Q&A: The Difference Between You and Rabbi Lando, May He Live Long, Regarding Torah Study and the Survival of the People
The Difference Between You and Rabbi Lando, May He Live Long, Regarding Torah Study and the Survival of the People
Question
Rabbi Lando was quoted today as saying that engagement with Torah is what won the war with Iran for us.
You argue that engagement with Torah itself can explain the survival of the Jewish people over long periods, since God, in your view, does not intervene anyway (at least not recently).
So what exactly is the difference between you regarding the connection between Torah study and the survival of the people?
It seems that, practically speaking, you both maintain the same thing in this specific sense..
Answer
I read a few quotations from his nonsense, and I’m offended by the comparison. Not by the claim itself that Torah protects. I don’t agree with it, but that isn’t nonsense—it’s just a different opinion. The arguments he brought as proof are on the level of a preschool child. And in the end, it’s true that I also think engagement with Torah has importance and that it protects us (without mysticism). So what? Why do you think there has to be a difference between us on each and every point?
If you think the Torah protects by the very act of studying / engaging in it, while Rabbi Lando, may he live long, by contrast thinks that at the root of the study there is also some mystical element that affects reality (for example, Torah study causes Iranian missiles to miss our pilots), then the difference between you is essential and enormous.
But it’s not entirely clear what Rabbi Lando, may he live long, thinks regarding the way / form in which Torah study has its effect.
Presumably, most of the pilots and technicians were not dealing with the Talmudic topic of “despair without awareness” before the decisive sorties, but were rather practicing aerial refueling, dropping precision munitions, and aircraft maintenance.
So somehow it makes more sense to me that survival really would have to be connected to some mystical / spiritual mechanism (even without God intervening in nature), because otherwise it’s hard to connect Torah study to survival, even if it is a divine text.