November 30, 2006
Da'as Torah, The Zohar and Other Assorted Thoughts
On The Main Line has a great post on a new journal article by Menachem Kellner entitled Maimonides Agonist: Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Modern Judaism. It's a long post, worth reading, and brought to mind a number of thoughts.
First, the issue of da'as Torah and just how historically normative it is. I'll just add that if you consider the explanation of Genesis that we've been throwing around here (in short: that Adam eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was Man asserting his prerogative to "know" morality by force of his own reason, and so was an inherent rejection of Divine authority) then it's clear that some kind of recognition of rabbinic authority (not necessarily modern-day da'as Torah) must be part and parcel of traditional Judaism.
Regarding the nature of da'as Torah, S. writes:
As far as I can tell that is the innovation of Daas Torah as a prescriptive ideology: the idea that a rabbi who spends the bulk of his time teaching Torah to 20 year bachelors is inherently better suited to practical leadership of the wider community than a rabbi who has street smarts, even if their Torah scholarship is otherwise equal.
Perhaps this is a result of galus, and the lack of a concrete reality in which the halachic reality can be realized. The subsequent focus of learning becomes segregated from the real world, more idealistic than practical or political. Very reminiscent of Halachic Man; and, in contrast, the Shalem Center and the Azure Journal work very hard at countering this perspective by focusing on reacquainting halacha with a political reality (in the Land/State of Israel).
It's interesting to consider the roots of this attitude: one would assume that it is Maimonidean, since it's more rational. But the article Kellner presents posits Maimonides as more practical. I haven't quite puzzled it all out yet.
One last comment: it hadn't occured to me of the import of the debate over the authorship of the Zohar as it pertains the traditional "proof" of the authenticity of the Torah, but it's a perfect example of why that argument falls flat.
