Dear Eran,



Let’s rephrase your question. How can people who have made reason and rationality central bases for their life at the same time believe things which contradict reason and act thus in their day to day lives?

This dichotomous situation was experienced by Moses Mendelsohn (1729-1786), one of the first Enlightenment leaders. He was a philosopher and rationalist on the one hand, and on the other clung to a belief in a Divine Revelation to the Jewish people, and continued to fulfill Torah and the commandments. He invested a lot of thought and wrote many essays in an attempt to settle the contradiction, and failed in all of them.

I will cite for you a paragraph from Eliezer Shebid’s book “A History of Modern Jewish Thought.” “Indeed, Mendelsohn was aggressively told that his attempts to bridge between loyal Judaism and rational humanism failed in principle, and that his life’s work was based, in theory and in practice, on a misunderstanding, or perhaps on falsehood and pretence.”

The explanation for this phenomenon seems to me to be that though reason and logic do not tolerate contradictions and a lack of consistency, Man’s soul can survive where there are contradictions and puzzles.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet