Question

Hello,
My name is Tzafrir Sharabi (age 56). Over the past year I’ve been exposed to the content you publish; I’ve read dozens of columns you’ve published, watched your lectures, and encountered your ideas. I’d like to express my gratitude for your work, both because it reinforces and resonates with important principles in my religious worldview, and because it serves as a trigger for reflection on essential issues concerning human beings in general and the religious person in particular. Alongside that, I’d like to raise two issues that cause me a certain discomfort: the decisiveness that characterizes your views on controversial subjects. By using logical principles that you adopt, or by relying on assumptions that seem self-evident to you, you sometimes reach firm conclusions without qualifications, where in my view qualifications do have a place. And often there is also an added blunt contempt for the opposing view, and sometimes I get the impression that it slips into ad hominem territory, even though in general you strongly protest against that phenomenon. I can’t avoid the assessment that you have adopted for yourself a number of basic assumptions/principles that you do not challenge—not because they cannot or should not be challenged, but for the sake of convenience, to avoid a life of intellectual chaos. If that is correct, then the gap between you and those who hold mistaken views (from your perspective) is a "quantitative" gap, not a "qualitative" one. I would probably feel more comfortable if you presented your views with more qualification and without contemptuous attacks on people who hold opinions different from yours—but perhaps I’m naïve and it’s all just a matter of ratings… All the best.