[Avodah] Napoleon ma'aseh, legend?

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 04:53:18PM -0400, S. wrote:
: Still, another angle is that a certain percentage of the hamon,
: especially nowadays, are actually annoyed and cynical about stories that
: didn't happen but happened to have been repeated in an echo chamber,
: with no one ever looking to see if it was true, or even any reflection
: on whether or not the story even happened.

IMHO, German R, the excessive forms of Haskalah, R, C, etc... made
many of us tend toward positions that choose the words in the books
over rationalism. A maximalist attitude toward claims made in the
sefarim. Even if one could argue (and I have) that most rishonim and
most acharonim before the mid-1800s or so do not expect every aggadic
story to be historical (nor that yeish mei'ayin was less than 6 millenia
ago), we are responding to the danger we have seen in such positions.
But dangerous and false are different concepts.

Let me defuse the importance of claims of rov vs mi'ut by noting
that we can all agree that insisting this is the ONE TRUE SHITAH is
certainly new. So, we have this tendency toward maximalism which is
a counter-reformation.

And therefore it is just as logical for others to be turned off by a
new trend.

:                                            This doesn't necessarily
: bring honor to the rabbinate, for example, if it is rabbis and talmidei
: chachomim who repeat such stories. So whether or not alienating such
: people is a consideration is also something to think about, in my opinion.

But again, this error is ours, not the generations of rabbis and talmidei
chakhamim. We are the ones who are insisting that there is a historical
claim attached. We are turning religion into science (if historical research
is a science), and then complaining when it doesn't fit our expectations?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I hear, then I forget; I see, then I remember;
micha at aishdas.org        I do, then I understand." - Confucius
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