A Thought Question

[rosends]

I was reading up on the opinions regarding the 3 "visitors" who stopped by Abraham's tent.

I am assuming (for the sake of argument) that the text of the Chumash is historically accurate -- there was a guy and he was visited by three visitors.

Some commentators explain that the 3 visitors were angels. Others explain that they were not angels, but men.

Only one of those two can be, ultimately, correct. If we were to go back in time and watch the event unfold, either men or angels who looked like men showed up. Right now, all we have is opinion because we weren't there but each opinion is trying to present a truth of the situation so only one can be correct.

But if we learn a lesson from each of the options (like each angel can have only 1 mission or that we should recognize a blessing even in the words of mortal men and be thankful for it) then only one of those lessons can be sourced in the actual event. So learning one of them would be in error (if they were men, then we can't learn about angelic missions and if they were angels then we can't learn about human blessings).

Does this devalue any of the lessons we learn?

I wonder if there are other examples -- I suspect that there are but off the top of my head, I can't think of one.

 

[Tumah]

I was reading up on the opinions regarding the 3 "visitors" who stopped by Abraham's tent.

I am assuming (for the sake of argument) that the text of the Chumash is historically accurate -- there was a guy and he was visited by three visitors.

Some commentators explain that the 3 visitors were angels. Others explain that they were not angels, but men.

Only one of those two can be, ultimately, correct. If we were to go back in time and watch the event unfold, either men or angels who looked like men showed up. Right now, all we have is opinion because we weren't there but each opinion is trying to present a truth of the situation so only one can be correct.

But if we learn a lesson from each of the options (like each angel can have only 1 mission or that we should recognize a blessing even in the words of mortal men and be thankful for it) then only one of those lessons can be sourced in the actual event. So learning one of them would be in error (if they were men, then we can't learn about angelic missions and if they were angels then we can't learn about human blessings).

Does this devalue any of the lessons we learn?

I wonder if there are other examples -- I suspect that there are but off the top of my head, I can't think of one.

A few comments:
1) It's not necessarily true that only one of them can be correct. There are plenty of times where two divergent opinions can be explained as agreeing on the objective details but disagreeing on say, which detail is the more important one. So for instance even here where you have an opinion that they were angels and another that they were men. Well, I know of an opinion that Elijah was originally an angel that became a man, later to return to being an angel. Depending on how you looked at him, what the important detail was to you, you might describe him as one or the other.
2) Sometimes we find cases where because an opinion holds that something isn't learned from somewhere, they don't hold of that principle at all. Other times, they might learn it from somewhere else, so the principle is still universally true.
3) Another example: One opinion is that Abraham killed Isaac and the other is that he was stopped by the angel before he actually cut him.