Avodah Mailing List

Volume 32: Number 37

Sun, 09 Mar 2014

• 1. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Micha Berger)
• 2. Re: knowing too much (Micha Berger)
• 3. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Lisa Liel)
• 4. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Micha Berger)
• 5. Tzadakah - Guidelines for Giving: To Whom Should I Give (Eli Turkel)
• 6. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Arie Folger)
• 7. Can Women Receive a Heter Ora'ah? (Chana Luntz)
• 8. Partnership Minyanim vs Deaf/Blind Aliyot (Chana Luntz)
• 9. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Lisa Liel)
• 10. Re: Time for the Deceased (David Riceman)
• 11. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (Kenneth Miller)
• 12. Re: Eitz HaDa'at (was: Why does Moshe use logical arguments when davening to, save) (Arie Folger)

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 01:17:48PM -0600, Lisa Liel wrote:
> I'm with Rambam.  The only reason maalot ha-ofi or ha-midotiot are an  
> issue is because of our failure to see emet v'sheker clearly.

Neither R' Yisrael nor any school of psychiatry would agree.

People do things while knowing they're bad ideas. People who know quite
clearly what smoking will do to them, someone with high blood pressure
and glucose levels who continues overeating.... We make up stories to
tell ourselves in order to satisfy our desires. Just this once. I'll
stop tomorrow. Soon.

Akrasia isn't as symple as a failure of opinion.

...
> Adam and Havah certainly knew they weren't clothed before they ate from  
> the Eitz.  But it was just a fact.  A truth.  No judgment attached to  
> it.  No judgment *could* attach to it.  After the Eitz, it became all  
> about feelings.

But  perhaps because it was only when desire became a part of "me" after
which taavah and self-shochad motivate me to create lies for myslf.

In any case, RSRH's theme is that chazal describe human perfection in
terms of emulating His Middos, not in knowledge of abstract theological
truths.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             In the days of our sages, man didn't sin unless
mi...@aishdas.org        he was overcome with a spirit of foolishness.
http://www.aishdas.org   Today, we don't do a mitzvah unless we receive
Fax: (270) 514-1507      a spirit of purity.      - Rav Yisrael Salanter

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 12:41:52PM -0800, saul newman wrote:
: http://www.torahmusings.com/2014/02/losing-tinok-shenishba-status/  the
: parameters for how much one knows to lose the tinok shenishba excuse.

The thing is, there is no category of "tinoq shenishba". TSN is an
example in the gemara of somoene who isn't even acting beshogeig because
he never knew it was assur.

Phrasing the question in terms of the TSN abstraction therefore makes
it harder to resolve than I would think is necessary. Someone doesn't
cross a TSN threshold; either they realize that particular act is
really assur (and that the concept of issur is real), or they don't.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Friendship is like stone. A stone has no value,
mi...@aishdas.org        but by rubbing one stone against another,
http://www.aishdas.org   sparks of fire emerge. 
Fax: (270) 514-1507                  - Rav Mordechai of Lechovitz

On 3/7/2014 1:43 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 01:17:48PM -0600, Lisa Liel wrote:
>> I'm with Rambam.  The only reason maalot ha-ofi or ha-midotiot are an
>> issue is because of our failure to see emet v'sheker clearly.
> Neither R' Yisrael nor any school of psychiatry would agree.

Not in our post-cheit world, no.

> People do things while knowing they're bad ideas. People who know quite
> clearly what smoking will do to them, someone with high blood pressure
> and glucose levels who continues overeating.... We make up stories to
> tell ourselves in order to satisfy our desires. Just this once. I'll
> stop tomorrow. Soon.
Only because we manage to trick ourselves into ignoring the 
repercussions that we know exist.  All that you're saying is true -- in 
our world.  Not in the pre-Eitz world.  There's no cognitive dissonance 
when you aren't blocking out the truth because you think it's bad.  And 
that's what we do.  "I don't like this truth, so I'm going to ignore 
it."  No, we don't always do that consciously, but we do it anyway.  
That's all a result of the cheit.

> Akrasia isn't as symple as a failure of opinion.

I don't know what Akrasia is.  And I didn't say anything about a failure 
of opinion.  In fact, "opinion", at least as it's used nowadays, is an 
addition to my argument.  People think their opinion matters even about 
things they know nothing about.  That's not an "opinion" in reality.  
It's what they want to be true.  Real emet v'sheker doesn't include 
things being true just because we want them to be.

> ...
>> Adam and Havah certainly knew they weren't clothed before they ate from
>> the Eitz.  But it was just a fact.  A truth.  No judgment attached to
>> it.  No judgment *could* attach to it.  After the Eitz, it became all
>> about feelings.
> But  perhaps because it was only when desire became a part of "me" after
> which taavah and self-shochad motivate me to create lies for myslf.
>
> In any case, RSRH's theme is that chazal describe human perfection in
> terms of emulating His Middos, not in knowledge of abstract theological
> truths.

Only in the post-cheit world.  You're applying rules of our world to a 
world that was quite different.  Our psyches were different, and the 
rules you're talking about don't apply to them.

Lisa

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 02:09:42PM -0600, Lisa Liel wrote:
>> Neither R' Yisrael nor any school of psychiatry would agree.
>
> Not in our post-cheit world, no.

But when the Rambam (first part of Moreh ch. III) reduces taamei hamitzvos
to
    - laws that teach us about G-d / emes
    - laws that wean us away from AZ / falsehood
    - laws that provide us with the quiet society neessary to accomplish
      the prior 2
he isn't talking to Adam. He is talking to our pos-cheit world.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A person lives with himself for seventy years,
mi...@aishdas.org        and after it is all over, he still does not
http://www.aishdas.org   know himself.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter

except for Purim the general rule is that one should give tzedakah only
after the are checked (except if they are starving which I doubt occurs
much in modern western society). Ahavat Tzedkahah states that someone who
collects money for a chatan and kallah or for an apartment should also be
checked out.

The sefer Ahavat Tzedakah quotes RSZA that one is PROHIBITED from giving
tzedaka if one knows that the receiver is a fraud and not poor. Even if he
decides that in any case it is present and not for charity because he
causes the receipient to sin since he thinks it is robbery.
One should not give the poor person more than one is fitting for him. Even
if the poor person threatens that he will rent himself out to a nonJew and
then violate shabbat because this encourages cheaters that request tzedakah
and come with all sorts of threats.

Maharshdam (YD 166) that one who cant work is considered and needy .
However, one whose background is that the people work for a living and he
prefers not to work but instead to collect charity this is not considered
needy ("yechsar lo") and neither the community nor relatives have no need
to support him.

In some communities the local rabbinate supplies certificates to tzedakah
collectors and requests that people not give to those who don't have
certificates.

In my shul I give the vast majority of my charity either to the shul
tzedakah fund - that checks people out - or to recognized institutions. If
there is a collector who appears only once I give some small amount. I tend
not to give to the regulars who are there all the time. My contacts claim
they are all frauds.

I once heard in the name of Rav Elyashiv that one should not give tzedakah
at the Western wall and the collectors there are frauds.

-- 
Eli Turkel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avod
ah-aishdas.org/attachments/20140308/bfc73fee/attachment-0001.htm>

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 8:17 PM, Lisa Liel <l...@starways.net> wrote:

> If I tell my daughter, "Your drawing looks terrible", I'm an awful mother,
> and so I would never do that.  But why?  Because lacking the original,
> pre-Eitz sense of emet v'sheker, statements like that are felt as personal
> affronts.  Given our current reality, where that's how we do sense things,
> middot become very important.  In an ideal world, they wouldn't even be
> necessary.


While I didn't address that in my post, another reason to reconsider the
peshat in Eitz HaDaat is on the esperiential peshat plane. What does it
mean, that there is a tree out there that can impart knowledge? Is there
another tree from which I can glean the knowledge to pass the bar, or,
since I am not a lawyer but am presently learning some Even HaEzer, how
about a fruit for mastering SA overnight?

That is another reason why I paid special attention to the sexual
euphemisms in the text. If the tree either was an aphrodisiac or something
that can make you lose control (alcohol, drugs), it would allow for the
yetser hara' to have free rein.

But if you go with Rambam, please explain, how does a tree lead us to lose
some intellectual capacities? Did it grow LSD, which then burned some holes
into Adam's brains? And this then became hereditary?

If you never ask science based questions and do not consider common
experience to be a source of peshat, this post does not speak to you. But
since there are a number of reasons to interpret the whole parsha
differentyl, as I argued, and since that other way of interpreting the
parsha also answers the experiential question, it might just convince a
bunch of people, both who were and were not bothered by the experiential
question.

Shavua' tov,
-- 
Arie Folger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avod
ah-aishdas.org/attachments/20140308/a8d319a5/attachment-0001.htm>

>
> RMB writes:




> <<I stated on Areivim that it wasn't clear to me that it is possible for a
> woman to receive a heter hora'ah. After all, hora'ah bifnei rabo requires
> a heter to begin with, teaching zil q'ri bei rav halakhah does not. It's
> not simply open to anyone with ability. Given that, pesaq today still
> devolves from beis din's initial lo sosur mikol asher yagidu lekha. So,
> is hora'ah open to those who aren't in principle qualified to become
> dayanim? Or is it joining a shalsheles that they are choq-like simply
> excluded from?
>
> I am not trying to re-raise the broader issue; I'm really only curious
> about the one point. Has someone shown that hora'ah is indeed something
> performed by anyone who is capable?>>
>
>
The Birchei Yosef Choshen Mishpat Siman 7 si'if katan 12 says explicitly it
is OK.  The Sefer HaChinuch effectively states likewise saying in Mitzvah
152 that:

"...The prohibition of coming into the temple drunk in the time of the
temple applies to men and women, and [refraining from] ruling on halachic
matters in any place and any time by males, and so with a wise woman who is
fitting to rule on halachic matters".

The Piskei Teshuva in Choshen Mishpat siman 7 si'if 5 quotes both the
Birchei Yosef and the Sefer HaChinuch and relates it back to Devorah and
(one of the) positions in Tosphos that what Devorah did was to teach the
din the judges who actually ruled - something that, given that what she was
teaching them was hardly settled din, they were the foremost scholars of
the time, and they then relied upon her teaching has to be considered
hora'ah.

>Tir'u baTov!
>-Micha

Regards

Chana
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avod
ah-aishdas.org/attachments/20140308/ba4955cf/attachment-0001.htm>

>
> RLK asked:




> >R' Weider from YU wrote the following article about the halachik
> >impermissibility of partnership minyanim.
>
>    -
>
> http://www.yucommentator.org/2014/03/the-halakhic-s
> tatus-of-partnership-minyanim/
>
> >One of his main arguments is that "Talmudic enactments retain binding
> >authority regardless of the situational applicability of any stated
> >rationale, unless explicitly stated otherwise."
>
>
Part of the issue is the nature of the definition. R' Weider is assuming
that we are dealing with "an enactment", understanding kovod hatzibbur as
the Bach does, in which case  he is pretty much correct (although how we
deal with talmudic enactments that in fact in practice are not followed
when their reason disappears  - such as covering of liquids (non prevalence
of snakes), mayim achronim (sodom salt) and clapping and dancing on shabbas
(fixing musical instruments) - involves a lot of complex discussion amongst
the rishonim and achronim).

 But he rather assumes what he is trying to prove, ie that kovod hatzibbur
is an enactment and that we follow the Bach l'halacha.  See the first part
of my post at:

http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol31/v31n039.shtml#08

where I set out three understandings that appear in the halachic literature
regarding kovod hatzibbur, and reference some of the situations in which
kovod hatzibbur comes up elsewhere - eg having a shaliach tzibbur who does
not have a beard and, rolling the Torah between parshios and how they are
then discussed.



> >How can this be reconciled with the following?
>
>  >  - http://www.torahmusings.com/2007/02/blind-aliyah/
>    >- http://www.yeshiva.co/ask/?id=1562
>    -
>    >
> http://www.jo
> shyuter.com/2011/02/20/judaism/calling-a-blind-person-to-the-torah-and
> -its-implications-for-womens-aliyot/
>
> >If in Talmudic times blind or deaf people were unable to be called to the
> >Torah, why would situational changes ("Rema (*Orach Chaim* 139:3) adds
> that
> >nowadays, when we are lenient to call to the Torah even an ignoramus who
> >cannot follow the reading, we also call blind men to the Torah") allow for
> >them to be called?
>
>
 But again you are assuming that not calling blind or illiterate people to
the Torah was due to an "enactment", whereas as the meforshim make clear
the ruling of the Shulchan Aruch is based on the majority rishonic position
that one of the requirements for an aliyah is that the person reads along
quietly with the reader and if they cannot read, (for sight reasons or
illiteracy reasons) they cannot be called, while the Rema allows one to be
lenient because of a minority opinion amongst the rishonim (Meharil) that
this is not necessary.  It is not at all clear which opinion was followed
in the time of the Talmud (if it was, then there wouldn't be a disagreement
amongst rishonim), so there is nothing that suggests that there was ever a
"talmudic enactment" , thus making the cases not comparable (assuming
indeed that kovod hatzibbur can be considered in the same category as a
regular talmudic enactment).


Regards

Chana





> >Kol Tuv,
> >Liron
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avod
ah-aishdas.org/attachments/20140308/5f597f0c/attachment-0001.htm>

Something of the sort, yes.  Think of it as a sort of synesthesia, which 
coincidentally, can be caused by LSD.  In synesthesia, our senses get 
mixed.  We hear colors and see music.  Prior to the /Eitz/, we perceived 
matters of fact as just that: matters of fact.  But the /Eitz /was like 
a poison.  It distorted our senses, hereditarily.  It made it so that we 
perceive good and bad in facts.

One understanding of /chochma/, /bina /and /daat /is that /daat /is 
factual knowledge, /chochma /is functional knowledge, and /bina /is 
theoretical knowledge. To use an example, when I look at a lightswitch 
and say "This is a lightswitch", that's /daat/.  When I know that I can 
turn the light on and off by flipping it, that's /chochma/.  When I know 
that flipping it causes a circuit to either open or close, thus allowing 
or disallowing the free flow of electrons, which causes a filament in 
the lightbulb to heat up and glow, producing light, that's /bina/.

Good and bad can apply to /chochma/ and to /bina/, but never to /daat/.  
If I jump off of the Empire State Building, I'm going to die.  That's 
not good or bad.  If I jump off of the Empire State Building, I'm going 
to die.  That's not good or bad. It just /is/.  You can say that jumping 
is bad.  But you can't place a value other than true and false on 
factual information.

With the lightswitch, good /chochma/ is turning the switch to the off 
position in order to extinguish the light.  Bad /chochma/ is throwing a 
bucket of water at the switch.  That'll probably put the light out as 
well, but with a lot of side affects that you really didn't want.  Good 
/bina/ is as I described it above. Bad /bina/ is that there's a little 
demon in the switch, and when I turn the switch to the on position, it 
pinches him in the rear end, making him so angry that he glows.

The very phrase/eitz ha-daat tov v'ra/ is unusual.  If it meant tree of 
knowledge of good and evil, the grammar is all messed up.  Literally, as 
it is, it means "the tree of /daat/, good and evil".  (I'm leaving aside 
the question of whether evil is a decent translation of /ra/, which I 
think it isn't.)  The fruit made us perceive good and evil in factual 
knowledge.  You can't say, "It's good that that's a lightswitch".  It 
just /is/. Moral/intellectual synesthesia.

Lisa

On 3/8/2014 2:45 PM, Arie Folger wrote:
> But if you go with Rambam, please explain, how does a tree lead us to 
> lose some intellectual capacities? Did it grow LSD, which then burned 
> some holes into Adam's brains? And this then became hereditary?
>
> If you never ask science based questions and do not consider common 
> experience to be a source of peshat, this post does not speak to you. 
> But since there are a number of reasons to interpret the whole parsha 
> differentyl, as I argued, and since that other way of interpreting the 
> parsha also answers the experiential question, it might just convince 
> a bunch of people, both who were and were not bothered by the 
> experiential question.
>
> Shavua' tov,
> -- 
> Arie Folger

RMB:

<<I am inclined to agree; I see Chazal's whole point as disputing 
Plato's identification of the fundamental, most pure truths, being math. 
They are in effect reply: No, they're the Torah.>>

Philo doesn't identify ideas with "the fundamental, most pure truths".  
See Wolfson, "Philo", vol. 1, p. 211 ff.  I doubt if it's an accurate 
description of Plato's opinions either.  See Vlastos, "Socrates, Ironist 
and Moral philosopher, pp. 47-48, items Ia and Ib, and p. 107 ff.

On the midrash I cited see Wolfson, ibid., p.242 ff.

David Riceman

RMB quoted RGB:

> "Internalizing the conscience - bringing the extrinsic Jiminy
> Cricket into one's inner essence - is the process of becoming
> fully 'human.'"

I never really understood how to do that. It's one thing to accept the
advice of a friend, but I think that is quite different than actually
internalizing the friend. That part of the mashal is quite lost on me. (In
contrast, the cartoon devil and angel who sit on one's shoulder - they are
actually internal, and to me the mashal to the yetzer hara and hatov is
totally transparent.)

But there is another mashal about externals that speaks to me very well,
though I didn't really appreciate it until Rabbi Arie Folger's recent post,
where he pointed out that Adam Before The Chet was indeed able to tell the
difference between tov and ra. What made Adam different from us was that we
are intimate with this concept, while it was foreign to him. He understood
it, but only intellectually. It was strange and unfamiliar, and he had
trouble dealing with it.

This sort of situation was portrayed in a 1998 movie called
"Pleasantville", about a world where everything was black and white. It was
a pleasant place (hence the name) but nothing about it was great, and
nothing bad either. Then some outsiders arrived, trying to make the place
more colorful and exciting. But the natives were very uncomfortable, and
had trouble dealing with this.

Over the course of the story, we learn that the natives are not
color-blind. Their eyes are fully capable of distinguishing colors.
Nevertheless, color is very foreign to them, and they never even mention
the names of the colors they see. While some residents followed the
newcomers, most of them rejected this intrusion into their pleasant world,
and attempt to preserve it by issuing a "Code of Conduct", of which item 7
reads: "The only permissible paint colors shall be black, white or gray,
despite the recent availability of certain alternatives."

Perhaps this was like Adam Before The Chet: He knew ABOUT right and wrong,
but he didn't really understand it, and didn't know how to deal with it.
But unlike the majority of Pleasantville residents, who were very afraid of
the foreignness, it seems that Adam was like the minority - very curious to
understand learn more about it, and this eventually overpowered his
intellectual understanding that it was wrong to want such things.

This is a VERY different take on Adam than what I'm used to. But to be
honest, if we take Right and Wrong out of the picture, and instead say that
"Staying away from the tree is Emes, and eating from the tree is sheker",
well, to me that smacks of squeezing a square peg into a round hole. Right
and Wrong *must* have been understood by Adam, and R' Folger's explanation
shows how it was both understood yet still foreign.

Akiva Miller
____________________________________________________________
#1 Trick to FIGHT diabetes
Discover odd herbs & spices proven to NATURALLY fight diabetes
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3131/531c01657c0a71655d7dst01vuc

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 2:11 AM, Lisa Liel <l...@starways.net> wrote:

> Something of the sort, yes.  Think of it as a sort of synesthesia, which
> coincidentally, can be caused by LSD.  In synesthesia, our senses get
> mixed.  We hear colors and see music.  Prior to the /Eitz/, we perceived
> matters of fact as just that: matters of fact.  But the /Eitz /was like a
> poison.  It distorted our senses, hereditarily.  It made it so that we
> perceive good and bad in facts.
>

Oh, quite obviously, as was clear to readers of your previous posts, you do
not belong to those who put much stock in experience as a source of peshat,
and you are not bothered by the oddity of eating from a tree bringing about
permanent and even hereditary chnages in human behavior. Of course, in
these matters, it is entirely impossible to conclusively prove anything, so
it's definitely OK to disagree.

I would, however, remind you that my main driver for my alternative peshat
was not experiential driven peshat, but plain old trusty Midrash, and even
the plain peshat in the verses, which in my opinion, and the Midrash's and
Rashi's, are filled with sexual euphemisms.

Another driver for my approach is that the Midrash does suggest that we
know the identity of the Eitz haDa'at (which you could, of course dismiss
as "just a midrash," but to which I would reply that it isn't any more
respectful to reject a midrash than to disagree on a finer point of peshat
with a Rambam. Torah hi velilmod ani tzarikh, and there is hardly unanymity
on the interpretation of that parsha). And the funy thing is that the
Midrash offers four different candidates for the Eitz haDa'at: the fig tree
(since they used its leaves to cover up a consequence of their sin), wheat
(never mind that's not a tree, we can deal with that problem - but this is
clearly driven by the relationship to Adam's punishment "by the sweat of
thy face shall ye eat bread"), the etrog and the grape.

Now despite having spent almost a decade living in Basel, Switzerland,
where Novartis is headquatered, I do not have the slightest clue as to how
to produce LSD, which was actually developed at Novartis for, I believe,
pain treatment. But I am rather confident that it doesn't involve any of
the four species mentioned in the Midrash, or if it does, it surely isn't
produced by any process available without modern laboratories.

You get my point. I find that your analogy breaks down, totally. There is
no physical process known that would have the effect you posit. IOW, it
falls in the realm of neis. Im qabala hi, neqabel, ve-im lav, yesh teshuva.
However, I do find a related substance, which can be brewed from any of the
four candidates. As I develop in one of my blog posts I linked to earlier,
I find that Noach's sin may be a repeat of Adam's, in which case the eitz
hada'at might have incapacitated Adam somewhat, or in modern parlance, made
him just enough high to drop all inhibitions and arouse his yetzer. There
are many midrashim that support this idea in one way or another, including
the one Rashi quotes that the Nachash (let's not translate that, as nachash
has two meanings in Chumash and there is a well known Midrash that seems to
side with the other meaning) got jealous seeing Adam & Chava be intimate,
and he wanted to seduce Chava. I will let readers work out the rest here.

>
> One understanding of /chochma/, /bina /and /daat /is that /daat /is
> factual knowledge, /chochma /is functional knowledge, and /bina /is
> theoretical knowledge. To use an example, when I look at a lightswitch and
> say "This is a lightswitch", that's /daat/.  When I know that I can turn
> the light on and off by flipping it, that's /chochma/.  When I know that
> flipping it causes a circuit to either open or close, thus allowing or
> disallowing the free flow of electrons, which causes a filament in the
> lightbulb to heat up and glow, producing light, that's /bina/.
>

> Good and bad can apply to /chochma/ and to /bina/, but never to /daat/.
>  If I jump off of the Empire State Building, I'm going to die.  That's not
> good or bad.  If I jump off of the Empire State Building, I'm going to die.
>  That's not good or bad. It just /is/.  You can say that jumping is bad.
>  But you can't place a value other than true and false on factual
> information.
>

> With the lightswitch, good /chochma/ is turning the switch to the off
> position in order to extinguish the light.  Bad /chochma/ is throwing a
> bucket of water at the switch.  That'll probably put the light out as well,
> but with a lot of side affects that you really didn't want.  Good /bina/ is
> as I described it above. Bad /bina/ is that there's a little demon in the
> switch, and when I turn the switch to the on position, it pinches him in
> the rear end, making him so angry that he glows.
>

Here I have a more objective problem with what you write. I do know that it
is common for people to try to translate kabbalistic notions into
understandable English, but the resulting translations can be so far from
the original meaning that I cannot imagine working that way. the three
sefirot you mention, which by the way, are not on every kabbalist's radar,
as Da'at is not universally agreed upon, far less how to interpret that
notion.

Synestesia is also something else than what you define it as. Synestesia is
an objectively diagnosable condition, which may even be induceable through
meditation (see Rav Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Meditation). The confusion of
morality and factuality is another kind of confusion, where it is not
obviousl that factuality is superior to morality, unless you subscribe to
the Aristotelian notion that formed the basis of that p?articular
exploratino by Rambam.

>
> The very phrase/eitz ha-daat tov v'ra/ is unusual.  If it meant tree of
> knowledge of good and evil, the grammar is all messed up.  Literally, as it
> is, it means "the tree of /daat/, good and evil".  (I'm leaving aside the
> question of whether evil is a decent translation of /ra/, which I think it
> isn't.)  The fruit made us perceive good and evil in factual knowledge.
>  You can't say, "It's good that that's a lightswitch".  It just /is/.
> Moral/intellectual synesthesia.
>

Or lada'at means what it means elsewhere in Chumash, a euphemism for sexual
relations. We all know (well, those who hew to the Torah's values, as well
as adherents to a slew of other, mostly related value systems) that
heterosexual relations withiun marriage are generally good (we will leave
nidda and marital rape out of here for simplicity's sake) and that
homosexual relations, adultery and incest are bad. Lada'at in the sexual
sense could thus have tov and ra' aspects. What we are called upon is
lehadil bein hatame uvein hatahor, or in this case, bei hatov uvein hara'.
Only G"d will intimately know evil, as He created All, whereas for man
lada'at tov vara' means trying it all out, having the experience not just
of tov, but also of ra'.

But hey, I wasn't looking to conclusively disproof your contention.

Kol tuv,
-- 
Arie Folger,
Recent blog posts on http://ariefolger.wordpress.com/
* Wieviel Feste feiern wir an Sukkot (Audio-Schiur)
* Die ethische Dimension des Schma Jissra?ls (Audio-Schiur)
* Ein Baum, der klug macht?! (Audio-Schiur)
* Podiumsdiskussion ?J?dische Religion zwischen Tradition und Moderne?
* Great Videos from the CER in Berlin
* A Priest Returns to his Faith
* The CER Berlin Conference in Pictures
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-ai
shdas.org/attachments/20140309/5e2c509c/attachment.htm>

------------------------------


Avodah mailing list
Avo...@lists.aishdas.org
http://www.aishdas.org/avodah
http://lists.aishdas.org/listinfo.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org


End of Avodah Digest, Vol 32, Issue 37
**************************************

Send Avodah mailing list submissions to
	avodah@lists.aishdas.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
	http://lists.aishdas.org/listinfo.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
	avodah-request@lists.aishdas.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
	avodah-owner@lists.aishdas.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Avodah digest..."


A list of common acronyms is available at
        http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/acronyms.cgi
(They are also visible in the web archive copy of each digest.)