I’ve heard several of your lectures. You attack the Guide for the Perplexed and replace it with Kant—which is all the more so not Torah—and you criticize it with things like “there’s no point in studying the Guide for the Perplexed” and similar dismissiveness. As someone who knows both, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Maimonides in his thought is many times more comprehensive than Immanuel Kant. Does the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) teach Torah? No, that I agree with. But it does teach the correct semantic meaning of the word “blessing” and the like, which the Talmud takes out of context—like the verse from Zechariah in the aggadah where they say 1,000 gentiles will grab onto the corner of a tzitzit, while anyone who has read Zechariah chapter 9 knows there is no connection to what is written there. Or, for example, tractate Zevahim speaking about Og in the book of Numbers—anyone who read the weekly Torah portion can’t fall for these absurdities. And don’t say you aren’t bound by aggadic statements, since it was stated that this is what they received from their rabbis as tradition. I really examined this well, and this thing contradicts the Written Torah and its terminology. In an almost total number of places throughout the Talmud—such as the word “blessing,” mentioned in Deuteronomy regarding Mount Gerizim, in Isaiah and Ezekiel, in Genesis—in all those places the semantic meaning of the essence of the word “blessing” was taken out of context into some idea that somehow one can influence the rainy seasons by speech. And for anyone who studies Talmud professionally and understands the logic behind what is learned in the Talmud, 80% of it is “fences,” as I explained before. Everything has some rational explanation behind it, such as appearance to the eye in tractate Kilayim. The problem is that a Talmud that invents terms is obligated to the semantic meaning of what is written in the Written Torah, and 30% of the Talmud is Bible-based, just to remind you. If I still haven’t proved to you that what is written about these matters is nothing but empty words, then how can I show it? I don’t understand—there is no contradiction in a few people gathering in Sura and Pumbedita and just adding things as leaders, exactly like the Ari added to the prayer liturgy, or the Ben Ish Hai about reciting blessings over things in sequence based on what was created first, according to the Zohar.

It seems that the deletion of my pointed question was a mistake.

Mishal,
who told you that you aren’t stupid?
Without the slightest desire to offend, or to address the person instead of the argument: the wording, syntax, and grammar did not necessarily testify to exceptional intelligence behind them. Of course, that also does not necessarily indicate the opposite, but it can be a certain indication when I have no other information (there is a correlation between ability of expression and language and analytical ability).
The whole question rests on your testimony about yourself as a talented person who was impressed by the Talmud as containing no wisdom whatsoever. You’ll need to try harder if you want the question to call for an answer.

Sorry for the unpleasant words. Sabbath peace.

Daniel, not Mishal. Second, I responded and brought several sources (tractate Zevahim 113b, about Og in the generation of the Flood, all the Torah sources on the required semantic meaning of the word “blessing/blessed,” tractate Kilayim on appearance to the eye, and of course I have thousands more examples that are a total contradiction, A and not A, in the second response—there are many more). But there is evidence that the Rabbi is not proficient in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the Guide, and those are weak points—not anything about me being able to understand passages. My arguments are based on logical reasoning and not on “wild testimony.” I’m not a rabbi who finished the entire Talmud by heart in a comprehensive way and can argue such a thing, but I’m certainly not a layman in everything concerning the Talmud and Lurianic Kabbalah.

Besides that, I deny any claim that obligates me to study the Talmud and that this is the Oral Torah given at Sinai. That’s like trying to scare an atheist with hell—it doesn’t work, I don’t believe in it. What was given at Sinai was the reasons for the commandments, not the halakhic casuistry that became necessary because of fences. And this was said before by people far more educated than I am—Moses Mendelssohn and Maimonides. The Holy One, blessed be He, is not interested in this. He is interested in human beings treating each other properly, and He mentions this countless times in the Written Torah, in every book you read. And the interpretive preaching of the prophets really stands on the principle of the Kuzari and reason, unlike a large part of the Talmud.

First of all, sorry that I got your name wrong, and sorry that I didn’t see your second response, where you did in fact bring a few arguments that can be addressed. Unfortunately, it was pretty much a speech, and included many claims, some of them confused. More importantly, even if I address each one of them, there are another hundred like them waiting for anyone who wants them on Google, and I’m not going to trouble myself to answer them all here even if I were able to. So with your permission I’ll go back to the statement with which you opened: “There is very little wisdom in the Talmud and no logic at all.”
You said you’d be glad to hear that you’re mistaken.
I hope you’re not planning to bring another thousand examples of things that in your opinion are flawed in logic. There are entire websites devoted to this; it’s a waste of our time, and it won’t be new to anyone.
But you claim there is no wisdom and no logic at all (I don’t know whether you meant only the Talmud or also the Mishnah and the like; examples are plentiful, but this one is a favorite of mine):

Mishnah Ketubot 10:4
“If a man was married to three women and died, and this one’s marriage contract was for one maneh, this one’s for two hundred, and this one’s for three hundred, and there is only one maneh there, they divide equally.
If there were two hundred there, the one with the claim of one maneh takes fifty, and the ones with the claims of two hundred and three hundred take three gold dinars each.
If there were three hundred there, the one with the claim of one maneh takes fifty, the one with the claim of two hundred takes one maneh, and the one with the claim of three hundred takes six gold dinars.
And likewise, if three people deposited money into a purse, and it decreased or increased, that is how they divide it.”
(One maneh = 100 silver dinars. One gold dinar = 25 silver dinars.)

Does this division seem lacking in wisdom and logic to you? If so, is it because you didn’t understand it, or because it is stupid? (In order to determine that it’s stupid, you need to understand its mechanism.)
Do you think a Nobel Prize winner in economics would bother writing an article in game theory about this mechanism of division if it were stupid?
If from now on you decide that the Mishnah is fine and only the Talmud bothers you, that would be enough for me.
Good luck with everything.

יש ללחוץ כדי לגשת אל uman-ktubot.pdf

I don’t think you understood very well what I meant. On the matter of “wisdom,” the Sages really did think in a shallow way detached from the Written Torah. Ninety percent of the things they said there about science are wrong, and people with warped minds like Rabbi Belsky—ultra-Orthodox people with an interest—come up with books claiming that you can’t refute the Sages on scientific claims, even though almost all of them have been refuted, and it’s been proven that the Sages had no knowledge of science, not of the 248 limbs and not of anything else in space—it’s all inventions. As for Jewish law, if you look carefully at the written sources from which the halakhot are derived, whether by logic or by the rules of interpretation, you’ll see they are all errors. For example, Mishnah Peah 3:3 from the Sifrei, and look at Onkelos. The problem is that this is true of everything. People just sat in Pumbedita and started inventing thousands of expositions about how to screw over Nazirites in oaths and how wicked they are. Even if there is difficulty in the casuistry, the casuistry itself doesn’t exist! The Holy One, blessed be He, made laws so that you would do them—they are not in heaven! You want wisdom in casuistry? Go study geometry instead of learning hypothetical brain-confusions that are hard to read because of how obscurely they were written. Anyone who learned Isaiah and Zechariah—even if that is “wasting Torah study” by learning Torah—at least I know that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t care about sacrifices. He only cared that they be offered because the nations used to worship cattle, and therefore we had to sacrifice them—“a pleasing aroma to the Lord.” The casuistry was meant only for those who wasted 50 years studying Talmud and aren’t willing to throw it in the trash. This has been said by countless great sages in the Talmud: it’s a waste of time, not because there is no wisdom, but because it is simply a satanic lie. Laws were not given to us in order to engage in casuistry, but in order to do them exactly as you said. Besides that, who told him that the Holy One, blessed be He, said he has to study Talmud? It didn’t even exist until the first millennium of the Common Era, through the amoraim. Stop making me laugh. The great Jews did not study Talmud; they were always against it.

You’re giving speeches instead of asking. It isn’t practical to answer you; it would be better to write a book.
But broadly speaking, you’re attacking on the wrong site.
Everyone here will agree with the factual side of many of your claims. Your conclusions, though, are just shallow, inflammatory, and contemptuous.

(Just two points: almost all sane rabbis—throughout the generations—knew that the Sages spoke about the science of their own times and nothing more. You just enjoy being inflammatory as if anyone thinks otherwise.
Second point: you claim that the Sages thought in a shallow way, and that is simply not true, and it makes you look foolish. See my previous response.)

So if your claim is that aggadah is allegory and does not represent Scripture (like with Og in Zevahim 113b), and that the scientific aspect was simply according to their times, then you said the halakhic aspect is complex—but when they mention the reasons for the law, such as separating mixtures because of appearance to the eye, or making a fence to keep away foreign factors, how can you say it isn’t shallow, or tied to its time? After all, if the amoraim themselves had known agriculture, they would have been the chief heretics and would have studied botany or other things—advanced Jewish law.