On Love: Between Emotion and Intellect (Column 22)

With God’s help

In this week’s Torah portion (Vaetchanan), the passage "And you shall love the Lord your God." from the Shema appears, dealing with the commandment to love God. When I heard the reading today, I was reminded of several thoughts I had had in the past about love in general, and love of God in particular, and a few points about them became sharper for me.

Between emotion and intellect in decisions

When I taught in the yeshiva in Yeruham, students would ask me about choosing a spouse: should one follow emotion (the heart) or the intellect? I answered them: only the intellect—but the intellect must take into account what the heart feels (the emotional connection, the chemistry with one’s partner) as one of the factors in its decision. Decisions in every area should be made by the intellect, and the role of the heart is to provide inputs that must be considered, but not to decide. Two reasons can be suggested for this. One is technical: following the heart can lead to mistaken results. Emotion is not always the only factor in the matter, nor even the most important one. The intellect is more balanced than the heart. The second is essential: when you hand the reins over to the heart, then in fact it is not really you who decides. A decision is by definition an intellectual act (more precisely: an act of will), not an emotional one. A decision is made through conscious deliberation, whereas an emotion simply arises on its own, not out of my deliberation. In fact, following the heart is not a decision at all. It is an absence of decision: letting circumstances drag you wherever they may.

Up to this point the assumption is that love is indeed a matter of the heart, but choosing a spouse is not a matter of love alone. As stated, emotion is only one factor. But it seems to me that this is not the whole picture. Love itself too is not merely an emotion, and perhaps emotion is not even its main component.

On love and desire

When Jacob works seven years for Rachel, Scripture says: "And in his love for her, they seemed to him but a few days." (Genesis 29:20). A well-known difficulty is that this description seems the reverse of our ordinary experience. Usually, when a person loves someone or something and is forced to wait for it, each day seems to him like an eternity. Yet here the verse says that his seven years of labor seemed to him like only a few days. That is the exact opposite of our intuition. The common explanation is that Jacob loved Rachel, not himself. A person who loves something or someone and wants them for himself is really putting himself at the center. It is his own interest that demands satisfaction, and therefore it is hard for him to wait until he attains it. He loves himself, not his partner. But if a person loves his partner, and his actions are done for her and not for himself, then even years of labor seem to him a trifling price.

Don Judah Abravanel, in his book Shichot al Ahavah, as well as the Spanish philosopher, politician, and journalist José Ortega y Gasset, in his book Five Essays on Love, distinguish between love and desire. Both explain that love is a centrifugal emotion, meaning that its vector points outward, from the person toward the outside. Desire/passion, by contrast, is a centripetal emotion, meaning that the vector points from the outside inward, toward the person. In love, the one at the center is the beloved; in desire, the one at the center is the lover (or the desirer, the one who lusts). He wants to conquer or acquire the beloved for himself. As our comedians already said: does a fisherman love fish? Yes. Then why does he eat them?!

In these terms, one can say that Jacob loved Rachel and did not merely desire Rachel. Desire is possessive: the one who desires wants to bring into his domain yet another thing that he craves, and therefore he cannot wait for it finally to happen. Every day seems to him an eternity. But the lover wants to give to the other person (the beloved), and so it does not bother him to work for years if that is what is needed for it to happen.

Perhaps one can add another dimension to this distinction. The mythological metaphor for the awakening of love is Cupid’s arrow lodged in the lover’s heart. This metaphor treats love as an emotion that arises in the lover’s heart because of some external factor. It is not his decision or his deliberation. But that description fits desire better than love. Love contains something more essential and less instinctive. Even if it appears to arise on its own, without laws or rules and without deliberation, it may actually involve hidden deliberation, or be the result of emotional and spiritual work that preceded the moment in which it awakened. The soul I built is aroused because of the way I shaped it. Therefore in love, unlike in desire, there is a dimension of deliberation and will, and not merely an instinctively aroused emotion independent of me.

Love of God: emotion and intellect

Maimonides discusses love of God in two places in his code. In the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah he deals with the laws of love of God and all that follows from them, and in the Laws of Repentance he returns and touches on them briefly (as with several other topics that reappear there). At the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance he discusses serving God for its own sake, and among other things he writes:

1. A person should not say: I will fulfill the commandments of the Torah and engage in its wisdom so that I may receive all the blessings written in it, or so that I may merit the life of the World to Come; and I will separate myself from the transgressions against which the Torah warned so that I may be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or so that I not be cut off from the life of the World to Come. It is not proper to serve God in this way, for one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the sages. Only the unlearned, women, and children are trained to serve in this way out of fear, until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.

2. One who serves out of love engages in Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil, and not in order to inherit good; rather, he does what is true because it is true, and in the end good comes because of it. This level is a very great one, and not every sage attains it. It is the level of our father Abraham, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called His beloved, because he served only out of love. And this is the level that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses, as it is said: “And you shall love the Lord your God.” And when a person loves God with the proper love, he will immediately perform all the commandments out of love.

In these remarks, Maimonides identifies serving God for its own sake (that is, not for some external interest) with love of Him. Moreover, in law 2 he defines love of God as Doing what is true because it is true.—doing the truth because it is true—and not for any other reason. This is a very philosophical and cold definition, even an alienated one. There is no emotional dimension here at all. Love of God is to do the truth because it is true, full stop. That is why Maimonides writes that this love is the level of the wise (not of the emotional types). This is what is sometimes called “the intellectual love of God.”

And yet, immediately in the next law he writes the exact opposite:

3. And what is the proper love? It is that one should love God with a great, exceedingly intense, and very powerful love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God and he is continually obsessed with it, like one lovesick whose mind is never free from love of that woman, and he is preoccupied with her at all times—whether sitting or rising, even while eating and drinking. Even greater than this should the love of God be in the hearts of those who love Him: they should be continually preoccupied with it, as He commanded us, “with all your heart and with all your soul.” This is what Solomon said by way of metaphor: “for I am sick with love”; and the entire Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter.

Here love is blazing and emotional, like the love of a man for a woman. Exactly as it is described in the best novels, and especially in the Song of Songs. The lover is lovesick and constantly engrossed in it. He cannot take his mind off it for a moment.

How does all this connect to the cold intellectual picture described in the previous law? Did Maimonides get confused, or forget what he wrote there? Note that this is not a contradiction found between two different places in his writings, or between Maimonides and the Talmud. These are two adjacent, consecutive laws that speak in entirely different languages.

It seems to me that one should beware here of a common error in decoding parables. When a parable is brought in order to illustrate something, it contains many details, and not all of them are relevant to the message and its application. One must identify the main point the parable is meant to teach, and not read all its other details too literally. It seems to me that the parable in law 3 is saying that although love of God is intellectual rather than emotional, one must be constantly immersed in it and not let it leave one’s heart. The parable teaches the constancy of love, as in the love of a man for a woman, but not necessarily the emotional character of romantic love.

An example from regret, atonement, and forgiveness

Let me return for a moment to the cheerful Yeruham period. While I was there, the environmental high school in Sde Boker approached me and asked me to speak with the students and staff during the Ten Days of Repentance about atonement, pardon, and forgiveness—but not in a religious context. I began with a question I posed to them. Suppose Reuven hurt Shimon and feels guilty about it, and therefore decides to go and appease him. He asks him forgiveness from the depths of his heart and begs him to pardon him. Levi, by contrast, also hurt Shimon (Shimon was apparently the class punching bag), but he feels no guilt over it at all. His heart does not torment him; he has no emotion whatsoever around the matter. He really does not care. And yet he understands that he did something bad and hurt Shimon, and therefore he too decides to go and ask him forgiveness. The angel Gabriel comes to poor Shimon and reveals to him the secrets of Reuven’s and Levi’s hearts, or perhaps Shimon himself estimates that this is what is going on inside them. What should he do? Should he accept Reuven’s request for pardon? And what about Levi’s request? Which of the two requests is more worthy of pardon and forgiveness?

Not surprisingly, the audience’s reactions were fairly uniform. Reuven’s request was seen as authentic and worthy of forgiveness, whereas Levi was a hypocrite and there was no reason to forgive him. I, however, argued that in my opinion the situation is exactly the reverse. Reuven’s request for pardon is meant to sustain his guilty conscience. He is really acting for himself (centripetally), out of his own interest (to calm his stomach pains and pangs of conscience). Levi, by contrast, performs a remarkably pure action. Despite the fact that he has no pangs of conscience or heart at all, he understands that he did something wrong and that it is his duty to appease the injured Shimon, and therefore he does what is incumbent upon him and asks his pardon. This is a centrifugal act, since it is done for the sake of the injured party and not for himself.

True, in his heart Levi feels nothing—but why is that important? He is simply built differently from Reuven. His amygdala (which is responsible for empathy) has been damaged, and therefore his emotional center does not function normally. So what? Should a person’s innate constitution have a role in our moral evaluation of him? On the contrary: precisely that impairment allows him to act in a purer, more altruistic, and more complete manner, solely for Shimon, and therefore he is precisely the one who deserves forgiveness.[1]

From another angle, one could say that Reuven is really acting out of emotion, whereas Levi performs the act through deliberation and his own decision. Moral evaluation belongs to a person for his decisions, not for emotions and instincts that do or do not arise within him.

Emotion as cause or as result

I do not mean to say that feelings of guilt or pangs of conscience necessarily invalidate the morality of the act or of the person. If Levi appeases Shimon for the right reasons (the centrifugal ones), but at the same time also feels guilt over having hurt him, the act is wholly complete and pure. That is so as long as the reason he does it is not the emotion—that is, putting out the fires inside himself—but bringing relief to the injured Shimon. The existence of the emotion, if it is not the cause of the act of appeasement, should not interfere with moral evaluation or with accepting the request for pardon. A normal person has such an emotion (the amygdala is responsible for it), whether he wants it or not. So obviously it does not prevent the acceptance of the request. But precisely for that reason, that emotion is also not important here, because it arises not as a result of my decision but on its own (it is a kind of instinct). An instinct does not indicate moral wholeness or moral deficiency. Our morality is determined by the decisions we make, not by the emotions or instincts that arise in us without our control. The emotional dimension does not interfere, but for that very reason it is also not important for moral evaluation. The existence of an emotion ought to be neutral on the plane of moral judgment.

If the emotion is created as a result of a conscious understanding of the moral problematic in the act, then it is an indication of Reuven’s morality. But again, Levi, whose amygdala is damaged and therefore does not generate such an emotion, made the correct moral decision, and therefore he deserves no less praise and moral appreciation than Reuven. The difference between them lies only in the structure of their brains, not in their deliberation and moral decision. As stated, brain structure is a neutral fact and has nothing to do with a person’s moral evaluation.

Something along these lines is written by the author of Eglei Tal in his introduction, section 3:

And while speaking of this, I recall what I heard—namely, that some people err intellectually regarding the study of our holy Torah. They say that one who studies and develops novel insights, and rejoices and delights in his learning, is not studying Torah as much for its own sake as one who studies simply, deriving no pleasure at all from the learning and doing it solely for the sake of the commandment. But one who studies and delights in his learning, they say, mixes personal enjoyment into his study.

But in truth this is a well-known mistake. On the contrary, this is the very essence of the commandment of Torah study: that one should rejoice, be glad, and delight in one’s learning, and then the words of Torah are absorbed into his blood. And since he enjoys the words of Torah, he becomes attached to the Torah [see Rashi’s commentary on Sanhedrin 58b, s.v. “and cleaves”].

Those “mistaken” people think that someone who is happy and derives pleasure from study thereby diminishes the religious value of his study, since it is done for pleasure and not for heaven’s sake (= for its own sake). But that is a mistake. Joy and pleasure do not detract from the religious value of the act.

But that is only one side of the coin. He goes on to add the other side:

And I concede that if one studies not for the sake of the commandment of study, but only because he takes pleasure in his learning, this is called study not for its own sake—like one who eats matzah not for the sake of the commandment but only for the pleasure of eating. And about this they said, “A person should always engage… not for its own sake, for from [doing it] not for its own sake…” But if he studies for the sake of the commandment and delights in his learning, this is study for its own sake, and it is entirely holy, for even the pleasure is a commandment.

That is, joy and pleasure do not detract from the value of the act as long as they accompany it as a side-effect. But if a person studies for the sake of the pleasure and joy—that is, if those are his motivations for study—then it is definitely study not for its own sake. Here those “mistaken” people were right. In our terminology, we would say that their mistake was not in thinking that study must not be conducted in a centripetal fashion. On the contrary: in that they are entirely correct. Their mistake is in assuming that the very existence of pleasure and joy proves that this is a centripetal act. That is by no means necessary. Sometimes pleasure and joy are emotions that come only as a result of the study and do not constitute its causes.

Back to love of God

The conclusion that emerges from everything so far is that the picture I described at the beginning is incomplete, and the situation is more complex. I distinguished between love (centrifugal) and desire (centripetal). I then distinguished between emotional and intellectual love, and we saw that Maimonides demands an intellectual love of God, not an emotional one. The description in the last paragraphs can explain why.

When love is emotional, it usually contains a centripetal dimension. When I feel an intense emotional love toward a certain woman, then the actions I perform in order to win her contain a dimension that turns back toward me. I am sustaining my feeling and want to fill the emotional lack I experience as long as I have not attained her. Even if this is love and not desire, as long as it contains an emotional dimension it involves a double direction of action. I am acting not only for the beloved, but also for myself. By contrast, pure intellectual love, without an emotional dimension, is by definition a purely centrifugal action. I have no lack, and I am not motivated by inner feelings that need to be sustained; I act only for the beloved. Therefore pure love is intellectual, Platonic love. If an emotion is produced as a result of it, that may perhaps not be harmful—but only so long as it is a result and not part of the cause and motivation for my actions.

The commandment of love

This may explain the question of how one can command love of God, and love in general as well (there are also the commandments to love one’s fellow and to love the convert). If love is an emotion, then it arises instinctively and independently of me. So what does it mean to command love? But if love is the result of intellectual deliberation and not a mere emotion, then there is room to command it.

In this context I would only note that it can be shown that all the commandments dealing with emotions such as love and hatred are directed not at the emotion but at our intellectual dimension.[2] Just as one example: Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner raises the difficulty that people asked him: how can Maimonides count the commandment to love the convert in his enumeration, if it is already included in the commandment to love one’s fellow? The convert is a Jew, and as such one must love him because he is a Jew, so what does the commandment to love the convert add?[3] Rabbi Hutner answers that the commandment to love the convert is not a commandment to love a certain person who happens to be a convert, but to love him because he is a convert.[4] Therefore, if I love some convert because he is Jewish, just as I love every Jew, I have not fulfilled the commandment to love the convert. Therefore, he explains, there is no duplication here, and each commandment has its own content and its own mode of fulfillment.

The meaning of this is that the commandment to love the convert is intellectual, not emotional. It involves my decision to love him for this or that reason. We are not speaking about a love that is supposed to arise in me instinctively on its own. There is no point in commanding that, for commandments address our decisions, not our emotions.

The rabbinic exposition of loving one’s fellow lists a collection of actions that we are to perform. Maimonides formulates it this way at the beginning of chapter 14 of the Laws of Mourning:

It is a positive rabbinic commandment to visit the sick, comfort mourners, escort the dead, bring in the bride, accompany guests, and attend to all burial needs—to carry on the shoulder, walk before him, eulogize, dig, and bury; likewise to gladden the bride and groom and support them in all their needs. These are acts of kindness performed with one’s body, for which there is no fixed measure. Even though all these commandments are rabbinic, they are included in “You shall love your fellow as yourself”: everything that you would want others to do for you, do for your brothers in Torah and commandments.

Again, it appears that the commandment to love one’s fellow is not about the emotion but about the deeds.[5]

This also emerges from the verse in our portion, which says:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be upon your heart.

Love is translated into action. And so too in the verses in the portion of Ekev (which we will read next week, Deuteronomy 11:1):

And you shall love the Lord your God, and keep His charge, His statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments all the days.

Moreover, the Sages too interpret the verses in our portion in terms of practical implications (Berakhot 61b):

“And with all your might”—it was taught: Rabbi Eliezer says, if it says “with all your soul,” why does it also say “with all your might”? And if it says “with all your might,” why does it also say “with all your soul”? Rather, if there is a person whose body is dearer to him than his money, therefore it says “with all your soul”; and if there is a person whose money is dearer to him than his body, therefore it says “with all your might.”

Is love directed at the thing itself or at its attributes?

In my book Two Carts and a Balloon, in the second section, I distinguished between the substance itself and its characteristics or attributes. The table before me has many properties: it is made of wood, it has four legs, it is tall, convenient, brown, round, and so on. But what is the table itself? Some would say that the table is nothing but this collection of properties (that is apparently what Leibniz assumes). In my book there I argued that this is incorrect. The table is something over and above the collection of properties. More precisely, it is the bearer of the properties. Those properties are its properties.[6]

If an object were nothing but a collection of properties, then there would be no obstacle to creating a substance out of any collection of properties whatsoever.[7] Thus, for example, the greenness of the jade stone on a certain woman’s finger, together with the squareness of the table beside me and the airiness of the cumulonimbus clouds above us, would also constitute a perfectly legitimate object. Why not? Because there is no object that possesses all those properties. They belong to different objects. But if an object is nothing but a collection of properties, then one cannot say that. The conclusion is that an object is not a collection of properties. Rather, there is a collection of properties that characterizes it.

Almost everything said about any object, such as the table, will be a statement about its properties. When we said that it is brown, or wooden, or tall, or comfortable, all these are its properties. Can there also be statements that deal with the table itself (its very substance)? It seems to me that there can. For example, the statement that the table exists. Existence is not a property of the table but a claim about the table itself.[8] In fact, my statement above that there is such a thing as a table over and above the aggregate of properties is precisely the statement that the table exists, and it is clear that it deals with the table itself and not only with its properties. I think that the statement that the table is one substance and not two is also a statement about it itself and not merely a description or a property of it.

When I dealt with this distinction years ago, one of my female students commented that in her opinion love toward someone is also directed toward the very substance of the beloved and not toward his properties. The properties are the way to encounter him, but afterward the love is directed toward the bearer of the properties and not toward the properties, and therefore it may survive even if the properties change in some way. Perhaps this is what the Sages meant in Pirkei Avot: Any love that depends on something—when that thing ceases, the love ceases. But any love that does not depend on something—even when that thing ceases, the love does not cease..

Another interpretation of the prohibition of idolatry

This picture may perhaps cast additional light on the prohibition of idolatry. In our portion (Vaetchanan), the Torah dwells at length on the prohibition of idolatry. The haftarah as well (Isaiah chapter 40) deals with the opposite side of the issue, namely the incorporeality of the Holy One, blessed be He:

Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her time of service is fulfilled, that her iniquity has been pardoned, that she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins. A voice calls: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh together shall see it, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. A voice says: Proclaim! And he said: What shall I proclaim? All flesh is grass, and all its kindness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. Go up onto a high mountain, O herald of Zion; raise your voice with strength, O herald of Jerusalem; raise it, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah: Behold your God! Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and His arm rules for Him; behold, His reward is with Him, and His recompense before Him. Like a shepherd He will tend His flock; with His arm He will gather the lambs and carry them in His bosom; He will gently lead those that nurse their young. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and measured the heavens with a span, and contained the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains with a scale and the hills with balances? Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or as His counselor informed Him? With whom did He take counsel, that one should give Him understanding, teach Him the path of justice, teach Him knowledge, and make known to Him the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; behold, the islands are like fine dust that He lifts up. Lebanon is not enough for fuel, nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before Him; they are accounted by Him as less than nothing and emptiness. To whom then will you liken God, and what image will you compare to Him? The idol—a craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and forges silver chains for it. He who is too poor for such an offering chooses wood that will not rot; he seeks out a skilled craftsman to prepare an idol that will not topple. Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Have you not understood the foundations of the earth? He sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; He stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. He brings princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth like emptiness. Hardly are they planted, hardly are they sown, hardly has their stock taken root in the earth, when He blows upon them and they wither, and a storm carries them off like stubble. To whom then will you liken Me, that I should be equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one is missing.

This chapter deals with the fact that God has no bodily form. One cannot fashion an image for Him and compare Him to something else familiar to us. So how, nevertheless, does one form a relationship with Him? How does one reach Him or become aware that He exists? The verses here answer: only intellectually. We see His actions, and from them infer that He exists and that He is immensely powerful. He is the One who established the foundations of the earth (created the world) and who sits over the circle of the earth (governs it). See who created these, who brings forth their host by number, calling each of them by name..

In the terms of the previous section, one could say that God has no form, meaning that He has no characteristics that are perceptible to us. We do not see Him, nor do we undergo any sensory experience in relation to Him. We can draw conclusions from His actions (in the terminology of medieval philosophy, He has attributes of action but not attributes of essence).

Emotional love can arise toward an object that is directly familiar to us, that we see or experience. After the experience and the direct sensory encounter, the love that awakens can be directed toward the essence—but it requires mediation through the beloved’s attributes and characteristics. Through them we encounter him. Therefore it is difficult to argue for emotional love toward an entity that we reach only by means of arguments and intellectual inferences, and with which we have no way of forming a direct observational relation. It seems to me that here what is mainly open to us is the path of intellectual love.

If so, it is no wonder that both the Torah portion and the haftarah deal with God’s abstractness, if the portion comes to command us to love Him. Once one internalizes God’s abstractness, the natural conclusion is that love toward Him must and can be only on the intellectual plane, not on the emotional one. As stated, this is not a deficiency, since as we have seen, this is in fact the purest and most complete love of all. Perhaps as a result of that love some emotion of love toward Him will also be created, but at most that is an accompaniment, a non-essential part of the intellectual love of God. Such an emotion cannot be the initial trigger, because it has nothing on which to latch. As I noted, a feeling of love latches onto the image of the beloved, and such an image does not exist with regard to God.

Perhaps one can see here yet another dimension of the prohibition of idolatry. If one creates an image of God, one is trying to turn Him into a perceptible object with which one can form a direct cognitive relation, and then love toward Him can become emotional—a kind of love with a centripetal character, which puts the lover, and not the beloved, at the center. That is why God demands in our haftarah that we internalize the fact that there is no way to liken Him, to turn Him into any image whatsoever. The way to reach Him is philosophical-intellectual, through inference. Therefore love toward Him, which is what the Torah portion deals with, will also have such a character.

Summary

It seems to me that there are quite a few traces of idolatry in the religious conceptions of many of us. People think that cold religious service is a deficiency, but here I tried to show that it contains a more complete and purer dimension. Emotional love usually clings to some image of God, and therefore it may suffer from the attendant elements of idolatry. I tried here to argue for the thesis that love of God ought specifically to be Platonic, intellectual, and emotionally detached.

[1] It is true that if Levi’s amygdala is damaged, it will be very hard for him, and perhaps impossible, to understand what he did. He does not understand what emotional injury is or why it hurts Shimon. Therefore damage to the amygdala may not allow him to understand the significance of his act, and he may not think that he ought to ask forgiveness. But it is important to understand that this is a different function of the amygdala, one less important for our purposes. My claim is that if, theoretically, he understands that he hurt Shimon even though the matter does not torment him, then the request for pardon is complete and pure. His emotions are not really important here. True, technically, without such emotions he perhaps would not do it, because he would not understand the gravity and significance of the act. But that is only a technical matter. This perhaps connects to my opening point, that it is the intellect that makes decisions, while it takes emotions into account as one of the factors that must be considered.

This reminds me of a TED lecture I once heard by a neurologist who had suffered brain damage and had no ability to experience emotions. She learned to imitate those emotional behaviors in a technical way. Like John Nash (known thanks to Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind, and the film based on it), who experienced an imaginary human environment and learned to ignore it in an entirely technical manner. He was convinced that there really were people around him, but learned that these were illusions and that he had to ignore them, although the experience still existed within him in full force. For the purpose of our discussion, let us think of Levi as someone with amygdala damage and no capacity for emotional empathy, who learned to understand intellectually and coldly (without emotion) that one act or another hurts people, and that one should ask forgiveness in order to appease them. Assume also that asking forgiveness is as difficult for him as it is for a person who does feel, otherwise one could argue that such an act is not to be valued if it exacts no emotional price from the one who performs it.

[2] See a fuller discussion of this in the eleventh volume of the Talmudic Logic series, The Platonic Character of the Talmud, Michael Abraham, Israel Belfer, Dov Gabbai, and Uri Schild, London 2014, part two.

[3] Maimonides states in his principles that duplicate commandments, which add nothing beyond another enumerated commandment, should not be counted.

[4] And this is not identical with a commandment to love the convert-ness in him. See our remarks there.

[5] True, these are rabbinic commandments, and ostensibly the Torah-level commandment is indeed about the emotion. Still, one who performs these actions out of love for his fellow thereby also fulfills the Torah-level commandment. But nothing in Maimonides’ wording here prevents us from understanding that the Torah-level commandment, which deals with the relation itself to one’s fellow, can also be intellectual rather than emotional, as we explained here.

[6] As I explained there, this distinction is connected to the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, or matter and form, and in Kant’s philosophy to the distinction between the thing in itself (the noumenon) and the thing as it appears to us (the phenomenon).

[7] See there the examples I brought from the brilliant story by the Argentine writer Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Ficciones, in Yoram Bronowski’s translation.

[8] I showed there that one can bring evidence for this from the ontological argument for the existence of God. If the existence of a thing is one of its properties, then it would be possible to prove the existence of God from His concept, and that seems implausible. Still, see a detailed discussion of that argument in the first booklet on the website. There I tried to show that the argument is not absurd (even if it is not necessary).