The Stupidity of Dark Light’s Fanatic Literalism
For a tenth man for your minyan, is it better to free a slave or build a golem?
When you are in the Dark Light, you simply ignore so much of the strange buzz flying around the edges of the superstitious and silly haredi communal mindset. Only later does it become clear that this absolute fundamentalist nonsense is coming from the top. As Shmarya likes to quote that old Yiddish saying, “The fish stinks from the head.”
Anyway, never mind what I think. Clearly the Talmud is always true and absolutely literal. Let’s take a look at this week’s Talmudic lesson from Dark Light, on the choice between getting your 10th man for a minyan from a slave you free, or through making a golem.
Rabbi Weinbach, the “dean” of Ohr Somayach, writes,
There were only nine Jews in the synagogue without a tenth man in sight to complete the minyan-quorum necessary for communal prayers. Rabbi Eliezer deemed the situation an emergency and liberated his Canaanite slave to complete the minyan.
How could he do so, asks the gemara, when it is forbidden to liberate such a slave, in accordance with the Torah command “You shall enslave them forever” (Vayikra 25:46)? The answer given in our gemara is that this ban does not apply when the slave is liberated for the sake of fulfilling a mitzvah. (In Mesechta Berachot 47b this answer is challenged on the grounds that you cannot fulfill a mitzvah through the committing of a sin, and the response is that a mitzvah of communal nature has a special status.)
The question has been raised as to why it was necessary for Rabbi Eliezer to come into conflict with the ban on liberating slaves in order to complete his minyan if he could simply have created a tenth man? The Talmudic sages certainly had the power to do so as is evident from the incident described in Mesechta Sanhedrin (65b). The Sage Rava created a man by using the mystical formula in “Sefer Hayetzira” and sent his creation to his colleague Rabbi Zeira. When the latter spoke to this creature and received no response he realized that this was a man-made man with no soul and the power of speech that goes with it. He therefore ordered it to return to its dust.
If Rabbi Eliezer preferred liberating his slave to making a man, it would seem that this is proof that a man-made man is not considered a Jew who can complete a minyan. What is interesting, however, is that the question of whether such a creature (commonly referred to as a “golem”) is eligible for inclusion in a minyan was actually dealt with some three centuries ago by Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi in his Responsa of Chacham Tzvi (93). He concludes that even though there is an argument to be made that since the creations of tzaddikim are considered as their offspring and therefore the golem should be considered a Jew, the aforementioned incident of Rabbi Zeira consigning Rava’s golem to the dust bin proves that such a creature cannot be included in a minyan. His reasoning is that Rabbi Zeira decided that the speechless creature had no value and if he was capable of completing a minyan he would not have so readily disposed of him.
Rabbi Mendel Weinbach is unreal, and so is the haredi world he recruits for. And they become so infuriated when you say they have a “medieval” mentality.
If this is “Torah true Judaism,” we don’t want any.
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Do they have pottery lessons at yeshiva?
Next time I pop over, I shall bring the DVD of the 1913 silent film classic “The Golem of Prague”.
Sounds good. We could invite Mo, but we’ll have to explain that it’s just a movie, and that the Golem can’t actually hear him.
Continuing sadness. Given that everyone’s faith no matter how similar is still unique, and the religion is only a framework for sharing what commonalities their are between the faiths of individuals, the obsession with a minyan indicates a lack of understand of why one should bother to talk to G-d in the first place. By our sharing should our faith be strengthened but the minyan obsession is obsession with the sharing to the exclusion of the faith that brought us together in the first place, without which there is no point in a minyan.
Besides, it strikes me as high impudence to suggest that if G-d can make man out of dust, a rabbi can do it too. One does not follow from the other and as generations of rabbis have shown, all they need to make a new man is a rebbetzin. They still have to wait nine months and thirteen years, but one should thank G-d for the required wait as an opportunity to learn patience and what prayer is for.
Maybe they’re thinking of some special notice or reward for forming a minyan, in which case they’re still missing the point of serving G-d.
It just occurred to me that this would be a terrible thing to come up again if cloning ever succeeds. I can imagine the jpost headlines.
>> A nd they become so infuriated when you say they have a “medieval” mentality
DK, calling them medieval is so ignorant of you! XD
>> A nd they become so infuriated when you say they have a “medieval” mentality
DK, calling them medieval is so ignorant of you! XD
Apparently you believe the gemoro is chareidi.(so do we) Or is it just a pack of lies?
mohammed,
No. You believe the gemorah is chareidi. As does Rabbi Weinbach. The rest of us would say it is not always literal.
My bad, 1920, but here’s how it works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zag79w8eIQ
DK
a pack of lies, in other words. Or what would be the non-literal reading of the gemoro in Sanhedrin?
mohammed,
People try the best they can. Not everything according to a 5th century lens holds up well today.
A pack of lies, in other words.
You know what bothers me the most about an article like this? Rabbi Eliezer violated a commandment in order to get his minyan. Why was it permissible? Because “a mitzvah of communal nature has a special status.” The Rabbis of previous eras were always adjusting the rules in order to accommodate changing circumstances and evolving sensibilities. How often do we execute rebellious adolescents today? We don’t, because, according to them, “it never happened, and it never will!”
However, when the non-Orthodox movements want to implement change, they’re told they can’t, because they aren’t knowledgeable enough. When they counter with, “then why don’t you guys do it?”, the response is, “because no Torah sage of today, no matter how brilliant, can match the brilliance and insight of the sages of the past. They were operating on an intellectual and spiritual level far beyond anything anyone today can attain.” Therefore, there can be no change. How bloody convenient.
Jeff,
It’s worse than that. Judaism itself used to be more fluid, and something went very wrong. Now it only gets more strict. It’s a real problem.
Hah, Jeff, I’ve occasionally received similar responses. I then ask who’d given those sages the brilliance / insights / knowledge to decisively alter the intention of the Torah or to introduce new laws. I usually get told it was god, but that he doesn’t make sages anymore. I then ask whether they either claim to know god’s will or whether they believe god is dead or has lost his ability of impact. Gets them pretty upset.
S/F,
Yeah, that’ll do it. Fundamentalists always get upset when you back them into a corner. The way in which my nephew wriggles out of it is to tell me that God has withdrawn himself even further from the world than he did during the Biblical era. He had to do it, or his aspect of “justice” would have destroyed the world by now because of our depravity (it always ends up being humanity’s fault, same as with Christian fundamentalism) . The result - we don’t have immediate reward and punishment, but, at the same time, he can’t intervene as directly as he used to.
God doesn’t make sages any more? What happened - sage machine got broken? I know - you can’t get a repairman to come to the house any more. I hope He kept the receipt.
The “yeridos Hadoros” — the “decline of the generations” since Sinai, is one of those very stupid ideas that exists in ultra-Orthodoxy but is not held in Modern Orthodoxy.
If you want to find out how big a fanatic someone is, this is a great gauge.
I heard an OU rabbi once outline the exact opposite idea of “yeridos HaDoros” — one parallel to macro-evolutionary theory. It was pretty impressive.
Judaism itself used to be more fluid, and something went very wrong.
Yeah. I don’t think we can get it back. Most of Orthodoxy is a dead end. The LWMO are nearly extinct (if nothing else, they’ll drop dead of exhaustion from hopping back and forth over that fence!). The non-Orthodox may survive (if our civilization, or even our species, has any real time left, which I doubt), but what survives will be of a very different nature. Perhaps it will be another great redefining moment in the history of Judaism - but I don’t really think so.
This idea of a decline from a mythical golden era to a current age of moral weakness and collapse occurs in most religious timetables. The Buddhists have it as well.
The OU rabbi gave a positivist argument? I’d like to hear more about that.
Mohammed let me explain what you did not learn at Yeshiva
From the times of antiquity until the early 19th century, it was generally believed that creatures such as vermin and insects and even fish and rodents were created from mold, that is, from rotted material or from the mud. This opinion obviously relied on the appearance of these type of creatures in different materials with no source of life apparent to the naked eye. According to Aristotle it was a readily observable truth that aphids arise from the dew which falls on plants, fleas from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, crocodiles from rotting logs at the bottom of bodies of water, and so forth. Given the influence of Aristotle, this theory of spontaneous abiogenesis reigned in biology during antiquity, the Middle Ages, and up through the 17th century when it became controversial following the invention of the microscope and was conclusively proved false by Pasteur in 1861.
When it came to the natural sciences the Gemara and Rishonim followed the scientific opinion of their day and accepted spontaneous abiogenesis as being correct. The Gemara rules that a louse does not reproduce. According to Rashi it is created from man’s flesh, according to the Tosfos from the sweat of man, according to the Rosh from old clothes, and according to the Ran and the Rambam from mold. (A flea, according to some of the Rishonim, is created from dust.). The Amoraim were so resolved in their opinion that lice do not reproduce through procreation, but are created from inanimate matter that in Gemara in Shabbat, on page 107b, they ask: “And does the louse not reproduce? Yet it is said: G-d sits and nourishes all, from the karnei re’emim to the eggs of lice” (meaning that there are eggs from which come lice, and therefore lice do reproduce). And they explained it: “There is a creature which is called “eggs of lice”.
Rodents were also considered to be created by abiogenesis. The Gemara relates that a certain Zionist challenged Rebbi Ami regarding Techiyas ha’Mesim, saying that it is not possible for a decomposed body, which turns into earth, to rise again as a living body. One of Rebbi Ami’s proofs for Techiyas ha’Mesim was the fact that there is a rodent that lives in the valley “that today is half-flesh and half-earth, and tomorrow it becomes completely flesh.” The Mishnah in Chulin (126b) mentions a mouse “which is half-flesh and half-earth; one who touches the flesh part is Tamei, and one who touches the earth part is Tahor.”. The Rambam wrote that those who think it impossible the the ant, wasp birth from mold, and others like them amongst the birds and vermin, are from mold within food are ‘know nothing of natural wisdom’. The idea of a Golem created out of a river mud derives from these ideas.
Mohammed, a lie is generally understood to mean a deliberate falsehood. The falsehoods in the Gemarra and Rishonim were made in good faith and were reasonable by the standards of their time. We cannot hold these false beliefs against them indeed their willingness to incorporate scientific ideas is commendable when compared against the current Haredi outlook. Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsh was of the view that the Chazal “did not especially master the natural sciences, geometry, astronomy, or medicine - except insofar as they needed them for knowing, observing, and fulfilling the Torah. We do not find that this knowledge was transmitted to them from Sinai..And if, as we see things today, these instances are considered fiction, can Chazal be blamed for ideas that were accepted by the naturalists of their times? And this is what really happened. These statements are to be found in the works of Pliny who lived in Rome at the end of the time the Second Temple was destroyed… [goes on to show that the notion that the human spine turns into a snake after 7 years, which is found on Bava Kama 16b:, actually predates the Talmud and was recorded by the ancient, Roman naturalist, Pliny, in his own book”.
The Haredi view is that it is heretical for a Jew to believe that Chazal may have tentatively accepted scientific theories which were subject to the limitations of their era and flawed because their Divine inspiration or Divine assistance made them infallible to errors, and impervious to misinformation and that accordingly a Jew is obligated to totally ignore modern science, his common sense, or even the evidence of his own eyes and ears if there appears to be any contradiction between this evidence and the most literal readings of the Talmud. In other words Haredism and reality are diametrically opposed. The Yekkers have been told by the Haredi Golems that Rabbi S R Hirsh should be marginalised.
Mohammed, I would not regard the Haredim who still believe in abiogenesis as a pack of liars since they seem to hold this falsehood in good faith. ‘Building a wall’ to keep out contradictory modern opinion however shows Hareidism as neurotic as well as delusional. The more important question is how can we allow such people to run an education system. It contradicts the Rambam who wrote “And do not ask me to reconcile everything that [the Sages] said on matters of astronomy with the situation as it really is, since science at that time was lacking and they did not speak so because they had a tradition of those things from the Prophets, but from the scholars of those generations in those disciplines or they heard them from the scholars of those generations, and this is not the reason to say of those things that match the truth that they are incorrect or accidentally correct, but all that can be clarified so that it matches proven reality is better and more correct”
Jeff, tell your nephew to read up on the Flood again and what the rainbow’s supposed to symbolize.
I’ll try, but it won’t do any good. You know they subordinate Torah to Gemara - then filter everything through the writings of the Alter Rebbe.
Maybe I’ve been outside the Haredi world for too long, but it seems to me like a pretty clear argument for counting women in the minyan.
Well, maybe not clear. But let me explain.
R. Weinbach writes
In other words, he learns the principle that golems don’t count for minyan from Rabbi Zeira’s destruction of the golem.
But wouldn’t we know the golem wouldn’t count, because he couldn’t speak? But R’ Weinbach would have counted the golem in the minyan had R’ Zeira not destroyed him… even though he was mute.
Obviously, R’ Weinbach believes R’ Ashkenazi would count a mute for a minyan. So too, of course, a woman.
That’s the problem with Conservative Judaism. Their teshuvos in favor of feminism were always rational, and therefore alien to the haredim. Now, a good achronishe teshuva such as the one R Weinbach was clearly implying — that’s the ticket!
First of all, this is a cheresh hashoimaya ve’eynoi medaber, not a deaf mute. Secondly, by that logic you would count a cheresh and koton also. thirdly, R Zeira didn’t need him for a minyan, that was just the way he realized he was a golem. As for counting him for a minyan once he realized he was a golem, there’s a case to be made that cheresh is an assumption of limited intelligence and a golem possibly has more.
Mohammed wrote “there’s a case to be made that cheresh is an assumption of limited intelligence and a golem possibly has more.”
Clearly somewhat who believes in such buba maiysos has less intelligence than a golem. Mohammed, do you think that such a person has less intelligence then a cheresh as well?
Mohammed, I am still waiting for your replying regarding my question as to whether a louse reproduces by laying eggs?
Why do you ignore me and not ignore Reb Yudel? Enough of your favoratism!
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