Q&A: Professor Rachel Elior
Professor Rachel Elior
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael. What do you think of Professor Rachel Elior’s view? – Link:
Broadly speaking, she says that there is no one specific and correct Judaism, and that there are several ways to practice it—the anchor for this lies in the history of the people.
Answer
I no longer have the energy to listen to this banal nonsense. These “humanities scholars” keep displaying the thinking ability of frogs. These are trivial claims that keep getting repeated, and they have no real meaning.
If she means only to describe reality, then there is no dispute at all. Who disagrees with her? Obviously, as a matter of fact, there are many groups that realize their Judaism in different ways. But if she means some kind of value claim (that all of these are correct or legitimate), I do not see how the existence of groups establishes that value claim.
The claim that there are different groups that realize their Judaism in different ways is a trivial empirical fact. The question is whether she intends to claim that this means they are all right. If so, why? Suppose I claim that only one is right and all the others are mistaken. Does that not fit perfectly well with the fact that there are many existing ways? What is the connection between the fact that there are many groups and the value claim (if indeed that is what she meant)?
The history of the people is a fact, and the claim that there are many legitimate paths is a normative claim. You cannot derive what ought to be from what is. That is the naturalistic fallacy.
Discussion on Answer
Dear Sagi, your disrespect toward a person with Rachel Elior’s breadth and depth of knowledge falls into exactly the trap you attribute to her. Have you even read one of her books?? What you are quoting is taken from an article available online, and I can provide the source. She understood the Talmudic passage better than you did, and caught the sharp humor of the Sages, who indeed were speaking about the animal called huldah, but used the name of the prophetess Huldah in order to poke fun at the notion that the animal does something intentionally, and so on. Now, it is clear that this is an exaggeration—the kind common among humanities scholars—to take a Talmudic passage like that and prove from it the chauvinism of the Sages. She did that to add color to her article; that is accepted and legitimate, and there is no need to get hung up on small things. At most, say “the sharper the mind, the greater the slip.” Even among the greatest sages of the generation you can find statements on that level. Everyone is human. But “an ignoramus on embarrassingly high levels”?! I wish you, Sagi, that in another seventy years you will know what Rachel Elior mumbles in her sleep during an afternoon nap. With love 🙂
Rachel Elior really does come across as a very educated and very serious woman.
It is truly astonishing, every time מחדש, to encounter such intelligent and deep people who fall into such a trivial trap without noticing it.
I ask myself (and I have no answer): perhaps Elior nevertheless understands very well the confusion between what is and what ought to be, and maybe she wanted to say something else here?
Maybe it is still possible to judge her favorably in this context as well? I don’t know.
Gil, my friend, Sagi’s words are carved in stone.
Honor is due, from time immemorial, to the giants of the world on whose shoulders we stand.
The moment an individual explains to the masses a belittling attitude toward those giants, even if only in appearance, that person has lost the value of the honor you are trying to extend to him,
since he had no concern for the honor of others.
Beyond that, I have read *everything* the professor has written. As plain common sense would suggest, she has no innovations—just a simplistic collection of articles.
But what is jarring is specifically the logical arguments, which one would expect to be of “professorial” quality.
Sometimes love does not extinguish the fire of blindness.
I wish you, Gil, that you wake up.
I studied carefully her book about divinity in the second generation of Chabad, and it turns out she has no idea what she is talking about! She reads texts and quotes them and explains them however she wants, without any of the basic understanding required for someone dealing with Chabad Hasidic discourses.
Without even listening to this talk of hers, she is an ignoramus on embarrassingly high levels, so there is no reason to get worked up over what she says.
In one of her books she wanted to show that the Sages were chauvinists, etc. One of her “proofs” was that once there was a prophetess in Israel named Huldah, the Sages tried to lower her status, and at the beginning of tractate Pesachim they asked, “Is Huldah really a prophetess?!” The problem is that the Talmud there is talking about the animal, a weasel/rat—whether we are concerned that the weasel dragged a piece of bread from place to place. When someone does not know how to read the plain meaning of a Talmudic passage, it is embarrassing for them to express an opinion on Judaism.