[Avodah] Achashverosh

[Lisa Liel]

On 3/11/2012 9:57 AM, Prof. Levine wrote:
> At 10:51 AM 3/11/2012, Lisa Liel wrote:
>
>> Rav Schwab write an essay in 1962 in which he raised this as a 
>> hypothetical.  He didn't "explain that the 165 years were 
>> intentionally removed from the calendar"; he suggested that such an 
>> argument could possibly be made.  For those who would like to read 
>> what he actually wrote, it was actually posted to this very list back 
>> in 2003: http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol11/v11n018.shtml#03
>>
>> When Rav Schwab saw that people were misreading his words the way 
>> this "Time Tapestry" person has, he wrote a retraction in his 1991 
>> book of essays.  It's really poor form to suggest that Rav Schwab 
>> meant something he specifically said he did not mean.
>
>>> It is not exactly a retraction.  See the Epilogue in the essay I 
>>> posted at http://tinyurl.com/5u7l3v <http://tinyurl.com/5u7l3v%A0>  
>>> which is an updated version of  his original 1962 essay.  In 
>>> particular, pages 284 - 285. 

That's definitely a retraction.  In the original essay, he goes through 
various possibilities, and winds up saying that if no other possibility 
presents itself:

    There seems to be left, as yet unexplored, only one avenue of
    approach to the vexing problem confronting us. It seems possible
    that our Sages, for some unknown reason, "covered up" a certain
    historic period and purposely eliminated and suppressed all records
    and other material pertaining thereto.

His concern was, as he states:

    The gravity of the dilemma posed by such enormous discrepancies must
    not be underestimated. The unsuspecting students of history are
    faced with a puzzle that appears insoluble. How could it have been
    that our forebears had no knowledge of a historic period, otherwise
    widely known and amply documented, which lasted over a span of at
    least 165 years and which was less than 600 years before the days of
    the Sages who recorded our traditional chronology in /Seder Olam/?
    Is it really possible to assume that some form of historical amnesia
    had taken possession of the collective memory of an entire people?
    This would be like assuming that some group of recognized historians
    of today would publish a  textbook on medieval history, ignoring all
    the records of, say, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of
    the Common Era. Would this not seem inconceivable to those who,
    unfortunately, do not possess the necessary /emunas Chachamim/ to
    accept the word of our Sages?


In other words, Chazal are obviously correct, but how do you talk to 
someone who isn't simply willing to accept that, and points to the 
accepted secular history?  For this purpose and this purpose alone, he 
proposes something kind of outrageous.  But given the response to his 
article, he decided, as he writes in his epilogue, "I would rather leave 
a good question open than risk giving a wrong answer."

It's probably inevitable that those who prefer to dismiss everything 
Chazal have to say about this period would read Rav Schwab's initial 
essay and glom onto it as a kind of "prooftext".  But it wasn't meant 
that way.

Lisa

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