[Avodah] How to teach emuna

Zev Sero via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Tue Aug 9 14:43:14 PDT 2016


On 09/08/16 17:27, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2016 at 05:11:14PM -0400, Zev Sero via Avodah wrote:
> : What makes you think that these ovdei AZ weren't also ovdei Hashem?  What
> : makes you think they weren't boki beshas (or its then equivalent)?  These
> : were *not* untraditional Jews.  They were active Jews who also worshipped
> : AZ, because they had a strong yetzer hara to do so.
>
> You mean like the guy who consecrated a potsherd to Havayah "and his
> consort, Asheirah", found among the material the Waqf bulldozed off
> Har haBayis? He may have worshipped a god named Y-HV-H, but to talk
> about him as a source of remembering matan Torah is a stretch.

How so?  Menashe certainly knew the Torah, and yet served AZ because his
yetzer hara was strong.  Frum Jews served AZ, just as today frum Jews get
involved in all kinds of znus.  It's a yetzer hara.  It doesn't change the
fact that  99% of the time they do right, and it certainly doesn't change
the fact that they *know* right.


>
> :> In Yoshiahu's day, the number of people who knew enough Torah to even
> :> recognize one when they found one was small enough to qualify as a cabal.
>
> : How do you know this?
>
> It took Barukh to recognize it.

Baruch?!   Was he even alive then?   And where do you see that it took
anybody to recognise it?


> :> In Ezra's day, the masses had to relearn the the alphabet.
>
> : Where is this written?
>
> Sanhedrin 21b-22a. Shabbos 104a. Shakehechum vechazar veyasdum. Unless
> you hold like Mar Zutra/Uqva and R Yossi who says this was the first use
> of Ashuris for sta"m. (But both R' Sherira Gaon and R Hai Gaon reject R
> Yossi's position. And the third position, aside from being listed last,
> has the most names attached; pashut peshat is that it's the masqanah.

That doesn't at all mean people had forgotten the Torah.  All it means is
that over the 850 years of bayis rishon it had become the custom to write
sifrei torah in ksav ivri, so more people could read them, and Ezra
reintroduced the practise of writing them in ksav ashuri.  This doesn't
show any lapse in the transmission of the Torah.   The Torah in the new
writing was the same as in the old.


-- 
Zev Sero               Meaningless combinations of words do not acquire
zev at sero.name          meaning merely by appending them to the two other
                        words `God can'.  Nonsense remains nonsense, even
                        when we talk it about God.   -- C S Lewis



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