So, HaRav Sorotzkin has a whole reid about this maskil sheigetz koifer rusheh (mostly my words) who had emineh issues regarding shishu bekeres echod, and HaRav Gordon proved it through the amount of bechorim.

I thought it was quite interesting that he said that an average family these days (read pre-war) had 5 children.

mosheshmeal
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I saw that in the Telzer hagada.

Eminah issues? It's interesting to open a העמק דבר (or any pirush which is printed with Rashi). Side by side you not only see what he does say, but what he does not say.

It says the following:

וישרצו. הרבה בנים

and Rashi, of course, says שהיו יולדות ששה בכרס אחד.

Here's one that always interests me. Rashi on the word "chamushim" mentions the medrash about 1/5 going out of Egypt. Yeshivish people in my experience take that as pure fact, and find it horrifying that I don't believe that at all. But what's fascinating is that they always ignore the rest of that medrash, which quotes two more opinions - that 1/50 or 1/500 went out. When I bring that up they tell me that those numbers are impossible. But the idea of 80% of the nation dying and the Torah only bothering to mention it in the most offhand way possible, that they think is a totally reasonable statement.

why do they think 1/50 or 1/500 are impossible?

So there being multiple opinions means that there is license to disregard all of them?

It means that none of them can be positively said to have occurred.

However, I think the reasoning behind this specific inyan has to do with perceptions about Rashi, who only quotes 1/5 and not the entire midrash.

There's a difference between saying that "none of them can positively be said to have occurred" and "all of them can positively be said to not have occurred."

And "all but one can be positively be said to have not occurred."

Right, but Mr. grend seems to believe none of them.

As an aside, the 80% number chosen by Rashi is the lowest number of casualties, so he may have chosen it because everyone agrees that at least 80% died.

So what? I think we can infer that Rabbi Berlin believed none of them as well.

En hachi nami, that might be why Rashi chose it. Anyway, this topic crashes right into that never-to-be-resolved topic about the meaning of aggadah and the two traditional schools of thought regarding it.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I won't pretend to be familiar with Rabbi Berlin's hashkafos or kommentarien.Which, of course, is where Mr. grend intended to send it.

They are disregarding some opinions because of feasibility, but they accept another equally infeasible position. It's a medrash after all - you don't have to accept any of the opinions - and if feasibility is a criteria, they all fail. The only reason 1/5 seems feasible is because people can't do math, and don't realize that if there were 5 times as many Jews in Egypt as there were who left, there would have been approximately 15,000,000 Jewish slaves, which is possibly more people than there were in the entire world at the time. In 210 years, starting with 57 males (ignoring Yaakov and the shevatim), you would need a population growth rate of 6% a year. To give you an idea of how insane that is, a population growth rate of 0% requires the average family to have 2.2 kids. To get to 3,000,000 you need a growth rate of just over 5%, which is still pretty crazy. I know 5% to 6% sounds small, but remember that there's an exponential in the population growth equation.

It's hard to translate these numbers to TFR, or how many kids per family. Afghanistan which has a growth rate of 2.67% which translates to 6.7 children per woman. On the other hand, Liberia with 4.91% growth averages only 6.4 children per woman, because life expectency is greater and infant mortality is lower. To make any of these numbers work we'd have to assume that despite Pharaoh and the barbarity of slavery, the Jews has pretty incredible life expectency and low infant mortality, especially for ancient times. Even then, 5% pushes the limits of the possible and 6% is about as likely as 1 in 500.

Psst. They think 6 children were born in each birth. They know this isn't *possible* but anything is *possible* if its miraculous.

Which then causes one to wonder why 1/5 is possible but not 1/500.

Personally I think that consciously or subconsciously they're simply influenced by the great stature of Rashi. Everyone knows that midrashim say all kinds of things. Some of them are routinely ignored, but others are famous, particularly if they're cited by Rashi. So I think the assumption is that even if *we* don't know exactly how to treat a midrash, Rashi does, so "we" can confidently accept the interpretation he gave as historically accurate. It's a symptom of modernity that their explanation manifests itself in terms of what's plausible, since 1/5 is not any more plausible than 1/500, and in any case they believe the whole matter was a miracle.

Yes, it does seem like those two midrashim need to go hand in hand.

Fig. 1: Rosh HaYeshivah Harav Gordon with the Talmidei haYeshivah.
Fig. 2: Gordon sextuplets from yetzias Mitzrayim.

I'm not a statistician and I won't pretend to know how to deal with population growth, but assuming that the 600,000 represent the decendants of 30 people out of the 70 Yordei Mitzrayim, and each of them had 6 kids, the for each Yored we need 100 000 decendents.
log_6(100 000)=7
If everyone gave birth to six in a shot just once, and was 25 yrs old when they did, we'd hit 3mil in year 175*, and the last generation would be 35 at the time of Yetzias Mitzrayim.

Which all just really boils down to: If you're going to try to prove something using a mathematical formulation, get the formulation right. The population growth in Egypt was clearly maaseh nissim, and so the poor Afghanis really have nothing to do with it. Let's try and leave the straw men in Oz.

*actually, 8,398,080. If we start with Mr. grend's base of 57, we'd get 57*6^7=15,956,352, which is uncannily close to his "assumed number." I'm not really sure where the number 3 million for yotzei Mitzrayim comes from, because who says everyone was married or had kids?

I think it's just that Rashi is printed on the page.

And taught to people when they're little kids.

Clearly!

For starters you've forgotten that it takes two people to make a child, so you are actually assuming every family had 12 kids. You've also forgotten to include an infant mortality rate (but let's ignore that). If you want 25 year generations, 6 at a time, 75 year life expectancy, and no infant mortality, then starting with 57, after 200 years the actual number is 1,080,378 men women and children. The correct formula is 57 * (3^8 + 3^7 + 3^6) * 2, where the 6 has become a 3 to account for the fact that only women give birth, the 2 at the end adds the men back in, we've counted the last 3 generations to get the 75 year life expentancy, and 57 is the original number of people. If you want to use this model and get to 15,000,000 kids you need approximately 11.5 children per family. And remember, this assumes every single child lives until the age of 75 and has that many kids - not a single infant death. Even modern medicine can't do that. If you start considering infant mortality as it was in the ancient world, it gets a lot worse, and if you start thinking about what that would mean for slaves, it's a lot worse. But in any event you've massively oversimplified things, since children aren't produced at neat 25 year intervals. The actual curve is an exponential, and I used a standard population growth model to produce my results.


Indeed. And while you were somewhat on the right track, you definitely did not have the right formulation. This isn't rocket science - this is the sort of math first year economics majors learn.


You can assume it was maaseh nissim, but you haven't exactly been convincing. There's no straw man here - I admit that even 3,000,000 pushes the limits of feasibility, but if it's 15,000,000 you might as well start assuming that there were the 1,500,000,000 necessary for the 1 in 500 medrash.


You'd better hope they did because if they didn't that curve is going to grow a lot slower...

I don't know what you're trying to say.

mosheshmeal
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Of course I'm not interested in infant mortality rate. The kids didn't die ---that much is explicit in the Chumash. There also does not have to be a 50% male/female rate because polygamy is a delightful thing, and one woman may have also had more than one husband (hopefully not at the same time.)
There are other things going on here too, but I'm under strict time guidelines here. The basic problem is, discounting infant mortality and assuming each father had 6 males and maybe 4 girls, how do we get 3,000,000 males and at least 3,000,000 females (just to keep it Victorian)? I don't think it's more impossible than, say, raining birds out of the sky.

Uhm... what Chumash do you have, exactly? in the last 3 generations (remember, Moshe was supposed to be 80 at the end of 210 years) Pharaoh is killing male children left and right, and at least some parents are separating because of this and refusing to reproduce. And once we are quoting midrashim, I seem to recall that they used babies for bricks and Jewish blood for health baths as well. Nowhere in Chumash is anything even hinted about infant mortality - let alone an explicit comment. If you think that every baby born in Mitzrayim, or even 90%, lived to the age of 75, then they really never should have left because that sort of healthcare system beats anything that has come in the 3500 years since. (And we haven't even discussed women dying in childbirth, which was common until a few centuries ago... having every woman simply live through that many births is perhaps the most unlikely factor of this all).


There in fact does have to be an (approximately) even ratio, since there's a 50% chance any baby will be male or female due to the fact that a sperm cell carries either an X or a Y with equal probability. Societies where there are very uneven ratios (more unbalanced than something like 51/49) are pretty much uniformly societies where one gender is dying off faster than the other, either due to wars or some sort of disease, not societies where one gender is born with greater likelihood. And you've already claimed that no one was dying.


Doesn't matter. How many babies the average woman had doesn't depend on how many men she fathered them with. If you want to claim that an entire nation of women averaged 12 babies each over 200 years you need to come up with a better explanation.


1,200,000 men and women is relatively easy - even with a high mortality rate, that sort of population growth is evident in some of the world's poorest countries, as I cited. It's when you multiply that number by 5 that it gets hairy. And you've made two massive errors in that last question. One, the gender imbalance of that sort would be a miracle in and of itself. Two, the number of fathers is irrelevant - you need to measure by mothers. If you count fathers, you are growing by 6 in every generation, but if you count mothers it's only 4.

Yes.

More males ARE born than females. At conception the ratio is 1:1; secondary sex ratio is around 105m:100f, naturally. Not much when you're dealing with a few babies, but a lot when you are with the human population.

That's not a generalization, is it?

A Midrash is binding if it's אגדה למשה מסיני. If there are disagreements about it, then it's not, so it's not.
Although I was wrong with answering yes to 'disregard'. I'll edit.

I said 49/51 is normalish. Gabbe suggested 40/60.

Source?

I don't have one.
It used to be common knowledge, and you can see that attitude in the writings of some rishonim and later.

So anything there's a disagreement on isn't aggadas Moshe misinai?

That sounds wrong.

Turn the question around... why do you assume any aggadot are required to be accepted. In general we say there is no psak in aggada, partially because by definition there are no practical ramifications, and partially because it's almost impossible to find an aggada that isn't contradicted by three others. You need to learn to see aggada for what it is - a literary tradition that is meant to teach lessons and not an attempt at history. Of course some history is preserved in aggadot, but on the whole they are morality lessons, and historical accuracy is of secondary concern if it concerned the authors at all.

To take it a step forward, R' Saadia Gaon gave 4 rules for when one can assume a passuk is not historically true, but only metaphorical. His rules essentially boil down to that you can reject anything that doesn't change halacha if it seems to be physically impossible. The Rambam is the most famous member of this school of thought, and he takes it a step forward. He rejects the notion of humanlike angels for philosophical reasons, and he rejects the possibility that Bilaam's donkey spoke not because of the physical issues with a talking donkey but because there's an angel in the story so it was obviously not historical. The Rambam is willing to reject the historiocity of a passuk because he didn't like the hashkafah in it! Forget the plausibility. On the same note, we've argued the sources 1000 times for treating whole parshiot in Bereishit as allegorical, and Chazal debated whether Iyov ever existed.

Once you are putting the historiocity of pesukim to the "feasibility test," I ask again, who ever told you that belief in aggadot is "binding" in any sense?

What does it mean that an aggada is "binding"?

I meant that you "have" to believe in it. Substitute it for "aggada l'moshe misinai" which is an equally meaningless term.

Why were they written, then? Perhaps because aggadeta is:

Are we then required to accept these morality tales?

The 1/5 midrash is really coming to teach us that there was a massive plague of Jews too. The actual number of casualties is really irrelevant. That said, I still don't think it's impossible that there were about 6 million Jews before the plague.


yawn. You know that's half the story, I know that's half the story, we both know that despite the Rambam's protestations the Shiur Komah was not a forgery, and that there was an entire parallel school that rejected Rasag and Rambam, and let's leave it at that.

Thanks.

Sure. As morality tales. Not as history.


So you are taking it as history. You are just disputing the exact numbers, which seems a little silly - why do you accept that there was a plague and not the number? In fact, the notion that there was a plague comes from the number, since it's all a drush on "chamushim." If you throw away the 1 in 5, what makes you think there was a plague at all? Does it occur to you that if there were a plague that killed a vast number of Jews it might have been expected to be, I don't know, mentioned in the Chumash? And what kind of miracle is that? We hear about how none of the plagues affected the Jews - they had fresh water, they didn't have frogs, etc. Then, whammo! I bet during Choshech the Egyptians were laughing their heads off - sure, it was dark, but those Jews were dying like flies. Some geulah!


I know it's half the story. existwhere basically asked how we are allowed to reject the historiocity of midrashim, and I responded that there's a whole school of thought that does this. I never implied that there wasn't a school of thought that takes midrash at face value whenever possible. I will argue that in premodern times when we had a much shakier notion of what is physically possible and how the world works, it's concievable that that was a reasonable position but that today it's indefensible, but I never claimed a lot of Jews don't think that way anyways.

Incidentally, I'm glad you backed down on the population growth numbers. 6 million is a possible number, although on the very high side, but with 6 million you get down to 1.2 million post-plague, which means there were 600,000 males from age 20 to 60 and 600,000 other people. Unless you want to claim that the plague disproportionately did not kill males in that age group, this would be pretty odd, especially considering there's no hint anywhere that there was a massive imbalance of men and women, as this would necessitate.

It could be history, it could be a morality lesson in of itself, it could be a projection to the future with Gog and Magog, it could be a lot of things. I never said what I accepted. I just argued for the feasibility of the number.

So how long is סתם נזירות, again? After all, the Gemara learns it out of the Gematria יהיה, and since drushim are so strongly bound to the pessukim they come from, the standard explanation that the gematria is an asmachta for a pre-existing halacha just doesn't hold water.

Right. Along with the 39 melachos.

The point of knocking them off during Choshech was for the Egyptians not to know, but that's beside the point. What is the point is that you feel the license to dismiss stories you openly admit you don't know the point of.

Also, here is where I specified what I wanted my base population pre-plague to be:

In other words, while I would admit to backing down if I did, I didn't.

Also, it didn't occur to me that I don't need 3M males in one generation. Simply including fathers and grandfathers would suffice. You'd need a tree in which the if the lowest level is L, pop(L + (L-1) + (L-2)) = 3M. I'm not going to do the math now, but it basically means that I need less people than I had thought.

I guess you didn't back down. That doesn't make any of your math correct though. You are still doing ridiculous things with the gender ratio, ignoring the fact that births are not compounded in 25 year intervals, assuming there was no infant (or even adult pre-75) mortality or death during childbirth. Population studies are a well known branch of statistics, but you keep on inventing your own stuff.

As for the last 3 generations, I already did that. Read my post - I counted the last 3 generations explicitly.

So according to this shitta, what is the point of even teaching Rashi to kids, if the midrashim can only be truly understood in ethical or other terms that are beyond their ability to grasp at that age? What should we teach instead, Halachic Man? Onkelos? Blogs? Really, why teach Chumash at all until they can think abstractly, if we have to explain all the miraculous events in metaphysical terms?

The little kids I know learn the same rashi as chareidi kids, but they know that Bereishit is a mashal, because that's what their parents tell them when they ask. (Don't underestimate kids - they do ask. They read a book about dinosaurs living millions of years ago and they ask their mother how that could be if the world isn't that old.) And what if they take it literally in 4th grade? You can't study the deeper meanings of midrashim without knowing what they say, and if that point all they understand is the story without being able to discern what is historical and what is not, then so be it. Kids believe a lot of ridiculous simplifications of the world, which we teach them until they are old enough to grasp something more nuanced. The problem is that some people never progress beyond the chumash/rashi they learned in 4th grade.

But really, this is your argument? The shitta can't be true because it's hard to teach to kids? So the test of what is literally true in midrash is what it's easy for kids to grasp?

I didn't have an 'argument', I'm asking what's the logical end of yours and the other nihilistic Orthodox's belief system. It amazes me what a sloppy reader you are, and how you lot all love to create ridiculous strawmen to beat on. Typical shut-in CS nerd.

Anyway, here on Earth, good teachers don't deliberately teach kids (false) understandings which later on they have to un-learn at a later age, that's an incredibly dangerous way of teaching any subject.

Call them simplifications, and practically all teachers do this. You tell a kid crime doesn't pay because they can't grasp the nuance that, in fact, crime often does pay but it's wrong to do anyways. You tell kids that the police are on your side even if they are sometimes corrupt. When you teach kids about the American Revolution, the rebels are real American heroes. When they're older they can learn about the financial motivations and the somewhat murkier issues. When you teach kids about Zionism you start with the simple parts of Jews returning to Israel and teach them about the Lechi when they are old enough to grasp.It's not that I recommend deliberately teaching something false, but sometimes you need to simplify the world for a 10 year old. And everyone does this when teaching Torah, too. The most obvious place we do this is about sex. When teaching Chumash, rebbeim tell kids some narashkeit to avoid teaching Tamar and Yehuda like it actually says. Or, in Gemara, when teaching a 5th grader Eilu Metziot they skip Rashi on the word "purya" and jump to the Mordechai who explains it in a rated G fashion.Oh please. You are asking where the logical end is, and trying to show that it leads to an absurdity. Implying that it leads to an absurdity is an argument against.Ad hominems will get you so very far in life.

Noch besser; that shows how this phenomenon isn't even a shitta, it's just laziness.

Who says [we] don't know the point of it? Perhaps the point is to explain why the Benei Yisrael left "armed" and yet two seconds later are vulerable to attack, even having to travel a circuitous route. So you get the derash on "chamushim," which sounds like it's saying something about 5, and not just "armed." This is a *possible* meaning of the midrash. But the point is, this is hardly the most obscure and seemingly pointless midrash aggadah. Think of a better example.

I repeat, what are you trying to say?

You do of course realize Rashi is quoting the Medresh.


What do you mean "they think"? There is proof, too, btw.


And what's wrong with that? Is that too "Golus mentality" like for you?


Do you believe that 6 were born bekeres echod?

IF not, why not? And do you believe in miracles at all?

IF yes, do you believe it was a miracle?

mosheshmeal
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רחוק פוסט זה ממני

Of course I realize that. Rashi quotes the midrash; Neziv omits it where he had the opportunity to include it. That was my point. It's not an eminah issue.



I mean "they think." What, they don't think so?



Did I say there's anything wrong with that?



Who cares what I believe?