Debate with Yaron Yadan
I watched the debate and, as usual, I enjoyed your answers. It seemed like Sharon didn’t know what to do with you.
Yaron commented, and I think somewhat rightly, that your view that there is no connection between morality and halacha is new and perhaps not entirely agreed upon.
This view of yours is indeed brilliant and may solve many problems.. This view is also difficult for me to digest. (Obviously, my digestive problems should not interest you) I still wanted to ask.
If all of Halacha is truly unrelated to morality, all of the moral commandments in the Torah, and there are many of them: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Do not forsake or forsake,” “The Sabbath is lost,” “Do not show favoritism to an old man,” and so on. Do they all happen to have religious value in addition to the well-known moral value?
Do these commandments really have nothing to do with morality? Isn’t it strange that two fields are not related at all, according to you, they have so many points in common?
In addition, regarding the woman of good looks (your view of course saves us from the difficulty in the parsha), it seems to me that there is a certain naivety and turning a blind eye to reality in attacking the Torah in connection with this parsha. The known reality is that in my opinion, in all wars in the world, including in modern times, women were raped in war.
What to do? Unfortunately, this is human/soldier nature. Of course, we need to fight the phenomenon, but this is the painful reality.
The Torah, faced with this painful reality, restricts, and imposes difficult conditions in order to permit this grave thing in retrospect. Dear soldier, did your instincts overwhelm you? It’s a great shame, at least take responsibility for your terrible actions. This parsha ends with “You shall not abuse it.” I wish this for all armies and all soldiers in the world.
This is no coincidence. God created the world, so it is no wonder that He tries to synchronize the instructions of Halacha with the instructions of morality. But sometimes a conflict arises and synchronization is impossible. And yet these are two independent categories.
If I may ask about the beginning of the debate - you claimed that the proof of the truth of the Torah is the source of revelation and not its content, and my question is, do you think that this has no effect at all on checking credibility? If they tell you that Albert Einstein wrote a text and there is a lot of support for it, and on the other hand, there are piles of nonsense in physics written there. Wouldn't that give an indication that he didn't write it?
I didn't mean it was completely unimportant. You're right, of course. But it's completely hypothetical. Since the source is the main consideration, then to rule it out you have to prove to me that it's a clearly stupid text, and not just that you don't understand it. That's not the case with the Torah. When you see me clearly writing something, but you discover that it's written in Chinese or that it's a progressive text. Will you conclude that I didn't write it? I suppose you'll consider other options, for example that I know Chinese or that I copied or that I changed my mind about the progressives and so on.
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