[Avodah] Lying to protect the simple of faith

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "Michael Makovi" <mikewinddale at gmail.com>
>>Just  this past Yom Tov Pesach, I saw Marc Shapiro's book The Limits of
Orthodox  Theology....he collects classical Torah opinions that controvert
Rambam's  13....


1) When Rambam says the Torah we have is the same as given by  Moshe,
Rambam cannot possibly believe that this is literally  true....
 
 
1a) Rather, then, Rambam is saying that no deliberate additions  were
made after Moshe. However, while Rambam is saying that this is  the
case, he cannot possibly be saying it is heretical to say  otherwise.
.... Most importantly, the Gemara
itself opines that  Yehoshua wrote the end of the Torah - surely Rambam
cannot declare Chazal to  be heretics! So while Rambam says no
post-Moshe additions were made, the  contrary opinion is not heresy....
 

2) As an alternative to point 1 above: Rambam knew that there  were
textual variants in our Torah scrolls, but he very well have  lied
about this, and said that there were no variants... In fact, in his  Iggeret
Teiman, Rambam makes exactly such an explicit lie. Back then,  the
Muslims were accusing us of falsifying the Torah, and any admission  on
our part would have harmed the faith of the ignorant.... <<
 
 
>>>>>
Most of this has already been extensively discussed  on Avodah but I would 
like to say that I have always found these  endless navel-gazing discussions 
annoying and frustrating.  "The Torah  we have is the same Torah that Hashem gave 
Moshe" does not mean and was  never intended to mean "and no human error has 
ever crept in even to a single  letter of the Torah."    Nor could Rambam ever 
have intended  to mean, "And Chazal grossly erred when they said Yehoshua 
wrote the last few  verses describing Moshe's death."  All this "how many angels 
on the head of  a pin" kind of discussion just seems so perverse and petty to 
me.  Rambam  meant to answer the kind of people -- so similar to the Reform 
and Conservative  of our day -- who claim that the Torah was written by men over 
a period of  centuries, based on the myths and legends of surrounding 
cultures.  
 
"So while Rambam says no post-Moshe additions were made, the contrary  
opinion is not heresy...."  -- well, Rambam is NOT stating an opinion  as to whether 
the last few pesukim were written down by Moshe or by  Yehoshua.  He IS 
stating that no post-Moshe laws and stories were added,  and if you say "The law 
against homosexual relations, and also the law  requiring the killing of Amalek, 
were later interpolations unknown to Moshe" --  then yes, you very much are a 
heretic.  If it is your opinion that some of  the laws and stories in the 
Chumash were written centuries after Moshe  lived, then your opinion definitely 
is heresy.  "The contrary opinion  is not heresy" -- I'm sorry, but the 
contrary opinion IS heresy.  It IS  heresy to believe that all or part of the Torah 
was written by human beings  out of their own heads.
 
BTW every one of the 13 Ikrim has been endlessly dissected here in  this same 
petty and perverse way.  So, for example, "It is not proper to  pray to 
anyone other than Hashem" -- instead of its obvious meaning, "Don't pray  to Jesus, 
don't pray to false gods, don't pray to intermediaries" -- is  twisted and 
made to mean "Don't ask a malach for a bracha" and then if you do  sing "Sholom 
Aleichem," someone pops out from behind a tree and goes,  "Aha!  So you don't 
accept the 13 Ikrim of the Rambam!  Well  ha ha, NO ONE does!"  Then singing 
Sholom Aleichem becomes tantamount to  being a Conservative rabbi and Yakov 
Avinu, who asked a malach for a bracha,  becomes the first Conservative rabbi, 
and all the Jews who have ever said to a  deceased relative, "Be a melitz yosher 
for us" set a precedent that you can  pretty well pray to anyone and anything 
you like  -- Rambam's ikrim now  being proven to be mere tentative 
suggestions, binding on no one, since Judaism  has no set of beliefs whatsoever, QED.  
This whole line of reasoning is  incredibly distasteful, or should be, to a 
Torah Jew.
 
As for the suggestion that the Rambam "lied," I find this to be an example  
of the unfortunate tendency to chutzpa and lese majeste to which impetuous 
youth  is sometimes prone.  I haven't read Igeres Teiman all the way through but I 
 highly doubt that he actually said in there, "And in all the Torah scrolls 
that  have ever been written throughout history, no sofer has ever made a 
single  mistake in even a single letter."   If, rather, he said, "The Torah we  
have today is the same Torah that Hashem gave Moshe, and the Torah we have was  
not written or rewritten or falsified by later writers" then he was indeed  
stating something that all Torah-true Jews must believe, not only the  
simple-minded.  This BTW would be an argument against both Moslems and  Christians who 
have claimed that the Jews "know the truth" (that Mohammed really  is the true 
prophet, or that Jesus really is the Messiah) but being the perverse  and evil 
dogs they are, the Jews have deliberately changed their own holy  scriptures 
to obfuscate the "truth."  It was against such falsehood that  the Rambam 
inveighed.  To call the Rambam himself a liar is the height of  arrogance.


 


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





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