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Kabbalah and Hasidism

שו”תCategory: generalKabbalah and Hasidism
asked 6 years ago

I argued with a friend about a sentence by Rabbi Nachman. I claimed that it had no content and I proved it. The answer I received was the classic one of “There are probably Kabbalistic and Hasidic things there that we don’t understand.” I wanted to ask whether, in the Rabbi’s opinion, this answer is acceptable, and if not, what do you think is the answer?


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מיכי Staff answered 6 years ago
It may be there, but what good does it do me? If I don’t understand, then for me the text is worthless. And if he doesn’t understand, then for him it’s worthless too. Beyond that, the question is how he knows that there really is something like that there. Any random and arbitrary text can be said to have sublime content. This is what is said about postmodern art and postmodern texts. See the Torey series 178-184.

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מיכי Staff replied 6 years ago

Consider the following quote from Moynam Chomsky:

“Since no one has been able to show me what I am missing, we are left with the second possibility: I simply cannot understand. I am quite willing to assume that it may be true, although I fear that I will have to be suspicious for reasons that seem good to me. There are many things I do not understand – for example, the recent debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way in which Fermat's Last Theorem was (apparently) recently proven. But from 50 years of playing this game I have learned two things: 1) I can ask friends working in these fields to explain to me at a level I can understand, and they can do so, without much difficulty; 2) If I want to, I can continue to learn more, so that I can understand. And here, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, and their ilk – even Foucault, whom I knew and liked and who was a bit different from the others – write things I don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who claims to understand [their words] can explain them to me and I have no idea how to continue to overcome my failures. That leaves two possibilities: a) some new development has been achieved in intellectual life, perhaps through a sudden genetic mutation, which has created a kind of “theory” that goes beyond quantum theory, topology, etc.; or b) well, I won’t name the child after him.

פלוני replied 6 years ago

If from your familiarity with the writings of Rabbi Nachman you know that he is not just a mind-bender and if other incomprehensible places can be explained by studying some introduction (Kabbalah) that you lacked, then it is very likely that he did not just utter a sentence without content.
Regarding Derrida and his friends – Sometimes wise people have to admit that they do not encompass all the wisdom of the world and that there may be a field of knowledge or a style of thought that they are far from grasping despite their genius. Perhaps there is no standardization of wisdom and it is possible that one wise person will not understand the language of his friend.

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