The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 32
This transcript was generated automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The philosophers’ picture: an unmediated gap and negative attributes
- The innovation of Kabbalah: mediating worlds and positive attributes
- Kabbalistic concepts, “projections,” and understanding without formulation
- Maimonides and negative attributes: “engraving around the interior” and a positive feeling
- Notes on Rabbi Hasdai Crescas and Rabbi Yosef Albo, and the connection to Aristotelianism
- Section 10: “In the negation of attributes there is nothing” versus “For it is no empty thing for you”
- A methodological crossroads: “one must find a special way” and the move to auditory logic
- The need for positive description and the question of “manifestations” versus “the thing in itself”
- The debate over the value of negative attributes and the gap between “not cruel” and “merciful”
- A conceptual system as the ability to formulate: the example of Freud and Maimonides without kabbalistic terminology
- Positive and negative commandments as illustrating the failure of logic and the intuition beyond it
- Section 11: “There is a middle term between negation and affirmation” and a prophetic hint of glory and the Shekhinah
- Analogy as an alternative logic: the analogue, the order of the world, and a hidden assumption
Summary
General Overview
Between the human being and divinity there is no “vacuum,” but rather a hierarchy of worlds that mediate between the created being and the Emanator, and the infinite gap is not presented as a direct leap from the created world to that which lies beyond all speech. The philosophical picture depicts a situation in which all human language belongs to the separate worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, and therefore cannot describe divinity except through negative attributes, whereas Kabbalah adds a further tier of worlds such as Atzilut and Adam Kadmon, which make it possible to speak in positive terms about powers and names that were created to serve as attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He. Even according to Maimonides, negative attributes are not merely a “blank zero,” because the accumulation of negations creates closeness and inner apprehension. But the Nazir argues that a path and a method are needed beyond philosophical logic in order to explain how positive understanding is constructed without definitions, and in this way he shifts the discussion to auditory logic and analogical logic.
The philosophers’ picture: an unmediated gap and negative attributes
According to the philosophers’ approach, the whole created world exists within a framework in which human language belongs to the separate worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, and above them there is “nothing,” in the sense that divinity is conceived as so abstract that one cannot speak about it. One can only say what it is not. This approach creates a situation in which there is no mediation between the created world and the Creator, and therefore the only possible descriptions are negative ones, because everything said in human language introduces concepts from the separate worlds. This conceptual abyss is identified with the transition to what is above the spheres, and philosophy therefore reduces description to what divinity is not.
The innovation of Kabbalah: mediating worlds and positive attributes
Kabbalah adds that there is “something along the way” between Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah and the Emanator—above all the world of Atzilut and higher, including Adam Kadmon, the line, and the contraction. In the world of Atzilut there are powers and names that are created entities whose role is to be attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He—characteristics or operative powers. Therefore one can describe them in entirely positive terms, even though one is not speaking about the Emanator Himself. The Emanator, or the Infinite, clothes Himself within them in the sense of “He and His instruments are one,” and so on, and the discussion focuses on the positive attributes of the powers and the sefirot, not on the essence of the Emanator, which lies outside all discussion. Kabbalah does not contradict philosophy, but adds another tier, because in the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah even Kabbalah agrees that human speech leads only to negative description. Only in the mediating worlds is positive speech possible—speech that is not drawn from our own world.
Kabbalistic concepts, “projections,” and understanding without formulation
Kabbalistic concepts such as Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Chokhmah, and Binah do not directly mean forms of governance in our world. Rather, those modes of governance are a “projection” of the sefirot onto the lower worlds, not the sefirot themselves. The use of these concepts creates understanding in students even when they cannot formulate that understanding in ordinary language, and the understanding is described as a kind of feeling rather than a definition. Leshem argues sharply against the claim that all of Kabbalah is merely metaphor for powers of governance in the world, because that would turn Kabbalah into philosophy in another language, whereas the real meaning is that “where philosophy ends, Kabbalah begins”—in the move from the realm of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah to Atzilut. The pattern of “seal and imprint” describes a relation in which what is above is represented below, but is not identical with it.
Maimonides and negative attributes: “engraving around the interior” and a positive feeling
Maimonides states that everything one adds by way of negation with regard to Him, blessed be He, brings one closer to apprehension, and he devotes effort to showing that negative attributes are not meaningless. The image of “engraving around the interior” describes the creation of a positive form by carving away what surrounds it, so that after negating all the attributes, something is formed in the middle that points to understanding, even though one cannot speak of it positively. This inner understanding is perceived as stronger than the ability to formulate it, and is described as the ability of the “divine parts” within a person to develop a real feeling in relation to divinity, even when human tools require negative formulation. Kabbalah is presented as an attempt to give “formulations” to that raw feeling that Maimonides identifies as the result of the process of negation, but those formulations are not in our language; they are in a terminology intended specifically for that purpose.
Notes on Rabbi Hasdai Crescas and Rabbi Yosef Albo, and the connection to Aristotelianism
In note 29, Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is cited (Or Hashem, discourse 1, general principle 3, chapter 3) as saying that positive attributes are unavoidable and that there is no escaping the attribution of essential attributes to Him, blessed be He, thereby challenging the doctrine of negative attributes. It is then noted that his student, Rabbi Yosef Albo, in Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, upholds Maimonides’ view that only negating attributes can be correctly predicated of Him. Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is described as having freed the new Jewish philosophy from the yoke of scholastic Aristotelian philosophy; he is also said to have influenced Spinoza, and there are claims that he integrates kabbalistic concepts into his philosophy. He is classified more as a thinker in Jewish thought than as a pure philosopher, a link in the transition from philosophy to Jewish thought and Kabbalah, within a developmental axis in which the Maharal is described as a central founder of Jewish thought and the Ari as representing a move into Kabbalah at roughly the same period.
Section 10: “In the negation of attributes there is nothing” versus “For it is no empty thing for you”
Section 10 states that “in the negation of attributes there is nothing, a blank void,” and the mutakallimun called those who denied essential attributes “people of emptiness.” According to the author of Emunah Ramah as well, negations remove many doubts but do not communicate anything—that is, they solve problems but do not add direct knowledge of divinity. Against this, verses are brought such as “For it is no empty thing for you, because it is your life and the length of your days” and “And you who cleave to the Lord your God are all alive today,” and it is established that negations lead to cleaving and closeness. The Guide says that everything one adds by way of negation brings one nearer to apprehension, and a parallel formulation is also cited according to which “the wisest of all human beings in the secret of the Creator is the most ignorant of them all,” and the one who is most ignorant regarding Him is the wisest—thus attributing wisdom to the capacity to negate positive attributes.
A methodological crossroads: “one must find a special way” and the move to auditory logic
It is said that here we reach a central crossroads in the book, because the doctrine of negative attributes is only an introduction to the book’s main point, which begins in the next section. The book seeks a path that does not suffice with negations that build nothing alongside them. It is argued that there is no way, within philosophical language and method, to explain how negative attributes construct positive understanding. Therefore one must seek a method and a conceptual system that rise above philosophy. The continuation of the essay deals with the revealed aspect of this new method, called “auditory logic,” while the second book deals with the hidden dimension, namely direct engagement with the world of Atzilut, while also claiming that the revealed realm too contains important tools that need to be recognized.
The need for positive description and the question of “manifestations” versus “the thing in itself”
A question is raised: why is positive description needed at all, if even with human beings we do not fully grasp the person himself, and yet we can still have relationships and understand through manifestations? The answer given is that understanding manifestations in human beings is still positive understanding, not negative, and that one cannot enter into relations with an “X” about which one has no concept, because actions alone do not answer the question “who is he?” The example “Shakespeare composed Macbeth” is brought to argue that a name is not merely a bundle of characteristics, but generates a grasp of the thing itself and not only of its actions, unlike the analytic temptation to reduce it to “whoever composed Othello also composed Macbeth.” It is argued that grasping “the thing in itself” is not a problem unique to divinity, but according to the Nazir there is a way to grasp it—unlike Kant—and the continuation of the essay is also supposed to address “Kant’s error.”
The debate over the value of negative attributes and the gap between “not cruel” and “merciful”
An opposite problem is presented from the one raised by the philosophers: instead of saying that negative attributes say nothing, it is claimed that they “say everything,” because “merciful” seems equivalent to “not cruel,” and therefore it is not clear what is gained by changing the wording. The possibility is rejected of saying that “merciful” and “cruel” are not relevant at all and that one might therefore just as well say “cruel,” because then the description becomes completely uninformative and clashes with the religious intuition that distinguishes between a true statement and heresy. A distinction is proposed according to which “not cruel” is not identical with “merciful,” because between opposites there is a gap that is not captured as a binary axis; the negation points to a higher concept for which ordinary language has no word. The description of an axis on which poles like shame and brazenness or humility and pride sit is used to show that there is an “axis” that has no name, and negation is trying to hint at that layer, where there is no positive wording in our vocabulary.
A conceptual system as the ability to formulate: the example of Freud and Maimonides without kabbalistic terminology
It is argued that a conceptual system makes it possible to think, classify phenomena, and argue, even if part of its content is mistaken. The example is Freud, who created a psychological language within which discussion is possible even if one disagrees with him. From this it is argued that Maimonides had insights regarding Atzilut at the level of inner feeling, but without the kabbalistic conceptual system he could not develop an orderly formulation and move further. Kabbalah is presented as a conceptual system that was “given,” not invented, in order to make positive formulation possible in a realm where the insights exist but philosophical formulation gets stuck.
Positive and negative commandments as illustrating the failure of logic and the intuition beyond it
A comparison is brought between “You shall make a parapet for your roof” and “You shall not bring blood upon your house” in order to show that positive and negative formulation are not equivalent in the religious experience, even if logically they appear to be mere double negation. It is argued that the intuitive difference between passive omission and positive action, and between failure to fulfill a will and frontal opposition to it, points to “something in between” that simple logic cannot define. The conclusion is that intuition detects a layer beyond logic, that logic covers only part of the field of human thought, and that this is what the new method is aiming at as it seeks to move beyond analytic thinking.
Section 11: “There is a middle term between negation and affirmation” and a prophetic hint of glory and the Shekhinah
Section 11 explicitly states that there is a middle term between negation and affirmation, and that negation carries affirmation within it as “a passage, a metaphor, a hint toward something higher than itself.” The example of “holy” is given: its meaning is separate and set apart, yet it is affirmative in the sense of “holiness from the essential holy, the being of holiness,” and after the attributes are negated in their external sense, they rise in their inner, higher sense. It is noted that Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi encounters complications in the path of prophetic hinting, and the question is raised: “How can one give thanks in the name of that about which there is no hint?” The answer is given through “a prophetic hint, by means of something intermediate, called glory and Shekhinah.” Glory and Shekhinah are described as concepts of the world of Atzilut and as a mediator that makes possible the leap from the human world of concepts to the higher realm.
Analogy as an alternative logic: the analogue, the order of the world, and a hidden assumption
It is said, “I am merely comparing the highest cause with the known action,” the “order of the world,” according to a human analogy between causes and divine actions, while the nature of the highest cause itself remains unknown. Analogical logic is presented as an alternative to deductive logic, and as part of “the human quality unique to Hebrew-Semitic logic.” The analogy is illustrated by the claim that since Socrates and our forefather Jacob are both human beings, then if Socrates is mortal, apparently Jacob is mortal too. This is described as an inference that is not necessary in the strict sense, but operates through similarity. It is emphasized that every analogy presupposes a hidden assumption: that the connection between the shared property and the inferred property is a causal-essential connection. Without that assumption, analogy would collapse into irrelevant inferences, such as moving from “human being” to “blond.” It is argued that the attempt to ground the hidden assumption through induction leads to the conclusion that induction too rests on analogy, and a future discussion is hinted at concerning Hume and the question of causality.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Between us and divinity, it isn’t a vacuum, it isn’t an infinite gap. It is an infinite gap, but it’s not located exactly right above us; it stands above some further hierarchy. Meaning, the picture drawn by the philosophers is as if there is some situation where we are here in this world—angels, whatever, but the whole created world is here—and divinity is some abstract thing, nothingness, as they say, and you can’t speak about it, you can only say what it is not. Why can you only say what it is not? Because everything we say is said in our language, and our language belongs to the separate worlds—Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. I’m already describing the philosophers in kabbalistic terms, of course. And above Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, from their point of view, there is nothing. And that is the abyss between Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah and the world above the spheres—the spheres below the spheres, those are already ancient notions, and you see them here too. And that’s the whole world-picture of the philosophers. So in effect, for the philosophers there is no mediation at all between the created world and divinity, between the world and the Creator. Therefore, necessarily, the only possible descriptions are negative descriptions. The innovation of Kabbalah is that there is something in between. There are positive attributes of God—that is, powers, the world of Atzilut and above, yes, all of Atzilut. The world of Atzilut, and then the lower part of Atzilut—there is the world of Adam Kadmon, the line, and the contraction; we spoke a bit about these things. And all these worlds of Atzilut are really worlds that stand between us and the Emanator Himself. Now of course we don’t speak about the Emanator Himself; about that we still say nothing. But the attributes of the Emanator are positive attributes, because these attributes are really the powers or the names that exist in the world of Atzilut. And these are attributes that are actually nouns—we talked about this a bit too—they are created entities whose role is to be attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, characteristics or powers of action of the Holy One, blessed be He. And those can be described in entirely positive terms. And the Holy One, blessed be He—or the Emanator, or the Infinite, not even the Emanator—clothes Himself within them in the form of “He and His instruments are one,” and so on, but we speak about them, and one can speak about them positively. Now of course this is still not about the Emanator Himself; the Emanator Himself is outside the whole discussion. But even so, one can speak in positive attributes. That’s the point that Kabbalah has and philosophy does not. And when you look at it this way, as we saw here, then it’s not really a contradiction either, because philosophy is right within the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. Meaning, there the description is correct; Kabbalah too would agree with that. All Kabbalah does is add another layer. It says that there are additional worlds between the separate worlds—Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—and the Emanator. In those worlds it is already possible to speak positively, because in any case these are concepts not drawn from our world. The concepts we speak about there—sefirot and all kinds of things like that—are not concepts drawn from our world. And since they are not drawn from our world, that is their whole purpose: to describe divinity positively, because that is why they were created. Everything we do in the philosophical world is describe divinity in concepts that were really created to serve us, concepts that belong to our language. So we have no choice but to twist ourselves into negative descriptions. But the kabbalistic concepts are something whose conceptual system, at least, was given. It’s not something people discovered or invented; it’s something given. And it was given to us precisely because it is a conceptual system, a conceptual world, within which one can describe divinity positively. It is a conceptual world that belongs to Atzilut. And you can find all sorts of meanings. You can see that a certain sefirah has some meaning here in our world, or in our worlds, in the form of some way of governance or another—but that is not the meaning of the sefirah; that is its projection, its projection onto the lower worlds. It is not the sefirah itself. And this is not meaningless, not devoid of meaning. And that is really the end of section 19—I’m about to read it now—because somehow it still develops: it is lacking formulation, but it is not lacking meaning. Because when people speak about this, then in fact—you can ask people, I don’t know what your experience is with this—but ask people who study a bit of Kabbalah and use concepts like these, and you’ll see that some sort of understanding develops in them.
[Speaker B] But maybe it isn’t formulated?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how one formulates understanding in any field, but here certainly not. But somehow you begin to use concepts like Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Chokhmah, Binah, and so on, in a way that says something to you. Now what exactly it says to you, I don’t know. It’s a conceptual system that you somehow manage to live.
[Speaker B] If I understand it, then is that a problematic understanding? If I understand it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then you understand it in some kind of feeling, if I—
[Speaker B] If I can define it for myself in my head, then that’s the problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t define it in your head; you understand it. That’s something else. You can’t put it into your language, into your vocabulary—obviously not. All you can put in are little projections of the matter. This is a bit of the dispute that Leshem has with the Ramchal and with… and with Jews even more extreme than the Ramchal, who claimed that all of Kabbalah is really only metaphor, but in practice it describes powers of governance in these worlds. And he attacks this furiously, because that is exactly the point. You’re basically turning Kabbalah into philosophy in another language, and that is exactly not right. Meaning, the whole meaning of Kabbalah is what we already quoted—I don’t know who the source is—that where philosophy ends, Kabbalah begins. It is not a description of the same thing in another language. It’s that in the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, philosophy ends, and from there onward Atzilut begins and Kabbalah begins. So there are projections downward. Everything above is like a seal and an imprint: it has something that represents it below, but it is not itself. And therefore there can be some positive understanding of divinity. Understanding, yes; formulation and definitions, no.
[Speaker B] So then couldn’t there also be understanding without Kabbalah? It could also define it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There can be without Kabbalah, and that’s what Maimonides says: that the more you continue with negative attributes, some kind of understanding nevertheless develops in you. Right, that’s what he writes in the Guide, and it’s also—
[Speaker B] connected to that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] that your inner understanding is stronger than your ability to formulate it, meaning formulation and definition. There are divine parts within you that can develop a feeling of understanding in relation to divinity—not an illusion of understanding, a real feeling of understanding in relation to divinity. True, to formulate it and use properly human tools, which are only human, won’t work. You have to arrive at negative attributes. But Maimonides, exactly against that, devotes the whole discussion to saying: don’t think that negative attributes say nothing. Negative attributes, after you have done them all, are all that you can reach by means of the tools of formulation and definition. But after you’ve done all that, it’s like engraving around the interior, right? Engraving around the interior means you create the letter by engraving everything around it. After you engrave everything around it, a letter is formed in the middle. Meaning, you negated all these things from the Holy One, blessed be He, and in the middle something is formed that does tell you something. True, you can’t speak about it positively, but I think this is also fairly simple on the level of feeling. Let everyone examine it within himself. It seems to me that some feeling of what divinity is does indeed develop—a positive feeling too—even through the means of negative attributes. Now Kabbalah tries to give this some formulations. What do I mean by formulations? Formulations not in our language—it sort of invents a terminology suited precisely to this. But that is the whole innovation, meaning the attempt to give positive formulation to that raw feeling that can also develop in Maimonides after he negates all the things that need to be negated. So basically maybe we should read section 10. It seems to me we already read section 10, right? Let’s just read it quickly because it really serves as a kind of summary of the passage dealing with negative attributes. Maybe one more note before that. At the bottom of the previous page there’s some note, at the end of the page, the last paragraph there in note 29. So he says, according to Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, Or Hashem, discourse 1, general principle 3, chapter 3—you see? At the bottom of page 80, in the notes. The last paragraph in the notes. The notes are also by the Nazir, of course. According to Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, Or Hashem, discourse 1, general principle 3, chapter 3, positive attributes are unavoidable, and there is no escape from attributing essential attributes to Him, blessed be He. Rabbi Hasdai Crescas challenged this whole claim about negative attributes. But his student, in Sefer Ha-Ikkarim—Rabbi Yosef Albo, author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, was Rabbi Hasdai Crescas’s student—essay two, and so on, confirms Maimonides’ opinion that the negating attributes are the correct ones with regard to Him. Meaning, he doesn’t agree with Crescas. But Rabbi Hasdai Crescas—it’s well known, and if anyone wants, it’s also mentioned here on page 120. So he says: Rabbi Hasdai Crescas in Or Hashem freed the Torah of Israel and the new Jewish philosophy from the yoke of scholastic Aristotelian philosophy.
[Speaker B] They also say Spinoza was influenced by him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s well known. In various descriptions of Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, people notice that he does not belong to the line of the Jewish Aristotelian philosophers, the Aristotelians. And in fact there are many claims that he integrates kabbalistic concepts into his philosophy. There’s some controversy around that.
[Speaker B] He addresses it in the book, he addresses it, and he says that he doesn’t know—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says maybe he doesn’t know, but his way of thinking does introduce certain kabbalistic elements. So there’s some controversy over how to classify him—whether as a philosopher or… I would classify him, as we once read, as a man of Jewish thought. Jewish thought is not Jewish philosophy, as we already discussed. There’s no such thing as Jewish philosophy. But Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is not a philosopher; he is a man of Jewish thought. He also uses philosophical arguments, and he deals with philosophical problems, but the method, or way of thinking, is not philosophy. Not pure philosophy. So you see it here too—here too he protests against Aristotelian domination. The matter of negative attributes is already basically found in Aristotle.
[Speaker B] Was that why he wrote the book? Huh? Was that why he wrote the book? Which book?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is really the first who begins to speak—he also stands toward the end of the period of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), yes, end of the 14th century I think, beginning of the 15th. He gives here some discussion—I’m trying to remember when he died, if I recall correctly. He was a contemporary of the Rivash.
[Speaker B] A student of the Ran.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he’s really already near the end of the period of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and with him the first buds of positive attributes begin. And he also bridges between philosophy and Kabbalah, as a very interesting link in the chain from several perspectives. Also in the transition from philosophy to Jewish thought and Kabbalah—yes, the Maharal is really the major pioneer of what is called Jewish thought. The Maharal is not a philosopher, that’s clear. And also in the sense of the transition to Kabbalah, not only to Jewish thought—the Ari is roughly from the same period as the Maharal, maybe a little earlier. So Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is an important link in that chain, and it’s worth looking into various things in his writings to see how the whole business flows. That is, for someone who relates to intellectual history as some kind of continuous axis. That’s a question of historiosophy—whether we think there is here some continuous process of the development of thought. If so, Rabbi Hasdai Crescas is an important link. Someone whose worldview basically sees each thinker as standing on his own—then each thinker stands on his own. It seems to me that that’s not entirely correct, at least. Anyway, in section 10 he says this: In the negation of attributes there is nothing, a blank void. And so the mutakallimun called those who denied essential attributes—above, I think—people of emptiness. Even according to the author of Emunah Ramah—that’s the Raavad, but not the author of the glosses—the negations, even if they remove many doubts, communicate nothing. Meaning, in other words, negations are useful—they solve many philosophical problems—but in practice they say nothing. To say that all attributes are negative attributes solves various problems, but bottom line, ask me whether I now know anything about divinity as a result of this negative description—the answer is no. Usually this solves exactly that kind of problem, the problem of those who think they know something about divinity and then get entangled in all kinds of complications. So he says to them: how do you solve the problems? You tell them, you know nothing about divinity, and therefore there is no problem. That is, you don’t need to get tangled up in anything. Yes, it’s a scheme for solving problems by means of negative attributes. He says, however, “For it is no empty thing for you, because it is your life and the length of your days,” and “You who cleave to the Lord your God are all alive today,” “For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we shall see light,” and “As for me, closeness to God is good.” The Guide says: everything you add by way of negation concerning Him, blessed be He, brings you closer to apprehension and you become closer to Him. We already saw parallel quotations to this in section 8, for example, on page 109: “The wisest of all human beings in the secret of the Creator is the most ignorant of them all. And the one who is the most ignorant of them all concerning Him is the wisest in the secret of the Creator.” The more you negate Him, the less you seem to know about Him—what does that mean? You say He is not wicked, not cruel, not all sorts of things like that, so apparently you know less and less about Him. But in fact, the less and less you know about Him, the more you know about Him. That is the one who is wiser in the wisdom of the Creator: whoever is more ignorant in positive attributes is wiser in negative attributes. That is really what he’s saying. It’s also in Duties of the Heart, in section 6—almost the same sentence is quoted. I wonder whether one is not literally taken from the other. In any case: but how? Rather, one must find a special path that ascends to the supreme Name, blessed be He. Here this is a very central crossroads in the book, this line, this section. Because we already said that the whole doctrine of negative attributes—all the details we didn’t go into too much, attributes of consequence, relational attributes, all kinds of things—that’s the doctrine of attributes; I’m not going into it too much. I also don’t understand it all that well and I’m not that interested in it. But all the negative attributes are a kind of introduction to what is really the book’s central point, which begins now, in the next section. Here the core of the book begins. And basically, as we already explained, this comes to explain that it cannot be that we make do only with things that say nothing, only with negative attributes. There is no point merely negating various things from the Holy One, blessed be He, if that does not simultaneously build something positive, like engraving around the interior, as we said before—like Maimonides says. Now the question is how that happens. Apparently negative attributes, as he began this section, contain nothing. Zero, void. And yet something positive is built here, as Maimonides himself says. Now how do you describe that? There is no way at all, in philosophical language and method, to understand it. That’s the claim. Meaning, now we have to look for some path that rises above philosophy. Both a method, not just a conceptual system—a conceptual system and a method that go beyond philosophy. And by means of that he is supposed to try somehow to bring the understanding closer to us, and sharpen for us the tools for how, after all, one creates understanding where philosophy stops. That is really the introduction. The continuation of the essay deals with the revealed side of this new method, auditory logic—that’s the title of the book. And the second book deals with the hidden side, which is really the core of the method itself. That is direct engagement with the world of Atzilut. But his claim is that even in the revealed world we have such tools, and it is very important to recognize them. So that is the subject of the following sections. But now I’ll just summarize a bit what we finished last class—it was a bit quick and maybe not entirely clear. I’ll try to summarize it a little.
[Speaker B] I still haven’t understood exactly why—what is lacking? Why do we so badly want to understand positive things? I didn’t get it. With human beings I don’t understand exactly what he is, and still I can create a relationship with him, I can do various things with him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly—but what is that? You understand something positive. With his manifestations, I only deal with—
[Speaker B] his manifestations, and still I manage fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But his manifestations you understand positively, not negatively.
[Speaker B] How does that affect me? Here too, with the Holy One, blessed be He, I can see His manifestations—He brings rain, I know something positive.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But when people say He is merciful—if you take that as an attribute of action, then fine. But many of the philosophers argued that it is not an attribute of action. It is His attribute only in a negating sense. So now I don’t understand—so do I know something about Him or do I know nothing about Him? That’s the claim: that even description through actions is also a negative description. Do you understand? Now the fact that He has mercy on someone is also some kind of negative description. At least here there are already nuances among the different philosophers.
[Speaker C] Isn’t an attribute of actions just partiality of something?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is how you understand the causes. Why indeed do attributes have to be negative? Because the actions of the Holy One, blessed be He, are also apparently infinite. Yes, they too are distinct.
[Speaker C] You can refer to the One who took us out of Egypt.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, in the historical sense. That’s clear. That’s already really an attribute somehow distant from Him. It isn’t a description of Him in any sense; it’s only a description of something He did. It’s not a description of Him, only a report of something He did. I’m relating, at least in some peripheral way, to Him Himself. So—
[Speaker B] Then let’s stay only on the level of what He did, so that if I say “merciful” and that does me good, if I say “compassionate”—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And we already lingered over this in the last few times: to say that X took me out of Egypt is a statement without content. We already talked about that several times. Right, but we said that I need to say something about that X.
[Speaker B] Why do I need to say it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can live with that X. You can live with anything, but that doesn’t mean it says anything.
[Speaker B] Yes, but I have interactions like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have no interaction with it at all.
[Speaker B] You can’t be in an interaction—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] with something you don’t know who it is.
[Speaker B] He took me out of Egypt and gives me rain. Who is He?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was someone who took me out of Egypt—that’s all I know.
[Speaker B] But who is He?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who is He? What do I know, who He is? I don’t know. No, no—you do know who He is. You know who He is. Do I know who He is? Yes, you know who He is. You have certain concepts. I’m not saying you know Him as He knows Himself, but you definitely form positive concepts about Him Himself through His manifestations.
[Speaker B] I think it only gets reduced to His manifestations. No, no, that’s exactly the point.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s true, and therefore your comment is important in the sense that really—and we’ve noted this several times already—the problem of grasping the thing in itself is not unique to divinity. Grasping the thing in itself is something I seemingly can’t do even with ordinary things. The Nazir’s claim is that this is not true. There is a way to grasp the thing in itself, unlike Kant. Later in the essay we’ll get to Kant’s error; we’ll talk about it more. But it looks as if some lines are missing here.
[Speaker B] He doesn’t—he has room to say that it’s only manifestations.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but why? How can you interact with someone with whom you have no interaction? What do you know? You know that he did this and did that, but who is the one who did this and did that and looks like this and that? What is he?
[Speaker B] With people too it’s the same, and that’s what I’m saying.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not true, no, what do you mean? With people it’s not the same either.
[Speaker B] I think I know only their manifestations.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m sure not. I’m sure not. You have some kind of feeling that—let me give you the most banal example. If I tell you that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth—we already talked about this once, I think, as an amusing example. Not his cousin, who was also named Shakespeare. It’s a nice joke. But really it is a joke. Because if I tell you it was his cousin who was also named Shakespeare, that will still tell you something. Meaning, when I say Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, that is not an empty statement. I said something here. There is some feeling in someone who hears that sentence that he heard something. He didn’t hear only that the author who wrote Macbeth was named Shakespeare. No, that’s not all he heard. When you say to someone—when you talk about Shakespeare—you conveyed, as we already said, that a name is a reference to the thing itself, to the matter of the thing. I conveyed to you somehow the possibility of relating to him himself, even before he wrote Macbeth. Amen.
[Speaker C] Maybe because it links me to a larger set of other actions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But actually in this context, for example, that’s not true.
[Speaker C] In this context that’s not true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because when I tell you that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, it is very tempting to think—and many analytic philosophers really do think this way—that all I told you is that whoever wrote Othello also wrote Macbeth. I didn’t tell you anything beyond that. I only connected characteristics. That is basically your claim. Meaning, all I do is connect various characteristics, but at no stage do I have contact with the subject of those characteristics itself. It seems to me the clear feeling is that this is not true. I don’t know how to justify it, because if I knew how to justify it then once again it would be formal and not about the matter itself. But all the same, I think the experience—I don’t know, at least mine, and it seems to me it exists in everyone else too—is that it is clear that we are also talking about the thing itself; we also grasp the thing itself.
[Speaker B] So with the Holy One, blessed be He, let’s make do with things that are manifestations—not create some thing that is something-in-itself that isn’t defined, just as Shakespeare isn’t defined for me, right? So let’s make do with manifestations.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But Shakespeare, when you say he is compassionate, you simply mean the plain sense of the word compassionate, even though everything you saw—you didn’t see his heart, you didn’t see his mind, and you didn’t see how he thinks or how he feels. So how do you know he is compassionate? Because you saw him give charity to a poor person, you saw him not taking a widow’s garment as collateral. Fine. So you assume that he is compassionate, assuming that we expound the reason of the verse. So you assume he is compassionate, but in your life you never actually saw that he is compassionate. How do you know he is compassionate? From his actions you infer something that is a description of the person himself. Right? Now here, you can understand this because the word compassionate belongs to the conceptual world that is relevant for describing Shakespeare, because he is a human being. Now exactly the same move exists with regard to the Holy One, blessed be He—that is the Nazir’s claim. It’s just that the concept compassionate does not really seize the matter by the horns, since it is a human concept. So we also need to create a terminological system that will help us with this, but the basic idea is that you are indeed right: it’s the same thing as identifying a human being. Exactly the same. Why am I asking? How do you know Shakespeare is compassionate? Because he cares in such ways. But when you say he is compassionate, for example, you don’t mean just that—you absolutely don’t mean just that. You wouldn’t dream of meaning only that. When you think, for example, about that person being compassionate, you also imagine to yourself what feelings passed through his heart or his mind when he gave the charity. You’re not only describing actions. But that you never saw in your life. So how do you know? So you infer it—you can say you infer it from yourself, you infer it, fine, okay—but those are exactly the tools by which, from actions, you create a description of the thing itself, of the agent. Now in the human world, as we said before, I take the conceptual world that I know from within myself and project it onto the human beings around me, because for them it is relevant. But with divinity that does not apply. So what is left? So the philosophers say: fine, then really there is nothing there, only actions. Just as you say. The analytic philosophers, let’s call them that in modern language—back then they weren’t called that yet. But that is how they understand the concept of divinity: that you really grasp nothing there. But Maimonides already feels that this is not right. Because even though he advocates negative attributes, he feels that the more and more you continue negating, some sort of positive understanding develops within you. Is this connected to negations? It’s connected to negations, of course. He says explicitly: the more you add in negation, the closer you will be.
[Speaker B] How is that connected?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does it mean that I—
[Speaker B] Negate—how does something positive develop?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just as you see: through the actions you infer that he is—
[Speaker B] Compassionate.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Through the ways he appears, you draw conclusions about him. Now, the way the Holy One, blessed be He, appears is that He does not appear. So you can say it in a negative way, but the path is the same path. From your external perception of Him, you infer something about Him.
[Speaker B] Fine, but with human beings I project—I try to imagine something from myself in relation to him. Here, with the Holy One, blessed be He—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly the point. Therefore they give you a terminological system that mediates—this is the purpose of Kabbalah. They give you a new terminological system that did not exist before.
[Speaker B] But Maimonides did not have that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore Maimonides really did have some sort of—well, the structure of his soul was like that of someone who knows Kabbalah. Within his soul there were parts built to grasp these dimensions. It just didn’t come out. So he had no way to formulate it.
[Speaker B] So what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he felt it. But obviously, anything we feel—when we formulate it, we have a much better way of dealing with it, right? We know that from various fields. We’ve talked about this more than once, right? About psychological terminology, for example—Freud invented all kinds of concepts in psychology. Now most of his things, in my opinion—though I am a very minor expert in these fields—are simply total nonsense. Things where it is clear that they have absolutely nothing to do with science. Meaning, there is just—these are simply more speculations, most of which are worthless and don’t even get off the ground. Sometimes he may be right, but even then he builds on isolated cases. He doesn’t build on—whoever knows Freud’s writings sees it: he describes individual cases; he doesn’t do statistics. But still, his importance and his genius—he was undoubtedly a genius—his importance and genius were that he created a conceptual system within which I can now even argue with him. Meaning, try to imagine that they put you in a situation where the whole conceptual system of psychology does not exist. Now you want to start investigating the human soul. How do you begin? You have no way to begin. You would not be able to start doing it at all. It doesn’t matter whether you adopt Freud’s statements or oppose them—you have no way either to adopt or to oppose them, because you have no language. You need some conceptual system, some set of drawers, in order to start sorting phenomena into them. Meaning: subconscious, repressed, taboo, totem—all these Freudian concepts are things about which you may disagree with him regarding the connections between them, regarding the laws he found linking the things together, or regarding the structure of the psyche, the way he arranges them one against another. But it gives you a conceptual system within which you can begin to speak. You can begin to sort psychological phenomena that you see around you. So therefore you can also argue with him. If he had not invented that language, you couldn’t even argue with him. You’d just say something and not know what to do. So a conceptual system is very important, even if perhaps the psychological insights themselves—fine, a conceptual system invented for you from outside, how does that help you with psychological insights? Psychological insights existed before him. There were people who had healthy psychological insight, obviously. You don’t need Freud for psychological intuition. But you see that the ability to formulate things, and an appropriate terminological system, helps you understand things better and study them—it is obvious that this is so. Therefore, it is true that Maimonides also had insights regarding divinity. But since he was not equipped with the kabbalistic conceptual system, he had a problem. He could not develop it, build from it an orderly structure, and try to organize those insights into some structured system and perhaps move further on. From such a system one creates unformulated insights on a higher level. Now we have a conceptual system. Behind that conceptual system too stand certain insights for which I already no longer have a conceptual system, but I have already advanced one step further. Meaning, it helped me advance one more step and create unformulated insights at a higher level—at the level of Adam Kadmon, of AK. I use the language of Atzilut and create insights about Adam Kadmon. Maimonides had insights in Atzilut because he used the language of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. Now last time I said that I am somewhat hesitating here over a certain problem. Most philosophers who dealt with negative attributes were troubled by the problem that negative attributes say nothing. What troubles me is the opposite problem—and we spoke about this at the end of last time—that negative attributes say everything. What do you gain at all by going to negative attributes? What is the difference between negative attributes and positive attributes? To say about the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is not cruel, and to say about Him that He is compassionate, is seemingly the same thing. What is the difference? I say of Him that He is compassionate; Maimonides tells me, no, that doesn’t apply—you cannot speak positively about the Holy One, blessed be He. The meaning, when it is said that He is compassionate and gracious, is that He is not cruel. How do you know that is the meaning? Because in the dictionary, compassionate means not cruel, right? That is how you know; otherwise you wouldn’t know that either. But if that is really so, then what is the difference between saying compassionate and saying not cruel? I don’t understand. So I say He is not cruel. Fine, that is called negative usage. But it is a description to exactly the same degree as the description that He is compassionate, right? Because if it were not the same description, then again how can Maimonides tell me that compassionate means only to tell you that He is not cruel? How do you know? Because you know that the dictionary meaning of compassionate is not cruel, right? But if that really is the dictionary meaning, then what difference does it make whether I use the negative term or the positive term? It is a positive description of the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker C] What we really wanted to say is both. Yes, exactly. No, it’s both not cruel and not compassionate.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, and if you say not cruel and not—then that is the other side we talked about. Then one might say—and as we saw in the name of the Kuzari on this point—regarding the subordination of the Holy One, blessed be He, to the concept of time, we spoke about that. So we said that the Kuzari, for example, both in the doctrine of attributes and, I think, also regarding time, says that it is more correct to say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is not within concepts of time at all. Not that compassionate applies to Him and therefore when I say He is compassionate I mean He is not cruel; rather, the concept compassionate and the concept—the concept compassionate and the concept cruel are simply not relevant to Him at all. They are human concepts. That is what the Kuzari seems to imply at the beginning of the second essay. The problem is that if so, then what difference is there? Then I can say about the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is cruel. Right? But we still choose the description that He is compassionate, and we are supposed to believe that and not its opposite. Meaning, someone who says He is cruel is clearly a heretic, and someone who says He is compassionate is a believer, right. Why? After all, if in truth cruel and compassionate both do not belong in His world as a description of the Holy One, blessed be He, then all the one who says compassionate is really saying is that the concept cruel is not relevant to Him—not that He is not cruel, but that the concept cruel is not relevant to Him. Then by the same token I can say that He is cruel in order to say that the concept compassionate is not relevant to Him. So do you want to say that I can just as well say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is cruel, to the same extent as when I say of Him that He is compassionate? I don’t think anyone can imagine saying such a thing, right? Therefore the simplistic solution that says that really the point of the concept is just to say that this whole conceptual system is not relevant to the Holy One, blessed be He—that is not correct. Because then indeed negative attributes say nothing. So I understand the sentence that negative attributes say nothing, but if so, then I can equally well say that He is cruel just as I say that He is compassionate; I’ll just interpret cruel to mean that the concept compassionate does not apply to Him, exactly as I interpret the term compassionate. Right? Therefore it seems to me that this is not what the advocates of negative attributes mean. But if that is not what they mean, then we are back where we started. So what are we claiming? We are claiming that if we say He is compassionate, all we mean to say is only that He is not cruel. The Torah does not say that He is not cruel; it says that He is compassionate. How does Maimonides know that what this means is not cruel? Because he knows that in the dictionary compassionate means not cruel, right? But if these really are two synonymous things, two parallel concepts that are the same thing, then what difference does it make whether you said He is not cruel or you said He is compassionate? I don’t understand. So this is a positive description and that is a positive description, and here you used the negative formulation of the description, and there the positive formulation. Therefore, what troubles me is not the problem that troubled the philosophers—that in the negation of attributes there is nothing, that they say nothing. What troubles me is exactly the opposite: what do you gain at all from a negative description? The negative description is just another language formulating the positive description; it is completely equivalent.
[Speaker C] Of course we can move on to the next stage.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if we move on to the next stage, then I don’t understand—so you—
[Speaker C] want to say that I can—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] say about the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is cruel to the same extent? That basically you are saying nothing. So forget it—then why do you say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth? And then what—you say, I’m not saying anything? Then I can also say the Holy One, blessed be He, is cruel and wicked and no one more wicked than He has ever arisen, and all sorts of things like that. Why? Because all that means is that goodness of heart does not belong in the description of the Holy One, blessed be He, and that is also equally true. So you understand that this description is completely uninformative. So let it go. It’s like “Have you finished saying all the praises of your Master?” yes—that’s what the Talmud says. Clearly the sense here is that the description compassionate has something that the description cruel does not have when applied to the Holy One, blessed be He, right? Meaning, describing Him as cruel is incorrect, and describing Him as compassionate is correct. Meaning that what you are really saying is that instead of describing Him as compassionate, I describe Him as not cruel. Fine, so I don’t understand—what did I gain from the whole doctrine of negative attributes? You are simply using a double negation, because cruel is after all not compassionate, right? So instead of saying He is compassionate I say He is not not-compassionate. Maybe cruel is not the right term in my conception? What?
[Speaker C] Maybe cruel is not right in my conception of divinity, of the actions of the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But compassionate isn’t right either.
[Speaker C] In my perception, what He does in the world is mercy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then forget it—then you don’t need any negative attributes. Then just say that the whole attribute of compassionate speaks about my perception of divinity, and leave negative attributes aside. No—I’m telling you that you gain nothing from the negation.
[Speaker C] Because the moment I say cruel, that also affects how I perceive the Holy One, blessed be He, in terms of my own concepts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] True, in a philosophical sense, but then it is just as correct to say of Him cruel as compassionate.
[Speaker C] Yes, but when you say cruel, that automatically affects how you perceive Him in your own conception; you’ll say God is very—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then you understand that really you are speaking—I just don’t want to confuse the fools, that’s all. It’s not that there is really something essential in the attribute compassionate that there isn’t something essential in the attribute cruel.
[Speaker C] When you utter the words, you should be—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] a philosopher whose intellect functions properly, and understand that all I mean by this is that this conceptual system does not apply to Him. What is the problem? It is very easy to understand that; there is no problem with it. Of course I would not say that He is cruel. You understand that in such a case I would not say He is cruel, and I also would not say He is compassionate. I would say He is neither cruel nor compassionate. That is what is correct to say. But you understand—not that is what is written when we say, “The Lord, the Lord, a compassionate and gracious God.” It doesn’t say, “The Lord, the Lord, neither compassionate nor cruel, neither gracious nor good-hearted nor gracious”—all that. That is not what is written there.
[Speaker C] The question is whether there is here an active intellect detached from all the rest of the—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. That is why I quoted this also for someone who is not postmodern. For ordinary people too. Say that He is neither compassionate nor cruel; don’t say that He is cruel. The concept that He is compassionate adds no information for me beyond the concept that He is cruel. It only serves to inflate certain connotations, to arouse certain connotations. So then it is simply not a description of Him—so don’t describe. Not even. Don’t define it as negative descriptions; then speak about descriptions of action. But those philosophers insisted that it is a description of Him, only in a negative way—not descriptions of action. Descriptions of action are a different approach among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Fine. So I can’t understand that—what do you gain by formulating it as a negative attribute? So we said—I am not one hundred percent sure that I have a good solution to this question. I only pointed out that sometimes two negating concepts really are—wait—shame and brazenness, or humility and pride, and so on. Meaning, we saw that two opposites formulated in positive words are not opposites in the full sense; there is some gap between them. To say not cruel is not to say only compassionate; it says also something else that is in the middle. I don’t know what it is; I have no word for it. If I had a word for it, it would be very simple. But the content of the description not cruel is indeed not the same content as the attribute compassionate. They really are not opposites in the simple mathematical sense. Clearly, as a rule, the description not cruel has as a subset compassionate, but that is only a subset. Meaning, there is also not cruel that is neither this nor that, and also compassionate. Okay? Now what is common to neither this nor that and to compassionate? I don’t know exactly; it is just not cruel, I don’t know what they have in common. Still, the concept already comes in some language that is above my own language. Yes—you understand that compassionate and cruel, let’s call it compassionate and cruel, are two opposite concepts. Two opposite concepts are always found on the same axis, right? Maharal wrote this often already, and there are ancient things like this long before Maharal. How do you define the axis itself? What is this axis on which shame sits opposite brazenness, or humility opposite pride, and so on? I have no name for this axis. It is some concept that is higher than the pairs that lie on it. Right? That is the definition of the axis itself. High on the axis is pride, low on the axis is humility. High on the axis is shame, low on the axis is brazenness—brazenness meaning insolence—and so on. So there is some concept here for which I have no term in my language, but it is clear to me that it exists. Right? It is some more fundamental concept that underlies all these pairs, underlies all these pairs. I am trying to say something at the level of that concept, understood? And therefore indeed some sort of insight develops here, but it has no positive formulation in our words.
[Speaker D] But in Kabbalah is there perhaps a convenient word between humility and pride and between shame and brazenness? I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] think—if I remember correctly—I think one might perhaps understand, one might perhaps understand, in this case, that it is even the sefirah of Hod. I would need to elaborate on that separately. The sefirah of Hod is the basic concept between pride and humility. Fine, that requires some explanation. But yes, at the principled level, I can take a kabbalistic concept—and that is exactly the point. Meaning: how do I connect it to our world, how do I find its projections onto our world? It defines a single concept; it has no opposite. It is a concept above our pairs. But in this world it appears in two poles, both of which are associated with it. It is the basic concept that underlies them. So that is the way to grasp something that is above our world, in the world of Atzilut, through concepts that belong to our world. And that is what we are now looking for: the way, the epistemology, that will enable this; the logical or cognitive path that will enable this transition. That is how he concludes the passage. He says: but how? Maimonides says that you can develop positive understanding through negative attributes. But how? How do you say that? After all, it cannot be formulated. How is it done?
[Speaker B] After all, the concept cannot be formulated, but we still know that it is an axis, something on an axis, and we don’t quite understand what it is—that is still problematic. Meaning, it is still problematic from the perspective of the one who upholds negative attributes, because his claim is that it is impossible—it is something impossible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so refrain from formulation, not from understanding.
[Speaker B] But it isn’t on an axis at all, because it is another plane. Obviously. But if we present two poles, then there is this axis which perhaps has no formulation, but it has been defined as an axis. So what? I didn’t understand. This axis has no word for me; it is not defined for me; it is not in my world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But it isn’t on the axis at all; it is something else. Why? It is the axis itself—it is the Holy One, blessed be He, whom we define by means of such an axis that—Maimonides formulates it as negation of the things on the axis, because that is the philosophical line that addresses it. But the fact that he himself testifies that some positive insight develops in him as a result of all these negations—he just doesn’t know how to formulate it; he doesn’t have the appropriate terminology.
[Speaker B] The problem is when one wants to formulate positive attributes; the problem is when we want to understand something unformulated, when we want to understand something that we see cannot be understood. The point was—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the initial assumption was that negative attributes really just mean that it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood in the simple sense—I think one cannot understand, I think. It cannot be grasped literally, this statement that negative attributes merely say that nothing can be understood. Because then, as I said before, one could say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is cruel to the same extent that He is compassionate. Everything would be the same. None of these thinkers, in my opinion, wants to claim that—not seriously, at least. Meaning, as Maimonides writes explicitly, when I say compassionate, I am not merely saying a negative thing. If I want to define what I am saying, I will define it in a negative way. But it tells me something inwardly positive, at the level of inner feeling. Now that something—when I try to define it in the human language of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—it has no definition, no terminology. For that one needs the terminology of Kabbalah, which Maimonides did not have. Okay?
[Speaker B] I don’t know; I think Maimonides gains nothing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, gains nothing?
[Speaker B] Because now he also creates here—he also creates here an axis that he speaks about in negative words; instead of saying something positive, he speaks in negative attributes, but about something positive. Right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—that is exactly what he wants. He wants to speak about something positive, but his conceptual system enables him to do so only negatively. That is exactly what we are saying. Maimonides too does this. Maimonides, the advocate of negative attributes, also does this. It is not correct to look at it only as negation—that is exactly the point. He is speaking about something positive, but in his conceptual system, when he tries to formulate what he is talking about, he is forced to use a negative conceptual system. That is exactly the point. In other words, this is a statement about the formulation, not about the insights, when we speak about the doctrine of negative attributes. Now the Nazir wants to argue that we have a way, even on the level of formulation, to arrive at a positive description of this thing. Of course, one reaches the formulation itself only in the second part, which is Kabbalah. But here he will sharpen the point further: that there is a way to pass over, to make this leap, somehow to get above. “However, one must find a special path ascending to the exalted Name, blessed be He.” “The Name,” as is known, is the world of Atzilut; that is where the names are inscribed. That is the Holy One, blessed be He. The names of the Holy One, blessed be He, are the sefirot. These are simply synonyms. We also spoke about this difference—that negations do not say the same thing—once in some lesson here on Sabbath afternoon, I don’t remember whether it was this year or last year, regarding the relation between positive commandments and prohibitions. What is the difference between saying, “You shall make a parapet for your roof,” and saying, “You shall not place blood in your house”? What difference does it make whether one formulates it as a positive commandment or as a prohibition? After all, you are saying the same thing. Right? So why does the Torah have positive commandments and prohibitions? What is the difference between them? There is no difference at all. I can tell you that I want you to put on tefillin, and I can say that I do not want you to be without tefillin. Isn’t that the same thing? Exactly the same thing. So what is the difference between positive commandments and prohibitions? Why for this am I obligated to spend all my money, and for that only up to one-fifth? Why does a positive commandment override a prohibition? Why? It is only a matter of formulation. I can formulate what I want from you positively, and I can formulate it negatively—so what? These are just two formulations of a positive will. That was the question that was asked, and we talked about it a bit with Nachmanides around the commandment of the parapet; that was the example. So it’s the same thing—you see that negation is not just a formulation in alternative concepts. Negation is something else. Here too you see the same thing. In exactly what way is it different? That is exactly the point at which logic fails. Because logic always grasps not-X as the opposite of X, right? There is no concept in the middle. Either you are this or you are the opposite; there is no middle concept. But all our healthy intuition says there is something in the middle. To say that I want you to put on tefillin is certainly not the same as saying I do not want you to be without tefillin. There is no doubt about that. Even though a logician would come and say that it is the same sentence. It is absolutely not—it is obvious to everyone that it is not. And not the answer you would immediately have given me—if I said, if someone does not put on tefillin, yes? If I say I want you to be with tefillin and he does not put them on, then he is not going directly against God’s will; he just did not fulfill the commandment, he won’t receive reward, right? But if I tell him I do not want you to be without tefillin, and now he sits without tefillin—that is going directly against what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, right? If the Holy One, blessed be He, says, I want you to put on tefillin, and I don’t put them on and ignore it—so what? I’m not going directly against God’s will. I’m not doing something He wanted me to do, but it’s not that I did something He did not want. Do you understand? I did not go directly against what He said. I didn’t do something He did want me to do. Fine—that’s a kind of passive resistance, yes? It is indeed a kind of passive omission. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, tells me: look, I do not want you to sit without tefillin—that is, logically, the same as I want you to be with tefillin, right? If the Holy One, blessed be He, says I do not want you to be without tefillin, and now I sit without tefillin, that is openly going against the Holy One, blessed be He, head-on. It is not just the absence of action. It is transgressing God’s will through positive action. If it were formulated that way, then sitting without tefillin would be transgressing through positive action, not through passive omission.
[Speaker C] Again, that’s intuition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? And that is exactly the point. It is an intuition that seems clear to us, but our tools of formulation fail to grasp why. Our tools of formulation cannot define why. Seemingly, to say I want you to be with tefillin or I do not want you to be without tefillin is the same thing. After all, double negation always leads me back to the positive, right? So what is the difference? But it is clear to us intuitively that there is something in between here. That intuition senses something beyond logic. And logic really covers only part of the domain of human thought, not all of it. And the next passage is devoted to that.
[Speaker C] And that means it is something very, very small.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is very small in the world of logic, and smaller than zero in the world of logic. Not something small at all. Something enormous—whether you are openly going against God’s will, or whether you are simply not doing what He told you.
[Speaker D] On the axis, the gap between yes—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and no—how do you measure that? I don’t know how to measure it. I don’t know. I somewhat feel what you are saying, but I need to think carefully whether it really has meaning and what it means. I don’t know. Bottom line—
[Speaker C] what I will gain is that I will go up a world. Yes. In the end I also say nothing, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that is called the Holy One, blessed be He. In a certain sense it is quantity turning into quality. I agree that you can look at it only as a quantitative accumulation, because clearly even the world of Atzilut, which is considered actual divinity, is itself also a creation, a created thing. And from our perspective that is called actual divinity. But you know, these are the paradoxes of quantity turning into quality. Meaning, this is the maximum one can attain in the apprehension of divinity, and to that we are commanded to arrive. Meaning, that’s it, there is no more. When we get there, then we will attain another stage. Meaning, we continue progressing further. In our current state we get as far as Atzilut. But when we attain Atzilut and arrive there, the whole world—not only individually, even—then we will begin to attain higher, higher, higher. Of course, one can always say that in the end there will always be an infinite gap, because between the first revelation and the Essence there is always an infinite gap. Right.
[Speaker B] A quantitative gap that in the end translates into something qualitative. What? A quantitative gap that in the end translates into something qualitative.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Section 11. Section 11 is the section that connects us from the introduction to negative attributes, where he led us straight to the trough, yes? He shows us—now we understand why we are looking here for some additional methodology that will advance us beyond simple logic, beyond analytic thinking, yes, in other words. So here he formulates it, and in 12 the description of that alternative logic begins—from section 12. Section 11 is the transition section. Section 10 ended the introduction. Section 11 is the transition section, and section 12 is the beginning of the solution. All right? That is the structure. “There is an intermediate between negation and affirmation.” You see how he begins the section? That is our conclusion from the previous section. I somewhat anticipated things in order to show you how it is derived from the problematic nature of the earlier sections. But here he formulates it himself. “There is an intermediate between negation and affirmation. The negation has in it transition, parable, an allusion to something higher than itself.” Understood? When I say not cruel, that is not just another way of saying compassionate. It is some sort of hint toward a higher conceptual world. What we have just discussed. “Like holy, separated, distinct, elevated above all. But holiness is positive in it. Holiness from the essential holy, the being of holiness. After the negation”—yes, holy is a positive concept. Holy means set apart. Seemingly, in an ordinary view, that is a negative concept. What is set apart? It is not such-and-such, it is not like the world; it is distinct from the world. But no—holy is a positive attribute. We always formulate it negatively. It is simply an example of the mechanism he is talking about here. “After the negation of the divine attributes in their external meaning, they ascend in their inner, higher meaning. There is transition, parable, from the negated external to the inner higher.” Yes. I’ve already formulated this in previous times, so it seems like he isn’t adding anything here, but he is simply formulating what he writes here—he has now written it. Yes. “For this path there are complications in the way of prophetic allusion according to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. How is acknowledgment possible in the Name when there is no allusion to Him? The answer: in prophetic allusion, through the mediation of what is called glory and Shekhinah.” Glory and Shekhinah are simply the light of glory—we already talked about this—that these are concepts from the world of Atzilut. Shekhinah too is a concept of the world of Atzilut; Shekhinah is the Nukva or Malkhut. And therefore the world of Atzilut is a mediation—it mediates between me and divinity. That is my way of leaping from my conceptual world upward. That is what he means by mediation. “Prophetic allusion.” Prophecy is a way of seeing the world of Atzilut; we saw that at the end of the previous essay. “The analogate, analogy, parable.” We will see later that, in the revealed dimension, the alternative logical route he proposes is analogical reasoning. Instead of deductive reasoning, it is analogical reasoning. But we will analyze that in the following sections, from 12 onward. “The analogate”—that means analogy. That is more or less the literal meaning. “The nature of the supreme cause itself remains unknown to me. I only compare it to the known action, the order of the world.” “The order of the world” means the world, because the order of the world around us is our conceptual world. Yes. “This is forever according to human analogy, divine causes and actions,” or “causes, divine actions.” We have actually already discussed this here already—order of the world, right? Let me remember the issue of causes and causes. I really don’t know how to vocalize it. “However, the depth of the matter is revealed in the human quality unique to Hebrew-Semitic logic.” Here the answer already begins, the solution of the coming sections. I’ll finish with this—just some formulation of what he is doing here. What is analogy? There are three basic forms of reasoning: deduction, induction, and analogy. What is analogy? Analogy is when I say that Socrates is a human being, and our forefather Jacob is also a human being. If Socrates is mortal, then apparently our forefather Jacob is also mortal. That is analogical reasoning, right? It is not necessary reasoning; the conclusions do not follow necessarily from the premises. But there is some transition here through resemblance, through analogy. What am I doing? I assume that since they are both human beings, there is a similarity between them that enables me to infer from one property of Socrates to another property of our forefather Jacob. Right? Even though perhaps our forefather Jacob did not die. But in principle, for the sake of the example. What lies behind analogy? If we try to think about it, analogy is a very wondrous thing. Because you understand that in order to make this analogy, I need to know that Socrates’ being mortal stems from his being human. Meaning, that his being human is relevant to his being mortal, because otherwise, if they are similar in that, then I’ll also say that if he is blond then the other one is blond. Certainly not, right? Why not? Because his being human is not relevant to his being blond. It’s not because they are not similar—they are similar. It’s just that the lines of similarity between them are in properties that are not relevant to the things I want to infer from the similarity. Right? Meaning, when I make an analogy, I must rely on some assumption—who knows where I got it from—but some assumption that links the comparing property to the compared property. Meaning, in order to say that if Socrates is a human being and our forefather Jacob is also a human being, and Socrates is mortal—that is, a creature that dies—then our forefather Jacob is also a creature that dies, in order to make that inference I must assume something that says that Socrates’ humanity is what causes him to be mortal. Do you understand? Because otherwise, why should I care that Jacob is human and Socrates is human with respect to the question of whether they are mortal? Why is that similarity relevant to the conclusion? So I must assume a connection between being human and being mortal. But where does that connection come from? After all, if I really don’t know what it means to be mortal or what it means to be human, then I cannot assume such a connection. In other words, every analogy assumes some unformulated understanding that is not contained within the premises of the analogy. I assume that Socrates is a human being and that Socrates is mortal—that is a simple premise. I also assume that Jacob is human. My conclusion is that Jacob is mortal. Right? Within the analogy I assumed something additional, even though I didn’t formulate it. I assumed that the reason Socrates is mortal is that he is human. It isn’t just that he happens to have two properties: he is human and he is mortal. No. I assumed that he is mortal because he is human. Otherwise no analogy here would help at all. No analogy would help here, right? And that assumption comes from some unformulated and unclear perception, and it does not derive from anything I see before my eyes. You might say that analogy derives from induction. Meaning, if I saw several cases in which human beings were mortal, I infer that being mortal stems from being human. But we will see later that induction too stems from analogy; it rests on analogy. So you cannot ground this hierarchically. In other words—well, that is already a topic we will see. Hume talks about this at length.
[Speaker B] About cause, about cause in general, Hume. We talked about induction, not deduction. We talked about there being cause, being able to talk about causes. It’s connected to this, connected to this—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We may mention that here as well. Fine, we’ll stop here; that will already be in—