[Avodah] Hasidism, A New History Banned

Professor L. Levine llevine at stevens.edu
Mon Feb 19 02:42:03 PST 2018


Not surprisingly, the book Hasidism, A New History has been banned. See

https://goo.gl/vSNRDh.<https://goo.gl/vSNRDh>


Click on the English translation on the right to enlarge it.


Apparently those who banned the book do not agree with  the way the Torah portrays our great men.


The following is from the new translation of the commentary of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch on Bereishis 12: 10 - 13. He is discussing the question of how Avraham could leave EY and put Sarah in danger.

In light of this, I have to wonder why some think that all "negatives" about our predecessors should be suppressed. What I am talking about is the tendency of some to go so far as to deny that certain things took place in the past if they do not jive with our present view of what the religious world should look like.

RSRH quotes the Ramban "Our father Avraham inadvertently committed a grave sin by placing his virtuous wife before a stumbling block of iniquity because of his fear of being killed . . . His leaving the Land, about which he had been commanded, because of the famine was another sin he committed" - nevertheless, none of this would perplex us.

The Torah does not seek to portray our great men
as perfectly ideal figures; it deifies no man. It says of no one: "Here you have the ideal; in this man the Divine assumes human form!" It does not set before us the life of any one person as the model from which we might learn what is good and right, what we must do and what we must refrain from doing. When the Torah wishes to put before us a model to emulate, it does not present a man, who is born of dust. Rather, God presents Himself as the model, saying: "Look upon Me! Emulate Me! Walk in My ways!" We are never to say: "This must be good and right, because so-and-so did it." The Torah is not an "anthology
 of good deeds." It relates events not because they are necessarily worthy of emulation, but because they took place.

The Torah does not hide from us the faults, errors, and weaknesses of our great men, and this is precisely what gives its stories credibility.The knowledge given us of their faults and weaknesses does not detract from the stature of our great men; on the contrary, it adds to their stature and makes their life stories even more instructive. Had they been portrayed to us as shining models of perfection, flawless and unblemished, we would have assumed that they had been endowed with a higher nature, not given to us to attain. Had they been portrayed free of passions and inner conflicts, their virtues would have seemed to us as merely the consequence of their loftier nature, not acquired
by personal merit, and certainly no model we could ever hope to
emulate.



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