Commandments and Their Enumeration – Lesson 2
This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Commandment, benefit/harm, and the need for a command
- The is-ought fallacy and the bridge principle
- Command verses versus indicative verses and truth value
- Maimonides: negation of obligation, the ambiguity of “not,” and commandment as law
- Positive and negative commandments as a shared normative sphere
- Motivation for observing commandments and the distinction between command and “desire”
- Jewish law and morality as two independent categories
- Three categories of commandments: moral, anti-moral, and amoral
- Conflict versus contradiction and deciding between values
- “Moral” commands in the Torah as an additional religious prohibition, not morality itself
- “Do what is right and good,” “Be holy,” and character refinement outside the count of commandments
- Morality and God: moral validity as a philosophical foundation
- What prevails when there is a clash: inherent versus incidental, and a transgression for its own sake
- Bringing moral principles into Jewish law and Meiri’s position
Summary
General Overview
The text defines a commandment as a normative category that depends on a command, not on beneficial or harmful consequences, and distinguishes between command verses and indicative verses through the is-ought fallacy and the need for a “bridge principle.” It relies on Maimonides’ remarks in the eighth root to show that not every halakhic verse is a command, and expands this to argue that positive and negative commandments belong to the same normative sphere even though they are phrased differently. It then argues for a basic distinction between Jewish law and morality as two independent categories, so that “moral” commands in the Torah do not create morality but add an additional halakhic prohibition/obligation on top of the moral duty, and that conflicts between religious values and moral values are not a theoretical contradiction but a practical clash that must be decided according to the type of conflict. In the end, it is argued philosophically that morality has no binding force without God, and examples are brought showing that sometimes extra-halakhic or moral principles prevail or enter into Jewish law through the Sages or through rulings of halakhic decisors, including mention of Meiri’s view regarding saving a non-Jew on the Sabbath.
Commandment, benefit/harm, and the need for a command
A commandment is not equivalent to the claim that an action is beneficial or harmful, and the fact that an action is dangerous or undesirable still does not make it a transgression without a law or command. Moving from the descriptive plane of outcomes to the normative plane of permitted/forbidden requires a command, and in Jewish law that command is the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. A command verse does not come to reveal that an action has good or bad consequences, but to establish an obligation or prohibition by virtue of a command.
The is-ought fallacy and the bridge principle
Claims of fact do not generate norms without a bridging assumption that links the facts to the judgment or obligation. The argument “there are many colors, therefore it is beautiful” fails without the assumption that “what has many colors is beautiful,” and the argument “murder causes suffering, therefore murder is forbidden” fails without the principle that “something that causes suffering is forbidden.” Many arguments seem self-evident because the controversial bridge principle is hidden, as in the argument that women should be accepted as witnesses today because their social status has changed, without assuming that their earlier disqualification stemmed from lack of education or involvement.
Command verses versus indicative verses and truth value
Imperative sentences and questions do not carry a truth value of true/false, whereas indicative sentences describe a state of affairs and can be true or false. Identifying commandments in the Torah depends on recognizing the imperative mood, not just wording that looks like future tense, because an imperative often resembles the future grammatically. The wording “therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve” is presented as Rashbam’s example that future-style wording can describe a custom rather than a command, even though there is a tradition that applies a prohibition to it.
Maimonides: negation of obligation, the ambiguity of “not,” and commandment as law
Maimonides in the eighth root distinguishes between “not” as prohibition and “not” as description, and therefore verses like “she shall not go out as the slaves go out” are a descriptive negation of obligation, not a negative commandment, even though they are halakhic verses. The Sages identify a clear negative command through “beware,” “lest,” and “do not,” because these are not ambiguous the way “not” is. Maimonides is presented as sometimes defining “commandment” in the sense of “law,” a law book, including defining laws that do not command action, such as the description that whoever touches a corpse becomes impure, which he counts as a positive commandment, while clarifying that this should not be understood as a command to do or refrain, but as a legal determination.
Positive and negative commandments as a shared normative sphere
What positive and negative commandments have in common is that they both belong to the normative sphere, not to the description of facts, and therefore they are “loaded verses” whose purpose is to move a person toward acting or refraining. Maimonides is cited as noting that in Arabic there is no single word that includes both command and restraint together, and in Scripture the use of one word for both may be borrowed usage, which emphasizes that language affects the ability to see the categorical connection between positive and negative commandments. Negative commandments are not about “fulfilling an obligation” intentionally, whereas with positive commandments there is meaning to the question whether a commandment was performed and whether one fulfilled one’s obligation.
Motivation for observing commandments and the distinction between command and “desire”
Observing a commandment requires commitment to the command, not just agreement that “this is the right thing,” and without commitment to the command the act is not a commandment even if it is good. Maimonides at the end of the Laws of Kings is cited regarding one who keeps commandments out of rational conviction: such a person is not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise people, and only one who keeps them because of the command given at Sinai is considered among the pious of the nations of the world. Mixed motives are described through examples of coercion and will, double intentions, and the comments of the Aglai Tal, who distinguishes between “enjoying one’s study” and “studying for the sake of the enjoyment,” where the test is what would happen if the secondary motive disappeared.
Jewish law and morality as two independent categories
The position advanced is that there is no essential connection between Jewish law and morality, neither identity nor contradiction, and the conflicts between them are clashes between different values, not a theoretical problem in the system. Morality is defined as universal, and there is no “Jewish morality”; the moral criticism of murder is attributed already to the story of Cain even before an explicit command. Rabbi Kook is brought as an example of the view that all Jewish laws aim at moral purposes, and the text rejects this and argues that there are commandments unrelated to morality altogether, and therefore Jewish law also rests on religious values.
Three categories of commandments: moral, anti-moral, and amoral
The laws are divided into laws that seem moral, like “do not murder” and “do not steal”; laws that seem anti-moral, like killing Amalek or separating a priest’s wife who was raped from her husband; and amoral laws, like the prohibition on eating pork, which has no connection to morality. The existence of amoral commandments proves that Jewish law is not directed only toward morality but also toward religious values such as priestly sanctity. Anti-moral commandments create a conflict between a religious value and a moral value without proving moral indifference, similar to conflicts between two moral values in Sartre’s example of the student torn between caring for his mother and joining the fighting.
Conflict versus contradiction and deciding between values
Conflict is described as a practical clash between values that does not negate the validity of the system, whereas contradiction is a demand to do and not do the same thing at the same time and therefore collapses the system. Examples like chocolate that tastes good but makes you gain weight illustrate that both considerations are true and one must decide according to a scale of values, without concluding indifference to the rejected value. The claim is that there is no reason to see a Jewish law-morality conflict as a theoretical problem, because the Torah expects morality and also advances religious values that sometimes come at its expense.
“Moral” commands in the Torah as an additional religious prohibition, not morality itself
The command “do not murder” is presented as establishing an additional halakhic prohibition beyond the universal moral prohibition, and therefore the Talmud can ask, “Why do I need a verse? It is based on reason,” while the verse adds a religious-halakhic dimension rather than creating morality. Examples from the laws of murder in tractate Sanhedrin, about distinctions between indirect causation and different forms of killing, show that Jewish law defines boundaries of liability and punishment that do not reflect a moral ranking but the boundaries of a religious prohibition. The section of the beautiful captive woman is brought as an example that the halakhic discussion among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) focuses on the problem of intercourse with a non-Jewish woman and not on the question of rape, and the claim is that morally rape is forbidden even if there is no halakhic prohibition attached to it.
“Do what is right and good,” “Be holy,” and character refinement outside the count of commandments
Nachmanides interprets “Be holy” as a struggle against being “a degenerate within the bounds of the Torah,” and “Do what is right and good” as a moral obligation, yet no central enumerator of the commandments counts them as commandments within the tally of commandments. The text explains that counting them as commandments would turn morality into Jewish law and eliminate its status as a separate domain, and therefore the Torah leaves morality as an expectation rather than a command. Rabbi Chaim Vital in Shaarei Kedushah is cited regarding the question why the Torah did not command character refinement, and it is said that the commandment “and you shall walk in His ways” deals with imitating divine conduct, not with building inner character traits as such.
Morality and God: moral validity as a philosophical foundation
A philosophical claim is made that without God there is no binding force to a moral command, because in a materialist world descriptions of facts do not create obligation. The text distinguishes between a methodological order, in which one moves from what people experience as moral obligation to God, and an essential order, in which God is the basis of moral validity. It rejects attributing to Leibowitz the position that morality is detached from the Holy One, blessed be He, and states that both systems are the will of God but are different: Jewish law is built from commands, whereas morality is not command-based.
What prevails when there is a clash: inherent versus incidental, and a transgression for its own sake
When the clash is inherent to the commandment, such as killing a Sabbath desecrator, the decision is that the specific law overrides the general principle, similar to lex specialis, so as not to empty the specific law of content. When the clash is incidental and circumstance-dependent, there is no rule that Jewish law always prevails, and sometimes morality or an extra-halakhic principle prevails, as in the Talmudic topic of a transgression for its own sake in Nazir regarding Yael, the wife of Hever, and Lot’s daughters. Examples are brought from halakhic decisors about institutionalizing prostitution and about invalidating the betrothals of secular Jews for reasons of “it just isn’t fitting,” as extra-halakhic principles that decide against utilitarian halakhic solutions.
Bringing moral principles into Jewish law and Meiri’s position
The Sages can bring moral principles into Jewish law as rabbinic enactments, while preserving the distinction between the moral plane and the halakhic plane. Examples include “we compel against the trait of Sodom” in Bava Batra and the law of the adjoining neighbor, and returning a lost object even after despair, where a moral principle becomes halakhically binding. At the end, Meiri’s position is mentioned, that there is an obligation to save a non-Jew on the Sabbath just like a Jew, including Torah-level Sabbath desecration.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re in the middle of discussing commandments and what grounds them. I spoke a bit about the concept of a commandment in itself—what a commandment is. A lot of people connect the concept of a commandment with some sort of claim that a given action is beneficial or harmful. That this is the meaning of a positive commandment or a negative commandment. Again, beneficial or harmful in some very general sense—not necessarily social, personal, spiritual, or whatever else. And I said that’s a mistake, yes. The example I gave was crossing at a red light, for instance. As long as the Knesset, or whoever legislates on its behalf, hasn’t legislated that crossing at a red light is forbidden, crossing at a red light is still dangerous, it’s still problematic. It may have problematic consequences, so it’s certainly reasonable to say that it’s not desirable to do it. But you can’t say that someone who did it broke the law. Meaning, the fact that some action is improper, undesirable, harmful—or on the other hand, in the case of a positive commandment, beneficial—is not equivalent to saying that we’re dealing with a prohibition or a positive commandment. In order to move us from the descriptive plane—let’s call it descriptive, that it has such-and-such consequences—to the normative plane, to the question of whether it is permitted or forbidden, you need a command. But without a command, or legislation in the context of law, ordinary legal systems—in the context of Jewish law, legislation is basically the command of the Holy One, blessed be He—so it is the command that turns the action into a forbidden act or an obligation, a positive or negative commandment. And there’s a very important point here: you have to understand that a verse in the Torah that commands us something, whether a positive commandment or a negative commandment, is not a verse that comes to reveal to us that a certain action brings bad results or good results. Rather, that is the meaning of the imperative mood. To reveal to us that the consequences are such-and-such is an indicative sentence, so that’s a claim of fact. In other words, if you do this, then such-and-such happens. Like if you cross at a red light, you endanger yourself or others. Okay? That’s a factual claim. But a factual claim cannot automatically be translated into a norm. That’s what is called David Hume’s is-ought fallacy. In other words, the ought is what should be done and the is is what exists—the desirable and the actual, if you like, though in some contexts that phrase means something else. So you can’t derive the ought from the is. What? The naturalistic fallacy. Yes, but in Hebrew “actual” and “desirable” can have two meanings. “Actual” and “desirable” can mean what situation I have and what situation I would like to have. And both of those are factual descriptions. The whole question is whether I want it or whether that’s what exists but it’s not what I want. Here we mean something else. It’s a different kind of claim. There is a claim about what is—the factual claim. A claim about what ought to be is a claim about what should be. Okay? That’s a different distinction.
So for example, when I say, I don’t know, this picture has lots of colors and therefore it’s beautiful. That’s an invalid argument. The fact that it has lots of colors is a fact. That’s a factual premise. You can’t derive from a factual premise, in this context, an aesthetic conclusion—that is, a judgment. Never mind whether it’s an ethical judgment or an aesthetic judgment, but you can’t derive from that the judgment that the picture is beautiful. In order to make the move—to go from the factual premise to the normative or evaluative conclusion—I need a bridge assumption, I need to add another premise. A premise that connects or bridges between the facts and the judgment or the norms. For example: what has many colors is beautiful. If I add that assumption, then I can derive the conclusion that this painting is beautiful. Okay? Or: murder causes suffering. That’s a fact. It causes suffering to the family. The person himself may die without suffering. But can I derive from that that murder is forbidden? No. You need to add that something that causes suffering is forbidden. Again, a bridge principle. “Causes suffering” is the fact; “is forbidden” is the norm. I need another premise that moves me from the fact to the norm. By the way, this is a common mistake. Very often people raise various arguments and it seems obvious and self-evident to you, when in fact it’s an invalid argument. And many times you can use this is-ought principle to identify invalid arguments without even going into analysis. Once you see an argument whose premises are facts and whose conclusion is a norm, it’s invalid. That’s it, period. You don’t need to start looking for exactly where the bug is in the argument.
I’ll give you an example. Suppose someone wants to argue that women today should be accepted as valid witnesses. In Jewish law women are disqualified from testimony. If we want to argue that women today are valid for testimony, and we say: in the past women were uneducated, stayed at home, weren’t involved in the market, the economy, public life, and today they are—and therefore they should be accepted as witnesses. You hear arguments like that all the time. That’s an invalid argument. It’s invalid because it starts with two premises that are factual and derives a conclusion that is normative. The fact is that women in the past weren’t educated and weren’t involved—probably true on average—and today the fact is that they are educated and involved, that too is true on average. So what? Does that mean that therefore they should be accepted as witnesses? What’s missing? What’s missing is the principle that connects me from the facts to the norm, that shows the link between lack of education or lack of involvement in the market and disqualification or qualification for testimony. Right? Or in other words, you need to add the assumption that they were disqualified from testimony because they weren’t involved or educated. If you add that assumption, then the argument is valid. What’s missing now is that assumption. When you don’t add that assumption—who can argue with the facts? Yes, reality changed, that’s hard to argue with. On the other hand, it doesn’t really prove the conclusion. And therefore sometimes there’s even an interest in hiding the bridge principle because it is the more controversial principle. In other words, it’s the principle that gives rise to the disagreement. That’s what the argument is really about, not the facts. Someone who argues about the facts is an idiot. About that I’ll get to later—the answer is yes, but I’ll get to it later. Right now I’m not dealing with that yet. So the claim is that I’m talking even in the realm of morality, not necessarily in the context of commandments. Even in morality you can’t infer a normative conclusion from something factual. The fact that it causes suffering still doesn’t mean that it’s forbidden; you need to add another premise that what causes suffering is forbidden. So for now I’m still not talking about the relation between Jewish law and morality.
So that’s what’s called the fallacy—sometimes they call it the naturalistic fallacy, though it’s not exactly that. And the point is: what this really means is that a command is essentially different from an indicative statement. A command verse or command sentence is essentially different from an indicative claim. An imperative sentence, for example, cannot be judged in terms of truth or falsehood. If I say to you, murder is forbidden—or, better, I command you not to murder. That’s not the same thing as saying murder is forbidden. Okay? I command you not to murder. You can’t say that statement is true, nor can you say it’s false, because it isn’t a statement, it’s a command. A statement is an indicative sentence; it describes some state of affairs, some fact in the world. If it describes a correct fact, then it’s a true statement; if it describes an incorrect fact, then it’s a false statement. But a question or a command—those aren’t sentences to which you can even attach a truth value, true or false. If I ask you what time it is, is that sentence true or not true? It’s neither true nor false; it’s simply not a statement. Only statements can be assigned a truth value, meaning true or false.
Therefore, the way to identify halakhic verses in the Torah, the commandments in the Torah, is basically to identify whether the verse is an imperative verse or an indicative verse. And last time I mentioned Maimonides’ eighth root, where Maimonides talks about verses he calls “negation of obligation.” And he says that we do not count negation of obligation in the tally of the commandments. Like “she shall not go out as the slaves go out”—that was the example he brought. We discussed this: “she shall not go out as the slaves go out,” the word “not” seems to imply a prohibition. And it really is also a verse dealing with Jewish law—that a Hebrew maidservant does not go free for the loss of a limb the way a Canaanite maidservant does. Yes, if you knock out one of her limbs she doesn’t go free, unlike a Canaanite maidservant. “She shall not go out as the slaves go out.” Maimonides says, but this “not” is not a prohibitive “not,” it is a descriptive “not.” And those are two different meanings of the word “not.” Therefore, for example, when the Sages say that a negative commandment in the Torah should be expressed by “beware,” “lest,” or “do not,” one of those key words, because those expressions do not have a double meaning. They are always commands: “beware,” “lest,” and “do not.” “Not,” however—yes, there are prohibitions that appear in the form of “not.” But the word “not” doesn’t appear there in those forms. Why not? One could say because it’s obvious—fine, “not” is the classic prohibition. You need to add “beware,” “lest,” and “do not,” which are less obvious. But there’s something else. The word “not” is ambiguous. Sometimes the word “not” has nothing to do with commands; it describes a negative fact. “So-and-so did not eat breakfast,” to use Maimonides’ example. Or “so-and-so did not go to a certain place.” That “not” is descriptive, not commanding. When we are talking about a commandment, it has to be a commanding “not,” so “she shall not go out as the slaves go out,” says Maimonides, cannot be a negative commandment, even though it is a verse dealing with Jewish law. It’s not like “so-and-so did not eat breakfast.” But it describes the absence of a norm in a certain case. Release by damage to limbs does not apply to a Hebrew maidservant. Fine? So if someone damaged a Hebrew maidservant’s limbs, did he violate a prohibition? No. She simply does not go free. Factually—that’s a fact. It’s not a command. Therefore there is no prohibition here. That’s an important point.
It’s especially interesting against the background of—maybe we’ll still talk about this—that Maimonides has a category of positive commandments that don’t really say anything, don’t command anything. For example, commandment 95 and commandment 96: annulment of vows and the laws of impurity, from 96 onward. Corpse impurity. Whoever touches a corpse becomes impure. That is a positive commandment in Maimonides. What is the positive commandment?
[Speaker C] Whoever touches a corpse becomes impure? Yes. That’s a positive commandment? Yes. So what’s the positive commandment here? To become purified? No.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There isn’t one. It doesn’t command anything. Maimonides writes: don’t understand me to mean that what I’m saying here commands you to do something or forbids you from doing something. For Maimonides—and we’ll talk about this more—“commandment” is the translation of the word “law.” The Book of Commandments is the law book. One of the laws is that whoever touches a corpse becomes impure. There are defining laws, not only commanding laws. Or: for purposes of this law, a minor is anyone who has not reached age fourteen—I’m just making this up. So that’s a clause in the law book. It doesn’t command me to do anything; it simply defines something. What?
[Speaker C] A prohibition?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, the question is why it’s classified as a positive commandment, but it’s in the law book. Right. It’s like masculine and feminine for inanimate objects. Why do we decide that a fork is—I don’t know what. Or “way”—in the opening of tractate Kiddushin, right?—whether “way” is masculine or feminine? I once thought about a car, right? I say “my car” in one gender, but “my vehicle” in another. Why? Did it lose its marks of femininity the moment I called it a vehicle? What happened? Inanimate things have no signs, right? They’re neither male nor female. So why assign them gender? An arbitrary decision, because you need some way to speak. So you decide. As opposed to all kinds of little homiletic explanations. Anyway, the point is that a verse that contains a commandment is a verse said in a different tense—it is not indicative, it is imperative, in the grammatical sense. It is imperative. Every verse in past, present, or future is an indicative verse. Therefore command, in the theory of language, is also called a tense. It’s not really a tense, but it does not belong to the other three tenses, even though usually it appears in future form. “Do something”—that looks like “you will do.” That’s why people often mix them up. Someone says, “you will do such-and-such,” but a command should be “do,” not “you will do.” “You will do” is an indicative future sentence; “do” is an imperative sentence. It’s just that a command always tells you to do something in the future, so naturally it’s phrased in language that resembles the future. Right. No, yes—future that isn’t command. For example, I already mentioned what Rashbam comments in his aggadic commentary on “therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve.” That describes what the children of Israel did. Even though “do not eat” is actually future-style language, still, it means “therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve.” What? So really there’s no command there. And Rashbam says, fine, but apparently we have some tradition that even though there’s no command here, it is still a prohibition. But it bothered him. In principle, wording like this cannot be a prohibition. Yes, the Torah isn’t commanding anything there.
[Speaker C] Is “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it” not a command, but it’s still the source? Because “remember,” “remember”—why isn’t it…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not “you will remember,” it’s “remember.”
[Speaker C] One must remember the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I’m not much of an expert in grammar, I’m a bit weak on that, but yes, in practice it is a command. Again, I’m not expert in the linguistic nuances. Fine—it’s not “you will remember,” right. Just one more comment—or not a comment, just to look at this a bit in Maimonides’ eighth root, because that really is the fundamental point from which the whole discussion starts.
[Speaker C] Sorry, one second—“At the end of seven years you shall make a release.” Is that a command? It’s future. “You shall make.” It’s not “make,” it’s “you shall make.” Right, right. It really is future.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It really is future, yes. I think we need to check—I don’t remember right now whether the enumerators of the commandments count the Sabbatical year from there, or whether that verse is just telling you when you are supposed to do it. When you describe the details of the commandment, you’re speaking descriptively, like “she shall not go out as the slaves go out.” It tells you: at the end of seven years you shall make the release. The command concerning the Sabbatical year may not be from that verse. “In plowing and in harvest you shall rest,” or whatever it is, right. We’d have to check the enumerators of the commandments. Interesting question.
So in the eighth root Maimonides has a very interesting introduction, and that introduction does touch on what I said before, but it actually presents it from a broader perspective. He says: know that prohibition is one of the two parts of command. I mentioned this last time, right? And this is the passage: a command can instruct the commanded person to do one thing or not to do it—positive commandments and negative commandments. As when you command him to eat and say to him “eat,” or command him to refrain from eating and say to him “do not eat.” And in the Arabic language there is no word that includes both of these matters together. In Arabic there is no common word for positive and negative commandments. We talked about that. There is no shared word for positive commandments and negative commandments. They are simply two different concepts. Now in Hebrew too, by the way, Maimonides says the shared word is not “commandment”—that’s borrowed usage. “Commandment” means positive commandment. There is no such thing as a negative commandment; there is a prohibition. There is prohibition and commandment. The shared word is not “commandment”; the shared word is “decree,” Maimonides says. The king’s decrees or something like that. Fine, that’s his claim, not important right now, but that’s how he understands it.
In any case, he says that in Hebrew—or biblical language, or the language of the Sages—there is a shared word for positive and negative commandments, whereas in Arabic there isn’t. And I talked about this last time: when your language lacks a word, very often you won’t notice the distinction—or the connection. Language often helps. I gave that example of one-two-many systems, if you remember. Right, I talked about that? Those tribes that count one, two, and many. I mentioned it, right? So they can’t compare five and six and say which is more. Because if you don’t have a word in your language, it makes thinking very difficult. And it’s not because they aren’t intelligent. Once they were taught, they understood it like anyone else. It’s not that. But when there is no word in the language, it makes the thinking harder. Think about a culture in which there is no shared word for positive and negative commandments. Such a person could look at a commandment and a prohibition and see no connection between them. They aren’t two subcategories of one thing, what we call commandments. There are commandments, there are prohibitions, there are indicative verses, there are all sorts of types of verses or types of sentences, and these are just two types among them. Once you have a shared word for these two things, it hints to you or helps you notice that they have something in common, positive and negative commandments.
Now, what do they have in common? On the face of it, what is it? Two different things. One tells you to do something and the other tells you not to do anything. Later we’ll see that that’s not really right, but at first glance that’s how it seems. So what is shared between these two things? What they share is that they both belong to the normative sphere. These are not indicative verses. They are verses that belong to the world of norms, not of descriptions and not of facts. They do not describe anything; rather, they either tell you to do something or prevent you from doing something—tell you not to do something. Okay? In other words, you could say these are loaded verses. They have some kind of charge. An indicative verse is a neutral verse. It’s not loaded. If you say, “This shtender is standing here.” Okay. Even verses that look loaded are not really loaded with normative force. Like “murder causes suffering.” “Murder causes suffering” is a neutral fact. In order to turn it into a norm, we said, you need to add something. But the fact in itself is a fact. And a fact is not… Both positive commandments and negative commandments are loaded verses. They carry some sort of charge. When you hear them, they are supposed to make you either do something or stop you from doing something. That’s what I’m saying—just explaining what a command is.
[Speaker C] Normative, loaded—the word “command” is explaining the word “command.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The word “command,” as opposed to—that’s what I’m saying—the difference between the word “command” and describing to me that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something. To describe that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something is a description. To command means that my response is supposed to be action or non-action. Here, for example, with a command sentence, it doesn’t make sense to raise the is-ought fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy. Okay? You tell me, say, that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants you to do such-and-such. That in itself says nothing. So what? So He wants it. That’s a fact. So what? In other words, the fact that He wants it is also a fact. Or the fact that the law book says “do not steal”—the law book says “do not steal” is a fact. And it can be a true fact or a false fact. Therefore that isn’t a claim—well, in philosophy they call it a prescriptive statement. There is descriptive, and there is prescriptive, meaning one that is basically trying to bring about some movement, some action or non-action. So a descriptive statement is neutral; it cannot generate norms, it cannot make you do something or refrain from doing something. A prescriptive statement is a statement that is not is but ought. In other words, it tells you that you must do such-and-such or that you may not do such-and-such. Between is and ought there is a huge abyss; you can’t bridge it. In other words, from is you can’t derive ought. Okay? Therefore what begins the ought is some axiom that itself has to be loaded, and that is the command, okay? Or legislation, or values in the context of morality.
If someone asks me, for example: I know that murder is forbidden, but why not murder? Is that the same thing as saying: I know that murder causes suffering, but why not murder? It’s not the same thing. The second question is legitimate. I know that murder causes suffering—so what? Who said murder is forbidden? Just tell me that something that causes suffering is forbidden. Okay? But the statement “I know that murder is forbidden, but why not murder?”—“murder is forbidden” means don’t murder. It’s a sentence that comes to prevent you from performing murder. So it makes no sense to ask: explain to me—I understand that murder is forbidden, but why is it forbidden? It’s the same as saying: I know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, but why should I obey Him? Good question, no? People often ask that. That question is built on a mistake. Because the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God is not a description. “God” is a being that has authority inherently. Therefore in the Torah, for example, judges are called “elohim.” Why? Because that is a function whose voice must be obeyed. It has authority built into the very fact of what it is—a court or judges. That’s the concept of “God.” “God” is not a description of the being who created the world. That’s true, but that isn’t the point. The concept of “God” in biblical language is the being with ultimate authority. The being that if He says something, you must carry it out. That is called “God.” Therefore if I say, “I know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, but why obey Him?”—that’s the same thing as “I know that murder is forbidden, but why not murder?” It’s simply a misunderstanding. If you ask that, then you do not know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, or you do not know that murder is forbidden. If you know, then you don’t ask questions like that. And therefore it’s a claim—I can say, I know that there is someone who created the world; call Him the Holy One, blessed be He, if you like. That, yes. But I can’t say that I know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God and then ask, wait, but why obey Him?
There is a Maimonides at the end of the Laws of Kings—I’m opening a parenthesis a bit, but it’s important for the discussion. Maimonides at the end of the Laws of Kings, at the end of chapter 8, writes there in the context of a resident alien. He says: one who keeps commandments out of rational conviction is not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise people. Some versions have “and not among their wise people,” but the more correct version is probably “but among their wise people.” So when is he among the pious of the nations of the world? If he did it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded Moses at Sinai. Okay? Now we’re basically talking about a person who does something because that is the proper way to behave. It’s not worth nothing—not that it’s worth nothing—but it isn’t a commandment. He’s a good person. Right? It’s not a commandment. Okay? And therefore command verses are not only the definition of verses that contain commandments, they are also the motivation for why I am supposed to observe the commandments. Meaning, if I fulfill the commandment not because there is a verse that commands it, but because it seems to me that this is the right way to behave, then I did not perform a commandment. What about commandments…
[Speaker D] Within rational compulsion you already feel that the reason you’re doing the commandment is out of morality, so that’s not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to morality in a moment, but in principle it’s not a commandment. Meaning, someone who does an act not out of commitment to a command—that’s not a commandment. Of course the Holy One, blessed be He, commands regarding murder, but how can I…
[Speaker D] feel that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t need to feel—who talked about feeling?
[Speaker D] Feeling…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Feelings don’t interest anyone, they have no significance here. No one is perfect, we all have—but…
[Speaker D] I don’t want—I want to believe that this also applies to…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t need to say that. Again, you’re judged through the question: what would happen if on a certain day you didn’t feel that emotion that keeps you from murdering? Would you murder? Or would you then still not murder because the Holy One, blessed be He, forbids it? It’s true that right now it’s masked, yes, by a natural feeling; nobody murders because we don’t want to murder, or we want not to murder, okay? But that doesn’t mean that in the background there isn’t an obligation. The Talmud at the beginning of Zevachim talks about, yes, about double intentions. For the sake of Passover and for the sake of a peace offering. You do something with two intentions. Or modest and licentious women, or yes, there is coercion and consent, a topic discussed by later authorities (Acharonim). What happens with coercion and consent? Someone is coerced, they threaten him, they threaten him into doing something under duress, something that in any case he had already planned to do. Is he considered coerced? An interesting question. Why? Because there’s a double layer here, a double meaning. If a coerced person is someone who does it only because of the threat, and without that wouldn’t have done it, then this isn’t coercion, okay? If a coerced person is someone who does it because of a threat, then he is coerced, because he is doing it because of a threat. The question is how you define the concept of coercion. But, but, but in a case where there are double intentions, many times the way to test it is: what would happen if the second intention didn’t exist? Would you still do it? If yes, then it’s fine. For example, in the introduction to Eglei Tal, he writes there, yes, he has a famous passage there, he says that many people stray from reason and think that someone who studies and enjoys his learning, then that is learning not for its own sake. Right? So he says there’s no greater mistake than that. ‘Please make pleasant, Lord our God, the words of Your Torah in our mouths’—we want to enjoy and rejoice in learning, and so on. He says more than that, it’s part of the commandment. But then he continues after that. That’s less well known. He continues after that and says, yes, but someone who studies for the sake of the enjoyment—that really is learning not for its own sake. Someone who enjoys learning is not the same as someone who studies for the sake of enjoyment. And not only that: even if I study for the sake of enjoyment, but I would also study even if there were no enjoyment, that too is learning for its own sake. Because then I have a double purpose or double motivation. And then we check whether I am faithful to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He—how do I check that? Suppose I wake up in the morning and, in terms of my natural feeling, I don’t feel like studying. Do I still feel obligated to study? If yes, then I study for its own sake even when I do enjoy it. Okay? Meaning, many times this hypothetical experiment—what would happen if the second motivation didn’t exist—reveals to you whether you are committed. Therefore, with moral commandments, if you do it because of morality, then it is not a commandment. But if you do it because of morality, yet even without morality you would do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it, then there’s no problem. You don’t have to shut off your moral feeling or your conscience in order to be a servant of God. You just need it not to be the only motive; meaning, service of God in itself must be a sufficient condition for fulfilling it even without the second motivation. Okay? So that’s regarding the meaning of command: a command is basically a sentence that belongs to a completely different sphere than a descriptive statement. It’s simply a totally different world or color of propositions. There are loaded propositions—positive commandments and prohibitions—that are meant to make you act or not act, and there are neutral propositions that describe facts. And the loaded propositions are divided into two: a positive charge and a negative charge. Right? Even with positive and negative charge we have a shared name. There too it’s an interesting question. Why are they of the same type at all, just one is positive and one is negative? Why are they both charges? Maybe it’s something entirely different, not electromagnetic. Who said? Why? Because we have a shared concept for the electron and the positron. Meaning, both are charged electrically. This one is positive and that one is negative. They also cancel each other out, unlike gravity. So there is a connection between them. But if we didn’t have the concept of electric charge, and instead negative charge were called ‘negative’ and positive charge were called ‘positive’ without the word ‘charge’ shared by both, we wouldn’t connect them. Okay? So in this context, positive commandments and prohibitions belong to the same category, which is normative sentences. We call them commandments even though that’s a borrowed expression, because ‘commandments’ strictly applies only to the positive ones. But that’s the borrowed expression we use, and they are divided into two species: positive commandments and prohibitions. And that’s basically what Maimonides writes there, and he says there are various kinds of commandments. He starts—it is in the ninth principle where he talks about the kinds, but never mind, let’s leave that for now. So basically the conclusion is that when we talk about commandments, we are talking about command-verses in the Torah. Verses that are not descriptive verses, which are divided into two: positive commandments and prohibitions. That’s the most basic division.
[Speaker E] A prohibition—is that not good, as opposed to a positive commandment, where whenever I do it, from a, I don’t know, I do it from a moral standpoint?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, except that there there is no fulfilling of a prohibition. Once I was in a barbershop in Bnei Brak, and it was written there that everyone can earn five commandments here. ‘Do not keep overnight’—have in mind to earn five commandments: ‘do not keep overnight,’ ‘the wages of a hired worker,’ ‘do not round off the corners of your head.’ That is, of course, nonsense. You have no reason to intend to fulfill a prohibition. You do not fulfill it, and you do not need to intend to fulfill it. So there the question comes up less. With positive commandments, it’s a question whether you performed a commandment or did not perform a commandment, whether you fulfilled your obligation or did not fulfill your obligation. Okay? So that’s regarding the difference between command-verses and descriptive verses, but within the command-verses themselves we also have to distinguish, and move to a finer resolution. Because I want to single out or sharpen much more precisely what a commandment is. I’m still at the introductory stage, okay? And here I’m talking about Jewish law or commandments versus morality. Usually people talk about the morality of the Torah, yes, about what kind of moral outlook we can learn from this law or that law. Sometimes people even raise complaints or feel a difficulty or tension between morality and Jewish law. Whereas what underlies those questions, statements, or tensions from every direction is that basically these are the same type of verses. Verses that establish halakhic values and verses that establish moral values—that it’s all the same thing. When the Torah states the halakhic verses, it is essentially telling us what Torah morality is, Jewish morality if you like. Now I claim that this is not true. I think that the category of morality and the category of Jewish law are two independent categories. They simply do not talk to one another. There is no connection between morality and Jewish law, neither for better nor for worse. To sharpen this a bit more, maybe I’ll jump to the end for a moment and then come back. Why do I say this? Because again, I want to focus what I mean by commandments. Moral principles will not be considered commandments according to what I’m saying here.
[Speaker F] Okay, maybe in defining commandments you should also mention values?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, after all there are Torah values and there are values—
[Speaker F] moral values, two kinds of values.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s terminology; you can call it not values, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get there in a moment. So what I just want to say is one further step in order to sharpen or isolate the concept of commandment. Before, I isolated it from facts; now I want to isolate it from other values, values that are not Torah values or halakhic values. Okay? This is an important point, because what will enter the count of the commandments—obviously facts won’t enter there, but moral values won’t enter there either, even if I learn them from the Torah. Excuse me. Right, so that’s the goal of the move. So let’s do it more systematically. You can divide the… the laws into three categories. Leave aside for the moment positive commandments and prohibitions, both of them. Three categories. One category—you can call it the moral laws. Laws that somehow look like moral values: do not murder, do not steal, honoring parents, whatever. There are laws, or commandments if you like, that are anti-moral commandments. Kill Amalek, Amalekite babies, mamzerim who may not marry—you’ve ruined their lives, they didn’t do anything, what do you want from them? At most their parents did something; what do you want from them?
[Speaker G] That’s not moral at all. Maybe the morality here is justified for society? Maybe there are other considerations because of which this has to be prevented in advance?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then kill the parents—in any case that’s what they do—why, what do you want from the child? I could also kill everyone so there won’t be crime; that makes no sense. Meaning, you don’t punish someone for a crime he didn’t commit, even though I could kill you in the town square and put up a sign above saying, ‘So shall it be done to one who desecrates the Sabbath,’ even though you didn’t desecrate the Sabbath, just to educate the public. So that doesn’t—
[Speaker B] Maybe that’s part of the moral values.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying yes, it doesn’t make sense, and for that reason I think so. And the third category is a-moral commandments. A-moral meaning, yes, they do not speak with morality, neither for it nor against it. The prohibition on eating pork has no connection to morality; it’s neither moral nor anti-moral. Let’s call them ritual commandments if you like, religious, I don’t know what to call them, it doesn’t matter.
[Speaker C] Is the first category what is called rational commandments?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not necessarily; it depends whether you identify reason with morality. I don’t think so. I do think morality is part of reason, but reason has other wings besides morality. Not because morality isn’t part of reason—morality is not in the emotions, morality is in the intellect—but it’s not the whole intellect. And there are certain things that are rational obligations that are not connected to morality; for example, arriving at the conclusion of belief in God. Okay? You can say that’s a rational thing, you can show arguments that lead there, but I don’t think there is a moral issue in believing in God.
[Speaker F] Fine, we need to sharpen how you define morality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What benefits human beings or society, I don’t know, what benefits… yes, it seems to me that’s the accepted definition, something like that. So there are basically three categories of commandments. Let’s try to examine each one. So first I want to discuss the a-moral commandments. Once I’m talking about the a-moral commandments, the neutral commandments—what? Yes, not against and not for morality, something that deals with other areas of life, not connected to morality. What does it mean that there are a-moral commandments? First of all, it means one minimal thing: that Jewish law does not aim only at morality. Right? On that we would all agree. As opposed, for example, to Rabbi Kook, who in a number of places writes that no, all the laws ultimately have moral aims. I think that doesn’t even get off the ground, with all due respect. There are very many laws that are in no way connected to morality, and the explanations he tries to offer there are really not convincing to me—Rabbi Kook’s. So it seems to me that from a straightforward look, this can already be inferred from the very existence of this category. A-moral commandments mean—and now for our purposes, this brings me back to the concept of values—it means that at the base of Jewish law sit values of another kind, at least another kind. Let’s call them religious values. Okay? The goal is to repair, I don’t know, some religious dimension of the world. It doesn’t matter right now whether that’s in the soul, in the world, in the upper worlds—I don’t care, let everyone define it however they want—but there are commandments here whose concern is the repair and corruption associated with them—and we spoke about repairs and corruptions associated with commandments—and that is not connected to morality; it is a religious matter. For example, when I… no, before the example, let’s say the example in a moment. So that’s an initial conclusion. Now if that’s really so, then when I encounter a commandment that belongs to the anti-moral category—I move to the second category—I no longer need to feel distress at all. Look, step by step, this is a necessary move in my opinion. Whoever says otherwise, in my opinion, has simply made a mistake in the calculation. Meaning, if we arrive at an anti-moral commandment and we wonder, ‘Wait a second, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, commands us, I don’t know, to separate a priest’s wife who was raped from her husband? What do You want from her? She was raped; the two of them love each other, they have children, they want to remain together, and You obligate them to separate?’ Because these are heartbreaking stories. Some are imaginary, some are real. So that’s a good argument, right? Seemingly, why does the Torah command us such an immoral command? Now again, if I concluded, on the basis of the first category, that the Torah has goals other than moral goals—religious goals—then the question is no longer a question. Why? Because when the Torah tells the wife of a priest who was raped to separate from her husband, it wants to preserve the holiness of the priesthood. The holiness of the priesthood is not a moral value; it’s a religious value. But it is a value, meaning it is important to the Torah for some reason that the priest preserve his holiness. And somehow it desecrates that holiness if he continues to live with this woman. I don’t know exactly why, but that’s what the Torah says. So that means that this value of preserving the holiness of the priesthood is currently in conflict with the moral value involved in harming the priest and his wife, mainly his wife, both of them, and the children. Now a conflict is not a contradiction. It’s not that this value is—it’s not that the Torah is indifferent to morality and commands us an immoral command. No. It commands us religious commands. Sometimes the religious commands stand in conflict with a command, or with a moral value. Fine, conflicts also exist between two moral values, right? Sartre describes, during the Holocaust—the French philosopher—a student of his in occupied France during the Holocaust years who came to him with a dilemma. He was left alone with his elderly mother and was caring for her, and the father collaborated with the Nazis, I think, or the brother collaborated with the Nazis and the father was killed by the Nazis, I don’t remember anymore. In short, he was alone there. He was torn over whether to flee to the Free French army to fight the Nazis and thus basically leave his mother alone in Paris, or to stay and nurse her or help her and not fight. So that’s a moral dilemma between two moral values, not religious and nothing else. Does that mean that this student or Sartre was indifferent to the value of fighting evil, or to the value of helping an elderly mother? Of course not. There is a conflict, and in the end you have to decide somehow. But there is some problem there. Would you say there is a problem with your commitment to the value of fighting evil because, how can that be, what do you do with the value of helping your elderly mother? Or the other way around? What do you mean? On the contrary, the whole conflict arises because I am committed to both. But what can you do? Reality brought them to the same inn, and now there is a collision, and I can’t fulfill both, so I have to decide which one I prefer over the other. Doesn’t matter what the answer is. So there is no reason it should be any different between a religious value and a moral value. My arsenal of values has simply expanded. Now among my values I have both moral values and religious values. And now the collisions can be not only between two moral values or between two halakhic values, like a positive commandment overrides a prohibition, but also between a religious value and a moral value. There can be many collisions. A collision says nothing. It is not distress, and you don’t need to answer with excuses, and there is no difficulty here, nothing. There is simply a lot—like my favorite example, the chocolate example. One person says it’s worth eating chocolate because it’s tasty. Someone else says it’s not worth eating chocolate because it makes you fat. Who is right? Both are right. It is both tasty and fattening, right? Now I can decide either to eat or not to eat. The question is what, for me, prevails: does pleasure prevail over health or aesthetics, whatever, each person according to his own scale of values, or the opposite. But when I decided in one direction, does that mean I am indifferent to the opposing value? No. It means I had a conflict, I couldn’t realize both, and I had to decide which one prevails. When a positive commandment overrides a prohibition, I am not indifferent to the prohibition; rather, I decide that the positive commandment prevails over the prohibition. The same thing when I have a clash between a commandment and a moral value. There is no reason to accuse Jewish law of moral indifference. It’s a conflict. Jewish law is not morally indifferent, nor is the Holy One, blessed be He, nor is the Torah morally indifferent. On the contrary, it says, ‘And you shall do what is upright and good.’ What does that mean? Obviously, we are expected to behave morally. But there are religious values that sometimes stand in opposition. The more values you have, of course, the greater the chance that they will clash. In a world that has only moral values, the number of clashes will be smaller. That’s mathematics. If there are more values, there is more chance of clashes, right? Nothing to do about it; it’s more crowded, the field is more crowded.
[Speaker D] It’s not a difficulty; it’s a contradiction between two values within Jewish law, right,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] just as there are contradictions within morality, right. But we make a decision about how we resolve that conflict, but it’s not a contradiction, it’s a conflict. What’s the difference? A contradiction would be, say, if it said both ‘do not murder’ and ‘yes, murder.’ That’s a contradiction, not a conflict. What does the Torah want from me—does it want me to murder or not to murder? But there is no contradiction between the prohibition on desecrating the Sabbath, and even the death penalty for desecrating the Sabbath, and the prohibition of murder. Why is the death penalty for desecrating the Sabbath murder? Of the Sabbath desecrator. How can that be? It’s not a contradiction. There is a value in killing the Sabbath desecrator, right, and there is also a value in not murdering, or a prohibition against murdering. Sometimes a conflict arises. And then you have to decide which one prevails over the other. Fine, and a conflict is not a contradiction; a conflict is not a theoretical problem. A conflict is a practical problem: I have to decide what to do. I know, sometimes it’s hard to decide. But when there is a contradiction, that’s a theoretical problem, and the system has to be thrown out or, I don’t know, some solution has to be found, but if not, then you’ve proved it’s not true. That’s what’s called a contradiction. Okay? So I’m saying, I call these things conflict and not contradiction. Once you call them conflict, you’ve solved the problem. That doesn’t mean you know what to do, but it does mean you’ve solved the theoretical problem. And between morality and Jewish law? There is no problem at all. None. Between morality and Jewish law, I see no problem in any of the issues of Jewish law and morality. None. I don’t even feel a need to answer them, to think about them. But you’re calling it a conflict. It is a conflict, right. And a conflict is not a problem?
[Speaker G] No. In a conflict you just need to know what to do; you need to know which one prevails. That’s a practical decision. But it has nothing to do with the question whether there is a contradiction within the system, whether the system is faulty. It would be faulty if it were indifferent to morality, but it is not indifferent to morality; it just wants to advance religious values. Sometimes there’s a problem—you can’t fulfill both. You’d say, a doctor performs surgery on a patient. The surgery may be very painful. So because of that, the doctor doesn’t care about causing the patient pain?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But sometimes, in order to heal him, he has to cause him pain—what can you do. That’s not a theoretical problem; you just have to try to minimize the pain as much as you can. Fine, okay. So you’re saying that necessarily some of the commandments are not moral, according to the way the Rabbi defined the moral category. Right, right. I would have been very surprised if conflicts like that didn’t come up. Once you have such a dense set of norms—613 positive commandments and prohibitions—what are the chances that situations won’t arise where there’s a conflict with morality? The existence of conflicts is not a difficulty. On the contrary: if there were no conflicts, I wouldn’t understand what was going on here. In other words, the moral problem is only in our eyes, because morality is one of the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, who is a compassionate and gracious God, full of kindness. So if the Holy One, blessed be He, commands us these things, then automatically we would expect that all the commandments would also—no, that’s not correct. The Holy One, blessed be He, expects us to be moral, but He also expects us to be religious. He expects us not to murder, but also to kill Sabbath desecrators. And there’s no contradiction in that. He expects both things, and sometimes we have a conflict between those two expectations. But for One whose perfection is complete, could there be contradictions in—no, not contradictions, conflicts. Of course. Why not? A compassionate God and a jealous God, a jealous and avenging God. No, I don’t see any problem. In other words, this whole discussion of Jewish law and morality seems to me to be a baseless discussion. Meaning, even before the question of what the answer is—I’m not looking for answers. Whoever asks the question doesn’t correctly understand the subject matter. That’s all. And that doesn’t mean I’m not troubled by a situation in which Jewish law forces me to do something immoral. I’m very troubled; I might also look for workarounds somehow, to do it differently, to do this, to do that. Fine. But that’s a practical disturbance; it’s a conflict, not a contradiction. I’m not troubled about the truth of Jewish law because of it. Meaning, that’s not the question; there’s no contradiction here. Okay?
Because there are those— all the approaches there are divided over whether Jewish law is supposed to be indifferent to morality and there’s no such thing as morality; whatever Jewish law says, it says, and whatever it doesn’t say, do whatever you want. Okay? Or alternatively the opposite, what I said in the name of Rabbi Kook, that all of Jewish law is nothing but an expression of the Torah’s moral instructions. Right? Or yes, I don’t know, you could say both. I think both are wrong. In other words, Jewish law and morality are two parallel categories that can sometimes come into conflict with one another, but not contradiction. By definition, no—because they’re two different categories. Just as there’s no contradiction between health and morality, there’s no contradiction between Jewish law and morality. Why should there be? They’re two different categories. They’re not speaking about the same field.
But how can you distinguish morality from Jewish law? Because morality is something that stands on its own. For us it would be strange to kill a girl who walks around in short clothing, but among Arabs that might be family honor. That means one is right and the other is wrong. To us it also seems very reasonable to observe the Sabbath, and to Arabs it doesn’t. Why don’t you ask that about Jewish law? No, that’s Jewish law. To separate morality from Jewish law—morality is something that does not stand—your question about morality exists in exactly the same way regarding Jewish law. Why does it bother you in morality and not in Jewish law? I didn’t say it doesn’t bother me. I’m saying that connecting morality and Jewish law as if they’re something different—morality is something very fluid, it has no—so what if it’s fluid? Jewish law too. It’s fluid? Jewish law is also fluid. Jewish law is more fluid than morality. There are more disputes in Jewish law than in the moral sphere. He says there isn’t one morality. And there isn’t one Jewish law either? Shall we say? Not “shall we say”—there isn’t. Don’t evade it: there isn’t. But if you want to raise a difficulty, then let’s say there isn’t—no, don’t say “let’s say,” don’t say “let’s say,” like HaGashash says. No, clearly there’s a contradiction between morality and Jewish law, but one could simply claim that the morality here is not—that the morality of the law… Yes, that’s what people usually say, but I think that’s a mistake. Anyone who says that assumes that Jewish law reflects a moral conception, and if it contradicts my moral conception then apparently I’m mistaken. But no—he’s mistaken, because Jewish law does not reflect a moral conception, and this thing is not a contradiction but a conflict. Well, it depends how you define morality. What is there to define? I said earlier: what benefits people, society, right? What’s the problem? It’s very easy to define. If it were hard to define, the Torah would define it; it doesn’t bother to define it. “And you shall do what is right and good”—okay, what is “right and good”? Have you seen anywhere a definition? Everyone understands what right and good mean. What, you need a definition? And if I say that there’s some higher, spiritual morality there that we as human beings simply don’t understand? That’s just words, yes. A lot of people say that—just words. No, but maybe it’s true? Anything can be true. I can say that all our morality is really mathematics—we just don’t understand it; it’s actually mathematics. Just words. Who cares? I know what morality is. What I perceive as morality is morality. As long as you show me that I’m mistaken—I’m not saying I can’t be mistaken, fine—but broadly speaking, we know what morality is. The Torah itself, as I said earlier, says “And you shall do what is right and good.” How do I know what is right and good? The Torah assumes that I know, right?
Fine, it’s easier for me to think that Jewish law has a morality that maybe I just don’t understand. Because it’s easier to think that way, that’s why I’m giving this lecture—because it isn’t true. Many times what’s easier to think is not true. Can you explain a bit beyond “and you shall do what is right and good,” how this really fits with the command to be moral? Wait, wait, one second—I’m getting there, getting there. I’m just laying out the picture. But we still haven’t reached the third category. We talked about the non-moral commandments, which show that we have additional values at the basis of Jewish law. There are the anti-moral categories, which show that we have such values because they in fact create conflict with moral values. And notice: the claim accordingly is that there is no morality in the Torah, no other morality behind the Torah. Morality by definition is something universal, by definition. There’s no such thing as Jewish morality and non-Jewish morality. No such creature exists. “Jewish morality” is an oxymoron. Morality obligates all human beings—what do you mean? Every person is held accountable for being immoral. The Holy One, blessed be He, had a complaint against Cain: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground,” long before he had been commanded regarding murder. You don’t need a commandment against murder in order to hold someone accountable if he murdered. We would have learned modesty from a cat, and everything else you want, what the Sages say there. So morality is by definition universal. And when there are clashes between Jewish law and morality, it’s not because we have Jewish morality, higher morality, another morality, abstract morality—there is no such thing. It’s a conflict between Jewish law and the one and only universal morality. And if there are disputes in morality—true, there are also disputes in Jewish law, so what happened? One is right and the other is wrong. The fact that there are disputes proves nothing. It means one is right and the other is wrong. There are disputes in scientific fields too.
The third category is the category of moral commandments. If there’s no overlap between Jewish law and morality, then the difficulty arises: why does the Torah say, “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” and so on? And the truth is that this is a question one should have asked even before I started speaking. Why command “Do not murder,” “Do not steal”? There’s already a moral prohibition like that, and it doesn’t depend on a commandment; it already exists. Why does the Torah bring that into Jewish law as well? So does Jewish law indeed deal with morality? There are those who understand from here—and I think almost everyone understands from here—that even if I don’t identify Jewish law with morality, the way Rabbi Kook does in too extreme a form, I still see morality as a subset of halakhic values. In other words, there are moral values and also religious values, but morality is included within Jewish law. But I think that’s not correct. Morality is foreign to Jewish law. They are two independent categories—that’s my claim. And the moral commandments are really not moral. Not that they’re immoral, but they don’t belong to the category of morality. Non-moral? Yes. Meaning, when the Torah says “Do not murder,” it does not mean the moral prohibition against murder; it means to say that beyond the moral prohibition against murder, there is also a religious prohibition against murder. So there’s no correlation between the moral law and the religious law? Correct. Accidental? I don’t know if I’d call it accidental, because where there are no other reasons, then I assume that the religious dimension also wants the moral result. I don’t know if I’d call it accidental. But yes, that overlap is not necessary; it doesn’t have to be. A correlation of compatibility, maybe. So what the Torah is really adding when it says—yes, you could ask, “Why do I need a verse? Why do I need a verse—reason alone should tell me.” The Talmud asks: why do I need a verse? Reason alone should tell me. Why do I need a verse for “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” honoring parents? The answer is: because without the commandment there would have been a moral obligation, and the Torah wants to say that there is also a religious, halakhic obligation here—not just religious, halakhic.
But Rabbi, why doesn’t the Rabbi place morality above Jewish law? So where does morality come from? In the end, where does it come from? Are you asking who created it, or what? No, I mean, how do I know what is moral and what isn’t moral? In another second I’ll talk about that a bit. I already said earlier: basic decency, conscience, I don’t know, my moral awareness. Like any non-Jew—how does he know what’s moral? We’re the same. Every Jew is a small gentile, as is well known. So—have you ever heard, have you ever heard people say about a gentile that he’s “a complete gentile”? They only say that about a Jew—that he’s a complete gentile, right.
So the claim, in the end, is that the moral commandments—even they do not belong to the field of morality. In other words, morality is not contained within Jewish law; it is foreign to Jewish law. Okay? An example of this. There are passages in Sanhedrin, for example, about the prohibition of murder. So there are all kinds of tricks there about how one can kill in various ways—constricting, bringing the object near the fire, setting something in motion so that the sun will arrive, indirect causation, this way and that way, all sorts of forms. In some cases one is exempt, in some cases liable. Now clearly, morally there is no difference at all between these and the others. What difference does it make whether I kill with some bullet to the head, or I kill someone by putting him here and letting the fire burn him? As long as I did it and intended that he die, yes? I’m talking about that. And I did it by indirect causation or I did it this way—so what? Am I any less immoral? It is outright murder on the moral level. So why in Jewish law are you exempt? In Jewish law you are exempt because the religious prohibition does not exist here. The moral prohibition remains fully in force; that’s unrelated. But the religious prohibition does not exist; it has its own definitions. There is no moral statement here that in such a case you are less bad morally. What about punishment? Punishment—you’d have to ask the Holy One, blessed be He. I am inclined to think that He also holds us accountable for morality; He expects it of us. In another moment I’ll say a bit more about that. So therefore we see the difference in the definitions. And again, very often this difference in definitions is deeply troubling, because what is this—is it a different morality? Is it permissible to murder this way? No, it’s forbidden to murder this way.
Or there was a discussion—I once wrote about this on my website—there was a discussion when the most recent Chief Military Rabbi who was appointed—I forgot his name—Karim, right? Rabbi Karim. So when he was appointed, they dredged up from the grave some question he had been asked about the beautiful captive woman. Is it permissible to rape non-Jewish women in war? And he said yes. It’s written in the Torah. Okay? And then all hell broke loose. It started, of course, years later when they appointed him Chief Military Rabbi; they always bring these statements back from the dead. And then all kinds of stammering apologies began and all kinds of this and that. He himself didn’t know what to say. In short, it was all very embarrassing. It was very embarrassing, and the answer to this is very simple: of course, according to Jewish law, it is permitted to rape a non-Jewish woman in a halakhically sanctioned war. But morally it is a crime. What? Does the halakhic permission cancel the crime? Fine, so I’m saying—they brought all the halakhic qualifications and restrictions and so on, but that’s not interesting; that’s not the point. Those qualifications come to bring Jewish law perhaps as close to morality as possible, because if I’m not obligated, I don’t want there to be dissonance between them. But in principle there is no identity. And therefore it has no significance. It is forbidden for me to rape a non-Jewish woman exactly as it is forbidden for any secular person or non-Jew to rape a non-Jewish woman in war, or to rape a woman in war. Exactly the same. The whole question is whether on me there is another prohibition besides the moral one—a halakhic prohibition. And the Torah says no.
By the way, everything that troubles the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and the halakhic decisors about the beautiful captive woman is not the moral problem at all, do you understand? All the qualifications they make are not because of the moral problem. What is it there—“against the evil inclination”? No, the inclination to have relations with a non-Jewish woman. The whole problem there is the prohibition of relations with a non-Jewish woman—not the rape at all. The problem is: halakhically, how can it be permitted for a Jew to have relations with a non-Jewish woman? “The Torah spoke only against the evil inclination,” or all kinds of things of that sort. Nobody cares in the slightest about the rape of the woman. Look at all the commentators: nobody is troubled by it one bit. The moral question doesn’t arise there at all. Which of course intensifies the difficulty a thousandfold. How can that be? It’s not just that the Torah says something immoral—nobody is even bothered by it? The only thing they’re bothered by is how it can be that a Jew has relations with a non-Jewish woman. That’s what bothers you? A soldier with a weapon raping a woman—yes, you can make chilling Hollywood films out of that. The answer is that we are not dealing with the moral issue; we are dealing with the halakhic issue. Morally it is forbidden to do that; obviously it is forbidden. It depends on the circumstances, depends on the norms, and so on. Once the norms were different; that can’t be denied. But given today’s moral norms, clearly they are such—and I think it’s good that they are such—then clearly a Jewish soldier too is forbidden to do it. The question is whether there is a halakhic prohibition here. That is an entirely different question. Why should your grandmother care whether there is a halakhic prohibition here? You criticize the non-Jew or the secular person or whoever it may be. Why should it matter to you at all whether you have a halakhic prohibition on top of the moral one? No, only a moral one. So I too have the moral prohibition here—what’s the problem? Okay? So the whole conception is distorted. This whole conception of the relationship between Jewish law and morality.
Yes. I don’t remember exactly, but if I recall, there are sources in the Torah that command the Jew not to abandon the Torah, to cleave to it day and night, in every sense. And I ask myself: if the Torah did include specific moral commandments and not others, that sounds as though the Torah’s morality also says that certain things are… And what is “the Torah’s morality”? I don’t understand the expression. Explain that expression to me first and then let’s discuss it. What is “the Torah’s morality”? There’s no such thing. There are moral commandments that the Torah commanded. Okay, I think they cover all the morality that is obligatory for a person. That’s what you think, but it seems to me that it doesn’t stand up to the test of the facts. What can you do? So why did the Torah include moral commandments at all? To tell you that there is also a religious problem here. That’s all. Besides the moral problem there is also a religious problem here. And nevertheless we are obligated regarding moral commandments that are not written in the Torah? Of course. How could Cain have been held accountable for murder before he was commanded? After all, there is a verse here—“What have you done to your brother?” What is he obligated for? No, there’s no sweeping rule. If you want, I’ll say a sentence about that in a moment. But then what is written in the Torah and what is not written in the Torah in terms of morality? Whatever has religious value. Why should morality have religious value? I have no idea. Why should putting on tefillin have religious value? Do you know? I don’t know. The Torah tells me what has religious value and what doesn’t. So those commandments that have a religious dimension in addition to the moral dimension—it establishes a commandment or a prohibition about them. What doesn’t—doesn’t. Not that it’s not binding; it is morally binding, but not halakhically. Okay? No, I started the previous lecture with that, with Rashi, yes? Rabbi Yitzhak’s question at the beginning of the Torah. Okay?
How do we view “It is not in heaven” in all this? As if we are somehow dictating morality here on earth? “It is not in heaven” has nothing to do with this. That’s Jewish law. “It is not in heaven” means that a prophet is not permitted to innovate anything from now on, or that we do not heed a heavenly voice—that concerns halakhic rulings. It has nothing to do with morality. Morality is obviously not in heaven; there’s no need to say that it isn’t in heaven. Did anyone ever even have the initial thought that it might be in heaven? That applies to Jewish law, and even about that we say “It is not in heaven.” And regarding morality there was never any initial thought that it might be in heaven. It’s obvious: morality is what we understand as morality. Period.
A point that somewhat completes the picture, apparently in the opposite direction. Along with everything I’ve done here—this disconnect that I’m making between Jewish law and morality—I still maintain, and here I won’t go into the details of the discussion, if you want you can read about it, I’ve written and spoken about it a lot: morality has no validity without belief in God. In other words, without God in the background, morality has no binding force, in my view. I’m now making a philosophical claim, not a halakhic one. What? The opposite, no? No, that proves nothing. The fact that you prove that people don’t behave morally—religious Jews also don’t behave morally. So why, exactly, does morality have no validity without—no, this has nothing to do with their being two parallel systems; that’s exactly what I’m saying. My whole goal is to show why there’s no connection between that statement and my previous statement. Two different things. My claim is that philosophically, if there is no commanding factor behind the moral system, then the moral system has no validity. Think in an extreme formulation, say, of a materialist world. Think of a materialist worldview. You think the world is matter, right? Fine. How could there be validity to a moral command in a world that is entirely matter? A collection of molecules must do one thing, and are forbidden to do another? How do you even define this kind of statement? You can say that all kinds of things are ingrained in me. It’s ingrained in me to behave this way, ingrained in me to behave another way. You can describe things on the descriptive level—if you do this, it will cause suffering, no problem. But I already said: description does not produce normativity. I’m asking where the validity of the moral prohibition or obligation comes from.
Isn’t that a bit in tension with what the Rabbi said—that there’s no connection between Torah and morality? There’s a religious command. No, in the Torah there is no moral command. Wait, wait—fine, in the Torah. So what is written in the Torah and what is not written in the Torah? I’m getting there, step by step. The moral assumption on that basis says that there must be God—or the opposite? That’s a question of whether you’re talking about methodology or essence. Methodologically, I go from morality to God. In essence, God is the basis of morality. Morality comes from God. It’s like in science: are the laws of nature the basis of the phenomena, or are the phenomena the basis of the laws? When I investigate, I begin from the phenomena and try to infer the laws from them. But clearly, the order of essential unfolding is from the laws to the phenomena. What? Yes, I’m starting from the assumption that there is—I’m not discussing that question right now. If someone does not believe in a moral command, then there is no moral command—for him. But if you already believe in a moral command, then it has no validity unless there is God in the background. If you want, I can point you to things I wrote about this, spoke about this—I once had a debate about it with Hanoch from the Hebrew University. He doesn’t believe in a moral command, but he’s an atheist? Yes, yes, he believes in ethical facts. Therefore I did the debate, because we had common ground. I can’t debate with someone who doesn’t accept moral realism at all; there’s no discourse there. Yes.
Right. He can say that the moral obligation isn’t really an obligation, but a biological need or something like that. Fine, then he doesn’t accept the validity. Fine, no problem—then he doesn’t accept moral validity. He just says: fine, I do it because I feel like it, or because I want to benefit others. No problem, that’s your right. But if I don’t want to benefit others, do you have a claim against me? I’m asking: I don’t want to benefit others—do you have a claim against me? He harms society. So what? Is it forbidden to harm society? He harms society or harms me, so I have… Right—no, you don’t have a claim against him, you just defend yourself. You can’t say he’s “not okay.” There’s no such thing as “not okay” as long as there are no binding criteria for how one becomes okay. Okay? Of course you can defend yourself—you don’t want him to kill you, so you defend yourself, fine.
Both morality from God and Jewish law… Wait, that’s exactly where I’m getting to now; those are the next sentences. So basically what I only want to say is: true, I’m making a total break here between Jewish law and morality, but both come from the Holy One, blessed be He. One of the indications of this, for example, is “And you shall do what is right and good.” What Nachmanides writes there is that this basically means being a moral person. Yet no enumerator of the commandments counts this among the commandments. It’s a verse phrased like a positive commandment: “And you shall do what is right and good.” In any other context this would have been counted as a positive commandment. Why isn’t it counted as a positive commandment? So one might have said: because “And you shall do what is right and good” means do the commandments. That’s what Maimonides writes about “You shall be holy” in the fourth root. He says: why don’t we count “You shall be holy”? Because “You shall be holy” means to do the commandments. There’s no need; the commandments are already counted, so there’s no point counting another commandment that tells you to do the commandments—that’s redundant duplication. But Nachmanides, both on “You shall be holy” and on “And you shall do what is right and good,” does not learn like Maimonides. “You shall be holy” means not to be a degenerate within the permission of the Torah, and “And you shall do what is right and good” means to be a moral person, like the Maggid Mishneh at the end of Laws of Neighbors—yes, he almost copies Nachmanides. “You shall be holy” means not to be a degenerate within the permission of the Torah—that’s Nachmanides on the Torah. And on the verse “And you shall do what is right and good,” he speaks about the need to behave morally. Okay? But he still does not count it among the commandments. Look at the commandments Nachmanides adds to Maimonides’ count—this list appears at the end of Sefer HaMitzvot—you won’t see “And you shall do what is right and good” there. And as far as I remember, no major enumerator of the commandments counts it. Maybe there’s one I missed, but in general no central enumerator of the commandments counts it.
Is that not because it has no content, as it were…? Not because it has no content; it has plenty of content. You don’t count it because once you count it, it becomes a commandment, part of Jewish law. And by definition, a moral directive is not part of Jewish law; Jewish law does not speak about morality. There’s a great question in Nachmanides’ glosses to the fourth root—yes, where he defends the Behag, because the Behag does count “You shall be holy.” But he doesn’t bring the most obvious defense: what he himself writes at the beginning of Parashat Kedoshim, that this is a command to behave beyond the letter of the law, not to be a degenerate within the permission of the Torah, and so on—and that is what the Behag counted. Because Maimonides does not count it, since he thinks “You shall be holy” means do the commandments, and what is there to count? It just repeats the commandments themselves. But Nachmanides has a different conception, so why doesn’t he write this as the defense of the Behag? Why did the Behag count “You shall be holy”? Because for him it’s not duplication. “You shall be holy” is not to fulfill the commandments—on the contrary, it’s to do things beyond what the commandments say. And the answer is that if they had counted it, then it would no longer be beyond the commandments—it would become part of the commandments. That’s the paradox of the degenerate. Right? In other words, if they had counted “You shall be holy,” then all the things we were supposed to refrain from because it says “You shall be holy” would turn into actual halakhic prohibitions, not things that are “degeneracy within the permission of the Torah” or “beyond the letter of the law.” And the Torah wants to leave this in the category of “degeneracy within the permission of the Torah.” It does not want to turn it into another prohibition. It is important to it that we do this not because of a halakhic command, but because it is simply not right to do otherwise. Okay? I say the same thing about “And you shall do what is right and good.” Morality does not become a commandment because the Torah is interested in our doing morality the way any non-Jew does it. Because that’s… you have to be a human being. Yes, what Rabbi Chaim Vital—I mentioned this last time, didn’t I? Rabbi Chaim Vital in Sha’arei Kedushah: why didn’t the Torah command the improvement of character traits? So he gives an interesting answer. The Torah speaks to human beings. If you’re not a human being, there’s nothing to talk to you about. There has to be some basic infrastructure connected to your being a human being who can be commanded at all. If you don’t understand that you are obligated to moral behavior, then what will it help to command you to behave morally?
Yes, it’s like the joke about the yeshiva boy who meets girls for arranged dates. He rejects all of them. The supervisor comes to him and says: our master, head of the academy, leading sage of the generation—none of them suits you? Sit and work on your character for a year; after a year come back to tractate Kiddushin. Okay? So he works on his character with great fervor—isolates himself in forests, in the moral-improvement hut, and so on. After a year he goes back to meet girls and again rejects all of them. The supervisor comes and says: what did you do for a year? Did you work on your character? He says: certainly. A year ago, when I was arrogant, none of them suited me. Now that I’m also humble, all the more so none of them suits me. Now this reflects exactly what someone looks like when he works on his character because there’s a clause, or because he was instructed to work on his character. When you work on your character and understand the meaning of working on your character, it’s much more meaningful than because there’s commandment number 513 to work on your character. By the way, there is such a commandment; that’s a strange question of Rabbi Chaim Vital. Yes, “And walk in His ways”—just as He is compassionate, so you be compassionate, and so on. So why does he ask why the Torah doesn’t command character improvement? It does command it. The answer is: it doesn’t. “To walk in His ways” means to do what He does. Character improvement is not about action. Character improvement is about your inner psychological structure, the traits of your soul. There is no commandment about that. The commandment is to behave as the Holy One, blessed be He, behaves. Because the Holy One, blessed be He, has no soul-traits. We cannot know what His traits are in the sense of how His psyche is built. We know how He behaves. Okay? So what we are told is to imitate how He behaves. That’s called “walking in His ways,” and it is counted as a commandment by all the enumerators of the commandments. But character improvement means having refined traits, regardless of behavior. Presumably that will also affect behavior, but that’s not the point. And about that there truly is no commandment.
Anyway, for our purposes, what I want to say is that despite the break that I made between morality and Jewish law, I do not make a break between morality and God, or between morality and faith. Absolutely not. And what this essentially means is that the will of God has two subcategories. One subcategory is Jewish law, grounded in commandments and all that we discussed earlier. The second subcategory is morality. And morality is not based on commandments. There are no commandments about morality. Even “And you shall do what is right and good,” which most looks like a commandment, is not counted as a commandment in the enumeration of the commandments. The Sages did not treat it as a commandment but as an expectation. The Torah expects us to behave morally. That’s all. But it is not a commandment. So that doesn’t mean it is neutralized—yes, it is not an atheistic category as Leibowitz said—but he grasped something correct and, as always, took it one step too far. In other words, he separated it from Jewish law, and in that he was right, but he also separated it from the Holy One, blessed be He, and in that he was wrong. In other words, there are two subcategories within the will of God: one is Jewish law and one is morality.
By the way, from here I return to what I said earlier, that I would comment on this a bit: the question is what happens when there is a clash. So if the category of morality were an atheistic category, then first of all it would not be binding. And beyond that, apparently it would automatically have to yield before every commandment—before every religious commandment. In every conflict between Jewish law and morality, Jewish law would have to prevail. But if both are the will of God, then it’s no longer so simple. Who says this one prevails over that one? So here I’ll just say briefly: one has to distinguish between two situations. One situation is when the clash is inherent. For example, killing Amalek; or, you know, let’s take killing a Sabbath desecrator. Killing a Sabbath desecrator obviously always involves taking a life, right? This is not that somehow by chance a conflict arose. So here the clash is inherent. Once the clash is inherent, if the Torah tells me to kill a Sabbath desecrator, then by that very fact it is also telling me not to pay attention to the moral value of life. Or to the prohibition “Do not murder,” which is also a religious prohibition, not only a moral one. Okay? That is what it told me. This is what our cousins the jurists call lex specialis. When there is a clash between a broad principle and a more limited principle, the more limited principle always prevails. There is “Do not murder,” which is the broad principle, and the obligation to kill a Sabbath desecrator, which is to kill a specific person—a narrower principle. It always prevails. And why? Because if the broad “Do not murder” were to prevail, then the obligation to kill a Sabbath desecrator would be completely emptied of content; it could never be fulfilled. But if the specific one prevails, then “Do not murder” remains in force, aside from these exceptions, when he desecrates the Sabbath or something of that sort. And therefore, by definition, the specific always prevails over the general. So if the Torah says something that necessarily always conflicts with a moral value—for example, forcing a priest to divorce his wife if she was raped, which is blatantly immoral, and don’t tell me stories about higher morality and things like that—but there is a religious value in preserving the sanctity of the priesthood, and the Torah tells us that the religious value is worth even the moral price—there’s nothing to do. So in that case it overrides, and therefore in such a case Jewish law will prevail over morality. The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself already told me what the final ruling is.
But where the clash is accidental, not essential, like saving a life and the Sabbath—again, that’s within Jewish law itself, but only to illustrate the logic—this is really an accidental clash. Or Sartre—you know, Sartre—that too is an accidental clash. Fighting evil does not contradict helping one’s elderly mother, and helping one’s elderly mother does not contradict the value of fighting evil. It just so happens that a situation has arisen in which a person cannot do both. What can you do? So I have a conflict; I have to decide it. In such a case there is no way to determine what prevails. It is not true that Jewish law always prevails. It is not true to say that Jewish law always prevails. No, sometimes morality prevails. And there are examples of this, by the way, in the words of halakhic decisors. The whole issue of a transgression for the sake of Heaven in tractate Nazir is basically this issue. If you bring it into Jewish law, that’s a different affair—like saving a life and the Sabbath, where it really is brought into Jewish law because the contradiction was from the outset within Jewish law. But I used it only to show the logic. I’m talking about a contradiction that is not within Jewish law and that the Sages did not resolve, like a transgression for the sake of Heaven. The issue of a transgression for the sake of Heaven basically says that there are situations—if they are extreme enough—in which a moral principle or an extra-halakhic principle can override a halakhic prohibition. Even the most severe prohibition—this is talking about a married woman. Relations with a married woman is not overridden by anything. Yet Lot’s daughters receive great praise—Lot’s daughters—for having had relations with their father, according to the Sages in that same passage immediately after the passage about a transgression for the sake of Heaven. Why? Incest overrides nothing; it is overridden by everything in the world. The same with Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite—that’s the example the Talmud brings there for a transgression for the sake of Heaven. From a halakhic standpoint there is no permission for it at all. And there are situations in which you suspend Jewish law and some extra-halakhic principle prevails. If humanity is going to be wiped out, or the Jewish people are going to be wiped out, that is probably important enough to override Jewish law. But there is no halakhic principle that says there is an override here. This is an extra-halakhic principle versus a halakhic value or prohibition. And one has to decide which prevails.
And there are examples among the halakhic decisors too. For example, regarding the institutionalization of prostitution. Several decisors discussed this; there are many responsa among the medieval authorities and later authorities. There is a lot of logic to institutionalizing prostitution, both health-wise and halakhically. Make sure the prostitute immerses, then she won’t be in a state of menstrual impurity, she’ll be unmarried and not someone else’s wife, everything will be arranged, health-wise too, today they’d also do medical supervision—excellent, a great advantage. But all the decisors opposed it. Why? Because it’s not done. You don’t institutionalize prostitution. You don’t give permission for prostitution. Why? But you gain avoidance of prohibitions related to menstrual impurity, severe prohibitions carrying karet, or adultery with another man’s wife. Fine, because there are extra-halakhic things that sometimes override halakhic considerations. Or invalidating marriages of secular Jews—put invalid witnesses there and everything will be fine; then there’s no promiscuity, no mamzerim, no adultery, nothing, everything is excellent. What’s wrong with that? No. Almost all the decisors—there were some who supported it—almost all the decisors opposed it. Again because it’s not done. Because if a person wants to marry according to the law of Moses and Israel, then he has to marry according to the law of Moses and Israel. So there are extra-halakhic or moral principles that sometimes override halakhic commands, at least in sufficiently extreme cases. Sometimes the Sages themselves bring this into Jewish law, and that is the issue, for example, of “we compel against the trait of Sodom” in Bava Batra, and there is no lack of such cases, and more.
And “we compel against the trait of Sodom”—what’s an example? The law of the adjacent field. Two brothers divide a field, and one of them has a field adjacent to this one. So the one with the adjacent field wants the half that borders his field, because it’s easier for him to work his land continuously. Now in principle the other one can object; it’s his right. There’s a lottery there; each one gets the half he drew, and that’s it. But the Talmud says: we compel against the trait of Sodom. They will force you to give him the other half. Why? There is no halakhic obligation. It is my non-halakhic right to insist on a lottery. Sometimes the Sages bring the moral principle into Jewish law—and they even compel it. Returning a lost object after the owner has despaired, and all kinds of things like that—those are various examples. In places where this enters Jewish law—“this one benefits and that one loses nothing”—in places where it enters Jewish law, it becomes rabbinic law. Say, for example, saving non-Jews? One second. But it becomes rabbinic law. The distinction between Jewish law and morality remains intact. It’s just that the Sages, just as they can institute various enactments or decrees, can also establish a moral principle as a decree or enactment. That’s fine—they can bring it into Jewish law, but then it will be rabbinic law. We’re not violating Jewish law here. I didn’t understand. In this case we’re not violating Jewish law. In which example? The case of the field. You are violating Jewish law there. First of all, yes I am—I am harming the rights of the other person. What do you mean? He has a right to receive that half of the field. Is it impossible to establish that there is a moral obligation to save a non-Jew on the Sabbath even though that… Yes, Meiri says there is also a halakhic obligation, not only a moral one. And I, the little one, agree as well. No, out of fear? Nonsense. Conservative gibberish. Not out of fear at all; there are all sorts of clear indications for it. He did not write it out of fear. There is a certain way people write things out of fear; this isn’t it. I wrote an article about it—if you want, all the indications are there.
Okay, we’ll stop here. Sorry for the delay; that’s why I also pushed the end a bit. It’s fine. What does Meiri say? He says there is an obligation to save him on the Sabbath just like a Jew. In what sense? Sabbath desecration at the Torah level—everything.