Human Interactions, Not Reason, Are the Necessary Foundations of Faith

In Reason to Believe: Rational Explanations of Orthodox Jewish Faith, Chaim Jachter sets out to provide exactly what his subtitle promises. In so doing, he draws on a variety of medieval and modern rabbinic approaches to fundamental theological questions. While finding many of Jachter’s arguments both “compelling” and “convincing,” and others less so, David Wolkenfeld doubts that such appeals to reason can ever be the basis for true religious commitment. He cites his experience as a campus rabbi to explain why:

[S]tudents were deeply interested in all of the questions and answers that thinking people ask about God and the Torah. How was the Torah written? Does archaeology discredit or reinforce the biblical narrative? Can Judaism become consistent with feminism while preserving its continuity with the past? And many students shift their relationship to Torah and mitzvot [commandments] dramatically while they are in college. But I can’t recall a single student who changed his or her relationship to the Torah and mitzvot because of a question or an answer to a question.

One helpful description of the nature of contemporary religious faith was provided by the late philosopher of religion Peter Berger. Berger argued that religious commitments are built on the ability to live within a “sacred canopy” that provides meaning and orientation to our lives. Communities enable their members to live under a sacred canopy by constructing what he calls a “plausibility structure” in which religious commitments can still make sense and be reinforced by something outside ourselves.

It is extremely uncommon for someone to abandon a commitment to a faith because of a question he cannot answer or an argument that she cannot countenance. But it is quite common for faith to be undermined by a visit to an unfriendly or unwelcoming synagogue, or by a religious leader whose serious ethical lapses are exposed. From one perspective, acceptance of a religious worldview shouldn’t depend on whether people are nice in synagogue! Either the Torah is true or it is not. But Berger’s paradigm helps us understand this common phenomenon. Faith is maintained by the communities and relationships that sustain a plausibility structure. When those relationships are strained or those communities shut us out, or we can no longer find religious leadership that is ethically compelling to us, faith itself can be lost or undermined.

And the corollary is equally true. Religious commitments are reinforced by religious leaders whose good will and good character help us see the world through their eyes and motivate us to want to [follow their example].

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Judaism, Rationalism, Religion & Holidays

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF