[HANASHIR:14908] Re: Reform and informed choices

[I. Oppenheim <i.oppenheim...>]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Richard Green wrote:

> I went to a Conservative Hebrew school which also
> didn't do much except teach by rote and only excerpts
> from the Siddur.  As we got older, we engaged in
> philosophical conversations but I never learned
> Hebrew there except to read.

Unfortunately, it is a widely spread misconception
that one could engage in a meaningful "philosophical"
debate without having developed a thorough knowledge
base.

Although my main subject is Computer Science, I've been
studying Western Philosophy for three years in part
time at the University of Amsterdam and also studied
Jewish Philosopy for one year at Yeshivat Hakibbutz
Hadati in Israel (esp. Maimonides, Soloveitchik and
Leibowitz).

If I learned one thing, it is that Philosophy is not
some sort of romantic, non-committal chatting about
anything that comes to mind. Rather it involves a
copious amount of serious reading of all the relevant
source texts and time consuming analysis of that
material. Only afterwards one can begin to form one's
own opinion about the subject at hand.

Likewise the Halachic discourse of the past 2,000 years
cristallized into a vast corpus of texts. One cannot
seriously claim to make an "informed" decision on
Halachah, if one has not thoroughly studied at least a
tiny bit of this oevre oneself.


 Groeten,
 Irwin Oppenheim
 i(dot)oppenheim (at) xs4all(dot)nl
 ~~~*

 Chazzanut Online:
 http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/

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