Is the Rabbi sure that the stories about Rabbi Joseph Karo’s maggid are not a forgery?

No. But as far as I understand, there is fairly broad agreement among researchers that the book Maggid Meisharim was indeed written by him, despite the problematic medium and content.

These are obviously Santa Claus stories meant to convince the idiots of that generation that what was written was true.

And on that subject I’ll ask:

Isn’t watching Barcelona play, and its star Lionel Messi, a case of “consulting the taxes”?

Best regards, Ronaldo from Juventus

The Last Halakhic Decisor, I tend to agree with you. Indeed, in earlier generations stupidity reached high levels. Large parts of the Jewish world, especially in southeastern Europe and North Africa, stumbled into sanctifying old wives’ tales. For example: the well-known “manifesto” of the Besht from the year 5510, little notes and various letters do not testify to their authors as ordinary sane people; at most they testify that we are dealing with mentally ill people posing as angels wrapped in the fog of legend.
It is worth noticing the terrible distortion of the creator of “neo-Hasidism,” Martin Buber, who attributed the repair of a corrupted Judaism to Hasidic tales — those that revived faith by bringing myth into it. To his credit, it should be said that Buber awakened a deep cognitive-psychological look into the guts of the phenomenon that denied the need for Jewish dynamism and instead sanctified stasis. The gentile world progressed, while the Jewish world sank into abyssal delusions.

A tremendous difficulty for Benjamin Gurlin:

Here he refers to the well-known “manifesto” of the Besht from the year 5510.

But here https://mikyab.net/posts/65931#comment-32193 he claims that the Besht “never existed at all.”

A tremendous puzzle.

And I sat over this and thought of resolving it in two ways.

Either one must distinguish between “Besht” and “Beshar,” and they do not refer to the same figure.

Or one must distinguish between “Benjamin Gurlin” and “Gnimin Borlin” https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%92%D7%93%D7%95%D7%99%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%93%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A8-%D7%95%D7%97%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%93-%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%94, and the one who taught this did not teach that.

And perhaps one could further say that his ideas became confused because he was preoccupied with the topic of the “right of the first night.”

Aharoyin

You’ve got a better memory, Aharoyin.
After it became clear that the question mentioned there was aimed specifically at criticizing Benjamin himself, then apparently it’s possible to bring up this nonsense again. Though at the time I thought Benjamin was a fool (and tendentious), and since then it has become clear to me that he is clever (and tendentious).

And this was the wording of the question there (obsessive repetition of the term “Hareidi,” with no factual basis, wild speculation, super-tendentious interpretation, mistaken understanding of halakhic formalism, and more):

By means of a sample check of garbage cans in Bnei Brak, one can easily see that the amount of orange peels is significantly smaller than in cities of similar density. Does this not reflect a Hareidi disregard for the need to protect the body and nourish it with vitamin C? Could it be that the need to remove the orange’s thick peel reminds the Hareidi of his distance from his own selfhood and his submission to external conditioning, or that as a Hareidi he is careful about desecration of God’s name and therefore avoids any act of squeezing? Which other fruits do the Hareidim avoid, and what can be done about it? I propose exempting oranges from the laws of orlah and tithes so that Hareidim (who do not work) can buy them more easily. Alternatively, perhaps oranges can be immersed with the designation of potatoes, and then the Hareidim will eat them at ease. The situation is very grave.

To “A tremendous difficulty for Benjamin Gurlin,” hello: insofar as we are speaking of the Besht as a persona, the claim is indeed that he never existed at all, and so according to the truth. On the other hand, insofar as we are dealing with writings attributed to him, then the claim is that the more writings there are, the more Beshts there are — and “break the one who taught this is not the one who taught that”!

With God’s help, Jerusalem Day 5780

As for the matter itself: the prohibition of consulting the dead is communicating with the spirit of a person who died, like the practices of necromancers. A maggid is an angel who appears to a person, and that is the standard mode of divine revelation to the patriarchs and prophets, with which the Hebrew Bible is full.

Best regards, Shatz