Meiri (Mishlei 30:6): One’s faith should be established entirely on the basis of the tradition received from the prophets. Only after it is firmly established should one work to comprehend the details through intellectual study. However, intellectual study should never be the determiner of the validity of one’s faith. This caution has been mentioned more than once because there are some of our people who feel that they have to justify and rationalize every aspect of the Torah. It is well known, however, that there are many aspects of the Torah that are simply not amenable to philosophical proofs. Those that insist on philosophical proof have their faith progressively weakened as the result of the inevitable repeated failure to find them. That is why I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that rational proof simply doesn’t exist for many things. In fact, the Torah requires that we start with faith - rather make its acceptance dependent upon some artificial criterion of philosophical justification. Furthermore, even those aspects of Torah which are convincingly provable - not everyone is capable of understanding these proofs. Therefore, those who are not competent in these areas should not get involved in these types of proofs - lest he be thoroughly messed up by the endeavor… In sum, in these deep matters there are very few who can meaningfully and successfully deal with faith on a purely philosophical basis. Therefore, it is appropriate for everyone to rely on the words of the Torah and the prophetic tradition - because that is the proven solid foundation and the length of our days.
Monday, February 28, 2022
New law to sanction divorce refusers
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/322995
The Knesset's Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday approved a bill to amend the law regarding rabbinical courts' enforcement of divorce rulings.
The bill was brought forward by Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana (Yamina), who intends to bring it for its first reading in the Knesset plenum on March 16.
The new sanctions against divorce refusers would expand preventing including preventing them from using business and bank services, preventing them from using credit cards and other forms of payment, an option to issue a direct fine (not through a complex court process), the option to enforce isolation in unusual cases and immediately (without a waiting period of 30 days), the option to require "payment for forcing obedience" from the refuser for the benefit of the refused partner, and an option to create a "divorce refusers registry" which will be open to the general public.
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Ex-AG William Barr attacks Trump as unfit to lead as he urges GOP to move on in ‘24
William Barr is urging Republicans to put former President Donald Trump in the rearview mirror in 2024 in favor of the political party’s younger leaders, the former attorney general writes in a new book.
In his upcoming 600-page book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” Barr says he thinks Trump could’ve beaten Joe Biden in 2020 if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The conservative lawyer encouraged members of his party to consider “an impressive array of younger candidates” that he did not identify by name — who he believes shares Trump’s agenda but not his “erratic personal behavior,” the book says.
The former attorney general, who served from February 2019 to December 2020, wrote that the former president has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”
Some on the far-right in the US oppose Ukraine, why? - analysis
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-698802
But if Russia is portrayed as somehow positive because it is nationalist and cares for traditional values, why is Ukraine portrayed as bad. Ukraine is also nationalist and ostensibly also cares for traditional values. The problem is that in the West people must choose sides, so Ukraine is bad because it is backed by the “left” in the West and thus the far-right must dislike it. An added aspect in US domestic politics is the sense that former US President Donald Trump was impeached for his involvement in Ukraine and he was also accused of being pro-Putin. Therefore the far-right who are sympathetic to Trump tend to like Putin and also think Ukraine is some kind of center of corruption, used by “globalists” like “George Soros” to push some kind of “European” agenda. In this narrative Ukraine is not really a cause for freedom fighters because it isn’t really a good democracy, and it is “flawed” and has “oligarchs.” What about Russia’s oligarchs and lack of democracy? That doesn’t matter in this telling, because the assertion is that defending Ukraine “isn’t in our interests” and we are being lied to about it being a democracy.
The Kuzari Principle: Not a Proof but Evidence of Plausibility
https://www.thetorah.com/article/modern-faith-in-sinai
With our account of the nature of faith, the Kuzari principle doesn’t have to be strong enough to provide evidence sufficient for belief, but can still play a role in making your faith reasonable. The more pressing question is less to do with evidence, and more to do with values. Is it desirable that there should have been such a revelation, and that God should have chosen a certain people, and communicated that which He was said to have communicated to them? That seems to depend a great deal upon how you view the notion of the Jewish election (was it exclusive, and what end did it serve), and what you take the content of the revelation to be – how do you interpret the laws and their ethical significance?
THE KUZARI PRINCIPLE - INTRODUCTION
https://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/Kuzari_Principle_Intro.htm
One of the foundations of Judaism is the revelation at Sinai. In this chapter we will see that belief in Sinai is reasonable. There is enough evidence in favor of the revelation to make it reasonable to accept. The evidence is of a very special sort, and that requires a long introduction
The Kuzari Principle
http://www.theapj.com/the-kuzari-principle-2/
What we call the Kuzari Principle is what I italicized in the quotation: Personal experience is equal to uninterrupted tradition as a ground for belief. Surely the principle is in need of some refinement, but the basic idea is true. The scientific community doesn’t feel the need to repeat every experiment ever conducted before accepting the relevant findings for themselves. If there wasn’t a modicum of trust given to the testimony of past scientists about their findings, then we could never move on, because we’d first of all have to repeat the entire history of science in our own laboratories. If we take the best elements of these medieval arguments and try to fashion them into something formal, and prima facie worth considering, we end up with something like the following:
If a reliable witness, called person-y, witnesses an event, event-x, and an uninterrupted chain of reliable sources passes on person-y’s testimony, even over many years, then, given certain provisos about the make-up of the chain, about person-y and about the reported circumstances of the original observation, we have good reason to believe that event-x transpired.
(KP2) The epistemic warrant provided by such a chain increases with the number of reliable observers in the chain who claim to have witnessed the event themselves.
There were 12 Golden Calves not one
Rav Yakov Kaminetsky (Emes L’Yakov Shemos 35:1): The sin of the Golden Calf was the opposite of the Giving of the Torah. Because our Sages said that at the Giving of the Torah the Jews were totally united. In contrast the Yerushalmi (Sanhedrin 10:2) says there in fact were 12 Calves made because they desired many gods such as the god of Moab and the god of Edom in other words they desired the unique power of every nation. Why did they desire multiple gods? It seems that amongst the Shevatim themselves there were different views as to which god to chose and therefore each Shevat made their own god i.e, their own Calf. Consequently when Moshe came to give the commands regarding the Mishkan he first needed to unite them in one place for a common goal.
Tucker Carlson leads rightwing charge to blame everyone but Putin
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/25/tucker-carlson-fox-news-russia-putin
“Rather than blame the actual aggressor for attacking his weaker neighbor, right-wing media pinned the blame on Biden for supposedly projecting weakness and vulnerability to Putin,” Media Matters, a non-profit which monitors conservative media, wrote.
“In the right-wing media echo chamber [...] the fault for this invasion lies with a mind-boggling variety of scapegoats, including Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American environmentalists, the LGBTQ community, and even the team here at Media Matters for America - anybody, that is, other than Putin.”
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Cheney Rips Trump, Pompeo for 'Praising' Russian President: 'Putin Is Evil'
https://www.newsweek.com/cheney-rips-trump-pompeo-praising-russian-president-putin-evil-1682980
White Nationalists Raid CPAC But Find Themselves Right at Home
The Conservative Political Action Conference, the nation’s premier gathering of right-wing, pro-Donald Trump die-hards is here this year. The American First Political Action Conference, the nation’s premier gathering that includes right-wing, pro-Donald Trump die-hards who are also overt and public white nationalists, is here this year too. In theory, the two events are separate, hosted at different hotels, selling different tickets, and separated by 10 miles of Florida highway. In practice, and in ideology, the lines are a bit blurry, and it’s unclear whether anyone in CPAC leadership cares enough about the white nationalist presence to do anything significant about it.
It is clear, however, that some prominent CPAC speakers are, as the kids say, here for it.
That’s most obvious with Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, the House Republican from Georgia who proudly took the stage at AFPAC on Friday night, hours before her Saturday speaking appearance at CPAC. On Friday she was introduced by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist whose own AFPAC address featured giggling praise of Adolph Hitler. Greene spoke at CPAC on Saturday morning, and pressed afterward about AFPAC and Fuentes, she said she was there to address his audience and claimed to have no knowledge of him nor any affiliation with — effectively pleading total ignorance and detachment from a conference she’d been a featured speaker at and a leader who’d introduced her.