Gil Student - whose blog is what Cross-Currents would be if its authors valued honesty as much as polemics (Rabbi Feldman aside) - recently fostered an interesting discussion to which I am regrettably far too technologically incompetent to link.
Anyhow, in the context of the limited archaeological evidence for the Exodus, Gil makes the point that he believes that silly responses to reasonable questions over doctrine are inferior to an honest acknowledgement of the questions (and questioner's) validity, when a compelling answer is not available.
One point your humble correspondent made in the comments was an echo of an idea of Rabbi Milton Steinberg's, who posited that the reason God created the world without clear and compelling evidence of the correctness of one branch of theological thought was to foster a sense of tolerance between religions. In his view, this tolerance itself had value, rather than just serving as a conduit toward, say, ultimately convincing everyone that one set of dogmatic principles was correct.
My own thoughts on this subject did not go as far as Rabbi Steinberg's, and they are yet another echo of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, who was willing to admit that his beliefs reflected a measure of subjectivity. My conclusion - ignored if blessedly not disputed in the flame war in the comments - is that given the observation that the evidence is not overwhelming, and that the convictions of the Orthodox rest on other sources, perhaps the animosity displayed to the non-Orthodox, that is itself premised upon the obviousness of Orthodoxy, is unfair.
I'm not changing any minds, I know that. I've actually been thinking a bit over the fact that no-one changes their minds in the blogosphere, and I've had some interesting conversations on that score. Perhaps I'll post them when it's time to produce something for July. But I wanted to get this out regardless.
- Moishe Potemkin
Posted by MoisheP at June 12, 2005 01:26 PM | TrackBack