Intellect and Emotion, Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• General Overview
• The author of the Tanya, the animal soul, and the divine soul
• Libet’s experiments and the veto mechanism
• The dominance of emotion in the postmodern age and the loss of truth
• Emotional pressure tactics in politics and the shaping of worldview
• Breaking the Silence, difficult experiences, and psychological resilience
• Matchmaking, art, and emotional intelligence: emotion as input, not as the decision-maker
• Morality, “the wife of a kohen who is raped,” and “Just because we imagine something, shall we act on it?”
• Hasidism, Nefesh HaChaim, and devekut: experience versus state
• Kabbalah, Hasidism as a psychology of the soul, and the flourishing of Hasidic study
• The mechanical character of Jewish law, a wedding in Yeruham, and asking forgiveness without emotion
• Acknowledgment, instrument flight, and the “divine soul”
• Maimonides: one who suppresses his impulse and the truly virtuous person, rational commandments and revelational commandments
• Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance: fear and love, and doing the truth because it is truth

Summary

General Overview

The speaker sums up a discussion about the relationship between intellect and emotion through the author of the Tanya and neuroscience, arguing that a person acts within a framework of drives and influences but is not deterministically fixed by them. Rather, a person is capable of deciding, and can even impose a “veto” on an impulse. He describes how, in the postmodern age, emotion has become dominant and rational argument has eroded, to the point that emotion is perceived as truth and authenticity, while principles and intellect are seen as mechanical and inhuman. He presents a position according to which emotion is important input but not decisive, and develops analogies like “instrument flight” to emphasize that decisions should rest on what is true, not on what one feels. Within the religious world, he places the tension between Hasidism and the Lithuanian approach, between devekut as an experience and devekut as a state, and he concludes with Maimonides’ call that the highest level is to serve out of love, “to do the truth because it is truth.”

The author of the Tanya, the animal soul, and the divine soul

The speaker presents the author of the Tanya as someone who describes inner work not merely as a war between inclinations, but as a struggle between following good and bad impulses and taking the reins in the hands of the divine soul. He translates this into contemporary language as a topographical framework of forces, pressures, and drives whose source is genetics, society, and environment, within which a person has to decide what to do. He argues that free choice does not deny drives and patterns, but says that they do not determine the action in a one-to-one way. So statistically, more people will “go down into the valley” than “climb the mountain,” but that does not amount to personal determinism.

Libet’s experiments and the veto mechanism

The speaker describes Libet’s experiment and the readiness potential that arises before the conscious report of a decision, along with the deterministic conclusions that claimed choice is an illusion. He attributes to Libet the answer that even if there is an early potential pushing an action forward, there is still an ability to impose a veto on it, and therefore not every potential necessarily leads to pressing the button. He distinguishes between “meaningless” actions like an arbitrary button press, where the veto is a central mechanism, and actions involving dilemma and deliberation, where the process may be two-sided and not just “there is an impulse and then a veto.” He adds that he was told at the Hebrew University that people are working on Libet-style experiments involving dilemmas, and he stresses that averaging and interpretation make it possible to confuse correlation with deterministic influence, to the point of casting doubt on the broad significance of Libet’s experiments without a detailed analysis.

The dominance of emotion in the postmodern age and the loss of truth

The speaker argues that in recent decades there has been a strong dominance of emotion in public discourse, along with despair over logical arguments, backed by an ideology according to which “there is no truth,” so all that remains is “what I feel,” from the gut. He argues that people are not necessarily less intelligent; rather, they are intelligent enough to identify the influences acting on them and then mistakenly conclude that those influences are all there is, so that the framework “makes decisions for me,” and a picture emerges of the person as a little ball or a marionette. He adds that people set up a straw man version of the libertarian, as though he denies influences, while the libertarian claim is only that those influences are not the final determining factor.

Emotional pressure tactics in politics and the shaping of worldview

The speaker describes the political use of emotion through “emotional pressure tactics” on both the left and the right, and says he has the impression that the left uses them more, though he notes that this needs research. He gives the example of emotional writing in the style of Gideon Levy, and argues that even if there is real suffering that ought to be prevented, the question of policy and worldview is not decided simply by emotional identification. He compares this to the discourse after Rabin’s assassination, when people claimed that religious faith leads to murder, and he rejects the demand to change one’s beliefs because of emotional consequences or difficult events instead of presenting a full and balanced argument.

Breaking the Silence, difficult experiences, and psychological resilience

The speaker argues that part of the Breaking the Silence phenomenon stems from soldiers’ difficult experiences and from real problems that need to be addressed, but he thinks that presenting them as “the whole picture” is a distortion of proportion. He describes a very strong emotional tendency “to the left” that can follow military service and difficult experiences, and says that he too experienced psychological injury and found it hard to keep his worldview from being dragged along by it. He also describes the opposite side, which builds psychological resilience through emotional numbness so as not to allow the experience to threaten its worldview, and he argues that both positions share the assumption that emotion is the final decisor, and that a moral problem requires an immediate change in one’s whole outlook.

Matchmaking, art, and emotional intelligence: emotion as input, not as the decision-maker

The speaker says that in Yeruham he was asked whether in matchmaking one should follow emotion or intellect, and he answered that one should follow intellect while taking emotion and chemistry as important input into the decision. He argues that letting emotion have influence is right, but letting emotion decide leads to mistaken decisions, because there are additional parameters that must be weighed. He criticizes a culture of responses to art that gets reduced to reporting, “it was moving,” instead of analyzing the work itself, and argues that the dominance of emotion is a problem not because one is supposed to be “autistic,” but because emotion has become everything, including in moral discourse.

Morality, “the wife of a kohen who is raped,” and “Just because we imagine something, shall we act on it?”

The speaker describes how many moral claims are presented as an emotional decision in the style of “I can’t live with this,” without any continuation into an argument that balances competing considerations. He brings up the public controversy surrounding “the wife of a kohen who is raped” and describes criticism of rabbis as “they have no heart,” even when their claim may be that they are committed to Jewish law and think there is no alternative. He quotes, “Just because we imagine something, shall we act on it?” and interprets it as a preference for following intellect rather than emotional feeling, and emphasizes that emotion is perceived as authenticity while intellect is perceived as an external construction.

Hasidism, Nefesh HaChaim, and devekut: experience versus state

The speaker argues that the book Nefesh HaChaim and the Tanya are actually very similar, even though Nefesh HaChaim was written against Hasidism, and he explains that the Tanya is not a “classic Hasidic book” and has something “Lithuanian” about it. He presents Nefesh HaChaim’s claim that the Hasidim see study as a means to experiential devekut, whereas Nefesh HaChaim argues that study is itself devekut, because “He and His will are one,” and Jewish law is the will of God. He describes Hasidic devekut as an emotional-experiential state, in contrast to Lithuanian devekut as an ontic-factual state that does not depend on feeling, and he expands this into a description of prayer in Nefesh HaChaim as an “engineering” act of making connections in the worlds, rather than as emotional work.

Kabbalah, Hasidism as a psychology of the soul, and the flourishing of Hasidic study

The speaker argues that a Lithuanian kabbalist talks about worlds, configurations, and sefirot, not about soul-forces, whereas Hasidism uses kabbalistic jargon to build a psychology of the soul involving fear, love, the animal soul, and the divine soul. He connects this to the flourishing of Hasidic study in the Religious Zionist and modern public as a response to the cultural shift from intellect to experience and existentialism. He brings an example from the Christian world through Tertullian’s statement, “I believe because it is absurd,” to show that an approach that places faith as separate from intellect is not new, and he argues that its popularity today strengthens the process of despairing of intellect.

The mechanical character of Jewish law, a wedding in Yeruham, and asking forgiveness without emotion

The speaker argues that part of the misunderstanding of halakhic conduct comes from its being perceived as technocratic, robotic, and lacking authenticity. He tells of a wedding in Yeruham where everyone “danced the way he learns,” with the analytical people “calculating” their movements and the more free-flowing dancers dancing naturally, and he sees this as a parable for the gap between action emerging from an intellectual structure and action emerging from emotional flow. He tells of a lecture at the environmental high school in Sde Boker where he presented a case of asking forgiveness without emotional remorse, and he describes how the audience rejected it as hypocrisy, while he saw it as “the purest request for forgiveness,” because it is done because it is the right thing, not in order to calm one’s conscience.

Acknowledgment, instrument flight, and the “divine soul”

The speaker cites Rabbi Kook on “Modeh ani lefanecha,” saying that the word “hoda’ah” includes both thanks and acknowledgment of a fact, and explains that it is hard to say thank you because it admits dependence on someone else. He uses the example of the film A Beautiful Mind, vertigo in pilots, and the use of Waze in order to describe a situation in which one has to cling to the “instruments” and not to what one feels, and he defines this as a parable for the divine soul imposing understanding over feelings. He argues that people not only find this difficult, but turn following emotion into an ideology that presents instrument flight as inhuman, whereas he sees it as the correct way.

Maimonides: one who suppresses his impulse and the truly virtuous person, rational commandments and revelational commandments

The speaker presents Maimonides in the sixth chapter of Shemoneh Perakim, where he distinguishes between “one who suppresses his impulse” and “the truly virtuous person,” and notes that the philosophers prefer the virtuous person, whereas the Sages say, “A person should not say: I do not want… rather: I do want, and what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.” He describes Maimonides’ resolution, according to which in rational-moral commandments, inner identification is preferable, while in revelational commandments, one who suppresses his impulse is preferable, and he notes that forbidden sexual relations are classified by Maimonides as revelational commandments. He emphasizes that Maimonides does not say to act according to emotion, but rather to aspire for emotion too to be corrected and aligned with intellect, and he presents a third model in which the decision is intellectual but emotion joins it.

Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance: fear and love, and doing the truth because it is truth

The speaker quotes Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, where he rules that it is not fitting to serve God in order to receive reward or escape punishment, and that such service is “one who serves out of fear,” appropriate for the unlearned masses, women, and children until their understanding increases. He explains that serving out of fear puts the person at the center, out of an egoistic motivation of what is good for me or bad for me, even if this refers to spiritual good and the World to Come. He presents serving God out of love as doing the truth because it is truth, with the good coming automatically as a consequence, and attributes this to the greatness of Abraham our forefather, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called “the one who loves Me,” because he served only out of love.

We were discussing intellect and emotion, so here’s a summary of previous installments. I spoke about the author of the Tanya, about the animal soul and the task as he sees it—not a war between inclinations, but a war between following two inclinations, good and evil, and taking the reins into your own hands, what he calls the divine soul. I tried to translate that into the language of neuroscience, or the way we look at it today, so basically the language of a kind of topographical map. You move around inside it, and that map basically exerts all kinds of forces and pressures and impulses on you and tries to take you to all kinds of places. That’s the result of all the environmental influences from inside and outside and from everywhere—genetics, society, whatever you want. And within that framework, a person acts and has to decide what to do. So to say that I act rationally or out of my free choice does not mean there are no inclinations, no impulses, no patterns operating within me. It means they do not determine in a one-to-one way what I will do. They affect me in various ways, but in the end I have to decide. A ball rolls wherever the potential energy takes it, but a person walking on the same terrain can decide to climb the mountain rather than go down into the valley, even though that will be harder. And therefore, in the same situation, if there are a hundred people facing a mountain and a hundred people facing a valley, fewer will go up the mountain than will go down into the valley. There is a statistical influence here, but it doesn’t deterministically fix exactly what each individual will do.

We talked about Libet’s veto. He found the readiness potential—the potential of readiness that arises in a person before he decides on the act—and people drew from that some deterministic conclusion, namely that we are driven by autonomous mechanisms operating inside us and don’t really decide. We just have the illusion of decision. And Libet said against that that it’s not true. True, before I press there’s such a potential that in effect caused me to press—but on the other hand, even when such a potential exists, I don’t necessarily press. Meaning, I have the ability to impose a veto on it, which, loosely translated, is basically the model I described earlier. That’s what it means. It means there is some impulse trying to make me do something, and no sane libertarian would deny that. Obviously we are all built differently and influenced in one way or another. The libertarian claim only says that that’s not the whole story. In other words, this is the framework within which we act, but it isn’t the final determinant of what we do. The decision in the end is our decision—what to do with that framework, or in other words, whether to impose a veto.

Now, when it comes to pressing a button—which was Libet’s experiment—there really isn’t much room for judgment, so it’s pretty clear that the action potential is what causes me to press. I won’t press without a prior potential, but it may be that there is a prior potential and I still won’t press—I’ll veto it. In places where the matter depends on deliberation, on judgment, where I have considerations this way or that, then the action I perform may happen without a potential, at least before the decision. After the decision I assume there has to be some mechanism that carries it out, but a potential does not necessarily precede the decision at all, because there the decision begins from what I decide through my judgment, and it’s not only a mechanism of veto. A veto mechanism is asymmetric: I can’t act without a potential, but I can refrain from acting despite a potential. But that’s in meaningless actions. In actions that are arbitrary—why am I pressing now and not in another minute, or earlier? Because right now there was a potential that made me press. True, sometimes I’ll still decide not to press, but I never press without there being something that made me press now. Why would I do that? There’s no reason to do it. So in these arbitrary actions, I assume the main mechanism really is the veto mechanism and not the opposite mechanism of action without a potential, but rather a case of there being a potential and no action following. In actions of choice, there it may work in both directions.

I said that at the Hebrew University they told me they’re now working on such an experiment—that is, trying to do a Libet experiment on situations of dilemma, on situations of judgment, and to see how it works. In the book I argue that if they didn’t succeed even in Libet’s experiment—I mean, if there’s no ability to predict it in advance—then what? I didn’t understand. If I say that even in Libet’s experiment they didn’t succeed, meaning you see that it isn’t always determined in advance, meaning only in certain cases—so what exactly can you learn from such an experiment? Meaning if it can also go in the opposite direction? Yes, can there be a case—can there be a case of action without a potential, or non-action with a potential? That at least.

Now, some people drew a deterministic conclusion from Libet’s experiment because there are all kinds of arguments there about averaging and things like that. Not everyone agrees with Libet’s interpretation of the veto mechanism. On the other hand, every such result is the result of a lot of averaging, so in effect you can’t really know, because people somewhat miss the point I’m making here. Then people think that if there are influences on you and you act accordingly, that means there is determinism. That’s not true. You need one hundred percent action in accordance with influences in order to say determinism, not just some correlation. And then it may be that Libet experiments have no significance at all. Meaning, one has to go through the details there more carefully—how exactly they reached that result. There are all kinds of debates about it, many debates, and I don’t know all the details there either.

Okay, so that’s more or less what we’ve done until now. I want now to return a bit to our world. I mentioned that joke of Dov Sadan about the orthopedist—the Jewish orthopedist. This mechanism, the mechanism of descent, yes, of our decision center from the head to the heart to the belly, everything I talked about—it seems to me you can see it very strongly in our era, in the last several decades. I think in the postmodern age there is a very strong dominance of emotion in people’s thinking. And again, is this really something new? I mean, five hundred years ago it wasn’t like that? I don’t know about five hundred years ago; I can’t measure that. What I can measure is what was written, or how the avant-garde thinks—that is, the educated people who write the books, the philosophical schools. There it is unequivocally true. What the ordinary person in the street did—ordinary people were always, I don’t know, I don’t know how to test that. But unquestionably the arguments—I’m not talking about how people act on the ground, but the arguments that are raised—once there was at least a feeling that we work with rational arguments and try to formulate a position, present a position, argue. Today there is a terrible despair of rational arguments. That is, today the arguments are very emotional, and this is actually backed by an ideology. People don’t perceive it as decline—okay, we’re trying to manipulate you, use rhetoric, emotional demagoguery, emotional extortion. No. It’s a view that stems from the fact that there is no truth. Yes, exactly. Despair of reason, or the loss of truth, basically means: fine, so what’s left? What’s left is just what I feel.

Now you can hear—what? From the gut. Yes, exactly, from the gut. And as I said, this doesn’t mean that people today are stupider than they once were. I don’t think that’s true. On the contrary. People are smarter than they used to be, and that’s part of the problem. Smart people are aware of all the influences acting on them and that their judgment isn’t as clean as people once thought, and on the other hand they take that all the way and say: okay, so that’s all there is. So there are only influences and only what I feel, and there isn’t even an attempt to act within the framework. Rather, if there’s a framework, fine—then that’s who I am. That’s how I am, so that’s what I do. And a lot of people say, yes, I do this because that’s how we were raised. A kind of infantile argument—I can’t stand that. People say it, I ask someone: why do you do that? Because that’s how we were raised. What do you mean that’s how we were raised? If you had been raised to be a mass murderer, would you do that too because that’s how you were raised? Aren’t you supposed to pass it through some critical test? Meaning, decide what you think about it? What does it mean, because that’s how we were raised? And all kinds of people come to me when I express some supposedly unusual opinion: we weren’t raised that way. Okay, so what? The secular person also wasn’t raised like you, so do you have a claim against him? He’s fine? What? I don’t understand—it’s such a strange argument.

I think part of the charm, or the power, of that argument is precisely this: basically, this is who I am, so that’s what I do. The framework makes the decisions for me. Not just “that’s how we were raised”; my parents were raised that way too, so they didn’t influence me—we are all basically the landscape of our birthplace, in a certain sense. The world somehow acts through us; the cosmic soul of the world acts through us. We are really just marionettes, as it were. It’s part of that same feeling, that we are essentially little balls on the surface of this terrain, not people who decide, albeit under influences of course.

And then, in order to fight the libertarian view, people set up straw men—yes, they fight straw men—as if the libertarian assumes there are no influences at all, that we are separate intellects, these kinds of people who only choose, with no influences, no psychology, nothing. That’s a straw man. A libertarian like that is an idiot; he’s not a libertarian. No one denies the connection between those things and behaviors. The question is whether that’s all there is. That’s the dispute.

And therefore these phenomena—the emotional pressure-cookers we talked about in the political sphere, for example—both the left and the right use various pressure techniques. I think the left uses it more, by the way, from my impression, but that would require more systematic research before saying something definite. A kind of painting of pitiful people—Gideon Levy style—and all sorts of heartbreaking articles about the miserable Palestinian suffering through no fault of his own, which the right of course dismisses. But I don’t dismiss it. It may be true. Even though he’s not terribly suspect in my eyes as a great spokesman for truth, and I’ve personally encountered a few cases where the connection between what he said and the truth was problematic. But okay, it may really be—not may, certainly there are such things, and it’s worth preventing them and avoiding them. But the question is whether that is supposed to change my worldview. If, say, in my worldview I’m right-wing, then the fact that there are Palestinians who suffer—fine, one has to see how to prevent that. True. But on the other hand, why should that feeling of identification shape my worldview?

And very often when you talk with people—in all our correspondences I think this comes up a lot—people speak from the depths of their heart. Truly good people, and these things pain them. And try explaining to them: okay, it pains me too, but I don’t subordinate my worldview to injustices that may occur, and to empathy, and to the desire—attempts—which indeed one should prevent, and maybe we don’t do that enough. All of that is true. But on the other hand, okay, there are unfortunate people—so what? So one should try to deal with it. Just as after Rabin’s murder, people said: you see what religious faith leads to. Fine—so what do you want me to do now, not believe because there are people who believe and also come to murder? What can I do? I believe because that is my decision. I do not subordinate my decisions to gut feelings. I decide what I think.

Now if there are problems, I’m not denying it. If there are problems, we should try to address them. Okay. But that doesn’t mean that because of the problems I’ll change my worldview. Unless it’s an argument. There could be an argument that says: look, if such-and-such a worldview leads to many moral problems and the opposing worldview avoids them, and there aren’t other costs or other considerations—or at least not weighty enough ones—fine, that itself is an argument. That’s a legitimate argument. You can present it as an argument. But my feeling is that people don’t do that second stage. They just present the picture and expect you to stand at attention and immediately convert.

By the way, I often feel that a large part of the Breaking the Silence movement comes from that. People had difficult experiences as soldiers, and there are indeed not-simple things that happen there. Obviously there are problems, and all of that is true. Although it’s not as bad as the outcry would suggest, at least from my impression. I don’t know—from what I myself experienced, from what I hear from my children or from friends. On the contrary, I think there is a really impressive concern for conduct, while of course there is the soldier at the edge who has power, and an army in which everyone is in the army—there is compulsory service—you have no control. There are people for whom, okay, power intoxication drives them out of their minds, or hatred of Palestinians, whatever; people are built the way people are built, and that can happen.

Now you went through such a situation and your sensitive soul was hurt. And I know, I went through such situations too, and my sensitive soul was hurt too. I remember it. And it was very hard for me to stop my worldview from following the psychic injury I experienced. On the other hand, those who were solid in their worldview didn’t feel that injury at all. It doesn’t bother them in the least: they should kill them all while they’re young—that’s the common line. So this is a kind of attempt to build psychological immunity against something that threatens my worldview, which is also part of the same thing. Because the feeling is that if they don’t build this psychological immunity, it will take them into thinking differently, God forbid. They wouldn’t be able to stand it. Exactly.

Now what is common to both sides is this assessment, or this belief, that if there really is such a problem here, then that means one should change one’s worldview. I deny that. I think one should not be emotionally numb to the matter; one should pay attention so that such things don’t happen. And on the other hand, a worldview has to be formed the way one forms a worldview—taking this into account and weighing it.

I once mentioned that when I was in Yeruham, more than once one of the students would come to me and ask: tell me, in dating for marriage, should you follow emotion or intellect? So I told him: only intellect. He said: what do you mean? But there’s chemistry—you love her, you don’t love her, how do you feel with her? I said: of course. Those are very important data. Take the emotional input and use it as input for the intellect’s decision. That is, the intellect has to make decisions while taking into account the chemistry, the love, the emotion, the connection between you. True, that’s very important input. But that input doesn’t decide. It’s input, meaning you have to take it into account. But to follow emotion is basically to say: I let it decide. And that’s not right. If you follow it and let it decide, you can make wrong decisions. You have to know: there are other things, other parameters. You can be madly in love with a woman who is seriously unstable. Fine—but you can be madly in love with her. So should you marry her or shouldn’t you marry her? Maybe you need to overcome it—I don’t know. There can be all kinds of situations. Letting emotion influence is fine; letting emotion decide is problematic. Emotion is something that can provide input, supply data, but decisions are supposed to be made by the intellect, not by emotion. And that’s true even in the most supposedly emotional, human areas, and all things of that sort.

We also talked about emotional intelligence in one of the previous topics. That’s related too. People are at a concert or in a museum or something like that, and the reactions you usually hear, even on the radio, are: it was very moving, I was really deeply moved. Why should I care whether you were moved or not? I don’t understand. Who cares? Take a pill and get moved even without the museum. You can get moved, or suppress the emotion, with a pill. Today we already know—there are pills that can do everything to you. So why should I care if you were moved? Tell me what you think of the work. What did he do there? Was there something new? Did he break some path there? Give me something one can work with, something substantial. No, no—it’s all excitement and “it really moved me” and things like that. This dominance of emotion, in my view, is downright shocking. It’s shocking not because one should be an autistic person, but because it becomes the whole picture. Fine, be moved, don’t be moved, that’s legitimate, we all get emotional from time to time. But that’s not the main thing one should talk about or according to which one should make decisions. Meaning, okay, that too is data, one should take it into account. If I’m going somewhere where a work of art may indeed be supposed to move me, then that will be one consideration in whether to go there or not. Fine. But besides that, I also expect to hear what it was worth, what it means, what the implications are, what I learned from it. Was it interesting, not interesting? I don’t know—give some cultural analysis, not some kind of Pavlovian conditioning: it stimulated my third gland from the left and my fourth gland from the right.

An interesting question—isn’t “interesting” also… what? No. When you explain, when you show—you can also say why it moved you, and that is already analysis. To say it moved me because I saw here something that did such-and-such to me, and since works of art are generally like this, that’s why it moved me—if that’s just a conclusion, then fine, because I still learned something. It is accepted, at least, to think that emotion is one of the parameters in artistic evaluation: what kind of feeling it causes in me. Fine, okay, one can argue about that. But all right, give something beyond a mere report on secretions, I don’t know.

The dominance of this is part of the same phenomenon Dov Sadan, I think, talks about: the descent from the head to the heart or the belly. Somehow everything is measured there. Morality, of course—there’s no need to say it—morality today is only emotion. You can hear people say: there really are no moral arguments; and even when they are raised, they are some very thin shell of—again, we talked about this in the context of the author of the Tanya—that is basically driven by feelings. My emotion tells me such-and-such, and then one wraps it in some thin shell, but in the end it is driven by feelings.

At every turn I hear people say: I’m not willing to live in a way where we are a conquering people and so on. I don’t know exactly what—just that, or not a conquering people, whatever. I always bring examples from both sides, and I feel a little uncomfortable because it exists on both sides. As I said, the proportions—you can maybe argue about them. I do think there is a difference in proportions. But the feeling is that reporting feelings becomes an argument in itself. That is, once I can’t live with it—then that’s it.

I talk with people who are good friends of mine, very smart people, really. I know several like that—super-smart people. There’s no talking to them about arguments. You can’t talk to them about arguments. I’m not willing for a person to suffer; I can’t, I can’t live with it. Good people—it’s hard to accuse people like that. That too is a consideration: if it activates emotion at that level, then his intellect tells him, listen, don’t pay that price. Don’t pay that price? But if because of this you’ll be in the ocean and they’ll sweep you out to sea… I don’t know. Maybe he says: exile is preferable to enduring this. Exile is preferable—but then say that to me. Don’t stop with… But they do say that… No, they don’t, because I don’t think they carry it through. That’s exactly the point. They stop here. Meaning, once the emotion is such that “I’m not willing,” then it’s immoral.

I began with Breaking the Silence, actually, so I said it’s the same thing. Breaking the Silence people had experiences that indeed may have been difficult experiences, and indeed they need to be dealt with, and maybe people really don’t deal with them in some cases. Could be, yes, that happens too, I’m sure. Okay? Fine. So protest—that too is a legitimate thing. But to make from that the whole picture is again a subordination of worldview to emotion. Because you had a difficult experience, fine, and that shouldn’t happen, true, and maybe it wasn’t treated seriously, and that’s very bad. But it’s not true that that is the whole picture. And it’s not true that the whole world is like that. It’s out of proportion. At least that’s my feeling—I haven’t done statistics—but it’s not the army I know that they describe. And I tend to believe they’re describing the truth. That’s what I tend to believe, at least regarding many of them, the ordinary people, not politicians, I don’t know—ordinary people, a fighter, who changed his mind because of it, he didn’t come with that opinion. There are such people too. I’ve seen such people too. I myself almost became one of them: after I went through those things, there is a very strong tendency to the left. Very strong. And I think that’s a great mistake, and partly it stems from this point: the feeling is that truth—or truths—truth is only the thing that in the end leads me to murder the other. Truths are not that, and it’s all arbitrary, unnecessary, harmful—all those arguments. They are different arguments, but all of them come up. And therefore one should go with feeling, with natural, simple, sincere feeling. And that is basically the replacement.

We talked about that dilemma around the wife of a priest who is raped. Maybe in one of the earlier sessions we spoke about morality; there I asked whether morality is in emotion or in intellect. That was one of the previous topics. And there too the feeling—people I spoke with after something like that was published in the newspaper, like Yitzhak who made that most unnecessary provocation—then there was a huge argument. People were outraged: what, those rabbis have no heart? How can it be that they force this couple to separate? And things like that. Now I try to tell people: listen, maybe they do have a heart. It can happen. They may have a heart, but they think there is no choice. Jewish law says they must separate. You can say: I don’t accept Jewish law. I don’t agree. This Jewish law is nonsense, it’s anachronistic, it has no place, where did you invent this from? Fine, that’s a legitimate argument. You think that way, I think otherwise, let’s argue. But those weren’t the arguments being made. The arguments were: even if you think Jewish law obligates this, how can you do such a thing? Have you no heart? And again, the feeling or the basic assumption is that if your heart says something, that is the final authority. It doesn’t matter what all the other considerations are—who cares? Why are you following all kinds of intellectual constructions like that? Never mind whether they’re true or not; maybe they’re true according to your method, I’m not arguing with you about that. But because of that you behave this way? “And because we merely imagine, shall we act?” as the Talmud says. And there, “because we merely imagine,” at least as I interpret it, means exactly the point: go with the intellect and not with some emotional feeling. And there it was the opposite: what, you’re going with your intellect? Go with healthy, natural, simple feeling.

Emotion is also often perceived as more authentic, right? If it isn’t accompanied by emotion, then it’s detached, it isn’t you. Emotion is supposedly the real thing. We talked about the author of the Tanya calling the animal soul the vital soul. It’s called the vital soul because that really is the thing you live. The divine soul is indeed something cold, detached. You think in certain ways and come to a conclusion—it looks like some kind of robot, like software operating you; it doesn’t come from inside, it isn’t authentic. Today that sounds bad. But that is exactly how things should work, in my opinion. Exactly how they should work. There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, this feeling that the heart is what should drive me, the heart is the real self—whereas the intellect is some external thing—that’s very often the way people speak. The heart is your true self. The intellect is just some external constructions implanted in you, something that comes from outside. In my view that is an utterly opposite conception of the relation between these two things from how I understand it.

Now of course I’m a Litvak, so that’s part of the issue. But I don’t know, it just seems obvious to me. I don’t understand how one can not be a Litvak. How does he say this against the concretely Hasidic view, no? What? That he is basically doing Chabad Hasidism—the idea of going with the intellect? Right. Chabad is a famously unusual Hasidic movement. Chokhmah, Binah, Da’at—that’s their name. It’s not Hasidism in the classical sense. I think we once talked about this when we even studied Nefesh HaChayim at some point—I don’t remember when. I said that one of the surprising things in Nefesh HaChayim, when you compare it to the Tanya, is the level of similarity. It’s amazing how much they are simply saying the same thing. With a microscope you won’t see the differences. And the whole book Nefesh HaChayim is meant to come out against Hasidism. And the Tanya is one of the foundational books of Hasidic thought. But not exactly, because the Tanya is not a classic Hasidic book, I think. Even though it is considered a foundational book of Hasidism, it isn’t a classic Hasidic book. There is something very Lithuanian in it—very Lithuanian. Yes, this is Hasidism in White Russia, I think, a region that isn’t classic Hasidic territory. It’s not Poland.

In any case, the claim of Nefesh HaChayim is that the Hasidim basically see study as a means to cleaving to God. Again, emotion is the goal, and the various things are to be harnessed in order to achieve the emotional goal. And Nefesh HaChayim’s whole argument—in the fourth gate—is that study is itself cleaving to God. Meaning, cleaving to God is not an experience; it’s an objective state. And the Hasidim, at least that is how he describes them—I’m not sure everyone would agree with this—but he describes them as seeing cleaving to God as a kind of experience, a kind of emotion. Meaning, you are supposed to arrive at an experience, a religious experience, some kind of cleaving to the Holy One, blessed be He, and the religious act’s role is to bring you to that experience, and that is basically the goal. Whereas Nefesh HaChayim presents a completely opposite approach. The approach is that study is not a means for the sake of an experience. The experience may not come afterward at all—that’s not what matters. Study is itself the cleaving to God. When you study, you cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He, because He and His will are one. And when you study Jewish law, then Jewish law is the will of God. And if you study the will of God, then the will of God is in you, in your intellect, in your mouth, and so you are attached to Him through the study itself. It is not a means to cleaving to God; it is the cleaving itself.

Now of course this is not only a shift in which stage I locate the cleaving. The very essence of cleaving is different here. Hasidism sees cleaving as an emotional-experiential state, and he offers cleaving as an ontic state. That is, this is the reality: I am now attached to the Holy One, blessed be He. It has nothing to do with what I feel. I may feel nothing at all. I can be the Litvak sitting there with “the birds of heaven”—yes, with Yonatan ben Uziel, all the famous jokes about Litvaks—and I am completely attached to the Holy One, blessed be He, with all that Litvak consciousness in which I ask who pays the damages. I am attached to the Holy One, blessed be He, whereas the Hasid understands attachment to the Holy One, blessed be He as being inspired by the greatness of Yonatan ben Uziel. These are two models of attachment that differ not only in the stage at which I reach attachment, but in what attachment is. Is attachment an emotion, or is attachment a state—a state that can be completely detached from emotion? There could be someone without an amygdala who is completely attached to the Holy One, blessed be He. He has no emotions, no nothing. A complete autistic person—not autistic, but never mind, some kind of Asperger’s, yes, like someone with no emotion. And that’s it—he is completely attached to the Holy One, blessed be He.

And in prayer? What? In prayer? Same thing, same thing. Look at Nefesh HaChayim on prayer. That’s the third gate, I think, on prayer; I don’t remember anymore. You see why I’m a Litvak? I don’t even remember which gate in Nefesh HaChayim deals with prayer. Which gate deals with study—I know by heart: the fourth gate. But prayer too—you can read Nefesh HaChayim on prayer, and you’ll see that he explains what kinds of constructions you build there with prayer. He doesn’t talk at all about feelings. He talks about what it does. Meaning, in prayer you are a plumber. You connect the pipes, you arrange all the upper worlds there, and that’s it—you’re just doing plumbing work. And among the Hasidim they use this plumbing terminology, but for them it’s a metaphor for psychic processes. In fact all of Hasidism—the Ba’al Hashem writes that Hasidism, and also some of the Kabbalists, understand Kabbalah as a metaphor, and therefore they don’t actually study Kabbalah, he argues. To study Kabbalah is to study what happens in the upper worlds. Where philosophy ends, Kabbalah begins, as we once discussed. To study from the world of Atzilut and above—that is Kabbalah. The worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah are philosophy. Meaning, you want to learn what happens there, which pipes connect to where—that is called studying Kabbalah, he says.

Now Hasidism, when it says this is a metaphor, is basically saying: there are no pipes there. This is only a way of speaking about me, about my soul, about the—does it seem metaphorical, or is it parallel? Meaning, there is the—no, that’s the Kabbalistic view, that it is parallel, “from my flesh I behold God,” that I am built in a way somehow corresponding to—what, the worlds are in the form of a person, yes, there is some correspondence. That is obvious; it’s a basic given there. But never mind—I don’t know if that’s all of Hasidism. And Hasidism’s “contraction not to be taken literally,” meaning there really is no up and down, no our world and another world—you can say there is no down or you can say there is no up, it’s the same thing; they simply identify them. So all of this in the end is basically meant to tell you something about the structure of the soul.

In that sense, by the way, the Tanya is distinctly Hasidic. The Tanya is Chabad’s doctrine of the soul. All the use of Kabbalistic jargon describes the powers of the soul: awe and love and animal soul and divine soul. The Lithuanian Kabbalist does not speak that language. The Lithuanian Kabbalist talks about Adam Kadmon, Beriah—that is, he talks about worlds and configurations and sefirot, not about powers of the soul. There are corresponding powers of the soul too; perhaps one can extract a psychological doctrine from it, but that’s not what he’s engaged in. He is studying Kabbalah. And for Hasidism, the Kabbalistic jargon is a means for engaging in their doctrine of the soul. So it is no wonder that Hasidism’s goal is ultimately a psychological-emotional goal, whereas the Litvak’s goal when he studies is an intellectual goal: I want to understand—it’s like physics. Physics deals with how this world works, and metaphysics teaches me what happens in those worlds there, how they function. And I am basically studying science, as it were—never mind that there is no experimental feedback—but I am engaged in some slice of reality when I study these things. So here the intellect operates, and there experience operates—emotion operates.

And therefore, by the way, the great flowering of Hasidism in recent years—the flowering, I mean not in the Hasidic world; there, in my opinion, there is also flowering, but as a result of what is happening outside—despite what is happening there, there is a flowering of Hasidism there too, because it had really withered completely until a few years ago, at least as far as I know. And there is a kind of flowering of Hasidism around the more modern Religious Zionist world. People find lots of answers, as it were, in the study of Hasidism. It has become terribly popular. There is no place today where they don’t study Hasidism and things of that sort. And that is part of the same matter: the shift of focus from head to heart, from intellect to experience, toward existential dimensions. That is exactly the study of Hasidism. Therefore the great flowering of Hasidic study is part of the same phenomenon I discussed earlier: the focus on emotion at the expense of intellect, the despair of intellect.

In the Christian world, for example, they take this in an even more extreme direction. There is that saying of Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, that I believe because it is absurd. Not despite the fact that it is absurd, but because it is absurd. Meaning, there is a sense that faith is by its very nature absurd. It is not intellect. Faith is something outside intellect, above intellect, call it what you like, but it is not intellect. On the contrary, something that is intellectual is just philosophy, some scholarly intellectualism, philosophy. Faith is something else. It is the same feeling, the same idea that Hasidism is not intellect, it is experience, it is what? It’s not something new. No, no, not new at all. This is an old Christian conception. And this—does it decline over generations? No, no, say something that existed earlier—obviously, obviously in Christianity. I’m saying, all these descents. I’m not trying to force the entire world into this model of descents. But this phenomenon exists. It has roots in Christianity, and of course ancient roots. But the fact that it gets such ratings, such popularity among us today, which it did not once have—or at least not on this scale—there were always various streams, but not on this scale. Today it’s obvious to everyone, as it were, that intellect is almost the antithesis of religiosity.

Maybe it’s just the desire to change every time, as if there’s some model and people get tired of it and now give me something new. We can test that when we see the next generations. I don’t know—that’s futurology. Maybe. I don’t know. But right now there is such a process. You know, when you see decline you can never know whether it’s a straight line or just part of some shape like this—that if you wait a little, suddenly—after all, in short intervals everything is a straight line. You can’t know. You have to wait and see. Even if you wait you still won’t be able to, because there are many scales. Elections replaced a president because people were fed up with those people. Yes, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better or worse. Maybe. And it doesn’t necessarily show that this is what they wanted. They just didn’t want that one, so they threw him out, and that was the alternative. Meaning, that’s—yes.

I’m saying that I think this process is happening around us. What will happen next? I don’t know. I don’t risk predictions. Even if you look backward, I think there is such a process. There was a very great optimism about reason before modernity too. In the Middle Ages too there was a very intellectual, rationalist period. Right, but then—also in Christianity? Certainly. Yes. So how did that fit with what the Rabbi—I mean with that view—I’m not expert, but look, the Christian thinkers were philosophers of real stature. Some of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages were Christian thinkers. And how did that fit with what the Rabbi—I mean with that view—I’m not expert—but how did it fit with…? They tried. I’m not sufficiently expert either, but I’m saying that in the Christian world there is a very deeply rooted conception like this. How did it fit among those fellows? It’s like asking how mythology fit with the Greek philosophers. Some of them were philosophers, quite sophisticated really, with systematic, critical, orderly thought, and together with that they believed in all the mythological nonsense. It came together. I don’t know exactly how one reconciles these things. Maybe as allegorical interpretations. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Some philosophers talk about the gods and it doesn’t sound allegorical; it sounds like that is their world, the gods are for them—once I heard this, yes, this was a process Rabbi Yaakov Medan went through in Gush.

When I studied with him, we would go to him at twelve, one in the morning, and he would teach us Maharal with sparks in his eyes, with these mystical things, and I would fall asleep after five minutes. Entirely burning fire. Today you won’t hear such things from him, but he still talks about angels. But for him the angels are here. He tells you what happened in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and says: look, the angel was standing here. If I stretched my hand out to the sword in my right hand, I would draw it and cut off the angel’s head, because he was standing right here. He still talks about angels, but they’re here. Meaning, he lives with them, dances with angels. There was once “dancing with angels,” wasn’t there? With wolves—okay. So he dances with angels. For him it is part of the concrete world. He lives it, and that is the world he deals with. Hearing it is really an experience. An experience. But what changed? What? What changed then? You said that—no, what changed in him is that once he didn’t speak this way. He lived in those worlds. Now he stopped—he isn’t a mystic at all. He’s not a mystic, he’s completely concrete; only his physics is a little different from ours. Meaning, it moved from metaphysics to physics, now in this world with all the previous baggage. And that’s a very interesting process. I once told him that.

Anyway, there is perhaps some feeling around this issue of the wife of a priest who was raped—we also talked about that—that a large part of the lack of understanding, I think, in the secular world, in the broader world generally, even among non-Jews toward the conduct of a religious Jew, or a Jew committed to Jewish law, or halakhic society, stems from this: it seems like a kind of mechanical technocracy, inauthentic, as though it isn’t you, as though you’re making some cold calculation of what is correct to do now according to some strange principles. But that’s not the point—that they don’t agree with the principles. As I said before, fine, if you don’t agree with the principles, then argue. That’s a dispute. Okay. There is something much deeper. It’s like: you people have no heart. People don’t even understand: even if you have the principles, so what? I have principles too, so I respect them, I put them in a display case. Why should one conduct oneself according to them? This feeling that one conducts oneself according to principles is perceived as terribly mechanical.

So everyone says he has some principles, but in a very general sense. In the end you respond naturally, authentically, emotionally really, experientially to what happens, while having a framework of principles. But someone who makes a calculation according to the principles in order to determine what should be done in each case is perceived as some kind of robot. He’s not a human being.

I remember that in Yeruham, in the first class there, there was a wedding of one of the guys. To this day I remember it. Too bad I didn’t film it—maybe I should ask, maybe someone there filmed it. They filmed there. These were my students, the first class I taught. Class A in Yeruham. I got them in fourth year. What a group. And we danced there at the wedding, the groom got married, and each one danced the way he learns. It was amazing! Really. You saw people dancing truly like professional dancers—it flowed out of them. When he learns, he doesn’t make constructions; he just learns, says what seems right to him, as if he doesn’t build sophisticated structures. And the ones who were more technocratic in learning, more analytical—they danced with calculations. They calculated how the feet should move now. The Yemenite dance—how yeshiva boys dance Yemenite dances. They don’t know how to dance, but they learned Yemenite dances and worked on it before the wedding. By the way, they did rehearsals, I remember them. Before that wedding they did rehearsals for dances—the groom was a Torah scholar and Yemenite—so they did rehearsals of Yemenite dances. All those guys checked when to move that foot, now joint number three has to turn. It was unbelievable. Every one danced the way he learns. I should have filmed it. I was really terribly sorry afterward that I didn’t film that. It was truly a fascinating phenomenon.

Okay, I’ll bring maybe an example—I don’t remember if I told this once. Were you at the wedding? Were you at the wedding? I was, I was. No, because you also analyze it like that in—how I danced, I don’t know; they would have had to analyze me. How did you analyze the wedding? I’m a Litvak, look—from a wedding you have to come to—yes, exactly. Instead of dancing I analyzed the dancers, yes exactly. Like the birds of heaven of Yonatan ben Uziel. I’m a Litvak, so what can I do.

Once they invited me to the environmental high school in Sde Boker. The principal of that school was a good friend of mine—still is—but he no longer manages it. So he invited me to speak there during the Ten Days of Repentance about forgiveness, atonement, pardon, things like that, but not in a religious context. In a secular school, not in a religious context. They didn’t want it in a religious context. Fine. By the way, very good people there. I was very impressed by the place. I have friends who studied there. At that time there was a plague of repentance there—a lot of people becoming religious. Guys three, four, five years younger than me fell there in many tens of percent, meaning they became religious. Personally, just from my accidental sample, I know maybe three or four from that period, but they told me that whole classes there fell. Fell. In any case, it’s really a place of a high level.

I got there, and it was an interesting challenge. So I said to them—they were all sitting there, teachers and students—and I said: look, imagine a case where I hurt someone. And now I want to go and appease him because I was in the wrong. I acted wrongly toward him, so I go and appease him, ask forgiveness. But in my heart I feel nothing. I don’t care that I hurt him. He interests me as much as the peel of a garlic clove. I don’t care about him at all; let him burn, as far as I’m concerned. But I was in the wrong, so I come and appease him, ask forgiveness.

Now suppose Elijah comes and tells you—this religious aspect apparently I was allowed to mention—so I said: Elijah comes and tells you that this is what’s going on in my heart. This is what I feel. Do you accept my request for forgiveness or not? And there was complete consensus there, I think down to the last listener, that no. It’s hypocritical. What do you mean? It’s not a real request. Yes, it’s not, what do you mean, it’s hypocrisy, not a genuine request for forgiveness. So I told them that in my view that is the purest request for forgiveness I can imagine. Because if I have some pangs of conscience, my heart aches over the fact that I hurt someone, and I go ask him for forgiveness, then basically I’m doing it in order to support my own distress, right? I’m trying to cover over, to take care of myself, and he is merely a means to settle my insides. Then maybe there’s no reason to accept his request for forgiveness, because if he wants me as a tranquilizer, I’m not willing to serve as a tranquilizer. But if a person comes and says: look, I feel nothing. You don’t interest me in the least. I don’t care whether you were hurt or not, but I know I was in the wrong, and someone who is in the wrong should ask forgiveness as part of repentance. I’ll also try not to do it again, of course, with all the implications. But emotionally, you don’t matter to me; I feel nothing. It doesn’t bother me at all that I hurt you. That, in my eyes, is the purest request for forgiveness possible.

He didn’t go with the slope, huh? Yes, exactly. The first one simply rolled into asking forgiveness; that other one climbs in order to ask forgiveness. He doesn’t climb, but at least he isn’t rolling. Okay, sometimes it’s even hard, so then he climbs. Rabbi Kook writes at the beginning of Olat Re’iyah on “I give thanks before You,” and he brings this. Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner brings it, and it already appears in Rabbi Kook. This is one of the examples Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner took from Rabbi Kook without saying so. He studied with him as a young man. When he came to Jerusalem, he studied with Rabbi Kook, and that is known. He studied with him quite a bit, but you can’t mention it. What? There was even once a picture of him on the wall, and at some point he took it down. Oh yes? Okay. No, I think that wasn’t because of him, but because of the surroundings, yes.

Anyway, he brings there—and he writes it too, and Rabbi Kook writes it too—about “I give thanks before You.” He says that “acknowledgment” has two meanings. “Acknowledgment” means to say thank you for, and also to acknowledge that—meaning, I acknowledge that I am such-and-such or that I did such-and-such, and I can also thank for what was done for me, to say thank you. He asks: why do both meanings use the same verb? Because there is a common root to the two meanings. He says that saying thank you is very hard, because saying thank you is basically internalizing the fact that you needed the other person, that you did not manage without him. It is basically admitting something. In other words, thanking for something expresses, or implicitly presupposes, also an admission of something—and that is what is difficult about saying thank you. It’s hard to say thank you because you’re basically admitting that you needed the other person, that without him you would not have managed and he is the one who helped you. And therefore what is difficult in saying thank you is admitting something. So basically there are two—and I think that really in that sense, when you go to ask forgiveness, what is hard about it? Because it is hard to ask forgiveness. You are presenting yourself as someone who was not okay; you are admitting something when you ask. You are admitting that you were in the wrong. Okay? Now if you do that in order to support your feelings—well, then you are doing the difficult thing, but on the other hand it is very easy for you, because you’re doing it for yourself. So why should I accept your request? But if you do it in a pure and genuine way, not because you need to support something inside yourself, but because you truly understand that you were in the wrong—that’s it—then that is the purest request for forgiveness there is.

It reminds me—this is a bit of a wild association—but it reminds me of the film A Beautiful Mind. You know the book and the film? It really is something amazing. The way they present it I assume is extreme. I don’t know whether people really experience it as whoever saw the film saw it there, because they present it as if these are completely concrete figures, the figures he imagines, and he cannot distinguish them from real figures. It looks really—I don’t know if it’s to that extent, maybe in extreme cases, I don’t know. But never mind, it illustrated the condition beautifully.

Now how can such a person really deal with the problem? After all, in the end Nash did succeed in dealing with it. Meaning, he convinced himself not to relate to those figures—he apparently managed to identify them as opposed to real figures, I don’t know exactly how, which means it probably can be identified. But he managed to persuade himself that despite the fact that all the way through he was convinced they were real—at least that’s how the film presents it; again, that’s why this is just a model—but all the way through he was convinced they were real, yet he persuaded himself to ignore them and behave as though… Now what does that mean? If they are really real, then on what basis? They’ll kill you—these are Soviet agents and they’ll kill you and all kinds of things like that. So what follows? He basically knew they weren’t real, otherwise he couldn’t have done it. So what does that mean? Do you go after your feeling or after what you know? What he did there was, because he had a very impressive intellectual ability—he did win the Nobel Prize—he apparently managed to let his intellectual understanding dominate the feelings, even if they were, at least as the film presents it, very strong feelings. It really looked like—this resembles vertigo in pilots… Exactly, to rely on the instruments. It seems to you that up is down and down is up, and you stick to the instruments. Benny Begin’s son was a pilot who was killed because of vertigo, yes, on a night flight. The instructions are to stick to the instruments. The instruction is not to rely on what you feel, but on what the instrument says. Like a robot. What the instrument says. And this is very simple; it’s like using Waze, even without being a pilot. Very often with Waze, you know, it isn’t right. I know I have to go this way. It probably lost me, got confused—but sometimes it also happens that it loses you. And what does it mean that it loses you? After two times you think you’re right and then discover that it’s right… No, no. I’m telling you, both for me and for others it isn’t always like that. No, not always. With Waze too it isn’t always like that. I miss a bridge and it says I saved four minutes. No, I’m saying Waze really does mess up sometimes too, never mind. But on the principled level, of course it is preferable to obey it. Usually it is preferable to obey it. When it gets lost, you missed what it wanted. Ah, you’re saying you have full trust in Waze. Okay.

Anyway, this is exactly that point. This is basically what it means to be the divine soul. That is, to impose what you think over what your emotion tells you. Sticking to the instruments in this sense is sticking to what the head says, because the head says that the instruments make fewer mistakes than the human being—or go bad less often. And therefore it’s all the same issue. The divine soul is instrument flying.

But what about sayings like “the Merciful One desires the heart”—that God wants your heart? We’ll get to that. I said that in the end I want to reach the commandments connected to the heart, and ask what they mean, and through that also discuss the role of the heart in the service of God generally. But in a general way I’m saying that part of the misunderstanding of halakhic conduct really is its mechanical character, its robotic nature, the suppression of natural feelings before—or against—the instruments, this instrument flying. And instrument flying is actually a good example of why this really is the right way to behave, and why it is not correct to go with natural feelings. Yet somehow in life people don’t like instrument flying. They go with emotion. And I think that in life too one should do instrument flying. Not only do people not like it—it’s also hard. Yes, but they also turn it into an ideology. It’s not okay, it’s not human, it’s not right, whatever. It becomes an ideology. I’m saying: the fact that you don’t succeed, fine, we all fall—that’s not the point. The question is whether you don’t see it as a fall, but on the contrary as the correct way to behave. There, I say, there is a problem.

Maybe one last point. In the sixth chapter of Eight Chapters, Maimonides discusses this. He brings there that the philosophers said there is—he describes there someone whom Rabbi Kook calls the one who suppresses his inclination and the upright person. Maimonides calls them there the one who rules over his inclination versus the excellent one, I think—that’s the expression, although it was written in Arabic so these are translations, but never mind. The one who rules over his inclination versus the excellent one. The one who rules over his inclination is someone who has an evil inclination and does instrument flying—that is, someone who behaves correctly despite having an evil inclination, and he overcomes it. Both are righteous, okay? By contrast, the excellent one is the person whose inclinations themselves are good, meaning he goes with—he has inwardly repaired his soul. So he asks: who is better?

He says that the philosophers say the excellent one is better. That the person who himself is a good person does not need to force good behavior upon himself. It’s like what I described earlier. The philosophers basically say that instrument flying is not good. You should go with your feeling, and your feeling should be good. It’s not exactly the same thing, because going with your feeling when the feeling is good is also a kind of decision—you already decided that it is good, and therefore I go with it. Fine. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it illustrates it. And our Sages say: do not say, “I do not desire to eat pork,” but rather, “I do desire it, and what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed against it for me.” Meaning, precisely the one who rules over his inclination is the better one.

Now this itself is very interesting, because Maimonides sees this as a difficulty. If you asked someone today, he’d say: right, so here’s another place where the philosophers were wrong, because the Sages said otherwise. So that settles it—what kind of question is that? But no, Maimonides takes it seriously. He brings sources from verses. What? He also brought sources—he says that from verses too it seems like the philosophers. Yes? I don’t remember that. Yes, from Proverbs and things like “the soul of the wicked desires evil.” Ah yes, maybe, I no longer remember.

In any case, his claim is that there is some contradiction between the philosophers and the Sages. Then he resolves it by saying that in rational commandments, the moral ones, identification is preferable. There the excellent one is preferable. But in commandments accepted by obedience, there the one who suppresses his inclination is preferable. And indeed he shows there that the examples the Sages gave when they said “I do desire it” were: “I do desire to eat pork,” “I do desire to wear shatnez,” “I do desire forbidden sexual relations,” and things like that. All these are basically commandments accepted by obedience. It is also interesting that forbidden sexual relations are treated by him as commandments accepted by obedience and not rational ones. I think there are other places in Maimonides where one sees this. And his claim is basically that in moral commandments, there indeed identification is preferable.

Now this does not necessarily contradict what I said earlier, and here comes in the distinction I noted parenthetically before. Maimonides does not say that I should be driven by emotion. He only says that although it is true I should be driven by intellect, if I also manage to harness emotion to the same place, then I am more whole than someone whose emotion remains behind while he works with instrument flying. But he is not saying to follow emotion—whatever emotion says. He is saying: make sure your emotion too says the correct thing. So in the request for forgiveness you spoke about, maybe the more excellent person is the one who also feels it. Exactly. Therefore I say: now the excellent one is a third model. Earlier I described two models. Model one is someone driven by emotion. Model two is someone driven by intellect and has no emotion. Now I’m saying: someone driven by intellect who also has emotion—that is the third model.

We once talked about the introduction to Eglei Tal, where he says there are those who think that to enjoy Torah study is studying not for its own sake. He says that’s a mistake, because “make the words of Your Torah sweet in our mouths,” and we want to rejoice and enjoy and so forth, and that is important to the study itself. But afterward he says: yes, but someone who studies out of enjoyment, or for the sake of enjoyment—that really is study not for its own sake. So those are two different things.

So I don’t need to be driven by emotion. Maimonides is not saying there that I should be driven by emotion. I should be driven by intellect. It’s just that the emotions are supposed to be corrected emotions. It’s better when emotion too points me in the right direction. It’s easier to identify that way. More certainly I’ll do it, of course, because emotion is our vital part—the part we live with more. It has much greater power than intellect. Maimonides in several places writes that we are supposed to conduct ourselves according to intellect and not according to emotions. I’m speaking about the third way, the middle way—there in the Laws of Character Traits. And Maimonides in the Laws of Kings, which we talked about once, in fact I think more than once, says that one should do things because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them. There he contrasts it with independent judgment, but I assume the same of course applies to inclinations or emotions. You have to do instrument flying: the Holy One, blessed be He, said so, and therefore that is what I need to do.

Or in the service of God, in the Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, law 6: one who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt, unless he accepted it as a god. And what is “accepted it as a god”? Again, instrument flying. Meaning, what the god says is true—not because I love him or fear him, not emotional motivations, but instrument flying, meaning because that is the right thing.

Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance—and with this I’ll begin next time—says that love of God means doing the truth because it is truth. That is what is called love. And with that I’ll begin talking next time. The tenth chapter, the final chapter of the Laws of Repentance, opens with Maimonides saying: “A person should not say: behold, I fulfill the commandments of the Torah and engage in its wisdom in order that I receive the blessings written in it, or in order that I merit life in the world to come; and I separate from the transgressions against which the Torah warned in order that I be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or in order not to be cut off from life in the world to come. It is not proper to serve God in this way, for one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the wise. And only the ignorant and women and children serve God in this way, for they are trained to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.”

Maimonides says there are two levels here: one level of fear and one level of love. What is the difference between them? When a person serves out of fear, what stands at the center? He stands at the center. He wants things to go well for him, or he does not want things to go badly for him. It doesn’t matter whether that good is material or spiritual; it doesn’t matter whether it is in this world or the next—the motive is egoism, concern for myself. That is called serving out of fear. Maimonides says: that is not the proper path. “One who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the wise.” The true service is service out of love. What is service out of love? Maimonides says: “One who serves out of love does the truth because it is truth, and in the end the good will come because of it.” In other words, my motive is not what I will get out of it. My motive is because this is the right thing to do, because the truth is truth. “And this is a very great level, which not every sage attains, and it is the level of our father Abraham, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called ‘My beloved,’ because he served only out of love.”