[Avodah] Local, Non-Global or Global Flood

[Meir Shinnar]

I wrote
> : The epistemological issue is that both sources of knowledge - both
> : mesora and science/reason - both come from hashem - and are both
> : true - and you reject that monistic approach. Yes, when there is
> : a contradiction, one has to weigh the evidence - but we are used to
> : assessing and deciding between variant positions in the mesorah -
> : suggesting an imerfect understanding - and the question is why is
> : knowledge obtained by one of hashem's other ways of revelation to us
> : not included in this type of debate? ...
Micha Berger
> I see the epistomological issue differently.
>
> We know we misunderstood something. Either revelation or science. (I
> would not call science another way of revelation, that language confuses
> the issue.) Or, of course, the theories that grow around revelation,
> around the empirical data, or some combination of the two.

No, the language is deliberate to clarify the issue - because the
issue is how much credit do we ascribe to knowledge obtained by other
means - and realizing hashem reveals himself in different ways.
Micha Berger
> The question becomes which do you consider more sure?
>
> I am arguing that your approach gives far too much relative surety to
> theories that grew up around empirical data in comparison to our mesorah.
> (Again, from the very subjective measure of my own comfort zone.)

The problem is that the mesora itself both
  a) gives credibility to knowledge obtained by other means
  b) recognizes its own limitations - and that understandings can change.
Therefore, giving some surety to knowledge obtained outside of the
mesora is PART of the mesora itself...

> I am okay with theories that grow up around both, and thus knowledge
> obtained by what you call "one of Hashem's other ways of revelation
> to us" IS included in this kind of debate.
>
> But to assume we got the Torah wrong when the Torah itself has no hint
> of such...

Here is where we differ - because my argument is that the torah
itself, by giving credibility to other evidence and reason, and by
informing us of the fallibility of our understanding, gives us more
than a hint that such changes are possible.  It is this refusal to see
what is immanent in the torah that is a problem ...


>Me
> : an understanding of much of tanach - that things happened in a
> : miraculous realm that left no impact on the general physical world -
> : seems far more radical than most allegorical approaches...
>Micha
> But it passed rabbinic peer review for the past 400 years.
>Me
> : eg, a flood that affected the entire world - but left no traces that
> : it actually happened?
>Micha
> Well, given how the Maharal understands nissim, it's not surprising.
> See the 2nd haqdamah to Gevuros Hashem.
>
> Cut-n-pasting from one of those repetitions (Mesukim MiDevash for
> Beshalach, pp 1-2 <http://www.aishdas.org/mesukim/5764/beshalach.pdf>):
>
>    The Maharal... writes that rather than being an exception to
>    the rule, nissim follow their own rules. Indeed, miracles occur
>    all the time, but on their own plane of reality. This is why
>    Yehoshua requests "shemesh beGiv'on dom -- the sun should stand
>    still in Giv'on." (Yehoshua 10:13) The sun stopped for the Jews
>    in Giv'on, who were on a plane where miracles operate, but not for
>    anyone else. Literally two different realities were simultaneously
>    experienced. Not two different perceptions of the same event, but two
>    conflicting things were real, depending upon which world one occupied.
>
>    Most of us live within a world in which the laws we call "teva"
>    apply. R' Chanina ben Dosa, however, lived in a world where the
>    laws of neis applied. In this world, oil and vinegar are equally
>    flammable.... Rav Eliyahu Dessler elaborates on this principle [MmE I
>    pp 304-312]. Mekubalim speak of four olamos, each of a higher level
>    than the previous: asiyah (action), yetzirah (formation), beri'ah
>    (creation) and atzilus (emanation)....
>
>    People have two sources of information that they consider
>    absolute. The first is their senses -- sight, sound, and so on. The
>    second is their self-awareness. The senses bring us information about
>    the physical world. Self awareness brings us concepts like truth,
>    freedom and oppression. Someone mired in the desires of the senses
>    lives in the physical world. He focuses his attention on it, just as
>    everyone focuses on that which is important to them. "Every tailor
>    notices and looks at the clothing of the people in the street; and
>    similarly every shoemaker, shoes..." The man of the senses therefore
>    perceives it as more objective and more absolute than the world of
>    the self.... This is olam ha'asiyah.
>
>    However, one can rise above that to the olam ha'yetzirah. This
>    is not merely another level, but another world with its own laws,
>    laws that do not conflict with free will. Those who focus on this
>    world have no question that free will exists. To them, it is the
>    ideals of this world that are more objective and absolute, and the
>    senses, more subjective. Rav Dessler explains that this is how nissim
>    can impact one person's senses and not another's. Yetzirah is the
>    Maharal's plane of nissim, and as the Maharal noted different people
>    will perceive the miraculous differently, or not at all. And so the
>    sea split in olam hayetzirah, but not in olam ha'asiyah.
>
> If during the event people have conflicting experiences, is it such a
> big chiddush to suggest the same is true after the event? We who don't
> rise up to the level of experiencing nissim don't live in a universe
> where their evidence exists.

The maharal's theory of nissim works fine as applied to individual
nissim - but certain parts of the torah are, by pshat, meant to be
very public events that had an impact on the outside world rather than
private events  - eg, the flood.  Interepreting them as private events
is one that has the same problem that you suggest initially - it is
driven by "external" evidence rather than internal.
Therefore, whether one tries to reconcile that "external" evidence by
i) allegory
ii) theory of nissim as private events
iii) theory that events occured as a prophetic revelation, rather than
in the external world (as in one previous go round)
iv) flood was local

- alll four are driven by the same issue that you find problematic,
and no one, based purely on "internal" torah events, would ever have
argued that, say, the flood had no public world wide
manifestations..Which one you are theologically and rationally are
most comfortable with
may be one thing, but it is hard to see a real difference in the
underlying issues


Meir Shinnar