Lesson from 14 Tishrei 5767, Part 2

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The difference between a righteous person and a wicked person is not some inborn traits, some form, how he looks, appearance, and so on, whereas the real difference is the question of what you chose—did you choose good or did you choose evil. That’s the real difference, and so multiplying other differences here is often harmful—not only is it not helpful, on the contrary. Both of them ought to look the same, and the only difference between them is that this one chose good and that one chose evil. That sharpens the difference. So if we really want to distinguish between two things—and this is true in a scientific experiment too—when we want to distinguish between two things, we want to isolate some parameter, and we have to equalize all the other parameters, otherwise we don’t know what actually caused the difference in the experiment. Right? If we want to isolate a certain parameter, we have to equalize all the rest. That’s how Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner explains “until one does not know between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordechai”—that you have to equate them in every other respect and be left only with the fact that Haman is wicked and Mordechai is righteous. That’s the difference between them. Not because one is ugly and the other isn’t, or one is such-and-such age and the other is such-and-such age. As far as we’re concerned, they should be the same thing: “until one does not know between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordechai.” He says the same thing about the two goats. He makes this connection too: the two goats also have to be alike in height, in weight, in value. Why? Because it has to be clear what the difference between them is. The difference between them is that this one was chosen by lot to go into the innermost sanctuary, and this one was chosen for Azazel. That’s the whole difference. This basically symbolizes the difference between the righteous and the wicked—that this one chose good and that one chose evil. Goats don’t choose, so what symbolizes choice is the lottery. The lottery as it were symbolizes for the observers—as it were this one was chosen by the Holy One, blessed be He, in this case; it didn’t choose on its own—but for us, the implication is of course what we choose. But the two goats are an act meant to show us that everything depends on the question of what one chooses. They are alike in weight, in value, in number, everything is the same, but the question is what they are chosen for: one was chosen for the innermost sanctuary and the other was chosen for Azazel. In other words, the role of the two goats is to illustrate for us the difference between good and evil, and to illustrate it in an isolated way—meaning that everything else is identical so that we can isolate precisely the difference between good and evil. How does this do that? How do they do that? The inner goat goes all the way inside, into the innermost sanctuary, to places no one ever enters, as far inside as possible. The goat for Azazel goes as far outside as possible, as far as possible in the direction of evil. And the lesson is quite amazing, because we go all the way with the goat for Azazel. There are many details along the way, many halakhic details—what happens, laws this way and that way—and then, like Alice in Wonderland, you wake up: the whole thing was a dream. We just have an ordinary poor, nice goat, like the one we took in the morning. You can slaughter it and eat it with appetite. What happened here? What they want to show us is that when we enter evil all the way to the end, we’ll discover that there is nothing there. Nothing at all. It’s an illusion, it’s imagination. There is no evil in the world in any real sense, unless we choose to do something evil. “No evil descends from above,” as it says. In other words, there is no such thing as evil in the world—that is the lesson of the two goats. And therefore Nachmanides says: after we send this goat to Azazel, which is basically a sacrifice not to God but to Samael, to evil, to the prince of desolation and wickedness—then what do we discover when we reach the end? We’ve already gotten to the kingdom of Samael, to the wilderness, to the cliffs, to the place of ruin and desolation. What do we discover? That there’s nobody there. There’s nothing there. It’s all fantasies of those who remain outside the wilderness. When you enter in, there is nothing there. So to whom is this sacrifice, to Samael? No—to God. In experience, in consciousness, we send this sacrifice to Samael, because we still live in a consciousness in which there is supposedly such a thing. But once you go in with it—now we go with it all the way, and it’s not the priest; an Israelite goes with it, every one of us has to go with it—we go with it all the way, and we discover that there is nowhere to go. We simply wake up at the starting point, like a Möbius strip. We got back to the very point from which we set out. And that is what Nachmanides means by “And they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat-demons.” “And they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat-demons” means that after we finish accompanying this goat to Azazel, we basically discover that all idolatry, all the other powers, all evil, everything called the “other side”—the other side—does not really exist. There really is no other side. These are our own fantasies. We can choose to create another side. We can. It will be a product of our choice. There are not really two forces and we have to decide whether we go with this one or with that one. We can decide whether to go with the Holy One, blessed be He, or not to go with Him. But not going with Him is absence. It is not going with someone else. There isn’t really something else there. We can—we were given the right and the power to choose, free choice—we can choose not to go with the Holy One, blessed be He.

[Speaker B] Why? Because darkness is just the absence of light.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Join nothing to nothing, and you’re still left with nothing. And then you really discover that there is nothing there. There is no evil, there is no prince to whom the sacrifice goes, there is really no other power besides the Holy One, blessed be He. An angel? We send it to Azazel, to an angel? Maybe you just don’t see him? No—what, obviously we’re not discovering that we see

[Speaker C] with our eyes that there’s nothing there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the problem—that you can’t see it with your eyes, and therefore we live with the feeling that there is such a thing because we don’t see.

[Speaker B] Just like the Holy One, blessed be He, exists and we don’t see.

[Speaker C] So that’s why this whole halakhic procedure comes—to teach us that, look,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] you offered him a sacrifice. I give him all the laws, says the Holy One, blessed be He. He has a sacrifice. It will be sacred with the sanctity of a sacrifice. It is forbidden to slaughter it outside. Go with it all the way—and then eat it with appetite at the end. Nothing happened. There’s nothing there. You’re supposed to discover—God teaches us what we’re supposed to discover. We’re supposed to discover that in the end, after going all the way, you discover: nothing. We are at the starting point. We’ve gone back to the morning before we even chose the goats and consecrated them and they became a sacrifice and all that. We’ve gone back even to the stage of the eve of Yom Kippur. We woke up, and look—it was a dream. There’s nothing there.

[Speaker B] Because you can’t see them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not because you can’t see—because there’s nothing there. We keep thinking all the time.

[Speaker B] But above, there are

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] angels, the goat—

[Speaker C] this goat is pushed down and it dies and it’s a sacrifice to Satan.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, that’s exactly the point. It is not

[Speaker C] a sacrifice to Satan. It’s the sent-away goat; it’s permitted to derive benefit from its meat. I got completely confused.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I don’t think that’s correct. That’s what I’m trying to explain right now.

[Speaker C] Does the Holy One, blessed be He, need this goat?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He, does not need this goat. He also—

[Speaker C] doesn’t need the one that goes inside.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, so the angels do? Rather, we need this goat. We. The Holy One, blessed be He, says: come, I’ll go with you. I’ll let you perform idolatry—but don’t be satisfied just looking at it from the outside. Go with it all the way, all the way, to the place of ruin and desolation. And when you go with it all the way, what I want to teach you, says the Holy One, blessed be He, is that in fact there is nothing there. You live with some feeling as if there is evil and there is good, God exists and there are other powers there too, only you don’t see them. So it’s no great proof that you don’t see them—from that you can’t infer that they don’t exist. Therefore the Torah comes and teaches us this, tries to explain this to us, and tell us that the fact that we don’t see is not because it can’t be seen, but because there is nothing there to see. There is nothing there. That is the background that we learn from this goat to Azazel.

[Speaker C] And what’s the proof that there’s nothing there?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a proof. It’s a hint about what one needs to work on. Not a proof. Not because—what proof? The Holy One, blessed be He, says it isn’t there; you can eat it.

[Speaker C] But of course you can eat it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The goat—you can eat it, as I said before. You can eat it at the end of the process. You can take it, slaughter it, and eat it. You can also choose not to push it down—the pushing down is not indispensable. The pushing down is not indispensable. No, you can also not push it down, and if you did push it down and it was smashed, even then there are opinions that say you can eat it, and in any case you certainly may derive benefit from it. And the one that went inside?

[Speaker C] The one that went inside, no, because it’s…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because there, there is—

[Speaker C] something. There, there is something. It’s holy.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A sacrifice never stops being a sacrifice. There’s no such thing. That’s exactly the question we started from. There is some sacrifice here. But one of the halakhic rules is that inherent sanctity does not simply lapse. A sacrifice does not stop being a sacrifice. So how does this become a sacrifice? It has the laws of a sacrifice—we saw in the Talmudic texts that it has the laws of a sacrifice. You perform the process, and at the end you basically have meat for eating—you can slaughter it and eat it. Just like it was in the morning before you began the whole procedure. Then too, you could have gone into the pen, taken it, slaughtered it, and eaten it. That’s also what you can do now. This whole procedure brought you back to the starting point. Now I’ll try to expand this point a little, make it a bit more contemporary. We know that there are fifty gates of understanding. That’s what’s written in various places. There are fifty gates of understanding. Nachmanides, in his introduction to the Book of Genesis, says: “Our rabbis have already said: fifty gates of understanding were created in the world, and all were given to Moses except one, as it is said, ‘You have made him little less than God.'” Yes, the fiftieth gate was not given to him. “And their number is accepted by the sages through tradition, that they are fifty minus one, because one is exceptional. And it may be that this gate is in the knowledge of the Creator, exalted be He, which was not given to a created being. And do not focus on their saying ‘were created in the world,'” because the saying is “fifty gates of understanding were created in the world.” Don’t take that statement literally. Forty-nine were created in the world, but one—the one gate—was not created. One gate was not created; only forty-nine gates were created. It’s an obscure sentence like that. It’s not clear exactly what he means. There are fifty gates of understanding. One of them is exceptional. Forty-nine were created, one was not created. What is the meaning of this? The Vilna Gaon writes on a verse in Proverbs. It says: “The Lord has made everything for His purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil.” “Everything” has the numerical value of fifty, and “even” has the numerical value of forty-nine. Nachmanides says: “The Lord has made everything for His purpose”—on the side of holiness, for the sake of God, there are fifty gates. “Even the wicked for the day of evil”—on the side of impurity, corresponding to the gates of understanding, there are gates of impurity. On the side of impurity there are only forty-nine gates. What Nachmanides writes here, the Vilna Gaon also writes there. But we know that “God made one opposite the other”—meaning that whatever exists on the side of holiness has a counterpart on the side of impurity. So why are there fifty here and forty-nine there? That of course has to be connected somehow to the uniqueness of the last gate. Nachmanides too says that really there are only forty-nine gates even on the side of holiness; one is exceptional, it is something a bit different, and apparently it has no analogue on the side of impurity. Another question: the Leshem asks the Vilna Gaon several questions in this context. One question he asks is: it says that in Egypt Israel entered the forty-nine gates of impurity, and the Holy One, blessed be He, “skipped over the mountains, leaped over the hills”—He hurried to take them out before the original schedule so that they would not sink into the fiftieth gate. So he asks about the Vilna Gaon: if there is no fiftieth gate of understanding—what were they supposed to sink into? Meaning, there is no fiftieth gate; that’s what the Vilna Gaon says. So what were they—after all, the midrash says explicitly that there is one. They were supposed to sink into the fiftieth gate, and then you can’t get out, so the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them out early so they wouldn’t sink.

[Speaker C] In the gates of understanding, the gates of impurity—maybe only in understanding the fiftieth gate was not created?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. In the gates of impurity there is no fiftieth gate at all, says the Vilna Gaon. None at all. There are only forty-nine in impurity? Yes. Another question we have to ask ourselves: why is the opposite of the gates of understanding the gates of impurity? The opposite of the gates of understanding, I would have said, is the gates of foolishness. Why gates of impurity? Why is the opposite of understanding impurity? It somewhat recalls the four sons at Passover: opposite the wise son stands the wicked son, not the foolish one. Right? That’s how we usually picture it to ourselves—the wise one versus the wicked one, not the wise one versus the one who does not know how to ask or the simple one. Right? Why is the wicked one the opposite of the wise one? So similarly here: why is impurity the opposite of understanding and not foolishness? So I’ll try briefly to suggest a model that explains this, and here it has contemporary aspects. I won’t be able to elaborate too much, but I think it gives good meaning to what we’ve been seeing all along. Look—what is a gate? A gate is something that connects us from one room to another, right? We move from one place to another through a gate. Why are the gates of understanding called gates and not rooms—forty-nine or fifty rooms of understanding? Why gates?

[Speaker C] A gate separates, like the distinction between sacred and ordinary, where they linked that to wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Understanding is in fact “to understand one thing from another”—that is what understanding is. The Sages said: to understand one thing from another. That means that passing from room to room through a gate is called understanding. Therefore the metaphor of understanding is pictured as gates and not as rooms. Now let’s imagine a chain of forty-nine gates. This is a very simple mathematical problem. A chain of forty-nine gates.

[Speaker C] A chain or a circle?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the question—we’ll see in a moment. And there are rooms between them, right? These gates are used to move from room to room. There are only two ways to draw such a picture, right? Either as a linear line—that is, room, gate, room, gate, room, gate—a line that ends at the end with a room, the gate leads to it and ends in a room, and that room has no further gate, so the room is closed. Or you close the circle in on itself, right? Gate, room, gate, room, gate, room—and return back to the first room. Again, that reminds us of this move, right? Returning back to the first room. Those are the only two ways. There’s no other way to arrange a chain of forty-nine gates. Topologically. I can already hear something alarmed here.

[Speaker C] Topologically there are only two ways. In the last one, in a straight line, it goes outward, meaning it kind of goes out to infinity.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, something at the end. I don’t care at the moment, but something that has no further gate. No, something that has no further gate. I don’t care whether it’s infinite

[Speaker B] or not, but it has no further gate. Do you enter the first room through a gate, or were you just born in the first room?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That already depends how you want to picture it.

[Speaker B] No, this is mathematics. No, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The number of rooms is not dictated here. We know how many gates there are; we don’t know how many rooms there are. What does this thing actually mean? The gates of understanding are understanding one thing from another. This is mathematics, right? In geometry—we all know this—there are a few axioms, and from them we derive conclusions by means of certain principles, certain logical principles; we derive conclusions from the basic assumptions. That is the power called understanding. Understanding means deriving one thing from another, understanding one thing from another. So how do you understand the first thing? From what? From nothing—from itself. Right? What comes before understanding in the sefirot? Wisdom. And wisdom is the sefirah that comes before understanding. The fiftieth gate that Nachmanides is talking about is called wisdom. And from that gate—let’s call them axioms for the sake of the logical parable—yes, those are the axioms. They don’t derive from anywhere else. They have no prior gate. They don’t come from some other place. We simply know them in some immediate way; we know that this is so. From there on, we begin deriving things with gates; we move from room to room. Through the logical principles—which in this parable are the gates of understanding—we discover additional propositions that follow from the foundational assumptions. Okay? Now such a structure can be approached in two ways, and today we know both of them. One way says: everything is arbitrary. Since the basic assumptions have no proofs—there are no proofs for the basic assumptions—and since that’s so, I can adopt them or I can adopt their opposite. Everything is arbitrary. And if so, then obviously what is derived from them is also arbitrary. If the basic assumptions contain no information, then everything derived from them is conditional information. If the assumption is true, then the conclusion is true. But once the assumption is arbitrary, the conclusion is arbitrary too. So if I ask someone with that kind of position, what is the sum of the angles in a triangle? He has to tell me: I don’t know. If you assume the assumptions of Euclidean geometry, then the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. And if you don’t assume that, then not. Right? There can be other geometries too. So that is the way such a person ought to answer me. But there can also be another approach. There can be an approach that says: our basic assumptions do not come from anywhere. We do not know them on the basis of earlier principles—but not because they are arbitrary. Rather, because they are so clear that we don’t need to derive them from other principles. There are no principles clearer than these. It’s simply obvious that this is so. We know it in an immediate way—that it’s simply so. A single straight line passes between two points—that is a simple axiom. Does anyone regard that axiom as something arbitrary? Would anyone accept as legitimate a person who comes here and tells me: look, in my view, three straight lines pass between two points, not one. Do you have a proof that they don’t? I don’t have a proof that they don’t. Fine—so you think one, and I think three. I’d hospitalize him. I have no proof for him. Why would I hospitalize him? Because there are things that are self-evident. So what if I don’t have a proof? There are things for which I have no proof—but on the contrary, what is a proof? A proof is always taking something that is not fully clear and grounding it in something even clearer, right? The clearest things there are have nothing further on which to ground them. There is nothing clearer than they are. So the assumptions will always be the clearest things there are, and therefore they do not need more foundational principles from which to emerge. These two approaches are exactly the approach of the line and the approach of the circle. This skeptical approach, which says that basically the basic assumptions are arbitrary, is an approach that says everything is arbitrary. Since everything that is proved is always proved on the basis of basic assumptions, and if all the basic assumptions are arbitrary, then everything proved is arbitrary too. So everything is arbitrary. That is the approach of the circle, where the first gate moves me to a room—gate, room, gate, room, gate—and suddenly I find myself in the first room. Why? Because I cannot build any solid information out of this. All I can know is: if this, then that; if this, then that. It is a model that has only understanding, without wisdom—only the conditional thing. From this principle I learn that principle. But is the second principle true? I have no idea. I only know that it follows from the previous principle. That’s all. The second approach is the approach of the line. The line basically tells us that deep inside there is a room to which no gate leads. No gate leads to it. Why not? Because it is self-evident. And note: it is also not just a starting point in the sense that everything is arbitrary and this is simply the point from which I started. No! It is truth in the fullest sense. That is wisdom. Wisdom is something that does not derive from something prior to it; I simply know it that way. From it, if I understand that there is such a thing as wisdom, I can derive from it through the gates of understanding all the other things that follow from it. Then, as far as I’m concerned, everything contains information. Someone who accepts the basic assumptions of geometry, the axioms of geometry, then all the propositions of geometry are, for him, propositions that contain information. But someone who does not accept the axioms has emptied the whole structure of its content. The whole structure remains devoid of any factual meaning—that is, devoid of information, with only conditional relations. So the gates of understanding actually signify the ability to understand one thing from another, and there are forty-nine such gates. The fiftieth gate is a gate that does not come from anywhere. That is called the gate of wisdom. And that is what Nachmanides means when he says that the fiftieth gate is different. It was not created from anywhere; it stands on its own. The other gates create room from room, so every proposition I encounter in geometry comes from previous propositions; it comes from somewhere, it is created from somewhere. But the axioms are not created from anywhere—they are simply there. Either I accept them or I don’t, but if I understand that they are true, then they are simply there. They were not created from anywhere. That is what Nachmanides is saying. That is wisdom. Everything sits there. Meaning, everything else is just drawing outward from those things what is already latent within them. Understanding cannot produce new information. It can expose information that is already hidden in the assumptions in some way. I don’t always fully perceive that; the logical rules help me expose it, help me bring to the table the information hidden within those assumptions. So what actually happens? What is the difference between these two models? The circular model is a model that understands that there are only forty-nine gates. It does not believe in the existence of the fiftieth gate. And what are these gates? The same gates as understanding—those very same gates. They are not different gates. There are forty-nine gates of understanding and forty-nine gates of impurity. Those same gates, which are the forty-nine gates of understanding, are the gates of impurity. What’s the difference? If there is a room at the end—the fiftieth gate, wisdom—then these are called the gates of understanding. If there is no room at the end and it ends in a circle that closes on itself, then that itself becomes the gates of impurity. What is impurity? Who is the ultimate source of impurity? A corpse. What is a corpse? A corpse is a person severed from the root of his life. Impurity is severance from a root, always. In its essence, impurity is severance from a root—that is the concept of impurity. In other words, when you have forty-nine gates of understanding without a root, they are gates of impurity. That is why this is the opposite of the gates of understanding. The opposite of the gates of understanding is the gates of impurity. In that lies the meaning, for example, of the wicked son versus the wise son in the Passover Haggadah. This is also the concept of the wickedness of that Greek figure whom Nachmanides brings at the end. What does that Greek say? What I have not grasped, what I have no proof for, does not exist. Now obviously, the moment you say such a thing, then nothing exists. Because there is no such thing as having a proof that is not conditional on other things for which you have no proof. There is no such thing. Proof is always a reduction to assumptions, right? If there are no assumptions, there are no proofs. If you do not believe in the truth of your basic assumptions, then even the illusion you have that the things you have proven are things you know—that too is just an illusion. Everything is illusion. And therefore that Greek—how does Nachmanides put it there? “That Greek trained his mind to think and persisted in his wickedness, for every matter he could not attain by his reasoning was not true.” Why is that such great wickedness? Because in the end it is contempt for everything. It is contempt for everything, because there is nothing you can truly arrive at in an unconditional way. And so in the end nothing remains. Nachmanides says: all this I have revealed to you, this secret of Ibn Ezra regarding the gates of understanding. He did not mention the gates of understanding versus the gates of impurity. But basically, to go all the way on the side of holiness is to arrive in the innermost sanctuary. What is that? To arrive at the room of wisdom, right? The foundation of the whole chain of understanding. To go all the way in the direction of impurity is to pass through the forty-nine gates of understanding while thinking there is nothing at the end. If there is nothing at the end, where do I find myself at the end of the process? At the starting point, with the fact that I can slaughter it and eat it.

[Speaker C] That’s why they’re identical too.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore, of course, they are completely identical. When the children of Israel left Egypt, there was a fear that they would sink into the fiftieth gate. But there is no fiftieth gate—people asked about this—so how do you sink into it? That is what sinking into the fiftieth gate means: to think like Aristotle, that something not proven is not true—not merely that it is not certain. I think it’s healthy to think that something unproven is not certain. But to think that it is not true and cannot be true—that is to sink into the fiftieth gate; that itself is sinking into the fiftieth gate. To sink into the fiftieth gate is to be annihilated, to disappear, to disappear intellectually.

[Speaker B] The absence of the fiftieth gate is the sinking into it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning, to enter such a vacuum that takes over all of reality—you can’t get out of it. Try persuading someone who accepts nothing as true—of anything. Anything at all. Impossible. It’s a black hole. It’s a black hole. You sink into that gate, and you can’t get out of it. And therefore, even though the fiftieth gate does not exist, you can still sink into it. Beyond the forty-nine. Yes, exactly.

[Speaker B] Meaning, you’re beyond the forty-nine with nothing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’ve already gone past the forty-nine.

[Speaker B] That is the fiftieth gate.