history, etc.

i remember some time back in boston RAbbi JJ Schachter's article on "facing the truths of history" (schacter Facing the Truths of History Torah u-Madda Journal 8 (1998-1999): 200-276.) and accompanying shiurim being a big deal, and truly inspiring the modern (in the technical sense) faithful in a new bout of idignation against the "black hatters," as they like to say. anyway, it always struck me that the attidude rabbi schachter criticizes is hardly atraditional, and if anything more in keeping with the general approach of our ancestors to history than, say, doing a phd at harvard.

[sidepoint: this brings up a lot of interesting points about the covert adoption of enlightenment/humanistic values over "torah values," not necessarily in a bad way but i think more than they like to belive," in the scholarly ranks of the MO. perhaps the best illustration of what i'm refering to I ever heard was prof gafni's insistence that historical studies must be ok because "chotamo shel haKBH emet." i mean, can't disagree there, but since when is "emet" in the torah sense determined by academic scholarship? Anwyay, I'm not for pretending there is no such thing as "reality" (including history), bu i just think the project of a lot of traditional orthodox scholars often comes off as bizzare.]

so why did i write about this now? (especially since i'm sure so much has been written before...) well, i was recently learning a gemara (hullin 11b) that tries to ascertain the biblical justification for relying on "rov," specifically of a not-strictly-quantifiable sort (my best shot at translating ruba de-leta kamman). it is suggested that the fact that the Torah allows us to eat slaughtered meat, and doesn't require us to wonder about whether the shechitah happened at the place of a pre-existing defect which would render the animal unkosher, bu can no longer be inspected becasue it has been cut trough, indicates that we rely on the "rov" of animals that do not have such defects. *
the gemara then wonders, what about R. Meir, who is "choshesh le-miuta" (worries about improbable but possible scenarios, more or less) and decides that he must not have eaten meat (ever).

this is in the context of a lot of improbable ukimtas (limitations on cases), many of which would seem to run counter to historical intuition. (eg, that no one was ever punished for hitting a parent unless all possibility of non-paternity was stictly ruled out). still, the sugestion that rabbi meir didn't eat meat seems stranger than comparably improbable suggestions about how things proceeded in biblical times, much like the suggestion that certain rabbis did not read uncle tom's cabin seems stranger to many people (like my father, and rabbi schachter) than the suggestion that sarah imenu never sinned.

all i'd like to suggest is that people take the same attitude toward contemporary "revisionism" as they do toward past revisionism. (while many like to allegorize ahistorical rabbinic statements, no one would denounce them the way they denounce their contemporary analogs, for example. so either they are devices with non-historical meaning or they are the undoing of our alleged proud tradition of rationalism, but not one sometimes and one other times...)

part of me suspects that there is some reluctance to implement such consistency because of a deep-seated disdain for the yeshivish masses that makes it necessary to marginalize them (sometimes i catch myself sharing this when it comes to the more extreme versions of the suppression of female intelect, autonomy, etc, in some communities), and davka not see them as within the spirit of the tradition. but yeah, we should try and get over that.


*the technical details are not crucial to my point here, but sorry if i've made them unnecesaily complicated...