Question following the article ‘Researcher and Ally’
peace,
I read your article, “Researcher and Ally.” During the discussion, two points came up that seemed to me to differ slightly from your position as I currently understand it.
- The first point is the place of providence in the creation of the Oral Torah, and in particular in the signing of the Talmud:
“The canonical text is expropriated from the authority of its author and reflects what supreme providence has embedded within it.”
“The Yeshivah scholar seeks the essential explanation, and this is the layer that providence has embedded within the text, sometimes without the author’s awareness (see my above articles), while the Talmudic scholar seeks the mechanistic explanations for the formation of the various laws.”
This position, of course, could easily completely negate the place of clarifying the versions, unlike what you stated in your aforementioned article. Furthermore, I get the impression that you do not see the creation of the Oral Torah as accompanied by the Holy Spirit and any providence, but only as the duty of the sages to study, teach, and explain the Halacha, as they (poorly?) understand.
- The story of Newton:
It turns out that Newton could have believed that this was indeed a punishment he deserved for a crime he had committed in the past, and yet still sought a scientific explanation for the fall of objects to Earth. These are two planes of explanation that exist simultaneously, and neither touches the other in any way. The punishment imposed on him on the theological plane is physically carried out by the action of the force of gravity. [10]
I understand that you do not believe in private providence, except in very exceptional cases. I assume from this that you wrote this according to De Newton and not according to your method. And yet, I did not understand the duplication of layers. Unlike the complexity between a philosophical and a psychological plane (starting with a question and returning to repentance) – here we are not talking about a combination of layers, but rather a parallelism between them. If God, the Blessed and Exalted, does not intervene in the world, and the only free factor is the will of humans, how would the fall of the apple constitute a punishment.
A possible solution would be if you claimed that the choice to sit at a certain point at a certain time – ‘it was from God’, all ethically sound. But you refuse to introduce the point of providence at the expense of sometimes reducing free choice!?
thanks!
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I will try to read your book, but I did not understand the excuse for the second question, and as you hinted, the difficulty remains.
If it is about completion, fine (God intervened in free choice and determined where to sit), but how can they be seen as parallel planes when each one constitutes a “closed solution”.
In the prayer for ”one who raises in the holy place and does not lower” as is the mitzvot of today according to the halachah..
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