In dealing with the demons that haunt rationality among those who assume that they are in fact being rational I find no word as helpful as “svara”.
I’m going to guess that you grew up pretty Modern Orthodox and therefore never swam and drowned in the sea of svara that chokes the souls of Chareidi youth. You see, in the word of “Iyun” (“In Depth”) Talmudic study, the Talmud is NOT the text that occupies anyone’s focus. The Talmud is just a small step ahead of the Torah in being a source text from which to jump into further discussions. An hour or two might be spent on studying a Talmudic passage after which a good month will be spent on the commentaries upon the commentaries upon the commentaries on the Talmud. Knowing the Talmud is nice, but no more impressive than knowing how to read—it’s a simple means to an end, and one that’s taken for granted.
The focus during the subsequent 14-hour-a-day “Talmud Study” is on explaining why a particular commentor holds a particular opinion regarding a particular law when—in a different volume—he holds an opinion that would seem to be at odds with the one that he expresses here. And after much shouting and pulling of hair the “Svaras” (loosely: “reasonings”) are set on the table.
“The reason why he claims that a table that fell on a horse that fell in a pit full of imaginary gas is still a table that cannot contract impurity, while in the other case he says that a man with two penises is required, according to Rav, to have only the larger one circumcised (laws that—when analyzed—appear to be based in contradictory premises) is because he holds that a penis is not created until the fourth month which would imply that we can assume that a boy is a girl until that time which means...”
yah. That’s the svara. It’s the ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT and intellectually beautiful way of explaining how Rabbinic opinions that appear to be inconsistent are actually FULLY consistent and priorly thought-out to a degree that borders on the incomprehensible.
And brilliant it often is, but bullshit it almost always is as well. There are NO TWO Rabbinic opinions (of the Rishonic Age—say 950 CE to 1430 CE) put forth by the same Medieval Rabbi that modern Yeshiva scholars would be hard-pressed to find a seemingly brilliant svara for. It’s like Nostradamus (or Evolutionary) explanations (and pardon the sacrilege there, but ON THIS SUBJECT they’re often, sadly, comparable) - except performed with mental gymnastics on a far higher sphere.
*Lest Iyun-Learning have any defenders here let me point out that its entire fundamental premise—it’s foundation stone, if you will—is based on the premise of Rabbinic Infallibility. It’s based on the belief that what Maimonides wrote when he was a young adult was letter-perfect and that his opinions/reasonings/traditions are expected to be identical to what he wrote in his final decade.
Which is naturally preposterous on account of the fact that Maimonides was human, he lacked modern archival resources, he STATES CLEARLY on a number of occasions that people who focus on Every Single Word in a text (even in the Bible!) - and expect brilliance therein—are fools, he writes about his own past errors and ask people to point out others that he might have missed and—did I mention? HE WAS VERY VERY HUMAN, and thus, likely NOT to be infallible. - Yah, and if HE wasn’t a letter-perfect God, you can damn well be sure that his less methodical, brilliant and intellectually honest colleagues likely were not as well.
Svara.
In dealing with the demons that haunt rationality among those who assume that they are in fact being rational I find no word as helpful as “svara”.
I’m going to guess that you grew up pretty Modern Orthodox and therefore never swam and drowned in the sea of svara that chokes the souls of Chareidi youth. You see, in the word of “Iyun” (“In Depth”) Talmudic study, the Talmud is NOT the text that occupies anyone’s focus. The Talmud is just a small step ahead of the Torah in being a source text from which to jump into further discussions. An hour or two might be spent on studying a Talmudic passage after which a good month will be spent on the commentaries upon the commentaries upon the commentaries on the Talmud. Knowing the Talmud is nice, but no more impressive than knowing how to read—it’s a simple means to an end, and one that’s taken for granted.
The focus during the subsequent 14-hour-a-day “Talmud Study” is on explaining why a particular commentor holds a particular opinion regarding a particular law when—in a different volume—he holds an opinion that would seem to be at odds with the one that he expresses here. And after much shouting and pulling of hair the “Svaras” (loosely: “reasonings”) are set on the table.
“The reason why he claims that a table that fell on a horse that fell in a pit full of imaginary gas is still a table that cannot contract impurity, while in the other case he says that a man with two penises is required, according to Rav, to have only the larger one circumcised (laws that—when analyzed—appear to be based in contradictory premises) is because he holds that a penis is not created until the fourth month which would imply that we can assume that a boy is a girl until that time which means...”
yah. That’s the svara. It’s the ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT and intellectually beautiful way of explaining how Rabbinic opinions that appear to be inconsistent are actually FULLY consistent and priorly thought-out to a degree that borders on the incomprehensible.
And brilliant it often is, but bullshit it almost always is as well. There are NO TWO Rabbinic opinions (of the Rishonic Age—say 950 CE to 1430 CE) put forth by the same Medieval Rabbi that modern Yeshiva scholars would be hard-pressed to find a seemingly brilliant svara for. It’s like Nostradamus (or Evolutionary) explanations (and pardon the sacrilege there, but ON THIS SUBJECT they’re often, sadly, comparable) - except performed with mental gymnastics on a far higher sphere.
And it’s almost always BS.*
mnuez
www.mnuez.blogspot.com
*Lest Iyun-Learning have any defenders here let me point out that its entire fundamental premise—it’s foundation stone, if you will—is based on the premise of Rabbinic Infallibility. It’s based on the belief that what Maimonides wrote when he was a young adult was letter-perfect and that his opinions/reasonings/traditions are expected to be identical to what he wrote in his final decade.
Which is naturally preposterous on account of the fact that Maimonides was human, he lacked modern archival resources, he STATES CLEARLY on a number of occasions that people who focus on Every Single Word in a text (even in the Bible!) - and expect brilliance therein—are fools, he writes about his own past errors and ask people to point out others that he might have missed and—did I mention? HE WAS VERY VERY HUMAN, and thus, likely NOT to be infallible. - Yah, and if HE wasn’t a letter-perfect God, you can damn well be sure that his less methodical, brilliant and intellectually honest colleagues likely were not as well.