Reply To: Shout-Out to Sam2

just my happence said almost the exact same thing as Sam2:

I really don’t get the whole “the Rambam was chozer at the end of his life” thing. So he was vehemntly angainst something all his life, wrote copious amounts in his seforim about why he didn’t hold of it, and then was suddenly chozer and never told anyone about it? He never wrote his retraction? I mean that’s a pretty big chazoro and he never actually publicized it?! There is no contemporary evidence that he was chozer, neither from him nor even from someone who was simply around at the time. Surely a chazoro as big as that would have got some sort of mention somewhere. It would be like one of the Satmar Rebbes turning round and becoming a tzioni, not going to pass without comment… And yet you would have me believe that it did… Hmmmm…

And:

And the mekor of the “echod mimeforshei haRamban” is? I didn’t think you were making it up – I had heard the claim long before I’d heard of the CR. What I was saying is that I find it extrememly hard to believe historically. Could you please answer me how when the Rambam, the famous rationalist who dismissed much of the supernatural as non-existent, suddenly turned around completely and said that he now did in fact believe in it absolutely no-one batted an eyelid. Nobody even took the time to write a letter to their acquaintance saying “have you heard the news?”?! How is there not a single note of this momentous chazoro?

So now the question is did Sam2 plagiarize just my hapence or did just my hapence plagiarize Sam2?

Later in the same thread as the quote from just my happence, Sam2 said

You’re being ridiculous. The “Chazarah” never happened. If such a thing happened everyone would know. I can’t find a big Rabbi who gets up tomorrow and says that the Satmer Rov, Brisker Rav, etc. all were Chozer on Zionism right before they died. It is a meaningless statement. It is unverifiable and pointless. You can’t make unverifiable statements hundreds of years after the fact and expect to be believed. The Maharam Al Ashkar either was misinformed or (more likely) tore the Sefer he was responding to to shreds (look at what he writes there, it’s the most Charif T’shuvah I’ve ever seen from any Rishon) and pulled out all the stops, even if he had to cite an apocryphal and untrue legend to do it.

The plot thickens…