[Avodah] A Post-Modern Orthodoxy

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

I often said on Facebook that one reason why more are going OTD in this
generation than in mine is that post-modernism has become part of the
common culture. It is impossible to maintain any orthodoxy, including O,
if one believes that there are no objective truths, or even that there
is nothing one could ever know to be objectively true.

And this touches everything on the college campus from religious beliefs
to defending the Palestinian because we have our narrative and they
have theirs. (There is room for every narrative but those that exclude
other narratives.) In the real world outside those ivory towers, though,
you won't find too many people with post-Modern notions of science,
declaring (eg) that math or physics are merely social constructs...

I think post-Modernism is a confusion of the subjectivity of my
justification for knowing something with the subjectivity of the known.
However, I can know that hilkhos Shabbos as we have them today really
did objectively speaking come from the Creator by way of my personal
experience of Shabbos. Objective truth, subjective justification.

So, the folk there pointed me to Rav Shagar (Rav Shimon Gershon Rosenberg),
a DL postmodern baal machashavah. Along the way, someone mentioned R/Dr
Alan Brill's blog post of notes he made to himself teaching R Shagar's
works. <http://bit.ly/1XmWvTu> or
<https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/rav-shagar-to-be-connected-to-eyn-living-in-a-postmodern-world>.

To give you an idea of R Shagar's thought, he likens Deconstructionism
to Sheviras haKeilim and the post-modern's inability to consider an idea
to be objectively true to Ayin.

Given their advice, and the hopes that I could find common language
with the post-modern among my own children, I spent part of the "3 day
yom tov" with R' Shagar. Given my opening rejection in post-modernism,
as well as a couple of comments made by Dr Brill, I must admit I may not
have been fair. Perhaps one of his fans is lurking on list and wants to
clear up wht I misunderstood.

As R/Dr Brill put it "The very question" in the prior sentence, not
quoted, "shows that Shagar is treating postmodernism as an ism to
adopt rather than the current condition of our lives like the prior
existential-psychological era that we did not choice but were embedded
within."

R Shagar builds a case for the condition of believing in nothing and
turns it into a Ism of believing in Nothing. An inability to believe that
something is objectively true into the belief in of an objective Ayin.

Help?


Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One doesn't learn mussar to be a tzaddik,
micha at aishdas.org        but to become a tzaddik.
http://www.aishdas.org                         - Rav Yisrael Salanter
Fax: (270) 514-1507