I’d be very glad if the Rabbi would devote a column or a series of columns to this topic.
In any case, we come out of the Torah reading on the Sabbath with a bit of confusion; in my opinion, there should be a clear and reasoned position formulated on the matter.

It seems to me that I already wrote above what I had to say. I don’t have any more intelligent arguments than that, and the topic also doesn’t seem especially important to me. As is well known, I don’t deal with the Bible, because in my view it’s not a useful area of study.

You barely deal with it because you know it’s Judaism’s greatest weak point. If, for example, you had to explain the connection between science and Genesis 1, it would become clear how much it goes against simple intuition, and all your lofty words and philosophizing about the intuitions behind the physico-theological argument and libertarianism would be exposed in all their nakedness. The Bible is your chestnut in the fire. You have nothing intelligent to say about it, because if you touch this hot potato, you’ll have nothing left.

You forgot to end with “How,” like every self-respecting Indian speech.

Take on a challenge and write something intelligent, for example about the connection between geology and Genesis 1. My bet is that the result will be a catastrophe of bizarre arguments—and it’s not as though your other posts don’t reveal an amusing combination of ignorance of basic philosophy and endless arrogance. As usual with these things, either you’ll have to distort science, or you’ll have to distort the verses. Either way, the result will go against all intuition.

How! Cowabunga!

Well then, there’s no need for me to write anything. You already wrote it all yourself here.
A bit odd that you bother reading all my ignorant and arrogant stuff, but to each his own.

Dan Kimon—
(and no, that’s not even the peak lol… there’s nothing better than a combination of intelligent texts and humor from one person)
As for the matter itself—I actually thought about this too and even mentioned it here on the site a few times, but in my opinion it’s just a matter of approach… why should he even try to solve the story of Genesis together with evolution?
The moment you say it’s a metaphor and an allegory, then the story is over, no? (Although that still doesn’t solve our particular issue, because you could reconcile other religions that way too, but it’s still better than thinking that this is literally how the world was created, because reconciling that is much harder…)

A.,
"The moment you say it’s a metaphor and an allegory, then the story is over, no?"

Maybe postmodernists buy the idea that words mean whatever we want them to mean, and that you can interpret everything however you feel like. I think words have meaning, and that you can’t interpret no as yes and yes as no just because you feel like it. I have a feeling I’m not alone.
Therefore, anyone who claims that Genesis 1 is an allegory and a metaphor has to show that he can actually provide and justify such an interpretation, not just wave his hands theatrically and claim he has one.

I was young and now am old, and I’ve read more than one person who claimed to offer a metaphorical/allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1. Biden was more coherent in his debate than those interpretations. They are a pile of nonsense that barely deserves to be called interpretation, and in any case they fail basic criteria of sane interpretation, all the more so valid interpretation.

If you ever look into such interpretations, I’d suggest two simple tests you should apply to what you read.

First: what do such “interpreters” do with words that appear more than once in Genesis 1, for example “earth”? Usually they interpret each occurrence of the word differently, without explaining how the interpretation of one occurrence fits with the interpretation of the other occurrence, and how the meaning given to each specific occurrence fits the context in which the word appears.

Second: how strong is the connection between the meaning assigned to the word and its plain sense? The metaphorical interpretations of Genesis 1 rely on pretty far-fetched association games. I remember, for example, that in our yeshiva in second year they brought in some self-appointed genius who declared that “earth” in Genesis 1 (at least one of its occurrences) is the human soul, because the earth is something stable and the soul is also stable. What’s the connection? The beer flew off the shelf. Maybe the person who came up with that interpretation received it by divine revelation from heaven, the way Ezekiel received from God the interpretation of his esoteric prophecies. But one thing is certain: this is not a justified and reasoned interpretation, but weak association games of the sort we used to amuse ourselves with as children, managing by association to connect two unrelated words. Here’s such an association chain: toad, green slime, grass, vegetarianism, transgender people, progressives… and behold, by association we have learned that the Society for the Protection of Nature, which protects toads, are progressives! How! Checkmate to the Hebrew language.

In general, in a real allegory the connection to what it stands for is much clearer, sharper, and more immediate. There is a heaven-crying gap between the nonsense masquerading as metaphorical interpretations of Genesis 1 and a real allegory. You wouldn’t need Nathan to tell David what the allegory of the poor man’s ewe lamb referred to, because just beforehand you had read what David did to Uriah, and the connection between the allegory and what it represented was obvious. And that’s still one of the allegories where the connection is not among the strongest. Someone familiar with Stalin’s history doesn’t need to be told the connection between him and Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm; that’s an allegory where the connection to what it represents is very strong and very clear. And examples could be multiplied.
Since there is no sage like one with experience, I can only recommend that you read allegories and their meanings from the world of literature before you approach the task of reading metaphorical interpretations of Genesis 1. Nothing makes them look more ridiculous than exposure to real allegories.

Okay, I get the mindset… (important for me to note that I’m not an expert on these topics, so don’t expect some counterargument or some novel point from me)
So I’m curious how you see it. That the Torah isn’t true? That evolution isn’t true?
Where are you on this very broad spectrum of the whole story?

A., I apologize for using the masculine form in the previous message.

As for the existence of God: I’m a light deist. Sometimes I lean atheist, depending on my mood. Specifically regarding the Jewish God, I think he doesn’t exist, and certainly the acts described in Genesis 1 as things he did never happened.

As for evolution: I think it’s true.

As for the truth of the Torah: in such a long text, it’s unlikely that every comma in it is wrong. It seems plausible to me that some memory of the distant past was preserved there. Still, there are things there that are completely absurd. Among them are the creation story in particular, and the description of humanity’s cradle in the early chapters of Genesis in general. Looking at the text as a whole, it seems to me exactly like what human beings with our imperfect knowledge and our desire to build a worldview uniting the natural and spiritual worlds familiar to us would write. I appreciate the attempt, and I think those behind it did their best. Still, it’s clear to me that their general direction was mistaken, and that we’ve learned a lot since then that enables us to see that.

Who exactly are you angry at here, Dan Kimon? At Rabbi Michi for not bothering to write articles about science and Genesis? At whoever wrote the Hebrew Bible? At people who offer interpretations that seem irrational to you?

If you don’t believe in the “Jewish God” or in God בכלל, then just be a gentile and that’s that, like most of humanity. No one is forcing you to remain Jewish. What’s your business on this site?

Moshe,
I understand that my sharpness didn’t sit well with you, but the feeling isn’t mutual. I feel completely comfortable on this site. Has philosophy become a commodity for religious people only, or Jews only? I assume that even gentile Indians who like Shredder and support Kerng, like me, are allowed to toss it around. And since that’s so, I read a site meant to lay out its author’s philosophical worldview, and I’m very comfortable doing so despite the disagreements.

That explains why I’m here, and it’s not hard to decipher why I’m writing in this thread. I offered an explanation for why our host seldom deals with issues connected to the Bible, and particularly Genesis 1, after he declined a request to address those topics. In addition, I proposed a challenge that would easily allow him, if he can, to refute my explanation. Haven’t you ever heard of someone on this site contributing, from his own point of view, to a conversation between others without being invited? Or is that forbidden to Indians like me? 😉

Let’s part as friends, and carry a blessing.

Dan Kimon
I also agree with you that Genesis is the weak point, a pile of children’s tales.
But—you wrote that Rabbi Michael Abraham’s texts are “an amusing combination of ignorance of basic philosophy and endless arrogance.” Do you really believe that?!

Yes.

Of course anyone who wants may delve into whatever philosophy he wants; I’m simply wondering who you’re angry at and why. According to your deist or atheist approach (depending on your mood…), truth and falsehood have no meaning at all, and there is no difference between someone who believes in Genesis and someone who believes in geology. What difference does it make how the world was created and how long ago? Why does it bother you that people offer one interpretation or another of texts that in any case are irrelevant? And what, in your opinion, is the problem with endless arrogance?

And in general, if Rabbi Michi is so ignorant in basic philosophy, why read ignorant things instead of reading enlightening things by great philosophers such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (who, incidentally, would also support your mockery of the children’s tales of Genesis)?

My question is more psychological than philosophical.

Your question is really psychological… it addresses the person rather than the issue…
“What difference does it make how the world was created and how long ago? Why does it bother you that people offer one interpretation or another of texts that in any case are irrelevant?”
Are you serious?
What do you mean, what difference does it make? If a person doesn’t believe in those texts, that doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in understanding why other people are interested in them.
Everyone has the right to ask whatever they want and argue whatever they want. I also don’t think the Rabbi’s texts are stupid; he thinks that, fine, but in any case that doesn’t move the discussion forward. What’s interesting is what he argues about the Rabbi not relating enough to the biblical text, and that actually is true. Whether it bothers someone or not—what’s that got to do with anything? For me it’s just an empty discussion if no one here has anything substantive to add regarding the subject under discussion, so there’s no need to try to bring someone down on a personal level. Why is that useful?

Dan,
There’s no doubt that allegorical interpretation of the “earth = soul” type is odd, and you can’t relate to it as a way of understanding the basic meaning. But I don’t see Genesis as any weak point, or a hot or cold potato, because the entire contradiction between Scripture and geological science is based on the assumption that the flow of time is absolute and uniform, always and forever. After we were privileged to receive the light of special relativity—that time is a relative concept—we have no idea either how time flowed in the way described in Genesis* or how time flowed in geological dating, and therefore the ground falls out from under the entire contradiction.

This problem also underlies most of the modern difficulties with the Hebrew Bible. They are generally based on the assumption of uniformitarianism, which assumes that the reality familiar to us has existed as it is forever. But there is no proof for this assumption, and just as there were major changes in nature resulting from the mechanism of evolution, so too it stands to reason that there were many other changes resulting from other laws of nature that science has not yet discovered, or more than that—changes that took place in the laws of nature themselves.

*This also appears from the problem of the meaning of evening and morning before the luminaries were set in place.

A. — let me remind you that the one who focused his writing on bringing someone down personally was Dan Kimon, who wrote no substantive argument beyond slandering the site owner, and I saw in his words not even the slightest attempt “to understand” why other people are interested in the texts in question, but only an attempt to show them contempt. If his intention had been to clarify why the Rabbi doesn’t relate to the Bible, he could have asked that in a substantive way, like most questioners on the site. Since it appears plainly that he came to pour out his bitterness about something or someone, I asked him accordingly who and what it is that makes him so angry.

Dan Kimon
If you think Michael doesn’t know basic philosophy, one can only conclude that you’re infinitely arrogant 😉

Moshe,
I don’t think you asked a psychological or philosophical question. You don’t have to be a genius of the generation to recognize the range of reasons why people talk to one another, even if they hold each other in contempt. There’s no great mystery here beyond our understanding.

It seems more likely to me that you wanted to make public all kinds of prejudices you have about deists and theists, once one happened to come your way. That’s perfectly fine, and I’ll respond to that briefly. According to you, we are the lackeys of great atheists, like slaves before their master, and afflicted with radical skepticism. My response: clearly, you don’t know me and are attributing to me views I do not hold, because you have prejudices about a group I belong to.

Forget the nonsense. It was already clear to me from your previous message that we weren’t going anywhere. Fine, it happens. Let’s part today as friends. In the future, if I comment here again on a subject that interests you, you can interact with me and maybe we’ll reach a different result.

I should also address your latest response to A. Indeed, I did not provide a comprehensive justification for my claim about our host’s motive for not engaging with the Bible. In my first two messages, I gave one reason for my opinion. I proposed an empirical test: a challenge to our host to show I was wrong by writing something intelligent on the topic that won’t be riddled like Swiss cheese. Later, in my response to A., perhaps I gave a few more lines of thought that shed light on my position. You and I agree that one could certainly provide more comprehensive justifications than that.

That’s part of the rules of the format. This is an internet discussion on a platform I don’t own. Obviously I’m not going to open the discussion with an illuminating 5,000-word essay on the subject. When discussions like this work well, an ongoing conversation develops, and in the end there’s interesting and perhaps persuasive material on the table for one side or the other. What’s certain is that I put more than enough on the table to start talking about, questioning, discussing, and rolling forward into a fuller conversation. I have no problem entering into dialogue on the subject, as I did with A., and as I intend to do soon (probably tomorrow at noon) with Yossi; both of them did exactly what is expected of anyone in an internet conversation: they raised a point of their own and kept the conversation moving forward.

And what did our host do? What he often does when someone raises a topic he’s not into: he blocked any possibility of discussion with him. Threw out something about Indians and moved on. It’s his right to manage his time however he wants, and so I stopped responding to him once it was clear he wasn’t interested. I’ll say more than that: I was flattered. Usually, when he blocks a discussion in its infancy, he uses one of several formulas: “the chooser shall choose,” “I’ve said all I have to say on this topic” (or words in that spirit), or “I wrote about this in book X / column Y,” almost never bothering to refer to the exact paragraph where the matter is discussed. It seems to me I got a privilege: a custom-tailored discussion block. And about this our sages taught: How! Cowabunga!

It sounds to me like Dan is saying sensible things. In my humble opinion, the Bible is a serious problem for anyone who believes the Torah is from Heaven, and the apologetics sound almost as strange as the biblical stories themselves. Even explanations in the style of Nachmanides about the secret of the verses of Genesis don’t sound especially strong to me. On the other hand, the biblical stories are a small problem compared to the halakhic expositions that the Sages derive from the Bible. (As a jurist, this resembles no legal method known to me.)
Even if the Torah turns out to be true, I don’t know why the Holy One, blessed be He, would come with complaints against the heretics, when all we had was a book of folk stories whose plain meaning contradicts science and common sense.
Even so, and unlike Dan, I remained faithful to the commandments because of intuition, inertia, and various other foreign words.

One has to separate between different planes of discussion. Any substantive criticism is sensible. And certainly questions about the reliability of the Bible or the creation story have their place, and for some of them perhaps there are no sufficiently good explanations.
But as I wrote here, I don’t deal with this, partly because I have no trust in disciplines like archaeology and biblical studies, and as a result I also don’t have enough knowledge in them. Therefore I’m not sufficiently familiar with the findings and can’t assess how reliable they are and how much weight they deserve in the discussion (quite a few “findings” are worth nothing). Such a discussion also depends on the assumptions and starting points of the discussion. Anyone who thinks there is an objective and clean discussion in these areas is naïve or pretending. Both the critics and the defenders make assumptions and have an agenda. That is precisely why these discussions are neither interesting nor useful in my view.
Of course there are others who deal with this and specialize in it, and one can turn to them. For some reason, Kimon wants specifically to get me to deal with these issues, even though I wrote that in my opinion they are neither interesting nor important. That is of course his right, but that is a different discussion from the discussion of the questions themselves. In that respect he is not saying sensible things (and that certainly does not mean that in the rest he is). If there is a real desire to clarify these issues, one should turn to those who deal with them, like Maor Ovadia for example, who has written here more than once and also writes on the site “To Know and Believe.” Questions like these can be raised there. People like Maor also have broad knowledge of the findings and the facts, and not a few critics would be surprised to discover there other findings or challenges to the existing findings. Even before we get to the discussion of the criticism and its implications, it is important to check whether the criticism itself holds water.
And finally, Kimon’s boastful declarations that already know what I would write and what value what I would write would have, and the wonderful confidence that no one knows how to answer these marvelous “killer questions,” are empty swagger and nothing more. They testify mainly about the declarer, may he live well and long. About this our rabbis already said: one who disqualifies does so with his own blemish.
That’s it. I wrote these words for the sake of those to whom it is worthwhile to write. There are some for whom writing is a violation of “do not destroy” applied to the keyboard, and therefore I avoided it until now.

Shlomi,
I agree with every word. The problem you raised—that the Bible is the smaller problem and the halakhic expositions that the Sages derive are the bigger problem—in my opinion, if this were just a text that people merely thought was true without any practical effect on reality, we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing it… that’s the whole story in the end: an ambiguous and unclear text that sometimes contradicts itself, and from it they derive Jewish law for real life. And after all that, you also said you didn’t leave, which is interesting too, but in my opinion you’re not the only one. For me, what bothers me is that religious people preach to others that they’re not okay with such intensity, and quote verses, and also “know” whether God will punish them and how He will punish them. I can’t grasp that. Whoever wants to be religious can be religious; he can also try to explain why he thinks that way—everything’s fine—but that’s where it should end. All the preaching and hatred and rift that these very shaky verses cause do not justify it. And if someone like Dan argues all kinds of things like this that seem pretty reasonable to me overall, then either be quiet because there’s nothing to say, or try to answer him like Yossi tried with the assumptions of science that time is fixed and so on. But to try to paint him as bitter, as someone angry at others? Sorry, but maybe it really is a bit infuriating when issues like these are ignored, and on top of that the people who ask about them are silenced…

Dan,
I have no prejudices against atheists, for the simple reason that my views about them derive דווקא from things they write, such as your words, so they are not “pre-judgments” but “post-judgments.” I find systematically on the internet that haters of religion outdo the religious from the right in the hatred and contempt reflected in their messages (though of course one can find this on the other side too). It is quite a puzzling phenomenon, because an atheist supposedly shouldn’t care what others believe, since in his view truth has no meaning, whereas a religious person should care—and that was my question to you, which you elegantly evaded.
Perhaps the reason for the difference is that the atheist has nothing positive to offer, and his whole faith is by way of negation; or perhaps it is because he has an internal struggle with his Jewish identity that gives him no rest. Probably both are true.

A.,
The fact that people preach to others that they are not okay, and think they know what will happen in the future, is a common phenomenon all over the world, and is not limited to religious people. According to this study https://www.maariv.co.il/news/israel/Article-853709
the hatred of secular people toward Haredim because they are “not okay” is twenty times greater than in the opposite direction, so apparently there is no need for verses or religion in order to accuse others of various things. See also in Yuval Noah Harari’s book amazing prophetic determinations about the future, some of which (such as “the age of wars is over”) are refuted before our eyes, so apparently there is no need for religion in order to prophesy…

I certainly agree with you that under no circumstances should questions be silenced, whether they are good or not. Someone who cares about truth answers questions and does not silence them. But it is impossible to answer “questions” whose purpose is not to ask but to provoke and mock, as is clear from Dan’s messages. He is not seeking any answer, only to sling mud at both the writer and the Torah together. About such a case it was said: “You too should blunt his teeth,” because where there is no question, there is no answer.

Shlomi — you are conflating two different matters: the Bible and the rabbinic expositions of the Sages.
I do not understand why the Bible itself constitutes any problem. All the problems stem from a modern assumption that the world has always been run according to the laws and form familiar to us. As I recall, most of the world throughout history did not think that way, and modern science has discovered nothing that proves it. This is no more than a philosophical assumption that dismisses outright all the folk traditions of the various peoples (as is well known, this is not unique to the Jewish people), without any scientific basis. I see no necessity for this philosophical assumption, and therefore I treat with great skepticism all the claims of science about the distant past or future. The scientific method works only on the present—that is, on the reality familiar to us—and no more.
According to this claim there is no difficulty at all, and no need to invent this or that apologetic explanation.

As for the rabbinic expositions of the Sages, I agree with you that their logic is not clear, but from the entire Talmud it is abundantly clear that this is a systematic method and not just random inventions according to the latest curiosity, and the method was generally accepted by all the sages. So although I do not understand the method, I trust that it was understandable to them, and since every legal system relies on the reliability of the legislators, our case is no different.

P.S. There is a difference between being religious because of intuition and because of inertia. Every belief relies on an intuition that things are indeed true, so you are certainly faithful to the commandments despite your questions. But if it is because of inertia, it is hard for me to see how that can be called faithfulness to the commandments. It sounds to me more like faithfulness to habit or society.