[Avodah] Fables and Lies

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, November 20, 2007 6:12 pm, R Daniel Eidensohn wrote:
: You have brought no evidence that the sources I have cited are limited
: to an individual blaming himself for his own suffering....

Presumably rabbanim doing so for their communities as well. As well as
Chazal making statements condemning earlier generations for things
their talmidim may well still have been doing (aval anachnu
va'avoseinu chatanu).

The gemara discussing yefashpeish bemaasav (Berakhos 5a) doesn't make
sense unless speaking as a prelude to teshuvah for one's own sins.
Since expanding the other meqoros beyond that runs against my moral
instincts, I would dump the burden of proof back in your court to show
they do perforce include aveiros I am not doing.

I think the whole point of the excercise is not to make claims about
history or current events, but to motivate teshuvah. Which is why I
moved my reply to this subject heading. It segues into...

On Thu, November 22, 2007 1:27 am, Ben Waxman wrote:
: Why not simply get rid of the linkage and use the tragedy itself to
: get people to do tshevua? Instead of linking, the gadol could say
: something like: "Tragedy has struck Am Yisrael. It is the
: responsibility of every Jew, man and woman, to search his actions and
: find ways to do teshuva, in the same way that it is the
: responsibility of every Jew to get rid of bread before Pesach."

Before RYGB corrupted me with exposure to Mussar (and my worldview
revolved around RSRH, the Scholastic rishonim, and RYBS), I probably
would have agreed. One thing he made me realize was that it's not
sufficient to know what's right.

Bi'ur chameitz is a mitzvah ma'asis. It may be harder to perform
without engaging one's heart, but you can intellectually convince
yourself to do so.

Teshuvah inherently requires emotional engagement. The senses, and by
extension mental images, engage emotion. (The koach hadimyon, but in
the original sense of the word "dimyon" -- the ability to have a
mental picture / MP3 / smellograph/ etc...)

That's the role of myth or poetic imagery. It's like RSRH's comments
on the need for mitzvos that are osos, or why nevu'ah is conveyed via
a chazon. His words are (roughly, I can't remember a mar'eh maqom)
that the symbol is at the crossroads of the intellect and the heart.
The mind can grasp more of the topic through use of analogy than it
could by simple description. The heart is moved by the pictures shown,
experienced, or conjured up by the words in ways a description
wouldn't cause.

Also,

Reality is a network of causes and effects. The RBSO, knows them all,
knows every cause -- sufficient or insufficient, necessesary or
unnecessary that would go into an event. Questions of the limits of
hashgachah aside (for another post that will probably have to wait for
another sitting), wouldn't hashgachah therefore reflect EVERY factor?

Thus the rav needn't identify /the/ spiritual cause in order to
honestly claim that some sin was a factor. Every sin ever committed
was a factor. The threshold would only be whether Hashem weighed this
factor in favor of His final decision, or decided what He did
.despite/ that factor.

And so,

When a rav identifies a sin to motivate teshuvah, he really has quite
a bit of leeway. His burden of proof is REALLY low. But I would still
fail to see the productivity of identifying aveiros we can do nothing
about, and which willy-nilly will cause us to think less of other
Jews. (Particularly "achikha bemitzvos".)

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One who kills his inclination is as though he
micha at aishdas.org        brought an offering. But to bring an offering,
http://www.aishdas.org   you must know where to slaughter and what
Fax: (270) 514-1507      parts to offer.        - R' Simcha Zissel Ziv