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Part 1 - the Rambam.
(ok I lied about part two being about kiddush on friday night. part two is about pirkei avot. sorry about that.)
Korah went to Moses - who was appointed by God, you know - and said, you have too much! we're all holy, and God is among all of us! you've made a prince of yourself, and we've had enough. (He came to a bad end, as you might have guessed.)
Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, on the other hand, perpetually disagreed about questions of law. Beit Hillel were famously lenient, and Beit Shammai famously stringent, and they were neither especially fond of compromise.
Any disagreement, says Pirkei Avot 5:17, carried on for the sake of heaven is of lasting worth, but any disagreement which is not carried on for the sake of heaven is of no lasting worth. What is an example of this former? Those disagreements between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. And of the latter? The disagreement carried on by Korah and his associates.
I went to a class whose teacher was very into this idea. Disagreements and challenges which are motivated by anything other than the purest search for truth must necessarily be motivated by the agendas of those involved, and disagreements fuelled by agendas are necessarily bad and to be avoided.
The thing is that everyone has an agenda. It's not possible to have a disagreement between people that's totally devoid of agenda (except perhaps about mathematics, and even then). There are always non-empirical interests at play. Beit Hillel didn't just coincidentally always come out on the lenient side; they had an agenda we might describe roughly as "wanting to take things a bit easy." Hillel and Shammai's agendas have been overshadowed by centuries of established rulings and heaped respect, is all. As soon as you have people having arguments about people, you have agendas.
A corollary is that as soon as you're losing an argument, you can accuse the other person of having improper motives, and you automatically win. You aren't looking for truth, you say, you're in this for self-aggrandisement, so I, the seeker for truth, win. This tactic is frequently used by those who hold the social high ground and want to keep it for themselves.
Judging the worth of disagreements based on presence of agenda is, therefore, not very useful. Since everyone has an agenda, you have to move into the question of "is it a good agenda?" and that's the same as asking "is it a good disagreement?".
Better, I think, to drop the idea that the distinction is about agendas. Try instead the idea that it's about rocking the boat. Hillel and Shammai disagreed violently about many things, but they did it in a way that didn't cause massive communal instability. Korah, on the other hand, was saying "Sod the social mores, I think some radical restructuring is in order here," and that was dangerously destabilising.
Obviously the likelihood of something to cause communal instability is just as hard to predict as is someone's personal agenda, but with the important difference that you can gather data and make observations and make intelligent predictions based on precedent and observed results, which you cannot when assessing motives.
Further, obviously any disagreement about change has potential for instability, because any change is likely to rock the boat. It's not about completely avoiding rockage; it's about upsetting the boat. A disagreement which upsets the boat is of no lasting worth and cannot be said to be for the sake of heaven; a disagreement of lasting worth, for the sake of heaven, does not upset the boat.
If you're sailing a boat in the normal way of things, you might have three people on each side, and if they all sat on one side, the boat would tip up and go under. But when the wind blows hard, the boat leans over and you need all six people on one side to compensate and keep the boat upright. So if you're a little community in a big society, it might well be that the winds of social change blow and you have to make a change to compensate, a change which would be silly or threatening in other circumstances.
It is, for instance, no longer the case that men are forbidden to wear trousers. I would suggest that in a society where women do not lead things, for a woman to want to lead prayers is potentially (although not necessarily) rather destabilising. However, in a society where women lead stuff all the time, for a woman to want to lead prayers is not all that destabilising. In the strictly local sense, yes; over time, it might be more destabilising to insist that women may not lead prayer despite leading stuff in other contexts.
This feels like a good place to pause. Tea. Part three soonish.
(ok I lied about part two being about kiddush on friday night. part two is about pirkei avot. sorry about that.)
Korah went to Moses - who was appointed by God, you know - and said, you have too much! we're all holy, and God is among all of us! you've made a prince of yourself, and we've had enough. (He came to a bad end, as you might have guessed.)
Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, on the other hand, perpetually disagreed about questions of law. Beit Hillel were famously lenient, and Beit Shammai famously stringent, and they were neither especially fond of compromise.
Any disagreement, says Pirkei Avot 5:17, carried on for the sake of heaven is of lasting worth, but any disagreement which is not carried on for the sake of heaven is of no lasting worth. What is an example of this former? Those disagreements between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. And of the latter? The disagreement carried on by Korah and his associates.
I went to a class whose teacher was very into this idea. Disagreements and challenges which are motivated by anything other than the purest search for truth must necessarily be motivated by the agendas of those involved, and disagreements fuelled by agendas are necessarily bad and to be avoided.
The thing is that everyone has an agenda. It's not possible to have a disagreement between people that's totally devoid of agenda (except perhaps about mathematics, and even then). There are always non-empirical interests at play. Beit Hillel didn't just coincidentally always come out on the lenient side; they had an agenda we might describe roughly as "wanting to take things a bit easy." Hillel and Shammai's agendas have been overshadowed by centuries of established rulings and heaped respect, is all. As soon as you have people having arguments about people, you have agendas.
A corollary is that as soon as you're losing an argument, you can accuse the other person of having improper motives, and you automatically win. You aren't looking for truth, you say, you're in this for self-aggrandisement, so I, the seeker for truth, win. This tactic is frequently used by those who hold the social high ground and want to keep it for themselves.
Judging the worth of disagreements based on presence of agenda is, therefore, not very useful. Since everyone has an agenda, you have to move into the question of "is it a good agenda?" and that's the same as asking "is it a good disagreement?".
Better, I think, to drop the idea that the distinction is about agendas. Try instead the idea that it's about rocking the boat. Hillel and Shammai disagreed violently about many things, but they did it in a way that didn't cause massive communal instability. Korah, on the other hand, was saying "Sod the social mores, I think some radical restructuring is in order here," and that was dangerously destabilising.
Obviously the likelihood of something to cause communal instability is just as hard to predict as is someone's personal agenda, but with the important difference that you can gather data and make observations and make intelligent predictions based on precedent and observed results, which you cannot when assessing motives.
Further, obviously any disagreement about change has potential for instability, because any change is likely to rock the boat. It's not about completely avoiding rockage; it's about upsetting the boat. A disagreement which upsets the boat is of no lasting worth and cannot be said to be for the sake of heaven; a disagreement of lasting worth, for the sake of heaven, does not upset the boat.
If you're sailing a boat in the normal way of things, you might have three people on each side, and if they all sat on one side, the boat would tip up and go under. But when the wind blows hard, the boat leans over and you need all six people on one side to compensate and keep the boat upright. So if you're a little community in a big society, it might well be that the winds of social change blow and you have to make a change to compensate, a change which would be silly or threatening in other circumstances.
It is, for instance, no longer the case that men are forbidden to wear trousers. I would suggest that in a society where women do not lead things, for a woman to want to lead prayers is potentially (although not necessarily) rather destabilising. However, in a society where women lead stuff all the time, for a woman to want to lead prayers is not all that destabilising. In the strictly local sense, yes; over time, it might be more destabilising to insist that women may not lead prayer despite leading stuff in other contexts.
This feels like a good place to pause. Tea. Part three soonish.