Chabad Media Won

@ARSo
According to you –
Why did RAMBAN consider the gmara of sanhedrin as a non challenge ?
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We cannot fully grasp the ahrayut of being at the helm of a vulnerable Jewish population, not only vulnerable in physical manner at the whim of the above, but also vulnerable in a spiritual sense where huge chunks of this population were torn of it, converting to the overwhelmingly dominant religion of Xtianity .

It was under these circumstances that RAMBAN struggled to provide physical protection to his flock [losing a high profile disputation like this one , could result in exile deportation or worse] and spiritual protection for them , as they were constantly bombarded by zealous preachers whose threats, blandishments and bribes they were forced to listen to.

It goes without saying that RAMBAN fully realized the ultimate stakes of this debate and the impact it would have. And prepared accordingly.
This wasn’t just a flippant conversation over coffee and cake.
He for sure took into account any possible rejoinder from his opponent[s] and its possible repercussions.

Nevertheless he stated , and publicly disseminated written records thereof , that a mashiach who died or disappeared without fulfilling the nevu’ot is unequivocally a mashiach sheker , exhorting all of Spanish Jewry TO BASE THEIR BELIEF on this.
Did he not expect or anticipate a challenge [by believing Jews or lehavdil learned apostates] from sanhedrin about Daniel , according to one pshat in Rashi ? What would he say if he would be challenged ?
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So now that the deniers of fact – no, I’m not talking about the LR’s death; I’m referring to lying about Rashi – are no longer with us, I’d like to return to my original post of three weeks ago. Namely

1. What do those who say that the LR is physically alive and is with us ‘everywhere’ mean? And not meaningless drivel, please.

2. What Torah basis is there for using a random opening of the igros as instruction?

For the full explanaition of my questions see https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/coffeeroom/topic/chabad-media-won/page/9#post-2310514

yankel berel: Did he not expect or anticipate a challenge [by believing Jews or lehavdil learned apostates] from sanhedrin about Daniel , according to one pshat in Rashi ? What would he say if he would be challenged ?

I have no idea what the Ramban thought or understood. What I do know, however, is that you can’t draw a definite conclusion from his supposed thoughts – as you seem to – that he differentiated between Daniel and any else who had died because Daniel had not started the process.

And by the way, how did yoshke start the process other than by supposedly saying that he was the king of the Jews, if he in fact said it?

@ARSo
j started the process by claiming to his followers that he is the messiah, they got it from him.
According to his followers’ claims, at least.
It is them who claim that he was the messiah.
And it is them who claim that they got this idea that he was the messiah from j himself.
They do not claim to have dreamed it up.
They claim that that they are acting according to his instructions and guidance.
And it is them who RAMBAN debated.
Whether their claims could be valid or are per force invalid.
Where RAMBAN stated in the absolute negative , because of lack of realization of the nevu’ot in j’s lifetime .
Stated publicly in a major high stakes debate in front of the absolute ruler of his country, in the presence of the Jews’ most implacable enemies.
And disseminated far and wide with the express intention that Jews all over should base their belief on this rock-solid argument and withstand the enormous pressures they were facing.
Which obviously could not be ‘open to further discussion’.
Possible discussion being- maybe gmara sanhedrin does lend its support for j’s possible candidacy.
[obviously not taking j ‘s personality into consideration]
This was clearly unthinkable.
Why ?

Philosopher: Arso, as usual, you misunderstood. Qwerty said he’s out of the thread. I never said I’m leaving.

True. I misunderstood.

I said I’m not going to argue about Yaacov lo mes anymore. Why should I waste my time with people who want to believe that Yaacov Avinue is physically alive, that his body is breathing while buried under the ground, that he’s eating and his bodily functions are working while at the same time being his body is in his kever not being able to move?

Not one person on this thread, and not one of the meforshim I have seen, say that Yaakov Avinu is breathing, eating, or that his bodily functions are working. You take statements of Rashi and meforshim, twist them to reach your own conclusion, and then make fun of what you have concluded!

Yaakov Avinu being alive after embalmment and burial is clearly miraculous, and as far as miracles are concerned it’s not a greater miracle for him to be alive without breathing etc than it is for him to be alive at all.

I will not continue arguing with people who deny what it says outright in the Chumash that the brothers of Yosef saw their father DIED, and other pesukim that openly show that Yaacov died.

So the fact that meforshim of earlier times discuss this problem, and answer it (!), means nothing to you?! Or are you going to ignore me for making that point, because you “will not continue” (despite feeling justified in denigrating those of us who understand what Rashi et al say, even though you wrote that you will not continue arguing).

And my challenge to you is one of the main challenges to qwerty that went unaddressed:
Does Artscroll say explicitly that according to Rashi, Yaakov Avinu did not die? Yes or no, please? And if yes, are they also as stupid and unlearned as Shmei and myself?

They don’t understand how to understand pesukim, Chazal and meforshim which only SEEM on the surface to contradict the pesukim that say that Yaacov died, but if learnt correctly, which these people obviously can’t or don’t want to

I take it you include in “these people” not only those on the thread, but also those meforshim, including the Ramban (Berishis 49:33), who answer your question.

I reiterate what I have said in the past, and although you will take it as an insult I mean it as a limud zechus. Women should not be involved in these discussions because they do not understand properly how learning Torah sheb’al peh works. (The same is true of men who do not have a yeshivah-education background.) Anyone who can stick to their question and ignore a Ramban who deals with it explicitly, hasn’t got a clue!

The fact is that you people choose to ignore meferishe pesukim

While you only ignore a Ramban who deals with the befeirushe pesukim…

because you want to use that as a springboard to then say the Lubavitche rebbe is alive. That is the point of you all arguing that Yaacov is physically alive.

And you say this to me?! How ridiculous! I challenge you to find anyone more adamant than me in arguing against the LR being Mashiach in a number of threads.

Sorry yankel berel, but after reading your posts TWICE I still don’t understand how you claim to prove that, based on Rashi in Sanhedrin, there is a difference between someone whom we disqualify because he “started the process” before he died, and someone whom we don’t disqualify because he died before starting the process.

According to Rashi in Sanhedrin – and we don’t know for sure that the Ramban had that Rashi, but let’s assume he did – the gemoro’s mention of Daniel can mean either one of two things:
1. If Mashiach was someone who has died, it WAS Daniel. No one else.
2. Mashiach will have the same type of tzidkus/traits that Daniel had, but it will not be Daniel because Daniel has died,

If the disputant of the Ramban believed in Rashi, then there is nothing further to discuss, as yoshke is both dead and he is not lehavdil Daniel.

If the disputant did not believe in Rashi, and he misinterpreted the gemoro by saying that the gemoro allows Mashiach to come from the dead, then what difference does it make if the dead person in question has started the process of geulah or not? The gemoro makes no mention of it. So why would the Ramban base any part of his argument on that. His argument, according to what you say, is that yoshke did not fit the criteria of Mashiach, period. Having started, or not having started, the process is irrelevant to the discussion.

Btw your differentiation between someone who has started the process and someone who has not works against you when it comes to the LR’s ‘candidacy’. He did not start the process – he may have wanted to, but he didn’t – and therefore according to your sevara – not mine! – he is not disqualified!

I will not continue arguing with people who deny what it says outright in the Chumash… They don’t understand how to understand pesukim, Chazal and meforshim which only SEEM on the surface to contradict the pesukim

Philosopher be like:
“If someone knocks out a tooth, the Gemara/Rishonim/Achronim say that he must PAY for the tooth. However, this seems to contradict an outright posuk, “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”
Rather, we must reinterpret the Gemara and poskim – when they said PAY, they really mean that you should knock out the person’s tooth. “Pay” was just a euphemism.
After all, pesukim must be taken literally while Gemara/meforshim must be interpreted figuratively to fit with the posuk.
Also, I’m not a Karaite.”

Arso, I dont make fun of Rashi because Rashi says Yaacov lo mes (which could mean many things like he is spiritually alive, for example), he does not say that his body physically stayed alive; that is yours and Menachem Shmei’s and the Lubavitchers interpretation.

“Bar Kochba was after the churban, and he waged a war to return Eretz Yisrael to the Jews, which seems to be “part of the process”. What did yoshke – who was in the times of the Beis Hamikdash – do to start the process?

yankel berel writes that yoshke allegedly claimed that he was the messiah. But that doesn’t seem to me as being part of the process. If anyone today would claim to be Mashiach and not do anything other than that, I don’t believe you would say that he had started the process.“

Arso,

My question from bar kochba was according to Lubavitch “starting a process” makes someone a candidate for moshiach if that’s the case bar kochba has as much of a chance as the Rebbe of being moshiach

Qwerty, you are totally right.

@ARSo
a] There is no reason at all to believe RAMBAN should not have had RASHI . He Quotes RASHI countless times, al hatorah and on shas. I imagine it reaches into the hundreds if not more. Btw, RAMBAN lived 200 years after RASHI.

b]I don’t understand what you mean by the disputant ‘believing’ in RASHI.
He [or better- they] for sure did not believe in RASHI.

They believed in only one thing, victory.
They [meaning a massive apparatus consisting of catholic clergy, the superstitious commoners filled with hate and envy against their Jewish neighbors, and the state machinery combined] all wanted VICTORY and get rid of this thorn in their side.
They wanted mass conversion of the Jews or alternatively their forced exile.
Victory at all costs.

They even aimed to prove j’s messiahship FROM THE TALMUDS OWN WRITING .

If RAMBAN would disprove j’s messiahship, they would give anything to be able to refute RAMBAN’s words from the Talmud itself .
Now, think for a second, there is a clear gemara contradicting RAMBAN , which seems [to at least possibly] say that mashiach could be from the dead.
Isn’t that gmara a virtual g-dsend to RAMBAN’s opponents ?

And didn’t RAMBAN think about that gmara ?
Why would RAMBAN advance a proof , so easily and obviously refutable from a gmara ?

Answer is very clear : RAMBAN knew that his line of reasoning is not against that gmara.

Why not ???

c] Am amazed ARSo could even claim that the rebbi of the habad hasidim did not start the process.
Did he not accept and encourage petitions from his followers that he is mashiach ? For sure he did.
Wasn’t that the prophecy that he prophesied [like a full fledged navi, that mashiach is here – meaning himself ?
Mashiach self proclaiming his messiahship and telling all yehudim mashiach is here to take you out of galut.
If this is not a claim as a mashiach wannabe , then what is ?

To philosopher

You see how quiet Shmei is. He’s letting that buffoon Benedict ARSo do his fighting for him. If yankel berel stopped arguing with ARSo he’d turn back to Shmei. He has no beliefs other than an insatiable thirst to throw his weight around. I once heard a Rabbi discuss such “people.” “Yes it’s unpleasant to deal with them for an hour a day, but remember they have to live with themselves on a constant basis.” I’m sure he’s universally reviled. His poor wife assuming she didn’t leave him.

yankel berel, your suggestion that the Ramban differentiates between someone who has started the process and someone who has not is something you invented because you were ‘concerned’ how the Ramban got away with his refutation when, according to Rashi, Daniel could be Mashiach despite having died. But if you look at the gemoro you’ll see that it has nothing to do with Rashi as it is the gemoro itself that says that Daniel may be Mashiach.

If anything, Rashi makes a xian view even less acceptable, because he says either Mashiach is someone who is alive and similar to Daniel, or it was Daniel. It is only by ignoring Rashi that someone can wrongly extrapolate and say that someone else who has died is Mashiach.

So why come up with a differentiation based on conjecture and for which you have no source?

Furthermore, I would venture to suggest that if anything you have it back-to-front. Wouldn’t you agree that it is more likely for someone who has started to process to be an acceptable candidate after death than someone who has not started the process? If it has to be the latter, then why yoshke and not someone else?

And that would make the Rambam even more simple to understand. That is, even though Bar Koziba, whom Rabi Akiva supported and claimed that he was Mashiach, was disqualified when he died, how much more so someone who did not ‘start the process’.

As to your claim that by accepting petitions and the like the LR is believed by Lubavichers to have ‘started the process’, since when is accepting petitions a criterion? It certainly has no source in the Rambam. At any rate, what Lubavicher do or do not consider in regards to their rebbe is irrelevant to us.

yankel> But I do not consider “interpreting gmara and rishonim” as “esoteric”.

I mean on what topic you are interpreting them. People (and computers also) train well when they repeatedly do similar tasks and can check their performance with some ground truth. How do you know whether you are right on the topic of Moschiach? Yes, you may have minimal skills to learn rishonim on simple topics, but here we are dealing with a complicated question on which nor we, not rishonim, have any final answers (except history of previous miracles, of course). That is why I am suggesting first trying to crack a complicated sugya where we have some hard data – and sometimes have more data than rishonim and see if you can figure it out. And, if you think that astronomy is not shayach for you – Rambam took some time (years?) to work on this, you could too.

Also, I bli neder will try to read the arguments of posters in this thread if they post any objective measures of their learning (SAT, LSAT, GRE, IQ, chess rating). Without this, I am not even trying, because I don’t know where the poster is holding.

@ARSo
a] As far as I remember RASHI says ‘kegon’ Daniel. Not that Daniel is the only possibility if its min hameitim . There are other possibilities.
So j would NOT be excluded according to that pshat of RASHI.

b] I am not ‘concerned’ about RAMBAN excluding j [because of his death], because he is contradicting RASHI. He contradicts RASHI many times.

I am rather, ‘very concerned’ why RAMBAN sees fit to present to vulnerable Jews AND powerful gentiles alike, a proof , which is so easily refutable.
Refutable with DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES.

Its refutable by the gmara , even without RASHI, as you correctly noted. The gmara could be telling us that a dead mashiach is not automatically disqualified.
And that puts into doubt the whole premise of RAMBAN, the foundation of the yahadut upon which he exhorts all yehudim to build their emuna.
And even more so, since RASHI possibly interprets the gmara that way.

c] Re having it back to front.
Not at all , this is very simple. The mashiach job is a very appealing job.
Admittedly not to everyone, but certain types of individuals would be VERY attracted to it.
As history amply bears witness.

RASHBA and RAMBAM and the rabbanim after tach vetat, for example, could tell you a thing or two about this . They all had to counter false messiah claims in their generations.

How can we know the difference ? The difference between the real and the plastic . The difference between the authentic and the forged ?

It’s obvious that RAMBAM is concerned about separating the chaff from the wheat : how will we know how to differentiate ?
Only as RAMBAM rightly points out [hilch melachim] : RESULTS.

The plastic and the forged will not be able to produce verifiable results.
Whereas the true one, will.

Now , let’s ask you . If the plastic and the forged one [or his followers for that matter] are able claim that a so called second coming will clear up all the left over mess, then we are back to square one.
Any failed , forged or plastic one , will say – I am still the right one . Just wait until I reappear.
.
Think about this.

To those that want a summary of this thread:

A narcissistic retard dentist and a woman debate a Lubavitcher and a Litvisher over a Torah subject they can’t comprehend.

My joy is the Litvisher and Lubavitcher joined forces.

Dentist the rock you crawled from under is calling.

Sorry meant bar Kochba (not bar kamtza 😂)

Yankel berel: a] As far as I remember RASHI says ‘kegon’ Daniel. Not that Daniel is the only possibility if its min hameitim . There are other possibilities. So j would NOT be excluded according to that pshat of RASHI.

The gemoro itself says kegon Daniel, and Rashi says that that either means that if Mashiach was someone who has died it WAS Daniel (and Rashi adds that the word kegon is lav davka), or that Mashiach will be someone like Daniel. From Rashi, therefore, there is no wiggle room to say that it can be someone else who has died. yoshke would therefore definitely be excluded according to Rashi.

b] I am not ‘concerned’ about RAMBAN excluding j [because of his death], because he is contradicting RASHI. He contradicts RASHI many times.

According to what I have explained above, does he still contradict him here?

Now , let’s ask you . If the plastic and the forged one [or his followers for that matter] are able claim that a so called second coming will clear up all the left over mess, then we are back to square one.
Any failed , forged or plastic one , will say – I am still the right one . Just wait until I reappear.
.
Think about this.

Call me stupid (this is an opening for qwerty to make his usual ‘pithy’ comments) but I don’t understand what you are trying to prove with the above.

yankel berel: Proclaiming to Klal Yisrael by force of a full-fledged Prophesy that RMMS has arrived to irrevocably take klal yisrael out of galut is an as clear as possible claim to the messiahship.

It’s certainly a clear claim to messianship, but how does that make it the start of the process? The Rambam makes no mention of the aspirer making a claim to be Mashiach. In fact when he talks about Ben Koziba he says that it was Rabi Akiva who declared that BK was Mashiach. (The Raavad, on the other hand, does say that BK himself made the claim.)

A claim which has to verified thru results and reality.
If there is a second coming and a second chance , then there is NO VERFICATION at all.

100%. But there is a negative form of verification, that is that the dead person has done nothing so far to justify the claim that he is Mashiach, and he is therefore no better in this matter than any one of the millions of righteous Yidden who have perished over the last millennia.

Arso, BTW, not to argue again over Yaacov lo mes again, but I do want to know if you took the advice you gave me to speak to a ruv or talmud chuchem if Yaacov lo mes means he is physcally alive in his kever. I told you should take that advice yourself and speak to a ruv or talmid chochem if Yaacov is physically alive while his guf is not engaging in any bodily functions (or perhaps it does, who knows…) I’m still awaiting an answer. Please post the name of the rabbi you’ve spoken to about this who said that Yaacov’s guf is alive. Thanks.

qwerty: To Lostspark

It takes a retard to know one. At least I’m successful.

Nope. It doesn’t take a retard to know one. But it certainly takes a retard to make such a juvenile statement.

And your defintion of success is clearly not a Jewish one. An apikorus, by definition, is a failure.

Arso, I forgot to mention in my previous comment that the rabbi you ask about Yaacov lo mes should not be a Lubavitche rabbi as i will not take their response as valid. The question again is: is Yaacov Avinu alive physically, is his guf alive mamesh, and if yes, what does that mean? Is his gif breathing while being comatose? Eagerly awaiting your answer, the philosopher.

To Benedict ARSo

The only schar you’ll get is from the sitra achra. Lostspark is celebrating the fact that you have teamed up with Shmei to prove that the Rebbe is Moshiach. Congratulations you have haskama from the group you claim to be against. You are one sick dude. Hashem should take care of you ASAP.

To philosopher

At least Benedict ARSo answered our challenge. That’s something Shmei would never do. And what was his answer,”I was a high level gemoro teacher.,” Right and because of that he knows more than any Rabbi in the world including the Rabbis of the shuls he attends. There is no way he was ever a Rebbe because such an arrogant jerk wouldn’t last a day. He’s probably an escepee from a psych ward. As for ARSo questioning how I can side with Maharsha, how can he reject his Pshat. Oh yeah he’s a high level Torah teacher. What a joke. Boy you can say anything on line if you don’t believe in Hashem.

Arso, aha. So you decide that Yacov’s guf is physically alive and you can’t be bothered to clarify that with a rav or talmud chuchem because you “learnt in yeshiva”. That means that all talmidie chachumim who say that Yaacov lo mes means that he’s alive through his descendants (like the gemorah says) or have other peshutim on what it means that Yacov is alive but not that his guf is alive are “apikorsim” because you decided that Yacov lo mes means that Yacov is physically alive? Or is it only me because I have not learnt in yeshiva and I’m a woman so I can be called an apikorus? Shame on you.

You do not get a pass because you learnt in yeshiva. Are you that stupid? Do you know how many men learnt in yeshiva and yet are amei haaratzim ?