Brute Facts Don’t Persuade Anyone
An interesting story told by a Soviet émigré:
… By then, I had already met many Americans for whom “anti-Soviet” was almost as much of a pejorative as it had been in the pages of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. My favorite was a man in the café at the Rutgers Student Center who shrugged off the victims of the gulag camps by pointing out that capitalism kills people too—with cigarettes, for example. When I recovered from shock, I told him that smoking was far more ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and anti-smoking campaigns far less developed. That momentarily stumped him.
My mother was also at Rutgers at the time as a piano instructor. She once got into a heated argument over lunch with a colleague and friend after he lamented America’s appalling treatment of the old and the sick. She ventured that, from her ex-Soviet vantage point, it didn’t seem that bad. “Are you telling me that it’s just as bad in the Soviet Union?” her colleague retorted, only to be dumbstruck when my mother clarified that, actually, she meant it was much worse. She tried to illustrate her point by telling him about my grandmother’s sojourn in an overcrowded Soviet hospital ward: More than once, when the woman in the next bed rolled over in her sleep, her arm flopped across my grandma’s body. Half-decent care required bribing a nurse, and half-decent food had to be brought from home. My mother’s normally warm and gracious colleague shocked her by replying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.” Her perceptions, he told her, were obviously colored by antipathy toward the Soviet regime. Eventually, he relented enough to allow that perhaps my grandmother did have a very bad experience in a Soviet hospital—but surely projecting it onto all of Soviet medicine was uncalled for.
The thing to do, if interested in swaying another, is to follow up by grounding simple facts in an interpretive framework. I try to do so on this site, as well.
In the above example, had the lady wanted to convince someone of the horror of Soviet life, the effective combination is to give them facts, but also a short book of basic economic theory.
הא בלא הא לא סגיא
‘Levush HaAron’ on Techeiles – FREE!
Find it here…
(Translated by Yehuda Epstein into Hebrew, as well.)
‘Orthodox Jew’: An Oxymoron
Two excerpts from My Western Wall discussing the “meta” of mitzvas Techeiles:
Judaism as a culture and religion is admittedly reactive by nature. One example, in terms of Halacha, Jews blow the Shofar on Mussaf rather than Shacharis, since the Romans got scared of battle calls against them and in response they killed many Jews *. Another example is the customs Jews have during Pesach regarding what foods to eat and not eat – many non-Chometz items were made taboo when there was a fear that Chometz might seep in (which goes way beyond the scope of this piece). Therefore, to make a proactive change to reconstruct something that has been lost for a long time is something that goes against this trend and naturally therefore is met with resistance.
…
Orthodox is a term not inherently Jewish. In fact, Ortho is a Greek prefix meaning “straight,” “upright,” “right,” or “correct”. Dox means opinion, praise. Therefore, it means the “straight/correct opinion,” and is a term more used in Christianity (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox in Germany, etc.). Torah observant Jews assumed the name Orthodox in response to other Jews calling themselves Reform (sort of a nod to the protestant reformation in Christianity) and, whether the Torah observant Jews said “we’re Orthodox” or the Reformed Jews said, “you’re Orthodox,” the name stuck. To be Orthodox implies not changing a single thing from what’s been going “straight” for centuries. It’s to keep things status quo until Moshiach comes.
The reason Tekhelet and Orthodox thinking don’t mix is because a major change such as color on a garment is something that “hasn’t been done before.” Tekhelet therefore is supposed to meet the same pushback as:
Quinoa on Pesach,
Using horseradish as Maror on Pesach,
Expensive/lavish Bar Mitzvahs (as opposed to schnapps and sponge cake mit ah bissel herring),
Super-light Sifrei Torah (due to the super-thin parchment used now thanks to modern technology, as opposed to pre-war ones that weigh generally 25-30 pounds),
Tefillin that’s “gassos” (gassos means it’s made from a cow hide which is much thicker, making it much harder to become Pasul, but is only available thanks to modern technology) as opposed to a much thinner piece of leather, made from goat/sheep leather and referred to as “dakkos”,
Saying “SheHem Mishtachavim” during Aleinu when “it wasn’t done” for hundreds of years,
And more.
מורא מקדש: פחד מועיל ולא פחד משתק
טענת עשיו והחשש מעליה להר הבית נראים מוצדקים ממבט ראשון
וַיֹּאמֶר עֵשָׂו הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ לָמוּת וְלָמָּה זֶּה לִי בְּכֹרָה • עשיו שמע על חומרת העונשים הכרוכים בעבודת הקורבנות והעדיף להמנע מהם • טענתו היתה, לכאורה, מוצדקת • למה להכנס לכל כך הרבה חששות? • אולם התורה מצווה ועלינו לעשות, תוך זהירות כמובן • כך לגבי העליה להר הבית • הרב יצחק ברנד • פרשת תולדות • בית המדרש בהר הבית
Nov 1, 2021