[Avodah] talmudic thinking

[Micha Berger]

BCC: Author of Avakesh blog

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:14:32PM -0800, Saul.Z.Newman at kp.org wrote to
Areivim:
: on whether  secular  knowledge is an impediment  to  talmudic thinking 
: http://parsha.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-eliyahu-segal-can-learn-yerushalmi.html
: http://www.avakesh.com/2010/11/talmudic-thinking-and-secular-education.html

They do not contradict. RJWaxman (parsha.blogspot) is speaking of "the
importance of knowing realia. And that this does not detract from knowing
gemara and halacha, but might in fact bolster it."

Avakesh (I don't see where he makes his identity explicit, so I won't)
opens his blgo entry:
> To a modern man, the ability to think talmudically comes with
> effort. Conditioned by the scientific outlook, we tend to think of many
> concepts in a very different way than the Talmud, and without training,
> we see its discussions as peculiar and strange.

One is speaking about knowing science, the other is speaking about
the science-centric outlook that is part of modern man's culture. In
comments on the Avakesh post, I argue that a big part of the problem
is that we're taking a legal system designed to shape minds and souls
and playing the game of facts. That's a "scientific outlook" -- dealing
more with what experiment tells us is there than worrying about what
it feels like when you do it, and how to *legislate* (not fact-find)
so as to maximize the resulting person.

This is also a central theme in the Lonely Man of Faith. The family
that only prays together in order to stay together (to paraphrase an ad
campaign RYBS refers to in the essay), not because prayer is an end in
itself. As he writes:
    Modern science has emerged victorious from its encounter with nature
    because it has sacrificed qualitative-matephysical speculation for
    the sake of a functional duplication of reality and substituted the
    quantus for the qualis. (pp 12-13)

Adam I (Majestic Man) wants to now "how", not "why". It's the Adam of
pereq 1 who is told "umil'u es ha'aretz VEQIVSHUHA". It's Adam II who
is covenental and seeks redemption.

And the Man of Faith is lonely in two ways: First, existentially --
he is driven by a need to connect, always feeling an alone-ness that
requires rectification. Thus the need for covenental communities and the
path to redemption. Second, in practice modern man has built a culture
so enamored of Adam I, those who strive to develop the Adam II within
them are few and lonely.

    While the ontological loneliness of the man of faith is due to
    a God-made and willed situation and is, as part of his destiny, a
    wholesome and integrating experience, the special kind of loneliness
    of contemporary man of faith referred to at the beginning of this
    essay is of a social nature due to a man-made historical situation
    and is, hence, an unwholesome and frustrating experience. (pg 91)

    By rejecting Adam the second, contemporary man, eo ipso, dismisses the
    covenantal faith community as something superfluous and obsolete. (pp
    91-92)

When someone trying to think like the gemara keeps on falling back to
those tools designed for empirical "how" in order to understand a law
based on "why", he is disoriented. He is trying to accomplish some further
goal, turn the why into a how (the prayer into family relationship glue),
and so is looking at mechanisms.

Compare this disorientation and what I wrote above about "how to
legislate so as to maximize the resulting person" based on how we
experience something to this quote from Avakesh:

    To the scientific mind, it is very curious to call the mere act
    of placing a seed in the ground, "planting". We see planting as a
    process which involves surrounding the seed with earth, watering and
    tending it in the appropriate conditions, and then producing from
    it a growth. Because we see the process as a totality of growing,
    we necessarily see the linguistic content of the word "planting" in
    a much wider context. Chazal, instead, looked at what one sees when
    planting takes place and they saw a seed being placed into the ground,
    that is what they saw, and that is what they saw. As such, connecting
    two bodies of water is the same as placing a seed into the ground.

Tir'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