Check out this post, Judaism and Geocentrism, from Joshua Zelinksy:
Most of the active Jewish geocentrists are Lubavitchers. In contrast to the Christian geocentrists who have as their main impetus for geocentrism various Biblical verses, the Jewish geocentrists seem to in a large part be motivated to preserve the correctness of certain statements by Maimonides. In particular, they defend the cosmology as set out by the Maimonides in the Mishne Torah. I am puzzled by these apologetics for two reasons: First, there does not appear to be any similar attempt to defend incorrect medical statements by Maimonides. Second, there’s no theological need even among charedim to believe that Maimonides was infallible. Prior to this, I have seen attempts to argue for what amount to infallibility of the Talmudic authors but had not previously encountered such attempts where later authors such as Maimonides were concerned.
Also, Flat Earthers on Iraqi TV.
I wonder if Memri chopped that video up to deliberately make it look like the flat-earther got the last word. The sense I got was that the physicist and the presenter were sort of having a laugh at the old nut’s expense.
It’s not that much fun to know a whole lot more about a subject than most other people in a crowd being as you can’t help but notice the minor inaccuracies yet you know that you’ll make an awful nuisance of yourself by pointing them out. Awright, so nuisance-wise, his understanding about the chareidi view of rabbinic infallibility is wildly wrong. While there certainly are different black-hatted Rabbis who will occasionally say or write differently, the fact is that the vast majority of chareidim on almost every single issue DO regard the Rabbis (almost every dead one and many of the living ones) to be practically infallible. How then can they debate issues in Jewish law? Through the quantum magic of eilu v’eilu divrei elohim chayim, ‘these opinions are the true words of the living God – and these are too’ (anyone TRULY interested is invited to read the scary sugya in Yevamos that deals with this at length – and don’t leave out tosfos or the other rishonim there either). In any case, yeah, Maimonides is not someone who most chareidim believe is able to have made mistakes (except perchance in not having accepted Kabbalistic literature until he finally saw the light at the end of his life as is recorded in a pseudonymous letter, etc). As for his medical advice? He was right there too. Fresh fruits aren’t as poisonous as he may have regarded them to be? Well, either he had overly ripe or wormy fresh fruits or nishtanah hativis, “reality changed” (the soft acceptance of super speedy micro-evolution). Eh – but enough of this specialized knowledge, the criticism of his state of puzzlement that should be available to ALL readers is the fact that he appears to have assumed that people, cultures, laws or religious beliefs are in any way consistent, such that we ought be properly surprised when something doesn’t match up. Come on. People’s value systems are wildly inconsistent (“would you pushthe guy onto the tracks”) and to expect that a corpus of literature and sentiment as vast as that held sacred by Ultraorthodox Jews to somehow be consistent throughout is really to be living in Asperger’s fairyland.
P.S. I spent about an hour and a half today missionizing for Jesus on Fremont street in Las Vegas. Oh, and about an hour prior to that hanging out in the Scientology Center. All in all I had a great time but I think my choice of diversions may have been ill chosen as I may now have a contract out on me from the Scientologist and have discovered that I’m most certainly going to be burning in a viciously un-fun hell for all eternity. On the plus side, I found out first hand that Scientology is even wackier and scarier than I had priorly assumed (the auditing sessions appear to be designed to make new inductees literally insane), I discovered that Law and Order’s “Ice T” is so white he could be a Grand Kleagle and, if I may be immodest for a moment, I believe I’ve won a few souls for Christ.)
mnuez
Mnuez, you raise some interesting points.
Most charedim I’ve interacted with regard the major Rabbis as close to infallible on halachic matters rather than on all matters in general. And yes, sometimes charedim try to assert that the nature of the world has changed. My favorite example of a claimed shinui hatevah is the claim that the human female reproductive system has changed since the time of the Talmud.
Moreover in my experience when one actually pushes charedim who claim that there has been a shinui hatevah in practice they are using that as almost a pro forma statement since they don’t really want to say explicitly that the Rabbis were wrong. They are also much more likely to use such arguments to defend the statements of Tannas or Amorahs than they are for later Rabbis. In any event, there’s a major difference between preserving Rabbinic infallibility by claiming that the Earth was different then and stating outright that the modern science is wrong.
I’m not in any event looking for consistency between various charedi sects. Obviously there’s massive disagreement among ultraorthodox groups. To name just a few major distinctions: The Satmars and Lubachitchers don’t get along well at all. Lubavitchers often (but not always) reject evolution while some other charedi groups are fine with it. And there is of course the whole issue of mitnagid v chassidic (and then there are sephardi charedim also).
What puzzled me in regard to consistency issues was not consistency between different sources or groups but within sources. Many of the sources I’ve found arguing for geocentrism based on a need to preserve Maimonidese focus only on geocentrism and don’t seem to have any issue at all with the medical material.