[Avodah] "Blei Gissen"; should we believe in this?

[Michael Makovi]

Was: [Areivim] "Blei Gissen"; should we believe in this?

>I don't know what we've come to but in those circles where one is required
>to believe in the absolute literal truth of every medrash, where one must
>believe in spontaneous generation of lice, believe in mermaids, believe that
>Moshe Rabeinu was 20 feet tall or whatever -- well, once it's a mitzva to
>believe impossible things, I guess there's no end of impossible things to
>believe in.  Vechol hamarbeh harei zeh meshubach, I guess.
>--Toby Katz


In the Rav Hirsch website that was posted last week, one of the
articles on aggadah says everything about science and aggadah that
Rabbi Slifkin would say. So when Rabbi Slifkin gets put in cherem, it
makes one wonder...

As an aside, I remember when I read the shita that aggadot are
m'Sinai, I was aghast. I exclaimed, "But those aggadot were "just" the
shul sermons of the Rabbis; they were given to be simple to women and
children; they were simply stories "made up" to encapsulate a certain
moral theme, with the story itself secondary; many Rishonim said the
aggadot were the personal ideas of the Rabbis", etc.; "So now I have
to believe that Chazal received the stories themselves at Sinai, that
they'd later invent out of their own minds according to their own
personal (non-Sinaitic) thoughts?!". As one can see, I was sticking to
the previous shita, of aggadah not being Sinaitic, and trying to fit
it with the opposite shita of Maharal. So finally, I okimta'ed the
m'Sinai shita, until I concluded that Maharal's intent was that the
moral itself was Sinaitic, but not the story itself, and if there is a
conflict between two aggadot, it means their basic ideas are Sinaitic,
but the details are not (hence the conflict), and sometimes, the only
Sinaitic part of a drash might be the basic idea that there is no
superfluous word in the Torah, but the entire rest of the aggadah is
not Sinaitic at all. And I concluded this was Maharal's intent. Then I
found Rav Hertz's introduction to the Soncino Nezikin where he simply
says the aggadot are stories and fables, invented to teach a story. And
then of course I found more writings on the same point.

Mikha'el Makovi