A Response to XGH

Beha'alotcha inconsistancies

The Lonely Manna of Faith

So XGH has some BC posts up at his kofer-lite blog. (Sorry XGH, but you aren't a real kofer if you actually do the mitzvot. A least, not in my book. Rambam might tell me to throw you in a pit and let you die though.)

BC - I'll say it again - offers the most parsimonious explanation of the Bible. Sadly, this explanation is not that Moshe got the text of the Bible 100% dictation from Horeb.

It looks like different narratives were stitched together.

Now, the primary question is, why should I care?

The answer is, if you ask Rav Schachter what Moshe got on Sinai, he would say

1. Some explanations as to the peshat meaning of some verses ("Beautiful fruit"="Etrog", Moshe had divorced his Cushite wife, etc)
2. Some stuff not in the Torah at all (Make Teffilin black squares... etc.)
3. The rules for pulling rules out of the Torah, and the mandate to do so
4. The Torah itself, 100%

Now, this all fits nicely together. The problem is, we can only apply our rules (We end up with 13 in Rabbi Yishmael's time) to Divinely inspired text, right?

Well, maybe we can apply the logical rules to faithful human representations of the past to try and find what was left unsaid.

So, my conclusion is this:

A. G-d gave Moshe 1 and 2, and for 40 years they worked out a set of normative laws.
B. The humans wrote down what had happened
C. Ezra ended up collating everything
D. As everyone was trying to faithfully represent the past, at every step of the way it was both appropriate and expected to use logical tools to derive laws.

Does the Torah itself say that it was given in its entirety "Al pi ado-shem, b'yad Moshe"? No. We tacked that on so that simple folk would follow the commandments. As Ibn Ezra says, the wise will understand.

[Edit] After some thought, G-d doesn't need to give Moshe explanations to written things. He just needs to tell Moshe stuff. Then Moshe n' Pals write it down, lest they forget, and some stuff gets written about in great detail, but some stuff not so much, and they keep that stuff as part of the Oral Tradition until we are forced to write it down later.

Why have an Oral Tradition at all? I suspect it was some flexibility built in the system. Precisely so that we don't have to worry about disagreeing with Rishonim... if we hadn't written their shailot u'teshuvot and hashkafa, we wouldn't need to worry about the shitot of anyone who wasn't alive.

Amos 8:11

"Behold, days are coming," declares the Lord GOD, "When I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the LORD."

Let me drash this verse out for you. This is a curse.

How can it be a curse? Surely it a good thing when people want to learn Torah!

But there will be a famine of Torah. And so people will imbibe other teachings, of other nations.

That is why we say, "Yeish Chokhma B'Goyim" - they have science that we can accept.

We must guard ourselves against their "torah", their religious/philosophical teachings

And if we tell our selves "Ain Chokhma B'Goyim" - When we see airplanes and medicine and cellphones, we will know that it is a lie.

And so we will go after their "Torah", and leave our own.

That is why we should not lie, and why we should admit "Yeish Chokhma B'Goyim".

Wisdom in the Nations

Chazal tell us: מדרש רבה איכה פרשה ב פסקה יג
אם יאמר לך אדם יש חכמה בגוים תאמן הדא הוא דכתיב
(עובדיה א') והאבדתי חכמים מאדום ותבונה מהר עשו. יש
תורה בגוים אל תאמן דכתיב (איכה ב:ט) מלכה ושריה בגוים
אין תורה.
If a person should tell you, “There is wisdom amongst the nations,” believe it! This is what is meant when in Ovadiah it states: And I will make vanish wisdom from Edom and understanding from Mount Se’ir [implying there is wisdom and understanding to destroy]. But should he tell you, “There is Torah amongst the nations,” do not believe it! As [in Eichah] it states: Her king and her ministers amongst the nations, there is no Torah.

The Chazon Ish

ספר אמונה ובטחון פרק א :ס"ח
דברי הימים וקורות עולם הם מאלפים הרבה את החכם בדרכו
ועל תולדות העבר ייסד אדני חכמתו.
The knowledge of history and world events to a great
extent train the wise man in his progress and it is on the
happenings of the past that he will establish the pillars of
his wisdom.

From, "Are Our Children Too Worldly?:

"When students are made to feel that asking rational questions about the reasons for Torah and mitzvos is somehow wrong; that trying to understand the ratzon Hashem, (the will of G-d) the taamei hamitzvos, is at best unimportant and irrelevant, then for many naturally and properly inquisitive minds, minds that have become used to reason, the world of Torah, if not Torah itself, becomes confining and suspect."

From "Hakirah", Vol. 4 2007, by Aharon Hersh Fried

Because kofer blogs just quote people they agree with to vapidly assert themselves and their intellectual not-aloneness to lend themselves credance, and I am at once mocking them and also very much in their same boat.

The Yaavetz and Rav Hirsch

Yaavatz:

ואצלי דקדק באומרו: ודע מה ולא אמר ודע להשיב. כי אין ראוי
להתוכח עמו. ולזה אמר ודע מה שתשיב את האפיקורוס לא שתשיב
אם לא שתצטרך להשיב לקדש את ה' ברבים, אלא שתדע אתה
לעצמך שיהיה לבך חזק באמונתך ותשקוד על דלתי התורה יום יום.
I have noted that the Mishnah states: “Know what (you
would answer a heretic,)” rather than “know [so that you]
will answer (a heretic,)” for it is not proper to engage in
debate with him. That is why it states “Know what you
would answer a heretic,” i.e., not that you should
answer—unless you need to publicly glorify Hashem’s
name. Rather, you should know for yourself, so that your
faith is strong in your heart, and you continue to strive
daily at the gateway of Torah.

Rav Hirsch:

Finally, it would be most perverse and criminal of us to
seek to instill into our children a contempt, based on
ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not
specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in
the belief that by inculcating our children with such a
negative attitude we could safeguard them from contacts
with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of
mankind. It is true, of course, that the results of secular
research and study will not always coincide with the truths
of Judaism, for the simple reason that they do not proceed
from the axiomatic premises of Jewish truth. But the
reality is that our children will move in circles influenced
and shaped by these results. Your children will come
within the radius of this secular human wisdom, whether it
be in the lecture halls of academia or in the pages of
literature. And if they discover that our own Sages, whose
teachings embody the truth, have taught us שנתן מחכמתו
לבשר ודם , that it is G-d Who has given of His own
wisdom to mortals, they will come to overrate secular
studies in the same measure in which they have been
taught to despise them.
You will then see that your simple-minded calculations
were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal,
because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in
order to protect the truth, and because you have thus
departed from the path upon which your own Sages have
preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse,
because by so doing you have achieved precisely the
opposite of what you wanted to accomplish. For now your
child, suspecting you of either deceit or lamentable
ignorance, will transfer the blame and the disgrace that
should rightly be placed only upon you and your conduct
to all the Jewish wisdom and knowledge, all the Jewish
education and training which he received under your
guidance. Your child will consequently begin to doubt all
of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from
your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of
ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of
its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to
perish.

See, I am not advocating a retreat from the ideological principles Judaism holds dear. I advocate a robust Judaism able to tackle the challenges it faces in our time, just as it always has had defenders of the faith who stopped the breaches in faith and observance by having its leaders go and prove themselves the equals of the heads of the Academies of Athens, or of other sects of Judaism, of Christianity and Islam, and modern Atheism.

We do not need to hide behind fences, and indeed, we cannot.

Hiding the Truth

The following is a quote from Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky

I’m often asked here in Monsey and especially
regarding girls, “How much should we or can we shut
them off to protect them from the culture at large?” I
always tell them, “You can’t! Unless, that is, you live in
Squaretown.” Now especially; I understand they have their
own hospital and their own cemetery, one can be born
there, live ones life there, and be buried there. To those
who can do that, ‘Tavo aleihem brachah’ (may they be
blessed). Most of us, however, do not live in Squaretown
and cannot live in Squaretown. So what will you do? Not
tell a young boy about evolution and then wait until at age
16 or 17 he reads in the New York Times, which he ‘knows’
prints only ‘verified facts,’ that the bones of a person 2 or
3 million years old were found!?? And the Times will print
this without any mention of detracting opinions or
controversy. What will this young man do? He’ll be
completely lost! This would not happen if he had been
taught at an earlier time in school by his rabbei’im and
teachers that there are people who believe such and such,
what their mistaken beliefs are based on, where their error
is, what it is we believe about such events, and how we
believers deal with these issues.

You know, when I was a boy growing up, I had a friend.
He was always a little more than I was, and did more than
I did. He was a year older: I was 10 and he was 11. He
wore long payos, I didn’t. He wore a gartel, and I didn’t. Last
summer when I was in Eretz Yisrael, I met him again. He
was living in K’far Saba and I paid him a visit. While
talking to him I found out that things had changed and
that, unfortunately, he was now turning on the lights on
Shabbos. He turned to me and he asked, ‘Yankel, what’s
happened to us? “Ich bin doch altz geven frummer” (Wasn’t I
always frumer than you??!!), to which I replied [and here Reb
Yaakov smiled and there was a glint in his eyes], “Ye, ye du
bist takke allz geven frummer, ich bin obber alz geven kluger.”
“Yes, yes you were always frummer but I was always kluger
(wiser).”

Ah, I did not know that great Rabbis were aware of what was going on far beneath them!

What is the good Rabbi's meaning here? That it is not right for us to ignore our ideological foes. Because doing so leaves our flank unguarded so that our yungerkiet (I'm just making words up here, honest, I don't know a word of Yiddish) will (Chas v'shalom!) get intellectually blind-sided.

And you know, reading the kofer blogs, talking to the real-life koferim around me (Yes, I do not live in New Skver) there is some element of them being unprepared for the truth, and having their life turn fliped turned upside down.

Of course, now is as good a time as ever to talk about evolution.

Is evolution the best scientific theory right now? Absolutely.

Does it conflict with my religious views? Not if "Maaseh Bereshit" and "Maaseh Merkavah" are both mystical texts beyond our comprehension that we would be fools to take literally.

More importantly, as a scientific theory, evolution lets us predict things, like whether squirrel fossils will be found in Cretaceous rock layers. (Answer: no squirrel fossils in Cretaceous rock laters, so evolution stays safe.)