know – you warned me in the introduction). I did, however, get food for thought from your chapter (i.e. strands of the text may be divine, and it is impossible to determine what is what – or – oral law itself never took the written Torah as its word either).
I am actually not even quite sure what I am asking. I suppose I am writing to you to get your thoughts on how a religious person can maintain his/her faith and fealty in and to a rabbinic system that is so directly based on the belief of a Divine text and the “Four Assumptions”? I fully realize that I am asking this question to a Bible professor who happens to be observant rather than to a Rabbi - I am more interested in the former's response than the latter's.
I am not sure if that is too personal a question or not. I hope not – and if you take offense, please accept my apologies.
D.T.
Answer
Before getting to the specifics of your e-mail, I should say something exculpatory (I hope) about this book in general. It really is not addressed specifically to Orthodox Jews, or even to Jews as a whole. I think there’s been some confusion about this. I’m a Bible professor, and the purpose of this book is to teach something about the nature of modern biblical scholarship – something that the general public, and even quite a few modern scholars themselves, are largely unaware of (i.e., the great gap separating ancient and modern scholarship, and the crucial role of ancient interpreters in shaping the Bible’s message). It’s true that, in the last chapter, I also tried to offer some thoughts about how different groups, including what I called "traditional Judaism," might try to reckon with the insights of modern scholars, but if that were all I was out to do, the book could have been considerably shorter.
A second point is also worth mentioning – and this is a bit closer to the subject of your e-mail. Orthodox Jews (myself included) are, by definition, people who like to be told what to do. We accept eagerly the whole “prepared table” of Judaism – not just the idea of avodat H’, but all the detailed plan that goes with it. In fact, the general idea alone would not get us very far (this was the oft-repeated theme of my book “On Being a Jew”). And so, it is part of the whole posture of seeking to do God’s bidding that we absorb ourselves in the details of the traditional way of life, "davening three times a day" as you say, and kashrut and learning and Shabbat. We don’t take easily to going beyond this, looking up from those daily tasks to contemplate our Employer, that is to say, to think about the really basic issues of theology. In fact, to talk about such things even seems to us un-Jewish; it is neither a necessary nor a particularly comfortable activity for someone who has undertaken to live as an Orthodox Jew. If it ever does come to such basic questions, I think our preferred path is, as in the details of halakhah, to look to our classic texts to tell us what to think. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
The problem posed by modern biblical scholarship is that it calls into question some of the most basic teachings of Judaism, and, since it really is modern, its specific arguments are not addressed by our classical sources. So what should a Jew think about modern scholarship? As I said, I wrote this book for a broad audience from different religions, but as far as Jews are concerned, my purpose was certainly not to get them to incorporate into Judaism modern scholarship’s version of what the Torah is or where it came from. In fact, I think I recommended pretty clearly at the beginning of the book that people of traditional beliefs think twice about reading it, and at the end I said outright that modern biblical scholarship is altogether incompatible with traditional Jewish belief and practice.
In other words, I think that if you want to be an Orthodox Jew, the Documentary Hypothesis and the other insights of modern scholars can have no place in the way you study Torah. (This, by the way, puts me at odds not only with the stance of Conservative Judaism, but also with a fair number of biblical scholars who describe themselves as Orthodox.) I really don’t even buy the idea that you can go halfway down the modern path, adopting the linguistic or philological insights of modern scholars but not the rest. Ultimately, all roads lead to Wellhausen.
But the question I tried to address in that last chapter was: bedi’avad, what is someone who has heard or learned something of modern scholarship (and this includes an increasingly large number of Orthodox Jews) to think?
I know that the answer of some people, perhaps a great many people, is what your e-mail calls “burying their heads in the sand,” though perhaps we should rather call it: “trying to stick with Judaism’s traditional teachings by ignoring or dismissing what modern scholars say.” I really have nothing to say against such a stance. I know perfectly well how much is at stake for most people in adopting any other position. For the same reason, I feel pretty sure that most Orthodox Jews will continue to declare modern scholarship off-limits.
But I also know that this is not an adequate response for some people – not for you, according to your e-mail, and truthfully, not for me either. It just feels wrong to say about anything that really matters to you, “Well, I know that scholars have turned up a lot of disturbing facts, but I don’t want to know about them.” My impulse, anyway, is to face the truth as best it can be known and then try to make sense of what it is telling us.
In your e-mail you say that if modern scholars have proved that the Torah is not a "divine document," then our whole system of halakhah collapses. I don't think I'd ever accept that premise in the first place: modern scholars may have proven a lot of things, but I don't think they've ever tried to determine what is or is not divinely inspired, simply because there is no litmus test by which you can decide such a thing. Words are words, whether written by prophets or interpolators or editors, whether written in this particular set of circumstances or another; the words never carry little flags identifying some of them as divinely inspired and others and ordinarily human.
I believe what I just said is absolutely true, but I wouldn't want to use it as a cop-out to avoid addressing what seems to me to be the real issue. Modern scholars have said a lot of things that are indeed upsetting to traditional belief: they've cast doubt on the Torah's reliability as a historical account of things that actually happened, they've highlighted contradictions within the text, and so on and so forth. Doesn't this indeed undercut the Torah's standing as the basis of our whole way of life?
Forgive me if I restate some of the overall argument I made at the end of the book. (I know you didn't find it particularly convincing the first time around, but I'm hoping this time I may say it better.)
When you actually consider Judaism as it is, the role of the Torah in it is really not what you say it is. Ultimately, Jews are not Torah-fundamentalists. On the contrary, our whole tradition is based on adding liberally to what the Torah says (despite Deut. 4:2), sometimes reading its words in a way out of keeping with their apparent meaning, and sometimes even distorting or disregarding its words entirely. (My book “The Bible As It Was” contains seven hundred pages of examples of how this all began.) What’s more, as everyone knows, much of what makes up the daily fabric of Jewish life has only a tenuous connection, or no connection at all, with what is actually written in the Torah. I mentioned such things as saying the Amidah three times a day, the berakhot that we recite before eating and on other occasions, netilat yadayim, many aspects of kashrut [e.g. basar vehalav], many of the particulars in the way we keep Shabbat and holidays, studying the Babylonian Talmud, and so on and so forth. Isn’t this an awful lot of what it means to lead a halakhic life? On the other hand, one might also mention such practices as mekhirat hametz, which on the face of it seem in fact to contradict what is written in the Torah, in this case, the prohibitions of bal yera’eh ubal yimmatze. And all these are really only the tip of the iceberg; you yourself could go into much greater detail on this theme.
So someone looking at this situation from afar would probably be reluctant to accept your assertion that the whole system of halakhah depends on the words of the Torah and their divine inspiration. (Of course I am aware that our Rabbis sought to find within the Torah itself the source of their own authority to add to or depart from the Torah’s own words, but I think our outside observer would rightly point out a certain circularity here: It is only the rabbis’ own, authoritative interpretation of a certain verse in the Torah that grants them the right of authoritative interpretation. In any case, this is a formalist argument, one that doesn't really speak to the larger issue.)
No, this observer would say, it is simply not true that the whole system of halakhah depends on the words of the Torah. Those words were the starting-point, but what has truly proven determinative in them (indeed, what was recognized as such from the start) was the general direction that those words point in and embody, and whose trajectory was then carried forward through the Mishnah and Gemara and all later writings. That "general direction" is the basic idea that Israel's connection to God is to be articulated through avodat H'. This is the whole substance of the Sinai revelation, and whether it took place at Sinai or somewhere else, biblical scholarship itself has highlighted the utter disconnectedness of this idea from all that preceded it. Before that moment, there was (for centuries) the God of Old, who appeared and disappeared; and there was the offering of sacrifices in the temple. Then, suddenly, the phrase la'avod 'et H' acquired a new meaning: it meant doing all these mitzvot. That changed forever the whole character of divine-human interaction, and it's that change that all later Judaism embodies.
As I said before, Jews generally don't like to think about such things, and talking about a "general direction" or overall character of the Sinai revelation is particularly disturbing for people who are otherwise so devoted to studying specific words and actual texts. But I think if you want to be absolutely accurate, you have to admit that, time and again, it's not a matter of the specific words, at least not if you try to see the big picture. What really underlies everything -- and what was the ongoing substance of the Sinai revelation -- was the revelation of a new way of being connected to God.
In the light of all this, I hinted at the very end of the book at what is called in German a “thought experiment.” What would happen if someone could demonstrate definitively that God had truly given only one commandment to Moshe at Mount Sinai, the one in Deuteronomy that says: “You shall serve the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul.” Then He said to Moshe: “Okay, you and the zeqenim and their later successors can work out the details.” Well, this is a somewhat jarring question, but please go along with it for a minute. In the end, I do not believe that this would, or could, invalidate our system of halakhah. Of course I do believe in nevu’ah, in divine revelation, and I don’t think that Israel got only that one commandment from God. Theoretically, however, I think it would be enough if that were all, since that would provide the firm basis for everything that followed -- Moshe's, or Rabbi Akiva's, elaboration of how this primal divine commandment is to be carried out. Because ultimately, any Jew must admit that at some point the divinely-given text leads to the human interpreter and the poseq, indeed, to this specific taqqanah and that specific gezerah shavah. And frankly, we don't really seem to all that aware of, or even care much about, where the dividing-line falls. This is our “prepared table,” the work of many hands. If someone wants a different table, let him go ahead – but this is the Jewish table, the way Jews serve God.
As one of our sages said: to what may the matter be compared? To a man who wished to see the King. So he went to the royal palace and stood outside and waited for the King to appear. After some hours, the King did come outside, and the man was thrilled. But soon the King went back inside the palace. The man returned the next day, and the next, and sometimes he did catch a glimpse of the King, but always only for a few seconds, and then his view would be blocked by someone, or the King would step behind a pillar or get into his carriage and ride off. What had at first been thrilling now became only frustrating.
Eventually, the king’s close advisor became aware of the presence of the man standing day after day outside the palace, and he approached him and said: “I know what you want, but you are going about it the wrong way. Go up to the palace door and ask to work inside – it doesn’t matter what: janitor, guard, woodcutter or water-drawer! Then you will enter the palace by right and see the King as a matter of course; indeed, He will recognize you and perhaps even call you by name.” And so the man did, and it was just as the King’s advisor had said: he saw the King up close every day, and the King called to him by name.
This is the whole idea of Judaism. If you want to come close to God, the only way is to become His employee. Understanding that avodat H' is the true foundation of our halakhah may not de-fang modern biblical scholarship; a lot of what it says will always be disturbing to Jews. But I think that modern scholarship does not, because it cannot, undermine the essence of Judaism or what Jews actually do in their lives; it cannot, as you suggest, cause the system to collapse.
That was not my whole purpose in writing this book, but it was one thing I wished to say, because I thought it might be of help to people like yourself. Of course I knew – I knew this even before I began writing – that some people would be upset by the book, and I knew that their natural reaction would be to attack me. I must tell you I really don’t mind. I know that for such people, even contemplating modern scholarship is off limits for an Orthodox Jew, so anyone who does so must be condemned. But after all is said and done and Kugel is long gone, the problems raised for Orthodox Jews by modern biblical scholarship will remain. My hope is that the response I’ve outlined here, which is really what I said in somewhat different terms in my book, will also be around for a while, and that it may help people like yourself to look squarely at those problems and at what seems to me to be their only truthful resolution.
Nov 4, 2007 2:00 AM
One Flew over the cuckoo's nest_
Seems like the new book by Anthony Flew (which I started reading) of how he changed from being an Atheist into a Theist (with a little help from Gerald Schroeder) is a bit of a con. Figures.
Nov 2, 2007 5:47 PM
If you know the DH, will you go OTD?_
There used to be a skeptic blogger who was famous for (amongst other things) arguing that if frum people were only exposed to the DH (Documentary Hypothesis), they would (be more likely to) go OTD (Off The Derech). This is somewhat true, I know someone who went OTD after reading 'Who Wrote The Bible'.
But my shul is living proof that this is not always the case. In my shul we have a bunch of Jewish academics, professors of Jewish Philosophy, even Bible Professors, who all know the DH, yet still believe in TMS (Torah Min Hashamayim). I can't even raise the 'bias argument' against some of these people since they grew up Conservative, and consciously made the switch to Orthodoxy later in life.
What's with these people???
How can they know all the skeptical stuff, yet still remain happily Orthodox? My Chareidi indoctrinated brain cannot comprehend this. One guy said to me he simply doesn't have the energy to deal with all this skeptical stuff, he has made his peace with it and moved on. What the heck does that even mean?!
I see the following demographics in my community:
1. Academics & Scholars like the above who know all the skeptical stuff but somehow are still (neo?) Orthodox
2. Frum skeptics who have already gone or might go OTD
3. Older people who are 'frum in their bones' despite not knowing very much
4. Young to middle age couples who are educated but stam don't think about any of this stuff ever
5. Orthoprax types who like the MO community but never believed in the dogma in the first place
I find this very interesting. I would post more about it but I can't as it would be ethically incorrect to infringe on people's privacy. (OK, the real reason is that they might get mad at me and not talk to me anymore.)
Nov 1, 2007 1:08 PM
The Goal of Life: To be an Eved Hashem_
In the past, I have gotten into arguments with fundie fruitcakes like Chaim B as to the goal of life. I have always argued that the ultimate goal must be to be a better person (moral, ethical etc), and that the Torah and Mitzvos are simply means to that end. The fundies often argue that the goal of life is to be an Eved Hashem, and I have argued forcefully with them because that just doesn't seem right. Why would God create us, just to be servants of Him? Even with the Ramchal's explanation (naamah dekisufah) it doesn't seem right.
However, after reading some Yeshayahu Leibowitz last night, I think we can come to a compromise. Leibowitz argues that the point of life is to be 'Godly'. What does this mean? To me, it means that we are to emulate God, since God is the best possible 'being' there is, so we should emulate that. This is what Chazal say 'Mah hu Rachum, af atah rachum'.
This could be the meaning of the words 'eved hashem' too. We think of an eved in very base terms, we picture a negro slave, toiling in the cotton fields of the deep South, being beaten by his master. But maybe that it is not the intent at all. Maybe a true eved Hashem is someone who strives with his utmost to be 'Godly', i.e. like God.
They say the sign of a true eved hashem is someone who is mevatel his daas to Hashem's daas. But does this mean he turns into a zombie with no thoughts? No! It means he shapes his thoughts to be like God's thoughts, and his actions to be like God's actions. In other words, 'What would God do?' is the question on his mind.
This neatly reconciles both my view point and the viewpoint of my opponents, and is consistent with Chazal and the Mesorah.
So now the big question is, what do we need to do to be Godly? Well, obviously I believe that Judaism has a very good appproach here, which has stood the test of time. More on that later.
Nov 1, 2007 1:08 PM
Top Eleven Questions that Bes Yaakov Girls Ask_
_Answers please!
Nov 1, 2007 1:08 PM
Agile Jewish Philosophy Development Methodology (AJPDM)_
One of the primary goals of this blog, if not the primary goal, is to figure out a new Jewish Philosophy, which adequately addresses all the Science & Torah, Faith & Reason issues which we have been discussing, while still retaining an allegiance to Orthodox Judaism (or something quite like it).
In the back of my mind, I do have a process for achieving this, but I have never formally laid it out. Recently, some commenters have been criticizing me for promoting ideas and then dropping them, or going round in circles or not being genuine. Nothing could be further from the truth, there is a method to my madness, and I guess it is time to now clearly lay out my methodology and its guiding principles.
Evolution, not Revolution
The foremost guiding principle is 'Evolution, Not Revolution'. By this I mean that a new philosophy must build on previous philosophies, and not throw them out alltogether. Occasionally there have been radical breaks with the past, for example the Rambam, or even the Ari, but these are few and far between, and are unlikely to happen here. Rather, we need to take baby steps, basing ourselves on things that have been said before, but still moving onwards and (hopefully) upwards.
For example, the original Israelites most likely believed that their God was the superior over all the Gods. Over time this evolved into the belief that God was the only God, yet many people still thought of God in very anthropomorphic terms. Under the influence of the Rambam, God became a more abstract concept. And in more recent times, you have Yeshayahu Leibowitz (and even Rav Kook in places) who go even further. But to suddenly take the concept of 'God' and throw it out altogether? Not possible.
Re-Interpretation, not Hijacking
Often times, a new philosphy will attempt to sneak in under the guise of re-interpretation of existing concepts. So an atheist might use the term 'God' to mean 'Existence'. In its most extreme forms, this amounts to the hijacking of terminology for concepts and ideas which are very different for what was originally intended. However, there can be no denying that evolutionary change in concepts does occur. Also, many concepts can have a 'base' meaning, a simple meaning for the masses, and then a more 'sophisticated' meaning for the elite. The Rambam makes much out of this approach, spending the first half of the Moreh Nevuchim re-defining or re-intepreting many basic words and associated concepts. The danger here is in going too far, but if we keep it in check it is perfectly legitimate as part of the evolutionary process.
Best of Breed, Not Single Source
There have been many Jewish Philosphers over the centuries who have tried to create consistent theories of Judaism, often based around some key guiding principle or idea. This is all well and good, and if it works then that's great. But often times this has lead to a limited focus, where the philosophy addresses one area of Judaism but neglects another. Or, in his zeal to apply his system of thought to all areas of Judaism, the philosopher stretches it past breaking point. My methodology is to pick and choose the best ideas and concepts from a wide range of philosophers and thinkers, and not to try and pick one over-riding philosophy. The latter approach can be dangerous, and lead to idol-worship. My approach runs the risk of inconsistency, so we will have to be careful about that. But, I don't believe that accepting one Rabbi's view in one area means that you have to necessarily accept his view in another.
Agile, not Waterfall
We need to be agile in our approach. This means we will iterate around a number of different topics, rather than going methodologically from start to finish. Since many topics are inter-dependant, I see this as the correct approach. To casual readers, this may seem somewhat disorganized, but since all discussions are documented (by definition), we have a clear trace of where we have been and what we have accomplished.
Destructive and Constructive
All construction requires some destruction too, it’s unavoidable. The focus is certainly on construction of a new philosophy, but this will inevitably require the destruction of some of the old. This is for 2 reasons: Firstly, we need to make room for the new, and more importantly, we need to see which parts of the old will stand up to a beating, and which will crumble. Healthy parts of the old infrastructure might not need to be replaced or refreshed. But we really need to take a long hard look at all the old infrastructure to see what is healthy and what isn't. The past two years have completed most of this destruction and testing, and now we can move forward with more of the construction. However we must be continually on the lookout for unstable foundations, since new development on top of a shaky base is not a good idea.
Traditional Sources
Any source is viable, as the Rambam says, accept the truth from wherever it comes. Obviously traditional sources will carry greater weight, as will sources from people close to Orthodoxy, since this fits in with the evolutionary approach that we have outlined. But no good idea will be rejected. Key thinkers will be the Jewish Philosophers of the 20th Century, such as Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Kook, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
Goal Driven
The entire approach is driven by a specific goal that I have articulated many times. In brief, the goal is to create an Orthodoxy compatible version of Judaism which is comfortable with modern science and similar disciplines. There is certainly room for faith, but not for faith contradicted by evidence. Halachah is of primary importance, as described by Yeshaya Leibowitz, Eliezer Berkovitz and others. Of course a non Halachik approach could be pursued too, and has been ably pursued by the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, but that is not the goal here for many reasons.
Approach
The approach I take in general is to continually widen and deepen my knowledge of all the available philosophy out there. Commenters and other bloggers contribute to this process. Often I will post provocative ideas to see what the reaction is. If the reaction is entirely negative, I may drop the idea, or reformulate it. Ultimately, this process is for me. To the extent that other people find it useful too, then all well and good. And obviously a key test of its viability will be how many people buy into it.
So, onwards and upwards!
