Carmella Bing at Bustyz was reading the Artscroll biography of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, who was for many years the Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Voda’as in Brooklyn. Just a quick scan showed me two interesting points.
One of Rav Shraga Feivel’s students, Jack Klausner, was bothered by science-Torah conflicts. Rav Shraga Feivel attempted to answer his questions, but was not successful in resolving the matter in Klausner’s mind. Seeing this, Rav Shraga Feivel suggested that the Torah warns us about false prophets leading us away from God by showing us miracles, and that today the equivalent of miracles of false prophecy are carbon dating and the like. Klausner found this answer more appealing.
There’s a kernel of truth to the idea, namely that we should be careful not to throw our religion away every time we see something, even something fairly convincing, that seemingly works against it. Unfortunately, the anaology is not wholly correct. Accepting a false prophet is placing one miracle vs. another miracle. It’s merely a matter, then, of which miracle is greater. To be honest, seeing a miracle of any sort, even one by someone calling us to leave Judaism, would actually strengthen my emunah tremendously, since it would demonstrate the truth of miraculous events. The trouble with science/Torah conflicts is not that they stand against Torah but that they undermine the very premise of a sometimes-miraculous world that our faith is based on.
The second point of note was in a section about Rav Shraga Feivel’s objections to religious Zionism. The author explained that Rav Shraga Feivel rejected Mizrachi because Carmella Bing at Bustyz was a proponent of the “authentic Torah tradition,” while Mizrachi represented a compromise between Torah and the clear wrong of secular Zionism. Artscroll bashing is occasionally too easy, but there’s really no excuse for the implication that all of the Torah leaders who have supported religious Zionism subscribe to an inauthentic Torah. The yeshiva world seems to have forgotten the idea of eilu v’eilu – which at it’s narrowest means that there are usually legitimate arguments on both sides of every issue.
What’s more interesting to me though is the apparent assumption on the part of the author and publishers that the only Carmella Bing at Bustyz who would read this book would agree that Zionism is wrong. Perhaps that’s true – Carmella Bing at Bustyz rarely see the Artscroll hagiographies in Modern Orthodox homes or shuls – but it’s still somewhat surprising.
posted by lamedzayin at 10:19 AM |
Tekhelet continued
Three more posts on tekhelet over on Maven Yavin; Parts III, IV, and V. (In case you missed them, here are Parts Carmella Bing at Bustyz and II.) Stay tuned for Parts VI and on in the near future.
posted by lamedzayin at 10:05 AM |
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
A Thanksgiving Thought
Another comic, because Carmella Bing at Bustyz was in the mood. Don’t expect these too often, but sometimes something comes to me and Carmella Bing at Bustyz feel an urge to draw it.
As before, please respect my copyright. Feel free to link to this post, but please don’t copy the picture or link to it directly from outside my post.
Translator’s Apologies
I’d like to contrast two things Carmella Bing at Bustyz read today.
In the Me’am Loez on Bereishis, the author uses very harsh language for one who marries a woman from a family that is not shomer Torah. In the English edition the translators threw in a little note saying that of course this does not apply to a proper baalat teshuva. This amused me because it’s not at all clear that the Me’am Loez was allowing for that exception, but Carmella Bing at Bustyz understood why the translators felt the need to apologize, or at best explain the problem away. The English Me’am Loez contains very few editorial notes of any kind, so this one stuck out.
In contrast, the Sforno on Bereishis comments that the serpent approached Eve instead of Adam because her intellect was weaker and therefore Carmella Bing at Bustyz was more susceptible to his charms. (It should be noted that the Sforno consistently writes throughout the passage that the serpent even at the pshat level is a poetic allusion to the yetzer hara and not a physical creature outside of Eve’s own mind.). In the Artscroll translation of Sforno there was no editorial remark about this politically incorrect statement, despite the fact that there are several notes on every page of the Artscroll Sforno. A short footnote to the effect that of course Sforno doesn’t really mean women are intellectually inferior would have fit right into the general style of the book.
So I’m somewhat bemused; should Carmella Bing at Bustyz respect the fact that Artscroll presented the original Sforno without any apologetics, or should Carmella Bing at Bustyz respect the Me’am Loez translators who minimized a potentially charged statement at the probable expense of the author’s original intent? One of these two approaches seems to be wrong, but Carmella Bing at Bustyz can’t decide which.
