Q&A: Faith and Torah
Faith and Torah
Question
1. How are we so confident in belief in God, when any proof we bring has to rest on prior assumptions, and those too are not certain?
2. Is it not reasonable that our story about receiving the Torah at Sinai was invented over the generations?
3. How does studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) advance me? I can’t manage to understand, whether from the stories or from the prophecies, how they advance me in knowledge of God or morality. Aside from the very simplest messages, I almost never reach any depth.
Even if in particular sections—like the Garden of Eden or the cleft of the rock—you can learn a lot, what does the rest of the Torah teach us?
4. Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed that there are parables for which some of the details have no counterpart, and there are parables for which every detail has a counterpart. How can one know which kind of parable one is facing? How can one know what the counterpart is? After all, there could be infinitely many meanings for any parable.
5. What is the relationship between the plain meaning and homiletical interpretation? Did God intend the interpretations of the Sages or of Hasidic teaching, when they seem so detached from the words of the Torah? Is anything that can be read into the words called plain meaning, or only the thing that fits best?
6. When determining Jewish law, can one rule based on one’s own analysis of the Talmud and the opinion of a small number of medieval authorities that was not accepted in practice, or am I indeed bound by the rules of Jewish law, such as the Shulchan Arukh?
7. Regarding tekhelet, could it be that the Talmudic text that says tekhelet is produced from a snail did not mean that this is the only way, but only that this was how they produced that color in their time? After all, the Talmud did not say that this is how it must be done, only that this is how it was done. (The problem with indigo, accordingly, is that it is very similar to the real color but not exactly the same shade.)
According to this possibility, if we learn to produce the tekhelet color by industrial means, we would be able to wear it.
Is this explanation accepted?
Thank you very much!
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Answer
You’ve presented here a collection of questions, each of which requires a whole book. This is not serious. You didn’t even bother to explain what exactly the question is and what the sides of the doubt are. This is careless writing.
1. I don’t know what “we are confident” means. Each person has his own considerations. Beyond that, I at least am not certain of anything. Why do you assume that anyone is certain of anything?
2. In my opinion, no.
3. In my opinion, it does not advance us in anything. You can search here for discussions of Bible study and the study of aggadic literature.
4. There is no sweeping rule here for all cases. There is common sense, and it needs to be used.
5. I don’t know whether He intended it, but the hermeneutical principles of interpretation were given to us at Sinai, and using them yields a result that is an interpretation of the verse by way of homiletical exposition. A homiletical interpretation does not have to meet the test of plain-sense interpretation, and it may contradict the plain meaning. It is a different explanatory plane, and one should not judge one in the terms of the other.
6. If you are capable, then not only can you rule for yourself, but it is preferable that you do so. See my article on authority and autonomy.
7. It is possible. Such a possibility has been raised in discussions about tekhelet, but it is commonly thought that this is incorrect. I have no clear proof either way.