Q&A: How to Answer My Students If There Is No Way to Say Anything Other Than What the Sources Say
How to Answer My Students If There Is No Way to Say Anything Other Than What the Sources Say
Question
Hello and blessings, Rabbi,
I am a rabbi-teacher in one of the advanced yeshivot in the Torah-oriented community.
For the past 10 years I have been following your content with great enjoyment. With God's help, may you continue your good work.
I will present my problem to you: many of my students come to me asking that I answer their questions about faith, and they are on a very high philosophical level. I cannot give them answers other than the ones you give. The problem is that these answers do not fit with the views accepted today in the religious community, and if I voice them they will fire me from the yeshiva. I also live with my wife in the same community where the yeshiva is located, and the entire environment I live in is very Torah-oriented and looks down on solutions of your kind.
So what should I do?
Leave my students with doubts, or take the risk?
Answer
First of all, it is very interesting that students in an advanced yeshiva are dealing with questions like these. That is actually encouraging. In many cases, closed-mindedness is accepted calmly.
As for the matter itself, in most cases it is possible to present things in a more moderate way, not as sharply as I do. You can refer them to other rabbis-teachers, and only if that does not satisfy them suggest a different direction. You can refer them to me, to my books or website, or to other people who can give them different answers.
And of course there are two more radical options: 1. You can raise the questions yourself with the staff you work with and see whether they have reasonable responses, and only then ask what they think of your response. 2. You can also come to understand that you do not belong there and look for a different direction, but that is of course difficult and carries no simple price.
Discussion on Answer
With God's help, 12 Kislev 5783
To our esteemed one — greetings,
Since you receive a salary from the yeshiva in order to teach the Torah accepted in rabbinic Judaism, whose worldview is based on the "sources"—the Bible and the words of the Sages, the medieval authorities, and the later authorities—then if you exploit your position to present a Torah that is not subject to the "sources," you are doing your work deceitfully. It would be worthwhile for you to establish a network of institutions that would declare that they are not subject to the sources (except, of course, the "trilogy" 🙂 ) and start raising money and recruiting students…
Best regards, Shatznimos the Halvingardi
When there are difficulties you do not know how to deal with, it is permissible to say, "I do not know." You can refer yourself and your students to sites such as "Ratio" of "Arachim" or "Knowing How to Believe" of the "Yedaya Institute," or to books such as "Our Generation Facing the Eternal Questions" by Dr. Aharon Bart and the like.
Best regards, Menashe Barkai Buch-Trager
To Shatznimos.
It may be that the students' right to truth and to know
comes before these calculations.
At the end of the day, reason is the mediator between man and God, as Ibn Ezra taught us,
and to kill that is to kill the basis of serving God.
Without it, one can be Bibists instead of servants of God.
Nachmanides too, on "And you shall do what is right and good," says that it is impossible to command everything, because there are many variables in reality.
And therefore the basis is:
Apply your mind…
That is:
Apply your mind = servant of God.
Remove your mind = not a servant of God.
(rather a servant of idols / an ordinary Bibist)
To the owner of the original solution.
I do not know all the sites you referred to.
Lecturers who worked in the organization called "Arachim" I have heard. And also from my own impression, and so too from a large group of Haredim with whom we discussed the issue, the understanding is that this is not a serious place worthy of attention. Certainly not somewhere to refer anyone who has a mind, or even just the simple and basic ability to look for sources and check what is being sold to him there.
Someone who refers there will become an object of ridicule, contempt, and mockery in the eyes of the questioner—and justifiably, in my humble opinion.
As for the other sites you mentioned—whether they are committed to the truth, and whether they do not smear things with nonsense and rubbish—I do not know.
Dr. Aharon Bart was the CEO of Bank Leumi in the 1950s. Because of illness he went on an extended leave during which he studied the subject, and following his concentrated study he wrote his book "Our Generation Facing the Eternal Questions."
As an educator, you are presumably entitled to a "sabbatical year," during which you can clarify your questions "from books and from scholars"—questions that are not new and have been discussed extensively in the literature of commentary and Jewish thought, old and new.
Best regards, Mabat
By the way, the term "Torah-oriented" here means closed and conservative. I do not like this negative use of such a positive term.