I was recently forwarded a Youtube video that was made from the program that lets you create cartoons by simply typing dialogue.
It is very entertaining and worth a watch, but for those who don’t have time, or have difficulty bending their ears around the computerized reproduction of ashkenazic pronunciations of Jewish legal and exegetical technical terms, I’ll give a short run-down.
The video pits two knowledgeable, presumably traditionalist, audibly Ashkenazi Jews against each other in a battle of ideas. One assembles his positions entirely from a mesora, or tradition — that is to say, his outlook is formed entirely from lessons (or vorts) that he heard from rabbis whom he trusts as authority figures — entirely without critical evaluation. This is illustrated most strongly when the ideas he expresses are immediately recognizable as counter-intuitive (for example, when he claims that the patriarch Jacob knew the future, when anyone familiar with the simple gist of the stories in Genesis would know that such a supposition would render the entire story unintelligible).
The second character is characterized by her ruthlessly analytic critical approach. This angle subjects all information to Socratic-style interrogation meant to destabilize the issue in question to the greatest degree possible, and also by her sardonic (sometimes to the point of rude) wit.
Needless to say, neither of these characters successfully convinces the other, given that they have entirely different epistemological criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate. No matter how many authorities A cites, B will still reject the position as illogical. And no matter how many sarcastic rhetorical questions B asks, A will still hold on to his position because of the greater stature, in his eyes, of those authority figures who hold it. If B had wanted to win the argument, she could have done what she only hints at at the end of the video (when she accuses A of cherry-picking his sources) and reference those significant Jewish commentaries and halakhic decisors that supported her position. By contrast, the only way A could have helped his cause was to find a logical ground for his argument.
But both of these characters are caricatures of ideal types. Neither would accept the other’s criteria as valid enough to privilege it with a space in their argument. We however, are not, and both of these criteria — critical analysis and reliance on authoritative sources of knowledge — play a role in how we decide what is right and wrong. To a certain degree, they both should. Each method fills in lacunae that the other leaves. But the important thing for us when we argue about Torah (or anything else), is that we should be aware of how we’re basing our arguments.
