Q&A: Your Personal Faith
Your Personal Faith
Question
Hello and blessings,
This is a somewhat personal question, and of course you can choose not to answer:
Do you believe less now than you did 20 years ago—both in the existence of the Creator, but especially in the truth of the Torah?
I remember the Rabbi Michi I knew, and I read older writings ("Two Wagons" and things from that period), and I see a big change in the present, and it is hard for me to understand that change without some weakening of faith.
That is, assigning less probability (a smaller "chance") and therefore increasing the degrees of freedom (the "risk").
Could you elaborate on that? Because it isn’t clear to me how you turned from a synthetic conservative into someone whom, in the past, you would have labeled liberal-analytic.
I’m not talking about concrete issues (because for each one individually I believe you would have a different answer), but about changes that correlate with analyticity:
Vegetarianism
Lack of belief in providence
From sending children to Haredi education to a very strong aversion to anything Haredi
Possible denial of the World to Come
Hints at far-reaching leniencies (male homosexual relations, etc.)
I can understand a specific explanation for each one, but what is the explanation for all these changes together?
What is the essential change that drives all of them?
Thank you very much.
From someone who used to listen to your teaching in the past and reads your old writings in the present
Answer
I don’t know whether there is any point in answering, since you don’t read my current writings. And let it be known that this very response is being written right now by a first-rate heretic.
I have not become analytic in any way, and in that sense I am no different at all from what I was then. Apparently you didn’t understand what you were reading even back then (synthetic thinking does not reject liberal values. I explicitly wrote that pluralism, tolerance, and liberalism rest on a synthetic foundation; in fact, the latter two are possible only on a synthetic foundation). Obviously there are differences in the details, of course, and it is hard for me to measure the degree of my faith then and now. But it doesn’t seem to me that this is connected to the issue.
At this point I think maybe it’s better that you not read my current writings (are you still reading my post here?), because you might interpret this too incorrectly.
But here you go, I answered anyway.
Discussion on Answer
Rest assured. I wasn’t offended at all. What I wrote—that apparently you didn’t understand—was not written out of hurt. I truly think you didn’t understand. The cynical phrasing is just my way of reacting to statements of this sort, which strike me as funny. There was no offense at all. I do have to say that you didn’t lose a rabbi. You never had one (at least not me).
I didn’t mean to provoke you, if that’s how it sounded, and I’m sorry for the wording, which apparently was not careful enough with your honor.
Forgive me.
What I meant to say was that I do not identify at all with your newer lines of reasoning, and therefore I don’t bother reading the details (the trilogy), but with the older ones (the quartet) I definitely do identify, and so I put in the effort and study them deeply, and I have a great deal of gratitude for them. They contributed to me and influenced me personally in a significant way (and that is why, psychologically, it is hard for me to swallow the change you have undergone).
I didn’t say that the changes you have undergone flatly contradict synthetic thinking (though my wording was not precise, that is true), but rather that you have "moved" along the axis in the analytic direction.
If synthetic means conservative-religious-right-wing, and analytic means the opposite, then you are more analytic than before—at least that is how it appears to my crystal-clear eyes.
But regardless of whether this is analytic/synthetic or not, my question was whether there is some principled position that underlies all the changes I listed in the question, or whether each one stands on its own.
Again, I ask your forgiveness for the wording. Personally, I am pained by your "heresy," because I have lost a rabbi.
I’m not angry or criticizing, only sad about it.
But what I think doesn’t matter.
I wrote this only to clarify that my words were not written in order to hurt, and that I have a great deal of gratitude for the past.