[Avodah] R' Angel & Geirus Redux

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Micha Berger wrote:

> ... Nisqatnu hadoros means that we will have to
> increasingly rely on formal law.
> ...
> And thus, it's not calamitous. It's the preplanned way of
> dealing with our increasing distance from maamud Har Sinai.
>
> Moshe gave us formal law in addition to values. "Miymino
> AishDas lamo." We lost many of those values when Moshe died,
> and Asniel had to reestablish those scenarios on more formal
> grounds. Similarly, all of the cases of "shakhechum vechazar
> veyasdum", where AKhG had to use formal rules to reconstruct
> the values lost during Bavel. Similarly churban bayis
> leading to the mishnah, and when we spread out beyond Bavel
> and EY, for the gemara. Loss of culture was ALWAYS, since
> Yehoshua's day, supplanted with use of formal rule.
>
> This is not catastophe. It's why Hashem gave us an AishDas,
> a halachic process unified with those values.

How can I argue with this? It is so simple. It is so logical.

And it is also so cold.

Not cold in a cruel sense, but cold in a lonely sense. In fact, it reminds of the themes which run through Rav Soloveitchik's "Lonely Man of Faith".

It also reminds me of how society at large is finding it more and more difficult to judge the quality of anything, other than by quantifying it in some manner. Standardized test for students are just one example of this.

As we distance ourselves from our roots, we're losing a great deal of sensitivity. We try to compensate for this loss of of subjective discernment by increasing our objective rules, but it pales in comparison.

RMB's comment that "And thus, it's not calamitous." was intended to be comforting. But it is a cold comfort. But, I suppose, that's galus for ya.

Akiva Miller
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