Q&A: A post Rabbi Ofran published about an hour ago
A post Rabbi Ofran published about an hour ago
Question
“Nothing is more enslaving than truth,” Rabbi Froman once said, because after all, we can never choose to stop knowing what we already know. Truth is forced upon us; it binds, takes over, grips us. From the moment you discover it, you cannot free yourself from it. Once someone has learned that 2+2 equals 4, the possibility of accepting any other answer has been taken away from him.
And yet, although truth enslaves, and although “Moses is truth and his Torah is truth,” the Sages insisted on saying that “the only truly free person is one who occupies himself with Torah.” How can someone engaged in Torah still remain free? How do freedom and truth walk hand in hand?
The answer is simple: one who believes in the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that he does not know and understands that he does not understand. One who is sure that he has understood has probably not understood at all. Truth leaves room for freedom only when it cannot be attained. The essence of faith in God is constant doubt, stemming from the inability of a material, finite human being to grasp divine truth.
That doubt is the key to listening, humility, compassion, gentleness, weakness—to all the good qualities that certainty and absolute confidence do not allow. That same doubt is what leads us into deep and genuine freedom. And its absence binds us in dark servitude.
The idol worshipper holds his god in the palm of his hand. He knows it with absolute certainty, and therefore is enslaved to it. The servant of God, who knows nothing with certainty, is alone free.
The dispute is not about the status of women, not about the attitude toward modernity, and not about LGBT people either. All these are only side effects of another, much deeper dispute—about truth, freedom, and above all certainty…”
Answer
A’, hello.
I didn’t understand a thing. It sounds very beautiful and profound, but in my opinion it doesn’t really say anything. Truth and certainty enslave, while doubt leaves me a free person. So is truth good, or is doubt? And what is the connection between those two and freedom? It sounds to me a bit like typical Hasidic nonsense (in the Froman–Shagar style), whose main effect is to convey a mood, but with no real content behind it.
It seems to me this is a nice illustration of the difference between poets and analytic philosophers. And the lesson? If you want to clarify some concept, go to the later authorities and quickly abandon the earlier ones (as the halakhic rule goes: the law follows the later authorities).
Discussion on Answer
With God’s help, 12 Nisan 5778
Does truth enslave? Quite the opposite: knowing the truth gives a person the tools to realize his aspirations in the best possible way without harming others.
Just as knowing the rules of the road, knowing the map, and knowing the capabilities of the vehicle enables a driver to navigate safely and find the quickest and safest route to his destination, so too knowing the boundaries that the Creator of the world set in His Torah gives a person a “living space” that allows him to realize his aspirations and abilities, while at the same time being “good toward Heaven and good toward other people.”
The Torah is the “order of the world,” and within it all powers and inclinations find their proper place!
With blessings for responsible freedom,
S.Z. Levinger
I don’t disagree with the criticism leveled here at Rabbi Ofran. I just want to say that it is possible to interpret him as meaning that freedom exists only where there is no necessity, that is, no constraints. Truth is usually forced upon a person’s mind, and therefore establishes necessity, and therefore there is no freedom. As Rabbi Michael Abraham wrote in his wonderful recent articles, although there is no identity between the concept of freedom and the concept of liberty, in the case of a person who is completely unfree, completely deterministic, the concept of liberty also does not exist. Therefore, as Rabbi Ofran writes, truth opposes liberty. So he proposes as a solution—I’m not getting into whether it’s good or bad—that in a world of uncertainty, truth does not force itself upon me, and therefore I am free and liberty becomes possible.
If you read my articles, I explained everything there. Truth does not oppose liberty; it constitutes it. Without truth there is no liberty. Liberty is not about what to think, but what to do given what is proper and improper.
I understand the Rabbi’s position, but I think that this is exactly the point of dispute between the Rabbi and Rabbi Ofran. The Rabbi holds that the concept of liberty exists only if there is constitutive truth in the background, but Rabbi Ofran holds that liberty also exists with regard to what a person thinks, not only what he does. So although there is justice in the Rabbi’s words, I don’t think Rabbi Ofran’s words are nonsense.
Correction: and not only with regard to what he does.
If you think there is a dispute here, then at most it is a semantic dispute, but on the principled level there is no room at all for his claim.
According to my approach, if truth is forced upon us, what liberty is there here? That is complete enslavement. And if not—what liberty is there here? That is freedom. If he means to talk about freedom and not liberty, then I already explained that it is worthless.
There can be intellectual liberty only in the following sense: although people think the truth is X, I dare to examine that and perhaps reach different conclusions. But that is an entirely different discussion.
Rabbi Ofran answers your question exactly: if truth is forced upon us, what liberty is there here? Answer: the ability to cast doubt. That is the liberty. What is the difference between accepting a binding framework of 1,000 commandments, in which I choose whether to observe them or not, and 1,000 truths, in which I choose whether to cast doubt on them or not?
So if that’s the case, then it is not forced upon us. I don’t just cast doubt for no reason if I’ve reached the conclusion that a certain thing is true. That’s not liberty, it’s foolishness.
This text is so pathetic. The writer wants to convey to us his humble and compassionate human experience, all supposedly arising from doubt, which is what gives birth to true faith. (In God? In the Torah?)
For some reason, reading between the lines, what I actually see is a know-it-all certainty and clear confidence in his own ideas and way of life.