Q&A: Religious Experience.
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Religious Experience.
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Attached is a link to the post about the interview with Sheleg in Makor Rishon.
Regarding what was said there, I would like to ask:
- Does the Rabbi really hold that religious experience has no value at all in the religious context?
- With all due respect, does the Rabbi really not experience such emotion in the religious context and in the experience of standing before God (“rational autism,” in Yifrah’s words), or does the Rabbi simply not attach any importance to it?
Thank you very much.
Answer
This will be explained in the upcoming columns.
By the way, you didn’t provide a link (but it isn’t needed. I read it).
It’s hard to characterize what religious emotion is. But in any study of a subject there is a sense of wonder: at the order, at the power of the generalization, at the subtle logical structure, and in addition (maybe for some people this is the main thing) there is the content itself, which can sometimes inspire wonder when one understands it and perhaps identifies with it. It seems to me that in the natural sciences you can’t really be moved by the content as such, only by the elegance of the structure, by cracking the puzzle, by the generalization of countless phenomena into a small set of equations. But in moral philosophy, for example, and in Jewish law for someone who tries (and succeeds) to understand the reason, especially if he draws out ideas from his human inclination and not as a merely formal way out of difficulties—there can also be a sense of wonder at the content. But I need to study a lot more before trying to diagnose it.