The Maggid of Beit Yosef
Good evening!
The Beit Yosef writes that an angel appeared to him several times and revealed the secrets of the Torah to him, and he writes the simpler parts in the book. Rabbi Elkabetz (or Rabbi Najera) also writes that on Shavuot night they saw with their own eyes that the Beit Yosef said words of Torah that seemed to be spoken by someone else, and the Rabbi himself confirmed this.
This is seemingly overwhelming evidence of the existence of the matter, isn’t it?
It seems to me that there is not a single person who would say that Beit Yosef is a liar (since even if one can lie for the sake of high value…, this is not the case of course). And likewise, it is not right to say that he is delusional, because this is someone who wrote the most refined Shulchan, and likewise, the rabbis around him testified to this, and likewise, he revealed some of those secrets.
And yet I would love to hear how an honest and sincere atheist would deal with this?
Thank you very much!
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So what can they say about great rabbis who testified that Elijah the prophet appeared to them in a dream? Here it is impossible to claim that this is a hallucination (after all, it is not in a dream, but in a dream).
Let's say a person like the Gra, who is famous for his level of truthfulness and honesty, who never uttered a word in vain (and the sources who transmitted this are people like Beit Brisk, who all know about accuracy, but have different mentalities..). And he said that an angel wanted to reveal the secrets of the Torah to him and he did not want to.
That they were daydreaming or imagining something. Or maybe they actually met him.
The Chazon Ish: The Maggid of the Beit Yosef is also the Beit Yosef. Quoted in Benjamin Brown's book, The Chazon Ish, page 191
The question is what exactly he meant by this. Simply put, he seems to be claiming that he should be taken seriously as if the words were spoken by Beit Yosef himself. I don't think his intention was to say that there was no Maggid and that these were hallucinations of Beit Yosef.
In my opinion, part of his rational approach. For example, as quoted in Mod 190 in Brown's book: "In this generation, the concealment of face is so great that a pregnant woman can intentionally step on a bird's fingernail and nothing will happen to her."
Here too, one can wonder whether he means that it works but we have a cover-up or whether this is a polite way of saying that it doesn't work and the sages were wrong. It reminds me that I once wrote in the name of Rabbi Neriah Gotal that the change of nature is a polite way of saying that the sages were wrong. He called me to protest, since it does not appear in his book. Although in his previous article it is raised as a possibility, he himself does not accept such a position. In my opinion, it is certainly possible.
The prophet never said that a Maggid was not revealed to the House of Joseph! What he meant was that the laws that the Maggid told him had no special significance, because from the Bible - if he is in the position of an angel, then he is not in heaven; and if he is in the position of a man, then he is no more than the authority of the House of Joseph.
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