Q&A: Faith, Primarily
Faith, Primarily
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi!
Good morning (more or less).
As part of your lecture series on faith / belief (I’m up to lesson 4 now),
and in many other places too, actually, you argued that faith is a factual claim,
and that if some particular emotion is involved then it’s probably an atheist with religious experiences.
And the statement “where reason ends, faith begins” is nonsense. But I didn’t really understand why, because there are lots of things in the Torah and especially in the Talmud that just don’t fit with reason,
like the child whose father told him to climb a tree in order to perform the commandment of sending away the mother bird, and he fell and died—so where is this person’s “length of days”? And then, I think, Rabbi Akiva or another tanna says that this actually means length of days in the World to Come (Kiddushin 49, I think). What does that even mean? “Length of days” for life in the World to Come sounds empty of content. And Rav Beivai bar Abaye, who was study partners with the Angel of Death, and all sorts of things like that, which seemingly do not sit well with logic. So what was your argument against “where reason ends, faith begins”?
2. When I argued with a Haredi person about Maimonides’ eighth principle (my claim was that the Talmud is a human creation of flesh and blood, not of supreme holy figures with divine inspiration), he told me that if a law given to Moses at Sinai is written in the Talmud, then the Talmud was given to Moses at Sinai. Isn’t that simply a logical fallacy in drawing conclusions?
3. What are the legal implications for a person who is qualified but doesn’t have certification from the Chief Rabbinate? Is a marriage he performs valid? And things like that.
4. Why do people throw away things (on Passover) that are not leavened food, have no connection to leavened food, but just aren’t kosher for Passover, even though they have regular kosher certification? For example, yesterday I saw a woman throwing out tomato paste that is kosher, but not kosher for Passover. Is there a source for that kind of thing?
5. Why didn’t you study at Ben-Gurion if you lived relatively nearby? What was your consideration in choosing a university?
Answer
1. Don’t accept things that are illogical. The claim that they should be accepted because there is some other faculty above reason is nonsense. Of course, if you trust God or a prophet who tells you something that is not logical, you can decide that they understand better than you do and accept it. But that is not faith; it is reason. Exactly like believing a doctor when I don’t understand medicine.
2. Indeed.
3. There is no halakhic authority at all today, and certainly not the Chief Rabbinate. As for halakhic acts like betrothal / marriage, if they were done according to Jewish law they are valid. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the person conducting them or with his authorities.
4. If it doesn’t have Passover certification, there is concern that it may contain leavened food. There is no need to throw it out. You can sell it in the sale of leavened food.
5. I wasn’t living in the south at the time, and in general the consideration was not geographic.