[Avodah] R' Angel & Geirus Redux

[Michael Makovi]

>  So far I have avoided getting involved in this discussion, mostly
>  because I have agreed with you as compared with RMM that one cannot say
>  that a tinok shenishba bears no guilt for their actions which violate
>  the Torah.
> R' Chana

>>They are not given a free pass that exempts them from mitzvos.
>> R' Daniel Eidensohn

>  On this I agree.  The language in the teshuvos talks about people's
>  taivos, just like every aveyran. People have taivos to not explore the
>  truth, just as they have taivos in other directions.  The proof of the
>  pudding is that a Reconstructionist Sunday School class can, inter
>  alia, produce an RMM.  If he can do it, why can't the rest of them?
>  And if they do do teshuva, then, so long as we are talking about
>  category b), their past averos are considered obliterated.
> R' Chana

Gevalt, is this what we were arguing?? Oy va voy, I misunderstood what
we were arguing about!

The Gemara in Shabbat perek 7 itself argues whether a TsN is b'shogeg
(R' Akiva, Rav and Shmuel) or ones (Munbaz, R' Yochanan and Reish
Lakish). According to the first, "af TsN" is like someone who forget the
inyan of Shabbat b'klal, and he must bring one korban chatat for all
his Shabbatot. According to the second, a TsN is not even shogeg, and
he is totally blameless; he doesn't even have to bring one single chatat.

So if we are arguing whether a TsN is shogeg or oness, then we may as
well just paste the Gemara into an Avodah email and let that be.

I was deliberately trying to be vague; when I said blameless, I
didn't necessarily mean b'klal like an oness; I just meant that he's
as blameless as any of us are when we wake up at 2 AM on Shabbat and
turn on the light switch before we remember what day of the week it is,
or absent-mindedly do borer like we'd do during the week. As far as our
practice goes, without a Beit haMikdash, there's not much a nakfa mina
AFAIK between TsN being oness and shogeg; either way, we wouldn't treat
him differently than we'd treat any other shogeg sinner, which I'm sure
we've all been at some point.

My argument was not between oness and shogeg; I was arguing against Reb
Moshe's meizid. According to R' Chana's terminology, Reb Moshe argues
(a), and I'm equally happy to argue for (b) or (c).

As an aside, that Gemara has an ambiguity that none of my Gemara teachers
was able to clarify to my satisfaction (this is davka what we are learning
in class; actually, we're now several dapim ahead, but...) - the Gemara
sets up Rav and Shmuel as TsN = shogeg against R' Yochanan and Reish
Lakish as TsN = oness. The Gemara then looks for Tannaitic sources,
and brings R' Akiva and Munbaz in a baraitha, for the two positions
respectively. But then, the Gemara asks what actually is shogeg itself
(forget about TsN), and it brings R' Yochanan as shogeg = shogeg b'karet
(he sinned b'meizid but didn't know he'd get karet for it), Reish
Lakish as shogeg b'lav (didn't know it was a melacha), and Munbaz as
shogeg b'korban were he to have not been shogeg (the guy intentionally
sinned and should get karet, and even knew that he'd get karet/skila,
but he didn't know that had he been shogeg hypothetically, he'd have to
bring a korban; this is a self-fulfilling prophesy and makes him into
a shogeg). Now, Munbaz's approach is (aside from being surprising and
astounding) intrinsically related to what he said about TsN being oness;
he said that a shogeg has (or can have) yediah (even 100% yediah!) (and
thus a shogeg can be meizid but shogeg b'korbano shel shogeg) and thus
a TsN is not even shogeg because he has no yediah. If so, then how can
R' Yochanan and Reish Lakish, who follow Munbaz, have such a different
approach to what shogeg atzmo is? The two are intrinsically connected,
and I don't understand how they can mix-and-match shitot like this. Rav
and Shmuel could have shogeg like R' Yochanan and Reish Lakish since Rav
and Shmuel follow R' Akiva, but since R' Yochanan and Reish Lakish follow
Munbaz, how can they differ on what a shogeg itself is, if they follow
Munbaz that a shogeg can have yediah and thus TsN is not even shogeg?
My Gemara rav suggested R' Yochanan and Reish Lakish changed their
opinions later, but wouldn't the Gemara hint at this? And why doesn't
the Gemara ever tell me what Rav and Shmuel hold on shogeg?

[Email #2. -mi]

> The language in the teshuvos talks about people's
>  taivos, just like every aveyran. People have taivos to not explore the
>  truth, just as they have taivos in other directions.  The proof of the
>  pudding is that a Reconstructionist Sunday School class can, inter
>  alia, produce an RMM.  If he can do it, why can't the rest of them?
>  And if they do do teshuva, then, so long as we are talking about
>  category b), their past averos are considered obliterated.
>  Regards
>  Chana

I disagree. Even if you say that I'm like everyone else there, I'm one
out of many hundreds who are still R/C, and with statistics like that,
you have to say that I'm exceptional and cannot be a paradigm. I'm a
spanner in the works. If 50% did teshuva, and maybe even if 33% did,
I'd agree. But it's got to be more like 0.1% or 0.2%.

It's not a simple matter of teivot not to explore the truth. For these
people, there's no reason to consider Judaism in the first place. The
people I knew, they don't even know how ignorant they are, so they
don't even know there's more to find out; as far as they know, they
already know Judaism! I gave the story about studying Kabbalah when
you're a talmid chacham and have studied everything else, and they
honestly thought this included them. I have another friend finally
did teshuva when has 42 or 43; his mother told him (when he was maybe
15 or 20) that he was Jewish, but this fact was totally irrelevant to
him - he said it was like, "So what?", as if someone had told him some
spectacularly irrelevant fact about his ancestors (I'll make one up:
that his great-great-great-grandfather had been a Buddhist whaler who
also ran a photo-shack). This guy did teshuva because when he needed
a new network password, the first word that popped into his head was
"teshuva", so he looked "teshuva" up on Google to see what it meant.

I also gave the story of the C clergy (JTS I presume) who suddenly became
Orthodox after a year at Machon Meir - obviously Machon Meir taught
something that JTS didn't. And since their C shul is who sent them
to Machon Meir (don't ask me why!!), you cannot answer that they must
have already been on the way to O to have chosen Machon Meir - they were
run-of-the-mill C clergymen from what I know. As an aside, I am reminded
of Rabbi Drachman - from what I remember, his R shul in America sent him
to the R seminary in Germany, but he learned also at the Hildesheimer
yeshiva, and came back O, much to the consternation of his R sponsors.

In any case, I'm not a normal R/C student in terms of upbringing (even
if I were, I'm such an anomaly in the statistics that I shouldn't count;
but the fact is, I'm NOT normal in terms of my upbringing, as I will
show) - my mother didn't raise me to me halachically observant, but the
hashkafot she gave me on the meaning of life and being a Jew, etc., from
my earliest years, were very RSRH-ian (when a rav of mine told me to study
his chumash, I was blown away at how familiar everything he said was).

--

(What is amazing is that where did she learn? - in a joint R/C gerut
class!) Similarly, the Zionism she raised me on was inexplicably very
Rav Kook/Rav Kahane/Moshe Feiglin-ish (she's thus gotten into arguments
with the leftist/politically-corect congregants at her Reconstructionist
shul) - when I was about 13 or 14, some three to four years before I
became observant, I decided to make aliyah because "G-d gave us the land,
and He's letting us back, so...".

--

My teshuva was simply that I started reading "Jewish Literacy" (R'
Telushkin) for some reason and decided to wear tzitzit, for some
reason. It was quite a many months before I really understood what I
was doing, which is why I actually kept going to the Reconstructionist
school for another year, and got into these arguments with people there
(the Kabbalah story above; at that very moment I gave an impromptu
discourse to the class on the extent of Jewish knowledge to be had).

[Email #3. -mi]

>  By the way, it seems to me that this is consistent with the section R' Michael Makovi
> quoted from Rav Aryeh Kaplan:

>> However, a person who has been brought up in a
>> nonreligious environment where he never had the
>> opportunity to learn about Judaism, is like a
>> child who was abducted by gentiles, and is not
>> considered to be doing wrong purposely.

>  My experience has been that Rav Kaplan was VERY precise in his wording, especially in
> this work, his "Handbook of Jewish Thought". Please note the last word in that sentence:
> "purposely". Now read it without that word, and it has an entirely different meaning.

>  If Rav Kaplan had left out the word "purposely", then he would have meant what RMM
> claims he meant. But he did not leave it out. He deliberately included it, and with its
> inclusion, he seems to be very consistent with what RDE wrote: Guilty on a shogeg level,
> but guilty nevertheless.

>  Akiva Miller

As I say to R' Chana, I never meant to decide between shogeg and
oness; I was deliberately conflating the two so as to contrast it with
meizid. AFAIK, there is not much of a nakfa mina, except for korban.

But this is fascinating with R' Kaplan's words, and I thank you for it
it - I'll have to read everything else he says similarly closely. I am
reminded of someone who said that many Israelis envy the Americans
when it comes to reading the Yad - the lashon is so simple, that the
Israelis miss the peculiarities (because they can read it so quickly
and easily), whereas the Americans have to go slower and they notice
the subtleties.

[EMail #4. -mi]

> R' Michael Makovi asserts:
>>But in today's non-religious Jew, it is absolutely positively known
>>that they know that Orthodox Jews don't eat pork or drive cars on
>>Shabbat. They also know that Orthodox women don't dress provocatively.

>  Lo Ro'isi Aino Ra'ayo - Because you haven't seen it doesn't prove anything.

>  I can tell you from first hand experience in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and
>  Petach Tikva that your statements are incorrect.

>  It's sad, but true. You simply cannot believe the ignorance of those
>  removed from Yiddishkeit.

>  - Danny

Okay, how about, MANY (even if not all) nonobservant know these
things, but Chazon Ish et. al. nevertheless characterized the majority
of nonobservant as TsN despite many (but not all) having this
knowledge. Surely you'll concede that many Tel-Avivians know pork is
treif - in fact, surely the vast majority know that pork is treif, for
even my gentile friends in America knew that! Will we say that
nonobservant Jews are more ignorant than gentiles? Surely they know
the exact same amount as gentiles if not more, given that you cannot
be more assimilated than the ones into whom you have assimilated!

Mikha'el Makovi