Q&A: A Few Puzzles / Questions
A Few Puzzles / Questions
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’ve been walking around for quite a while with two puzzles/questions that don’t give me any peace. I’d like to lay them out before you.
Question A
Based on what I’ve learned from almost all books that clarify matters of faith, the common religious faith today is, at best, superstition, but more often completely idolatrous.
How is it that Torah scholars allow this situation?
Question B
The prayer service has been influenced by these superstitious and idolatrous beliefs over the last several centuries and has become a combination of a musical performance together with abuse and reviling (Otzrot HaRe’iyah, pp. 916–924).
How is it that no Torah scholar rises up to try to restore things to their former state and allow the Jewish people to go back to actually praying?
Question C
Why does the religious public, for the overwhelming most part, not study important introductions before studying Talmud?
How is it that there are people who have gone through most of the Talmud without understanding Maimonides’ introductions or the introductions to the aggadic passages that appear in Ein Yaakov?
Does it come out from this that there are masses of rabbis who are ignoramuses when it comes to matters of faith, who haven’t studied the Kuzari or Guide for the Perplexed?
And they teach Torah and deliver sermons!
Since these questions aren’t just coming out of nowhere, I’d like to explain the line of thought that brings me to them.
The basis of beliefs today
When I meet a religious person, especially if he is influenced by Hasidism and Kabbalah, but also far beyond those groups, I encounter a willingness to accept impossibilities as facts. The way people generally understand the aggadot of the Sages is magical, and rational clarification of what is possible in reality as opposed to impossible in reality is accepted in the religious public as heresy.
The result is that people, even intelligent ones in many areas, abandon reason and are willing to accept almost any nonsense if it is written in the name of some great authority or another.
When contradictions arise between religious-faith conceptions and archaeology, science, or common sense, they are all dismissed in the face of blind faith in a tradition from the holy Ari or the holy rebbe, no matter which rebbe.
Perfectly normal people, in most of their lives, stand in line to receive a blessing or some charm from charlatans who make millions off the faith of those innocent people. Casting doubt on the validity of those frauds is viewed by much of the public as heresy against the fundamentals of religion, across the entire religious public.
These people, who believe in impossibilities, serve as teachers, rabbis, psychologists, social workers, etc., and influence everyone who comes into contact with them with their superstitious ideas.
When I try to ask a religious person to use his reason regarding this or that piece of nonsense, he dismisses my question because, after all, so-and-so great figure acted this way, and who am I to question the custom of salt during the Counting of the Omer for protection from harmful forces, or circling a grave to find a match, saying verses for livelihood, or mentioning a rabbi’s name to find a lost object.
It comes out that an educated secular person is usually far smarter and more perceptive than the average religious person.
When we get to the synagogue, my puzzlement only grows.
Perfectly normal people, on most days, stand there screaming or crying and asking God to change, or to change other people for them.
But that’s still their problem.
The wording of the prayers and the way prayer is conducted make the synagogue experience very difficult for me.
The wording of the prayers
Over the generations and throughout the exiles, parts got inserted into the prayer service for which I see no source—not in the Talmud, not in Maimonides, and not even in the Shulchan Arukh.
Unifications for mystical intent whose wording really resembles Babylonian incantation bowls, repetitive repetitions, supplications and liturgical poems that, when you look closely at their words, seem very strange.
The form of the prayer service
especially on Sabbaths and holidays, has turned into a long and exhausting musical performance. I understand that during exile the synagogue gathering was an important communal time, but a Sabbath service of more than two hours, where most of the time the prayer leader drags out with lip movements the sounds AAA or UUU, is unbearable in my eyes.
When I find references in Jewish law or in the words of the Sages to public prayer, it is supposed to be quick, at the pace a person speaks.
The Sabbath is so important that the Sages shortened the Amidah in its honor (Berakhot 21a). Today,
yet even to question the style of the prayer service, let alone its wording, is considered heresy in the religious public.
Answer
Hello Eli. Questions A-B: empty slogan. What exactly is superstition in your view? How does it affect prayer? Empty declarations add nothing to the discussion. Question C: I don’t think someone who hasn’t studied the Kuzari or Guide for the Perplexed is missing anything. On the contrary, in many cases his condition is better than that of someone who has studied ancient philosophies like those. In general, introductions are not necessary in order to understand what one studies. Introductions merely conceptualize insights that exist in the learner even without having conceptualized them. And certainly there is no need to precede study itself with study of introductions. That is true in most fields. Introductions are for experts, not beginners. I agree with a considerable part of your criticisms. Of course, each one is directed at a different group, so combining them is artificial and unhelpful. But even when there is criticism, I prefer to create a more sensible view for myself and not ask why others think differently. That isn’t constructive. The claims about the educated secular person are nonsense. He doesn’t know that there is a God, which is knowledge far more fundamental than the knowledge that salt is useless during the Counting of the Omer. This is just demagoguery. I’ve written here more than once about the criticisms of prayer. But there are explanations for why people cling to it, even though in my opinion too it has no logic and is unnecessary. But as for the mystical “for the sake of unification” formula, if you don’t agree, then don’t say it. Personally, I see no problem with it. In short, you’re pouring out here a lot of mixed-together criticisms, most of them unargued and phrased in a general and vague way. This is not serious. If you want to discuss something, raise one focused question and it will be possible to discuss it. There is no point in this whole mishmash.
Discussion on Answer
For that you don’t need to study Maimonides. It’s simple. And someone who doesn’t agree won’t agree even if he studies Maimonides. Adopting magical conceptions is not connected to studying Maimonides, just as adopting belief in God is not connected to studying Maimonides. A person forms his positions on different issues in different ways. Even if he studies a text that presents a different position, that won’t necessarily change his views. Many of those who adopt magical conceptions know Maimonides very well (and even criticized these positions of his, the Vilna Gaon for example).
And the claim that when one position is rejected one adopts its opposite (by the way, that’s not deduction, at least not in the accepted definition, but the law of the excluded middle) also does not require studying Maimonides. That’s elementary logic. At the next stage you’ll tell me one needs to study Maimonides in order to know that one plus one equals two.
You have a very romantic picture of the secular person. It is completely detached from reality. The secular public too has superstitions and foolish positions no less than their religious brothers.
My discussion of prayer appears in the second book of the trilogy, at much greater length.
I didn’t understand what you wanted from the matter of idolatry and “I am.” Maybe you’ll be surprised, but I too had heard of those verses already before.
If you want to begin a systematic process of clarifying faith, this is not the place. You may perhaps find help in my trilogy, which is intended exactly for that.
Negating idolatry and paganism is definitely one of the axes of the Torah, but today that has no real meaning. Anthropomorphism, on the other hand, not at all. On the contrary, the plain meaning of the Torah anthropomorphizes the Holy One, blessed be He. Apparently you’ve studied too much Maimonides.
Thank you, Rabbi.
Is there, and if so within what limits, rabbinic authority since the sealing of the Talmud?
Beyond accepting the authority of a group of students in a specific place and time, which is easy to accept.
Thank you.
Your answer was:
There is none. I discussed this at length in the third book of the trilogy.
If so,
what allows me to marry off my children with authority?
What allows my in-laws to eat at my table?
Or why shouldn’t I open a synagogue with a prayer rite I invented yesterday?
This is not a riddle,
and it’s not 3 questions.
It is one question: if no one has binding authority,
how is it that for 1500 years there is still a framework in which we conduct ourselves within a halakhic framework that meets us at every moment, and where some of the possible points of division should have split us into completely separate groups?
The fact that there is no authority today does not mean there is no Jewish law, nor that there is no way to function. First of all, there is Jewish law that was ruled in periods when there was authority (up to the Talmud). Beyond that, there are customs and accepted halakhic rulings (though in my opinion they are not binding). Beyond that, even if there is no halakhic decision today, why does that mean it is impossible to marry or eat at one another’s homes? I simply don’t understand the question. Don’t you live among us? Don’t you know that there are people with different halakhic norms, and yet life goes on? The public has developed an ability to live in a way that contains different rulings and methods (for example, spouses adopt one custom of ruling, and so on).
I’ve written more than once that our ability to exist as one unit is mainly thanks to the Talmud. A brilliant text, edited in an astonishingly brilliant way (though I don’t know whether consciously, that is, whether its editors actually thought of this). See here briefly: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%94%D7%97%D7%99%D7%95%D7%91-%D7%9C%D7%AA%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93
Thank you for your answer.
I’ve been trying to carry out the systematic clarification for about the last 15 years.
I’d also be happy to go through your books.
At the same time, I would be glad to keep up a line of correspondence with you.
“Negating idolatry and paganism is definitely one of the axes of the Torah, but today that has no real meaning.”
This answer surprises me,
especially in light of what Rabbi Kook writes in Orot, “Seeds,” “Sufferings Cleanse”:
“All the entanglements of opinions among human beings, and all the inner contradictions that each individual suffers in his opinions, come only because of the fog that exists in thought regarding the divine concept,
which is a sea without end, and all thoughts, whether practical or theoretical, flow from it and return to it.”
“The desolation of thought due to too little study and knowledge leads a person to think much about the essence of God. And the more immersed he is in the ignorance of this terribly brazen and dreadfully foolish thought, the more he thinks that by this he is approaching exalted divine knowledge, about which he has always heard that all the greatest souls in the world yearn for it. When such a habit accumulates over several generations, many vain illusions are woven out of it, whose results are much evil and terrible harm, until even the individual person loses his physical and spiritual strength from great distress and darkness. The greatest restraint on the human spirit, when it comes to attain knowledge, comes from the fact that the divine thought is fixed in a particular and familiar form among people because of habit and childish imagination. This is a spark of the defect of making an idol and image, against which we must always be very careful, and all the more so in an age of clearer knowledge.
All the troubles in the world, especially the spiritual troubles—sorrow, anguish, disgust with life, despair, which truly are the main troubles of man—come only because of lack of knowledge, of looking with a clear gaze upon the majesty of God.”
Because of the general prevention of spiritual study in divine matters, the concept of God grows dark….
Because of the general prevention of spiritual study in divine matters, the concept of God grows dark, for lack of purified intellectual and emotional labor. Along with this, external fear and natural faith and the submissive yoke remain in many hearts as an inherited effect from those periods in which divine consciousness and feeling shone powerfully, to the point that by its greatness it was fit to subjugate all souls to it. Since the inner point of divine recognition is dim, the divine essence is included among the masses—and even among individuals fit to be path-illuminators for them—only as a powerful force from which there is no escape and to which one must submit. When people come to submit themselves to the service of God on the basis of this empty state, of the dark picture full of chaos and void that forms in the mind when one thinks about God without understanding and without Torah, lower fear disconnected from its source, which is higher fear, a person keeps losing the radiance of his world by attaching himself to constricted consciousness. No divine greatness is then revealed in the soul, but only the lowliness of wild fantasies, depicting some blurred, impoverished, irritable imaginary existence, which terrifies everyone who believes in it and crushes his spirit, dulls the heart, prevents the refinement of the human soul from prevailing, and uproots the divine splendor in his soul. And even if he says all day long that this faith is in the one God, it is an empty phrase, for the soul knows nothing of it, and every refined spirit is forced to turn his mind away from it. And this is the heresy of the footsteps of the Messiah, when the waters have gone from the sea of divine knowledge in the Jewish people—and in the whole world.
Crude psychological settling for the existence of divine content in the words and letters alone—this is what degrades humanity, and heresy comes as a kind of cry, out of the force of pain, to redeem man from this foreign pit of distress, to raise him from the darkness of letters and slogans to the light of idea and feeling, until it finds a place to stand even at the center of morality. Heresy has a temporary right to exist, because it must digest the filth that has clung to faith from lack of knowledge and labor. This is its whole role in existence—to remove the particularized forms from the essential thought of all life and of the root of all thoughts. When this state continues over generations, heresy is forced to emerge in a cultural form to uproot the memory of God and all the institutions of the service of God,”….
In order to purify the atmosphere from the pollution of brazenness and wickedness in thinking about the essence of God—the peeping that leads to idolatry—absolute heresy comes,
I understand from these words that the essential cause of heresy/secularization is the removal of idolatrous ideas from among us.
Is that understanding mistaken?
Rabbi Kook’s speculations are not a binding source for me. I wrote what seems right to me.
What he writes here seems to me entirely baseless.
Thank you, Rabbi, for your answer.
A. I don’t agree that Questions A-B are an empty slogan, but rather a heading for a question that gets laid out in more detail afterward. Even so, I agree that the way it was initially presented makes serious discussion difficult, so from here on I’ll arrange the questions one by one.
B. Regarding your answer to Question C, Maimonides writes in his introduction to the chapter Helek:
“[The first group—those who take the words of the Sages literally]
The first, and this is the majority of what I have seen, and whose compositions I have seen and what I have heard about them—
they believe them according to their plain sense, and do not think there is any hidden interpretation in them whatsoever. And all impossibilities are, in their view, necessary realities…
And this group is poor in understanding; one ought to grieve over them for their foolishness, because they honor and exalt the Sages according to their own thinking, but in fact they lower them to the deepest degradation, and they do not understand this. By the life of the blessed Lord, this group destroys the glory of the Torah and darkens its radiance, and makes the Torah of God the opposite of what was intended by it.”
My heart tends to agree with the words of Maimonides. And therefore it is hard for me to accept your answer that someone who does not study introductions before reaching the Talmud is missing nothing.
C. You are right that connecting the topics in the original question is somewhat artificial. The logic behind it is that these three issues are what cause me discomfort in my frequent encounters with the religious reality in which I live. Beyond that, there is a causal connection between them, at least in my understanding: when people do not study introductions to learning and to clarification of faith, they arrive from the Talmud at magical conceptions, and because of magical conceptions the structure of prayer loses the essence and becomes what it is, which is uncomfortable for me.
D. I ask why others think differently in order to define my own thinking. One of the methods of thought is deduction: when I reject the false, I get closer to the truth. As Maimonides says in Guide for the Perplexed, Part I, chapter 59:
“You have thus been made to understand that every attribute the negation of which has been demonstrated with regard to Him, may He be exalted, leaves you more perfect; while every additional positive attribute you ascribe to Him makes you go wrong and distances you from knowledge of His true reality. By this path one should approach apprehension of Him through investigation and inquiry, until one knows the negation of all that must be negated with regard to Him.”
Since my view is rare in the environment where I am, there arises a need to clarify it precisely through collision with the views around me. Therefore this criticism is constructive for me.
E. The typical educated secular person is critical toward reality and tries to clarify what is possible in reality and what is fiction. True, he is required to investigate as far as he can the truth of reality and thus arrive at affirming the existence of a First Being (Book of Knowledge 1:1), but in the environment we live in this is very difficult for him, because he usually grows up, like me, almost like a child captured among the gentiles; and when he does encounter Torah disseminators, it is usually very shallow and contradicts simple reason, so it is hard for me to fault him for not knowing a primary and fundamental truth.
In contrast, when an adult believes that a red string, a bag of salt, or a branch from a tree that grew near a grave has magical influence, I simply cannot help being appalled by that opinion.
F. I’d be glad if you could point me to your discussion on the topic of prayer so that I can use it in clarifying my own approach to the structure of prayer.
G. At the same time, I’d be glad to begin an orderly and reasoned discussion.
1. Since the first commandment in Exodus 20:2,
“I am the Lord your God,”
is a foundation without which there is no discussion at all, I conclude that the second commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me,” is, in my understanding, the central axis running through the whole Torah.
There is almost no portion in the Torah without some reference to the prohibition of idolatry. As it says in the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 13a: “And why is he called a ‘Jew’? Because he denied idolatry, for whoever denies idolatry is called a Jew.”
Or as brought in Midrash Bereishit Rabbah, section 38, passage 13:
“A certain woman came carrying a bowl full of fine flour and said to him: Here, offer it before them.
I placed it before them. One said: I will eat first, and another said: I will eat first.
Then the biggest among them stood up and broke all the others.
He said to him: What, are you mocking me? Can they do anything?
He said to him: Then let your ears hear what your mouth is saying.”
Question:
Is this assumption correct—that distancing ourselves from anthropomorphism and idolatry is one of the most central axes in the Torah?