Q&A: What Is Religion Based On—Reason or Tradition?
What Is Religion Based On—Reason or Tradition?
Question
A worn-out question, admittedly, but I still don’t know of a clear answer.
What is our religion based on: intellectual inquiry and rational analysis, or acceptance and tradition from our ancestors?
On the one hand, you have to be convinced and one hundred percent certain that everything really is true. There’s no value in saying “I believe” if I’m not convinced with certainty that this is so, and in order to be convinced you need to see things for yourself and/or carry out an orderly theoretical investigation.
Even Moses himself says, “Your own eyes have seen what the Lord did,” “not your children, who did not see,” etc.
But on the other hand, the Torah itself requires us to “tell your son” (see the Passover Seder night). Judaism encourages educating even minors from an early age, so we inject Judaism into our children’s bloodstream in such a way that it becomes very hard for them to think about it in a clean, unbiased way.
And in practice too, Judaism is a family story. We are all the children of one man. Not a scattered collection of truth-seekers.
How does objective examination fit together with the Jewish educational method?
Answer
I dealt with this at length in my book The First Existent, and in the notebooks here on the site. In general, there is no reason to assume there needs to be certainty here. In fact, a person cannot have certainty about anything.
Beyond that, people make decisions in different ways, and different people do so differently. Some go by intuition, and others by logical-philosophical arguments. Each river follows its own course.
As for the question whether, after our education, children come to the issue in a clean way—I’ve written about that in a few places. At the moment I can’t find it and would need to search. My claim is that it’s like teaching geometry: if no one teaches it to you, you won’t manage to arrive at it on your own. And beyond that, secular education doesn’t leave a person any “cleaner” either (in my opinion, less so). There’s no getting around it—we are all shaped by the landscape of our birthplace.
Discussion on Answer
A. I wrote that each person follows his own path. But there is no fundamental contradiction. The attitude toward tradition is itself based on reason, and only to the extent that reason requires it. Rabbi Shimon Shkop already addressed this at the beginning of Gate 5.
B. I’m absolutely not convinced, and certainly not with certainty. So what? But it seems likely to me that he existed. And beyond that, even if not—is it forbidden to tell an educational story?
What does “each person follows his own path” mean?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds from what you’re saying that there are two tracks in religious life. Let’s call the first one theoretical examination, and the second simple acceptance of tradition.
If so, then I don’t understand:
A. How is that divided up? Do you freely choose which track to be religious by, or is it according to IQ?
B. And was the commandment “tell your son” stated only for those who choose the second track? After all, the commandment is to tell the sons what happened. Not what might have happened.
C. When you come to a three-year-old child and tell him / “pump into him” what you call “educational stories,” you almost inevitably block his way to a clean examination. In other words, it is almost certainly harmful to the possibility that he will really investigate these things and become convinced of them from within himself.
D. And what about the fact that in practice the Jews are one family, all the investigators disappeared and only the traditionalists remained?
In the last line I’ll ask the disturbing question again:
The issue of educating children is an inseparable part of religion. That is true for all types of religious people, more educated and less.
The Torah repeatedly demands that this education be carried out, that these stories be told, that it be injected into the blood of minors.
Judaism is clearly built on passing on this tradition. The Jewish people is fundamentally built on family, not on outsiders joining.
All of this essentially contradicts a rational examination of the truth and essence of things.
It seemingly necessarily “closes the mind” of minors, or at the very least makes it very difficult for them in the future to reach a level of certain inner conviction.
So what did the Torah want? A herd of the educated, or thinking individuals? It seems that neither this nor that is right.
I really don’t understand what the problem is.
There are many tracks, because there are many kinds of examinations too. And perhaps simple faith also comes in many forms. Why are you assuming there has to be only one track? Do people make decisions in other areas in only one way? Some rely on intuition and others rely on more detailed calculations. It depends on tendencies, abilities, and other character traits, and so on.
What does any of this have to do with the commandment “tell your son”? You are supposed to tell about the Exodus from Egypt and its meanings and the Jewish laws of the holiday. It has nothing to do with the previous issue.
In a parallel thread here I briefly explained why I am not blocking him. There is no education that leaves a child with a clean examination. That is a naive illusion. And religious education is needed, because without it a clean examination of the religious option is almost impossible.
And how does this connect to the family nature of the Jews? Are you trying to prove that there are no newcomers because there is no substantive examination? Of course there are newcomers. Very many of them.
Why is “tell your son” unrelated to this? It’s one of our foundations. Every other thing in the Torah is a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.
If it’s not certain that it happened, then it’s not certain that anything is true.
And what does “supposed to tell about the Exodus from Egypt” mean? A story is an experience; it’s not a sequence of words that you utter.
Either you’re there or you’re not.
I’m pretty worn out by this circular discussion. The answers are self-evident and not always related to the course of the discussion. So I suggest that at this stage we part as friends.
??
As for the question of religious education, see column 294, which will go up today.
A. I didn’t understand the last line. Reason or tradition?
B. When you tell children about Pharaoh, are you or are you not convinced with certainty of the story?