Negotiation in Israeli Thought
Hello Rabbi,
You say in the third book in the trilogy on the field of Jewish thought that “every thinker who uses sources uses flexibility and contradictions, and in fact the ambiguity that is created, in order to interpret as he wishes. You will not find classical sources in the field of thought or negotiations designed to create a complete picture while resolving contradictions and dealing with other mishnahs in order to find a Torah that will fit all the sources.”
This is also my feeling, but I have reservations about it that I would like to hear your opinion on:
A) Did Maimonides not hold such negotiations and reach a decision in his books?
b) Is it not possible to say that within the books of Jewish thought they respond to the claims of their time and, in fact, to each other (simply in an implicit and not unambiguous way, as sometimes happens in the early halacha)?
A. I understand that you mean his halakhic books? There he apparently did investigate the sources and made a decision. In his philosophical books, in my opinion, he really didn’t. He determined his conclusions according to his own opinion, and was absolutely not moved by contradictory sources.
B. Maybe it’s possible. After all, there is no negotiation or clarification and everyone can conclude whatever they want.
It is not true that there is no debate in Jewish thought. It is simply rarer. For example, I saw that Rabbi Ashlag claimed that the Rashi was wrong on some issue in the teachings of Kabbalah. They simply don't write it in books like that. Usually, each generation writes their own insights through a complete synthesis that they learned from all their predecessors. In any case, books by people who see the same things only from different angles are accepted. And whoever teaches them all himself will write his own book. Rabbi Sherlow wrote a book about the union between Rabbi Kook's harmony and Rabbi Soloveitchik's dialectics, for example.
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