[Avodah] Hypocrisy in halakhah

[Michael Makovi]

R' Zev Sero noted:
"For instance: during the times of the blood libels, how many times did
we point out that we don't even eat blood in an egg, and argue that al
achat kamah vechamah we couldn't possibly be putting human blood in our
baked goods."

A problem I see with your example is that while our proof was wrong,
what we were trying to prove was correct. I.e., in the end of the day,
we certainly did NOT eat human blood, and we certainly would have been
disgusted to kill a nicht-Jude to use his blood in our matzot (and
murdering a nicht-Jude IS murder, whether or not culpable in a beit
din). It's just that the nicht-Judes wouldn't accept a ingenuous (a U
- ingenUous, not ingenIous) answer, so we had to give a DISingenuous
one. But either way, what we were trying to prove stood.

On the other hand, if we had proved to them that we don't have a
one-sided law about the goring ox, etc., not only would the proof be
wrong, but the idea being proven would also be wrong.

I see no moral difficulty with being disingenuous when proving
something that actually is true, even if the proof itself is wrong. If
I prove that pork chops are treif using Genesis 1:3, well, I'm still
correct that they're treif! But if I use the same pasuk to prove that
OU glatt kosher lamb chops are treif, we've got a problem.

But I see your point (which is not affected in the least bit by your
faulty (IMHO) example) - we would say that any discriminatory laws of
ours, we'd say to ourselves that we know Torah is true, so any
discrimination against nicht-Judes, and any lies we have to tell to
the nicht-Judes to save ourselves, are of no moral difficulty to us.
Hypocrisy would not trouble us. We know we are correct, end of
discussion.

Actually, as soon as I finished this entire post down to the bottom,
past what follows, I realized the following:
My critique of your (R' Zev Sero's) blood-in-the-egg example is
ill-founded. According to you, we ARE correct even if you use a
disingenuous argument. I.e., it is NOT correct that Jewish law is
discriminatory, but on the other hand, it IS correct that morally
speaking our law is correct in discriminating against nicht-Judes. Our
law is discriminatory, but this discrimination is correct and proper
and fitting, and so even if the proofs we give to the nicht-Judes are
false, we are still correct morally speaking. It's like when you are
arguing with someone and you KNOW you are correct, so you give a
disingenuous proof with the other disputant accepts. In one way, you
just lied. But on the other hand, you were correct anyway, so what
does it matter if you won with a lie - you were correct in your
initial argument anyway!

Perhaps it is precisely because the hypocrisy DOES trouble me,
however, that I go with Meiri.

(I have preserved what I had written prior to my above realization,
because I think my prior thinking on right-wrong
ingenuous-disingenuous shows my gut reaction to the hypocrisy, prior
to my intellectual realization that my case against R' Sero was
ill-founded. My statement, "On the other hand, if we had proved to
them that we don't have a one-sided law about the goring ox, etc., not
only would the proof be wrong, but the idea being proven would also be
wrong.", while this statement is not correct given what I realized
later, I think it shows what my core gut thinking is like prior to any
fancy rationalizations and intellectual conceptions. That is, it
initially never occurred to me that the discrimination is morally
correct and therefore justifies the disingenuity. My only thought was
that either we are correct or incorrect that halakhah discriminates,
and that we tell the nicht-Judes the truth or else be hypocritical. At
first, it never occurred to me that we could lie without being
hypocritical, as per R' Sero's case.)

Similarly, the idea that a Jew can steal and get only restitution,
while a nicht-Jude would get death, and that a Jew could do teshuva
and a nicht-Jude could not, despite the fact that the Torah is
supposed to be teaching moral and religious truths that are equally
applicable to Jew and nicht-Jude alike with barely any distinction,
gave me immense (IMMENSE) discomfort. I asked one of my rabbis about
it, and he only told me that the Torah makes this distinction, and yes
it troubles us, but what can we do? Thus, I was delighted beyond
measure when I saw that Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, Rabbi Moshe
Feinstein, Rabbi J. David Bleich, and Chelkat Yoav Tanyana (anyone
know anything about him??) all say the Noahide death penalty is a
maximum, not an imperative - see
http://wikinoah.org/index.php/Capital_Punishment_in_Noahide_law

Similarly I was troubled when I learned we ostensibly do not save a
nicht-Jude on Shabbat, I asked another rabbi and he told me to see
Derech haShem on these matters. Thus, I was delighted when I saw Rabbi
Jakobovits's argument to Shahak, and a few months later Rabbi Shlomo
Riskin's argument to Feldman, and a few months later Rabbi Nahum
Rabinovitch's argument to Shahak and several other arguments to
Feldman (see my previous post to Avodah in this same thread,
responding to R' Grossman).

Mikha'el Makovi