When the Torah speaks of water it is a metaphor for many things, it is not an allegory in the sense that most mean it. Rather, every thing that fits correctly within the metaphor is a literal truth.
Recently for example, someone asked me about a comment of our sages, that God created the world through the mixture of snow and water. He said, "wouldn't the snow melt?" After we discussed it for a while, he was happy to understand that the water referred to energy, and snow to matter, and their combined nature was expressing something it took thousands of years for science to produce an Einstein to understand that relationship in nature. But I had to warn him that this was not what the sages had meant. They were talking about something even deeper than this, but this was one of the truths which is built upon this metaphor. [To his credit, the warning was just a reminder of something he was already well aware of.]
If you were to philosophically puzzle out how to explain an infinite concept to a finite intellect, you would realise two things, 1. it is ultimately impossible. 2. one can transmit more information through compression. [grouping ideas/metaphors into over-arching metaphors and groups that can be permuted to obtain a much larger family of ideas/metaphors.]
From this you can arrive at two philosophical conclusions: 1. That perhaps the point of the transmission must not be to provide with all information (read: truth)--rather perhaps information has been divulged on a need to know basis, ie. enough info was provided to complete the task at hand.
2. That if the simplest route was taken, the world could be created in a fractal manner, such that one could compress infinite knowledge into finite space.
When you take these two paths together as one, you may see that the Torah (Trans: old testament), contains all Truth, compressed in a fractal way.(The tradditions passed down from Moses, The Oral Torah, are then the directions through which one may permute the Writtern Torah in order to further decompress it.) Further, that the divulging of such knowledge is performed on a need-to-know basis. In other words, the fact that there may be a discrepancy between evolution & chapter 1 of genesis [which I don't agree with] may imply that we do not _yet_ need to understand our physical (and spiritual) roots in that much depth. (ie. it is enough to know that we originate from God, and not how the transition from God to Us occurred. (which, if you work on it long enough, you will realise such a transition is unexplainable from a logical/rational standpoint.))
yitz..
--- Nate Nygren
> So, is truth relative, according to what you just
> described? I understand about "Torah is truth", but
> if two faces
> contradict each other, as in the day/age problem,
> how can both understandings be true?
[disclaimer: obviously that was not what the maharal would say, rather.. what i understand him to say.. he would likely say something very different.]
Tue Sep 19, 2000 4:46 am
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