I accept the criticism and apologize. People have different motivational frameworks (as one French novelist said in an interview, “Find what makes you rage and write”). Even though I usually take an off-topic response like yours to what I wrote as a compliment. You know, I could add a suspicion of literary theft from Christian creationists. Rabbis in Israel do that a lot. But that is not the direction, and it was not the direction. My rhetorical style is unpleasant for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Not that that is an excuse. Yom Kippur is a great day for a reminder that I have things to work on.

Yom Kippur. Quite likely based on rituals in honor of the god Marduk. My hostility to Orthodox Judaism does not stem only from its violence toward the different streams in Judaism (they burned down our synagogue in Hod HaSharon), but also from my love for children’s rights and women’s rights. It is hard not to take into account the kind of god you flatter several times a day (“Therefore, O harlot, hear the word of the Lord” — a chapter censored from public reading and from translation into the vernacular ever since the days of the Mishnah). Of course, the techniques of flattery, such as prayer, are based on those of ancient Akkad; the formulations (“breaker of cedars,” etc.), the hand movements, and so on. My claims regarding anatomical errors in the Hebrew Bible are clear. The heart appears as the organ of thought throughout the Hebrew Bible in keeping with the spirit of the period. Biblical cosmology is also clear, and the early Sages agreed with the Babylonian interpretations that are its source. Of course, there are also rewritings of the original texts; my favorite is the father of Yahweh (El Elyon) who divided lands among the nations and the various gods in Deuteronomy (they are also punished later in the chapter for not obeying that division). The council of gods can also be found in Psalms. The biblical texts are clear in their context.
What is not clear is the justifications for taking them out of context, especially when there is no indication whatsoever in the text that this is a metaphor or a general principle,
doing with them whatever the people taking them out of context feel like,
and adding content retroactively. (Dualism as opposed to the monism of the Hebrew Bible,
a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, when it is clear from the biblical narratives — like his lie to Adam and Eve, and his jealousy toward his wife, the people of Israel — that he is none of those things.)

I do not accept your distinction between Jewish law and moral doctrine. Both clearly deal with guiding the behavior of Jews and gentiles in overlapping dimensions. Unless prohibitions on theft and murder are of no concern to moral theories (and here we have arrived at the Euthyphro dilemma). As for your examples that are meant to ground the principle: medicine and ecology are normative fields, interwoven with moral conjectures and assumptions at their base; from the concept of “disease” and its opposite “health” all the way to the physician’s oath.
If I may quote the Jewish philosopher Hilary Putnam and his philosopher wife Ruth Putnam:
[“Dewey rejected this false worldview; he rejected the so-called fact/value distinction. He pointed out that what
we call factual knowledge is shaped by our values: we inquire into matters that matter to us. Dewey noted that factual claims and value claims are so intimately interwoven in our reasoning that one cannot challenge or support a claim of one kind without implicating claims of the other. “]
David Hume’s dictum that “reason is the slave of the passions” has now received substantial confirmation from the neurological literature, which presents a very complex picture of our decision-making and thought processes, into which emotions and evaluations are woven (that is, the neurologist Antonio Damasio or the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett).

As for your philosophy of logic: again, puzzling for a physicist. You are no sucker in either field, and to think that you can derive from sitting in your chair facts about what is going on on the other side of the universe, when the prevailing view in philosophy today is that logic gives you overall consistency — I apologize, but that is puzzling. Especially alongside religious scientists like Haim Sompolinsky who simply take their field seriously: there is no free will (a useless concept regardless of neuroscience). Do you think philosophers of religion have an extra sense organ? As a naturalist, and someone who writes among other things about the psychology of philosophers, I would be happy to tell you that that is probably not the case.

Hello,
I do not know what was off-topic in what I wrote, but if you saw something in my words as a compliment, that is of course your decision, and I am glad of it.
In any case, it seems I should clarify that I see nothing in your words for which you should have apologized. I saw no problem with the style, and that was not the problem I saw in your remarks. My problem with your letter was the lack of focus, which does not allow for a proper discussion. You piled up a varied collection of points without arguments and reasons, and I did not see the connection between them and things I had said, so I did not know what in my remarks had provoked your anger. For problems like that, there is nothing to apologize for; one should simply improve and correct them. Beyond that, it is hard to discuss general comments and characterizations of me without your raising specific and reasoned points.
In this letter of yours, you raised a collection of points that mainly concern the background of the Bible and its sources. I do not see what in my remarks dealt with these points, why you directed these questions to me, or how you connected them to the conversations of mine that you mentioned. Not for nothing do I not deal with these matters, since I am not proficient in biblical scholarship. Clarifying these points should be done with someone more expert than I am in the matter. I will only say that my lack of expertise in the Bible (I do not deal with it at all, not even within the framework of my traditional Torah study) also stems from very limited trust in these disciplines, which are based on rather dubious hypotheses and associations.
Your attitude toward Orthodox Judaism is based on its violent conduct and the burning of a synagogue, and that seems problematic to me. I am not violent, I have not burned any synagogue, and I do not support such acts. I think most of Orthodox Judaism does not do that and does not support it. Determining one’s attitude toward an entire group because of the acts of individuals within it seems problematic to me. If you had brought up matters of religious coercion, or improper conduct by Haredim, I would join your criticism. In that case it would also be more justified, because that is a more accurate characteristic of the group and of its political and rabbinic representatives, even if not of all of it. I myself work vigorously against such measures.
Even here in your words, I do not see which of my remarks you are referring to. I see a collection of various general questions about the Jewish (Orthodox) tradition concerning the Bible and its sources. Despite what I wrote above, I will try to address the principles in a general way, since every point requires detailed treatment in its own right.
1. The fact that a biblical text or instruction is influenced by earlier sources, even if that is true, does not seem problematic to me in itself. If something is taken from Marduk or from ancient Akkad, does that necessarily mean it is invalid or false?
2. Seeing the heart as the organ of thought is accepted to this day as a metaphor. Just like God’s limbs in the Bible, which is obvious to everyone (at least today) are metaphorical. A simplistic interpretation of various texts can lead you into a great many interpretive errors. Maybe you are right and maybe not, but I do not see a difficulty here.
3. Interpretations regarding God’s father are thoughts of your own heart. I do not see what I can say about that. You are entitled to hold such an interpretation, but I do not see a claim here.
4. The question of God’s goodness is a difficult one, but I think it can be defended in various ways. Your declarations that he lies to Adam and Eve or is jealous of his “wife” sound somewhat hollow to me. But they are too general, and therefore it is hard for me to address them concretely.
5. Regarding my distinction between Jewish law and morality, you raise various difficulties, apparently because you did not understand the thesis. If you would like to understand more, I refer you to column 541 on my site (there are many other discussions there as well). https://www.google.com/url?client=internal-element-cse&cx=f18e4f052adde49eb&q=https://mikyab.net/posts/79775/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjQx-7OrYmJAxW_cfEDHUPtG8IQFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Dp2W10NidEvgcKyweKRRf
I will add in passing that this has not the slightest connection to the Euthyphro dilemma.
6. Medicine and ecology were brought by me as examples of other fields different from morality. Quite apart from the fact that they too may contain normative and moral assumptions (I am willing to argue with you about that too. In my opinion, the people who deal with them have such assumptions, but the sciences themselves do not). My claim was that the fact that Jewish law does not condemn act X does not mean that it regards it as moral. Just as if medicine or ecology does not condemn it, that does not mean that those who deal with them are not moral. This was meant to illustrate my claim that Jewish law is a domain independent of morality, just like ecology and medicine and many other fields, and therefore it is incorrect to expect moral treatment from it.
7. The fact that the Putnams disagree with the distinction between fact and value says nothing. That is ad hominem. I see these as two different and independent categories. If you want to raise substantive arguments and not just quotations, we can discuss it. But as stated, this matter does not relate in any way to what I said.
8. The same applies regarding the relation between logic and passions. Damasio’s arguments that I have seen on this matter suffer from several flaws (for example, his identification of morality with emotion and empathy, among others).
9. Your claim regarding the ability to infer factual conclusions philosophically is too general. I have written quite a lot about this, and if you want to discuss it, you will have to raise concrete arguments and not make do with general declarations. In your view, a physicist is supposed to be an empiricist, and that is of course a logical error. The fact that I deal with empirical science (and even that is not entirely true) does not mean that I hold an empiricist approach.
I have already discussed Sompolinsky’s errors at length (including in debates with him personally), but he too, exactly like you, does not infer everything he knows from observations (in particular, he believes in the existence of God, but this is true of atheist scientists as well). Empiricism, which categorically rejects conclusions not based on observation, is a very naïve position that does not hold water. It seems to me that Hume’s arguments, which greatly narrow the conclusions an empiricist can hold (and even after his narrowing he was wrong), demonstrate this very well.

All the best,

Look, I grew up as a Conservative Jew. It was “obvious” to us that the Hebrew Bible was a human creation. If someone wanted to believe in some abstract god, that was his business. Moses could not have written the Torah in a language that did not exist in his lifetime. This is discussed in the Talmud. It appears in popular culture too, like films from the middle of the last century. In any case, Orthodox people were, for us, idol worshippers. Foolish devotees of corrupt rabbis who represented the evil in the Jewish tradition throughout its history (that is, the sons of Eli who sexually harassed women and stole from the sacrificial meat; the brothel in the First Temple, relations of money and power in the Second Temple period, etc.). Making aliyah to Israel is a destabilizing experience for any Jew. It is like arriving in Greece or Norway and finding them seriously worshipping Zeus or Loki, while the measurable change in reality from the magical powers promised by their religion’s priests is the balance in the bank account and politicians joining the priestly circle of friends. My grandfather refused to believe Israelis were Jews; he was horrified by the idea that a person emerging from the genitals of a Jewish woman could sum up a person’s whole life as “Jewish.” He may have eaten bacon and eggs in the morning, but in the evening he studied Talmud, and on weekends he drove to synagogue in order to be one of the quorum of Jews. Unfortunately, his pessimism about this place was probably justified as well. Secular Israelis are not Jews; they are Hebrew-speaking Americans. Corruption in Israel is exceptional in its scope; to quote David Horovitz, the British editor of The Times of Israel: “Israelis export suffering and misery on a global level” (this refers here to economic corruption, not politics).

1. I am not ruling it out. I am presenting a competing explanation to the claim that the Torah was given at Sinai and that the Hebrew Bible is a “divine” book. This is cultural heritage. I prefer dealing with what is probable, not what is merely logically possible. This is a classic religious apologetic move, even though it is clear that your assumptions are not “basic” (Christians created an entire literary genre just to try to ground that assumption).
2. “But, O Lord of Hosts, who judges righteously, who tests the kidneys and the heart, let me see Your vengeance upon them, for to You I have revealed my cause.” Where is the metaphor in getting mixed up about the ability to read thoughts through the wrong organs? Was it hard to write brain or head? This is not a metaphor.
Just as the hundreds of mentions of the heart as the center of thought in the Hebrew Bible are not metaphors, and just as for most if not all of the ancient world this was not metaphorical. The Egyptians removed the brain through the nose and embalmed the heart. Aristotle described the brain as a cooler. Tribes would even remove the hearts of key figures from rival tribes and negotiate to return them. The Hebrew Bible is clear in context.
Maimonides’ apologetic project is a failure, but it does testify to the need for a conceptual shift at a certain point in time — and that is because in Judaism until his period God was conceived as a physical entity in a monistic world.
3. That is one difference between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text in Deuteronomy. The Bible scholar Knohl also gathers the collection of Yahweh’s traits and shows how they are borrowed from the surrounding peoples.
4. “The nature of God” is your phrasing. I am talking about how the authors of the Hebrew Bible imagined him, and the picture that emerges is clear. A few years ago I wrote a comprehensive article on the subject that I had to take down because of the many threats on my life that I received.
Yahweh lifts skirts and exposes genitals, has a need for admiration, control issues, is vengeful, wrathful, etc. — he is, to quote academic Bible scholars (in English), a “sexual predator,” “God is portrayed as a rapist,” and a “wife-beater.” By the way, of all Jewish communities in the world, the only one that did not censor Ezekiel chapter 16 from public reading was the Yemenite community (probably not for the right reasons; I could not stop laughing). As a Conservative Jew I have no problem with this. This is the imagination and interests of men from the Bronze/Iron Age Middle East. Zeus too was not an exemplary figure when it came to sexuality. The difference is that in Greece they did not lose touch with reality the way they have in Israel regarding their cultural heritage.
5, 6. Anti-moral Jewish law has no connection to the Euthyphro dilemma? I wrote that there is overlap between Jewish law and morality. Morality is not “universal by definition.” I am not a Kantian. This discourse is built for people who do not know or engage in clinical psychology, moral psychology, and who do not read literature. Kant had a very German and puritan childhood, and Sylvia Plath did not. A woman who is shockingly self-centered to someone like me who grew up in a community like mine, but not to people in Tel Aviv nightlife.
7. These sciences themselves. “Disease” is a normative judgment exactly as “healthy” is a normative judgment — it is about a desirable state and an undesirable state, and what we throw into each bucket also depends on our evaluations.
8. I have had conversations with men who use date-rape drugs (a parent who communicates to a child that he is not good enough becomes an adult who hates himself and has an insecure attachment style) and with women who suffer from “psychopathy” (cluster B personality disorders; “I can’t manage to feel compassion for a friend who is suffering”). Morality is based on emotions shaped by personality structure, which is usually formed in childhood and early environments. People do not respond to “rational reasons”; they need to care. In this context, that is exactly Hume’s and Damasio’s point (I did not understand the connection to identity; he does not make that identification). This is also one of the reasons Scandinavians generally have better lives than Israelis and Americans. This discourse about decisions is shocking, harmful, and incoherent. Our mental world just rolls from event to event and no more. Like a tree. Like a parrot. Like a monkey. Moral responsibility is a blight and should be denounced. Finland’s open prisons, which offer study and swimming to offenders, fit that.
9. No. I am simply interested in why someone who thinks medieval cosmological arguments are successful needs cosmology. Why not build a logical system like Spinoza’s about what happens between particles or on Saturn?
I take Quine’s position. Empirical observations can change even the most basic laws of logic. I also believe that non-classical logic, historical inquiry, and cross-cultural study of systems of logic have made logic far more contingent than neo-Kantians would be comfortable with. Needless to say, I prefer reading developmental psychology to people who assume I must posit certain mental categories because we all happen to exist for five minutes. Just as Descartes perhaps forgot that he was writing in Latin.

Look, I am not writing an article, and I am not experiencing the drama of the gifted child (the psychology of many academics, a topic in itself). That is, I did not come to spar. I am wrong not infrequently; that is a natural part of learning. I am thinking out loud together with you. For now I will spare the writing of a syllogism and try to write clear prose.

Hello,

At the beginning of your remarks, you describe a picture that repeats the same flaws I pointed out in my previous letter. Wild generalizations based on a few people whose conduct is problematic. Do you really think that in the Conservative movement everything is clean and there is no one who acts improperly? I very much doubt it. We are all human beings. The sons of Eli, who harassed, were condemned by the Hebrew Bible with noteworthy fairness. To bring an example from them is indeed a wild generalization. David also sinned, and so did Moses our teacher, and all is described honestly. Relations of money and power in the Second Temple period characterize the Orthodox? Strange. In my innocence I thought Orthodoxy was a new movement. My feeling is that you are throwing in everything at hand and not really formulating the essence of your criticism. It is hard to discuss things this way. Do you want me to defend the sons of Eli? Or the Sadducee priests who were responsible for relations of money and power in the Second Temple? Did they establish Orthodoxy? I did not understand the claim. You must overcome the anger when you want to discuss something. It interferes with addressing things substantively.
The conduct of the organized Orthodox establishment in Israel is indeed problematic, as I wrote to you in the previous letter. I too fight against this. That proves nothing whatsoever about the question whether one should be Orthodox or not. In the same way that Zionism’s conduct since its founding has not been free of flaws, and that does not mean I will stop being a Zionist. Likewise, Yigal Amir’s conduct, which had a religious background, should not cause me to stop believing or being committed to Jewish law. This is a truly bizarre way of thinking.
As for editors of The Times of Israel, I am not sure I would bring evidence from them on the question of how to relate to the State of Israel. Absolutely not. If you had brought data, fine. But a quoted ad hominem from someone like that is an intellectual joke. There are various corruption indices, and more than once I have seen (though I have not checked in depth) that Israel is not ranked so badly relative to countries of the world. But beyond that, how does corruption (economic, not political, in your words) in Israel constitute a criticism of Orthodoxy? Again, you are being carried away by your anger.

1. You may of course propose a competing explanation, but that is not how your remarks were presented. You presented them with complete certainty, as though they were facts and anyone who thought otherwise was a fool. Now you are retracting and presenting this as an alternative proposal. That is already better.
2. I did not understand what you see in all these quotations. As I understand it, this is a metaphor, and it continues to this day when everyone clearly knows that the heart takes no part in thought. Usually the heart serves as an expression for intuitive thought as opposed to the intellect, which deals with recursive thought (perhaps right and left hemisphere, as people commonly say today). The fact that there were those who treated this metaphor seriously and removed the heart says nothing about the intention of the Hebrew Bible. Of course, if you assume it is human, the argument is better (and even then not very strong), but that is begging the question. God knows the truth and uses metaphors. People take them too literally. By the way, “heart” is an expression for the inside of something. Accordingly, the thoughts of the heart are something that take place inside a person. If you want to see a detailed discussion, I found one here, for example: https://forum.otzar.org/viewtopic.php?t=58494
3. You did not answer and did not bring any proof for your words. Knohl and other Bible scholars do not inspire much confidence in me from what I have seen in their writings. But even if they did, so what?
4. Again you are begging the question (that there are authors of the Hebrew Bible and that these are not metaphors). The Hebrew Bible is full of God’s goodness, and you ignore that. Indeed, there are difficult passages in it as well, but you present that as the whole picture (cherry-picking).
I find it hard to believe that someone threatened your life over an article, and even before you published it. Quite a few books and articles have come out saying such things, and worse. Again this seems to me a very tendentious description. By the way, censorship of books exists on the secular side no less. You should sometime hear the adventures of those who wanted to publish in Hebrew the books of Immanuel Velikovsky, the treatment of Adam Zertal over the identification of Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal (regardless of whether he was right), and much more. Fanatical zealots exist on every side, unfortunately. That is not a reason to reject or adopt any belief.
5-6. Indeed, there is not the slightest connection. But on the matter of Jewish law and morality, there is no point discussing it here. I sent you to a place where I expanded on the matter, and if you read it and want to discuss it, you are welcome. The psychological reductions of moral conceptions are very typical of psychologists (they too grew up in some flowerbed, and they too can be reduced). And they are all built on one great misunderstanding.
7. Indeed, I too have written more than once that disease and health are a normative matter (mainly with regard to the question whether homosexuality is a disease). So what? Therefore can a doctor claim that raping a captive woman is unhealthy physiologically? What is the connection? My claim was that we do not expect a medical book to express a position on the question of raping captive women. And likewise with a book of Jewish law.
8. See my remarks in sections 6-7.
9. Again you retract. You said that as a physicist I am not supposed to infer conclusions from the armchair. Now you admit that this is not connected. You are simply making an empiricist claim, and to that I answered. Now you move to labeling and reject arguments because of the period in which they were practiced (the Middle Ages), instead of discussing them on their merits. It is hard for me to count all the fallacies you managed to pack into two or three lines. And on Spinoza’s logic I will not elaborate. If that is your model, then we really are not speaking the same language. If there is something on which I would build nothing, it is Spinoza’s collection of word games and metaphysical speculations. There are subjects I treat as a physicist and not from the armchair (though physics too is saturated with armchair assumptions). And there are subjects that I do not. Therefore, to investigate the physics of Saturn I will not build a logical system but use observations and scientific tools, but with respect to metaphysics, which is not accessible to that, then I too, as a physicist, use other tools. If you object, I would be glad to hear a substantive and concrete argument instead of a collection of declarations. I already wrote to you that I have written quite a lot about this, and you are welcome to read.

I am completely in favor of discussion (even if it includes a bit of sparring, so long as one does not give up arguments). Thinking together is excellent. I hope you read my remarks and truly and honestly try to examine them. I am certainly trying to do that with yours.
(By the way, a syllogism is the clearest prose I know. It has other drawbacks, but clarity is not one of them.)

I did not say they are Orthodox; I said that is what they represent. We are definitely not equal. My rabbis — a British couple and a South African — never lied to me. Rabbi Shapiro, who received rabbinic ordination in Israel, describes in his Harvard dissertation Orthodox rabbis such as Rabbi Kook explicitly calling for lying to their believing public. He sums up his dissertation with the question, “Is there value to truth in Judaism (Orthodox Judaism)?” The answer is depressing.
We have not even touched on censorship and rewritings — books hundreds of years old that are censored and rewritten according to the interests of the here and now by the Orthodox priestly class. I come from a line of librarians. There were several emergency meetings and evenings on the subject at the National Library in Jerusalem.
The Orthodox movement resembles a cult more than a religious stream with a theology pursued for theology’s sake. Librarians throughout history were always politically involved, but their political power was limited. They do not have television channels with people promising magic spells with an annual turnover of one hundred million shekels. This corruption is not surprising in light of researchers (qualitative ones) on the personality structure of rabbis. Unsurprisingly, the need for admiration and power stands out. Jewish communities, especially Orthodox ones, need to stop putting them on a pedestal — they are scout counselors and nothing more. It is a job. They are not magicians. This idealization comes at the expense of our children and at the expense of the truth, or as one of my rabbis told me in conversation, “First of all I have a family to support.” In Israel that sentence changes to the words “politicians to take care of so there will be apartments for the cousins.” You may think that one justification for adding interpretations to the Hebrew Bible is the demand created by its relatively abstract language, but animal sacrifices are described in great detail because clearly this was then a technology with an annual turnover no less than that of Orthodox rabbis today — one that was supposed to bring rain, help in wars, heal, and so on. Conservative Judaism rejects these views and the corruptions they generate.
David Horovitz is a Zionist Jew and an admirable person. So is his journalist Simona Weinglass from New York, who covered the “horizontal and vertical corruption infecting the entire State of Israel and all of Israeli society.” And Yael Sherer, the South African. Israel is a “paradise” for bad people, and Zionist Jews should be very careful not to take part in that.

1. In the Judean Desert they found the story of Gilgamesh on a clay tablet made from clay originating in the Judean Desert. These stories were circulating in the region. Also Yahweh’s wife, as documented in the Hebrew Bible (and the ugly divorce: “He brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem to the Kidron Valley, and burned it”), has been found archaeologically (they are holding hands). It is logically possible that an Indian elephant genetically engineered with a jellyfish, and therefore eternally young, comes into my apartment every day and makes himself coffee. Judaism developed over a long period, and certainly was not given as a unit before the language in which it was supposedly written was invented. The Tannaim, Amoraim, and so on did not have the findings we have today. Orthodox views are not reasonable in light of the evidence.
2. All our language began as metaphorical (a fledgling “flies,” a chick is “stolen”), but not all of its uses were metaphorical. The use of the heart as an organ of thought is a consistent use, throughout the Hebrew Bible, in accordance with its time and place. The same is true regarding biblical cosmology. By your unique standards, I can take Harry Potter out of context and turn it into a book that it is logically possible is sacred. This is beyond arbitrary.
4. It was published (unfortunately it also reached, through a friend I greatly respect, some of the people with whom you carry on dialogue). The “troubles” that came afterward are a story in themselves. No, you simply did not bother to look into it. His need for compliments matches the pathological personality structure of a typical “wife-beater.” In psychology, patterns of behavior over time are the most important factor, not secondary descriptions (“Yahweh is a generous god,” etc.). The match here is one-to-one, on every level — from personality structure to the familiar three-part model of an abusive relationship. The people of Israel are described as his spouse, who tries to flee again and again from a man with control and jealousy problems (“for the Lord is jealous”).
Secular people censor too, absolutely. You apparently very much like talking about fallacies instead of giving your opponents generous interpretations. Needless to say, an appeal to hypocrisy is a logical fallacy and a change of subject. Your response also sounds like a typical response from the psychological literature — defending a sexual offender who is socially esteemed (a rabbi, a professor, a wealthy philanthropist, etc.). There is also use of date-rape drugs, as with the daughters of Edom (“Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, who dwell in the land of Uz; to you too the cup shall pass — you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare”). There is here a cynical, mocking address to a rape victim of his — a typical act of a sexual offender. The imagination of the authors of the Hebrew Bible (God is not actually like this) tells a very sad story about the Bronze and Iron Ages. Conservative Judaism is emotionally mature, unlike Orthodoxy, and places emphasis on the welfare and safety of its community. Again, it is not clear to me or to others what exactly is Jewish about a population that censors whole sections of its own cultural heritage. This is corruption, not Judaism.
5-6. The “threat” from parts of moral philosophy that if we do not accept their position we will not receive the compliment that we are “rational” is a bit ridiculous to people who have to deal with human beings day to day, or even reading and writing clubs like my aunt’s in Australia. People’s motives are varied and many, just like their capacity to compartmentalize and rank. To be a Kantian in a country like Israel requires compartmentalization. The population here has no respect for abstract laws. In my reserve duty we started with signs saying “Closed Military Zone,” moved on to plastic barriers, and then to actual wall construction, and even then they found a corner to pass through in order to shorten their route. The imperative simply does not interest them. Factually, Kant’s sense of “duty” simply does not interest people here.
That separate faculty of “will,” or the incoherent idea of “self-control” (a person does not step outside himself to control the source of his emotions — namely, himself; psychologists are in the process of changing paradigms, thank God, toward the language of cognitive frameworks), is an unfortunate legacy of our theological past whose source lies in the Middle Ages (mainly Augustine). It is time to embrace complexity — that is, let scientists do their work and philosophers contribute their part, for example by helping with conceptualization — and not “discover” some deep truth for us.
7. The preference for one physiological state over another is a judgment. You probably dismiss Putnam and his wife, but in my opinion the discussion itself is very interesting. It is very hard to separate facts and judgments in basic situations. In complex bodies of knowledge like medicine or ecology, it is not possible.
9. The book Conversations with the Devil by Leszek Kołakowski is a satirical book about the Hebrew Bible. I have a friend who spends hours on the internet searching for hot sauces; I would even say he lives for it and feels in his whole body the existence of those peppers. So let us move to a pseudo-syllogism:

My Yemenite friend believes with all his soul that the hottest sauce in the world is perfect.
Part of perfection is existence, because something that does not exist cannot be perfect.
Therefore, the hottest sauce in the world must exist.

There are certain arguments that deserve satire more than substantive engagement. Of course, preferences for what feels “perfect” to philosophers represent their psychology in a given time and place, and nothing more. Unfortunately (at least in part) because of my familiarity with some of the people involved in Tel Aviv nightlife, their concept of “perfection” would not correspond to that of ivory-tower residents. Their fantasies of perfection are different (and deeply disturbed in more than one sense; sex addiction, for example, is a relatively common phenomenon, as are fantasies of being “the perfect sex machine”). Nietzsche believed that the only justification for life is aesthetics. Needless to say, he was not especially sexually active, nor did he have children. The idea that someone thinks he can learn about the “cause of the universe” through conceptual analysis from the armchair — that is, through his psychological views about a concept like “existence” — in this case both Nietzsche and Rorty are right: philosophy here is autobiographical poetry.

Hello,
You repeatedly generalize without any basis. That is not a good point of departure for an intelligent discussion. Fine, so you had three rabbis who did not lie and you know others who did lie. So what? I also know three religious people who do not lie and one secular person who does. What conclusion follows from that? By the way, esoteric speech and writing were very common among philosophers as well until the twentieth century. Regarding censorship too, we have found such things elsewhere. I already commented to you about books that were not published here in Israel. See also cases of suppressing positions in the media, and so on. There is criticism of these bad phenomena within the Orthodox world as well, and they are not unique to it and certainly not to all of it.
In short, all these are foolish generalizations, and any conclusion you draw from them regarding a worldview (Orthodox or otherwise) is nonsense. The same goes for selective quotations from various journalists regarding Israel’s corruption. See, for example, here: https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/by67oir5a and again, what is the connection between corruption indices regarding Israel and our discussion?
All your other arguments repeat themselves, and the whole exchange between us is not a discussion but angry declarations. There is no point in it, and therefore I will stop here. If you have some specific concrete argument that relates to things I say, or any other question you are interested in discussing with me, I will be happy to discuss it one by one in the responsa system on my site. Please write there clearly and with a concrete argument.
All the best,

You keep changing the subject. The conclusion is that important and influential rabbis called in the past, and call in the present, for lying to the public — sufficiently important that all Jewish communities over the last two thousand years repeatedly did not read publicly and did not translate into the spoken language parts of their “divine” book. There are also passages, by the way, that are read in an “accelerated” way. According to Rabbi Yigal Bin-Nun, “There is no yeshiva where they teach these contents.”

I would be happy to see where, in your circles, people talk about Jewish mythology as mythology, and about a god who is very unexceptional in his troubling sexuality compared to the other mythologies of the nations (lifting skirts, exposing genitals, intoxicating and stripping, using gang rape as punishment for the whorish daughters of Zion, etc. — it appears all over the Hebrew Bible. English Wikipedia is generous; in Hebrew they censor).

I understand that this is probably emotionally difficult for you, as it is for many Orthodox Jews because of their fundamentalism and their psychological dependence. People who leave the Orthodox stream often have symptoms like drug withdrawal. “Suppressions in the media” do not contradict your suppressions. You are changing the subject. I understand that you are emotional — a natural part of our thinking process (Damasio). If you calm down and want to get back to me, I would be happy to.

I am not changing the subject, if only because there is no subject. More precisely: I am looking for the subject. The discussion you are raising has no subject. It is a collection of accusations, some with substance and most without. They have no common line, and they certainly are not connected to things I said in the debate or elsewhere. All this in addition to a free diagnosis of my psychological difficulties, without my even having to lie down on the couch for it (many thanks).
It turns out that you are apparently looking for the first of the two goals I described in my first letter. So here, you have done it.
Good luck and all the best.

I studied formal logic and argumentation theory. If there were no subject, you would not be able to attribute to me, as you are quick to do throughout the whole conversation, “logical fallacies.”
Even for games of ball on flying broomsticks in fantasy books like Harry Potter, you can build complex mathematical systems. If you are interested in wasting your life on hairsplitting of that kind, that is sad but predictable; every ideology has an intellectual class, high-IQ people who rationalize after the fact beliefs in which they are emotionally invested. The problem begins with the damage this causes to people who are supposedly your own people.
The Orthodox technology of verbal flattery, animal sacrifices, meticulous processes checked by a specialized class of religious priests (the Hebrew Bible devotes around seventeen chapters to the subject) — failed again and again.
The economic theology of people like Smotrich is a product of the Orthodox stream and its conceptions — that is, a product of biblical fundamentalism, which people like you among others promote.

If they taught you that in the absence of a subject there are no logical fallacies, you should fire the lecturer. He too should read this correspondence so as to see his mistake. In general, if you studied argumentation theory, you have provided a fine demonstration here of the importance of practice. You still have room to improve, since presenting arguments did not happen here, and certainly not in a way consistent with a defined thesis and goal.
In short, I believe you that you sincerely think you are engaged in argumentation. I think that at least for your own sake you should be aware of what you are doing, hurling, or claiming (hint: the first).
I understand that anger and frustration interfere with calm, substantive discussion, and you should be aware of that as well. One can be angry and one can also discuss (those are exactly the two services I spoke about), but it is hard to do both together.
All the best