[Avodah] on orthopraxy

[Micha Berger]

CC recently carried R' Yitchok Adlerstein's take on the subject
<http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2013/08/11/living-with-questions>

    Voltaire said, "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his
    answers." Jews could easily offer a third option: judge the faith
    of a people by their ability to live with unanswered questions.
    ...
    Those are good questions. Before we answer them, we might consider
    that we have been there before. We've been there so often, that
    living behind an intellectual eight ball might be described as the
    modal place of residence for Jews over our long history.
    ...
    But did this happen? To be sure, there were casualties lost to
    those questions in earlier times. Some of the important works we
    study and cherish today were meant to curtail the extent of those
    casualties. Yet we, for the most part, are descendants of the
    majority who were not fazed by them, who realized that Jews can
    live with questions, when they have enough overarching commitment,
    love and loyalty for Hashem and His Torah.
    ...
    But we need to employ the formula of the past, applying it as best as
    possible to the changed conditions of the present. That means that we
    should entrust such work only to those who have immersed themselves
    in serious Torah study. People who are not afraid to say ad kan / I
    can go till this point, but no further. Beyond this point is treif.
    My starting point is not "let's see where this leads us," but "how can
    I better demonstrate the beauty and cogency of the Torah I know
    to be true?" People who operate with responsibility, answering
    the perplexed few without perplexing the clueless many. People who
    respect the halachic sanctions against studying kefirah, except for
    those entrusted by their rabbeim to do battle with it. People who do
    not smirk when you speak of the gemara's warnings of the potency of
    minus, but recognize that simple faith is more worthwhile preserving
    than skepticism.

    We know where to find those few good men. And by now, we know where
    we should not even bother to look.

Once again, I wrote a comment that apparently isn't making CC's cut. This
time I am kind of surprised. While I disagree with RYA's thesis, my
complaint is tactical (the people who have this problem can't easily drop
the question awaiting an authority to reolve it for them), and my proposal
no less chareidi-friendly than his. Anyway, here was my submission:

    The closing paragraph undermines the thesis of the rest of the
    article. You appear to be saying that we are not the people capable
    of living with a question after all. That the masses should instead
    not face the question, and leave it to those who can. The people
    you have to worry about defecting are the ones bothered by the big
    questions who can't simply put them down. Those who need things
    to make sense to their own mode of thinking. The people for whom
    accepting your tactic is as big of a challenge as the original one.

    To accept any document theory r"l is to accept that (for example)
    the juxtaposition of Shabbos to building the Tabernacle was not
    necessarily the product of Divine Wisdom. After all, the entire
    foundation is the claim that one could perceive the seams between
    documents, that the composition has imperfections. But without
    attributing that juxtaposition to the Creator, the basis of a Shabbos
    of resting from 39 specific categories of work becomes human. The
    basis for (again, one example among thousands) distinguishing between
    "little things" like whether I remove what I don't want from what I
    do or if I remove the good from the bad is being questioned. Anyone
    who has observed a halachic Shabbos, one so different than intuitive
    notions of how to structure a "day of rest", and has felt it heal
    his soul, couldn't take such theories seriously.

    We lived with the questions because, as R' JB Soloveitchik put it,
    we had "erev Shabbos Jews" -- people who not only kept the laws of
    Shabbos, but felt its approach on Friday. Today we have universal
    education, and so the community could well on average know the laws of
    Shabbos better than the masses of our great-grandparents' generation
    did. But Shabbos -- and kashrus, and even Hashem's Presence -- aren't
    firsthand experiences nearly as many of us live with. We know more
    about these things, but we don't know them. If a philosopher were
    to disprove the existence of a country you regularly travel to,
    you wouldn't worry about his proofs too much either. But too few of
    us in today's generation have retained the ability to have regular
    first-hand experience of the world the Torah brings us.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The greatest discovery of all time is that
micha at aishdas.org        a person can change their future
http://www.aishdas.org   by merely changing their attitude.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                   - Oprah Winfrey