There are kiruv personnel who preach that all important principles of Judaism are self-evident; that not only can all questions be answered with complete satisfaction, but all the important ideas in the life of a Jew can be demonstrated to be true beyond any shadow of a doubt.
It is not clear to me whether people who take this position really believe it, or use the line to bait people, counting on the probability that the neophyte will be sufficiently attracted by what he/she sees to want to stick around.
If they believe it, they must have access to arguments that have evaded me. I cannot even imagine HKBH reducing emunah (belief) to a tautology, embraced by anyone who can think properly, and rejected only by those whose self-need gets in the way.
I believe that HKBH in every generation leaves room for people to reject – even for intelligent people to reject – and for all of us to have to struggle and exercise our core will to choose His word.
At times of great manifestation of the Divine in our past, HKBH insured that the attractiveness of avodah zarah (idolatry) would be immense. When He lessened its hold upon us, He replaced it with alternative ways to reject. [XGH: What, you mean like rational, non-biased analysis?]
The struggle remains in every generation.
[XGH: Note to Bob Miller. This does NOT mean that science or rational thought is a yetzer horoh covered by 'lo tosuru']
Is it really OK for a Torah teacher or spokesperson to admit to continuously grappling with issues, to not having all the answers to his/her own satisfaction? Shouldn’t the Torah representative speak with such force that all who listen simply melt in his presence?
Personally, I don’t think so.
But then again, I really don’t know.
I’ll tell you what I think. Of course leaders need to project confidence. If every leader, whether in religion, government or the corporate world, appeared to lack confidence in their religion, country or corporation, all would be lost. You need to inspire the troops, and to inspire you must have confidence in your message. However there’s a difference between inspiring confidence, speaking ‘forcefully’ and having your listeners ‘melt’ in your presence, and saying stuff which simply isn’t true.
Also, there seems to be a certain ‘meanness of spirit’ portrayed by some people against questioners. Bob Miller even compared skeptics to Amalek on the recent Hirhurim thread. In my experience skeptics act only because of the incredible frustration that they have seeing that some (all) of the ‘answers’ don’t really work, or that in many cases the questions are far better than the answers. If these skeptics truly didn’t care about Judaism or Orthodoxy, I can assure you the last thing they would be doing would be writing blogs about it. Instead, they would be off eating cheeseburgers and doing other fun things which I can’t mention.
The real truth is that when it comes to religion, you are dealing with a serious degree of subjectivity and bias, making rational arguments for religion very difficult. The skeptics get frustrated that the believers can’t seem to see the ‘obvious’ truth, whereas the believers get frustrated that, well, the skeptics can’t seem to see the obvious truth! Amazing how two entirely contradictory positions can both seem so obviously true.
I think this why ultimately you have to have some degree of ‘faith’ in religion. And I myself have often said ‘You can always have faith’ or 'You gotta have faith'. But isn’t faith just ‘believing in things you know ain’t true?’, as Mark Twain famously said? Isn’t it irrational to have faith? On what basis can one have faith?
I think the answer is as follows. The kind of faith you can have is ‘faith in’, rather than ‘faith that’. In other words, faith means trusting a system that has produced good results, rather than believing in certain truth propositions. When we look back at the vast sweep of history, and how the Jewish community has fared in comparison to the rest of the world, it becomes very easy indeed to have ‘faith in’ Judaism, even if the ‘faith that’ part is missing.
Ultimately, any skeptic who struggles with ‘faith that’, but upholds the ‘faith in’, is okay in my book. He is a genuine questioner. However once he begins to regard the entire religion as just a waste of time, or even worse, something meaningless, stupid and even evil, then I can agree that such a person has gone beyond the status of ‘frum truth seeker’ and has become an ideological enemy of Orthodoxy or Judaism.
I still wouldn’t compare such a person to Amalek though.
