Symposium Launching Rabbi Moshe Rat's Trilogy

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a well-known midrash that, as a child, really made me laugh—a midrash that also connects to Parashat Zakhor, which we read this Sabbath. It’s a parable about a child whose father carries him on his shoulders and walks with him through the marketplace, and whatever the child asks for, his father gives him. “Dad, give me fruit”—he gives him fruit. “Dad, give me candy”—he gives him candy. And so they go through the market. Then they meet some man, and the child asks him: “Tell me, have you perhaps seen my father?” His father hears this and says: “Really? I’m carrying you on my shoulders and you ask, ‘Have you seen my father?’” Immediately he throws him off his shoulders, and a dog comes and bites him. Similarly, the children of Israel go through the wilderness, the Holy One, blessed be He, gives them clouds of glory, manna, and quail, and then they ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The Holy One, blessed be He, says: “Really?” Immediately Amalek came, and they were punished. Now, as a child, it really did sound funny—that image of a child riding on his father’s shoulders and asking someone, “Have you seen my father?” But it turns out that some people take this joke very seriously.

Rabbi Mikhi—as you mentioned earlier—we’ve known each other for years. I studied with him here at the institute, I learned a lot from his books, we’re both members of the Yedaya Institute. But on this issue of divine providence, I’m forced to disagree with him very sharply. For anyone who doesn’t know, or hasn’t yet read Rabbi Michael’s approach to divine providence, it can be summed up in one sentence, in his own words: “The Lord has forsaken the land.” What does “the Lord has forsaken the land” mean? It means there is God, there is the Holy One, blessed be He; He created the world; He did indeed govern the world in the period of the Hebrew Bible, maybe in the period of the Sages as well; He intervened, watched over things, performed miracles, and so on. But at some stage, He decided to stop intervening in creation and withdrew from the world. He still knows what’s happening, He is aware of everything we do here, but He does not intervene. Rather, He leaves the laws of nature to run reality.

The result of that extreme, sharp statement is basically that everything that happens to us is not under providence, is not directed from above. There is no divine hand managing things—not on the level of the individual and not on the level of the collective. Everything is just laws of nature, statistics, chance, and so on. An even more serious implication that follows from this is that prayer does not help. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not answer prayers. We can pray and cry out as much as we want—He will not intervene. Prayer may be good as thanksgiving, as an expression of closeness, but prayers will not be answered. This is the rather shocking approach that Rabbi Mikhi presents in his books.

What I want to show now is that this approach is not only troubling because of the damage it does to faith, but it also has nothing whatsoever to actually stand on. Why does Rabbi Mikhi claim that the Lord has forsaken the land? Why does he claim there is no providence, no divine intervention in reality? The answer is very simple: because he doesn’t see it. Rabbi Mikhi looks at reality and says: we do not see divine intervention. We see nature, we see regularity, we see statistics; we do not see divine providence. So if we don’t see it, that means it isn’t there.

Now of course Rabbi Mikhi knows perfectly well that not seeing something is not proof. There are many reasons why we might not see something and yet it still exists. We don’t see the Holy One, blessed be He, either. So what does he do? Rabbi Mikhi adds one more assumption and says: true, if we have a good reason to believe in something, then even if we don’t see it, we can explain why we don’t see it and still say it exists. But in this case, not only do we not see providence, not only do we not see intervention—we also have no reason whatsoever to think that there is divine intervention. The very idea of divine intervention, Rabbi Mikhi says, is an idea with no basis, no reason, no rationale. There is no reason at all to believe it, no reason to think there is divine intervention in reality. Therefore, since there is also no reason to think there is divine intervention, and since we also don’t see divine intervention, the necessary conclusion, in his view, is that the Lord has indeed forsaken the land and there is no divine intervention. Maybe there once was; today there is not.

If we divide this claim into two parts, it really has an a priori component and an a posteriori component. The a priori assumption—that is, the assumption we approach things with before we have even examined reality—says that belief in the existence of divine intervention is a strange, bizarre, absurd belief. We have no reason to assume it a priori, before checking anything at all. And from that it follows that when we move to the a posteriori part and examine reality, we approach it with far more skepticism and suspicion than if our a priori assumption were different. The two things are connected. If I assume a priori that it is reasonable that there is providence, that it makes sense, that it is plausible, then I will accept evidence for it much more easily. Various things that I can interpret as signs of providence, I will indeed interpret as confirmation of providence. But if from the outset I begin from the premise that this is a strange belief with no basis, then I will have to work very, very hard to prove that there really is providence and intervention.

So these two assumptions—the a priori assumption that it is not reasonable, and the a posteriori assumption that we do not see providence—are bound up with one another. And the focal point, the root of the whole outlook Rabbi Mikhi presents, is that a priori assumption that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that God intervenes in reality. And so that is the assumption I want to attack now.

If we read what Rabbi Mikhi wrote in his book, and even more so on his website, where he expresses himself much more sharply and bluntly, he treats belief in divine intervention as something completely bizarre—as though who would even think there is such a thing as divine intervention in reality? He does not hesitate to compare it to atheistic concepts like Russell’s flying teapot. The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell said that it is like someone coming and trying to convince me that there is some teapot flying around the moon. Maybe there is, right? And the fact that we don’t see it is only because it is small and far away. But clearly that is something so strange that a priori it sounds absurd to me—why should I assume such a thing exists? In Rabbi Mikhi’s eyes, belief in divine intervention is as strange and baseless as that flying teapot, like believing there are transparent fairies fluttering around Jupiter. Why would I even think of such a thing?

Now, if the person making that claim were some hard-core atheist—some Richard Dawkins type—who does not believe in God, the Hebrew Bible, miracles, or anything else, then from his point of view I would say: okay, you’re right. If you look at the world from such an atheistic angle, then yes, divine providence really does sound like something strange, something unusual. I wouldn’t try to persuade you until we had gone through earlier stages first—that there is a God and that He created the world, and so on. But Rabbi Mikhi, for you to say such a thing—let’s go in order. Rabbi Mikhi, according to your view, is there a God? Yes. Did He create the world? Yes. Can He intervene in reality? Certainly—He is omnipotent. Did He intervene in reality in the past? Certainly—as it says in the Hebrew Bible. You accept it all, all the miracles, that He intervened in reality. Is He capable of intervening in reality in the present? Yes, certainly—if He wants, He is omnipotent. Does He intervene sometimes, on rare occasions, in reality? Even that Rabbi Mikhi does not deny. He says one cannot rule out that sporadically He sometimes intervenes in reality.

Okay, so maybe He intervenes a bit more than that? “Absolutely not—that’s completely bizarre. How did you even come to think such a thing?” Excuse me—if we have already accepted that there is a God, and that He intervened in reality in the past, and that He is capable of intervening in reality, and that maybe He even does it today, then why should the a priori assumption that He intervenes a bit more than that be so absurd and bizarre? Fine, maybe it isn’t necessary—let’s check whether He does it or not. But to say a priori that it is absurd and bizarre like a flying teapot—why? What is more reasonable than to presume continuity, to leave a thing in its established state? Rabbi Mikhi likes to use halakhic principles in philosophical discussions, so we have a principle accepted in Jewish law in many areas: leave a thing in its established state. If we agree that the established state is that God did intervene in reality in the past, governed the world, then until proven otherwise, the assumption is that He continues to do so. Whoever wants to argue that He suddenly stopped at some unknown date bears the burden of proof.

Again: if this were an atheist saying there never was a God and He never intervened, that would be one thing. But once you agree that there is a God, that He can intervene, that He intervened in the past, and that perhaps He also intervenes in the present, then you cannot come and claim that a priori this belief is absurd. You can say that you think things changed. You can say that you think it is not true. But you cannot say that a priori it is absurd and bizarre like some flying teapot.

And you could say: fine, Rabbi Mikhi will say, prophecy once existed and miracles once existed and then stopped; today there is no prophecy and no miracles. So just as God stopped that, maybe He also stopped intervening in the world. So first, the fact that maybe He stopped still does not mean He definitely did. We have a doubt here, and we remain with the presumption. You would have to prove it; it is not enough to say “maybe.” Second, we need to remember that even in the biblical period miracles and prophecy were exceptional things. It’s not as though they were always there. There were hundreds of years during the biblical period when there was no prophecy and no miracles. The psalmist says: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and none among us knows how long.” In other words, it is not that miracles always existed in the past. Miracles were always exceptional things, and prophecy too. But providence—the simple belief that God is King of the world, and as King He governs the world—that belief appears plainly throughout the Hebrew Bible.

God makes the wind blow, brings down the rain; when a woman becomes pregnant, God gave her that pregnancy. When rain falls and there is produce, “God had remembered His people by giving them bread” in the Book of Ruth. Everything that happens, God does it. Joseph says to his brothers: “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” The prophets say in the name of God: I am bringing against you the king of Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar. God is the one who governs everything that happens in the world. So this belief that God intervenes is not some matter of exceptional miracles or something like that; it is part of His very being God, part of His very essence. To come and claim that suddenly He stopped doing this, after you have already agreed that He exists and that He did it in the past—the burden of proof is on you. And certainly a priori, before we have checked, this is not bizarre or absurd at all.

So that is regarding the first part, and that already suffices to reject the a priori claim that the belief is bizarre and absurd, as Rabbi Mikhi argued. But more than that: we have further reasons to assume a priori that there really is providence and divine intervention. The second reason, beyond the Hebrew Bible, is the simple fact that the great Torah sages—the overwhelming majority of the great Jewish figures throughout the generations—believed in personal divine providence. Rabbi Mikhi, true to form, says: I’m not interested in what they believed. Their opinion is worth no more than mine. Great Jewish figures can also make mistakes, and so on.

So here, first of all, I disagree with him on that. I think the great Jewish figures, many of them, were not just people with sharp intellects, but also people who had spiritual intuitions, sometimes divine inspiration—what you might call spiritual intelligence, just as there is musical sensitivity. Someone can come and say: I listened to Beethoven and Bach, and in my opinion they’re just bad. Fine—you probably lack musical sensitivity. I agree that you don’t hear it. But there are more sensitive people who hear things better. And those great Jewish figures who had divine inspiration, who had divine revelations, who had high spiritual intelligence—when they looked at reality, they saw providence in it. They saw patterns in it. They saw things in it. Now, it’s possible they were mistaken. I’m not saying that everything anyone said is necessarily true. But again, if you want me to accept that they were mistaken, it is not enough for you to tell me: they can make mistakes. Prove to me that they were mistaken. Show me that they were mistaken. Otherwise, why should I accept your opinion over theirs? Just because they might have been wrong? After all, you might be wrong.

And therefore, the fact that the great Jewish figures believed in providence—even if in different forms, even if to different extents, whether on every detail or only on certain people or only on the Jewish people—still, the fact that they all understood providence as something that happens in reality, and even interpreted specific events through it, is already a reason that—even if it does not yet prove that there is providence, because we are not yet at the a posteriori stage—on the a priori level it makes belief in providence something reasonable and not absurd.

And the third point is the point of intuitions. Rabbi Mikhi likes to talk about intuitions in his books, to give them respect and a place. And what intuition is more widespread than the simple intuition that very many people in the world recognize: that there really is a God, that there is meaning to the things that happen, that God intervenes in their lives, leads them, guides them, and so on? This intuition is so widespread that there are psychologists who claim there are no true atheists in the world. Even the atheist who defines himself as an atheist, in certain respects his patterns of thought—his way of relating to reality as meaningful, as directed, and so on—and there are those well-known sayings: there are no atheists in the trenches, there are no atheists on a crashing airplane. A person in a moment of danger turns with a cry to God out of some deep intuition that this can help.

And what does Rabbi Mikhi say? He says: these are not intuitions. He says these are the result of brainwashing, of religious education, of religious influence that affected people and caused them to think this way, but it is not really an intuition one can rely on. I do not accept that. The fact is, as we said, that even completely secular people, even atheists, many of them sometimes become religious precisely because of this—that they do in fact feel and experience God on their personal level. Many stories of people who became religious say: I felt there was a guiding hand in my life; I felt things were not happening by chance, but according to a plan, and so on. And then I went to search, and I came to religion and returned in repentance. To say that all of this is brainwashing and so on—that is not acceptable to me. And as I said, even if this is something that comes from religion, it still doesn’t matter. Let’s ask ourselves: why did religion enjoy such enormous success? Why were all people in the world, until the modern age, religious to a great extent? Because this belief that there is a power that created the world and governs it is so simple and so natural and not at all absurd or bizarre that everyone believed in it—even if in one form or another, whether as one God or many gods. But this belief, this intuition, is so simple that it is agreed upon and accepted by the whole world—certainly by all religious people, and also by many secular people, and even by those who deny it.

To sum up this first part: up to here we have been discussing the a priori stage—that is, before we even examine whether we see providence and divine intervention in reality or not, we examine whether the very idea itself is absurd or not. And unequivocally, within the framework of the assumptions that Rabbi Mikhi himself accepts, this idea is not absurd or strange. If one agrees that there is a God and that the Hebrew Bible is true and that there were miracles and so on, there is no reason to assume a priori that this ceased. And it is certainly not a bizarre or absurd idea at all. All the more so since the great Jewish figures, whose divine inspiration and spiritual intelligence I believe in, throughout the generations continue to affirm providence, including in our own day. And all the more so since this is a widespread intuition among many people. I do not accept the claim that this is only religious brainwashing. It is something much deeper: the feeling that there is a guiding hand, that things do not happen by chance. Anyone who says “I hope that such-and-such will happen” is, in a certain sense, praying. Anyone who says “justice will ultimately prevail” is, in a certain sense, believing that there is providence that will lead to the triumph of justice. All these things are very, very intuitive. And therefore, again, the burden of proof is on the one who claims this is an absurd belief.

So much for the a priori side. Now that we have shown that this is not an absurd belief, let us check whether we also see it on the ground. Let us now look at reality a posteriori and see whether we actually observe providence. And here Rabbi Mikhi does something completely unfair. What does he do? Rabbi Mikhi says: there are laws of nature in the world, and I make a sharp dichotomy between laws of nature and natural causes on the one hand, and providence on the other. As far as he is concerned, anything that has natural causes is not providence—the cause was nature. What am I willing to accept as providence? Only something that has no natural cause, some open miracle that breaks the laws of nature. Only if I see such a thing am I willing to accept that there is providence.

Why is that unfair? Because that is not what we mean when we speak about providence. There are miracles, true; we all agree that open miracles like the splitting of the Sea or a staff turning into a snake do not really happen today, if at all. But that is not what we are talking about when we speak of providence. Most providence operates in the mode of hidden miracles—small things that God directs behind the scenes without anyone seeing. With all due respect to the laws of nature, after all, nobody sits and watches every single molecule in the universe to see whether it moved in a slightly unusual way. The Holy One, blessed be He, can easily move things—tiny movements, a screw loosening here, an idea entering someone’s mind there, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Africa—and in that way direct whatever He wants without anyone noticing any deviation from the laws of nature. These little miracles can happen; nobody can rule them out. But since Rabbi Mikhi comes with the approach that the very idea of providence is absurd and bizarre, then for him, anything that has a natural explanation—even a strained one, even a highly improbable one—he is unwilling to accept. In his view, nothing will ever count as proof of providence until he sees some giant transparent hand coming out of heaven and moving things around. But as I mentioned, that is not how providence works.

We see in the Hebrew Bible that Joseph says to his brothers, as mentioned: “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Excuse me—wasn’t it the brothers who sent you? The brothers sent you. When in a little while on Purim we say “for the miracles” that You performed for our ancestors—what miracles? Read the story of the scroll of Esther. There is no miracle there. Everything is completely natural events. The same goes for everything in Hanukkah. The Greeks had an advantage. Fine, true, it was the few against the many, but there are also natural explanations: they outwitted them, they used guerrilla warfare, political reasons. Everything has a natural explanation. In fact, the whole idea of Purim, now that we are approaching it, is exactly this point: a period, a transition from a mode of open miracles to a mode of hiddenness, of miracles that happen behind the scenes apparently through natural causes, where the wisdom lies in seeing the hand of providence even there. But for Rabbi Mikhi there is no hiddenness. If I don’t see it, then it isn’t hidden—it does not exist. It has withdrawn. The Lord has forsaken the land. And that is unfair. It is unfair to take providence and turn it into a straw man, to say: if I see a giant transparent hand, I’ll accept it; anything else I won’t accept. That is not what we are talking about when we say providence. The idea of double causality—that things have natural causes but also spiritual causes, that providence moves things along—that is the idea of providence.

Another example from the Talmud: it is told there about the sage Levi, who became lame. Why did he become lame? Rabbi Yohanan says: because he spoke harshly toward Heaven. He accused the Holy One, blessed be He—“You have ascended on high and forgotten Your children”—in a way that somewhat echoes our topic here, and therefore, as punishment, he became lame. So the Talmud asks: wait, because of that he became lame? He became lame because he tried to demonstrate before Rabbi a bowing gesture of the High Priest and strained a muscle or something—that’s why he became lame. The Talmud answers: both caused it. True, there was a natural reason he became lame, but there was also a spiritual reason. After all, it was not inevitable that this should happen. So God arranged things, moved the muscle just a bit, so that the spiritual cause brought it about that the natural cause would indeed take effect. That is the idea of providence.

So to come and say that anything with natural causes is not providence—this idea stems only from the a priori negation according to which divine intervention is absurd. If I do not assume that, if I assume that divine intervention is reasonable, then I have no problem saying yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, moves things behind the scenes in small ways that do not violate the laws of nature. The laws of nature still operate within a natural framework; I simply move things a little—just as a person can reach out his hand and slightly move the apple that falls from the tree, certainly the Holy One, blessed be He, can also move it a bit without our seeing anything conspicuous.

So what do we nevertheless see? If we look at reality and leave aside the whole earlier discussion—can we actually conduct some test or experiment and see something that really does show divine intervention in the world? Well, if we look this way, we see that the more we move from the individual to the collective, the more clearly and distinctly we see providence. On the level of the individual, each person can often see in his own life events where he really feels these kinds of coincidences, things falling into place, or all sorts of things that a person with even a little spiritual intelligence, as I said, can notice.

If we go a bit higher, Mikhi says: let’s do an experiment. Take two groups of patients. For one group people will pray, and for the other they will not. Then we’ll see whether prayer helps, whether those prayed for recover more than those not prayed for. The thing is, such an experiment has indeed been done—not just one but many—and in quite a few of these experiments they really did find significant signs that those who were prayed for recovered more. Now Rabbi Mikhi says: there were methodological problems with those experiments. That is true—there were problems. But those problems are precisely problems in the opposite direction. What do I mean? The problem is that the kind of prayer used in such an experiment is very weak prayer. Why? Because they take a person who does not know the person he is praying for, and the patient also does not know the person praying, so there won’t be some bias, and they tell him: pray for someone you do not know, about whom you know nothing—a kind of perfunctory chirping. And there is another problem: who said the patient himself is not praying for himself? Who said his relatives are not praying for him? In short, there are all kinds of issues here that mean that even if we saw no effect, we would say: fine, we saw no effect because this is not real prayer; it is an imitation of prayer. But if after all these limitations—when you have actually weakened the prayer—you still see effects in a great many experiments, then all the more so that does prove the power of prayer. Certainly in cases that were not tested and where you did not put the Holy One, blessed be He, to the test, and so on—you can come up with all kinds of excuses and say we don’t see it, but we do see it. The fact is that there are enough such experiments in which one sees a change.

Let’s go one level higher—not an experiment on some small group of people, but statistics. Do religious, believing people statistically have an advantage in health, recovery, or longevity over non-religious people? If there is providence, and providence rewards the righteous, then maybe we would find such a difference. The answer is that unlike the prayer experiments, where some succeeded and others did not, here there is no doubt. Many studies, both in Israel and around the world, show unequivocal differences of dozens of percentage points between the data for religious groups and non-religious groups. I’ll briefly give a few examples.

A study done here in Israel on kibbutzim examined over 16 years the morbidity and mortality data in 22 kibbutzim, half religious and half secular. The mortality rate from heart disease in the secular kibbutzim was 93 percent higher than in the religious kibbutzim. The mortality rate among patients suffering from tumors was 67 percent higher. This is not some negligible thing. Another study in 2005: religious people live longer than secular people. The likelihood of dying prematurely in religious communities is 30 percent lower, and so on. Likewise, between people who attend synagogue and those who do not, the mortality rate was 75 percent higher among those who do not attend than among those who do, and so on. In other words, statistically there are differences between religious and secular people, period, in many measures—mental health, physical health, and so on.

Now Rabbi Mikhi will come and say: there are natural explanations for this. It’s because of community, because of I don’t know what, kindness, and so on. Fine, there may also be natural explanations. But what exactly are you expecting to see? If we agree that it is not absurd a priori for God to intervene also in ways that look natural, then what is the problem if there are natural explanations? True—but that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, manages things. Again, only if you reject that view from the outset because it is absurd will you not accept this.

And if we go higher still—not groups, but the whole Jewish people—I cannot understand what greater providence, what greater evidence one needs than the entire chaos surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel: all the events of the founding of the state, the ingathering of exiles, the victories in war time after time, again the few against the many, absorption of immigration from all over the world, making the desolation bloom. And all of this in a way that also corresponds very closely to prophecies that the Torah itself stated thousands of years ago. What more do we need? How is this any less than that child riding on his father’s shoulders and asking, “Where is Dad?” What am I supposed to believe—that God promised thousands of years ago that He would gather the dispersed of Israel and return us to our land, and so on, and He really did it, because that is what is happening—or that no, the Holy One, blessed be He, did indeed promise it, but at some point He changed His mind and forsook the land, but by chance and to His great luck things somehow happened because the people of Israel remained faithful to their land, and events rolled along so that by chance the prophecies were fulfilled without the Holy One, blessed be He, intervening? Why should I think such a strange thing?

In his book on evolution, God Plays Dice, Rabbi Mikhi distinguishes—five more minutes—between plausibility and probability. He says there: true, probabilistically there may be, say, a one-in-a-million chance that evolution would occur. So people tell him: okay, if it’s one in a million, that’s enough; a one-in-a-million chance can happen once. Rabbi Mikhi says: yes, but what is more plausible—that a one-in-a-million chance happened by accident, or that a guiding hand made it happen? If I have an a priori plausible possibility that a guiding hand made it happen, that is the possibility I will choose. The same is true here. True, there may be some one-in-a-million probability—I don’t know what it is—that of all nations it would be the Jewish people who survive exile and return to their land and make the desolation bloom, something no other people did before. And all the nations cooperated too—all the Arab nations intentionally lost so that the prophecy would be fulfilled and did not settle the land so there would be room for us to return. There may be a one-in-a-million statistical chance that this would happen. Fine. But what is more plausible? What is more plausible—that it happened by chance, or that it happened because the Holy One, blessed be He, did not forsake the land and indeed fulfilled His prophecy?

And more examples could be brought: in the Gulf War, when thirty-nine missiles fell and despite all sorts of scenarios there were only a few fatalities, and so on. But Rabbi Mikhi says that if Nachshon Wachsman died and the prayers did not help, then that means prayer does not help, period. I truly cannot understand the plausibility behind that approach.

In short, I will summarize. We have seen that Rabbi Mikhi’s approach stems mainly from his a priori assumption that the very concept of divine intervention is absurd and bizarre and unacceptable. We saw that this a priori claim is not correct—not from the Hebrew Bible, not from the sages of Israel, not from simple intuition. The very idea of divine intervention is logical, reasonable, and plausible. Therefore I have no reason to set the bar so high that only if I see a transparent hand from heaven will I believe there is divine intervention. I can certainly accept that the data we saw—whether it is what I feel personally, whether it is in prayer experiments, whether it is statistics, and certainly when it comes to the Jewish people, the founding of the state, and all this—are very good evidence that God has not forsaken the land, that God continues to run things, and that there is no reason to insist on some clearly supernatural phenomenon in order to accept it.

The burden of proof lies on Rabbi Mikhi if he wants to claim that God has forsaken the land—unless, of course, he goes back and argues that God was never in the land in the first place, but then that really goes beyond the boundaries that I think he wants to cross. And I will just say that this approach of sudden, extreme skepticism is not only problematic in this context; by its nature it also tends to expand further. If I do not accept anything that is not empirically and scientifically proven, then my very belief in the revelation at Mount Sinai, in the existence of God, in obligation to Jewish law—all of those too will gradually be undermined over time. So not only does this approach, as I said, have no basis beyond some personal feeling, it is also dangerous and harmful, and it is truly appropriate to oppose this approach and try to show why there is no reason to accept it. That is all.

[Speaker A] Okay, thank you. The response from Dr. Aviad, Rabbi Mikhi, and Rabbi Yehuda. I’ll keep this short—there are only a few minutes left at the end, and I don’t assume I’ll really manage to address everything that came up here. I’ll try to be brief, and maybe we’ll also have time for a few questions from the audience. I again refer the public to the sources I referred to earlier; it seems to me that things are clearer there.