Q&A: Yaron Yadan
Yaron Yadan
Question
I once heard the eminent Rabbi and halakhic decisor Rabbi Yaron Yadan speak. He claims that he found errors in the Talmud, maybe also in the Mishnah and other books of the Oral Torah; it’s possible he also claimed this about the Written Torah, I’m not sure about that. And he said that if this is God’s word, and God doesn’t make mistakes, then if errors are indeed found, the Talmud and the rest of the Oral Torah are not of divine origin.
I once saw online really excellent answers from some Torah scholar, point by point: about the passage in Hullin with the cow’s three windpipes, when in practice after slaughter you see two because one of the tubes is extremely thin; about the poison in a cat’s claws, which is really dirt that causes infection when it scratches another animal; about the fish whose scales fall off in the water. I don’t remember everything. But before even answering him at all: everything he argues only works if God is making a mistake, ostensibly. What if God makes mistakes on purpose in order to test us?
Answer
Because there is no logic at all in testing us through errors. Is He trying to make sure we are not honest, God forbid? Where did this bizarre thesis come from?!
Discussion on Answer
Of course. It could also be that He doesn’t exist and that a misleading demon wrote the text. It could be that every word there has a different meaning from what we think. It could also be that we got confused and read Kofiko instead of the Torah. Anything is possible. The question is not what could be, but what seems reasonable, and which claim that is raised requires proof. Yadan argues, rightly, that if there are errors in the Torah, that means it is not divine unless proven otherwise (that is, the claim that He wants to confuse us or something like that is the one that requires proof). Do you want to argue that the default assumption is that He wants to confuse us, and anyone who claims that He is straightforward bears the burden of proof? With a defender like that, I don’t need Yaron Yadan. You’ll collapse trust in the Torah even without him.
And what will you do with the Talmudic passage where the Holy One, blessed be He, laughed and said, “My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me,” and gave Rava supernatural powers to change the order of the world, including the deliberate misleading of a heavenly voice, and to test the sages to see whether they’d be impressed by it and give up?
A strange question. First of all, what exactly am I supposed to do with that aggadah? It could be a mistake. More likely, it’s an allegory meant to teach various things. Either way, it’s clear to me that the heavenly voice did not come to mislead. It expresses the Holy One’s position, and the sages reject it according to the rule that “it is not in heaven.”
According to what you’re saying, the question is not what could be, but what seems reasonable. That’s your starting assumption. What if someone is looking for the absolute truth, and hasn’t reached it yet—whether he assumes that one day he will attain that truth, or whether he assumes that our minds can never attain it? In the meantime, let him choose the path that suits him, because all paths are currently presumed incorrect. Because for him, 99% belief equals 0. What do you think about that?
Good luck to him.
Look, knowing what is definitely correct or true is a bit hard. Knowing what you want to do is easier.
The most reasonable thing is that man created God and not the other way around. A religious person has no proof for this whole structure of tradition and Jewish law. Nothing besides “my father told me.” That’s a very weak argument and a very harmful one. After all, people used to be idol worshippers, and they also used to throw virgins into volcanoes. They can make the same argument—that their father taught them that it was true. People once lived in caves. Complete nonsense—learn to think independently and cast doubt on everything.
Or not necessarily to test us, but maybe He just feels like playing at making mistakes for His own amusement—who can understand heavenly beings?! He’s not in our clique.
And I don’t know whether He’s trying to make sure we aren’t honest! Do you know?