R' Slifkin's defense of Gedolim

I have been having an exchange with Shlomo M [on this post] who asserts that gedolim are not aware that the majority view is that Chazal made mistakes in Science. I have asserted that they are fully aware of these views but have a different understanding of these critical views of Chazal by major rabbinic figures through the ages. Furthermore Shlomo M. assumes that only a "rationalistic" view is identical with truth - which it is not.

Shlomo M. said...

Rav Soloveitchik had no interest in these matters. Rav Kamenetzky was quite naive and probably thought that it was an aberrant (but legitimate) view. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was totally irrational in these things, he said that Rishonim who said that Chazal were mistaken in science, didn't really believe it and wrote it for kiruv! On the other hand, R. Hirsch and R. Herzog z"l, who had expertise in this area, considered that which you call "R. Avraham ben HaRambam's view" to be the normative view.

Who do you mean by "contemporary Gedolim"? Charedim? Even those who are aware of this shittah, don't realize how widespread it was. They are quite unaware of the rationalist school of thought. (The same is probably true for the view that there is no such thing as gilgulim.)

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Daas Torah responded:

In other words you are saying that most if not all contemporary gedolim were totally unaware of these mainstream sources or their ignorance of philosophy prevented them from noticing it. But that R' Slifkin was able to discern that this is in fact the majority view.

Your understanding of gedolim is outrageous. Rav Soleveitchik didn't care?! He wasn't interested in truth!? Rav Yaakov was naive?! the Lubavitcher Rebbe was irrational?? Chas v'shalom. Do you think that Rav Lichenstein would say such a thing or even think it? Does R' Slifkin think that his powers of discernment are greater than all these gedolim?

Thus we are faced with three possibilities. 1) Gedolim don't know how to learn as well as R' Slifkin 2) Gedolim are aware of this view but are afraid to say it because of fear of kanoim 3) there is an alternative way of understanding what these sources mean.

I assume your view is number 1 or 2.

I'll stick with number 3. Obviously gedolim are familiar with these sources but their understanding of them is different than yours.

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I think that additional support for my understanding is contained in an essay of R' Slifkin entitled " In Defense of My Opponents".

"People are certainly entitled to strongly oppose the views of Rambam and any other Torah scholar. This need not be at all at odds with having great respect for Rambam himself. Ramban (Nachmanides) was full of admiration for Rambam, but this did not prevent him from condemning some of Rambam’s ideas in the strongest terms. If a person is entitled to follow Maimonides in adopting his views, why is someone else not entitled to follow Nachmanides in rejecting them? The actual burning of Rambam’s books was a tragedy, but it was not wrong for them to be opposed. It is certainly legitimate for today’s luminaries of the yeshivah world to reject the view of Rambam and others that the Talmud contains errant scientific statements, and to insist upon the absolute infallibility of the Talmud. They may be mistaken in believing in the existence of spontaneously-generating creatures, but they are fully entitled to hold this belief.

Of no less concern to my opponents is that the rationalist approach is not only wrong, but dangerous. In this, they are displaying sensitivity to a very real concern. The zealots who engineered the campaign against my books attained signatures by telling the Gedolim about how my books were causing harm, and about the angelic yeshivah student who read the books, dropped out of yeshivah and went off the derech. As it happens, I investigated the case and discovered that the student in question dropped out of the yeshivah and went to YU! I certainly don’t know of anyone who was harmed by my books, whereas I know of hundreds of people whose faith and Judaism was strengthened by them. But I definitely agree that there are potentially many people who could be harmed by my books. You don’t go into Mea She’arim and start teaching them about dinosaurs and evolution – it will rock the foundations of their world. And if someone has spent his entire life in an insular community, was taught to revere absolutely everything in the Talmud as the word of God, and has no knowledge of science that would lead him to doubt this, it would shake his faith terribly to learn of great Rishonim who said otherwise. Now, I don’t believe that such people ever read any of my books, at least not before they were banned. But I can certainly understand that books which are written by a graduate of mainstream yeshivos and published by a well-known Orthodox publisher, complete with prestigious rabbinic endorsements, can be perceived as targeting such an audience.

Furthermore, the rationalist approach innately involves dangers. It opens a Pandora’s Box; while issues such as evolution and Talmudic science can be resolved, other challenges, such as those from archeology and academic Biblical scholarship, are vastly more problematic. And in the long run, rationalism can have disastrous consequences. As Paul Johnson notes in A History of the Jews, Rambam “laid dangerous eggs which hatched later… he brought a confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason which fitted his own calm and majestic mind but which was in due course to carry Spinoza outside Judaism completely.” Of course, the anti-rationalist approach carries its own dangers – people who have their questions stifled, or who discover that they are being fed false information, will be resentful and rebel – but communities are entitled to choose which risks they wish to deal with.

But even if the Gedolim personally oppose the views of the rationalist Rishonim, don’t they have to respect their right to be taught? Absolutely not. Every community has the right to choose its own educational approach, and to select its own leaders who will make such decisions. The charedi community has the right to choose to submit to the directives of the rabbanim that they consider to be the Gedolim (albeit that there is no basis for asserting that the entire Jewish People is obligated to listen to them). And they have the right to say that they oppose the rationalist school of thought and that they wish to exclude it from the curriculum. When challenged with the question that Rambam’s Guide of the Perplexed contains the same unacceptable views as my books, Rav Elyashiv replied that if someone were to publish a contemporary edition of the Guide that was actually readable, he would equally oppose it. This is a perfectly legitimate and understandable position. In the same way as Rambam had the right to oppose the mystical and superstitious approach that he disapproved of and which was harmful for his community in Egypt, his opponents had the right to oppose his rationalist approach that was unsettling for their communities in France."

Abuser from Meah Shearim convicted

Ynet:

The Jerusalem District Court found Avraham Katz (40) an ultra-Orthodox man from the Meah Shearim neighborhood in the capital guilty of three counts of sodomy and indecent assault against minors.

Monday's somewhat unusual conviction was secured after members of the ultra-Orthodox community filed a police complaint against the man – a rare move by itself in a community which usually deals with such acts within itself.

The indictment against Katz details three cases, which took place in mid 2006, December of 2007 and May of 2008. According to all three accounts, he would approach teenaged boys, lure them to accompany him and once they were alone he would touch them in various ways for his own sexual gratification, sodomizing at least one of his victims as well.[...]

Homosexual Adoption

YNet:

Two years after petitioning court to allow them to adopt child they have been fostering since 1995, Prof. Uzi Even and Dr. Amit Kama can now officially call Yossi their so

The Ramat Gan Family Court set a precedent Tuesday after allowing a gay couple to finally adopt their foster son after 14 years.

Prof. Uzi Even and Dr. Amit Kama have been serving as foster parents to Yossi Even-Kama, 30, since 1995.

"The court finds that all of the stipulations noted in the adoption laws and pertaining to the foster child in question have been duly met," Justice Alisa Miller noted in her ruling. "I hereby grant the adoption decree and state that Yossi Even-Kama is now Uzi Even and Amit Kama's son."

Yossi first arrived at the Even-Kama home in 1995, after being disowned by his family for being a homosexual. Even and Kama soon petitioned the Israeli Social Services to become his foster parents, and when their request was granted they also became Israel's first-ever gay couple to be recognized as a foster family. [...]

Free-will & Compulsion

Rav Tzadok(Tzedkas HaTzadik 43): There are times when a person is presented with such a great test that it is impossible that he should not sin. This is described in Berachos (32a): “How could the son not sin?” This is considered an overwhelming force and the Torah says he is exempt. Also there are times when the yetzer harah seduces with such overwhelming force that it can’t be defeated. This is also described as beyond free‑will (onas). If G‑d twists a person’s heart so that he sins - that is not considered a sin at all since it was G‑d’s will. Look at what it says in Kesubos (51b) in reference to a woman being raped and she protests strongly but at the end she says that the experience was so pleasurable she would have even paid for it. Nonetheless the gemora says she is still permitted to her husband because her lust was aroused so strongly she had no free will. She is not punished even though it is prohibited – because she was forced. However a person cannot testify on himself that he didn’t have free‑will. That is because it is still possible that he did have the power to control his desires. I heard this in regard to Zimri who erred in this matter.

Declining influence of religion in America

Fox News reports:

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said. [...]

while the number of Jews who described themselves as religiously observant continued to drop, from 1.8 percent in 1990 to 1.2 percent, or 2.7 million people, last year. Researchers plan a broader survey on people who consider themselves culturally Jewish but aren't religious

Islam -Religion of Peace

Wall Street Journal reports:

by Tawfik Hamid (a former member of an Egyptian Islamist terroristgroup, is an Islamic reformer and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.)

The film "Fitna" by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders has created an uproar around the world because it links violence committed by Islamists to Islam.

Many commentators and politicians -- including the British government, which denied him entry to the country last month -- reflexively accused Mr. Wilders of inciting hatred. The question, however, is whether the blame is with Mr. Wilders, who simply exposed Islamic radicalism, or with those who promote and engage in this religious extremism. In other words, shall we fault Mr. Wilders for raising issues like the stoning of women, or shall we fault those who actually promote and practice this crime?

Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.

Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.[...[

So, Islamic scholars and clerics, it is up to you to produce a Shariah book that will be accepted in the Islamic world and that teaches that Jews are not pigs and monkeys, that declaring war to spread Islam is unacceptable, and that killing apostates is a crime. Such a book would prove that Islam is a religion of peace.

Abuse - false accusations?

Haaretz

Four times the police brought M. from Be'er Sheva to court to extend his remand. The suspicion was grave: rape of a 7-year-old girl in the toilets at her school. Each time the court ordered a remand extension, M. loudly protested his innocence and demanded a polygraph test. He says that in response to his denials, the police would whisper in his ear "You raped her."

It was only in recent days, after 10 days under arrest and a moment before an indictment was filed, that the police and prosecution acceded to his lawyers' pleas and sent M. for a polygraph test. He was found to be telling the truth and was released. The case was then closed for a lack of evidence of sexual assault, save for what the girl had said.

Three days after he was released, M. still finds it hard to calm down. He chain-smokes; one moment he is sunk in thought, the next he gets up and paces around the room hundreds of times, his eyes fixed on the floor. From time to time he spreads his arms out to his sides. Then he leans on the wall, his face in his hands. "I know that I have to be strong and get through this," he says. "I am praying to God to give me strength to raise my children."

He is 38 years old, married and the father of three. He works in the maintenance department of the Be'er Sheva municipality, taking home NIS 4,000 per month. Only two months ago he moved with his family to a private house in Be'er Sheva.

One morning about a month ago a first-grader at the state religious school, a girl, went into the school's only bathroom, for both boys and girls. Three municipal maintenance workers, among them M., were working nearby, installing tables in the new computer room.

According to the girl, as her mother told Haaretz, "She went into the bathroom and she saw this man. He closed the bathroom's main door behind him and she was paralyzed with fear. He pushed her into one of the stalls and sexually assaulted her. Immediately after he satisfied himself, she escaped. She put her clothes on in the corridor. She was running so fast she bumped into the railing and was hit hard in the chest." [...]

Psychological problems - pikuach nefesh?

I need some help.

I am looking for clearly stated positions that causing psychological problems in others i.e., abuse - is consider life threatening?

Or put another way - what sources say that preventing a person from being abused or rescuing him from abuse - is pikuach nefesh

The above is in reference not only to sexual abuse but physical abuse - and even poor parenting, teaching or psychotherapy.

Obama breaks transparency vow

CBS News

The White House claims that President Obama's administration will be "the most open and transparent in history," and announced on Friday it will convene a conference on March 12 to ensure "transparency" in the way money from last month's massive spending bill is distributed.

This would be a change from the secretive way that bill rocketed into law. As a candidate for office, Mr. Obama promised he would "not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days."

That didn't happen. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus bill, was approved by the Senate on a Thursday. Mr. Obama signed it on a Monday, just three days later.

Mr. Obama also signed the CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization) bill and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act without waiting the promised five days.

Were those all "emergency" bills? Probably not. Even the Democrat-controlled Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 8 percent of the "stimulus" spending comes in budget year 2009. If setting government spending levels in 2010, 2011, and 2012 qualifies as an emergency, it's hard to imagine what doesn't.

This came after Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders rushed the 1,027-page stimulus conference report to a vote and gave their colleagues only hours to read it. (A few days earlier, the House had unanimously approved a non-binding, pro-transparency measure that assured members they would have 48 hours to read the bill.)

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) told CNSNews.com that none of his Senate colleagues would "have the chance" to read the final version before the vote. A Rasmussen Reports poll conducted at the time found that only 24 percent of respondents believed Congress will understand what they're voting on.

For an administration that promised to be the most "transparent in history," and for a House speaker who promised the "most open" Congress in history, this may not be the most auspicious beginning.

Before taking office, Mr. Obama promised new openness in the presidential transition, saying "you can track these meetings" his transition staff had with groups seeking to influence policy. A "Your Seat At The Table" memo said: "This scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials."

That never happened. Although Mr. Obama did disclose documents submitted to the transition staff, his Web site never provided a list of meetings with the names of groups and identities of participants. [...]

Rav Sternbuch - Life without Problems?

Textbooks as propaganda

Fox News:

Jesus was a Palestinian? That's what one public school textbook says.

Although Jesus lived in a region known in his time as Palestine, the use of the term "Palestinian," with its modern connotations, is among the hundreds of textbook flaws cited in a recent five-year study of educational anti-Semitism detailed in the book "The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion."

Authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research found some 500 imperfections and distortions concerning religion in 28 of the most widely used social studies and history textbooks in the United States.

Ybarra, a research associate at the institute, called the above example "shocking."

A "true or false" question on the origins of Christianity asserted that "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus." The teacher's edition says this is "true."

But even though Jesus is the founder of Christianity, the question ignores the fact that he was Jewish. And Ybarra said, "The Christian scriptures say that he preached in Judea and Galilee, not Palestine," a term that was used at the time as a less specific description of the broader region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Ybarra says part of the problem is that publishers employ or contract with writers who are not experts in the subject, or they may use out-of-date information. Or they may bow to special interest groups.

"They're under pressure from all kinds of minority groups, religious groups, and they try to satisfy everyone and that results in content that is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator," he said. "And so, in that process, things can be missed. Errors can survive."

Ybarra also claims that the textbooks tend not to treat Christianity, Judaism and Islam equally.

"Islam has a privileged position," he said. "It's not critiqued or criticized or qualified, whereas Judaism and Christianity are."

One example is in the glossary of "World History: Continuity and Change." It calls the Ten Commandments "moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew God," while the entry for the Koran contains no such qualifier in saying it is the "Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God."

But First Amendment scholar Dr. Charles Haynes, who has written extensively on the subject of public schools and religion, says he thinks sometimes the criticisms go a little too far. [...]

Psychopathology of cults

Haaretz

Mati Lieblich will never forget the day she realized that a man who had been coming to her house for half a year and taking an active part in the study group she started was considered a dangerous guru.

At first she couldn't sleep at night. "He knew where I lived," she says about the sense of terror that overtook her. "He knew my son, he sat in my living room and learned from me."

She consulted with colleagues who warned her, and advised her to stop the relationship with the controversial man. But Lieblich saw an opportunity to try to understand the spiritual-psychological processes that create mentors who enslave their students' souls.

As a psychologist who had studied for her master's degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco - in the Eastern-Western psychology track, which combines the modern Western approach with the Eastern-spiritual approach - it was a professional challenge. The study group that met at her home was meant for therapists.

"They were all adults, with a lot of experience," she says. "An older man sat with us, who used to come with a young woman who wrote things down for him. He didn't introduce himself as a teacher, and at that point I didn't know that she was his student. She existed and was non-existent. She never spoke."

The group met once a week for almost a year.

"Slowly but surely, he began to tell us that he was a teacher," she says. "He began to reveal horrifying stories. He said that someone in his group had a problem of great anger, and he had advised him to initiate a traffic accident and then get out of the car and shout at the man with whose car he had collided on purpose. And I sat and listened, and all the warning signs were already flashing."

At that point, Lieblich turned to a friend who is an expert in the field, and asked about the man. "My friend reacted sharply. It turns out that he's one of the dangerous gurus operating here in Israel. And this was the first time I had to deal with the question of 'What do I do with this phenomenon?' I understood that this was a man who imposed thought control on his group, prevented people from getting into contact with their families, prevented them from sleeping, shook them up in front of the group and undermined everything they did. He moves them around among jobs, tells them to leave temporary jobs and transfers them from one job to another, and they don't settle down anywhere. And this man was sitting in my living room? Learning from me?" [...]

Another crappy Obama nomination

Michelle Malkin reports

I was going to ask whether Barack Obama’s vetters had taken a vacation.

But that would presume that they ever actually showed up for work.

The latest nightmare Obama nomination? Charles Freeman, the White House pick “to serve as chairman of the group that prepares the U.S. intelligence community’s most sensitive assessments, according to three congressional aides.” He’s got a rather, um, colorful history of Israel-bashing, America-bashing views and glaring conflicts of interests due to his Saudi and Chinese ties. Yet, the White House has only now decided to vet his record.

Hello?

Seriously?

Criticism of the pick is coming from all sides — Left and Right.

Frank Gaffney sums up this latest botch in four words: Garbage in, garbage out.

Epigram of this administration.

Obama's cynical use of banking crisis

The Sleight of Hand Behind Obama's Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."[...]