Q&A: "The Survival of the Soul"
"The Survival of the Soul"
Question
Hi,
I saw a podcast of yours with Daniel Dushi on YouTube.
You were asked there whether you believe in the “survival of the soul,”
and you answered that you are in a state of “tension” about this issue and are undecided whether it is true, since the sources for it are “dubious.”
I didn’t quite understand what kind of dubiety you mean.
Assuming you accept the Oral Torah (from the podcast I got the impression that you do, though maybe I’m mistaken), isn’t it full of this?
And if you don’t accept it, do you think there is no system of reward and punishment? Or perhaps there is, but you think it is implemented here in this world?
Answer
I don’t know what it means to “accept the Oral Torah.” The question is what is included in the Oral Torah—meaning, what was received at Sinai and what was not. Most of the Oral Torah we have did not come from Sinai, but was developed over the generations by people who could have been mistaken. Regarding halakhic claims, one can still appeal to authority as grounds for acting in a certain way. But when it comes to factual claims, authority has no significance. You can find the analysis here on the site.
Discussion on Answer
An overwhelming majority of the laws, not just the dialectical discussions, were created over the generations. And of course not everything written in the Mishnah, or anywhere else, is a tradition from Sinai. Binding laws are binding even without being from Sinai, but matters of worldview certainly are not. In short, I already explained everything, and I see no point in going over it again.
"Most of the Oral Torah we have did not come from Sinai"
What do you mean by “most”? And what do you mean by “Oral Torah”?
Most of the Oral Torah in the sense of the dialectical give-and-take and so on (for example the Talmudic discussions and the like) indeed consists of developments from later generations,
but are the basic foundations of the central laws around which the Talmudic discussions revolve, etc. (practical commandments, tithes and offerings, and other things that are not written explicitly and clearly at all in the Written Torah, and so on)—are these an invention of the course of the generations??
When, for example, the Mishnah tells us in passing, as a simple matter (not subject to dispute), about life in the World to Come after death—was that “invented” by some people or other? Or was it something accepted as obvious in all generations….