Re: The Kosher Pork

Steve Goldfarb <slg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It is ojectively true that "Micha experienced the rose as red." Even if
I am the only person with the strongest jutification for that claim.

No, it isn't. That's precisely where we differ. It may be (although I'm
not positive) objectively true that "Micha experienced the rose," but the
"as red" part is not objective truth. I don't know how you experienced the
rose. I can't know - thus, it's not objective.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Because you can't/won't tell the difference between
reality and knowledge, as evidenced by your last sentence. Truth is that
which corresponds to reality. Knowledge is a truth that a given person
believes in for a good reason.

....
Another example. Some people experience numbers as colors (or sounds). I
think I did myself when I was a kid, to some degree - I associated them
with colors, anyway. Bottom line is even something as precise and
objective as the number 7, say, I'm certain that I experience it
differently than you do.

But it doen't change the truth of the predicate "Bob experienced a red
seven".

....
Your theory of the universality of experience is thus clearly and
unequivically disproven. Your thesis fails. The fact that some Wikipedia
author of a page on qualia doesn't see that, isn't my problem.

This comes across as both pompous and wrong. I am not talking about the
"universality off experience" except of those experiences that I believe
others would also have. You know, like when I see the sun come up, and
assume everyone else does. IOW, when I directly obtain the truth of
"I experienced the sun coming up today"
and from that conclude that
"The sun is coming today"
a predicte that doesn't include who is experiencing it, is also true.

And for that matter, Rv Dessler's explanation of the Maharal's theory of
miracles is that it's not absolutely true of the empirical world. That
the sun can stand still only in Giv'on, or the same substance can
simultaneously be blood for the Egyptians and water for the Jews, etc...
because none of this deduction doesn't work for the empirical world.
People tend to impose the same categories on their experience, so these
things tend to be univeral across all people, but physics is as much
finding what we look for as what's objectively real. Which is why a human
who defies that element of the human condition, to the point that laws of
justice and mercy are actually more objectively real to him than physics,
will actually have different empirical findings. Such people are rare,
and increasingly so. Which is where all the miracles gone.

But the truth of a statement made about a person's experience that
includes the person within the predicate is true. Even someone having an
experience that is very subjective is either objectively true or false.
"Bob experienced the seven as red" or he didn't. The answer doesn't
change depending on who is onsidering the question, because Bob appears
in the predicate.

That's different than "the 7 is red", which is a conclusion Bob might
discard after learning about his synethesia.

But worrying about such things in general would mean being unable to
believe that the sun comes up in the morning because one might be deluded.
Nothing would be provable, and as I said, that way lies insanity.

sheldonlg <sheldonlg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Micha Berger wrote:
sheldonlg <sheldonlg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<tease> I can PROVE there is a body. I cannot PROVE there is a soul
</tease>

Who proved there's a body?

Don't go off on that ridiculous crap of "You don't exist. You are just
a figment of my mind.". The existence of a physical body is self-evident.

No! I'm heading in the reverse direction. I'm saying that the presence
of a soul is just as self-evident. Your soul is that which loves your
wife, or might wrongly hate someone who did you know ill. If you
experiences these non-empirical things, you have as much reason to
believe in your soul as in your knee.

....
No, I am teasing with "can you prove that there is a soul that remains
after the physical body ceases to function?". "Soul" is an idea. It
has no measurable qualities. It is conceptual. It cannot be proven to
exist.

Soul is a reality, whether or not you can prove it exists. Here you show
a minor variation of the same error Steve made (above). Provability
doesn't change whether something it real or an idea.

And it has measurable qualities, including survival.

BTW, I would say that the question isn't whether the soul survives death
as much as whether the soul is outside of time and thus the concept of
duration is meaningless. Unlike the duration we impose on ourselves by
trying to make sense of bodily experiences. The eternity of the soul
is about the limited nature of time not positing an indestructable
"substance".

I would head in the direction of saying that since truths are eternal
(in the sense of not being within the timeline) the soul is made of
eternal stuff. To extend the above discussion "Bob experienced 7 as
red at 2pm Sunday EST" is either objectively and eternally true --
an absolute reality -- or it isn't.

....
rulings over what makes sense to me. Of course, if my LOR ceased ruling
in a manner that evinced my confidence, I would see another. It's not
a blind fealty.

....and if my reasoning disagrees with my rabbi, I go with my own reasoning.

Yes. We alredy established that if you predecided that mycology was a
trivial subject that you can understand without buying into weird theories
about chemistry and whatnot, you would go with your own theories rather
than that of the expert. Say, if you decided that somoe feature a novice
can ascertain was "obviously" more relevent.

But while eating only and any mushroom where the cap had a dull color
and was larger than the stalk might have worked until now, people who
studied the subject know that you're running personal risk.

As I said, it all hinges on your preumption that surgery requires more
expertise than getting everything you could out of the Torah.

(And aided along by this inability to treat your soul or anything
non-empirical as equally real; as discussed above.)

....
I really hope you never have a serious illness; I'd miss you if you
would rely on your own surgical expertise to tell the doctor what to do.

**MY** thinking would be to evaluate which surgeon was the best and then
to have FAITH in his/her expertise. When it comes to logic, I consider
myself the best.

I pick my poseiq the same way. And sure enough, I went with one whose
approach to things (eg the relative values of what my zeide did,
which has the best legal-formal argument and which I could relate to
philosophically) are compatible with my own.

....
19:27 Do not cut off the hair on the sides of your head.
Do not shave off the edges of your beard.

Where is there anything about the cutting motion.

"Shave off" is a poor translation. As I wrote:
The word is "sashchis" (Israeli: tashchit), to destroy...

I don't see it.

Because you didn't follow the plank in the R platform about learning
Hebrew. You're duped by a translator's fuzziness.

Learning Hebrew is about #397 on my todo list.
As far as fuzziness, "if you say so".

IOW, you don't have the time to develop expertise, and won't go to
someone who would. That is the whole reason to defer to the expert!
Because he can pick up that the word doesn't connote what you think it
is, or the direction the Jews charted to redeem ourselves took the
mitzvah in our choice of interpretation (and of further legislation).

....
to say WE are not to be around any leaven in order that WE remember the
Exodus.

That is one plausible reading. Not eating it is another.

Despite the verse continuing beyond making that statement? That's a
major presumption to make for someone who doesn't even know the language,
the feel of the genre, or how the verse was successfully applied by
others.

....
You start with the theory and fit the data. What R' Hirsch called
Geiger's alchemy.

That's the you see it. Not me.

Empty rebuttal. How is it NOT deciding what the Torah ought to say, and
either maaking it say that or deciding that anything that contradicts
isn't applicble to you?

You could use this "Shabbos as rest" example. You first picked a theory
that this was rest from work rather than rest from creativity and then
decided what practices fit what you wanted Shabbos to mean.

Now, HOW is that no religious alchemy?

That's beyond autonomy and valuing your own thought. As you note, it's
a decision of which paradigm to even think about.

Paradigm is not something to "think about". Paradigm means "way of
thinking".

You consider and reject which paradigm to use, no? (Sometimes I think
you just look for rebuttal points as an end in itself.)

....
I don't see it that way at all. I see two common themes in O in topics
where we disagree:

1 - Devising ways to avoid what to me is the obvious meaning of the law
and still saying you are observing the law. A classic is heter iska
where it is a device to charge interest but not call it interest.

Again, "obvious meanings" need not be right. G-d handed us a legal text,
that provides a system for knowing what He was getting at. (This is
after Hammurabi, people knew what legal texts meant.) The loopholes
are inspired.

You also don't address my point that they are only utilized to fulfill
the greater good -- to make sure poor people get funding rather than
the prohibition against usury harming them rather thn protect them. Or
keeping a wife in an abusive marriage, etc...

There are other mitzvos, more fundamental, that would be violated by
our standing on our theories about the spirit of the law.

Things like this fall in the the "a rose by any other name...." category.
2 - Ruling to ever increasing restrictions on a simple theme. Not
deriving benefit from leaven is one of these.

2 has nothing to do with O. It predates OCR. Your example is a case in
point. What you're explaining here is a rejection of rabbinic Judaism,
which explains why yoou differ from R party line about the significance
of something appearing in the Torah literally in deciding its role
in one's Judaism.

R starts with instinctive morality and zeitgeist, deduce what they think
the spirit of a law is, and then assess the sources and the spirit of
the law from that yardstick.

Eg: The unfounded assumption that Shabbos is about rest, not a cessation

Unfounded? Now it is "unfounded"? "What does God ceasing from his
labors" mean? To simple minded me it means exactly what it says --
stopped working. It didn't say stopped from his acts of creation. It
said stopped from his labors.

Stopped creating! He certainly didn't stop working, as the story
continues with His interactions with Adam. The Torah is clearly not a
Deist text.

....
The whole paradigm of R is to look at the original, look at the
tradition, consider it and then formulate a conclusion. In this case
the original clearly said "don't work". The practice was "not working"
and going to synagogue. It is simple and history was right -- don't work.

I quoted R's platform. "The original" is very much not part of it. I
argued that mining out your own notion of original intent was consciously
excluded. You're describing your own process, not mainstream R's.

....
Ah, but you said you discarded because of modernity. And that is simply

No, I discarded not because of modernity. I discarded because it is
nowhere except in multiple layers thrown on by the Talmudic rabbis. I
don't see this ruling as in any way important. Therefore, I discarded
it. Modernity had nothing to do with it.

And what makes the talmudic rabbi less authoritative than your purported
communities that produced E, J, P and redacted them? Is it not about
original intent vs later development of Judaism?

Which, I am arguing, is a concept about which you diverge from R's stated
of principles.

R stresses change and progress, not restoration.

....
on how someone who doesn't even speak the language (see shaving, above)

Yes, see shaving. You still have not shown anything. So what if your
translation says "destroy"? What difference does it make if it says
"don't destroy the corners of your beard"? None. In fact, if I were to
know what the "corners of your beard" meant, have them nicely cut into a
neat appearance would be the opposite of "destroy". Letting it grow
haphazard would be more in in line with "destroy". So, yes, see
shaving, above.

When you say "war" do you think "sword" or "scissors"? If the term is
the same one used militarily, is it so surprising that it was understood
in the sense of cutting with a single blade instrument?

....
thinks of the text. After he already decided his conclusion, because he
decided the "spirit of the law" before opening the book anyway.

As for the spirit of the law with regard to shaving, I have absolutely
NO idea why that is there....

And thus both you and most R Jews find it doesn't help their spiritual
growth and omit it from their own practice. Understood.

IMHO, from the O side, I find it lamentable, since many things work that
you don't understand, and even if you think it's only divinely inspired
you have reason to believe the text contains ideas you should try rather
than discard. But that's why I'm not R.

....
The juxtaposition of the laws of Shabbos to building the Tabernacle. Since
we know that the population of the camp was at least 600,000 (plus
non-military age men, plus women), that's the implied population.

As implied in my parenthetics, it's a deduction held by some sources, an
Oral but Sinaitic law. (And before you question that, you don't consider
the text Sinaitic either, so at least the law should be treated on par.)

Thanks. It is an interpretation/extension. OK.

A recurring theme is that I don't see why you consider interpretations
and extensions as similar. An interpretation is a way of understanding
the text, perhaps different than yours. But it's the Jewish Community's
understanding, including its experts, of what the original mitzvah is
getting at.


...
Heter iska? It is a LOAN at INTEREST.

And a stock is a corporate bond.

Stock is ownership. A bond is a debt.

Exactly. Heter iska is ownership, and a loan at interest is a debt. My

I own two feline siblings named Fred and Ginger. They are calico dogs.
Why are they dogs and not cats? Because I wish to call them dogs!
Likewise for your sentence right above this comment.

No, heter iska is a partnership, the contract says so, there must be a
potentially money-making venture involved, etc... It's a stock with
a contractually promised minimum dividend. You're simply mis-describing
what kind of contract it is.

Also, in a contract, the description as written on the paper IS the
object. It's therefore unlike your metphor of calling a cat a dog.

And you should have known that. What I wrote was shorthand for a reply
you must have gotten over a dozen times before.
....
The ban on interest is one of the laws that I discard. Why do I discard
it? I discard it because it made sense when there were small tribal
communities and everyone was more or less related...

Not that far from the reason why we assumed that the spirit of the law's
application to modern economic system is preserved with a heter iska.
Presumbly in a clan society, where poor people get money from cousins
without the need for such contracts, we would avoid them. Because the
law would and could have richer meaning without sacrificing mercy for
the poor.

....
You presume you know the spirit, without even wanting to know the words
used. Melakhah, as opposed to avodah. And doesn't it make sense that
Shabbos is about avoiding construction? It might not be the mental image
of "rest" that you leaped do without foundation. However, it is arguably
a more valid commemoration of G-d creating the universe.

To each his own.

You miss it altogether. Your problem with halakhah is based on a false
asusmption. You decided Shabbos is Y instead of looking at the evidence
that says it was traditionally understood as X. Instead, you reject both
the understanding and the traditional practice.

If that is what makes you happy.....

So you don't have a reply as to why your reasoning is alchemical? That
you simply decide what Judaism should be BEFORE you look at it and make
it fit? It's just that encountering it on its own terms is "what makes
me happy"?

....
That's not informed judgment, that's prejudging the information.

And the one Jews traditionally held.

This is not Fiddler on the Roof

Actually.... you overstate. Read again my quote from the platform.

Which one?

I only had one quote. The bit about lookng over historical practices,
both ancient and new, seems very relevent.

...
Similarly, there is nothing in the scripture about divorce being
voluntary....

I used "voluntary" because that was the word the Orthodox used in
describing it. Complain to your buddies.

Why? Why should I defend what somebody else on scjm writes? Is every O
Jew well informed? You just want a strawman.

It is what everyone wrote. The excuse given was that "deep down he
really wanted to do the right thing". This justified imprisonment and
beating....

And again, you retreat from my position to hit the strawman.

The Rambam describes forcing the guy to state that "deep down" desire so
we can act on it. Nothing abut it being his choice. I don't feel a need
to argue in favor of any other position. Despite your desire to take
a conversation about a halakhah's internal logic and turn it into the O
camp vs the R camp in OCR wars.

Oral Torah. Therefore, the same source that says it must not be "anoos"
says that an obligatory divorce can be compelled -- as long as we can
get him to express that minority desire to give it. Either care what
they say and buy both, or don't and ignore both. But your dilemma is
artificial by insisting one (not anoos) is more primary than the other
(you can force an abusive husband to give a get on the presumption that
deep down he must have a conscience that's getting shouted down).

So, where is the strawman Micha? Didn't you just repeat what I typed
above in reply to the previous paragraphs?

The notion that a get must be voluntary, rather than in accord with a
desire held by the husband. The difference being cases where we can
presume the desire exists despite being on a list of internal "pros"
that are far outweighed by his "cons". A desire exists, but he chooses
to act on a stronger contrary desire. Reading the Rambam, it appears
that this is suffiient to make a get non-anoos.

Is take 18 or so clear enough?

Frankly, I don't care what legal means you use to get the result.
However, beating or imprisoning him until he "voluntarily" does is it is
ridiculous.

Which is why you didn't find me say it was voluntary, and why I called
your insistence on using the term because some other O posters used it
in some early discussions a "strawman" you keep on retreating to. Rather
than letting conversation progress.

But then, you don't want conversation, you want the comfortable, familiar,
OCR war. Even to the point of exressing surprise two posts back that
I actually learned the R position, and didn't do the same.

....
1- I disagree. I think that if the mycologists repeatedly point out safe
mushrooms for my salad, I'll increasingly assume that their theories
-- regardless of how they reached them -- must have fondation. The
matephor breaks down, because the gap between what I know and the
quality of the results is more straightforward WRT mushrooms than WRT
don't-create-Shabbos vs rest-Shabbos. And thus their accuracy more
post-fact startling.

I know you disagree. That does not make them on the same provable
foundation. They are not. Since it is you that is arguing for it, even
for the very existence of the soul, the onus is upon you to prove your
point. I can't argue that something that may not even exist is on the
same level as something that undeniably exists.

No, I don't. I make decisions based on what I know myself -- not what I
can convince someone on scjm.

What I am doing is lamenting your assumptions about the nature of the
non-empiricial world that keep you from trying before deciding. The
famous "we will do and we will hear" that our ancestors said at Sinai,
places doing before being able to realize what the Torah says.

Do I expect to convince you in a typed discussion that my sadness is
well-placed? No.

2- That's irrelevent. All you're saying is that the matter is even
harder to discern, and yet you're trusting your own inadequately
informed judgement rather than using the most information you could.

No, Micha, I am not saying it is harder to discern. I am saying it is
impossible to prove ANYTHING about the "soul". It is just a concept.
It may be real. It might not be real. Before you can even discussed
levels of discernibility, you must first prove it even EXISTS.

Des Cartes' Cogito proves it exists. Who would it being proved to,
if not the soul? Perhaps you would want to prove it is eternal, but
mitzvos could be justified without that.

....
You bought into the entire O paradigm and then make the same mistake
over and over and over again. You start with the assumption that
everything there is true in an absolute sense. You then set out to
prove that it is all true using those assumptions as a basis. It is the
same argument we have been having for the last month. You cannot prove
God exists by first taking as bedrock that God gave us halacha (which
means he had to exist). It is circular.

I think the notion of truth being absolute is self-evident. Saying
that the sun exists or doesn't exist depends on the person is a huge
novellum. And if that's true for the sun, it's true for G-d, souls, etc...

What is vs what is known.

But yes, I noted quite a whie back o this thread that this conflation
on your part is the epistomological difference that underlies our other
disagreements.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

--
Micha Berger Today is the 10th day, which is
micha@xxxxxxxxxxx 1 week and 3 days in/toward the omer.
http://www.aishdas.org Tifferes sheb'Gevurah: When does strict
Fax: (270) 514-1507 judgment bring balance and harmony?
.

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