I relate to the creation of the world as though it were a work of art—perhaps the creative impulse that many human beings have is nothing but a small copy of the Creator’s impulse of the Holy One, blessed be He!

Maybe. And maybe not.

True, I can’t prove the truth of my idea, but it seems to me that the idea I’m proposing carries a message for believers of all religions to unite around the commitment to preserve creation, whereas the classic Jewish approach, which proposes that the world was created so that there would be someone to observe commandments, is problematic because it offers nothing to believers of other religions.
It doesn’t seem to me that Judaism proposes that believers of every religion should go on observing the commandments of their own religion!

Oh, A., my friend.
How long will you go on begging the question? You justify an idea by saying it is useful. But what can I do—I’m looking for reasons why it is true. For example, it is very useful to believe that there is a God and that He expects us to be moral. Does that make the claim that there is a God true? Is that supposed to persuade an atheist? Or the other way around (from an atheist perspective): it is very useful to think there is no God (that way you avoid religious wars). Does that mean there really isn’t?
I showed you that the argument you raised actually shows that preserving creation is not the main goal. So now you move to the question of usefulness and say that it is very useful to adopt this incorrect conclusion. Fine, maybe it is useful, but it is still not true. I’m not inclined to adopt incorrect conclusions, even if they are useful.

No, but really not!
I made use of your response: maybe, and maybe not. I assume that means my idea is not absurd.
And apparently you are unable to refute my idea [because otherwise you presumably would have done so!], and therefore I allow myself to relate to what you said about the position of Jewish tradition—which of course I cannot refute—but I think my argument about the problematic nature of its particularism is certainly relevant.
And if my idea is not absurd, and it turns out it can also bring different branches of humanity closer together, then why not, really?

I was talking about the impulse and the act of creation. That has nothing to do with our discussion. There I already explained where your argument falls apart.

I’ll try to be clearer: I’ll start with full disclosure—indeed, observing the commandments is not my highest priority, because my highest priority is concern and responsibility for my descendants, and after them, as expected, human beings in circles increasingly distant from my gene pool. After them, mammals, and so on. But as you know, I really do believe in God, and I also believe in the Torah, except that I have concluded that the interpretation of the Sages is not suited to today’s needs, and it seems to me that support [partly indirect] for the necessary adjustments can be found in the Written Torah.
Some of these adjustments are indeed far-reaching. So as you may remember, my earlier arguments were based on the interpretation of the commandment to love God, but while thinking, it occurred to me that since we value more something created intentionally than something created by chance, we can [and even must!] use the text of the creation story to prove that the Holy One, blessed be He, intended to create the world—roughly as it is today. Why roughly? Because I believe the Holy One, blessed be He, left broad room for natural processes, including evolution.
Even if we assume the Darwinists are right that evolution shaped us into what we are today, I am convinced that the Holy One, blessed be He, was nevertheless involved at crucial junctures of evolution. Since that is so, we must be careful with the honor due our Creator. And here I return to the matter of the Sages—after all, a very large part of Jewish law is interpretation by flesh and blood of the written commandments. I independently arrived at the view of great thinkers and concluded from my own understanding that most of the Torah’s commandments were given in order to accustom the Jewish people to discipline. Similar to army recruits who practice close-order drill and field drill so they get used to carrying out orders. But since the reality has changed beyond recognition since the Torah was given, the challenge today is not idolatry or institutionalized sexual immorality; the main challenge today is to enable the continued existence of the human species and the other species.
You can adhere to the Jewish tradition that we were created in order to observe the commandments of the Torah. And I have no ability to refute this belief [in your language: maybe and maybe not], but you will have to refute my claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, would be infinitely more offended if we do not devote ourselves to preserving creation than if we do not observe the halakhot [the Torah’s commandments], with the central point of my argument being the assertion that the destruction of creation is an irreversible harm!
I am left only to quote Midrash Rabbah, Ecclesiastes 7:1:
When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man, He took him and led him around all the trees of the Garden of Eden,
and said to him: See My works, how beautiful and praiseworthy they are,
and all that I created, I created for you.
Take care that you do not ruin and destroy My world,
for if you ruin it, there will be no one to repair it after you.

You decide on your own interpretation of the Torah. Maybe it’s right and maybe not. I don’t see why I should adopt it, especially since it doesn’t seem plausible to me. You also decide that the commandments were given for the sake of discipline. Maybe yes and maybe not. Now you decide on behalf of the Holy One, blessed be He, what the right challenge for Him today is, and then draw conclusions. Maybe yes and maybe not.
Why do I need your claim in order not to accept it? Someone who wants to persuade another person has to prove what he says. If I claim there are three-winged fairies, do you have to accept the claim as long as you haven’t refuted it? Pardon me, but that’s crooked logic.
The midrash you quoted at the end shows that it matters to the Holy One, blessed be He, that His world be preserved, but that is obvious. The question is whether this is the main thing or the only thing, as you claim, or whether it is simply one value among several.

I have to admit, Michi, that I can’t manage to recall which of the pillars of Judaism said the same thing I had thought of regarding the commandments as training, so let’s assume this idea is mine alone, and therefore there is no need to attribute any value to it.
As for the challenge of preserving creation, I didn’t think this matter lay at the doorstep of the Holy One, blessed be He, because if I claimed that, it would certainly be an act of belittling Him.
My opinion is that this challenge lies at our doorstep!!!
Regarding the crooked logic of arguments from refutation—I apologize for the intellectual mischief I got drawn into in the effort to refute your claims, and I’m not at all sure this mischief is really to the point:
I think that if a claim is presented about the existence of three-winged fairies with no connection to an idea of broad meaning and value, then indeed there is no need even to address it. But if someone comes and tells us—the general public—that a three-winged fairy spoke to him and uttered several prophecies, and indeed, miraculously, within a few months those prophecies are fulfilled [even though some concern the distant future, and we have no guarantee they really will be fulfilled!], then how relevant would the claim be that there are no three-winged fairies at all?
If 4 out of 5 prophecies come true, that’s 80%, one could say—well, fine, coincidence. But is that still true with 80 out of 100 cases?
In the case of 4 out of 5 there is no need to take the three-winged fairy seriously. What about 80 out of 100? And especially 95 out of 100?
Obviously in the case of a 100% success rate in the fulfillment of the prophecies, the rules of the game would change completely.

I wrote that I wasn’t sure this mischief was to the point, but now I understand why I developed it:
As you know, I relate to my Judaism as something very functional, but I cannot ignore the built-in tension within my Jewish identity between rationalism and simple faith. I gave that expression through developing the fairy game…
Since I believe it would be possible to “sell” the idea of commitment to preserving creation to all other believers in one God as a central value carrying the potential for a drastic reduction of violence on earth, I am trying to win people over to this idea.
From this it is also clear that purposeful preservation of creation is a central value in my worldview, and observance of the commandments exists alongside it.
I hope my words weren’t too confused…
All the best

Again, this is an instrumental consideration, meaning that preserving creation will unite people. A result is not a good reason to adopt beliefs. Beliefs should be examined based on whether they are true, not whether they are useful.

Hi Michi,
I shared my debate with you with my friend T. from Tirat Zvi, and as a result the penny dropped and I understood that I need to climb down from the tree of “preserving creation is the main thing.”
So I climbed down!
All the best, and Sabbath peace

Please convey to her my full appreciation. She accomplishes in a second what I can’t manage to do in endless correspondence. 🙂

Oh no! It was the longest phone conversation I’ve ever had in my life!

Have a good week, Michi [my email ran away again!]
After I understood that I should not expect commandment-observant Jews to accept preserving creation as a supreme value, I return to the question whether the idea I propose should be seen as an important value. You argued:
Again, this is an instrumental consideration, meaning that preserving creation will unite people. A result is not a good reason to adopt beliefs. Beliefs should be examined based on whether they are true, not whether they are useful.
Come on, Michi—to wonder about the truth of a belief?…
After all, the maximum one can do in this matter is to check whether the proposed value contradicts something among the principles of the religion to whose believers one is appealing.
Or am I mistaken in this matter too, your faithful servant?
All the best
P.S. I admire you partly because I can write in mock defiance—“Come on, Michi.”

You admire me because of what you write?? Well then, Ozi. (There, now I can admire you.)

As I wrote, I agree that this is a significant value. One among many. It certainly does not contradict the principles of the religion, but you proposed it as a substitute, and sometimes also as a basis for pushing back against another religious principle. Here there would be problems for someone committed to Jewish law. As long as there is no conflict, of course there is no problem at all.

By the way, two more methodological comments:
1. Why can’t one wonder about the truth of a belief?
2. Even if something does not contradict, that does not mean it is true. There are lots of things that don’t contradict anything, and still I won’t think they are true. Standing every morning for two minutes on one leg doesn’t contradict anything, and still it doesn’t seem to me to be such an important value.

A] I didn’t dare suggest that my idea should replace the principles of the religion, but rather I hoped it would be ranked first, and that Jews would observe the other commandments after making sure they had done everything required [that day] for preserving creation—but I understood that the generation is not fit for it… And apparently here too haste is from the devil, and I will have to be happy if my interpretation of the creation story is accepted at all.
B] Please give me an example of examining the truth of a belief.

This is not about empirical testing but about various philosophical considerations. For example, the physico-theological argument, which infers the existence of a Creator from the complexity of creation or from moral obligation. I discussed this at length in my five notebooks on the site.

Hi Michi,
Now I’ll reveal to you what motivates me in the concept that the whole set of ideas should make preserving creation the common denominator of the monotheistic religions:
In my youth we used to go to work camp during summer vacation to work in kibbutzim at mass jobs like weeding or picking, boring work and often backbreaking. To challenge us, the counselors introduced competition. But heaven forbid, not personal competition—rather socialist competition. That is, they divided us into groups, and we competed between groups over which group would manage to do more. [By the way—in research done on the building of the pyramids, it turned out that already in Pharaonic Egypt this motivational method was practiced!]
So—I dare hope [am I deluding myself?] that if preserving creation is indeed accepted by Muslims as a highly important value, it might be possible to compete among the religions over which religion takes better care of the world created by the one and only God.
I intentionally spoke now about Islam because Christianity is already very close to this matter.
Sabbath peace and all the best

Hello A.,
Children may be convinced by that kind of nonsense, but I want no part in it.

Haha, you found quite the rabbi to correspond with on these topics.
Lol.

This is theology here, not didactology (if anything).

Hi Michi,
I think I have examples in my bag to prove my approach, except that you will always be able easily to prove that it’s not exactly the same thing. And then we’ll be left with the question of the difference—is it essential or non-essential? And to me, as an ignorant, unlearned person, it seems that many times it is very hard, even impossible, to prove matters of essence.

A., what approach? You’re not presenting an approach here, but rather an attempt to stage a somewhat childish competition between religions.

Hi Michi,
At long last they fixed my computer and I can answer you, and “by chance” I got hold of an article in Epoch Times whose existence I had not been aware of at all. This article raised the claim that hope has enormous value in improving human achievement.
The article reviews observations and experiments conducted over the last decades on the effect of hope, and this was examined against optimism.
None of this was new to me; it seems to me my awareness of the issue was awakened already in my youth following my reading of East of Eden by John Steinbeck. As best I remember, Steinbeck devoted some paragraph to the subject of the effect of hope on human beings. I tried googling it and found something that apparently indeed matches, but I didn’t delve into it too much.
It’s important for me to sharpen the point: hope gives determination and with it resourcefulness, which is not the case with optimism.
From your response I can infer that whatever is not based on the foundations of cold logic [mathematical?] is nothing but straw and stubble—except for the matter of observing commandments, on which of course the world rests.
Am I suspecting the worthy unjustly when I wonder whether, in your eyes, the studies and observations about the effect of hope also fall under the category of “junk science”?
Be that as it may, I believe that without hope the State of Israel would never have arisen [is that good or not good for the Jews?…], but hope will also enable us to find out-of-the-box ways to achieve peace.
All the best

Hello A.,
This field does indeed belong to junk science, but that doesn’t mean the result is untrue. On the contrary, sometimes the result is so trivial that there is no point in doing research on it. It’s like doing a study showing that everyone who has a wound feels pain.
Logic does not stand alone. Every logical argument begins from assumptions, and these are not derived from logic but from common sense or observation. Part of the facts on which one must rely is our psychology. That is not examined through the prism of whether it is logical or not, but through a factual prism: this is how we are (that hope, whether justified or not, helps us succeed).
And from this I did not merit to understand why the commandments are an exception. Their observance is important (= a fact), and therefore they should be observed. That’s logic like any other logic. Whether the world stands upon them or not, I do not know.
By the way, regarding Steinbeck, actually The Grapes of Wrath (a truly wonderful book) speaks about the meanings of hope and hopelessness.

Hi Michi,
At long last I’m free to present / ask you a new old question:
Can one refute my claim that one can infer that the essence of the Written Torah is our duty to preserve the world that the Holy One, blessed be He, created?
[I assume, and am almost sure, that the Oral Torah can easily refute this claim.]
All the best

To A. the tireless, many greetings.
All that remains for me is to repeat for the tenth time my old answer: there is no need at all to refute claims that purport to prove something before they have done so. First prove it, and then maybe I’ll try to refute the proof.
By the way, can you refute the claim that Goldbach’s conjecture can be proven? Alternatively, can you refute the central claim of Beethoven’s Fifth Sonata?

Hi Michi.
I debated for hours how I could deal with your answer.
I think that although both of us believe in the same God, that is where the similarity ends [at least for the sake of discussion]—in faith.
Because belief in God [the same God!] is inseparably attached in your case [or so at least I get the impression] to belief that the Torah—both the Written and the Oral—is holy, and therefore exists in its own right without any claim to be instrumental [in your language] in one way or another.
Whereas I believe that the Torah is indeed a means that is supposed to give us human beings the conceptual tools to preserve creation. Therefore I am tireless in my efforts to prove that my desire to protect the future of my descendants is based not only on my biology, but also on my faith that this is the right thing on the level of belief.
So for now, Sabbath peace and all the best

Hello A.,
It is hard for me to see what purpose most commandments serve (the prohibition on eating pork, milk, creeping creatures, impurity and purity, redeeming the firstborn donkey, halitzah and levirate marriage, and much more). To say that this has instrumental meaning seems to me speculative and lacking any logical basis. Therefore my impression is that you are inserting (= screwing in, in yeshiva-boys’ slang) your own desires (blessed in themselves) into the Torah for no fault of its own.
But beyond all this, what I wrote to you is a very basic methodological and logical principle: one cannot establish a thesis on the grounds that it cannot be refuted. A great many theses cannot be refuted, and I assume we would agree that not all of them are true. The burden of proof is on the one proposing the thesis, not on the one opposing it.

Hi Michi,
I assume you know that for some of the prohibitions seemingly rational reasons have been found: I read somewhere that in the Middle East, raising pigs was forbidden in ancient times because pigs do not have four stomachs like ruminants, so they feed on concentrated food—that is, grains of various kinds. In countries where water is scarce, feeding animals on grain is considered wasteful because of the extra water required to fill out the grain, unlike leaves and stalks.
But even if we assume this explanation is unfounded, my opinion is [I think I’ve already expressed it to you] that the role of the commandments is to accustom the Jewish people to discipline. For after all, the existential challenges of the ancient era were so different from those of today, and there would have been no point in formulating commandments whose implementation depended on practices that did not exist at all in antiquity.
It seems to me that the considerations of the Holy One, blessed be He [if one may formulate it this way], in giving the commandments to the Jewish people, were not only to create a pioneering force for implementing advanced social ideas [the Judeo-Christian culture], but also a public accustomed to seeking meaning in its existence, and seeking new challenges even if they are not mentioned in the Torah’s commandments.
And this is what, in my opinion, the “clowns” [progressive Judaism] do so well! Unfortunately, it does not seem to me that the leaders of this movement are aware of the weight of the mission placed upon them!
Have a good week

I could offer you another hundred interpretive suggestions like that. Actually the purpose of the commandments is to prevent us from enjoying ourselves, and everything else is only to create discipline. The purpose of the commandments is to cause us spiritual exaltation (“and you shall rejoice on your festival”), and everything else is only for discipline. And so on.

Indeed—I debated whether to deal with hedonism, but decided not to, and now you have raised that topic:
To the best of my knowledge, nowhere in the Written Torah are we commanded to be in constant joy without a festival.
That is, of course, the innovation of the Baal Shem Tov.
Since both of us—you and I [with all due distinction…]—are not Hasidim, we are exempt from the “obligation of joy…”
And one more difference—you have a degree in engineering, whereas I do not, but in my soul I am an engineer, and therefore I strive with all my heart to use the knowledge at my disposal [which also includes any knowledge relevant to the matter that I have a chance of obtaining] in order to try to increase the chances of my descendants living in well-being [not luxury!]. For this purpose it seems to me proper to base my arguments on the Torah, even if to you it may seem a bit or very forced.
Whether from rational calculations or as a result of the interpretation of the secular left in Israel, I feel obligated that all human beings, regardless of origin, religion, or nationality, living within a radius of at least 1000 km, should live in material and emotional well-being.
Because I believe they deserve it too, and thus the risks will decrease that they will aspire to violence.
I think all these are sufficient reasons to want to interpret the meaning of the Torah’s commandments in the way I interpret them, of course on condition that they do not contradict the Written Torah.

I disagree. All your desires are your own, and there is no reason to load them onto some text for no fault of its own.

Hi Michi,
I assume that like any parent you are worried, at one level or another, about the future of your descendants, and therefore I wonder whether you also try to find a way that will improve their chances in the future.
Since you are supremely rational, it is clear to me that you do not rely on prayers and incantations.
So what then—determinism? Everything is from Allah?

I certainly try. One does whatever effort one can. And what one can’t—comes from Allah (metaphorically; that is, there’s nothing to be done). I didn’t understand the question. Why did you think I don’t try?