Friday 30 May 2014

Exile as Survival - Rabbi Sacks' Fallacy

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In an interesting article about Shavuot, and the Counitng of the Omer, Emeritus Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks analyses the opposing views of the Sadducees and Pharisees regarding the Omer and the Oral Law.  what is enlightening about this article http://www.rabbisacks.org/double-celebration-thought-shavuot/
is that logically, it seems to prove that the Sadducees were correct in their understanding of the Torah.
However, what is fallacious about his argument, is that the errant way of counting (the Pharisees and Rabbis) has ensured Jewish survival in the last 2000 years of exile.

This is fallacious for a number of reasons.

The Pharisees were instrumental in the desecration of the Temple, by falsifying the laws of impurity, murder of the High Priests, cancellation of many Torah laws, and addition of many more new Testament styled D'rabbanan laws.  Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai colluded in the Kohanicide - the murder of the Priests, and also enabled the Romans to destroy Jerusalem, in exchange for the creation of a new centre for Phariseeism in Yavneh (from which he was eventually deposed by the more honest Rabbis who could not accept his treachery).

The "success" of the Rabbinic exile that Sacks refers to includes the pogroms initiated by Rabbis of Iberia against the Karaites, and its punishment - the Spanish Inquistion. It includes decimation of populations of Jews, and the diabolical Holocaust.  If Sacks claims the State of Israel is a Rabbinic achievement, he would be clearly deluded. It was the Talmudic "3 oaths" that stirred the oppositionof the majority of Rabbis to Zionism. A few lone genius rabbis like Abraham Kook and Shlomo Goren, who supported the Zionist enterprise, are not really accepted by majority of Orthodoxy. Finally, it was David Ben Gurion, the secularist, who declared the State of Israel. Although he was externally secular,  his acceptance of the truth was expressed in his comment that we do not need the rabbinic laws and midrashim, we have the TeNaCh. This perhaps, was a sign that it was not the "oral law" that brought about our return to the Land, but the soul of the Tenach that even secularists still cling to.

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