Q&A: Questions Following Your Book, Truth and Not Certain
Questions Following Your Book, Truth and Not Certain
Question
Hello,
I finished reading your book Truth and Not Certain over this Shavuot holiday. More power to you.
I was reminded of your critique of Menachem Navot’s book on repentance, where he tried to anchor his ideas in the view of Maimonides, and you commented that the yeshiva-student habit of hanging everything on Maimonides is not necessary and is sometimes forced.
At the end of your book you wrote that Maimonides’ words in Foundations of the Torah (chapter 8) regarding belief in a prophet on the basis of miracles should, according to your approach, be explained by distinguishing between truth and certainty. It seems to me that it did not escape your notice that Maimonides thought all his words were true and certain, and that anyone who did not think like him was mistaken at best. As an example I will cite his words in Guide for the Perplexed (1:36, from the responsa project), which in my opinion contradict the well-known words of the Radbaz (responsa 4:187) about one coerced by his intellect. Maimonides writes there as follows: “Know that if you believe in corporeality, or in any bodily attribute, such as jealousy, anger, blazing fire and wrath, hatred, enmity, and hostility, this is worse by far than idol worshipers. And if it should occur to you that one who believes in corporeality has an excuse because he was raised that way, or because of his stupidity and limited understanding, then by the same reasoning you ought to believe that an idol worshiper serves only because of stupidity or because he grew up with the custom of his ancestors in his hands. And if you say that the plain sense of the verses cast them into this doubt, know likewise that the idol worshiper too was brought to his worship only by deficient imaginings and mental images. Therefore there is no excuse for one who does not accept the teaching of those who authenticate and investigate, if he is negligent in inquiry. For I do not regard as a heretic one who has no proof for denying corporeality, but I do regard as a heretic one who does not believe in its denial, especially when he has before him the translation of Onkelos and the interpretation of Jonathan son of Uzziel, peace be upon him, both of which distance God from corporeality as much as possible.”
And now to the general point. At the beginning of the book you noted that people had remarked to you that in The Quartet you attacked analyticity but did not present a synthetic alternative, whereas in Truth and Not Certain you laid out the synthetic methodology. But I was surprised to see that you referred only briefly to what is, in my opinion, the main point of syntheticity: how one finds the alpha and beta parameters, that is, how one develops the “context of discovery.”
The methods for developing auditory logic do not touch methodology itself; they are more like methods that make one “see” the type of solution to a differential equation. Likewise, if we try to identify people who possessed auditory logic, we will notice that these were not the great methodologists but people with a primordial intuitive sense.
In my opinion, the way to develop this ability is to live in the atmosphere of the field in which we want to develop the auditory sense. In the case of mathematics, that means rubbing shoulders with professors, solving exercises, and the like, and thereby living in the mathematical milieu. In the case of Torah, in my opinion the method is to return to primary sources such as the Hebrew Bible in its plain sense, to live “halakhic lives” close to the way our ancestors lived: in the Land of Israel, without excessive stringencies and in a relaxed way, מתוך a general view of the Torah—not only laws relevant to the present time—to earn an honorable living, and so on, and then to enter the world of Kabbalah, which is the living spirit behind the wheels.
The thirteen hermeneutic principles by which the Torah is interpreted are an expression of general auditory logic in comparison with Greek Stoic logic, but there is also a secret auditory logic, and it is found in Kabbalah—as Rabbi HaNazir wrote in the first section of his book The Voice of Prophecy.
To develop a methodology for the context of discovery seems to me like giving a deeper definition of classification by scope instead of developing the skills needed for definition by content.
Answer
Hello,
It has been quite a while since I last heard from you, and I hope you and your household are well, and that you are on the way to becoming Chief of Staff, God willing.
1. Indeed, that is true: Maimonides thought that most of what he said was true and certain, and on that point I disagree with him. Still, not everything he thought was, in his own eyes, of that sort. After all, he explicitly writes that two witnesses are not absolute proof—and that is of course obvious, since there are also conspiring witnesses—and yet we rely on them. I do not see how your remarks here contradict what I saw in his words.
2. Like every formalism, it comes after intuition. Still, it is not true that it has no value. Formalism helps where intuition does not succeed on its own. Giving meaning to the alpha and beta parameters is an intuitive process, but formalism can be very helpful in it. There is no point in talking about intuition and its development, not because there is no such thing, but because I have nothing to say about it. Formalism is the objective dimension that one can talk about, even when dealing with the context of discovery. What you called developing skills for the synthetic—such as living in one atmosphere or another—belongs to the realm of ethical literature, and I do not deal in hidden matters. And in the language of your metaphor, the novelty in what I say is that there is an objective formal dimension even in the context of discovery. I did not say that this dimension is everything, and perhaps not even that it is the main thing.
Auditory logic in Kabbalah is unfamiliar to me, and I do not understand what is being referred to. But in any case, here I depart from Rabbi HaNazir’s approach (and with regard to the logic of the hermeneutic principles as well, I do not agree with his claim that it is uniquely Jewish).
All the best,
Michi
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Questioner:
Greetings and blessings,
We are alive and well, and the chief-of-staff position is on the horizon, judging by what’s been going on in the army lately 🙂
I hope you are well. May God give you strength to continue and teach us understanding.
By the way, I am still serving in X, so if there is a regular class I could attend at Bar-Ilan or in the area, I would be happy to know.
In your previous reply you moved what I wrote about a way of life that would lead to intuitive understanding into the department of ethical books, which you do not deal with. But you yourself wrote in your book, and this is what Maran ruled, that the reason Maran wrote in chapter 2 of the laws of rebels that we accepted upon ourselves not to dispute what is written in the Talmud is that they had intuitive understanding, and therefore there is a connection between character traits, or way of life and period, and opinions!? Therefore, in my opinion, it is proper to try to trace their actions and not try to build logical crutches for ourselves in place of intuitive understanding. If you still maintain your position, I would be glad to know how you would explain Maimonides’ words in his introduction to the Guide for the Perplexed, that there is a type of knowledge that is hidden and appears like lightning, and the difference between people is the frequency of illumination. After all, someone who knows mathematics or metaphysics knows them even if you wake him in the middle of the night. What kind of knowledge is hidden and revealed, and on what does that depend? In my opinion, the answer is simple and comes close to Maimonides’ words that certain apprehensions were withheld even from Moses because he was embodied.
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Rabbi:
Obviously there are reasonings that appear and disappear, and still they are handled with logical tools as well. Once we discover the reasoning that one who benefits from this world without a blessing is as though he committed sacrilege, from that point on we handle it with logical tools—both for deriving conclusions and for seeking the sources on which it is based. I do not see any difficulty in this.
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Questioner:
What kind of knowledge appears and disappears, in your opinion?
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Rabbi:
Reasonings, by their very nature, can depend on different states of illumination. But the reasonings operate within a logical framework, as stated.