Q&A: A Short Note on Your Response to Sheilat’s “Indeed, No Man Has Power over the Spirit”
A Short Note on Your Response to Sheilat’s “Indeed, No Man Has Power over the Spirit”
Question
Rabbi Professor,
I have just finished reading Sheilat’s woefully off-base and at times unhinged critique of your trilogy and your response to it. With that said, I would ask that your response be corrected or, at the very least, supplemented.
In short—I beseech you to please, please, please provide a source for every single claim you make—as is the practice of thinkers in these generations who deal with matters that stand at the height of the world. An example: I would love to see where Nachmanides said of the Ba’al HaMaor, “ancient words from the mouth of a new elder”—a phrase I know (with slight variations) only from Bereishit Rabbah, and I was incredibly surprised to see it, because I thought I knew most of the sharp formulations he hurled at him, and that is not one of the better-known ones. A cursory Google search shows that the only person to associate the two is you, in this article. Indeed, as you write toward the end of the column, in the context of defending citing your views from Wikipedia—your words and ideas should be judged on their own merits. But when bringing proof from a witty remark of the medieval authorities, I would expect it not to be a castle floating in the air, but rather anchored in a reliable source!
Go up and succeed.
Answer
Hello,
If you read the trilogy, then I assume I can answer in Hebrew.
0. I prefer responses through the responsa system on the site.
1. I am not a professor.
2. I do not see myself as obligated to cite sources, since my writing is not academic. If I rely on a text in order to build something on it, I will provide the source, but if I use it as an illustration, I do not think it is necessary to cite a source. This is all the more true in the age of databases.
By the way, thinkers—as distinct from academic researchers—also do not necessarily cite sources. Researchers are not thinkers.
3. I wrote that line from Nachmanides in Milhamot from memory and did not look up the source. When you pointed it out, I thought perhaps I had made a mistake and remembered it incorrectly. So now I looked, and immediately found in Milhamot, Bava Batra 14a: “Said the writer: see old words from the mouth of a new elder, for these two formulations were written by the Geonim of blessed memory…”
4. I strongly recommend not idolizing anyone, and certainly not an ordinary person like me. One can of course appreciate a person, but admiration is dangerous and in most cases unjustified.
All the best,