Q&A: Rabbi Chaim of Brisk’s principle — regarding belief in Torah from Heaven
Rabbi Chaim of Brisk’s principle — regarding belief in Torah from Heaven
Question
Hello. You mentioned in one of the notebooks, and I think also in one of the books, Rabbi Chaim of Brisk’s principle in tractate Chagigah regarding identifying an insane person: namely, that if several symptoms or several questions can be explained by one simple explanation that accounts for all of them, and it is also possible to answer that each case has its own incidental explanation—then we go with the simple explanation, even though it is not absolutely necessary. And I want to ask: why wouldn’t this also be נכון with respect to belief in Torah from Heaven? That is, there are quite a few questions about the assumption of Torah from Heaven—both from the standpoint of the relationship between Torah and science, and from apparent contradictions between different verses, and from verses that seem to be late. So even if we take only the category of Torah and science, even there there are quite a few questions, some of which have nice answers and some of which have more difficult answers (at least in my humble opinion). So why, then, should we not prefer the option of giving the simple answer (which rejects belief in Torah from Heaven) rather than giving point-by-point answers to each difficulty on its own?
[True, there are questions about which one can say that they only seem like questions to us, and it is not the Torah’s “fault” that they strike us as difficult. But clearly there are also questions that are not difficult for us only because of mistaken underlying assumptions.]
Answer
There are no fewer questions if one assumes that the Torah is not from Heaven. It is very hard to measure such a complicated topic the way you measure the signs of an insane person. This reminds me of a suggestion I once heard on the radio for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by using the method of dividing a cake between two children: one of us would divide the list of disputed points into two equal parts, and the other would choose first.
Discussion on Answer
Where did it come from? What did it come to achieve? How did it come to acquire such a status? How did the Creator of the world intend to inform us what is incumbent upon us? What is the source of the uniqueness of the Jewish people, in history and in its influence on the rest of the world?
Notice that we have returned to the standard discussion of arguments for and against Torah from Heaven, with no connection at all to Rabbi Chaim’s principle. The question is whether that seems reasonable to you or not. Rabbi Chaim’s discussion adds nothing and subtracts nothing here.
As for the discussion itself, which is hard to conduct here because it is broad and ramified, see the notebooks and the first volume of "Matzui Rishon".
Rabbi Michi,
What questions are there if one assumes that the Torah is not from Heaven?