[Avodah] women learning Torah

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "Micha Berger" _micha at aishdas.org_ (mailto:micha at aishdas.org) 

 

> SOCRATES:  Without any one teaching him he will recover his  knowledge
> for himself, if he is only asked questions?

>  MENO:  Yes.

> SOCRATES:  And this spontaneous recovery of  knowledge in him is
> recollection?

> MENO:   True.

> SOCRATES:  And this knowledge which he now has must he  not either
> have acquired or always possessed?

> MENO:   Yes.

> SOCRATES:  But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this  life, then
> he must have had and learned it at some other  time?.....
 
> SOCRATES:  And if the truth of all things always existed in the  soul,
> then the soul is immortal. ....
 
--end quote--

>>And so, Plato has Socrates prove that the real  unchanging Platonic
Truths are learned before birth, and "learning is  recollection".

Given this context, I think the chiddush isn't that we're  prepared
knowing Torah in order to make Torah learning easier. Rather,  Chazal's
point is that those Truths aren't limited to geometry or  the
rigorously provable, but are/include Torah.<<


>>>>>
I think this quoted dialogue has more to do with  math than with Torah.  It 
has to do with the question of whether  mathematics is "discovered" or 
"invented" -- with Socrates' line of thought  seeming to weigh in more on the side of 
"discovered" -- i.e., when  mathematicians created their system of 
mathematics, step by step, at each step  it was intuitively obvious to them that this 
step was "true."
 
I don't know if this type of innate knowledge -- that when one is  confronted 
with step-by-step logic one intuitively sees that it is true, even  though 
one didn't know it before one took tenth grade geometry -- this type of  innate 
knowledge hints at but certainly does not prove the existence of a  soul.
 
It is in any case a different kind of knowledge than the knowledge of  Torah. 
 Torah really does have to be taught and cannot be "discovered" or  
reconstructed by logic.  In fact all the recent discussion on  Avodah of whether there 
are "Torah rules of discovery" bears on  this.  It seems there are not such 
clear rules, not clear like  mathematics.
 
BTW aren't the Japanese working on computers that excel at "fuzzy logic"  
which can solve problems that step-by-step straight logic cannot solve?   "Fuzzy 
logic" doesn't mean "illogical thinking" (or "typical female way of  thinking" 
-- as the subject line here might suggest.)  It means that a  number of 
different kinds of rules all operate at the same time, and that there  is always a 
range of possibilities rather than One Right  Answer.



--Toby  Katz
=============




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