Faith – Lesson 42
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The historical foundation: the Torah’s contribution to global morality
- The survival of the Jewish people and the Talmud as a mechanism of survival
- The codification controversy and the acceptance of the Shulchan Arukh
- Language, nationhood, the Holocaust, cultural prominence, and antisemitism
- Uniqueness versus miracle: “third-generation missiles” and reservation about active divine intervention
- Statistical rarity: rare-and-“special” versus rare-and-“not special”
- Miracles, distributions, and the example of Nassim Taleb
- Examples of a personal “miracle” and Entebbe: statistics versus religious interpretation
- Prophecies fulfilled: the value of the argument and reservations
- Critique of the prophecy argument: ambiguity, non-falsifiability, and competing conditions
- A qualified body of evidence and the move to the question of obligation
- Clarifications about idolatry, exclusivity, and attitudes toward monotheistic religions
- His position on open miracles, preservation of the Torah text, and the return of the people to the land
Summary
General overview
The speaker sums up the historical basis for the claim of revelation and the giving of the Torah, and lists unique phenomena in Jewish history: the Torah’s contribution and its ethical-moral message to the world, extraordinary survival under persecution and dispersion while creating and preserving a halakhic system centered around the Talmud, as well as phenomena such as the people’s return to their land, the revival of the language, cultural prominence, and antisemitism. He argues that this overall picture joins earlier proofs for the existence of God and for the plausibility of revelation, but he qualifies this by resisting the attribution of “miracles” in the sense of violations of natural law, and also proposes natural-cultural explanations. He then develops a statistical distinction between a rare “special” event and a rare “not special” event, and applies it to claims of miracle and to fulfilled prophecies, emphasizing their possible value alongside interpretive and methodological limitations. Finally, he announces that the next stage in the series is the question of obligation to the Torah even if it was indeed given from heaven.
The historical foundation: the Torah’s contribution to global morality
The speaker argues that the Torah, and the culture within which it was given, played a central role in the birth of values and morality that are widespread in the world, and that in the past this claim was stronger because it meant going against the current of a pagan and cruel world. He says that, in the moral and value-oriented sense, there seems to have been “some kind of giving of the Torah,” in which values are given to a certain group and from there spread throughout the world. He states that even after secularization, moral discourse still uses religious jargon such as the image of God and the Ten Commandments, and even atheists use it; he sees this as evidence of the source of these ideas and of the sense that without that source the values have no real validity, as he argued in the “proof from morality.”
The survival of the Jewish people and the Talmud as a mechanism of survival
The speaker presents the survival of the Jewish people under constraints, persecution, and dispersion as a phenomenon without parallel, and cites Toynbee, who said this despite being antisemitic. He emphasizes that this survival includes ongoing creativity such as the Mishnah, the Talmud, commentaries, and the preservation of Jewish law without an enforcing national hierarchy, while maintaining discourse and connections among scattered communities. He describes the structure of the Talmud as “strange” because of its associativeness, topic shifts, lack of clear division, and lack of definitive rulings, and argues that in retrospect there is collective wisdom in it, because a rigid canon in the style of the Shulchan Arukh would have fallen apart within 100–200 years under conditions of dispersion and cultural difference. He attributes to this structure the ability to contain a multiplicity of opinions and nuances over nearly two thousand years, and connects this to the idealization of dispute as reflected in the Mishnah in Eduyot and to the survival value of not erasing minority opinions.
The codification controversy and the acceptance of the Shulchan Arukh
The speaker says that the Maharal and the Maharshal opposed the very idea of legal codes, as part of what Menachem Elon calls “the codification controversy,” and that a strong internal controversy also arose against Maimonides and later against the Shulchan Arukh and the Rema. He argues that the opposition was principled—against a code as such—out of rejection of a fixed mode of thought unsuited to a changing and dispersed reality. He adds that the Shulchan Arukh was “accepted” only in the sense that it serves as a skeleton, and that the great halakhic decisors established a rule not to issue halakhic rulings from the Shulchan Arukh without its commentaries and sources; in fact, it is precisely because it is surrounded by disputes, qualifications, and Talmudic analysis that one can rule from it. He concludes that the fixation of the Shulchan Arukh is illusory, and that a flexible halakhic system is a unique key to cultural survival.
Language, nationhood, the Holocaust, cultural prominence, and antisemitism
The speaker presents language and nationhood as further unique phenomena, alongside a history of persecution and destruction culminating in the Holocaust. He emphasizes the “enormous specific gravity” of Jews in global cultural creation in fields such as art, science, literature, and ideologies, and sees this as a striking statistical phenomenon. He adds ongoing antisemitism as another datum requiring explanation, and expresses astonishment also at the world’s attitude toward the State of Israel, which in his view is disproportionate, especially when the conflict is between a democracy and terror groups, even if some countries partly support Israel. He concludes that the totality of these phenomena creates a significant historical uniqueness that joins the tradition of revelation and the role of the values transmitted to the world.
Uniqueness versus miracle: “third-generation missiles” and reservation about active divine intervention
The speaker proposes two interpretive tracks for uniqueness: one can see it as an ongoing historical accompaniment by the Holy One, blessed be He, or one can explain it naturally through a culture that gave survival power and drove processes such as the return to Zion without the need for direct miraculous intervention. He says that anomaly is not the same thing as miracle, and that a miracle requires an event “against the laws of nature,” whereas political and military successes may be unusual but not supernatural. He declares that he is “allergic” to proofs drawn from miracle-workers in our own time, and argues that if one attributes every anomaly to active providence, then one must also attribute the Holocaust and tsunamis to it; he rejects such a conclusion and says he does not need it for his argument. He defines the cultural explanation as “third-generation missiles,” in which a legacy and ethos implanted in the past continue to operate across the generations.
Statistical rarity: rare-and-“special” versus rare-and-“not special”
The speaker distinguishes between a rare and special event and a rare event that is not special, illustrating with the throwing of dice: a hundred sixes in a row seems to demand explanation, whereas some random sequence of results is equally rare but not special, because something had to come out. He adds that prior knowledge or advance prediction of a result turns even a non-special event into a special one, because the very fit with what was said beforehand demands explanation. He applies this to miracle claims and says that the tendency to infer “the hand of God” from rare events is problematic, because special-looking things happen in nature by force of statistics; he gives examples such as modern “miracle books” and a discussion of rarity versus meaning.
Miracles, distributions, and the example of Nassim Taleb
The speaker cites Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan and presents its claim that a figure like Warren Buffett can appear to be a genius, but may simply be the product of statistics whereby out of a million investors one person survives with long-term success. He argues that one has to look at the distribution: if there is a pyramid of successes, then there is no need to assume exceptional talent; if everything converges on one person over time, that is less likely. He uses this example to argue that when we see a rare phenomenon, we should examine the context and not jump immediately to conclusions.
Examples of a personal “miracle” and Entebbe: statistics versus religious interpretation
The speaker tells of an accident in Gedera in which a neighbor from Yeruham with a large vehicle picked up his family in the middle of the night after that neighbor had “lost his way” and happened by chance to arrive there, and he shows how the event can be broken down into components and placed on a continuum of similar cases in order to understand whether this is just statistics. He quotes a letter by Rabbi Shach about Entebbe and explains that if the chance of success was five percent, then the fact that it actually succeeded does not refute that estimate, because statistically five percent of such operations will succeed. He concludes that special events are not necessarily proof of intervention, and that if special events never happened, that would actually be the surprising thing from the standpoint of nature.
Prophecies fulfilled: the value of the argument and reservations
The speaker says that claims about fulfilled prophecies annoy him when they rely on ad hoc interpretation, similar to the criticism of equidistant-letter-code claims, but he still argues that there is something there worthy of serious examination. He quotes verses describing exile, persecution, mockery, subjugation, “a nation from afar… as the eagle swoops down,” “and the Lord shall bring you back to Egypt in ships,” and verses from Leviticus about the land’s desolation, destruction, exile, and return through the “covenant of the first ones,” and presents possible correspondences to Rome, eagle symbols, a foreign language, being taken down to Egypt by ship, and historical desolation. He argues that these are unusual events foreseen in advance in broad outline and in some details, and therefore the argument should not be dismissed—especially since advance prophecy makes even a “rare but not special” event into something that demands explanation.
Critique of the prophecy argument: ambiguity, non-falsifiability, and competing conditions
The speaker says that for the argument to be decisive, one would have to go verse by verse and examine predictive power in advance, not just after-the-fact fit, because formulations can be metaphorical and non-fulfillment can always be explained away. He compares this to the Delphic oracle and to the charlatanism of vague prediction, and also criticizes academic “futurology” as a vague discipline that can be made to fit any outcome. He argues that a systematic check is needed of all prophecies, not selective picking and choosing, and also comparison with other books such as the Quran. He adds that non-fulfillment is not a refutation because of competing considerations and conditional prophecies, and cites Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman with the example of “one who makes Havdalah over a cup will have male children” alongside other factors such as “because of the sin of vows, a person’s children die,” so that different considerations may cancel the expected result; therefore if non-fulfillment does not refute, fulfillment alone is also not unequivocal proof.
A qualified body of evidence and the move to the question of obligation
The speaker concludes that no single claim is “a crushing argument,” but the whole picture “demands interpretation” and joins the arguments for the existence of God, the plausibility of revelation, and the tradition of the giving of the Torah. He says he is finishing the historical chapter and moving to the final chapter in the series: even if there is a God and He gave the Torah at Sinai, why is that binding? He defines this as a philosophical question in the style of the “is-ought problem.” He argues that obligation is not based only on a feeling of obligation, because if “something obligates only the one who feels obligated, then it doesn’t obligate.”
Clarifications about idolatry, exclusivity, and attitudes toward monotheistic religions
The speaker clarifies that idolatry is not necessarily the same thing as immorality, and cites the Meiri to the effect that idolaters can be moral. He distinguishes between the Torah’s war against idolatry and today’s attitude toward other monotheistic beliefs, which in his words worship the Holy One, blessed be He, who revealed Himself at Sinai, and therefore the exclusive claim against them is weaker. He says he thinks Judaism is more correct than the others, but he does not need exclusivity in order to ground his own path, and he offers a scenario in which the Holy One, blessed be He, expects a gentile to serve Him in a church and a Jew through the 613 commandments, and that this can still be “good enough.” He argues that exclusive rhetoric serves internal needs, and he sees no reason why the Holy One, blessed be He, would “fry Mother Teresa in hell,” and therefore rejects collective reward-and-punishment imagery with respect to righteous non-Jews.
His position on open miracles, preservation of the Torah text, and the return of the people to the land
The speaker says it would be hard for him to be convinced that a “rare” event is a miracle, and that perhaps only an open miracle before his eyes, like the splitting of the sea, would convince him, whereas along the axis of rarity there are always explanations. He is asked about the identity of the Torah text across communities; he acknowledges that there are small differences and mentions “Rabbi Akiva Eiger’s responsum listing seven problems with letters in the Torah,” and stresses that this is a wonder of preservation resulting from halakhic meticulousness and not necessarily from active divine intervention. He agrees that the people’s return to the land, the land’s desolation over long periods, the revival of the language, and other phenomena are “not logical” in the sense of being anomalous, but repeats that this is not necessarily a metaphysical miracle, rather evidence of unique cultural power. He closes by saying that similar claims also exist regarding the Quran, but they need to be examined in an orderly way, and states that the continuation of the inquiry will appear “in the next book.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s begin. I want, at the very least, to finish this part of the whole discussion today—to talk about the foundation before I get to the question of obligation to the word of God itself. Meaning, assuming there is a word of God, why are we obligated by it? So I’ll sum it up this way. There is some overall body of things—and I’m not going back now, not returning again to proofs for the existence of God, to the plausibility that He would reveal Himself, to the fact that morality cannot be… all the things we discussed earlier, I’m not going back over them now. I just want to summarize what we might call the historical issue. In the historical context, there are several points that seem very unique to our history. Maybe the first thing is the central, essential role of the Torah and of the culture within which it is given—our culture—in the values and morality that are common in the world today. It seems to me that on this point it’s hard to deny it. Even though today it sounds like a much weaker argument, because after all these moral values are accepted all over the world—some keep them more, some less, and we too don’t always excel—but it seems to me that in the past this was, I mean, when you look at the past, it’s a much stronger claim. Meaning, there is some kind of going against the accepted current in the direction of morality, whose principles basically still exist to this day, and I think quite clearly it comes from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and from the Jewish people to a great extent. I’m not even talking now about uprooting idolatry and all the cruelty and child sacrifice, and the corruption that was widespread in the world. And again, I’m saying: I don’t want to make these claims about today. I’m making them in the historical sense—where this came from and where it was given. Because these things have significance when we look at revelation. So in that sense at least, even if not in the religious sense, then certainly in the moral and value-oriented sense, it really does look like there was some sort of giving of the Torah, that is, some sort of revelation: values are given to a person, to a certain group, and from there they really spread to the entire world. And today, thank God, I think that’s almost universally accepted and very widespread, and that is exactly the meaning of an interaction called revelation—that is, the interaction with the Holy One, blessed be He, who gives something, and through that event it spreads throughout the world. Even though we’re talking only about morality, and I already said that morality cannot be the ultimate end of this whole matter, even today it seems to me that after it underwent secularization—yes, becoming secular—the moral discourse still very often uses religious jargon. Yes—where is the image of God in man? All kinds of claims, quotations of course, the Ten Commandments, and so on. People who are openly atheists keep using this jargon, and I think that testifies to two things. First, of course, it testifies to the source of these things—that their source is there, even if in the end you don’t accept the religious framework they once had. And second, it seems to me—though of course one can argue about this—that there is some feeling, even among those who don’t admit it to themselves, that it comes from there. Meaning, without that source these values have no real validity. And I talked about that in the fourth lecture on the proof from morality—that basically without the religious jargon, trying to conduct moral discourse in secular jargon does not inspire confidence, and rightly so, because philosophically in my opinion it is not valid. But I think its power in the world is weak. It’s weak even with regard to people who do not accept religious faith, who do not accept the existence of God as a factual claim, and they also won’t admit that it’s a weak discourse. But the fact that they keep using the religious jargon seems to me to say something nonetheless. That’s one point. A second point is of course survival—the survival of the Jewish people, I mean. I think there is no other example of such survival in the history of the world. I’m not talking about the sheer number of years—I don’t know, maybe the Chinese are around the same amount of time, I haven’t checked exactly—but under the constraints, persecutions, and problems that this people faced, I think this survival is unparalleled. There’s Toynbee, by the way—he was a well-known antisemitic historian whose specialty was the survival of ancient cultures, that was his field—and he himself, as an antisemite, said there is nothing like it. Meaning, this phenomenon of the survival of the Jewish people. And I’m not even talking about the fact that in the course of this survival, this people keeps producing works like the Talmud, the Mishnah, the commentaries; it manages to preserve Jewish law as some kind of framework all over the world despite the dispersion, despite the absence of any formal national hierarchy to back this broad cultural framework—there’s nobody enforcing it—yet still a set of communities scattered all over the world continue to preserve, first, ties, and second, a shared discourse with all the disputes and the different customs, of course, and everything. All of that is contained within the framework of halakhic-Talmudic discourse, and that, in my opinion, certainly has no parallel. I mean, it has no parallel even among a people living in one place. I’m not even talking about a people scattered all over the world, speaking different languages, not knowing one another, communicating by carrier pigeon rather than by internet. So this really has no parallel at all. I once spoke about this in the context of the character of the Talmud, which at first glance has a very strange character, because there’s some sort of collection of associative links between claims, between topics, movement from one subject to another, the divisions are very unclear and not maintained—the division of subjects—the give-and-take does not end in conclusions in the great majority of passages, some sort of free discourse among people about all kinds of odd subjects, and that’s it, it just remains hanging in the middle. And that is what gets framed and fixed as the code, the canon of Judaism. It’s very, very strange. We would have expected something more like the Shulchan Arukh, the Kitzur Shulchan Arukh, Maimonides—some more defined and unequivocal rules. Even there I wouldn’t have expected that exactly; I would have expected more systematic rules. In Maimonides it’s a collection of laws arranged by category, but not orderly principles from which one can derive conclusions. This whole story is built in a very strange way. And I think that at least in retrospect one can see some sort of very powerful collective wisdom in this structure of the Talmud, because if they had established a Shulchan Arukh-type work in the fifth century, sorry, or the sixth century—if they had established such a Shulchan Arukh as the Jewish canon—it would have fallen apart after 100 or 200 years. Because a rigid text that sets definite rulings and has to be applied in very, very different places, with very, very different modes of thought, with very, very different constraints, in very different periods—we’re talking about a preservation over almost two thousand years, say from the beginning of the crystallization of the Talmud—and it still continues to be the text that determines how we function, the text within which the discourse and the discussion and the argument are conducted. There is no chance of achieving such a thing otherwise. If they had fixed a canon, we wouldn’t be here today. If they had fixed a canon like the Shulchan Arukh, again, we wouldn’t be here today because it would have broken apart after 100 or 200 years. The trick they found was to establish a canon, so-called, something that looks least like a canon imaginable—some sort of free discourse with different opinions, no ruling, anyone can prove all sorts of things from all sorts of passages and argue, and it’s very hard to arrive at clear conclusions. Precisely that, it seems to me, ultimately helped us preserve this framework of discourse that contains within it all the nuances and opinions and ways of thinking—everything, everything is present and conducted within the Talmudic discourse.
[Speaker C] And that’s exactly the Maharal’s and Maharshal’s claim against the Shulchan Arukh. They didn’t agree with the whole idea of the Shulchan Arukh.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s what Menachem Elon calls the codification controversy. And in both those contexts—in the twelfth-thirteenth century and onward, that was Maimonides, and in the sixteenth century it was the Shulchan Arukh and the Rema—a very, very strong controversy arose. I mean an internal controversy, one in which all the leading rabbis and halakhic decisors came out against those codes. And the claim was basically a principled claim against the existence of a code as such. Not because of Maimonides specifically or the Shulchan Arukh specifically—they were unwilling to accept that kind of mode of thought. Unwilling to accept that kind of mode of thought, and the reasons are the same reasons that I think I described here.
[Speaker C] But in the end the Shulchan Arukh was accepted.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, in the end the Shulchan Arukh was accepted—that, I think, is a somewhat exaggerated word, but yes, it serves as a kind of skeleton around which—by the way, the early commentaries on the Shulchan Arukh, the great halakhic decisors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, established a rule that one must not issue halakhic rulings from the Shulchan Arukh. One must not issue halakhic rulings from the Shulchan Arukh. Later, halakhic decisors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries said: because around the Shulchan Arukh there are commentaries that argue with it and bring the sources from the Talmud and discuss and qualify and so on and so on and so on—that is what allows us to rule from the Shulchan Arukh. The fact that it did not remain merely a Shulchan Arukh, that is what allows us to rule from it. Meaning, there is some kind of acceptance of the Shulchan Arukh, and if you look even today at how many different positions exist within the halakhic world, all of them hanging on the Shulchan Arukh, then you’ll understand just how illusory the fixation of the Shulchan Arukh is. Meaning, it isn’t really a true fixation. Its commentators disagree with it, of course, and it’s not only the people around it. Therefore I think that the survival of a system which on the one hand is so flexible, and that flexibility is what allowed it to survive, is really a very, very unique phenomenon. I don’t think there’s another such phenomenon in the world, in culture—some culture that survived in this way. I’m not even talking about statements that nowadays already sound downright pathetic, like respect for others’ views and conducting civilized argument—but yes, I think we do have some sort of copyright on that too, even though lately we’re not doing so well at it. And that is part of what enabled that survival. Meaning, precisely because there was no final ruling that tossed aside everyone whose view wasn’t accepted, but as the Mishnah in Eduyot says, they left the words of the one who rules pure among the words of those who prohibit, the words of the minority among the words of the majority—they left all that for future generations because there is some kind of idealization of dispute, or of a multiplicity of opinions. And that idealization is very wise also in terms of survival. People think it is a price we pay for morality or for a decent attitude toward other views. I think first of all it has survival value. Meaning, first of all it is an interest. It is an interest, because without it we don’t survive. If whoever wins simply throws everyone else aside, no trace of the whole system will remain. It’s an interesting lesson, I think, for our own times too, but I won’t get into current events. In any case, survival is the second thing, together with the creativity and development over this whole period—the period of dispersion and lack of an organized system within which we function. The organized system within which we function is a book. Not social institutions and not some government, certainly not one with an effective police force. It’s simply a book. There is a book within which we live—the Talmud. It’s an amazing thing. I mean, I’m full of admiration every time I talk about it; I get emotional about it. Full of admiration for this thing. There is no such phenomenon in the world. It’s amazing. Yes, I can never understand people to whom the Talmud doesn’t speak. I don’t know—for me it’s literally the breath of our nostrils. Someone who isn’t moved by it is, in a certain sense, obtuse in my eyes. Anyway—can I take a question?
[Speaker E] Yes. I didn’t understand what exactly you’re trying to demonstrate through the fact that the Jewish people survived—is it the divine promise in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), or…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m getting to that in a moment. I’m getting to that in a moment. First of all, I’m pointing to the uniqueness. Afterward we’ll see what this uniqueness means. Okay? So that’s the second thing. So again: the legacy, the source of the values, their spread, and so on; our survival, together with the creativity under constraint, the creativity that takes place in the course of all these processes. The third thing is language and nationhood, a villa in the jungle if you like—in the phrase of someone I don’t like—and still other phenomena that we’ve somewhat grown numb to. Those too are quite unique things in world history, certainly when we’re talking about a history of persecution and destruction over thousands of years. Of course, in the Holocaust in the twentieth century this was almost the—well, not almost, it was the peak of the whole thing. And all the while, the enormous specific gravity of Jews within creative activity on the various fronts of world culture—mainly Western culture, but world culture generally—whether in art, science, literature, all fields, ideologies, all kinds of areas. In my eyes that prominence is hard to ignore as a statistical phenomenon. To that I would perhaps add also the blatant antisemitism that exists in the world all the time, which of course one can also explain as part of the same reaction to that prominence I described before, but I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation if you look at it that way. Even the attitude toward the State of Israel always leaves me astonished. I don’t think there is another example of a state fighting groups whose essence is terror and whose leadership is terror—a democratic state—and the enlightened world quite systematically comes out against the democracy and in favor of those groups. It’s really strange, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s another such phenomenon, or many such phenomena, in the world. There are always, of course, the Orientalist and post-colonialist arguments, the Western frustration over their own colonialism, which causes them always to support various violent, dark, primitive groups. There is some nostalgic tendency in the West, or perhaps paternalistic, I would say, to support violent and unjust groups as compensation for their post-colonial frustration. But that doesn’t characterize the states—it characterizes bizarre groups on the left side of the political map. The attitude toward the State of Israel—again, it’s not that all countries are absolutely against us all the time and don’t help us; they do help us and support us here and there. Still, the response to the struggle going on here is, in my opinion, very, very unbalanced and atypical. Especially when it’s a struggle between a democracy and other groups for whom saying they’re not democratic is a compliment—or look at how they treat minorities and their own women, not anyone else’s. And how can one understand this global identification that is always, always occupied only with the wrongs done by the State of Israel? I can’t understand it. And again, I really don’t want to get into politics here, and surely there are different outlooks in the room, but just looking at the phenomenon itself: you can say we’re more righteous or less righteous, but it seems to me that this attitude is disproportionate. And there is something in this attitude that, in my view, is unique and requires explanation. The whole collection of these phenomena says that there is some very unique phenomenon here in the history of humanity. And if I combine that with everything we’ve seen so far, then that means that basically there is evidence that God exists, that He revealed Himself or that it is very likely He revealed Himself; there is a tradition saying that He revealed Himself. That revelation bequeathed to the world a set of values which to this day is basically the skeleton on which the world’s ethical thinking is built. Of course, today many people carry that message, but it is still the skeleton. And the people who carried that message—the Jewish people—have a very, very, very unique history in all the aspects I described here. What does that mean? Yes, I mentioned Toynbee; there are also Mark Twain and all the quotations we heard in Bnei Akiva—I won’t repeat them here. The question is what this thing actually means. There are… there are two arguments that one can make about uniqueness. And here I want to respond to the question that was asked earlier. One can argue, on the basis of this uniqueness, that apparently the Holy One, blessed be He, is actually shaping this history of ours, accompanying us all the time—and look, there is something very, very anomalous and different in our history. That’s one argument. In places where there are open miracles, or I don’t know, things of that kind, then yes, that is the natural interpretation. But it seems to me that at least in recent generations, when people speak about miracles, they get carried away a bit. I mean, the return of the Jewish people, the success in establishing a state, victories in wars, or all the success of this state, and so on and so on—these are indeed unusual. But unusual and miracle are not synonyms. The question is whether I can put my finger on something that happened here against the laws of nature. Because not everything unusual is against the laws of nature. Before I get further into this, let me perhaps suggest another possible interpretation of that anomaly—one that is also connected to the involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He, but without miracles. Meaning, even if the Holy One, blessed be He, did not cause our return to the land, and the victories in war, and the survival, and everything I talked about earlier, it is still possible that the culture we received and developed around the Torah we received is what helped us survive naturally. Meaning, a people whose culture is this kind of culture will survive better than other peoples in a natural process—not because of intervention by the Holy One, blessed be He, but because this culture has some sort of power or survival capacity—adaptation, if you like—that other cultures do not have. Now that too is a possible explanation, because once we have such a culture, one in which we are supposed to return to Zion and we have been promised that we will return to Zion and so on, then you understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t actually need to intervene for us to return to Zion. Meaning, it is enough that there is such an ethos accompanying us for thousands of years for some people with initiative to arise—good thing the religious people didn’t control the whole story, someone also had to actually do something—and in the end the thing materializes. The fact that it materializes does not have to be direct miraculous divine intervention. It can be the result of that culture within which we have been living and operating for thousands of years, and whose source is the Holy One, blessed be He. So this is what I call third-generation missiles—you fire and forget. You pass on some heritage, some ethos, some culture, to the Jewish people, and from there on the story works the way it works. It doesn’t require the Holy One, blessed be He, to do these things, because I’m a little allergic to proofs of divine involvement based on anomalies, as I’ll explain in a moment. Therefore—yes, I’ve spoken about this in the past, I think, and I’ve also written about it—that I don’t think there is active divine involvement in history, at least not in recent generations, and all the proofs people always bring, and the open miracles and all kinds of things of that sort, are neither miracles nor open, and they prove nothing. But they are unique. They are unique in the sense that they do say there is something special about this people, which manages to survive and flourish and thrive within this system of constraints. But that unique thing does not necessarily prove divine involvement. It does not necessarily prove that there is active assistance from the Holy One, blessed be He, freezing the laws of nature so that we can do what we do. No, absolutely not. I don’t think there is any indication of that. Rather, this is a culture that has that power. And in that sense too it is significant, because it says something about the quality and the source of that culture. Meaning, beyond the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, did these things here. If the Holy One, blessed be He, did every unique thing, then He also did the Holocaust, He also did the tsunami, He did many things for which we would be less inclined to thank Him. I don’t think that is the necessary conclusion. It is not the conclusion, and it is also not a necessary conclusion for the argument I’m making here. Meaning, I do not need the involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He, in history in order to make the claim I’m making here. Now I want to move a little more into this whole issue of the rarity of events and so on, because we need to understand what it means for an event to be anomalous or rare. Look, one can distinguish between two types of events in this context. There is an event that is rare and special, and there is an event that is rare but not special. Two kinds of rare events, for example. If I throw a fair die—meaning one whose chance of landing on each side is equal—and it lands a hundred times in a row on six, then I think most of us would agree that it is not reasonable to say this is chance. It probably isn’t chance. We might suspect that the die is loaded, maybe someone intervened here. It is not reasonable that this is random, because it is a rare and special event. Okay? The probability that a hundred times in a row it comes out six is—there isn’t really a probability, right? It’s six to the power of minus one hundred, some unimaginable thing with seventy zeroes or something like that. That’s one type. The second type is a rare but not special event. For example, I throw a die a hundred times and some sequence of results comes out: three, one, six, five, six, two, four, one, four, six, three, two—it doesn’t matter, write down a sequence of a hundred numbers from one to six. That thing is unique, of course, and the probability of getting it is the same probability with the same seventy zeroes. But it’s not special. It’s not special in the sense that if I were to throw a die a hundred times, some result had to come out, and whatever result came out would be a rare result. Okay? The difference between that and the result of a hundred sixes in a row is that this result is rare but not special. The result of a hundred sixes is rare—the chance of getting it is exactly the same as the chance of any other result—but it is anomalous, it is special. Okay? And when you have a result that is both rare and special, that requires explanation. Okay? That is basically the claim. Now, there’s another important point in this context: what happens if we have some prior knowledge that this particular special sequence is going to come out? Let’s say someone told me in advance the sequence of a hundred numbers that would come out in these throws. Then even if the sequence is rare and not special, if someone told me in advance that these numbers would come out, that itself makes the sequence special. Because this is the very sequence he said in advance would come out. And so de facto it becomes a special sequence. Meaning, even non-special events—if someone predicted them in advance or said in advance that they would happen—then that itself already requires explanation. Here it becomes special—rare and special. Okay? Of course, if someone foresaw in advance that there would be a rare and special event, that requires explanation squared. Right? If someone says beforehand that we’re going to get a hundred sixes in these dice throws. Then here you have both advantages. Meaning, it is also a rare and special event, not just rare and not special, and there is also prior expectation or prior foresight that it would happen. Okay? So the claim I want to make is that when we look at the events or characteristics of the Jewish people that I described earlier, there is always a question in the background—
[Speaker F] Do you have help?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? רגע—one second, I’ll mute here. There’s always some background question whether you can infer from this rarity some kind of conclusion, right? The victory in the Six-Day War, all kinds of miracle books about I-don’t-know-what in Gush Katif, with missiles that fell and nobody got hurt—do you know all these ridiculous miracle stories? So these are things of that sort. Most of it is complete nonsense, some of it is not complete nonsense, but it’s all nonsense. So the claims—or the intuitions—that accompany these kinds of claims about uniqueness are always claims of the following sort: is this an implausible uniqueness? Is this rare and special, or rare and not special? Right, my favorite example in this context: there’s Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese economist, that Lebanese market guy, who wrote a very popular book in the world about various statistical phenomena of this kind, in the context of the stock market but not only. And for example he says, take someone like Warren Buffett. Okay? Warren Buffett is a legendary investor who has managed, over decades, to succeed in his investments. Okay? That’s the claim. So he says the obvious conclusion is that Warren Buffett is probably a genius. A financial genius. Because the fact is, over decades, the man keeps succeeding in his investments. More or less—I assume he also fails from time to time—but by and large he succeeds fairly systematically. Does this really tell us something about Warren Buffett’s abilities?
So Taleb says, let’s say a million people enter the world of investing. Now after a month, five hundred thousand of them will drop out because they’re no longer in the market—they’ll fall. The other five hundred thousand will get the money of those who fell and continue. After another month, another hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand people will fall. After a year, ten years, twenty years, ninety-eight percent of them will have fallen. Let’s say after—I don’t know—fifty straight years, there will be a few individuals, one, two, three, five, I don’t know how many, who for fifty straight years continue to succeed in investments. I don’t know—after a hundred years maybe there will still be one person continuing. Statistics. Now after a hundred years, we’ll look at that one person who’s been successful in investments for over a hundred years, and we’ll say wow, this is a financial genius, an economic genius. No—it’s simply a result of statistics. Meaning, it could be that he has no ability beyond the rest of the million who were in the market. On the conceptual level I’m saying, I have no idea—I don’t know Warren Buffett and I don’t understand this field—but I’m saying that statistically, even if he had no skill beyond all the other million who entered the market, statistics still says that one can remain and succeed over a long period—fifty years, I don’t know how many, seventy years—one person out of the million will continue succeeding.
So that basically means that there can be a very rare phenomenon, and of course we naturally tend immediately to infer conclusions from it—so he’s an economic genius if he succeeded—but many times there’s simply a statistical explanation. The statistical explanation says that one person out of all the losers entering the market will survive for fifty or seventy years, and that person happens to be called Warren Buffett. Now I’m not saying that’s the case, I’m only raising the possibility, or that interpretive possibility. When we see an unusual event, we need to check. One of the ways, by the way, to do this is to look at distributions. Meaning, if I discover that Warren Buffett is indeed the only one who succeeded for, say, fifty years, seventy years, I don’t know how long—but those who succeeded for forty years were five people, those who succeeded for thirty years were twenty, those who succeeded for twenty years were a hundred—meaning, if the distribution overall looks like some kind of reasonable pyramid and we’re left with one person at the top, that’s an indication that maybe he really isn’t especially talented, but rather that this is a statistical result. But if Warren Buffett remains the only one from year thirty to year one hundred, and he’s always just the only one, that’s less plausible. Meaning, if this isn’t a pyramid but narrows down to one person, and that person keeps succeeding for another ten years and another ten years and so on and so on—that’s already less plausible.
Meaning, when we see a rare phenomenon, we need to look at the context, at the surrounding distribution, because without that it’s very hard to draw conclusions. I can’t avoid giving here the example I already gave a few times in the past, about the accident in Gedera—the mythological story. We were driving at one in the morning with the family back to Yeruham from some celebration in Kfar Chabad. And in Gedera some woman came out from the side—it turned out to be a young driver, had just finished and gotten her license—she came out from the side, the car in front of me braked, I hit him, and my car was finished. At one in the morning, with eight people, in Gedera, on the way to Yeruham. Before I even managed to open the car door and understand what had happened, a large empty vehicle stopped next to me—belonging to a neighbor of mine from Yeruham—who put all eight of us into his vehicle and took us home. Meaning, we hadn’t even had time to think what we were going to do, how to order two taxis and pay—I don’t know—thousands of shekels to get from Gedera to Yeruham. This guy happened to pass by, and then it turned out that he too had had his own adventure: he’s usually a regular driver and never loses his way and everything is fine, and that evening somehow he missed the turn at Latrun, got to Ramla, and got to Gedera. He says, I don’t know where I’m even driving around. Then he passed by us and his wife says to him, look, Arieh, the Abraham family is here. He says, okay, the Abraham family is here. They hadn’t even seen that there had been an accident. This really happened. Meaning, they hadn’t even understood that we needed help at all. He says, no, no, stop—maybe they need something after all. He stopped, and the rest is history.
Seemingly this is an open miracle. Obviously, the hand of God in an unequivocal way. But when you ask yourself how many people got stuck at one in the morning far from home in an accident and no neighbor stopped next to them, or a neighbor stopped with a small car that couldn’t hold everyone, or the neighbor who stopped with a big car hadn’t lost his way, or hadn’t missed the turn at Latrun but really passed there naturally—you can break this miracle down into its components and produce some sort of distribution of cases, such that in the end it turns out that, say, the probability of such a thing is one in a million—just throwing out a number, because this is not a serious calculation, but say one in a million. Okay. Now over the course of history, a million people got stuck at night in faraway places. The question is: how many of them had this miracle happen to them? If it happened to two, three, five people, then it’s no longer a miracle, okay? It’s statistics. At some point it has to happen. Even a one-in-a-million chance happens one in a million. Right? It’s like the letter—the letter from Rabbi Shach, which I like. He has a letter about Entebbe.
There was an argument whether to carry out such an operation, to endanger soldiers or not to take risks because the chance of success was small—various arguments. I’m not talking within the army, I’m talking in the public sphere. So apparently someone asked him, and he said that in his opinion it was not correct to do such a thing. Meaning, it was not right to endanger soldiers for a small chance of succeeding in rescuing the hostages there in Entebbe. In the end they carried out the operation, and the results are known—it succeeded. Meaning, there were costs, but it succeeded. So they came back to Rabbi Shach and said, well, Rabbi, you see—you were wrong. He said, why was I wrong? I wasn’t wrong at all. I said there was a five percent chance it would succeed, and for five percent you’re not allowed to go out on such an operation. When I say there is a five percent chance it will succeed, that means there is a five percent chance it will succeed. Meaning, if they did a hundred such operations, five would succeed—so this operation that they did is among the ones that succeeded. Does that prove I wasn’t right originally? No. There’s statistics. Okay, even about that you can quibble a bit—I even once wrote about it—there is nevertheless some twist here. But on the conceptual level, I’m saying we have a tendency to infer conclusions from special events. Every special thing that happens, people immediately declare it a miracle, the hand of God involved in the world. There’s no basis for that. No basis for that, because special things happen all the time naturally. If special things didn’t happen, that would be a miracle, because nature says that special things do happen. There’s statistics, and statistics says that an event whose probability is one in a hundred happens one in a hundred. That’s what it means when we say its probability is one in a hundred, okay? So to say it won’t happen because its probability is one in a hundred—if it doesn’t happen despite the fact that its probability is one in a hundred, that’s a miracle.
So this leaning on rare events is very, very problematic. Now why? Because these rare events may be rare and not special. In order to infer conclusions, the event has to be rare and special. Okay? Now here, in historical contexts—the contexts I spoke about earlier—it’s somewhat hard to determine clearly whether this rarity is a special rarity or just rarity. Right? The survival I described earlier—is it special survival, or rare survival in the sense that this happens to one out of a hundred peoples, so one out of a hundred peoples had it happen, okay, there’s nothing special here, and in this case it’s us? Or is it really a special rarity? I personally tend to think there is something special here, not merely something rare. And the reason is that I don’t think—it’s like with Warren Buffett—check the distribution. Meaning, are there nations that succeeded in eighty percent of our parameters? Two nations. And fifty percent of our parameters—five nations, and so on—and then some sort of reasonable statistical pyramid emerges? But if in all these parameters there is only one nation over a very long period of time, that means there is some kind of implausible distribution here. This is something that is both rare and special, not rare but not special—like the Warren Buffett criterion.
So again, that’s my personal tendency, but I want to add to it—and this is an issue that many people turn to, and I always recoiled from it until I wrote the book, because I said it isn’t straight. Meaning, to be rational in a crooked way is also not straight. I’m talking about the fulfilled prophecies people speak about—that the Torah itself, or the prophets, no matter, I’m talking right now about the Torah—the Torah essentially predicts various things, and those things came true, so that’s evidence that the Torah knew in advance what would happen. These arguments always irritated me. Why do they irritate me? I’ll explain in a moment. But in principle they irritate me because we allow ourselves to interpret verses, knead them into all kinds of shapes, and then locate in history some event that fits some interpretation we managed to produce for the verse, and then rejoice that the Torah foresaw in advance what would happen. It’s a little bit like these Bible-code things, these gimmicks where they find all sorts of hidden information in the Torah through letter skips. Many times the feeling is that we arrange the algorithm in such a way that it will produce the information we’re looking for. As someone once said: they never pulled from the Torah who will assassinate Sadat; they always pull from the Torah who assassinated Sadat. Meaning, who killed him in the past. And after we know his name, we can also arrange a code of letter jumps in the Torah that will yield his name next to Sadat—where of course we arrange the very notion of “next to” flexibly enough so that we can always define it as being adjacent. So it’s a pretty dubious business. Though again, I’m saying, it’s not entirely absurd, because after all, before someone assassinated Sadat, I don’t know whom to look for. I don’t know the name yet. So it’s true that there is some built-in limitation on finding this information before the events happened. But on the other hand, once everything is found after it happened, it sounds like something cooked up ad hoc. That’s just an example of this issue.
So here too, in this context, there are all kinds of claims about fulfilled prophecies, and I want to touch a little on this point—even if only because many deal with it, although again I’m saying, I myself am rather reserved about it. So look, let’s take a look for a moment at several verses.
[Speaker F] But isn’t it also—there’s another point too: a self-fulfilling prophecy isn’t just that there was a correct guess or—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No.
[Speaker F] It was written, and we wanted to fulfill it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, yes, this is connected to what I spoke about earlier—that even the fact that there is something special here, or a prophecy that was fulfilled, does not necessarily mean this is divine involvement. It could be that our culture, and the prophecies themselves included within it, led us to these events. Right, that’s what I said earlier. But there are also events that happened to us—not events that we did—and there it’s already harder to say that. Look, for example, at these prophecies: “And you shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all peoples to which the Lord shall lead you,” meaning they predict exile for us, that they’ll persecute us and mock us and so on—yes, all the various caricatures of the Jew. “You shall father sons and daughters, but they shall not remain yours, for they shall go into captivity. The stranger who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, while you shall come down lower and lower. And you shall serve your enemy whom the Lord shall send against you, in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness and in lack of all things; and he shall put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you. The Lord shall bring upon you a nation from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops down, a nation whose language you shall not understand.” By the way, there are commentators who say that “as the eagle” here is the symbol of the Romans—that every single verse here corresponds verse by verse to what happened in the Roman exile. Even what appears below, “you shall eat the flesh of your sons”—of course the Sages speak about this already—“and the Lord will bring you back to Egypt in ships,” yes, the concluding verse: “And the Lord shall bring you back to Egypt in ships, by the way of which I said to you, you shall never see it again; and there you shall sell yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer”—which raises a common question regarding the identification of these verses with the Roman exile. Okay. But it turns out that apparently a significant part of the Jewish people really was taken down to Egypt in ships by the Romans. Taken down to Egypt in ships. Meaning, there really is a scope of prophetic fulfillment here that is quite impressive. And this was given almost a thousand years in advance.
The Torah tells us in advance, pay attention, that we will be uprooted from our land, scattered all over the world, from one end of the earth to the other, throughout the whole world, that we will find no rest in any of those places, that they will continue to persecute us all the time, we will continue to wander from place to place, the ridicule of the Jew, antisemitism and hatred, “and I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth,” in all places. With all the strange exceptionality that there is in antisemitism, as I described—the Torah says in advance that it will exist. Yes, even mass murderers—I don’t know—like the Germans, sometimes it seems the hatred toward them is not as deep as what we find in various places with respect to Jews. The nation that exiles us—it is written—will be a distant nation whose language we do not know. It comes from Rome. Usually wars happen between neighboring peoples. It swoops like an eagle, which is the symbol of the Romans. Their language indeed was not familiar in the Semitic sphere until they got here—meaning, this is “a nation whose language you shall not understand.” Other conquerors from Greece or from the Near East, their languages were already here beforehand. Okay, Egypt in ships I already spoke about. “Slaves ruled over us”—when the Romans conquered us, essentially those who ruled us were the Herodian dynasty, slaves—yes, “Whoever says, ‘I am from the house of the Hasmoneans,’ know that he is a slave.” The destruction of the walls, the takeover of the land, the eating of children’s flesh—all these are events foreseen a thousand years in advance, and that’s not trivial.
We’ve become so used to it—yes, okay, persecutions happen all the time and always and so on—no, that’s not it. This whole cluster is really a rare set of events, and they were foreseen almost a thousand years in advance in writing. Now there’s something here that I wouldn’t dismiss. That’s not—I don’t think it’s conclusive proof, because for it to be conclusive proof we would need to go verse by verse and try to predict in advance what exactly would happen, and not ad hoc, as I said—after the things happened we suddenly see everything. If someone had asked what exactly would happen—give me the scenario, write the history book in advance—I assume it would be impossible to do that on the basis of what is written in the Torah. But still, there is something here that was foreseen in advance: exceptional and rare and unique events. At the end, of course, it also says that we will return to the land, and redemption, and rebuild the Temple—and all of this is written in the Torah. All of it is written in the Torah. Things—historical events, yes, over thousands of years ahead—events in broad outline.
[Speaker G] I think there’s something even stronger with what is written about the land becoming desolate, because it really is true that the land wasn’t settled at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, נכון, the desolation—I’m not going into all the details, there are more details here. And therefore this claim about fulfilled prophecies is not a claim—it is not a claim that is absurd on its face. Right? “And I will make your cities a ruin,” yes, in Leviticus, “and I will desolate your sanctuaries, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas,” yes, the destruction of the Temple. This they connect to Babylon. Look, there are descriptions here that really are—yes, “And I myself will desolate the land, so that your enemies who dwell in it shall be appalled at it,” that’s what you just mentioned, “and I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you; and your land shall be desolate and your cities shall be a waste. Then shall the land make up for its Sabbaths all the days that it lies desolate”—and the Sages say this is seventy years of the First Temple exile corresponding to seventy Sabbatical years they did not observe—“while you are in your enemies’ land, then shall the land rest and make up for its Sabbaths. All the days that it lies desolate it shall have the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling upon it.” You will not keep the Sabbatical year, and therefore you will go into exile, and the exile corresponds to the Sabbatical years you did not keep. That’s a rather impressive vision in its detail.
“And those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies,” and so on and so on—in short, this whole story. And then at the end: “And I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham I will remember, and I will remember the land. And the land shall be forsaken by them and shall make up for its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them, and they shall atone for their iniquity because, indeed because, they rejected My ordinances and their soul abhorred My statutes. Yet even with all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I abhor them to destroy them utterly and break My covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God. And I will remember for them the covenant of the ancestors whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, to be their God; I am the Lord.” Meaning, we come back. And all these unusual events, which historians write are unusual, are written in advance. So this is rare and exceptional and also predicted in advance. There’s something here whose force I would not belittle.
Now, in this matter I do want to qualify things a bit.
[Speaker F] It also says that if you keep the commandments then you’ll have rain and produce and everything will be wonderful, and if not—so do we see the relationship, the connection between the two, for example today?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So in a moment, in a moment I’ll talk about that. First of all, it seems to me that in these generations we don’t see a connection between anything and anything, because actually “the rain of heaven”—that’s no longer history. Rain is divine involvement. Divine involvement, in my opinion at least, doesn’t exist in these generations. The question one should examine is: in that period, when there was divine involvement—prophecy, miracles, or things of that kind—was there then some clear correlation between observance of commandments and rain? I don’t know, I haven’t checked. But I think that in our period today, this is not the period in which it is correct to test this, because today the Holy One, blessed be He, has basically withdrawn from here, in my opinion, and therefore no involvement of His exists, neither for good nor for bad. In any case, I want to qualify the picture a bit. Still, you can’t do without at least a little evil inclination.
First, we need to check what counts as a rare event. I already said: there are rare events that are special, and rare events that are not special. There are other peoples who were hated too; the Gypsies were also hated and persecuted here and there. Meaning, it’s not unequivocal, right? This is not logic, not pure logic. But still, of course, once you say it in advance, it already becomes more significant. Then you need to check the unambiguity of the wording—how unambiguous the wording in the Torah is. “And you shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters”—that too can be a metaphor. After all, if it hadn’t happened, what would we say? We’d say, well, the Torah meant that the situation would be very bad; it’s only a metaphor. Okay. It could be, by the way, that when the Sages say this happened, they also don’t really mean that it happened historically, but are merely using it as a metaphor to show how great the famine was. Maybe. So therefore, once we have excuses for everything that doesn’t come true, we need to be suspicious of all the things that do come true. Because this is an unfalsifiable theory. And an unfalsifiable theory has a limited status, right?
The oracle at Delphi always gave prophecies—various oracles, Delphi is just the more famous one—about what would happen in the future, and these prophecies always came true. They always came true because the prophecy itself could not be deciphered at all until the thing happened. Once the thing happened, we understood that this is what the oracle at Delphi had meant, because it maintained enough ambiguity so that whatever happened would fit what it had said in advance. This is a well-known trick, by the way, of various charlatans and miracle-workers and people like that: they predict all kinds of things in language that is vague enough so that when it happens they can always say, we told you this in advance. And even then it doesn’t always work for them. But they try. And by the way, there are modern versions of this too—these so-called futurists today. What nonsense. Some supposedly new discipline of futurology. David Passig, for those who know, at Bar-Ilan University—this is a pile of nonsense the likes of which I’ve never seen. People make impressive academic careers out of this. It’s simply a collection of stupid chatter, worse than the oracle at Delphi in my opinion. It just comes with graphs and numbers, but aside from that it’s basically the oracle at Delphi: always vague enough that whatever happens can somehow be made to fit, and even then it still doesn’t fit. Meaning, even so they get professorships and academic positions and build academic careers on this nonsense. So people have a tendency to believe all kinds of prophecy-blowers, and even to see the fulfillment of prophecies with too quick a trigger finger.
Another thing: to examine this seriously, we need, first, to go systematically through all the prophecies in the Torah and see whether they really all came true. It’s not enough to show that there are several prophecies that indeed came true in an impressive way. If there are many prophecies that did not come true, then again statistics says, okay, you issue a hundred prophecies, two of them will come true anyway statistically. Therefore, to do this more seriously, one needs to examine all the Torah’s prophecies systematically. In principle I think it would be hard to find a prophecy that I can clearly determine did not come true, because of the flexibilities I spoke about earlier. So it’s very hard to arrive here at any unequivocal measures. But still, it is definitely worth examining, and one has to see how much interpretive crookedness we need.
[Speaker G] But conditional prophecies don’t have to come true. What? They’re conditional prophecies—they don’t have to be fulfilled.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I’m getting to that in a second. Now indeed there are certain prophecies where the fact that they don’t come true doesn’t mean—now I’m moving to the other side of the coin. Earlier I spoke about the fulfillment of prophecies as proof. Now I’m asking: is the non-fulfillment of prophecies a refutation? And I’m saying here too: no. Why? And of course this projects back onto the first issue, because if it’s not a refutation, then it’s hard to see fulfillment as proof. It’s not falsifiable. Why is it not a refutation? Rav Elchanan Wasserman brings the example: “One who recites Havdalah over a cup of wine will have male children,” the Talmud says. Well, our own eyes see that there are people who did not merit male children, or didn’t merit children at all, and still presumably they recited Havdalah over a cup. The Chazon Ish, I assume, recited Havdalah over a cup. He had no children at all, and certainly not male children. How can that be? The Talmud says, one who recites Havdalah over a cup will have male children. Well, first of all, how does the Talmud know? I think from the outset I would not have expected this to happen. But even if yes.
There are things like what Rav Elchanan Wasserman says: it also says that because of the sin of vows, a person’s children die. That is also written. So what happens with someone who recites Havdalah over a cup but is deficient in keeping his vows? So instead of giving him children and then killing them—why reverse the rain, as it were? Meaning, from the outset they simply don’t give him children, and that’s it. In other words, there are other considerations that can intervene in the question of whether prophecies are fulfilled. For example, if we had done what is good in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, then all the prophecies of doom that apply when we do not do what is good in His eyes should not be fulfilled, because they are conditional prophecies. So therefore their non-fulfillment only means that maybe we weren’t bad enough; maybe we deserved a different punishment for other reasons. So the gates of excuses have not been locked, and the non-fulfillment of prophecies does not constitute a refutation. But if non-fulfillment is not a refutation, then fulfillment is not a proof. So therefore this whole discussion of fulfilled prophecy—I would not dismiss it, because there is even the Torah’s taking a risk by stating these prophecies explicitly in advance, with all sorts of things, and this is a description of fairly unusual and special events. There aren’t many—even like the pyramid of Warren Buffett—there aren’t many peoples that went through part of this, and fewer peoples that went through more of this, and one people that went through all of it. If that were the situation, I’d say this is Warren Buffett, or this is Nassim Taleb’s interpretation of Warren Buffett—that there is a normal statistical pyramid. But that’s not what we have.
There is something like a delta function here, meaning: we went through everything, and the other nations overall went through things very far from what is described here. Therefore I would not belittle the uniqueness of the matter, especially when there is advance prediction—because then even if it is rare and not special, if there is advance prediction, that already says something. On the other hand, I don’t think you can extract definitive proof from here because of all the qualifications I mentioned earlier. All I really want to say is that these things join that whole complex that I’ve been describing throughout this entire series. That’s why I said that none of the arguments is an argument that stands on its own unequivocally. Very often people bring each such argument as if it were a crushing argument. The moment you hear it, you should immediately repent. Not true. None of these arguments is really a crushing argument. But there is something in the overall picture that does call for explanation. Meaning, all these things—yes, there is a certain suspicion, and it’s not completely clear. But if you add to that the fact that the Torah predicted in advance, and there is a Holy One, blessed be He, and He indeed was supposed to know what would happen in the future—then it is no longer so surprising that He predicts things in advance. Add to that that there really is something here that looks like a fairly impressive fulfillment of the prophecies. Overall, it seems to me that the picture does have significance. That’s really the claim—a somewhat qualified claim, but taken together, I think there is definitely a persuasive whole here, even though every single detail in it raises disputes and deserves to raise disputes. It’s very far from unequivocal.
Okay, I’ve basically finished this chapter as I planned, and we’re arriving at the final chapter of this whole big series, and that chapter is: okay, there is a God and He gave the Torah at Sinai—so what? Why does that mean I have to observe it? Okay? So we talked about there being a God, we talked about the question of whether He gave the Torah at Sinai, and now I’m going to talk about whether the Torah that He gave is binding. That is really a question that is more philosophical, not historical as I’ve been discussing until now, but more philosophical. “Is–ought.” Sorry?
[Speaker B] Is-ought.
[Speaker G] I can’t hear.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The is-ought problem. Fine. Okay, so we’ll stop here.
[Speaker G] If it’s binding, is it binding only on someone who feels obligated by it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If something binds only someone who feels bound by it, then it doesn’t bind. A binding thing means that you are obligated to do it, not that you feel. If you feel, that can be an indication—but not that the feeling is the basis of the obligation. If it’s the basis of the obligation, then it isn’t an obligation. Another question?
[Speaker E] Yes, two questions. First, in this lesson you spoke about the struggle against idolatry as maybe some sort of moral track that came to advance morality in the world, and—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not to advance morality. Idolatry is not necessarily immoral. But yes, our culture today, which no longer embraces idolatry, is influenced by the source we received at Sinai—in the sense of morality, in the sense of idolatry, though I’m not identifying them. That’s the Meiri. He says there can be idol worshippers who conduct themselves morally; there is no necessary identity between idolatry and immorality.
[Speaker E] The question I wanted to sharpen was in comparison to the previous lesson in this series, where I got the impression that the Rabbi said that all the commands not to imitate the nations, and also the struggle and contempt for idolatry, are more for patriotic reasons—like to unify yourself and everything, and—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—not the struggle against idolatry. I’m talking about other monotheistic faiths. Other monotheistic faiths also worship the Holy One, blessed be He, who was revealed at Sinai. And I think that with regard to them, the exclusivist claim is weaker. And therefore I said that I really would—someone brought this up to me, you said I should clarify it, so I’ll take the opportunity now. I did not mean to say that everyone is equally right. What I meant to say is that I don’t need the exclusivist claim. Meaning, it is enough for me that I feel whole with the path of worship of God in which I find myself. I also think I’m right and that others are mistaken. But I don’t need the claim that others are mistaken, and I have no interest in proving that to them in order to establish the fact that I am right. Because even if they were right, and even if the Holy One, blessed be He, expects the Polish Gentile to worship Him in church and by eating the host, and expects me to worship Him through the 613 commandments—that too is perfectly fine with me. I don’t need to show that he is doing nonsense and that only I am right. Although, again, I’m saying, I think I’m right.
But I’m aware that I am a product of the landscape of my birthplace, just as the Polish Gentile is a product of the landscape of his birthplace, and therefore it is clear to me that I am somewhat biased in this calculation. And still, when I make the calculation and examine it, I think that this is the correct faith, or the correct path of worship of God. That’s clear. I’m just saying there are arguments that say, okay, everyone thinks his own way is the right one, because where you were born naturally casts a spell over you. The place where you were born seems very convincing to you. So I think I try to overcome that, and still I come to the conclusion that I’m right. That’s one point. Second, I don’t need this exclusivity. Exclusivist discourse serves internal needs. When they explain to everyone that all the others are doing nonsense and only we are right and we’ll sit in paradise while everyone else gets fried in hell—that’s for internal purposes. In my opinion, that also really won’t happen, by the way. Not because they’re right, but because there is no reason to take righteous people and put them in hell. I don’t think the Holy One, blessed be He, is going to fry Mother Teresa in hell, even though she was a devout Christian. Doesn’t seem likely to me. Not the Holy One, blessed be He, that I at least learned about or believe in. So therefore, my claim about exclusivist discourse was that it serves internal purposes. Not because I’m a pluralist and think everyone is right. I think we are more right than the others. I just don’t need this exclusivist claim. That’s really what I mean.
[Speaker E] Rabbi, are you talking about this discourse as post-biblical? More—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again?
[Speaker E] This discourse as post-biblical?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Christianity and Islam were born after the Bible.
[Speaker E] So I understood that you meant also—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Idolatry is the Torah’s war against idolatry. There it is very clear, and idolatry really has no substance—except that today it is not an option that anyone takes seriously at all. We’ve moved past that. Now I’m talking about the options standing before us today. The options standing before us today also don’t really seem to trouble many people. But where they do exist—about those options I’m saying that all the exclusivist discourse is some remnant of an earlier period that we don’t need. It’s unnecessary discourse. And as someone also mentioned, that article by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda, “Critique of the New Testament”—yes, that’s a funny critique. Because obviously, if you are empathetic and you look at it from inside, you’ll reach different conclusions than someone who opposes it and is looking for bugs or problems. Someone who did that to us would reach much better results than the ones we reach regarding the New Testament. We have more bugs when viewed from the outside.
[Speaker E] May I ask another question? Uh—so I couldn’t understand how the Rabbi would relate to an event that is rare but still as a miracle or as divine intervention. Meaning—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It would be very hard for me to be convinced that a particular event was a miracle. People have accused me many times—and justly—that I’m a bit closed off, but on the other hand it’s true. I have no way of becoming convinced of it. What can I do? Meaning, I have no way of becoming convinced of it. Let’s say if someone held something in the air in front of me and it didn’t fall to the ground, maybe that would convince me—I don’t know—though even then I’d look for some hidden magnetic field there. But I don’t know, maybe that would convince me. Or if I saw the sea split in front of my eyes. But those aren’t the kinds of things that happen today. So perhaps with open miracles, yes, I would be convinced. I’d need to stand in front of it and see. And that is connected to rarity.
[Speaker E] Along the axis of rarity, there’s nothing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Along the axis of rarity, I don’t see how anyone could convince me that a miracle occurred. Really, if it isn’t an impossible miracle but only something rare, rarity always has explanations.
[Speaker E] And what about a divine culture that is more inward in a person? Not something that cancels free will, but an inclination toward a certain idea or toward giving things like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what to say. If the Holy One, blessed be He, plants ideas within us—maybe. I don’t know.
[Speaker G] Rabbi, you didn’t talk about the fact that the wording of the Torah is identical across all communities, which is also something unusual, no? That there are almost no mistakes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is preservation of a framework. There are, by the way, small differences.
[Speaker G] Between the Yemenite text and the other books, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is a responsum by Rabbi Akiva Eiger that counts seven letter-level problems in the Torah, and a friend of mine didn’t want to tell me for years that such a responsum exists. He was completely anxious about the terrible implications of the thing. It makes me laugh. The fact that there are only seven letters about which there is doubt—that is very impressive preservation. Right, there is doubt, but it is still very, very impressive preservation.
[Speaker G] But if you go by Rashi, for example, many times he brings—for example—that in his text there’s a yod and in ours there isn’t a yod, and he interprets accordingly. There are many such cases. So how do we relate to that? His version is probably closer to the truth.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then maybe his interpretation is incorrect—what’s the problem? Maybe his interpretation is incorrect—what’s the problem?
[Speaker G] No, but what he saw in front of his eyes—he saw the text he saw.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then apparently there was a scribal error in the text, either in ours or in his. There are textual variants. Clearly there are textual variants. The fact that there are so few textual variants—that’s remarkable. Remarkable, again, not because of divine intervention, but because Jewish law is very strict that we check the scrolls, proofread them, and be precise in them, and not add or omit even a single letter. So here is a wonderful example of a very, very rare phenomenon that does not prove active involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather that the culture He gave us created this naturally—like third-generation missiles.
[Speaker F] About the matter of prophecies: can one basically say that it’s not like some magician standing on stage and saying, “I can guess what will happen tomorrow.” Rather, prophecies are like—by way of analogy—a mother saying to her child, “If you don’t eat, you won’t have strength, you’ll get sick,” or similarly, “If you smoke cigarettes, you’ll get cancer.” Meaning, it’s more the sort of thing meant to shake people up so that they’ll be—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You need to distinguish among several things. First, “if you smoke cigarettes you’ll get cancer” is not prophecy; it’s scientific information. Though, again, it means there’s a high chance you’ll get cancer, not that you necessarily will. But you need to distinguish between two things. If there are prophecies about details that were fulfilled—ships to Egypt, persecutions, exiles, and various things like that—then that’s already more than warnings and so on. There are details here that were predicted in advance and came true. So if they had not come true, nothing would have happened. But if they come true exactly according to the detail given in the Torah a thousand years earlier, that does say something. If someone tells me in general, “You’ll get punished,” then in the end either I got punished or I didn’t, depending on my actions. That’s obvious. That’s a kind of warning, and that’s the comment someone here made earlier and I spoke about it: there are prophecies that are not meant to be fulfilled but are warnings of “if you misbehave.” But there are things that are details, and the details are fulfilled, and that does say something.
[Speaker F] You really have to check when it was actually written, really verify that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I already gave all the qualifications that I—
[Speaker F] know, yes, earlier too.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have to be careful not to take this argument too far, and on the other hand not to belittle it too much either. I think that because people make ridiculous uses of it, I suddenly realized that I myself had reached total disdain for this argument, and I decided to sit down after all and try to think about it seriously. Because when all kinds of seminars and things use it in absurd ways, you completely lose confidence. So no—we need to be careful about extremism in both directions.
[Speaker G] Can I add one last point about the return to the Land? In itself, it’s something that just isn’t logical. A people that wandered around the world for two thousand years left the place empty, and then came back and it was still more or less empty here. That’s not logical. Why wouldn’t other nations have settled here? After all, it’s a strategic place.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, agreed. So?
[Speaker G] In itself, even without the prophecy, it’s just not logical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They didn’t settle here, they didn’t develop anything. It was desolate in the period in between. Yes, all the…
[Speaker B] And what about the revival of the language?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The revival of the language, yes, everything. You can include everything, and again, none of them—none of these things is a miracle. A miracle in the metaphysical sense, meaning something that departs from the laws of nature. But certainly this whole picture says that there is some kind of culture here, a unique culture, that brought about all these things, even if it’s not the hand of God in the direct sense, but rather a third-generation missile. Still, yes, I mentioned all these things.
[Speaker D] Rabbi, I apologize, I got here a little late, so I don’t know whether the Rabbi spoke about this, but I actually met someone not long ago who told me about the same thing in the Quran—that the Quran is a true book because of lots and lots of things that were fulfilled. I don’t know if the Rabbi…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not, no, I’m not familiar with it, it needs to be checked. I don’t know. It could be that there are interesting phenomena there too; they need to be examined. That’s exactly the kind of thing I said: if you want to draw conclusions, you need to do a very systematic examination. First, go through all the prophecies in the Torah and not just pick the ones that are easy to show were fulfilled, and see what the statistics are. And second, check prophecies in other books and see whether there too there isn’t fulfillment at a similar rate. I don’t know. I haven’t done that examination; I’m not familiar with it.
[Speaker D] Next book.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so goodbye, Sabbath peace.
[Speaker D] Sabbath peace.
[Speaker B] Sabbath peace.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sabbath peace.