[Avodah] Religion and Falsifiability

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 07:56:29PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
: RMB himself responded <<To be honest, all it would do is prove my 
: suspicion that there isn't a statistically meaningful population of 
: people who actually follow the Torah.>>  If I can translate, RMB says it 
: would make him question, not the Torah, but how we implement it today.  
: The Torah is Morashas Kehillas Ya'akov, and RMB suspects that nowadays 
: it really belongs only to a favored few.  Shouldn't such a result induce 
: RMB to rethink how we implement the Torah so that more people "actually" 
: follow it? ...

Except that I already have strong ideas as to what it means to follow the
Torah, and why the majority of today's frum world is not quite doing it.

The Torah is supposed to be a program to follow to acheive deveiqus and
temimus. How many of us live our lives with daily consciousness toward
reaching these goals? How many of us approach Torah and shemiras hamitzvos
with the awareness that we're following a program altogther?

We live in a world with unprecedented talmud Torah and widespread
search to learn how to perform halakhah correctly. But a mindset in
which aggadita is just something to gloss over in order to qualify for
a siyum isn't going to lead to /meaningful/ observance.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha