Sunday, September 24, 2017

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Mesorah

I finally read "Changing the Immutable." In it, Marc Shapiro chronicles many of the deliberate distortions that have been made to the opinions and writings of rabbinic authorities. Most of his focus in on the distortions of the Chareidi press in the recent past, but he also shows that this has been going on at least since the time of the gemara. Amoraim had no compunctions about lying about the source of their halachik assertions, and even more disturbingly, lying in general. Opinions were deliberately misattributed over the last two thousand years to give them more weight by putting them in the mouths of respected authorities. The true opinions of those same authorities were hidden and deleted from their writing when those opinions no longer fit with generally accepted thought and practice, when it was thought that those opinions would reflect badly on them, or when the publisher simply disagreed.

The conclusion one must draw from "Changing the Immutable" is, to be blunt, that the mesorah is garbage. Even if we say - and it is probably the case - that most rabbis most of the time were not lying, that we know some lie some of the time, and believe they are justified in doing so, calls everything they say into question. We have no way of knowing if any given thing a rabbi says is a "pious" lie. In addition to inevitable errors in transmission that would creep into any millennia-long tradition, the frequent intentional falsification by authorities through the ages means that nothing is reliable. The whole thing may well be lies built on lies built on mistakes built on lies - all the lies told for the sake of preserving the religious "truth."

It is telling that so many of the "Torah True" believe that their community's beliefs need to be protected by lies. It's almost as if in "Torah True," the name they've adopted for themselves, "True" is not modifying "Torah," in contrast to those heterodox movements they believe are portraying a false view of Judaism. Instead, "Torah" is modifying "True," in contrast to the usual meaning of "True" as something that accurately reflects reality.

2 comments:

  1. Well said. When orthodox Jews wake up to the fact that rabbonim are and were ordinary people, nothing more, nothing less, we might have significantly less religious fanaticism about. Hopefully.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Powerfully put. Just today, I was speaking to someone who marveled over Talmudic page layout, which allows for continuing commentary and acknowledges a dialogic tradition. I agreed, because I didn't want to get into this argument, but I was thinking along the lines of what you write here.

    ReplyDelete