[Avodah] history

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 01:13:31PM +0300, Eli Turkel wrote:
::> What ethical purpose is served by preserving a realistic historic
::> picture? Nothing but the satisfaction of curiosity. We should tell
::> ourselves and our children the good memories of the good people, their
::> unshakable faith, their staunch defense of tradition, their life of
::> truth, their impeccable honesty, their boundless charity and their
::> great reverence for Torah and Torah sages. What is gained by pointing
::> out their inadequacies and their contradictions? We want to be inspired
::> by their example and learn from their experience...

: There is a basic flaw in this argument. If the only censorship was
: that of a gadol doing an explicit sin, R. Schwab has a point (with the
: opposing view of Rav Hutner). However, in reality most of the censorship
: is about things the gadol did knowingly....

I think you're not complaining about anything RSSchwab said, but rather
about the gap between what he supported ommitting and what people are
actually censoring.

I also think you mean the issue is more what the gadol did knowingly
because they thought it was right. Aside from removing sins, inadvertant
or even bemeizid, we are censoring out support for shitos by pretending
the gadol didn't hold that way. Making it look like various perfectly
mesoretic positions (sometimes even the historical rov!) are wrong or
avante gard.

I can see two etiologies that would get us to this point:

Option 1: The audience is judged as likely to think less of the gadol if
they read such facts about them, rather than being likely to accept it
as proof the permissability of the act or acceptability of that concept.

Option 2: Editorial melevolence -- they are actively trying to promote
one shitah over the other even to the extent of dishonestly.

The problem in either case is the assurendess implied, an unwarranted
confidence that one has the one true way. Whether we ascribe it to a
judgment about the typical reader or about the editor's belief that one
may skew the data in favor of that one true way.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Every child comes with the message
micha at aishdas.org        that God is not yet discouraged with
http://www.aishdas.org   humanity.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                   - Rabindranath Tagore