interjection – love your posts. To have those feelings, and they clearly aren’t there by rote but from conscious decisions and an openness to life’s experiences – it says a lot.
GAW – I haven’t read it yet, just the intro. am planning to. But from what I know, I have a hard time believing that he says what I referred to. My problem was with the implication that the SOURCE of Chazal’s statement’s were social understandings, and the meforshim reinterpreted them according to modern ‘sensibilities’. To say that Chazal had a Torah source for an idea, and while their understanding was based on their perception, it is valid despite that being proven wrong, for reasons we may know better today – that’s something else. [I’m not saying I believe that, just differentiating between two similar sounding ideas.]
The idea may be similar to gezeiros, where we (often) say that they are still valid even when the reason given is no longer applicable, because they had hidden reasons as well.