Doubt and Statistics – Lecture 25
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Failures in inference from isolated cases and the law of small numbers
- The prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, and the exception of tithing in Tractate Ta’anit 9
- Reward for commandments, “Honor your father and your mother,” and the case of Elisha ben Avuya
- Determinism versus statistics: offsets, a “deterministic rule,” and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman
- Empirical refutation, modern methodology, and the claim that the prohibition was meant to block testing
- Tithing: the interpretations of Ben Yehoyada, the Sefer HaChinukh, and the meaning of “Test Me now”
- Prayer experiments, conceptual bias, and Sheinfeld’s article
- Criticism of “hollow” faith, tithing experiments, and the demand for consistency
- The example of Nachshon Wachsman and an article about individual providence
- “One must not deny what is palpable,” rationalism versus observation, and the medieval Spanish and Ashkenazic authorities
- A methodological question: why statistics works in the social sciences and with free choice
- The counting of the 613 commandments and Maimonides’ roots/principles
Summary
General Overview
The lecturer continues the series on doubt and statistics and argues that isolated cases are misleading and do not allow reliable inference, whereas controlled experiments on large groups do allow empirical claims to be tested and even refuted. He presents the issue of “it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He” as a principled barrier to checking Torah promises in this world, and develops a critique according to which using that prohibition to avoid systematic testing reflects a lack of confidence that the promises hold in their plain sense. He presents the exception of tithing as an especially sharp test case, brings different interpretations (Ben Yehoyada, Sefer HaChinukh), and demands methodological consistency: if it is permitted to “test,” then one should carry out an experiment with real conditions of falsification and not rely on ad hoc excuses. Toward the end he raises a broader philosophical-methodological question about the very possibility of statistics in human behavior and free choice, and concludes with a halakhic question about what distinguishes the counting of the 613 commandments according to Maimonides’ principles.
Failures in inference from isolated cases and the law of small numbers
The lecturer says that people draw broad conclusions from one case or a few cases, but a small sample is not representative, and therefore such conclusions suffer from statistical failures. He argues that one can always fit “signs” after the fact and invent double explanations that justify any result, so a private case cannot serve as evidence. He presents the need for large samples, a control group, neutralizing placebo, and double-blinding as the only way to evaluate claims about outcomes in reality.
The prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, and the exception of tithing in Tractate Ta’anit 9
The lecturer cites the Talmud in Ta’anit 9: Rabbi Yohanan meets “the child of Reish Lakish,” whose verse is “You shall surely tithe,” and Rabbi Yohanan interprets it as “Tithe so that you may become wealthy” and tells him, “Go test it.” The child objects, “And is it permitted to test the Holy One, blessed be He?” on the basis of “Do not test the Lord,” and Rabbi Yohanan answers in the name of Rabbi Hoshaya, “Except for this,” and brings the verse from Malachi: “And test Me now with this… until there is more than enough,” while Rami bar Hama said in the name of Rav that this means, “until your lips wear out from saying, ‘Enough.’” The child says that had he reached this verse he would not have needed Rabbi Yohanan or Rabbi Hoshaya, and from here it emerges that in principle it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, but with respect to tithing there is an exceptional permission, and at least regarding the tithe of produce the Talmud permits it.
Reward for commandments, “Honor your father and your mother,” and the case of Elisha ben Avuya
The lecturer presents the possibility of interpreting verses like “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened” as wording that can be tested experimentally, and suggests a modern experiment with large groups to examine whether there is a difference in life expectancy. He mentions Elisha ben Avuya, who saw a child fulfill both sending away the mother bird and honoring his father and mother and then die, and explains that the modern mind would dismiss such a case as a single instance that does not refute anything, but would still want to test large groups. He quotes the passage in Kiddushin 39: “Where is this one’s good, and where is this one’s long life?” and its conclusion, “in a world that is entirely good” and “in a world that is entirely long,” and emphasizes that the conclusion there is learned from the failure of the experiment and not from the general principle that “there is no reward for a commandment in this world.”
Determinism versus statistics: offsets, a “deterministic rule,” and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman
The lecturer argues that the promises of the Sages are not necessarily a “statistical rule” but can be a deterministic rule that is always true, though other mechanisms may “offset” its actual realization. He cites Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s question about the statement “whoever recites Havdalah over the cup will have male children” versus reality, where many do not merit this, and presents his solution: other sins, such as “because of the sin of vows a person’s children die,” can prevent the result, to the point that instead of children being born and dying, no children will be born at all. He explains that this model makes a private case irrelevant for refutation, but the claim can still be tested on large groups because the offsets themselves should be distributed approximately equally between the sample and control groups.
Empirical refutation, modern methodology, and the claim that the prohibition was meant to block testing
The lecturer says that a thesis that can always be saved by ad hoc excuses is a thesis that cannot be refuted, but a large, controlled experiment can create conditions for refutation even if there are offsets. He argues that the bigger problem is that the Talmud forbids “testing,” and when that prohibition is understood as applying even to serious experiments on large groups, it creates the impression that the Sages are in effect preventing testing because the result will not fit the plain meaning of the verses. He presents two options: either this is simply a scriptural decree, or the prohibition applies only to inference from small and biased cases and not to large-scale research. He emphasizes that if the prohibition applies even to large-scale research, then the implied message is that one cannot learn from the Torah about what happens in this world.
Tithing: the interpretations of Ben Yehoyada, the Sefer HaChinukh, and the meaning of “Test Me now”
The lecturer quotes Ben Yehoyada, who asks how the child could “test” this if a minor is not obligated in tithing, and answers that becoming wealthy depends on the act of tithing even without formal obligation. He describes how Ben Yehoyada asks why many people give tithes and do not become wealthy, and brings in the name of his son Rabbi Yaakov that they have some sin preventing them from attaining wealth, whereas the child has no offsets because he is not yet subject to punishment. The lecturer quotes Sefer HaChinukh on commandment 424: “Thus the benefit and blessing in our money is present in any case, and no sin or transgression can hold it back,” and presents this as the claim that in the case of tithing there are no offsets, so it can even be tested on an individual. He argues that permission “to test” requires an experiment that can actually fail and lead to the conclusion that the claim is not true, and therefore excuses such as “without the tithing he would have been poorer” or semantic reinterpretations of “wealthy” do not allow a real experiment and do not fit the meaning of the permission.
Prayer experiments, conceptual bias, and Sheinfeld’s article
The lecturer describes Christian studies on the effect of prayer on healing, and tells of a medical article from Tel Aviv University signed by “Sheinfeld et al.” reviewing dozens of experiments. He says that according to the table in the article, in all the experiments conducted with full scientific methodology, including double-blinding and a control group, significant effects were found, but the conclusion of the article is that there are no clear results and everyone should remain with his own position. He argues that this illustrates just how deeply researchers can be captive to a preconceived framework even without any intent to deceive, and adds that there are criticisms of the experiments themselves as well, so he does not draw sharp conclusions, but sees this as an example of strong bias in charged subjects.
Criticism of “hollow” faith, tithing experiments, and the demand for consistency
The lecturer argues that people parrot “tithing makes one wealthy” but are unwilling to carry out a large-group experiment even though in the case of tithing one is allowed to test, and therefore in practice they do not believe the claim would stand up to examination. He says that if an experiment were carried out and failed, intricate explanations and excuses would immediately be constructed that empty the permission “to test” of any meaning, because an experiment whose every possible result fits the theory is not an experiment. He presents himself as someone who stops “hiding” and argues that hiding behind statistics and excuses reflects lack of faith, emphasizing that a faith unwilling to face facts is not better than heresy but worse, as a kind of internal double-speak.
The example of Nachshon Wachsman and an article about individual providence
The lecturer says that the case of Nachshon Wachsman, with massive public prayer and public broadcasts that did not lead to rescue, was a turning point at which he realized that the conception that prayer “works” does not fit reality as he experiences it. He quotes an article titled “I am an Orthodox woman who no longer believes in the principle of individual providence,” in which the writer describes an “insane miracle” of being saved from a terror attack and then later a severe illness that left her son dependent and disabled, with no miracle, leading her to conclude that belief in individual providence over particulars does not allow her theological peace of mind. He uses the example to present empirical honesty, in which a person changes a faith-based interpretation in light of harsh reality instead of denying it.
“One must not deny what is palpable,” rationalism versus observation, and the medieval Spanish and Ashkenazic authorities
The lecturer cites the Ran in Sukkah, “one must not deny what is palpable,” as an example of observation overriding a priori assumptions, and attributes this approach to the medieval Spanish authorities (Rishonim). He presents Tosafot and the medieval Ashkenazic authorities as tending to learn “facts” from verses even when one can see otherwise, and compares this to a rationalist approach that is unwilling to update itself in the face of reality. He argues that proper rationalism allows acceptance of claims that do not arise from observation, but does not allow acceptance of claims that contradict observation.
A methodological question: why statistics works in the social sciences and with free choice
The lecturer asks why it is possible at all to analyze statistically phenomena that are not random, such as falling missiles or human behavior, where ostensibly every event is the deterministic result of causes and decisions. He gives the example of “frustration and aggression” as a central formula in the social sciences, and emphasizes that an aggressive response is perceived as a decision made through deliberation and not as a coin toss. He argues that if one assumes neurological determinism it is easy enough to understand statistics about human beings, but if one assumes libertarian free will it becomes hard to understand how stable correlations still emerge, and he leaves that question for the next lecture.
The counting of the 613 commandments and Maimonides’ principles
At the end, a question is asked about what distinguishes a commandment that is counted among the 613 from many other obligations in the Torah. The lecturer answers that the discussion relies on Maimonides’ “fourteen principles,” which include classification rules that unite particulars under a single commandment, the distinction between a commandment and its rationale, and the distinction between broad principles and countable commandments. He says that every Torah-level obligation needs an explanation if it is not counted as a separate commandment, because it may be a detail within an existing commandment or a principle that is not itself counted.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello everyone. We’re continuing the series on doubt and statistics. We talked a bit about concepts like doubt, vagueness, lottery, fixed, separated, following the majority, statistical fallacies, what else? Yes, all kinds of double explanations, causes, identifying miracles, the law of small numbers, and things of that sort. I still want to continue a little more in areas adjacent to this, and then maybe I’ll move on to discussing the laws of doubts, and with that we’ll finish this series. So I want to begin with what we talked about last time—in the last few times, but especially last time—about all kinds of fallacies in drawing conclusions from specific cases. A person goes through some specific incident, or sees, encounters, a few specific cases, and draws all kinds of conclusions from them, and we saw that there are fallacies here. The sample isn’t always representative, one case is completely insignificant, after-the-fact inferences, all kinds of claims learned from signs that of course can always be fitted ad hoc, and so on. In the halakhic—or I would say Talmudic—aspect, there’s an interesting passage on this topic in the Talmud, in Tractate Ta’anit, page 9. The Talmud there discusses the prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He. “Rabbi Yohanan found the child of Reish Lakish”—the son of Reish Lakish, who as is known is Rabbi Yohanan’s nephew. Yes, Reish Lakish married Rabbi Yohanan’s sister. “He said to him: tell me your verse.” Tell me, so to speak, the verse you learned; yes, there are a few such Talmudic stories. The child said to him: “You shall surely tithe.” “You shall surely tithe all the produce of your seed,” and so on. He said to him—apparently the child, from the flow of the discussion afterward; the speaker here again is the child—“And what is ‘you shall surely tithe’?” He asked Rabbi Yohanan to explain the verse to him: what does “you shall surely tithe” mean? He said to him: “Tithe so that you may become wealthy.” Yes, tithe in order that you may become wealthy. He said to him: “From where do you know this?” Here the question is whether he means: from where do you know that this is the meaning of the verse, or from where do you know that one really becomes wealthy through tithing. He said to him: “Go test it.” Try it. He said to him: “And is it permitted to test the Holy One, blessed be He? Isn’t it written: ‘Do not test the Lord’?” He said to him: “Thus said Rabbi Hoshaya: except for this.” Meaning, it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, except in the matter of tithing. In the subject of tithes one may test the Holy One, blessed be He. From where do we know? As it is said: “Bring all the tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in My house, and test Me now with this, says the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until there is more than enough.” What is “until there is more than enough”? Rami bar Hama said in the name of Rav: until your lips wear out from saying, “Enough.” He said to him: “Had I reached that verse”—that’s a verse in Malachi—then the child says to Rabbi Yohanan: if I had gotten that far in my studies and reached this verse, “I would not have needed you or Hoshaya your teacher.” I would have understood it on my own. That’s basically the claim. So what emerges here from the Talmud? What emerges is that in principle there exists a prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, but in the matter of tithing it is permitted. Tithing here, plainly speaking, means the tithe of produce. The commentators discuss whether this also applies to monetary tithing; some say yes and some say no, but at least regarding the tithe of produce, the Talmud says yes. So what comes out is this: in principle there is some connection between the actions we do and the response of the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s the Talmud’s assumption. I already spoke about what I think about this matter, at least in our time, but that’s the Talmud’s conception. Yet despite the fact that this connection exists, it is forbidden. It is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He. And what does it mean to test? On the face of it, one could say: I’m not allowed to do an experiment that checks this claim. Say, “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened.” So let’s run an experiment: take a hundred people who honor their parents, a hundred people who don’t honor their parents, or honor them much less, and let’s check the average life expectancy in the two groups and see whether the verse “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened” is fulfilled. We know the case of Elisha ben Avuya, right, who was passing by there and saw the father asking the son to climb a tree and bring down fledglings, and he went up there, fell, and died. And these are two commandments for which long life is explicitly stated: sending away the mother bird—“you shall surely send away the mother”—and “honor your father and your mother.” He was engaged in the two commandments for which long life is promised and died on the spot. So to that, at least with a modern mindset, we would say: fine, that’s not an experiment; one case can happen. In principle there is a connection between keeping these commandments and long life, but it’s an average matter. You need to take large groups, sample and control groups, and then do the experiment. So let’s do that experiment with sample and control groups, a large experiment. One case says nothing—that’s the law of small numbers. But let’s check large groups. Now first, even regarding one case, it’s not so simple, because the claim “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened” is basically a claim that seems deterministic—that everyone who honors parents gets long life. Why assume there are cases where yes and cases where no, meaning that this is only a statistical rule and not a deterministic rule that holds in every single case? That itself is already a claim that needs to be examined. But here one could say that in principle honoring father and mother always brings long life, but there are other aspects that can affect this result. For example, I don’t know, someone who is liable to death at the hands of Heaven because he ate terumah, okay? So what happens if he honors his father and mother but also ate terumah? On the one hand he deserves long life; on the other hand he is liable to death at the hands of Heaven. So it could be that in such a case the liability to death at the hands of Heaven overrides the long life he deserves, and therefore he dies. Meaning, what I want to claim—say, this is Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s example—is that he writes that it says, “Whoever recites Havdalah over the cup will have male children.” Someone who is careful with Havdalah over a cup of wine, who makes sure to perform Havdalah over wine, will be blessed with male children—assuming male children are a blessing; that at least seems to be the Talmud’s view. So Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman says: wait, but we see with our own eyes that quite a few people recite Havdalah over the cup and were not blessed with male children. I assume the Hazon Ish also recited Havdalah over the cup; he had no sons, no daughters—he had no children at all. So how does that fit with the Talmud’s statement that whoever recites Havdalah over the cup will have male children? So Rabbi Elchanan says: the fact that he recites Havdalah over the cup causes him to have male children, but there may be other things that affect the outcome and offset that effect. For example, “because of the sin of vows a person’s children die”—if he is not careful about vows, then his children die. Now what happens if he recites Havdalah over the cup but is not careful about vows? Then instead of giving him children and then killing them, they don’t give him the children at all. Sounds like a reasonable solution, right? And so basically, it’s not that the rule “whoever recites Havdalah over the cup will have male children” is really a statistical rule. It’s a deterministic rule. It’s always true. But there are other rules that can interfere with the realization of this rule; they contradict it, and therefore there will be cases where it is not realized. But again, not because it isn’t true in that case—it is true in that case too. It’s just that in that case there was another rule that offset this one. Do you understand the difference? I’m claiming that this rule is not a statistical rule—or not necessarily a statistical rule—but a deterministic rule. Everyone who honors parents gets long life, period. But there’s a person who is also liable to death at the hands of Heaven. Fine? So… his long life will be offset by death at the hands of Heaven; maybe Heaven will kill him a year later.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, may I ask the rabbi? Rabbi, if claims like these of Rabbi Elchanan—that really someone who blesses over the cup does in fact get it, but there may be something else that offsets it—if we use claims like those, then nothing means anything, because we can always say that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because you can’t test it. Yes, yes.
[Speaker B] It’s an unfalsifiable claim.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly where I’m going, just a moment. So the claim basically is that even if certain things are not fulfilled, there are certain cases where it doesn’t happen—as I presented earlier, okay, so maybe this rule is a statistical rule. Now I’m saying no. It could be that this rule is deterministic, not statistical, and still it won’t always be fulfilled. Understand? When I say it’s a statistical rule, what that means is that seventy percent of the people who honor parents will have greater longevity, and thirty percent won’t. The Holy One, blessed be He, runs a lottery among all those who honor parents. Okay? That’s the meaning of a statistical rule. Now I’m claiming no. Everyone who honors parents deserves long life. But there are other considerations in the calculation, and sometimes there will be offsets. And therefore, in principle, we cannot judge from a single case. But we can carry out an experiment, and here I say: on the face of it, this is a thesis that is not falsifiable. Notice, that does not mean it isn’t true. It only means it cannot be refuted. What does that mean? I cannot put it to an empirical test. If I see a case like that of Elisha ben Avuya, I can always attribute it to the fact that he wasn’t careful about vows, or that he deserved death at the hands of Heaven, or I don’t know exactly what, something like that. And therefore a single case won’t succeed in refuting the theory. But that doesn’t mean the theory is not refutable. And this is exactly where modern methods come to our aid. How do we test a medicine today? Nobody tests a drug on one individual and sees whether it works or not. What do we do? We take a large sample group, a large control group, neutralize the placebo effect, yes, double-blinding and all the things that need to be done so that the experiment is properly organized. And now we check the average life expectancy in this group versus the average life expectancy in that group. If it’s a sufficiently large group, the expectation is that even if this rule is a statistical rule and a single case won’t be able to refute it, in a large group it should already show itself. Because the assumption is that in a large group, the law of large numbers says that in large groups the statistics more or less behave according to the expectation. So I’ll discover, on average, a longer life expectancy. Is this true only for the statistical sense I discussed earlier, or also for the deterministic sense? I want to argue that it’s true also for the deterministic sense. Meaning, I therefore want to claim that this is indeed a thesis that can be refuted. Why? Because if I take a group of a thousand people who honored parents in an exceptional way, and a thousand people who were extremely contemptuous in honoring parents—let’s say, so that the experiment will be very sharp. Fine? I took a thousand people from every direction. And now I check the life expectancy in the first group against the life expectancy in the second group. My claim is that even if longevity is deterministic—everyone who honors parents deserves long life—but there are certain aspects that can offset this reward of long life, in a group of many people that too should cancel out. I should still see the difference. Because my assumption is that among these thousand people and among these thousand people there is roughly the same number of interfering factors. The interfering factors that offset life expectancy also distribute more or less equally if the groups are large groups. Now, this isn’t completely precise, because for example if there’s a group that is very contemptuous about honoring parents, one could say that maybe there too there will be more people who are liable to death at the hands of Heaven. Because if they’re not God-fearing, then they’re careless not only about honoring parents but also about eating terumah. But it would be possible to set it up differently too. And my claim is that even if an individual case cannot serve as a refutation of the theory, a controlled double-blind experiment on large groups can test the theory. And therefore it is not true that these theories are not refutable even after Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman. But in order to test them, you have to do something serious, not look at the Hazon Ish and ask why he had no children, or at that child who climbed the tree and died. Do something serious, do a study like they do in the social sciences. Take a thousand people, check the life expectancy of a thousand such people and a thousand such people. Do all the regressions you need, and check whether you find a correlation between life expectancy and honoring parents. If you find such a correlation, you have supported the Torah’s claim: “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened.” If you don’t find it, then you have refuted it, or at least not supported it. Therefore even after all Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s arguments, and the statistics, and whatever else you want, still on the principled level these theories are refutable. But for that you need to do a serious experiment on large groups, not on a private case. A private case says nothing. And we’ve talked quite a bit about that in the past. So what now? Now comes the great joker. The joker is our Talmudic passage. Our passage says: but it is forbidden to do such an experiment. Now, you can say: don’t do an experiment on a single person, because an experiment on a single person is not statistically serious and you can draw wrong conclusions because it’s statistically biased. Do a serious experiment on large groups. But the accepted view is no: there is a prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, concerning what He said. Not because it doesn’t work—it’s forbidden to test Him. Now, if in large groups it should work, then it’s very unclear why there should be a prohibition. After all, if I take seriously the statement that honoring father and mother really brings long life, and I already have statistical expertise and I turn to a professional polling institute with experts who lead in this field, and they do everything necessary, all the diagnoses, all the regressions, all the breakdowns needed to offset things, and they carry out this experiment—we see that regarding elections they work amazingly well, so why shouldn’t we let them do an experiment on the life expectancy of people who honor parents? So there’s something a bit problematic here. On the one hand, maybe there really is no prohibition in that. If you do the experiment seriously, then there is no reason there to draw wrong conclusions, and after all I know that the Torah speaks truth, so what’s the problem if I test it? Let’s test and discover it, verify it. After all, the prohibition against testing apparently seems—unless it’s just some kind of scriptural decree, but it doesn’t seem that way. It seems the prohibition against testing is because of the concern that I might draw problematic conclusions. Now, what are problematic conclusions? I’ll think that the Torah is not true, because it tells me that honoring parents brings long life and I see that it doesn’t. Just like Elisha ben Avuya. And Elisha ben Avuya did this based on one case, and on one case it’s really wrong to do that; statistically it’s not right. But if you tell me it’s forbidden to do this also with large cases, with large groups, then why is it really forbidden? You tell me: it’s a scriptural decree? Maybe, I don’t know. Or perhaps you’re actually hiding behind this the fact that you don’t really take that long life seriously—those… yes, “where is this one’s long life?” In the World to Come. Fine, so if long life means the World to Come, then even in large groups maybe you won’t discover long life. And then what they’re really telling me when they say I’m not allowed to test is: this claim is not true. But the Sages say it politely. They don’t say directly, what the Torah says isn’t true. What does “isn’t true” mean? It means not true in this world—it doesn’t happen here. Maybe it meant the World to Come, maybe it meant something else. This claim in its plain sense is not true. So what did happen? I don’t think the Holy One, blessed be He, lied, so I don’t know, you have to look for explanations, but don’t draw conclusions about the world from things written in the Torah. That’s really the meaning if I understand the prohibition as applying even to experiments on large groups. If you tell me it’s forbidden to do such an experiment even on large groups, then basically you’re telling me: listen, this won’t work for you even on large groups. And between us, quietly, without anyone hearing—let everyone ask himself what he thinks the result of such an experiment on large groups would be. I’m saying out loud what almost all of you think quietly: that it wouldn’t work. And how does that fit with the Torah? I don’t know, for that you have to look for explanations. “An eye for an eye” is also written in the Torah, and we explain that it means monetary compensation. So too, long life means the World to Come. Yes, like with Jacob—when will he meet Esau? How does it go there? “Until I come to my lord in Seir,” right? So yes, in the future I’ll come to my lord in Seir. We have no problem; we know how to interpret the Torah in all kinds of ways so that what is written in it is not a lie, but you can’t learn anything from it. And I think—I suspect—that this prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, certainly if we apply it also to large groups, basically means that we don’t really believe that what is written in the Torah really happens. I, for example, don’t believe it. People don’t dare say this, but in my opinion deep down inside, they don’t believe it either.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, but the Sages say this explicitly in the Talmud too, in Kiddushin, that there is no reward for a commandment in this world. You don’t need all this pilpul to derive it from the prohibition.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. “There is no reward for a commandment in this world” applies, you’re saying, in ordinary places. But where the Torah says “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened,” then what do you mean there is no reward for a commandment in this world? The Torah says there is.
[Speaker C] Why—there in Kiddushin, isn’t that exactly the conclusion from the passage the rabbi mentioned, about Elisha ben Avuya?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t remember. Let’s check for a second. Ah yes, that’s what I mentioned earlier. Let’s share it for a moment. In Kiddushin 39, yes: “He said to him, behold, if his father said to him: go up to the building and bring me fledglings, and he went up to the building and sent away the mother and took the young, and on his way back he fell and died—where is this one’s good, and where is this one’s long life? Rather, ‘that it may be good for you’ refers to a world that is entirely good, and ‘that your days may be lengthened’ refers to a world that is entirely long.” Fine. After that the Talmud already discusses—maybe it was something else—that those on a commandment mission are not harmed, other parameters that enter in, maybe he entertained idolatrous thoughts, all kinds of things like that. But yes, true, in that context. But they reached that conclusion following the failure of this experiment. So in principle, when you read the Torah, you say: this is “Honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened.” The Talmud doesn’t derive it from “there is no reward for a commandment in this world,” but from the failure of this experiment. “There is no reward for a commandment in this world” is a different passage. One could certainly have said that “there is no reward for a commandment in this world” is a general statement, except for those places where the Torah itself said otherwise. Therefore Elisha ben Avuya really did this experiment specifically with honoring parents and sending away the mother bird, and not with separating terumah. Why not with separating terumah? Because in the case of honoring parents and sending away the mother bird, the Torah itself says it there. Regarding separating terumah, he too would say, well, if he died then apparently it’s for the World to Come; there is no reward for a commandment in this world. But honoring parents and sending away the mother bird, in the plain meaning the Torah itself takes them out of that rule and says that the reward of those commandments is here. And then the Torah comes and says no—the experiment failed, okay, so it means a world that is entirely good, a world that is entirely long. Now what happens if I do an experiment on large groups? The same thing. And therefore the claim is that I don’t really believe that this business happens here. It’s not just an excuse for a single case; rather, I am not willing to draw conclusions from what is written in the Torah about things that happen in the world. And that is a very radical statement. Because when they tell me it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, what they are really telling me is: forget it, it doesn’t work. It sounds a little different, but if I’m right, that’s basically what they’re saying. The only possibility is to say either that this prohibition is a scriptural decree, or that it does not apply to an experiment done properly—large groups and all that—so do it, no problem. Just don’t infer from a single case, in all the ways we saw in earlier lectures, because that’s a statistical fallacy. Fine. But then they should have said that. The Sages, when they prohibited the experiment, should have explained in one line: listen, you can’t learn from one case, because in one case the Sages themselves say here “perhaps he had thoughts of sin.” Right? The Talmud itself says maybe there is something else offsetting the long life, and therefore this happened; so from one case you can learn nothing. For that, there’s no need to impose a prohibition on testing the Holy One, blessed be He, in general; just explain why it failed. When you impose a prohibition, the plain meaning is: no, you’re not allowed to test Him. If you’re not allowed to test Him, that means basically that I don’t really trust that this thing works.
[Speaker D] And this prohibition—does it have the force of a rabbinic enactment? Can you hear? Is this prohibition a rabbinic prohibition?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is written in the prophetic writings, from Malachi. So apparently it’s something—it’s not really Torah-level. “Prophetic writings”—is that rabbinic? Not really Torah-level, but it’s also not quite rabbinic; rather it’s what is called “prophetic writings” in the accepted category. “Prophetic writings” means from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), yes. It is not one of the 613 commandments, right? It’s not something of Torah-level status, but it’s something in between. Maimonides also uses the term “words of the Scribes” for things that come out of the Torah through exegesis. So an exegesis that comes from the prophetic writings, I assume, is no stronger than that, but terminologically it isn’t called “words of the Scribes” in Maimonides. It’s called “prophetic writings.” “Received tradition” here means the Prophets and Writings. “Torah law is not derived from prophetic writings”—the Talmud discusses that as a standard term.
[Speaker B] In any case, now what the Torah says—what the Torah says, “Do not test the Lord as you tested Him in Massah,” something like that—that’s a verse in the Torah. Isn’t that what it means?
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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the Talmud itself he says that only if he had gotten to Malachi would he have understood it. He didn’t know it because he hadn’t gotten to Malachi. It could be that he didn’t know that tithing is an exception, not that he didn’t know it’s forbidden to test. I don’t know, it really could be that you’re right. That in fact the prohibition against testing is itself already derived from the verse in the Torah itself, just as that verse can of course be read as literally… testing the Holy One, blessed be He, in the plain sense; in its simple wording it’s not a test in the sense we’re talking about here. But from the Talmud itself you can understand it that way, that it really is from the Torah, and the exception of tithing is from the Prophets, from Malachi. I understood that from the Torah itself one could really learn otherwise, but if Malachi says, “Test Me, please, in this,” from that I learn: only in this, and not in other things. And then that means there is a prohibition against testing. It could go this way or that way, I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t appear among the 613 commandments; I don’t know any enumerator of the commandments who brings it. In any event, from here it somehow seems that at least there is a strong side to say that this whole business is not so… meaning, the Sages don’t really place trust in what appears in the Torah in its plain sense as a description of what happens in the world itself. Fine, that brings me to the exception. Because now we have an exception regarding tithing. With tithing, yes, it is permitted to test the Holy One, blessed be He. Now there are two ways to understand that, in light of the two possibilities I mentioned earlier. One could say that with tithing, what they permitted you to test is also only with large groups, because in a small group it can fail due to offsetting factors. But with large groups you can test, because that’s a serious statistical experiment. And then that means that even with large groups it’s forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, in anything; with tithing, with large groups, you may. That’s one possibility. A second possibility: no, with large groups it is permitted to test the Holy One, blessed be He, everywhere, because large groups are a good experiment; why shouldn’t it work? The Torah says so. Okay, so you can test everywhere. With tithing you can test even a private case. Because with tithing it always works. There there are no offsets. That is basically the claim of “Test Me, please, in this.” That with tithing, even if a person were liable to death at the hands of Heaven, the tithe would save him; you would see a person with long life. Maybe they’d deduct a year from him, but he’d reach age 128 and not 129. In any case, he’d reach an advanced age so that in the experiment you’d see that it worked. Those are the two possibilities for understanding the prohibition against testing the Holy One, blessed be He, in the entire Torah and the permission to test this in tithing—the question is whether this speaks about large groups or small groups. Now among the commentators I found, there are commentators who ask here… yes, the Ben Yehoyada for example, on the aggadic passages of the Talmud, the Ben Ish Chai—yes, the Ben Yehoyada on the aggadic passages of the Talmud—he asks: after all, a minor is not obligated in tithing. So how can Rabbi Yohanan tell him, “Go test it,” to this child? So the Ben Yehoyada’s claim is that in any case this principle still applies to him—that if he tithes, he becomes wealthy—even though he is not obligated. It doesn’t depend on the commandment in the sense that you are commanded; rather, if you tithe, you become wealthy. After that he asks: after all, we see many people who give a tithe and do not become wealthy. Then he brings in the name of his son Rabbi Yaakov that these people have some sin that prevents wealth from coming to them. Those are the offsets I spoke about earlier. What does that mean? That even in tithing you cannot test it, at least not on isolated cases. You can test it perhaps on large groups, where the offset won’t work. Now he says: as for the young child, the child is not subject to punishment because he is a minor. So the tithing itself applies even to a minor. The offsets won’t be there in a minor because he is not liable to punishment for anything. Therefore he says to him, “Go test it.” Fine, so it’s a nice pilpul, but for our purposes, what the Ben Yehoyada is basically saying is that in fact if you check this even in tithing, you’ll see that many who tithe do not become wealthy. Meaning, he sees that this does not really hold in every case. Rather, there are sins that interfere, there are offsets. In minors there are no offsets, fine. But the question is: what does he mean to say? That only with minors do we conduct the experiment? Or that with adults too one can conduct an experiment on large groups? Because with large groups, we said, that neutralizes the offsets. So with large groups you can do this experiment also on adults, right? Because there those offsets are absent. But that’s only with tithing. In other matters, even with large groups, it is forbidden to test. That is basically what seems to emerge from his words. By contrast, there is in the Meiri on this Talmudic passage in Ta’anit—well, he says there’s a dispute whether this applies also to charity or only to tithing, not important. The Chinukh—sorry, not the Meiri—the Chinukh writes, in commandment 424: “And the reason for ‘in this’ is as in the matter written, ‘He who is gracious to the poor lends to the Lord,’ meaning that He, blessed be He, has informed us that in sustaining the ministers of His house through the tithe, the benefit and blessing in our money is found in any event, and no sin or iniquity will delay this.” What does that mean? He says that with tithing the experiment is supposed to succeed for each and every person. There are no offsets. Meaning, even if you have sin and iniquity that in other contexts would delay, say, the long life associated with honoring parents or sending away the mother bird, maybe the sin would delay it, and therefore there it is forbidden to test—but with tithing you can test even on an individual person. From his words it follows that with tithing you can test even on an individual person, whereas in other matters it is forbidden to test even with groups.
[Speaker B] So he wasn’t aware of the reality that the Ben Yehoyada mentions, and that we see that a lot of people don’t become wealthy?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. He says that if you check, apparently, if you check statistically the way you should. With tithing you can even—yes—he says you can check even on an individual person and not only on a large group. Right. Amazing, you know—one can always say, look, without the tithe he would have been utterly destitute, and now he’s just an ordinary person. With an individual person there are always excuses. The problem is that if you test the Holy One, blessed be He, that’s not an experiment. Meaning, an experiment where every possible result fits the theory is not an experiment. Therefore it’s not called testing the Holy One, blessed be He. It will never be falsified on an individual person. That’s true. So that’s not called testing the Holy One, blessed be He. When you say to test the Holy One, blessed be He, what that means is an experiment such that if it fails, I say: it’s not true. That’s what testing means. Now, how does that fit with the fact that many people who tithe do not become wealthy? It seems to me I would even say that most of them don’t. So how does that fit? It doesn’t fit. But we’re already used to the fact that people live off slogans—with all due respect to the Chinukh. People live off slogans; we’re used to it, we’ve gotten used to it: the Sages are certainly right, they are righteous, the Torah certainly speaks truth, the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth, and therefore don’t confuse me with facts.
[Speaker D] Can I ask a question? Yes. In this context of Sefer HaChinukh and the Meiri and whoever you mentioned, could there be a situation where the Sages, who said “Tithe so that you may become wealthy,” also said, “Who is wealthy? He who rejoices in his portion”? So maybe it means that a person is satisfied with what he has, and by giving, he is saying, “What I have is enough for me,” and in that sense he is wealthy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re explaining the saying “Tithe so that you may become wealthy”; I have no problem with that. First of all, you’d just have to check whether everyone who tithes is really happy with his lot—and let’s assume.
[Speaker D] But then they’re using the same word, “wealthy,” while really in a double sense: one that the Sages understand, and one that the public understands.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. But you won’t be able to explain this way the permission to test the Holy One, blessed be He, regarding tithing. Explain to me that promise—that if I tithe then I will become wealthy. Ah, I don’t have a lot of money in the bank? Yes, but I’m happy with my lot. But you won’t explain to me the permission to test the Holy One, blessed be He—how does that work? That is a different statement. What do I do there if I discover that people don’t become wealthy and also aren’t happy with their lot? So what then? Is it an experiment that failed? And I assume there are people who tithe and are not happy with their lot, and they are not wealthy. Yes, it’s like the Kotzker—some young man came to him and said, listen, I’m always chasing honor, and it doesn’t chase after me. So he said to him: look behind you. Yes, it’s the same thing. Meaning, you tithe so that you may become wealthy, so I’m not becoming wealthy? Well, yes, look behind you. You’re tithing all the time and looking behind you to see whether you’re becoming wealthy. Fine, if everyone who looks behind him doesn’t become wealthy, again this is an experiment that cannot—this is a thesis that cannot be falsified. Every time you check, it won’t work.
[Speaker B] Well, thank you very much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you told me it’s permitted to check, didn’t you? Do you understand? All these excuses help in order not to falsify the theory. But here there is a stronger statement—not that the theory is true, but that the theory is testable. That’s something entirely different. If we say the theory is true, no case will be able to falsify it, because I can always find ad hoc excuses. But when you tell me that the theory is testable, that means it is open to empirical testing, then ad hoc excuses won’t help. Because ad hoc excuses are not an empirical test. An empirical test means that if the experiment comes out like this, the theory is right, and if it comes out like that, the theory has failed. That is what it means to test. If you have an explanation even for the side where the theory failed, then it’s not an experiment. So it can’t be tested. So when people tell me to test it, what that means is to conduct an experiment such that if it fails, I will conclude that the theory is not correct. That is what the permission to test means. Otherwise, what does permission to test mean? Permission to conduct an experiment, but no permission to draw conclusions from it? You understand—that’s not serious. So what is the meaning of this whole thing? How do I really understand this in tithing? The only way I can understand the permission to do the experiment in tithing—it’s obvious that it does not go with the Chinukh, there is no doubt about that. With an individual person it doesn’t work, with every individual person. I say again: it may be that it works because without the tithe he would have been much poorer. In that sense, that it enriches him, I have no problem—I’m willing to accept that, that tithing enriches. But explain to me how I carry out the experiment. When you said I can conduct an experiment, that means I can see with my own eyes. But according to your thesis I can’t see with my own eyes. Because however much money he has, I can always assume that without the tithe maybe he would have had less. When you tell me I can test, what that means is that I can carry out an experiment with clear results. If it succeeds, then yes; and if it does not succeed, then no. Here, the excuses won’t help—that without it he would have gone bankrupt altogether. Because that still doesn’t let me test it. Therefore here I’m supposed to see clearly, with my own eyes, that a person who tithes is a millionaire. No doubt—I know he became wealthy. And not only that; he also became wealthy in some miraculous way. Because if he went to work and became wealthy like another person who went to work and became wealthy, then what’s the novelty? I need to see that the tithe made him wealthy. To see it with my own eyes. That is the meaning of the permission to test. Not excuses like yes, yes, he became wealthy, you just don’t see it, because otherwise he would have had to go to the dentist and spend ten thousand shekels. And he saved on the dentist, and therefore he’s just poor, but he could have been much poorer. That won’t help me, because it doesn’t explain how I conduct the experiment. An experiment means doing something that can also fail. That is what the permission to test means. And that doesn’t exist with a single individual whom I examine, because many individual people who tithe did not become wealthy, so the experiment failed, period. So tell me, fine, maybe one can conduct an experiment on large groups. Maybe like the Ben Ish Chai, yes? So with an individual person indeed you cannot do this experiment, because there really are offsets with an individual person; something may offset the whole matter. That is perfectly logical, by the way. I have no problem with that at all. But with large groups, it should neutralize that variability between people. With large groups, it ought to show up clearly. Which means that in fact one thing I can derive here according to all views is this: an experiment on large groups in the case of tithing is permitted, and if that experiment fails, then this thesis is not true. No excuses. This thesis is not true. There are no excuses; excuses won’t help here. But the thing is, I don’t know anyone who… do you know anyone? I know Christians who do this, yes—Ido, you mentioned it earlier. Yes, the Christians are serious; they’re not suckers like us. If they believe in what they believe, really. We recite it, but nobody really believes it deep down. Yes, let’s admit it. I admit it openly, but everyone admits it inwardly. We don’t really believe this. But the Christians—they’re serious, they’re not fooling around. If they believe in something, they run an experiment. I’m not sure they don’t cheat in the experiment, but they do conduct the experiment. There is a lot of criticism of those experiments. But they do the experiment. And there are results, by the way; I think I mentioned these experiments, right? In the appendix to the book God Plays Dice, I brought a link to these experiments. Some article that came out in a medical journal at Tel Aviv University. It was signed by five people; I think Professor Shoenfeld led the matter, but there were four others with him, doctors or doctoral students or something like that, and the five of them signed this article. And it was an amazing article. I asked Mordechai Halperin to see whether I was missing something—he’s a doctor. I asked him to see whether I was missing something, because maybe he was even the one who referred me to it; I don’t remember anymore. In that article there appears a survey of studies. Of course they were all Christians—no Jew conducted such a study, let there be no confusion about that. They all just argue with me on the website that I’m a heretic. But nobody is really prepared to carry out such an experiment. So in short, the Christians did carry out such an experiment, and there’s a survey there of many dozens of experiments. Now, some of the experiments yielded results that were not significant. Does prayer help the healing of patients? That’s what they checked. Okay? Now some of the experiments, a large number of the experiments, yielded non-significant results. In all the experiments done with full scientific method there were significant results showing that prayer affected healing. Notice—an amazing result. In all the experiments that were done with everything—with double-blind procedure, control group, sufficient size, proper scientific method, no sloppiness—in every one, that is what appears in the article. I didn’t check all of them. That is how they survey the studies they examined. They have a table, and in that table it shows who conducted a study with full scientific method and who did not. All the studies with full scientific method show significant effects. What is the conclusion of the article? Well, we have no clear results, and each person should do what seems right in his own eyes—“the righteous shall live by his faith.” Everyone can decide what he thinks; science shows us nothing about it. I tore my hair out when I read this. What—what do you mean? Your table says the opposite, and you as the author of the article are summarizing the opposite of what you just presented to me. Meaning, you are not only a denier, you’re also stupid. And if you want to fool me, then don’t present me with the data. But you present me with the data and then draw a conclusion opposite to the data. It’s insane. I mean, the data themselves, by the way, are in dispute. In the book I gave a link to a site that criticizes even the serious experiments. Meaning, I’m not sure these really are significant experiments. But according to what is described in that Shoenfeld et al. article, yes, according to what is described in that article, that is the picture they portray, and then the conclusion is: well, there is no clear conclusion, and therefore there are experiments pointing in both directions, and therefore everyone should remain in his own position. Now this shows you how much people are captive to their own preconceptions. They themselves collected data, did a so-called scientific study. It was published in a journal, it went through refereeing, meaning this is not only the writers’ mistake but also the referee’s or referees’. It got through there, printed in black and white, this nonsense. No, no, no—I’m talking about a double-blind method. They did not know that people were praying for them. They took care of double-blinding; that’s exactly the placebo effect they wanted to prevent. But there are methods in medical research—they know how to neutralize these things. That’s what is called double-blind. They didn’t tell the doctors or the patients that people were praying for them. And this teaches us how biased people are from all directions. Also from the direction that doesn’t believe in the effect of prayer—I assume the authors there belong to that side of the map—and also from the direction that does. Everyone takes it in his own direction, and even in academic scientific journals you can’t trust what goes on there. It’s really a fascinating phenomenon. These loaded topics are topics in which the tendentiousness—now understand, it’s not deliberate. They’re not cheating deliberately. If they were cheating deliberately, they would have had to… They simply did not understand what they themselves found. It’s not deliberate cheating. They are so captive to the conception that they simply erred in—by the way, I still remember Shoenfeld from decades ago being considered a genius. I think he was the youngest professor of medicine in the country, or at least at Tel Hashomer, I don’t know. I just remember from my youth that he was a very young department head. So no, we’re probably not talking about stupid people. It’s pretty fascinating, this matter. In any case, for our purposes, I’m not sure I’m terribly impressed by these experiments. One would have to really look inside them and see the criticisms of them. The Christians too perform various tricks, with all due respect to their seriousness that they’re really willing to check—but I’m not always sure these checks are carried out in the most responsible and reliable way. I don’t know, I don’t want to defame them all, but there are cases where clearly not. So I don’t know how to draw clear conclusions, but not because of the table—despite the table. If the table were the data, then there are very clear conclusions from it—the table in Shoenfeld’s article. But in principle, for our purposes, this means that if I carry out an experiment in principle on large groups with tithing—grain tithes at least—on large groups, it is permitted to perform an experiment. The fact is that nobody does this. Why not? Because nobody believes it. Plain and simple. If it were true, then in large groups it should work. And not only should it work, but in the case of tithing it is also permitted to do the experiment. So do it on large groups, because that’s absolutely clean, permitted according to all views in the case of tithing. Nobody has done it. And if they do it, you’ll already see all the excuses and pilpulim for why, when it didn’t succeed—because otherwise he would have been completely impoverished, and this way he at least remained merely poor. Yes, the usual excuses. Fine—then where is the permission to test, to conduct an experiment? If you have excuses for failure, then it’s not an experiment. An experiment means checking it. I’m trying to show you through this just how much this hiding behind statistics conceals a lack of faith. And a few years ago I decided I’d had enough of hiding, and I simply say it—what everyone else thinks. And the point is, again I say, I want to soften the criticism a bit. I believe people when they think that tithing enriches. But none of them dares conduct the experiment. Why? If the experiment doesn’t succeed, then he sincerely will think that excuse—that the experiment didn’t succeed because otherwise I would have become destitute, and this way I didn’t become destitute; therefore I’m a poor person even though I tithe. And he really believes that—I believe him that he believes that. But the Sages tell us that it is also permitted to test, not only that tithing enriches. But if it is permitted to test, then go do the experiment. That they do not do. Meaning, I believe people that with all the excuses, they believe that tithing enriches. I do not believe them that they really believe tithing enriches in practice. Because otherwise they would conduct an experiment on large groups. And therefore the answer I give is: okay, why don’t you check the effect of Torah study on victory in wars? Then they say: no, it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He. Fine, so we have our excuses—forbidden. We’re immune to falsification, everything is excellent. We can fortify ourselves behind our bizarre theories; no one is allowed to test them. So everything is fine. But in the case of tithing it is permitted. So go test it in the case of tithing. Sorry for a lecture in heresy, but this thing annoys me, because hollow faith is not better than heresy—hollow faith is no better than heresy. If you declare that you believe, but inside you don’t believe, then you don’t believe—don’t confuse my brain. And that’s perfectly fine, by the way, because facts are facts. This is in connection with the column I uploaded today, following that debate I had with the fellow Aviv Franco, yes, who kept presenting rationalists as people—I presented myself as a rationalist, not “rational,” but a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist. So he presents rationalists as people who do not let observation affect their views. But if observation were to contradict it, of course I would give it up. That has nothing to do with rationalism; it’s foolishness. Rationalism means a willingness to accept claims about reality not from observation, but not to accept claims about reality that contradict observation. That is not something even a rationalist would do. A rational rationalist would not do that. Same thing here. Meaning, you basically believe that tithing enriches, even though it goes against the facts. That is not rationality, and it is not faith. It is just living in duplication, in contradiction. What are you—don’t believe your own eyes? Unless you don’t believe your own eyes, you deny the observation. Then you are Aviv Franco’s rationalist. So if that’s true, then facts won’t affect him. Now, facts about individual cases really should not affect. I said, individual cases can always involve offsets. That’s connected to the law of small numbers and everything we’ve seen until now. But what about the large-group experiment? Do it. Come test the rescues in Gush Katif from the missiles, what we talked about. Make a comparison to missiles that fell elsewhere on the same scale, with roughly the same population density, and check. Or test entire barrages of missiles as a function of the number of people becoming religiously observant at that time among the Jewish people. I don’t know exactly what. Or how many people are praying in that town. Try to find correlations to commandments and service of God, and then I’m willing to hear your arguments. And don’t confuse me with all kinds of numbers devoid of any meaning about miracles that happened to you with a Book of Psalms in your pocket and missiles that didn’t hit anyone. If it isn’t backed by numbers, then it means nothing. And when it is backed by numbers, then do it for real and carry out an experiment such that if it fails, admit that it failed. If you have excuses for everything, then it’s like the PASAK—I talked about this one of the last times—about that fellow at Bar-Ilan, the professor who predicts the future. He predicts the future like the Oracle of Delphi, where everything that happens fits his prediction. A wondrous vision. Everything that happens fits his prediction. Meaning, the vision is vague enough that whatever happens will fit it. So fine, maybe he’s right and everything can fit—but it isn’t falsifiable. It’s not something that can be put to an experimental test. And from an academic school, a scientific one, I expect it to put itself to the test of falsification. And the same thing here. You can tell me that tithing enriches and leave it at that—no problem. I accept that people live with that belief. I don’t have that belief, but I accept that people can live with that belief. But don’t tell me that it can be tested in an experiment and then not do it. Not even dare do it, not just fail to do it. That’s not serious. It’s just empty talk of faith. Fine. Look, for example, at another example. There’s an article here that I once saw; I think I brought it in one of the—
[Speaker B] Did the Sages believe it? Did the Sages believe it? In what? That tithing enriches?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume so. That’s what Rabbi Yohanan said there. I don’t think he was lying.
[Speaker B] Because maybe it’s what Maimonides says about the Torah itself—that the sacred falsehoods and “the wrath of the Lord will blaze” and all that—so maybe the Sages also allowed themselves to lie.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And they counted on us being stupid enough to swallow this line. Actually, justifiably, because we really are like that. The fact is that everyone keeps reciting this line even today, and it’s some kind of yardstick of fear of Heaven that whoever says otherwise is a heretic, like yours truly. It’s a yardstick of fear of Heaven, though nobody really believes it. So it’s not only that you declare you believe it—you disqualify the person who is honest and says he doesn’t. So Rabbi Yohanan was apparently right if he said it just for the masses. Fine. But I am not willing to be part of the masses for Rabbi Yohanan’s sake, with all due respect. “Immediately it stands over his head,” and so on. Right. Fine. So I spoke about that article—look. Again. Today I’m preaching heresy to you. In my eyes this is not preaching heresy; it is preaching sane faith. And I think not only is it preaching sane faith. I think this thing leads to greater fear of Heaven. Because fake fear of Heaven, built on beliefs that you are not willing to put to a real test—not like the Christians—that isn’t really faith. It’s just some slogan, reciting a slogan. By contrast, someone who says: what I believe, I really believe, and what I don’t, I don’t believe—that in my eyes is a much more meaningful faith, much more correct, much more worthy and just, than the supposedly total beliefs that all the Sages and the Torah and everything are true and one may not question and nothing at all—that is fake faith, because you yourself do not really believe it, and if you do believe it, then you are a fool. And it’s just recitation. After all, how many times have I spoken about the fact that there cannot be authority regarding facts? How can you demand that I believe in the coming of the Messiah? Suppose I reached the conclusion that the Messiah will not come, like Rabbi Hillel, yes, in tractate Sanhedrin. So he reached the conclusion that the Messiah will not come. Now what does it mean that he is obligated to believe in the coming of the Messiah? His conclusion is that the Messiah will not come. They expect him to recite “I believe in the coming of the Messiah” every morning, but inside, his conclusion is that he does not believe in the coming of the Messiah. But they expect him to recite it. The same people who talk about authority regarding facts are the same people who recite the falsehoods of faith I talked about earlier. It’s a consistent conception in their method. The stupidity is consistent. They speak nonsense consistently. Meaning, you accept that there is authority over facts, and as a result you recite the facts as if they were true, although inside it is clear to you that they are not true. Like with tithing and medicine and prayers and all these things. Meaning, somehow theology follows practice and practice follows theology, and it’s all one big lie. So if that is called innocent and pure faith, I don’t know what is called heresy. Fine, and for our purposes, look at this article—there are more like it, of course, but again, one of someone who at least became an honest religious person. Yes, the headline is: “I am an Orthodox woman who no longer believes in the principle of divine providence over individuals.” So it begins: “Five years ago, a few days before Hanukkah, I experienced a crazy miracle.” It was an ordinary morning, I went to work, doesn’t matter, some man bumped into her, another man chased him, and in the end it turned out that the man who bumped into her was a terrorist. She didn’t even understand the situation. He was a terrorist. She fled and was saved. And then she says, wow, an attack—it was an amazing miracle. Yes, when I saw the video I understood the magnitude of the miracle. She only saw the video from security cameras on television; she didn’t understand at all what had happened to her. She understood the magnitude of the miracle, how she was saved—a terrorist bumped into her, an armed terrorist bumped into her. Then she moves on—this was five years ago. Three and a half years ago, no miracle happened to us—that’s the second heading. Yes, “Our son suffered a severe brain injury because of a bacterium that entered his blood and left him completely dependent, unable to speak, unable to eat; everything changed. In the first weeks in intensive care we prayed for a miracle, and with us thousands did too, people we knew and people we didn’t know, from south to north, with gestures that warmed our hearts. Also during the next two years that we spent hospitalized in a rehabilitation hospital, we maintained optimism and cautious hope that there would be a turn in the plot. If he wouldn’t return to himself, then at least he’d return to speaking—and that did not happen. The hope for a miracle was what sustained us.” In short, no—the miracle did not occur. And then she says: “When a miracle occurs, we feel that a higher power spread a protective dome over us and guarded us. When one waits for a miracle and it delays in coming, one feels abandoned and forsaken. These fluctuations in life’s journey can create a worldview that is complex or paradoxical within us.” Paradoxical within us—that’s what I spoke about earlier. “I, for example,” she says, “am an Orthodox woman who no longer believes in the principle of divine providence over individuals. Only that way was I able to achieve theological peace of mind.” Fine. Afterward she lays out her approach—she does believe in providence over the collective, not over individuals, not important right now—but at least she put her faith to an empirical test honestly. And when it didn’t work, she says, okay, it didn’t work. Fine, in large numbers it does work; this is only an individual case, and individual cases are not a proper basis for conclusions. She says, at the principled level, this is an example of a person behaving honestly. She was raised like all of us on the slogans we were all raised on. At some point—except for those who became religious later in life, who weren’t raised on them—at some point reality slaps us in the face. Some draw the conclusions and abandon religious commitment because they say, okay, it doesn’t work, the whole thing isn’t true. Others deny reality; they say, no, you don’t understand reality, it works, it always works. It’s just that maybe you don’t see it; I got confused, I didn’t see. And I think a sane person should say, okay, it doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean that everything in faith and religious commitment should be thrown away. One has to understand how to interpret it, what this means—but not at the price of denying facts. Because there is the famous Ran in tractate Sukkah—I always quote him—“one must not deny what is perceptible.” There is a dispute there whether shade gets smaller from top to bottom or larger from top to bottom, a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and a discussion there in the Talmud. The Ran says: “one must not deny what is perceptible.” I saw it—it gets smaller. Whether he is right or not is not important right now, but he says: that is the observation; leave me alone with all the authorities, Rashi and so on, all fine—but one must not deny what is perceptible. I see it. It is well known and famous—well, at least to me well known and famous—that this is very characteristic of the Spanish medieval authorities. The Ran was among the Spanish medieval authorities, from what would later be called the Eastern communities. Because the Ashkenazic medieval authorities did not work that way. Among Tosafot, if their a priori calculation came out a certain way—they were like Aviv Franco, like Aviv Franco’s rationalist—meaning, if their calculation came out that the shade at the bottom was, like Aristotle with the heavier stone falling faster, then for them that was the truth. Why are there so many stars in the sky? Because it says in the Torah, “Look at the stars of heaven, which cannot be counted for multitude.” Therefore clearly there are many stars. Other medieval authorities say, what do you mean there are many stars? I look up and see that there are many stars. What do I need verses for? But Tosafot derive everything from verses; they don’t relate to experiment. You can see this in many other places. It’s a consistent method of the Ashkenazic medieval authorities. The Ashkenazic medieval authorities were these strange rationalists that Aviv Franco described. The Spanish medieval authorities were rational rationalists. Meaning, yes, you are willing to adopt a position from a calculation or an a priori insight, but if it contradicts the facts, then you admit that it is not correct. That does not contradict your being a rationalist. It reminds me of what I wrote in the book—where did this whole realization hit me and I started getting angry at this duplicity that I suddenly understood I was living in? It was with—maybe I told you, I don’t remember—during the kidnapping of the soldier, Gilad Shalit? No, not Gilad Shalit, Nachshon Wachsman.
[Speaker E] Nachshon Wachsman, exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped there for several days, and they didn’t know where he was. He was probably inside the country, and they knew he was probably inside the country, but they didn’t know where. They searched for him house by house everywhere, the entire IDF was on this mission, and they didn’t find him. The whole country prayed—it was really unbelievable. Secular people, religious people, on the radio. Today you already hear a lot of religious things on the radio—songs, prayers, everything—the reality has changed a lot in recent years compared to what it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago. But back then there was no such thing. A prayer on the radio would have led to a parliamentary query the next day if there had been a prayer on the radio. No such thing. The radio was completely secular, anti-religious, there was no religious voice on the radio, except maybe for that daily Bible verse at the end, or those boring programs on Saturday night—I forgot what they were called, “On the Seventh” or “After the Seventh,” I don’t remember, something like that—there was some program like that where just seeing the title made you fall asleep. Those were the only religious corners that existed. But there it was unbelievable—mass prayer gatherings at the Western Wall with live broadcasts on the radio, on television, amazing. I said: if here, after all this, Nachshon Waxman doesn’t come out alive, then don’t tell me stories about prayers that work. The Jewish people almost repented there—it was really unbelievable, truly. Mass rallies at the Western Wall with secular people, religious people, everybody. And as is known, it didn’t work. And not only did it not work, but Nir Poraz and another two, I think, and Nachshon fell there, from Sayeret Matkal. It didn’t work. And that made the penny drop for me. Now again, it’s one case, so with one case you can always come up with excuses. But I said, there’s a limit to excuses—how much can you live on excuses? Another case, and another case, and you never see anywhere that it actually works. It doesn’t work any more than statistically it would have worked even without the prayer. So why should I assume it happens at all? And that really made the penny drop for me in that sense. It was a step similar to what I described to you in the article I just read—simply being honest with the facts. Okay, I want to—up to here, that’s the anti-Semitic part of the series. I want to go back to the theory. My theory basically assumes that you can do statistics on human behavior. Now that in itself is not a trivial statement. And why? I’m going back to the course of this series on doubt and statistics. The whole discussion I’ve given until now is basically some kind of statistics about people’s behavior. Now the question is—and of course also the behavior of the Holy One, blessed be He. Now the question is: why can subjects of this kind be examined with statistical tools at all? On the face of it, statistics describes random events. Random events. You roll a die, flip a coin, something like that. You do something random, so there’s some kind of statistics. But human behavior is not random. A person behaves—at least in my view—a person behaves according to some kind of judgment. Each person with his own judgment, doesn’t matter—a person behaves according to some kind of judgment. Now the question is why does a collection of judgments also obey the rules of statistics? Or why do we assume that at all? Or in other words, I’ll ask it more generally: why do we use statistics at all when dealing with psychology? Statistics may be good for the natural sciences, but why for psychology? Now the truth is we already talked about this at the beginning of the series, that this isn’t really true even for the natural sciences, because even in the natural sciences there are no random processes. Except perhaps in quantum theory at very small scales. But in our lives, in the everyday objects we encounter, in the everyday events we encounter, these things happen in a completely deterministic way—there’s nothing random here. Everything that happened has a cause. So in what sense—yes, for example statistics of missile strikes. Statistics of missile strikes—there’s nothing random there. These are people’s choices about where to go, how to build the house, which direction to aim the mortar or the missile. In the end that’s what creates the outcome. Why can things like that be analyzed at all in terms of statistics? And all the more so human behavior. When you talk about human behavior, people make decisions out of judgment. Say, take the classic example—my favorite, because it’s the only one there is, at least according to my sister, who is a criminologist. She told me that all her lecturers, when they wanted to give an example of a law in the social sciences, would say, let’s take an example—and then they’d pause for a few seconds, pretending to think, and then say: frustration and aggression. But it was always frustration and aggression, there is no other law. That’s the only law—that there’s a connection between frustration and aggression. Okay? So maybe there’s something else, but let’s not overdo it—that’s more or less the situation. So the connection between frustration and aggression. Now when I examine the statistics of frustration and aggression, how am I supposed to test this thesis that there’s a connection between frustration and aggression? So we already saw earlier: an experiment on large groups, double-blind, controlled, sample group and control group, and so on. So I do such an experiment, and I check a thousand frustrated people and a thousand calm people—how each group responds to a certain stimulus. And I see whether the frustrated people respond with greater aggression. Violence, aggression, whatever, something like that. That’s how I’m supposed to conduct the experiment. Now you have to understand that a human response is not a random event; it’s a person’s decision what to do. If it weren’t his decision, then he also wouldn’t be guilty for what he did. Rather, he decides, and therefore he decides to respond. Now of course he has a tendency to respond this way or that way, but what he does with that tendency is his own judgment and decision, as long as he is responsible for his actions. Okay? Therefore it’s not at all clear how one can do statistics on this sort of connection, of phenomena. The decision whether to respond aggressively or not is a decision made out of judgment. Why should that follow some statistical distribution? It’s not a random event where I flip coins and decide based on that whether to behave aggressively or not. Rather, there’s something here… If you assume that a person is a deterministic creature, then it’s like flipping a coin. It may not be a random event, but it’s statistics of the ordinary kind we know, like flipping a coin or rolling a die. So too with a person—the neurons in his brain were simply arranged in such a way statistically that it dictates an aggressive response. Then maybe I can understand. But if I’m a libertarian and I think a person has free will, then it’s very unclear how statistics can work at all on such a situation. Why should it obey statistical rules at all? By the way, that is one of the arguments—at least in the subtext—of many people who attack the libertarian conception of free will, on the grounds that we see that people who grow up in a certain environment behave accordingly. Say, the correlation between your upbringing and whether you are religious or secular. The correlation isn’t one, but it’s high. Not random. Okay? What does that mean? It basically means you’re not really making a decision. Your environment channels you into that path or that specific result. And therefore you really don’t have free will. What does that assume? It assumes that if there were free will here, then the correlation wouldn’t exist. There is no statistics of free will. But if I assume there is statistics of free will, then of course that argument collapses on its own. The good question is really how one can assume that. How can one assume that there is statistics of free will? Since we need to stop now, I’ll leave that for the next class. Anyone have questions or comments? Okay.
[Speaker D] Can I ask a question unrelated to the class? Uh-huh. I asked on the website and didn’t really understand the answer. What is unique about a commandment from the 613 commandments? There are thousands of commandments in the Torah, but there are only 613 commandments. So what makes a commandment count as part of the 613 and what not? I mean, what’s the difference?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t remember specifically what I answered you, but I assume what I answered was that the fourteen…
[Speaker D] I read an article of yours, I got the article.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, the article on Maimonides. My article on Maimonides is basically exactly about the question he deals with in his roots. And those roots are divided into several types. There are roots that are roots of classification, and it could be that several commandments in the Torah are classified under one heading as one commandment out of the 613. Maimonides has rules for why and when that happens. And there are roots that say: this is just a reason, not a commandment. “He shall not have too many wives, lest his heart turn away.” Okay? So “he shall not have too many wives” is a commandment; “lest his heart turn away” is a reason. Others will say no, “lest his heart turn away” is also a commandment. So that too can determine what is considered a commandment and what is not. There are fourteen roots; you can divide them into groups and subgroups, and that is exactly the question Maimonides deals with.
[Speaker D] Yes, but what is unique about a commandment that is within the 613 as opposed to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There isn’t one single unique thing. There are many, many parameters by which you determine what gets in and what doesn’t. Every Torah-level obligation is included among the 613 commandments; it just won’t always be a distinct commandment. Sometimes it will be a detail within an existing commandment—for example, the blue thread and the white threads in tzitzit. One does not prevent the other; that’s the eleventh root. One does not prevent the other, but they are not counted as two commandments; they are counted as one commandment. And Maimonides explains why; I explained what I think Maimonides explains as to why. But I can’t give you one single rule defining what characterizes all the commandments that appear among the 613. It’s a collection of many parameters that determine what enters and what doesn’t.
[Speaker D] And all this simply
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] rests on the fact that every Torah-level thing ought to be there. There has to be a reason for a Torah-level law not to be there. So either it is a detail within an existing commandment—in which case it is there, just not as a separate commandment but within an existing commandment—or it is a reason and not a commandment at all. Or it is a principle and not a commandment, like a half-measure, beautifying a commandment, broad rules of that sort. It’s a principle, not a commandment. Yes, right, the Vilna Gaon, as people wrote here in the chat. And so on. So anything that does not enter needs a reason.
[Speaker D] But you said something else against the Vilna Gaon—that there are in fact halakhic ramifications to this count of the 613.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I wrote that there. There are ramifications from the very fact that we have the overall number. If we did not have the datum of the overall count, there would be no ramification at all. That’s what Rabbi Yerucham Fishel Perla writes. Okay, is that clearer? Roughly. Okay.
[Speaker B] If I may, to go back to what you were talking about—the people who just recite clichés like that and supposedly are great believers in beliefs—how do you really deal with such people? You run into them all the time, at least among the religious. How do you relate to them, how should one behave with them? Try to explain, start arguing, give up—what do you suggest?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how to give a general rule for that; every claim is something else. If I have some opportunity to talk calmly, and I have enough time for it—not just throw out a remark, because if you throw out a remark they’ll say you’re a heretic and that’s it. But if you have the possibility to explain what you mean, then yes, I do try to explain. Once I see there’s nobody to talk to, then there’s nobody to talk to, so I leave—there’s no point. But if there is, then why not? I think it has great value. At first I had a period when I had reached this conclusion but had not yet reached the conclusion that it was also right to say it out loud. And then I had a second stage where I said: no, it’s also right to say it, because I feel that this can also save a lot of people. Because people who feel it doesn’t work will leave everything. And if I tell them, listen, it doesn’t have to work—it’s legitimate to say it doesn’t work. There are things that do, there are things that don’t; let’s examine things in a straightforward and fair way. And I think for many people, something like that can specifically keep them committed. People told me it kept them in; there were also people who told me it pushed them out. There were both kinds.
[Speaker B] Yes, I’m referring more to people who are not willing at all to accept things that go against these slogans.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If they’re not willing to accept it, then what is there to do? What is there to do? If they’re unwilling to accept it as a starting point, but you feel you can talk, then try to talk. I don’t know how to give you a smarter rule than that. With every person you meet, you have to assess where he stands. Okay. Yes, thank you. Well then, good night, Sabbath
[Speaker E] peace.
[Speaker D] Sabbath peace, thank you.