Q&A: Synthetic Belief and Prophecy
Synthetic Belief and Prophecy
Question
Hello Rabbi,
You presented 3 models of maturation in faith: a child (who believes his parents about everything), an adolescent (who demands absolute certainty in order to accept something as true), and the synthetic believer (who is the solution to both the skeptic and the fundamentalist).
Where does the experience of revelation at Mount Sinai (as a model of prophecy and unmediated connection) find expression in the model the Rabbi presents? It seems to be a model that rejects experience as a religious emotion, and accepts only things that pass through the filters of common sense?
I can think of one of three possible answers:
1. Prophecy is an experience that “speaks” with common sense, that is, an intellectual one (although it is a bit hard to accept this answer)
2. Experience can and should be factored into the common-sense calculation.
3. This model is relevant only in a time of the absence of the Divine Presence and revelatory experience.
Thank you very much!
Answer
This is no different from a person revealing some piece of information to you. What category would you assign that to? So in revelation, the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals the information to you. I would assign that to cognition, not thinking, since the information comes to you from outside. But this does not seem to me to be a very interesting question.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand the question. I can get excited when I study quantum theory, so is the conclusion that quantum theory is emotion? An encounter with the Holy One, blessed be He, arouses emotions. That sounds reasonable.
I assumed something that I thought you would agree with—that the Torah is sparing with words (or at least precise in its wording—that when it is not sparing, it is coming to teach us something [there are questions about this assumption, like “and Lotan’s sister was Timna,” and perhaps I’ll elaborate]).
On the basis of that assumption, I asked why there are descriptions of emotion at the event at Mount Sinai, or more generally why we need descriptions such as “And the sound of the shofar grew louder and louder…” and “And there were thunderclaps and lightning, and a heavy cloud upon the mountain, and the sound of the shofar was very strong; and all the people who were in the camp trembled,” and others, at the giving of the Torah.
If the event at Mount Sinai is purely intellectual, and speaks to common sense / intuition, why do we need all this staging?
By the way, I didn’t say that faith is emotion, and indeed emotion does not define quantum theory. I suggested that faith is based also(!) on religious experience, and very much not only on it. Otherwise every random emotional person can say my feeling = my faith = the truth, and we’re back to postmodernism and all kinds of crazy things like that.
In other words, I am claiming that religious emotion has significance at the very least—apparently that significance would be defined in the semantic field of “emotion,” “closeness,” “attachment,” and so on. Perhaps, maybe.
Have a peaceful and blessed Sabbath!
Generally speaking, I do not deal with the question of what the Torah is trying to teach us. I do not have answers about very many verses, and the event at Mount Sinai is really a negligible part of all those verses. Beyond that, here it may be coming to teach us that an encounter with the Holy One, blessed be He, is a powerful experience. What is the problem with that? Are you assuming that it is coming to teach us that emotion is important? That sounds bizarre to me. Where does it say here that this is important? It says that this is what happened.
If I weren’t afraid, I’d suggest that there is something in religious experience, and that faith stands on two legs. But I’m a little afraid, so let’s say I didn’t suggest it.
In any case, if there is no difference at all between information that comes from the Holy One, blessed be He, and from a person, why did the Torah bother to write descriptions of feelings of anxiety and awe at Mount Sinai? Or more generally, why are there references to emotion in the Torah at all?