Showing posts with label Hirhurim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hirhurim. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
what do you do when you need to write about a VERY embarrassing topic on your blog, namely that one of your mentors is a fraud?
You close comments. Which is what Reb Gil Student, who has no problem condemning people like SMR and allowing the dissenting comments to flow fast and steady, did when it came to write about the Michael Broyde fraud fiasco. Intellectual honesty, anyone?
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Is Gil Student gefallen ofen kupp?
Otherwise why would he post a thing like this?!
But the truth is I can relate. After some 7.5 years of grinding out this stuff on a near-daily basis you sometimes get desperate. Speaking about Chabad, especially when juxtaposed with words like "heresy," gets people to read and talk about you. So he really meant no harm.
Chakira tells him as much:
"What an offputting title to a post. I realize you end up in the right place. But the idea that you or the people you quote are remotely qualified to render judgments on two of the greatest contributors to Jewish theology in modern times is so laughable and farfetched as to border on the offensive. Even someone whose spent years reading Kabbalistic texts and understands the implications of the Kabbalistic terms at play might be flummoxed and confused by this debate. It really relies to a great extent on arcane of how you read Lurianic and Zoharic texts which are not explicit on this point. Also on how you parse a few disputes in 13th cent. Kabbalah which are not at all clear. I really don’t think more than half a dozen or so people in the world are qualified to weigh in on this question from either traditional or academic perspectives. Certainly not to render definitive judgments. This is like headlining a post “Was Descartes Wrong?” or “Socrates, what a moron!” without really understanding the entire oeuvre and reading copious amounts of secondary material. It's provocative to juxtapose a picture of the Alter Rebbe with some trash talk. What it isn’t is productive."
But the truth is I can relate. After some 7.5 years of grinding out this stuff on a near-daily basis you sometimes get desperate. Speaking about Chabad, especially when juxtaposed with words like "heresy," gets people to read and talk about you. So he really meant no harm.
Chakira tells him as much:
"What an offputting title to a post. I realize you end up in the right place. But the idea that you or the people you quote are remotely qualified to render judgments on two of the greatest contributors to Jewish theology in modern times is so laughable and farfetched as to border on the offensive. Even someone whose spent years reading Kabbalistic texts and understands the implications of the Kabbalistic terms at play might be flummoxed and confused by this debate. It really relies to a great extent on arcane of how you read Lurianic and Zoharic texts which are not explicit on this point. Also on how you parse a few disputes in 13th cent. Kabbalah which are not at all clear. I really don’t think more than half a dozen or so people in the world are qualified to weigh in on this question from either traditional or academic perspectives. Certainly not to render definitive judgments. This is like headlining a post “Was Descartes Wrong?” or “Socrates, what a moron!” without really understanding the entire oeuvre and reading copious amounts of secondary material. It's provocative to juxtapose a picture of the Alter Rebbe with some trash talk. What it isn’t is productive."
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