Even in a puzzle, each component has to hold water. You’re saying that there is a God and it’s plausible that He would reveal Himself, and then a tradition reaches you saying that He did reveal Himself. But that tradition itself has to be at least relatively reliable. Even if there is a God and it’s plausible that He would reveal Himself, that doesn’t mean I have to believe every report of a revelation.
Why doesn’t this scenario seem plausible to you?

The scenario you suggested is at most one hypothetical possibility among several others (one of which is that the tradition is reliable). There’s no reason to adopt דווקא that one. When I’m expecting a revelation, it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility that the tradition is reliable over the other possibilities. If you had a more credible report of some other tradition—that would be another matter and definitely worth examining.

So in your view it’s more likely that God revealed Himself than that He didn’t, and therefore even if all the evidence were really problematic, you would still choose the most credible one among them and go with it. Did I understand correctly?

That’s too extreme a formulation. Among roughly comparable options, I’d choose that one. It’s hard to draw a sharp line.

But if so, why isn’t that a gamble? (You wrote that faith based on a gamble isn’t enough.)
For example—say there’s a 70% chance that God revealed Himself, and say there are 2 traditions—given that God revealed Himself, there’s a 70% chance that tradition A is the correct one, and a 30% chance that tradition B is the correct one. You would adopt tradition A, even though there’s only a 49% chance that it’s correct, meaning it’s more likely wrong.
(Of course we’re talking about plausibility and not probability, but as far as I understand, that consideration applies there too.)

Read column 661 on faith and gambling again.

I read it and didn’t understand where the mistake is.

That there is no boundary between faith and a gamble. That’s a matter of a person’s decision.

So even if there’s no religious problem here—from your perspective, does it make sense to believe something that by your own view is probably false?

I don’t understand what you want from me. I think we’ve exhausted this.

The basic Jewish tradition is transmitted very accurately. You can see that communities scattered around the world and reunited after two thousand years preserved the same commandments in all their thousands of details, and the same sacred texts with exactly the same words, without significant changes. That means the process of transmitting Jewish tradition is generally reliable, even if here and there minor corruptions crept in. Accordingly, it seems to me that the claim that everything was invented is implausible and resembles various conspiracy theories.

Gideon, you’re talking about how the story was transmitted from the moment it became fixed. The discussion is about the question of how it became fixed. Michi and company argue that it became fixed because it happened, and its memory was transmitted through the generations. The questioner offered an alternative explanation.

I’ll add that you’re overstating things. The Jewish communities that were scattered around the world were in contact with one another throughout those thousands of years, so it’s much less surprising that their sacred texts are almost identical. A counterexample is Beta Israel, who were much more isolated. They have different sacred texts. They’re even in a completely different language, Ge’ez, and include apocryphal books.

A similar phenomenon exists in other religions as well, like Christianity and Islam (where there are also sub-streams that hate each other and fought each other for years, so of course each of them has to be viewed as a separate religion). There too, there is a core of sacred texts that were copied from generation to generation reliably from the moment they were regarded as holy by the believers of that same sub-stream. That doesn’t mean I’m about to believe in Muhammad or the stories about Jesus.

Uriel,
Indeed, your distinction is correct, but the principle remains. If information was passed down reliably from generation to generation, then it should be accepted as reliable, and the similarity of the tradition across communities (even if there was some contact between them) refutes the broken-telephone idea. For this reason, it is reasonable to assume that the events told about Jesus and Muhammad were indeed accepted as reliable by people of their own time or shortly thereafter, and the doubts of “scholarship” are nothing but conspiracy theories.

The question of reliability ought to focus not on the process of transmitting the story but on its earliest tellers: can their reports be trusted? The place to doubt the stories of Jesus and Muhammad is whether to accept the words of the apostles and the inspired authors as reliable. That doubt is relevant also with regard to many stories in Jewish tradition connected to individuals, but not with regard to nationwide events.

Gideon, that doesn’t refute the broken-telephone idea; it sharpens the discussion about what the questioner raised: when did the broken telephone happen? We both agree that there was a point in time at which the story became fixed, and after that it was passed down from generation to generation (for our purposes, what especially matters is the Torah, though also the Hebrew Bible).

The question is what happened before the story became fixed. Is the story that became fixed a fairly accurate memory of the real events that occurred, as Michi argues? Or is it the result of broken telephone, at best “based on a true story,” which is the possibility the questioner raised?

Also, it’s important not to get stuck on the terminology. It’s not necessarily the “earliest tellers,” as you put it, that matter to us. It’s quite possible that the story familiar to us developed over 10 generations, so maybe we’re talking about hundreds of years in which the story evolved. Likewise, are they “reporting” to us, as you put it, what they saw, or are they reporting what they believe happened? As before, that is exactly the question under discussion.

Finally, I’ve heard the distinction between isolated events and national events. In the past, I thought it solved the issue, but I don’t think so anymore. I realized this because of the Palestinians. Think about it: the Palestinians built a national story based on an experience they never actually had! They tell themselves that Jews from Europe came to the land and violently dispossessed them of their land, a land to which the Jewish invaders had no connection at all. They forgot that the persecution of Jews in the new Jewish settlement before the establishment of the state was a direct continuation of the persecution of Jews in Arab lands, and likewise came from a fanatical religious motivation, a profound hatred of Jews that had been instilled in them. They tell themselves complete lies about massacres and terror that we supposedly carried out against them in the War of Independence so that they would flee their lands. To this day, they live in this lie about a supremely national event and keep adding more and more “layers” to it. Right now we are supposedly committing genocide in Gaza—another formative event in their history, no doubt. And this is today, when there is print, internet, books documenting history as it is, photos, texts that their preachers wrote even before the state was established, recordings of speeches. Today! When anyone who wants can check the documented history from before the establishment of the state until now.

I don’t have good answers to these arguments, and therefore I no longer use the witness argument.

I disagree with you. The Palestinians are not telling a story they didn’t experience! They absolutely were here before the Jews arrived, and they really did flee because of the Jews who decided to establish a state, and some of them were indeed killed by Jews during the war, and even today there are tens of thousands killed in Gaza. All the basic facts are true—the problem lies in their interpretation. They define the presence of their forefathers in the Land of Israel as a “Palestinian people,” while we define it as a “rabble living under foreign rule.” They define their flight from the Jews in 1948 as dispossession from their land, and the dead in Gaza as “genocide,” while we define it as a defensive war.

In short, there’s no way a people can invent a formative national experience that everyone went through without a basis in real facts. It can invent a false interpretation of those facts, but not the facts themselves (of course, details can be added and numbers inflated and so on, but the basis will always be real).

You got carried away a bit. To say that the Philistines were their ancient ancestors and to speak of a Palestinian heritage going back hundreds and thousands of years—that’s not interpretation but fabrication.

Those claims are not part of the Palestinian national experience, but rather an attribution of the (real) history of the ancient peoples of the region to the Palestinians. (That is similar to Jewish claims attributing the Zohar to Rashbi or the wisdom of Plato to the prophet Jeremiah—everyone agrees those are not part of the Jewish national experience but claims about history.)

The Palestinian national experience focuses on the last hundred years, and it is based on a false interpretation of real events.