Indeed, that’s what I wrote. But in the other thread the Rabbi didn’t express an opinion on what I wrote, and that is what I’m asking for here.

A reasonable argument, and it can be added to the overall picture. Your description is a bit too decisive and “crushing,” in my opinion.

The decisiveness is only regarding the difference between the revelations, and after that clear distinction we return to the revelation argument, which joins the other arguments.
Without this point, the argument can’t really be considered to have any value at all, even when combined with the other arguments, since there are lots of mass miracles.

Again, I don’t agree with the decisiveness. There aren’t lots of mass miracles. And even if there are, they still carry some weight even without the obligations that were accepted through them (though less weight).
But I think we understand each other.

Dear A.,
No one tells miracle stories for no reason. The point of Jesus’ miracles was to regard him as a superhuman figure, and thereby believe whatever he says. Now reconsider what you said — “the miracle does not create religious obligation” — and you’ll be convinced that the opposite is true. Do you think someone performs a miracle for no purpose? He walked on water?! Come on…
Between us — I hardly understood what you were saying to the Rabbi or what the Rabbi answered you, but I figured I’d throw in my comment based on what occurred to me.

If so, Rabbi, then we have a dispute. There definitely are lots of mass miracles, and without my sharpening of the point there is nothing unique about the Jewish revelation (“the mass revelation argument”); rather, it becomes an event that we prove by means of other things.
The miracles:
Jesus walks on water, raises the dead, heals the sick, feeds crowds with a small amount of food. All before crowds.
Muhammad splits the moon, causes thousands of his soldiers not to need to drink in battle, throws dust at his enemies in battle and makes them blinded.
In the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh): hailstones from heaven before all the people, the Mount Carmel event before all the people, the splitting of the Red Sea, the crossing of the Jordan, the Ten Plagues with prior warning.
And so on.
And here comes the distinction between a “mass miracle” and a “mass revelation” that creates practical obligation.
Clearly it still has some weight even if there are many revelations, otherwise it becomes circular. But one should not see this as an argument that is even worth bringing up for discussion if we have found so many myths that entered tradition.

Hello dear A. More power to you. I’m adding important references for anyone who wants to get to the bottom of this topic. Without them the picture will always be incomplete:

I recommend reading the nice argument in Dishon’s book, A Skeptic Shall Live by His Craft, where he argues convincingly that precisely because the Sinai revelation story appears in all four sources of the Torah (J, E, I, P), despite the assumption of their geographic and chronological dispersal, this may indicate that there really was a historical event that was seared into everyone’s collective memory. This also makes good sense from the first-person arguments in the speech of Deuteronomy, commonly regarded as late: “You saw… you knew…” etc., describing something known among the listeners (the covenant community, as is known to those in the know) as an unquestioned convention.

Also, the two covenant books (the large and the small, as is known) are thought to be northern and southern (look in Yair Hoffman’s article on this) — and again, as above, the parallels are surprising. Both are based on ancient law collections that, according to tradition, were passed down from Sinai.

Yaakov Licht’s comprehensive article on “the founding claim” seeks to persuade that a founding claim (in the sense of foundation) of a people before it had a territory, centered around a covenant with God, is unique and exceptional among all the founding traditions he surveys, and that the best explanation for this cardinal difference is that this is indeed what happened. (Without entering the question of revelation itself, but mainly regarding the reception of laws and entry into a covenant with one God around a charismatic figure in the pre-settlement era.)

But your actual claim — that the revelation story is what establishes acceptance of the yoke of the commandments (which indeed differs from Christian stories and the like, which mainly abolish customs — the burden of Torah law — and make things easier or replace one existing practice with another, rather than taking a people free of such a burden and placing a yoke upon them, which is already very hard and difficult to conceive) — that still has to be proven. Professor Baruch Schwartz, in his article on the meaning of the giving of the Torah story, tries to argue the opposite: that the laws were already accepted in ancestral tradition, and the revelation stories came later to give them narrative authority. Against that, slogans won’t do; one needs a knockout blow.

Personally, I was not convinced by Rabbi Michi’s arguments on this issue. It seems much more plausible to infer God’s providence over Israel from the uniqueness of the Jewish people — which could also have brought about acceptance of the Torah’s law as we have it even without there actually being a theatrical revelation (see Tamar Ross’s “ongoing revelation”) — than to dismiss the concept of divine providence, as Rabbi Michi generally does, and then try to hang the uniqueness of the Jewish people on some one-time exceptional event that granted them this gift.

And finally, it is a bit regrettable that there are two giants in the Land of Israel in our generation dealing with the question of revelation — Rabbi Michi and Rabbi Cherki (one may also count Rabbi Neugershal, if we accept classical arguments) — and it seems that neither has read the other all night long. There are no references, no drawing on shared ideas, no criticism. This one won’t mention that one, and that one won’t acknowledge this one, and each will convince us to believe in “the revelation of his own heart.” Meanwhile, on the internet one can find a bubbling swamp of criticism against revelation arguments in general and against Cherki’s interpretation in particular — yet we have not found any concrete response from Rabbi Cherki against the sites that grind his ideas to dust, nor from Rabbi Michi, who even mentions Cherki’s arguments, the criticism of them, and the videos and online material that mock the entire proof from revelation. If this were academia — even just an ordinary seminar paper — it would be unthinkable to write an article without knowing the relevant material in the field and citing it in references, all the more so in a foundational and supremely sensitive field like this one: the one-time revelation of the Creator of the world in human history. And shall a priestess be treated like an innkeeper?!

And with all that — Rabbi Michi (and Rabbi Cherki) has taken upon himself a great, mighty, and abundant task, and were he not such a giant — with his hands in everything (and since opening the site, everyone’s hand is in him too) and with his many occupations for the needs of Your people, the House of Israel — we ought to ask and plead with him that he enter deeply into precisely this little topic, because all — yes, all — the bodies of Torah depend on it (perhaps).

With the help of Heaven, 9 Nisan 5777

The hypothesis that it was possible to formulate one Torah and one national consciousness out of different tribes and different traditions is devoid of any “real-life footing.”

After all, there was almost never political unity, except for a few decades in the days of David and Solomon, after which everything fell apart again; and a few years in the days of Hezekiah and Josiah, after which the tribes — which had almost never been united — were dispersed to the ends of the earth, yet all of them, including the Samaritans (!), had the same Torah with only minimal variations.

Who then was the magician who, without any political power at all, managed to unite the members of these opinionated and stubborn tribes and bring them to give up their previous traditions? And how did this immense enterprise of unification leave no trace at all in the national memory?

The reality of a shared national consciousness and a shared Torah scroll for all the scattered communities of “a people scattered and dispersed” could only have taken shape if everyone had a common basis. You can’t invent such a thing.

Regards,
S.Z. Levinger

Hello A., your claim that the religious obligation resulting from the revelation is what makes the revelation at Mount Sinai unique — in that the weight of the religious demand would cause much greater critical scrutiny and even resistance — sounds reasonable and logical. The Sages tell us that the Israelites wept when they were commanded concerning forbidden sexual relations.
But your claim contains historical assumptions that need to be examined. It seems you assume that before the revelation at Mount Sinai the Hebrew people had no religious burden of any kind, and that at Sinai the mountain was held over them like a tub.
In addition, you assume a proximity between the revelation and the acceptance of religious obligation, as though in one moment, in one event, an entire people changes its face and adopts a different way of life, different religious conceptions, and a new religious sensitivity…
See the words of Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, part 3 — if I remember correctly; I don’t have the energy to quote it — where he speaks of the ancestors of the nation as having belonged to the Sabians, idol worshippers, whose religious way of life was unbearably difficult. He gives examples there of their extreme stringencies, for example regarding menstruation: that even wind blowing across a menstruating woman would render impure a person whom that wind touched, and that anyone who touched an object touched by the menstruating woman became impure, and similarly many other extreme prohibitions.
After that historical background, Maimonides argues that the Torah came to ease religious worship (!!!), so according to the Guide for the Perplexed, historically speaking, the revelation at Mount Sinai actually made religious life easier (!!!).
In addition, many of the commandments are inversions or uprootings of ancient pagan religious practice, but the practice itself remained fairly similar even after its “conversion.” See, for example, what the Guide says about sacrifices.
Menstruation laws, as I mentioned, were practiced among many peoples; circumcision was practiced by Egyptian priests even before us; land remission and many other things as well, for anyone a little familiar with the history of the ancient Near East. So the notion that a people, culture, or religion is created all at once like that is historically absurd.

He was talking about belief in miracles, not about acceptance of the commandments.

Once a religion is established by miracles, it’s easy to establish another miracle too.

To this day, if you tell a Sephardi Jew about the Baba Sali or another rabbi who performed a miracle, he’ll certainly believe it; but if you tell him about a priest, he certainly won’t.

Why?
Because one is already established (within his religion) as someone who can perform miracles, and the other isn’t.

Same thing here: in Judaism, the difficulty is the initial acceptance. After that, of course, it’s easier to believe in miracles, for better or worse.

As for your claim that the commandments came to make things easier:
Everyone has hands, both Jews and Muslims.
So they copy one thing from another’s words.
Both circumcise the foreskin, etc. etc.

The essence of religion — of any religion — depends on intention.
Are you worshipping God, or idol X?

And you need to remember that the novelty of Judaism is the connection between the commandments and the Exodus from Egypt….
Very many commandments are connected to one thing: “a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.”

And truthfully, it’s not “just” unclear commandments that are connected to the Exodus, but commandments like eating matzah, and “it shall not be seen and it shall not be found.”

What’s more, certainly in the first generations after an inventor of the Exodus myth, it would be very hard to say that they could have implanted a myth of the Exodus from Egypt together with all the commandments connected to it (even if life had been hard for them before), because the Torah narratives have a voice — too much of a voice. So the only claim left would be forgetfulness (aside from the fact that this contradicts chapters in the Torah). Can a myth be implanted by means of a claim of forgetfulness? Strange.
Rather, clearly, if the myth arose, it came from the people.
And even there, for a people that is not united to accept a unifying myth — that too is quite difficult.

And if we have evidence (and there is such evidence) that the Israelites came from outside and very possibly from Egypt (rings and an Egyptian building method), and that they kept commandments upon entering the land, then that certainly greatly strengthens the force of the claim.

Shemaya, just one note. The Sabians probably never existed. Commentators and researchers say they never heard of such a people or such a group, and therefore Maimonides probably invented them and the books of theirs that he himself read (apparently in the same sense that the tanna sat on the grave of the stubborn and rebellious son) in order to convey his messages. Also, I don’t recall him claiming that our ancestors belonged to them.
Beyond that, a general remark about the obligation argument. When the Torah was given, I think Jewish law was not as detailed as it is today, and I very much doubt how noticeable and burdensome it was in everyday life. It was a general ethos, not detailed instructions like how to tie your shoelaces or how much matzah to eat and when.

Forgive me, Rabbi, but that’s not precise.
The sect and its books did exist in reality (to the best of my knowledge there is no dispute about that; it’s even mentioned in the Quran….) They just were not ancient the way they tried to portray themselves. They did that so the Muslims would not slaughter them and would allow them to keep their religion. So they forged things to make it look as if their books were ancient, and so on. The scholarly assessment is that Maimonides most likely fell into their trap and believed they were ancient. That is the accepted view up to this point.

Recently, scholars have been painting a somewhat more complex picture. In their view, their books really did contain ancient customs that they inserted in order to deceive people into thinking the religion was ancient. More and more people think this today, and their view seems persuasive.
There are some who went so far as to say that the sect really is ancient, but that last view, to the best of my knowledge, is still not considered the accepted one.

Maybe. I haven’t checked it in depth.

I’m familiar with the criticism regarding the Sabians and their writings.
I did not pretend to claim the absolute correctness of that view.
I only wanted to cast doubt on the naïve, popular conception of how religions develop. In any case, the main point still stands even apart from the Sabians; the cultural background of the peoples of the East is well known.
I also wanted to address a common intuition that has acquired the status of obvious truth — as though the harder things are for me, the more right I am; the more stringent I am, the closer I am to the truth; I act against my own interests because truth is my guiding light, and that proves that my personal needs and desires do not guide me, only the obligating truth.
And I ask: what would that intuition say about a person who sacrifices his son to Molech?

A person who sacrifices his son to Molech wants Molech to fulfill his desires; it’s like the price the sacrificer pays in return for his request.

Intuition = an inner feeling. Everyone has a different intuition.
Instinct is any immediate and roughly involuntary response that is embedded in us.
Interest is the aspiration of a social agent to achieve a certain goal in a certain way.

Answer: according to that same intuition of a person whose guiding light is truth and who is bound by it, he would sacrifice his son to Molech if he felt that this would bring about a goal more worthwhile than his son remaining alive and not being sacrificed to Molech. Because such a person surely also loves his son.
I don’t understand why you specifically wrote “to Molech” and not “to his god.” Although Molech can also be his god, you understand that Molech is a false idol.
To begin with, if an intelligent person does not understand that false idols have no power at all, then it may be that even if he sacrifices one son and his wish is not fulfilled, he’ll sacrifice another son and so on until he too collapses, once he realizes his idol does not love him.

Actually, the solution to the difficulty is pretty simple. The revelation story of the Sioux tribe is written in a book by, if I remember correctly, a British writer who claimed to have heard the story from a wanderer. The story shows a clear Christian influence connected to the revelation at Mount Sinai, and it is not a story of the Indian people.

Adding two criteria would knock out all these various revelations.
A. The Kuzari principle speaks about a revelation before the entire people, not a group within the people — because some unidentified group of a thousand people is really not hard to invent, with someone claiming he was part of it, and anyone who heard about it would simply have to believe. By contrast, when it is a revelation before the entire people, there is no room for lying, because when someone comes to tell the story of the revelation to people, they should already know about it, since according to the claim the whole people had already witnessed it. So they would not believe a story they did not already know, and therefore persuasion is impossible — unlike a revelation to a small group within the people. Likewise, there must not also be a contrary tradition circulating among the people about that event, because that would constitute evidence contradicting the revelation tradition.

B. There needs to be difficulty of interpretation. In the ancient world, where there were many unexplained things (such as the lights at the poles, etc.), it is not hard to interpret some unknown thing as a miracle or revelation… (the cross formed by clouds and sunlight, or sunrays creating a cross effect, and so on). On the other hand, something very hard to explain is the very idea that God Himself speaks directly to each and every one in the nation and everyone hears. There is in that a stronger proof than if I myself were to hear God right now, because I could always suspect that I’m schizophrenic. But here we have something that has not happened at all in history (and from that angle it is a break in regularity): a claim by an entire generation that God spoke to all of them simultaneously and told them, “I am the God who rules over you.” And the fact that this does not recur among all the various beliefs and peoples shows that it is impossible to fake.

1. Can anyone find the original story of the tribes that claim a revelation? I stress that I do not want academic research and not an outside retelling, but the original story. Does anyone know how to get it? I’m tired of heresy websites claiming there are thousands of peoples who claim revelation. I’d be glad if someone could give me sources one can rely on.
2. Doesn’t the Rabbi think there is a fundamental difference between a revelation where it is not known to whom the revelation occurred and the revelation at Mount Sinai, which was made to a known group?
3. Doesn’t the Rabbi think there is a difference between a miracle and a revelation?

Things are much simpler than this whole cauldron of arguments that has provided a livelihood for many people who err and mislead:
The source of obligation is education at home (which creates fear) and fear of disconnecting from belonging.
And for someone who became religious, the source of obligation is the desire to belong to something elevated (which stems from fear of emptiness).

Obligation always stems from fear, without exception. Whoever denies that understands absolutely nothing about the human soul.

Yishai — I looked into this deeply and read the research literature. It really is nonsense. I brought the scientific sources in a footnote in an article by the Yedaya Institute on the witness argument.

I’ll say that in my opinion this whole search-war about revelations is methodologically mistaken. The very existence of traditions, even if we say such traditions are false, is almost meaningless in the course of the argument, and this plays into the atheists’ hands. But I won’t get into that here.

Can you point me to your articles? They sound fascinating.

Not that fascinating, but search for “Knowing How to Believe.” There’s an article there (I was only one member of the writing team, together with several historians and rabbis, including Rabbi Michi) on the witness argument (though I don’t entirely sign on to his approach).

At the end there, in the discussion about revelations, there are scientific sources (or at least reliable information) regarding all the revelations in atheist literature. For example, regarding Muhammad I consulted an expert in Islam, etc. Regarding the Indians, I read the text and examined the research literature on their myths, and so on.

But again, in my opinion these comparisons are methodologically mistaken. Ask yourself, for example, whether finding a fabricated murder tape or a lying witness should cause you henceforth to stop taking seriously tapes for which there is no positive proof that they are fabricated, or likewise witness testimony. Now ask yourself why you wouldn’t do that. It’s simple — because the reliability of a type of testimony is examined first of all by the rule, not by the exception. If the testimonies of peoples are reliable in most cases, then the few isolated cases do not carry systemic significance, given that this is testimony of a generally reliable type when combined with the other considerations.

The fact that the dozens of miracle stories cited by atheists always boil down to the same 3–4 examples shows exactly that they rummage through thousands of myths and manage to find only a few crumbs like these. So yes, the stories they bring are nonsense (see there), but even if they found 15 such testimonies, that still would not change the presumption that foundational traditions generally have a kernel of truth. And that is what matters in our discussion. This whole attempt to refute the individual cases (by the way, it’s not very hard, because these are usually distortions) is playing by the atheists’ rules of the game, and those rules themselves are entirely baseless.