Intuition in Jewish Law – Lesson 5

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, both assumptions. If both of your assumptions aren’t certain, then your conclusion can’t be certain either. Only the inference itself brings certainty. And then he asks: where do you know the assumptions from? And the answer, of course, is induction. Every human being I’ve seen until now—or every person I’ve seen until now—has died. People don’t live past a certain age; nobody gets beyond a certain point. So my assumption is that every human being is mortal. But that’s a generalization. I only knew particular cases, and from that I made some kind of generalization. So he says that in the end, all deduction is really an illusion. It’s an illusion because you think deduction, or logic, is a tool for certainty, but really it’s conditional certainty. It depends on how certain you are of the premises, and with the premises you have no certainty because they come from induction, so your conclusion can’t be any more certain than that. Which is really just a reflection of what I said earlier: a logical argument needs premises. And if logic is the only tool you’re willing to accept as legitimate, then it won’t give you anything either, so it’s empty. Because you don’t get the premises out of a logical argument. So where do you get them from? From intuition—or, translated into logical terms, from analogies and inductions, or whatever else belongs to that family. Okay, so this logical distinction between three forms of inference is really a reflection of the same thing I’m saying now: that at the base of rational thought, or logical argument, there sits intuition. Now what this really means is that there aren’t actually two modes of thinking, if we set aside fundamentalism and mysticism and all the non-rational stuff. There really aren’t two modes of thinking. There’s intuition, and from it you can derive conclusions by logical tools. But still, somehow in life, in practice, it is perceived as two alternatives, and it really does function a lot of the time as two alternatives. And that’s what I want to talk about a bit now. And in Jewish law too, actually—I’ll talk about this aspect there as well—and with that we’ll wrap up the topic of intuition. So, regarding working with rules: first of all, on the halakhic level—or even empirically, when I look at the Talmud—I ask myself whether Talmudic thinking generally works with rules or with intuitions. And it seems to me it’s very easy to agree that it’s not thinking that works with rules. It works with intuitions, making analogies between things, generalizations; analogies and inductions, for me, are a kind of intuition. Okay? So we’re basically not working with rules. This is not deductive thinking; it’s inductive or analogical thinking or something else. Nachmanides, in the introduction to Milchamot, as is well known, writes his famous line that “the wisdom of our Torah is not like the wisdom of astronomy and mathematics, whose proofs are decisive.” Astronomy is astronomy, and mathematics is arithmetic. So he says that there the proofs are decisive; there are necessary logical proofs. But in Torah it doesn’t work that way. Torah works with softer logical tools. And that simply reflects what I said earlier: when you look at the Talmud, it doesn’t work with rules. And not only does it not work with rules—this too I’ve spoken about more than once in the past—it sometimes seems that there’s a kind of contempt for rules. A kind of contempt for rules. I’ll maybe give one example, one example. The Mishnah at the beginning of tractate Bava Kamma brings the four primary categories of damages: the ox, the pit, the grazer, and the fire. And then it says—it concludes the Mishnah—“This one is not like that one, and that one is not like this one; the common denominator among them is that they are your property, their safeguarding is upon you, and when they cause damage, the damager is obligated to pay compensation from the best of his land.” Okay? So basically the Mishnah gives four examples of damagers: ox, pit, grazer, and fire, and then it gives the rule. The rule is that anything that is your property and whose safeguarding is your responsibility—if it caused damage, you have to pay. Fine? Now the Talmud on page 6 asks: “The common denominator comes to include what?” And when you think about that question, it’s a very strange question. I mean, just when the Mishnah once in a while finally works in a civilized way and gives you the rule instead of giving you several examples from which you’re supposed to infer some conclusion in all kinds of odd ways, the Talmud asks: who needs the rule? Why did they bring the rule? Ask why they brought the particulars. If the rule is already written, why bring the examples? You’ve got the rule—the rule already says everything; you can learn everything from it. So ask why they brought the particulars. Why are you asking why they brought the rule? So there’s some sort of assumption here. Fine, I’m not going into the details of the passage there; there are of course special laws in each primary category of damage. But I’m saying in general, when you look at it, suddenly you see that even when the Mishnah already gives rules—which is rare; usually the Mishnah deals with examples, it states the laws, it doesn’t usually bring general rules, though here and there it does—even when it does, suddenly the Talmud asks: wait, why? Who needs rules? In other words, there’s some kind of contempt for rules. Not only did they fail to notice that you could really work in a much more systematic and orderly way—you could work with rules and not with examples—as if they didn’t notice, some primitive old-fashioned kind of thinking. But it’s not just that they didn’t notice and rejected it. It’s as if: no, not true. Who needs rules? Don’t give me rules; it’s unnecessary. So it comes to include your stone, your knife, your load that fell from the roof and caused damage—or they find all kinds of odd cases that this thing comes to include. Just say what the rule is. What’s the problem? So you’ll be able to issue a halakhic ruling in cases that come before you. No, that’s not an option. Why is that not an option? Interesting question. But in practice, all through the Mishnah and the Talmud, throughout the Talmud, you see that the Talmud does not like rules. Here and there there is discussion of rules, which is really rare. Once there was some discussion at the National Library—they invited me—we did some learning of the passage of “this one benefits and that one does not lose.” So I suggested learning that passage because it really is a special one; it’s unusual in its formulation in the Talmud. There are others like it, but it’s relatively unusual, because there the Talmud does the kind of conceptual investigation typical of the later authorities (Acharonim). The Talmud there says: yes, “this one benefits and that one loses” is liable, “this one does not benefit and that one does not lose” is exempt, “this one benefits and that one does not lose”—what is the law? In other words, translated into the language of the later authorities, what does that mean? In the case of “this one benefits and that one loses is liable”—what creates the liability? What creates the liability—the benefit or the loss? When someone benefits from me, and that benefit causes me some loss, okay? Then he has to pay. That’s what the Talmud says. But fine, he has to pay—but there’s room to discuss what obligates him to pay. Is it the fact that I lost something, or the fact that he benefited from my property? Where will the practical difference be? In a case where there is only benefit without loss, or only loss without benefit. And that is a classic Acharonim move. It’s an investigation: is this what obligates, or is that what obligates? And what practical difference follows when one is present and the other isn’t? Okay? That’s thinking with rules. It’s analytical, orderly, logical thinking with rules. But that characterizes the later authorities more. In the Talmud they don’t work like that. It’s an exception. Precisely because it’s exceptional, the exception points to the rule—to the rule that the Talmud doesn’t work this way. I also once brought that other example, from the Talmud in Kiddushin, where the Talmud there discusses women’s obligations. The Mishnah writes: “All positive commandments dependent on time—women are exempt, except for…” I don’t remember how many exceptions, maybe eight or maybe three or four exceptions. Then the Talmud brings the commandment of Hakhel, where women are obligated as well, so why doesn’t the Mishnah mention it? And the Talmud says: “One does not derive from general rules, even in a place where an exception is stated.” Meaning: it says all positive commandments dependent on time, women are exempt. Fine? That’s a rule. That too is a kind of rule; this is also a Mishnah that gives a rule, and there are several exceptions. Fine? So if it says the rule, “all positive commandments dependent on time, women are exempt,” okay, there are some exceptions; maybe they didn’t go into detail. Broadly speaking, that’s the rule, okay? But where the wording is precise—it says to you, “all positive commandments dependent on time, women are exempt, except for A, B, C”—then they listed the exceptions. You can’t get more precise wording than that. So there, yes, you’d expect there not to be more exceptions. If there were more exceptions, then let them bring those too—or else don’t bring any exceptions at all. But why give me only some of the exceptions and not the others? And the Talmud answers this with some sort of Olympic calm—I read it with a kind of irony or sarcasm—saying: “One does not derive from general rules, even in a place where an exception is stated.” Meaning: even where it’s written in precise language, we don’t make a big deal out of the rule. Don’t take these rules too seriously. Fine, there are a few more exceptions. Don’t make a fuss over every little thing. Meaning, even when the wording is precise—I think here you really do have to read it ironically. I’m basically saying: in a place where the Mishnah makes its greatest effort to show that there is some clear rule and to give you the exceptions too and close the whole thing off, you bring another example? Fine, there’s another example. Maybe there are a few more examples too. So what? Right, Abaye? The Jewish law follows Rava except for YAL KGM. In disputes between Abaye and Rava, the Jewish law follows Rava except for YAL KGM. And if we find one more? Then we find one more, okay? Why are you making such a big deal? We don’t relate to this as though there is a rule, and it’s formulated together with the exceptions, and then everywhere we find that the ruling suddenly follows Abaye in a case that isn’t one of YAL KGM, we should raise a question. Right? I mean, you have a rule—fine, don’t make a fuss about it. There’s a rule, there are some exceptions, so they didn’t count all the exceptions. There are a few more. Fine? There is some kind of blatant or explicit disregard for thinking by rules. And that’s an interesting question—why. That’s one side. On the other hand, as…

[Speaker E] But in YAL KGM there aren’t any more. What? In YAL KGM there aren’t any more.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says there aren’t? There are quite a few difficulties, so the rule-mongers of course try to resolve them. One of the rules, for example, is that where Abaye and Rava disagree about how to rule in a dispute among tannaim, there maybe the Jewish law can follow Abaye. Only in their own independent disputes is it YAL KGM. For example—that’s one exception I remember; there are others. Maimonides, for example, has a contradiction regarding him on “if one did it, it is not effective,” at the beginning of Temurah. So there’s a dispute how Maimonides rules there. On the face of it, he ruled like Abaye there, and that is not one of YAL KGM. “If one did it, is it effective or not effective”—that’s another passage, and there it’s not a dispute about the opinion of tannaim, it’s a dispute of Abaye and Rava themselves. I don’t even remember how they resolve it there, but… but Maimonides ruled that way. Meaning, fine, don’t make too much of these rules. I don’t think you have to find explanations for everything either. The Talmud says it: “One does not derive from general rules, even in a place where an exception is stated.” Rules are some kind of—okay, I summed up for you roughly what I had on hand at the moment, but obviously no one should take it too seriously, that rule I just said. And that’s what the Talmud asks on the Mishnah, “The common denominator comes to include what?” You gave me the examples—okay, I understood the principle. Why are you giving me this rule now? The rule doesn’t help me at all. I’m not really going to use it; I don’t really rely on that rule. So give me the examples and I’ll understand from the examples roughly what you’re talking about.

[Speaker G] But now you’ve killed all the later authorities, because all the later authorities make fine distinctions as to why…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the other side. Meaning, this is the Talmud, and that seems to be the prevalent approach in the Talmud. Here and there there are rules, but broadly speaking the prevalent approach is highly associative. It really doesn’t work with some deductive logical structure with rules and so on. On the other hand, we know that as the generations go on, and in the period of the later authorities and even more in our own time, thought becomes much more systematic. They formulate far more rules; every such exception like YAL KGM and so on immediately gets organized into some rule, because it can’t be that it’s just some random detail that doesn’t fit. No—surely there’s some other rule that cuts into this rule. Meaning that the whole rule that the Jewish law follows Rava except for YAL KGM applies only to independent disputes between Abaye and Rava, but not to their disputes according to tannaitic opinions. Just an invention, right? But because you found something else, you decided there’s some sub-rule that qualifies this rule, because you have to keep everything within a framework of rules. It’s a bit similar to… yes, I mean, people always bring that example from astronomy—the Ptolemaic model with epicycles and deferents. The assumption of ancient astronomy was that all the paths are circular paths. In astronomy the paths are always circular. Now they saw… it’s elliptical. Okay, it’s not circular. So they explained: no, no, it’s a circle, only there’s another little circle inside that circle. Meaning: it’s all built on circles, but sometimes the paths are built as a circle on top of a circle. Meaning, it goes around in one circle, and within that revolution it also makes a revolution in a smaller circle, and somehow that creates approximately this. Or the center of the circle itself makes some circular motion, and so on. They added all sorts of things—think of gears, gear wheels: you have a big gear and you add a small gear to it and then another gear. The path ultimately traced by a point on the edge of the small gear is not circular. But you can describe it as a sum of circles. That’s how they described astronomical paths. Meaning, it’s all combinations of circles upon circles, because it was obvious to them that it had to work with circles. Which is a wonderful example of our own logic. Our logic assumes that everything has to work with rules. And if there’s something—as in science too, by the way, in science as well—there are Newton’s laws, there’s Schrödinger’s equation, whatever, all kinds of scientific laws that are perceived by us as binding rules. There’s no such thing. If something is exceptional—of course, there are exceptions—but if there’s an exception, then it means we simply don’t understand fully yet. There’s some other rule that says why this rule here doesn’t quite work completely, or that some other rule is interfering. But it always has to be somehow the result of a set of rules. We have some trust that behind the physical system there sits some set of rules that maybe we’ll never know fully and maybe we will, I don’t know. But the accepted assumption is at least that there is such a set of rules. In other words, everything happening here is the result of some set of rules, and we’re just looking for those rules.

[Speaker B] But we see that it works, still.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It works not badly. But you know, there are puzzles, right.

[Speaker B] No, it works not badly, and it still gives

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] me prediction about the real world. There are puzzles, though. There are points where the rule gets stuck.

[Speaker B] Doesn’t matter, the rule is more complex, but you see it’s not an infinity of

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] unrelated details.

[Speaker B] Who says? I don’t know, maybe it is. I see the precise predictions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t see that. What you see is that there is a set of phenomena that can be placed under one description. But there are other phenomena too that don’t fit that description. Not just description, not just description.

[Speaker B] Beyond the description, thanks to the rule I saw in these phenomena I can also give prediction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, obviously. Fine, it behaves in some uniform way and that lets you make predictions. But that doesn’t mean you can describe the entire natural totality by a set of laws. It means there are certain parts of reality that can be described by laws, that operate according to laws. But there’s an assumption here that everything works by laws—we just don’t know everything yet. I think that’s the assumption of almost every scientist. There’s some debate about it, but I think even those who debate it are doing so a bit only verbally. People who work today in what’s called complexity, the study of complexity, are a little more skeptical of this notion that everything has to go by rules. And they don’t take so seriously the principles of quantum theory or mechanics or whatever, these universal laws that ordinary physicists are convinced stand at the foundation of reality. Rather: fine, it’s a possible approximation, a certain kind of description, but you don’t have to take it too seriously. There are things that work somehow differently. And in complex systems it’s easy to argue that, because complex systems by their nature are systems that you can’t reduce to the basic laws. At the very least it’s too complicated, if it’s possible at all.

[Speaker H] Too complicated, not impossible.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Now the question is whether that’s only because it’s too complicated, but really there are laws at the base—or whether there are no laws at all. So the complexity people are usually the ones, at least among physicists—mathematicians, physicists—they’re usually the ones who raise the question whether there are rules at all. Or maybe not; maybe each thing has to be discussed on its own terms. True, there are certain parts of reality that at least systems of laws describe reasonably well. It’s never exact, of course, but reasonably well. Fine. But that means there are certain parts of reality where this works for us. It doesn’t mean that all physics is a collection of rules. That’s a very far-reaching assumption. And not to mention Einstein, who in general dreamed of a unified field theory. Meaning, he thought there ought to be some single law that governs everything. Which really sounds like wild speculation. Why assume there’s such a law at all? Why look for such a thing? Who said there is? Right, it’s that sort of intuition. Okay.

[Speaker B] No, and it’s also based on something. No, I understand. You also see it—what I started saying—it’s not that they just threw out some idea. We live, it works, and that only leads us to think there is such a thing, and we keep grouping more and more things under it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the fact that it works—I’ll tell you—the fact that it works is not as strong an argument as people think. I’m not dismissing it; it’s just not as strong as people think. Because the fact that it works could be a statement about us. A lot of people, philosophers, argue that the laws of nature are a statement about us.

[Speaker B] But airplanes fly, don’t they?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, yes. Because what they’re really saying is that as long as we hadn’t developed a method capable of gathering these details and describing them within the framework of a rule—the mathematical language that helps a lot with that, and so on—as long as that wasn’t sufficiently developed and we couldn’t do it, we had no way to deal with the details. It’s not because the laws are true, but because laws are the way our minds know how to deal with so many details. Without that, we’d stand helpless before a mass of details and wouldn’t know what to do with them. So laws are a means that helps us deal with the details. The question whether there are really laws in reality itself—that question can still remain open. Okay? So the fact that it works maybe gives some support to that, maybe it says there are certain parts of reality you can work with through laws. But to infer from that that the whole business really has to operate by a system of laws that actually governs everything—even if we don’t know it, doesn’t matter, but in principle there is such a system of laws—that’s a long way to go. And still, I think most scientists do assume it—if not all of them, I think—they assume the existence of such a system, even though we haven’t reached it yet and we don’t know it.

[Speaker H] They assume its existence, a system of science. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and I’m speaking cautiously because I don’t know—I haven’t done a proper survey. I don’t know one either. But most of them think this way.

[Speaker B] One who assumes that sort of regularity.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. The question is on what basis, or what it means—that’s really the point. In the Talmud too, when the later authorities analyze it and fit it into a system of rules, so that all these exceptions suddenly get an explanation—what is explanation? We explain something; we do conceptual analysis in the Talmud. What is analysis? Analysis is to explain something. What is it to explain?

[Speaker B] To show how it fits with the rules. Right—or to invent a rule.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are two kinds of explanation.

[Speaker B] The problem is why there wouldn’t be rules, because often over the generations things need to change.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but if there are rules, then there are rules. It’s not up to our choice.

[Speaker B] They’re binding, right, so they won’t change.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the truth is—if that’s the truth—if that’s the truth, there are rules, then there are rules. What can you do? Just because I want to change, should I therefore deny that the truth is that there are rules? The question is whether that is the truth.

[Speaker B] That’s the important question. The problem is that they’re approximations. Anyone who talks about rules, I assume, is talking about approximations. I’m not sure. Most people—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] don’t see it that way. In my opinion, most people don’t see it that way. They think the rules are real. Maybe we haven’t hit on the right rule yet—that can happen—but they see

[Speaker B] that the rules—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] are binding rules, and that’s what stands behind the phenomena. That’s how I think most people see it.

[Speaker B] Also in halakhic interpretation?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, there too, certainly. Now, just like in science, in my opinion—it’s the same thing.

[Speaker J] So why is your conclusion that the Talmud doesn’t like rules?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Simply, it—

[Speaker J] says, “I’m not dealing with that.” It doesn’t tell you “the tanna taught and omitted”; it tells you “I’m not…”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the fact is that there’s some rejection of the use of rules. It’s not that the Talmud never thought of the possibility of working with rules. It did think of it—after all, the rule appears there, and it asks, “This rule—what does it come to include? what does it come to exclude?” So it’s saying, “I don’t want rules.” It’s as if there’s some rejection of rules. It’s not just, “Fine, I don’t deal with that, it doesn’t interest me, or my method is different.” It’s not only that; it’s more than that. That’s why I brought the earlier examples.

[Speaker B] There’s contempt for rules here, because it sees that there’s a rule—the Mishnah doesn’t work with rules, and here this is an exception to the rule.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every rule has an exception.

[Speaker B] The question is why that’s the rule.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So when the later authorities offer explanations for phenomena, they naturally use rules. Because explanation by definition—what is explanation? Explanation means showing that the phenomenon being explained fits certain rules. Now there are two kinds of explanations. One kind is an explanation that grounds the phenomenon in known rules; let’s call that a technological explanation. A commission of inquiry checks why an airplane crashed. So it finds a crack in the wing, or there was an explosive device there, or the captain went crazy—I don’t know exactly what—but they understand what happened there in terms of known rules, in terms of principles familiar to them. And if they don’t find such an explanation, then they’re left with “it requires further analysis,” because it’s a commission of inquiry; it’s not scientific research. Scientific research, when it finds something not understood—that’s where it starts. When it finds the thing that is understood, that’s basically technology, not science. When you explain something by means of known scientific tools and principles, you’re not changing science. All you’re showing is that known science explains another phenomenon. But when science advances, it does the opposite: it offers an explanation for a phenomenon in terms of a rule that until that point was not known. I invent a new rule and then say, “And here, this phenomenon is a demonstration that this rule is correct.” Okay? We once talked about this when I spoke about evolution—I don’t remember when that was—and there was an article by Elia Leibowitz from Tel Aviv, the astrophysicist. His son. Yes. No, he’s the astro—yes, the son of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Right. He’s an astrophysicist in Tel Aviv and a sort of well-known atheist fighter, and he mocks the proofs for the existence of God. He says that basically to explain that the world is complex and therefore has a composer and therefore there is God—that’s a ridiculous argument.

[Speaker C] Why is it a ridiculous argument?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s like, he says, they bring examples such as Paley’s watch, or a Coca-Cola bottle you find lying around—you don’t assume it came into being by itself; someone manufactured it. Or the windows—he brings the example of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. So you see the windows and it’s obvious to you that someone painted them and they didn’t come about by themselves. So that’s a sign that if there is a world, then there is also someone who created it. That’s what the outreach people always say, right? So he says: this argument is nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because when you look at the Sistine Chapel, you ask yourself: did this come about by itself, or did someone make it? Now you have experience. You know there are painters in the world. You’ve already encountered paintings and people who painted paintings. So then you have a basis for claiming that if there is a painting here, someone probably made it. Or airplanes—you know someone manufactures airplanes, that they don’t come into being by themselves, because you know there are factories that do that. Okay? So therefore you can assume that if you find an airplane, someone probably made it. That’s Fred Hoyle’s example with the airplane. Or Paley’s watch, doesn’t matter. All these examples are the same. But worlds? Do you also have experience regarding the creation of worlds—that there are such creatures or beings who go around creating worlds, and worlds don’t come into existence by themselves? There you have no experience. And because of that, you can’t explain something not understood—that this complex world exists here—by means of something else that is also not understood, namely that there is God, of which you have no indication that it’s true. It’s an English-English dictionary. Now his mistake is that he thinks every explanation has to be an explanation by grounding it in what is already known. And he doesn’t notice that precisely in his own field, the field of science, the explanations by which science advances are explanations that ground things in the unknown. Grounding in the known is technology, not science. A lot of scientists work on that, but in essence it’s technology. It basically says: the law is correct, I have no criticism of it, I just want to understand through that law the phenomenon I’m studying. It’s application, exactly. There are applications that are the business of scientists, applications that are the business of engineers—it doesn’t matter. But in principle those are not the stages in which science advances, when a paradigm is broken, in Thomas Kuhn’s terms. When we break the previous paradigm and move on to a new theory. When does that happen? Take Newton: he discovered—discovered—we all knew that bodies fall to the earth, that bodies attract and so on; he discovered the law of gravitation. So he explained by means of the law of gravitation that bodies attract one another. So I’ll ask Elia Leibowitz’s question: what kind of explanation is that? You’re explaining a phenomenon you don’t understand by means of a law you just invented in order to explain it? After all, you don’t know that law from anywhere else. So what explanation is there here? It’s exactly the same as saying there is God and that’s how I explain the existence of a complex world. Fine. But the fact is that this is how science advances. It’s not true that all explanations are grounding in the known. There are explanations that are grounding in the unknown. Those are exactly the explanations where science advances, where something else was discovered that wasn’t familiar to us before and now we understand that it may be true. We’ll subject it to further tests and so on, but it may be true. That’s how progress happens. Anyone who accepts only explanations grounded in the known—I told this story in that context, I’m sure I also told the story about jaundice. There was someone in our yeshiva, in Gush, when I was there, who had jaundice for about half a year. Hospitalized, out, back in—he couldn’t get rid of it. Fine? So they brought him some sorcerer with those pigeons, put them on his belly button there, the pigeons died, and after a few days he came back to the yeshiva. Someone who was there and saw it told me; we have a mutual friend—he’s two years older than me, but we have a shared friend who was there. He saw it. And he told me, listen, I was there, I saw it. And after two days he came back to yeshiva. I mean, for half a year he wasn’t there. I told it at home, told my parents. I said, listen, something interesting happened—some sorcerer put some pigeons on him, they died, I don’t know, the guy came back to yeshiva, recovered after a few days. Wow—they grabbed their heads. What are they doing to you in that dark yeshiva? Alon Shevut, yes. That dark yeshiva and all that. It’s the kind of thinking of primitives who don’t understand what science is. My enlightened parents weren’t willing to accept such a thing. So I said to them: listen, being critical is a fine thing, but refusing to accept facts is not rationality. You need to look for the explanation of the facts. I understand—you don’t have to treat it as a miracle. Look for the explanation of why it works. But to deny facts because they don’t fit my existing paradigm, my currently available knowledge—that is actually the opposite of rationality. But that is exactly what Elia Leibowitz does. Elia Leibowitz is unwilling to accept a new law on the basis of a fact that cannot be explained using the existing laws. Supposedly he is willing, but in the theological context he isn’t. Fine? Why? Because for him explanations are only familiar science. This is also one of the common critiques of Occam’s razor, by the way—we also talked about that once. Occam’s razor says that among the possible theories, I choose the simplest one. Okay? There are those who criticize this principle because basically they say it’s a recipe for conservatism. What does “the simplest” mean? “The simplest” means what fits best with what I understand right now. Right? So basically I’m saying I choose the theory that best fits what I understand right now—in other words, I’m conservative. I don’t want to change anything. Maybe what you think now is wrong. Why should that give preference to that theory? Why? Simplicity depends on basic assumptions. What seems simpler or more plausible to you depends on experience. On experience—it doesn’t matter—on assumptions, on current knowledge. So this too is the same sort of criticism. It basically keeps you conservative within your present conceptions and won’t let you move into new places.

[Speaker B] So that’s also what induction does—it keeps you conservative relative to what you’ve seen so far. It’s an inductive outlook. I saw it this way, saw it that way, so I stay conservative. I saw it all those times, so the next time too—conservatism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And the same criticism can be made of induction too—that maybe it’s just plain conservatism. Fine? So all these criticisms, I partly accept and partly don’t. Because there is, by the way, also value to conservatism in science. If every experiment that contradicted a theory made us throw it out, today we’d still be in Aristotelian physics; we never would have moved on. In other words, one of the things that advances science is its conservatism. The fact that it doesn’t throw away a theory so quickly when the theory works well. It works well, it explained many things. It may be false, it may only be an approximation—that’s all true. But you’ll need to convince me with enough counterexamples for that. One counterexample—I prefer to remain with “this requires further analysis,” like Rabbi Akiva Eiger with the next Tosafot, like those stories where a student comes to the rabbi and says: I’m having a terrible difficulty with this Tosafot, what’s going on here? How can this be? It doesn’t work for him. Rabbi Akiva Eiger looks in the Tosafot—I don’t remember where, somewhere—and “astonished,” he looks there and finds something; it’s not connected at all to what the student asked. He goes to the rabbi and says: tell me, what was I supposed to learn from Rabbi Akiva Eiger there? He says: you saw there are two Rabbi Akiva Eigers on two Tosafots one after the other. He remained with “requires further analysis” on the first and moved on to the next Tosafot. Meaning, so you too remain with “requires further analysis,” okay, move on to the next Tosafot. So that’s… in that sense science works that way too. If there’s a theory that works well, I don’t throw it out because there’s one counterexample. That’s the Popperian illusion—that once there’s a counterexample, the theory is thrown out, refuted. Nonsense. That’s not how it works. Once there’s a sufficient amount of contrary evidence, then a paradigm breaks. But when there’s one counterexample, I wait for someone smarter than me to explain it. I don’t throw out the theory.

[Speaker B] The stronger the theory was to begin with.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Fine, obviously—it’s all a matter of weights. But I’m only saying: it’s not Popperian. It’s not that if there’s one example, the theory has been refuted and we throw it out. It doesn’t work that way. So basically I return to the picture I described: in the Talmud you see disregard for rules. But when people begin explaining things—and the Talmud doesn’t really engage much in explanations; it simply says what it thinks on various issues—it engages less in what we today call iyun, conceptual study. Conceptual study always means fitting things into some general patterns, and that’s what’s called explanation. Whether it’s explanation by grounding in the known or explanation by grounding in the unknown, it’s still explanation that grounds the particular phenomenon in a rule. Whether it’s a known rule or a rule I’m innovating right now—I don’t care at the moment; for our discussion that’s not important. Because still, explanation means grounding in a rule. So Carl Hempel, one of the well-known philosophers of science, called it that scientific explanation works by a deductive-nomological scheme. That’s what he called it. Nomos is law, right? Deductive-nomological means: explanation means propose a law from which this case can be derived by deduction. Meaning, you want to explain why this thing falls downward? The law is that any two bodies with mass attract each other. If so, then this is a particular case that can be derived from the law by induction. By deduction, yes. That’s scientific explanation. Fine? In other words, explanation is bound up at the hip with the concept of rule or law. Whenever you explain something, you say how it works with the rules. So when we explain things, it’s no wonder that we need rules, because I don’t know any other kind of explanation. What would another explanation even be? Explanation is always by means of rules. But that’s exactly the point that raises the not-so-simple question: maybe this is only a bug in our thinking. We simply aren’t capable of thinking outside a framework of rules. For us, explanations are always explanations in terms of rules, so we clothe all these phenomena in rules, and rules about rules, and sub-rules, and epicycles, and deferents, and all sorts of things like that just so everything fits into rules. But is that really true? Right—it works in many cases. Not always, but in many cases. What? There is in the Talmud too. Yes, in the Talmud too, depending how exacting you are.

[Speaker B] Because when you discuss a Talmudic passage, you’re boarding airplanes, so to speak…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, what do you mean? You find choices in the Talmud that fit the theory you built. You say, “we do not say migo in order to extract money”—I see that from this passage here. Now I learn ten other passages, and again I see there’s migo and still they don’t extract the money. That’s a kind of prediction.

[Speaker B] Yes, but you also see exceptions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but in science too there are exceptions, so I build another rule that will describe the exceptions. No—in values, in general in normative matters, you can’t test, you can’t…

[Speaker B] But in the Talmud I’m aiming at what the Talmud says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I want to understand the Talmud. I don’t care right now about the theory of whether this reflects what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants. Say it doesn’t. I want to explain the Talmud.

[Speaker B] So these aren’t normative questions, they’re questions of—exactly, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I’m saying—these are questions… no, normative questions, but of course the question is what norms the Sages wanted to convey to me, not what the correct norms are, but what norms the Sages wanted to convey to me.

[Speaker I] To test the laws when the facts are what is written in the Talmud.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. So in that sense it’s more or less analogous to what we have there. You can put it to the test, you can make predictions, you can do everything. Meaning, there’s a completely scientific framework here in that sense. So I’m saying that the fact that we need rules stems mainly from the way we think. If we were built differently, maybe we wouldn’t work this way; maybe we really would work with examples. But that raises the question whether these rules really are… whether there really are such rules, or whether we simply organize phenomena into groups because it’s convenient for us to handle them that way. That’s all. One of the difficult questions in the philosophy of science—and we once talked about this too—with Semmelweis, the doctor who discovered puerperal fever, we talked about it, and Carr the historian, I brought some analogy there between the two of them—that when you group together a collection of scientific phenomena, say Newton: he took a collection of scientific phenomena and grouped them all under the law of gravitation. For example, the paths of the stars, which really stem from attraction between stars, between masses; the falling of objects toward the earth; tides; whatever—an assortment of phenomena that can all basically be explained by the law of gravitation. Right? Now, he chose that collection of phenomena as a set that belongs to the same domain and is governed by the same set of laws, the laws of gravitation. Okay? But you could have chosen a different division of phenomena. I don’t know—the paths of stars as one thing, the pitch-frequency of ravens’ cries at night, and, I don’t know, the color of clouds at the end of summer. And find some rule that explains those three facts. Why do I think those facts don’t create a physical field or a defined scientific field, but belong to different fields, whereas the collection of phenomena Newton gathered under the law of gravitation belongs to one field? The answer is simply that I found a law that explains those three. The law of gravitation—I managed to formulate a law that explains those three. But you understand that I can formulate laws…

[Speaker B] A simple law, whatever.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying, I can also formulate some law, in one wording or another, that might explain unrelated phenomena. And then I’ll create from those things some kind of field as well. And still, I think many of you won’t accept that explanation as something that reflects something in reality. It’s just an intellectual trick.

[Speaker I] Some kind of consideration of a common denominator, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but I can make a common denominator there too.

[Speaker I] What do they all have in common? They have mass.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I can say there too: what’s the Aristotelian explanation? The birds’ cry belongs to the element of wind and therefore rises upward, and the clouds belong to the element of air and therefore they also remain—they don’t fly upward and don’t fall downward, they just stay there. I’m just inventing this in real time now, okay? And the element of earth causes things to go downward. I’ve got a wonderful explanation for why the clouds are there and why the bird is crying—I’m just making this up. Okay. It doesn’t seem to us like something very scientific. Why not? Not a simple question. It could be that this is simply how we’re used to thinking: this seems more convincing to us, and that one doesn’t. That’s how we’re built. That’s how we’re built. Yes, because it would have been possible to collect different sets of facts and perhaps propose entirely different laws that would divide the world of facts into sectors divided completely differently from the way we divide it today. Today we divide it into mechanics, biology, chemistry, electromagnetism—there are scientific fields, each with the laws that govern it. But that is really a result of the laws we formulated. And we could have divided it differently and had other systems. We talked about women, right, about the critique of feminine physics—there I spoke a bit about these issues. And basically that means that the scientific world we built for ourselves may be nothing more than a reflection of how we ourselves are built. And not really—or the laws that stand behind these categorical divisions are laws whose basis is in us, not in the world itself. And that really raises the question: are there laws? Are there laws? And many times there are discussions—I brought here some article I once wrote in Midah Tovah about the use of rules, exactly on this topic, on the Torah portion Ha’azinu. And I brought there several midrashim. There, for example, there is a midrash in Sifrei on Deuteronomy, several midrashim that I collected there in that same area, and there is a midrash there that says this: “Another interpretation: ‘May my teaching drop like the rain, may my speech flow like dew, like storm winds upon grass and like showers upon vegetation.’” That’s the verse from Ha’azinu. “Another interpretation: ‘May my teaching drop like the rain’—Rabbi Nehemiah would say: always gather the words of Torah into general principles. Might one say that just as you gather them as general principles, so too you should present them as general principles? Scripture says, ‘May my teaching drop like the rain.’ And ‘drop’ is nothing other than a Canaanite expression. By analogy, a person does not say to his fellow, ‘Break this sela for me into change,’ but rather, ‘Drop this sela for me into change.’ So too, gather the words of Torah into general principles, and then separate them and present them like these drops of dew, and not like these drops of rain, which are large—but rather like these drops of dew, which are small.” Meaning, there is indeed value in gathering the words of Torah into rules, but there is also value in presenting them in the form of particulars. Yes, that’s what this midrash says. After that another midrash says: “Rabbi Dostai ben Yehudah says: If you have gathered words of Torah the way water is gathered into a cistern, in the end you will merit and see your learning clearly.” Yes, it helps you handle your learning, preserve it, process it, analyze it. We think by means of rules, so it is worthwhile to put all the particulars you learn into a framework of rules. Notice: worthwhile. This could be only a methodological question; it’s not a real question, it’s not the question whether there really are rules, but methodological recommendations. It’s worthwhile to do it this way because that’s how we think; it will help us get control of the material. Right? Same thing: Rabbi Meir would say, “Always gather words of Torah into general principles, for if you gather them as particulars they weary you and you do not know what to do.” And so on, and he brings various examples for that. But all of these are methodological recommendations. They are not recommendations saying there really are rules. The outlook today, for example in yeshivot, I think—in that sense I actually tend to identify with it—is that the purpose of learning is to expose the rules. Like in the scientific world, the purpose of scientific research is to uncover the laws of nature. The goal is not to explain facts. Explaining facts is more technology. The goal is to uncover the laws of nature. The facts are the medium through which I try to examine what the true laws of nature are. So I do experiments, I check things, I check facts—but only as an indicator to test what the true laws of nature are. That’s a scientist. By contrast, a technologist says: he takes the laws of nature and wants applications. He wants to apply them to all kinds of different situations for benefit. Fine? So the scientific role, its goal is to uncover the laws. The laws are not a means of controlling all the facts. I think I once talked about this also in the context of the purpose of Torah study: if I were to offer a scientist a huge book containing all the information about the world—it would tell him, in every situation, what will happen. Not laws, but a collection of details. Organized in some way so he could access it. Does that cover the scientific project?

[Speaker I] Meaning, is that a code of Jewish law?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Does that cover the scientific project? A complete code of Jewish law, but really complete—for all situations. There are no situations not found in it. Or is there still a point to scientific work? That’s a very interesting question. Those who think that the rules or laws are only a means to know more and more facts—or in other words, they’re basically saying there is no such thing as laws, rather they are only ways to describe facts—then indeed my goal is the facts. The rules are only my way of getting control over them, because I don’t know how to put into one book just a random collection of facts and also enable a person to find them. Right? How would you organize them? I once thought that one of the most interesting projects possible, intellectually too, in Torah study would be to build a Talmudic encyclopedia whose entries are entries of conceptual analysis. Meaning, types of reasoning. For public use. You have a difficulty—I provide you with a toolbox of conceptual arguments for your use. Choose which argument will help you resolve the difficulty. Fine? Now let’s collect all the arguments, all types of arguments, the categories, yes? The different logics that are implemented in many passages—the same argument, the same method. Yes? The method of pilpul worked like this. Because there was a difficulty, so they would say: ah, that’s Regensburger. Finished—you don’t need to add a word. It’s Regensburger, so you already know: the method is to do this, move that baraita over there, attribute this to that sage, and then the difficulty is resolved. Now it’s already a fixed method, you don’t need to say anything. In every passage where you encounter that kind of difficulty—Regensburger. Finished. That’s Ravensburg. That’s something else. Never mind, there were several such names. It’s a kind of toolbox you use to handle difficulties, because all in all there are types of difficulties. You can make use of accumulated knowledge. The intellectual problem, in my opinion—unsolvable, I think, I don’t know if unsolvable, but I can’t think of a way to solve it—is how to build that encyclopedia. Assuming I’ve collected all the arguments, say, or everything I can find, never mind. Okay. Now, it has to be accessible. And a person has to know: I have this kind of difficulty, where do I leaf through the encyclopedia to find which argument might be relevant? He’s not going to read the whole encyclopedia from beginning to end every time he has a difficulty. Right? You need a sorting process. But how do you sort? A search engine. No, a search engine won’t help. What will you search by? Are there no keywords? Which keywords? But it’s not by words—that’s exactly the point. The classification accepted today is classification by topics. There are the laws of the Sabbath, there is migo, there is civil law—it’s all by content. No problem. I know that if I’m in the laws of lender and borrower, how Maimonides opens the laws of lender and borrower, because I’m dealing with loans. That’s simple classification. But when I’m looking for something cross-cutting, I’m looking for methods. What will the keywords be? I’m talking about someone who doesn’t yet know the methods. If he knows them all, he doesn’t need the encyclopedia. He doesn’t know the methods, so what will he search by? If he knows all the methods and he also knows their names, he doesn’t need to search—he already knows.

[Speaker K] Classify by problems. Exactly!

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, now—how do you classify the problems? What are types of problems? How—you understand? It’s a wonderful logical question, a very deep question. I can’t even think of a direction for how to solve it. Maybe if someone comes up with an idea, that would be terrific, because it’s a wonderful project. I mean, the feeling is that in the world of conceptual study, everyone reinvents the wheel. All in all, he’s paving roads that were paved long ago. Not always on the same difficulty, but he uses a method that was used in other contexts, and he uses it here. So give him the toolbox already, and then the smart people will invent more things, add more things to the toolbox—but not everybody will keep grinding the same flour over and over again. But there’s no way to build that encyclopedia.

[Speaker D] The encyclopedia has another value. Meaning, if someone reads such an encyclopedia—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine, that’s true.

[Speaker D] It’s like a regular toolbox, like a mechanical toolbox. Meaning, someone who doesn’t know—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —that a screwdriver opens screws, I’ll take—

[Speaker D] There are tool warehouses—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A warehouse without sorting—what are you going to do? You’re looking for some type of screwdriver and you’ll start searching the warehouse?

[Speaker D] No, so if you make an instrument and an example, okay, what do you do with it—you’ll find some other examples.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, but the example also won’t succeed in classifying. How will you classify examples?

[Speaker D] No, I’ll give a rule and I’ll give an example. If you make a rule and give it an example…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then you have to read the entire encyclopedia for that.

[Speaker D] Fine, but one hundred percent—once you’ve read the encyclopedia and remembered two rules, you’ve gained something for many other cases.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously. You understand that the Talmudic Encyclopedia is built for people who are not reading it from start to finish, but rather I can get to what I’m looking for alphabetically and find what I need. That’s the whole idea of an encyclopedia. If you just want to collect all the knowledge, that can be done, and that has value. No, it has value, I agree. I’m only saying the problem I want to present here is not that. How do you classify? Or how do you search?

[Speaker K] There’s the book Talmud of Rabbi Shmuel—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —HaNagid. It’s a kind of rulebook. But again: by what is it classified? By nothing. It’s simply a collection of rules. Some classify alphabetically, but when you classify alphabetically it’s clear that you’re referring to rules I already know; you just want to define them for me. Meaning, if avad lo mahani will be under aleph, because I know that in the Talmud there is if avad lo mahani, so no problem—when I’m looking for material on if avad lo mahani it will be under aleph. That’s not the problem. But I’m not talking about that; that’s simple classification. You’re ignoring the fact that there is value in the learning itself.

[Speaker C] What do you mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not that I press a button and get an answer, but rather—

[Speaker C] I’ll learn and rack my brain.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Learn, rack your brain over things that need to be advanced further—why should you rack your brain over things that have already been solved? Rack it, by all means, but in order to advance the matter further. This feeling, as though in science or in accumulated knowledge in the world generally, in various fields—things accumulate. And somehow in the Torah world the feeling is that nothing accumulates. Everyone has to start learning from scratch, and whatever he manages to cover, he manages to cover.

[Speaker B] The goal is learning itself, so what difference does it make?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the goal is not only learning itself. The goal is also to know. And not only to know, but also to refine, improve, develop further. Now, you really can’t develop further—there are developments here and there, but you can’t really develop further if you don’t first present, properly, in textbooks and in an orderly way, the knowledge accumulated up to now. Then I know: this is what has happened until now, and from here I move forward.

[Speaker I] You know that it developed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Fine, look, many people work on this, and people really do get mastery over the material. The more talented among them can get control over what has been done and then they can also advance it a bit further. But in the scientific world the whole idea is that you don’t need to be especially talented for this. The knowledge is presented to you in a structured way. If you study, you’ll know it, and now you have the little point from which you can research further. But in the Torah world, you don’t know whether the little point you’re dealing with here hasn’t already been done. Especially in the methodological realm. It could be that your difficulty is new, but the form of—the way you are handling it, the method, has most likely already been used before. So why not develop it and try to think of new things? If all the rest, all that already exists, were known to you, you could rather quickly zero in on what is not yet known. And then it would be possible to develop it further. So it does happen—again, it’s not that it doesn’t happen at all—but it’s less efficient. And I think part of the issue is that we haven’t found a key for organizing the knowledge. Meaning, how to present the knowledge accumulated up to now in an orderly way, one that will be accessible to everyone, so they won’t have to develop it anew and learn it anew, and waste their whole lives just learning what is already known by now.

[Speaker K] What happens in a similar but different field, like law?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So in law, because it’s divided—it’s divided into fields of legal knowledge, this law and that law, like in Jewish law. So in that sense there’s no problem. But in Jewish law too there’s no problem.

[Speaker K] But every court ruling is the judge’s give-and-take against a whole array of considerations, and he starts from zero.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the methods—I’m saying, there is a not-large set of legal methods, which are indeed recognized and known, but I don’t think there is something there parallel to physics, say. It doesn’t seem to me there is something like that. There is a certain set of tools; in Jewish law too it’s like that. There are a few tools that, after all, we all know. Fine, we know the few basic things. But the feeling is that we remain with just those few basic things, even though it could be that we might have, if we had… part of it—I’ll say even more than that—since the legal world is part of academia, which is more modern, there are also people who deal with that, with methods. There are people who deal with legal methods themselves. So maybe they haven’t found a way to index them, but at least they do what Itzik suggested earlier. At least there are books that collect those methods in an unclassified way—but here is a book dealing with this method or that method, books dealing with method and not topic. In Jewish law there are few such books. In Jewish law there isn’t much reflection. We don’t really deal with the method of Jewish law, but with different halakhic fields. We discuss halakhic problems, but not halakhic methodology itself. Even academia, by the way, doesn’t deal with this all that much; that’s a problem there. That’s a separate discussion. So there is even a certain advantage to the legal world because it is simply more modern than the classical learner, who is…

[Speaker L] But maybe that’s because in law the method isn’t important? What matters is the law and the ruling?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the method isn’t important, because…

[Speaker L] Depends for whom.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you ask the scholars, so to speak—not the judges or the lawyers—they are exactly like scientists. They want to know the principles of law. The law itself doesn’t interest them. The law itself is for judges, legislators, and lawyers. The scholars are the scientists; those are the technologists, yes? The scholars are the scientists who want to uncover more and more legal layers or legal methods or legal forms of thinking. That is their business in the world. Or at least it is supposed to be their business in the world.

[Speaker M] Too bad it’s not like that in Jewish law too. If someone tells me, “This is our tradition from generation to generation,” then that’s it. The whole discussion is over.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m only saying that if you are a judge on a religious court or a halakhic decisor, then I can understand—it’s parallel to a judge. You need to know the material and issue a halakhic ruling. But most learners are not that. Most learners deal with Jewish law, and I would expect them to deal with it in order to develop it. And that happens less. It happens a little, but much less. It happens less because we haven’t found a way to present the knowledge accumulated so far and build on it, to produce orderly books. You know that… the first time I heard that they were training rabbinical advocates, or female rabbinical advocates, a few years ago when that started, programs to train rabbinical advocates—I laughed a lot. Because it was obvious that they would be ignoramuses. You can train a rabbinical advocate in a two-year course? That’s nonsense. You need to know how to learn. And these people study, they recite the Shakh and the Taz, they don’t know anything about life. You can wrap them around your little finger—they understand nothing. And most of them are like that, by the way. So why? Because here there really is… from the outset my feeling was that you can’t do this in a scientific way. Let’s collect into a book what a rabbinical advocate needs to know, he’ll learn the material, and now he’ll be an advocate. That whole idea is somewhat foreign to halakhic thinking. People take ordination exams or rabbinical court exams or something like that, but that’s after many years of training that was not focused on the exam. Studying material for an exam comes very late. Today it already exists a little—Shulchan Arukh, or Choshen Mishpat and Even HaEzer for someone who wants to be a rabbinical judge or something like that. That already exists a bit, because there is already some corpus over which one needs to gain mastery, more or less. But that comes after you already more or less know the things, the methods, the… you’re already swimming in the material; now you need to learn the details. There is no textbook that presents the material: know this and you’ll be there. You need to go through several years in which you are not going through textbooks. You study conceptual analysis, once with this person, once with that one, trying here, trying there. After that you can spend a few years learning some specific material and be tested on it. But the basic training—for that there is no textbook. You can’t take a person and offer a structured track for training him to be a lamdan. Just study for several years and get experience. But it could always be that he missed a few things, right? Every lamdan missed something—depends on what he encountered and what he didn’t encounter, who he studied with, which books he read. Meaning, not every lamdan knows the same corpus of material. So it doesn’t work that way. There is no orderly syllabus like in a bachelor’s degree in physics or mathematics or whatever, where you know: this is the material that needs to be known. There are of course other materials too, but this is the basic material one needs for a bachelor’s degree. And if you know that and the basic methods, then you know mathematics at the level of a bachelor’s or a master’s or a doctorate, right? There is some structuring from the start. But in Talmud, the basic training doesn’t get structured. Only afterward, after you’re already built, and you’re a lamdan and everything is fine—now learn something, learn some material, know the laws of the Sabbath, know the laws of claimant and defendant, or I don’t know exactly what.

[Speaker C] The court system seems to me to be like that—not that I’m a great expert—but it seems to me that the court system is like the Mishnah itself, with all due distinction. Meaning, they use rulings as precedent and move on. Meaning, the Mishnah said such-and-such, the court said such-and-such, there’s a precedent and they move on. But the problem with responsa is that whoever it may be, in responsa there isn’t the same sense that this responsum is binding the way a court ruling is binding, which would be parallel to the Mishnah, right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s why it’s not.

[Speaker C] No, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Responsa—you’re talking about the ruling in the responsum, not the—

[Speaker C] The—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —method of the responsum.

[Speaker C] Right. A religious court doesn’t open a responsum ruling of the Chatam Sofer and move on from there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it does open it, but it’s not a binding precedent. It has a degree of freedom; it can play with it. But yes, people do use responsa. It’s not that one also doesn’t rule from responsa. But true, it isn’t some binding precedent such that if it’s written in the Chatam Sofer you have to go with it. Fine, because there is the Noda B’Yehuda saying the opposite—so what force does the Chatam Sofer have?

[Speaker C] And also in legal matters maybe you can indeed—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Put everything into a computer or some database. There too it’s not completely—

[Speaker C] —like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the Supreme Court, precedent is binding; in other courts, it isn’t. Now, even with binding precedents—what do they do and what don’t they do, a minority opinion that you can sometimes use—even there it’s not mathematics. Meaning: but yes, it is true, it’s more structured than the halakhic world, I think, because there is more modern treatment there. And traditional learning deals less with methods and more with the things themselves. A Torah article, in most cases, is an article clarifying some specific Jewish law. An article dealing with meta-halakhah—that is, with some method in halakhic ruling or some form of inference—is rare. There are a few such things. I often happen to deal with those things; for some reason they interest me more. But there aren’t many of them. Meaning, most Torah articles are not like that. Okay, let me go back for a moment to the issue of rules and particulars. All these methodological discussions—whether it is worth working with rules, whether it is worth working with particulars—implicitly assume some assumption that itself requires explanation. Are these two forms of description really equivalent? A way through rules and a way through particulars, and then I can choose whichever is useful to me. The assumption is as though one can describe everything by means of a set of rules; one can give the collection of particulars, and now I will choose what helps me. I’ll gather it in order to preserve it in myself, so I can handle it and process it, so they recommend to me to work with rules, to work with particulars.

[Speaker K] Could it be that it’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That it could also be a mixture? What? Wait, wait—not yet. At the moment I’m talking about equivalence; in a minute I’ll refine it. So the assumption is that there are really two equivalent possibilities here, and there’s a discussion whether it is preferable to use rules or particulars. I want to raise here the question whether there really are two such equivalent descriptions at all. Can this collection of particulars really be described by a set of rules that describes them all? And again, an additional question is whether that set of rules is accessible to me. That’s another question. First: is there such a set of rules—did the Holy One, blessed be He, think of some set of rules? And second: can I also arrive at that set of rules? That is question number two. And as to both of them, I don’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer.

[Speaker B] The question is whether you’re talking about the world or about the Talmud.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About the Talmud. In the world too it’s true, but at the moment I’m moving over to the Talmud because I’m now starting to narrow in toward the halakhic direction in our topic. So here this is, I think, an open question. I don’t know what to answer, because it is very unclear to me that behind these things there really is some set of rules. Rules come into being over time, and all of them have exceptions, and that basically raises a heavy suspicion that these rules are really a kind of approximation. And fine, approximation is also a legitimate thing.

[Speaker B] This is what we spoke about earlier, about what Shmuel said. Shmuel said: look at the Talmud as facts, and now turn them into rules—as if, things written in the Talmud, not what the Holy One, blessed be He… But then if these are things written in the Talmud, what are things written in the Talmud? It’s a group of people who said things, and they even disagree with one another. Right, but because these are people from whom we build rules, then it’s very likely that they too worked according to rules.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I am not at all inclined to think that way.

[Speaker B] If it’s—if we are now talking about what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, or what—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, even they themselves. No, I don’t think that’s…

[Speaker B] Human beings—they are human beings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, human beings usually do not work with rules. Human beings who want to crack a topic do it in terms of rules, but people who give rulings in the routine, just ordinarily—do they work by rules? Of course not. Intuitively. This is forbidden, this is permitted, this is Sabbath desecration, this is selecting, and similar things.

[Speaker B] That’s all. No, our thinking is built that way. Why do I think this now? Because I’m used to it being like this and this and this. I think inductively.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re mistaken. You’re unequivocally mistaken.

[Speaker B] Now, half an hour ago you said… no, I’ll explain what I said.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain what I said—that’s not what I said. I said that if I want to understand some field, if I look on a meta-plane, when I’m trying to think about some field, trying to explain some fact, then I use rules. Wait, wait, one second. But if I want to issue a halakhic ruling, most decisors—certainly the older decisors, yes? The medieval authorities (Rishonim), or in the Talmud itself—absolutely did not work with rules, not even in any conscious sense. Absolutely not—they didn’t work that way. This seems forbidden to me, this seems permitted to me, this is selecting, these and those are… that’s all. I don’t—it’s very intuitive. We as conceptual analysts, and today too there is a difference between decisors and conceptual analysts by the way on this issue—we as conceptual analysts, because we ask the question why, and that’s exactly what you inserted into the middle of the discussion—

[Speaker B] Just because you think they didn’t work consciously that way doesn’t mean that’s not what they did. When I have an intuition about something, as the Rabbi explained… no, I have an intuition about something, the basic assumption is that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly the point. Once it’s not conscious, now the question is: are there rules in the unconscious and it’s just not conscious, or are there no rules at all? That’s exactly the question I’m asking. When you speak to me on the conscious level, there’s no argument that I work with rules. I work with rules. But that’s always in the meta-language. When I ask what is the explanation for a set of halakhic facts, when I ask a conceptual question, it will always be in terms of rules. But when I ask a halakhic question—permitted or forbidden? Most decisors do not work with rules. They don’t work with that. They say this seems permitted to me, this seems forbidden to me, that’s all. They make some analogy or other—they don’t work with rules.

[Speaker B] That’s not what I’m saying. I didn’t say they worked with rules. I agree that maybe they worked by intuition, this is the answer as it comes, but when they thought that thought, when they had that intuition, that too was built—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who told you? You’re assuming that. Who said? Who said? That’s exactly what I’m asking—who told you? You assume that behind it there are rules. Who told you? In the meta-language, when it’s conscious, I agree, because then we do work with rules; that’s called explanation. But when human beings are not engaged in explanations, when they are doing the thing itself… no—when I come to explain it, I’ll do it with rules.

[Speaker C] When he does the thing itself… you don’t need more than “the righteous decrees and the Holy One, blessed be He, fulfills.” This bird—this bird, its bone was broken…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He can decree that there be a rule, true, because—

[Speaker C] —because that’s how the righteous man decreed. You don’t… it could be that the Holy One, blessed be He—it could—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that the righteous man decrees because he is decreeing the rule. That proves nothing. There is a difference between a righteous man decreeing rules or particulars.

[Speaker C] A poor woman comes and she has nothing to eat, poor thing, and he rules for her—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if he makes a judgment based on the fact that the bone was broken after the slaughter.

[Speaker C] He doesn’t—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —decree. He reached the conclusion that the bone was broken after the slaughter. He didn’t decree. He doesn’t “fulfill”; rather, it was broken after the slaughter.

[Speaker C] Well, and doesn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, fulfill first?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He, fulfills afterward. He doesn’t fulfill anything. If it wasn’t broken after the slaughter, then it wasn’t broken, even if he rules that it was broken after the slaughter. What do you mean? What, reality changes after you issue a ruling? Nothing changes. Rather, that is the ruling—what can you do. The Holy One, blessed be He, fulfills the intuition… He doesn’t fulfill anything. That’s the intuition, and therefore I say that that is the ruling. It could be that I was mistaken, and then in fact I was mistaken and the Holy One, blessed be He, fulfills nothing. What can you do? Sometimes we make mistakes. Why assume something changes here? This is baal-teshuvah folklore about the Talmud. Of course not.

[Speaker B] When I speak about a certain basic assumption that I think is correct because that’s the intuition I have. Yes. So why do I think it’s correct?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re speaking about assumptions again.

[Speaker B] But when you—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you speak about assumptions, it’s always… no, no—when you speak about assumptions, that is always on the meta-level. When you ask a question: what is the meaning of this passage? What is the underlying basis behind it? I want to explain the passage. Then these are the assumptions and these are the rules from which I derive conclusions, and then I can explain the passage. So here, when I build a structure, I say: my assumptions come from intuition, and these are the rules, and from the rules I derive particulars. But now someone issuing a halakhic ruling does not do that work. That is the work of a lamdan. There are decisors who are also conceptual analysts, but I’m saying, generally, if I want to divide it into two categories: the decisor tells you, “This chicken is non-kosher.” Why? Because it is sufficiently similar to that case there.

[Speaker B] Why not explain? Rather, why now, when I analyze why he thinks—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you analyze why he thinks… but we analyze what… no! No! That’s what I’m asking—whether that is what we are doing. Because maybe you analyze that way because you are built that way, not because he thinks that way.

[Speaker B] Come on, all the Amoraim and Tannaim put their thoughts down into the Talmud and the Mishnah, right? Now the thoughts they had, where they said this is so because it seems so to me and this is so because it seems so to me—when I analyze and want to say—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But are you analyzing them?

[Speaker B] Who says? Who says? One second—my claim is, I want to know what the Talmud is saying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You want to, but who says that’s what you arrive at?

[Speaker B] You want to know what the Talmud is saying—that’s the process we’re engaged in here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You want to, but who says you succeed? You assume that behind these things there sit rules. And now I ask: are there really rules sitting there? Or do you assume that because when you try to explain something, explanations are always given in terms of rules? There have to be rules there because—

[Speaker B] Human beings wrote it, and human beings think that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but human beings did it—they didn’t think about what they were doing. They simply did it. They don’t need to think about—

[Speaker C] That’s for working with intuitions? I completely disagree, that’s not true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that’s not correct. Rather, it’s not necessary. I’m asking: is it this way or that way? No, absolutely not, absolutely not, absolutely not. Now, when I sit down—Rabbi Soloveitchik, after all, Rabbi Soloveitchik is known for writing that there is no halakhic decisor whose ruling emerges from the reasoning. That’s a bit exaggerated in my view, but that’s what he claims. There is no halakhic decisor whose ruling comes out of the reasoning. You always know the ruling in advance, and afterward you build some kind of reasoning in order to get to the ruling. But that doesn’t entirely matter, because he only writes them down. What he is trying to say, in my view, is that the Talmud brought the ox and the pit because it wanted to convey the rule to you. Who says so? I say no, no—I’m saying, when it gave those examples, it’s as if it wanted to convey the rule to you. Okay, now he says, listen, you’re the one calling it a rule; I can’t tell you whether that’s the rule. All right? It could be that there’s a different rule. I understand what he’s saying, I’m just claiming—I’m asking on what basis he says it. I’m saying: you assume that behind this there is a rule. I also usually assume that, but you have to understand that many times that assumption is the result of the fact that I don’t know how to explain things except by means of rules. So when I explain something—scientific facts, or statements of Amoraim, it doesn’t matter—I’m forced to use rules, because that’s how things are explained; I don’t know how else to explain them. Is there really a rule behind it? That’s a completely different question. Now, you can argue that yes, there is—but you can also argue that no, there isn’t. I’m presenting this as an open question. I don’t see how you can be so certain that behind this there can be rules, that there must be rules. I’m not saying there are rules because I assume that when the Amora said something, he saw or did not see before his eyes some rule and therefore said it—that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that behind everything people say or think or claim, there stands something that is built somewhat like rules. Who told you that? How do you know that? I see it. How do you see it? How do you see it? That’s how he thinks. Exactly! You see it because that’s how you see. Because when you explain anything that you explain—exactly! No! No! But here we can put our finger on it. When you look for an explanation, you have no way to explain something except through rules, right? On that we agree. That’s an explanation, okay. Now when I give an explanation for something, then obviously I’m going to insert it into a pattern of rules. But the question whether there really are rules standing behind it is a completely different question. After all, I know why I arrive at rules. I arrive at rules because I don’t know how to give any other kind of explanation, only through rules. So I can put my finger on why that is rooted in me. So I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m only saying: how do you know so clearly that you’re right? I’m presenting the question as an open question. I don’t know whether there are rules or not, do you understand? Not that I’m saying you’re necessarily wrong—I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong. I’m only saying that you have to understand. Because if you asked the halakhic decisor, he would tell you that he too works on… No, obviously, because if you ask the halakhic decisor, he too will become an analyst. Because a halakhic decisor and an analyst are not two different kinds of people; it’s a difference in the question of what you are doing. The same halakhic decisor, when he sits in the yeshiva in the morning—not when he rules in the afternoon—asks the why questions; he doesn’t ask the what questions. And when he asks why questions, he is an analyst, not a halakhic decisor. But not always—but there too he operates, it could be that he activates a different department in his mind. It’s a different department, it’s the analytical department, not the decisional department. And then, when he explains himself, it’s not certain that he’ll even explain it correctly. That’s unrelated. When that same Amora said something, he did one of two things: either he simply saw it the way I see a wall. Right. Or he simply saw it the way I see induction, meaning: I saw other things and now… Okay. Right, either this or that—does it matter? So then fine, then that means there’s a reasonable chance that many of these things are not just… There’s no chance—it’s either this or that. What do you mean by chance? But “I saw a wall” here is like prophecy, meaning… Why prophecy? What do you mean—what’s the difference? I see it with the eyes of my intellect, it’s my intuition, I see it. But to see—really see—what the halakhic ruling is in this matter the way I see a wall, that’s a bit like directly seeing what the Holy One, blessed be He, says. Not true. What do you mean? What’s the difference? And when you see the rule, how do you see it—isn’t that also like seeing what the Holy One, blessed be He, says? It’s a bit different because there’s a difference between… It’s speculation—there could be infinitely many rules. I agree with you, but when I see a wall it’s not like when I see something inductively, so that’s… And it’s also not like when I see a rule. It’s not at the same level of certainty, that is. Right, exactly. So what’s the difference? Why is seeing rules more understandable than seeing the ruling in the particular case? Because I see rules and I don’t see laws. Why? I see laws like walls. Personally, I see Jewish laws like walls. Because you think about them intuitively. No, you’re explaining the “because.” So I’m asking whether that explanatory “because” is correct. Right, I’m telling you what I do. When a case comes before me—we’ll talk about that next time. No, no—if I look inward, I’ll activate the cognitive department that is responsible for explanations, even when I look at myself. Then yes, I’ll come out with explanations that follow laws, because that’s how I explain things, including when I explain myself. But when I worked originally, it’s not at all clear to me that it was built on that. It’s not at all clear to me that it was built on that. But it has to be. Why? Why should I rule that a kohen and a divorcee may not marry? Because it is correct that they should not marry. What, just because I feel like it? Not because you feel like it—because it’s correct. Obviously! But not because of a rule. You know the particular case. It’s not right—they are forbidden to marry, period. That’s exactly an example of seeing a wall and not seeing… Yes, it’s more… No, the question is what you see. Do you see a rule, or do you see the particulars? That’s a very non-simple question. Look, I…