Topics Religion

Question Can you help me evaluate Judah HaLevi’s “Kuzari” argument for the authenticity of the Jewish Tradition? If you’ve not heard of it, I am happy to offer an imperfect synopsis, but you’re better off consulting some more reliable sources (see below). The Kuzari, in a nutshell: If public miracles (e.g., manna of Exodus 16) had occurred, they would have left behind a huge amount of accessible evidence. Therefore, had the miracles not occurred, an entire generation of Jews (millions of people) would never have been duped into believing that they did. Therefore, since virtually the entire Jewish people (along with the Christians and Moslems, presumably) do believe those miracles occurred, the only explanation is that they must have occurred.

Accepted:
January 24, 2008

Comments

The argument is problematic for a number of reasons, but let me concentrate on one aspect. You say that "virtually the entire Jewish people (along with the Christians and Moslems, presumably) *do* believe those miracles occurred". But do they, and in what sense? There are certainly accounts of such events in the Jewish bible, and the question arises whether they are to be taken literally or not. Some Jews certainly do take them literally, but many don't. Many of the major Jewish thinkers like Maimonides tended to link miracles with nature, arguing that the world's natural structure as a whole is a miracle, and what seem to us to be individual miracles are merely ill-understood natural events. The fact that many people at the time believed that what they were experiencing were individual miracles, if that is how they interpreted their experience, is no sort of evidence that they were right at all.

History and our own personal experiences tell us that people -- even very large numbers of people -- can be mistaken or even bamboozled. So it cannot be right to say that "the only explanation" for those people's beliefs is that the alleged miraculous events occurred.

But might it be the best explanation for their reports? The locus classicus is David Hume's "Of Miracles," which appears as Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He argues there that the answer to the last question is a resounding No. If you want a powerful assessment of the argument you've presented, I'd start there.