Does the Rabbi not know Abraham Korman's answer to the question of the hyrax and the hare?
The hyrax and the hare have a two-stage mechanism of rumination—chewing the grass and its initial digestion. Then the grass is expelled in the form of small pellets, which they then eat, and only then does the final digestion take place. That is exactly the rumination done by other herbivorous animals (other animals do not have this two-stage mechanism, so they cannot digest cellulose). By the way, in the book Watership Down, which deals with rabbits, this mechanism also appears through the eating of pellets (the grass balls expelled after the initial digestion).

In the past I saw several answers, including this one (there is also a response by someone called Rabbi Segal on the Da'at Emet site on this matter). I only added that there is also the possibility of incorrect identification. Because of all this, I am not interested in this topic.

Rumination has a clear halakhic definition. It cannot be defined differently. This answer sounds like bad apologetics. You could use it to reach a lot of absurd claims and to permit quite a few animals that are known to be impure.

Interestingly, the Christians do not have this problem, because in the Septuagint it is specifically mentioned that the hyrax (which is identified with the rabbit) and the hare do not ruminate. It may be that this was a mistake, or that the translator of the Septuagint, who had a Hellenistic education, changed the verse.

If everything can be interpreted so that it fits the facts, how does that square with the assumption that the detail came from Heaven?
After all, words have a clear meaning, and presumably the intention is clear. It is obvious that a weird interpretation was not the author's intention.
I would understand claims like: "this specific detail is not from Heaven" or "this is a copying error."

After all, if one assumes that God would not transmit incorrect details, and that the Torah is from Him, then if a contradiction is discovered and we really understand that it is a contradiction, then there is a contradiction in the assumptions. And therefore there is a problem that carries over into the model as well
(and in general the problem is even more severe, because afterward one can prove anything).
Trying to interpret things differently when it is clear that this is not the intention, just in order not to reach an absurd situation, does not seem serious.

A,
According to Maimonides, this definition applies to domesticated animals, and therefore he excludes the camel from it. The hare and the hyrax are not domesticated animals, so it is not clear that this definition has to apply to them.

That sounds strange. Why should there be a different definition of rumination for wild animals and domesticated animals? And the distinction between wild animals and domesticated animals in the Sages is also unclear, so today everything is treated as domesticated animals.

The fact is that Maimonides takes the trouble to exclude the camel and does not bother to exclude the hare and the hyrax, which the Torah does exclude—perhaps because from the outset they do not belong to the reference group of domesticated animals with this sign of rumination.

A very good question, which is why I do not deal with the Bible and do not think there is value in studying it. Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of whether it is from Heaven or not.
And you are also not precise when you say that one can prove anything. On the contrary, one cannot prove anything (or almost anything).

To the person who wrote that the excuse about a specialized digestive system is a bad excuse—what other animals, besides the hyrax and the hare, have such a digestive system?

And to Michi: if you have already decided that "the Torah is from Heaven, and therefore there is no problem interpreting it in a way that does not contradict the facts,"

there are at least 2 problems with that:
A. What happens if someone, unlike you, is still not locked into the idea that the Torah is from Heaven, and is studying it in order to understand whether these are words of life or not?

B. Does "there is no obstacle to interpreting it in a way that does not contradict the facts" override rationality?
After all, common sense says there is not a sufficiently good reason to assume that the Jewish people lost the tradition regarding rabbit and hyrax.
So I have no problem matching the Torah to facts when it fits with logic. But here that is not the case, and that is why it looks like evasion or intellectual dishonesty.

If you want to ask about my dishonesty, you need to start from my point of departure. Unless you want to accuse me of dishonesty for thinking differently from you. That is of course possible, and good luck with that.

I'm going along with you.
Let's take a step back—what makes you see the Torah as a superhuman source?

I do think it is rational to believe that reality has a creator. I even do think that He probably left some purpose to be realized here.

But how did you reach the conclusion that it is specifically the Torah?

You are so committed to the heavenly origin of the Torah that even if people show you things that are crystal clear and do not fit the facts, you are willing to do interpretive acrobatics (once, of course, the heavenly origin of the Torah is already clear to you) and leave rationalism behind.
Why?
What in the Torah convinced a rational person to agree to such acrobatics?

A quick look at the site reveals that you yourself admit that if you had been born a Muslim, you likely would have boasted about the sayings of the Hadith and spoken in praise of the great Muslim philosophers and the great Muslim mathematicians.

So where does such a high level of confidence in the Torah come from?
What is superhuman about it?

So now, after we have finished with the accusations of dishonesty, you are retreating and only want a general lecture on my belief in the Torah. Nice. How nice that you are going along with me.
In short, I do not see anything superhuman in it. My doctrine on this matter is laid out in my book The First Existent, mainly in the fifth discussion. Good luck.

I did not exactly accuse you of dishonesty.
I only wondered whether it is not ridiculous that you accuse religious people who ignore problems of dishonesty, while you solve the problems in a crooked way. That was a question, not an accusation.

Why do you decide that those religious people who ignore problems are "dishonest"? Maybe, just like you, they have already reached the conclusion that the Torah is from Heaven, and therefore there is no need even to acknowledge the existence of the problems (or to "solve" them crookedly)?

One more thing: I read the fifth booklet, and it is very, very, very unconvincing.
The witness argument with all sorts of supposedly philosophical wrapping, plus all kinds of apologetics about tradition and the Torah's influence.
Not something that would give a neutral person a solid basis to believe that the Torah really is from Heaven.
And I repeat again that in fact you yourself say that if you had not been Jewish, you would not have gone in the direction of Judaism.

So in the end we are left with the fact that your accusation of others for intellectual dishonesty is unjustified, since maybe they are like you—they reached the conclusion that the Torah is from Heaven, and therefore there is no need to delve into problems about things written in the Torah.
Or, in the less pleasant case—and here I am now accusing out loud—that both you and they are intellectually dishonest.

Wow, fascinating response. You did not accuse me of dishonesty, you only wondered whether my words were not ridiculous.
In addition, it now turns out that you read the booklet and found it unconvincing, so you ask in a focused and intelligent way (and with impressive integrity) directly about the points that seemed difficult to you: why I believe in the Torah. Meaning, you expect me to briefly repeat the whole booklet here (which you already read), and that is presumably so that you can once again wonder, in a very focused way, whether all this is not ridiculous. Quite a discussion we have had here. I must say this is amazing trolling, full of integrity.
I would be happy if next time you could raise your voice a little more, because it is still not clear to me whether you are only wondering whether this or that book of mine is ridiculous, or only accusing in a whisper of dishonesty, or perhaps accusing out loud some other amorphous accusation.

I feel uncomfortable with how the discussion developed.

I am making a kind of summary:

Regarding the zoological problems in the Torah,
in your book The First Existent you wrote something along the lines of:

"It is enough if we say that we do not know which animals the Torah meant" …

whereas in this thread you proved that you yourself do not really believe this statement (which, as noted, you wrote and signed your name to in your book), since regarding the questions people raised here about the "zoological acrobatics," you wrote: "Good question. Therefore I do not deal with what is written in the Bible."

That is, in this thread you showed that the acrobatic move that you yourself recommended in the book is not serious at all.

We topped it off with the claim that you are allowed to square the triangle and round the square because you believe the Torah is from Heaven, but someone who claims the Torah is from Heaven without trying to square the circle is already intellectually dishonest.

And everything is documented here and in the book.

How lovely for us.

Every time anew I wonder whether to delete trolling like this, and in the end I do not delete it, because a person is allowed not to be a very sharp pencil.
You quote a sentence that says, "It is enough if we say…," whose meaning is precisely that I am absolutely not committing myself to that, but only saying that this is one possibility among several that exempts me from dealing with the Bible (especially in light of its ambiguous nature), and then you see in this a contradiction to my statement here that I do not deal with the Bible because of its ambiguous nature.
It is a bit hard to discuss this with a person whose reading comprehension is so poor.
As for the rest of your demagogic nonsense here (squaring the circle, etc.), I see no point in getting into it.
All right, we are done.

Michi gets a simple geometry exercise showing that a triangle has 200 degrees.
So he explains it away by saying that the pencil with which the exercise was written is not sharp.
And then he says, "It is enough if we say that this exercise is ambiguous . . . there is no essential need to check the error."

Very logical.

The Bible is ambiguous?
Maybe. But in the case of rumination the matter is written quite clearly.

Either you provide a serious answer (and it is okay to be mistaken), or it would be better for you to be like those who keep their mouths shut.

But after people already showed you how problematic the excuse is—"let's just say it is not clear which animals the Torah meant"—and after you insist that you are allowed to go on using "because of its ambiguous character I am exempt from dealing with this issue," I have nowhere to conclude except that you are simply intellectually dishonest.

Instead of taking responsibility and admitting a mistake and arrogance in your writing, without checking the matter in depth, you even try in a roundabout way to say that your writing is actually perfectly fine.

Intellectually dishonest, and in full view of everyone.