Faith – Lesson 44

[0:00] Speaker identification: was transferred automatically by the system. Minor errors are possible.

[0:12] Original link: YouTube.

[0:17] Sofer.AI transcript: sofer.ai

[0:24] In the opening it is said the world without divine meaning; the main point is that meaning depends on divine intervention, even though the gift of the world and human waste are abundant.

[0:39] God does not intervene in His creation; nevertheless, do not disparage religious commitment. What is God’s command? We will discuss this later.

[0:51] The speaker argues that the framework is intended for those who are already convinced, but wonders about its justification. ethical facts versus ought is of David Hume, as well as a theological fact.

[1:03] The claim that presents religion as merely the product of conditioning is rejected. axioms and turtles all the way down are not intended here.

[1:18] A common criticism: religious faith is the result of programming. asymmetry in favor of religious education is not the focus of the discussion.

[1:31] Bottom line, the discussion seeks to understand:

How did the claim/critique arise that a figure like father is the dominant factor, while mother is secondary or absent?

A common joke holds: Mom is always right. The question itself: is there any truth to the statement Father knows best?

The interviewee uses analogies like Mother always knows, but adds: Is father right? By contrast, there is also another folk version: Mother is right because she is a mother.

When asked Why don’t you listen to mother? he replied: Because father said. That is, in his view, Father said, and that seems credible.

From there they proceed to the research question: how is Oedipus syndrome defined in men after childbirth? This refers to postpartum depression in fathers, sometimes also called paternal postpartum depression.

[2:03] Does postpartum depression in fathers actually exist? In studies it is sometimes called paternal postnatal depression.

[2:20] Sometimes the term male postpartum depression is also used, although it is controversial.

[2:36] However, our question here is not about fathers after childbirth but about another condition: seasonal affective disorder (SAD), known as a seasonal disorder.

[2:49] We will discuss seasonal affective disorder – sometimes called SAD – and not OCD. The question is not about obsessive-compulsive disorder.

[3:02] As opposed to OCD, shall we examine ADHD in adults דווקא? There is literary debate in the diagnoses.

[3:15] The text also includes the acronym ADHD, although that is not what the paragraph is about.

[3:29] In fact, the main topic is bipolar disorder, not schizophrenia.

[3:43] In addition, schizophrenia is mentioned, but we will not discuss it at length. Sometimes autism spectrum disorder also comes up, but that is not the subject.

[3:58] Here, instead, we will address narcissistic personality disorder; in any case, borderline personality disorder is mentioned in passing.

[4:10] However, our main concern is major depressive disorder (MDD) in the elderly?

[4:24] The question actually under discussion here is internet addiction disorder. We will not deal with gaming disorder.

[4:39] Our topic is actually a different phenomenon: burnout syndrome among medical students.

[4:52] Instead, we will deal with impostor syndrome. However, this is not our situation.

[5:06] The original question actually asked: Recognizing that the world is very beautiful despite natural harms, can one still say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

[5:20] Since this is an opening joke, we will now move to the real topic: what is beauty?

[5:33] Philosophically, what is the meaning of life? We will move to the classic question of meaning.

[5:46] Some thinkers ask what is the purpose of life, but here the purpose is different:

[5:59] Loosely translated: Life, the universe, and everything – what’s the point?

[6:13] The question in the thread: Why are we here? Sometimes they also translate what’s up.

[6:27] The interviewee answers the opening question How are you? – approximately.

[6:41] And then the dialogue begins:

Interviewer: What’s up? Can you tell me about the impact of the internet on democracy in Israel?

Interviewee: Yes… we can talk about that.

[6:58] In this context I will first present a short background on the Knesset of Israel and the coalition: this refers to the parliament, the government, the prime minister, the High Court of Justice, and the Supreme Court.

[7:14] After this long introduction, we will discuss Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud, Blue and White, Labor, Meretz, Yesh Atid, the Democrats, the Republicans, Trump, Putin, Zelenskyy, Biden, and even Gantz.

[7:31] First, a bit of world history: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, communism, Marxism, liberalism, fascism.

[7:49] On the subject of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and the Indo-European religions, we will deal with language.

[8:02] In fact, the language question is: how was Hebrew preserved as a Jewish language, Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Ladino, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish?

[8:17] We will focus on the period of the Bible, the Sages, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Written Torah, rabbinic literature, Tanakh, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Exodus chapter 1, the Book of Genesis.

[8:32] We will mainly deal with the descriptions of creation in Genesis, the Garden of Eden, Gehenna, Sheol, the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Eden.

[8:49] According to the account, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the Book of Exodus it is written: Let there be light.

[9:03] And then And God said: Let there be light. Afterwards:

Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

[9:21] From there we will move to the next chapter; but before that, a little Latin and classical Greek, Sanskrit, Paleo-Hebrew, Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Coptic, Ugaritic.

[9:39] We will also touch on sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran Scrolls, the Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, hidden manuscripts, an ancient manuscript, ancient manuscripts, papyrus, parchment, parchments, ancient papers.

[9:58] Finally, to the historical question: how did Hekhalot literature, sanctuary, temple, tabernacle, synagogue, church, mosque, minor sanctuary, palace develop?

[10:15] The interviewee laughs: It’s as long as the exile! And then seriously, we return to the discussion: film, cinema, television, Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook.

[10:33] Ironically, we are not talking about sex, love, relationships, marriage, divorce, sexual relations, pornography.

[10:49] Instead, the main issue is the status of women, feminism, gender, social gender, biological gender, patriarchy, matriarchy, masculinity, toxic masculinity.

[11:06] The gender question is relevant because we will discuss LGBT, gays, lesbians, trans people, queers, proud people, bisexuals, pansexuals, intersex people.

[11:24] However, we will not deal with Blacks, whites, Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Arabs, Africans, Asians, minorities, immigrants, refugees, foreigners, gentiles.

[11:43] In fact, the focus of our discussion is parents, children, babies, newborns, toddlers, teenagers, adolescents, adults, the elderly, old people, grandfathers, grandmothers.

[12:01] The research question concerns fatherhood, motherhood, parenting, parenting, parenthood, fatherhood, motherhood.

[12:19] More precisely: what is the role of the father in his children’s lives? And what about the mother?

[12:37] In the context of family life, we will examine the father figure as it appears in the Bible, in literature, in poetry, Song of Songs, liturgical poetry, lament, lamentations.

[12:55] Perhaps you can quote for us some lullabies on the subject? Something from the liturgical poems or the psalms?

[13:13] Well then, if we are already mentioning a psalm, we will move to the Holocaust, destruction, genocide, murder, killing, slaying, killing, bloodshed, bloods, blood, violence, suicide, death, dead people, grave, graves.

[13:31] If we mentioned violence, then terror, terrorists, attacks, bombings, suicide attacks, assaults, attack, attacks, terrorist attack, global terrorist attacks are also a broad topic.

[13:47] At the end of the day, however, we are here to talk about peace, war, and international relations. Now to the real question: how is peace created?

[14:05] Is it possible to reach world peace without justice, law, law, the rule of law, legal system, rule of law, human rights, human rights, charity?

[14:23] In the context of social justice, democracy, regime, republic, monarchy, dictatorship, autocracy, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, tyranny, tyranny, authoritarianism.

[14:41] We return to democracy, elections, ballot box, voting, primaries, polls, public opinion polls, public opinion, Public opinion.

[14:58] According to public opinion polls and data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, samples, sample surveys, census, census, population, population, demography.

[15:16] For the purpose of the research we used a questionnaire, questionnaire, scale, measure, index, index, coefficient alpha, reliability, Cronbach’s alpha.

[15:34] The scale included items on grades, IQ scores, intelligence quotient, intelligence, understanding, wisdom, knowledge, cognition, consciousness.

[15:51] Beyond that, we will discuss emotion, emotion, feeling, affect, affective state, mood, mood, anxiety, anxiety, stress, pressure, tension, tension.

[16:09] Specifically, the question here is about the experience of fear, fears, awe, terror, terror, dread, fear, phobia, anxiety disorders, panic.

[16:27] Finally, the focus shifts to dream, dream, unconscious, subconscious, subconscious, subconscious mind, fantasy, fantasy, myth, myth.

[16:45] Within this field, memory, memory, reminiscence, amnesia, recollection also arises. In what way do we remember?

[17:03] Since we already mentioned memory, we move to study, education, schooling, school, teacher, student, student, students, teaching, instruction.

[17:21] Here there will also be school, university, college, yeshiva, academy, faculty, campus, classroom, classroom, lesson, research, science, knowledge.

[17:39] In academia and political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art.

[17:56] If we set all these aside, our question is very simple: Who are you?

[18:04] What is your name? If you are comfortable, tell us about your name.

[18:18] The interviewee replied: I am ChatGPT, a large language model by OpenAI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, neural network.

[18:36] Here is the answer as a model:

ChatGPT: Hello! Ask me anything.

[18:49] Thank you! I’d be happy to help. Here is a request: answer in English only.

[19:02] Final answer should be in English.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I’m getting to that now. So the claim, really, is that the correlation between the environment a person grows up in and the way he turns out can be explained in two ways. You could say that both faith and heresy are both products of programming. A secular person in a secular home, a religious person in a religious home and environment—yes, I’m speaking generally—and therefore there’s no way to know who is right, there’s no point dealing with it, it’s all programming. Notice, that’s a symmetric interpretation. So if that’s true, then the secular person is under attack exactly like the religious person. There’s no difference at all. Meaning, basically, you can’t relate to people’s outlooks, because a person is a reflection of the landscape of his birthplace, as the poet said. And therefore there’s no point—we are deterministic products of our environment, or almost deterministic products of our environment. That’s one interpretation, and it’s symmetric.

A second interpretation: no, the secular person will say, the religious outlook is foolish. So of course the fact that you hold it is a result of the fact that you grew up in a religious home. Because how would an intelligent person suddenly adopt a foolish view or a false view? But by the same token I’ll say to the secular person: your view is foolish, and therefore obviously the fact that you turned out secular is because you grew up in a secular home. So here this is not a position that says we have no way to reach truth and there is no truth. No—here we are assuming that one side is right and the other is wrong, except that notice we are once again in a symmetric situation. Because you, the secular person, assume that you are right, and therefore you explain me away as merely a product of education or programming. But I think I’m right. So in the end, the fact that I am a reflection of the landscape of my birthplace and you are a reflection of the landscape of your birthplace adds nothing to the discussion. The whole discussion begins and ends with the question: who is right and who is wrong? After I decide that I’m right and you’re wrong, I’ll also say that your mistake is because you grew up in a certain kind of home. But what difference does that make? After all, I start from the claim that you’re wrong, so let’s argue about that.

The argument that says, look, you’re wrong because everyone who grows up in a religious home turns out religious and everyone who grows up in a secular home turns out secular—that is a stupid argument. It adds nothing. You can say, I don’t agree with religiosity, I think it’s foolish. Okay—let’s argue about that. But don’t tell me stories about where I grew up, because you also grew up somewhere. Therefore I’m saying this argument is completely irrelevant; it’s entirely symmetric.

But now I want to make another claim, and actually use this irrelevant discussion to move one step specifically in the direction of faith. And I want to say this: first of all, the fact that there is a correlation between where we grew up and the position we eventually adopt does not mean that the outcome is the product of programming. Not at all. Why? I’ll give you an example, from geometry. Every child understands the axioms of geometry—that one straight line passes between two points, parallel lines do not meet, and so on. Every child understands that. But almost no child you ask will know that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. For that you have to study geometry. There’s a teacher—the mathematicians who discovered it and the teachers who teach it. Without them, we wouldn’t know it. Why? After all, in the end it follows from assumptions that we understand perfectly well. So why do we need this? We need it because, first of all, we don’t even know how to formulate the assumptions. Ask a child—if you ask him, how many straight lines pass between two points? He’ll tell you, one. But it would never occur to him to build a geometry on the basis of that assumption and a few more axioms and derive all sorts of conclusions from them. For that you need the help of a teacher.

In other words, education often has the role of shaping, clarifying, and sharpening conceptions that are actually already inside me—correct conceptions. And still, without the education I would never have arrived at them. Just like I study physics, just like I study mathematics. So to my mind, the claim from correlation is like someone saying: look, you studied geometry, so you think the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. I didn’t study geometry, so in my opinion it’s two hundred and seventeen degrees. Now who’s right? Each one is a product of his birthplace. You simply grew up in school; meanwhile I played soccer. So as a result, you think the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees, and I think it’s two hundred and seventeen degrees. Therefore obviously there is no truth and no falsehood here, and everyone is just a reflection of the landscape of his birthplace, a product of the environment in which he grew up.

I assume you wouldn’t accept such an argument, right? Why not? Because it’s obvious that the environment didn’t create these truths. The environment merely helped me notice these truths. But once I was helped to notice them, it’s clear to me that they are true. My claim is that religious education works the same way. Religious education is basically like education in mathematics. Mathematics is a difficult field. Even if I know all the axioms, I still wouldn’t be able on my own to derive all the theorems, the statements, the conclusions. I need help—education or learning, a teacher—to help me get there. Even though it’s there, and even though once he helps me it’s obvious to me that it’s true, and obvious to me that in some sense I knew it already. But without his help I wouldn’t have discovered it.

I claim that religious education is the same thing. What does that mean? A person is born with certain feelings, a person is born with certain capacities, certain tendencies, but it’s all very raw. It needs to be cultivated. Without cultivating it, the person won’t really know how to formulate for himself what it means and how to derive the necessary conclusions from it. And in my opinion, religious education is not programming and not conditioning. It’s not supposed to be programming and conditioning—I didn’t say it never is—but I’m saying it shouldn’t be, and it is not necessarily that. Religious education is like learning mathematics.

And therefore there’s no question—wait, you went through religious education and became religious, he went through secular education and became secular. That’s like saying: whoever got an education in geometry knows that the sum of the angles—and says that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees—therefore there’s no point paying attention to that. What kind of nonsense is that? My claim is that it could be that a person grew up in a completely secular home, and inside him there is religious faith. There is faith. And if he had received the tools that religious education gives, he would have recognized that he really believes, and he would have drawn the conclusions—to be committed—and he would have understood what God is, and that when God commands, one must obey. He would have understood that.

But what happened? He grew up in a secular home or a secular environment. Again, of course, what I’m saying here sounds very deterministic—I’m just trying to sharpen the point. It doesn’t happen so deterministically. But the point is that he did not receive the tools that tell him: listen, this feeling inside you is not just some irrational nonsense. Instead, he is educated to think that all of this is irrational nonsense that needs to be overcome. Yes, Alterman’s poem about the little cleric, as is well known—that is, the secular child in the kibbutz who asks questions about God, and they keep explaining to him: leave it, that’s Grandpa’s nonsense, it’s irrelevant, we need to overcome it. Right, we do have that feeling within us, but we need to overcome it; it’s nonsense.

The point is that these feelings—for the person who finds within himself this faith and this sense of obligation, and this understanding that if God exists and commands then that is something binding—now the question is what you do with that feeling. In secular education they tell you: leave it, ignore it, it’s all delusions. And in religious education they say: no, no, this is something reasonable and true and proper, and this is something you should follow. Now you understand that in this case education is not necessarily programming. In this case education simply helps you cultivate understandings and tools that are already inside you, exactly like geometry. And if you don’t cultivate them, you won’t know that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees, but the mathematical ability is inside you even if you never studied. If you sat in a classroom and learned, you too would understand it.

Now true, that’s a very paternalistic statement. It says that even the secular person, if he went through religious education, would discover God, he would be committed to God. But that itself is exactly what the secular person claims—that’s what the secular person claims. He says to me: look, you turned out religious because you grew up in a religious home. So what is he actually saying? That even if I had grown up in a religious home, I too would have turned out that way. Well then, listen to what your own mouth is saying—that you yourself turned out secular only because you didn’t receive the tools that religious education gives in order to shape the view that is actually already inside you. And therefore this criticism, in my view, comes back like a boomerang against the critic.

Now I’ll say more than that. There is a certain asymmetry between religiosity and secularity, and therefore in my opinion this argument is actually better in the hands of the religious than in the hands of the secular. Why? Because the secular person is basically claiming an absence. The religious person claims the existence of God and an obligation to obey His command. The secular person claims an absence. Now to get tools in order to recognize an absence—you don’t need tools for that. If there isn’t, then there isn’t, that’s all. I don’t need a special education to explain to me that nonexistence doesn’t exist. Okay, fine, that’s obvious.

By contrast, in religious education it’s obvious that you need tools in order to recognize it, just as you need to study physics. There is such a field, but not everyone can get there alone, and education or learning or a teacher—yes, an educator—is supposed to help you get there. Therefore, if you ask me, in the argument between the religious person and the secular person, I think I have all the tools to understand the secular person’s world, because the secular person’s world is a vacuum. Not vacuum in the sense that all secular people are empty of content and meaning and values, but vacuum in the sense that secularity is a vacuum. A person can add lots of values to himself and everything else, but his being secular is only an absence. It means he does not believe in God. Whatever else he has beyond that is something additional. Yes, all these arguments about the empty wagon and the full wagon always amuse me. Of course secularity is an empty wagon. It’s an empty wagon because that’s the definition: secularity is the absence of belief in God—that is what secularity means. In other words, it is a vacuum. Now on top of that there can be wonderful people who fill their wagon with many marvelous contents, but that is not their secularity; those are additional things they possess. Secularity is a vacuum.

Therefore the claim is that there is a built-in asymmetry here. I, as someone who grew up in a religious home, know the secular world very well and have the tools to formulate a position about it, about secularity. The secular person, who did not receive religious education, does not have the tools to formulate a position about God. He suppresses it even if he feels it, because he thinks those are irrational feelings that need to be overcome—some kind of totems, taboos, and all sorts of psychoanalysis and the like. So if there is any asymmetry here at all, it is an asymmetry in favor of religious education.

And therefore I think this perspective is a very important point, because it troubles a lot of people, including within the religious world. It’s not only in the argument between religious and secular people. I have met dozens, if not more, of people who ask themselves this question. Some of them because of this leave everything because of this question, which is the hardest question that I—but I have met many, many people who struggle. The hardest question troubling people is this one: we are products of education, and if we had grown up somewhere else we would be different, so why are you telling me stories about Mount Sinai and God and all that? It’s something that troubles people very, very much.

And I want to say again: if someone says, no, I don’t feel any of this inside me at all, I have nothing to say. Fine, then he really is secular, I have nothing to say to him. I’m speaking to the convinced, and therefore I return to the point where I began. I’m speaking to people who do feel this obligation within themselves. They only say, okay, but it’s just built into us, it’s irrational, it’s the product of programming or whatever, we need to overcome it. So to those people I say: no, that’s not true. It is not necessarily the product of programming, and it is not true that you need to overcome it. Just like any primary intuition we have, which in a mathematical context we turn into an axiom, and we don’t say, well, that’s just nonsense and we have to overcome it—even though I have no explanation. I have no explanation, but it is clear to me that it is true. The same is true here. And for the necessary conclusions, you need educational help in order to shape them and to understand for myself, to sharpen for myself, the obligation that follows from them.

Therefore, in my view, religious education is not the problem. Without religious education, religious people would almost never emerge. Almost. Here and there there’s one—Abraham our forefather, I don’t know.

[Speaker E] Right? This week’s Torah portion: “we will do and we will hear.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again?

[Speaker C] This week’s Torah portion, “we will do and we will hear”—some of the commentators explain that this is exactly the point.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay.

[Speaker E] Can I ask another question?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes.

[Speaker E] I want to go back about half a step. I completely accept your logic and your line of thinking about why, if God indeed revealed Himself and gave commands, then one has to obey. I have no problem with that. I’m only asking, going one step back—the question is: what did He command? What did He actually command? You took—wait, wait, one second—you took one of your proofs, or your main proof, for the existence of the revelation at Mount Sinai to be the large number of people who were present at that event, so that you can’t just come and ignore it. But at that event, what He commanded was the Ten Commandments. Everything else is the story that Moses goes up the mountain, sits with the Holy One, blessed be He, and receives the entire Torah from Him. Here we don’t have testimony, here we don’t have your thesis and the logic that says this. And then I ask two questions. Two questions. First, how can I know what He actually commanded if it doesn’t have those proofs? Because you used that proof. And second, why are we in a situation where a certain stream takes ownership over what God commanded, and anyone who doesn’t go along with that stream is a heretic in the fundamentals, he’s nothing? Why? Why can’t someone think that God commanded, but according to his reasoning He commanded something a little differently?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so I’ll relate to it briefly, because this really is maybe a topic for—

[Speaker E] Right, I didn’t expect—I just threw it out there to say that even if I go with you, there’s still a problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll answer briefly anyway. Since you already threw it out there, I won’t just leave it hanging. Look, first of all, I’m not dealing here with the question of what God commanded. I’m dealing with the question of whether He commanded, and whether what He commanded is binding. Certainly afterward one can discuss the question of what He commanded. A large part of what exists in our hands today in Jewish law—I have no doubt that He did not command it. He didn’t command it, and it never even entered His mind. The question is why I am obligated to it, if at all. Some of it I’m not obligated to; other parts I am, but those have explanations of their own. The claim is that it emerges from the interpretation of what He commanded. Even if He didn’t intend that, there is some mode of conduct that Jewish law obligates. But that’s really a more distant discussion.

I just want to say regarding the revelation at Mount Sinai: once God reveals Himself and tells us the Ten Commandments—actually He said only two. He tells us the first two commandments, and then calls Moses our teacher—

[Speaker E] And tells him all sorts of things. Moses our teacher comes down and says, look, I received this and this. It seems to me that the obvious conclusion is that he received all the rest from the Holy One, blessed be He as well. After all, this whole event was an event that provided the framework for Moses our teacher’s ascent upward to receive the Torah. What, is the Holy One, blessed be He, fooling us? He reveals two commandments to us, summons Moses our teacher upward amid clouds and lightning and everything, and afterward Moses our teacher comes back down and deceives us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, stays silent?

Just one word. Just one word. I don’t know why you say two commandments; I think ten commandments. But I’m saying: to my eyes, in terms of plausibility, it seems very reasonable that when the Holy One, blessed be He decided to address the people of Israel, He condensed the most important thing He wanted from us into the Ten Commandments.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s all fine.

[Speaker E] And everything is condensed there, and all the later stories have no proof.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll explain again. Look, there is no proof for anything. I’m talking about—

[Speaker E] No, I accept your proof. I accept your proof regarding the revelation at Mount Sinai.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I claim that there is—I claim there is. Because first of all, the “two commandments” I mentioned is simply the Sages. “I am the Lord” and “You shall have no other gods” we heard directly from the Almighty, and the other 611 commandments, including the other commandments, were not given directly by the Holy One, blessed be He. The Torah. The people did not want to hear the Holy One, blessed be He: “You speak to us,” they say to Moses our teacher, “you speak to us, lest we die.” So the Sages explain that this was only the first two commandments, “I am the Lord” and “You shall have no other gods.” “Moses commanded us the Torah”—the numerical value of “Torah” is 611. So only two commandments we received directly from the Holy One, blessed be He; that’s why I said two. But it doesn’t matter for our purposes.

The claim is that once there is a framework of the giving of the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He reveals Himself, and now He tells Moses our teacher, “Come up to Me,” and gives him the remaining commandments or the rest of the Torah or whatever it was, the assumption is that everything that happened within that framework is basically the word of the Holy One, blessed be He—whether those things we received directly from Him, or those things we asked Him to give us through Moses our teacher rather than directly. It is not plausible that the Holy One, blessed be He reveals Himself at Mount Sinai, descends there amid thunder and lightning, and then basically lets Moses our teacher pull the wool over our eyes and give us an entire Torah that is all a forgery. That is not plausible.

Now again, I’m saying: there are no one-hundred-percent proofs, there aren’t for anything. This isn’t mathematics. Even for the first two commandments there is no proof in the full sense. But I do think that once there is an event, and part of the event is direct speech, and part of the event is—this is very long—what, all of Israel was supposed to stand there for forty days and forty nights and study Torah? That’s not physically plausible either. So obviously not. You will receive two commandments and understand that I am revealing Myself here, the Holy One, blessed be He tells us. All the rest—Moses our teacher will go up, I’ll sit with him for forty days, I’ll give him all the rest, and what he tells you will be the continuation of My words. I think that if you accept the framework, that is a completely reasonable interpretation of the framework.

And therefore in my opinion this proof from mass revelation and so on does indeed extend also to things we did not hear directly from the Holy One, blessed be He. And again I say: the question is how far that extends—that’s a good question. I think that even about the Written Torah I would not sign off that all of it was given there, and certainly not the Oral Torah. Okay—but those are already issues that need their own discussion.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, it’s a bit—yes, just one more word—so in light of what you’re saying, and I agree this is a very, very broad topic, but maybe a little humility toward other streams, toward other people who say: we think this is what He commanded, we believe this is what He commanded.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, your second point is a correct point. I think it’s not only a question of humility, but also a question of recognizing that not all the truth is with you, in the real sense. Not in the sense of not abusing others or treating them with patience and courtesy, but in the sense that maybe you really are not right. In other words, there are different interpretations of what was given at Sinai. Some of those interpretations—like the Reform, for example—they claim there was no revelation at Mount Sinai, so that’s not an interpretation of what was given at Sinai; that’s something else. It’s another religion, sort of—if it’s a religion at all; I’m not sure it is, it seems more like a culture to me.

But within the religious world there are different interpretations of what was given at Mount Sinai. By the way, in my opinion Christianity is also an interpretation. Same thing. Christianity is on the map of the same interpretive process. They claim that the Holy One, blessed be He revealed Himself at Sinai and afterward changed direction and gave a new covenant. Fine—that is what they claim. I wasn’t persuaded. But if that is what they claim, then it is an interpretation of what happened at Mount Sinai. I cannot determine categorically, one hundred percent, that they are wrong, even though I have my own position, and I know that I too am a reflection of the landscape of my birthplace in this matter as well. And therefore I respect that position too. I don’t agree with it, but I respect it.

And I’ll say more than that. Even someone who thinks there was no revelation at Mount Sinai and that the Holy One, blessed be He did not reveal Himself—Reform, or secular, or whoever it may be, who does not accept the framework at all—I respect that position too. They think differently. I think they are wrong, I tend to think they are wrong, whatever, fine—but that is what they think, and it is a legitimate interpretation. I do not attack anyone who has a reasoned position. And I think that attacking people who hold reasoned positions by calling them heretics and unbelievers, with excommunications and bans—those are the tactics of the weak. When you have no substantive arguments, you move to bans and excommunications and war, and the fewer arguments you have, the more violent your attitude toward those positions becomes. Because that is, of course, a direct result of the lack of arguments. So with your criticism at the end, I fully agree. I agree not in the sense that everyone is right. No, I don’t think everyone is right. But yes in the sense that these are interpretations, and since I cannot be sure that I am right—I only tend to think I am right, or I think I am right, but it is always possible that maybe I am wrong—and overall they have their own reasoned position, I completely respect that.

In my view Christianity is a Jewish branch in the theological sense. Again, ethnically—yes, many of them do not have Jewish mothers—but in the theological sense, this is a Jewish position. It is one of the positions about what emerged from the revelation at Mount Sinai down to our own day; according to them it went through transformations. Fine. Just as there is a difference between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, between Religious Zionists and modern religious Jews, Conservatives—up to there. Meaning, everything beyond that is no longer, in my view, Jewish religiosity but Jewish culture or something like that: Reform and secularity. But Christianity, yes. Christianity is fully Jewish in that sense, because they speak about the revelation at Mount Sinai and commandments and obligation to what the Holy One, blessed be He commanded—not like the Reform and the secular. And in that sense Christians are closer to the point, even though their interpretation is farther away in content. But in terms of their fundamental stance, this is a position that tries to offer an interpretation of the will of God and of the revelation at Mount Sinai. I may not accept it, but fine—it is an interpretation like any other. And I even said more—I think I talked about this before—I want to claim more than that. I claim that the exclusive discourse among religions is mainly for internal purposes. Saying that we are the most correct and the Christians will be fried in the fires of hell—that is good for internal needs, to make us feel that we are terribly right and certain, and to give us self-sacrifice to stand by our own side, and so on.

I would wager that the Christians will not be fried in the fires of hell, even if there is such a thing there. Because if they acted innocently, and that is how they understood what the Holy One, blessed be He wanted from them, then what do you want from them? I mean, that is what they think, that is what they want. What—a person who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox religious home or whatever is more able to formulate a position intellectually than someone who grew up in a Polish village? He knows better how to ground his views? No. He grew up in one place and the other grew up elsewhere. And here I return to the environment. Yes, a person is a reflection of the landscape of his birthplace, and that is true. The only question is which environment helps formulate true things, and which environment merely programs. And here I close the circle: in my opinion the secular environment does more programming than the religious environment, contrary to what people usually think. That is my view. But in any case it is certainly no more than symmetric. An attack against religious faith in this way certainly does not exist. I claim there is an attack against secularity—but that can be argued. So at most it is symmetric. That is basically the claim.

[Speaker C] Rabbi, may I ask an empirical question? Okay. If we go back—you were talking about the revelation at Mount Sinai that we read about last week. If we assume, purely empirically, that the Ten Commandments at Sinai had not been “do not steal” and “do not murder” and “do not commit adultery,” but the opposite—murder, commit adultery, exploit your fellow, be cruel to him. Suppose the entire Torah, Heaven forbid, had been entirely the Torah of Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, sheer wickedness from beginning to end. The overall message, God forbid, would be wickedness and cruelty to one another. Would the Rabbi still do the service—would he still worship God in that situation or not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. Any situation that differs radically from the situation I’m in is hard for me to judge what I would do in, because I don’t really experience that situation in its full reality. And I think I spoke about this in the past—our ability to judge a situation that is completely foreign to our own. But I’ll say something like this: from my present point of view, what I would think about such a situation is—actually, two things. From my current point of view, what I would think is that I have an obligation to fulfill what the Holy One, blessed be He commanded because He is the Holy One, blessed be He. But I would have a moral objection to what He commanded, and therefore I would be in conflict. And now the question is what I would choose. Would I choose the religious obligation or the moral obligation? I don’t know.

Now if you ask me, okay, but maybe morally too He would not expect me to behave—if you say no, no, morally too there would be no problem murdering and so on—here I’ll tell you that that is like saying that two plus three equals seven. Meaning, what would you do in a world where two plus three equals seven? I don’t know how to answer that, because two plus three is five. In other words, you can’t say, let’s imagine a world in which it would be moral to murder. There is no such world, because it is immoral to murder. It’s like a world in which two plus three equals seven. Therefore, on the moral level, clearly the question has no meaning. What would I do if the moral situation, coming from the Holy One, blessed be He, told me to murder? There is no such world.

[Speaker C] But Rabbi, after all, the Rabbi says that he separates between the obligation to the divine norm, on the moral side, and on the religious side. So I said: if the religious side were sheer evil, focused evil, and alongside it there is morality—which I don’t know how one could live with—but God tells you that He upholds such wickedness as a supreme value, and that is the essence, that is what we are supposed to attain in divinity: wickedness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I answered that, I answered that.

[Speaker C] Would the Rabbi still feel obligated to worship Him? Why? Why worship Satan? I want to understand the logic of worshipping, Heaven forbid, Satan. Let the Rabbi explain to me anyway what the feeling is. Would the Rabbi really, somewhere deep down, feel an obligation to worship that Satan?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I promise you that if you let me, I will explain it to you. You just have to let me. That is, this is all I’m going to do from now on. I’m not going to get to it today, but we’ll do it later. But this is exactly what I’m going to do from here on. My claim—I’ll sharpen the point—is that the obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He is not because He is good. The obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He is because He is God. And in such an obligation, in principle, whatever He says, I am obligated to do. Even if He were Satan. If God were Satan, then I would be obligated to do what He says as Satan. But I would have against that the moral obligation not to do it. Therefore I would have a dilemma. It is exactly the same thing as when the law tells me to do something, or a military order tells me to do something, that is blatantly immoral. That does not mean there is no obligation to obey the law. It means that against the obligation to obey the law stands the moral obligation, and I am in conflict. Sometimes I will go in this direction, sometimes in that one, depending on the price, depending on how I weigh the two obligations, and so on. But in the end my claim is indeed what you said: that the obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He stems from the fact that He is God, regardless of whether He is good or not good.

[Speaker C] Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait.

[Speaker C] So He created a world—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We spoke before the lesson about how antagonistic He is toward this world—

[Speaker C] Wait, so I’m still obligated to Him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You asked, let me answer. I told you I’m going to explain it, so there’s no point asking it again. This is what I’m going to explain from here on. I’m going to explain from here on exactly this point: why am I obligated to God—what do you mean “why,” rather to point to the point, to explain in the same sense I spoke about until now, why this feeling is not a delusion. That’s what I call explaining. My claim is that if there is a God who commands, then I must obey regardless of the content of the command. Because if it were connected to the content of the command, then what would obligate me here would not be obedience to God, but rather that the command is good. So what does that have to do with God? It’s just an identity statement.

[Speaker C] Maybe the moral duty is what it means to be obligated to God—it’s the same thing in different words.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Religious service means accepting Him as God. Once He is God, I am obligated to do what He says with no connection whatsoever to whether He is good or not good, and with no connection whatsoever to the content of the commands. The midrash of the Sages about the revelation at Mount Sinai says that when the Holy One, blessed be He went around to the nations, they asked Him: do you want the Torah? They asked Him, what is written in it? And that is why the midrash criticizes them. Why? They are doing exactly what you recommend. They say: let’s see what is written in it. If it contains good things, excellent; if it contains bad things, very bad. No. Because Israel said, “we will do and we will hear.” Why? Because they accepted the Holy One, blessed be He over themselves as God. Religious service is service that I do—and I spoke about this at length—religious service is service I do because the Holy One, blessed be He said so. Not because it is right, not because it is good, not because of all kinds of things like that, and not because I love Him or fear Him or whatever it may be, but because He said so.

But if He had said things that were blatantly evil, it could be that I would not do them for moral reasons, but that would not negate the fact that I have an obligation to obey Him. Rather, another obligation might override it—maybe yes, maybe no. Now if He had commanded me, as I said before, also on the moral plane to do terrible things, that is an oxymoron. It is like telling me to create a world in which two plus three equals seven. There is no such thing. And that murder is evil. You cannot create a world in which murder is good. Murder is evil, period. The Holy One, blessed be He Himself is subject to that as well—to that rule. He cannot change morality. It is imposed on Him. Exactly as geometry and mathematics are imposed on Him; He cannot change them. That is an important point.

Now why, really, this point—and maybe it’s good that you asked it here because this is exactly the opening point where I’ll begin next time—why indeed, or how, do I understand this unconditional obligation to obey the Holy One, blessed be He because He is God—not regardless of whether He is good or evil, not regardless of the content of the commands and so on, but because He is God, period. Isn’t that something fanatical, irrational, unreasonable? So that is what we’ll talk about next time. We’re already out of time.

[Speaker F] But the example you gave is exactly the opposite. What the nations asked about was precisely moral issues.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, “do not murder,” “do not steal.” There the case is the opposite. After all, He told them that it says “do not murder,” and because of that they didn’t want it—not that they wanted to check whether it was moral; they wanted to check whether it was not—

[Speaker C] moral.

[Speaker F] No, that’s exactly what I’m saying. You say one has to obey the Holy One, blessed be He even if it’s not moral—He is God, He commanded. But the example you gave is precisely one in which the Holy One, blessed be He agrees that what is written in the Torah are moral matters.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, right—you are correct that from that midrash it also emerges that the Holy One, blessed be He expects moral behavior from us. That is true; according to that, it does come out of there. But another lesson also comes out of there. The alternative to what the nations said is not that we also asked, like the nations, what is written in it, and when we heard that it says “do not murder,” we said “we will do and we will hear.” Because since the content is moral, we accepted it, and therefore we are better than the nations because we accepted moral things and they weren’t willing to accept moral things, so they are immoral. No. The midrash is speaking here about religious superiority, not moral superiority. We did not ask at all what is written in the Torah; we said “we will do and we will hear.” And therefore the lesson is twofold. First, the Torah says “do not murder,” it does not say “yes, murder.” The Holy One, blessed be He expects this of us. But that is not the main lesson of the midrash. The main lesson of the midrash is that it is wrong to ask; rather one should say “we will do and we will hear,” without asking. In other words, the nations erred in two ways. They both asked, as though they condition their obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He on the content of the command—that is the first problem. The second problem is that once they discovered the content was good, they still did not want it, so they were also not moral. So they were both not religious and not moral.

And the people of Israel—I don’t know whether they were moral or not, because they didn’t ask what was written there, so I don’t know whether they were moral or not. I do know that they were religious. They accepted the Holy One, blessed be He over themselves as God. They said “we will do and we will hear”; they did not ask. And I think the focus of the midrash is not that the Torah is good. Let’s say that’s in the subtext, but it’s not what is written. The midrash itself, its focus, is that religious obligation should be unconditional. You should not need to ask what is written in it.

[Speaker C] Rabbi, that’s only if we start from the assumption that there had not been the Exodus from Egypt and that we had not experienced God as the ultimate good. After all, this was after the Exodus from Egypt. For some reason we didn’t receive the revelation at Mount Sinai before that. For some reason it was afterward—“and they believed in the Lord and in Moses His servant”—they understood that God is indeed the ultimate good, and therefore they stopped asking. Why not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says that? They understood that one must obey the Holy One, blessed be He—maybe because He is all-powerful, maybe because of all sorts of things. The fact that He is also good—that’s true. I didn’t discuss whether He is good or not. I’m only claiming that the reason to worship Him is not because He is good. I didn’t say He is not good. Rather, the reason to worship Him is not because He is good, but because He is God. That is the point.

[Speaker G] This is Abraham with the binding of Isaac—that the Holy One, blessed be He—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] said—

[Speaker G] So He commanded, but he had the dilemma that he didn’t understand why he was killing his son.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly right, yes. Therefore I think these founding myths—the binding of Isaac and this midrash about the revelation at Mount Sinai, yes, about “we will do and we will hear”—they are coming to say exactly this. There is an obligation. And again, I’m drawing this from midrashim, but I’m now making a logical claim; the midrashim are only an illustration. I’m not saying accept it because that’s what the Sages said—after all, we are discussing whether to accept the Sages, so that would not be proof. But I’m bringing an illustration from the Sages. I claim that the conception they are trying to convey to us is that there is a basic religious obligation to fulfill what the Holy One, blessed be He commanded because He is God. And if He commanded, it must be fulfilled.

Afterward I also know that He is good and everything is fine, okay, but the obligation to His words is not conditioned on that. On the contrary, if it became clear to me that He is not good, then perhaps I would be in conflict, I would be in a dilemma, maybe. But right now I’m talking about the first plane. And that is what I’ll try to clarify more next time: why really, where does this obligation come from, from the mere fact that He is God. Okay, that is the point left for me, which is exactly your question, so I’ll devote the next lesson to it.

[Speaker C] Can I just add half a sentence? Really half a sentence. Deep down I don’t think I disagree with the Rabbi, and I’ll tell you why. Because again, several times I’ve tried to explain: I don’t think the moral obligation is to man. I have no obligation to man, nor to society, nor to sociology—it really doesn’t interest me. The obligation is ultimately to worship God, and the moral issue I’m talking about is not morality so that there won’t be suffering in the world or so that people will be happy and joyful. That’s not the point at all. The point is really worship of God as obligation directly to the Holy One, blessed be He. The entire Torah, in my view, is between man and God, not between man and his fellow. And therefore I don’t think I disagree with the Rabbi in the end—we are actually in the same position.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying that is a different argument. You are discussing the question of what the moral obligation itself is grounded in. I’m discussing the religious obligation, not the moral one. You say yes, but what is the moral obligation grounded in? Is it grounded in the content of the things, because the good obligates itself upon me or imposes itself upon me, or am I obligated to it because the Holy One, blessed be He commanded it? So that is basically the Euthyphro dilemma two, four, five, seven—I talk about that too—but it doesn’t concern us here. I’m discussing the question of what the foundation of the religious obligation is. Leave the moral one aside; that is another issue that I’m not dealing with right now.

[Speaker B] Fine, can we go back for one second to the issue of the vacuum?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which vacuum?

[Speaker B] That secular people basically have a vacuum, and we didn’t get into the issue of the wagon, because the empty and full wagon was really referring to whether they have some other burden inside the wagon that’s sort of—what burden? No, so I’m saying the issue of the vacuum—it doesn’t exactly overlap with the problem of the empty wagon.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it does overlap. I’m claiming that when the Chazon Ish said that secularism is an empty wagon, he meant to speak about secularism, not about secular people. Any secular person, insofar as he’s defined as secular, that means he doesn’t believe in God—that’s the definition of a secular person. Beyond that, he can be a complete righteous person, full of content, art, values, science, creativity—everything, excellent. But that isn’t his secularism.

[Speaker B] Okay, and that’s called God as a vacuum. Again, I’m saying, it’s not this particular source, but sixty years ago. Rabbi Bogatz in our yeshiva—when the children would say, “I don’t believe.” Was that from Midrashiyah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From Nehalim. Nehalim.

[Speaker B] Okay. So he would say—he would say, what do you mean, “I don’t believe”? There’s no such thing. You believe. The question is what you believe in. There’s no such thing as not believing. Meaning, we’re setting up one person as a believer and the other as supposedly a vacuum. That’s not how it is. Belief is basically a parallel word for a worldview. How do you explain what’s go…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That takes me into a different discussion, one column before the one I mentioned, four, five, six. There I talk about the question whether values can exist without God. In my view, no. And in a world where they do exist—an atheistic world in which there are values—that means one of two possibilities: either they’re inconsistent, or they believe in God unconsciously. Those are the two possibilities. There’s no third possibility, in my opinion.

[Speaker B] And we already mentioned, “and he saw that there was no fear of God in this place,” okay, in another context. But I’m saying that to say that this one believes and that one is empty, a vacuum—that’s not right. Everyone believes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again,

[Speaker B] If there’s no problem, then

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you’re not secular, then I wasn’t talking about you. I’m talking about a secular person who doesn’t believe in God.

[Speaker B] But he believes, he believes—he has a worldview. It’s not a vacuum. He explains the world around him one way, and the religious person explains it another way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but if you agree with me that without God there is no morality, then now whoever holds by morality believes in God. He isn’t secular. Not secular in the sense of not believing in God. I’m not talking about whether he observes Jewish law, but he isn’t secular in the philosophical sense—he believes in God. Fine. I’m talking about someone who doesn’t believe in God, or at least not in a God who commands us regarding values, morality, or Jewish law, or whatever it may be. All those who think that God commands us values, morality, Jewish law, Christianity, it doesn’t matter what you want—Reform, whatever you want—no problem. I’m not talking about them. When I talk about the vacuum or the empty wagon, I’m talking about secularism as secularism. In itself, it’s empty. Anything beyond that is beyond that. If you believe in God, only you’re secular sociologically or you don’t observe commandments, but you do think that God commands morality or I don’t know what other things, fine—then you do believe in God and also in the values He expects from us. No problem. That’s not what I was talking about. Okay? Good. But you

[Speaker H] can point out what exactly the educational tools are for faith in God? Meaning, the fact that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The educational tools are the encounter with Him. The encounter with Him and with His word—with Torah, with our history, with Jewish law. To study these things, so that through cleaving to His words you also cleave to Him. And I think that’s the way to encounter Him. To keep asking all the time, “Who created these?” and all these midrashim and all that… not even with lofty philosophies, but rather to give some kind of validation, to give a person legitimacy for the feelings he has inside, that this whole story didn’t happen by chance. There really is someone who created this, and He also revealed Himself at Sinai, and here is the Torah that He gave us, and this obligates us in Jewish law. All of that is the way to encounter Him. Torah, first and foremost, is giving legitimacy, in my opinion. Because I think that for very many secular people—that song by HaKlerikala HaKatan expresses this wonderfully. Whoever doesn’t know it should read it. The claim is that this exists in many people, many children, they just don’t get cultural, social, philosophical legitimacy for it, and so they say, okay, we were born with all kinds of fantasies like these, we have to get over it and move on. And I think the main work of religious education is to explain to you that these are not fantasies, this is something real.

[Speaker H] If I understand correctly, is it right to say that there is some sort of inner intuition—let’s call it—for the existence of God in some sense? Sees Him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To see Him with the eyes of the mind. It’s like an inner intuition that there’s a door here, because my eyes show me a door. The skeptic will come and say, wait, but maybe there’s no door here and your eyes are deceiving you? So I say that faith too is a kind of eyes—we talked about this. Intuition is some kind of cognition, and with intuition I recognize that there is a God. It’s not a psychological construct. If it’s a psychological construct, then the secularists are right. Then it’s just because that’s how I’m built; it’s not really a claim about the world. I’m not saying that. I’m claiming that it’s a kind of recognition of the world that exists within us.

[Speaker H] Part of this issue is not only, let’s call it, opening the child’s antennas, but also, let’s say when we get into the specifics of observing commandments and of Torah from Heaven, there’s also some kind of development here—let’s call it—artificial. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s the question? I didn’t understand. I don’t know what this term “artificial development” means. There are additions, of course, beyond the antennas. Jewish law, I…

[Speaker H] Also, say, in a traditional home, where the name of Heaven is common on their lips, they go to synagogue—does that too count as a kind of education, let’s call it, that develops the religious tools? Not necessarily commitment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, usually in traditional homes there is commitment too. But it’s that kind of commitment that isn’t formulated and isn’t defined, and sometimes yes and sometimes no, and for this I have no energy and for that I do have energy—but in the background there is commitment there too. It’s not a philosophical conception of God, it’s a religious conception of God. They don’t just go to synagogue; philosophers who believe in a philosophical God don’t come to synagogue. There’s something very religious here, something that many times is much more religious than what I find within myself in the sense of connection to God. Except that there they make a bitter mistake, because they don’t fulfill the obligations that derive from that religious conception, but they do have a very deep religious conception, in my opinion—among traditional people, at least many traditional people.

[Speaker H] Thank you, that’s a lot of things to think about.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Good, have a peaceful Sabbath. Peaceful Sabbath. Goodbye.