The Kuzari Principle

The Kuzari Principle argument is the primary outreach argument of Orthodox Jews to establish that Orthodox Talmudic Judaism is the one true religion. The Kuzari principle is as follows: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then almost certainly, this event must have occurred. Since only Judaism claims that its origins are in national revelation rather than merely personal revelation, it must be the true religion. There are two versions of this argument of which I am aware. Here is the first.

Judaism makes these four claims:

1. At least 600,000 Israelites gathered at the bottom of Mount Sinai over 3,300 years ago.
2. All of the Israelites heard God speak to them at Mount Sinai, and they then asked Moses to be His prophet.
3. Moses received the entire Torah from God and taught the Torah to all of the Israelites standing at Mount Sinai.
4. The Israelites transmitted the Torah and also the history of the transmission process of the Torah from generation to generation in an unbroken chain of generations for over 3,300 years until today, with at least one hundred thousand Israelites in each generation of the chain.

Here is how the proof is supposed to work: Suppose that 100,000 people all claim to see a flaming unicorn appear in their midst. Is their testimony likely to be true? I think so. Suppose these 100,000 people form a community and all tell their children about the flaming unicorn incident. Is the witness of that entire second generation enough to establish that the first generation believed they saw a flaming unicorn? I think so too. When a third generation is produced, it attests the validity of the second generation's beliefs, which attests to the validity of the first generation's beliefs, which attests to the validity of the original event.

No matter how many generations away from the event you go, as long as you have that unbroken chain with at least 100,000 in each generation, you have proof of the original event. In this way, the modern Jewish people are in a sense direct witnesses to the events on Sinai.

So what's the catch? Why is this argument so thoroughly rejected by liberal Jews, many Modern Orthodox Rabbis, and even some Haredim?

The fatal flaw with this entire argument is in the central claim itself. Remember what it states: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then almost certainly, this event must have occurred. Do you see the flaw? This version of the Kuzari Principle argument is really nothing more than a Sorites paradox.

What is a Sorites paradox? A Sorites paradox is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

Just because a sand heap can remain a heap when you remove one grain of sand, it does not follow that you can remove any number of grains of sand and expect that it will remain a heap. Likewise, if you hear the testimony of 100,000 people that they witnessed an event, is that the same as witnessing the event yourself? Is there absolutely no difference? I think there is. Hearing the testimony of the second generation attesting to the first generation is not as reliable as hearing the testimony of the first generation directly. You lose credibility with each generation.

In order for the argument to actually work, the Kuzari Principle would have to be reformulated as: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then 100% certainly (or 100% minus some infinitestmal amount certainly), this event must have occurred. But that's obviously false. Hearing the testimony of 100,000 witnesses just isn't the same as being an eyewitness to the event.

If we think about this proof in mathematical terms, suppose we attached a percentage of certainty to the 100,000 witnesses. Let's say that the witness of 100,000 people gives you a 97% certainty that the event was true. The 97% figure is only for illustration purposes. It was chosen just as arbitrarily as the 100,000 figure. So speaking to the eyewitnesses of the event, you're 97% certain it happened. Speaking to the children of the eyewitnesses, you're 97% certain that the parents believed it, which if true would give you a 97% chance that the event happened. So 97% of 97% is about 94%. Not too bad, but at the 20 generation mark that brings you to about 54%. Twenty more generations takes you to about 30% certainty. Twenty more generations which would get you to around the time of the Macabees, and you're at 16%. Today, we are somewhere around 150 generations from the time of the event, which even under these generous probabilities, would you about 1% certainty based on oral tradition alone.

Here is the second version of this argument:

1. Suppose that a group of 100,000 people claim they have an unbroken line of tradition that a certain number of generations ago at least 100,000 people saw a single, spectacular, memorable event which we will call a national experiential tradition or NET for short.
2. If that claim is false, it would have to be introduced at some point without the event taking place
3. But such a claim of that type cannot be introduced without the event taking place
Conclusion: The claim must be true.

This is a better argument, at least this version is not fallacious. However, premise 3 seems weak. Why can't such a claim be fabricated? Proponents of the argument will usually give two reasons to support this premise.

First, all proposed scenarios where the claim slips into a national culture are implausible. How do you convince a nation of 100,000 people that such an event took place? Do you do it all at once?

My answer is: No, you can bring it in gradually through legendary development. Legendary development is a process by which oral traditions change as they are passed from generation to generation. The details change, and the stories often take on larger than life characteristics. Once you get past two generations from the original event, legendary development begins to wipe out the historical core. An example would be the legend of King Arthur.

Worse, the argument assumes a society in which texts and information are widely distributed, so that the people, when receiving a new text or story, will know that it is new. However, this is often not the case in ancient societies. People often had only the vaguest knowledge of their own family or national pasts, and were aware that information might well be in slow circulation about which they knew nothing. If an individual learned of what appeared to be that information, it would be welcomed and not questioned.

The second reason to believe premise 3 supported by Dovid Gottlieb, is that there are no counterexamples. Specifically, there are no stories that fit these five criteria:

1. The story must describe an event witnessed by a nation of at least 100,000.
2. The event must be one that would have created a national tradition.
3. The story was in fact believed to be true.
4. The believers included the nation composed of the descendants of those to whom the event was supposed to have occurred.
5. The story is in fact false.

These criteria seem both conveniently vague and enormously ad hoc i.e. contrived. It's almost as if in formulating the argument, Gottlieb did a survey of religions, observed which characteristics make Talmudic Judaism different, and made those characteristics his criteria for what constitutes true religion. Even if documents of a previously unknown ancient religion founded on national revelation were unearthed, Gottlieb could use the ambiguity in terms such as "national tradition" and redefine it to include Judaism and exclude the other ancient religion. And since such a religion would be long dead, one could not prove that all the descendants were were believers.

Also, why the figure of 100,000. Is 5,000 somehow not enough to verify an event? Gottlieb's methodology is like shooting an arrow into a tree and then painting the target around it.

Since Gottlieb has a degree in philosophy and mathematical logic, I hope he also realizes that there is no such thing as proof by lack of counterexample. Not in mathematics, not in philosophy, not even in history. A theorem is not proved by failing to find a counterexample. Otherwise, theorems like Goldbach's conjecture or the continuum hypothesis should be considered proven. This goes for science as well. If I claimed that there can be no gold spheres larger than 20 feet in diameter, and claimed as my proof the fact that there are no counterexamples, I do not think anyone would accept that.

Similarly, a historical hypothesis is not verified by a failure to find evidence against it. Instead, you have to show that if the hypothesis is false, there would be evidence against it. In this case, the proponent of the Kuzari Principle argument has the full burden of the proof. Good luck with that.

Besides, if we drop the arbitrary 100,000 requirement from the argument, then there is a plethora of counterexamples. The Kurukshetra War in India, the founding of Thebes, and the fouding of the Aztec nation to name just a few.

But speaking of counterexamples. Why are there no ancient Egyptian records of such an event taking place? The Kuzari proponent will reply: "The Egyptians did not record their defeats." Well hold on there, sparky. Does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the millions of Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

It also may be the case that premise 1 of the argument is false. The Torah might not claim that there were at least 600,000 at Sinai after all. I think the problem is in assuming that the Hebrew word elef in the context of the Pentatuch only meant thousand. It could just as well have meant clan. If we are talking about 2,500 clans, we can get a number somewhere around 70,000 to 140,000. This figure is more consistent with ancient population statistics, as well as ancient archaeological evidence. Alexander the Great only had about 50,000 soldiers with him when he conquered Persia. Hannibal had about 20,000 soldiers with him. There were only about 20,000 soldiers in Egypt's army, so why would an Israelite army of 600,000 be afraid of them?

Also, if the larger figure is true, a mass exodus of 3 million people leaving Egypt, wandering through an uninhabited wasteland for 40 years, and then invading the Canaanite area would leave a massive trail of archaeological evidence. However, the much smaller figure would be able to make this type of journey without leaving such a massive trail. But if the smaller number is true, then the number at Sinai could be as low as 10,000, and we would not have the necessary 100,000 for the Kuzari argument to work.

To repeat, I am not arguing that the story of the Exodus is false. I believe that it is true. I am only arguing that it is not provable in the way that the Rabbis want it to be. By extension, the Rabbinic claim of an unbroken and uncorrupted line of Rabbinic Tradition and Oral Torah that dates back to Moses and Sinai is also not provable.