Well, you know Adam Shear has a whole book on this topic. But yes part of the irony is that the "proof" as such should probably be attributed to R Saadia Gaon even if his presentation differs in some crucial ways.
I feel like this happens all the time in the history of philosophy. How many people cite the euthyphro dilemma not knowing it’s about “the holy” rather than the good?
100%. I assume this is because of the secularization of philosophy over time, so that most people encounter the dilemma in a context where "the holy" would be at best out of place. I wonder what the equivalent dynamic is for the Kuzari.
As you hinted in the article and others have said in the comments, my guess is it relates to the shifting purpose that “the argument from mass revelation” has served in history. It is mainly used not as a defense of Judaism as the “despised faith,” but a kiruv tool meant to bring non-frum Jews on side with unbeatable proofs.
Yes it sounds like “the Kuzari vs. ‘the Kuzari proof’” is a topic that deserves even more development. I personally associate the “proof” with Aish Hatorah, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s even older.
I also associate it with Aish, as well as Ohr Someach, but it’s always presented as an obvious truth that I have trouble imagining anyone recent came up with it themselves.
I think this is a bit of a strawman of the argument, though I agree that attributing it to the Kuzari makes no sense (the Torah makes the same argument at the end of Sefer Devarim)
See I think that A. the modern version or whatever isn’t just a change of context and scope, it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of the claim. And B., even shifting back toward the Kuzari, as you describe it, the “MUST” preserves what is foreign about the modern version.
The Kuzari isn’t interested in pointing out certain facts which mean that the origins of the tradition must have been X or Y, he just takes the tradition to be a valid source of knowledge about historical events.
I understand that the Kuzari takes Sinai and the Exodus for granted and on that basis argues for trust as the foundation of the faith whereas the latter argument tries to prove Sinai through the existence of the tradition, but I'm not really sure why you see these as inherently alien lines of thought.
The Rabbi in the Kuzari never finds himself needing to defend Sinai as an event because the other religions (besides the philosopher's) take it for granted. I don't think that makes his position indefensible when applied to scrutiny. Yes, the "couldn't have faked it" argument doesn't originate in the Kuzari, but I don't think it undermines the concept that faith is predicated on experience rather than proof. It's not a philosophical or empirical proof for Gd, it's a proof for the existence of our experience. The two arguments just fall in different domains: one is prior to my acceptance of the experience of Sinai (and co) one after
I would say that "proof" and "trust" are inherently opposed: one sees the need to demonstrate the truth of a proposition, one says it is obviously true if it came from a trusted person. If the person is trusted, when the need to prove the proposition?
This is all the more so when the Kuzari is at pains to attack religion that supports itself via argument and proof instead of trust.
"Proof for the existence of our experience" might capture some of the weirdness here: If you had an experience, you don't need to prove it; if you need to prove it, you either didn't have the experience, or you're trying to persuade someone who didn't have the experience—in which case, again, it's no longer about being part of the trusted tradition.
I would say that "proof" and "trust" can be symbiotic. Yes, they accomplish different things, but trust is earned and trust can be lost and regained. You can prove yourself worthy of trust, but I need a reason to trust you in the first place. If my reason for trusting you is in question, you can likewise prove yourself worthy of trust.
Once upon a time, when it was nearly universally agreed upon that Gd spoke to His people at Sinai, no further proof than that was necessary. Once we know that Gd spoke to us at Sinai, the rest is given down to the last kal v'chomer. Once you've been given the mesorah, you have an experience of the revelation (albeit and indirect one). If though, I challenge its validity, your experience is wanting, not because you didn't experience it but that the content itself is unstable.
I have a better idea than most people on the planet of what my great grandfather was like. I grew up with stories about him, even though I never met him. I have an indirect experience of what he was like. Is it possible my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were lying or collectively misremembering? Sure, but probably not. If, however, I learn something about him that would lead me to believe their accounts were inaccurate, that would break my trust. It would go a long way to re-establish the trust if someone said to me "that new information is impossible for x and y reasons". It still wouldn't prove to me that their stories of him were true, but there would be no reason left not to trust them.
SO I agree that there is a form of continuity between a state of trust and one without trust, and that proofs can help you move between them. But I think the Kuzari doesn't present any model for how to move out of a state of trust, he only has a what to say to someone existing in a state of trusting the tradition. Hence the king remains unconvinced once the rabbi has said his piece.
I think I would say that something saying "the new information is impossible, etc." doesn't actually create trust though, it creates a reason for certainty in the absence of trust.
I'm curious to hear what you understand the difference between trust and certainty here to be, why you think trust can't be restored, and why you think certainty can be established even though there has been no positive evidence (only saying that the information that caused doubt had no merit. We haven't actually established any evidence for the account of the family, in our analogy)
Well I very specifically wasn’t taking on the details of the argument, though we can have that discussion if you want (my main problem with it is that it actually assumes a strawman opponent!)
Can you say more about where or how you see this in Devarim? I would be very surprised to find that it makes claims along the lines of “mass revelation is a claim that can’t be made falsely and still be believed.”
Fair enough. I'm more positing that the notion that the Jews wouldn't have had the opportunity to fake a mass revelation is an adhesion to the argument but not a part of the essential argument itself.
The argument begins, more or less, with the assertion that common experience is superior to logical proof because the latter is subject to debate whereas the former is experienced directly and so cannot be reasoned away. This initial common experience was transmitted from generation to generation without rupture until it reached us.
The obvious objection here is that you can simply claim that you have a tradition because a text tells you so. If you have it written down in the Chumash that it was to be passed down from generation to generation and the Chumash is the classic of the Jewish religion, you're reading a history into a text, not the other way around. A frustrated defendant would then say "Help me out here, at what point do you think we would have adopted this text that told us something that we had never experienced?"
This is essentially a tangent, not a part of the original argument. (I think it basically works in the sense that a gradual text would leave us with different versions of the text, which don't survive. It's very difficult to maintain a standard text in the ancient world without a mechanism of control over what survives, which just didn't exist in ancient Judea. We don't know of any equivalent to the early church which standardized a text and then hunted down all alternatives and consigned them to the flames. An oral text that was later committed to ink would have likewise produced variants, etc. Essentially, you're stuck with the idea that there was a point in time where a text was adopted that asserted a tradition that the adherents didn't hold.) But this challenge is entirely besides the point here.
The point of the original argument is that the tradition is internally binding and relies on transmission by the entirety of the people who themselves experienced the mass revelation. This isn't supposed to be a compelling argument to outsiders, it's an appeal to fidelity of something you're supposed to know by means of cultural transmission. I can be sure the fact that both me and ancient Judeans put on Tefillin, kept the Shabbos, and circumcised our children attest to the fact that the tradition has remained faithful among our collective culture. Obviously this needn't be historically demonstrable to be basically compelling.
Deuteronomy 4 (Vaeschanan. I misremembered where it was) implores the people to remember the Exodus and Sinai for all generations and challenges the nation to ask itself if any other nation heard Gd speak from the fire or had a small enslaved nation redeemed from amidst a larger more powerful one. There are essentially two components here: 1) That the beginning of law is sourced in mass revelation (and not like, say, the supposed miracles of Jesus, which leave over very little in the way of actual content), essentially that we know the law is true because we witnessed it being given together, which no other nation can claim 2) That the miracles of the Exodus (weren't only witnessed publically by the entire nation but) had real world geopolitical results. This is the difference between the Exodus and all other public miracles. (An Indian guru can appear to reverse the weather or juggle the stars but it doesn't produce any provable results. A nation of slaves can attest that they used to be slaves and now they aren't. That's a real world tangible result to a set of public miracles)
First off: No apologies, thank you for the thoughtful response.
Second, I think I would probably disagree with some of your other points, but I agree with your basic understanding of "the point of the original argument," and that the Kuzari is trying to make essentially that point. In this and the other posts, I most try to point how what you call the "adhesion"—but which I think is the main way people talk about this—has so little to do with the text of the Kuzari, and actually opposes the Kuzari's argument in some key ways.
Maybe I just haven't been around enough to see it become the main way the argument was presented. My main objection, I think, to your article, is that this argument is fundamentally opposed in its assumptions to the "Kuzari" argument. I think it's just a later defense of the original premise. The difference in concern just reflects a difference of standards of the challenger, not necessarily the argument itself
I think the shift of mode from “trusted transmission” to “objective, rational proof” shifts exactly into a mode the Kuzari was trying to negate. Hence the rabbi responds to the Khazar king and says that proofs are features of speculative religion, but not of Judaism. And he returns to that critique quite frequently.
The attacking question the "couldn't have faked it" argument assumes is that you can't actually claim to a tradition if you can explain this "knowledge" of the event through the adoption of a text rather than from experience. This would throw the entire premise that knowledge of Judaism is attained through common memory into question. If the "tradition" comes after the text, then you can't lay a claim to common memory. It's not really about objectivity so much as it is asserting the existence of experience.
Well, you know Adam Shear has a whole book on this topic. But yes part of the irony is that the "proof" as such should probably be attributed to R Saadia Gaon even if his presentation differs in some crucial ways.
I feel like this happens all the time in the history of philosophy. How many people cite the euthyphro dilemma not knowing it’s about “the holy” rather than the good?
Good point!
100%. I assume this is because of the secularization of philosophy over time, so that most people encounter the dilemma in a context where "the holy" would be at best out of place. I wonder what the equivalent dynamic is for the Kuzari.
As you hinted in the article and others have said in the comments, my guess is it relates to the shifting purpose that “the argument from mass revelation” has served in history. It is mainly used not as a defense of Judaism as the “despised faith,” but a kiruv tool meant to bring non-frum Jews on side with unbeatable proofs.
Yes it sounds like “the Kuzari vs. ‘the Kuzari proof’” is a topic that deserves even more development. I personally associate the “proof” with Aish Hatorah, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s even older.
I also associate it with Aish, as well as Ohr Someach, but it’s always presented as an obvious truth that I have trouble imagining anyone recent came up with it themselves.
I think this is a bit of a strawman of the argument, though I agree that attributing it to the Kuzari makes no sense (the Torah makes the same argument at the end of Sefer Devarim)
See I think that A. the modern version or whatever isn’t just a change of context and scope, it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of the claim. And B., even shifting back toward the Kuzari, as you describe it, the “MUST” preserves what is foreign about the modern version.
The Kuzari isn’t interested in pointing out certain facts which mean that the origins of the tradition must have been X or Y, he just takes the tradition to be a valid source of knowledge about historical events.
I understand that the Kuzari takes Sinai and the Exodus for granted and on that basis argues for trust as the foundation of the faith whereas the latter argument tries to prove Sinai through the existence of the tradition, but I'm not really sure why you see these as inherently alien lines of thought.
The Rabbi in the Kuzari never finds himself needing to defend Sinai as an event because the other religions (besides the philosopher's) take it for granted. I don't think that makes his position indefensible when applied to scrutiny. Yes, the "couldn't have faked it" argument doesn't originate in the Kuzari, but I don't think it undermines the concept that faith is predicated on experience rather than proof. It's not a philosophical or empirical proof for Gd, it's a proof for the existence of our experience. The two arguments just fall in different domains: one is prior to my acceptance of the experience of Sinai (and co) one after
I would say that "proof" and "trust" are inherently opposed: one sees the need to demonstrate the truth of a proposition, one says it is obviously true if it came from a trusted person. If the person is trusted, when the need to prove the proposition?
This is all the more so when the Kuzari is at pains to attack religion that supports itself via argument and proof instead of trust.
"Proof for the existence of our experience" might capture some of the weirdness here: If you had an experience, you don't need to prove it; if you need to prove it, you either didn't have the experience, or you're trying to persuade someone who didn't have the experience—in which case, again, it's no longer about being part of the trusted tradition.
I would say that "proof" and "trust" can be symbiotic. Yes, they accomplish different things, but trust is earned and trust can be lost and regained. You can prove yourself worthy of trust, but I need a reason to trust you in the first place. If my reason for trusting you is in question, you can likewise prove yourself worthy of trust.
Once upon a time, when it was nearly universally agreed upon that Gd spoke to His people at Sinai, no further proof than that was necessary. Once we know that Gd spoke to us at Sinai, the rest is given down to the last kal v'chomer. Once you've been given the mesorah, you have an experience of the revelation (albeit and indirect one). If though, I challenge its validity, your experience is wanting, not because you didn't experience it but that the content itself is unstable.
I have a better idea than most people on the planet of what my great grandfather was like. I grew up with stories about him, even though I never met him. I have an indirect experience of what he was like. Is it possible my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were lying or collectively misremembering? Sure, but probably not. If, however, I learn something about him that would lead me to believe their accounts were inaccurate, that would break my trust. It would go a long way to re-establish the trust if someone said to me "that new information is impossible for x and y reasons". It still wouldn't prove to me that their stories of him were true, but there would be no reason left not to trust them.
SO I agree that there is a form of continuity between a state of trust and one without trust, and that proofs can help you move between them. But I think the Kuzari doesn't present any model for how to move out of a state of trust, he only has a what to say to someone existing in a state of trusting the tradition. Hence the king remains unconvinced once the rabbi has said his piece.
I think I would say that something saying "the new information is impossible, etc." doesn't actually create trust though, it creates a reason for certainty in the absence of trust.
I'm curious to hear what you understand the difference between trust and certainty here to be, why you think trust can't be restored, and why you think certainty can be established even though there has been no positive evidence (only saying that the information that caused doubt had no merit. We haven't actually established any evidence for the account of the family, in our analogy)
Well I very specifically wasn’t taking on the details of the argument, though we can have that discussion if you want (my main problem with it is that it actually assumes a strawman opponent!)
Can you say more about where or how you see this in Devarim? I would be very surprised to find that it makes claims along the lines of “mass revelation is a claim that can’t be made falsely and still be believed.”
Fair enough. I'm more positing that the notion that the Jews wouldn't have had the opportunity to fake a mass revelation is an adhesion to the argument but not a part of the essential argument itself.
The argument begins, more or less, with the assertion that common experience is superior to logical proof because the latter is subject to debate whereas the former is experienced directly and so cannot be reasoned away. This initial common experience was transmitted from generation to generation without rupture until it reached us.
The obvious objection here is that you can simply claim that you have a tradition because a text tells you so. If you have it written down in the Chumash that it was to be passed down from generation to generation and the Chumash is the classic of the Jewish religion, you're reading a history into a text, not the other way around. A frustrated defendant would then say "Help me out here, at what point do you think we would have adopted this text that told us something that we had never experienced?"
This is essentially a tangent, not a part of the original argument. (I think it basically works in the sense that a gradual text would leave us with different versions of the text, which don't survive. It's very difficult to maintain a standard text in the ancient world without a mechanism of control over what survives, which just didn't exist in ancient Judea. We don't know of any equivalent to the early church which standardized a text and then hunted down all alternatives and consigned them to the flames. An oral text that was later committed to ink would have likewise produced variants, etc. Essentially, you're stuck with the idea that there was a point in time where a text was adopted that asserted a tradition that the adherents didn't hold.) But this challenge is entirely besides the point here.
The point of the original argument is that the tradition is internally binding and relies on transmission by the entirety of the people who themselves experienced the mass revelation. This isn't supposed to be a compelling argument to outsiders, it's an appeal to fidelity of something you're supposed to know by means of cultural transmission. I can be sure the fact that both me and ancient Judeans put on Tefillin, kept the Shabbos, and circumcised our children attest to the fact that the tradition has remained faithful among our collective culture. Obviously this needn't be historically demonstrable to be basically compelling.
Deuteronomy 4 (Vaeschanan. I misremembered where it was) implores the people to remember the Exodus and Sinai for all generations and challenges the nation to ask itself if any other nation heard Gd speak from the fire or had a small enslaved nation redeemed from amidst a larger more powerful one. There are essentially two components here: 1) That the beginning of law is sourced in mass revelation (and not like, say, the supposed miracles of Jesus, which leave over very little in the way of actual content), essentially that we know the law is true because we witnessed it being given together, which no other nation can claim 2) That the miracles of the Exodus (weren't only witnessed publically by the entire nation but) had real world geopolitical results. This is the difference between the Exodus and all other public miracles. (An Indian guru can appear to reverse the weather or juggle the stars but it doesn't produce any provable results. A nation of slaves can attest that they used to be slaves and now they aren't. That's a real world tangible result to a set of public miracles)
Sorry for the novel.
First off: No apologies, thank you for the thoughtful response.
Second, I think I would probably disagree with some of your other points, but I agree with your basic understanding of "the point of the original argument," and that the Kuzari is trying to make essentially that point. In this and the other posts, I most try to point how what you call the "adhesion"—but which I think is the main way people talk about this—has so little to do with the text of the Kuzari, and actually opposes the Kuzari's argument in some key ways.
Maybe I just haven't been around enough to see it become the main way the argument was presented. My main objection, I think, to your article, is that this argument is fundamentally opposed in its assumptions to the "Kuzari" argument. I think it's just a later defense of the original premise. The difference in concern just reflects a difference of standards of the challenger, not necessarily the argument itself
I think the shift of mode from “trusted transmission” to “objective, rational proof” shifts exactly into a mode the Kuzari was trying to negate. Hence the rabbi responds to the Khazar king and says that proofs are features of speculative religion, but not of Judaism. And he returns to that critique quite frequently.
The attacking question the "couldn't have faked it" argument assumes is that you can't actually claim to a tradition if you can explain this "knowledge" of the event through the adoption of a text rather than from experience. This would throw the entire premise that knowledge of Judaism is attained through common memory into question. If the "tradition" comes after the text, then you can't lay a claim to common memory. It's not really about objectivity so much as it is asserting the existence of experience.