[Avodah] ad hayom hazeh

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 05:44:55AM +0000, Rich, Joel via Avodah wrote:
> The phrase "ad hayom hazeh" (until this day) appears 76 times in Tanach
> and "ad hayom" another 12 times. Some authorities understand it generally
> to mean until the time the Torah was written while others understand it
> as forever.

I think this is related to the question of diberah Torah belashon benei
adam. Which benei adam? Does this give license to say the Torah was written
specifically to make sense to the Dor haMidbar? Or, that the Torah was
written in a language aimed at all the generations of its audience?

The difference is in approaches like R/Dr Joshua Berman's, where much of
the Torah is explained in contrast to the AZ and politics of that era.
See an interview with him for examples
https://www.torahmusings.com/2015/03/qa-with-r-prof-joshua-berman/
(and he since came out with a book. But RJB is far from alone in this.

But if DTbLBA means the language of the Ancient Near East, then when the
Torah says "hayom hazeh", it has to be something that makes sense to an
ANE reader. And needn't continue to be true afterwards.

In general this approach demands that contemporary readers of the chumash
read it keeping the times and other context in mind. That we are reading
a book phrased as though it is for someone else

Which is pretty much why I am /not/ in favor of that approach. It requires
preserving way too much context, without which too much of the Torah's
meaning is lost. The Torah is /for/ every generation, so why wouldn't
be in /language equally meaningful to/ every generation?

And thus keeping the phrase to mean that it uses human idiom. Knowing that
"Yad Hashem" means His power, not that He has a Hand.

Or using the word "raqia" doesn't mean that the Author was literaly
describing a shell the stars were embedded in. Any more than Neil de
Grass Tyson needs to believe in geocentrism to use the words "sunrise"
and "sunset" -- something I once heard him talk about on YouTube.

RJB finds his approach in the Rambam, From that interview:

    Do you have to have a PhD in Egyptology in order to understand
    the Torah? Can that be?

    In the Guide to the Perplexed (3:49), the Rambam expresses sorrow
    that he didn't know more about ancient practices, because that would
    have helped him better understand the Torah. There certainly are
    many things that we can understand today because of our enhanced
    understanding of the ancient Near East....

But li nir'eh that doesn't mean peshat in the pasuq. The Rambam is
talking about the content of mitzvos requiring knowing what AZ was like,
in order to better know how the Torah weens us away from them.

Which, frankly, I have a harder time with than saying the text is written
for its time. But that's a well known issue: How does the Rambam in the
Moreh make it sound like the role of qorbanos is specific to weaning us
away from a kind of AZ we don't see anymore, and yet still discuss the
restoration of qorbanos and their being a mitzvah ledoros in the Yad?


AND... The Rambam's use of DTBbA isn't even Chazal's use! R Yishma'el
didn't say it about anthropomorphications, but about grammar. R Aqiva,
who darshened al kol qotz vaqotz tilei tilin shel halakhos, who darshened
the word "es", had 19 middos of derashah that looked at each word.
RY held no, the words themselves are the normal use of language, it's
their meanings we should darshen. Not that "akh" is a mi'ut, but is the
meaning of a given word or phrase a perat?

> Does the latter interpretation mean that some avenues of free will
> are foreclosed? According to the former, why bother telling us?

Let me give a mashal from Widen Your Tent sec. 2.5 (I agree with the
author on this point):

    When you drop a drop of ink into a cup of water, the ink spirals
    around in some chaotic pattern and eventually diffuses until the
    entire liquid is a uniform light blue. Even though each time you
    repeat the experiment the dance and spiral are different, something
    about the process in general is predictable. If you had different
    snapshots of the sequence that were significantly far enough apart
    in time, you could place them in historical order. Entropy always
    increases until it reaches the maximum. The system runs a certain way,
    reaching equilibrium.

    History also has a known final state the Messianic Era. The colorless,
    pure potential of this world will be eventually assigned a meaning
    represented by the sky blue of techeles, of the vision of sapphire
    paving stones under the Heavenly Throne during the revelation at
    Sinai. (Shemos 24:10) People have free will, and therefore how the
    process unfolds is not fixed. And, like ink in water, it's hard
    to understand the purpose of any particular dance or spiral in the
    process of history. Still, the general parameters are known. We are
    tending toward equilibrium.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 Circumstances don't make a person,
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   they reveal a person.
Author: Widen Your Tent
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF