A Look at Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 13 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

Table of Contents

• Giving a bill of divorce as a metaphor for conceptual analysis: carving out, sculpting, and peeling an onion
• Talmudic casuistry, precedents, and the logic of inference: analogy, induction, and deduction
• A critique of positivism: John Stuart Mill, axioms, and the limits of deductive certainty
• German law versus common law and Jewish law: a practical problem versus a principled one
• Positivism, the mid-20th-century crisis, and narrative postmodernism
• Neural networks and learning through rejection: rules as peels, not as the goal
• The value of the process: the penitent, the completely righteous person, and movement as the essence rather than the destination
• Repentance as a commandment and its content: Maimonides, Nachmanides, Meshekh Hokhmah, and “I will sin and repent”
• Repentance out of love and repentance out of fear: intentional sins, inadvertent sins, and merits
• Rabbi Kook in Orot HaKodesh: perfection and perfecting, the deficiency of perfection, and “service for a higher need”
• The Book of Jonah: mercy, ideology, the kikayon plant, and an a fortiori argument
• Movement, Zeno, and instantaneous velocity: the process as reality and not merely an indication
• Torah as poetry and definition by negation: garments, angels, and internalization

Summary

General Overview

The text summarizes a line of study built around the topic of giving a bill of divorce in order to show that conceptual analysis works like peeling away “the layers of an onion” until no final rule remains, yet the very act of peeling internalizes an intuitive understanding that cannot be formulated. It presents the Talmud and Jewish law as casuistic systems based on cases, analogies, and softer generalizations than positivist deduction, and links the failure of positivism to the crisis that gave rise to postmodern narrativism. It then argues that the process has intrinsic value, as reflected in the superiority of the penitent over the completely righteous person and in conceptions of repentance out of love, and it brings Rabbi Kook’s comments on perfection and perfecting, to the point of “service for a higher need.” The summary returns to defining Torah as poetry: the content is not in the words themselves but in what passes through them, and Torah study is a kind of rubbing up against the garments that generates an inner attachment to Torah.

Giving a Bill of Divorce as a Metaphor for Conceptual Analysis: Carving Out, Sculpting, and Peeling an Onion

The conceptual process is described as carving out, where the writing is produced by removing the surrounding material and leaving the letter, and as a sculptor removing from the stone what is not the statue until the form that was “inside the stone” is revealed. Study progresses by proposing rules, testing them, correcting them, and rejecting them, until no valid rule remains, but an internalized understanding of the concepts in the passage is created. That understanding is not the product of a final rule but of the process of negation, and the rules serve as a ladder that you climb and then throw away.

Talmudic Casuistry, Precedents, and the Logic of Inference: Analogy, Induction, and Deduction

The Talmud is described as having a casuistic character that does not “believe” in general rules, but rather builds understanding out of cases and precedents, similar to common law. Three basic forms of inference are presented: deduction from the general to the particular, analogy from one particular to another, and induction from particulars to a general rule. It is said that positivist law tends toward deduction, whereas casuistry relies on analogies and generalizations. The claim is made that the rigid distinction between these methods is an empty abstraction, because analogy can be broken down into induction that creates an implicit rule and deduction that applies it to another case.

A Critique of Positivism: John Stuart Mill, Axioms, and the Limits of Deductive Certainty

It is argued that deduction is necessary only in the relation between premises and conclusion, not as a source of the truth of the conclusion, because certainty depends on the certainty of the premises. John Stuart Mill is presented as someone who undermines the superiority of deduction by arguing that the premises themselves generally arrive by way of induction or other “soft” tools such as intuition and generalization. The geometric example emphasizes that theorems are not “truer” than axioms, because proving them means grounding them in the axioms, and therefore deduction has no power beyond whatever justifies the basic premises.

German Law versus Common Law and Jewish Law: a Practical Problem versus a Principled One

German law is presented as based on legislation and deductive rules in which the legislator determines and the judge “derives,” and the failure is attributed mainly to the complexity of reality, which prevents the formulation of rules that will cover every case. In Jewish law, the problem is doubled, because the initial data are Talmudic cases, and the rules are created by the learner and the halakhic decisor as an induction that is inherently uncertain and sometimes does not succeed at all, as is evident in the attempt to derive a rule in the topic of giving a bill of divorce. The text describes a retreat from extreme positivism in legal systems, alongside an opposite movement of common law toward more legislation and rules, because human thought cannot function without categories and rules even if there are no final “true rules.”

Positivism, the Mid-20th-Century Crisis, and Narrative Postmodernism

It is argued that the aspiration to ground all thought in first premises and logic collapsed, and that even science cannot be fully grounded in a positivist way, certainly not law, Jewish law, and philosophy. Out of that failure there emerged a conception of multiple narratives in which “everyone has his own truth,” because deduction is valid only within a given system of premises, and different premises place different people on equal footing with no positivist tool for deciding between them. The text describes postmodernism as an internal continuation of positivism rather than its opposite, and connects that development to contemporary social and ideological phenomena.

Neural Networks and Learning Through Rejection: Rules as Peels, Not as the Goal

The process used in the topic of giving a bill of divorce is compared to the learning of a neural network, where one advances through examples, mistakes, and corrections until a competence is built that is not formulated as an all-encompassing rule. Rules are presented as necessary working tools for sorting phenomena, but not as a truth that can be “discovered” at the end, and clinging to rules as the goal is a mistake. The desired result is an intuitive understanding that comes from a process of proposal and negation, not a deductive formulation of an absolute rule.

The Value of the Process: the Penitent, the Completely Righteous Person, and Movement as the Essence Rather than the Destination

The text interprets “In the place where penitents stand, the completely righteous cannot stand” as a claim that the process itself has intrinsic value, and not only the reward or the effort. A penitent can reach the state of a completely righteous person, but his advantage comes from the very fact of change and progress, and therefore the value lies not in the final state but in the walking itself. Movement is presented as a value that exists even if there is no stable “destination” one reaches, and learning is described as the accumulation of insights that cannot always be formulated, but are created within the person through the dynamic of analysis.

Repentance as a Commandment and Its Content: Maimonides, Nachmanides, Meshekh Hokhmah, and “I Will Sin and Repent”

A dispute is brought between Maimonides and Nachmanides as to whether “And you shall return to the Lord your God” is a promise or a command, and the explanation of Meshekh Hokhmah is discussed, according to which there is no need for a commandment of repentance because one is in any case required to observe commandments and avoid transgressions. The text argues that repentance includes dimensions such as regret, confession, and acceptance for the future, and that even if Maimonides can be explained differently, one possible content of the commandment of repentance is the duty to be in a process and not merely to arrive at a sinless state. “One who says, I will sin and repent” is presented as a serious initial assumption stemming from the superiority of the penitent, but the Talmud warns against initiating sin because of the danger that he may not be enabled to repent.

Repentance out of Love and Repentance out of Fear: Intentional Sins, Inadvertent Sins, and Merits

The text brings the Talmud in Yoma that repentance out of love turns intentional sins into merits, while repentance out of fear turns intentional sins into inadvertent sins, and it emphasizes that the intentional sins are not “erased” but receive a new interpretation. It explains that repentance out of love turns the sin into a merit because the sin becomes the lever for a process that creates a level beyond that of the completely righteous person. Repentance is presented as coloring the past in a different shade and directing one’s gaze forward, with acceptance for the future understood as more essential than sinking into regret.

Rabbi Kook in Orot HaKodesh: Perfection and Perfecting, the Deficiency of Perfection, and “Service for a Higher Need”

Passages are quoted from Orot HaKodesh, part 2 (“Perfection and Perfecting”), in which slowness, limitation, and deficiencies in the world are presented as the basis for unceasing elevation, and perfecting is described as rising above complete perfection. A theological difficulty arises: if perfection also includes the advantage of perfecting, how is the Holy One, blessed be He, perfect if He cannot “be perfected” because of His perfection. Rabbi Kook is described as opening a solution in which the capacity for creation and the coming-into-being of the world allow perfecting to appear through deficient creatures, and this is described as “service for a higher need,” in which human service כביכול completes the dimension of continual addition.

The Book of Jonah: Mercy, Ideology, the Kikayon Plant, and an A Fortiori Argument

Jonah’s flight is presented as a principled argument with the Holy One, blessed be He, about the very idea of repentance, out of a view that one who has sinned should be punished and not be given an opening to return. “Is it good for you to be so angry about the kikayon?” is presented as an a fortiori argument that seems absurd if Jonah cared only about its shade, and two readings are suggested: either Jonah truly did care about the kikayon even if he had an interest in it, or the Holy One, blessed be He, “needs” Nineveh’s repentance just as Jonah “needs” the kikayon, because the structure of the world includes sin and repentance as part of its purpose. The midrash on “When a person dies in a tent” is presented as Adam’s claim, “You come against me with a pretext,” highlighting that death and failure are built in from the outset to the order of the world and are not an accidental response to one individual sin.

Movement, Zeno, and Instantaneous Velocity: the Process as Reality and Not Merely an Indication

The text returns to Zeno’s paradoxes and distinguishes between “standing” and “being located” in a place, and presents velocity as a point-like property in time and not as a definition of change of place after the fact. Velocity is described as a local quantity from which change of place follows, and this serves as a model for the claim that study and repentance are a movement with self-standing reality, not merely an indication visible only when one reaches another place. The result is a conception according to which analysis and progress are “the thing itself,” and not a device on the way to a final conclusion.

Torah as Poetry and Definition by Negation: Garments, Angels, and Internalization

It is said that it is hard to define concepts like poetry in a positive way, and so one adopts the indirect path of carving out, defining by way of what something is not, and that move parallels the study of giving a bill of divorce. Torah is called poetry because the words of the Torah scroll do not carry the “content of Torah” in a simple literal sense, but serve as a garment and medium through which something abstract passes, something that cannot be directly described—similar to the line “Once upon a time there was a lone lantern at the edge of a neighborhood,” whose content is not literally about lanterns and neighborhoods. Learning is described as rubbing up against those garments, peeling them away, and internalizing Torah within the person in a way that is not exhausted by formulations of rules but by attachment and inward absorption of “the desires of the Holy One, blessed be He.”

Okay, a summary of the previous chapters. You may need some kind of recap of what was going on here. Yes, the summary will be natural, meaning—but yes. “The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God and keep His commandments, for that is the whole of man.” There are already written summaries. Well, in any case, that sums up every course, so it’s not an irrelevant summary. What sums up every course is not a summary, as is well known. Anyway, we talked about delivering a bill of divorce, and through the discussion of the topic of delivering a bill of divorce I tried to show how, basically, we operate in conceptual study in general: some kind of peeling of an onion. We peel and peel and peel, and in the end apparently we’re left with nothing. And my claim was that the act of peeling itself is what creates the understanding, not what is produced afterward. I called it explanations by carving out the background, like they write in the laws of the Sabbath or in the laws of bills of divorce, like writing letters by removing the surroundings and leaving the letter—where the writing isn’t really about the letter itself at all, only about removing the things that interfere with seeing it. So that’s a good metaphor, yes, like the sculptor we mentioned: the sculptor doesn’t create the statue; the statue was already inside the stone beforehand. All the sculptor does is remove everything that is not the statue. And what remains is the statue. So here too, same thing: we peel layers of onion, and in the end somehow there is embedded within us some sort of understanding of the concepts of the passage, of the principles. And I explained that this is connected to the casuistic character of the Talmud, which basically doesn’t really believe in general rules and principles and in positivistic thinking in general, but rather believes more in cases, in precedents, like common law, where you start from precedents and make analogies or comparisons to other cases.

But maybe I’ll sharpen this a little, because I don’t think we looked at it from this angle, so it’s worth noticing. When we make an analogy from one case to another, in logic there are three basic forms of inference: analogy, induction, and deduction. Deduction is going from the general to the particular. If all human beings are mortal, and Socrates is a human being, the conclusion is that Socrates is mortal. Socrates is a particular within the class of all human beings, so we went from the general—what is true of the whole is true of the particular, of each of the particulars that make up the whole. That is a necessary inference. Analogy is an inference from one particular to another: if Socrates is mortal, then Yankele is also mortal. I’m making a comparison: this one is a human being and that one is a human being, so apparently if this one is mortal, that one is mortal too. And induction is: if Socrates is mortal and Yankele is mortal, then apparently all human beings are mortal. That is moving from the particular to the general. From the particular to the general is induction, from particular to particular is analogy, and from general to particular is deduction. There’s also abduction, but that’s not our concern right now.

When we think about the relationship between these three forms of inference, we need to understand that positivistic thinking—I said that German law tends in that direction, the Bundeslaw—this is a way of thinking that basically tends toward deductions. You start with rules, the legislator sets the rules, and the judge basically just derives instructions from those rules for particular cases. Like: all human beings are mortal, Socrates comes before me, he’s a human being, so he’s mortal. That’s how the deduction machine works. In a certain sense, the judge is just a machine. The legislator set the rules, and the judge derives from them the required conclusions for the case before him. Of course that’s a somewhat naive and simplistic description, but in principle that’s the positivistic mindset, and the guiding light of positivistic thinking is deduction. The legislator set the rules and I apply them to particular cases—that’s my role as judge. And there is a kind of trust here that it is possible to formulate the legal system deductively, as a system of rules where all the cases that come before the judge are merely particular instances of those rules. Of course, if it’s not a particular case of any of the rules, that’s fine too, because then the judge says: okay, the law has nothing to say about this. Everything’s fine, do whatever you want. Whoever is stronger prevails. Or in Jewish law, you can see it as withdrawal, which is basically that. Okay? It basically means: the law has nothing to say about this matter, work it out yourselves. And that’s fine.

Aharon Barak might say that this too is a legal statement, because the whole earth is full of law, and there is nothing about which the law has nothing to say. Even when the law says “I have nothing to say about something,” that too is a legal statement. And it could have said otherwise. Fine, those are mostly semantic hair-splittings. In any case, that’s deduction. But common law, and casuistic conceptions, are conceptions built more on analogy and induction. You have a case; an earlier court ruled something about that case; a new case comes before another court; it compares it to that case or to other cases, and from that tries to understand what to do in this case. In other words, it is built more on precedents than on what is called enacted law, law legislated in parliament, in the Knesset.

And in Jewish law what is it? You take today, go backward, and look at what was. Yes, but you can go backward in two ways: you can go backward and find the relevant rules, or go backward and find cases and make analogies from them. In Jewish law, or in the Talmud, and I think in Jewish law in general, the second method is the accepted one. That is, you work more with cases than with rules. Now, it’s true that as the generations progress, we try more and more to formulate rules out of all those particulars we find. And that’s human nature; that’s how people are built. And we saw that exactly in our study of delivering a bill of divorce—how all the cases that appear in the Talmud, dozens and dozens of them, are being forced into a framework of rules. That is exactly the attempt to turn casuistry, the collection of cases, into a rule. And from then on, if we manage to find a rule, the world becomes simple. Any case that comes before us—we’ll just see whether it fits the rule, what the rule says about it. And then we can do the rest deductively, assuming we’ve made those generalizations.

So common law, I said—and Jewish law is similar to it in this respect—does not believe in deductions. It works more through analogies and inductions. In other words, moving from one particular to another, or from one particular to several particulars, but not deductions. It is not a necessary inference. That’s what Nachmanides writes in the introduction to Milhamot Hashem, that the wisdom of our Torah is not like the wisdom of astronomy and mathematics—astronomy and mathematics—whose proofs are conclusive. There the proofs are clear; that’s deduction; those are necessary conclusions. In Torah it’s not like that. The conclusions are softer. And in this language I would say that this is more analogy and induction than deduction.

Now, Rabbi HaNazir too, when he speaks about auditory logic as opposed to Greek visual logic, is basically talking about this. Greek logic is deduction, Aristotle’s Organon. And auditory logic, as he calls it, is fundamentally analogies and inductions. General and particular are generalizations, binyan av is analogy, binyan av from two verses is a generalization, and so on. These are mainly different kinds of analogies and inductions.

Now, why am I saying this? Because usually when people look at this logically, at these three forms of inference, and I ask: which is strongest? What is the strongest method? Deduction, right? Deduction is necessary. The conclusion—whoever accepts the premises must accept the conclusion. Analogy and induction are not necessary. The comparison may be right and may be wrong, and so on. But John Stuart Mill already reflected on this great trust we place in deduction, and he says: true, deduction is a necessary procedure, meaning the conclusion is necessarily true. But what does “necessarily true” mean? Necessarily true if you accept the premises. Deduction is only the move from the premises to the conclusion. So it is not that the conclusion is true; rather, the move from the premises to the conclusion is the thing that is valid. In other words, if you know that all human beings are mortal, and you know that Socrates is a human being, then necessarily Socrates is mortal. But he asks: how do you know that all human beings are mortal? Your premise—how do you know it? Without that premise you won’t be able to determine with certainty that Socrates is mortal. Your certainty about the conclusion depends on the degree of certainty you have about the premise. How do you know that all human beings are mortal? That is usually the result of induction. Right? You saw some human beings who are mortal, and you reached a general conclusion, you generalized that all human beings are mortal. Which means that the correctness of the conclusion of a deductive inference actually depends on the premise, and the premise is the result of induction. Therefore our trust in deduction cannot be greater than our trust in induction. Deduction just describes the transition from premise to conclusion—but the premise itself, how do I know that it is true?

Think about geometry. I prove a theorem that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, okay? Based on the axioms of Euclidean geometry. Okay? Now is the conclusion necessary? No. The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, from the axioms. But as long as you’re not sure about the axioms, you can’t be sure about the conclusion either. Right? So geometry merely performs the transition from the axioms to the conclusion. But who can guarantee that the axioms are correct? Once I asked students—more than once—I asked people: what is more true in geometry, the assumptions, the axioms, or the theorems? The theorems have proofs; the axioms don’t. You understand that that’s nonsense, right? The proof of the theorems is to ground them in the axioms. That’s what “proof” means. Okay? So the theorem cannot be stronger than an axiom. The degree of confidence you have in the theorem is the degree of confidence you have in the axiom.

So what lies behind Mill’s challenge to deduction is that deduction does not stand on its own. Deduction describes only part of the process, the move from premises to conclusion. But you have to explain to me how you arrived at the premises. And when you explain how you arrived at the premises, you’ll need analogy and induction. How do you know that all human beings are mortal, or that two parallels do not meet, or that one straight line passes between two points, or whatever—the principle of causality; everyone has his assumptions; in every field there are different assumptions. Okay? How do you know them? Through generalization, intuition, I don’t know—softer tools, not deduction. Okay? So what Mill is really claiming is not that deduction is not necessary. Deduction is necessary. But the necessity concerns only the question of how I move from premises to conclusion. Necessity is not a property of the conclusion itself, only of its relation to the premises. If I want to determine the level of certainty I have in the conclusion, I need to examine the degree of certainty I have in the premises. And it is not enough to say that it came out of a deduction.

Now I’ll ask you: leave deduction aside. What is stronger, analogy or induction? Moving from one particular to another, or from the particular to the general? On the face of it, analogy is stronger, right? Why? Because analogy takes fewer risks. In other words, the conclusion is more modest. If I say: if Socrates is mortal, then Yankele is also mortal—maybe I’m right, maybe not, but I didn’t take a big risk. I only spoke about Yankele. If I say: if Socrates is mortal, then all human beings are mortal—well, here I took a very big risk. That means there are many more possibilities for error. So apparently analogy is stronger, right? But that isn’t accurate.

Think about how I make an analogy. If I say: if Socrates is mortal, then Yankele is also mortal—why do you assume that? Why do you think that what exists in Socrates also exists in Yankele? Because both are human beings. Right? You are actually assuming that Socrates’ being mortal depends on his being human. And Yankele is also human, so apparently Yankele too is mortal, right? That’s how our analogies are built. Exactly. In other words, behind every analogy there hides a small induction. You are basically saying: if Socrates is mortal, then Yankele is mortal—but implicitly you said: all human beings are mortal. Not just Yankele. Because you moved to Yankele not because of some specific property of Yankele, but because he is human. So in fact you are saying the same thing about all human beings.

Or in other words: just as induction is a collection of analogies—let’s say I say Socrates is mortal, therefore all human beings are mortal; that’s induction. It is really a set of analogies: if Socrates, then Yankele; if Socrates, then Berale; if Socrates, then Ezra; then Muhammad; then whoever—and therefore all human beings are mortal. So induction is a collection of analogies. But on the other hand, each individual analogy is actually based on a hidden induction. How do I compare Socrates to Yankele? Because both are human. They have something in common which I estimate is what determines their mortality. Okay? So in fact induction underlies analogy, and induction itself is nothing but a collection—bottom line, this distinction between the three forms of inference has no substance. It’s just an abstraction, an empty abstraction.

In reality, the process of our thinking is always analogical. Only what is an analogy made of? Let’s say I say: if Socrates is mortal, then Yankele is mortal. How do I make that analogy? I say this: Socrates is mortal. In my estimation that follows from his being human—from that feature of his, not from the fact that his name is spelled with an S, right? That’s not why he is mortal. That is not the relevant parameter; his being human is. So now I make an induction: apparently all human beings are mortal. And once I know that all human beings are mortal, I make a deduction: and in particular, Yankele, who is also human, is mortal. So what does that mean? When I made the analogy from Socrates to Yankele, you can actually break it into two stages. Stage one is induction: creating the rule. Stage two is deduction: from the rule I arrive at another particular. Or in other words, there is a kind of circle here. You can cut any segment of it and say this is deduction, this is induction, this is analogy—but it’s a circle. It’s an analogy made of an induction followed by a deduction. That’s all. That’s simply how our thinking works.

And therefore the positivistic illusion that it is possible to build our legal world on rules, on general laws, and then all that remains for the judge is to derive conclusions—that is problematic. It is problematic in two different ways, I’d say. In the legal world, on the theoretical level, it could have happened. If the legislator were to set laws, then the laws would be valid simply by virtue of being the legislator’s determination. I don’t need to ask whether those laws are true; that’s irrelevant, certainly in positivistic conceptions. A natural-law jurist may ask whether those laws are just, but positivism says: once the legislator determined it, that is the law. So it’s valid. So if the legislator were to determine a general law, it would be valid. There the problem is a practical problem, because the cases that come before the judge will never simply be deductions from the laws, from the rules. The world is too complicated. Practically, you won’t succeed. But on the theoretical level, it is possible.

In Jewish law it is more problematic. Why? Because in Jewish law, our data are cases. The rules are something we, as interpreters of the Talmud, create. We try to produce rules—what we did with delivering a bill of divorce. We try to produce rules from those cases. You understand that what we are doing is really induction, right? We take the cases and produce from them a general law. And now from that induction we will derive deductively what the law will be in the next case that comes before the halakhic decisor or the religious court. But in delivering a bill of divorce we didn’t succeed in doing that. What? Right. So I’m saying—that’s exactly the point. In the halakhic world there is an additional problem beyond what exists, say, in German law. In German law the problem is only technical, practical. You won’t succeed in fitting all cases into a rule—the future cases that come before future judges, you won’t succeed. That is, you won’t succeed in creating a system of rules that gives you a univocal answer to every future case that comes before the court. The problem is technical. On the theoretical level it’s possible. If the legislator determines laws, then there will be general laws. And that’s how it would be. The goal is to put all these things in, put in a computer, and it will tell you. Right—in principle, yes. The dream of every positivist. Exactly. Yesterday I said that’s the future of AI. Do you know what the dream of a philosopher is? That the lights come on in a movie theater in the middle of the film and people shout, “Is there a philosopher here?” It will never happen, as is well known. They’ll ask for a technician, ask for a doctor, but not a philosopher.

Anyway, German law runs, at most, into a practical problem. You won’t manage to define a system of rules that gives an answer to every case that comes before the judge. You simply won’t, practically speaking; reality is too complicated. In the halakhic world the problem is double. First, you won’t succeed in producing rules that answer future cases. But now I’m asking not the practical problem; I’m asking Mill’s problem. After all, your rules themselves came out of induction. Who told you the induction is correct? Who told you that from the cases appearing in the Talmud you generalized the right rule, produced the right general law? In fact, in most cases you won’t even succeed in producing that law—not only might I challenge whether you’re right. We saw an example in delivering a bill of divorce; that is exactly the problem: you don’t manage to produce general laws from the cases. And not for nothing does the Talmud focus on cases, because from the outset it assumes that it will be impossible to work with rules; it has a lack of trust in rules, in the positivist conception. And in my view that lack of trust is very justified.

So in the end the claim is that positivism is a kind of illusion—in philosophy in general, and certainly in the world of law. Positivism tries to ground all our thinking in fundamental assumptions and logic. That is a wonderful dream of theoreticians, but it cannot be done. It fails completely. And by the way, this failure has many practical, social, ideological consequences that we encounter today in our world. A lot of postmodernism—what today is called progress, say, and things like that—is a result of this failure. The conception that says that basically everything can be grounded logically, and if not then it’s nonsense—a positivistic conception that ruled until the middle of the twentieth century: either observation or logical argument, and nothing beyond that; everything else is nonsense, like metaphysics, religious faith—but not only those. This conception actually led to a crisis, because in the end they concluded that positivism can’t provide anything. Even fields like science cannot be grounded positivistically, so certainly not law and Jewish law and softer fields or philosophy and things like that.

And then what happened? The crisis that emerged there says: okay, so if that’s the case, then there really is no truth. So everyone has his own truth, because things cannot be grounded positively. And thus suddenly, out of nothing, postmodern narrativity was born: everyone has his own truth. And if I have my assumptions and derive conclusions from them, and you have your assumptions and derive conclusions from them, then both of us are equally right, because both of us have set up a deductive structure that justifies our conceptions. And there is no way to determine which of us is right, because analogy and induction are not legitimate—in other words, we are left only with deduction. And deduction says: if you have premises, I’ll tell you what the conclusion is. But someone else has different premises—what do you do with him? He is equally right. And there you have the dominant narrativism, and there you have the claim that there is no standard, no truth and falsehood, and everyone is right. Any telephone pole can be a man or a woman or I don’t know what or a cat, according to its own decision, because there is no way to determine here who is right and who is not if your standard is positivistic.

Therefore positivism, which reigned supreme until the middle of the twentieth century—some even tie its collapse to the Holocaust, perhaps—was shattered to pieces, and postmodernism replaced it. It replaced it because of what was embedded within it itself, not because of something else: because of this determination to ground all thinking in logic. In a certain sense, it is a direct continuation, a direct continuation—I’ve written books about this. Even though it looks opposite: positivism is terribly optimistic, we’ll reach absolute truth, there is a science of law; the Germans always talk about the science of law—that’s their positivism. Okay, everything was science. Philosophical science, science of law, scientific anthropology, scientific sociology—everything was sciences. That was a product of the positivist era, all that nonsense. Fields that have not the slightest connection to science were all made scientific in that period. And in the middle of the twentieth century, when it shattered to pieces, we were left with the fact that only deduction works—but we understood that if so, then the basic premises are arbitrary. And if you adopt one set of premises and he adopts another, then you are on equal footing. Once you are on equal footing, everyone is equally right. So from this optimism that there is only one truth and everything else is nonsense, we suddenly arrive at this pluralism, or this multiplicity, that says everyone is right and there is no truth—or rather, everything is truth. Not that there is no truth, but everything is truths. And in fact it is a continuation of the same thing. It looks opposite, but it is the same thing. By the way, opposites are always like that. Something is opposite to something because they have something in common. A dove is not the opposite of a cloud. A white dove is the opposite of a black dove because both are doves. Right? A dove and a cloud have nothing in common, so a dove is not the opposite of a cloud. In other words, opposition is always a relation that exists between similar things. You need some common category, and then the two are opposite species within that category. If you don’t share a common category, you’re not opposites. Okay.

So what I basically wanted to say is that positivism is collapsing, or has collapsed, before our eyes. I think that if we needed proof of this Talmudic vision, that casuistry is actually the preferred method, it seems to me that the last generations have given us excellent proof of this. And I think the legal world has already concluded this very, very clearly. Right, we also talked about the connection to AI. What we did in delivering a bill of divorce is exactly the way a neural network learns. It’s exactly the same thing.

So in the end the claim is that… after all, in the end we do think with rules. That’s how we think; that’s how we’re built. We can’t think without rules. But we sort particulars according to rules. I say: this is a human being. “Human being” is already a general label. You’re a human being, you have this height, this color, this place. Every one of those characteristics is a rule, a general feature. The intersection of the rules tries to identify an individual. Okay, I describe him—but whenever I think about cases, I think about them in terms of rules. Which rules are relevant here? “The burden of proof is on the one seeking to extract property,” “this one benefits while that one does not lose,” all kinds of rules that we create, in whose terms we analyze particular cases. Okay? The cases are instances of the rules.

Why is this important? Because although German law is now retreating from its extreme positivism because it understands that it can’t work, and it is introducing casuistry and analogies and softer things, on the other hand common law is also moving a bit toward the positivist direction. There are now more statutes and more rules; it isn’t only analogies anymore. That’s what experts say—I’m not an expert in this field, but I’ve read and heard from people who know more. What does this mean? The compromise made by German law follows from what I said: positivism can’t work. But why is British law also giving up a bit and moving toward the middle? Because our thinking cannot function without rules. It’s true that the rules can’t be completely correct, but on the other hand we can’t think without rules. What can we do? We have to work with rules. When you discuss something, you try to define a rule, explain the thing, then check the rule, correct it, change it, do all sorts of things like that. But we can’t work outside the framework of rules. That’s how our thinking is built; that’s what we are. Okay? So it’s a constraint on us—not because the truth is that there really are rules, but because we can’t think without them. And that is exactly what we saw when we talked about delivering a bill of divorce. Every time I proposed a different rule, checked it, refined it, threw it out, replaced it—but it was always work with rules. Rules are our working tools.

Even though in the very end we are left with nothing. We peeled the whole onion and were left with nothing. So what did we gain? That’s what I asked, and that’s how I got to the doctrine of negative attributes. But no—in the end, not really. All the rules flew away; they don’t work. But we have a great arrangement—well, we have—so no, we don’t. In the end there are no rules. There are no rules. We tested them all; none of them can really work. So what do we do? I say that thinking by means of rules is a constraint, because that’s how our thinking is built. We can’t do otherwise. But that doesn’t mean that the truth is that there is some rule that we can discover if we just keep going to the end. No. There aren’t. There are no true rules in some real sense—at least that’s how it seems to me. Okay?

So what can we do? We can’t give up rules, because that’s how we think. But we should give up clinging to rules. Clinging to rules, or believing that in the end we’ll reach the correct rule and then our conceptual analysis will be complete—that that is the goal of the conceptual analysis—that is a mistake. And what should be the goal of the conceptual analysis? Exactly this neural-network model. That is, we propose a rule, throw it out; propose a rule, throw it out. This is the doctrine of negative attributes we talked about last time. And in the end we are left with some intuitive understanding of what delivering a bill of divorce is. And that understanding is the right thing, and we have no way to formulate it through sweeping rules, yes? Through general, absolute rules. Rather, the rules served us as onion peels, which we discarded by way of negation—those are the negative attributes—in order to produce that positive insight into what delivering a bill of divorce is. But that insight cannot be formulated through rules. It cannot be formulated through rules. The rules were a helping device; they were a ladder that we used to climb out of the pit, and then we threw it away. In other words, only a ladder can get us out of the pit. But in the end we throw away the ladder. We don’t really rely on the ladder. In the end we are standing on the ground above. We don’t remain standing on the ladder. The ladder only got us out of the pit.

So that’s a slightly different look at the things we did over the past few sessions. And I want to look for a moment at what we did last time from a somewhat different angle as well. In fact, what follows from what I described is that the point of the conceptual process is not the conclusion you arrive at in the end, because there is no such conclusion. The conceptual process—the walking, the walking itself, not the destination we reach after we finish walking. After we finish walking, that means we walked. It doesn’t mean we arrived somewhere. The walking is not a ladder; it’s not a means that is supposed to lead us to some place. We are always in the middle of a process. But in any case, even if you look at what we did until now, the value of the thing is measured not by the place where we are, but by how much we walked. The walking is the essence.

I’ll perhaps bring an example of this, related to things we discussed in previous times about Zeno’s arrow and the paradoxes of motion. It says that in the place where penitents stand, the completely righteous cannot stand. And not because of overcrowding, as the joke says. So the question is—yes, you know that Yasser Arafat was the world champion of peace agreements. Warmongers are always world champions of peace agreements. They made the most peace agreements. Great penitents too—those who do a lot of repentance are the ones who have a lot to repent for, the great sinners. In any case, the claim of the Sages is that a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person. There is some dispute there between Amoraim, but that’s how people usually quote it. There’s no Jewish law here; this isn’t a halakhic ruling. But that’s what gets quoted in the end—somehow this notion caught on that a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person.

Think about that for a moment. What does it mean? Why is a penitent preferable to a completely righteous person? So maybe he deserves more reward. But it’s not that he is now really in a better state. He worked harder, so he’ll get more pay for what he did, or reward, whatever. But I’m asking: is he really better? Is his current condition preferable to the condition of a completely righteous person? A penitent, however perfect he may be, has now arrived at being completely righteous. He erased all the sins; he became completely righteous, right? There is no blemish in him. So he is completely righteous. How can he be more than completely righteous?

Usually people explain that in terms of reward. That is, he worked hard, so he deserves it. I’m not even sure about that, by the way, because the completely righteous person may also be working very, very hard all the time, and exactly because of that he did not sin. It is not true that the completely righteous person has it easy while the penitent has to work. If it comes easily to him, then maybe he deserves less reward, but the fact that you are completely righteous does not necessarily mean you worked less hard. On the contrary, maybe you worked harder than he did, and therefore you did not fall, because you kept working all the time. So I also don’t accept this thesis of effort, of “according to the pain is the reward.” So what is it then? Why is the penitent really preferable to the completely righteous person—not only in the sense that he deserves reward?

The simple answer is because the penitent underwent a process. And the value of the process is not only in the state you reached at the end. Because if it were only the state, then the penitent is at most completely righteous—that’s where he arrived at the end of the process. If you tell me that a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person, that means the process itself has some intrinsic value. It isn’t merely a ladder that enables me to reach a higher spiritual state; rather the walking itself gives me some kind of advantage that does not exist in the completely righteous person. Not because he didn’t work; he worked hard. But he did not progress; he was always in the optimal state in which he stands. Okay? Therefore, this statement that a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person actually hides behind it the same statement I was making here: that the process has value not only as a device that brings me to the goal, to the state I am aiming for, but the process itself has value.

In one of the previous sessions I brought this example of a factory, where people say it is better for a factory to be in a dynamic state—to change, to vary, to refresh everything. Now, when people say that, they do not mean: make the process more efficient. Making the process more efficient obviously helps, because in the end it will come out more efficient—that’s trivial, that’s a tautology. When you say there is something positive in the factory’s dynamism itself, you are saying something beyond the claim that dynamism will bring you to a more efficient condition. Rather, dynamism itself gives value. That is, the very fact that there are changes, the very movement itself has some kind of value. Okay? And that is exactly the—what? So I’m saying, for example, there are different management methods. Some management methods say that it is actually preferable for everyone to know everyone else’s jobs. Even though that seems less professional, it provides backup, it gives understanding of how to make the interface with the other person—if you understand his work, you also know how you are supposed to behave toward him. There are many advantages to this, and there are disadvantages too, yes.

Once I was at Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s eightieth birthday. They celebrated for Leibowitz at Tel Aviv University. I was a student then, so I came to hear. At the end of the evening he went up on stage and spoke, and he said that many times people had told him—I don’t know, eight doctorates or something like that, the man had done endless things. So he said that many times people had told him that if he had concentrated on one field he could have gone much further, maybe even a Nobel Prize, things like that. And he said, listen, young people, I tell you: I don’t regret a thing. I strongly recommend breadth. There is something about breadth that is much stronger than narrow specialization—apropos what we spoke about earlier.

Anyway—just a second, yes. So I’m saying, the process itself has some kind of value. In the case of a factory, for example, it may give people some kind of freshness, a more pleasant feeling, and that can increase their productivity—not because the process brought us to a more efficient condition, but because of the very fact of being in the process. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you went from state A to state B or from state B to state A; the result is the same result. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you moved. In a goal-oriented conception, going from A to B cannot be the same as going from B to A. If B is preferable to A, then you should always go from A to B, not from B to A. From B to A is decline. But if you understand that the walking itself is a value, then it really doesn’t matter whether you went from A to B or from B to A. And it doesn’t even matter if B is better—still, it may be worthwhile for you to go to A and come back to B. Maybe yes. And that is exactly what you said earlier: a trip, or a journey. The journey is not in order to arrive somewhere; the walking itself is the point, and therefore it doesn’t matter whether you go from here to there or from there to here.

Now, penitent and completely righteous person is exactly the same thing. And what I want to claim is that study is like that too. In study as well, the goal of the study is not to arrive at the insight at the end. The goal of the study is the process of study itself. The very act of study? Yes. And not only in the value sense, in the sense of what the Holy One, blessed be He, truly demands of us. Here I’m speaking also in the teleological sense. You simply won’t get to the goal. What I’m saying now is not a discussion within the commandment of Torah study. Within the laws of the commandment of Torah study, you can say the point is not to know but to study—that’s an investigation among later authorities. Is the commandment to study, or is the commandment to know? I’m not talking on that plane at all. Whatever the commandment may be, that doesn’t interest me. I’m talking now about what happens in practice, not how the commandment is defined. You cannot arrive at the final insight; there are no final insights. The value that accumulates in you accumulates from the walking, from the dynamism. Even if the definition of the commandment of Torah study were the conclusion, I would still say the same thing. I’m not talking about the legal definition of Torah study. That’s not the discussion. The discussion is what happens in practice when you study. What happens? What happens is not that you accumulate insights, that you arrive at insights because of analysis. Rather, the analysis itself implants within you certain insights that you don’t even know how to formulate. It’s not that you arrived at insights—they were simply formed within you, piece by piece. Okay? That’s an interesting insight, because look—I even managed to formulate it, so apparently there are some insights that can be formulated. Because very often we miss this. We think the process is a means to arrive at the state to which the process leads us.

And about this we spoke—yes, there are mathematical aspects, how we relate to the derivative and the infinitesimal, what we discussed in previous lessons, which is really the concept of velocity. I said that the concept of velocity does not merely describe that I am about to get somewhere else in a moment. That is not what it means to have velocity or to be in motion. To be in motion means to be in motion; it is a local property. It is not a property measured by saying that after a second I am somewhere else, so that’s proof I was moving. That is an indication that I was moving. But the definition of the concept of motion itself—yes, velocity exists at a point in time. After we take the derivative of the position function, we get velocity at a point in time. That means velocity exists at a point, not over an interval. Why? Because velocity is not change of place. The result of velocity is that place changes, but being possessed of velocity is a point-property, a property at one point in time. And this really reflects what I said earlier, that to define velocity through difference in position divided by difference in time is a mistake. That is an operational definition, that’s how you calculate velocity. But the definition of velocity is a quantity at a single point in time. In other words, at every point in time there is such a quantity called velocity. And that is Zeno’s paradox with the arrow—we spoke about it—the difference between standing and being located. Yes, the arrow is not standing in a different place at each moment; it is located in a different place at each moment. Standing means being at zero velocity. There is a potential for velocity. Yes, we spoke about that too—that sometimes the velocity doesn’t even actualize as change of place, for example when you hit a wall, inelastic collision, all sorts of things like that.

Returning to our issue: what this means is that in study too, the process is really the thing itself. Again, not within the commandment of Torah study, but in study itself. That is, one must understand that the process is not intended to bring me to the general conclusion. The process is the thing. The analogy I make is really what teaches me how to make analogies, not the conclusion of the analogy. Let’s say I make an analogy from case A to case B. Usually we understand that the role of the analogy is to teach us what the law is in case B. I know what the law is in case A; I make a binyan av or an analogy, and then I know what the law is in case B. My claim is: no. The value of the analogy lies in how I found the similarity between A and B. Not in the result—what that means for the law in B—but in the fact that I uncovered a similarity between them. I uncovered a way to look for similarities between things, to make analogies between things, and that is really the value of the study.

I want to present this same point from a somewhat different angle. For example, maybe before I get there, there is a question in the Meshekh Hokhmah: why do we need a commandment to repent? He explains: after all, there is a dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides whether there is or is not a commandment to repent. “And you shall return to the Lord your God”—according to Maimonides, this is a promise. As Maimonides writes in chapter 7 of the laws of repentance, Maimonides says that the Torah has already promised that Israel will eventually repent, as it says, “and it shall be… and you shall return to the Lord your God.” And Nachmanides, on that verse, writes: what do you mean? It’s a commandment. “And you shall return to the Lord your God” is an imperative; one must repent. According to Maimonides there is no commandment to repent. And there is a contradiction—the Minhat Hinukh raises contradictions there, but never mind. According to Maimonides there is no commandment to repent; you won’t find it in the enumeration of the commandments.

So he asks and explains Maimonides: why is there no commandment? Because one doesn’t need a commandment. In the end, what is the commandment to repent? You simply need to do what the Holy One, blessed be He, said, and stop violating what He said. That follows from the very fact that He commanded to do this and not do that. Why do you need an additional commandment to repent in order to remove these deviations? These deviations are prohibited regardless of any commandment of repentance, even if there were no commandment of repentance. That’s how he explains Maimonides’ view; therefore there is no commandment to repent.

And what would Nachmanides say? First of all, that isn’t quite precise even in Maimonides’ view, because repentance is also leaving the sin, regret, acceptance for the future. All that I would not have thought one needs to do—only that from now on I won’t sin anymore, I’ll keep the commandments. But that I need to revisit things I did, abandon the sin, regret, confession, acceptance for the future—would I know that without a commandment to repent? I don’t think so. And beyond that, even if he were right, the value of repentance is not in order for me to arrive at a state where I keep the commandments. The value of repentance lies in the act of repenting itself. The dynamic process is the value, and for that you need a commandment. Or at least that is a possible content of the commandment. That I would not know if all I had were the set of commandments and transgressions that the Torah commands. The commandment of repentance says that you need to be in a process. That’s the point. Therefore a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person because he is in a process. And therefore the content of the commandment of repentance is not to arrive at a state in which you don’t sin. That is the result of repenting. The content of the act of repentance is to advance toward the state in which you will not sin. And that advancement is repentance—not the final state. The final state indeed is redundant. Obviously you must reach a state where you do not sin; that’s why they are called sins, because one is forbidden to do them. For that you don’t need the commandment of repentance. The commandment of repentance concerns the process, not the result of that process.

And therefore, for example, the Talmud says that one who says, “I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent,” is not given the opportunity to repent. What is this initial thought—“I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent”? The Hasidim say—and sometimes even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day, twice in a twenty-four-hour period—they say that “I will sin and repent” is a serious possibility in serving God. You need to sin in order to be able to repent. If you don’t sin, you’ll be completely righteous. Fine, you’ll be completely righteous—but a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person. And in order to be a penitent, you need to sin. And about that the Talmud says: yes, but don’t do it, because that is a risk we don’t want you to take. He is not given the opportunity to repent. But this initial thought is a serious initial thought; it exists. Because you want to be a penitent, and you cannot be a penitent if you’re completely righteous. Then you’ll lose that quality of being a penitent, and therefore you have an initial thought to sin and return in order also to be a penitent. A descent for the sake of ascent? Yes, exactly.

Think about it. Notice: the Talmud in Yoma says—it’s already becoming a sermon on repentance—the Talmud… he needs to be completely righteous in order to get to the stage where he starts committing sins in order to practice. Yes, usually we don’t need the motivation of repentance in order to commit sins. Sins come automatically. But you’re saying he is basically already completely righteous if he’s making this calculation. Yes.

Wait, I lost what I wanted to say. The Talmud—yes. The Talmud in Yoma says: what is the difference between repentance from love and repentance from fear? Repentance from love causes intentional sins to become merits, and repentance from fear causes intentional sins to become unintentional sins. Notice an interesting point: the intentional sins are never erased. There is no process that erases intentional sins. Either they become merits or they become unintentional sins, but they are not erased. There are no miracles; what you did, you did. You can’t erase it from history. You can repaint it in another color. If it’s repentance from fear, then the color becomes not intentional but inadvertent. But it happened—only now the color, or the level or intensity of the matter, is an inadvertent sin rather than an intentional one. If it is repentance from love, it becomes merits. Why does it become merits? Because that sin enabled you to become a penitent. So in the end you really gained from it. You never remain neutral. Either you lost less, or you gained—but you never erased the sin. There is no such thing as erasing the sin.

Like with unintentional sins? Yes, but not in the same way. Not in the same state. If you sinned unintentionally, then you have the… not under every… not under every commandment. In the process of repentance, there was a sin, and then you repented. Not a commandment—not every commandment. This is about a sin that we sinned; it has to be about repentance, not a commandment. Repentance is based on sin, not a commandment based on sin. Yes, and in the analogy to AI you also need mistakes. You need to train it also on incorrect cases in order to train… Right, very good. I think that analogy definitely continues here. I fully agree. You need both false positives and false negatives in order to train it properly. Yes.

So the claim is that… so how do intentional sins become merits? Because these intentional sins, these wrongs, actually enabled you to become a penitent, and that is a level beyond the completely righteous person—it becomes a merit. The completely righteous person has no merit from this and nothing at all. He didn’t commit the sin, didn’t repent for it, remains at zero. But one who returns from love becomes more than the completely righteous person—it turned into a merit, the sin itself became a merit. Okay? You could maybe also say that his test was harder, and because of that he gets… Then you’re bringing us back again to the plane of how much reward he deserves because he exerted effort. I’m speaking on an essential plane, not about that. As I said before, the completely righteous person does not necessarily exert less effort, but the fact that the penitent is in motion—that is what distinguishes him from the completely righteous person. The completely righteous person is not in motion. He may work terribly hard to stay in place, but he is not in motion; he is always in the complete state. The penitent is in motion. That is what distinguishes him. And motion is itself a kind of virtue, a kind of advantage, apart from the question of what state we reach because of the motion. Motion is not a means to reach a better state; motion is itself the goal. Minus becomes plus? In repentance from love, yes. The plus is basically because the process is the value, the plus.

But there is a danger here, because now if a person starts thinking in these terms he may say: I’ll look for some sin for myself… That’s what the Talmud is talking about: one who says, “I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent.” What does it have before its eyes? Someone who really would make your calculation. And then it tells him: no, don’t do this, because he is not given the opportunity… “Bring me not to trial and not to disgrace”… he says no—yes, bring me to trial and we’ll see that I’ll manage to cope. That’s dangerous.

No, that’s something else. He means actually to sin, not just to come into a test and withstand it. I’m saying I’ll begin only with a test. But that’s the completely righteous person. But that’s the completely righteous person; that’s not the penitent. The completely righteous person is someone who finds himself in the test and withstands it. That is not a penitent, because he withstood it; he did not sin. A penitent is someone who actually sinned… And he can fall… Here he can fall, but that is the prayer of the completely righteous person, not of the penitent. The completely righteous person basically says: I’ll enter a test and I’ll withstand it—assuming I enter the test and withstand it, do not bring me to tests. Right—but why? Why do I pray that way? Because I might fall. Right. But the penitent says: bring me into the test, because I will sin and repent and then I will be more righteous, right? That’s what the Talmud says. Therefore it says that there is indeed such an initial thought of “I will sin and repent,” because it warns him and says all the same: don’t do it. That’s not good; one should not live that way. Don’t worry—you will sin even without that. In other words, you don’t need to initiate sins. The Master of the Universe will help you with sins. Is this not a kind of dogmatic conception? Maybe. There is that…

The Sefat Emet, for example, on Maimonides—Maimonides says in the laws of repentance: who is a complete penitent? One who has the opportunity, in the same state, and so on, and withstands the test—in the same place where he was and withstands the same test. So the Sefat Emet comments there, and several later authorities discuss this: is it permitted to do this? Is it permitted for a penitent to put himself back into the very same situation in which he failed? As part of the act of repentance. Yes, to test yourself. Is it permitted to place yourself into a test in order to… What do you mean, “permitted”? There is no halakhic prohibition against putting yourself into a test. It’s not recommended. He says no, for a penitent it is recommended. You want to check yourself, whether your repentance is real. There are discussions there; I once saw a book called Teshuvat HaShanah, on Maimonides’ laws of repentance, where he brings several views on this.

Anyway, I want to show you something. I think it is a very interesting point that really touches this issue. Rabbi Kook, in Orot HaKodesh, part two, is basically dealing directly with this question. Part two. He writes as follows. It’s called “Perfection and Perfecting,” yes, some pretty well-known passages. If even I know them, they must be famous passages, because I’m a very minor expert. Okay. “The slowness in the order of reality, the limitation in nature, its external laxness, the constriction in spiritual ascents, the transience of miracles—all these are the supports of the unceasing elevation.” In other words, all the deficiencies in the world—the slowness, the fact that you can’t soar to the heavens—all that is intentional. It is intended so that there be constant elevation. In other words, there needs to be perpetual elevation. Okay? Yes. “That is the inner foundation of reality… that the descent of worldly reality should reach its lowest depth and darkest darkness, in order to make possible an eternal ascent without any interruption. And every slow period prepares strength for a swifter period of ascent, until the highest speed… He leads us in youth…” In swiftness, “like the stag over the hills,” that is the translation. “Running and returning like the appearance of lightning. And the manifestation of elevation will never cease.” In other words, there is the possibility of ascending without end. By the way, for that of course you don’t need infinitely many steps; there are also asymptotes, exponentials. The derivative can always be positive until the end and still give you a finite range.

“And the addition of light, delight, and life, going and being constantly sweetened and filled with ever greater and more exalted value, until the form of complete perfection and the form of unceasing perfecting, coming because of the prior deficiency, become equal together.” Yes, the exponent is already approaching its asymptote, and the constant elevation is already clinging to complete perfection—it merges. “And the memory of past deficiency will suffice to give a constant push toward further and added perfecting. And the form of unceasing perfecting will rise above complete perfection.” In other words, perfecting is more important than complete perfection. Or in other words, a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person, to someone who is perfect. Okay? “A woman of valor is the crown of her husband,” and “the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads and delight in the radiance of the Divine Presence”—ever increasing, ascent after ascent, without end or limit. Blessed is the Lord forever, amen and amen, and so on.

But if everyone has some deficiency, then everyone is a penitent? Right, exactly. One should also be a penitent. Not that he already is one; he needs to be one. Not everyone overcomes his deficiencies, but in principle yes. Now, later on there, he raises a question. That was section 14; this is section 15. “The tendency of all existence, from the side of the hidden infinite will, as it is revealed to us, is a great counsel of eternal ascent and addition. For if there were no reality of smallness and deficiency, there could be only greatness and fullness, but not becoming great.” Yes. If there is no smallness and deficiency, then you can be great, but you cannot become great. Okay? To become great, you need there to be small states from which you can advance. “And a continual stepping toward added blessing,” yes, constant elevation. “And even though there is no end to the fullness of complete perfection, in which there is no increase because of its infinitude, nevertheless there is included within it too this exalted power of continual elevation. And it is considered as though absolute perfection is perfected through the process of perfecting that comes because of…” In other words, he says that when you speak of absolute perfection, part of that is being in a process of perfecting, because perfecting is one of the perfections. The process itself has value. Therefore you cannot speak of someone perfect. You can speak of a completely righteous person, but a completely righteous person is not a perfect person. A perfect person is a completely righteous person who at the same time is also in a process of becoming perfected, progressing in some way.

But of course this raises the question: fine, with human beings maybe this is only hypothetical, because there is no completely righteous person, so there is always somewhere for us to go. But it raises, of course, a theological question: what about the Holy One, blessed be He? He is perfect, right? If He is perfect, He cannot be perfected. He cannot become more complete. Right? So in effect one of the perfections is missing in Him, because being in the process of becoming perfected is one of the perfections. And that perfection cannot exist in Him because He is perfect. So what happens then—is He perfect or not perfect? So he says: “it is considered as though absolute perfection is perfected by means of the process of perfecting.” One who is perfect needs those who are in the process of becoming perfected in order to be perfected, because without the process of becoming perfected he is not perfect. And “this work is a high necessity.” Avodah tzorekh gavoha—“service for a high necessity”—is an expression that always refers to such secrets that are dangerous to reveal. There are secrets that are dangerous to reveal, secrets one does not say out loud, because if you say them out loud people will get confused, misunderstand, and come to problematic conclusions. And one of the most prominent among them is avodah tzorekh gavoha.

In the language of the kabbalists, avodah tzorekh gavoha means that our service is for the sake of the Holy One, blessed be He. He needs us. He is not complete without us. He lacks. “Give strength to God”—yes, exactly—the Ari learns this from the verse “Give strength to God.” “Give strength to God” means we give Him strength; we complete His lacks. Now you understand why this is called the secret of avodah tzorekh gavoha, yes? You can’t say this out loud—that He lacks, that He is not perfect, that He needs us—not only that we need Him. Our whole education works the opposite way: that He is perfect, that only we need Him and He doesn’t need us, right? That’s what we grow up on. But there is a gap between us and Him, because we are limited by time. This training requires time. He has no issues of time; He is outside the definition of time. Fine, okay—but still He needs us; you complete Him.

And still He needs us. He lacks because He cannot be perfected. Wonderful—but regarding the aspect… I didn’t say we are like God and there are no differences. No, this conflict, as though He needs to train, this training, this becoming perfected, gives Him perfection. Yes, but He cannot become perfected because He is already perfect. What laws? If He is perfect, He cannot become perfected. He is already perfect. To become perfected means to arrive at a complete state. How? Both triangular and round? What? No, He is outside the rules. Not outside the rules of logic—outside the rules of physics. About that we’d have to have a separate discussion, but that sentence has no meaning. It’s not even that you are wrong. What you just said is meaningless. It’s words—moving your lips—that say nothing. His perfection is the ability to become perfected? So can the Holy One, blessed be He, make a ball that penetrates every wall and also a wall that stops every ball? He can, because He can do anything. He can do both. So now you’ll have a ball that penetrates every wall and a wall that stops every ball—what happens when they meet? No, He can’t. He can’t do both. He can’t, because that is a logical contradiction. Logical contradictions are something to which even… the Holy One, blessed be He, is supposedly subject. He is not subject to physics; He created physics. He is subject to logic, because being subject to logic is actually not subjection at all. Because logic is not built as some physical concept. Not at all, not at all, not at all. The opposite. Logic is precisely not built on a physical concept—that’s the definition of logic. Right, but still… it underlies physics. No, it’s not in our heads. It’s also in our heads. We understand logic, but logic is not a product of our heads. A triangle is not round not because of our heads, but because it is triangular. A triangle is not round. The stone that God can’t lift and all those tricks—they all collapse at this point. No, no—that’s simply a mistake because of this point. I wrote about it; if you want I’ll send you articles I wrote about it.

Anyway, the point is that if the Holy One, blessed be He, is perfect, then by definition one of the perfections is lacking in Him. He cannot be in a process of becoming perfected. That is Rabbi Kook’s difficulty. So he says: we are basically the solution. The Holy One, blessed be He, created us as lacking beings. There is the fall of Adam, the world of repair, the world of corruption, the shattering, and so on. The shattering and the repair are essential, essential. And by that we build His model, as it were. In a moment we’ll see what it means to build His model; we need to understand exactly what that means. But that is basically Rabbi Kook’s claim. And that’s what he says: “What do we think about the divine goal in bringing existence into being? We say that absolute perfection is itself necessary existence, and there is in it nothing potential, only everything actual. But there is also a perfection of adding perfection, which cannot exist in divinity, for absolute infinite perfection leaves no room for addition. And for this purpose too, that there not be lacking in existence the goal of adding perfection, worldly existence had to come into being, and therefore had to begin from the very lowest level—that is, from a state of absolute deficiency—and proceed always upward toward absolute elevation. And existence was created in such a way that forever and ever it will not cease ascending, for this is an infinite activity. And in order to secure the ascent within the very essence of existence, all of it was created in a supreme elevation, and the elevation was more than the proper measure”—because it was created in a complete state and then fell. When it fell, it was left with an infinite path to return and rise again. Okay, that is basically the claim, and the rest of his additions don’t matter for the moment.

In short: “We understand in absolute divine perfection two values of completion. One value of completion is such that because of its greatness and fullness no addition of superiority can apply to it. But if there were no possibility of addition, that itself would be a deficiency.” Okay? “Because perfection that is continually increasing has in it an advantage and delight and a kind of elevation that we long for so much—going from strength to strength. Therefore divine perfection cannot lack this advantage of the addition of power.” How can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, lacks that advantage of being in a process of becoming perfected? “And for this, divinity has the capacity of creation, of the unbounded worldly becoming, which in all its values goes and ascends. And it turns out that the divine soul inherent in existence, which gives it life, is its continual elevation; that is its divine foundation, calling it into being and into development.” Fine?

So what does he say? He says: the Holy One, blessed be He, has a deficiency. Because of His perfection He has a deficiency. And that deficiency is that He cannot become perfected because He already exists as perfect. One who is perfect cannot become perfected. We already saw that you need sin in order to repent, right? So what does He do? He creates us—or the world in general and us in particular—as deficient creatures, and imposes on us the mission of becoming perfected. And in that way He Himself gains, as it were. He needs us, and this is the secret of avodah tzorekh gavoha. Therefore the world was created.

Or in other words, the world was created so that there should be sins. If we now had a button and someone told us: look, if you press the button the whole world will be repaired and everything will be perfect—do we press the button or not? The answer is no. No. That would be the end of the world. It would have no purpose anymore. The purpose of the world is—therefore sinners are essentially part of the world. This is not a failure in the… It is a failure for the person; he must struggle not to sin. But the fact that there are sins—the Holy One, blessed be He, built this into the world; it has to be there. That’s why we are here. That’s why we are here. Now you’ll ask: how does this complete the Holy One, blessed be He? So we complete Him through the process of becoming perfected. How—why does that help complete Him? Here I need what we discussed in previous sessions: with us there is change of states. Right? We move from place to place, ascend. But the velocity, the potential for change of place, exists in Him too. And therefore it also completes Him. In other words, with Him it does not actualize; it actualizes through us, because only with us can it actualize. But in Him lies the potential that enables our progress, our becoming perfected—the velocity that enables the change of place. Okay? And that’s what he says, that the divine soul, which is the continual elevation, is really the potential velocity placed within us and enabling us to advance. Therefore our progress actualizes the velocity that is in Him. In that dimension? Yes.

This, it seems to me, is basically the motif, or the main theme, running through the Book of Jonah. In the Book of Jonah, the Holy One, blessed be He, sends Jonah to bring Nineveh to repentance. And Jonah refuses. He flees from the Holy One, blessed be He. What is he, a little child? What does it mean, “he fled from God”? Come on—a prophet. A prophet is supposed to have some spiritual level, some understanding… He’s not an idiot. What—what does it mean that he flees? From God? Obviously there is some fundamental dispute here, and the dispute is the same dispute as in the midrash: “They asked wisdom, what is the punishment of a sinner?” and so on, and “they asked repentance… let him bring an offering and atone; let him repent and atone.” Jonah says: they sinned, let them take the blow. Why repentance? What is repentance? Whoever sinned should take the hit. And the Holy One, blessed be He, says to him: no, no. I want them to repent. They sinned, but I want to give them an opening to repent. And Jonah doesn’t agree. It is a principled ideological argument that he has with the Holy One, blessed be He.

Then the Holy One, blessed be He, educates him through the fish, spits him out, then the gourd. He arrives there on the outskirts of Nineveh with the gourd out in the wilderness. Right, exactly, a via dolorosa. The Christian via dolorosa is that God Himself goes through the via dolorosa, because they have incarnation. But I think in a certain sense with us too it is like that—we basically go through it while He is within us. Yes, exactly. And therefore, in general, I say, the Christian Trinity is not as absurd as people make it out to be. In our tradition too there is a trinity to the same extent. It’s just a metaphor depending on whether you look from inside or from outside. But “the Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one”—what is that if not a trinity? Fine, you can argue interpretations; there too you can argue interpretations. That’s not…

Anyway, let’s return to our issue. At the end of the educational process, what happens? He arrives under the gourd, right? Then the Holy One, blessed be He, appoints a worm there, an east wind and so on, and the gourd dies. Then Jonah asks for his soul to die. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, says to him: “Are you so angry over the gourd?” He says: “I am angry enough to die.” Then He says to him: “You pitied the gourd, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow. And shall I not pity Nineveh, the great city, with much cattle and many people,” and so on? An argument a fortiori: you pitied a gourd for which you did not labor and which you did not grow—shall I not pity Nineveh? That’s a bizarre kal va-homer. What kind of argument a fortiori is that? Jonah pitied the gourd? A fisherman loves fish—like in the old comedy sketch: if he loves fish, why does he eat them? Why does he catch them? Jonah didn’t pity the gourd. He pitied himself. He needed shade in the desert. He wanted the gourd for his own shade. So what kind of argument is it to go from Jonah pitying the gourd to God pitying Nineveh?

There are two ways to answer this, and I once spoke about it after Yom Kippur in Yeruham. They pray at sunrise there in Even Nun, and afterward I spoke with them a bit about this. I told them there are two ways to answer this, and I’d bet that in books of Hasidism you’ll find at least one of these two answers. One answer is to change the perception of Jonah. The second answer is to change the perception of the Holy One, blessed be He. The problem is that Jonah does not have mercy while the Holy One, blessed be He, does have mercy, and therefore there is no room for an argument a fortiori. So either we misunderstood Jonah or we misunderstood the Holy One, blessed be He.

Let’s start with the idea that we misunderstood Jonah. The mistake regarding Jonah is the mistake of political commentators. Political commentators, when they see a political operator or politician doing something, immediately look for his interest, right? The moment you find an interest, obviously it was an impure act. He did it for his interest. That’s the bread and butter of political commentators, right? But that is a logically invalid leap. The fact that you have an interest does not mean you didn’t also do it because you truly believe in it. On the contrary: in the political world, usually those things coincide. Because what is your interest? Your interest is to advance what you truly believe in. If you succeed in advancing what you believe in, you’ll get the votes of your supporters. Therefore I think that when you point to an interest—not in the sense of putting money in your pocket, but an ideological interest or something like that—that is not disqualifying. It does not mean your action wasn’t pure.

So in the narrow-eyed outlook of a political commentator, when you look at Jonah, who asked for his soul to die, and the Holy One, blessed be He, said to him, “Are you so angry over the gourd?” and he said, “I am angry enough to die,” “you pitied the gourd”—that means the Holy One, blessed be He, understands that Jonah pitied the gourd. Who says he didn’t pity the gourd? He did pity the gourd. True, he also needed it; he had an interest in the gourd. Does that necessarily mean he didn’t pity it? Why look at it so narrowly? He both needed the gourd and pitied it. More than that: many times, because the gourd served you, a feeling develops in you that you really do pity it. It doesn’t contradict; in many ways it complements. So Jonah did pity the gourd. One needs to learn that the outlook of a political commentator is a problematic outlook. Okay? That is one possibility. Then we’re done: Jonah pitied the gourd, and the Holy One, blessed be He, pities Nineveh, and the argument a fortiori is an excellent one.

The opposite possibility, of course, is to say: correct, Jonah didn’t pity the gourd; I am a political commentator. Jonah basically needed the gourd. But the Holy One, blessed be He, also does not pity Nineveh—He needs it, exactly the same thing. Why does He want them to repent? He wants them to repent because that is why He created us: so that we would sin and repent, because that way our becoming perfected completes Him. We are here for the secret of avodah tzorekh gavoha. “Give strength to God”—that is, we are here because for this He put us here. He says to Jonah: you simply do not understand reality correctly. You think that if they sinned they should take the blow? What are you talking about? If that were the truth, there would have been no need to create the world. It is not beyond the letter of the law to forgive our sins. That is a conceptual mistake. Sins are built in. If there were no sins, there would be no need for a world; it wouldn’t have been created at all. The whole world was created only so that we would sin and return. But without sinning we cannot return. There is no point in a world of completely righteous people. The Holy One, blessed be He, knows how to be completely righteous all by Himself.

Therefore the shattering there is… the midrash, Midrash Tanhuma, says about the Garden of Eden that when the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed death on Adam, Adam said to Him: “You come against me with a pretext.” “You come against me with a pretext.” What does that mean? A parable: a man whose wife ruined his dish—he takes a divorce document already signed by two witnesses out of his pocket and gives it to her. He was just waiting for that moment. Exactly. She says to him: “You come against me with a pretext.” What do you mean? After all, you had a signed divorce document in your pocket before you even tasted the dish. So don’t tell me that because of the dish you’re divorcing me. Likewise Adam says to the Holy One, blessed be He: “You come against me with a pretext.” After all, it says in the Torah: “When a man dies in a tent.” The Torah, which preceded the creation of the world by 974 generations, already says “when a man dies in a tent.” That means from the outset we’re talking about a creature that is going to die. So now you tell me that because of this sin you have decreed death upon me? Sell that line to someone else.

What is he really saying? He is saying: You needed my sin. Obviously—you caused me to sin. After all, the whole world was created only so that we would sin, otherwise there is no point to the whole story. So don’t tell me stories. And in the end Adam is right. He is right. It really is true. If he had not sinned there, perhaps he had free choice, perhaps he didn’t—that’s a whole discussion in Maimonides at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed. Fine. Then it would have been another sin. It doesn’t matter. In the end there would be sin. Because if there were no sins here, the world would not exist here. The world exists for that. And by the way, for repentance. For sin, yes—but the sins are what enable repentance.

Therefore the fact that you sinned is part of the structure of the world. You shouldn’t be frustrated by it. You shouldn’t look backward. You should look forward. Acceptance for the future is much more important than regret over the past. Regret over the past is an important point because it helps you in the future. But in the essence of repentance, it is acceptance for the future, not regret over the past. Because you were created in order to sin and afterward repent. That’s why you are here. Fine—you should still be upset over it and try to use it as a lever so that in the future it won’t happen. But the gaze should be forward, not backward. You were created in order to sin and return. That’s why we are here. Like being in debt at the bank. Yes, exactly. But someone can come and say: I’ll just keep sinning, and someone else will complete it. No—someone else can’t repent for your sins. That won’t repair your sins. It won’t help. Okay, the Holy One, blessed be He, created the whole world, everything is good, but your sins no one else can repair. So you have to take the consequences of what you did. He doesn’t say it doesn’t matter; you still take the consequences. No—He created the world so that you would sin and return, not so that you would sin. Sin is necessary, because without it there is nothing to return from. But you need to return. You have a potential that you didn’t actualize. Even worse. Maybe I’ll do it later, but for now I’m sinning. So that’s “I will sin and repent.” We’re back to that discussion. If you’ll do it later, that is indeed a possible thesis. The Sages say all the same not to do it, because it’s not recommended. You’ll sin even without that, don’t worry. No need to initiate it. But there is indeed such an initial thought. Right—that’s exactly the initial thought of “I will sin and repent,” yes, exactly.

One has to understand that people always ask: what was the Holy One, blessed be He, lacking when He created the world? Right? A very well-known theological question. What did He need? Why did He create? People say He created for us. But “He created for us” is nonsense. What does it mean, He created for us? If He created for us, then let Him not create us and then there’s no need to do it for us. Once we exist, then if someone gives me something, he improved my situation. But if I don’t exist, and you create me so I’ll have needs and then you’ll satisfy them—what is the point of the whole game? Don’t create me, then I won’t have needs and you won’t need to give me anything. Obviously in the end the goal is with Him, not with us. There is some lack of completion there. And now the question is: what could possibly be lacking in Him? This is a brilliant logical solution. What is lacking in Him is precisely that He is perfect. That is what is lacking in Him. That is the only thing that can be lacking in Him. And therefore the only way in which we can complete Him is not by being perfect, but by becoming perfected. That is, yes, striving for perfection—but not being perfect. Okay?

So this sheds entirely new light on a lot of theological questions and a lot of… But in the end you see here too that the process is what underlies the matter, not the conclusion or the state to which the process brings you. The process is the value. And that finds expression in our conduct in the world with sins. I think all these things ultimately converge on the same place. We are here for the process, not for the goal.

Let’s talk about Maimonides’ idea of form, and what comes to mind when Maimonides says that study improves a person’s form. It may be, I don’t know, but as though you improve the form—you’re like the bench. What I said before—I’ll just complete what I said earlier with this carving out the background—I’m talking here about why there is value, that is, why we were created. We were created for the process and not for… What I showed before is more than that: not only is that the thing of value, it is the only thing that we do, because in the end there is no conclusion. We don’t arrive at a conclusion in the end. Even if we wanted to see value in the conclusion, we have no way to get there. We do not reach conclusions. We somehow create conclusions within ourselves through this peeling process of the onion, through this carving out the background. Okay? So that is much stronger than the question of what has value, the dynamism or the state to which it brings me. I claim there is no such state. We simply do not reach that state, so there is no point in splitting hairs over whether it has value or not. We just need not be frustrated by that. On the contrary: to understand that it’s all okay. That’s why we are here. Okay? Just Zen. Yes, like that fellow who gets some punishment to fill a barrel of water with a teaspoon—some military punishment like that, to fill a barrel with a teaspoon. And it’s like Sisyphus, yes, with the stone he raises and lowers. The myth of Sisyphus. For Albert Camus the myth of Sisyphus leads man to thoughts of suicide, but from this perspective—not at all. I am not raising the stone upward so that the stone will be up there. I am raising it in order to raise it. And there is no problem. I am constantly engaged in raising the stone; what is the problem? When you look at the resultant state, you say: it was already up there; why do I need it down here and then to raise it again? Because you’re looking at the result. When you look at the process, what problem is there? I am constantly in a process of ascent and everything is excellent; I’m always going up. Sometimes you need to go down in order to keep raising, and therefore it’s that kind of process. But such a process has tremendous value. It is not a process of arriving at the complete state, but a process of advancing toward the complete state.

Therefore, by the way—and this is another lesson, I won’t go into it here—our calendar is built that way. Our calendar is built in circles, but there is also a historical axis that is not circular, right? Our age or history passes and does not repeat itself, whereas the yearly cycle repeats itself. So if you look at this as two axes, it is actually a spiral, right? It has a circular projection—the projection on the XY axis is circular, that is the annual axis—and there is the projection on this axis, which is the historical axis. The time axis is really the spiral. The time axis is the spiral. And it can be shown that positive commandments caused by time—there are positive commandments caused by time on the circular axis, and there are positive commandments caused by time on the linear axis. And the question is whether that too is called a positive commandment caused by time. For example, Tosafot in tractate Kiddushin says that circumcision—a woman is exempt, never mind, because she herself is not in circumcision, as the Talmud says. So Tosafot asks: why? After all, this is a positive commandment caused by time. Why not say she is exempt for that reason? He says: this is not a positive commandment caused by time because it begins on the eighth day but has no endpoint, no end. That means that commandments bounded in time on the linear axis are not the same as commandments bounded in time on the circular axis. On the linear axis it is not called a positive commandment caused by time; only on the circular axis.

Okay, so let’s pause the discussion here. You asked for a summary, so let’s make a brief summary of what we saw. Look, I began first of all with an attempt to characterize what a definition is. We wanted to define Torah and Torah study, so we asked ourselves: what is a definition? Okay. Then I tried to understand this by illustrating it through the concept of poetry, which is very difficult to define, and I proposed some indirect way of defining it. In fact, if you now go back to the lessons I gave there, you’ll see that what I did there is exactly the same conceptual move that we made in delivering a bill of divorce. It’s good now to close the circle. That is, I tried to define the concept of poetry by carving out the background, meaning trying to show what it is not, as opposed to prose. So it’s not prose—then what is it? I never said what it is, only what it is not. You could see that there. And I said that the Torah is called poetry because the Torah too, as we have now seen, is basically something you cannot define positively, only negatively, just like poetry. Therefore the Torah is called poetry.

The content of Torah is basically like the content of a poem. The content of a poem—“there once was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood”—that poem is not about lamps and not about neighborhoods. Okay? The words, or the sentences, or the meanings are only a medium through which something abstract passes, something you do not know how to describe. Because otherwise you would have written it in prose and not in a poem. When you write it as a poem, that means the literal meaning of the sentences is not really the content of the poem. It is the vehicle of the content; it is the medium through which the content passes. If you remember, with Zen—the example from Zen Buddhism we talked about—you can learn it in various ways.

From there I moved on to the idea that Torah really is an abstract thing, and all attempts to define it are attempts that deal with the garments of Torah, not Torah itself. Remember the angels—that Torah basically goes through two stages of concretization? It goes from abstract ideas to ideas we know, and from the ideas we know to the concrete formulation of the Torah scroll that we read today. And Torah is neither this nor that. Torah is that thing over there—the Torah of the angels and all those things. And therefore Torah is called poetry, because all the words written in the Torah scroll are like the words “there once was a lonely lamp.” That is, those words do not contain the content of Torah. Those words are some garment that wraps the Torah.

And our goal in study—that’s where I continued from there—our goal in study is actually to try to expose that abstract concept without being able to speak about it. How do you do that? You try to brush up against the garments, peel them away—those are the onion peels we’re talking about—and what remains at the end, which you don’t know how to formulate and don’t really… it is simply imprinted within you. That is, in the end it gets burned into you in some sense. That is what it means to study Torah. And in the end, to study Torah is to cleave to the Holy One, blessed be He, or to the Torah, which is His will, and to internalize that within ourselves. That is called Torah study.

And when we looked at it from the angle of Torah itself, I looked through the lens of the ukimta solutions. We saw that even the ukimta that they bring from a case is basically meant to express an idea. And when you talk about the idea, you see that it too is not really the idea but something even more abstract than the idea, and we saw all kinds of implications of that. In the end we talked about delivering a bill of divorce and neural networks, and today we ended with the fact that the process is the thing of value, because the product is created anyway, created by itself within us. But that product that is created by itself within us—that is Torah. Torah study means putting the Torah into ourselves. The act of study is peeling the onion, and the result is that the Torah is somehow embedded within us. That is the relationship between Torah and Torah study. In the naive conception, Torah study means learning a detail and then I know the detail, and that’s it. No. Study and Torah are indeed means and end, but in a much trickier way. That is, you engage in study in the sense we spoke about—peeling the onion—and in the end something somehow remains within you. That is what is called Torah: what remains within you in the end.

Okay, so that’s the summary in a nutshell. That’s it. I wish you success in your exams, and in the elections, and in everything you are about to—or not about to—go through.