I finally read "Changing the Immutable." In it,
Marc Shapiro chronicles many of the deliberate distortions that have been made
to the opinions and writings of rabbinic authorities. Most of his focus in on
the distortions of the Chareidi press in the recent past, but he also shows
that this has been going on at least since the time of the gemara. Amoraim had
no compunctions about lying about the source of their halachik assertions, and
even more disturbingly, lying in general. Opinions were deliberately misattributed over the
last two thousand years to give them more weight by putting them in the mouths
of respected authorities. The true opinions of those same authorities were
hidden and deleted from their writing when those opinions no longer fit with
generally accepted thought and practice, when it was thought that those opinions
would reflect badly on them, or when the publisher simply disagreed.
The conclusion one must draw from "Changing the Immutable"
is, to be blunt, that the mesorah is garbage. Even if we say - and it is
probably the case - that most rabbis most of the time were not lying, that we
know some lie some of the time, and believe
they are justified in doing so, calls everything they say into question. We
have no way of knowing if any given thing a rabbi says is a "pious"
lie. In
addition to inevitable errors in transmission that would creep into any millennia-long
tradition, the frequent intentional falsification by authorities through
the ages means that nothing is reliable. The whole thing may well be lies
built on lies built on mistakes built on lies - all the lies told for the sake
of preserving the religious "truth."
It is telling that so many of the "Torah True" believe
that their community's beliefs need to be protected by lies. It's almost as if
in "Torah True," the name they've adopted for themselves,
"True" is not modifying "Torah," in contrast to those heterodox
movements they believe are portraying a false view of Judaism. Instead,
"Torah" is modifying "True," in contrast to the usual
meaning of "True" as something that accurately reflects reality.
