Q&A: The Writing, the Sound, and What Is Proper (Regarding the Naturalistic Fallacy)
The Writing, the Sound, and What Is Proper (Regarding the Naturalistic Fallacy)
Question
Dear Rabbi Michael, greetings,
I have a question about what many call the “holiness of the Torah,” or the “divinity of the Torah,” or that the Torah is “from Heaven.”
I want to approach the question through things I read from you, and it seems to me that I also understood them on their own terms.
I read that you wrote several times about the support for the Torah’s divinity based on the unique history of the Jewish people. If I am not mistaken, you presumably mean the exiles and redemptions.
I am a bit puzzled about what the support here is.
I wonder whether this could in principle join together with the plagues of Egypt, things hidden in the Torah (if there are such things), prophecies that were fulfilled, and say that there were various miracles connected to figures whom the Torah tradition exalts.
Let me get to the point—I do not know how to confirm or refute miracle stories or reports of supernatural knowledge, but suppose that tomorrow the Rabbi is walking down the street and suddenly a book appears before his eyes and lands right in his hands. In the book it says that one ought to run three times every day and that this is the will of God. Would the Rabbi then hold that one ought to run three times every day?
I must admit that I would not be persuaded by the book at all. I do not know what the connection is between the writing that appeared before my eyes and any moral question or understanding whatsoever—what is proper and what is not proper. In fact, this falls into the naturalistic fallacy that David Hume pointed out—a leap from facts to a moral imperative. There is a logical link missing here that connects the sensory perception of the writing to moral understanding. Of course, exactly the same would be true if I heard a voice from above saying the words, “It is proper to run three times every day.”
What connection is there between an experience of sounds and letters coming from nowhere—even if in a way that contradicts the laws of nature as I know them so far—and an understanding of what one ought to do?
Therefore, even if we were to say that the tradition about the Revelation at Sinai was exactly as the kindergarten teacher tells it in terms of the facts, still no moral obligation follows from the understanding that in Moses’ consciousness there appeared an experience of words, whether vocal or in the form of scrolls appearing in his hands or stone tablets.
I think the only solution to the problem of the naturalistic fallacy is the understanding that there is an intuition that accompanies speech, ethical discussion, the understanding of a reasoned text, and somewhere this is always connected at the root of things to an encounter with the inner voices of the soul, of another person’s soul, of the soul of an animal… Many times this is connected to the “libido” that takes different forms in life.
But what is the proof that Moses received an intuition? Or that the people of Israel received one? Maybe there were simply supernatural phenomena all along the way. Maybe they just heard voices. And even if he did receive an intuition—how can one know that it was clear, and that he himself understood it properly?
One could say: we experience this directly and authentically from our ancestors, we hear it in the authentic voice of the rebbe, we understand that the commandments are moral, etc. etc.
But then the Torah is like any tradition, and any teaching, in the sense that there is nothing special in its being “divine” or “from Heaven” regarding the reasoning behind the obligation to observe it. Rather, a person must listen to the wisdom of the generations, weigh things himself, listen to the wisdom of other nations, listen to moral philosophers, politicians, psychologists, etc., and decide what is most moral in his opinion.
And regarding the idea of reward and punishment—if God created a world with much evil and much good despite being omnipotent, then it follows that the aim of creating the world is not entirely in favor of our happiness or the reduction of our suffering, nor the opposite—not the reduction of our happiness and the increase of our suffering,
and therefore I am not sure that the aim of the Torah, which is part of creation, whether by emanation or directly from the Creator, is to instruct us how to be happy or alternatively to threaten us through bullying. It is like how I would not be very moved by threats or promises from people when I do not know that they particularly intend to benefit me or particularly intend to harm me. If it is a person with an ambivalent attitude toward me, I would not take his words seriously (except insofar as to deal with him). Also the history of the Jewish people—I do not think anyone can prove that the more righteous we were and the more commandments we kept, the more we returned to the Land, or that the more we abandoned the commandments, the more we were exiled.
So the question is—what does it mean that the Torah is “from Heaven,” and how can this be proven aside from arguments based on the reasons for the commandments? (It seems to me that Maimonides and Rabbi Kook actually went in the direction of proof from ethics.)
Thank you very much, and Sabbath peace,
Ofir
Answer
I didn’t understand any of this. You started with the historical proofs for the Torah and moved on to the naturalistic fallacy and all the rest. I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate less and sharpen the point more.
Discussion on Answer
I do not know what the supernatural nature of the Tablets of the Covenant is supposed to mean. We are talking about divine revelation, in which the Creator of the world gives us a Torah and in it commands us to do and not do various things. The obligation to observe is not connected to supernaturalness or all the rest, but to the fact that this is a command of God.
You could call it the “meta-naturalistic fallacy,” because we are dealing with “supernatural” facts rather than “natural” ones, and it is misleading as though if they are supernatural that somehow advances us toward the goal of deriving values or norms from them.
But the essence of the fallacy is the same essence: how can values be derived from facts alone—whether natural or supernatural—that is, normative knowledge? Even a supernatural fact is still just a fact.
I didn’t see the previous response. How can one know that God commanded the commandments, and that the Torah was not simply a supernatural appearance and that’s all? After all, one cannot experience God. How can one connect the experience of the voice or the writing to God?
(In my opinion one can experience “divinity” in prayer, but then one experiences the presence in the whole world, and I feel how the whole world is full of sublime presence, but in this world every stone and every book exists, and not only Torah scrolls are full of presence. And in every total conception of God—logos, “substance,” the separate intellect, the Idea of ideas, “the One,” etc.—the whole world is determined by God, including British law and the Qur’an and Mein Kampf, and not only things that appear outside the laws of nature. And yet there is what is moral and what is not, and in my view this is a matter of natural morality, which develops through ethical discussions.)
According to what was transmitted to us, when one encounters Him, one knows that He is there and that one is speaking with Him. That is how a prophet knows that he is speaking with the Holy One, blessed be He, and is not hallucinating. Just as when I speak with a person I know that there is a person before me and that this is not a hallucination. I do not see any connection to the naturalistic fallacy.
Where was this transmitted to us?
It sounds to me from the Bible exactly the opposite—not a meeting, but hearing a voice. “You saw no form, only a voice”; “You cannot see My face, for man shall not see Me and live” (and Maimonides writes about this that it is impossible to know God’s essence).
And the prophet is known as one who “prophesies in the name of” (as in Deuteronomy 13, and likewise “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name the Lord I was not known to them,” “and You have said, I know you by name,” “and I know you by name”; and the matter of the name that conveys divine presence is very dominant in Psalms, as in “Ascribe to the Lord the glory of His name”) or as one who “dreams a dream” or is aided by music.
The use of names is known as a tool for mystical experiences “from below upward,” and it depends on the mystic’s psychological makeup, so that the truth of the message is judged on its own merits and not by the person himself, unless he has moral excellence. I do not understand how dreams can help one understand what is proper except to hint at what is proper, as good psychoanalysis indeed does, and music too brings at most inspired genius.
Another place I know on this matter is the words of Rav Saadia Gaon in “Beliefs and Opinions,” on this issue, that the prophet sees a cloud when he prophesies and that this is a sign for him that the experience is prophecy. Here there are three problems, in my opinion—
A. These are the words of Rav Saadia Gaon, who lived in the Middle Ages and not in antiquity, and at least I do not know this as a widespread opinion, so this could certainly be his own invention out of his personal thoughts and experiences.
B. The very image of a cloud suggests to me obscurity and not clarity at all (and this connects to the mystical experience), so it is hard for me to see it as a symbol of clear and distinct “knowledge.”
C. If this is a bright cloud that looks like the clouds we are used to seeing in the sky every day—this does not seem to me an impressive sign that the matter is from God (for even if a book landed for me from the clouds and it said to jump three times, I would not be impressed by that).
It was transmitted to us in the tradition from our ancestors, who say that they received the Torah at Sinai. Otherwise they were having hallucinations. And the same applies to all the prophets.
(Sorry, Deuteronomy 13 does not mention use of the name.)
First of all—why shouldn’t they really have been hallucinating? So many supernatural things happened there—like the ten plagues and the sea splitting in two—so why shouldn’t there also have been a mass hallucination?
(Second, as an aside, not really connected to a discussion of the sort that tries to describe things in the world detached from the context of the question of authenticity, I am sorry to see the contempt for hallucinations. In my opinion, human beings who experience hallucinations are usually undergoing a very authentic experience. When all the screens and repressions fall away, one can דווקא discover important truths through hallucination. I cannot ignore the resemblance between “psychotics” who think they are “prophets” in the streets of Jerusalem and go about naked, and the way the prophets are described in Samuel as prophesying naked. Nakedness, without concealments, is an expression of an authentic state. In my opinion, stigmas about the mentally ill come from the repressions of “normal” people that prevent them from recognizing the authentic state of one who has reached it—fear of this authenticity can be found in the burning of Ezekiel’s scrolls, anything so that no memory of authenticity should remain. After all, the Messiah is described as “despised and rejected of men, with no form or splendor,” and the prophet is not promised a life of luxury and public recognition. If you ask me, the prophets would today be defined as mentally ill and put in a locked ward. But this is nothing new; they also put Jeremiah in the court of the guard, and in Nehemiah it says that the children of Israel killed their prophets…)
(Proceeding from the understanding expressed in that aside, prophecy indeed allows an encounter with truth, and at the same time it is incumbent on the person hearing the prophet to listen carefully and weigh it together with the various truths in life, and choose his most authentic choice—and once again we have returned to an ethical examination of the prophet’s words—though perhaps this time I too am encouraging a morality of authenticity like that which is “beyond good and evil.”)
And if I think with the help of the private-language argument (with reference to the “experience of revelation”)—the idea that “our ancestors received the Torah at Mount Sinai” can be understood only by observing the social behavior of traditional human beings (or to accommodate your argument—let us say that all the traditional people were ordinary Orthodox religious people), as people who act according to rules corresponding to the wording of the books of Jewish law, and who say that they “know” what is right to do from Sinai onward through the chain of generations and the development of the Oral and Written law (you still have not presented any way to relate God to this Torah). The fact that someone, or many people, say that they know how to behave and indeed behave that way for a long time does not seem to me to require that they are in fact following the right path (for example, there are many approaches in moral philosophy that can lead to different rules, and they have many adherents).
I personally do not understand how such a spectacle logically obligates me to join those rules if I do not think they are moral on the basis of my own judgment (and of course I act from within the context of how I was educated and the culture in which I live, and I do not weigh considerations from nowhere)
The question in short is: what difference does it make what evidence there is for the supernatural nature of the Tablets of the Covenant or the voice that Moses and the people of Israel heard, or for the supernatural nature of the contexts in which they appeared, with regard to the question whether it is proper to observe commandments that correspond to the wording of the voices Moses heard or the writing engraved on the tablets? (Again, if a book were to appear supernaturally in your hands—would you do what it says?)