Career of Listening series,
“Success in Challenging Times,” Tape T109.
The very beginning of Side B:
“…Everybody was satisfied with what the Greeks taught them,
and they adopted willingly everything: all the wickedness, all the attitudes,
and all the technical achievements of the Greeks. And here was one little
enclave of humanity in a small corner of the world that considered themselves,
not only that they were indifferent to what the Greeks had to offer, but they
considered themselves superior to the Greeks. They said, what you have
is sheker v’kozov, and what we have is the truth. At that time it was
preposterous, it was ridiculous. Now, looking back today, if we want to assess:
What did the Greeks have? We see that there was a big literature and a big
science of foolishness. Today, many things are actually comical. The Greeks
taught for instance that there are four elements, and they swore by that. Air,
water, fire, and earth. The Greeks taught that all matter had a primeval element
they called chomer hiyuli, and the reason that matter has
different forms is there is a state of existence called the tzura,
that’s the shape. When certain shapes… these shapes are something that exist
only in the minds of the people that talk about them. Actually there’s no such
thing. When the shape rests on this original matter, so the matter assumes such
a form. So let’s say that all metals are one. And all earth is the same as the
metals - but when a certain shape attaches itself to the original material, so
it becomes gold, to another kind of material the shape attaches itself and it
becomes silver, and so on. Now, many of these things were considered for
generations to be foundations of science, because the Greeks earned for
themselves such a secure place in the world’s esteem that it took a long time
before the world discovered the errors of Greek science. But at that time there
was nobody to criticize, nobody to point out the flaws of Greek science, and
therefore it seemed insane when the people of Judea refused to accept the gifts
that the Greeks wished to bestow on them. At that time, Josephus, that is, 2000
years ago, attempted to demonstrate that the Jewish people are an ancient
people, not like the Greek writers said that they are recent arrivals,” etc.
… short continutation of the shiur before the Q&A
section …
“Question: Don’t we find in Hebrew seforim the four
elements? Yes. Because the Hebrew seforim wanted to synthesize, to show
that these things are in conformance with the Torah. I remember about 60 years
ago when it was considered the “thing” for rabbis, rabbonim, from the bimah,
to show: “Socialism min ha-Torah minayin?” [light laughter] …that the Torah believes in
socialism. At that time, socialism was considered the wave of the future, and
therefore people sought to justify it by the Torah. Now, some of the seforim
use this only as a symbol for all the elements, but we don’t look in these seforim
for the study of chemistry, and therefore we will take it in a general sense,
when they talk about elements. But four elements, forget it. That’s an
ancient Greek error, and that’s only one of many misconceptions that the
Greeks taught. The Greeks today wouldn’t pass a high school test, in any of the
sciences. Now today, even with the knowledge of 40 years ago, the Greek
philosophers of the first degree would flunk a freshman’s test - they knew so
little about science.”
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