Definition of Concepts 5

Table of Contents

• The two poles: an encyclopedic entry versus pure poetry
• Zen as a metaphor for a non-essential medium
• Shofar blowing as abstraction and a song without words
• A continuum of phenomena between the poles and the difficulty of defining “poeticity”
• Poetry in the Torah, Psalms, and literal message
• Parable, context, and the need to signal to the reader: “this is a poem”
• The heap paradox, Russell, and the attempt to avoid mistaken formal definitions
• Modern poetry, meter and rhyme, and ambiguity as a poetic virtue
• Kitsch according to Tomas Kulka and the distinction between a situation and added artistic value
• Photography, Alex Levac, and grasping meaning that is not in the details
• Art, a television report, and a documentary film as a continuum
• Duchamp, Gideon Ofrat, and the museum as an indication rather than a definition
• Kishon, mockery of the avant-garde, and the possibility of being “outside the context”
• From inside and from outside: Jewish law, law, and apprenticeship with Torah scholars
• Rejecting postmodern despair and rejecting sweeping contempt

Summary

General overview

The text proposes understanding poetry and art through a continuum between two abstract poles: a prosaic-encyclopedic pole that conveys information directly, and a pole of “pure poetry” or “pure art,” in which the connection between signifier and signified is neither literal nor linear. The meaning in a poem is not the explanation of the words, but something indirect that depends on the reader, the context, and the mode of reading. That is why sometimes you have to signal to the reader that this is “a poem,” so it will be read through the right lenses. The proposal expands to art in general through examples like shofar blowing, kitsch, photography, and Duchamp, and emphasizes that even when the external criteria are present, the artistic value still depends on the added value the creator puts in, and not on the situation itself. The text opposes both the postmodern despair of “there is no definition and anything goes” and sweeping contempt for modern art, arguing that both extremes rest on a shared assumption that misses the nuances and the indirect meaning.

The two poles: an encyclopedic entry versus pure poetry

The text defines one pole as a technical encyclopedia entry whose purpose is to convey information without investment in form, order, or choice of words. Opposed to it, it places a second, abstract and unrealistic pole of pure poetry, in which the relationship between signifier and signified is not literal, and therefore one cannot “understand a poem” by translating it into a verbal explanation. The text argues that the words are only a medium, and a line like “Once there was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood” is not there to report a fact, but to create an atmosphere and evoke something reader-dependent; anyone who locates the meaning of the poem in the fact itself has not understood that this is a poem, but prose.

Zen as a metaphor for a non-essential medium

The text brings a story about a German philosopher who studied Zen and was told by his teacher that he had to choose a medium such as flower arranging, fencing, or archery, because the principle is learned equally through any of them. The text compares this to a poem and argues that words are a medium through which “something more abstract passes,” and not their simple meaning. In that sense, it says, one could in principle convey “the same thing” through a completely different poem, and even through a different medium like a picture, because the connection between the thing and the medium carrying it is indirect and not necessary.

Shofar blowing as abstraction and a song without words

The text uses shofar blowing to describe extreme abstraction: when you strip a poem of its words, what remains is a melody, and when you strip a melody of its modulations, what remains is a simple blast, “simply producing a sound,” without tone or movement. The text presents this as an abstract ideal of an extreme poem that would have no words and would have “nothing” in it, but argues that there is no way to do this in practice, because one must pass through words and through a medium.

A continuum of phenomena between the poles and the difficulty of defining “poeticity”

The text places between the two poles a continuum of literary phenomena such as ballads, epics, poems with and without structures, meters, rhymes, and melodies, and argues that one can “arrange them” along that axis. It says there is “a certain degree of poeticity” in many manifestations, but that in order to speak about degrees, one has to define “poeticity in its purity” by means of an abstraction that is not any of the familiar concrete manifestations. The text connects poeticity to the claim that the more the relation between the words and the idea behind them is vague, indirect, and hard to understand, the more “poetic” it is, because the message is not the explanation of the words.

Poetry in the Torah, Psalms, and literal message

The text argues that the Song of Ha'azinu is “not really poetry” according to the proposed definition, because it conveys content and the message is “embedded in the meaning of the words,” even if it is written in the brick-over-brick layout. It also presents the Song of the Well and the Song at the Sea as examples in which the content does not hide anything beyond the meaning of the words, including gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, and the communication of information or emotion in a direct way. The text argues that every poem conveys a message, but the distinction is that in poetry the relation between the message and the words is not direct, whereas in those songs the connection is direct, and therefore they are closer to the pole of prose.

Parable, context, and the need to signal to the reader: “this is a poem”

The text says that a parable has a poetic dimension because it is indirect, and that if nobody told you it was a parable, you would think it was just a story about a fox. It argues that a poem “has to appear in a book of poems,” in the sense that the reader has to be oriented to the context and to the “glasses” through which to look at it, in order to understand whether the interpretation lies in the meaning of the words or is indirect and more complex. The text uses this to explain the brick-over-brick writing in the Torah as well, as an indication that signals to the reader to read it as poetry, similar to printing it inside a book of poems.

The heap paradox, Russell, and the attempt to avoid mistaken formal definitions

The text compares the definition of poetry to the difficulty of defining a “heap,” and emphasizes that there is a continuum of “heapness” without a sharp boundary such as “from 12 stones and up.” It mentions “Russell’s theory of types” and the idea of solving paradoxes through a language that does not allow them to be formulated, comparing this to a formal definition that is consistent but not correct. The text uses this to justify an abstraction that tries to capture the essence of poeticity rather than an external criterion such as writing format alone.

Modern poetry, meter and rhyme, and ambiguity as a poetic virtue

The text notes that modern poems are less strict about meter and rhyme, and suggests that in a certain sense they are closer to pure poetry than classical poetry is. It formulates the proposal that poeticity increases the less the message is identical to the meaning of the words, and the more indirect the connection becomes.

Kitsch according to Tomas Kulka and the distinction between a situation and added artistic value

The text brings Tomas Kulka and his article “What Is Wrong with Kitsch?” and presents a problem: a kitsch work can have high technical ability and arouse strong emotion, and still be regarded as inferior art. The text describes Kulka’s claim that the excitement in kitsch comes from the situation in the picture and not from what the artist added, and therefore there is no “added value from the painter.” It states that true artistic value is an emotion that arises from what the creator has “invested” in the work, and not from the fact described in itself.

Photography, Alex Levac, and grasping meaning that is not in the details

The text distinguishes between a family photograph that preserves information and artistic photography that captures something an ordinary person would not have seen. It gives the example of a photograph by Alex Levac in Herzliya with Herzl, a sign reading “Hebrew labor,” and Arab workers, and argues that in prose this would be a description that says nothing, whereas in the photograph the message is “not in the details that appear in the picture.” The text compares this directly to poetry and argues that the meaning in a work of art is not simple facts, but something dependent on context and interpretation.

Art, a television report, and a documentary film as a continuum

The text sets up a similar continuum in art as well: a television report is practical information, whereas a documentary film can be art even when it describes reality, because presentation, angles, and perspective create value that is not merely information. It says that here too there are “two abstractions with a whole continuum of levels between them,” and that this approach explains our intuitions about what counts as art and what does not.

Duchamp, Gideon Ofrat, and the museum as an indication rather than a definition

The text mentions “Duchamp’s urinal” and Gideon Ofrat’s position that art is whatever is placed in a museum. It rejects this as a definition and adopts it only as an indication, while arguing that the art is not the urinal itself but “what the artist does through the urinal.” The text adds that art “in its purity” may look to the layman like a joke, similar to a simple shofar blast, and connects this also to Rashi on “a still, small voice” as the grasping of abstraction without a concrete medium.

Kishon, mockery of the avant-garde, and the possibility of being “outside the context”

The text presents Kishon as someone who mocks Duchamp-like works and sees them as jokes, and opposite this it raises the possibility that the mocking viewer is doing so because he is outside the context and lacks sensitivity to non-literal interpretation. The text admits skepticism and the possibility that some works are nonsense, but also argues that art depends on what the creator does through the object and not on the object itself. It gives examples such as the sheep and the simple drawings in Saint-Exupéry to show that technical simplicity can be “pure poetry” by virtue of the context and what it brings about.

From inside and from outside: Jewish law, law, and apprenticeship with Torah scholars

The text brings a debate surrounding Aharon Barak and the legal system to illustrate how an external perspective interprets a field as arbitrary and agenda-driven, whereas someone on the inside identifies a “discourse,” arguments that are correct and incorrect, and lines that may not be crossed. It compares this to Jewish law and explains the need for “apprenticeship with Torah scholars” and professional internships as a way to acquire a “sense of smell” for what is right to do, beyond the study of written material. The text uses this to explain modern art as well, as a language with nuances that a layman may fail to perceive.

Rejecting postmodern despair and rejecting sweeping contempt

The text argues that the conclusion, “It’s complicated, there’s no definition, and everyone can do whatever they want,” is a mistaken conclusion that comes from despair and not from necessity. It states that both extremes—the postmodern “anything goes” and the classical critique that “it’s all nonsense”—rest on a shared assumption that ignores the indirect meaning and the nuances that define art. The text seeks to maintain a complex position that recognizes both laziness and lack of talent in some avant-garde work, and also the possibility of a “genuine statement” that someone outside the context misses, while distinguishing between a definition and an indication, such as being displayed in a museum.

Something very useful is to define two poles, or two coordinates, between which all these phenomena somehow related to poetry appear. I once defined the two poles as a kind of stretching-out. One is an encyclopedic entry, an encyclopedic entry even in the completely technical sense, yes. It simply conveys information without any investment in how it’s written, or in what order, or which words are chosen—just to transmit the information. And opposite that stands the second pole, which really is an even more abstract and even less realistic pole: pure poetry—well, pure prose, yes. Pure poetry is something where the connection between signifier and signified is not literal, not linear, yes. Meaning, it’s not just the meaning of the words. In other words, when you want to understand what a poem means, you can’t translate it into some path through the meaning of the words—that’s not the right way to understand it. I think I mentioned that Zen sage, yes, that German philosopher who went to study Zen, and his teacher asked him: what do you want to study—flower arranging, fencing, archery? And he said, I want to study Zen, not this or that or that. And the teacher said, yes yes, but decide whether you want flower arranging, fencing, or archery. And the insight was that it really doesn’t matter which medium you choose—you’ll learn Zen. You can learn Zen through flower arranging, and you learn exactly the same thing, or through archery, or through fencing. And in all those options you learn exactly the same thing—meaning, it’s the same principle, yes. And in that sense too, a poem basically—the words are some kind of medium through which something more abstract passes, not the simple meaning of the words. Yes, “Once there was a solitary lamp at the edge of a neighborhood”—it’s not trying to tell me that there once was a lamp at the edge of a neighborhood, that’s not the point. It’s trying to draw me into some atmosphere of place, of time, of how it feels, how people felt then, and to awaken something in me—I don’t know exactly what, and that can also depend on the reader, and certainly not just can depend—it does depend on the reader and on the context and on many things. But there’s something here where the meaning of the poem is not that there was once a solitary lamp at the edge of a neighborhood. Anyone who thinks that’s the meaning of the poem hasn’t understood that this is a poem, okay? He thinks this is prose. I think I mentioned that Bialik wrote somewhere: if I could have written it in prose, I wouldn’t have written a poem about it. There are things that are very hard—or maybe impossible—to convey in prose, and since that’s so, you write a poem about it. For me, prose again is that abstract pole over there, the coarsest, most bare-bones thing possible, yes, some encyclopedic entry written in the most prosaic way possible—yes, most prosaic exactly. Written as simple transfer of information without thinking about form, or how you present it, or organize it—something absolutely, exactly prosaic. So that’s what I call prose, not literature. Literature lies in the middle. And opposite that is pure poetry, which of course is completely detached from words. I think I brought the shofar blast as an example, yes—the shofar blast is some kind of abstraction, the blast, yes, the simple blast, not the broken sounds. Pure music? No no, a shofar blast is even more than music; a shofar blast is the greatest abstraction. I talked about that, right? When you strip the poem of its words, what remains is melody. When you strip the melody of the modulations upon it, you’re left with a blast. Just sounding a tone—nothing, no shading, no movement, a kind of completely primordial something. So making that kind of abstraction from a poem, yes—a poem without words. And if I could write a poem that belonged to that really extreme pole, then that poem would have no words and would have nothing at all. But there’s no way to do that; you have to do it through words. Okay, so you choose some medium. On the conceptual level you could have chosen another medium. Meaning, another poet—“no two prophets prophesy in the same style,” yes—another poet might convey the same message, maybe like with Zen, through a completely different poem that doesn’t deal at all with lamps or solitude or the edge of neighborhoods, but with something entirely different, and still the… the wrapping might have been different… no, that’s translation, that’s another language, translating one-to-one. Here it’s not translation, it’s like with Zen. Not one-to-one exactly; you can sort of build… one-to-one maybe not one-to-one in the words, one-to-one in the ideas, doesn’t matter. But here you don’t have to go through lamps and neighborhoods and all that. You want to create some mood in the person, or I don’t know what you want—I don’t even know if “mood” is the right word. Something else. I don’t know exactly what. But maybe you could create that same thing in a completely different way, entirely, with no connection at all—maybe even through a picture, not through a poem, I don’t know. Meaning, this is something whose connection to the medium carrying it is not necessary. In any case, it’s very indirect; let’s call it that. Even if it were one-to-one, maybe it is one-to-one, I have no idea—it may be that every poem really is such that there cannot be two different poems that express exactly the same thing. That may be. But still, the connection is indirect and not direct, even if it is one-to-one. Now in the middle, in the space between those two poles, sit all the other literary-poetic phenomena that really confused us so much at the beginning when we tried to define what a poem is. There are ballads and epics and poems without structures and with structures and with meters and without meters and with melodies and without melodies and all sorts of things, and you can arrange them. Poetry in the Torah, for example. Poetry in the Torah—at least some of the songs in the Torah—are poems, for example Ha’azinu. I think Ha’azinu is not really poetry. Because Ha’azinu conveys content. It’s written in the brick-over-brick form the way poetry is written in the Torah, but really all in all—what do you mean not poetry? It’s closer to the pole of prose than other songs are. It’s not prose, but it’s closer, and farther from pure poetry. Because it’s basically a poem that comes in the brick-over-brick format, but it conveys information. It conveys a message embedded in the meaning of the words. The message is embedded in the meaning of the words. Now most of the songs in the Torah. The opening lines certainly not. What? The opening lines, “May my teaching drip like rain, may my speech flow like dew.” That’s an opening, right. The opening maybe really less so, you’re right. Maybe that’s even a good example, because really the other songs are even less like poems. Say the Song of the Well: “Spring up, O well—sing to it—the well that the princes dug, that the nobles of the people excavated.” You’re thanking the Holy One, blessed be He, for the well and so on. That seems to me not to conceal behind it anything beyond the meaning of the words. It’s written in a poetic form and so forth, but it’s basically prose by this definition. Or the Song at the Sea: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously.” I’m saying thank you very much to the Holy One, blessed be He, for helping me and splitting the sea and drowning the… There is also expression of information, of feeling, of… Doesn’t matter. The information is emotion, maybe—what does that have to do with it? If I convey emotion, still I’m conveying that information, I’m saying thank you to the Holy One, blessed be He, conveying to Him the message I want to convey. And every poem conveys a message. That’s what I’m saying. A poem—first of all, even that, there are many people who would be offended if you told them their poem conveys a message; sometimes “message” or “meaning” in a work of art is considered a dirty word. Fine, that’s a bit exaggerated, I think. But the message—what I argued earlier is not that there’s no message, but that the connection between the message and the words is indirect. Meaning, it creates a mood in some sense. Maybe you could create it another way too, I don’t know, but it’s not the lamp and not the neighborhood, okay? That’s the point. Now here, in the Song at the Sea, it really is just that. I’m saying to the Holy One, blessed be He, thank you very much that He triumphed gloriously, that horse and rider He cast into the sea; thank you for drowning them and helping me; everything’s fine. That’s what I said there. Now that sounds terribly diminishing, because there’s a lot of pathos there and a lot of… and it’s also written brick-over-brick, but all in all, when you look at it beyond the external markers, by the definition I’m giving here, it’s not a poem. Is Psalms poetry? What? Is Psalms poetry? Psalms also not really. Those are psalms, and psalms for me are one of the things, one of the layers on this axis between the two poles. No, but you started with “what is poetry?” Now you’re saying, wait, what is poetry? The Song at the Sea, the songs in the Torah—that’s not poetry. The songs in Psalms—that’s not poetry. So I asked: what is a heap, right? So I said there’s a continuum of degrees of heap-ness. Okay? So when we speak in ordinary language I say I have a heap of stones, and I have a heap of, I don’t know, books, whatever. Okay? But what is a heap? I’m not entering into a definition here. I’m saying there is a degree of heap-ness here; that’s basically what I mean in everyday language. Same thing here. That’s my proposal; I’m making a proposal. I’m saying there is a certain degree of poeticness in this thing. Obviously there is some degree of poeticness both in the Song at the Sea and in Ha’azinu and in Psalms—each has some degree of poeticness. But it’s not enough. I want to understand what poeticness is before I talk about some degree of poeticness. So for that I need to produce an abstraction that is none of the poems we know. But by definition that’s so. That’s what I’m saying, it’s not an accident. By definition, that is exactly the problem. The difficulty of this field is exactly because when it appears in its purity, it’s not—we don’t know any creature that’s really pure, a pure poem. And that’s what confuses people. And therefore people say, wait, it’s complex, you can’t define it, and all that. I say not true, you can define it quite well. Just don’t look at the phenomena you encounter as expressing the thing in full. Understand that they contain a certain poetic aspect. These have meter. But the content is literal. Those have no meter at all, they’re written in the form of a poem like Natan Zach, not Alterman, or whatever, something else. Yossi Babli, David Avidan, maybe Pinchas Sadeh, Yossi Gamzu and so on. More modern poems. More modern poems, so they don’t really insist on meter and rhyme and things like that. In a certain sense that is closer to pure poetry than classical poetry. So you’re basically saying that the more blurred and difficult to understand the connection is between the words and the idea behind them, the more poetic it is. נכון. More indirect. That the message is not the interpretation of the words. That’s the proposal I’m making. That’s the definition. Why? It’s very hard to… Exactly for that reason I give this example, or examples in general, because through examples I know how to convey things. If I could write this in prose, I wouldn’t bring examples. Meaning I’m trying to convey… Look, you’re facing this kind of complexity, you have to deal with it. I don’t know, I feel I have to deal with it. Brick-over-brick—is that a definition…? That’s just like defining a heap as twelve stones and up. I can define it and it will be consistent and I won’t have any paradox. So what? It’s not true. Why? Because it’s not true. A heap can also be eight stones sometimes, and five stones sometimes, I don’t know, depending on the context, depending on… There’s no definition. “Twelve” is a formal definition; it doesn’t really solve the problem for me. I can… I talked about Russell’s theory of types, yes, where he proposed a language in which it is forbidden to express the problems, and thus he solved them. Yes, that’s Stalin’s method for solving paradoxes. Meaning, you formulate a language in which the paradox cannot be formulated, define a language in which the paradox cannot be formulated, and everything is fine, problem solved. Really, here too I could solve the heap paradox: twelve stones and up is a heap. Excellent definition, passes every logical test, gets me into no paradox. It has one and only one problem: it’s not correct. Because that’s not the definition of a heap. Meaning, we know in language, when we use the term “heap,” that’s not what we mean. But on the other hand we see there’s a wide variety of phenomena we call a heap, and they also appear in different intensities. That gives me a clue that the concept of heap in its purity appears in different doses in the concrete heaps I encounter. And then I say the same thing—of course it’s more complicated—but I’m trying to convey the same idea in the field of poetry. But you still define them as a heap. So I say, “heap” is an everyday-language expression. They contain a degree of heap-ness. So I say they contain a degree of poeticness. Right, that’s what I’m saying. But what is poetry? It’s not enough to say there’s a degree of poeticness. What is poeticness? A degree of what? So I have to define the concept of poeticness in its purity before I enter the question of how much it appears in each place. And in order to define that concept I need to make some abstraction that goes beyond the concrete phenomena we encounter and know—ballads and epics and psalms and songs in the Bible and all sorts of things like that. The feeling… And I’m proposing—this is a proposal—I say again, I have no way to defend it except whether you feel as I do. I’m trying to convey to you my feeling about this issue, and either I succeeded or I didn’t. It may be that you disagree. A parable? A parable has a certain poetic dimension, simply by virtue of not being direct. Not direct. By virtue of not being… Exactly, a parable—if they didn’t tell you it was a parable, you’d think it was a story about a fox. Right? The moment they tell you it’s a parable, that’s the whole point. Therefore a poem has to appear in a book of poems. If it doesn’t appear in a book of poems, it’s not a poem. But that’s not because whatever appears in a book of poems is the definition of a poem. That’s Gideon Ofrat’s despair with “whatever is displayed in a museum.” Rather, you have to explain to people in what context, with what glasses, to come when they read this thing. Because he needs to understand: is the interpretation embedded in the literal meaning of the words, or is the interpretation something more complex or more indirect? So you have to explain to him: listen, I wrote a poem here, because when you read it, read it in that way. You have to know, in order to know on what plane to relate to it. And when you say… say in prose, you don’t need to say anything. You don’t need to say it’s prose; everybody knows it’s prose. Right? With a parable, sometimes you need to say it’s a parable. Why? Because there’s a poetic dimension here. But a poem really… Right. So it’s already close to the pole of pure poetry. Exactly. And when not, then it depends on context. Right, there are things that don’t need to appear in a book of poems for us to understand that they are a poem. And there are things that do. I think that’s exactly the point. But why not go from the particular to the general and say: we know “Spring up, O well” is a poem, even though “Spring up, O well” has no deep intention at all. Now the Torah says it is a poem, it is poetry. Now it doesn’t fit the rule. Suppose there isn’t… So I say: propose another rule for me. Okay, then I’ll give a rule. Suppose another rule is: a sequence of words with a certain structure. It can be the brick-over-brick structure… The way it’s written? Is a poem dependent on writing? No, because for example a parable… A parable—where is it? It’s written continuously. And computer code is also a sequence of words with a certain structure, and that certainly isn’t a poem. Wait, to define something as a poem by how… You see, I brought this example last time, remember? What he did to my message—where is it? Wait, but there has to be some kind of logical sense. What is “logical sense”? I don’t know. Suppose. The fact that someone arranged it in two… Wait, so what is this logical sense you’re talking about? There is some kind of logic to it. A poem, yes, is called that, brick-over-brick. In rhyme there’s logic. What do you mean logic? I didn’t understand the logic. There is form to it, I agree. They wrote it in some form that isn’t ordinary prose. Right. But if you claim the writing is the criterion for why this is a poem, that sounds very strange to me. The writing is an indication that this is a poem. As I said last time, I think that this special writing form is instead of putting it in a book of poems, because the Torah is one book. When the Torah wants to mark for me: here, read this as a poem, it writes it brick-over-brick. It’s like printing something inside a book of poems. Because I’ll tell you, I’m going, so to speak, from the particular to the general. Meaning, if they tell me “Spring up, O well” is poetry, then first of all it is poetry. Now I see there’s nothing deep in it, nothing… and still the Torah calls it, let’s say, poetry for the sake of discussion. So poetry—your definition, let’s call it organic poetry, deep poetry. But what is shared by those two things? In the end I’m striving for the most basic foundation. What will be true of all these appearances in which I diagnose some poetic dimension? What will be true of all of them? That’s what matters to me. Afterward, when I get to the Torah, then I say: there is a poetic dimension here by my definition. But according to your view, “Spring up, O well”—what is it, how do you classify it? So I say, maybe you say it has nothing at all; there is some poetic dimension here because it really expresses the fact that the words had to be chosen, right? This is no longer an encyclopedia in the sense… because they wrote it in some form that isn’t mere message transfer. They couldn’t have written it “There was a well here, thank you very much Holy One, blessed be He, yes, it sustained us, everything is fine,” right? Meaning, they wrote it in some form where the form they chose matters, the words they chose matter. So that means there is a poetic dimension here. But that poetic dimension is limited, because in the end after I chose these words and not others, practically speaking, when I want to understand what it says, it’s what is written there, not much beyond that. And therefore I say: these are complex phenomena, and I have to make some leap that I don’t know how to justify. I can try to explain my feelings, or why I think this is the definition of poetry and how it explains all our intuitions about the different phenomena—and either you’ll agree with me or not. Meaning, I don’t know. That’s exactly the problem with a field like this. On the other hand, I think this kind of problematic nature—that’s what I’m trying to persuade you of—this kind of problematic nature shouldn’t bring us to despair, like those who didn’t write the encyclopedia entry because they despaired since it’s terribly complex. And I’m saying: look, here is an orderly system, an orderly systematic way to deal with complex problems. Now maybe you’ll propose something else, and maybe you’ll have a theory that will convince me. But by all means, let’s hear it—if you have some definition of the concept, a general definition of the concept of poetry that will explain all the shades and all the meanings and what they have in common, maybe I’m wrong. By all means, this really isn’t something that I… it’s not a simple physical observation. But it’s an observation of ideas, an observation of more abstract phenomena. And still I think the observation gives more or less this thing, it seems to me—that’s what I’m trying to say. Does a bill of divorce also have a definition? What? Does a bill of divorce also have a definition? A bill of divorce, the giving of a get, what I talked about last time. So that too has a definition. Here, that’s something less… interesting question, I’ve never tried to formulate the definition, but let’s say there is a definition in that sense—in the sense that what I said is that in the end, after all the examples we get in the Talmud, some kind of feeling is formed in us of what proper delivery of a bill of divorce is. That’s the definition. Now whether I manage to put that feeling into words or not—that’s a question of how gifted a poet I am. Can you define it without words? Well, that’s exactly the point. No, a definition yes, but that’s why I’m saying what the definition expresses—you can’t… No, I’m saying what the definition expresses is that same feeling. The question is whether I know how to express that in words—that’s a matter of talent. There are people who know how to formulate better, people who know how to formulate less well. I assume maybe a good poet or, I don’t know, a good philosopher, will be able more easily to pour that feeling into words. But the Talmud, in these examples, skips over the need for words because it really felt it couldn’t formulate it in words. It gives you many examples, and learn it like some kind of machine learning, you know—you take examples, you learn, you tweak your neurons a bit until it comes together and you understand what a valid delivery of a bill of divorce is. Okay, there’s a nice example of this way of looking that will take us beyond poetry, because I think it also begins to approach the question of what art is. As I said here, poetry is only one branch of art, and it seems to me that what I described here is perhaps true of all fields of art, of art in general. So there is—maybe I mentioned it once, I don’t remember anymore—the essays on what kitsch is. I didn’t mention it? There’s someone who sits in Tel Aviv cafés named Thomas Kulka; that’s what I once heard from a good friend of mine who knew him. I only… Thomas Kulka. A Swiss fellow originally. A real person? I thought that was some joke. No no no, totally real. And I read his essays. I didn’t know him, but I have a friend who knew him. He was at Tel Aviv University and wrote various essays on the subject of kitsch. What is kitsch? What’s wrong with kitsch? In fact one of his essays is called “What Is Wrong with Kitsch?” What? There’s a Wikipedia entry on kitsch. Ah, okay. Need to look there. They probably put in at least some of his essays too. In any case, so you’re saying that work they did do, unlike with poetry. Anyway—what’s wrong with kitsch? So he tries there to develop criteria for what good art is, say in a painting. Not specifically kitsch, not only in paintings, but say a picture of a tearful child in the light of sunset, okay? On the seashore. And it can be a picture of excellent technical ability. It’s not poor technical skill, and it also arouses some emotion in you, which is what you expect a work of art to do. So what’s the problem? Meaning, as I recall, he gives a list there of criteria for what counts as art, and this meets all of them. So what exactly is wrong with kitsch? Maybe it is art, but it’s bad art. Why? Why? It does everything in the best way possible—arouses strong emotions in you, has excellent technical abilities. In certain kitschy works, the painter’s technical abilities are excellent, and still the feeling is that there is something here—bad art, inferior in some sense. And the question is why? In what sense? What does that mean? The Wikipedia definition of kitsch is something that… is a concept not well defined. Okay, so they didn’t do the job there either. Okay. That entry on poetry I can also write: a concept that is not well defined. Wait, what’s the definition? That’s the opening line, not the whole entry presumably. Well anyway, Wikipedia is only supposed to collect what exists, not invent definitions of its own. They have an ideology. Anyway, yes, my son—I’m sensitive about Wikipedia, my son is one of the… No, according to the rules there are principles for this, meaning you’re not supposed to do original research. My son writes a lot on Wikipedia. Once when they filmed something on Wikipedia in Israel they filmed my son, so that was cute. Anyway, he even got to formulas there—that’s how I got to this essay. I’m leafing through a philosophy journal and suddenly I find formulas. I said, my eyes lit up, how wonderful. I always love formulas in philosophical essays. So he made a formula for the artistic value of a work. The sum of the emotion it arouses, the technical ability—he assigned variables and sigma and divided by I don’t know exactly, he made some mathematical expression that defines… He didn’t do much with it of course; it was only an illustration. But then you’re disappointed, at the end you’re always disappointed—philosophers don’t really do mathematics. But he proposed a formula and said that kitsch fits it very well. Excellent artistic value by the accepted definitions. Let’s take the accepted definitions—everything’s fine. So what’s wrong with it? He has a series of essays, beautiful—I so enjoyed reading them, really beautiful essays. I recommend you read them. Surely it’s online somewhere, I don’t know where. I read it in Iyyun. At least one essay appeared in Iyyun, but he has several, so… So basically he wants to claim the following. He says that what arouses emotion in a kitsch picture is the situation, not the picture. Of the painter in the picture, or the situation you’re in? No, the situation in the picture. It’s basically a photograph, not a painting. Doesn’t matter if not… even if the situation didn’t exist and the painter invented it, what arouses in you the… In other words, the point is: what is the painter’s added value? If you saw such a child crying in the light of the… in the light of the sunset, you would be moved to the same degree. There is no added value from the painter. The painter added nothing. He conveyed to you an image, a picture of a situation that stirs emotion in you. That’s all. And that is not artistic value. Artistic value means that your emotion should come from what the painter invested in the matter, not from the situation he painted. Meaning, the artistic value is the added value the painter inserted into the matter. And if it arouses some emotion in you, then you have an artistic emotion. Okay, so the work of art did that to you, not what the work conveys to you, because in reality all sorts of things can happen. And that raises very interesting questions about why photography is art. It’s very interesting because photography, ostensibly, conveys the situation. But still, even in photography, there’s Roland Barthes’s book on photography, that also touches on this a bit, though in other matters. So photography seemingly gives you the situation directly—so why is it art? But the fact is, I don’t perceive situations that Alex Levac perceives. Ah, there are plays of light and shadow there. Yes, plays, but still, reality made those. Not entirely; depends how he brought in the shadow. But reality made it; he only captured it, he only seized it. This painter too—you could say the brush did it, meaning… Not the brush. But the play of light and those things were there before the camera too, even without the camera. No, not always; sometimes a photograph doesn’t look exactly like what you’d see if you were standing there. Fine, those are effects of the camera itself, but I don’t think that’s the definition of photographic art. That’s not the point. In photographic art I think the point is precisely—meaning, you seize that same situation that anyone else would have passed by. Like there were a few such photographs and they’re really so beautiful because they’re completely prosaic, meaning this is a situation I’m sure I passed by a hundred thousand times, and until I saw it inside a photography book—which not for nothing reminds me of a book of poetry—until I saw it in a photography book I didn’t understand the beauty of the matter. There’s an Alex Levac photograph, yes, with “Hebrew labor,” it appears on the cover of his book, in Herzliya there, where Herzl appears—you know, at that intersection on the Haifa road… with the workers, exactly, with the Arab workers renovating that sign about Hebrew labor, with Herzl appearing there above, and workers… Now I would pass by that and not see it at all. Meaning, obviously Arab workers—who works in this country? Only Arab workers, right? Fine, so they’re renovating the sign too. I’m not going to renovate signs, right? Someone has to do it. But you wouldn’t notice… Now what is it? Right, that existed there even before Levac, he didn’t place the workers there, they were there. But he captured something beyond the situation as such. Meaning, obviously there are workers—you’d describe workers and one is named Ahmad and he’s from such-and-such village and he’s repairing this sign in Herzliya, and Herzl appears there and it says “Hebrew labor.” If you described that in prose, it means nothing. You understand that the message here is not in the details that appear in the picture. You see that this is exactly like poetry. Exactly the same thing. Meaning, the question is whether the work of art isn’t supposed to convey to you—if I’m talking about words, say in poetry—then in prose, the words, the meaning of the passage is the meaning of the words. Meaning, you translate the words, combine them into sentences, and that is the meaning. In photography or in a non-artistic picture, then the meaning is—when I photograph the family, the children, it’s not artistic photography. Why not? Because I simply want to remember what the children looked like at age two. Fine, so I take the information and preserve it, and that’s all. That is precisely not artistic photography, because basically I only… I didn’t capture anything there that anyone else wouldn’t capture, except the sublime beauty of the children that no one else perceives except me. But basically I captured nothing that anyone else wouldn’t capture; there’s no art here. Art is when you add something, something an ordinary person wouldn’t see, something that depends on context. And once it depends on context, you already see that there is something poetic here, artistic—that is, something beyond the mere thing itself, something context-dependent. Like I said about poetry, that you need to know it’s a poem in order to read it through the right glasses. Meaning, there is something here—kitsch is such a beautiful example, because these examples, dwelling on pathological examples is always because it sheds much brighter light on ordinary examples. Meaning, when you want to define what art is, it’s hard to define; look at what is not art, and through that try to understand what art is. So here, kitsch is a good example because on the face of it—why is it good? There are many things that aren’t art. But here is something that isn’t art and yet on the face of it meets all the criteria. Remember the example I gave about intelligence? Maradona meets all the criteria, right? We distilled the criteria, he meets all the criteria, so why isn’t he a genius like Einstein? There is something artistic here—that is, something context-dependent—even though all the criteria are ostensibly fulfilled. But still there is something context-dependent, dependent on context, dependent on interpretation. The meaning is not just the simple facts. There is something here that is… An art film is not a film that conveys information to me. A documentary film is not a television report. Even a documentary film that is also art—it is not a television report. A television report and a documentary film are two different things. A documentary film conveys something that happened, but it is artistic filming, not family photography. He needs to understand how to present it and how to capture angles. We wouldn’t see in that situation. If you are not an artist, you don’t see. You don’t see on television. What, there he is? That he’s simply a clown. “It’s a springlike day today and we gained a sunny day here.” Prose—but why prose? Why? Because “we gained some springlike day today, a wonderful day, and for the farmer it’s a terrible day.” That too is description. Obviously, description—therefore I’m saying, description is not such pure prose. Why? Because if they had said today twenty-five… Fine, I’m saying it’s close to prose. There’s a certain poetic dimension there, but it’s still close to the pole of prose. Slightly prose. We’re not speaking in ones and zeros; we’re talking about a continuum. It’s completely prose. It’s completely prose. It’s not even prose, it’s just some springtime desolation that somehow became an item, I don’t know what, in these forecasts and weather reports, what? It’s not clear to me. Everybody falls asleep there and they invest money in it. Why does everybody fall asleep? Because it’s practical. Yes, practical—fine, then give the information and leave me alone. On every channel there’s someone from the office of the… What? On every television channel there’s one from the office of the… Just for this item? Yes, that’s it. I’ve seen it. Looking at the news, I see there’s someone producing the whole thing. Is television art? Information. No, maybe he prepares it himself, kind of—you know, once it was just maps and such, today he checks the data, estimates what will be. So, you see that this logic of moving from prose to poetry is the same logic as moving from something to a work of art in general. Poetry is only an example, but I think this is a definition of art. Not specifically poetry—poetry is only an example. And here too there will be different levels of art. Right? A television report—but done with a certain artistic sensitivity. That can happen, then it’s already closer to a documentary film, there’s already an artistic dimension. Therefore I say, here too we’re dealing with two abstractions between which there is a great continuum of levels. And I think overall it explains not badly, I don’t know—for me it explains not badly the intuitions I have about things that are art and not art. Maybe not precise definitions, but it explains those intuitions not badly. And I think this is an efficient way of dealing, it seems to me, with this kind of complex field. Does art also have no definition? What do you mean no definition? In an encyclopedia, you mean? Does electricity have a definition? I don’t think you’ll find a definition there, but there will be an entry. There will be an entry. I believe that… Again, electricity has a definition. Check; by now I know nothing. Check. Electricity has a definition, and with poetry I thought there was one. What is electricity? That really is a defined concept. What is electricity? Electric field, electric circuit. What is electricity? Electricity meaning something that uses Maxwell’s laws, electric fields. Okay, so there’s a definition here. So there is a definition between what and what electricity is. Anyway—no, I’m saying every such thing requires investment. I sat on this thing for quite a few hours and developed here a fairly complex theory, and I gave you the edges of it. Because really, to invest those hours in every such concept—I didn’t do that. But I’m saying that this is… I’m trying to demonstrate why one need not despair in the face of complex phenomena, and why it is not correct to jump straight to the postmodern conclusion that says: okay, it’s complex, there’s no definition, everyone should do what they want. Some kind of… Why is there any point in making a definition? What for? Aside from the personal intellectual challenge. And because I think what matters to me intellectually is to understand the things I talk about. You can’t relate to it otherwise. Now look, for example, at Duchamp’s art, yes? Duchamp’s urinal, which became a work of art because it’s in a museum. So Gideon Ofrat will say it’s art because it’s in a museum, and I say that its being in a museum is an indication that there is art here. Why? I don’t know, I don’t understand this stuff—for me it says nothing. But if I trust those people, for whom it apparently means something—not sure I trust them, but maybe—then I interpret it that way. Meaning, I say on the contrary: that is art in its purity. When you make concrete art, more realistic art, or something that conveys the message more literally, then in fact you have moved away from art. Because when you get closer to the abstract concept of pure art, like pure poetry, you have to arrive at things that an ordinary person looks at and says, come on, don’t tell me jokes. It’s like saying that a shofar blast, a simple blast, yes—that is art in its purity. Someone says to you: this is the most banal and simple and empty thing. But no, in a certain sense this really is the thing that comes closest to that abstraction that Rashi… I brought that Rashi, right? Where he says in Kings there with Elijah, that I heard there is a voice emerging from the silence. “The Lord was not in the wind,” “the Lord was not in the fire,” the verses there say. So Rashi writes, “And after the sound—a still, small voice,” and there the Holy One, blessed be He, appears. Not in noise, not in fire. Rashi says: I heard there is a voice emerging from the silence. Is that some kind of image? If you listen well to silence, it too emits some kind of voice. And of course he means not an audio voice, but some abstraction that you don’t need the mediation of sound in order to grasp. When you stand before silence, sometimes you can better grasp the abstract thing than when people try to concretize it somehow, to convey it to you. Of course, on the other side of the coin is Kishon, yes, with all the… he has a wonderful book on art that I mentioned, a book—I don’t even remember what it’s called—The ABC of… where I saw this. A wonderful book on art that came out after his death already. What? They printed it in Germany. Really? I don’t know. Here it came out not many years ago, after his death already. It could be a translation, I don’t know exactly. There he makes fun of all the Duchamps and all those self-satisfied fellows, saying it’s all jokes. Now I don’t know what to say. They are so self-satisfied—there’s so much… it doesn’t seem to me this desire of the rich man with money… Not rich in money; they’re terribly self-satisfied. Artists. And nobody understands them, so that’s a sign they are great artists, because nobody understands them. And maybe nobody understands them because there is nothing to understand. That’s also an option, and that’s the option Kishon proposes. The truth is, I don’t know… And you’re saying this is poetic definition at its active best? Right. After I made this move for myself, here’s an example of why the practical upshot of this anthropology… there’s no shortage of works of… I’m saying again, I don’t know. I’m very skeptical about… You look at a poem and have no idea what it wants… That also diminishes them. Right. So the simplest response is to belittle it. The second simple response is to say everything is poetry, that’s postmodern. And I say there may be something less simple but more true. Meaning, maybe I don’t understand because I don’t have the sensitivity, I’m not within the context, I don’t know exactly what this means—but that’s me. And sometimes too you don’t understand that it is understandable… Fine, fine. But also a painting that is all one uniform color—white, black… Yes, there too the same thing. So I also mock that, and I have mocked it. And still I always say to myself on the side: maybe the mockery is right and it’s just nonsense, but maybe it’s just that I am outside the context and I don’t quite understand what this thing means. But this thing means something that is not literal in relation to… That too I can do. Come on, everybody can make urinals. But the work of art is not in placing the urinal there. The work of art is what the artist does through the urinal, not the urinal itself. And that is exactly the point this definition says. The fact that you know how to make urinals does not mean you are an artist. My father once said—I don’t know why, what he had against Ilanit, Ilanit actually sings fine. But my father really looked down on Ilanit. So he said that “Fine, Ilanit is a genius, because for Chava Alberstein to make money from her singing, that’s no big deal—I could do that too, because she has a wonderful voice. But Ilanit, that people pay her to sing—she has to be a genius to make money from that.” So I say in that sense too it’s the same thing. Meaning, to make art out of a urinal—you have to be a genius, understand? To make art out of serious artistic ability—that’s no great feat, I could do that too if I had artistic ability. The sheep that Saint-Exupéry drew in the book? Yes. So there too—it’s a little similar. It’s a sheep that’s supposedly very simple, but it’s something… But it does something to you that I think isn’t just… And that of course depends on context. But it does something to you that just seeing an ordinary sheep doesn’t do. That childish drawing of the sheep there, the baobab tree and all those things. Draw a closed box. Yes. And the snake that swallowed an elephant, where you see that shape inside the snake. Fine. But that’s exactly the point. That is pure poetry. Because the level of drawing—fine, there are children who know how… I can even draw like that, of course. But there are children who know how to draw such things. It’s not such a big deal. But the context—it’s beautiful. And what it does is wonderful. Really. And I think that’s exactly the point, and therefore I… I think I once told you that I was at some conference of rabbis and jurists at the Israel Democracy Institute, and Englard was sitting there, who had been a Supreme Court justice. He was actually religious and okay, relatively environmentally friendly. And the crowd attacked there: what is the Supreme Court doing, doing whatever it wants, just ideologies and agendas and the like? And he insisted—he’s the last of the positivists, Englard, the last dinosaur who still believes in that. And he insisted: what do you mean? It’s all professional work, has nothing to do with agenda, it’s all mathematics. What do you mean? In every charged case you see that the religious judge says this and the secular judge says that—you can’t ignore the connection between people’s worldviews and their rulings. Yes, that’s no longer only the kinds of things published in the media, it’s not… apparently that’s how people think. Many times that’s how it is. And from rulings that religious decisors experienced, they would send to… Forget more examples, there is correlation. I don’t know whether one-to-one, but it’s higher than people think. Right, there’s… there is non-random correlation. And even Elon is on the far left—friends kilometers to the left of Moriah and so on. Fine, but if they are all secular and left-wing then you can’t make correlation between the judges and their decisions. Not true. There are religious judges and they really are in the minority opinion. Edmond Levy published a report on the settlements. I assume that if his friends in the Supreme Court had written… He didn’t do it as a Supreme Court justice, never mind. He had been a judge. Yes, therefore I’m saying, never mind—but they wouldn’t have written such a report. Fine, obviously there is… worldview plays a part there. Now at a certain point, after the argument heated up and so on, suddenly the penny dropped for me and I believed Englard. I believed Englard. And why? Because suddenly I remembered—and that’s what I said to the crowd there—suddenly I thought about it, I tried to step outside myself and look at myself from the outside. I said, look, you are exactly the same. You rabbis do whatever you want. When you want to permit, you permit; when you want to forbid, you forbid; you do whatever you want. Heaps, incidentally—you really do whatever you want, it’s all agendas. A Religious Zionist rabbi—you know what he’ll say on all sorts of issues. A Haredi rabbi—you know what he’ll say. So you’re the same. Now as someone who knows that world more than I know the world of judging—come on, that’s not how it is. I’m telling you, it’s not like that. Not that there is no correlation—obviously there is correlation, no question. But there is a certain discourse that you understand—there are valid arguments and invalid arguments, there are boundaries you don’t cross, there is room for discourse even between rabbis from different streams. Someone who knows these things from within, when a serious discussion takes place, it does take place. It is a discussion that takes place, and not always does one side persuade the other, but there is discourse. Meaning, it operates within a system where there is right and wrong; it’s not anarchy where everyone does whatever he wants, the way it looks from outside. Now when I look at it from outside, like with Duchamp, then from the outside I say, okay, these are charlatans. That is exactly what people say about me and my friends when they look from outside. And I, as someone who knows it from within, don’t agree. It’s not true. Of course there is a lot of dependence on agendas, obviously; I’m not naïve. But I’m telling you there is halakhic discourse and there are arguments and there is a way to raise arguments, and it is more or less universal. Because not all approaches are equivalent between two alternatives; there is a decision about which alternative is preferable. So I say, here is that expression—and with serious halakhic decisors it appears even more strongly—that you… In my view, by the way, just parenthetically, for example with Rabbi Aviner, I like him very much. Not my cup of tea at all in his halakhic direction, in his Zionist direction, in any direction. I really like him because many times you can’t know what he’ll say. He has surprises, lots of surprises. I don’t know—I’ve seen, I don’t know all his writings and I don’t read those things enough—but I’ve seen quite a few surprises that really surprised me coming from him, and immediately I liked him. And like Eliezer… Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, for example, really not my cup of tea, okay? I know that the man really says what he thinks in a systematic, orderly way. He thinks… Right, and you’ll find surprises in him, you’ll find surprises you wouldn’t expect him to say. And that means that… From someone systematic I would expect that to be predictable, no? Seemingly I’d expect someone more systematic to be more predictable. Meaning if you are consistent then one can already derive it, no? He is more predictable, yes, but when you expect a person to be systematic with his assumptions, that is one kind of expectation. When you expect a person to say something that fits the stereotype you have of him, that is another kind of expectation. I meant nonconformity to the second kind of expectation, not the first. So I said, really the whole question is whether you are inside or outside. And therefore I understood what Englard meant. And to some degree we are outside. We are outside because even if you can read his texts… No, there are people who can, but still you’re outside. You’re outside because there are certain norms, you can surely say—there are certain modes of thought, you know when something is right and when it isn’t. And the layman can know the law and he can read all the arguments, everything is fine. And it’s not because he is less intelligent, but because he is in the field and knows how people talk and which arguments carry weight and which don’t, and many times he has intuitions he may not know how to formulate but he understands what is right to do and what is not, because he is already inside this business. And you are outside, so from outside you analyze it in this mathematical way and you can be very talented, it doesn’t matter. But you’re outside, you don’t understand the smell of things—what is right to do and what isn’t. And I believe there is something there like that which I don’t fully understand. And in the legal world I’m a bit… I’m not a jurist and not that, but I do know a bit. There are people who know even less, and I know—they have more criticism of the legal system than I do. And I attribute that to the fact that they are more outside than I am. And therefore even some of the criticism I have of the legal system I attribute to the fact that I too am a bit outside. There are also people inside with criticism. No, obviously—I didn’t say there’s no room for criticism. I only said that part of the criticism stems from my being outside. That doesn’t mean they are heavenly angels—I’m very far from thinking that they are. Obviously yes, and I also don’t spare my criticism. When I have criticism I say it. But along with that I also remember that I’m outside, and sometimes I don’t catch the nuances, don’t catch the nuances. But they too are outside with regard to many of the things they judge; that doesn’t stop them from not grasping the… They are the judges—that’s their authority. Here it’s a different kind of criticism. He has to decide what to do. That’s his authority. Who will decide? That’s exactly the point. Is it within his authority to intervene in what? I’m saying, let’s say on the assumption that he has to intervene in a certain area, I don’t know, some administrative area or another—he is not the public service person, the judge. So how does he know how to behave, how to manage things and how not to manage things? He doesn’t know—he needs to enter the issue because what can you do, the judge has to. Who will decide? The clerk? Who will decide? The echelon will decide. No, the echelon will not decide—I don’t agree at all. Not with rabbis and not with judges. That criticism is incorrect. It is incorrect. In the end the judge has to decide, and even when he decides that something is legitimate and he does not intervene, that too is a decision. Right. And that decision is his. In the end everything must be justiciable—I’m completely with Aharon Barak. His dispute with Elon—I’m with him. Even the fact that they let me breathe in principle, that’s the example he brought there. And even in their discourse, in their formulations, they’re basically using the phrase “for that is why we were created.” There is something here that is… I share many of those criticisms, that’s not the point. I have a lot of criticism of the Court. That’s not the point. I’m trying to illustrate one specific point. Dor or Aharon… which ruling? Did he read some ruling? The gas outline? Which ruling? Who appointed him? Who appointed him? Let’s not open up, let’s not open up the discussion of the legal system because that’s not the topic. What I mean to say is—I’m saying they didn’t appoint him to decide matters… No no, there’s… what are you talking about? Among other things, the gas outline, that simply… But what? Did you read the ruling, which… the ruling? Or did you read in newspapers what they said? I read in newspapers what they said. You read the commentary… No no no. Again, there’s no point going into… But they sat inside the issue. Never mind, guys, there’s no point. I read some very embarrassing things there. I didn’t read the whole thing, someone sent me an excerpt. I didn’t send it to you, I sent you… Where did you send me? Not the article in Midah—I sent you that quotation from Elyakim Rubinstein. That Nadav sent me. Doesn’t matter, I share a great many of the criticisms. That’s not what I’m trying to show. The point is that as long as you are not inside the system, take into account that there are nuances you miss. You can follow the line of argument—that’s fine, you don’t need to be a genius for that. You see, right, these are arguments, everything’s fine, every intelligent person can follow the line of argument. But if you are not inside the matter, something in the smell is missing, in the touch. And in Jewish law it’s the same thing. In Jewish law I know it up close, so I know. A person looks at Jewish law from outside, and he can—I’m not talking about someone who knows nothing, it means nothing to him. A person who is knowledgeable, knows how to read a halakhic text, but doesn’t have a sense of smell. Why do you need apprenticeship with Torah scholars? Why isn’t it enough to learn the material? Apprenticeship means acquiring the ability to smell what is right and what is not right, how, from what angle to approach it, how to do it. Why do you need an internship when you’re going to be a researcher? You need a postdoc, not postmodernism. Why a postdoc or internship in medicine or in all sorts of professions? The internship does not come to teach you the material. You learned the material at university. It comes to teach you what to do with that material. Now you can read from books—it won’t help you to read the material from books. But you don’t know what to do with this thing. It’s a bit of humility, really—I say this because I too often suffer from it. It took me a long time until that penny dropped. When you look at another field, take into account that you are nevertheless outside. Meaning, there are sensitivities you don’t understand. You don’t understand exactly what is meant and what the connotation is and what the context is. And the same is true of modern art, and the same is true of many other things. And I know this about myself in fields in which I work, and therefore I assume it’s true also of other fields when I look at them. But are those the nuances? That’s not the mass of it. If you put that judge there, he’d come with his opinions, and it’s only because of the authority; it’s not because they have some… there’s nothing beyond it, there isn’t… I don’t agree, I don’t agree. There is something in the legal tradition where you understand what is right and what is not right. You have some kind of sense of smell. I’m telling you, I myself know, because in recent years I’ve dealt a bit with legal matters here and there—I’m not a jurist and I didn’t study law, but I do deal with it a bit—and I learned things that before I wouldn’t have understood. In context. Not that I didn’t know the law—that’s not the point; even today I don’t know the law, that’s not the issue. But I know better how to relate to things, how to look at things, what weight to give… a bit. Okay? Even without being a jurist. And I know that if I were more inside, there would be more. And it’s not Torah from heaven—I’m not trying to make this prophecy or some exalted wisdom. Rather, it is a discipline, and you need to be inside it to understand how the thing works. And it may be that Israeli law is also different from other legal systems. But there is also a shared foundation, something that… And I am outside both things. And you need to know that. And the same goes for modern art—I want to think that it’s the same with modern art, although often I have many doubts. And I don’t spare my criticism there either—I’m certainly not suspected of holding back criticism in many fields I criticize. I also criticize them when I am not inside them. I allow myself to, but I also take into account the possibility that I… But in that reckoning, in my opinion, in the end it’s authority, that’s all. It’s only authority. There’s no… Fine. Authority—you are right. But the “all” and the “only,” I don’t agree. And regarding that, what I said earlier about Aharon Barak and Elon—the point is, I agree with many of the criticisms of Barak, that he intervened in places where he shouldn’t have, or that he was too heavy-handed. His fundamental conception that everything is law—I’m completely with him. Everything is law, and he should have decided not to intervene as a judge—which is also a decision. Exactly. That’s the point. I share that criticism, but not Elon’s criticism. Because I think in the end the court has to decide, regarding every act in the state, whether it was done in a reasonable way or not in a reasonable way—not whether it was correct or not. The legislator. The legislator put him there. Put him there to decide whether something is reasonable? Yes, yes, yes. The court. If something is contrary to the law or not contrary to the law—that’s obvious. What is “reasonable”? Contrary to the law and not contrary to the law is not mathematics, Shmuel. What is law? The law is written: human dignity must be preserved. Fine? What is human dignity? The law. What is human dignity? One must decide what is reasonable, what is a reasonable infringement of human dignity and what is not. Who will decide? Now the judge is no more an expert in this than I am. Here I completely agree. The judge knows nothing about human dignity more than I do. But what can you do—he is the authorized one. He has to decide. And I completely agree with that. And there is no nuance here. Right. In that context, I really… really not. Why? Here too I tend to think not, but never mind. It’s really a technical argument, not important to enter into. But right, here I’m simply speaking about the issue of authority, and that’s why I brought this example. He is the authorized one. He has to decide what to do. The law says there is human dignity; someone has to decide what human dignity is, what it includes and what it doesn’t include. The judge can decide not to intervene because it’s within the bounds of reasonableness. That too is a decision. And many times Aharon Barak didn’t make those decisions, and on that I too had criticism. Fine? But the fundamental notion that he has to decide that he is not intervening—I’m completely with him. And that Elon is deeply mistaken on this matter. If the rabbi were sitting there and he were the authority, would his decision have the same force without knowing the nuances and without knowing the law? Really I would not have been the authorized one. Therefore, therefore, therefore his criticism has force. Because if you don’t understand the language—if I put the rabbi into an operating room, okay? There authority has no meaning at all. There you have to know the procedures. No, authority has meaning there too. If you’re not a licensed doctor, even if you perform an excellent operation, they’ll put you in jail. Jail is one thing, but if a mistake were made, unlike the judicial seat, in many respects… I’m talking about force of validity… Unlike the judicial seat, it’s like when they say the prime minister has responsibility—he has responsibility for nothing. He is the decider. Same with the court. Rabbi, if I put you in the judge’s seat, no disasters will happen in the State of Israel, no disasters. And without knowing the nuances. You’re mistaken in thinking that legal knowledge is esoteric, in a certain sense, like the knowledge of a brain surgeon. No. I certainly think it’s much more accessible knowledge. I’ll give you an example. One second. But still, my claim is not that they know how to do hocus-pocus I don’t know how to do. My claim is that there is internal consistency in their discourse. That’s the point. It’s not “the secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him.” That’s all. And therefore it is not true that they do whatever they want. That’s what I mean. Not that they know secrets I don’t. They do whatever they want. I’ll tell you why, Rabbi. Only for the very simple reason that if the nuances carried such weight that they didn’t do whatever they want, and this constrained them the way an operating room does, then that would be true. But the nuances are on the margins. The main thing is the authority. Therefore they will convey whatever they have in mind, their agenda—they’ll convey it in any case. I think authority is at the center. There is authority, and it doesn’t compete one with the other. The nuances mean that your scope of action in law and in halakhic ruling and in… is much greater than in surgery. Right, and I completely agree. Therefore I say it’s terribly… therefore the space there, because that’s the problem, and still that space compared to such… is small. But still, again, I’m not claiming law is mathematics. I never claimed that. What I am claiming is that there is internal consistency within what is done there. And people who think a person does whatever he wants—I think that is a mistake. I think it’s not true, even though I’m not a jurist. Let’s give an example. Suppose someone now files a petition to the High Court—and in a moment I’ll give you a practical example that happened to me—someone files a petition that buying an F-35 plane is unreasonable. Unreasonable because it’s a waste of public money. Absolutely within the High Court’s authority. Why exactly? What law forbids wasting public funds? That is within the High Court’s authority. Okay, I unequivocally claim not, because then it’s simply impossible to do anything. What do you mean within the High Court’s authority? Why is it within the High Court’s authority whether this is reasonable or not? Because the High Court has to check—the chief of staff decided it was reasonable and the defense minister decided it was reasonable. Maybe the chief of staff is corrupt? Maybe the judge is corrupt? Fine, okay. What kind of argument is that? What does that have to do with anything? Now I’ll give you an actual example that happened, okay? The Nautilus people back in the day, who developed the Nautilus, went to the south and they filed—sixty residents, council heads—filed a High Court petition. They filed suit asking why they are in danger being hit and the Defense Ministry is criminally negligent for not bringing them the Nautilus. Fine? The legal adviser of the Defense Ministry came and said to me, listen my friend, there’s a trial on this and this, bring me all the arguments and I want someone to come and be… I told him: absolutely not. I’m not bringing you any argument. No argument whatsoever. The one and only argument: it’s not the Court’s business. This is not the Court’s business. So then he throws you out? Wait, wait, wait, what if it had been… such a thing against Pinhas… The Knesset decided on… same thing, what is this? You said the Knesset… It’s not that at all. You know that in court… the chief of staff is different in your mind… Let’s assume now in wartime here… The point is that… Wait, and I told him under no circumstances, no, you’ll get nothing. Went to court, said what I said, the court dismissed the petition outright—it’s not the court’s business. Of course, that’s a decision. Are you trying to argue there’s no standing? You say everything is justiciable because that’s… No, Shmuel, you didn’t understand. You define the… Not true, Shmuel, you’re mistaken. There’s a difference between saying you have no standing in court and saying you may petition on any subject and the court decides when to intervene and when not to. That’s a totally different claim. There are no subjects entirely excluded from entering the court’s gates. That’s the claim. The court will often decide not to intervene, and in many cases it decided not to intervene—that’s unrelated. Two completely different things. With Barak it turned out that standing… standing… Doesn’t matter. What is standing? He didn’t create it; standing always existed. No, no, no… With Aharon Barak there was no standing… Who determined there was no standing? When you came to court, who determined you had no standing? The High Court said that. No, because in the second case they didn’t discuss that. Yes they did. They didn’t discuss that, that it wasn’t within its authority. There they said you couldn’t even get to court. What do you mean they said you can’t get there? The judge said you can’t. There is a difference, but he filed a claim in court; he didn’t discuss—they don’t examine… That’s exactly what he did; he discussed and said… He didn’t discuss anything, he simply threw them out. Listen, listen, there was no representative of the legal adviser… It doesn’t matter, Shmuel, there is no such thing… At most he can say there is no indication here… You have to distinguish between two things: he doesn’t need to evaluate your professional decision. He needs to evaluate the reasonableness of the way you made the decision. And the reasonableness of the way you made the decision—that is the court’s mandate. It does not determine whether your engineering calculation is correct or not—that’s not the point. And it can’t check everything. Now if the petitioners don’t bring anything that even argues against the reasonableness of the decision-making process, but only argue against the content of the decision, then the court will throw them out. They had eighteen pages, after all there… What was written in those eighteen pages? That the decision was unreasonable, adopted without reasons… Fine, so perhaps the court wasn’t persuaded that there was unreasonableness here. No, it didn’t say it was reasonable. It said this is not a matter for the court. This is a sterile argument. I don’t know, I don’t know the case. What did the court say in that case? That it was non-justiciable, not justiciable. Okay, I understand. Maybe you’re right, maybe not, but I think that court was mistaken in that case. I don’t agree with you. When there was no standing before Barak, then they wouldn’t even file at all. What do you mean they wouldn’t file, and if they had filed what would have happened? It wasn’t possible; it wouldn’t be accepted. That was the atmosphere that formed, you need to understand that. And that’s the great disaster that happened, that now people understand that anything can be filed. First of all, that’s not such a bad thing—there are many very unfortunate people for whom a solution suddenly emerged. A solution? There are many, and the damage is enormous. Fine, but aren’t we carried away? Let’s return to art. There’s no country where this works like that. In the United States does it work like that? Of course not. Everything gets stuck here. The legislator doesn’t want to take it. He doesn’t want to take it. Because if he wanted to take it, he would legislate. He doesn’t strike down the law. He can’t strike down the law; there are rules. You are mistaken about the law. That’s demagoguery. It’s impossible to do anything. Because there are rules for how laws are struck down. And if the legislator said no! You’re mistaken. If the legislator said it’s not within the court’s authority, there’s a limitation clause, the court cannot intervene—and it wouldn’t intervene either. The legislator doesn’t pass that law because the legislator itself either can’t or won’t limit the court. And sometimes there is criticism of that too, but that’s the fact. I expect the legislator to do its job. That’s an exemption! That’s a pit! It’s all a matter of degree! It’s an insane degree. What a difference. You can’t emerge from legal helplessness. Of course you can. It’s impossible to do anything. It’s not true. No, did you read the ruling? No. Because Barak wrote… No, read a Barak ruling, read! It’s uncomfortable. The facts aren’t right. Read. Fine, let’s at least summarize from here. The court isn’t really optional. Fine. In short, what I want to say—let’s leave the court now, that was a parenthetical example—is that again, if I return to art, there too there may be, I say “may be” because I’m outside it, some kind of language, and one who is outside doesn’t catch the nuances of the language. And when you know how to make the urinal itself that doesn’t mean you are an artist like Duchamp, okay? Making a urinal yourself seems to me technical craftsmanship. Yes, never mind, but technical craftsmanship isn’t considered art in the usual sense. I think Duchamp didn’t make the urinal; he bought it. So buying a urinal—I can do that too. In any case, and the important point is that this is tied at the navel to the definition I proposed. Because the definition I proposed is exactly this point: the work of art in that urinal is not the urinal, just as the meaning of a poem is not the meaning of the words. Exactly the same thing. And precisely because of that, it opened the door to a lot of wildness which is sometimes probably wildness without substance, people just playing games. But they give a bad name to those who are really doing serious things. And I think it’s very easy to take it in one direction and say everything is equally serious, and others say nothing is equally serious, it’s all nonsense. So postmodernism on the one hand—which is the core of the modern artistic conception—and the criticism—which is the classical artistic conception, yes, criticizing the bitter fate of present-day excesses—basically sit in the same place, even though they clash with each other. Postmodernism says everything goes, right? That says everything is art. And the critics say: what nonsense, let’s see your artistic ability, your drawing, your variety, your complexity, the classical technical abilities, what always classically defined art. They are the greatest critics of the Duchamps, right? They share exactly the same intellectual platform, both of them. Because the one who says everything goes is also basically proceeding from the same point of view—he too is unwilling to accept that there are nuances that really define what art is and what it is not. And since there are no nuances, then everything really goes, because there is no definition at all. And the other says: look, if there’s no definition at all then there’s no such thing as art, so why should I fund you and why should I recognize you at all? Go home. And both suffer from the same problem. Both think that the nuances I spoke about, which perhaps cannot be grasped from the outside, don’t exist. There really is no such thing. They both ignore the indirect aspects of meaning. And therefore they reach extremes, and many times when two extremes clash they have—we’ve said this more than once—a shared intellectual infrastructure. And often the truth is not like either of them. Why do I always find myself disagreeing with both sides? Because I disagree with the shared intellectual infrastructure. I do understand that there can be some kind of meaning—not only can there be, that is the meaning of art. Even in classical art, its artistic value is not technical skill. Even if there is marvelous technical skill there, so there is in kitsch too, as we said. So leave it, then let’s make art without technical ability, which in that way is actually much closer to this abstract pole of pure art or pure poetry. And that is basically what I want to believe—let’s judge them favorably—what those avant-garde fellows are trying to achieve: basically to get to that abstract place that is not committed at all to all the technical indicators. I give them a lot of credit. What? No, I’m saying—and that’s exactly the point. There too I want to look at it in a complex way. Part of it stems from lack of talent. Obviously. And part stems from laziness. Obviously. But there is also a part that perhaps stems from some genuine statement. Therefore I say there are those who give others a bad name. And I do not give up my criticism, and I also mock these things, only I also mock myself on the side and say: okay, you mock it, but know that maybe there is something there you don’t grasp. Fine, and I say that and I also mean it. Fair enough. There’s one like that. And one is right and all the rest. Okay, maybe—but still I say one example is enough for me to make this claim. I’ll go to the extreme. So I say this is what’s important to understand here: both sides suffer from the same point. And it’s very important to me to clarify this because what I’m saying sounds, on the face of it, very similar to what Gideon Ofrat says. Gideon Ofrat also basically says that art is what is displayed in a museum, but he sees that as a definition and I see it as an indication. For him, what is displayed there is the definition of art—that is, the moment you place whatever you place there, it becomes art. I say no. If they decided to place it in a museum, assuming their motives are pure and the court did not strike down their unreasonable conduct, then this thing is art, and the indication that it is art is that it is displayed in a museum. That is an indication. So what is the definition? The definition is that it has some kind of…