” SEGULOS ARE EASY. Think about it, if you are having a serious family issue, one rav tells you to improve upon your behavior and actually change your middos vs. another rav who says just say a certain kfitel tehillim and wear a red string – which would you choose??? “
I’ve seen a quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter that went something like, “It is harder to change a single character trait than to learn all of Shas.” Can anyone give a source?
“My problem with segulos and the like is that if you try to test them, somebody will label you an apikorus.”
Chazal in Shabat 61a talk about proving the efficacy of amulets. For reasons that I’ve never understood, they reject a biblical model of research design from the first perek of Sefer Daniel and rule that three successes means efficacy — with no mention of how many times the amulet has been tried (the denominator) and no comparison group as in Daniel to account for the fact that most illnesses clear up by themselves with no treatment. That Chazal knew about the importants of denominators is proven from the discussion in Taanit 21a regarding the definition of a plague that requires a public fast.
“I do not understand what role could be played by sheidim, for example.”
As others have pointed out, you are in the company of Rambam on that one!
“segulos have some source because EVERYONE has a minhag to do simanim on rosh hashana “
I had always thought that they were just excuses to say more blessings to HaShem!
“It is the Ramban who says the pshat on Azazel because he was a mysticist.”
Not in everything. In the Ramban’s long discussion of shiluach hakein in this week’s parsha, he spends pages on the rational/mussar approach and barely mentions that there might be another approach at the end of his commentary without describing it.
“you are saying that anything you can’t see can’t really exist”
Regarding the physical world, if you can’t see it (or detect it through some other sense) it doesn’t exist.
“How do you know He exists?”
Faith. HaShem is NOT part of the physicial world and can’t even be compared to anything in the physical world. See Rambam’s 3rd principle.
“how come nobody complains about going to doctors and getting expensive security systems?”
Rabbi Tendler explained this very well in a shiur a few years ago. Doctors don’t cure anybody, ever. (My wife is a physician and she agrees with this.) The healing is from HaShem and ONLY from HaShem. Once you realize that, the halachah requires us to go to real doctors with real medical training because that is the system HaShem set up. Relying only on faith is a major tenet of a Christian group and therefore might also be a violation of the prohibition of chukat hagoyim.
“The problems in Emuna are mostly from believing too much in the natural order.”
But we also get into *physical* trouble when we don’t accept the natural order. If you stick you hand in a fire you will get burned. More seriously, some frum people have bought into the junk science about vaccines being dangerous and now we have had the chilul HaShem of frum kids getting measles.
“then the only way he can explain those gemaros is to say they are not-literal”
Both Rambam and Ramban explictly write that we do not have to take any particular aggadata literally. Rabbi Avraham Ben HaRambam goes into greater detail and that seems to be the accepted wisdom regarding interpretation of aggadata given that his commentary is the introduction to the Ein Yaakov aggadata compilation.