Skip to main content

Thought for the Day: Adherence to Torah Demands an Open Mind

There is a famous (among math and science grad students) anecdote about the mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace.  Laplace was once lecturing and stated that some point was obvious.  One the of students raised a question on the point because he didn't see it as an obvious conclusion at all.  Laplace, so goes the story, went to the side of the room and worked for fifteen minutes filling and erasing the blackboard.  He finally finished and turned back to the class, "Yes; it is obvious."

That's what a scientist means when he says something is obvious: it is directly provable from the data.  It may not be a one or two step process, but the conclusion is inescapable.  That's called having an open mind.  The polar opposite of that attitude is, of course, "nya, nya, nya, nya, nya-yah; I can't hear you".  Or, more poetically, "we hold these truths to be self-evident".  Once something has been elevated to the status of "self-evident", the discussion is finished.  All religions and dogmas are built on a foundation of self-evident beams.

Orthodox/Torah Judaism, by contrast, has no such foundation.  The seminal work on Jewish philosophy -- Chovos haLevavos -- begins with careful and thorough exposition proving (using Aristotelian logic) the necessity of the existence of G-d.  The m'chaber of the Chovos Levavos was taking nothing for granted, no truth as self-evident.  You want to be true, you need to prove yourself.

This is not to say that one does not need a healthy dose of emuna/faith to live according to the Torah.  There certainly is a place and time for leaps of faith.  However, we both minimize and constantly strive to eliminated them.  This is not much different than the leap of faith I take every time I put my foot down on the floor.  I assume, based on past experience, that the floor will support my weight.  I have no evidence the the floor will support my next step, just loads of experience that it always has in the past and I have no reason to expect the next step to be different than the last thousands or millions.  That kind of "blind" faith the Torah does demand.  After all is said and done, after all the factors are considered, it takes as much faith to believe in the Torah and HaShem as it does to believe that the floor will support my next step.

Not self-evident; evident.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thought for the Day: Love in the Time of Corona Virus/Anxiously Awaiting the Mashiach

Two scenarios: Scenario I: A young boy awakened in the middle of the night, placed in the back of vehicle, told not to make any noise, and the vehicle speeds off down the highway. Scenario II: Young boy playing in park goes to see firetruck, turns around to see scary man in angry pursuit, poised to attack. I experienced and lived through both of those scenarios. Terrifying, no? Actually, no; and my picture was never on a milk carton. Here's the context: Scenario I: We addressed both set of our grandparents as "grandma" and "grandpa". How did we distinguish? One set lived less than a half hour's drive; those were there "close grandma and grandpa". The other set lived five hour drive away; they were the "way far away grandma and grandpa". To make the trip the most pleasant for all of us, Dad would wake up my brother and I at 4:00AM, we'd groggily -- but with excitement! -- wander out and down to the garage where we'd crawl
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: אוושא מילתא Debases Yours Shabbos

My granddaughter came home with a list the girls and phone numbers in her first grade class.  It was cute because they had made it an arts and crafts project by pasting the list to piece of construction paper cut out to look like an old desk phone and a receiver attached by a pipe cleaner.  I realized, though, that the cuteness was entirely lost on her.  She, of course, has never seen a desk phone with a receiver.  When they pretend to talk on the phone, it is on any relatively flat, rectangular object they find.  (In fact, her 18 month old brother turns every  relatively flat, rectangular object into a phone and walks around babbling into it.  Not much different than the rest of us, except his train of thought is not interrupted by someone else babbling into his ear.) I was reminded of that when my chavrusa (who has children my grandchildrens age) and I were learning about אוושא מילתא.  It came up because of a quote from the Shulchan Aruch HaRav that referred to the noise of תקתוק
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: David HaMelech's Five Stages of Finding HaShem In the World

Many of us "sing" (once you have heard what I call carrying a tune, you'll question how I can, in good conscience, use that verb, even with the quotation marks) Eishes Chayil before the Friday night Shabbos meal.  We feel like we are singing the praises of our wives.  In fact, I have also been to chasunas where the chasson proudly (sometimes even tearfully) sings Eishes Chayil to his new eishes chayil.  Beautiful.  Also wrong.  (The sentiments, of course, are not wrong; just a misunderstanding of the intent of the author of these exalted words.) Chazal (TB Brachos, 10a) tell us that when Sholmo HaMelech wrote the words "She opens her mouth Mwith wisdom; the torah of kindness is on her tongue", that he was referring to his father, Dovid HaMelech, who (I am continuing to quote Chazal here) lived in five worlds and sang a song of praise [to each].  It seems to me that "world" here means a perception of reality.  Four times Dovid had to readjust his perc
Post a Comment
Read more