Faith – Lesson 41
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
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Table of Contents
- [0:00] Introduction to the saga and the concept of the whole
- [2:20] The idea of presumption through three occurrences and triple proofs
- [3:29] The third part: why obey God?
- [4:35] The difficulty of justifying a philosophical religious framework
- [8:08] The dilemma of anthropological research in religious life
- [17:04] Criteria for choosing an initial alternative
- [20:05] The question of exclusivity and the possibility of multiple ways of serving God
Summary
General Overview
The speaker sketches a cumulative picture of considerations in favor of theism: a philosophical conclusion that there is a God, a need for religious goals and not only moral ones, a requirement for revelation, and then an encounter with a tradition that claims revelation. Each component by itself is debatable, but the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts. He then moves to the question of how to sort among many religious alternatives, arguing that general philosophical tools cannot decide among concrete practices and religions, so the decision ultimately rests on impression and what seems reasonable, while recognizing the limits of time and the biases of “the landscape of one’s birthplace.” He criticizes exclusive interreligious discourse as childish and ethically limited, proposes an exemption claim for someone born into another tradition, and even draws on Rabbi Kook in LeNevokhei HaDor for the possibility that there may be several ways to serve the Holy One, blessed be He. He ends with reservations about discussions of “who is right” and opens a possible future direction regarding fulfilled prophecies.
A cumulative web of arguments and the presumption created by three occurrences
The speaker argues that there is a web of considerations, each of which has criticisms, some of them fairly solid, but together they point in a plausible direction. He compares this to Rabbi Chaim’s comment on the three signs of a fool at the beginning of Tractate Chagigah, where according to one opinion all three are required, because a presumption created by three occurrences generates one explanatory force that ties the phenomena together beyond the sum of the separate explanations. He applies this also to evidence such as suspicion of a conspiracy, where combining several pieces of evidence strengthens one unifying explanation more than separate explanations for each piece. He concludes that no single argument is a “clear case,” but the overall puzzle is stronger than a mere collection of parts.
Beyond theism and the question of obedience
The speaker marks the transition from assuming God’s existence in a philosophical sense to the question of God’s purpose, and argues that morality cannot be the goal, so there must be “religious goals” that require revelation. He describes how a tradition that comes along and claims revelation fits into the cumulative picture. He notes that the next stage in the series is the question: assuming there is a God and that He commanded, why should one obey? But he still wants to complete the second part before moving on to the third.
Multiplicity of religions, the limits of philosophy, and the tool of impression
The speaker presents the problem of alternatives: even if one accepts a revealing God and commandments, there are still many religions and many movements that claim to speak in the name of that same God. He argues that general philosophical considerations can deal with God’s existence and with broad questions, but they cannot decide between putting on tefillin and “eating the holy bread in church,” so the decision between particular religions is not philosophical but depends on impression and what seems reasonable.
You can’t examine everything, anthropology, and initial sorting
The speaker says that technically it is impossible to seriously examine all religious alternatives, and even examining Judaism itself requires deep study and even living inside the practice for a certain period. He brings up the anthropological dilemma of whether to study a culture from a distance or to enter it and live it, and argues that probably both perspectives are needed, even though they are hard to combine. He concludes that a person is not required to examine everything to the very end, and that “if there is a God in heaven,” He understands the limits of time and ability. Therefore a person makes an initial sorting of what sounds, on the face of it, worth checking and what does not, and in that context he says, “and He, being compassionate, forgives iniquity.”
A multiplicity of opinions does not negate truth, and a critique of postmodernism
The speaker rejects the conclusion that a multiplicity of religious opinions means that “it’s all nonsense” or that there is no truth. He cites the Mishnah in Sotah, “and truth will be absent,” and the Talmudic interpretation, “truth will be absent—truth will be made into many separate flocks,” to describe the feeling created by many claimants to the crown of truth. He argues that a multiplicity of positions does not cancel truth but only indicates that many people are mistaken, just as a multiplicity of opinions in physics does not negate truth. He criticizes postmodern narrativism, which claims there is no truth, only constructions, and prefers an attempt to approach truth while remaining aware of biases, similar to his argument against moral relativism, where a multiplicity of opinions does not prove there is no morality, only that there is disagreement about its content.
“If there were no God, we would have had to invent Him” as suspicion, not argument
The speaker explains that a claim like “if there were no God, we would have had to invent Him” can at most arouse suspicion or caution, but it does not prove that God was invented. He says conclusions come from arguments and evidence, not from suspicions and conspiracies, and applies this also to the afterlife and reward and punishment: the fact that it is “called for” is not an argument against its existence. He argues that something can be useful and also true, and distinguishes between suspicion and argument.
Criteria for sorting: priority and the public nature of revelation
The speaker suggests criteria for initial sorting among alternatives, including “the question of priority” within the monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam accept the Jewish account up to a certain stage and then propose a “new covenant,” so the revelation at Mount Sinai is a shared datum from which one can begin examination. He adds “the degree of publicity or mass revelation,” arguing that revelations in Christianity and Islam are personal, subjective revelations that are difficult to establish, whereas acceptance of a prophet requires prior verification. At the same time he acknowledges the bias of “the landscape of one’s birthplace” and says that if he had grown up in a Polish village he probably would have become a devout Catholic, with considerations that would have justified that too.
Exclusivity, the exemption claim, and Rabbi Kook in LeNevokhei HaDor
The speaker argues that the exclusive discourse of “who is right” is limited, because even if one tradition is true and the others are “falsehood and deceit,” there is still an exemption claim for someone born into another tradition who acted as a reasonable person would have acted. He distinguishes between telling someone he is mistaken and blaming him, and argues that the heavenly court would likely accept such a claim. He presents a “more radical” argument and relies on Rabbi Kook in LeNevokhei HaDor for the possibility that “maybe they are also right,” and that there are several ways to serve the Holy One, blessed be He—“each river according to its own course”—and interprets exclusionary statements as intended for internal purposes, to strengthen commitment.
Empathy, judging from inside and outside, and criticism of religious polemics
The speaker describes how an outside perspective can point to flaws and contradictions, but sometimes it comes from lack of understanding, whereas empathy for a system is also a tool for understanding and not only a source of bias. He gives an example from a publication by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda in Tzohar with remarks on the New Testament, and says that the criticism there strikes him as childish, because one could formulate no less difficult objections to Jewish sources, but people are simply used to them. He argues that reading expressions like “His strong hand and His outstretched arm” as metaphors is natural from within the internal discourse, and that there is no language without metaphors and connotations.
The example of the Trinity and Kabbalah
The speaker argues that a Jewish attack on the Christian Trinity as primitive ignores internal parallels, and cites “the Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one” as a similar structure, adding that in kabbalistic literature and in the teachings of the Arizal this is said “literally.” He concludes that the gap in judgment stems from empathy: inwardly one interprets in a way that resolves difficulties, while outwardly one presents it as idol worship.
Prophecy, the binding of Isaac, and the need for immediate experience
The speaker raises the question of the binding of Isaac: why didn’t Abraham our forefather suspect that this was a hallucination? He argues that the question assumes the external perspective of someone who has not experienced a divine command. He uses the image of a blind person and a sighted person to explain that immediate experience changes the space of interpretive possibilities, even though he admits that people can make mistakes and have hallucinations, just as sight can mislead in a mirage. He concludes that external criticism of religiosity as “made-up stuff” has limited significance for someone who has not experienced the system from within, even if the internal perspective also has its biases.
The limited significance of sorting between religions, and a possible continuation on prophecies
The speaker says that once one arrives at theism, the question “which religious service” is, in his eyes, relatively marginal, and he believes that someone who did the best he could, even if he is Catholic or Muslim, will receive “exactly the treatment he deserves just like the Jews.” He prefers to focus on the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a shared foundation, and distinguishes between “proofs” and “responses to objections” that he had previously presented regarding gaps in tradition. He suggests possibly continuing later with the subject of fulfilled prophecies, but says this is not the kind of discussion he particularly likes, and ends by criticizing exclusivism as “discourse for internal purposes” and by saying that “what seems reasonable is on our side.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, basically the picture as I—well, by the way, we’re already getting close to the end of this never-ending saga. The picture that’s emerging so far, or at least the one I tried to sketch so far, is some kind of whole made up of considerations, where each component—by the way, this is similar to what we talked about earlier—each component is definitely open to debate. It gets criticisms, and some of them hold water, let’s put it that way. But still, the totality of these considerations seems to me to point in a reasonable direction. So if I start with philosophy and arrive at the conclusion that there is a God in some philosophical sense, and then I ask myself what He intended—I’m not going to go over it again because we already discussed it—but I ask myself what He intended, what His purpose could be, and it can’t be morality, so apparently He has to give us other goals; I called them religious goals. So there has to be revelation. And then suddenly a tradition comes along that indeed claims there was revelation. So all these things together somehow create a picture where each component separately could be debated. There are debates about this or that proof for the existence of God, about whether the tradition is reliable or not, everything—there are debates about everything. And still, it’s like Rabbi Chaim on the signs of a fool, right? At the beginning of Chagigah—we actually talked about this in the Thursday series recently. Rabbi Chaim says there that the Talmud says at the beginning of Chagigah that there are three signs of a fool: he goes out alone at night, he sleeps in a cemetery, and he tears his clothes. And according to one opinion there in the Talmud, you need all three signs; one isn’t enough. So why? The Talmud says that if there were only one sign—he goes out alone at night—maybe he forgot something outside and that’s why he went out. If he tears his clothes, maybe he’s absorbed in troubling thoughts and doesn’t even notice that he’s tearing them. Each of these things could have its own explanation. So if he has all three, each one could still have its own separate explanation. Why do the three signs together solve the problem? That’s exactly the idea of a presumption created by three occurrences. If you have three phenomena, each of which could have a different explanation, but there is one explanation that runs through all three, then there is something about three that is stronger than the sum of each one by itself. Right? When we talk, say, about some phenomenon—I suspect some kind of conspiracy. So there’s one piece of evidence, okay, maybe yes maybe no. Then there’s a second piece of evidence, and that one too could go either way. But when the two pieces of evidence are together, and you say the conspiracy explains both of them, whereas the alternatives are one explanation for this evidence and another explanation for that evidence, then the conspiracy gets stronger. If there are three pieces of evidence, it gets even stronger, and so on. So the whole idea here is that there is some kind of weave of arguments, or some complex picture, a kind of puzzle, where each component by itself is debatable. And anyone who thinks any one of these arguments is a clear case—it isn’t. I don’t think any one of them is a clear case. But I do think the totality creates a picture here that has greater force or power than the sum of the components. There is something in a puzzle that is more than just the collection of all its parts. The whole that is created here is stronger than the collection of the parts. So that’s the claim.
Now, basically, the next step this brings me to is the final question I want to discuss in this whole process, and then I get to the third and last part of the series. And that is: assuming I’ve reached the conclusion that there is a God and that He commanded me—so what? Why do I have to obey? That’s the third part. But right now I still want to finish the second part, so the question now is of course: what about the alternatives? Okay, there’s a God, God was revealed, gave the Torah, demands things of us—however you want to phrase it, fine—but there are many religions, many currents within Judaism or outside Judaism, doesn’t matter, all claiming things in the name of that same God and revelation and commandments and the purposes for which the world was created and all kinds of things like that. So now the question is: which of them is right? Very often people make the claim: okay, you think Judaism is right, but there are a hundred thousand other claims from this religion and that religion. So even if I agree that there is a God, and even if I agree that this is a religious God—that is, that He was revealed and expects things from us—it still doesn’t bring me to Judaism. So here all kinds of considerations enter, and of course they can’t be general philosophical considerations. I don’t think you can justify any particular religious framework on the basis of general philosophical considerations. General philosophical considerations can discuss whether or not there is a God, whether morality has validity, whether morality is connected to God, why God created the world, and things of that type—general a priori claims. But the moment you’re talking about putting on tefillin, or specifically about Judaism as against Christianity, Islam, Buddhism—
[Speaker B] Wait, can you hear me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. So basically the claim—the claim, I really don’t know exactly how far… I mean, my claim is that the next question I want to touch on, the question of how I sort among the alternatives after I’ve reached the conclusion that there is a God and that God expects things from us—that is, theism and not just deism, He reveals Himself and there are religions and all kinds of things of that sort—there are still a huge number of alternatives. Non-Jewish alternatives, and even within Judaism there are different interpretations, different currents, all kinds of things like that. And the question is how I sort among these alternatives after I’ve reached the conclusion that there is a God and religion and an obligation to obey and all kinds of things like that. I said that this can’t be decided with philosophical tools, because the question is not a general conceptual philosophical question. I don’t expect to arrive by philosophical means at the conclusion that one should put on tefillin and not, I don’t know, eat the holy bread in church. That’s not something philosophical reasoning can give me as a result. Therefore, the tools here are not philosophical tools but tools of impression. And the question of impression is again what seems reasonable, right, each person and his impressions. It’s difficult here, but I do want to make a few comments about this decision.
The first comment, with which I began, is that it’s impossible to seriously examine all the alternatives. Just technically, we don’t have enough time for that. The claim is that in order to examine Judaism, you can’t just sit for an hour or two, even with someone very knowledgeable, hear from him what the whole thing means, and then form a position. It requires deep study, it requires examining possibilities, different interpretations. I think you can’t really do it seriously unless you live it for a certain period, because studying it on the theoretical level isn’t really enough—certainly not when you’re talking about religiosity that includes religious practice too. You can’t really judge the matter without getting into those shoes seriously. This is the old dilemma among anthropologists. There was Margaret Mead’s teacher—I forgot what his name was—you know, the one connected with Coming of Age in Samoa. So her teacher was one of the creators of modern anthropology, I forgot his name, and he raised a very, very big debate over the question of how you can study cultures. How is anthropological research supposed to be done? Do you need to sit on the hill above the tribe down there and record everything you see in a detached and distant way, not being involved in your object of study? Or, on the contrary, do you need to enter in, live together with them, get into their atmosphere, into their way of thinking, and then write a study done from the inside and not from the outside? There are arguments both ways. I think in the end you probably need to do both things, though it’s a bit hard to do both things, because if you stay detached you won’t live it, and if you’ve lived it then it’s hard to detach. But I don’t think you can really make do with only one of those two perspectives. So yes, the same goes for deciding about a particular religious direction. That too is a serious examination. It’s not something you can really do in some concentrated course of a few weekly hours over, I don’t know, two months. And to do that for every religious proposal in the world is madness. No chance. You’ll just go around…
[Speaker C] Sorry, I’m not sure that’s even required at all. My logic says exactly the opposite—that that itself proves it. It’s like, to use a different example, children in kindergarten fighting over a toy. In the end the teacher comes and says, if you can’t work it out, nobody gets it. So what does that have to do with anything? I mean… maybe it leads to the conclusion of “let the boys play,” that it shows it’s all nonsense, excuse the expression. With so many opinions and everyone thinks that… you see those Arabs there getting down on their knees and doing all the movements and all that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It says in the Mishnah in Sotah, right, “and truth will be absent,” and then the Talmud says: “truth will be absent”—truth will be made into many separate flocks. In a place where many people claim the crown of truth, people get this feeling that if so, it’s all nonsense and there’s no truth. But there is no greater mistake than that. That is simply not true. Why? Why? Because suppose there is some thesis that is true. Does the fact that lots of people make alternative claims make it untrue? It just means that lots of people are mistaken. Now I’m not saying—I don’t know.
[Speaker C] Yes, but if we’re claiming that 99.9 percent are mistaken, then what’s the problem with saying 100 percent are mistaken?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why say that? Why make such a strange claim? Suppose I say either Judaism is right or it isn’t right. Now there are opinions this way and that way. So what does that mean—that there’s no such thing as right or wrong? Why? Why assume that? It sounds unreasonable to me. It’s like saying that if there are, I don’t know, many opinions on some issue in physics, then that means there’s no truth. No—it means you have to clarify and reach a conclusion as to which of them is the truth. Yes, but if there are so many people who are wrong—
[Speaker E] When Einstein published the papers of his miracle year, he was almost alone. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is he saying?
[Speaker E] When Einstein published the papers of his miracle year, he was alone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that’s a problematic argument. By the way, this is postmodernism, right? Postmodern narrativism basically rests on this. It basically says, look, everyone has his own narrative, everyone has his own discourse, so there’s no truth, it’s all just constructions. And I don’t accept this fatalism. In other words, the fact that there are many opinions and many positions and all that—true, and many people are captives of those narratives too, I agree. But that doesn’t mean that someone who is at least aware of this and tries to clean, as much as he can, the stew of his own thought from the narratives in which he is trapped—and you can never be sure you’ve done it completely, but you try—such a person can get closer to the truth. You’ll never be certain you’re there. I don’t think it’s right—this is like moral relativism. People say: look, there are many opinions about what is morally right to do. Actually there aren’t that many, but never mind, let’s say there are. Therefore there is no truth and no such thing as moral and immoral; it’s all made up. Why on earth? The fact that there are many opinions only means that everyone feels there is such a thing as morality, they just disagree about what it says. If it were all invented, then why would there be many opinions? Let everyone just do whatever he feels like and that’s it. What are we arguing about?
[Speaker C] So I think the multiplicity of opinions indicates the opposite. What did that fellow say—I don’t remember who—if there were no God, we would have had to invent Him. Okay, fine, it’s something people need. It’s something people need; that doesn’t mean it’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The same argument can be made here too, yes. This is basically Marx with religion as the opium of the masses—that same argument. So I say: if there were no God, we would have had to invent Him—but how good it is that He exists, so there’s no need to invent Him. The claim that if God didn’t exist we’d have had to invent Him can at most lead to a suspicion that maybe people did invent Him because it’s so tempting to invent Him, but it cannot lead to the conclusion that they did invent Him. To reach the conclusion that they invented Him, you have to examine whether the arguments in favor of His existence hold up.
[Speaker C] But I mean a conclusion at the level of probability. I didn’t say a scientific conclusion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a conclusion even at the level of probability. It’s not a conclusion at all. At most it’s a reason for caution, or to proceed carefully. But conclusions are reached from arguments, not from suspicions and conspiracies. And the arguments have to be examined. If there is good evidence for His existence, then I conclude that He exists; if the evidence is not good, then no, He doesn’t exist. But the fact that if He didn’t exist we would have had to invent Him—that’s not a counterargument. This is a mistake many critics make. It’s not a counterargument. It only says that since it’s so tempting… Say I made a similar claim about the afterlife or reward and punishment. It’s obvious that if it didn’t exist we would have had to invent it, right? Because it causes people to behave the way they should behave. So what? Does that now arouse suspicion that maybe people really did invent it, maybe it really isn’t true because it’s so tempting to invent it? But that by itself cannot be an argument that there is no afterlife. It means I now have a suspicion, and I want to examine carefully the arguments for and against the existence of the afterlife, and then I’ll see. It’s motivation to examine the arguments carefully, but by itself it isn’t an argument. The fact that something is good—that it’s too good to be kosher, as they say. In other words, if it suits me, then it’s probably not kosher. No. It may suit me and also be kosher. It may be that God is very useful, and as it happens He also exists. Not that He was invented because He is useful—He is very useful, but He also exists. In other words, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, as someone once said. Very often we turn suspicions into conclusions. Suspicions are suspicions; they are not arguments. Those are two different things.
Okay. The first comment I have is that it’s very hard to examine these things deeply. From that you can draw two conclusions, and they complement one another. Apparently I’m not required to examine every conclusion to the very end. Suppose there is a God in heaven—He also understands my limitations, that I can’t now travel around the whole world checking every sect and every religious stream and every secular stream and I don’t know what else, whatever you want, in order to reach conclusions, because then I’ll finish my whole life and I won’t have covered even a quarter of what exists. So He Himself probably doesn’t expect me to examine everything to the end. So what yes? A person, despite his biases and despite the fact that he is shaped by the landscape of his birthplace, has to do some kind of initial sorting, and not carry out a full examination with total immersion, as I said before, for every single proposal. You do an initial sorting. You ask yourself: okay, what can even come into the picture? Just as we make decisions in every field. When there are many options, we can’t check everything, so we do an initial sorting: what could be possible, what on the face of it sounds maybe plausible and worth checking, and what doesn’t. I don’t know—African paganism doesn’t seem worth checking to me. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe if I lived it I’d discover wonders there. But I don’t live it, and I don’t have time to go through all of this, so I do an initial sorting, and He, being compassionate, forgives iniquity. In other words, if in the end I get up there—I get to the next world—and the Africans’ mask sits in judgment over me asking why I didn’t dance around the bonfire, then I’ll have to make my arguments. What can I do? That’s not what I understood from the a priori argument, and I didn’t have time to examine everything all the way through, and I’m sorry, that’s what there is. If that mask created me with these limitations of time and ability, then it has to take that into account. That’s one point.
[Speaker C] And therefore not—this is—sorry—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore I need to act—I can’t do everything, so I need to do an initial check. That initial check can use a few criteria. For example, I ask myself the question of priority. Say I’m examining the major monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Judaism isn’t actually all that big, to tell the truth; we’re always a bit megalomaniacal like that. But never mind—the three main monotheisms. The claim is that Islam and Christianity basically agree with the Jewish account up to a certain stage. And at some point there’s a new covenant—yes, in both of them there’s a new covenant. But they too agree, say, about the revelation at Mount Sinai, the revelation of God, the creation of the world, even about the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in one form or another. So in effect there’s a kind of priority here that gives you an indication that, if these are the alternatives, then Mount Sinai is the datum everyone agrees on. From there onward, let’s start checking. I do it like a legal discussion, yes? There’s some initial presumption, and then let’s see how to move forward. So the question of priority can help me sort things out or decide which alternative is more plausible, or which one requires further examination. Another thing is the degree of publicity or mass participation in the event. The revelations of Christianity and Islam, for example—I take them as the main competitors in the field—the revelations there are personal, subjective revelations. It’s very hard to ground them, and as you know, there are plenty of people with fantasies and dreams—among us too, by the way. So it seems to me that if the whole story is based on that, it already starts becoming weaker. And especially, as I said earlier, priority gives a certain presumptive standing to Mount Sinai and the Torah, and now you want to depart from that or continue one step further on the basis of some personal reaction to an unauthorized source, whose prophecy was never verified. After all, you have to test a prophet before accepting what he says in the name of God. And since that’s so, it seems to me to be a rather dubious matter. But as I say, I have to add—maybe I’ll say this in advance already—look, if I had grown up, and this is the disease of modern thought that also leads to postmodernism, I am a product of my native landscape, I’m very well aware of that. It’s clear to me—unlike perhaps many people in earlier generations—it’s clear to me, just as I think it’s clear to each of you, that if I had grown up in a Polish village, there’s a good chance I would have become a devout Catholic and been sure that Catholicism was the correct religion, and I would have made the appropriate a priori calculations to explain why Judaism is out of the question and why Catholicism is really the most reasonable. Quite likely that’s what would have happened. There are exceptions, there are people who do check and change. In both directions, by the way. But in most cases that’s what happens. And therefore I think that beyond that, my next point is that the question of exclusivity is really, in my view, not all that worthwhile to discuss. If I go back to the tractate that judges this—if that Polish Catholic arrives in the heavenly court and the Holy One, blessed be He—and yesterday some German, not a Pole, arrived in the heavenly court—and now the Holy One, blessed be He, is going to judge him for having been pope and not redeeming a firstborn donkey and refraining from eating pork, then he’ll have a claim: listen, I grew up in a Christian village, I was sure Catholicism was true. That’s a claim I think—well, I don’t know—as the Holy One, blessed be He, I would accept it. I’m hardly in a position to advise Him, but it seems to me that basic reasonableness says a reasonable person, or a reasonable being, would accept such a claim. You can’t demand from a person something that a reasonable person would not do—well, you can’t demand that a person refrain from doing what a reasonable person would have done. The reasonable person standard—we talked about that earlier. Okay? And therefore I think the whole discourse of exclusivity—and not because everyone is right. I’m not sure everyone is right. Even if Christianity is wrong and only Judaism is true and everyone else is falsehood and deception, still, as an exculpatory claim—that is, as a claim that says, listen, fine, but this falsehood and deception—if I had been born there, I would have done the same thing too. So you can’t come accusing someone for having been born there just because you weren’t born there. You can tell him he’s mistaken, you can argue with him—you can’t blame him. And those are two different things. So this whole exclusivist discourse—by exclusivity I mean the discourse that excludes, that says one is right and the others are not—the discourse of who among us is right is a problematic discourse. First, because even if I’m right, there’s still an exculpatory claim. And now I want to make a more radical claim. By the way, here I have a tree to lean on: Rabbi Kook writes this. Rabbi Kook writes this in Perplexed of the Generation, that maybe they’re right too. Meaning, it could be that there are several different ways to serve the Holy One, blessed be He. There are several religious ways to serve the Holy One, blessed be He. I was born into the Jewish path; that Pole there from the village was born into the Catholic path, and that’s perfectly fine—that’s what is demanded of him and this is what is demanded of me. So what are all these exclusivist statements? These exclusionary ones that say idol worshiper, and what his punishment is, and how severe it is, and so on. Those are statements—those are statements for our own internal needs. In order to create self-confidence or commitment, we need to explain that we are the most right and everyone else is wrong. But I don’t think there’s any point to this discourse outwardly. It’s an inward-facing discourse—which even there, in my view, is better suited for children. But this outward-facing discourse that comes to show who is right and who is wrong—I’m not sure how much real point there is in it, or how true it is. So notice: these are two different claims. First, how much point is there in it, because you won’t persuade anyone, and the person is under compulsion, so there’s no point in coming with accusations. The more radical claim is that maybe he’s right too. That is, it may be that the Holy One, blessed be He, really wants one kind of service from Christians, another from Muslims, and another from Jews, and that’s fine—each river follows its own course. And therefore there’s no point arguing, because the feeling often is—I think I mentioned once—in one of the early issues of Tzohar there was an article by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda, a chapter from a book of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda with notes on the New Testament. A chapter against the New Testament with Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda’s notes below, where he comments on this verse that it’s contradictory and doesn’t make sense and contradicts itself, and raises difficulties against it from Ketzot, and he has all kinds of pilpul there on the New Testament. I died laughing when I read that thing. It really was an unbelievably funny text—terribly childish. I mean, I could take out the Bible, the Talmud / Talmudic text, whatever you want, and annotate it with comments a thousand times harder than the comments he made on the New Testament. But what can you do? We’re used to ours. “An eye for an eye” means monetary compensation. The claims there were far more reasonable than “an eye for an eye” meaning monetary compensation. And then Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda explains, what are you talking about, it’s nonsense and contradictions and it doesn’t fit and it doesn’t—and presents it as if—and the nonsense in our own sources, we’ve simply gotten used to. That’s all. When you look at something from the outside, you can always point to its flaws and to how irrational it is, and so on and so on. And it’s not only because you’re cleaner and less biased. Sometimes it’s because you understand less. The empathy you have toward a certain system—in this case a religious system—is also a tool of understanding; it’s not only a tool that misleads you. The empathy I have for Judaism because I grew up inside it—and it’s obvious to me that I have that—creates two things. First, it can mislead. It can make me tendentious, create biases. Second, when I live the system from within, I understand that when people see a problem or a contradiction from the outside, it’s not right. They don’t really grasp the essence of the matter. Someone who lives it from within understands that it’s not contradictory. Interpretation—you know—God’s mighty hand, the debates that come up from time to time over things written in the Torah. So what does that mean? That the Torah is anthropomorphic? There’s even an article by Uman about this, where he basically says that this abstraction of God is Maimonides’ invention. He’s not the first to say it. Because before him, it was obvious both to the sages and in the Bible that the Holy One, blessed be He, has a hand and a body and a bodily form, and is basically a being with a body. And one could argue that this development is one that brings us closer to the truth—that once people were mistaken and today we’re right. I’m only claiming that, independently of the evaluative question whether it’s closer to the truth or farther from the truth, that’s simply incorrect. When you read the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) through external lenses, meaning the hand of God and the foot of God and whatever you want—when you look at it from within the so-called Maimonidean perspective, I read it perfectly naturally, and when I see His mighty hand and His outstretched arm, it’s obvious to me that these are metaphors. Is it just an excuse to say these are metaphors merely because I’m captive to this conception of a God who has no body and no bodily form? I don’t think so. When I understand the discourse from within, I understand that that’s how it has to be read. There is no language without metaphors. There is no language that can be understood without understanding the connotations that accompany it. Language cannot be interpreted only literally. Someone who understands only the literal meaning without the connotations does not speak the language; he doesn’t really understand what it means. And therefore I don’t think that pointing out contradictions or showing who is right and who is wrong is relevant. Once, debates with Christians were very popular; sometimes they were forced, yes—Nachmanides with Abner of Burgos and various other disputations—so often it was under compulsion. I don’t see any point in it. The arguments are not persuasive in most cases, and you find mistakes and contradictions in his system just as he’ll find them in yours. Take the Trinity. The Holy Trinity, as an incarnation for the Christians—that God, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are one. Don’t we have that? Of course we do. “The Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one.” And that is exactly the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by the way. Exactly. It’s father, mother, and son. Look in kabbalistic literature—that’s what it says there. And the Arizal writes it literally; it’s not a metaphor. “The Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one.” What is that if not a trinity? When you look at the Christian trinity, you say: primitive idol worshipers, what kind of nonsense do they have in their heads? Then you come to our side and say, ah no, obviously, it’s a metaphor, they don’t really mean that man and God are identical—it’s exactly the same thing. It’s simply a question of empathy. Meaning, if you live within a certain tradition and experience it from within and want to defend it and approach it with empathy, you suddenly discover that all the great contradictions and enormous problems that people point out from outside don’t really exist and don’t really bother you. And therefore my feeling—and this I do take from postmodern discourse—there is something in this narrativism. You shouldn’t take it too far, but there is something to it. There is something in the fact that when you judge something from outside and when you judge something from inside, it’s completely different. And not always in favor of the outside. Sometimes, like I said earlier with anthropology, you need to look from outside objectively, and that’s the coldest judgment. But sometimes, if you don’t live it from within, you don’t really understand what it means, and you can’t really judge it. I think I’ve spoken about this in previous times too—maybe, I don’t remember anymore—about the binding of Isaac, yes, about that question regarding Abraham our forefather: why didn’t he refuse the divine command to bind his son? Maybe it was a hallucination? Who says it was a divine revelation? Okay? So that question troubles, I think, a lot of people, including commentators, but it seems to me that the question assumes something problematic. Meaning, if I myself were to experience the divine command—if I were a prophet and were hearing the Holy One, blessed be He, speak myself—then perhaps I would understand that there is no option of thinking this is a hallucination. It would be obvious that it’s true. When I look at it from the outside, I’ve never experienced it, so I say, well, maybe it’s a hallucination; that’s an option, it could be; people do hallucinate from time to time. So when I look at it from the outside, apparently there are two possibilities, and why doesn’t Abraham our forefather take that possibility into account? But when I look at it from the inside—it also gives an advantage, not only a disadvantage, not only biases. It gives a certain kind of understanding. It’s like the example I usually give for this: the blind person and the sighted person. Where did we talk about that? The blind and the sighted. Yes, the blind person casts doubt on what I see, says maybe your eyes are deceiving you, maybe eyes in general deceive. So I say: if you were, say, blind from birth—if you understood what sight is, you wouldn’t ask those questions. I simply experience sight myself. Therefore very often critiques, say, against the religious world—critiques that come from outside against the religious world: you invented some God for yourselves, all kinds of commandments, such strange and bizarre things—where do these inventions come from? A celestial teapot and all kinds of odd claims.
[Speaker D] We see—sorry, you hinted at this a bit here—but that with the Holy Spirit, surely a person who knows it knows that it’s the Holy Spirit. But we see with Samuel at the beginning of his prophecy that it wasn’t clear to him that it was prophecy; he didn’t know. So we see that it’s not always clear that there is prophecy.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not always clear, but that’s why I say, it’s not… I can agree that it’s not always clear. After all, people do have hallucinations, and when they hallucinate they think it’s true even though it isn’t true. So clearly people can make mistakes. But on the other hand, sight also sometimes deceives us—there are mirages—and still, in ordinary life, when I see something, nobody will convince me that it’s an illusion. In other words, you need to experience something directly in order to judge it, in order to raise other interpretive possibilities. And sometimes, when you don’t experience it from within, you can find loads of bugs and lots of other interpretive options. Yes, like people say, who says? It’s all inventions—about religion, say, the critique from outside. If you haven’t experienced it from within, the critique has limited significance. Although of course, for someone who has experienced it from within, that too can sometimes be a bias. As I say, it goes in both directions. But it goes in both directions, and therefore I think that this discussion of who is right and who is wrong among the different religions—if I’ve already reached the conclusion that there is a God and that He revealed Himself and that He expects religious worship from us—yes, I’ve moved from deism to theism—the question of which religious worship is, in my view, a marginal question. It’s a marginal question, and therefore one can argue in favor of Judaism, raise points this way or that, but it’s not really significant in my eyes. I think—I want to believe, and in the end I do believe, not only want to believe—that in the end, someone who did the best he could, even if he is Catholic, Christian, Muslim, whatever, will get upstairs and receive exactly the treatment he deserves, just like the Jews. No one will sit there on the mountaintop and look down on all the others with contempt. As long as his intentions were right and he did the best he could, the fact that by chance he was born in a Polish village and not in rebuilt Jerusalem should not affect his fate. And therefore I think this interreligious discourse, and the attempt to determine who is right and who is not, is a discourse of limited significance. I don’t like dealing with it so much. What I can try to do, though, is examine the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), which is the shared foundation for all of us, and try to see whether… what does that mean? So we spoke a little about the gaps in the tradition as they appear in the Bible in previous sessions, and I tried to show—but there those were not proofs that it’s right, but responses to refutations. Meaning, there are refutations that say, look, here there was a gap, here there’s some jump in the tradition, so I tried to show that that’s not true, there is no jump. But the question of how one really relates to this system from within—are there positive proofs in its favor? About that maybe one can talk. People speak, for example, about fulfilled prophecies. Yes, there are all kinds of prophecies in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and the question is whether they were fulfilled, and if they were fulfilled, what does that mean? So about that maybe I’ll… I’ll touch on it a little next time, although even that is not among my favorite kinds of discussions. At least next time I’ll try to explain why this discussion is not so appealing to me. All right, let’s stop here for today. Some of our time got taken up by other matters.
[Speaker E] Still, the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t say about the Poles, “You shall be to Me a treasured people from among all the nations.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know—ask them. It could be that in the New Testament it does say that. In the old covenant it says it about you; in the New Testament it says it about them. All this exclusivity is, in my view, internal discourse. To explain that everyone else is wrong and I alone am right—that’s because people need some reinforcement for their commitment, for their sense of truth, for the devotion they need to show. So fine, they engage in exclusivist discourse. But in my view that’s childish. Not because I think everyone is right. I think we are right and they are wrong. But I’m also aware of where I come from, and that if I had come from somewhere else, I might have thought differently.
[Speaker E] So let’s—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] drag out a bit the discussion of who really is right.
[Speaker E] The reasonableness standard is on our side.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. For the time being, it’s still possible to be Jewish, yes.
[Speaker F] Okay. I’m saying, on the contrary, they claim that they are the new Israel, yes. Yes, yes. So it’s not only that what is said among them is what is said among us, but that what is said in the Torah is said about them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, after the direction changed—
[Speaker F] so also—
[Speaker E] even in that case, since they claim it in Polish, it doesn’t sound so good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. It can be in Latin too.
[Speaker F] Latin, Latin exactly.
[Speaker E] Even worse. Okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, have a peaceful Sabbath.
[Speaker E] A peaceful Sabbath. A peaceful Sabbath. Thank you very much.