Question

In honor of Rabbi Michael Abraham, may he live long and well.
I am a Haredi yeshiva student. I read your articles and generally enjoy them very much. It’s only in everything that touches on the fundamentals of Jewish thought that I have not dealt with them so far, because your ideas on these subjects are, in my opinion, outside the bounds of the principles of faith.
 
(Of course you’ll ask: if it’s true, then it’s true! My answer is that in my opinion, with all due respect, your method of thought misses certain points, and this shows up in the above areas. You’ll ask: how can that be? With me it’s all logic! I’ll answer: of course, with me too. But when one thinks too analytically [not “analytically” in some special sense, just plain analytically], sometimes one arrives at some point and immediately issues a verdict on it, whereas with deeper analysis one can find that the truth is different, and can be given a fully analytical and logical definition, but not in a way that stands out immediately.
For example, you write that you do not understand the benefit of studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). I won’t get into the topic, but I’ll just say that in my opinion studying the Hebrew Bible has a very significant effect on the learner. Let us say that the explanation for this is psychological. (Briefly: it is not for nothing that the poetry of the Hebrew Bible is admired to this day by all poets. And not because its authors were great poets even relative to their contemporaries. It is because of the broad spirit of ancient man, and I won’t elaborate.) But clearly, someone who has not thought of this explanation will assume that the only possible reasons are: knowing the events or messages in the Hebrew Bible, knowing the commandments in the Torah, learning “ethics” from the prophets in a way no different from learning from ethics books, the commandment of Torah study, and so on (perhaps you brought other considerations there; it makes no difference). Therefore you came and said: history can be learned, and better learned, in other ways, and in general it is not all that important. The ideas of Judaism can be learned, and better learned, in other ways. Jewish law—same. Ethics are learned from books that specialize in that / books from our own times, Torah study is fulfilled more scrupulously (as is known from Yalkut Shimoni, Psalms 1: “And of them he says: ‘May the words of my mouth be acceptable,’” that they should be made and engraved for generations, and not be read as one reads secular books, but rather they should read them, meditate on them, and receive reward for them as for the laws of leprous marks and tents, as it is said: “May the words of my mouth be acceptable.”) (perhaps you brought other arguments, but I am only giving an analogy as above) So the conclusion is decisive—clearly there is no point.
But the real explanation, in my opinion, is not noticed if one approaches the subject in a “computerized” way. True, the fact that something can be formalized computationally is a measure of its truth, and indeed after thinking and finding the above explanation one could confirm it with complete logic as well [dry logic has no problem with psychology. If a certain thing brings about a desired result, then one does it, and why should I care if the process between the action and the result passes through emotions? But from the outset, that kind of thinking does not even raise the idea.]
And therefore I agree with those who complain against you: “You can’t approach everything with pure logic,” and although they are certainly very mistaken, because the truth must be true, they are right in the sense that in practice this method fails in many areas.)
Let me explain myself: I seem to recall reading by you (and even if I didn’t, this is probably your opinion) that you do not understand how it is possible to forbid engaging in subjects liable to lead to heresy. For after all, either way: if I become convinced, then that is the truth as far as I am concerned. And if not—what is the problem?
Rather, even when a person reads an article that undermines one of his opinions, and he is not rationally convinced, he will no longer experience his view as something clear the way he did before. Despite the intellectual answers he gives himself, he no longer fully feels that truth. And there is also the emotional side; someone told me that in the past he had read a satirical story by someone who had become formerly religious, in which the main character was the Chazon Ish. The Chazon Ish is portrayed there in a very ridiculous light. Although he knew the story had never happened, and although the author also did not mean by it to illustrate in caricature any real point connected to the Chazon Ish, but used him arbitrarily—he could no longer think about him without being reminded of the story. The reverence and admiration he had felt toward the Chazon Ish were damaged for several years. True, in this case the damage is not all that severe, but what would happen if a boy my age were to read, for example, an article in the style of “the Hebrew Bible at eye level” or biblical criticism? For even though it is clear to me that these things are not true, it could still be very damaging.
Therefore, any article that I fear may contain things that the problematic part of your approach caused you to say—I do not read. Maybe in the future.
 
A remark on the validity of a statistical proof
In the third column of the series of columns on belief in God that you wrote on Ynet, you bring Eliyahu Leibowitz’s argument that one should not assume that God exists because of some statistical pressure, since we are not familiar with the concept. Your answer is that an unfamiliar answer is legitimate when dealing with science, and that otherwise we would not have physics, etc.
But there is a mistake here. The very fact that there is order does not increase the probability of the possibility that there is an arranger, because order among details is only one possible state they could be in. Thus, when the wind knocks over a glass cup, the chance that the shards of the cup will form a Star of David is exactly equal to any particular disordered arrangement. Nevertheless, when we see shards of glass in the shape of a Star of David, we are sure that this is human handiwork, and that is because even before we saw the shape, two possibilities stood before us: a. a random fall arranged the shards; b. a person arranged them. (Let us assume that all three possibilities have probabilities more or less of the same order of magnitude, so that the decision can be made by the next stage.) When we see the order, we understand that if we assume the shards were scattered naturally, the chance they would arrange themselves this way is very low, whereas according to the arranger theory there is nothing so rare here—we understand that a person arranged them, because that possibility has a much higher probability.
And if order came into being, in a way that is very improbable, because of external reasons, and there was in the area a factor capable of arranging things—then it is more probable that the order happened by chance.
Accordingly, the orderly world will testify in the discussion about God’s existence only in the second discussion. In the first discussion they will discuss the basic probability that God exists. And that—everyone will say according to his intuition… no?