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Q&A: Deletion

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Deletion

Question

Rabbi Michi, why did you delete the page of the question I asked in the name of your physics student, Shay Yafet? He sent it to my email?

Answer

Which question? I vaguely remember something, and I think I didn’t see an actual question there. If you want to send a question, please formulate it clearly.

Discussion on Answer

Shay Yafet (2025-01-09)

Okay, thanks.
And these are the words of Shay Yafet, owner of the site “The Slightest Clue” (a site mainly for interesting articles on physics and mathematics and the like, but also on these topics). He also studied with you at the university.

And this is what he says:
The religious person accepts the witness argument regarding the revelation at Mount Sinai as a valid and true argument.
In other words: according to the religious person, the revelation at Mount Sinai necessarily happened, because it is impossible to invent it. If so, it doesn’t matter what difficulties we find in the Torah—they are in any case only apparent, and all of them can necessarily be explained away. Once the witness argument is accepted as valid, from the religious person’s point of view it no longer really matters what is written in the Torah; any difficulty can be explained and resolved, because the witness argument has already guaranteed us that everything is fine.

In my opinion this is a serious mistake, and I wrote about it on the site, for a simple reason: the witness argument relates not only to the revelation at Mount Sinai, but also to the testimony that the Israelites entered the land of Canaan after Moses’ death with the Torah as we know it today.

The witness argument is a package deal:
According to rabbinic Judaism, we have a tradition from our forefathers, who were witnesses to the entire chain of events from the Exodus from Egypt, through the revelation at Mount Sinai,
and finally they testify that they received the Torah scroll that is in our hands already in the wilderness period and entered Canaan with it. But the Torah itself proves that this testimony does not fit with the text of the Torah itself, and therefore the testimony of our forefathers that today’s Torah scroll was already given to them in the wilderness loses credibility and is cast into doubt, and therefore doubt must also be cast on the revelation at Mount Sinai, because it is an inseparable part of that same overall testimony!

And the question is, Rabbi Michi, how do we deal with these points?
And here is the link to his article: https://theslightestclue.com/?page_id=195

Michi (2025-01-09)

What we have here is an expression of a position, not a question. The addition at the end makes it into a question.
The Torah certainly does not prove this. Even if one accepts all of biblical criticism, at most one could argue that there are later sections, and even that is far from unambiguous (apart from a few isolated verses such as “to this very day”). Beyond that, the tradition is not one single block. The revelation at Mount Sinai is the core, and the other events are far less significant and therefore also less binding. So, for example, Maimonides sees the angels with Abraham as a dream. Others see the creation narrative as myth or allegory. The allegorists see Abraham and Sarah as parables, not historical figures. Even regarding the revelation at Mount Sinai, nobody is swearing to the pyrotechnics that took place around it. In short, the necessary focal point, which is the core of the argument, is the revelation at Mount Sinai, and about that there is wall-to-wall agreement. Everything else is open to debate.
Beyond that, if you found errors in a history book, that is no reason to reject the whole thing because of them.
And finally, the witness argument is indeed not decisive. It is supported by a priori philosophical arguments for the existence of a Creator, and the overall picture is stronger than the sum of its parts. I discussed this at length in The First Foundational Principle.
So the witness argument is not a package deal, and even if it were, the package stands just fine.

Shay Yafet (2025-01-12)

This is exactly where I strongly disagree with him, and in my view the situation is the opposite:
The Torah text is full of very major problems,
and the attempts to patch them up are very forced and contrived.

What I think the Rabbi is missing is the question: why are those problems there in the first place?
Why is a Torah given by God, from the outset, packed to the brim with fingerprints of editing and human error?
Hand on your heart, doesn’t that seem strange to you?
To me it seems highly suspicious,
and the doubt that it is really a human creation simply tips the scale.

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