Debates in faith

Thank you.
Can I have a link to purchase the book?

Question: So you will also sit with Zvi Yanai at your house for, say, a whole day – you will not succeed in undermining his faith and forcing common sense to decide that it is true? And what if it is someone who is not as learned as Zvi Yanai was? Does your very knowledge cause a leftist person to confess to you one on one?

The attitude that has formed in me after several Jews approached me, that there is a spiritual force in a person that prevents him from accepting the subject (a shell as the Kabbalists call it).
I have seen before my eyes people who have been involved in Kabbalah for years or who were complacent and held a certain opinion, and at one moment (among themselves) they suddenly understood the Chabad point, for example”. And then I ask myself.. what happened up to this point.
That is, there are different parts of the soul that at each level can contain a higher faith – The books of the middle rabbi of Chabad and Gai Rait talk about this. It also depends on the spiritual level of the writer and how much that righteous man in heaven is connected to you and will pray for you. And who is the person in the treasury of souls?
What bothers me is why I can't prove anything to left-wing people! Intellectual proof of a court of law! As the Rebbe writes in the proof for students in the book Sha'arei Emunah (appears in Hibroks)

Thank you
Mo'edim leshimcha

Hello.
This is the link:
https://shop100313.istores.co.il/
Usually not, at least not immediately. The effect is effective mainly before the opinion is solidified (with religious undecideds, and sometimes secular undecideds). When a person has a solidified opinion, it is very difficult to change it, and perhaps to some extent rightly so.
By the way, I am not usually concerned with leftism but with religion. You mix them up, but it is really not the same thing.
And you are mixing Chabad with Judaism. It is really not the same thing either (I am not referring to Rabbi Schach's statements, but to the very identification that is so natural in you and so typical of Chabad members in general).
I am also not usually impressed by the psychological-spiritual analysis of kelpits and the like. It is quite simple psychology and there is no need for all this. Furthermore, religious people also have obstacles to accepting secular arguments, just as secular people have obstacles to accepting religious arguments. I don't know who is more open. As mentioned, it's hard for a person to change their mind once they've formed one. Is this obstacle (of religious people) also a shell in your opinion? Unless you're talking about a shell of Venus (good and bad mixed together).
And finally, talk about "courtroom proof" is naive and not serious. It's not mathematics, and there are serious arguments for and against. You shouldn't feel like you're right for sure and everyone else is wrong or stupid. As mentioned, there are smart people and stupid people on all sides. There are also biased and objective people to varying degrees on all sides. You have to try and convince, and that's it, without getting into psychological and judgmental questions. Believe me, atheists are asking exactly the same thing about you (and me).

You mentioned Rabbi Yaakov Elitzur of ’Ervaim’.

I must share an anecdote I had with him, the memory of which still hurts me.

A few years ago I began to formulate an atheistic position (a deist, to be precise). A family member of mine approached him, and we established contact.
Rabbi Elitzur came to me voluntarily (to the far north), sat with me and showed me his presentation and views (by the way, I got the impression that it was material from the ’Creationists’ in the US, which had been processed and translated).

At the same time, he maintained contact with my family member, and claimed to him that the change I had undergone was due to ’lust’.

I approached Rabbi Elitzur and asked him why he told him that? And he answered me:

“Common sense and common sense easily show and prove that there is a Creator of the world and that the Torah is true. Anyone who denies this, despite being presented with the ’proofs’, is either an extreme idiot or a lustful person.
Since it is clear to me that you are a very intelligent person, you will agree with me that there is no choice but to state that lust has driven you out” – right now.

This sentence really irritated me, and I no longer agreed to meet with him.

There are two problems with the sentence.
First, it is very offensive, of course. No one likes to hear such ‘compliments’, even if they are true.

Second, it shows difficulty or a complete inability to understand the second position. You cannot argue with a person and argue with him if he approaches the debate with absolute certainty that logic says that his position is 100 percent true and the other side's position is 100 percent stupid.

This is not a fruitful discussion, but preaching.

From my acquaintance with Rabbi Elitzur, I know that his intentions are good and his heart is warm. But in my opinion, his approach is completely wrong, both substantively and tactically.

Aaron, beyond insulting, it just means that the matter itself shouldn't matter to you whether he listens and is open or not. It's clear that people of value are not here to discuss with you, but to convince you. The question is whether you are willing to hear their arguments in favor of formulating your own position. If they don't hear you, it's their loss. Of course, if in your opinion they have nothing new to offer, there's no point in talking, but that's true even if they were attentive.

Thanks Rabbi, I'll try to phrase it differently:

In these kinds of debates, the arguments are not black and white. When discussing problems of biblical criticism, for example, some things are more consistent with religious belief, and some things are more consistent with the position of biblical critics.
How do you make a decision? Based on a general impression. According to which approach things work out better.
Now, when people sit down with an open mind, and are willing to reexamine everything, they give due weight to all evidence. Obviously, the weight is a subjective matter, and yet, when one side makes an argument, their partner understands its meaning.
When you sit down with a person for whom one position is crystal clear and the other is so wrong that any child would deny it, there is a problem with the discussion.
The problem is not with the arguments themselves. Each side may make good arguments according to its own system. The problem is in the atmosphere that accompanies the conversation.
The Rabbi (the moderator) makes arguments that, in his opinion, are unequivocal and solid as a rock. He doesn't understand how it's possible not to be impressed by them. I make an argument, the rabbi gives it as much weight as a garlic peel.
At the end of the conversation, the rabbi's summary (not always literally): “I explained everything to him, he just doesn't want to understand”.

You might think that this is just an emotional matter. But I think it also has to do with the quality of the debate:
When you have a good partner, who knows how to be impressed by your good argument and belittle a shaky one, you come to terms with yourself and learn to clarify your positions and formulate them precisely.
When every argument is treated equally, and every secular argument is not convincing at all, you don't receive feedback, and are less able to weigh your arguments well.

Aaron, it's not natural that this is a correct distinction, but rather related to rhetoric, in a way.
Perhaps it's your sense of reluctance that causes you to initially consider the rabbi's arguments weaker … In my opinion, it's quite subjective and depends on your interaction with that other person and yourself.

Very interesting discussion
First of all, it is clear that God and the Jewish tradition are not a fact, just as the sun rises in the morning, which is claimed to be proven in court
Faith is based on common sense, logical conclusions, and then a leap of intuition from a conclusion. I don't see how one can base a stable faith if not on rationality and common sense. Talk about mystical experiences and receiving a soul is indeed fascinating, and I don't want to deny those spiritual concepts that are beyond reason that the author of the Tanya or Harry may have had” but it dawned on me how they were planted to expect those simple Jews like me who did not receive the Holy Spirit like those righteous people of the world to base my faith on those stories. After all, you can find experiences of revelation of this kind. And indeed, excuse me for the comparison also with Indian Sufi gurus, Muslims, and messianic preachers, for example. Or worse, with people like Ohad Ezra who adapts humane lewd events as a mystical revelation experience.

Regarding the issue of psychologizing the opponent. Like Miki and Aharon, I am against all these childish preachings that every infidel and atheist is like that because they slept with a few girls or simply because they are a messenger of the other world. The reincarnation of a great Rabbi or all sorts of things of that nature. What is true is that many atheists, like many believers, base their disbelief on a feeling from the past. Like the fact that they find the Torah and Judaism to be incompatible with their values or that they simply feel that it is not it (as Miki wrote years ago in his column about the phenomenon of coming out in question). An incident I had with one of my good friends who said that he was born into a secular family, converted to Judaism in a yeshiva in the style of an ultra-Orthodox oxidation. And after a year and a half he decided to come out in question? When asked why, he replied that he simply felt that he was putting on a mask every day and that it was not who he was and that he did not feel his role in the world.
With such a claim, it is impossible to argue because he is not talking about facts at all And logical arguments and not even about moral questions..but about a mental experience that he simply” doesn”t connect”

Also. There are atheist intellectual positions in which they have planted that simply as long as there is no unequivocal proof of something like the proof that the sun rises in the morning, belief in God will be equal for him just like belief in Berlin Greeks people with such a way of thinking. It was very difficult to convince

In my humble opinion. The only people you might be able to convert are those who do believe but have such and such final questions and rumors from them to go to the end (like the age of the world, evolution, a moral problem in this or that Torah passage, etc.)

Greek gods*
Rumors of them going all the way*
To the world of their values*
Massive lewdness*

Prevents*
Annoying keyboard

Moderate Haredi style*

Aaron, I accept that you can get less out of the discussion if he doesn't take your arguments seriously. And yet, if hearing his arguments could be valuable to you, I see no reason to avoid it because of his attitude towards you.