Dor Daim - Criticisms

Criticisms

1. There are those who would claim that Dor Daim and even all students of the Rambam are heretics by reason of their non-acceptance of Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah. This claim depends on the assumption that the Lurianic Kabbalah is a dogma of Judaism binding upon all Jews. Not only the Dor Daim and talmide ha-Rambam, but many other Orthodox groups, such as the followers of the Vilna Gaon and many Modern Orthodox, would disagree with this assumption, whether or not they personally accept the Lurianic Kabbalah.

The Dor Dai response is that whether a person or school is heretical is a question of law, to be decided according to authoritative works of halakha: one is not a heretic simply for disagreeing with a widely held aggadic interpretation, unless the halakha specifically says so. The Mishneh Torah is comprehensive in scope and is, at the very least, one of the authoritative sources of halakha, so to follow it must be an acceptable way of doing Judaism. Accordingly, since the Dor Daim assert nothing that is not found within the four corners of the Mishneh Torah, and the Mishneh Torah cannot be interpreted as actually requiring belief in anything approaching Zoharic or Lurianic Kabbalah, they cannot be heretics - unless the Mishneh Torah itself is heretical, which is not held by any mainstream Jewish group.

2. Others believe that the main problem is not that Dor Daim do not follow Kabbalah for themselves, but that they delegitimize those who do follow it. Rabbi Yiḥyah Qafiḥ, for instance, held that one must not use parchments written by, or eat meat slaughtered by, believers in Kabbalah because these are dedicated to Zeir Anpin (one of the partzufim of the 10 sephirot), a concept apparently distinct from the Unfathomable Almighty Creator.

Few Dor Daim take such an extreme view today, as most consider that the above reasoning makes Jewish law too uncertain in practice. Those who do take such a view would argue that it is not at all uncommon in Judaism for one group to treat as invalid the ritual acts or objects of another for technical or doctrinal reasons. That does not amount to an attempt to exclude the other group from Judaism.

3. A third criticism is that Dor Daim take works of Kabbalah too literally: it is intended to be myth and metaphor, and to subject it to rigorous analysis as the Dor Daim do is like trying to construe a Keats sonnet as if it were an Act of Parliament. Works of Kabbalah themselves contain warnings that the teachings should not be exposed to common view or read too realistically, and that to do so is indeed to incur the danger of falling into heresy or idolatry.

The Dor Dai response to this is that, however this may be in theory, these warnings have not been observed. Kabbalah, in its most literal and "realistic" sense, has in fact been extensively popularised, with the result that many otherwise pious Jewish groups are now permeated with superstition, so that the whole enterprise is now more trouble than it is worth. Further, the claim that these works, on their true interpretation, are harmless metaphorical imagery fully compatible with monotheism is disingenuous: the origins of most Kabbalistic concepts in pagan systems such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism are too glaringly obvious to be ignored. (Dor Daim do not claim that Kabbalists are in fact polytheists: only that they are inconsistent.)

4. A fourth criticism is that it is a stultification of Jewish law to regard any authority, even one as eminent as Maimonides, as final. The essence of Oral Law is that it is case law rather than code law, and needs to be interpreted in each generation: otherwise the Mishneh Torah could simply have been handed down as part of the written Torah. For this reason, it is a principle of Jewish law that "Jephthah in his generation is as Samuel in his generation": one is bound by the current authorities, rather than by previous authorities however objectively superior.

The Dor Dai response to this is that the acceptance of Maimonides in the Yemenite community has always been regarded as a legitimate version of Jewish law, and that they are no more stultified by the authority of Maimonides than other Jewish communities are by the authority of the Shulchan Aruch. From the practical point of view Jewish law as codified by Maimonides is as compatible with modern conditions as any later code: if anything more so, as later Jewish law has become enmeshed in many unnecessary intellectual tangles. If there are practical problems caused by this "static" view of Jewish law, that is part of the price of exile: the question is not whether a given reform would be desirable, but whether there is constitutional authority to make it, and in their view there is not.

5. A final criticism is that the Dor Dai version of Judaism is disquietingly reminiscent of militant Islamic trends such as Salafism. Both started out as modernising movements designed to remove some of the cobwebs and allow the religion to compete in the modern world, and both have ended up as fundamentalist groups lending themselves to alliances with political extremism. Both disapprove of mysticism (Kabbalah or Sufism) and praying at tombs; both tend to dismiss more moderate coreligionists as unbelievers (see Takfir); both cut out centuries of sophisticated legal scholarship in favour of an every-man-for-himself "back to the sources" approach.

The Dor Daim answer to this is:

1. Political militancy is no more characteristic of Dor Daim than of many Kabbalistically-inspired branches of Religious Zionism (e.g. the followers of Zvi Yehuda Kook). In fact the conditions for political or military action, as laid down in the Mishneh Torah, are extremely strict and limited.
2. Neither Dor Daim nor talmide ha-Rambam are against mysticism per se: see Attitude to Kabbalah above. The attitude to Kabbalah is based on much more specific factors: if there is an analogue to their opposition among other religions, it is essentially an opposition to the espousal of concepts such as incarnation, pantheism, and panentheism - apart from the opposition to idolatry in general, as understood in the context of the Mishneh Torah.
3. The antagonism shared by Dor Daim and talmide ha-Rambam against praying at tombs etc. is distinct from the Salafi view in a number of ways. First, in contrast to the Salafi view, the Dor Dai / talmide ha-Rambam view is that this prohibition is Rabbinic, meaning that it is not a direct command from the Almighty, but rather it is a "fence" to distance a Jew from the possibility of transgressing a more severe prohibition. They do not consider praying at or visiting a tomb to be idolatry, nor do they believe that this is prohibited to all people (i.e. non-Israelites), whereas the Salafi view is that this is forbidden to everyone as a very severe prohibition in itself.
4. It is wrong to accuse Dor Daim and talmide ha-Rambam of being extremists, or of dismissing more moderate coreligionists as unbelievers: see reply to 2 above. On the contrary, they often find more in common theologically with sectors of Modern Orthodoxy than they do with much of the Ḥasidic or Ḥaredi communities.
5. The method of learning and religious observance aimed at by them is firmly rooted in Jewish rabbinic authority (see Jewish law above), and is about as far from an "every-man-for-himself" approach as it is possible to get. How far a similar accusation may be true of Salafism (which is itself an umbrella description for a great many trends) is an independent question, on which Dor Daim are not required to express a view.
6. Salafis typically reject Islamic philosophy of the kind propounded by Avicenna and Averroes. Dor Daim, by contrast, find strong inspiration in the closely related Jewish philosophies of Bahya ibn Pakuda and Maimonides.
7. Many Dor Daim and talmide ha-Rambam desire that the Jewish people as a nation will return to upholding the Almighty's Torah with the establishment of a central religious authority - a Great Court (Sanhedrin) reestablished according to Jewish law as only fully codified in the Mishneh Torah. That is one form of the Messianic aspiration implicit in any form of Orthodox Judaism. It cannot be compared to the desire of some Islamists to reestablish a Khilafah by violent means if necessary.