Episode 19 – Rabbi Michael Abraham on the Importance of Israeli Discourse – Radical
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Opening, gratitude, and Israeli dreams
- Pluralism, religious truth, and the shared public space
- Introducing Rabbi Michael David (Miki) Abraham and his writing
- Meta-discourse, “religious fanatics,” and the absence of limits on discourse
- Holocaust denial, the danger of persuasion, and the dispute over setting limits
- Prayer versus science, libertarianism, and trust in common sense
- Denazification, Hamas, Islam, and education as soft coercion
- Incitement to actual harm, practical boundaries, and education with exposure to other views
- Asymmetry between religious and secular institutions, and examples of extremist speakers
- Moving beyond the personal example of debates
Summary
Overview
Jeremy Fogel opens the podcast with a sense of gratitude for being alive during a difficult period, presents open and attentive conversation as a condition for mutual betterment, and frames the discussion through the multiplicity of “Israeli dreams” and the need to allow them to exist within a diverse geopolitical and social space. He raises questions about pluralism, religious truth, and commitment to Jewish law alongside voices that are not committed to it, and invites Rabbi Dr. Michael David (Miki) Abraham to the conversation. Rabbi Abraham argues that the root problem is not the disagreements themselves but the inability to hold a conversation, because many groups have something “sacred” that may not be criticized. He proposes a principle of almost unlimited discourse, in which arguments are answered with arguments rather than silencing, with reservation only for cases of imminent danger of real harm. The tension between the ideal of absolute openness and practical concerns, education, and the shaping of public consciousness accompanies the exchange throughout, including examples of Holocaust denial, denazification, prayer versus science, and asymmetry between secular and religious educational institutions.
Opening, gratitude, and Israeli dreams
Jeremy Fogel greets the listeners, asks for “a moment of gratitude,” and says that thank God, mere existence is a miracle that gives us a chance to seek the good and try to do good even in this “nightmarishly difficult time.” He expresses hope that the audience is somehow keeping “their heads above water” and doing good first for themselves and then for their immediate and broader surroundings as much as possible. He connects this betterment to the importance of open, attentive, and diverse conversation, and says that lately he has been thinking about many “Israeli dreams” rather than a single dream, including his own personal dream of Geula Beach with a sunset, paddleball, and Tel Aviv freedom.
Pluralism, religious truth, and the shared public space
Jeremy describes pluralism as a “fluid” concept and asks whether it means multiple truths, multiple ways of saying the same truth, or acceptance that there is one truth alongside agreement to a multiplicity of voices. He asks how value-based, religious, and ideological pluralism can exist when there are growing audiences committed to absolute truth, and how real and attentive discourse can exist in such an environment. He presents Rabbi Abraham as a “multifaceted” person and as “the pluralism of one man,” and frames the episode as a conversation that will move across topics without rigid definition.
Introducing Rabbi Michael David (Miki) Abraham and his writing
Jeremy introduces Rabbi Abraham as a rabbi, a doctor of theoretical physics, a lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University, engaged in philosophy, science, and thought, and emphasizes the breadth of his output. He lists the trilogy of thought: “The First Existent — Faith, Religious Commitment, and Rational Thinking,” “No Man Has Power Over the Spirit — Toward a Lean and Updated Framework for Jewish Thought,” and “Moves Among the Standing — On the Need and the Possibility of Refreshing Jewish law,” and also mentions “God Does Play Dice.” He describes Rabbi Abraham’s blog as “a Talmud of one man” and links it to a follow-up conversation surrounding an event in which he had quoted a “rabbi” and later clarified that the rabbi who had written to him on the subject was Rabbi Abraham.
Meta-discourse, “religious fanatics,” and the absence of limits on discourse
Rabbi Abraham says that his vision is similar to the vision of free life on the beach, and argues that private visions should remain in each person’s private domain and be transformed into a unified public vision of enabling every person to realize his own vision. He argues that the central problem is not the arguments, not “who is right,” and not the harms that one position or another may bring, but the inability to conduct discourse because “everyone is religiously dogmatic,” meaning people who are unwilling to listen or accept criticism of things they regard as “sacred.” He defines himself as “anti-religious” in the sense of being against such religious-mindedness, and declares as a foundational view that “there are no limits to discourse,” including willingness to discuss even whether Hitler was right, while refusing to assume in advance that the other side has no arguments.
Holocaust denial, the danger of persuasion, and the dispute over setting limits
Jeremy raises the problem of sophistry and charisma through the example of Holocaust deniers who develop technical arguments and can persuade an innocent audience, and concludes from this that it makes sense to set limits in order to prevent dangerous persuasion. Rabbi Abraham compares this to the closedness of religious sides around the “principles of faith” and argues that the problem exists, but one must choose between two alternatives: silencing by hegemons who determine the boundaries of discourse, or complete openness in which anyone who disagrees brings counterarguments. He opposes banning Holocaust denial and argues that handing over the boundaries of discourse to hegemons is dangerous because you can never know who the hegemon will be. Therefore, the solution is to bring skilled speakers who can refute, to give the public credit for deciding, and to try persuading again if the decision was “wrong.”
Prayer versus science, libertarianism, and trust in common sense
Jeremy presents a case involving defense against Iranian missiles and sets up a clash between scientific method and investing resources in reciting Psalms and prayer, asking whether the two positions should be given equal standing. Rabbi Abraham says that both views should be heard even though he himself does not think reciting Psalms helps, because he is unwilling for others to make decisions in his place. Jeremy compares this to criticism of libertarian capitalism, in which reducing regulation creates a vacuum filled by unrestrained forces such as monopolies. Rabbi Abraham responds that he agrees about the problems but does not see an alternative that is less dangerous, and argues that people have “common sense,” and that Jewish law and Jewish outlook flex in the face of reality when something simply “doesn’t fit.” He says that if most of the public lacks common sense at that level, then one should “get out of here,” and that in practice even capitalists agree to clip the wings of monopolies out of an understanding that the extreme does not work.
Denazification, Hamas, Islam, and education as soft coercion
Jeremy presents denazification in Germany as a project in which discourse was restricted and top-down direction contributed to transforming a Nazi society into a democratic one, and connects this to the idea that concrete coercion is expressed mainly through education and national guidance of values. Rabbi Abraham questions whether top-down restraint was the main reason for the success and argues that defeat and sobering up also contributed, and that even if coercion worked, it does not suppress views forever and they may re-emerge. He distinguishes between Nazis and Hamas and argues that with Hamas this is “rooted very deeply in the culture,” whereas in Germany the Nazi psychosis was not “deeply embedded in the foundations of the culture,” even though he acknowledges the existence of a militant ethos and historical events, and stresses that the hardships after World War I played a generative role.
Incitement to actual harm, practical boundaries, and education with exposure to other views
Rabbi Abraham sets a clear exception for “imminent danger” of real harm and agrees that in such a case no platform should be given, but distinguishes that from ideological discussion, even very extreme discussion. He argues that one cannot allow either a minority or a majority to educate the rest in a one-sided ideological direction when there are deep disagreements among “tens of percent” of the public, and declares that both sides try to educate children without giving room to the other direction, which in his view is a “mistake,” because the other direction “is alive and present.” He distinguishes between education and coercion and argues that education always aims at values and there is no “transparent education,” but demands that within an educational framework other positions also be heard, after which the teacher can present where he disagrees and why, so that the students will “choose” rather than simply be kept inside a bubble.
Asymmetry between religious and secular institutions, and examples of extremist speakers
Jeremy argues that there is an asymmetry in which an Orthodox voice is heard in state schools and Tel Aviv schools, while secular positions or views like his are not heard in Haredi or Religious Zionist yeshivot, and gives as an example that he would gladly invite Rabbi Abraham. Rabbi Abraham agrees that there is asymmetry but argues that the phenomena exist on the other side as well, and gives the example that secular schools would not bring in a speaker like Ben Gvir, even though he represents a significant public. Rabbi Abraham says that “everyone” should be brought if they have arguments, including examples like Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein, whereas Jeremy objects to a school holding a discussion that gives room to justifying such acts, and compares it to the claim that one does not hold a debate for or against pedophilia. Rabbi Abraham insists that when arguments are presented they should be answered with counterarguments, and argues that silencing is not an option and will not work in practice either.
Moving beyond the personal example of debates
Jeremy begins to raise “another problem” on the practical level and says that he held a debate, like the debate with Professor Hatzroni, and the text cuts off at that point.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Radical Podcast. I’m Jeremy Fogel, and we want to begin with a moment of gratitude. Thank God, we’re still alive somehow, despite everything. This miracle of mere existence is still happening, and that means we have an opportunity to improve things, to try to do good, to seek the good, to aim toward the good, in whatever way we can, even in this difficult, nightmarish time. We hope that somehow you’re doing as well as possible, keeping your heads above water, and doing good for yourselves first of all, and for your immediate surroundings and the wider environment as much as possible. Now of course, part of that good includes the importance of conversation—open conversation, attentive conversation, diverse conversation. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Israeli dreams. Maybe precisely because we really are in such a nightmarish period, I’ve been thinking about Israeli dreams. I don’t think there is one Israeli dream; I think there’s a range of Israeli dreams. My Israeli dream is at Geula Beach with maybe Epictetus or one of the books here, and a sunset, and paddleball, and a sense of Tel Aviv freedom that is more precious to me than gold. I assume that our distinguished guest’s dream today is a little different, and there’s a wide variety of dreams. The question is how all these dreams can continue, how we can reach a situation in which we can try to sustain these different dreams within a space that is geopolitically complex and also internally very diverse. I think a lot about pluralism and religion. I’m throwing out a few topics that I think will come up, right? Pluralism, a really fluid term. Does pluralism mean that there are several positions that contain some sort of truth? Or that pluralism means there are several ways of expressing the same truth? Or does pluralism mean accepting that there is only one truth, but understanding that not everyone will agree with it, and accepting a situation in which this multiplicity of voices exists? How can that—however we understand it—how can value pluralism, religious pluralism, ideological pluralism exist alongside growing groups in Israeli society that are committed to absolute truth, or to a conception of absolute religious truth? How can these things fit together? How can we still hold a conversation that is real, that is attentive, within all this? There are just a range of topics I want to discuss with my guest, even without defining the episode too precisely, partly because of the nature of the guest himself, because we’re talking here with a guest who is very multifaceted. He’s a kind of one-man pluralism, because there are so many thoughts, positions, ideas in him. Of course I’m speaking with someone whose views and arguments I very much respect, Rabbi Michael David Miki Abraham. Miki—but yes, Rabbi Miki Abraham—rabbi, doctor of theoretical physics, lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University, engaged in philosophy, science, thought. Too many books. The man is insanely productive. I need to ask you how you produce so much out of yourself; I don’t know if you’ve got some tricks. But his latest work, his latest book, is a trilogy of thought, as the name suggests—a trilogy. The first part, The First Existent: Faith, Religious Commitment, and Rational Thinking. Two, No Man Has Power Over the Spirit, outlining a lean and updated framework for Jewish thought. Three, Moves Among the Standing: On the Need and the Possibility of Refreshing Jewish law. But there’s also God Does Play Dice, your book on evolution, and so on and so on and so on, dozens of books and publications, and of course the blog as well, Rabbi Miki Abraham’s blog, a blog that is a kind of Talmud of one man. You know that thing of a one-man band, where he’s also drumming and also playing and also the harmonica and singing—so your blog has that Talmudic one-man diversity to it, a very abundant blog, it must be said. And this is also the time—I know you also published about it there, so I’ll allow myself to say—there was some whole meta-episode and then the episode about the episode about the episode, with a quote, and I quoted a rabbi whose views I said I respect and appreciate very much, and since you also published the matter openly, I can also say that you were the rabbi who wrote to me on that subject. Maybe that too will somehow come up, I don’t know if the event itself but the follow-up conversation that I want us to discuss. And in general I want us to talk, because it’s always enjoyable to talk with you, always insightful, always thought-provoking. Rabbi Michael David Miki Abraham, hello. Hello, hello. Let’s really start with the framework. There are some burning issues I want to discuss with you, but I want to begin with the framework of shared life. And I want to ask this in a direct way, really cut straight to it and ask explicitly. Given that we live in a space with a variety of opinions and positions and value gaps, religious gaps, ideological gaps—given that in this space, specifically around the religious issue, there are people committed to Jewish law who regard it as the word of God, meaning as something sacred that cannot be violated, and there are other people who are very much not committed to that same Jewish law—how do you see the possibility of sustaining a shared space, given this Israeli diversity?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that’s a very broad question. You can approach it from all kinds of directions. It seems to me that this is the main reason for it—if I go back to the visions you spoke about in the opening—my vision is similar to yours. I also want to live on the beach, if not necessarily with Epictetus; my taste is a little different, but never mind, everyone has his own taste, and freedom, and not necessarily Tel Aviv-ness or Lod-ness, exactly the same thing. And I think that in a certain sense we need to translate our visions into some kind of—leave them in each person’s private domain and transform the unified vision of visions into one unified vision: that all we really need is to allow people to realize their visions, and we don’t need to argue about the visions themselves. You can argue, fine, convince me or don’t convince me. And so, in my view—and now I’m returning from Epictetus and Tel Aviv and the beach to our more turbulent lives—even in the difficult disputes taking place today around many issues, there too, in my view, the problem is not the arguments, and the problem is not who is right, and the problem is not the damages that each position may bring—and in my opinion, there are positions that will bring damage, many positions that will bring damage. In my view, we’re not there; that’s not the problem. The problem is that we are unable to conduct the conversation about these problems because people are all religious fanatics. Everyone is. Everyone is. I’m anti-religious, by the way. I’m anti-religious not in the sense of belief in God—I believe in God. I’m anti-religious in the sense that I’m against religious-minded people of that sort. Against people who are unwilling to listen or accept criticism of things that are sacred in their eyes. You mentioned earlier Jewish law, or the Torah, or things sacred in the eyes of religious people, but I think that today many groups and many people have things that are sacred to them in exactly the same religious sense that this exists among the religious. And they’re unwilling to accept criticism, unwilling to listen to opposing arguments on these issues. Now maybe they’re right and maybe they’re not. But this tactic, or this approach, this meta-position that says there are things I am unwilling to discuss—that is the root of the evil. It is the root of the evil not because you’re wrong and I’m right or vice versa, but because we won’t be able to clarify that I’m right and you’re wrong. And in my view, as a foundational conception, there are no limits to discourse. As far as I’m concerned, we can discuss whether Hitler was right. Give me your arguments; either I’ll be convinced or I won’t be convinced. I won’t silence you in any way. I’ll invite you to discuss if you have arguments, and so on. And I don’t assume in advance that you have no arguments, even if perhaps you’re very far from me in your positions. And I’m willing to hear everything, everything. And I think that this is something I hardly find anywhere. And in my view, that’s the heart of the matter. Now when you ask me how to get—going back to your more concrete question—how to get to a situation in which we can actually conduct a conversation, I don’t know. I mean, I think that if everyone were like me—sorry for the chauvinism—but if everyone were like me, we could conduct a conversation, not because there wouldn’t be disagreements.
[Speaker A] Do you hear how much that position sounds like—if everyone were like me, then I could hold a conversation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if everyone were like me in the meta-discourse. That’s exactly the point. Meaning, you can be left-wing; I tend to the right. You can be left-wing, you can be right-wing, you can be for, you can be against, religious, non-religious, everything. I do think that in the meta-discourse we need to agree that discourse should take place. Now if we don’t agree on that, then what can I offer?
[Speaker A] Look, I’ll tell you something. This issue—you can hold a conversation about whether Hitler was right—and somewhere I also want later for us to talk about discourse that unfortunately in my view isn’t far enough from that question. But you know, I once saw a documentary about Holocaust deniers. There are people who devoted decades of their lives to denying that there were gas chambers. And then they come with all kinds of arguments: if you burn a person it takes more than ten minutes, and according to the numbers you see that it’s impossible, and so on. Now you bring a person like that—I assume you’d agree with me that in the end he’s a sophist, right? Someone who perhaps manages to produce arguments that may even sound convincing. And if you bring him before an innocent audience, an audience that believes there were gas chambers and that Jews were burned, but no one actually calculated how many Jews and how much time in the fire and how much time in the crematoria—it’s just not something you dealt with when you’re standing before someone for whom this is his profession, his life’s work. And you bring him to a school, one person who says there were no gas chambers versus one who says there were gas chambers, and for that matter, the randomness of reality may mean that the one speaking about there being no gas chambers, the Holocaust denier, is more persuasive, has sharper arguments, is more charismatic and better-looking, more pleasant in manner, and we’ll end up in a situation where young people are persuaded because of this encounter, which is supposedly open, supposedly liberal—we’ll have persuaded them that there were no gas chambers. So what I’m saying is that I’m in favor of this radical openness you’re talking about, but I do think it makes sense to set certain limits in order to prevent situations like that. Don’t you think?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, as a connotation or association, this is exactly what I hear from the religious side when I argue with it. They too don’t agree to open the boundaries of discourse beyond the principles of faith, some principles of tradition. Inside that there’s lots of pilpul, but it’s all within some framework that may not be crossed. And there I have the same arguments, so this is a very nice expression of what I said earlier—that the dogmatists exist in every direction. And I’ll tell you, the problem exists, you can’t deny it. There are two possible solutions to it, two types—there are shades, but two types. One type is to silence whoever falls outside the boundaries of reason, in my view, morality, or whatever.
[Speaker A] Meaning, for example, you oppose those laws in France and Germany that say you’re not allowed to speak
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] publicly about—yes, you’re not allowed—
[Speaker A] to deny the extermination of the Jewish people?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Also in Israel. I completely oppose the ban on Holocaust denial. I think it’s a very problematic prohibition. There are two ways to deal with this problem, and it is a problem. But you know, with problems you have to cope. It’s not enough just to point out that there’s a problem; we have to compare alternatives. One alternative is to let a few hegemons determine the boundaries of discourse, and whoever doesn’t fit inside those boundaries gets silenced. Now I don’t need to tell you what happens when we hand over the boundaries of discourse to hegemons. You never know who the hegemon will be. And therefore I think a view developed, one I very much identify with, and for some reason today there’s a bit of retreat from it, that says no—we won’t choose that solution. We’ll choose the opposite solution. Anyone can speak. You think he’s wrong? Bring someone good enough, sharp enough, knowledgeable enough, who did the work, to show that he’s wrong. And give the public credit—not always justifiably, by the way, not everyone has the sharpest pencils—but that’s what there is, that’s the alternative. Give them the credit to hear the arguments and decide. And once they decide wrongly, try to persuade them again; bring someone better. That’s fine. Everyone should try to persuade in his own direction. If all the geniuses think there was a Holocaust and everyone who thinks there wasn’t a Holocaust is an idiot, then you know what—maybe there wasn’t a Holocaust. So I’m a capitalist in this sense too. I think the thing should be completely open, because once you start limiting it, then I become a leftist—I start seeing the apocalypse on the way, that soon nothing at all will be discussable anymore.
[Speaker A] The question is whether all forms of dogmatism are equal, right? For example, there could be a methodological difference. Suppose we’re now going to hold a discussion on what is the best way to defend ourselves from Iranian missiles, and one person comes to talk about science and military technologies that have undergone real scrutiny and careful field testing, that broadly speaking have gone through something identifiable as scientific method, versus a person who says no, we should invest all our resources in encouraging people to say Psalms, to pray. Do you think both—I mean, according to your conception, that discourse should be completely open and those two positions should have the same standing? Don’t you think there’s a problem here?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Definitely yes. I think both views should be heard, and not because I so love the recitation of Psalms—I don’t think it helps, by the way, even as a religious person. So I’m not the one who needs persuading on that. But I do think it needs to be heard, because I am not willing for anyone to make decisions in my place.
[Speaker A] No, but there’s a difference between—you know—there’s something, I agree with you theoretically. I think what you’re saying is problematic practically. Just as I have a problem with libertarian capitalism. It sounds good theoretically, but in practice, at the practical, pragmatic level, we always see that the moment the government says all right, I’ll reduce myself, there won’t be regulations, there won’t be this, let’s have a free market, free market, free market—the shrinking of government doesn’t leave some open layer of freedom. What it leaves is a vacuum, and what fills that vacuum is not freedom but other coercive mechanisms that are not under democratic restraint, and they take over the space. Meaning, giant corporations that ultimately create monopolies that exploit consumers. It’s not some beautiful invisible hand of freedom. So here too, if I say all positions are equally legitimate for the sake of argument, and the position of let’s try to think rationally about how we defend ourselves from missiles, versus the position of let’s throw prayers and magic at it and see what works better—that’s not going to be some kind of system-wide equality. You’re opening it up to any power agent that happens randomly to gain more power, and it could be a power agent that is not restrained by people’s choices, and it will operate in this open space you’re proposing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re back to the same point. I agree with everything you said, but I don’t see an alternative. Meaning, once you decide that a certain person or certain people determine the boundaries of discourse, you’ve ended the discourse. And we see this these days. We see it. There is no discourse, because everyone sets boundaries beyond which it is forbidden to speak, and those boundaries keep narrowing, and we remain dogmatists in separate monads, unable to speak to one another. So I agree with all the problems you described. I’m going back to what I said earlier, completely. I’m against this irrationality. I think people aren’t always intelligent, and so of course people can be manipulated. But I don’t see an alternative. The alternative doesn’t prove itself. And by the way, specifically on this issue, despite people talking about Psalms and all that—you know, they talk about Psalms while they know there’s Iron Dome. Most of the people who talk about Psalms as the option that protects us—if there were no Iron Dome, they would build it. I know them up close; I live among them.
[Speaker A] No, but in order to build it they also need, you know, to study science, core curriculum studies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course, of course. In the longer term they’ll also have to study core curriculum subjects and professions, yes, scientific subjects and so on. I completely agree. I criticize them for not doing that. But I think that even when you see this irrationality, people in the end, in the end, do have common sense—most of them. They have common sense. I see how Jewish law and the Jewish outlook bend in simply virtuoso ways, I would say, before reality. You go against explicit principles in Jewish law when you understand that this just doesn’t fit, as the expression goes. There’s a nice phrase for it. Meaning, you can’t act that way, and so you don’t do what Jewish law says, even though it says that. Now, you’ll carry the banner of Jewish law, and you’ll fight for it, and you’ll hold demonstrations, and I don’t know what. In the end, in the end, people have common sense. If you live in an environment where sixty percent of the people don’t have that common sense, then get out of here. Don’t try to conduct discourse, don’t try to control them—you won’t succeed, just get out of here. If you’ve lost trust at that level, I think we can’t conduct this discussion at all anymore. If we’re not there, then between these two options—letting hegemons determine the boundaries of discourse and what may and may not be heard, versus open discourse where everyone gets to try—I’m in favor of the second option, because the first option is not an option. And regarding—just one more second—regarding economics. The example of economics that you mentioned: there it seems to me that today no one is really a complete libertarian anymore. After all, this absurdity of going after monopolies, which is a distinctly capitalist feature—it’s actually against capitalism in principle. He’s a monopoly because he’s smart and strong and talented and managed to do everything—why are you going after him? Because you understand that pure capitalism doesn’t work. Again, it just doesn’t fit. That “doesn’t fit” means, look, people have common sense. In the end they balance it, but they balance it when they understand that the thing doesn’t work, and by agreement. Even capitalists agree that you need to clip the wings of monopolies. But if socialists forced them to do it, then it probably wouldn’t work and we’d all suffer because the monopolies would take over us. So I agree with the apocalyptic forecasts; I refuse to let them run my life.
[Speaker A] But for example, if we go back to Germany as a kind of example—if you look at the denazification project, one of the impressive political projects of the twentieth century, because you basically have a culture that for fifteen years is completely subordinate to Nazi ideology. We tend maybe to forget that because of the disaster-images of ’45, but if you look at Nazi festivals in Germany in the thirties, people were part of it, people were enthusiastically part of it, people loved Hitler. And there a deliberate program was carried out by a certain hegemon, a hegemon that was perhaps actually led by people who weren’t even German, because of the Marshall Plan and so on. And they took this culture and said, yes, we will restrict discourse, yes, we will steer it from a Nazi place to a democratic place, to a liberal place, to a sane place, right? And this thing, this restraint they imposed, proved itself to some extent. Germany succeeded in turning from a Nazi society into a democratic society, and even if now in our day we’re seeing a return of the German far right more toward the center of the political stage, still, if you look over the seventy or eighty years since then, there has been a certain success here, and that success came through restraining the discourse and directing it from above.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t agree in two senses. First, factually, I’m not one hundred percent sure—I don’t know, it would require some research that I obviously haven’t done—I’m not entirely sure that this top-down restraint is what brought about the results. There was something in the defeat and the sobering up from the madness of the Nazi period that led people, at least some of them, to understand that they had been inside some sort of psychosis and to come out of it. I don’t know whether coercive force specifically did the work. That’s one thing. Second, even if it did the work, you yourself are saying—listen, if people really have other conceptions inside them, you won’t succeed in suppressing it by force. It will emerge at some point. And you yourself say it’s emerging a little today. I think part of the success there came because people inwardly really did not identify with that psychosis. By the way, in my view—and I wrote this in the column you read—there’s a difference between Nazis and Hamas, despite the funny comparisons we’re always making. In this sense, I’m not saying this in order to judge or condemn, but with Hamas there’s something rooted very deeply in the culture. With the Germans, no.
[Speaker A] Look, I think we need to wait fifty years to judge that, because in the thirties it was deep.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It was deep in the sense that the phenomenon swept people along. But it seems to me it was not deeply embedded in the foundations of German culture. Maybe there was antisemitism there—there was antisemitism in many places. But this murderous psychosis that was there—I’m not impressed that—
[Speaker A] There was World War I, there was the very militant Prussian ethos. The point is, they carried out a kind of genocide in Namibia beforehand. Meaning, it’s not completely foreign to them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Other people carried out genocides too.
[Speaker A] No, I’m talking about Germans.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m saying, I’m not impressed that it’s really deep in their culture. There was the hardship, the Treaty of Versailles, all the hardships of World War I. There is hardship in Gaza too. No, so I’m saying, I think there the hardships were what gave birth to the Nazi psychosis. I think that in Gaza—and we see this in other places in the world too—it’s not only because of the hardship. The hardship probably has some part in it. It’s not only because of the hardship. There’s something in Islamic thinking that you can’t ignore. And Islam was born in the seventh century. Islam wasn’t born today. Now, I’m not saying all Muslims are like that, but there is something in Muslim thought that leads in that direction.
[Speaker A] But there’s also a lot to do with interpretations and time. Because for example today liberal, pleasant, enjoyable Europe—obviously a Jew would prefer to be in Berlin right now rather than in Damascus. But really sixty years ago he would have preferred a thousand times over to be in Damascus rather than Berlin. And the analysis could have been very different. But the point is, when we talked about—when you said coercive force—the concrete expression of coercive force isn’t that people walk around with a whip and say, ‘Ah, you had a good thought about Nazis, boom,’ and beat you or put you in jail. It’s, for example, education. It’s taking a clear direction in educating the new generation. And when you educate people in certain directions, then obviously there will be people for whom the education won’t succeed, or for whom the educational guidance won’t perhaps find concrete expression. But in the large statistics, once you declare a certain direction for national education, then you know how to direct people toward it—like the success of Israeli education, for example, education toward meaningful military service, which is an important value in Israeli state education, and you see that in the end that does succeed. Like our demand, for example—people talk a lot about the prime minister and so on—that there should not be a culture educated solely toward murdering Jews in Gaza, and so forth. Meaning, we are demanding a change in education. German education—this coercion, in the end, is just another word for it: education. Education is always aimed at some kind of value. Education is not neutral. There is no education that is just education. Education is always aimed at certain values. We’re talking here, for example, about the possibility of Israeli education being aimed at certain values, and here there’s a certain duality, whether you like it or not. The question is simply what kind of duality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll tell you a few points that arise in this context. First, one more qualification to what I said earlier: as the law itself also determines, in a place where there is imminent danger to someone else, obviously you should not give the person a platform. Meaning, I’m talking about discussion of ideas. I’m not talking about incitement to actual harm against someone. On that I agree; I don’t know how to deal with it otherwise, that needs to be stopped. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the question of how we clarify ideological disputes, including the most extreme ones. So someone who tells me on the ideological level that he is a Nazi—if I see a tangible concern that they’re going to start setting up concentration camps here, then no, I won’t let him set up a party and advance his ideas. But if he has arguments, then I want to hear them, I want to hear them and discuss them. That’s one thing. Second, there’s the practical issue. You can’t let 20% of the population educate the other 80%, and not 40 the 60, and not 60 the 40 either, not that either. You can deal with problems through education when there is some agreement about what the right direction is. You want to educate the youth to go in that direction—fine, legitimate. And even there, by the way, I think you need to present them with other alternatives too. But yes, I accept having an educational direction. In a place where we have a dispute, a deep dispute, and it’s not a dispute of 5% of the population against 95%—there are heavy, real disputes here between tens of percent in every direction, without statistics, and each question splits differently—but there are deep and real disputes. I think such disputes will not be solved by educational means. And I say this to both sides, because both sides try to do it. Both sides try to educate the children in school toward their own ideological direction and not give the other direction a platform. And that’s a mistake, because the other direction is alive and well here; you won’t suppress it.
[Speaker A] I don’t think it’s symmetrical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One second, one more comment. Last thing: I still want to distinguish between coercion and education, despite the similarity between them. Education—having an educational direction—is completely acceptable. Even I, if I were setting up an educational institution, there would be an educational direction there. But alongside that very clear educational direction, I would want them to hear other positions too. That doesn’t mean there is no educational direction, but it does mean: this is the direction I believe in, I want to persuade you to go there, but I want you to choose to go there. So when I say absence of coercion, that doesn’t mean absence of education. It means—education has a clear direction, as you said; there is no empty education, that’s an illusion. And also humanistic education and all these approaches where sometimes there’s a sense that they think it’s completely neutral, transparent education—there’s no such thing as transparent education. And that’s perfectly fine; everyone should educate as he sees fit. But I think that even inside my own school, I would want them to bring you, or other people who disagree with me. I want to hear what they say, and afterward I’ll tell the students where I disagree and why.
[Speaker A] So here there’s that asymmetry I already pointed out, maybe a little differently earlier: not every religious person is the same kind of religious person, and not every religious woman is the same kind of religious woman. And for that matter, I know, because I’m involved with all kinds of cultural institutions and educational institutions, and I also know state schools, secular ones—not everyone there is secular—but state schools, even schools in Tel Aviv, where the Orthodox voice will in fact be heard, for example. I’ve personally lectured in hundreds of places; never—and this isn’t about me personally, right, but me and people like me—they won’t invite me to come speak about Spinoza or Spinoza’s philosophy in a Haredi yeshiva, or even a Religious Zionist one. Right. There’s no symmetry here. Because I’m sure you’ve spoken in many schools and many institutions with a more secular character, and we, for that matter, are happy to invite you here. Hasn’t that happened to you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. But I’m not denying the asymmetry.
[Speaker A] We held this evening at Alma, for example, understand. Not a school. Fine, but it’s a kind of secular yeshiva.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A dialogue space, yes, not a school. A school is something else. A school means bringing people in to speak with students, with children.
[Speaker A] You’ve never ended up speaking in schools over all the years that you’ve…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Once maybe there was something on Zoom with some school in Tel Aviv where the homeroom teacher was religious and he brought me in.
[Speaker A] Look, but for the sake of the point—let’s not even make it personal—your position is heard in schools in Tel Aviv; my position will not be heard in yeshivas in Bnei Brak or Eli.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. First of all, I agree there’s an asymmetry. I just think it’s not as sharp as people present it. And that’s an important point. I’m not trying to make this a competition over who’s better. When I’m not talking to you but to my religious friends, I talk to them with no less force and firmness against their closed-mindedness. It’s just that here, since this is the platform, I want to argue that phenomena like this exist here too. Whether it’s in the same dosage or not, that can be debated. In the schools, I think it’s not the same dosage, because in the religious world schools really are considered some kind of bubble that supposedly has to be preserved and protected. Part of that is because it’s much easier to preserve religious education than to preserve secular education. Factually. Meaning, it’s easier, because you demand more from children, and things that are less intuitive, less self-evident, so there are certain justifications for it too. You can understand it. Okay, I don’t agree with it, but you can understand it. But I want to argue that on the other side there’s also a lot of this, despite the differences, despite the asymmetry. And that’s a point people often aren’t aware of. And let’s say—I don’t know in how many secular schools in Tel Aviv they would bring Ben Gvir to speak, for example. Not that I’m one of his admirers. Okay? So they’ll bring someone like me, say, for the sake of argument—like I told you, I still haven’t been—but let’s suppose they would. But they won’t bring Ben Gvir. Now understand, Ben Gvir isn’t some patch of thorns, with all my reservations about him. He represents a certain public, and it’s not an insignificant public.
[Speaker A] And should they bring Yigal Amir too?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my view, everyone. Anyone who has arguments, again.
[Speaker A] But you won’t bring everyone. I’ll bring everyone. No, but practically speaking, you won’t bring everyone. I mean, fine—for the sake of argument—I don’t see a very big ideological difference between Ben Gvir and Yigal Amir, you know. Okay. On the night of the murder, Yigal Amir thought Ben Gvir would do it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’d bring Yigal Amir too—I said that.
[Speaker A] And I respect the coherence of your position because you say: I go all the way. But I don’t think a school in Tel Aviv needs to bring in someone who holds Yigal Amir’s position.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s exactly my criticism. Again, not because of Yigal Amir specifically, but because of this conception that says there are limits to discourse.
[Speaker A] No, I don’t think that in a school one should hear the view that the despicable murder committed by Baruch Goldstein was a justified act.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my opinion it should be heard.
[Speaker A] There shouldn’t be a discussion for or against Baruch Goldstein.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that’s our disagreement. In my opinion it should be heard. I’m talking about when there are arguments, not when someone comes to preach.
[Speaker A] But you know, arguments can be invented for anything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine—if there are arguments. “Invented” is already your judgment. If someone presents arguments, what you can do is present counterarguments. That’s how I see it. Silencing him is not an option. It’s not an option, it’s also not right to do, but practically too—you won’t succeed.
[Speaker A] But practically speaking, we’re not going to hold a discussion in a school for or against pedophilia.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? If someone has arguments, I’ll hold a discussion about pedophilia, absolutely. Again, I’m saying: if someone has arguments, if someone is prepared to present an argument, and I’ll present an argument against it—absolutely yes. Everything is on the table.
[Speaker A] Because presenting things that way—what’s problematic about it—is that it doesn’t reflect reality; it sort of assumes symmetry between two positions, not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Symmetry—symmetry in possibility, not symmetry in validity. I’m saying: I don’t agree with this view, I think it’s deeply problematic for reasons A, B, C, D. And I say that to students with all the force I can muster—but I want them to hear it.
[Speaker A] I’ll give you another problem, and this is a practical problem. I did, like the debate we did with you and Professor David Enoch, I also did one about global warming. And I got torrents of criticism, really, from the side that’s supposed to be the more liberal side, the open side: how can you present both positions now? On the one hand I said no—there’s a question here that I think can be discussed and should be discussed. What I later did think was problematic was that if you hold a discussion, for example, where there’s agreement among ninety-five percent of scientists, even if you bring a smart, prominent, learned presenter—a scientist who is among the five percent—and you put them one against the other, what gets distorted is that this setup, of one person who believes human activity contributes to the massive ecological damage coming toward us and one person who doesn’t believe that, fails to reflect that this is the position of ninety-five percent of scientists and this one is only five percent.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then reflect that—reflect it.
[Speaker A] Technically, you’d need to bring ninety-five people arguing X and five arguing Y.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that would give—
[Speaker A] those five a platform.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? Again, it doesn’t have to happen on the same panel—bring a hundred people, we don’t do it that way. But let that position appear in the discourse too. After that, say: this is a small minority of scientists. By the way, a minority can also be right. True, I’m not denying that. Galileo was. And that’s exactly why I say: give that minority a chance to speak. You know, before my doctorate, I met some Vizhnitz Hasid from Haifa named Scheffler. I don’t know whether he’s still with us or not; he was already old then. He had devised some alternative theory of relativity that solved various problems that existed in the physics of those times. And some professor told me, the man is serious, worth checking out—I was looking for a dissertation topic. So I went to speak with him, and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Then I started opening the Physics Abstracts, those big volumes with all the published articles, and it turns out that dozens of such relativity theories get published every year. And each one claims it solves problems the current theory doesn’t solve. Now no one has really checked all those theories seriously to see whether they’re right. If they were never given any hearing at all, there would be no chance anyone would examine them. Even as it is, because of the huge flood, they don’t get checked. But I’m saying: the marketplace of ideas has to be free, and that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a position. And it doesn’t mean that…
[Speaker A] Today, for example, we—I think a lot about, you know, that article by Leo Strauss on persecution and the art of writing, where he says: when you read philosophers writing under conditions of political persecution—say, you read Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise in 1670, but also many other books, Hume’s books, many books from the Enlightenment—they obviously can’t fully say what they want, and so you have to read between the lines; you have to read what he writes and also what he means to write but cannot write. Today, for that matter, we live in an age where ostensibly you can pretty much say what you want. Not anymore. Maybe less—but you can publish things independently on networks and so on and so on and so on. The thing is, I think the persecution today is about who gets prominence. Meaning, there are so many voices on the internet.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not on the internet—you can write whatever you want on your website, unless Facebook has their…
[Speaker A] So I’m saying the question of censorship is actually the opposite question. It’s who gets the more central platforms in a situation where the media is so fragmented. For example, suppose there are a hundred positions on a certain issue. You can’t expect a school to present all hundred positions. The school will choose the positions that are central, the ones it sees as legitimate.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But not specifically its own positions. Fine, no problem, that’s okay. But certainly when you censor—I don’t know—twenty, thirty, forty percent of the population, you understand, that’s not serious, that can’t sustain discourse. You’re not dealing with one percent here. Look, just notice where we are. In the preliminary conversation and also in your opening, you said: look, we want to see how to deal with a reverential attitude toward religious texts, how discourse can be conducted. Do you notice what positions we’re occupying here?
[Speaker A] Right, but I think…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re the one defending the idea that there are things one must not talk about, and I—the religious guy—am actually demanding to talk about everything.
[Speaker A] I’m not saying there are things that should never be talked about in any situation, under any circumstances. I’m saying that practically, in arenas where it matters—in mainstream media, in education—there’s going to be a selection of positions anyway. You’re not going to have the full range of positions on the news broadcast, and then I do think one has to consider moral judgments that are supposed to be shared.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that I don’t agree with. I’ll give you an example. In the Supreme Court it used to be standard that there was one religious judge. That didn’t exactly reflect the percentage of religious people in the population. Today there are many more, and still they’re usually a minority, okay? And that makes sense, because religious people are a minority in the population. That’s fine. But what happens is the David Levy effect. The David Levy effect—once in the Likud central committee he said: look, all the jobs you take for yourselves. I have a faction of—I don’t know—thirty percent, say, I don’t remember anymore, and we get nothing. They told him: what do you want, there are democratic elections. He said yes, in every democratic election the seventy percent decide against the thirty percent, and one hundred percent of the jobs go to you. Now in the Supreme Court it was the same thing. Suppose the percentage of religious people in the court reflects their percentage in the population, but in every panel there’s one religious judge and two secular judges—as in the population, or even more—still the religious judge will lose, and therefore in one hundred percent of decisions the secular judges will win. Never mind whether that’s the reality right now; I’m just reflecting a conception here. I’m saying the same thing: if you make an open lottery among all hundred positions, obviously you can’t present them all—but make an open lottery. If you’re selecting them, then don’t tell me there are a hundred positions and you just can’t present them all. You don’t want to present certain positions.
[Speaker A] Right, right—I don’t want to present them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then don’t give me the line that you can’t present a hundred positions. You’re hiding. You don’t want to present certain positions even if there were only three.
[Speaker A] I think it’s a question of context. I think there are certain contexts—and for that matter it’s also a question of maturity, right? In kindergarten I’m not bringing in one person who argues for genocide and one who argues against it. Agreed? Agreed. In elementary school neither. In academia, for example, in arenas like that, I want a philosophy scholar or a political science scholar…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A gradation—I agree. Educational considerations, at what stage to do it, no problem with that. I have no argument there.
[Speaker A] So maybe let’s really illustrate this practically with an issue that you and I corresponded about a bit, and which is an issue that, to me, really hurts. We said earlier that you wrote me—well, I called it a scroll, because, you know, again, you’re a prolific person; anyone who knows your blog and more generally—where do you always get that kind of energy from, do you sleep little, I don’t know, how do you…?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t sleep little. I sleep reasonably well. I write fast.
[Speaker A] You write fast?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, and you don’t edit? Because the ideas are already formed, meaning I just need to get them out. No, I need to work…
[Speaker A] Really? Sure. For years. Yes. Okay, so some of those words were directed at me around the scandal, the sensation we had here with the episode—the episode about Pi Sukkot. I remind you that in the end you wrote, rather dramatically, I must say, “Contrary to what I gather from your tone, you should understand that this is not a small or accidental mistake; we are dealing here with a colossal failure. Over the outrage this podcast wrote, I would set up a commission of inquiry,” and so on and so on and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A commission of inquiry by the system, not by the state.
[Speaker A] Yes. As stated, there are other commissions that need to be established first. “A magnificent failure such as I don’t think you’ll find a parallel to in the history of podcasts.” I have to say, there I had this little spark where I thought, wow, I’ve made podcast history here. But the thing is, I accept the criticism, and I apologized and so on. The thing is, what I answered you was: look, I understand that you’re writing here in a language that is in some way angry language, or strong language, and not only is that your right, I also accept that these are the kinds of emotions and reactions that this event gave rise to. But I wrote you this: know that meanwhile I am very shocked and very troubled—and this is something I also shared in the episode about the episode about the episode on Pi Sukkot—that between the time I spoke with him and the time I decided to blow up the format, a statement by the chairman of your party, Bezalel Smotrich, deeply troubled me as a human being, as a Jew, as a resident of this place here: namely, that even if technically the world won’t let us starve two million Palestinians to death, that is apparently the moral and justified thing to do. And then I said to you: tell me, I know your views are so varied and complex, and even from what we’ve said so far it’s clear you’re not a simplistic admirer of any party; and I don’t even know whether you voted for Religious Zionism or who you vote for and how you vote, but—but you are associated with that sector sociologically, right? You were in Bnei Akiva when you were a kid.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. A lot of them probably wouldn’t accept my being associated with them anymore, but yes, let’s say, it’s the closest fit.
[Speaker A] And then I said to you: look, when a prominent leader in that sector speaks—and again, I hope to say that the intention is not what it sounds like, and he didn’t mean it that way, and he was speaking in the more complex context of humanitarian aid in exchange for humanitarian aid and pressure to bring back the hostages, whom we want to see home every day, and so on—but when there’s already flirtation in the sector with genocide as a moral thing, that is, not something we are sadly even forced to do, but as something moral and just, there’s something here that terrifies and horrifies and shocks me. And then you really sent me the column. You said no, I actually did address this issue, and you sent me—you sent me a column you wrote in response to the statements of the rabbi from Eli?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Rabbi Mali from Jaffa.
[Speaker A] Sorry, Rabbi Mali from Jaffa, sorry, who spoke openly about how the law of Amalek should apply to all Gazans, including babies, and he said explicitly: including babies. And that is something you argued against—and of course I very much agree with you there. Now I also want to say, and I won’t go into the details and so on, that since I aired that episode I’ve been getting quite a few messages from people who are not trying to bring me to repentance and not trying to say it was wrong for me to attribute these genocide-like ideas to Smotrich because he meant something else—which, to me, by the way, is a strong argument to make—that instead come and try to convince me that the proper and moral and just thing to do is to destroy them all, every one of them, their children and their wives and their elders. And this column of yours—I mean, look, on the one hand there’s again this issue of the limits of discourse, because on the one hand I feel you’re saying things I agree with. In the end, you’re saying you can’t—this is immoral, this is wrong, and it’s also not halakhically justified to go in that direction, to act in that direction. You oppose genocide openly. Yes. I will say—and again, this is a stylistic comment, if I may—that because you can see it’s a great Talmudic mind writing this column, because you lay out the positions and you say: if so, and if so, and if so, and if so. Now what’s a little dangerous is that for someone who may not be used to this kind of thinking, there are moments before you get to the conclusion when one might think you’re actually encouraging it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Flirting with it.
[Speaker A] And flirting with it, and saying: it’s okay in the case of Amalek. And if it’s okay in the case of Amalek, then maybe the Gazans really are like Amalek, because the Nazis were a psychotic episode; Hamas’s murderousness is a more essential part of the culture. I don’t know if I agree with that, but for the sake of argument there are moments like that—here, I’ll quote, for example. “While reading the section ‘Remember’ last Sabbath, I thought to myself that regarding Amalek the situation is simpler. Think of a people whose entire business in the world is harassing other people, and especially the people of Israel, and destroying them. That is how they educate their children in schools; that is the goal of the entire nation. Even if those who actually hold weapons are only a minority belonging to the Amalekite army, this is nothing more than a division of labor; their entire existence is devoted to this goal, and regarding their children too, it seems to me their future is already quite clear. One can of course say, as we saw regarding the seven nations, that here too we should allow every infant the choice and determine his fate only after he chooses evil. But with Amalek we are not speaking of a transgression but of a physical threat to us, and therefore the issue there is not only the eradication of evil but self-defense against them. Taking into account the choices of the Amalekite child involves taking unreasonable risks with ourselves. In such a situation there is definitely logic in permitting the blood of every Amalekite, whether involved or not.” Now it doesn’t take much to see here how—you know—you’re talking about schools, about weapons, and so on; I assume there was no compulsory education law at the end of the Iron Age, there were no Amalekite schools. It’s clear that you’re really hinting—and you also say explicitly—that one might have thought maybe even in Gaza this kind of action is justified. Now here again, stylistically, I think there’s a problem, because someone who doesn’t make it to the end of the column may think things that are very, very, very, very grave. Rabbi Miki—very grave, Rabbi Abraham, very grave. You agree with me that it’s very grave. And then I also just want to finish by saying that even at the end, when you answer that rabbi specifically, you tell him: “You shall not let any soul remain alive” was said about the seven nations or Amalek, and that’s all. If the rabbi has interpretive innovations, very nice—but to go out and commit genocide on their basis is excessive, especially since this borders on deriving law from the reason for the verse, and with difficulty one might say it is a definitional rule. About that it is said…” and so on and so on. Meaning, you enter with him into a kind of halakhic discussion where you say: I’m listening to your view, you’re talking about destroying all the Palestinians in Gaza, and I’ll give you halakhic arguments showing you why that’s not justified. And you say that is excessive, excessive. I feel—I don’t know—I’d like to hear you speak this out loud maybe a little more deeply, because there’s something here that is very hard for me. I mean, it’s hard for me first of all that we’ve reached a point where we’re conducting this discussion this way. Okay. For or against genocide.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll start with two opening comments.
[Speaker A] And I also have to say that I’m afraid even that we’re talking about this here and now. Okay, that’s exactly the—because it frightens me, the thought that people will hear this and say, wow, so yes, genocide.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so look—one comment about that event with Tzvi Sukkot, where you later apologized, and I wrote you that I greatly appreciate the integrity of the apology and everything, but I told you that in Jewish law and in the Torah, part of repentance—we’re now approaching the Ten Days of Repentance—is also a commitment for the future. What does that mean? It means that the apology—for having hurt the viewers, hurt Sukkot, whatever—you did, that’s all fine. In my eyes, that’s not the root of the matter. The root of the matter is that this policy—that there are things that cannot be heard. In your case at least, okay?—that’s what I would have expected you to retract. And that brings me to the discussion we’re having now. In a certain sense, here you’re already moving further along, but you see that you still have some reservations because…
[Speaker A] I have very strong reservations, not just some—very strong.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, perfectly fine. So I’m just saying, that’s the first comment. The second comment: as I told you in the previous discussion, these phenomena exist, these positions are heard, the internet is open, as you yourself said earlier, okay? Now you have two possible ways to deal with it: either scream and say “it must neither be seen nor found,” I refuse to hear it, refuse to let it be heard, and go on jihad against the whole thing. Or discuss it substantively and explain why you don’t agree. I don’t think there’s much of a middle path. Of course there are various gradations, but one has to choose between those two options. Now you are choosing… in favor of the religious-guy option. Meaning, there are things that are fundamental heresy, and I refuse to hear them.
[Speaker A] Look, between us, that works for religious people. What? It works for religious people. The Haredim succeed in preserving their very specific form of existence.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I want to remind you that the phenomenon of secularity is relatively new, and that religious-guy education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought us the eighty percent secularization we experience today—maybe now it’s a little less. It didn’t succeed. It didn’t succeed because they failed to deal with the new ideas.
[Speaker A] And look how the Haredim—how they’ve…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] grown.
[Speaker A] In the State of Israel, within their ghettoization, they’ve succeeded in preserving their character since ’48.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They’ve grown in the State of Israel, but those are things that even then helped in the short term and didn’t work in the long term. We see the results all around us. I assume all of you—even without knowing your families—two hundred years ago your family didn’t look the way you look.
[Speaker A] True, but precisely then they didn’t protect themselves from modernity. They didn’t understand what was coming at them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They did understand—they banned everything and excommunicated everything.
[Speaker A] The fact is that Haredim today do succeed in preserving their very strange lifestyle relative to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think you’re mistaken.
[Speaker A] There’s a lot of leaving religion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have to know—it’s not only leaving religion. There’s a seepage of outside ideas into Haredi society itself. It’s no longer really what it declares itself to be. There are of course a great many phenomena of being in the closet—religious-secular people in the closet. Today they’re called coerced conformists, and phenomena of that sort. They themselves know this, and they themselves are trying to deal with it, and they’re not really succeeding. Now I don’t know what will happen in the long term. The view that “it works,” in my opinion, is a superficial view. I don’t think Religious Zionism, which is more open—with all the things I disagree with in it—is less successful. It simply puts its failures on the table more; it hides them less. But in the long term I think that’s a more correct and also healthier approach. A: correct in itself, and B: also strategically. Even if tactically it’s less good, strategically it’s better. And I think the same applies here. Religious-guy closedness is something that can’t work, certainly not in a world where everything is open and information is open and children surf onto sites of, I don’t know, neo-Nazis and lunatics. You won’t stop it. The only way, in my opinion, to deal with it is to say: okay, folks, I want to educate you toward one thing—not toward the bottom line of what’s right and what’s wrong, I want to educate you toward critical thinking. And as part of educating for critical thinking, I’ll take any idea you bring me and discuss it on its merits. No ranting, no saying “how dare you,” no screaming, none of that. Let’s discuss it, analyze it. People often told me on my website: why are you so long-winded? Why don’t you shorten the posts you write? They’re long. I told them: I will never shorten them. Because the post wasn’t written in order to reach the conclusion, to persuade you of the conclusion. The post was written for the path to the conclusion. And along the way I go through all kinds of things that outrage people—and me too. But I insist on discussing them substantively and saying whether I agree or don’t agree. And by the way, on this matter of Amalek and Gaza and so on, I spoke both on the halakhic plane and on the moral plane. It’s just that I also analyze the moral plane with analytical tools, like one does in halakhic conceptual analysis. It looks terribly cold, but yes—in my view morality belongs to the head, not the heart. We could talk a lot about that, but that’s my view.
[Speaker A] In your view—and in Kant’s too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. I’m Kantian on this point. And so in my view it’s not some unfortunate accident that I conveyed a somewhat cold and balanced message there. That is the message. Meaning, my message is: friends, with the most wicked and bizarre ideas there are—certainly if they’re not the ideas of some idiot who lost his mind, but of a group, whatever its size, but a group—there is not a small group for whom these ideas are not out of bounds. By the way, ideas of flattening Gaza came from the secular Zionist mainstream too, not only from the bizarre messianic religious people, or whatever they’re called—I don’t agree with those labels either—but they came up on center stage, and the way to deal with that is to deal with the arguments, not with the religious-guy way.
[Speaker A] Before we talk about those arguments, I want to understand from you and from your broad reach—you’re a person with a very large audience, and a lot of that audience are people from the Religious Zionist sector, and… You also write, I think, in your response to the rabbi, that there are murmurings like this, there’s talk of really an Amalek-style annihilation, meaning down to the last baby. We remember—you’ll correct me if I’m wrong—that Saul was punished because in the end there was something he didn’t wipe out—the king and the cattle—and for that he was punished. You understand? Meaning, wiping out everyone down to the last punctuation mark is this sort of metaphysical, almost Nazi-type conception: if there is even one Jew left, it will keep contaminating the whole world, so everything has to be wiped out. Including their babies. And you say that voice exists. How significant do you think that voice is? I can’t imagine it’s even a significant minority.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I usually don’t like paternalism, but many times there is a hidden consciousness, yes—meaning a double consciousness—but often it exists. There are many people who speak in that language, and then if you present them with the three or four options I mentioned there in the column—if you look, there are three or four options there for which category they mean—you suddenly discover that they do not mean the genocide category. They mean the category of: listen, you mustn’t spare children if that’s the way to achieve the goal of fighting Hamas and defeating Hamas.
[Speaker A] Which is very different from what one means by a final solution, for example, where you wipe them out. Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And because people are not philosophers, they often are not really aware themselves which of the options they actually mean. And that’s another advantage of this systematic, cold, intellectual, analytical analysis, which says: folks, there are several options. First of all, I want you to tell me which option you choose. Suddenly you discover that those who choose the Amalekite, genocidal, metaphysical option—that’s a negligible minority. There are hardly any such people.
[Speaker A] Yes—what a relief, I’m very glad to hear that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Most of them are driven by feelings of anger, of course, which are there, and together with that by the understanding that often compassion for the children and the flock and so on, as in the Amalek metaphors, ultimately prevents us from dealing with those who threaten us. Now, there too one can debate how far that justifies harming uninvolved people in order to deal with Hamas members. But you understand, that’s a different argument from the argument about genocide. Here it’s a question of okay—what’s the price?
[Speaker A] Yes. You know, it’s important to understand that when we talk about—or when people talk about—genocide, you know, we’re talking, for example, about forty to fifty thousand people in Gaza who have died in this war, whom the world may say were murdered. Some of them were surely terrorists, a large number were not. I think we destroyed something like sixty to seventy percent of the buildings in Gaza. Meaning, even if you destroy one hundred percent of the buildings in Gaza, you blow up Gaza, you flatten Gaza, then you know, if we continue roughly with numbers like that, we’re talking about a hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand. To kill two million people systematically, the way some people speak, is a project that unfortunately, of all people, we know exactly what it looks like.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I completely agree. That’s why I say almost nobody really means that.
[Speaker A] And that’s why I say—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, Yirmi, I’ll tell you something else. You teach philosophy, research philosophy. When you look at these things—and I showed you from Smotrich’s own words—that in my view you didn’t understand him correctly. And I’m not… no, I’m showing you from his own words, not what he thinks in the innermost recesses of his soul. From his words I can show you he does not mean that. Now you, as someone sensitive to philosophical nuances and so on, are not making those distinctions.
[Speaker A] No, no, I am making the distinction. I even said, by the way, in the apology, that I don’t think that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you rise up against genocide when no call for genocide was made there.
[Speaker A] I said—I said—that it’s clear to me he meant it in the context of hostage pressure, humanitarian for humanitarian, that that was the context. So why genocide? Because I think that when you are a minister in an Israeli government, and a Jewish minister in an Israeli government, you need to make sure you don’t speak in a way that can imply those kinds of things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s an etiquette criticism. I’m talking about criticism of principles, not manners and etiquette.
[Speaker A] Who is Hannah Bavli?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hannah Bavli used to be a lecturer on manners and etiquette; she had radio segments about how to hold the fork and knife properly. I’m not talking about the question of how he speaks and so on—whether tactically it’s right, not tactically right, educationally even, not just tactically.
[Speaker A] I’m saying it’s immoral to starve two million people.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Period. Okay—but to starve two million people when that is the only way to deal with Hamas, you can still say that’s immoral. But that is a different statement from starving two million people, period, like Amalek, like genocide. That’s something else, and I think it’s very important to make that distinction.
[Speaker A] Rabbi Abraham, you know, Locke in his second letter on toleration—and this comes after someone named Proast, because Locke comes with one of his arguments for why religion and state should be separated, saying that religion is an issue of inner conviction anyway, and by force I can make you say “blessed be God,” but I can’t make you feel “blessed be God.” Then Proast comes and opposes him and says: actually, there are all kinds of things you can do by force, like encourage belief. And Locke answers—now Locke understands he’s in a slightly weak position, because he says: I didn’t say that in every case, in every situation, at every moment, under every circumstance, no coercive means can ever lead to a situation in which people really begin to believe. But it’s not the direct solution. For example, it may very well be that if you castrate all men, you’ll cause a higher percentage of them to become believers. That still isn’t something you’d propose doing. To translate that a bit: there is, sadly, a problem of rape. Human beings—men—rape. There are men who rape. If we—you know—and we could even arrange it so it doesn’t affect fertility, preserve people’s sperm in little boxes and castrate all men, then maybe there would be much less rape. Right? Still, that would not be the kind of solution we’d consider to that problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, but two things. First of all, not all men are guilty because there are rapists. The question is whether you think there is no guilt on the general public—not necessarily on this particular baby or that particular baby, but on the general public in Gaza. Does it bear some kind of responsibility? To some extent. Okay, wait, wait—so that already means there is some kind of collective responsibility here. Now where exactly, which child, which not, and so on—but there is public responsibility here. That’s not the same thing as harming all men so that two of them won’t rape. That’s one thing. The second thing is that even then, if you do it so they won’t rape, that really is not the same thing as exterminating men because I’m a female chauvinist. Yes—because I think men shouldn’t exist. And for me it’s very important to make that distinction. And one must make it. And then conduct the discussion. Meaning, if you had said to me: look, in my view it is completely immoral to destroy those people in Gaza even if that is required in order to deal with Hamas—that is a completely legitimate position. More than legitimate; I might even agree with it. And I certainly want it to be heard. But that’s not what you said. And that was my problem. My problem was that you went against it not with arguments. You went against it with an interpretation from which I would have expected—you of all people—a more nuanced interpretation.
[Speaker A] I just want to correct something here. In my view, I…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You did add those comments—yes, but maybe that’s not what he meant. Correct. Correct. But after that… but after that, the energy you invested was in the war against genocide. But—but no, he didn’t say genocide. You can’t extract that from him. He didn’t say it. Look, by the way, Amichai is closer to that than Smotrich is.
[Speaker A] Amichai said it explicitly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Almost, yes. Meaning there it was much closer, and therefore there one really could more… So again, I want to say, I’m not coming to attack you. I’m coming… I’m coming to demonstrate how the discussion between us is conducted.
[Speaker A] Of course. If you attack with arguments, all good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That’s the point. I think that if we speak in arguments and not in screams or disqualifications or boycotts or things like that, the discourse will also be more effective. You’ll be more successful in fighting against genocide when you show the person that he himself does not want genocide. He—after all… you’ll show him that he himself does not want genocide.
[Speaker A] I’ll tell you one more thing, what bothers me in that expression, “arguments,” that you use so often. There’s something I really love in Mendelssohn’s philosophy, and that is that he says… you know, he has essays like, say, Morning Hours. That’s the second-to-last book he published, Morning Hours, when he came to understand Kant. It took people time to understand Kant, and Mendelssohn basically realizes that all the arguments he devoted his whole life to trying to advance—metaphysical arguments proving the existence of God in a metaphysical way, and proving all the truths he believed in—he basically grasps that the whole thing is over, that this carriage got stuck and Kant destroyed everything. And he writes this very modestly, very much in the Mendelssohn style. He says, I no longer have the strength to struggle against Kant; let someone come with his own strength and try to defeat him. I’m no longer up to it, I’m done. And the doctors also tell me I’m not allowed to do philosophy, and that’s why I have a few hours in the early morning when I can do philosophy, and I taught my son this way before his bar mitzvah, and this book is the lessons I taught him that way, and I know this no longer has any real significance, and so on. But what he also says is that… and he says it elsewhere too… is that sometimes there are things you believe on a basis that is much more solid than arguments, and that is common sense, sound reason, Gemeinsinn, common sense—and it’s very important that it’s “common,” that it’s really shared. Meaning, the view of the great majority of people. Or sometimes he calls it healthy human understanding. And I think there are such categories, and he says: when philosophy carries you far away by way of arguments—because sometimes arguments can be persuasive because you don’t quite understand what’s wrong with them—then I’m not going with it. I stay with healthy reason. And for our purposes, on the question of genocide—I mean the question of destroying every old person, every child, every child with special needs, every baby, every human being as such because of ethnic affiliation—I don’t even… I reject that on the basis of healthy common sense. Even before I enter the question of arguments, because I understand it may be that I’ll lose against someone who has much better arguments than mine because he’s thought about it, because he’s smarter, because he’s a better cognitive chess player than I am. I don’t even want to enter that arena, because my healthy common sense tells me: any call to destroy every person because of his ethnic affiliation is something invalid, period.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, you know, first of all, I have a few posts on my site that I wrote about paradoxes. In a paradox, there’s an argument that on the face of it looks good and leads to a conclusion that is obviously wrong. A large part of paradoxes are built that way. Right. And you have two options. One option is to find a flaw in the argument. Right. Then you understand the conclusion is wrong because there’s a flaw in the argument. But you didn’t find a flaw in the argument. So there are two options: to say, okay, then apparently the conclusion I thought was wrong is actually right. That’s one possibility.
[Speaker A] Or to assume there’s a flaw and you just haven’t found it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Or to assume there’s a flaw and you haven’t found it, and that’s what you called common sense. Meaning, my initial inclination, my primary intuition, my a priori intuition before recursive thinking, says this conclusion is not right. That’s so strong for me that this argument, even though I haven’t found a flaw in it, will not persuade me. And by the way, I brought examples there of these things going in all directions, and I think it’s very interesting because a lot of people fail by missing one of these options—how to deal with paradoxes. But when you’re standing opposite someone who doesn’t have your common sense, apparently at least, who has a different position—you can say, look, common sense says otherwise, and reject him, and that’s it. What do you gain? He remains where he is with his own common sense—or crooked sense.
[Speaker A] No, the discussion I would have with a person like that—and I’m going to meet people who wrote to me, I’m going to sit with them—and what I thought I’d try to say is: listen, leave arguments aside. You don’t want to live in a world where we actually carry out genocide for real. That’s an argument, that’s an argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the point.
[Speaker A] No, it’s not an argument to reason, it’s an argument to something else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, it’s an argument.
[Speaker A] To reason, to an apodictic perception, meaning to an immediate perception where I’m trying to awaken in him the intuitive understanding that genocide is something he finds abhorrent.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have a long discussion in one of my books explaining why that too is an argument. I call them revealing arguments and creating arguments, or philosophical arguments and theological arguments. One of the ways to discuss intuitions—and you assumed earlier that intuitions can’t be discussed, I disagree—the difference between philosophy and rhetoric, rhetoric in its positive sense, not demagoguery as people often identify it, is that common sense can also be discussed and one can also persuade regarding it. How? You show him, for example, an implication of that same common-sense principle in another context, where let’s say he’s less personally invested and can identify with you. Parables often do that work. Then suddenly he understands that this assumption, which seemed so simple to him, was actually something driven by a feeling of revenge, say, toward the Gazans. But if it were in Indonesia or New Zealand, he wouldn’t say that. Then he says, wait a second, so actually I don’t have this intuition. It’s not true that this is my intuition. And that is an argument that attacks an intuition. And it’s not argument versus argument. Even against opposing intuitions you have to raise arguments. Because if you just say, no, you’re wrong—that’s not workable. Exactly, basically to help him with self-diagnostics, so that he diagnoses himself. And such arguments can be made.
[Speaker A] Now here—and here there’s something I want to ask regarding the very structure of your response to that rabbi. Now I understand that you’re speaking to him in halakhic language—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And moral language, not only halakhic / of Jewish law, both.
[Speaker A] The thing is this: you begin, and correct me if I’m wrong, you say there’s… and there are the seven na… let’s focus on Amalek, it’s really clearer, simpler, and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but specifically with Amalek I wrote that the seven nations are destruction for the sake of destruction. With Amalek it’s destruction because of self-defense, because he threatens me all the time.
[Speaker A] No, but you know, the one-year-old Amalekite child—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’ll threaten you in another twenty years. Again, that’s the assumption.
[Speaker A] Let’s do this—let’s go to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Let’s stay only in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), okay? And free ourselves from… because I’m really worried about speaking… let’s stay in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). You killed all of Amalek, one one-year-old child remains. Adopt him or kill him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The descendants of wicked Haman, yes, the Amalekite, studied Torah in Bnei Brak. That’s what the Talmud / Talmudic text says.
[Speaker A] No, but I’m talking about… right, in the Talmud / Talmudic text, in the Talmud / Talmudic text they do a lot of softening. But that’s exactly the point. You say the Sages are the Reformers of the ancient period.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, absolutely, absolutely.
[Speaker A] Now, but let’s stay with the purely biblical conception.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but there is no purely biblical conception. I don’t recognize a purely biblical conception.
[Speaker A] Why was Saul punished?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On that too interpretations have been written, and because of…
[Speaker A] The plain meaning. I’m an idiot, I’m plain meaning. The plain meaning is that he didn’t kill one person and the animals, right? Meaning, God gives a divine command that he destroy them down to the very last person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can offer you different interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but I wrote a few posts about that too and people were furious with me. You can’t learn anything from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). From the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) you learn what you already think. And you can see it—the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is litmus paper. Meaning, what you think is what you find in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). And if you want, I’ll explain to you the passage of King Agag the Amalekite from my perspective too, because the Sages also learned that passage, and the fact is that it underwent sublimation. Also among the medieval authorities (Rishonim), also among the Sages, and so on. We are not a Judaism of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). The Protestants are a religion of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), so ask them what they say about Agag, I don’t know. For me, Judaism is something that takes the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a very, very amorphous base and builds on it an infrastructure, much of which is that same common sense you spoke about earlier, which sometimes tells me to depart from the simple meaning. “An eye for an eye”—no, that means monetary compensation, we don’t take out the eye. Am I such a great heretic against an explicit verse in the Torah? And the Talmud / Talmudic text says no one ever disagreed about this, although Rabbi Eliezer did disagree, because it wants to plant this very strongly in consciousness.
[Speaker A] My question is this: as a believing person, do you actually think—do you believe—that there is a divine command to destroy every Amalekite? Their women, their children, and their babies?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll tell you: for that I need to go back, at least in summary, to the move I made in the column. Please. And it’s divided into two—really more than two—several stages. First of all, and this is a principled view of mine, Jewish law and morality are two independent categories.
[Speaker A] Right. Sometimes you do the halakhic / of Jewish law thing and it isn’t moral. Like someone said: circumcision is an immoral thing. You take a child and hurt him—why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What did he do to you? What do you want? But there are religious values that obligate you to pay in moral currency, just as within morality itself. It may be that sometimes, in order to realize value A, you pay the price at the expense of value B. That’s one point. Second, where the moral injustice cries out to heaven, very often the Sages will come and interpret the halakhic / of Jewish law command in a restrictive way, and this happens very often. Not always, but very often it happens. The greater the injustice, I think, the greater the motivation to narrow the halakhic / of Jewish law command. And in this context, regarding Amalek, that’s exactly the point. If you—I can’t judge a situation I didn’t experience, and that’s what I said there. If I were a child in a ghetto, I don’t know where, in an extermination camp, not a ghetto—would you blame me if I said we need to kill all the Germans, with their families and everything? No. Why not? Because it would be clear that they all posed a threat to him, meaning a direct threat. That’s not genocide. You may disagree, you may say he’s biased because he’s inside an impossible situation, but it’s not a call for genocide. Now, if I had lived in that period and understood what Amalek is, I could answer you in a way not dependent on interpretations. I could understand what it means. Today I interpret it according to my world, and according to my world there cannot be such a command just to destroy someone by virtue of his affiliation. And therefore I think—and I think this also has an anchor in the Torah, in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) itself—that this command arose from the threat they saw in what that people does. It’s a kind of Spartan people that raises its children for war, for a war of annihilation, not a defensive war. You understand that in such a situation this is not called genocide.
[Speaker A] But some of the children haven’t been raised yet. Genocide really includes babies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because the assumption is that at age twenty—it’s deterministic there—the whole public is like that. And more than that, I say if this were just genocide to eradicate evil, as I write there in the column, that would be something else. Then really, why are you eradicating him? He’s not evil yet, he hasn’t chosen yet. But if you see this as a future threat, then I say, look, if I don’t kill him now, he’ll kill me in twenty years.
[Speaker A] Yes, but what are we, in Oedipus Rex? The prophet said the baby—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not a prophet. That’s not a prophet.
[Speaker A] A two-week-old baby—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not a two-week-old baby, look at the environment he’s growing up in. There is an environment he’s growing up in where almost deterministically everyone comes out murderers and robbers, say, for the sake of discussion.
[Speaker A] But that’s not the logic, that’s not the logic of the divine demand in the plain meaning of the biblical text. Why not? Because you could say: destroy everyone who is grown, take the children and adopt them. Every baby under one month old—just for example—the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) could have said every baby under one month old, adopt them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem, adopt him, that’s permitted. You don’t have to kill him? An Amalekite? Certainly. There, I told you—the descendants of Haman studied Torah in Bnei Brak. Meaning, there were Amalekites whom they adopted. No, so that’s exactly the point: I’m not a Hebrew-Bible-only Jew. Fine, okay. I’m saying, the point is that if there were a practical solution that spared me the killing, then the interpretation I proposed—that this killing is not just plain murder but self-defense—if I have a way to defend myself without killing him—
[Speaker A] Obviously I wouldn’t kill him. Look, Rabbi Abraham, because you’re now saying what you’re saying, I actually can’t complete the argument I thought I’d complete. Because what I wanted to say, and I don’t think it applies to your position as I now understand it, is that I oppose the very framing of this discussion—this hard, horrible discussion—and saying there is legitimacy to commit genocide against Amalek as self-defense. As self-defense, for the sake of argument. Okay?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, genocide—again, that takes us—
[Speaker A] Into the territory of genocide.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In a place where there is no other way to defend oneself, it is permitted to destroy Amalek, yes. That’s the claim.
[Speaker A] Again, “to defend oneself” is… there’s a logical contradiction here, because the moment you say “defend oneself,” then it’s not one-month-old babies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? If there is a place that deterministically raises murderers, say, in this hypothetical situation, that is self-defense in every respect. You know, there are books like that, all kinds of thrillers, where they take little children from orphanages and raise them to be assassins, CIA agents, I don’t know exactly what. Now, say you see that child at age eight in his training camp—don’t you think it would be justified to kill him? You know what he will become. There’s maybe a two percent chance he won’t, but he poses a threat. I’m not killing him because I don’t like him.
[Speaker A] But that’s why I’m focusing on the clearest example, the two-week-old baby. The two-week-old baby has not learned—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The two-week-old baby in what context?
[Speaker A] But you are currently—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The two-week-old baby who is six years away from entering that training camp.
[Speaker A] You’re in a total war against Amalek, and you conquered an Amalekite village, and you took down all the adults and all the boys and girls and the old men and old women and everyone and anyone who—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Go ahead, adopt all the children left over, no problem at all.
[Speaker A] Not according to the plain meaning of the biblical text.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Leave me alone with the plain meaning, I’m saying… the plain meaning of the biblical text is also “an eye for an eye.”
[Speaker A] The point was this, Rabbi: I don’t like it when the discussion is framed as, there is a divine demand to destroy Amalek absolutely—even though you also deny that, because you say Haman the Amalekite’s descendants study Talmud / Talmudic text. And then the question becomes: are the Houthis Amalek, are the Palestinians Amalek, are the Germans Amalek, are the Americans Amalek, are the Chinese Amalek? Meaning, to examine peoples according to that criterion. And I reject the criterion itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I disagree.
[Speaker A] But I think you do too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, absolutely not. No, again, I don’t think they are Amalek, but I don’t agree that the discussion should be ruled out. On the contrary, a systematic discussion has to proceed with categories.
[Speaker A] We have a category called Amalek. Fine, you don’t reject the discussion, but you don’t think there is justification for genocide of Amalek.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, of course. No, genocide of Amalek—what is Amalek? I told you, I wasn’t there, I don’t know.
[Speaker A] If Amalek existed—but for the sake of argument, an Amalekite village—you say you can adopt the one-month-old baby? The Nazis said you do not adopt a Jewish child; the Jewish child is impure.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, and that’s why I say it’s not genocide, precisely because of that.
[Speaker A] I want to end our conversation like this—you know, once upon a time we had good times where we’d have freer philosophical conversations.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As far as I’m concerned everything is good and everything is philosophical. I don’t have holy rage.
[Speaker A] No, when you wrote that statement, there was no rage in you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was anger, but it’s tempered—the engine is the intellect. Meaning, first of all I analyze the topic / passage; in the end I can revolt against the results.
[Speaker A] You were a young man and you’re also a very vital man. I mean really—may I ask how old you are?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sixty-five soon.
[Speaker A] You’re a vital man, but above all really a brilliant man, a wise man, a deep man, knowledgeable, someone exposed to worlds. A person for whom even I would have trouble coming up with new arguments against you. You know, if I come to you with “For the Miracles” of Yom—then you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about, and if I speak with you using other arguments, you’ll know those too. You’re a complex man, a deep man, a very rational man. You’re a scientist. What do you believe happened at Sinai?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wow, that’s complicated. Look, bottom line, I think there was some kind of interaction there with the Holy One, blessed be He, and some kind of message passed to us. All the pyrotechnics around it, the specific contents, what exactly that message included—was the whole Torah there? Probably not. The Oral Torah certainly not. But yes, there was an interaction of the Jewish people with the Holy One, blessed be He. We received there some kind of mission that went through a huge number of interpretations and additions and so on through the generations, many of which the Holy One, blessed be He, probably never even dreamed of. And that’s it, and that’s what reached us. But that root, that core, I accept—that interaction that took place.
[Speaker A] Okay, so first of all I want to come back to the interaction in a moment, but first I want to stay with the text that is supposed to reflect, according to the traditional interpretation, that interaction—at the very least the Torah, yes? Let’s not even talk about the whole Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), just the Torah. The Torah is the product of miraculous revelation at Sinai. Or, you know, also in its wake, because Moses writes it, but it’s part of that same sequence of events. There is a prophet, there is Moses who receives revelation, who receives what today they’d call channeling, yes, from higher planes, and he writes the text. You’re not there—you don’t think every single sentence in the Torah is a sentence that comes through miraculous revelation. You’re open to biblical criticism, that some of the texts came in and were transmitted and someone edited and someone did this and that. Those are two different things, what you just said.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, it’s not that I think it didn’t come from above; I’m open to the possibility that it didn’t. Meaning, I don’t know. I know there was some kind of core there; I don’t know what it included. But my starting assumption is that as long as I don’t know that something is some kind of corrupted addition, then as far as I’m concerned it’s part of the message that reached me. As a default interpretive assumption, let’s call it that.
[Speaker A] Your default is that every single sentence in the Torah is a sentence of miraculous revelation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s the assumption. Now, when it says “to this very day,” for example, those famous verses that indicate this is probably something later—then it probably is later. I’m not alarmed by that. By the way, among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) such suggestions already appear; it’s not as far-fetched as people sometimes think.
[Speaker A] Let’s put it this way: is there a sentence in the Torah that you can point to and say, this is a sentence that is mistaken?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. There is a sentence I can say is later, as I said, like “to this very day.”
[Speaker A] You know, I have this questionnaire I always ask religious friends who come on. “You shall not let a sorceress live.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At the level of interpretive freedom I described to you a moment ago, admittedly very briefly—
[Speaker A] No, you can do whatever you want, “It is not in heaven.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So therefore I say, this is a theory that can’t be refuted. But how would I discover that a verse is not correct?
[Speaker A] But for our purposes, “You shall not let a sorceress live.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “You shall not let a sorceress live” in Exodus, yes.
[Speaker A] “You shall not let a sorceress live.” Do you think there were sorceresses?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Were there? Of course there were, what do you mean? Again, sorceresses not necessarily in the metaphysical sense—that’s a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Maimonides and his school held that this whole wing of mysticism—the “other side,” sorcery, mediums and all sorts of things like that—is all nonsense. And all those prohibitions are really a prohibition against being stupid. There were other interpreters—
[Speaker A] Maimonides—I really love that Maimonides gives the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) a philosophical koshering, naturally.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, whatever—interpretations.
[Speaker A] You know Spinoza said he was forcing the text. Fine, okay. And I think it’s hard to argue with Spinoza on that point.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m not sure, but fine, maybe. It has to be discussed case by case. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I wouldn’t make some sweeping statement here. There are other medieval authorities (Rishonim) who say no, no, of course there are other powers—what is called the “other side,” only one must not resort to them—but not that such powers don’t exist. If you ask me, I’m in Maimonides’ camp. I don’t really believe in the existence of such powers.
[Speaker A] Do you think Moses threw down the staff and it turned into a snake?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I have no idea.
[Speaker A] Do you think the Jewish people left through the splitting of the Sea of Reeds?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be yes; it’s a more public description, a more public description. Yes, I tend to think so. Like the revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, at Mount Sinai—the day of the revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, at Mount Sinai is itself a miracle.
[Speaker A] Wait, let me ask—so let’s talk about that miracle of revelation at Mount Sinai. You know, the question I feel like asking you really as a physicist and as a person who’s lived already—you know, sixty-five years isn’t so many, but in a human life it’s already, you know, you’ve lived, you’ve seen the world. Yes. I assume you’ve never seen supernatural intervention in the natural order.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, and I also don’t believe there is any.
[Speaker A] You haven’t witnessed a miracle?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I also don’t believe there is any.
[Speaker A] No, you just said that you do believe there were miracles. Do you think now there are no longer any?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, yes. And I have some thesis—long theological theses.
[Speaker A] The question—and I don’t want to be rude—but in the end, how can you believe that something supernatural happened specifically there, at Sinai back then, in ancient stories like every people has ancient stories—what basis do you have to believe it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, here I need a bit of a lecture for that, because I’ll put it schematically. I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God who created the world from philosophical arguments.
[Speaker A] On that I want to refer listeners—whoever wants to hear discussions about that—to two episodes we did on the subject in the Metaphysical Circus. We won’t go back over the arguments. Fine, okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God. Contrary to Kant, I think—contrary to Mendelssohn—I think Kant did not murder those arguments. Once there is a God and He created the world, a simple assumption—and again, there is no certainty about anything, nothing at all has certainty, maybe except this, that nothing has certainty—that after the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, He probably wants something from it. That’s the line of thought in a nutshell. Now morality is not the suitable candidate, that what He wants is moral behavior from it. And why? Because in my view morality is a means for the existence of a proper society. Don’t create society and you don’t need it to be proper. Meaning, it can’t be that society’s proper functioning is the purpose for which it was created. Therefore morality is, for me, a means. I’m not Kantian in morality, but I see the whole moral enterprise as something that is basically a means to a proper society.
[Speaker A] Meaning a proper society is a moral result. So yes, morality is a means to the existence of morality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, someone could come and say no, it’s a means to our existence in general, evolutionarily, because otherwise we won’t survive. Altruism as an evolutionary instrument. So therefore morality can’t be the reason. So what is? Morality I feel within myself; I have a conscience, each of us does. Something else probably has to reach me somehow if they want me to do something. And I believe we have free choice, so we also need to choose correctly or incorrectly.
[Speaker A] But you know, for you to believe—not because you were born into a religious Jewish family—for you to adopt the belief that there was an event completely different from the whole way you understand the world to function scientifically, you need very strong evidence for that. Fine—you know what—there is an intelligence that created the world, it wants something from us, those are very general things. Here there is a description of a specific event for which you have no sufficient scientific evidence, and yet as a rational person you choose to grant it a belief that is critical in terms of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s Hume’s argument—
[Speaker A] That’s basically Hume’s argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and I dealt with it at length in the book The First Existent, and I think it’s not correct; that is, it begs the question. Because once you assume that the world is entirely material and there is only physics here and nothing beyond that—no, he doesn’t need to assume that, I’ll explain to you why, he does need to assume that.
[Speaker A] Hume after all doesn’t assume there is causality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, wait—obviously, never mind. Even without assuming there is causality, there certainly is regularity; there may not be causation, but there is regularity.
[Speaker A] No, sorry, Hume says the following. He says if—so when you come, Rabbi Abraham, and tell me: yesterday, or Dor—Dor Komt our editor here—comes and says, yesterday I was on Allenby Street and I saw Elijah the Prophet in the sky. Then Hume says I need to do something very simple. I need to say either Dor was high, or he’s crazy, or he’s lying, or he’s confused.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand, that’s Hume’s argument.
[Speaker A] Or Elijah the Prophet really was there yesterday. And the question is: what is more miraculous? Is it more miraculous that he is lying to me, or is it more miraculous that Elijah the Prophet appeared?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A statistical comparison between two hypotheses.
[Speaker A] Exactly. And more miraculous is that Elijah the Prophet was there, so I reject the greater miracle. That’s it. I’m not assuming there are or are not miracles, I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s exactly the formulation of the comparison between those two hypotheses—precisely about that I speak there in that discussion, and I argue that it’s not correct. It begs the question. Because you assume that one possibility is implausible or cannot happen or is unlikely to happen.
[Speaker A] I have been less witness to it, yes?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’ve been less witness to it—so what? I’ve also been much less witness to an eclipse because that happens once in many years. Right. So what? So now if someone tells me he saw an eclipse I won’t believe him? What does that have to do with anything? Since I think an eclipse can happen. So it’s rare—so what? Now here too, if you think there is a God and He wants something, then not only can it happen, but it’s expected to happen, that He will tell us what He wants. So true, it doesn’t happen to me day to day, it doesn’t happen to you either, and I also don’t believe those who say it does happen because I more or less know the world around us. But if some testimony arrives on a broad front that this happened once… what do you mean by broad front? Fine, one second. On the broad front that this happened to us once, and I also expect in advance that it indeed ought to happen, then in my view why not accept it? I do—yes, I accept it.
[Speaker A] What do you mean, why not accept it? Why not? Because it contradicts all your experience and your reason.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it contradicts nothing. It contradicts in the way an eclipse contradicts. There is an event that certainly can happen and is even expected to happen, so it’s rare like an eclipse. Whoever assumes it can’t happen is begging the question. That’s exactly the point. If you’re an atheist and don’t assume there is a God, then there will be no revelation. No, no, I assume that if I wake up in the morning and go to a mountain in the desert, the odds are that what I will see there is a desert mountain. Right. I say odds are. It could be there will be a revelation of the Jewish God there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The odds are that if you go outside and look at the sun, you won’t see an eclipse. Right, almost never does that happen. In fact it basically never happens. But once in a while it does happen.
[Speaker A] If I have reliable testimony that it happened.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So the whole question is how reliable the testimony is. Very low. Okay, so that’s already another discussion. That’s no longer Hume’s argument.
[Speaker A] No, the whole thing is the reliability of the testimony.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. No. That’s exactly the point.
[Speaker A] That’s Hume’s argument.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hume’s argument is not that—
[Speaker A] Sorry, Hume’s argument is about the reliability of the report.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Yes, explicitly yes. No, no. Hume bypasses the problem of the reliability of the report, because Hume says, leave it—even if the witnesses were trustworthy, the chance that they saw it is smaller than the chance that it didn’t happen and they’re lying. That’s the claim. So therefore I don’t need to check the reliability of the event. That’s in chapter two. Again, though, this is a dispute about interpreting Hume.
[Speaker A] Right, because in… no, I just want to say that in chapter two of Of Miracles he explicitly gives arguments for why to this day there has been no reliable testimony.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, but the argument you presented earlier between the two hypotheses—he’s trying to bypass the problem of the reliability of the testimony.
[Speaker A] Never mind, okay, never mind for our purposes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you know what, then leave Hume aside.
[Speaker A] I think Hume did say it, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s ask the same question differently. I myself am standing at Mount Sinai—not today, thousands of years later. I have two options: either to think something happened to me and I got confused, or to think I’m seeing divine revelation. So this has nothing to do with the reliability of testimony, right? Right. Now there are two options. Hume says: don’t believe what you see. So this has nothing to do with reliability of testimony.
[Speaker A] By the way, in the next and forthcoming book, Philosophy Against God, I address exactly this point, and look what I say. I say that first of all it’s really interesting that Hume attacks only the reliability of testimony and not the reliability of my inner testimony. Meaning, he doesn’t even toy with the thought that I’m an eyewitness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I saw his comparison between the two hypotheses, I understood him to be attacking only that. The reliability of testimony he may attack elsewhere.
[Speaker A] Look at chapter two of Of Miracles. But for our purposes, one of the popular arguments regarding Sinai—and I know you need to go, so I’ll end with this. Twelve-thirty, need to go. Yes. When he… one of the popular arguments regarding Sinai, and I wonder if this is what you meant when you said “broad front,” is that there was not one witness… this isn’t one person who told you yesterday “I saw it,” it’s not Dor saying “yesterday I saw Elijah the Prophet,” it’s six hundred thousand people. There were six hundred thousand people there. You know, I always say, with all due respect to the fact that there are supposed to have been six hundred thousand people there, there is one text that speaks of six hundred thousand people. If archaeologists found six hundred thousand diaries in Sinai and in every diary it says, “Whoa, wow, yesterday at Sinai there was a revelation,” and another said “Wow, I can’t believe what happened yesterday,” and another one—then I would relate to it completely differently. But there is only one testimony, there is one text that speaks of six hundred thousand people. I count that as one testimony, I don’t count it as six hundred thousand testimonies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So first, I don’t think you would relate to it differently; you would simply say someone forged six hundred thousand diaries.
[Speaker A] No, I’d relate to it differently.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I don’t… personally you may, you know better than I do what you would say. Most people wouldn’t relate to it differently; everyone with his own bias. But beyond that, I don’t accept the argument itself, because my testimony is not the book. My testimony is the tradition accompanying the book, and the tradition accompanying the book is the broad front. Now the Jewish people who take this book and transmit it—again, in the documented part of history, this doesn’t begin at Mount Sinai, it begins a bit later. But there are not-bad bridges over those gaps until the documented part of history. There is broad-front testimony saying that this book indeed describes our history.
[Speaker A] So just a second: the broad-front testimony for you is all the generations that came after the foundational event?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The broad front is in that same generation—many people.
[Speaker A] But they weren’t witnesses to the event.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They weren’t witnesses to the event. Their forefathers were witnesses to the event. Now someone has to come and persuade them: listen, all your forefathers were in some place, and here, this is the book that describes it. That’s implausible. Apparently there really was some tradition that their forefathers on a broad front experienced this encounter and passed it on. That’s what I call a broad front. Right, there is this kind of folklore.
[Speaker A] One text that is no more reliable than any other text.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, the text is not the point at all. Any text you find—what is its reliability? You can’t know. How would you know what its reliability is? The question is what accompanies the text; the question is in what context it appears. And if an entire people holds this text and insists that not one letter change here or there in documented history, over the thousands of years we know, that not one letter change, and all the time—and whoever disputes this is attacked like the zealots we spoke about earlier—that means there is broad-front testimony. It’s not the book. It’s the public that takes the book.
[Speaker A] But none of them were witnesses to Sinai. They are witnesses to the fact that there is a story.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who told you none of them were witnesses? The witnesses were in that generation, and from there on it began to be transmitted. None of us was a witness to Napoleon or Hannibal either.
[Speaker A] We don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the historical testimonies were transmitted.
[Speaker A] But there is a very large multiplicity of testimonies regarding Napoleon.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even if there were only one testimony, so what?
[Speaker A] Also it’s a multiplicity—you know—in French and Russian and German.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you know, there is a rule in Jewish law that if everyone copies from one source, then it’s one source, not many sources. Every people has mythological stories. Meaning, the fact that it’s written in French and German changes nothing.
[Speaker A] Exactly, that’s what I’m saying.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying, the question is whether everyone copied from one source. In my view that’s implausible. That’s what you think. I claim it passed on through a broad front; that’s what the tradition says.
[Speaker A] Look, to close our discussion, I also assume we won’t agree today on the reliability of the miraculous revelation at Sinai. Probably not. But it’s good that this discussion can be held, and I think it’s important that the religious side understand deeply that there are people here who really deny the core principle. Obviously. They deny the core principle, and the arena of our discourse cannot be determined on the basis of that kind of belief.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree, and I’ll say to the other side, to complete the picture: the religious side, from your side, needs to understand that there are people on the other side who have positions and arguments, and they cannot determine the boundaries of the discourse either. Both sides.
[Speaker A] I agree with you. On both sides. The point where I think we differ—if I look at it this way, I’ll do a meta-discussion of what happened today—I think the point where we disagree is that I think there are moral boundaries that you and I can agree on regardless of the nature of our belief in Sinai or not. Clearly. And that discussions should in fact be conducted in a way that takes those boundaries into account.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not so. The first part I agree with; the second part I don’t.
[Speaker A] All right, so we’ll agree to disagree on that part. Rabbi Abraham, I want to thank you very much for coming here to the Radical podcast. Fascinating as always, deep and complex as always. I’m also looking forward afterward to going to see what you write on the blog about the analysis—about, you know, the meta-discussion on that Talmudic blog of yours.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t always do that, sometimes. If it works out.
[Speaker A] Look, it doesn’t seem to me that this time we created a sensation or a scandal, I think everything was fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I also don’t often talk about sensations unless there are things that I think need to be sharpened further.
[Speaker A] That need to be sharpened and all that. Well, we’ll see if there is, but either way, that blog of yours really is a Talmud of one man, which is a very complex and impressive thing to create. And of course your students know you well, but our audience here too, the audience of Radical, and I highly recommend going to read a bit about Rabbi Michael David Abraham and choosing from among his many books the one that especially intrigues you. I thank you again, thank you very much for coming. Many thanks to our editor Dor Kommet. If that’s your real name, Dor, who can know—as Yom said? Pseudonyms. Dor Kommet, our editor, who does hard work here at Beit Radical. And thank you very much, our holy audience here on the Arnica podcast. I very much hope you enjoyed this episode, and the episodes that, with God’s help, we’ll record in the future. And what can I tell you in the meantime? He who makes peace upon us and upon all the Jewish people, within, without, abundantly. Just health, just great love, and we’ll talk again. Thank you very much.