Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel’s Thought – Genesis – Lesson 6

Table of Contents

• “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”: heaven and earth as the totality of reality
• “And the earth was tohu va-vohu”: matter, primordial state, and the explanation of tohu va-vohu
• Kabbalah, space and time, and matter and form: yesod de-malkhut, worlds, and the description of beings
• Upper and lower realms, angels, and the question of how to interpret heaven and earth
• The plain-sense approach and reading it “in my language” as an ideological stance
• The four elements: the interpretation of the ancients, Maimonides and Nachmanides, and rejecting the need for that
• Scientific criticism of the four elements and interpreting darkness literally
• Critical comments on the criticism: elements as a form of description and context
• An interpretive rule: you do not depart from the plain sense except when necessary, and the example from Sotah 11

Summary

General overview

The text interprets “the heavens and the earth” as a pair of linguistic poles that point to the entire universe and all reality, and proposes understanding the creation verses in a way that prefers the plain sense of the language and avoids mystical readings where there is no necessity. It explains “and the earth was tohu va-vohu” as a state of primordial matter without form, in which everything exists only potentially, and integrates into this Kabbalistic frameworks about the relation between worlds, space and time, and matter and form. Throughout, an ideological stance is developed according to which the Torah ought to be understood “in our language,” even almost like an explanation for children, together with criticism of attempts by the ancients—and also medieval authorities (Rishonim)—to find philosophical systems such as the four elements in the verses. At the end, an interpretive rule is brought from the Talmud in Sotah: you do not remove language from its plain meaning unless there is a compelling reason from the context, and sometimes even when the plain sense is impossible, a figurative interpretation is required.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”: heaven and earth as the totality of reality

The text states that “the heavens and the earth” is a general term for the entire universe and all known reality, similar to the way the Sages use two representative extremes to express a whole. It illustrates this with the Sages’ statement about “one thousand seven hundred a fortiori arguments and verbal analogies” that were forgotten during the mourning for Moses, where “a fortiori” and “verbal analogy” are understood as two representative poles of interpretive methods in general. It adds that “in the beginning” hints at creation “in potential,” which gradually brings things from potential into actuality, with an allusion to questions about the age of the world and the relation to the traditional counting.

“And the earth was tohu va-vohu”: matter, primordial state, and the explanation of tohu va-vohu

The text interprets “earth” not only as planet Earth but also as a borrowed name for matter as a whole within the framework of the world’s creation, and therefore “and the earth was tohu va-vohu” becomes “all matter was tohu va-vohu.” It identifies “tohu” as emptiness and desolation that brings a person to bewilderment, and explains “vohu” as “in it is,” meaning that everything is already present potentially within that state even though it has not yet emerged into actuality. It stresses that the point is not merely that there were no human beings, but that there was no “thing” in the familiar sense, because primordial matter is an abstraction and not an entity that a person encounters in a world of matter plus form.

Kabbalah, space and time, and matter and form: yesod de-malkhut, worlds, and the description of beings

The text cites the Ari’s teaching that “the space and time of a certain world” are “the yesod de-malkhut of the world above it,” and spells out the structure of the sefirot and partzufim in order to illustrate that the lower world is like a fetus in the womb of the world above it. From this it concludes that space and time appear abstract because they belong to a higher world, and therefore matter without form and form separated from matter are also perceived as abstractions relative to the world of action, where matter and form always appear together. It connects this to the division into the worlds of Beri’ah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah: Beri’ah as creation ex nihilo and as primordial matter, Yetzirah as form attaching to matter and as something from something, and Asiyah as the world in which materials already have forms, so there is no grasp of matter without form or form without matter.

Upper and lower realms, angels, and the question of how to interpret heaven and earth

The text presents an interpretation according to which “the heavens and the earth” means “the upper realms and the lower realms,” that is, “the spiritual and the physical,” and connects this to ancient conceptions that attributed a different substance to the heavens—until you could “reach a satellite” and see that it’s the same matter. It cites the words of the Sages that angels were created on the second day or later in order to challenge the interpretation of heaven as spiritual and earth as physical, and it prefers a simple reading in which heaven and earth are everything a person sees in the world. It adds a personal critical remark that there is no reason why in the spiritual world too a “primordial spirit” could not have been created on the first day, with spiritual beings such as angels being formed only in later stages.

The plain-sense approach and reading it “in my language” as an ideological stance

The text describes a consistent tendency to replace mystical and alienating interpretations with a simple, everyday reading, and presents this as an ideological direction rather than necessarily a definitive decision about the “correct” interpretation. It argues that the proposed interpretation is like the kind of explanation that could be taught to first-grade children, and that this is how the creation passage ought to be studied, without “pilpul and philosophies.” It admits that the alternative is sometimes simplistic and not always persuasive, but presents the attempt as the ability to read the verses “according to their plain wording” and arrive at a coherent picture.

The four elements: the interpretation of the ancients, Maimonides and Nachmanides, and rejecting the need for that

The text notes that “the ancients looked for the four elements in these verses”—earth, water, air, and fire—and presents the identifications earth = dust, spirit = air, water = water, along with the difficulty of fire, which they solved by interpreting darkness as the power of fire that does not shine in itself. It incorporates Rabbi Zevin’s essay on Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel as “in potential” versus “in actuality” through the dispute over “who creates the light of fire” versus “who creates the lights of fire,” and parallels this to the conception that darkness is light in potential that has not yet emerged into actuality. It also cites the Leshem regarding the “Infinite Light” as without form and yet containing “ten hidden sefirot,” and identifies the “hidden” as an aspect of darkness, in contrast to light as emergence into actuality.

Scientific criticism of the four elements and interpreting darkness literally

The text notes that both Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed and Nachmanides interpreted the verses by way of the four elements, and it suggests a possible modern translation of fire as energy alongside the three states of matter, but states that “there is no need to look for four elements in the verses.” It argues that experiments proved there are more than four basic substances, that water can be decomposed, and that gold cannot be chemically decomposed, and therefore the four elements are not an accurate description of the nature of matter. It proposes that the verses are explained well in their plain sense: “darkness means darkness literally,” complete darkness with no light at all, “over the face of the deep” as a dark void, and it compares this to the darkness of Egypt, “and one could feel the darkness.”

Critical comments on the criticism: elements as a form of description and context

The text argues that the criticism of the four elements is too simplistic, because the four elements are not necessarily a competitor to the periodic table but rather a descriptive system of appearances and qualities, similar to talking about states of matter or about dimensions in a human being such as “dust from the ground.” It develops the claim that the same reality can be described through different bases, like Cartesian coordinates versus polar coordinates, and by comparing the Copernican description to the Ptolemaic one as a difference of convenience rather than of “right” and “wrong” on the kinematic level. It continues with the idea that different descriptive systems can be equivalent even in physics, including discussion of Zeno’s arrow paradox, the uncertainty principle, “the position picture” and “the momentum picture,” and illustrates this with the analogy of an “ideal camera” versus an “ideal movie camera” as different perceptual lenses. It concludes that the dispute is sometimes about the mode of description rather than the thing being described, and in that way challenges the claim that modern knowledge necessarily “refutes” an ancient descriptive system.

An interpretive rule: you do not depart from the plain sense except when necessary, and the example from Sotah 11

The text sets out a rule according to which trying to interpret “darkness” as elemental fire or as energy takes the word away from its plain meaning unnecessarily, and that the principle is to interpret literally as long as there is no compelling reason not to. It illustrates this with “A new king arose over Egypt” in Sotah 11, where there is a dispute between Rav and Shmuel whether it means “literally new” or “his decrees were renewed,” and the reason for departing from the plain sense comes from the context, because “it does not say, ‘and he died and another reigned.’” It adds that “who did not know Joseph” must also be interpreted non-literally, because it cannot be that Pharaoh did not know about Joseph; rather, “he made himself as though he did not know,” and in this way it shows that even when the plain sense is impossible, one resorts to a figurative meaning that is permitted by the ways of language.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” — so he says that “the heavens and the earth” are really the whole universe, all the reality we know. And he took “the heavens and the earth” as they are. Maybe an example of this: the Sages in several places say — for example at the end of Temurah, I think at the end of Temurah — the Talmud says that one thousand seven hundred a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies were forgotten during the days of Moses’ mourning. Now, a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies aren’t specifically derivations of a fortiori and verbal analogy and not of general-and-particular or prototype construction; rather, I think the point is derivations in general, where you take two representative examples, or in this case two poles, right? A verbal analogy is the less logical measure, and a fortiori is the most logical measure. One thousand seven hundred derivations were forgotten, and “a fortiori” and “verbal analogy” are two typical examples that come to express the whole set, not specifically those two. So here too, “the heavens and the earth” means all of reality. When you take some two poles or two typical examples — what’s up above and what’s down below — but really the intention is everything. And he says that in fact already “in the beginning” the Holy One, blessed be He, created them, and then they were created potentially, and it took time until they emerged from potentiality into actuality. Here he is already hinting at things he’ll discuss later. Meaning, questions of age — the age of the world — and how this fits with the traditional count. “And the earth was chaos and void” — this is page 87. “Earth” can mean the globe or part of it. But it can also be understood more generally: matter. Really a continuation of that same direction. “The earth” is not specifically the earth, but all matter, all the reality we know. Obviously when someone says he traveled to such-and-such a land, it has the simple meaning of a region. But when we are speaking about the creation of the world, then within the ways of language one can understand that “the earth” is a borrowed term for matter as a whole. Yes, so “the earth was chaos and void” means all matter was chaos and void. What does that mean? All matter was in a state of chaos and void, that is, in a primeval state. We already said that “primeval” means lacking form. “Chaos” is a term of emptiness, as in “and in the chaos of a howling wasteland.” A desolate wilderness in which a person is bewildered, and therefore it is called chaos. The person in it is bewildered and astonished and finds nothing. There are not yet beings in the world, and yet “void” — in it there is. Everything is already in it potentially, everything that will later develop — “in it there is.” The medieval authorities (Rishonim) already speak about “chaos and void” in those senses. Just one point: when he says there are not yet beings in the world, he doesn’t mean there are no human beings. When we speak about primeval matter, then we’re talking — I think we touched on this a bit — the difference between primeval matter and matter that has form on it is not that there are no people in the world. That’s not the point. Rather, there is nothing in the world. Meaning, primeval matter is something abstract. There really isn’t such a thing as primeval matter in the world we know; it’s an abstraction. When we say that at the beginning there was primeval matter, the meaning is that reality as a whole was fundamentally something different from what we know today. It wasn’t connected to the question of whether certain creatures were there or not there. The whole business simply didn’t exist, just as everything we know today is really matter plus form. Okay, so that’s what he means by saying the person in it is bewildered and astonished and finds nothing. He doesn’t mean, yes, like in those movies where you see a desolate planet and you don’t find anything. The planet itself also isn’t there. Meaning, there is nothing at all. Primeval matter, for us, is an abstraction. It seems to me I mentioned that the Ari speaks about space and time, and he says that the space and time of a certain world are the yesod of the malkhut of the world above it. And what is yesod of the malkhut? They divide every world — every world is divided into partzufim, for example. One of the divisions of every world is into sefirot, another is into partzufim; there are all kinds of divisions, subdivisions of reality. So in this division of the sefirot there are ten sefirot; when you look at it as partzufim, then malkhut… malkhut — that is the sefirah, that is the lower female partzuf. There are father and mother, and there are son and daughter. Right? The son is Ze’ir Anpin and the daughter is the malkhut. Okay? Now yesod is the reproductive organ. Netzach, Hod, Yesod — it’s in the middle, right? Chokhmah — right side, the right of… right, for you it looks like left. Chokhmah, Binah, Da’at, Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod. Now the things — Chokhmah, Binah, Da’at — are in the head. Okay? Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet are the right hand, left hand, and the body. Okay? And malkhut is below. Now Netzach, Hod, Yesod in the body: Netzach and Hod are the two sides of the body, right? And Yesod is the reproductive organ. Okay? Now yesod of the malkhut is the reproductive organ of the mother. Right? Of the female. The reproductive organ of the female of the upper world. What does that mean? That the world below is basically like an embryo, right, in the womb of the world above, of the female side of the world above. And space and time are the womb itself. Meaning, that is why from our perspective space and time are perceived as something abstract. They are perceived as abstract because they really do not belong to this world; they belong to some world at a higher level of abstraction. That is why philosophers debate whether there is really such a thing as space and time at all or whether these are only forms of our perception. And what the Leshem says, according to what he explains in the Ari, is that this simply belongs to one world above. Therefore from our perspective it looks like some kind of abstraction, right? So in that sense too, matter devoid of form, primeval matter, is also some level of abstraction one step beyond what we know. We always know things that have matter and form together. Separate forms are not something we grasp as an existing thing, as an existent, and neither is matter separated from form. So really separated matter and separated form are simply worlds at a higher level of abstraction than ours, and therefore from our perspective they count as abstractions and not as entities, right? But in the language of Kabbalah they are entities, just entities that belong to a world one level higher. By the way, in this context of matter without form and separated form — about that I think I did speak. So these are the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. The relation between them: the world of Beriah — creation — is something from nothing. It is bringing something out of nothing, meaning that there should be something. That is the chaos, right? Primeval matter. Then there is the world of Yetzirah; Yetzirah comes from the root “form.” So the form attaches to the primeval matter created in the world of Beriah. Therefore Yetzirah is something from something. Ordinarily, when a sculptor does something, carves stone, he produces something from something, not something from nothing. That is why it is called Yetzirah, okay? Beriah is producing the stone itself from nothing. Then giving it a form is called Yetzirah. The world of Beriah creates the very fact that something exists — that is primeval matter — and then they shape a form for it, that is the world of Yetzirah. And after Yetzirah there is our world, the world of Asiyah. This is the world in which matter already has forms, in which you can no longer see separate forms or matter devoid of form standing on its own, okay? So from this perspective, matter and form — you can also see all this as metaphor, and that too is a dispute among interpreters of Kabbalah, right? Whether we are talking there about metaphors or really kinds of reality. But if you really see them as kinds of reality, then the form — viewing these things as metaphor basically means that the world of Beriah and the world of Yetzirah are the two abstractions we are talking about when we speak about primeval matter and separate forms. Forms not clothed in matter, Platonic ideas, okay? And someone who sees them as entities says: it looks like abstractions to you because they are entities belonging to a world at a higher level of abstraction. So you do not see them as entities; for you they are ideas, not entities. But that is because you are at the stage — you are the embryo inside the womb. Now the womb belongs to the mother; that is one generation higher, it is not from your world. So that is why it looks to you like things that do not really exist, just abstractions. Because of the meaning of “earth” as matter in general, some understood that “the heavens and the earth” means the upper and the lower, namely the spiritual and the physical. And this connects to what he said in one of the earlier sections we saw, that more ancient conceptions thought that in the heavens there is a different kind of matter. Then he said that one can go to a satellite and bring it here to earth and see that it is the same thing, the same matter we know from here as well. But at the stage when it was not accessible, they looked upward and said: apparently those are different kinds of matter, the spheres. So when they speak about “the heavens and the earth” they mean matter, in quotation marks, “spiritual” matter — the matter that belongs up there — and our matter. That is “the earth.” So “the heavens and the earth” are basically two kinds of matter, or two kinds of entities, that exist in the universe. Therefore “the heavens and the earth” means the upper and the lower, namely the spiritual and the physical. All right? The Sages say that the angels were created on the second day or later. Why does he bring that? Because angels belong to spiritual matter. And if “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” means the spiritual and the physical, then the angels should already have been created on the first day. Why does it say they were created on the second day? After all, the spiritual was already created on the first day. Therefore he says there is no need to arrive at this interpretation that this is matter and spirit; rather, “the heavens and the earth” can be interpreted in their plain sense — everything a person sees in the world. “See what a beautiful world the Holy One, blessed be He, created — heaven and earth” — meaning everything you see. Not specifically spirit and matter, especially in light of what he said earlier, that even in the heavens the matter is the same matter we know here. There is not something else there that has to be created in another phase. It is the same thing, not essentially different from what we have here. The truth is that here one should comment, because even in the physical world, as he said, one first creates primeval matter and then forms from it the various creatures according to their kinds. And the creatures according to their kinds emerge day after day according to the evolutionary stages: inanimate, plant, animal, and human. Okay? So I do not see any reason this could not happen in the spiritual world as well. In the spiritual world too, one creates primeval spirit, and the spiritual creatures, for example angels, are formed during the days of creation — in this case, say, on the second day. I do not see a proof here for what he says. These are ideas, but I do not see any necessity, any necessity to say this, any difficulty in the standard understanding. Meaning, I do not understand why one had to get to that. “And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” Right, we go step by step through the verse. So now we have spoken about “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and after that, “And the earth was chaos and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep.” Did you notice? “And the earth was chaos and void” — and what about the heavens? After all, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “And the earth was chaos and void.” And the heavens? Maybe, now that I think about it, maybe that is what I said earlier. I wanted to say that the heavens too were chaos and void, and the next day they took primeval spirit and made from it spiritual beings, angels in this case. So that happened on the second day. But then indeed the heavens too were chaos and void, not only the earth was chaos and void. Fine, I don’t know if one can be that precise here. “And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” The ancients — but do you notice his direction? His direction continues exactly what we saw also in the halakhic section. He constantly takes the spiritual, mystical interpretations, the ones seemingly alien to us — meaning those that shift things into some language that is not our ordinary everyday language — and he basically offers an alternative that is completely within our world, in our language. Not to look at it in some mystical, other, exceptional way. What it says, “the heavens and the earth,” is what you say: the heavens and the earth — meaning everything you see, that’s all, nothing different. Meaning, the direction he is aiming for is extremely clear. One can argue with this argument here and that argument there, maybe even with almost all the arguments, but what is more important is to see his ideological direction, his orientation, where he is heading. He is basically trying not, I think at least, not to offer the necessarily correct interpretation, but to offer an alternative that does not require the alienation that is customary when we learn the creation narrative. When we learn the creation narrative it turns into these mystical spiritual days that you do not understand, and you speak in some language that is not from your world. And his concern, as in Jewish law, so too in biblical interpretation, is to bring everything close to my language. The whole business speaks to me; it is supposed to speak in my language, teach me, and be understandable to me. And therefore this whole interpretation is ostensibly really an interpretation for children. Meaning, this is an interpretation with which you can explain the creation narrative to first graders. And his ideological claim is that that is really how it should be learned. Don’t turn it into all kinds of mysticism and all kinds of things. Just like you teach children. The Torah speaks to ordinary people, who should understand exactly what they are supposed to understand in the simplest possible way. In that sense, I think that although this alternative often seems terribly simplistic, and in my opinion in some cases also very unconvincing, still the attempt is an interesting one. Meaning, to present here some outlook that says: leave it, come on… let’s read this simply like an ordinary Jew reading the verses in their plain sense, without all the hair-splitting and philosophies. You can read it that way, there is no problem, and you can reach a coherent and complete picture of everything written there. In that sense it is an interesting attempt. Is it the correct interpretation, is it convincing? I am not sure. Right, so: “And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” The ancients looked in these verses for the four elements. Again you see it — he always presents the strange alternative. Meaning, what people are usually accustomed to, but when you think about it, that itself is the strange alternative. And he says: no, come on, these are simple things, read it simply, without flying off to overly lofty realms. The ancients looked in these verses for the four elements, which in their opinion were the basic elements of matter: earth, water, air, and fire. And they interpreted it like this: “earth” is dust, “spirit” is air, “water” literally means water. Fire is missing. So who is the fire here in this story? After all, there has to be a mapping between those four elements and what is written at the beginning of Genesis. So the conclusion is apparently that the darkness is the elemental fire. That is very strange, right? So he says why: because in itself it does not shine, but only when it sets something else ablaze does that thing shine. Therefore darkness specifically expresses fire, or the power of fire. There is an article by Rabbi Zevin in one of his books — what is that book called, he has several collections of essays — one of them is on the approaches of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, his well-known essay. And he wants to argue that they proceed consistently in many of their disputes, that basically they go along the same path or disagree at the same point. That Beit Shammai go by potentiality and Beit Hillel by actuality. Therefore in the future the Jewish law will follow Beit Shammai — that tradition — because in the future the potential will emerge into actuality. It says that in the future — no, that is a tradition in the name of the Vilna Gaon, we once spoke about it; it is not written, there is no source for it, it is an oral tradition in the name of the Vilna Gaon. In any case, he wants to argue — and he explains many disputes this way. One of the disputes is how to recite the blessing: “who creates the lights of fire” or “who creates the light of fire.” So he says, what is the difference? “The lights of fire” is what you see; “the light of fire” is the power of fire, the very fire-ness itself, not the concrete fire you are looking at now. Therefore Beit Shammai say “the light of fire,” because they speak about the elemental power, not the thing you see, not the object that appears before your eyes. And “the lights of fire” is the variety, everything you see, because when it emerges from potentiality into actuality it becomes diverse and different and appears in many forms and so on. But the elemental power is one thing. And Beit Shammai recite the blessing over the thing in potentiality, not the thing that has emerged into actuality. And Beit Hillel speak about actuality. And this darkness is really the fire of Beit Shammai, then, because it is not yet shining. When you already see something shining, that is already the emergence, the actual appearance of fire. We are speaking about the power that generates that appearance, what underlies it, what stands at its foundation. So this is actually darkness — specifically darkness, because it is the absence of illumination, not the absence of light. Illumination is the emergence of that fire from potentiality into actuality. Before it emerges, you see darkness — as he said above, that although the earth was chaos and void, he said: although it was chaos, that is primeval matter, still “void” — everything was already in it potentially. Everything that later developed was “in it there is,” yes, in the passage we read earlier. I think we spoke about this too, that the Leshem also writes that in the infinite light — “infinite” means… we spoke about that, right? That “infinite” means that it has no form. It is something primeval. Therefore there are no sefirot in it, because a sefirah is an attribute, it appears this way and not another. It is Chesed, so it is not Gevurah; it is Chokhmah, so it is not Binah. Meaning, the sefirot express the differences in reality, the diversity — they are forms. Okay? And the infinite light is something — why is it infinite? Because whenever something has an end, that means it has a form. The end of a thing is its form. If something is triangular, what does that mean? That its edge looks triangular, right? Therefore the object is triangular — its edge, its boundary, its form is triangular. Form is always what bounds the object, what says how far it goes and what it is and what it is not, up to where it is present and from where it is no longer there — then it is no longer it, but something else. Therefore “infinite light” means something devoid of form. It has no boundary, no end; it is simple. You cannot characterize it in any way — of course not only geometrical or spatial form, but anything at all. You cannot say anything about it, really. It has no form. In any respect. And still the Leshem says that within the infinite light there were ten hidden sefirot. He proves it from expressions of the Ari — that within the infinite light there were ten hidden sefirot. What does that mean? This ability later to generate a reality that branches into sefirot and becomes diverse and so on, was somehow latent inside the primeval matter, inside the infinite light. Because if it were not there, where would it come from? The assumption is that after all everything ultimately emerged from the infinite light. So here too, the hidden sefirot are darkness. When they emerge outward, that is light. But as long as they have not emerged, they are hidden. What does it mean that they are hidden? Darkened, or in darkness. But darkness is not the absence of light according to this conception. Darkness is not the absence of light. Darkness is light in potential. It is light in potential that has not emerged into actuality, because absence of light is nothing. So darkness would just be nothing. The absence of light is not something in itself; it is simply not light. But the question is: what is it positively? What is darkness? He says darkness is also something. What is it? It is that power underlying the light. When it emerges from potentiality into actuality you see light. That power to illuminate, what is called fire in itself, not the illumination it produces — that is what is called darkness. Okay? So he effectively turns darkness into an object, not an absence. Why does he… sorry. What? If we are saying that the four elements were… we know… No, he is talking about that right now. On the contrary, he sets it up as a straw man that he is now going to shoot down. It is always like that. He begins with the supposedly mystical interpretation, even though it is the accepted one, and then he comes to blow it up. He says: what suddenly? Why resort to all this? Read it like a human being, like a child in first grade. Read what is written, that’s all. It’s very funny, because this is always perceived as novelties that people are almost afraid to go to his lectures because of all the heresy and lofty things said there — and that loftiness basically just means returning to how a child reads it. Meaning, stripping away all the baggage we accumulated throughout history and returning to the simplest possible reading. That is really his great innovation, or at least one of his main innovations. Right, so because in this puzzle it was missing what the fire was, they decided that darkness is the fire. Then they produce this whole nice little insight: how is darkness fire? It is the opposite. So they say it is the power to illuminate before it emerges into actuality, therefore it is called darkness. Fine — a very nice, sophisticated, somewhat mystical explanation. And he is going to destroy it, meaning he is going to give it up and offer an alternative. “But only that” and so on. Thus too Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed and Nachmanides interpreted it. He says: true, the senses show us matter in different states of aggregation. Solid is dust, liquid is water, gas is air. In place of fire perhaps we would say energy, which is the elemental transformation of matter. So he even offers an interpretation a bit closer to our conceptual world: three states of matter plus some abstract concept called energy. And that is what fire… it even sounds pretty close. He says: if you insist on wanting a more plausible alternative that still preserves four elements, I would say this in our language. But the next sentence says: leave it, even that is unnecessary. Right, but then where does the energy appear? Darkness? Energy is already a connection… No, fire is energy. But there is no fire. Ah, you mean why is darkness called energy? Darkness to fire, yes. The explanation from darkness to fire… He is still translating, it is still a translation of that previous interpretation. When they translated fire into darkness, then in our language we would not call it fire, we would call it energy. Because energy really is the capacity to do work, not the work itself. In that sense I think he actually has a point — I think it is an interesting translation into our language. But he says there is really no need to look for four elements in the verses. He inflates all these balloons into the air in order to pop them. Meaning, there is no need to look for four elements in the verses. If we are speaking about elemental substances, countless experiments and tests have proven that there are far more than four elemental substances in nature. Earth, air, water, and fire are the four elements of the ancients, but that is not really correct. Those are not the four elements that really make up our nature. Gold, for example, is an element that cannot be decomposed into other elements, whereas water can indeed be decomposed into other substances — H2O. So water is not an element. Water is also a composite thing. Certainly that is not an element in that sense. It is clear that that is not the intention. I also agree — in another moment I’ll comment on that. I agree. The verses are interpreted beautifully in their plain sense without any business of elements. Darkness is darkness literally, where there is no light at all. Not like the darkness we know at night. At night there is a little light. When you go outside now it’s dark, but what is dark? There is still some light. Do you see? It’s a terribly prosaic interpretation. Yes, exactly — absolute darkness. Egypt, that’s it — “and a palpable darkness,” where darkness is a reality, yes. Not like the darkness we know at night: there is a little light and one can distinguish something. Even on a cloudy night with no moon and stars there is some sort of light. The darkness of Genesis is complete darkness. If a person had been alive then, he would have felt as though he were enclosed not in a dungeon but in a wrapping enveloping him entirely. Maybe in Egypt there was a darkness like that — yes, he is hinting at “and a palpable darkness.” “Upon the face of the deep” means the void; the whole expanse was dark. And the spirit… how does it go there? Sorry — “and darkness upon the face of the deep,” the whole expanse, the void, was dark. This interpretation sounds very funny, by the way. People treat it as though these were sublime secrets. He’s just bringing us back to first grade, that’s all. He says: read the verses, leave aside all your nonsense, read it in its plain sense, as though nobody had been hammering your brain for fifty years — or two thousand five hundred years, not fifty years. Just read it simply, as it reads. Fine, I don’t know. As I said, what is nice here is the proposal, not that this is necessarily the correct interpretation. He is basically saying: leave it, why all these complications? Now here regarding his criticism of the four elements, I too feel one should add a note. This criticism is too simplistic. Meaning, with all due respect to the critique — don’t act like a child in first grade. Even if your proposal is to read it like first grade, it is still obvious that the ancients’ four elements were not competing with our periodic table. Meaning, it is not that the ancients simply… there is no necessity to explain it the way he does. I do not know exactly what they thought, but there is no necessity to understand it the way he does — as though gold is supposed to be composed of a little dust, a little water, a little fire, and a little whatever. It does not work that way. The idea is four types of manifestations in the world. Just as we talk about states of matter — they did not think in terms of states of matter, but still there were four kinds of manifestations of matter. There is liquid matter, there is dusty matter — yes, dry earth — there is fire, which is the more abstract, tending upward; the earth goes downward, the water flows. Meaning, you can describe every thing in the world as some combination of these qualities, and that is true on the conceptual level. Now that does not mean you can synthesize gold and become an alchemist, right? Take earth, water, and fire in certain doses and produce gold from them. When we speak about elements in the way we speak today, we speak the language of chemistry. Meaning, to take the elements means these are really the things from which, through chemical processes, one can produce everything we know today. Okay? In practice, you can really decompose and recombine them. That is what is called elements in our language. What they called elements then — again, I am not well enough versed in Greek philosophy because it does not interest me that much — maybe they did mean that, but I do not think one has to understand it that way. Meaning, they mean to say that in every thing there is a certain element of heaviness, falling downward, and a certain element striving upward. In a human being there is a soul that strives upward — that is the element of fire in man, the living element in him. Yes, our body — I am not even speaking about the soul, I mean the biological vitality in the body. So the body is not just dust. “And the Lord God built the dust from man” — “the man [from] dust from the earth.” Right. What does that mean? We have within us a dimension of dust. This does not mean building us from dust the way one synthesizes in a chemistry lab, synthesizing material from elements. Rather, the meaning is that there is in us a dimension that is material, physical, that falls downward — that heaviness. “Dust from the earth.” And there is in us a dimension that aspires upward — we stand upright. Now that is not because of our soul that we stand. Our standing upright is a biological trait, not a mental-spiritual trait. That is biological vitalism, not the soul and spirit and will and thought and intellect and all those things. So even in the biological sense there is in us a good deal of the dimension of fire and water, and not just plain dust. That is the description. I do not think the meaning is that they literally took dust, water, and fire and made man from them in some process. I don’t know — that is not the idea. Beyond that, I also think — and this is perhaps from a more mathematical point of view — you know, the same reality itself, or the same world of phenomena, can be described on the basis of several different systems of bases, different bases. Meaning, take two-dimensional space, okay? I can draw an x-y coordinate system, and every point on that plane can be described by two coordinates, x and y. I can describe it in terms of polar coordinates, what is called the distance from the origin and the angle. Never mind — another pair of numbers. Okay, it will always be a pair of numbers, by the way, because it is a space that is inherently two-dimensional; you will always need two independent magnitudes to describe it. But which two magnitudes — that is flexible. You can choose two other magnitudes, you can play games, build combinations, rotate the coordinate system. Then you have x and y; rotate it and you get some tilted system like x-prime and y-prime. Y-prime, okay? Tilted relative to the first one, but every x-prime can be translated in terms of x and y, every y-prime likewise in terms of x and y. Okay, a rotation matrix. So basically you can choose to describe a certain reality according to completely different bases. And the fact that we choose to describe our reality using the basis called the periodic table, meaning the set of elements we place within the periodic table, does not mean there is no completely coherent and scientific, if you like, description based on a different system of bases. And perhaps it would be some kind of rotation of the periodic table. Why not call every two gold plus hydrogen some new “element,” and describe every object we speak about in those terms? It’s two gold plus hydrogen; subtract one gold plus hydrogen and you get what we call the element gold, for example. I don’t know — you can define many forms. But the elements are coherent in that you cannot decompose them through chemical processes. Of course you can decompose them. Not through chemical processes. Of course you can. Through a chemical process? Certainly. Take hydrogen, and I will decompose it for you into H2O. Of course — you just don’t call that decomposition because you assume that H and O are elements. But I’m saying H2O is the element. You didn’t understand me in the sense that in H2O hydrogen is contained, it is part of it, it is included. No, H2O is contained as well. How? If you take H, you can decompose it into H2O and minus O. And I don’t know what, minus HO or whatever. I’m saying the decomposition is not the one we are used to in our language, but what difference does it make? You can define a mathematical operation of decomposition and define a completely different system of elements, and through it describe everything. Would there also be a chemistry that could do this? Maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t know. That’s it. No, maybe there would be. The reason they chose this system to describe things — it isn’t that they were looking for a coordinate system. It’s because there the reasons are… physical and chemical reasons. No, I disagree. I disagree. Only reasons of simplicity. If you could — I don’t know — if I found, by the way maybe one could find, a complete chemical system whose elements are actually what we today call compounds, and where decompositions include both plus and minus, that is, substitution operations and this and that, operations — what difference does it make? On the mathematical level it is completely equivalent. We are already captive to the standard outlook; I too, of course, see it that way, as you suggest. But I am saying all of this is a system we decided to use. It is like — in every basic logic textbook, you take classical logic and build it on a set of axioms. Now which axioms? There are endless proposals. You can take these three axioms; or you can replace them so that the combination of this axiom plus theorem 17(c), plus whatever else, will become your three axioms, and from them too you can derive all the theorems, all the claims. Meaning, you can choose any basis you want, as long as every element in one basis is a combination of elements in the other basis. Okay? There is no problem with that; it is a mathematical operation one can define and choose at will. It is arbitrary. It is a bit like deciding — yes, people always say that Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the sun and not the sun around the earth, as people thought before him. He discovered nothing. There is absolutely no difference between saying that the earth revolves around the sun and saying that the sun revolves around the earth. On the kinematic level there is no difference at all between them. The only thing is: one system is simpler. If you assume the sun stands still and everything revolves, it comes out very simply, because everything revolves around it in ellipses. That’s all. If you decide that the earth is at the center and everything else moves around it, things become horribly complicated with all the epicycles and circles within circles within circles. But what is more true and what is less true? There is no “more true.” They are two descriptions. Dynamically there is a difference, but kinematically there is no difference. Meaning, when you bring in forces and things like that there may be a difference, but when you look purely kinematically, only at motion, there is no difference. So what is the relation between fixing the origin at the sun and fixing it at the earth? It is just a shift of coordinates, that’s all. Right? So what now? Every x in this system will be a function of the x and y in the other system, and vice versa. Meaning, this is just moving us into a different conceptual system through which we describe the same set of phenomena. Okay? Now I can define whatever sets you like. I think we once spoke also about Gadi Taub’s book The Stooping Rebellion, where he mocks the modern critiques of radical feminists who say that physics is altogether a male domain and therefore it excludes women, and that is why women do not succeed as much in physics, or do not advance as much in physics, and so on — because it is a male domain, etc. So he says he would not want to fly on a plane built according to the principles of female physics, because in physics there is correct physics and incorrect physics. So what does male or not male have to do with it? Physics is physics, that’s all. Now on this point I actually do not agree with him. I do not agree because that same set of physical phenomena may perhaps — again, I’m not the authority here — maybe it can be described by a completely different conceptual system, with completely different concepts and principles. And with those principles and conceptual systems, one could get a coherent and complete description of all the phenomena we know. We are used to describing our physical phenomena in terms of acceleration, velocity, position, force. Right, but what does that have to do with women and men? No, maybe… what is a male conceptual system, what is a female conceptual system? No, there are such things. It could be that the female mind, say, gets along better with another way of description than with this one… No, there is a female cast of mind. Sometimes the female mind is built differently — again, in averages, this is all averages. Broadly speaking — Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, how does that go, that book? There are differences in styles of thought in general. There is a difference — of course there is variation and diversity and all that. Broadly speaking, definitely there is a difference. Is there a difference in patterns of thought? Yes — why? Of course. Without any doubt, in my opinion. There is a difference between the pattern of thought of women and men — again, I admit this is a generalization. There are all kinds of men and all kinds of women. Broadly speaking, definitely there is a difference. But what does it mean that you do not agree with him? What are you saying? What do you mean you do not agree? No, but those critics say: we are not such good physicists, but in principle if there had been a genius like Newton sitting down and founding physics anew in a completely different conceptual system, maybe — there is no reason to rule out the possibility of describing, say… you know what? If we had been born not with the system of five senses we are born with, but with completely different senses, do you understand that physics would look completely different? And that people would describe it in terms of qualities they perceived, not in terms of qualities we perceive with our senses. Right? We are compelled to think through our perceptual and sensory system. Now if there is some other kind of creature, its physics could be no less intelligent and no less successful, perhaps even more successful, and completely different. And until we found the rules translating its laws and concepts into our laws and concepts, we would not understand that it is the same thing. But it would describe all the phenomena coherently and completely. That can happen. By the way, I once thought about this in the context of Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow. I once wrote an article about it. And my claim there was — you know the paradox? Zeno asks: you see an arrow flying, okay? At every instant you observe it, it stands in a different place. One instant it stands in one place, the next instant it stands somewhere else. So when does it pass between those places? At every instant it stands here, after a second you see it standing here, another instant it stands here — so when does it move? Okay? That is something people asked. They got tangled up in it for many years. It is not so simple to answer, at least in ancient thought. The solutions eventually given in the twentieth century speak in terms of infinitesimals — that one speaks not about a moment of time but an arbitrarily short interval of time. In my opinion that solves nothing. It solves nothing at all. It merely gives a description that fails to expose the problem. I think the solution is much simpler and does not require any infinitesimals. The solution simply says that at every instant the arrow is not standing in a different place but is located in a different place. That is not the same thing. “Standing” means being at zero velocity. Right? But when I look at the arrow at every instant, it is not standing in a different place, it is located in a different place. You ask when it passes? At the same instant you are looking at it, it is also passing, because it is there but it has velocity. But in a single instant you cannot see an expression of that velocity in terms of change of place, because velocity times time gives distance. If time is zero there will be no distance. It will not cover any distance. If you look at one instant of time then of course the body does not move. Does that mean it has no velocity? No, it has velocity. It is located somewhere; it is not standing somewhere. That is not the same thing. All right? Then I continued and said that in fact one can solve this with the uncertainty principle in quantum theory. Why? Because the uncertainty principle says that a body cannot have a precise velocity and a precise position simultaneously. Okay? Now what are you really asking? You are asking what its velocity is and what its position is at the same moment — that is illegal. If you want to ask when it passes, switch to what is called the momentum-world glasses, the momentum picture, or glasses that see velocities, not glasses that see positions. Those are different glasses. Different glasses; you have to change glasses. You cannot use the same pair of glasses to see both properties. What? Is that the principle of quantum theory? No, it is the uncertainty principle. No, that is complementarity. Basically it says that the meaning is that you can measure velocity and not… no, you cannot. My question is this: the uncertainty principle depends on interpretation, no? There are different interpretations, but the principle itself exists. Schrödinger’s interpretation, if I remember correctly, is not that in reality there is no velocity and position, but just that you cannot measure them simultaneously. No, no, no — today we already know that is not correct. There is Bell’s inequality; they did experiments, they ruled out that possibility. Meaning, this is a real property of things, not just a form of our observation. And it is not inability to measure — they do not have it. They do not have it. For example, even in the double-slit experiment you can see that you cannot explain it in our terms. You cannot measure whether it passed through two slits or through one. If you put a measuring device there, then it passes through one slit; if you do not put a measuring device there, then it passes through both, and you get interference. So it is not a question of whether you can measure or not. There are many indications. It is not a problem in the ability to measure. That is the great difficulty in quantum theory. But never mind — for our purposes, all I want to say is this: okay, but explaining it through quantum theory is like an English-English dictionary, because you explain something unclear through something even less clear. So that explains nothing. What I wanted was the opposite — to use the solution of Zeno’s arrow paradox to provide some insight into the uncertainty principle or the principle of complementarity. And what does that basically mean? It means that apparently what we see in Zeno’s arrow is that when you look with glasses — we and our glasses are static glasses. We see positions. When we look, we see what stands before us. When something moves, we have no way to see its motion. We see its position each time in another place. Therefore we get tangled up in Zeno’s arrow paradox, because we do not understand — so when exactly does it move? What do you mean, when does it move? If you wore the glasses of velocity, you would see it always only moving, and you would ask when it stands still. All right? It is only a matter of which glasses you are wearing. So essentially I called it there, let us say, two theoretical instruments: an ideal camera and an ideal movie camera. An ideal camera is a device that captures positions. So in order to represent velocity, you need to photograph it, sample it at high speed — yes, exactly, as they do in cinema — sample it rapidly, each time another position. Then your brain fills it in and it looks like motion, but nothing there moves. It is a collection of static positions. But that is only because our ordinary vision is like a camera. All right? Then when we build a movie camera, that is not really something that captures velocity; it is just a collection of cameras. Because we do not know how to work with movie cameras; we know what a camera is, we do not know what a movie camera is. But imagine there were another creature whose sensory system were different, and it perceived only velocities, not positions. For it, position would be the integral of velocity; it would not be something one really sees. Yes, it sees velocities; it does not see positions. It simply has no instrument that sees positions, no eyes. It has a movie camera — I don’t know exactly what that means, it is hard to imagine, it is an abstraction. Okay? So it sees like that. Then of course for it the paradox of the flying arrow would be formulated in reverse. Meaning, it would ask: yes, I see all the time that it is moving — when does it stand still? Wait, if it is moving, how does it never reach any place? Maybe that is how it would ask it, or something like that. Now what does that actually mean? That clearly both its limitation, the limitation of this imaginary creature, and my limitation, stem from the fact that we can wear only one type of glasses at a time. We cannot wear both pairs at once. Okay? Maybe reality does not allow it, never mind, but it is impossible in principle. Not that we are not nimble enough — impossible. Impossible. If you are with these glasses, that’s it; you cannot wear those glasses, and vice versa. Even if someone were equipped with both kinds of glasses, he could not use them simultaneously, together. Okay? And that is exactly the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle basically says that if you are wearing position-glasses, you will not succeed in measuring velocity, and vice versa. Therefore in quantum theory too, by the way, on the basis of this principle they define two pictures in which I describe reality: the position picture and the momentum picture. The position picture is just a description of reality by means of a camera. The momentum picture is a description of reality by means of a movie camera. And this is not just my idea. Yes, but that is not inability to measure. No, that is what I am saying. Just as the arrow has both a position and a velocity… no, but that is not exact. Because I am not talking here about the question of the ability to measure. These are two ways of looking that do not fit together in themselves. Not that I cannot. These are two ways of looking that truly do not fit together, not because I have some limitation. It simply does not fit. You cannot look at both together, but not because you are limited. So I cannot also look at the arrow both… Right, but I am saying it has both a velocity and a position. Right, it has both a velocity and a position. A definite velocity at that exact moment and a definite position. So that means that also on the quantum level, in uncertainty, it has a definite momentum and a definite position. Right, right — but what you measure, what you call momentum and position there, those do not speak to each other. But this is an essential inability. It is not a matter of improving the technology or something like that. Not that I know enough, of course. Now then, what does this actually say? In fact — never mind the arrow of Zeno for the moment — I am using it to return to the question of different but equivalent descriptions. Okay, a description in terms of a camera and a description in terms of a movie camera: if, say, there were born a creature whose basic perception was movie-camera perception, not camera perception — that is how it would see. By the way, I think I once thought that the Doppler effect — what is the Doppler effect? The Doppler effect is a way of seeing the speed of a car not by subtracting positions and dividing by time. Meaning, two consecutive positions divided by the time it took to pass. That is how we usually define speed. Why? Because we want to define velocity in the terms of a camera. We say: it was here at this time, here at that time, the distance is a meter, it took two seconds, so the velocity is one meter divided by two, namely half. Okay? Half a meter per second. But if I look through the glasses of an ideal movie camera, then I see velocities, not by subtracting positions. Okay? Like the Doppler effect, although in fact the Doppler effect, at least as it is usually explained, is not exactly that — you can still describe it in those terms — but never mind, I think the Doppler effect comes very close to this idea. If there is someone who naturally sees in a Doppler-like way, then he does not need to do the calculations we do, which really translate it into positions. So he is some kind of Dopplerist — he simply sees everything as velocities, everything velocities. The picture he would see is completely different from what you would see, but everything that happens in the world he would explain. There would be no problem. In fact, this is a theorem: the momentum picture and the position picture are equivalent. So everything you describe with one, you can describe with the other. It is just moving to another basis, exactly like those rotations. Moving to another basis. All right? So this is a good example, I think, of two forms of description that do not speak to each other at all. They look completely different. The instrument you use to interact with the world, to observe the world, is entirely different: ideal camera, ideal movie camera. Two completely equivalent physicses. Now imagine that women had an excellent ability to handle movie cameras. Theoretically, right? Then they would have had a completely different physics, and they would master it beautifully, while the men would constantly fail in physics if that is how it were taught. But as it happens, to men’s good fortune, Newton was the one who first significantly advanced physics, and he used the tools we know today, and that is how it developed. No, no, no — it is not because Newton thought it up; it is because human beings are cameras. The instrument they have is a camera. And women and men both have cameras. No, obviously — I’m bringing it as a metaphor. So I am saying: women have something else, not camera and movie camera, because they too have a camera. But they have something else, some other aspect of perception, say, that is different from us. Then physics would look different. I use camera and movie camera because that is the example I have from quantum theory. Yes, but it is hard for me to imagine there is something different in a woman that would have implications for physics, that would look at physics… I do not think one can rule it out. If we have a movie camera and… then no — what is it? It is not a question that she would be unable, again, she can also grasp our physics. She simply has a harder time getting along with it. Okay? It is harder for her, less natural to her, say, if that is the thesis anyway. Okay? It is not that she has a different brain from ours and is an alien, or that I am an alien — depending on your frame of reference. But I am saying the claim could certainly be that a different kind of mind is built in such a way that this conceptual system is harder for it to handle. But if it were formulated in a slightly different conceptual system — not necessarily camera and movie camera, but something more suited to the female mind — then they would get along with it much better. Obviously different styles of explanation can help different students. That is obvious; pedagogy is everyday reality. There are things where a certain style of explanation fits some children very well, and other children will not grasp it at all. Explain it differently, and those children will grasp it beautifully, while maybe the first group will not. Therefore a great deal depends on the way you explain, the way you describe. I see no reason to rule this out. I think it is a claim that can definitely be… to me it even seems very plausible. Not that I know how to produce such a physics. You would need to be a genius like Newton to produce such a physics. Okay? But there is no reason to assume there isn’t such a physics. Why not? I really do not see why not. Because there is no reason to divide between men and women — it is like dividing between a plumber… There are different styles of thinking — what do you mean? There are differences in the thinking of women and men. Again, I do not mean to make this a categorical biological thing, but there are differences. Do you deny that? So why do people say women are weaker in physics — because they are more stupid? I do not think that is true. There are fields in which they do better and fields in which they do less well. Why? Because there are fields where the styles of thought used there suit women better than men. In physics it is not like that. So what does that mean? It means that something in their way of thinking is less adapted to handling the physical system — at least the way we describe it — and if it were a different system, that could definitely reverse. Is today’s physics objective or male physics? Marie Curie, what? Fine, I already said I am not making this deterministic. Obviously there are women who are good at physics, at “male” physics. But as a generalization, in terms of distribution, yes — as a generalization I think that in general the female mind has a harder time, perhaps certainly a harder time, with certain domains of knowledge, and is much more successful in others, and vice versa for men. I do not see why not. It sounds entirely plausible to me, entirely plausible. Fine, I brought all that only to show that one can in principle describe reality on the basis of a completely different system of principles — earth, air, water, and fire in this case — and define every element in nature as some combination of those four elements. In principle that is possible. I see no reason otherwise. Maybe one could even produce some mapping between that description and the description in terms of the elements, and maybe one could not. But again, I do not think our knowledge today necessarily contradicts that conceptual system. It is a different conceptual system. Of course it is much less convenient. They did not succeed in advancing with that conceptual system to the point where they could make predictions, control materials, manipulate them. That is the power of modern chemistry. So obviously it is less effective and less useful technologically and scientifically. Is it less true? I do not know. It may just be a different mode of describing the same thing. It is not like Copernicus. There is no true or false here, and still the Copernican form is much more convenient than the previous Ptolemaic one, the one with epicycles. Much more convenient — but there is no true or false here, only more convenient, that is all. The attempt to interpret darkness as elemental fire or as energy is taking the word darkness out of its plain sense unnecessarily. The rule is that if there is no compelling reason to remove words from their plain literal sense, one does not remove them. It is preferable to interpret them in their plain sense. Only when there is some necessity showing that the expression does not mean its literal sense, does one interpret it in another meaning that is possible according to the rules and usage of the language. Maybe before we continue to the example I just want to comment: then why did the ancients actually do this? Why did they interpret it not in its plain sense? Because their conceptual system and their physical assumptions were such that from their point of view the plain reading really was strained. That is exactly the point. From our point of view, in light of our knowledge today, it is not strained. We are no longer bound to earth, air, water, and fire, to that division, and so it is not strained. Now does that mean that our interpretation today could not take the same blows in another two hundred years? Maybe it could. Therefore I also do not think he pretends to offer here the correct interpretation. Rather, he means to show that if you can interpret in the plain sense, then do so; if not, then work a little harder. But whether you can or cannot interpret something in its plain sense depends very much on your context, on what you were born into, what you came out of. It depends on that very much. Therefore the fact that Maimonides or Nachmanides, it doesn’t matter, took these things and interpreted them that way, is because for them physics meant the Aristotelian system of laws. That’s all. Within that system it was very natural that earth, air, water, and fire would appear there. It made perfect sense, so you have to look — something is missing. Say if I managed to find a fairly good correspondence to the periodic table in Genesis, and I found exactly the number of elements in the periodic table but two were missing. You understand that it would then be very tempting to do some move like the one with darkness: darkness is the element of fire, therefore it will count as fire, okay? And I would do some interpretive gymnastics in order to make it fit, because the comparison with my physics today would strongly invite it. But I think that perhaps in this sense we have advanced a bit more — specifically in the sense in which he is not right — in the sense that we understand that this too depends on context. You never really arrive at a description free of context. We are all context-dependent. I know what I’m saying today sounds terribly postmodern, but I do not mean that intentionally. I do not think this is really postmodernism. I am not claiming that… there can be a description in another system of this one correct thing. That is not postmodernism; there is nothing skeptical or relativistic here in any essential sense. Okay? Often people make this mistake, for example with the theory of relativity. There are always two classic examples brought in favor of relativism: relativity theory and non-Euclidean geometries. Meaning, geometry with a system of assumptions different from the accepted one we learned in high school — that between two points there passes more than one straight line, or that two parallel lines do meet, or whatever, changes of that kind. So the existence of parallel geometries supposedly points to relativity: you are geometric, you look Euclidean, he looks non-Euclidean. Or relativity theory: you see it in an inertial frame, so the laws are one way; in a moving frame, the laws of nature are another way. So basically everyone is right and the whole thing is relative and all is well. That is of course nonsense. It proves exactly the opposite, obviously. Not only does it not prove relativity, it proves the opposite. How was relativity born? What did it come to achieve? All it came to achieve was synchronization between different frames, so that they would describe exactly the same thing and correctly — the one and only physics there is. And in order for that to work, you have to shift time and space and velocities and define some transformation between how it looks from one system and how it looks from another. The same with geometry. Geometry describes different spaces, so you can describe them in different ways. But one and the same space can be described in only one way. If the space is Euclidean, you cannot impose non-Euclidean assumptions on it. There is no such thing. Okay? You are describing a different space, then you describe it with different basic assumptions. So no, there is nothing relative here. And so too here. What I was claiming in its favor is that there are different systems of description of one and the same single truth. There is one and only one truth. Not that there are many truths. But it is true that often an argument between people stems from the fact that they confuse the mode of description with the thing described. For example, when he says that the system of elements we know today has refuted the Greeks’ four elements, in my opinion he falls into exactly that. He basically does not understand that a system of elements is just a mode of description. If the Greeks had said according to their physics that one cannot compose water from hydrogen and oxygen, I would say they are wrong, because one can, and in fact one does. But if they had said: I will describe that process not as the combination of oxygen and hydrogen into water, but as the subtraction of H3O — I remove one H and it becomes water — fine, health to you, that is a different mode of description of the same thing. Do you understand the difference? I am not arguing here for relativism of truth, but for the relativity of its modes of description. So sometimes when we argue and the argument is rooted only in a different mode of description, then indeed yes, it is worthwhile to be aware of that. But to say that all arguments are of that sort — there I disagree. That is already postmodernism. Although the Greeks did not try to describe the world the way the elements describe it; they tried to explain the world — that’s something else. What do you mean? They tried, for example, to explain the “desire” of a stone, and that’s something else. Yes, true — there are things that are different there. By the way, even the stone’s “desire” can also be seen as a description. I once gave a lecture at Bar-Ilan in physics — I came from the yeshivah and asked them to let me give a seminar — because that is exactly what I argued. Namely, that this Aristotelian description of the stone “wanting” to fall downward is a completely equivalent description to ours; there is no problem with it. We know, for example, Fermat’s principle, right? It can describe all of geometrical optics not via laws of reflection and refraction and so on, but through an optimization principle. Exactly. Light chooses the shortest path in terms of time, the path that takes the least time to reach its destination. Assume that, and all of geometrical optics comes out. Everything follows. The laws of refraction — everything comes from it. It is exactly the same thing; completely equivalent. But understand that the second description is teleological. Light chooses the shortest path — what, does it calculate which path is shortest? Ah, it says this is very short, worth taking this route. Obviously it does not do that. Rather, there are two equivalent modes of description. I can describe this causally, and I can describe it teleologically. But these are two mathematical modes of description. It is customary among physicists to think that the first is real and the second is fictional. The causal description of geometrical optics is supposedly the right one, and this is a mathematical curiosity, another mathematically equivalent way to describe the same thing — just a curiosity. And I say: how do you know? Maybe that one is right and yours is the curiosity. More than that: anyone who knows a bit of quantum theory knows that in quantum theory… maybe before quantum theory, in the world of mechanics, for example, we can describe things… this is a description in terms of potentials. Now the description in terms of potentials is teleological, while the description in terms of force is causal. A force acts on you, therefore you move. Right? Now we know the descriptions are equivalent. Force is the gradient of the potential. Okay, the descriptions are completely equivalent. Which is right and which is not right? I do not know which is right and which is not right. Again, usually people think force is the correct description. Potential is a mathematical curiosity that is very useful, simplifies calculations, but it does not really describe reality. In reality there are forces, not potentials. But what do you do with quantum theory? In quantum theory there are no forces at all. There is no description in terms of forces, only in terms of potentials. Schrödinger’s equation has potential in it — kinetic energy plus potential. That is Schrödinger’s equation. There are no forces there at all. Feynman once wrote an article where he defined force within quantum mechanics, and it is so artificial and contrived that if we had started from there, it would have been obvious to us that potential is what is really right and force is some fiction that you managed to define, but it has no… it is obvious that it is artificial. And in all modern physics, by the way, the descriptions are exclusively teleological and not causal. And people do not notice this. All modern physics, all field theory, everything — all of it is descriptions in terms of minimization. Descriptions of finding a minimum of some functional or something like that. All of it is teleological description. There are no causal descriptions; that ended. And for some reason people think Lagrangian mechanics in the nineteenth century is some mathematical curiosity. But in the end all of quantum theory came from there — analytical mechanics. That is, descriptions of the same laws of mechanics by means of minimum principles, just as Fermat did. In other words, the laws of mechanics through principles of minimum — okay? Teleological principles, principles by way of ends. Right? And people treat this as some curiosity that became obsolete by the end of the nineteenth century. But quantum theory says that only this is correct. Newtonian mechanics does not work in quantum theory — not empirically, conceptually. There is no force in quantum theory. The concept of force does not exist there — the most basic concept in Newtonian dynamics. Okay? And people still continue to assume that the causal description is the true one and the teleological one is a curiosity. Therefore I say: here I am not — I do not even know, once I understand that these are just modes of description, whether one can decide what is right and what is wrong. Whether there is any such thing as right and wrong here. I do not know. Maybe there is no right and wrong at all. Is it causal or teleological? I don’t know. There is right and wrong regarding what the trajectory will be — that I can tell you. But is it because of a cause or for the sake of an end? I do not know. When people speak about the stone wanting to fall — that is how I started this whole story. When Aristotle said the stone wants to fall, he did not mean that the stone can choose not to want to. Right? The stone always wants to fall. So you understand that “wants” in this context is a borrowed expression. He did not mean literal desire — yes, it is not that the stone decided to fall. For some reason people translate “wants to fall” and it sounds ridiculous. Of course — but Aristotle did not mean that. Aristotle meant to describe exactly what we describe, just in teleological language, in language of what it wants instead of what pushes it. Just language. He did not mean to say it could want something else. Okay? Fine, so I return here. So he gives you a simple example: “And there arose a new king over Egypt” and so on. In tractate Sotah 11 the Talmud records a dispute between Rav and Shmuel. One said a truly new king, and the other said his decrees were renewed. The one who says a truly new king says: because it is written “new.” And the one who says his decrees were renewed says: because it does not say “and he died and another reigned.” Meaning, according to one view, the context proves that “new” should not be understood in its plain literal sense, because in a historical narrative when a king is replaced, first one tells of the death of the first and then of the rise of the next one. And the fact that here it does not say Pharaoh died compels us to understand that “new” is not in its literal meaning but in a borrowed sense, namely that his policy changed. One can no longer recognize him. And such a use of the word “new” is possible according to the ways of language. But you need a reason. Meaning, because it does not say “and he died and another reigned,” apparently “new” here should be interpreted in a way that is not its simple sense, though it is linguistically possible. That is, it is a possible interpretation in the language, but we would not adopt it if not for the reason. That is what he is saying. As for the second opinion, to interpret it as truly new, the Talmud gives no explanation why he interpreted it as truly new. Why would one need an explanation? It says “new,” so it is new. That’s all. The one who does not interpret it literally needs explanations. He means to say that if you can interpret it literally and you have no reason to remove it from its plain sense, why would you remove it? If you can interpret it literally, then do that. There is a statement of the Beit Yosef — I once saw it, someone once showed it to me, Rabbi Moshe Levi of blessed memory brings it in the name of the Beit Yosef in Yoreh De’ah — that it is preferable to force the language a bit than to force the reasoning. I always heard it in the name of the Chazon Ish, but it is a Beit Yosef. Better to strain the wording than to strain the logic. Meaning, if you have two options — either interpret somewhat far from the wording but it fits the reasoning better, or interpret close to the wording but it is harder in reasoning — which is preferable? The first option is preferable. You pay in the coin of linguistic convenience for explanatory convenience. But clearly where there is no difficulty in reasoning, the wording is the basic consideration. Okay? You do not cling to the wording by force. If it is difficult for the reasoning, then you bend the language a bit. But if there is no reason, then stay with the language. And later there: “who did not know Joseph” — “he acted as though he did not know him at all.” Because even according to the one who says he was truly new, it cannot be that he had not heard of Joseph, for Joseph had been so famous in Egypt. Rather, he acted as though he did not know. Here again one is compelled to interpret “did not know” not in the literal sense. Again, he wants to say: what does that mean — “he acted as though he did not know him at all”? If he was not a new king, then what does “who did not know Joseph” mean? He was not really new. Right? So he says: “as though he did not know him at all.” What does that mean? Even if he really was new, it still cannot be that he had not heard of Joseph. So in any event you must conclude that “who did not know Joseph” is not simply to be taken literally, but rather as someone who did not recognize or acknowledge Joseph fully. And if that is so, then you can say the same thing about the old king too, and then it is no longer forced. He is trying to show that one can read these things in their plain sense without paying with an additional interpretive strain. Okay, fine.