I don’t understand.
What Rabbi Shinan says seems, at least on the face of it, light-years away from what you’re saying.
He claims that Moses our teacher did not put on tefillin.
He claims that the Jewish law of lineage is completely the opposite of what God said, not that it developed from it.
As for laws that developed from some core given at Sinai, that’s perfectly fine. But turning the Torah upside down by 180 degrees? That tefillin is a late invention? Could there be a greater violation of “do not add and do not subtract” than this?

I have no principled problem at all with the claim that Moses did not put on tefillin (or that he did; either way, in my opinion it is really not problematic). And the same goes for lineage. What determines things is what was accepted over the generations.

If it had become accepted not to keep the Sabbath, would that also have been fine?
As for tefillin, why is there seemingly no violation here of “do not add”? On the face of it, this fits all the halakhic criteria of that prohibition.

What do you mean by “became accepted”? If that were the interpretation given to the Torah, then certainly that is what would be binding. See Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 2 of the laws of Rebels, where he writes this explicitly. That is how “an eye for an eye” was accepted as monetary compensation, even though the text says it is literally an eye.
Adding means adding a commandment beyond what is written, not giving a different interpretation of what is written.

1) Let us assume for the sake of discussion that Moses did not put on tefillin.
Now I want to ask three questions:
A) How can such a thing obligate me? Surely that is not what the Holy One, blessed be He, intended—and what does it help that one can somehow fit it into the verses?
B) How did the sages of the generation in which tefillin were invented allow themselves to do such a thing? They saw that previous generations had never put on tefillin. Seemingly they were outright violating “do not add.”
C) If today we know that Moses did not put on tefillin (so to speak), isn’t there tremendous reason to abolish them? In order to draw closer to the true Torah of Moses.
2) How is a child’s lineage subject to interpretation within the verses? Throughout the Bible one sees that it follows the father, so at least here this is certainly “do not add.”

I referred you to Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 2 of the laws of Rebels. Did you look there? It seems to me that you didn’t. First read it, and then ask whatever remains unclear.

Indeed, pardon me.
I looked now, and I did not understand how that answers the question.
Maimonides says there that if they expand the prohibition of meat and milk together—which goes against the oral tradition—then that is “do not add.”
Seemingly this is exactly the case with tefillin. How did a religious court one day stand up and decide that tefillin must be put on, when never before had there been a Jew who put on tefillin—and then they also established it as obligatory and claimed that the laws about the black color and so on are a law given to Moses at Sinai?
Maybe you can focus more specifically on the relevant clauses in Maimonides, because most of what is discussed there concerns rabbinic enactments.

First, Maimonides writes there that every religious court in every generation can interpret the Torah differently from its predecessors. True, in rabbinic law there is a requirement that it be greater in wisdom and number, and still a later religious court can make changes. The meaning of this is that the Torah in our hands is not supposed to be the Torah that Moses received at Sinai, since it contains many later additions and changes in tradition. If I remember correctly, I brought the exposition of Rabban Gamliel in Sabbath 64 about “she shall remain in her menstrual impurity” as an example of this.
Such a change, or a different interpretation, is not considered “do not add.” The later court thinks its predecessors erred in interpreting the Torah, and so it interprets it differently. Adding means adding a commandment beyond what the court thinks the Torah includes. And that is only according to Maimonides, who holds that there is in general a problem of “do not add” even with a commandment that the Sages add. The medieval authorities disagree about this (see Rashba and Tosafot, Rosh Hashanah 16b).
Now, with any change relative to previous generations, to determine whether it involves “do not add” or “do not subtract,” one has to examine what the court did according to its own understanding. It is not enough that it differs from previous generations. If a court reaches the conclusion that there are only 10 primary categories of labor, then it has the right and the duty to determine all the Sabbath laws differently. But they do so because, in their opinion, this is what the Holy One, blessed be He, intended at Sinai, and not in order to add or subtract. In that there is neither “do not add” nor “do not subtract.”
Rabbenu Tam, Rashi’s grandson, changed the structure of tefillin and the times of day (sunset), and no one claimed that there was even the slightest trace of “do not add” or “do not subtract” in that.
Now each of your questions must be discussed on its own merits, but the principle is clear. And even if Maimonides writes that some principle came down from Sinai, I am not obligated to agree. The exposition concerning meat and milk comes from the threefold repetition in Scripture of “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” and one can expound that differently from how people once thought. There is no “do not add” in that at all, unless one decides that there is a law given to Moses at Sinai that this is how it must be expounded. By the way, I think I mentioned this too: Maimonides himself writes that almost all the derashot in our possession were innovated over the generations and were not received from Sinai (except for something like three or four). The same applies to “and they shall be totafot between your eyes”: any religious court can interpret and expound it according to its own understanding and disagree with everything its predecessors thought. Of course, if a court thinks that this is a law given to Moses at Sinai, it will not do so, but it has the right to decide that this is not such a law and to interpret it according to its understanding.

As an aside I would note that I do not know whether this is what those who mentioned the “deep” Christian videos had in mind here—that is, what you brought at the beginning of your remarks, about the use being made of Shinan’s words—but if so, then as I suspected, it really is a misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, many Jews are partners in this mistake too (including Torah scholars): those who hold the childish view that when one says the Oral Torah came down from Sinai, one means that all the details of Jewish law in our possession were received by Moses from Sinai. That is, of course, utter nonsense and completely baseless. Seemingly it helps in dealing with criticism of the tradition, but here you can see why its harm is greater than its benefit. And that is aside from the fact that it simply is not true (see my column 21 here on the principle of “silence is consent”).

Hello, honored Rabbi, and many thanks for the response here and in the parallel threads.
I will try to be more to the point here.
Regarding lineage, which in the Bible follows the father and according to the Sages follows the mother:
Professor Shinan argued that this is a change that the Sages introduced against the Torah.
What is the justification for such a change? Seemingly when they changed it, they knew that this was not what God intended and that this had never been the practice.

I would need to see the arguments and the sources, and then I can respond.

Rabbi?

“Those who hold the childish view that when one says the Oral Torah came down from Sinai, one means that all the details of Jewish law in our possession were received by Moses from Sinai. That is, of course, utter nonsense and completely baseless.” Response: What can we do when the Sages said that the Gemara and the Mishnah were given at Sinai?! Berakhot 5a: “Rabbi Levi bar Hama said in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish: What is the meaning of that which is written, ‘And I will give you the stone tablets, and the Torah and the commandment, which I have written, to instruct them’? ‘The tablets’—these are the Ten Commandments; ‘the Torah’—this is Scripture; ‘the commandment’—this is the Mishnah; ‘which I have written’—these are the Prophets and Writings; ‘to instruct them’—this is the Talmud. This teaches that all of them were given to Moses at Sinai.” But that cannot be, since the Gemara is also full of scientific errors or distortions of verses from the Torah that could not possibly have come from God, such as: “And the man said: This time, this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called woman, because this one was taken from man.”

“This time”—this teaches that Adam had relations with every beast and animal, but his mind was not put at ease until he had relations with Eve (Yevamot 63a). Could such nonsense have been spoken by the Almighty? Is it possible that Adam had relations with zebras or panda bears? After all, they do not even say that this was received from Moses at Sinai; they learned it from the verse… And if that is their learning from verses, then Heaven save us.

I did not understand this strange remark. I said that someone who understands the words of the Sages literally is thinking childishly. Their intention is to say that we should relate to the products of our interpretation as though they were all given at Sinai. This is a normative claim, not a historical one. That is unlike childish ignoramuses who think everything really was given at Sinai—which hardly needs explaining is nonsense. The Gemara itself records how and when various derashot and Torah-level laws were created (a prominent example is Rabbi Akiva on “she shall remain in her menstrual impurity” in Sabbath 64, and more). Maimonides says that most of the derashot in our possession are creative, not merely supported by verses. Nachmanides and his students argue that even a verbal analogy, which one may not derive on one’s own unless one received it from one’s teacher, was not transmitted to us from Sinai. And so on and so forth. In short, the claim that everything came down from Sinai is both childish and ignorant.

With God’s help, 2 Sivan 5782

See that Professor Shinan overlooked explicit verses. The commandment of tefillin is mentioned in four passages in the Torah, where it says: “And it shall be for you as a sign upon your hand and as a memorial / and as totafot between your eyes” (Exodus 13), “And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be totafot between your eyes” (Deuteronomy 6), and in chapter 11: “And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be totafot between your eyes.”

The son of an Egyptian man and an Israelite woman left Egypt “among the children of Israel,” whereas in the days of Ezra, together with the foreign women, they sent out from the people of Israel also “those born from them” (Ezra 10:3). By contrast, Ruth was accepted after she declared: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

With blessings, Edmond Akavia Lietman-Ledrer, the Meiri