Q&A: Debate with Yaron Yadan
Debate with Yaron Yadan
Question
I saw the debate and, as usual, really enjoyed your answers; it seemed that Yaron didn’t know what to do מולך.
Yaron remarked — and in my opinion somewhat justifiably — that your view that there is no connection between morality and Jewish law is innovative and perhaps not entirely agreed upon.
This view of yours is indeed brilliant and perhaps solves many problems… I also find this view hard to digest. (Obviously my digestive problems shouldn’t interest you.) Still, I wanted to ask:
If in fact all of Jewish law has no connection whatsoever to morality, then all the moral commandments in the Torah — and there are many such ones: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Do not take revenge and do not bear a grudge,” returning a lost object, honoring the elderly, and many more — do they all just happen, by coincidence, to also have religious value in addition to their well-known moral value?
Is there really no connection at all between these commandments and morality? Isn’t it strange that two areas which, according to you, are completely unrelated, have so many points of overlap?
In addition, regarding the beautiful captive woman (your view, of course, rescues us from the difficulty in this passage), it seems to me that there is some naivete and turning a blind eye to reality in the attacks on the Torah over this passage. The known reality is that, in my opinion, in all wars in the world, including in modern times, women were raped in war.
What can be done? Unfortunately, that is human nature / a soldier’s nature. Of course one must fight the phenomenon, but that is the painful reality.
Faced with this painful reality, the Torah limits it, sets not-easy conditions in order to permit, only after the fact of the after-the-fact, this grave matter. Dear soldier, your impulse got the better of you? Very unfortunate. At least take responsibility for your terrible actions. This passage ends with “you shall not abuse her” — if only all armies and all soldiers in the world were like that.
Answer
It’s not a coincidence. The Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, so it’s no wonder that He tries to synchronize the directives of Jewish law with the directives of morality. But sometimes a conflict arises and it’s impossible to synchronize them. And still, these are two independent categories.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t mean that it’s completely irrelevant. Obviously you’re right. But that’s entirely hypothetical. Since the source is the main consideration, in order to undermine it you’d have to prove to me that this is clearly a foolish text, and not merely that you don’t understand it. That is not the case with the Torah. If you clearly saw me write something, but then discovered that it was written in Chinese or that it was a progressive text — would you conclude that I didn’t write it? I assume you’d consider other possibilities, for example that I know Chinese, or that I copied it, or that I changed my mind about progressives, and so on.
If I may ask about the beginning of the debate — you argued that the proof of the truth of the Torah is the source of the revelation and not its content, and my question is: in your opinion, does that have no effect at all on checking reliability? If someone told you that Albert Einstein wrote a text and there were lots of supporting indications for that, but on the other hand it contained a bunch of nonsense in physics — wouldn’t that indicate that he didn’t write it?