| נשלח ב-27/5/2003 17:33 |
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Path to Ideal Judaism #2
For a law to be a Jewish law, it must obviously stem from the original Jewish law - the Torah.
Now, the Torah as it is presented today is definitely incompatible with many realities. If we create our own system of law and call it a Jewish law just because Jews have created it, this doesn't make it a Jewish law.
The only way to have a realistic Jewish law is to discover what are the eternal principles of the Torah and what are its everchanging details. This means the discovery that the Torah basically reveals the moral laws of nature-reality and that they were expressed through the details relevant at the time they were taught.
It is said that when the issue was discussed whether the Torah was given "from heaven" [supernaturally revealed], Kaplan said: "I don't know if the Torah is from heaven, but I know that the heaven is in the Torah" This meant that upon serious Torah learning we realize that its compatibility to reality is extraordinary "heavenly".
Taking that remark into account, we may realize that the possibility of the Torah stemming from a divine revelation, does not contradict the alterability of its details. It is the principles which are eternal throughout all past, present and future changes of the details.
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| נשלח ב-28/5/2003 03:44 |
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M. Rotam, a Reform, wrote: "I firmly believe that without fundamental values, Liberal Judaism will be unable to measure itself with the challenges of the morrow"
This is a true statement, but it entails another point. For fundamental values to be accepted as such, they have to be taken as absolutes.
Now, for anything to be taken as an absolute, there are two ways, one artificial and one natural. The artificial way is through a supernatural revelation and the natural way is a direct identification of its truth.
Therefore, before delving into analyzing the eternity of the Torah's many subjects, we ought to set its principles and recognize them as absolutes.
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| נשלח ב-28/5/2003 04:05 |
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It has been demonstrated earlier that the acceptance of the notion of a divinely revealed Torah does not contradict reality, since it may be alterable in its details. However, we are too much removed historically and ideologically from Sinai in order to accept the tradition of such a revelation as credible enough for adopting its principles as absolutes.
We will therefore meet our first challenge to find the fundamental principles through the rational way and at the same time identifiying them as Jewish principles.
So lets first check out the ancient principles. Although Maimonides divided them into thirteen, they are included in three main categories as divided by Albo.
The three are:
1. Belief in God,
2. Belief in the Torah as a divine source,
3. Belief in Reward and Punishment.
If we attempt to analyze those three principles and find their rational basis, we shall come up with three abstract principles but the other way around (meaning starting from #3).
1. Choices are important, (not necessarily because of external reward and punishment, but for their own values),
2. Man is not yet strong enough to dispense himself from a moral code. For him to accept it, it must stem from a source he accepts as being absolute (not necessarily a tradition of divine revelation),
3. The absolute source is the direct perception of reality, whatever we call it, God or any other name.
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| נשלח ב-28/5/2003 10:00 |
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Summary of the above:
That which ancient religion achieves through sociological power to handle one's psycholgical motives by brandishing Reward and Punishment and one's philosophical convictions by telling its theories about God and his divine revelation, was thus translated into a rational view.
The psychological motivation becomes one's desire for being compatible (moral etc...) and the philosophical conviction is a simple and pure view of the evident premises within Being (existence etc...).
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| נשלח ב-28/5/2003 12:07 |
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Now in the next cluster we shall take up the principle that the Torah's function is to express reality's principles of compatibility. We shall attempt to present in an orderly sequence and in a logical order that discovery within the Torah
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