Interviewer: Noam Oren

Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham is a truly unusual figure. One can understand this even from a cursory glance at his life story. Rabbi Dr. Abraham was born into a religious-Zionist family, but in adolescence he became secular. Over the years he returned to religious observance and even spent time in a Haredi kollel. Alongside his studies in the kollel, he completed a doctorate in physics and conducted research at the Weizmann Institute. In recent years, Rabbi Dr. Abraham has found himself, on many issues, positioned between camps. In matters of Jewish law, some see him as Conservative, since he has more than once called for changing Jewish law in light of changed circumstances. On the other hand, Rabbi Dr. Abraham often criticizes religious Zionism for the messianic elements found within it. In addition, Rabbi Dr. Abraham has published quite a few books, some of which became bestsellers—from ‘Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon’ to ‘God Plays Dice’ and ‘The Science of Freedom’. Rabbi Dr. Abraham’s fields of interest are exceptionally broad: on the one hand he frequently deals with purely philosophical questions, and on the other hand he also addresses practical questions of Jewish law. As part of these pursuits, Rabbi Dr. Abraham has more than once aroused considerable anger among different currents in Israeli society, and he has often stood at the center of heated controversies. These days he is finishing a trilogy of books in which he intends to lay out his religious worldview in all its different aspects. I caught up with him for a fascinating conversation about his various areas of work.

 

Let us begin at the end. In your latest book, ‘Truth Without Certainty’, which deals mainly with ethical issues, you advocate what is now called in philosophy ‘moral realism’. This means that there are moral facts that do not depend on culture or historical period. In other words, there is ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in morality. How can one make such a claim when it is clear that there are substantial disagreements in the moral sphere?

The fact that different people think different things is indeed a fact, but as we learned from Kant and Hume, there is no connection between facts and norms. The fact that two people think differently does not mean that both sides are right; it only means that two people think differently. It is entirely possible that one is right and the other is wrong. There are disagreements in science as well, and in that field there is broader agreement that there is ‘truth’, so why can it not be the same in ethics?

The reason is that in science we have an agreed procedure for deciding scientific questions, whereas in ethics it seems that no such procedure exists.

It is true that in the scientific world we know the tools at our disposal better, whereas in the ethical world we have not yet developed sophisticated tools for deciding ethical questions; we have intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. But despite this difference, it seems that many people would agree that murder is evil. Even Hitler would have agreed that murder is evil; he simply introduced a few qualifications into the rule and explanations for why murdering Jews was not murder. The point is that even on the factual level—which, as I already said, does not determine norms—the picture people draw of a multiplicity of moral positions is a distorted one, because there really is a general consensus. The differences lie at the margins and in the way the agreed principles are applied. Even in metaethics there is broad agreement that there is moral truth. People say that Hitler was truly evil, not merely that his deeds subjectively disgust them. If in fact the overwhelming majority of people understand that there is right and wrong in the moral world, then in my view whoever denies that is a skeptic; and just as I do not concern myself with skeptics regarding physical facts, so too I do not concern myself with skeptical arguments in the moral context. If we all think that something is right, then the burden of proof rests on the side that rejects the broad consensus. It is like my ignoring the arguments of someone who denies the existence of the wall in front of me—unless he brings good evidence that my sight is indeed deceptive. So too in ethics: as long as no good evidence is supplied that morality is subjective, I will continue to hold the accepted claim that morality is objective.

Even if there really is broad agreement on basic ethical rules such as ‘one must not murder innocents’ or ‘one must not steal’, how does one get from these amorphous rules to concrete moral conclusions in the issues that confront us day after day?

I do not think that even on the concrete issues there is such a broad spectrum of views. There is a tendency to notice the disagreements and not the points of agreement. In the end, if you look around the world today, you will see that the distance between extreme libertarianism and the far left is already quite small. It is not what it was in the days of Lenin and American capitalism. Even today’s America is not the America of then, and today’s Russia is not the Russia of then. Everyone more or less understands that equality has value and freedom has value, and the only question concerns the relative weight of each. Therefore I say that even on the more minor moral issues there is broad agreement, though there is also a gray area. With regard to that gray area, I am even prepared to say that it is not necessarily the case that one side is wrong and the other is right; it may be that there is a range of correct and legitimate views, but that range is not infinite.

You are saying this from the vantage point of the present, but if you had lived a hundred years ago you would have seen a wider range of moral opinions. So if you had lived in those years, would you have concluded that there is no objective morality?

Then perhaps I would have held a more extreme moral position in one direction or the other, but I would have been mistaken; today I truly am wiser. Just as then I did not know the theory of relativity and today I do. Today we are able to see more than previous generations saw, including in the moral context. Proof of this is that when an encounter takes place between a primitive African society—pardon the paternalism—and a Western society, it is fairly clear that the Africans are the ones who will adopt Western ethics and not the other way around. Westerners are not going to start eating human flesh; on the contrary, cannibals are disappearing. That means there is some universal human moral intuition that can identify the morality of an action when it encounters it.

So your epistemic tool for clarifying moral truth is to examine majority opinion?

I regard majority opinion as an indication, and perhaps even a central one, in everything having to do with ethical questions. But it is only a certain kind of indication; one must be careful not to take it too far, though there is no doubt that it is indeed an indication. The example of the encounter between a primitive society and a Western society does show that there is a certain kind of progress in ethics, and not only in science. Therefore I maintain that just as I might have been mistaken fifty years ago on a question of physics, so too I may have been mistaken on an ethical question.

It seems that your metaethical view also falls into the naturalistic fallacy, since it claims that there are moral facts, but, as noted, facts cannot obligate us to act. A given person can say, ‘I choose to act contrary to the moral facts.’ How can you condemn him? What obligates him to act according to those facts?

A person who chooses not to act according to a moral fact simply chooses to act immorally; one has that choice. Moral condemnation is identical, in this respect, to scientific error. If you say there is no wall here, I will criticize you scientifically by saying that your conclusions are incorrect. So too in the moral context I can condemn you for your failure to recognize those facts. Moral facts, unlike physical facts, are ‘loaded’ facts, and therefore the naturalistic fallacy does not apply to them; the naturalistic fallacy applies only to natural facts. It is true that someone can say, ‘I see a person suffering,’ and still say that there is no problem with hurting that person. That is because the person’s suffering is a fact, and from such a fact one cannot derive the norm that one must not cause suffering. But if I see the fact that ‘one must not cause suffering’, that, in my view, is already a moral fact; at that point the freedom to decide whether it is acceptable to cause suffering no longer remains.

And what do you say to the criticism of many sociologists who repeatedly argue that ethics is a social tool intended to serve different parts of the population, and as part of that claim show that Western ethics too is one kind of oppression or another, or one kind of instrument for satisfying needs or another?

Sociologists will analyze anything that happens and will even provide an explanation for it. My confidence in sociology is limited.

And what about questions of religion and morality? I ask because in many respects you are a student of Leibowitz, and he made a complete separation between those two domains and argued that morality is an atheistic category. But on the other hand there are many religious thinkers in our time who argue that morality without religion is impossible.

On this issue I am more or less in the middle. I think there is a close and airtight connection between morality and religion. In my opinion, without belief in God there is no morality; there may perhaps be good behavior, but not morality. At the same time, there is no connection whatsoever between morality and Jewish law; these are two completely different disciplines. When I say ‘Jewish law’, I mean the normative part of the Jewish religious world, and that part truly is unrelated to morality, and in that sense I agree with Leibowitz. I do not agree with Leibowitz that morality is an atheistic category. I think that within an atheistic worldview—even one that is not materialistic—there is no morality and there can be no morality. That is because one needs a source that defines the good and the evil. That ‘is’, whatever it may be, which gives validity to moral norms, is God Himself. In this context one can say that the distance between belief in such a ‘moral’ God and belief in a ‘religious’ God is not so great, because unlike belief in God as ‘Creator of the world’, the moral God is a commanding God.

And in your opinion, what should one do when there is a clash between the system of Jewish law and the moral system?

In the end, responsibility for a person’s actions rests on the person himself, because he is the one who ultimately makes the decisions. In religious education they teach that one must subordinate human will to the will of God, and that I accept, but on the other hand the person must do the subordinating himself. That means the responsibility is yours. If you murder someone or leave a non-Jew to die and claim that the reason for your actions is that you wanted to observe Jewish law, I will not accept that. You should have made the decision and said that such an act is impossible; the moral price is already too high, and therefore you were not prepared to accept the formalistic argument that says we have no authority to challenge what the Talmud determined. You do not leave a human being to die because of such a consideration. Another example is the discussion of testimony by relatives. By explicit scriptural decree, two relatives cannot testify together, out of concern for a conflict of interest. I understand someone who will not accept the testimony of two brothers who witnessed a murder. But that is a simple case, because at most you failed to punish a murderer, and you can still punish him by means outside the formal law as well. I ask what you would do as a judge in the opposite case, where two brothers come and testify that a person sentenced to death for murder did not commit the act. Would you still punish that person? In my opinion it is clear that the proper thing to do is to accept their testimony, even though the accepted legal procedure does not allow it. In this context I introduce the concept of ‘a transgression for the sake of Heaven’, whose legitimacy the Talmud already recognized. The meaning of this concept is that there are acts which are a ‘transgression’ in the formal sense, but are ‘for the sake of Heaven’, meaning that they realize the intention of the commandment more fully even though they depart from the accepted procedure of legal decision-making.

In your latest book you also devoted quite a bit of attention to analyzing fundamentalism. How does that connect to the whole moral issue we have just been discussing?

Today there is a kind of struggle between Western postmodernity and fundamentalism of the ISIS variety. My claim is that these two outlooks are two sides of the same coin, and therefore they have no ability to cope with one another. Both claim that truth must be certain; they are unwilling to accept uncertain truth. The postmodernists argue that because there is no certainty, there is also no truth, since in their view truth is identified with certainty. By contrast, the fundamentalists argue that because there is no certainty through rational tools, the way to reach certainty is by using supra-rational tools. In that sense the two agree that in the West there is no truth at all. The West’s reason for defending itself against ISIS does not stem from a philosophical alternative but from an unwillingness to die. That is also the reason there is a phenomenon of Europeans who suddenly join ISIS. It is an astonishing phenomenon: people convert to Islam and join ISIS. The reason is that they understand that the only place where they can gain access to ‘truth’, to certainty, is in places where people think differently from the areas in which they grew up. But all this is the result of identifying truth with certainty. The alternative to these two (supposedly) opposing poles says that one must sever the connection between truth and certainty.

If so, what is that alternative?

The alternative is to believe that there are ways to reach truth even when there is no certainty that it is indeed the truth. In this area, which I call ‘the synthetic domain’, the central tool for reaching ‘truth’ is intuition. Of course skeptics can always raise one doubt or another about my intuitions. I am prepared to listen to those doubts, but my starting point is that so long as the contrary has not been proven, I accept my intuition. One must remember that in non-scientific fields we have to accept ‘probable’ or ‘plausible’ truths and not only ‘proven’ truths. In this context the skeptics are also part of that same outlook that identifies truth with certainty; the skeptic believes that as long as there is even the faintest shadow of doubt in my belief, it is not true. In my opinion, synthetic thinking is not only philosophically correct but also practically useful; it is the only way to fight fundamentalists and postmodernism.

I am less familiar with fundamentalist thought, but many thinkers who define themselves as ‘postmodern’ argue that the postmodern outlook is not merely a negative conception that contains no positive claim at all, but that it does present a worldview, even if partial and incoherent.

There is no such thing as ‘postmodern thought’. In every postmodern work there are two components. The first component is nonsense—word games that say nothing. The second component is arguments that can easily be translated into entirely modernist language, in a way that would have made it possible to state them even in the twelfth century; for that one did not need the twentieth or the twenty-first century. If someone shows me a single argument that I could not explain to Maimonides, and that still has content and meaning, then I am prepared to admit that I am wrong and that there is such a thing as postmodern thought. So far I have posed this challenge to quite a few people, and I have still not received an example that shows an argument of that kind.

Let us move to another area in which you write a great deal, namely philosophy of religion. My impression is that in your books you criticize two conceptions of religion that are very widespread today. One sees religion as an expression of emotion or as folkloristic culture, and from that concludes that with regard to ‘religion’ there is no basis for discussing its truth, since religion makes no claims about the world. On the other hand, you also criticize the approach that sees religion as a theory that explains reality, but whose explanations contradict science. In other words, you believe that religion does make claims about the world, but that these claims have not been refuted by science.

The question is what you mean by religion—is the Bible the foundation of religion? If so, which interpretation of the Bible? Perhaps it is the Talmud after all? Religion is a very amorphous thing. The sages certainly made claims about the world, and they also certainly erred in many things. I do not argue with that. On the contrary, it is clear to me that this is so. If the Torah itself contains claims about the world, it will be harder for me to argue that the Torah errs in its judgment, because God ought to know the world He created—unless there are human additions within Scripture; perhaps, I do not know. In any case, my basic assumption is that in Scripture we will not find errors, but there really are very few claims there about the world. Even in places where you find descriptions of the creation of the world, the text itself is open to interpretations and to one metaphorical reading or another, so it is very difficult to derive concrete claims about the world from Scripture. The central elements that do in fact make claims about the world concern two matters—creation of the world and revelation at Sinai—and that is more or less it. Beyond that, I am not sure I am prepared to stand behind any factual claim found in ‘religion’. There is a book by Rabbi Amit Kula called ‘Havaya O Lo Haya’, in which he tries to empty the religious outlook of every factual statement about the world. The disagreement between us is minor. I think that in order to adhere to religion one must believe in one of the two phenomena we discussed and see it as an actual fact—creation of the world or revelation at Sinai.

Why are these particular events the foundational points of ‘religion’?

Because without them there is no reason for me to be obligated by the commandments of religion. Religious realism, as I understand it, cannot identify religious truths unless God Himself stated them. In other words, I have no epistemic tools for arriving at truths concerning religious commandments, and therefore the only tool available to me is divine revelation. Hence, without any revelation from God there is no reason for me to believe that the commandments of religion are indeed God’s commandments.

But it seems that even if we accept the fact of revelation at Sinai, it does not concern you at all. Why are you obligated by an event that happened thousands of years ago?

The reason I am obligated by an event that happened before I was born is the same reason you are bound by laws that the state enacted before you had the right to vote. When there is a group that took certain laws upon itself, that binds, to a certain extent, its children as well, even if all the lawmakers have long since died. Laws enacted by the American Congress two hundred years ago still bind the American of today. The reason is that the entity that committed itself to those laws was the American collective, not the set of individuals who lived at that time, and the contemporary American is still part of that same collective. In addition, I believe that I am obligated to do the will of God. For these two reasons I feel bound by the laws that were revealed at Sinai.

But these two events—creation of the world and revelation at Sinai—are events whose occurrence many scientists doubt, at least as they are described in Scripture.

When I say that ‘God created the world’, that does not mean that everything written in the opening chapters of Genesis is a historical-factual description. As I said earlier, perhaps it is all metaphor, perhaps yes and perhaps no. A large part of it even fits the scientific picture—after all, Genesis has the evolutionary stages, from the inanimate to the plant world to the animal world to the human being—but in Genesis the process is spread over only six days. In my view that fit is not important at all. On the principled level, all that matters to me is that God created heaven and earth—that is where the factual dimension begins and ends. For that, I think there are already good arguments. Incidentally, creation of the world as such is not critical; as I noted, revelation at Sinai could suffice for me. But in this case I simply think that creation of the world really did occur.

If you were to encounter a clear contradiction between a religious claim and a scientific claim, how could you decide?

I cannot answer that question in sweeping fashion. The question is how reliable the scientific findings are and how deeply rooted the religious claim is within the tradition. In order to prove to me that revelation at Sinai never happened at all, they would have to show me very strong evidence, and if they really do provide me with such evidence, I will indeed be convinced that revelation at Sinai is a fiction. With respect to facts, I have great confidence in scientific thinking and rational thought, but what is called ‘science’ today is a collection of many fields and disciplines. Some of them are as far from science as east is from west, and the relevant question is how reliable that specific field is. But once I have reached a clear conclusion, then for me that is reality; those are the tools by which I know reality. For me, tradition is not a reliable source for facts.

Let us leave ‘religious history’ aside for a moment and discuss religion in our own day. It is undeniable that conventional religion makes quite a few claims about the world. For example, prayer is perceived as a tool for obtaining help in times of distress, and more generally religious people tend to believe in active and direct divine intervention in what happens in the world. How do you deal with such claims?

Those are excellent examples, and I really do think that prayer is ineffective and that there is no providence in the active sense. Perhaps God follows what we do, but He is not involved and He does not bring things about in the world. Prayer, for example, has to be understood by dividing it into several components—praise, thanksgiving, and request. Praise is not a problem; there is no obstacle to praising God for creation. Even thanksgiving is not much of a problem, although if God does not do anything there is no reason to thank Him. One can argue that because He created the world, every good thing that happens to us is a good reason to thank Him for the very creation of the world, since without that creation it would not have happened. The big question concerns requests—because if I ask God for something, that means I assume that He is in fact involved. Therefore I truly do not ask. I cannot rule out categorically that He is involved; it may be that here and there He does intervene, but I have no ability to know that. Still, all the indications point to the fact that He does not intervene in what happens in the world. Yet the very possibility that God intervenes is not illogical, and as I said, it is entirely possible that He does intervene, and therefore I cannot dismiss out of hand the requests people make in prayer. Let them ask; perhaps after all He will intervene in some particular case. At the same time, I do think this has implications for requests in cases where the matter is not critical—it rules out the approach of the Breslov followers, who ask God for everything; that is nonsense. I do not assume that God intervenes in every triviality. Even if He does intervene in the world here and there, it is probably not in minor matters where a person can solve his problems by himself. If you can take an aspirin, do not ask God to lower your fever; take an aspirin—’God is not a health-insurance fund’, to use Leibowitz’s phrase. Therefore I say that in exceptional cases one can ask God for help; perhaps it will help and perhaps it will not. Very likely it will not, but who knows.

Still in that same context, in the book ‘God Plays Dice’ you criticized the view that evolution contradicts belief in God. You tried to show that not only is there no contradiction between the two, but that evolution may even strengthen belief in the existence of God.

In principle there is obviously no contradiction; anyone who understands the subject even a little knows that. The only place where there is a clash stems from the fact that one of the proofs for the existence of God is based on the claim that the world is complex, and that this complexity indicates the existence of a creator and organizer, since a complex thing cannot arise spontaneously but requires a directing hand. This proof is called the physico-theological proof. That proof is challenged by evolution because evolution shows that complex things can arise through a spontaneous process and without outside intervention. But even if we assume that such a clash really exists, what would its significance be? All it would mean is that the physico-theological proof has fallen. Fine. But there are countless other proofs that have not fallen. If I present you with a geometric proof that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, and you manage to refute my proof, that does not mean that a triangle does not have 180 degrees. The fact that you have overturned a particular proof says nothing about the conclusion of that proof. Therefore I say that even if evolution does refute the physico-theological argument, all that means is that proof 17c for the existence of God is invalid; it means nothing more. But I claim that evolution does not even do that. Evolution does not succeed in refuting the physico-theological claim. The reason is that evolution shows that, given these laws of nature, the world advances from the singular point that occurred at the time of the Big Bang all the way to you and me—to life and the complex world in which we live. But that happens because of a particular set of natural laws that governs this process, and so it merely transfers the question from ‘How did life come into being?’ to the question ‘How did the laws of nature come into being that made it possible for life to arise through a spontaneous process?’ Evolution explains how life arose within the laws, but it does not explain the laws themselves. And even if it tries to explain how those laws came into being, it will have to do so by means of additional laws, about which one can also ask what their source is. Science will never be able to explain its laws, only to describe them, and therefore every attempt by science to find an explanation for the emergence of laws is doomed to failure. That is the point at which religion enters the picture. It is important to note that this is not a ‘God of the gaps’. This is not a gap for which science has not yet found a solution, but a gap for which science will never be able to provide a solution or an explanation.

But you argue that evolution actually strengthens belief in the existence of God. Why?

Suppose you placed a lump of plasticine in the corner of the room, and after fourteen billion years you found a zoo there. If you tell me that this happened by chance, I will say that it is improbable, but who knows. But if you show me that through a systematic process of fourteen billion years a lump of plasticine gradually turns into a zoo, that clearly points to a directing hand. Such a process is far more impressive than any sudden ‘creation’ of one kind or another.

If I understand correctly, the claim is that this purposiveness you see in nature is not real. The plasticine did not advance toward the zoo; it operated solely according to the laws of nature, and by chance the result was a zoo.

That is not correct. What evolution shows is precisely the systematic character and not the randomness. It shows that the emergence of the human being took place gradually and systematically, not in a wholly random manner. I will repeat what I said earlier: there is here a set of laws that ensures that a lump of plasticine becomes a zoo; under a different set of laws, the zoo would not have come into being. Obviously, from the standpoint of evolution the process is not teleological, because evolution looks at the world from within the given laws. But if we look at the world from a standpoint above those laws, we will see that there is clear purposiveness here.

As we near the end, let us move to questions of a somewhat different kind. First, I would be glad to hear to which religious camp you would assign yourself sociologically.

I define myself as a secular Zionist and a religious Jew. The late Yosef Burg, one of the leaders of the National Religious Party, said that the essence of religious Zionism lies not in the religion and not in the Zionism but in the hyphen that connects the two, because their religiosity is Zionist and their Zionism is religious. That is not the case for me. In other words, I do not accept the religious-Zionist ideology that believes we live in a messianic or pre-messianic era. I am a Zionist the way Ben-Gurion was a Zionist, and I am religious the way Rabbi Shach was religious; these are two different planes, and there is no hyphen between Zionism and religiosity for me. Incidentally, I think a substantial part of religious Zionism and also a substantial part of the Haredi world are where I am. The problem is that no one has ever presented those people with this option. In this context it is worth noting that the argument between the national-religious and the Haredim is simply an irrelevant and entirely uninteresting argument—it seems that both sides are still arguing over whether a state ought to be established, as though seventy years had not already passed since the state was founded. So sociologically people always have difficulty defining me—some define me as Reform and some define me as Haredi. The only camps in which I truly do not see companions are, on the one hand, the students of Rabbi Kook, who see the state as ‘the beginning of the flowering of our redemption’, and on the other hand the anti-Zionist Haredim.

And in terms of legal decision-making, where do you see yourself?

Other than the Reform, I do not think there is any movement that is ‘outside the boundary’. I see both the Conservatives and the stringent Orthodox as partners in my conversation. In the Conservative context, it is worth noting that the left wing of Orthodoxy has long since swapped places with the right wing of Conservatism. I could sign my name to most of the legal essays written by ‘Conservative’ decisors. I may not agree with the final ruling, but methodologically I do not see significant differences.

Why do you reject the religious-Zionist approach from the school of Rabbi Kook, which sees the state as ‘the beginning of the flowering of our redemption’?

I reject it on two planes. The first plane is the factual one: I have no idea whether this really is the beginning of the flowering of our redemption. Perhaps. I even hope that this is indeed the case, but I simply do not know. How do those people know that we are at the beginning of the messianic age? One must remember that there have already been quite a few false messiahs in Jewish history. On the second plane—and this is the more essential one—I argue that it simply does not matter whether we are at the beginning of redemption or not. Either way, it has no practical implication whatsoever. That is because I determine my attitude toward the state according to its actions and not according to the metaphysics behind it. I am not interested in whether the state is the footsteps of the Messiah or the demonic other side. If the state acts properly, I will support it; if not, I will oppose it. The claim of messianic religious Zionism on the one hand and anti-Zionist Haredim on the other, according to which metaphysics has consequences for the practical world, is a radical innovation; nothing of the sort ever existed. The Satmar Hasidim will not be willing to see the state as something positive even if it saves the world of Torah study, and they will continue to see the state as Satan incarnate. Conversely, the followers of Rabbi Kook will not be willing to see the state as a harmful force even if it damages the world of Torah study. This is because they do not see the state at all, but only the ‘demons’ standing behind it.

So what are the central issues among the observant public, in its various shades, where you see significant consequences?

What I do not understand is why the watershed line that divides religious society in all its varieties is the question of Zionism. It is such an uninteresting and such a non-topical issue. Religious society ought to struggle over other issues, with far broader consequences. Take, for example, the last elections for the Chief Rabbinate. In those elections the religious-Zionist public felt a terrible defeat, because Haredi rabbis and not religious-Zionist rabbis were chosen. That is stupidity incarnate, because what was really at stake in those elections was not Zionism at all—and rightly so—but the question whether the elected rabbi was liberal or not. In the struggle between the liberal candidates and the Haredi candidates, everyone was against Rabbi Stav. From the perspective of that issue, which as I said is the central one, there was a clear majority for the Haredi candidates, because all the candidates, including the religious-Zionist ones and with the exception of Rabbi Stav, are conservative in their legal rulings. In substance, the conservative rabbis are Haredi in every respect; perhaps they are Zionists, but who cares? And on all the questions on the agenda—from conscripting yeshiva students, through the conversion law, to the status of women—the watershed line runs between conservative rabbis and liberal rabbis; Zionism has nothing to do with it. Today, in practice, the Jewish Home party is a Haredi-conservative party in every respect; there is no difference between it and the Haredi parties in the way it votes on religious issues.

These days you are working on a trilogy of books dealing with your religious-Jewish worldview, unlike your previous books, which dealt mainly with general philosophy. I would be glad if you could give us a spoiler for this trilogy—what awaits us?

Following conversations I had with several people, and also with myself, I reached the conclusion that the time has come to present fully and completely my religious outlook, parts of which I have written in articles published here and there. The book is going to present a Jewish theology from the ground up, the whole picture in its entirety. The first volume of the trilogy will deal with philosophy, the second with Jewish thought, and the third with Jewish law. In this trilogy I am trying to present an up-to-date and lean theology, one I am able to stand behind, one that does not include all sorts of beliefs that for some reason are regarded as ‘articles of faith’. I think this trilogy can help many religious people who also feel that they are not prepared to stand behind all the prevalent religious claims. I want to show them that Jewish theology is far narrower than people usually think. I have no doubt that this trilogy will draw heavy criticism from all sides.

A concluding question: in one of your lectures you said that you reject the description of yourself as a ‘Jewish thinker’. Why?

The second book in the trilogy, which is devoted to the field of Jewish thought, comes precisely to explain why there is no such field as ‘Jewish philosophy’ or ‘Jewish thought’. These fields deal with factual questions—does God exercise providence? Is the people of Israel unique? Does the Land of Israel possess a unique intrinsic quality? These are factual questions, even if there is no scientific method for examining them. In matters of fact there is right and wrong. If these facts are true, then every non-Jew too must say that they are true, even if those questions may not interest that non-Jew. And if these facts are not true, then what difference does it make if Jews believe that they are true? What interests me is what correct philosophy has to say, not Jewish philosophy. What difference does it make whether it was Maimonides or Kant who made a particular claim? It may be that Maimonides made incorrect claims and Kant made correct ones. If so, then for me what Kant said is Jewish thought, and what Maimonides said is nonsense. I am a Jewish thinker with a comma between the two descriptions—thinker, Jewish—there is no connection between those two facts.