Ein Ayah – Lesson 21

Table of Contents

• Body and soul: dualism, emergence, and the roles of the soul
• Science, vitalism, and the distinction between methodology and metaphysics
• Evolution, creationism, and the absence of competition between God and the natural sciences
• “Sees but is not seen”: the ungraspability of that which gives life, and its connection to the transcendent and immanent
• “Sustains the whole world”: renewal of existence, laws of nature, and the question of the source of the laws
• “Pure”: good and evil as presence and absence, the coarseness of the body, and weakness of the will
• “Dwells in the innermost chambers”: revelation through causes, particulars, and systems
• The purpose of praise: the fruit of cleaving and becoming similar
• The structure of the analogy: God–world and soul–body, nearness and distance, and the capacity to influence

Summary

General Overview

The text presents an analogy between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul in five respects, and places it within a broader discussion of the relationship between body and soul and of the difference between the methodological assumptions of science and metaphysical claims about reality. It distinguishes between materialist conceptions that understand the soul as a product of the biological system and dualism, which posits an additional entity interacting with the body, and argues that one can—and even should—investigate scientifically as though there were no God and no soul, without concluding from that that there is no God and no soul. Drawing on Rabbi Kook’s Ein Ayah, it interprets the parallels in the Talmud as describing ongoing being, the ungraspability of the source of life, the purity of the source of influence, revelation through particulars and levels, and the purpose of praise as a moral-practical fruit within the human being.

Body and Soul: Dualism, Emergence, and the Roles of the Soul

The text describes a view according to which some see the soul as a function of the body in the sense of strong emergence, as opposed to a more intuitive conception of dualism in which the soul is an entity interacting bidirectionally with the body. It lays out two planes of the soul-body connection: the soul both influences the body and also constitutes the body as an organism, so that without it the body is not really a body but a collection of cells, molecules, or atoms that eventually disintegrates. It explains that in Kabbalistic terminology the distinction is between nefesh as the force that gathers the body into one entity, as opposed to ruaḥ and neshama and additional levels, and it emphasizes that the transition between “the coming-into-being of the body” and “influencing it” is not sharp, so one can view the human being as a single entity even though in principle there is another entity here.

Science, Vitalism, and the Distinction Between Methodology and Metaphysics

The text presents the materialists’ resistance to accepting an aspect of an “additional entity” beyond the transformation of physics into biology, and notes that vitalism is considered a “dirty word” in biology and is sharply rejected. It argues that even as a dualist, vitalism adds nothing to biological research and in fact cripples it, because it provides an easy answer that shuts down inquiry. It compares this to saying “it’s the Holy One, blessed be He” as a solution to mysteries in physics such as quantum theory, and argues that science advances דווקא when it does not accept answers from other conceptual worlds but searches for explanations within its own toolbox. It defines his position as sober dualism: methodologically there is no reason to assume God or soul within science, but one must not infer from that the metaphysical conclusion that there is no God or soul.

Evolution, Creationism, and the Absence of Competition Between God and the Natural Sciences

The text argues that the debate over evolution repeats the same mistake on both sides: neo-Darwinians infer from the lack of a methodological need for God that there is no need for Him at all, while creationists attack science in the name of faith as though there were a competition. It states that as scientific methodology it is correct not to insert the Holy One, blessed be He, into the explanation of phenomena, but from that no claim follows about reality itself. It proposes conducting scientific research “as if I were an atheist” while at the same time believing in the Holy One, blessed be He, on another plane, and cites the image attributed to Rabin about operating on two different planes. It notes that in the book God Plays Dice he argues that science does not assume God—and in fact that would interfere with it—but that a view “from outside” on the very existence of laws and the question of their source leads, in his view, to evidence for the existence of God, in the formulation: “If there are laws, apparently there is a lawgiver.”

“Sees but Is Not Seen”: The Ungraspability of That Which Gives Life, and Its Connection to the Transcendent and Immanent

The text opens with an examination of Rabbi Kook’s words: “To bestow the power of life upon another requires that it be so mighty and so exalted beyond the level of the recipient that life may blossom, while the recipient lacks the power even to grasp it in imagination,” and at first raises doubt about the necessity of that assumption. It suggests that the difficulty in grasping the one who influences stems from the fact that the influencer is not merely an external cause, but also that which constitutes the recipient from within, and therefore the perceiver and the perceived become intermingled. It brings examples of the difficulty of grasping the framework within which perception itself operates, such as space and time, and mentions in the name of Leshem and the Ari that space and time belong to the foundation of malkhut of the world above us, like a womb within which the world is “born,” and therefore they are difficult to grasp from within the world itself; it also mentions Kant, who claimed that space and time are forms of intuition. It interprets “Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sees but is not seen” to mean that the life-giver is not grasped by the created being, and weaves this together with the pair of concepts transcendent and immanent: the invisibility stems both from distance—belonging to a world above—and from extreme closeness—presence within the person—while the two sides are understood as two sides of the same coin.

“Sustains the Whole World”: Renewal of Existence, Laws of Nature, and the Question of the Source of the Laws

The text reads in Rabbi Kook that food “restores what was lost” from the powers of life, and parallels this to the flow of existential abundance into reality, relying on the phrase “Who renews in His goodness every day continually the work of creation.” It brings an anecdote from the hakafot of Simchat Torah in Yeruham with Rabbi Blumentzweig about Abraham our father’s exposition, “Who turns the sphere?”, and contrasts it with Newton’s first law, according to which motion continues without an external force. It accepts the answer given there: within the laws themselves there is no need for a mover, but the law itself is not self-evident, and the philosophical question is “Who created the law of inertia?” It presents Rabbi Kook as assuming that reality requires constant “refueling” in order to continue existing, and formulates this as the difference between a scientific perspective operating within the laws of nature and a philosophical perspective asking about the source of the law itself. It adds an example from Anaximander about the emergence of the world through the separation of opposites from primordial matter, and parallels this to the modern idea of the creation of matter and antimatter out of a vacuum without violating conservation laws, while claiming that the cancellation-out does not solve the philosophical wonder but intensifies it.

“Pure”: Good and Evil as Presence and Absence, the Coarseness of the Body, and Weakness of the Will

The text interprets Rabbi Kook’s words, “Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is pure, so too the soul is pure,” to mean that there is no evil force in the human soul in itself, and that the evil forces stem from the thickness and coarseness of the body, which prevent the intellectual soul from “cutting through” and directing the good. It presents a view according to which only good has real existence, while evil is the absence of good, using the image that darkness is the absence of light, and connects this to the theological problem of the source of evil and to the Kabbalistic solution that sees evil as absence rather than an independent entity. It brings the image of demons as “creatures without a root” found in dark and isolated places, and explains this as the appearance of fear and consciousness where there is no light of guidance and familiar presence, not as the independent existence of evil. It explains choosing evil in terms of weakness of will: a person does not “choose evil” in a way symmetrical to choosing good, but rather “chooses not to choose,” lets go of control, and is dragged along; therefore the experience of failure is more a loss of control than a conscious willing of evil.

“Dwells in the Innermost Chambers”: Revelation Through Causes, Particulars, and Systems

The text reads in Rabbi Kook that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not revealed in His fullness except through “a complete array of causes and effects,” in which even small causes generate great results through which His glory becomes recognizable. It interprets this as the original meaning of the expression that God “is found in the particulars,” when contemplation of particulars reveals an organically coordinated system. It parallels this to the soul: its wholeness is revealed in lofty powers such as intellect, understanding, justice, and uprightness, but it also weaves together “lowly” powers that serve as a corridor to the “innermost chambers” in which the soul “dwells” and illuminates the entire being. It presents this as an explanation of why one who looks only at physics or physiology sees no need to posit a soul, whereas a comprehensive look at organic unity reveals the unifying force.

The Purpose of Praise: The Fruit of Cleaving and Becoming Similar

The text concludes with a passage from Rabbi Kook: “The essence of praise is that it should bear fruit,” and interprets that fruit as a desire to cleave to the upright ways of God. It argues that without some degree of similarity between the soul and the Holy One, blessed be He, praise would be of no benefit to the soul, because it would have no way “to resemble its Maker.” It states that since the soul contains powers “something like the power on high,” praise strengthens awareness of greatness and the perfection of governance and adds “blessing to a person’s conduct” in the likeness of His blessed governance of His world.

The Structure of the Analogy: God–World and Soul–Body, Nearness and Distance, and the Capacity to Influence

The text presents the Talmudic analogy as operating along two complete axes: God–world and soul–body, including the similarity between the entities and between their constitutive mode of relation, so that without God the world would not be a world and without the soul the body would not be a body. It describes the relation as requiring both great distance and great closeness, formulating this as the convergence of the transcendent and the immanent and as a difficulty of apprehension arising both from sublimity and from inner identity. It argues that the connection between the soul and God is not only an analogy but also an inner affinity that makes recognition and praise possible through inward contemplation, and in this context it mentions Schopenhauer on perceiving “the thing in itself” through the self. It notes that Perek Shira attributes praise also to the inanimate and the vegetative, but not in the same conscious way as in the human being, and it concludes with a distinction between the influence of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the influence of a person: the Holy One, blessed be He, has access both to the inside and to the outside and therefore can “sustain” at infinite distance and at zero distance, whereas human beings, who do not have full inward access, require an “intermediate gap” of not-too-far and not-too-close. He illustrates this through the prohibitions of sexual relations in cases of “too far” and “too close,” and through the remark that self-treatment in psychology is limited because of one’s closeness to oneself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time, basically, we started with the Talmudic text that draws an analogy between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul in five respects, and I spoke a bit about organisms, or about how to understand the relationship between body and soul. I talked about how some people understand the soul as some kind of function of the body—what I called emergentism, emergence, strong emergence in the sense that you can’t reduce the collective phenomenon to the individual phenomena. And the view that seems to me more intuitive is that there is dualism here. In other words, there is a soul; it’s some kind of entity, not just something that emerges from the material whole, and that entity interacts with the body, in a two-way interaction. And we spoke about how that interaction is expressed on two planes: one plane is influence on the body, and the second plane is turning the body into a body. Meaning, without a soul inside the body, it’s not only that the soul doesn’t influence the body—the body isn’t even a body at all. It’s a collection of cells, or not even cells because they’re not alive, but I don’t know, a collection of molecules or atoms. And that’s also why in the end it disintegrates, because it can’t continue to survive without a soul inside it. So the connection between soul and body is really on these two planes: first, the soul constitutes the body itself, it turns it from a collection of particulars—molecules or cells—into an organism; and second, it affects it. In other words, there is interaction between them. I said that in kabbalistic terminology, this is usually the distinction between nefesh and ruach and neshamah. The nefesh is what makes the body into an organism, meaning into one overall entity that integrates all the body’s functions into one being. And ruach and neshamah and all the levels above that—there are five such components: nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. Everything beyond that really is some other kind of entity that interacts with the body. And therefore the transition between these two functions isn’t entirely clear, so the way we look at the human soul and body is really as some kind of one entity and not two entities in interaction—but that’s only one perspective. In principle there is another entity here, and so it’s no wonder that, say, materialists, or people inclined toward a worldview of physics, physicalists, refuse altogether to accept the second aspect. They see the soul or the nefesh only as something that turns the body into an organism, or that emerges from the organic, biological, physiological whole, and not as another entity, something else that influences that whole. Because it’s pretty hard to grasp what this thing is beyond the fact that it turns physics into biology. Okay? In other words, in the world of biology, life is defined as some state—call it a phase if you like, doesn’t matter—some different mode of behavior of matter. That’s all. There’s no additional substance here. Vitalism is practically a dirty word in biology today. Meaning, vitalism is the assumption that in a living body there has to be something besides chemistry and physics in order for biology to exist. So biologists today reject that out of hand and very vehemently; it’s almost heresy in their eyes. And in a certain sense this is some kind of dispute that exists between them and the approaches of religious, spiritual traditions that see the soul as some additional kind of entity. But here too one has to know that this dispute is not necessarily—it isn’t necessary. Because one could say, and I think it’s also true to say—and personally at least that’s my impression, even though I’m not a biology expert—that vitalism adds nothing to biology. And that’s true even—I’m saying this as a dualist, as someone who thinks there is something in the human being besides matter—but it contributes nothing to biological research. On the contrary, any phenomenon you see that needs explanation, you say no problem, it’s just the vital substance, and therefore everything is fine, and then you don’t need to continue researching. All the progress of biology came from the fact that people were unwilling to settle for that answer and decided to keep investigating with the tools of natural science, with the tools of material research, what is happening here in biology—and that’s the only way progress was made. So in a certain sense it’s a claim that cripples scientific research a bit, because it’s like with the Holy One, blessed be He. You’re facing some natural riddle—quantum theory, say—you discover phenomena there that you can’t explain, and then someone comes and says: that’s the Holy One, blessed be He, that’s beyond nature, beyond logic, and therefore everything is fine. And that is exactly the reason, or one exact reason, why we simply won’t continue to investigate, because no problem—we have an answer, it’s the Holy One, blessed be He. Physics, by contrast, advances by refusing to accept answers of that kind. It asks the questions and refuses to accept answers from other conceptual worlds; rather, it proceeds and tries to find answers within its own conceptual framework, and that’s the only way to move forward. Otherwise there’s simply no reason; everything can be answered by saying it’s a divine decree, it’s beyond nature, it doesn’t fit physics and that’s fine—and then nothing comes of it. The difference between materialists and dualists like me at least—call it sober dualism—is that on the level of scientific methodology I completely agree with the materialists. In scientific methodology there’s no reason at all to assume there is the Holy One, blessed be He, or a soul, or things like that; it only cripples the ability to advance scientifically. But they argue that as a result there is also no need to assume such things—that there is the Holy One, blessed be He, or that there is a soul, and so on. And I say no. That’s a claim about scientific methodology: that within scientific methodology this is not a legitimate tool in the scientific toolbox. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Those are two different things. It could absolutely be that I believe there is God and that there is a soul and everything else, and yet I conduct biology while ignoring those assumptions, because that’s how biological research progresses. So maybe let me say one more sentence about this. That’s also why in the debate over evolution, say, versus the Holy One, blessed be He, you see the same thing. Evolutionists try to claim that I don’t need the Holy One, blessed be He, in order to explain what’s happening here; I have natural explanations—evolution, genetics, and everything we know today from this world of neo-Darwinism. The creationists, those who believe in the Holy One, blessed be He—mainly Christians, by the way—attack evolutionary science in the name of faith. This science can’t be right; they try to find scientific bugs in neo-Darwinist theory. And again, I think both sides share a common assumption, and I disagree with it—they’re both mistaken. Because in terms of scientific methodology, the neo-Darwinians are right that it is wrong to bring the Holy One, blessed be He, into the matter. If there is a puzzle, one should try to solve it using scientific research methods. It’s not certain we’ll succeed in every case, but as a methodological assumption it is certainly more fruitful than the assumption that there is God and that solves all our problems and we don’t need to ask questions or seek answers. But that doesn’t mean that if it’s a methodological assumption, it’s also a correct claim about reality. As a methodological assumption, in order to advance science, I assume there is no God. But that doesn’t mean that as a philosopher, or as a theologian, or however you want to put it, I think there is no God. These are entirely different questions. I can say there is God, but that doesn’t advance scientific methodology, because science doesn’t deal with the aspects that this idea advances. So there is no need to bring it in. And therefore both the creationists and the neo-Darwinians are mistaken here, because both think there is some competition between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the sciences of evolution or biology. And that is not true. There is no competition at all. On the contrary, I think biology should proceed as if there were no God—like Rabin, I think, once said: one should fight terror as if there were no peace, and strive for peace as if there were no terror. So here too I say the same thing: one should conduct scientific research as if one were an atheist, and believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, as if there weren’t. And these really are two different planes. And in the book God Plays Dice I tried to give this a bit more content, and argued that although science on the one hand says nothing about God, or assumes nothing about God, and shouldn’t use the idea of God—on the contrary, it actually interferes with it—on the other hand, when one looks not at the picture within the laws, but at the laws themselves: evolution offers an explanation of what happens in the world, of the development of life, in terms of a system of laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. But I ask not how life develops within this given system of laws. I ask what is the source of the system of laws. That is not a scientific question. Science operates within the laws: let’s explain what happens here. But science does not answer the question why these are the laws. It only discovers that these are the laws, and then uses them to explain various phenomena. But the philosophical question—which is not a scientific question—is where the laws came from. In other words, who is responsible for these laws? And here, in my view, the Holy One, blessed be He, enters. But this is not on the scientific plane at all. Therefore on the one hand, from science’s perspective, the Holy One, blessed be He, really only gets in the way, and certainly is not needed. On the other hand, the Holy One, blessed be He, is not just some optional faith. In other words, independently of science, I also think there is God, and these are two different aspects. No—I’m making a stronger claim than that. I’m claiming that after I look at science itself, but from the outside and not from within, I claim that this is evidence for the existence of God. In other words, science does not use God, but it constitutes evidence for the existence of God. Not the explanation of processes in terms of laws—that is science’s business and has nothing to do with God—but rather the explanation of why these are the laws, or how these laws came into being. Here I say that if there are laws, there is apparently a lawgiver. Without getting into that, I’m just trying to show the logic of the matter, which separates the methodological question from the metaphysical question: between the question of what it is worthwhile to assume in order for science to advance, and the question of what is true. Meaning, what exists in the world and what does not. And many times people mix up these two things. People who say that science is the whole picture and there’s no point thinking about anything beyond science say there is no God. But they are confusing a methodological assumption with a metaphysical conclusion. Those are two entirely different things. Methodologically, I can agree; metaphysically, I do not agree. Okay, that’s just a supplement to last time. I’ll now share the Ein Ayah. Good, so let’s start reading. Last time we hadn’t read yet; we read only the Talmudic passage. So Rav Kook says as follows: “In order to impart the power of life to another, one must be so mighty and so elevated beyond the recipient’s level that life flourishes, yet the recipient is not even capable of grasping it in imagination.” Yes—so that something can impart the power of life to some other being, the giver must be much higher in value than the recipient. That is Rav Kook’s assumption, to the point that the recipient cannot even know the giver or understand what this giver is—and this must be so in principle. Maybe I’ll say a sentence about this, because on the face of it I don’t see why this assumption is necessary. Why can’t I influence something without being ten times higher than it? I’m someone like it, and I influence it. Are parents who influence their children so exalted and incomprehensible in their children’s eyes? Why? This reminds me of Mark Twain, who said that when I was fourteen, my father was a complete idiot. A mere six or seven years passed, and look how much he learned in those few short years, how much he progressed in those few years. So I think that’s a nice metaphor for this issue. Anyway, it could be that this is related to the two aspects I spoke about before. Because I said that this influence Rav Kook is talking about—I didn’t say about Rav Kook then, but now I am saying it—the influence Rav Kook is talking about is not just influence in the sense that a parent gives a child food so he has something to eat, but some sort of influence that also constitutes him as a child. That is, as I said, the soul not only feeds the body, sustains the body, but the soul actually makes it into a body. In other words, without it, it isn’t itself. Now if I’m talking about that aspect of influence, then I can understand what Rav Kook is saying. Because it is very difficult for a person to grasp that which itself makes him into a person. There is some kind of mixing here between the perceiver and the perceived. In order to grasp something, I need to stand outside it, look at it, understand what it means, where it is and where it isn’t, delineate it and try to characterize it or define it. But if this is the thing that actually constitutes me from within, that is what makes me me, it is very hard for me to grasp it. It is very hard for me to look at it distinctly and ask myself what it is. What is this thing, say, apart from other things? Because even that very act of looking, that very question, itself makes use of that same thing. So I’m a bit trapped in the inability to grasp that thing as something standing outside me. Only here, again, I say I’m not one hundred percent sure this is what Rav Kook means, because what I’m describing here is some kind of technical problem and less a problem of elevation. It’s not that I fail to grasp it because it is terribly lofty, far more sublime than I am or something like that. I fail to grasp it because it’s simply me. Because the perceiver and the perceived—yes, “the binder, the bound, and the altar”—the perceiver and the perceived are the same entity, and so it is very hard to grasp. I once mentioned in one of the earlier sessions Ron Aharoni’s book The Cat That Isn’t There, where he says that all the problems of philosophy begin—in fact this is philosophy’s very definition in his view—with that confusion between the person as perceiver, the person as observer, and the person who is being observed. When I observe myself, I’m really mixing two hats, and that is how many philosophical problems are created—in his view all philosophical problems. So what I’m saying here is really something similar. But then the inability to grasp is not because there is something terribly elevated here. On the contrary, it’s because this thing is very, very close—it is me myself. It is very hard for me to grasp myself. Yes, even metaphorically—it’s not exactly the same thing—but it’s not so trivial to understand that the space around us is full of air, because air is perceived almost like space itself. What is there in space itself besides the air? Or the reverse, if you like. There is air around me—but what is the space in which the air exists? People identify the two things. Space is that collection of air in front of me. No. Space is some abstract thing in which both I and the air exist. It is very hard for me to grasp the concept of space in itself—not as the infrastructure within which things happen, but when I try to contemplate the concepts of space and time themselves, it is very hard for me to grasp them. It is hard for me to grasp them because I myself operate within them. So it’s not exactly that I can’t grasp them, but I don’t know whether what I fail to grasp is, as Rav Kook says here, because it is vast and elevated beyond my level and therefore I can’t grasp it, or because I can’t grasp it simply because it is part of the system within which my perception operates. It is part of me myself. So how can I grasp such a thing when I’m already inside it and functioning within it? I’m reminded of something else: the Leshem brings in the name of the Ari that space and time belong to the yesod de-malkhut of the world above us. In every world, the space and time relevant to it belong to the yesod de-malkhut of the world above it. In kabbalistic terminology, yesod is the reproductive organ; malkhut is the female opposite the Ze’ir Anpin, which is the male. Yesod de-malkhut is the reproductive organ of the female, which is really of the mother, which is really the womb. Meaning, the claim is that the space and time in our world are the womb of the world above us, within which our world is born. We are born from the womb, so how can we grasp the womb—that which contains us, within which we function? Therefore space and time appear to us as abstract concepts, to the point that Kant claimed they do not exist at all. They are only forms of our perception of reality, but not really things called space and time. So according to the Leshem, his claim is that such things do exist, but they belong to one world above ours, and therefore in the language of our world they seem to us like some fiction that doesn’t really exist—it belongs to the world above. If one looks at it that way, then again I return to Rav Kook: maybe one can identify what I said with what Rav Kook means. I fail to grasp it because I live within it. But that doesn’t contradict what Rav Kook says, that it can’t be grasped because it is of a higher order than I am. Anything I live within, anything from whose power I came, in essence belongs to one higher world, and therefore within my world’s conceptual system I cannot grasp it. I cannot define it as a concrete entity. And you can already see how this immediately returns us to those concepts of God in relation to the world, or the soul in relation to the body, to which I devoted the previous class. Because that is exactly the relation between soul and body, or between God and the world, which they actually constitute. The soul constitutes the body—not only affects it, but constitutes it—and the same is true of the Holy One, blessed be He, with the world. And in that sense, therefore, we cannot grasp the Holy One, blessed be He, and by the same token we also cannot grasp our own soul. So is it because it is elevated, or because it is the thing itself? Maybe those are two sides of the same coin, I don’t know. “Therefore”—I continue reading—“therefore just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sees but is not seen, so too…” because it cannot be grasped, since that is the valuation required in order to draw the flow of life from the recipient toward the level of the giver. Yes, in other words, something that can influence me is something I will not succeed in grasping; it is not comprehended by me. And therefore I cannot grasp the Holy One, blessed be He, and this is what the Talmud means when it says that He sees and is not seen. He sees and is not seen—but in a certain sense this is not only because He is terribly far away, far from me. In a certain sense it is precisely because He is inside me. Remember that the framework for the whole discussion was one of the earlier passages about the relation between surrounding and filling in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He? That He fills me, He is inside me, and therefore the fact that He surrounds and the fact that He fills may be two aspects exactly like what we saw with space and time. Space and time are the womb within which my world takes shape, just as the fetus born from its mother’s womb takes shape—but all of that is done within the womb. It’s like Plato’s cave metaphor. If you want to grasp what a womb is—yes?—and you’re a fetus inside the womb, and now I’m speaking, you have no chance of doing that, since the womb is the matrix within which you operate. It is the world within which you live. Meaning, you have nothing with which to compare it. In order to grasp it, you need to get outside, understand: ah, here is the womb and here is something else—then I can define what exactly a womb is. As long as I’m inside it, I have no way of grasping the womb. It is simply the framework within which I live. Just as a person in the Matrix cannot grasp that this matrix is some imaginary world. In order to grasp that it is an imaginary world, you need to get outside, see what this world is in relation to the real world, make a comparison, and then you can understand. When you are inside it, it’s like the cave metaphor—yes?—you have no way of grasping it. So the womb and space and time and all these things are all really—I don’t know whether they’re examples, because in kabbalistic terminology it is literally the same thing. The womb is space and time; the womb of the higher world is the space and time of my world. I live within a spatio-temporal framework, but that framework is really the womb within which my world functions. But that womb belongs to the mother—to what belongs to the world above. Okay? Therefore by definition, the abstract concepts within which I function are concepts really taken from one world above. Therefore I cannot grasp them. So that is the first comparison: the Holy One, blessed be He, sees and is not seen, and the soul too sees and is not seen. And again I say that there are two aspects: one aspect is because He is very far away, in a higher world; the second aspect is because He is very near, because He is simply me. I cannot grasp what I am. And these are two aspects that seem opposite but are really two sides of the same coin, and this returns us once again—this is why I say the circle closes here that was opened in the passages about surrounding and filling. There we saw two different perspectives on the Holy One, blessed be He, and His relation to the world: surrounding from outside and filling from within. And here suddenly we see those two aspects reconnecting. Now the second aspect that the Talmud compares between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sustains the whole world—yes, here—just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sustains the whole world, so too the soul sustains the whole body. This is the second aspect of the analogy. “Food comes to restore what has been lost, because the life of the living being and its powers were depleted through the labor of life. Food comes and renews the powers and restores them. And behold, the Holy One, blessed be He, bestows the abundance of existence upon reality in the manner of food. For there is no necessity for the continued existence of reality except through the renewal of His abundance and His will. As our early sages, of blessed memory, explained on the verse, ‘Who made the great lights, for His kindness endures forever,’ indicating that He renews in His goodness each day continually the work of creation. And behold, if the powers of the body were valued only as a machine operating by its prepared power, without added fuel or nourishment, but only by the power already in it and now functioning, they would labor and grow weary”—in the end it would run out, it would fall apart. “Only the soul, by its own intrinsic power, renews the weary powers and adds new strength to them. And this is what sustains the body, just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sustains the world.” There are several assumptions here. I’m doing this paragraph by paragraph because these paragraphs are really separate in the Talmud as well. He joined them into one paragraph, but what he is really saying is this. I once had an interesting argument during the Simchat Torah hakafot in Yeruham. Rabbi Blumentzweig—we were dancing there in circles, and every so often Rabbi Blumentzweig would stop the circle and launch some little Torah thought into the air. He was the head of the yeshivah there. Launch some little Torah thought into the air. So at one point he spoke there about the circles of dancing in the hakafot of Simchat Torah, and he said that this was really like what Abraham our father saw when he saw the spheres turning and asked himself who turns the sphere—which is the proof Abraham our father brought for the existence of God: who causes the motion of the stars, which are constantly turning? That’s Maimonides at the beginning of the laws of idolatry; it also appears in rabbinic midrashim. So I said to him, wearing my physicist’s hat, that the fact that something keeps spinning all the time proves nothing. Newton’s first law of mechanics says that if no force acts on an object, then it continues moving in uniform motion in a straight line. People think that if no force acts on a body then it will stop, but that’s not true. Newton’s first law says that if no force acts on a body, it will keep moving forever at the same speed in the same direction. On the contrary, in order to stop it or change its speed up or down, you need to apply a force to it. If no force acts, the motion continues; you need to apply force in order to stop the motion, not in order to continue the motion. It’s exactly the opposite of what Maimonides says and what the sages say about Abraham our father—that since we see the spheres constantly turning, apparently there must be someone turning them. But that’s not true. If they stopped, then there would have to be someone stopping them; if they’re turning, that’s just what should happen according to the law of inertia. He said to me there—of course we could have discussed friction and all kinds of things—but he said something interesting there that I thought about quite a bit afterward. He said that this is true within the laws. Given these laws of mechanics, then indeed those laws are such that if no force acts on a body, it will keep moving in the same way, in the same direction, at the same speed. But that law itself is not necessarily self-evident. Why does a body in fact keep moving when nothing acts on it? On the physical level, when I ask myself as a scientist why it happens—Newton’s law of inertia. Now a philosopher comes and asks himself: yes, but who created Newton’s law of inertia? Who created a reality such that if no additional force acts on it, it keeps moving forever in the same way, and a force is needed in order to change that or stop it? Whoever did that, in some sense invested force here—or perhaps even constantly invests force—so that this business should persist. Only from my perspective as a physicist, that is a force outside physics; for me that is already Newton’s first law. I operate within the law; I ask, within this framework of laws, how I explain what happens in the world. But the philosopher asks why there is this force, or why there is this law—sorry, where the law came from. And that is what Rav Kook is saying here: we understand—think of an inanimate object for the moment, let’s leave aside a living being. An inanimate object, if it receives no nourishment, nothing happens to it, unlike a living being. Nothing happens. It doesn’t need something to fuel it in order to keep living. Rav Kook is describing reality here as though if there weren’t something fueling it all the time, it would simply disintegrate by itself; it would not continue by inertia to exist. And this isn’t just his assumption; it’s an assumption of many philosophers, and in Hasidism there’s a lot made of “He renews in His goodness each day continually the work of creation” precisely because of this point. Meaning, certain things cannot continue to exist if there is not something taking care of their constant coming-into-being. And again, through a physicist’s lenses this is simply not true, because on the contrary, if nothing interferes, they will go on existing as they always were. For something to change, something must act upon that entity so that it changes. But I say: perhaps what Rabbi Blumentzweig answered me there is also what lies at the basis of Rav Kook’s claim—that when you look at it not from within the laws of nature but at the laws of nature themselves: how did it actually happen that in our world, without applying any force, things keep turning forever in the same way at the same speed when nobody touches them? There must be something outside physics that fuels this and enlivens it all the time. As a physicist I assume that this exists—it’s Newton’s first law. But a law is not an explanation; a law only describes reality. The question is why this law exists or who is responsible for it. And in that sense Rav Kook’s claim is that there must be something here that constitutes reality, and that returns us to Maimonides in the laws of idolatry and to Abraham our father, because that is how he inferred the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He. And not to mention that when you speak about a living body, this is certainly true. A living body, even according to ordinary laws of nature, if it does not receive nourishment, in the end it will disintegrate—that is, it will die and decompose. So if one can argue about inanimate things, with regard to a living body this is already true within physics—or more precisely within biology. That is, it does not continue to exist if it does not receive constant nourishment. And therefore just as the Holy One, blessed be He, gives life to the world—and in this case that means both the inanimate and the living, physics itself—on the level of the human being, the soul gives life to biology. The parallel is: the Holy One, blessed be He, does for physics what the soul does for biology, of course by His power, but they are what fuel this system so that it can continue according to the fixed laws. Something a scientist will never be able to detect, because everything proceeds according to the laws, so he doesn’t ask himself what the problem is. He sees no problem at all—it proceeds according to the law and everything is fine. But the philosopher, who asks himself why there is such a law, reaches the conclusion that there must be something that enlivens it. You see that again and again we return to the same point: that from within the organic entity we are looking at through the lenses of the biologist, there is no question, everything is fine, there are biological laws and that’s how it works. Through the lenses of the philosopher, I ask myself: wait a second, what is the source of these laws of biology? And then I say there must be a soul. Even though as a biological methodology, it is not advisable to assume the soul or bring it into scientific considerations. But when I ask about science itself, or why there is this science, I necessarily arrive at the existence of a soul. Or, in the world, I arrive at the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He. Again, these are the same two perspectives. We saw this above in the first comparison, that the Holy One, blessed be He, sees and is not seen, and so too the soul. And now we see this in the second comparison: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sustains the world, so too the soul sustains the body. Maybe—now I remember—one more comment about this difference of perspectives between the scientific view and the metaphysical or philosophical one. There is a passage by a Greek philosopher named Anaximander. It is the first written passage we have from Greek philosophers. One passage from his writings survives; it also appears in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, and you can find it on the internet. There he explains how the world came into being. He has some metaphysical scheme there of how the world came into being. So he says—in my translation, and one can debate the interpretation somewhat, but I think this is the accepted translation—that it basically came into being out of primeval matter by the separation of opposites. Say heat separated from cold, dense from rarefied, and things like that. And then these opposites cancel each other out, and so nothing essentially new is added compared to the initial state of the primeval matter. In modern terms I would say this is exactly what contemporary physics of the last several decades says about the creation of matter and antimatter. That is, the claim that, say, there can be a vacuum in the world, and now out of that vacuum an entire world can arise without violating any conservation law. Why? Because corresponding to every charge or mass that is created, an anti-charge and anti-mass are created, so that the total mass in the world is zero, the total charge in the world is zero, and no physical conservation law is broken. Therefore the physicist is calm. The physicist is willing to accept that something like this can come from a vacuum. In quantum theory it is absolutely foundational that a particle and antiparticle can suddenly burst out of the vacuum. Creation ex nihilo. Why? Because all the physical properties cancel, and the total remains zero. So there is no problem; the conservation laws are not broken. But as a philosopher, Anaximander asked himself: but something here still doesn’t make sense. With all due respect, maybe those are the laws of quantum theory, but philosophically it is not plausible that something should come from nothing. So what if an anti-something is created opposite it and cancels it out? That only doubles the wonder. So two complex things came into being out of the vacuum, and now you’re satisfied? Now everything is fine? It makes sense to you? Two opposite things, each of them astonishingly complex, only one cancels the other in every respect. That correspondence is even more astonishing than if only one thing had come into being. But from the physicist’s point of view he is calm, because the conservation laws are preserved, not violated, so everything is fine. But as a philosopher you ask yourself: how can this be? Something here is not logical. Again the same thing: in the physicist’s perspective you say no problem, opposites are created from the vacuum and everything is fine. Anaximander was not willing to accept that. He claimed: opposites are created, but out of primeval matter, not out of vacuum. Because there has to be something beforehand; it cannot emerge from nothing. For a physicist it can emerge from nothing; he is not interested in the things themselves but only in their physical properties, okay? But Anaximander was a philosopher, not a physicist, and as a philosopher he had to add another certain dimension here, namely primeval matter. Fine, that’s just another example illustrating the same point. Now the third aspect: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is pure, so too the soul is pure. Here this is the third aspect in which the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul are compared. “This teaches that there is no evil power in the human soul in itself, and the evil powers come only from the density and coarseness of the body. At times it does not pierce through”—that is, from the language of penetrating—“and the intellectual soul does not succeed in penetrating, the rational soul, so as to act through its powers the good that is proper. Therefore evil too is found in reality. Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, bestows His abundance for the ultimate good, and the wicked at times invert the intention and by their choice harm themselves.” What is he saying? Again, there is some assumption here that needs discussion: that both the Holy One, blessed be He, in relation to the world, and the soul in relation to the body, are really the only source of reality. The only true being that exists is spirit, not matter. We spoke about Descartes’ cogito last time, and that is really what he writes here too. That the more basic thing that exists is actually spirit. I know matter exists because spirit apprehends the fact that it exists. And by analogy to good and evil, Rav Kook claims that there really is no evil in the world. What there is is the absence of good. Meaning, only good has true existence. And when we speak of something that seems to us evil, what that means is that the good did not succeed in penetrating—like in something pierced through—into that place, and that is what we call evil. Just as darkness is not something real but only the absence of light. Okay? So he claims that this too is the relation between good and evil. This is also, by the way, the accepted solution. Both early kabbalists and philosophers or scholars of Kabbalah speak about how Kabbalah tries to offer some kind of solution to a very basic theological problem: how can evil have come into the world? If everything comes from the Holy One, blessed be He, then there ought to have been only good in the world. How was evil created? So the solution that Kabbalah offers, at least in the commonly accepted interpretations as far as I know—those aware of this difficulty, this philosophical question; Shomer Emunim ha-Kadmon speaks about it, I think, Rabbi Yosef Ergas and others—the claim is that evil is not really something that exists. It is only the absence of good. That is, if the good does not succeed in penetrating into some place, yes, crossing some vessel, if the light does not succeed in entering a vessel, in striking within the vessel, then a place without light is created. And there is darkness there, which by analogy is evil, the absence of good. So there are not really two kinds of entities, and evil does not descend from above, only good descends from above. Evil is created where good is not allowed to enter. Wherever good is not allowed to enter, evil is created. But this evil is created—for example, in the kabbalistic world it is well known that demons are creatures without a root, unlike angels. What is the difference between angels and demons? Angels have a root in worlds higher than themselves. They begin from the Holy One, blessed be He. Demons are creatures without a root. They exist in the world of formation or in our world, but they have no root in a higher world. What is the idea behind that? It is this idea. Because demons are not beings that really exist. Demons are beings that exist in a place where the light of good is not allowed to reach. That is why demons are always found in dark and isolated places—in the Talmud always in the wilderness, in the desert. That is where the demons are. In darkness and in the desert and so on. Why? Because there really is no such thing as demons. Demons are the absence of the reality of good. The absence of familiar reality always gives us some fear of demons. So we imagine there are demons there, and it frightens us terribly. But what frightens us is not the demons that are there, but what is not there. What is not there is that familiar reality of human beings, of divine presence—depending on what plane you are speaking about. That is what is called demons. Therefore even the view that sees demons as spiritual entities—and there are even algorithms in the Talmud for how to discover them, yes, with the afterbirth of a black hen and all those things—that too is the same view that sees demons as some kind of fiction rooted in our own perspective. I’m not sure these are separate perspectives. It is the same perspective. Because this fiction is created in a place where we do not find divine providence, or angels, the emissaries of the Holy One, blessed be He—yes, where He does not appear. So where the Holy One, blessed be He, stops, as it were, demons are created. But just as darkness does not really exist, it is only the absence of light, so demons too do not really exist. And therefore that is basically his claim: that the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul are both entirely pure. Evil does not come from there. When a person chooses evil, this is really this same perspective—what does it mean that he chooses evil? After all, choice is an action of my soul; the body does not choose. How can a soul choose evil? Well, it cannot be that the soul does not choose evil but only good, because then there is no choice. We spoke about this too one of the previous times. In order for choice to have meaning, there has to be an option to choose good and an option to choose evil. Then if I choose good, that act has value. But if I cannot choose evil, then it has no value at all; I am compelled to do good. So how does a person nonetheless choose evil? I think I spoke about this once—this is what is called weakness. Weakness of will, the problem in analytic philosophy with all kinds of paradoxes that arise around it. But for our purposes, what I’m saying is that weakness of will means that I am not really choosing evil; rather, I let go of the reins, I stop choosing. Then as a result I am sometimes dragged into doing evil. That is, once again, evil is presented here as some sort of absence of choice, not as a choice of evil. That is why the feeling a person has after failing and doing something bad—bad according to his own view, I mean—is that I failed. Not that I chose evil. I lost control; my impulse overcame me. Therefore it is called weakness of will, yes? My will was too weak, and so I was dragged into doing something I did not want. This basically means that when I choose evil, I am not really choosing evil. It is not the same thing as choosing good. To choose evil is to choose not to choose. Once I do not choose, I am sometimes dragged into doing something bad. But I do not consciously and wholeheartedly choose to do evil, and that usually does not happen. So this is what he says here: the Holy One, blessed be He, is good and the soul too is pure. The soul chooses only good. And the Holy One, blessed be He, too—evil does not descend from above, only good. So how are a person’s evil choice or evil in the world created? As the absence of good. When good fails to enter, then evil is created. But still, how is it that it does not succeed in entering? There has to be some power—there is an absurdity here that is not entirely resolved. Because say the light does not succeed in entering because the vessel blocks it. Fine, so what is the vessel? Where did the vessel come from? So there is still some additional entity beyond the light. We have not entirely gotten rid of dualism. But the vessel is indeed another entity that exists, only it is not evil; it is neutral. It is just that where the vessel exists and is too dense, the light cannot enter, and then evil is created. It is not that the vessel is evil; the vessel is not evil. But if the vessel does not let the light enter, then darkness is created—yes?—and then evil is created. There is still some element of dualism here, except that this dualism is good versus neutral, not good versus evil. When the neutral blocks the good, that is what creates evil. And this is true both with the Holy One, blessed be He, and with the soul. Now the fourth: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells in innermost chambers, so too the soul dwells in innermost chambers. “The blessed God, who reveals Himself to His creatures in His perfection, reveals Himself to them only through a complete system of causes and effects and ordered actions”—that is, actions derived from causes and effects—“some more significant and some lesser in value. And from the small causes come results for great and significant causes through which the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, is recognized.” Yes, this is what people mean when they say God is in the details. God is in the details—that phrase in common usage means, of course, when you manage, pay close attention to the small details; they can trip you up. God is in the details. But of course that is a borrowed use. The source of the phrase “God is in the details” is what Rav Kook writes here. Namely, that precisely the little things, which seem not connected to other little things—look at them and see what stands at their root, and suddenly you will see that this whole business actually functions as one coordinated organic system, even though when you look at the details you do not see this. So looking through the details toward the whole reveals the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world, or the soul in the body. Again we return to that same connection between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world, and the soul and the body: our organism is composed of many, many tiny details and tiny functions and tiny organs, but when you look at it as a whole you see that every little thing really reveals “the heavens declare the work of His hands.” In Bless the Lord, O my soul, yes—there are many verses that really say this: that this whole great system of all the details behaving like one coordinated organic entity reveals that at the base there is some one thing that turns them into such an organism and gives life to them all. So that too is an analogy between the soul and the Holy One, blessed be He, and again it returns to the same axis that has accompanied us throughout this whole passage. “Thus the soul”—I continue reading—“though its principal perfection is revealed through the lofty powers, righteousness and uprightness, intellect and understanding”—these are the big systems we see, the intellect and understanding in the whole system, righteousness and uprightness and seeing the larger picture—“nevertheless even the lower powers are interwoven together with the lofty powers. And they are like a corridor to the innermost chambers in which the soul dwells and reveals its splendor and radiance.” And this is exactly the same point that keeps returning: there is the way of looking at the organism as if it were merely a mechanical material matter, but if you look carefully and ask yourself: wait, why is it really like this?—you discover that in the innermost chambers, meaning in the infrastructure of this whole system, there actually sits some additional entity called soul. Something that one who looks at physics as such or physiology as such sees no need at all to posit. Therefore this analogy between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world—the relation between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world—has a very beautiful analogy to the relation between the soul and the body. Now in the next passage—just a second—in the next passage Rav Kook concludes his treatment of this Talmudic passage. You can see it, right? When I move here you can see paragraph 135, yes? So let’s read it. “The essence of praise is that it bear fruit.” Meaning, when we praise the Holy One, blessed be He—yes, “Let one who possesses these five things come and praise the One who possesses these five things”—the soul praises the Holy One, blessed be He. So Rav Kook explains: the essence of praise is that it bear fruit. You do not praise the Holy One, blessed be He, for His sake; you praise the Holy One, blessed be He, for your sake, perhaps—we’ll see in a moment. In any event, it has to bear some fruit; it is not something that stands on its own. Praise is instrumental, not a value in itself. “To become desirous of cleaving to the straight ways of God.” That is the fruit. Basically, when I praise the Holy One, blessed be He, what good does it do? Because if I praise Him, then I also want to cleave to His ways, and that can improve me. “If so, had the soul not possessed analogues of these powers mentioned in the praise of the Holy One, blessed be He, it would not have been able to receive benefit from the praise, since it would have no way in which to resemble its Creator.” Right—if the soul has nothing in common with the Holy One, blessed be He, in any way, then what is the point of praising Him? After all, the whole point of praising Him is for me to acquire within myself those qualities that I praise in Him. But if they have no relevance to me because there is no similarity at all—these are simply entirely different beings—then praise becomes meaningless. Therefore there must be an analogy between the soul and the Holy One, blessed be He, so that the soul can praise the Holy One, blessed be He. “But since it does possess powers akin to the heavenly power, then in praising its Maker it adds strength to recognize His greatness and the perfection of His governance, and it adds blessing in its own governance in likeness to His blessed governance of His world.” This is the next line, and this is the question mark I noted above. At first he says that the purpose of praise is the fruit. What is the fruit? The fruit is ostensibly my own perfection, right? When I praise the Holy One, blessed be He, for His perfection, His goodness, then I become perfected and become better, and that is the fruit that praise produces. But in the last line Rav Kook says there is another fruit: “to add blessing in its own governance in likeness to His blessed governance of His world.” Ah—sorry, here I’m actually not sure. Now suddenly I see I’m not sure I’m right. I thought he meant to say this is worship for the sake of the supernal, that the praise is intended for the Holy One, blessed be He, and if I praise Him, it improves His governance too, not only my own. But I think “its governance” here means the person’s governance. I retract that. “To recognize His greatness and the perfection of His governance, and it adds blessing in its own governance”—that is, in the person’s own governance, not the Holy One’s. So no, I erase the question mark. The fruit Rav Kook is speaking about here is fruit in the person himself. But now let’s try for a moment to see the overall structure of what we have seen here. What we basically saw in these two passages of Rav Kook—which are really the whole of this Talmudic text we read—is that the relation—there is an analogy between the relation of God to the world and the relation of the soul to the body. The analogy is not between God and the world or between the soul and the body, but between those two axes: the God-world axis and the soul-body axis. These two axes stand in analogy, and the analogy is made on all three levels: God versus soul, world versus body, and the relation between them, the hyphen versus the hyphen. Yes: God in relation to the world, and soul in relation to the body. These analogies really sum up what I spoke about last time. Because this basically means that the Holy One, blessed be He—what does that hyphen mean? That hyphen means that beyond the dualism that there is God and there is world, or there is soul and there is body, there is also something such that without God the world would not be a world, and without the soul the body would not be a body. And therefore there is a hyphen between them. It is not that they are standing side by side; there is some kind of symbiosis between them. And therefore the relation wears two hats—yes?—two hats, both with respect to the soul and with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He. Now Rav Kook says that the relation between God and the world, like that between soul and body, requires a very great distance between the two things. Between the thing and what is connected to it by the hyphen there is a very great distance, because otherwise it could not nourish it. And I discussed whether this distance is an inward distance or an outward distance—surrounding and filling. Distance and closeness: there are here two faces of the same thing, tremendous closeness that creates distance or a very deep inability to grasp this thing. So that is what exists in each axis separately. But now I come back and say: but the Talmud is not talking about the axes. The Talmud is talking about the analogy between God and the soul. And that actually means that these two systems connect to each other at both of their ends. The human body is part of the physical world, so in fact the human body is an expression of the world. It is not an analogy; it is the thing itself. The human body is part of the physical world. And likewise the soul in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He. The soul in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, is not just an analogy. There is something in the soul that comes from Him—that is the filling as distinct from the surrounding. And therefore this analogy is connected at the lower end and at the upper end. At the lower end and at the upper end it is connected, and some kind of two axes are formed that run somehow in parallel, but they emerge from a common point and end at a common point. And this means that just as the soul can praise the Holy One, blessed be He, because there is an analogy between them, there is similarity between them, this really returns us to what I said at the beginning, in the first passages that opened this whole series of passages: that the Holy One, blessed be He, is within the soul, and therefore we can know the Holy One, blessed be He, by looking within ourselves. Remember Schopenhauer, who said that I can grasp the thing-in-itself only in the context in which I look at myself. In other words, this connection between the soul and God is not merely analogical; it is a connection, it is simply the same thing. It is not that there is an analogy between two things; something of the Holy One, blessed be He, is within the soul, because otherwise it would not exist at all. And that enables it on the one hand to praise Him, and on the other hand to know Him—that is, to understand who He is. Without that, we could neither understand Him nor, consequently, praise Him, and therefore there also could not be the fruit that follows praise—namely that I myself improve because I aspire to reach where the Holy One, blessed be He, is, to what I praised in the Holy One, blessed be He. So that is really the overall picture that emerges from here. And that is one of the reasons why, say, rocks or inanimate bodies, or even plants, cannot really do all this. Although Perek Shirah says that even inanimate things and plants praise the Holy One, blessed be He, and sing song to Him, I assume it does not mean in the same sense that a human being does this, but either they do it in the eyes of man, or they do it through their nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. I don’t know exactly what that means, but they do not have the consciousness a human being has, the intellect a human being has, and therefore this cannot really be done there in the full sense we saw here. Perek Shirah says that there too there is some aspect, even among inanimate things and vegetation, of praise of the Holy One, blessed be He, since ultimately they too live by His power. It is not only the human being who exists through His power; inanimate matter too exists through His power. Therefore praise can come from them too, but not in the same way that a human being praises the Holy One, blessed be He. There may be one final comment here, and with that I’ll finish. I said that Rav Kook begins by saying that in order for something to nourish something else, it has to be far higher than it. But on the other hand, as we saw, it also has to be really one with it. It has to surround—yes, surrounding light—but also fill. Only that way can it truly nourish it. I remind you of the first passage, which says that Rav Kook is not like a painter, because a painter paints a figure on the wall, whereas the Holy One, blessed be He, also puts inner organs into it; He deals with it from within and not only from without. Your ability truly to influence something exists only if you also have access to its inside, not only to its outside. Therefore the analogy I described here is a necessary analogy in order to complete the picture we discussed there regarding the painter. And that is what I said: although this answer, which draws an analogy between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the soul, appears in the Talmud after some kind of misunderstanding—someone there misunderstood a question, answered it in detail, and then it turned out that it was not even the right question; the real question was different, and now it was answered with the analogy between the soul and the Holy One, blessed be He—but I said: it is the same thing. There is some editing of the passage here whose purpose is really to approach the same idea both from the mistaken initial assumption and from the correct conclusion, both of which really lead to one large picture. One last comment in this context. It has occurred to me several times that when we speak about the laws of marriage, say, in Jewish law, then among forbidden sexual relations there are two types. There are forbidden relations of too far, and forbidden relations of too close. For example, a gentile—not to mention an animal or things like that—there is, of course, a prohibition on having sexual relations with them. Those are prohibitions of too far. There are prohibitions of too close, which are incestuous relations, relatives or family members; those are the prohibitions of ervah. Good and productive procreation takes place when you are in an intermediate range. You have to be distant, but not too distant. If you are too distant, interaction cannot occur. Meaning, living beings cannot reproduce with one another when they belong to two different species, because they are not of the same kind, and so they cannot reproduce. Why? Because it is too distant. You need something to fertilize the other thing. In order for it to fertilize it, it has to be different. But in order for them to be able to produce something together, they still have to be sufficiently close and not totally different. Therefore marriage prohibitions, whose point ultimately—or marriage, not marriage prohibitions—marriage, whose point in Jewish law at least is procreation, can come about only when it is not too far and not too close. When there is some access to the inside of the other even if not complete, but not total identification. Total identification creates nothing new. Two identical things simply duplicate themselves. If you want true procreation, something that creates something new, you need difference. You need difference, but not too much distance. With the Holy One, blessed be He, what emerges is a kind of very interesting dual picture. The Holy One, blessed be He, is very far from us, but at the same time very close to us—actually within us, and also at an infinitely distant remove from us. And He nonetheless somehow succeeds in sustaining us, or the world, because He has access both to our inside and to our outside. But this is both infinite distance and zero distance. We, as human beings, are only painters; we cannot touch the inner organs. Therefore, in order for us to be able to exert productive influence, to be fruitful and multiply, we need to choose a partner such that our distance from that partner is neither too great nor too small. We need some access to the inside of the other, even if not complete, but not identification. Identification creates nothing new. Two identical things simply reproduce themselves. If you want real procreation, something that creates something new, you need difference. You need difference, but not too much distance. So here too there is another difference that returns us to the difference between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the painter. Because the Holy One, blessed be He, has access to our inwardness, so He can influence even at infinite distance, because He also has zero distance from us and infinite distance from us. He approaches us both from the outside and from within. We, who do not have access within, need some middle distance, to find some mean between too far and too close, and then we can make the kind of influence that we are able to make. Fine, we ended with a bit of a homiletic flourish, but it seems to me there’s really something to it, I don’t know. That’s it, up to here. Any questions or comments?