[Avodah] nes niglah

[Daniel Israel]

Zev Sero wrote:
> kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
>> We often hear varied stories about this tzadik, or that gadol, and 
>> frankly, they are sometimes difficult to believe. I have often heard 
>> this as a common reaction to such incredulity: "If you think all these 
>> stores are true, then you're a fool. But if you think they're all 
>> false, you're an apikores. The message of these stories is that they 
>> *could* be true."
> 
> Well, no.  Each individual story claims to be true; some of them have
> messages, but the truth of the message may to varying degrees depend on
> the truth of the story (depending on how novel the message is).  The
> saying is about this whole corpus of stories, that it's not possible
> for them all to be true, it must be that many false stories have crept
> in over the years, but it's difficult to know which particular stories
> are false, because to a believer they're all plausible.  Disproving
> such stories depends on external evidence, and generally ends up with
> it remaining possible that the basic story happened, but to another
> person, or in another place, etc.

Are we talking about "gedolim stories" or midrash?  I usually associate 
RAM's statement with the latter. If that's what we're talking about, I 
think RZS is taking too minimalist a position.  Why is it impossible for 
all of them to be true, if they are all plausible.  WRT midrashim we see 
that certain midrashim are contradictory, so they can't all be true. 
But I don't think that the intention of the statement is simply to deal 
with contradictory midrashim; it is a wider statement about the nature 
of midrash.  Midrash is not a body of historical material that contains 
errors which must be sorted out; it is a body of truths (all true, 
including both sides of contradictions) but the truth is not always in 
the literal meanings of the story.

If, OTOH, we are talking here about "gedolim stories," then it seems to 
me we are over analyzing.   In a machshava sense, they all (or, almost 
all) are plausible.  But we don't have a reliable mesorah for most of 
them; the credibility of a story is only as good as its mesorah.

-- 
Daniel M. Israel
dmi1 at cornell.edu