Preface

With putting my response up online, I have in mind to provide answers to people who have already read Naftali’s letter, or those who have significant theological questions about Judaism.

For those of you who already have sufficient belief in Judaism and don’t have such questions, I would prefer that you do not read any further, as even if one finds satisfactory answers to these types of questions, it still comes with a certain undesirable “cost”. Therefore, I cannot encourage in good conscience, anyone who is not familiar with these questions, to read any further.

For those of you who are already familiar with such questions, and for those who can’t control themselves, I have tried to provide answers that I believe are satisfactory and truthful. If you disagree, feel free to let me know in the comment section, but please make the effort to keep the dialogue civil.

I would also like to acknowledge here the work of those who came before me, and have provided some answers to these questions, most notably, Rabbi Gil Student, whose work can be found at www.aishdas.org/toratemet/, and Rabbi Meir Goldberg, at www.truetorah.blogspot.com.

1 Introduction

1. Dear Rabbi

Many years have passed since we studied Torah together. Since then you went on to become a prominent scholar and I continued with my business endeavors. Thank G-d, my business is doing well and I am able to devote part of my time to Torah studies. My wife and children are well and at least outwardly my family seems well integrated in the community where we live.

Inwardly, however, the last few years have been quite trying for me. I seem to have lost the calm and confidence I used to have in observing Yiddishkeit, in following the path which gave my life overall meaning, definite and absolute goals that I should strive to achieve. My belief that the Torah and only the Torah is the absolute Divine truth has been seriously challenged and I find myself at a loss to respond.

2 Proof from Tzaddikim

For this proof, I could have theoretically chosen any of the number of Tzaddikim who lived in our generation, who were able to perform miracles. However, as being a Lubavitcher, I chose to bring the Lubavitcher Rebbe as my example, simply because I know the relevant information very well.

It is my belief with regard to miracles stories that each story adds to the certainty that this is something that is really true. Throughout my years, I have heard well over 500 miracle stories, some of them involving close family relatives. I obviously will not send all of them to you, but I recently took the time to go through the videos that JEM put out on their Living Torah program, and compiled a list of the interviews that had a connection to the Rebbe's miracles.

I will ask you to take the time to watch all of them, as afterwards, it will be much easier to relate to the conclusions I have reached.

3 The Kuzari Proof

This is a famous proof, which is brought down by almost all of the Rishonim, but is explained more at length specifically by Maimonidies, in the eighth chapter of the Laws of the Torah Foundations; the Chinuch, in the introduction to his book; Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, in his commentary to Exodus, chapters 19 and 20; and the Kuzari.

Unfortunately, this proof is commonly presented in the wrong way, which gives the impression that we are bringing a proof based on the account of the Torah, which in turn proves the truth of our religion. That doesn’t really work, as it doesn’t explain why we should assume that the Torah is true in the first place.

4 What We Believe

2. What we believe

Until now, I have understood what Yiddishkeit teaches as typified by the assertions below. I have chosen to weave together various statements and arguments. This is how our beliefs were communicated to me. If I am in error, please do not hesitate to correct me:

1. G-d, who created the Heaven and the Earth 5762 years ago, chose the people of Israel, saved them -- 600,000 adult males, their wives and children -- from Egyptian slavery and revealed His glory to them on Mt. Sinai. Such a thing -- Divine revelation to a whole nation -- was an event unique in human history, and no religion except Judaism claims or has ever claimed to have such a revelation at its foundation.

5 Outreach Arguments - Part 1

3. Outreach arguments

Let me begin this inquiry with the arguments that are usually brought by the people of outreach organizations, whose goal it is to rationally prove to skeptics the divinity of the Torah. Sadly, after I devoted time and effort to analyze these arguments, they all appeared to lie somewhere between charlatanry and ignorance or, more accurately, seemed a mixture of both. Perhaps they may best be described as overenthusiastic.To give one example, they claim that the four animals listed in the Torah as each having a single sign of purity -- the pig, the camel, the hare, and the hyrax -- are the only animals in the world with only one sign of purity. Our Sages, OBM, knew that from Divine tradition and stated so explicitly in the Babylonian Talmud (Chulin 59a). They then argue that if our Sages' tradition of were not of Divine origin, they would not dare say no other animal in the world has only one sign of purity, nor could they be correct.

6 Outreach Arguments - Part 2

One more case of outreach argumentation: they bring a citation from the Zohar (on Leviticus, p. 10a), which says that the world "rolls in a circle like a ball." From this they say we see that even at the time of Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai, who supposedly wrote the Zohar (2nd century CE), the Jewish sages knew that the earth is spherical, while the gentile wise men still thought of it as flat. But what can we say? All the evidence shows the Zohar was not written before the 13th century CE, while the ancient Greeks (specifically, Pythagoras) had already stated in the 6th century BCE that the earth is spherical. True, we do not need the Zohar's statement, for the Jerusalem Talmud, written in the 4th century CE, says that the earth is "made like a ball" (Avodah Zarah, chapter 3, halacha 1) -- but this, again, was said 900 years after Pythagoras, and the Jerusalem Talmud itself uses this statement to explain why a statue of a gentile deity holding a ball is forbidden (the ball symbolizes power over the whole earth); the Talmud admits that gentiles were aware of the earth's spherical shape.

7 The Exodus and History

I can bring more examples of far-fetched proofs by outreach activists, but that is not the point. It does not take much to pull their weak arguments apart (one of those tricks, incidentally, is using haskamot from leading rabbis as weighty arguments in scientific disputes) but the problem seems to go much deeper.

I have searched and researched, but I cannot find any positive evidence for the correctness of our beliefs. History, natural science, and every other field of human activity involved in discovering factual reality (in searching for the truth in its most essential form) yields a great deal of evidence that seems to make the main points of our tradition implausible -- and yet virtually no evidence exists which could serve as support for our tradition.

8 Contradictions in the Torah Text

In fact, the Torah text itself contains much evidence suggesting that it was probably not written down under the circumstances we believe it to have been. Though we believe that the Written Torah should be understood in the light of its interpretation by the Oral Torah, we nevertheless consider the Torah text to be comprehensible, on a plain level, in and of itself. In dozens of places the Talmud says, "The Torah spoke in human language" (see e.g. Yevamot 71a, Sanhedrin 67b, etc.); we find the Rishonim interpreting the Torah according to the plain meaning of its verses in the Hebrew language and considering such interpretations no less legitimate than the exegesis brought in the Talmud and the Midrash (see e.g. Rashi on Genesis 33:20 and Nachmanides on Leviticus 27:29). Sometimes the commentators even rejected the Midrashic homilies on the Torah verses and adhered instead to the plain meaning of the verses in the Hebrew language (see e.g. Rashbam on Genesis 37:2, and Ibn Ezra on Genesis 25:1 vs. Bereshit Rabbah, section 61). The Torah text has its own meaning and may be read and understood on its own by a person familiar enough with the Hebrew language.

9 Authorship of the Torah

Could the Torah have been written down by Moses?

Nor am I doing better with the time at which the Torah was written. According to our tradition (Maimonides, Foreword to the Mishnah Commentary) Moses finished writing the Torah (as G-d dictated it to him) just before his death, in the 40th year after the Exodus. But in Genesis 14:14 we find: "And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them to Dan." The place-name Dan is mentioned once more in the Torah: "And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to the mountain of Nebo... and the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, to Dan" (Deuteronomy 34:1).

10 Were all Prophecies Fulfilled?

5. The Scripture's prophecies -- proof of Divine supervision? 

As I wrote above, the assumption that the prophecies contained in the Holy Writ are correct is a very essential element in Orthodox Jewish belief. The Torah itself says that after Moses's death G-d would raise prophets for the Jews "from among their own people" (Deuteronomy 18:18). A way to find out which prophet is true and which is not is also specified: "And should you ask yourselves, 'How can we know that the thing was not spoken by the Lord?' If the prophet foretells something in the name of the Lord, and this thing does not come true, that prediction is one not spoken by the Lord" (Deuteronomy 18:21-22). Sadly, it seems that many predictions of the Prophets and even of the Torah itself did not in fact come true.

11 The Oral Torah

6. The Oral Torah and the Halacha -- I 

Categories in the Oral Torah

The situation is no less problematic when it comes to a belief in the Oral Torah and the Divine authority of practical Halachic rulings. Maimonides states in the foreword to his Mishnah commentary that the Oral Torah consists of five parts:

"Traditional exegesis [perushim mekubalim], received through the tradition from Moses; there are hints to these laws in the Scripture and they may be derived rationally. There is no disagreement concerning these laws, and when one says, 'This is what I received from tradition,' it should not be disputed."

12 Halacha Given to Moses at Sinai

Halacha given to Moses at Sinai

But let us return to the Oral Torah and its components. So far we have dealt with the "regulations and customs." Now let us turn to the second part of Maimonides' list -- Halacha given to Moses at Sinai. As I quoted above, "there are no logical arguments in favor of these laws" -- that is, they are not derived from Scripture or reason, but Moses received these laws from the Divine at Mt. Sinai, and these laws were transmitted through tradition, without any flaw or alteration until the Oral Torah was written down.

Not only is such a scrupulous oral transmission of detailed laws through 1500 years -- without a single change and with no point forgotten -- extremely unlikely from a common sense viewpoint, but we also have texts which relate that this is not how things happened.

13 Edicts of the Sages

The Sages' edicts

One more part of the Oral Torah, according to Maimonides, is "The edicts [gezerot] which were established by the prophets and the Sages in each and every generation, to make a fence around the Torah." These laws are also admittedly not from the Divine, but from the Sages' own minds -- though, Maimonides says, the Sages were authorized to establish these laws by the Torah verse, "Therefore you shall keep My guard" (Leviticus 18:30), the meaning of which is explained by tradition as "Make another guard around My guard [of Torah commandments]," as described in Tractate Yevamot 21a. The explanation of this verse as giving such great authority to the Sages is itself of the kind of "traditional exegesis [perushim mekubalim], received through the tradition from Moses," who, in turn, received it from G-d at Mt. Sinai. Of this Maimonides said, "There is no disagreement concerning these laws, but when one says, 'This is what I received from tradition,' it should not be disputed."

14 Personal Integrity

7. Tradition -- is it reliable?

Personal integrity -- not the best criterion

However, the questions raised in the above passage are not the main point. The main point is that, as we all know, tradition may well become distorted or forgotten, especially over the course of the 1500 years between Moses and Rabbi Judah HaNasi. The Tosfot, as said above, explicitly admitted this. Therefore it is peculiar that Maimonides was so persuaded tradition could be the only reason for the lack of dispute amongst Chazal on certain laws that he even ruled: "When one says, 'This is what I received from tradition,' it should not be disputed."

Do we simply rely on the personal integrity of each and every one of our rabbis? This seems most problematic -- not only because for common sense plausibility one should require matters not be dependent solely on the personal virtues and abilities of specific people, but also because we have found certain rabbis' concepts of the truth do not square with our notions of fact and historicity: "So we find that truth is whatever leads to good and to the will of the Creator, while lie is whatever bring success to the business of the Master of Lies, he on the other side [Sitra Achra]."

(Rabbi E. E. Dessler, "Michtav MiEliyahu," v. 1, p. 94)

15 Reliability of our Senses

Tradition as the basis of our faith

Because many people see in tradition the main core of our faith, I find it necessary to expand on this matter. What those people think is well described in Nachmanides' commentary on Deuteronomy 4:9: "What is said above (Exodus 19:9), 'And in you, too, they will believe forever,' means that when we tell this story to our children, they will surely know that the story is true, without a doubt, as though all the generations saw [the Sinai Revelation]. For we will not testify falsely to our sons, and will not bequeath them nonsense and useless things. And they will not have the slightest doubt about our testimony which we will testify before them, but they will surely believe that we all have seen, with our own eyes, all that we tell them."

16 Persian History

Judaic tradition unaware of its own history

Moreover, what is often claimed to be a characteristic of our tradition's reliability -- its awareness of the history of its own transmission -- appears to be faulty. The first three mishnahs of Tractate Avot say: "Moses received the Torah from Sinai, and handled it to Joshua. Joshua handled it to the elders, and the elders -- to the prophets, and the prophets handled it to the men of the Great Assembly... Simeon the Righteous was one of the last men of the Great Assembly... Antignos of Socho received [the Torah] from Simeon the Righteous..."

This seems to be a consistent picture. However, if we try to find out when all these people lived, the problems begin. On one hand, the Gemara (Yoma 69a) tells us of the meeting between Simeon the Righteous and Alexander the Great -- the meeting which saved the Second Temple from destruction by Alexander's armies as they conquered the Land of Israel from the Persians. On the other hand, the last prophets were Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (Yoma 9b, Sotah 48b). They returned from Babylonian exile after the edict of Cyrus was issued and took part in building the Second Temple (Ezra 5:1-2); the last of them -- Malachi -- lived after the Temple was built, when sacrifices were already being brought there (Malachi 1:8). So the period of "the men of the Great Assembly" seems to fit the period of Persian rule over the Land of Israel. 

17 Reliability of Our Tradition

Judaism has no mass tradition

Even saying that Judaism has a mass tradition and that this alone is an argument for the tradition's historicity is of no help. A mass tradition would involve many independent personal accounts containing varied details of those events, each from the viewpoint of that particular participant, as one would expect were hundreds of thousands of fathers transmitting the record of the events to their sons. Each account would thus add credence to the others. Yet we have no such mass tradition of the Exodus, the Sinai Revelation, and all the rest. All we have is the Scriptural text, the story of which fathers have told to their sons for many generations.

18 Josiah and Ezra

No Uninterrupted Tradition in Judaism

The Scripture itself admits that for long periods the Torah's tradition was forgotten by the Jewish masses: "And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe: 'I have found the Book of the Torah in the Temple of the Lord. And he gave the book to Shaphan, who read it... Then Shaphan the scribe told the king: 'Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.' And Shaphan read it before the king. When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his garments... And the king gave this order to the whole people: 'Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your G-d, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.' For such a Passover had never been observed since the days of the judges who judged Israel, nor throughout the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah."(II Kings 22:8-23:22)

19 Marian Apparition

Mass Revelation -- Not Unique to Judaism

Many times I have heard that Judaism is the only religion in the world claiming that it was founded in a mass revelation of its deity to people, and that makes it more trustworthy than all the other religions. However, this claim is baseless for the following reasons:

1. It is unclear from the Judaic sources what exactly the people heard from the Divine at Mt. Sinai. Anyway, nobody claims that anything more than the Ten Commandments was revealed there to the people -- and the Ten Commandments, fundamental as they may be, do not comprise the whole core of Judaism. There is no hint in them of such basic elements of our religion as circumcision and ritual slaughter, the holidays and the Day of Atonement, permitted and forbidden foods, laws of family life, or of all the narrative portion of the Torah. All the latter were allegedly revealed by G-d to Moses, who then told them to the People of Israel -- this may or may not be so, but these matters definitely have nothing to do with any mass revelation.

20 Josephus, Philo and Artapanus

Different Jewish traditions of the exodus from Egypt

Returning to the issue of tradition, I find it valuable to note that concerning the events upon which the main core of Judaism is based, several significantly different traditions existed as late as about the beginning of the Common Era, and different Jewish circles and thinkers accepted whichever tradition better fit their spiritual or other needs. The different traditions popular among the Jews at that time cannot all be true, and we have no means of reasonably judging which of those traditions (if any) describes the events as they happened.

21 Accuracy of the Torah's Text

No Definite tradition of the Torah text

So it is proper to speak of different Jewish traditions rather than of the one single tradition preserved by the Jews through generations without alteration or flaw which Orthodox defenders proudly proclaim. I have already written that the tradition of present-day Judaism concerning the Exodus and the Sinai Revelation is based solely on the Scriptural narrative. In the light of this, it is interesting to note that nowadays there is considerable evidence and largely a consensus among scholars that the text of the Scripture itself has undergone significant changes. And though the changes, of which we are now aware, did not affect the main details of the Exodus--Sinai--Land-of-Israel narrative, the findings dealing with the text of the Pentateuch as it looked through ages seem sufficient to undermine a belief in the Divine origin and immutability of each and every word of the Torah -- a belief which is presented as basic to Orthodox Judaism in its present-day form.

22 'Melachah' in the Torah

Likewise, we find in Tractate Shabbat 49b:

"The principal categories of labor, forty less one, to what do they correspond? ...Rabbi Simeon the son of Rabbi Yossi the son of Lakonia said: they correspond to the words melachah [work], melachto [his work], and melechet [the work of], which occur forty less one times in the Torah."

The Gemara continues to say that there are really 40 occurrences of melachah, melachto, and melechet in the Torah, and the Amora Rav Joseph doubts which of the two occurrences -- "Vayavo habaytah laasot melachto..." (Genesis 39:11) and "Vehamelachah haytah dayam..." (Exodus 36:7) -- should not be included in the count, for in the context of one of these verses the word melachah or melachto means something other than "work" or "labor" (see Rashi on Shabbat 49b, s.v. Mishum dektiv).

23 The Dead Sea Scrolls

Moreover, in the Mesorah remarks at the end of the Leningrad manuscript (on which the Adi edition of the Scripture is based), it is written: "The total number of letters in the Torah is four hundred thousand nine hundred forty-five." In all the manuscripts and editions of the Torah known to us, from Middle Ages until now (including the Leningrad manuscript itself and all the editions based on it), the Torah text consists of a bit more than 300,000 letters -- that is, the discrepancy between the text and the Mesorah of the Leningrad manuscript is about 100,000 letters! If even such a basic Masoretic manuscript suffers from a 33% discrepancy between the Torah text and the Mesorah, what reason is there to believe that the Mesorah succeeded in preserving the Torah text in its original form?

24 Julian's Temple

Tradition unreliable -- an example

I feel it necessary to bring an example about the issue of tradition to show why it is highly problematic to rely on a tradition, even a tradition speaking of mass events which would be expected to leave many witnesses behind (as is claimed concerning the Sinai Revelation).

In 361-363 CE, the emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus ruled the Roman Empire. Since he was a bitter enemy of Christianity and publicly announced his conversion to Roman paganism in 361 CE, Christian chroniclers titled him Julian the Apostate. One of the deeds attributed to him is the order to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by Titus in 70 CE. 

25 The Customs of Other Communities

Halachic Traditions Contradictory to the Oral Torah As We Know It

Halachic traditions contradictory to Rabbinic Judaism have been preserved for centuries by certain Jewish communities. These communities did not proclaim war on the Rabbinic tradition as did the Karaites; they simply preserved their own Halachic tradition. Amongst these communities is Ethiopian Jewry, frequently called Falasha. (Since many of them view the term Falasha as derogatory, I will use the term Beta Israel -- House of Israel, which is what that community calls itself.) According to their tradition they are descendants of the Jerusalem nobles who came to Ethiopia with Menelik, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef's halachic ruling of 1973 states that Beta Israel are descendants of the tribe of Dan. In the past two decades, due to massive Beta Israel immigration to Israel and their subsequent subjection to Rabbinical influence and due to the activity of foreign Jewish organizations in Ethiopia, many Beta Israel customs were abandoned and Rabbinic ones adopted; the information I give below describes the original customs and traditions of the Beta Israel community in Ethiopia, as given by Encyclopedia Hebraica (entry Falashim), and by Michael Corinaldi in Jewish Identity: the Case of Ethiopian Jewry.

26 Exegesis of the Torah

The Oral Torah and the Halacha -- II

Chazal's exegesis of the Torah must be rationally analyzed

So tradition, dear to us as it may be, is too vague to base our faith upon or to provide authority for practical Halacha. To Maimonides, celebrating Shavuot 50 days after the first day of Passover is most certainly "traditional exegesis" (see Maimonides, Laws of Permanent and Additional Sacrifices 7:11 and 8:1), and this practice should be shared by all the Jewish communities worldwide -- yet the tradition of Beta Israel does not include such a law, nor the way it is learnt from the Torah; instead it states that Shavuot should be celebrated 50 days after the last day of Passover. So we see that based on reason and factual reality, the category of "traditional exegesis" has no value based only on support from tradition; it should be examined together with the category of Oral Torah laws I have not yet mentioned -- "the laws derived rationally and there was disagreement about them... and in these matters the law is determined by the majority."

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30 Chazal's Attitude to the Torah

Chazal's attitude to the Torah

Moreover, even the Pentateuch -- the most sacred book of our faith -- was treated by Chazal with a certain measure of frivolity which suggests they did not consider it really given word by word by the L-rd of heaven and earth. We have seen already the Gemara in Makot 24a which deals with several Torah verses as though they were Moses's own edicts. Things of that sort are also found in Midrash Tannaim on Deuteronomy, chapter 14. Speaking of the portion which lists the impure animals and birds and which was written twice in the Torah -- in Leviticus 11 and in Deuteronomy 14 -- the Midrash says: "Why were these things duplicated in Deuteronomy? The animals [were duplicated] because of the shesuah and the birds because of the raah vulture -- to teach that one should not be ashamed to say he had forgotten. It is an inference from minor to major -- if Moses, the wisest of sages, the greatest of greats, father of the prophets, was not afraid to say he forgot, a person who is not even one of a thousand millions, of multitude of myriads of his disciples' disciples -- how much more so should this person not be afraid to say 'I forgot.'"

31 The Sages' Morality

Coming Soon(ish)

32 Forbidden Thought and Ending

Forbidden thought?

Lastly, having raised assorted troubling questions I am haunted by the fact that the Halachic system forbids me to so much as think about my queries. Is there some internal insecurity which compelled Chazal to prohibit thoughts which might conflict with their world view?

We know that what distinguishes us as human beings from animals is the capacity for thought and understanding, as Rashi puts it in his comment on Genesis 2:7, "And the man became a living soul": "Animals and beasts also are called 'living soul,' but the human soul has a higher level of living than all of them, for a man also has reason and the power of speech." To be more precise, it is appropriate to say that humanity's uniqueness lies in its capability to understanding abstract concepts -- and this includes mastering language.

Endnote 1

Various Counter-arguments to the Proof from Tzaddikim

One of the most common counter-arguments that I hear, is that maybe the people who retell such stories are not reliable. The problem with that argument is that it isn’t true.

History, in the sense of what actually happened in previous times, is very black and white – either something happened or it did not. It is not as if we can come to a gentlemen’s agreement, where one of us will decide that something did happen, while the other will decide that it didn’t, and both of us would be correct. So whatever conclusion that one person reaches, if it is true, should be as valid for the other as well.

Endnote 2

Endnote 3

Endnote 4

Endnote 5

Endnote 6

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