Q&A: A State of Jewish Law and More Questions
A State of Jewish Law and More Questions
Question
Hello to the righteous one of the generation, may he live long.
Would it be possible, in your opinion, to establish an enlightened state of Jewish law that could integrate with modern life? And if so, I’d be glad if you could lay out some basis for how that would be done.
2) Why does the Rabbi think there is no providence, and how can such a thing even be disproved? After all, we can never know whether God is watching us and directing our path or not.
3) Why does the Rabbi think there are no miracles today? Aren’t events like the Holocaust and the State of Israel miracles?
4) Regarding the Rabbi’s parable about philosophical maturation, in my humble opinion the Rabbi is mistaken in dismissing prophecy. Even if God decided to stop intervening in nature, He should still renew prophecy, because a father who stops intervening in the lives of his grown children would still want a relationship with them, and vice versa.
Does the Rabbi know the approach of Ramchal in Da’at Tevunot regarding the attribute of justice, meaning the laws of nature, versus the attribute of unity, which is the divinity that rules over and constitutes all of creation? The attribute of justice is dominant. Can this model create a bridge between the Sages’ approach that everything is in the hands of Heaven and the Rabbi’s approach that there is no providence?
And last but not least: does the Rabbi think the six days of creation can be interpreted literally, or does scientific research completely refute that? If I remember correctly, the Rabbi once said that he knows of no refutation of the world having been created according to the plain meaning of the Torah.
Answer
0. You could have added one more little section asking me to write a replacement for the Mishneh Torah here. Even the righteous one of the generation such as myself can’t do that in this format.
1. The space is too short. This requires an entire book. In principle, clearly yes. After all, if it’s impossible to run a state according to Jewish law, then Jewish law must be changed, and then it will again be possible. The question is what exactly “Jewish law” is (what we have today?), and whether there is an authorized institution that can deal with it and be accepted by the public. See my article on “Do not be intimidated”:
Discussion on Answer
I’m not insisting on black and white. I said that maybe He intervenes sometimes, but there are no indications of it. I do think that people usually pay lip service to this because they are not aware of the meaning of belief in divine involvement. There is an illusion as though there are interventions that fall within nature and are not miracles, but there is no such animal. Every intervention is a miracle, because the laws of nature were supposed to lead to state X, and the intervention causes Y. The accepted physical picture is deterministic on the macro level, and on the micro level too it is quantum-random, which is also a mechanism such that any intervention in it is a violation of the laws of nature.
Regarding 2, you yourself actually argue that electrons move in the brain without a physical force.
I was already asked about this on the site in the past, and I answered that human will is the only exception known to us from experience to the physical picture. Just as my experience shows me that only physical forces move electrons, it also shows me that my will can bring about things in the brain and through it in the world, meaning move electrons without a physical force. The same mouth that forbade, namely experience, is the mouth that permitted.
Of course God can do that too, but I have no indication that this actually happens, and therefore it does not seem likely to me that He intervenes, certainly not routinely. Intervention in rare cases I of course cannot categorically rule out.
The difference is clear. I only meant to sharpen the point against the sentence you wrote: “When you see something move, you will never conclude that no force acted on it.”
I also think this breaches the dam to some extent. You are of course entitled to conjecture A, but others are entitled to conjecture differently. And of course you also have the right not to believe them when they say they really think that, but that cheapens the discussion, and you yourself tend to get annoyed when people do that to you. When the position is airtight that every particle moves because of a physical force, then of course there is no reason to leave that framework. But once there is an exception, there is certainly room to think that maybe there are more, even if they are unknown to us.
Regarding 2: I don’t understand why the Rabbi insists on a black-and-white model (you have to check every experiment to see whether it was done on people who pray or not / versus: God does not intervene at all, and everyone believes this, only I admit it).
Nobody claims that every prayer is answered and all experiments are ruined. Even if we assume intervention on a high level, once you take a large sample the distribution will be normal thanks to the law of large numbers.
Most people, in my estimation, think God intervenes to some degree somewhere in the middle, and contrary to what you say, they really do believe that their prayers are sometimes answered. Of course, the law of small numbers sometimes helps them with that, but that doesn’t matter.