Elul, Lesson 2

Table of Contents

• Elul hints and trembling as a religious experience
• Earlier models, decline of the generations, and religious utopia
• Divine hiddenness, the Book of Esther, and miracles as divine manifestation
• The need for miracles, scientific culture, and the claim of maturation
• A religiosity of laws and not “God of the gaps”
• Two levels: intellectual proof and existential relationship
• The role of emotion in serving God and in human life
• Commandments of love and hate as a non-emotional structure
• “Love your fellow as yourself” and the relation between Torah-level and rabbinic law
• Modern reaction: return to mysticism, New Age, and Uman
• Intuition versus emotion and the critique of an “authentic place”

Summary

General overview

The speaker argues that the longing for the “trembling” of Elul, for a tangible fear of the Days of Judgment, and for the kind of religious experience people had in the past is neither fate nor necessarily a binding ideal, because the cultural-spiritual atmosphere has changed and perhaps even matured. He identifies two main discomforts with this position: resistance to modernism, which challenges the idea of the decline of the generations and the model of the Sages and the medieval authorities (Rishonim) as a fixed utopia; and resistance to the move from emotionally driven service of God to rational religious life, which may be seen as cold and detached. He suggests rethinking the place of miracles, the question of God’s manifestation in the world, and the role of emotion versus intellect, and argues that commandments phrased in emotional terms in practice point to a structure in which intellectual decision leads, while emotion follows from it rather than directing the person.

Elul hints and trembling as a religious experience

The speaker raises the possibility that nostalgia for strong Elul feeling and fear of the Days of Judgment is not necessarily a measure of proper spiritual health. He presents two ways of responding for someone who cannot get back to those feelings: either to see it as a necessary evil that one must accept, or to ask who said it is evil at all, and to understand it as a change in the spiritual-cultural atmosphere that does not obligate us to recreate the past. He says there is no point in living in constant frustration over trying to return to an old model that may not be possible and may not even be preferable.

Earlier models, decline of the generations, and religious utopia

The speaker describes the discomfort with the claim that a contemporary person is not necessarily worse, just different, and that one can work within the spiritual framework of one’s own generation without a constant sense of inferiority toward the past. He formulates the question of whether the model set by the Sages, the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and the later authorities (Acharonim) is a fixed ideal that may not be changed, and whether one is allowed to reject one utopia and propose an alternative utopia. He distinguishes between formal halakhic / of Jewish law commitment and the shaping of models on the level of serving God and meta-halakhic foundations, and frames the discussion as an aspect of conservatism in a context where there is already a built-in conservatism by force of tradition.

Divine hiddenness, the Book of Esther, and miracles as divine manifestation

The speaker brings an example from a question asked at a tenth-anniversary conference of the Be’er women’s study center in Yeruham, about the felt absence of manifestation of the Holy One, blessed be He—not as a question of proof, but as a protest against a mode of hidden governance. He connects the Book of Esther to the end of the exile following the First Temple and to the end of the prophetic era, and presents the cessation of prophecy as a transition to life based on books that were handed down in the past. He explains that the Kuzari emphasizes the memory of the revelation at Mount Sinai because in the present there is no parallel direct experience, and so people look for an anchor in the past.

The need for miracles, scientific culture, and the claim of maturation

The speaker argues that the expectation of open miracles is a product of an atmosphere in which a person feels dependent and lacking control, whereas in modern culture there is a greater sense of control and therefore this need has weakened. He quotes Leibowitz, who says that miracles never brought anyone to repentance, and cites the sin of the golden calf after the revelation at Mount Sinai as an illustration that sin does not necessarily stem from lack of faith / belief, but from drives and other mechanisms. He uses Nachmanides at the end of Parashat Bo to argue that the laws of nature themselves can be seen as divine governance, and criticizes a reading that empties the concept of miracle of all content when everything is defined as a miracle. He argues that the scientific mindset sees anomalies as a challenge requiring explanation, not as proof of God, and therefore even if signs and wonders were to occur, people would tend to look for a physical explanation or postpone the solution with a “this requires further analysis” until one is found.

A religiosity of laws and not “God of the gaps”

The speaker says that systematic functioning according to rigid laws and a small number of fundamental laws of physics points more strongly to a directing hand than a one-time miracle does, and that in the current culture this is a more suitable basis for faith / belief. He criticizes what is called “God of the gaps” as a childish way of grounding faith / belief in holes in scientific understanding, and argues that one must mature and see divinity precisely where scientific understanding works. He cites the Sages about Abraham our father, who sees the heavenly bodies moving in their courses and says, “There is a leader of the palace,” as proof that recognition of God can come from the order of nature and not only from deviation from it.

Two levels: intellectual proof and existential relationship

The speaker distinguishes between the intellectual question of whether God exists and the existentialist question of how one lives with God. He argues that even on the intellectual level, miracles are not necessarily better proof than laws, because the scientific paradigm turns anomalies into a research problem rather than a foundation for faith / belief. He emphasizes that a feeling of dependence can reawaken in times of crisis, but that this is a “peak” within a historical process of declining dependence, and explains that a momentary return to religiosity does not cancel the overall direction of the flow.

The role of emotion in serving God and in human life

The speaker presents the discomfort with cold rationality, which may be seen as a detachment from humaneness, and formulates the question of whether religiosity is identified with emotion or with intellect, and whether a rationalist “cold fish” should really be considered whole. He argues that emotion is not supposed to lead decisions but to follow from intellectual judgment, and compares emotion to a wagon led by the driver. He says emotions must be critiqued by the intellect, and that the very existence of an emotion is not proof of its correctness or of the fact that it should dictate action.

Commandments of love and hate as a non-emotional structure

The speaker uses commandments that appear emotional as evidence that Jewish law does not command an uncontrollable emotional state, but rather a structure in which the reason defines the commandment. He cites Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner in Pachad Yitzchak, who asks about the count of the commandments in Maimonides: why are both love of one’s fellow and love of the convert counted, if the convert is included in one’s fellow? He answers that the commandment is to love because of the reason, so that if a person loves a convert without knowing that he is a convert, he has not fulfilled love of the convert. He also presents the common formulation regarding commandments of hatred, “to hate the transgressions within him,” and connects this to the difficulty of commanding emotions. He concludes that commandments of love and hate operate first and foremost on the intellectual plane, where a person chooses and directs himself, and only afterward is emotion drawn along.

“Love your fellow as yourself” and the relation between Torah-level and rabbinic law

The speaker cites Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 14 of the Laws of Mourning, who attributes accompanying a bride, escorting the dead, and visiting the sick to the command of the Sages, while at the same time to the principle of “Love your fellow as yourself.” He explains that there is a distinction here between a Torah-level commandment of love and rabbinic enactments of practical actions. He says that someone who performs the actions without love fulfills only the rabbinic level, while someone who loves without performing actions fulfills only the Torah-level commandment, and someone who acts out of love fulfills both. He rejects the formulation that commandments of love are only external behavior, and sets out a model in which decision and direction come from intellect and action, while emotion joins in accordingly.

Modern reaction: return to mysticism, New Age, and Uman

The speaker describes a phenomenon of renewed searching for emotion and mysticism as a reaction to the fact that the modernist period “dried people out” in its attempt to live by intellect alone. He identifies New Age and the “return to Uman” as expressions of this movement, and argues that this is a reaction born of difficulty in coping with religious maturation and with letting go of the longing for the old model. He treats this as a major danger, and sets against it the claim that rationalism can be a source of joy and that mature religious life does not depend on childish forms of concretization.

Intuition versus emotion and the critique of an “authentic place”

The speaker distinguishes between feeling as emotion and intuition as an intellectual faculty, and accepts that intuition is an important component that is not identical with emotion. He rejects language that defines an “authentic place” in an experiential-emotional sense, and defines truth as a concept describing a correct claim about a fact in the world. He objects to a model that sanctifies lack of education or emotional spontaneity as holiness, and presents this as a critique of patterns similar to Christianity and of a cultural tendency to prefer experience over clarification.

Okay, it’s true that following last time, when I spoke a bit about the hints of Elul, about this feeling of Elul, right? The trembling, the dread. How much it’s missing, how much it ought to be missing, what to do with the fact that it isn’t missing for someone for whom it isn’t missing. So I suggested a certain way of relating to it that sparked some reactions, commotion, arguments, and I thought it still needed a bit more elaboration, or that I should deal more with the questions at the root of the issue. So I’ll just briefly remind you what I’m talking about.

Basically, I argued—or suggested as a possibility—that this nostalgic clinging to that strong feeling that Elul has arrived, to that fear or that identification with the Days of Judgment that are approaching, is not a decree of fate. Meaning, people assume that once we no longer have that feeling today, our condition is miserable, and we need to try to reconstruct it and get back to those feelings. And with all the longing, for those who can’t manage it, right? We saw there a bit of the poem and the words of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. Whose poem was it? Avraham Chalfi’s. And I said that maybe that point of departure is simply wrong. Meaning, there are things—and again, Yehudit Ronen said yes, that she does think people feel this today and that one should get to that place today—and fine, then my words were not aimed at someone in that situation. I’m only talking out loud to myself. Meaning, someone who says: Listen, friends, I’m not going back there. I’m already past that. I can’t return to that place.

Now I can relate to that in two ways. One: the fact that I can’t return there is bad, but it’s a necessary evil, so I have no choice but to make peace with it even though it’s bad. And a second possibility is to say: Who said it’s bad at all? It’s simply—I don’t know whether to call it—a different mentality, but rather a different spiritual or cultural atmosphere, or however we want to put it, a different religious atmosphere. I’m in that atmosphere, and it’s not right to take instructions that were said to people or to a society living in a different religious-spiritual atmosphere. And without even judging now who is better and who is worse—I’m in a different situation, and so there’s no point constantly living in that frustration of how to get back there or why I can’t manage to get back there. First, because there’s no chance of going back there even if it was better—that’s one possibility. Second possibility: maybe there is a chance, but why? Who said it really is better? Who said we need to go back there? It could be that I’m in a different condition and I’m supposed to act within the condition I’m in.

And as part of all this, it seems to me that two aspects came up here that stirred the argument or the discomfort, let’s call it that. One aspect is the blunt modernist aspect, let’s call it that. Meaning, we’re used to looking at the reality of the past—and we saw this both in the poem and in Rabbi Yisrael Salanter—as a fuller reality, one from which we are constantly declining. There is a decline of the generations. How could it be that all our righteous teachers were not better than we are? Right? I mean, obviously there’s a decline of the generations all the time. So there may be some discomfort here with this brazen claim—I don’t know what to call it—that I too am not less good than others, I’m just different, simply different, and I need to work within the spiritual framework in which I find myself, or in which my generation finds itself, and not within a spiritual framework that existed in earlier generations. And that’s not necessarily better or worse—it’s just different, something else, and maybe even better. I think I may even have said a sentence in that direction, and today I want to sharpen it a bit more.

And that’s one point. Meaning, to what extent am I supposed to relate to the model set before me by the Sages, the medieval authorities (Rishonim), the later authorities (Acharonim), the great later authorities, as an ideal model that I’m supposed to constantly work against, to try to see where I stand in relation to it, and to return to it as much as possible—and if I can’t, then cry a little and return at least a little—but to stand constantly opposite that model. Not to change the model, not to give up on the utopia. The utopia—no. That doesn’t change. Only our condition keeps deteriorating. So here I’m saying—that’s the first claim—can one deny the utopia? Meaning, can one present an alternative utopia? Okay, so that’s one question, and of course it runs against the religious education that perhaps many of us are very used to: the decline of the generations, the view of the Sages and the medieval and later authorities as our teachers—that is, great people, people who transmitted the tradition to us, by whose words we live. There is a halakhic obligation toward these authorities, each according to his stature. And somehow suddenly, on the level of the foundations of serving God, I say, wait a second—who says so? I’m suggesting a different model that may be better, or at least no worse. So that’s the first discomfort.

The second discomfort, which may have come up a bit toward the end, is the detachment from the emotional plane, moving instead to some kind of cold rationality in serving God. And that contradicts a very basic intuition that many people have, I think, which identifies religiosity with emotion. Because intellect—that’s philosophy; what does that have to do with religiosity? Religiosity is something connected somehow to experiential, emotional dimensions and the like. That’s one point. And a second point: even apart from the conceptual problem—whether religiosity is emotion or religiosity is intellect—that’s the second point. Meaning, the first point is the conceptual problem: is religiosity emotion or intellect? The second problem is: is a person who is devoid of emotion, some cold rationalist, some kind of radish, really a whole human being? Is that how one ought to be? Meaning, isn’t that—as you rightly said—not a detachment from religiosity but from humanity? There’s something there that’s a bit disturbing to hear, even not in the religious context.

And that’s the second point: the role of emotion in humanity and in serving God. Okay? So those are two questions that are almost independent of one another. There is a connection between them de facto, but in truth they are basically independent questions. One question is whether earlier models are necessarily better, or whether I can recognize—or establish, or found for myself—a different model and it will be no worse. But your model wasn’t clear to me, because it had no awe in it. It didn’t have that sense that we have judgment, that we fear judgment. So I’ll talk about that, because the concept of awe itself is a concept we usually project onto our emotional dimensions, and I’m not even sure that’s what should be done. I’d say there’s awe in the mind and awe in the heart—fear. We’ll talk about that. Is it a means or an end? After I define what it is, we can discuss that. But maybe emotion has a role as a means, even if I succeed in defining awe on the emotional plane—you could still say fine, but emotion still has a role as a means. That’s already a second-order question, okay?

So that’s the second question. The first question is the relation to earlier models—can one build other models? What does “earlier model” mean? Other than the decline of the generations, then it has no importance? Let’s talk about truth, about the Torah’s demand, not as an earlier model. But that’s the argument. I’m saying: if a model is a goal, then that’s a problem. If a model is mass… No, no—I’m saying now, if the complete person is someone who is supposed to feel dread when Elul begins… According to the Torah, not according to an earlier model. Meaning… But I don’t know what “according to the Torah” means. The Torah has interpretations. So the interpretation that was accepted for a long time by many people was one interpretation. So you’re turning this into a model, and every time you discuss how to relate to things previous generations practiced and so on, there’s nothing unique about this issue specifically. It’s not that there’s some unique value to the path of the ancients. The assumption is that the path of the ancients is more correct—that’s generally what’s accepted. Whatever you discuss about commandments, it’s conservatism versus the past. Right. Therefore this isn’t a special case; it’s a private case of conservatism. Correct. Right, but in the context of serving God, in the context of commandments and serving God, there is a kind of built-in conservatism. After all, we live by the words of these people, so how can it be that I now suddenly propose a different model and see it as no worse, maybe better? Didn’t we say that this is the question of conservatism? Yes, absolutely.

So I’ll maybe start with that issue, the first question, of the past as ideal. I spoke about this last time too. You see it in the talks, and also in Rabbi Yisrael Salanter: once there was dread, and today there isn’t. Meaning, even within the words themselves, without the specific content, you can see there’s an assumption here that once the world was whole and now less so, and we are supposed to try to reconstruct as much as possible, by one means or another, what once was. So the question is whether that assumption is really a necessary one.

Maybe I’ll bring, just to illustrate the other possibility that I want to suggest—or did suggest—another discussion that came up some years ago, I don’t remember exactly when. I may not have been in Yeruham then; there was a ten-year conference for the women’s study center they established there, “Be’er” it was called. I had the chance to teach there a bit in recent years when we were in Yeruham. And before that conference, they sent me a question from one of the women there—not one who had studied with me, this was after I had already left—and they asked me to respond. And the question she asked was written in a somewhat poetic way, but never mind. The question was: Where is the Holy One, blessed be He? Why doesn’t He appear?

Now, you could have interpreted that as: does He exist? But that wasn’t really how she was asking. My feeling was—and afterward she told me this was indeed the case—that she wasn’t asking for proofs, meaning: bring me proofs that He exists. Rather: why has He abandoned us? Meaning, why don’t we see Him? What are we supposed to do, live facing an entity that basically gives us no indication that it exists? And the question is: that isn’t fair. What kind of demand is this? This is not an intellectual question of whether it is correct to believe or not correct to believe. It is a protest against the way the Holy One, blessed be He, conducts Himself—He has in some sense abandoned the world.

Yes, the Scroll of Esther is called by the name of concealment, and if you pay attention to the historical context, the Scroll of Esther comes at the end of the exile following the First Temple, which is more or less the end of the prophetic period. And therefore it really is the stage at which the concealment of the divine face intensifies. Prophecy is a very direct and very clear revelation of divine presence in the world. And once prophecy ceases, we begin to live by books that were once handed down to us. Once, there was some revelation, and from then on we basically feed off of it; we have nothing of our own. We have not encountered the Holy One, blessed be He, in any direct sense. And so all this in the Kuzari, which says one needs to remember the revelation at Mount Sinai—why is that so important? Because today we have none of that, so we have to search for our anchor in those times when it did happen. Okay? So that was more or less the question.

Then when I spoke about it, I asked her: In what way do you want the Holy One, blessed be He, to appear? Something that performs open miracles? Is the question why there are no miracles? And yes—first of all, yes. It seems to me that that’s the simplest form, right? Prophecy or miracles, all kinds of things that go beyond the natural conduct of the world—that’s the basic form of manifestation that is very much lacking. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not appear in those ways anymore, and hasn’t for a very long time.

Everything eventually becomes nature. At first it seems strange to you, but afterward it becomes nature. Yes, that may be. Fine, but if you do a different miracle each time… Bring someone from a thousand years ago to walk around here and he’d say everything here is a miracle. Yes, fine, but if you did a different miracle each time, as there used to be, then people wouldn’t get used to it. A miracle is still a miracle. Not manna again—that’s an ongoing miracle—but I don’t know, there was the revelation at Mount Sinai, then it ended, that was it; it didn’t happen every two days. So it was clear to people that here the Holy One, blessed be He, is appearing. Right, so I’m saying then afterwards there was the splitting of the sea; that too happened once and that was it. It doesn’t have to be a continuous miracle. So that’s the kind of manifestation that is missing in these years. Joshua did it, Elijah, Elisha. Yes, but each one did something else, so it was still perceived as a miracle; it wasn’t that people got used to miracles and that was it. I think that’s still true—the descriptions clearly relate to it as a miracle, not as just another law of nature. And the river split and it keeps splitting. What? No, but there those are rabbinic legends; I don’t know how much that really happened.

If God intervened too much, there wouldn’t be free choice anymore. Right, fine, but let Him not intervene too much—once a month. Okay? Every New Moon eve. What? It would reduce the value. Every time the miracle stopped they’d be sure God had abandoned them. Yes, so that’s the other side of the same coin. Doesn’t that eliminate free choice? What? Doesn’t that eliminate free choice? No, I don’t think so, because it depends on the question. If you understand that when a person sins—after the revelation at Mount Sinai, and not long afterward, there was the sin of the Golden Calf. That’s Leibowitz—Leibowitz always says that, that after Sinai… Miracles never brought anyone back in repentance, that’s what Leibowitz said. So how did he bring them back? Right.

No, I think the point is that when a person sins, it’s not because he stops believing. It’s because he sins. He has desires, he has—whatever, each person and his reasons—but it’s not necessarily because he stopped believing. What is it? He convinces himself it didn’t happen, in order to… Yes, fine, those are the psychological mechanisms that come afterward. But that’s also the… So he’ll do the same thing with the miracle too. He’ll do the same thing with the miracle too. Meaning, that’s not… So the miracle will tell him there is God; he already thinks there is God. But he manages to deny it when he needs to because he sins, so with that too he would manage. Meaning, I don’t think that’s the foundation—the foundation of why people sin.

But the real question that arises here is: why indeed expect the Holy One, blessed be He, to appear in the form of a miracle? And I said to her that I think that in a certain sense, the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not need miracles today is because we have advanced. We are better than those to whom the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself through miracles. We no longer need the miracle—or at least we are not supposed to need the miracle. We probably do still need it sometimes, but the expectation of us is not to need it. And this is Nachmanides at the end of Parashat Bo. Nachmanides writes there that a person has no share in the Torah of Moses unless he understands that all our occurrences are nothing but miracles. More than that—every miracle that happens, they’ll explain it by saying there must be some physical explanation for it. And if not, then they’ll leave it unresolved until they discover the explanation. Right. So that’s exactly the point—I’m getting there in a moment; that’s why I brought this example.

If Nachmanides says that everything that happens to us is a miracle, that of course empties the concept of miracle of content. Because what is a miracle? A miracle is always a deviation from natural law. If you say that natural laws too are a miracle, then there are no miracles. Meaning, what I call nature you call miracle, but that’s just words. Yes. Exactly. It’s words. What difference does it make what you call it? A declension of every concept, like love, hate. If you love everyone, then love has no meaning anymore. Exactly. That’s why often opposites meet from the other side of the circle. If you go all the way in both directions, they meet in the end.

So when people read Nachmanides, usually the moral overseers, with stern faces, rebuke anyone who thinks there are laws of nature, because Nachmanides says he has no share in the Torah of Moses. But the truth is that Nachmanides is simply saying that there are laws of nature and God runs the laws of nature. That’s all. Fine—every believer, at least, understands that there are laws of nature, that the Holy One, blessed be He, operates them, created them, all true. But there are laws of nature. The world runs according to those laws.

And in the scientific mindset of the past several centuries, and certainly in recent times, the more we understand those laws, the more we live with a consciousness that didn’t once exist. In earlier times, a person—and people have talked about this many times already—they say that religion was a kind of attempt to find an anchor in the chaos of reality. A person feels lost like that; he’s at the mercy of reality; he had to invent for himself some higher factor he could hold on to. One that would care for us: okay, we’ll do the commandments and He’ll take care of everything. Everything will be fine. We’re not subject to the arbitrariness of natural law. It’s not some blind fate. But today… What? Today too. What’s the definition of “earlier times”? No—“earlier times” is a continuum. It’s not a matter of how many… It’s not binary. They did amazing things three thousand years ago—cities and who knows what. No, but the more we know, the less that feeling exists. Of course it’s a continuum, not a binary. There isn’t some specific number of years such that until then it was one way and from then on another. But there is a process here, and we see it around us. It’s a process that also manifests statistically: fewer and fewer people believe in God than once did, because that need no longer exists—or exists less. Because today there is some sense that I control my fate.

And then indeed people lose faith in God because He answered a certain need. Marx wrote that religion is the opium of the masses. To a considerable extent he was right. He was right—in many, many people religion functions as a kind of anchor, and it can even be a fictitious anchor. But they need it, so they’ll invent it just in order to keep afloat. And in a world of that sort, the manifestation one naturally expects seems to me to be a manifestation of miracles. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, says: friends, I’m here, don’t worry, I control what happens here, I’ll take care of you, I’ll handle you. I’ll handle everything. Also this—that there is accountability for everything, that everything has an accounting, that if someone did something to you there will be payment. The hand of God as it appears not in miracles. No, no—that’s already a derivative. But in order to reach that consciousness that this reality is in fact governed, even in stages where there are no miracles, I need those one-time deviations called miracles in order to show that there is a Master, to show there is someone running the castle. The early books are full of that.

Now once you understand there is a miracle, then you understand that the one who performed the miracle also controls the natural order, because evidently He can freeze it whenever He wants. Meaning, if you need to calm down from the feeling of blind fate, then that hand has to appear every now and then, visibly, so that we can see there is a ruler of the world, someone managing reality. And in a certain sense, this need for tangible revelation is the result of an atmosphere we simply do not inhabit today. We are not in it today. Nothing will help. We can develop it, work at it—it’s the same thing as in Mesillat Yesharim. A lot of people labor very hard to train themselves to think there is no nature and that nothing will happen and he won’t recover if he doesn’t pray, even if he takes the medicine a thousand times; or that the plane will crash if he doesn’t recite the traveler’s prayer; or all kinds of things of that sort—in order to strengthen in themselves that same thing that in fact no longer exists. They are working on themselves. That feeling of dependence doesn’t exist. The feeling that I am lost unless someone here… Today we have a supermarket. It doesn’t exist.

Again, it’s not a question of from when. It’s a continuum. It’s a continuum. Seventy years ago was it also like that? Yes, also. Less so. What difference does it make? But even in that catastrophe too they searched for explanations. On a different level. They searched for explanations there too. It was as if a miracle was expected. It was expected momentarily, but the historical process… maybe do something? Let’s put it this way: I’d bet that if you did a systematic study of requests for, or dependence on, miracles during the Holocaust, compared to dependence on miracles ten years before or ten years after, I promise you there would be a very large spike during the Holocaust. Which means that the historical process works monotonically; there are occasionally spikes like that, true. There are periods in which it changes. I said, it’s a continuum, not binary. It’s not that until 1700 everyone needed miracles and from 1700 onward no one needed miracles. There is a continuum of less and less feeling of dependence. Of course, when we are in terrible distress, as happens also in our own times or in the Holocaust or—fine—again, when they conquered the Wall there, or there was a victory there, all the religious emotions were pouring out of everyone’s ears. Fine, but it passed after some time. It’s not…

Obviously there are events, or short periods, in which things return or flash up briefly. So do those periods show that we stayed the same? It’s a pitiful spike. It’s a huge spike, one like there’s never been. What happened in our own time is a huge spike unlike any before it, so does that mean we also don’t need miracles? It’s a huge spike and it passed. It’s a huge spike and it passed. Everything passed. It would have passed then too. No, that spike wasn’t a spike of miracles. That spike was a spike of a reality in which we felt dependent, in which we felt insecure—not a spike of miracles. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many miracles there, it seems to me. Again, without getting into private miracles—in the broad sense, there were not all that many miracles there. The Holy One, blessed be He—one of the hardest things is that even there, where everyone waited for Him to reveal Himself, that didn’t really happen. Or at least, again, not in the terms of the revelations people used to speak about. You could also see the hand of God there, but not revelation in that simple miraculous sense.

And therefore I think the historical process is a clear process. There can be retreats and advances, but overall there is a kind of direction of flow. Reality proves it. Fewer and fewer people believe than used to. It seems to me. Okay, no—now there really is some kind of change. We’ll get to that in a moment; I’ll get to that comment. And the desire that the Holy One, blessed be He, continue to reveal Himself by way of miracles—I think there is something childish about it, in a certain sense. Because the Holy One, blessed be He, in my understanding, expects from us—there is a reason we are in a different atmosphere. He expects us to be older children. Older children understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, appears perhaps more powerfully in systematic conduct, in conduct according to laws, than in miracles. So here the thing is, they understand that because when they were little they experienced it very, very… Fine, the description of… No, no, no—when they’re little, let them do it when they’re little. But when one still longs for that place, and from there can build theories about that place—then again I say, maybe you are moving to the second-order question, what I said before: whether one still needs that as a means. Fine, so when we’re little in kindergarten they’ll go on telling us those same stories. I’m asking what we do when we are adults. Okay? Those are already technical discussions. The question is whether it is right to build a different model of religious attitude because today we are in a different situation.

I’m saying more than that: not only is it different, there is a case to be made that it is better. We have advanced, we have matured. To children one describes God as a grandfather with a beard—good or bad, depending on what you do, woe unto you—because things need to be made concrete for them. For adults, people do that less, right? Why? Because adults do not need those illustrations, because those illustrations are not true. But you use them as a didactic means, and once people mature, there’s no need for it anymore. So now the question is: am I supposed to long for my childhood state, when I still saw the Holy One, blessed be He, in such a concrete way? The child is a greater believer than we are. Because the child sees before his eyes some… The child exists in us so that… Yes, but the Holy One, blessed be He, is not an old man with a white beard, right? On that we agree. He comes close to us in commandments. But the question now is whether you are supposed to delude yourself in order to have stronger faith, or whether you say: friends, okay, I matured; that was kindergarten; now I understand—it isn’t like that. So let’s see what I do now. Am I supposed to go on clinging to some childish images like that because it makes me more of a believer?

And it doesn’t even make me more of a believer, because once I’m in a different atmosphere, then it no longer fits. Meaning, for a child it fits, but again this is what brings me back to the dread of Elul. If I’m in a different atmosphere then it also doesn’t help. Not only is it not necessarily right to do it, not only was it not necessarily better then and now “do not say that the former days were better than these”—that too—but beyond that, it also doesn’t help. Those things were said and practiced in a period whose atmosphere was different.

Now the question is whether, instead of expecting miraculous revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world—as Ilan said earlier—it seems to me that even if He revealed Himself here with signs and wonders, tomorrow morning I’d come with three physical explanations of what happened here. With no need for the Holy One, blessed be He. Why? Because our minds are already built in such a way that for us these deviations have no significance. Those deviations are simply a scientific challenge. Okay, now we need to see what the scientific explanation is for those deviations. Those deviations are exactly the platform on which science advances. Every time something doesn’t fit the existing paradigm, that’s the challenge: now we have to see how to build a paradigm in which it does fit. Once, everything that didn’t fit only increased faith. And today, everything that doesn’t fit increases atheism—it increases the sense that, look, we’re treating this scientifically; we’ll solve this too. Meaning that in the end, we don’t really need Him.

And even if there is a miracle, a miracle is not performed from absolute nothing. If there is a little oil in the house, something in the house, then a miracle has to be made from something… Yes, but even “something from something” is still a miracle against the laws of nature. So I’m saying: this expectation of revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the form of open miracles contains something of that same longing I spoke about last time. And today we are in a different situation.

I think the Holy One, blessed be He, today expects us to live within the scientific worldview and culture—not outside it, not as an alternative, but the opposite. Today we can perhaps understand what was harder for earlier generations to understand: that everything here is run through very rigid and orderly laws. And if that doesn’t point to the Holy One, blessed be He, guiding the world, I don’t know what miracle would. A miracle is chaos.

Rabbi, there’s also a question here, a wonder: adults are capable—and this connects a bit to what you said—adults are capable of containing or accepting very abstract things in their lives. Whether in science, whether money—people today don’t long to compare currency to gold that exists in a bank. People live with abstract concepts. But when it comes to God, suddenly one can’t accept an abstract concept; He has to become concrete somehow, either in reality or… or some entity that punishes, or intervenes, or watches over in a personal way. No—here one really has to distinguish between several levels. If we’re talking about the question “prove to me that You exist” on the intellectual-philosophical level, then here it won’t help to say: okay, live in a world of abstractions. Fine, on the intellectual level the answer is whether it works. Meaning, the existence of God too—yes or no—is a philosophical question that in the end you test to see whether it works logically, like any abstract thing when you try to show manifestations. No—I’m saying, if you’re saying we can live with more abstract concepts than once, I agree. But that doesn’t answer the question if you pose it on the intellectual level, because I can live with an abstract God as long as it is clear to me that He is there. But first of all—who says He is there at all? If He doesn’t appear, it may simply be that I conclude He is not there—not that I can’t live with Him. In a miracle. How in a miracle? What? A miracle, I don’t know: He’ll tell the oil to burn like vinegar, like water. So I said—that’s exactly the problem. Therefore I’m saying that we have…

Or like some planet we don’t see; we only know it’s there from its gravitational pull. What, do people not believe it exists? Yes, fine—if that thing were revealed… Yossi, even today, if a prophet stood here and told us: friends, if you desecrate the Sabbath this coming Sabbath, this book will remain standing in midair. Okay? Let’s speak in the language of children. David Copperfield can do that for you in two days. Maybe yes, maybe no—but it would still impress people today. Fine, so it would still impress people today. Meaning, no—there are things for which it would be a bit hard to find a scientific explanation even today.

And I’m saying these are two different levels at which we ask the question. There is the question of whether He exists—the intellectual question I mentioned earlier. There it won’t help if people say to me: look, deal with it, it’s an abstract thing, not something that appears. I’m willing to deal with that as long as I have reached the conclusion that it really is there. But in order to reach that conclusion, maybe I need some sort of manifestation. That’s the first question. The second question is, of course, the existential one: how do I live with this? That’s a different question.

Now on both of these planes I’m making my claim. On one plane I’m saying that even on the intellectual level, when I want proof that He exists—we talked about this last year—when I want proof that He exists, I don’t think miracles are better proof than orderly behavior according to laws. On the contrary: with our scientific mindset it would almost be impossible to perform a miracle for us. As Yossi said earlier, as Ilan said, we will always look for an explanation, and if we don’t find one we’ll say: okay, there is an explanation, we just haven’t found it yet. We are already somewhat blocked to that kind of manifestation.

And on the other hand, common sense still seems to say that if there is here a system that behaves according to prescribed laws, and there is a pretty impressive fit between those laws and everything we talked about last year, then that is stronger proof of God’s existence than a one-time miracle. Now this is more relevant for us than it was for previous generations, because today we know how rigid these laws are, how few laws underlie the whole range of phenomena we know. Once people thought every thing had its own laws; today we know there are four laws of physics and from them you can derive almost everything. So that points even more strongly to some directing hand. And therefore I’m saying: within our culture today—and I’m still on the intellectual plane—I’m not sure it is right to expect or long for those direct manifestations through miracles, through prophecy, through all kinds of such exceptional things beyond the laws of nature. It may be that today something else is required of us, and it is in our hands—not that it is required but not in our hands; it is in our hands because modern thought is supposed to confront laws of nature, not deviations from laws of nature.

Such thought says: if there are laws of nature here, then just as Abraham our father—the Sages put this in the mouth of Abraham our father—that he saw the stars moving in their courses and said, there is a Master of the castle, someone is running this business, it functions in an orderly way—and there were no miracles there. Abraham our father, in the rabbinic midrash, saw the conduct of natural law, not deviations from nature. And therefore this too, I think, is another example of the same attempt to cling nostalgically to some model that once was and is no more, some feeling that we were not privileged enough, that we have no miracles, that our state is too bleak. No—we were privileged too much. We are already so good that we don’t need miracles, and someone who needs miracles has a claim made against him: grow up. Something else is expected of you. You are expected to understand that miracles are not needed.

What in debates around evolution they call “God of the gaps,” right? Proving God’s existence from the gaps in scientific understanding. Yes—the gaps. Where science doesn’t understand, that’s a sign there is God. That’s how it worked until not so long ago. I think one needs to outgrow that. One needs to outgrow it and understand the opposite—where it does work, there is God. In the gaps you should ask: what is God doing there? Eh? Because otherwise in the end you’ll prove there is no God. Yes, but even without that. Really. Without implications. I’m not talking about the “otherwise” as a meaning.

So we live in a different world, in which it is not right to cling longingly to the old model as some kind of ideal model, both because it is impossible—exactly those two planes I mentioned—because it is impossible, it just won’t work today anymore, and also because it isn’t needed. It really isn’t needed.

I really don’t understand, I really… I mean, every one of us, when he has some difficulty, longs for some… He needs to get over it, take a pill. There is something in our basic emotions. Take a pill. It’s not taking a pill. A person who is connected to himself—that’s what happens. The fact that I feel… That’s what happens to you. Take a pill. A paranoid person too has what “happens” to him, and he needs to get over it. The fact that it happens to me doesn’t mean it’s right. Maybe he needs to listen to it and say it means something. It means what exactly? That now I need miracles? It means there is also that place in our relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He. No, wait, wait, wait—I’m not there yet. I’m still on the intellectual plane. We’ll get to the existential one in a minute. I’m currently on the intellectual plane, on the question whether I need this in order to understand that He exists, in order to serve Him. Now the question of what happens in the relationship with Him—that’s the second question. In a minute; I’m not there yet.

It’s not only that. The kind of service is different if the relationship is living and breathing, or if the relationship is some kind of… So that’s the relationship—we haven’t gotten to the relationship yet. We will. Those people whose behavior or dread I’m clinging to—the point of departure is that even if they had lived in today’s reality, maybe they too wouldn’t have acted… Yes, of course. I don’t think they would have been different people. It’s a result of culture. It’s not that the genetics changed or the wiring in the brain changed. Of course. It’s a result of culture; it’s a result of growth in knowledge, of understanding, of ways of thinking. We are part of the world. And that antagonism toward the world of today—that same conservatism, you said earlier that this is the question of conservatism here—is part of that very thing. People think the old model is ideal, and the farther the world around us gets from what once was, the more that itself proves to them that it is less religious.

Now true, there are fewer believers today than once, but that is not essential. One can create religiosity no less meaningful within this atmosphere. We are not required to go back to shepherds’ flutes and living in tents in order to do that. Maybe more. Religiosity today has to come from logical conclusion or things like that. Yes, exactly what I’m saying. And therefore from many angles I’m trying to show that we have a tendency to see the past as something fuller, something whose loss we should mourn. The question is whether there were also such people in the past. Maimonides was that kind of person in his day; he was an exception. Yes, no, of course. I’m talking about a historical process. There were always people—and there are others today too.

Why do you need the Holy One, blessed be He, at all in order to explain miracles? I’m saying, when there weren’t miracles then either—who reported to you that there were miracles then? No, fair enough, I’m not… I’m willing to accept that. They’re sitting exactly on the same gaps, right? Today one could even try… Maybe if you found an explanation for the splitting of the sea… Then they thought it was a miracle. So perhaps the whole tendency—if that’s the tendency—can be taken also to commandments generally. Meaning? Once we needed, because we were childish, that some external factor command us, give us Torah. As we grow up, we understand by ourselves what is right and what is not right.

Here you need to distinguish between two things. I’ll say: first, there is obligation on the halakhic level, and that’s why I made this distinction at the beginning of the discussion—not today, at the beginning of the year. There is a difference between halakhic obligation and intellectual or meta-halakhic obligation. Halakhic obligation—at least according to what is accepted, and one can indeed discuss what its basis is—but what is accepted is that it is a formal obligation. Meaning, we need to do it because we were commanded, not in order to achieve results. Already in the time of the Sages they said, and so it is ruled in Jewish law, in the dispute between Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda, that one does not expound the reasons of the verse. Meaning, we do not do something in order to achieve some result. That’s one thing.

Second thing: I don’t see such an explanatory option. If I saw such an explanation, I might be willing to accept it. Meaning, if you showed me what exactly the commandments gave then, and why today that’s no longer needed, maybe there’d be room to consider it. But I don’t think that really… What? You did the Sabbath thing well—that’s not even a commandment, but who counts that? I’m talking about the commandments, about Jewish law, the details of Jewish law. So I ask: what did the prohibition of eating pork come to achieve then, such that today I can do that without the prohibition? I don’t know what it came to achieve then, and I don’t know how I do that today. So if you offered me a coherent model that explains all the commandments—not some isolated detail, because for an isolated detail I can always find an ad hoc explanation, that’s not difficult, fine—and show that it really…

What would you do if you had maturity? Meaning, if not eating pork suited us, or was given to us, when we were childish, then now as we mature…? So again I say: I don’t think that’s right. So are there things that suit both children and adults? I’m saying—I just see it. What does that mean? If I know that a child learns that two plus two equals four, does he need to outgrow that when he grows up? No—two plus two equals four is true for a child and true for an adult. Not everything a child grasps is incorrect. So why these things in particular? So I’m saying: because here I have an explanation; I understand it. That’s what I’m saying. This isn’t a hypothetical claim; I’m proposing an explanation. I’m saying why a child needs illustrations and an adult does not need illustrations.

You are saying there really were miracles then. I’m saying… No—who says? I didn’t say anything. Maybe there weren’t. You say suppose it was a miracle? No—I don’t know. Maybe because they needed it then, and then it’s not the point. Maybe yes and maybe no—I don’t know. They saw it as a miracle. That too I think. Fine—so what? I didn’t say anything. Children need to be shown, they need miracles. Did He do a miracle? Maybe He did, maybe He didn’t; I’m not getting into that at all. I know they needed it and I don’t—this is what I know. Whether He performed a miracle for them or not, I don’t know. It could be yes and it could be no. As far as their need is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether it was actually a miracle or not. Yes. Suppose that’s how they saw it, yes. So “sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon in the valley of Aijalon”—it seems to me nobody today can do that. Fair enough. No, I’m not claiming there were no miracles. I’m only saying I’m not entering into the question of how that was a miracle and things like that. I’m not entering the question whether there were miracles—not that I claim there weren’t miracles. I’m not entering that question. That’s not the question I’m dealing with right now. We can also discuss that question; it certainly raises doubt and each case needs to be discussed on its own. Fine. But I’m talking about whether there is a need for miracles, not whether there were any.

And whether the fact that we have no need for miracles means that we are disconnected from the Holy One, blessed be He—as we always accuse ourselves—or whether perhaps it is because we are different people, more mature, and our relationship with Him is different.

And now I move to the existential part. Last week you mentioned the theological question that we expected the blessed God to intervene in history and He didn’t intervene, and it would have been a miracle if He had intervened. Meaning that in some sense you do still expect… I said: where we are not different people—our genetics are the same genetics. Meaning, if we find ourselves in the same state people were in a thousand years ago, then we will act as those people a thousand years ago acted. No, I’m talking about seventy years ago. So I’m saying: seventy years ago they were in a situation where the feeling of dependence returned very powerfully. The feeling of insecurity, the feeling that you are delivered into the hands of the world—exactly as was generally the case a thousand years ago or five hundred years ago. So their reactions returned too; of course. We’re not different people. But today, thank God, we’re not in that situation, and today we don’t have that feeling. People are trying very hard to work on it—after all, they’re constantly explaining to us with stickers that “we have no one to rely on except our Father in Heaven,” and that we have to remain dependent on Him all the time—to cultivate a feeling of dependence even though everyone feels we’re fooling ourselves. We don’t have that feeling.

Maybe to the extent that… to the extent that there is more natural explanation… He gives us more miraculous laws. Maybe miracles that would look different. You can’t really do miracles in nature anymore. So what’s the problem? Then miracles aren’t needed. Why? Miracles aren’t needed—who needs miracles? Well, apparently we do need miracles. I don’t know, I don’t. Because if fewer people believe today, why do they believe less? Because there’s an explanation for everything. Obviously, because they aren’t functioning properly… No, because in fact what those who see a miracle in everything and those who see no miracles and therefore leave the system share in common—again, opposites meet. What they have in common is that both their religious model is the same model, the childish model that says religiosity means miracles. One says: okay, but today there are no miracles, so I’m not religious. So he needs to see Him. The second says: everything is a miracle, obviously—and he invents miracles out of thin air all the time, tells stories, books come out about the miracles that happened to them… For them it just hurts because they understand they’re about to stop believing. In the stories he heard in kindergarten, he comes to ask the rabbi for advice. Okay, I encounter this quite a bit, yes.

So I’m saying that in this sense there is a common side here, and we are required to mature. What messes us up is that same yearning for a model that today does not exist, and justifiably does not exist. Why? Why is it required? Why not take it? Because I think that we really need miracles in order to breathe. In Asher Yatzar you say, after all every moment is a miracle! No—in Asher Yatzar I say exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite. In Asher Yatzar I thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for my biology, not for deviating from my biology. The opposite—the exact opposite. So my biology too is a miracle, and I give thanks. Right—but that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve changed levels on the table. That’s exactly what I’m talking about: biology is the miracle. You don’t need deviations from biology for it to be a miracle. That’s exactly my point. But he doesn’t want deviation. I’m not claiming that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t govern the world. I’m claiming that in order to be convinced of that, I don’t need deviations from the laws. The laws express that better, not worse.

Now there are people for whom that doesn’t sit well, so I argue that they need to mature. Again, that’s on the intellectual plane. Now there is of course the plane of the relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He, and here I move basically to the second question. The second question I defined at the beginning. Because there is the question whether the models of that time were more ideal, more complete, whether we are obligated to try to reconstruct them as much as possible, or whether another model can be built. Now we are entering the question of how much those so-called childish—I don’t know, maybe that’s not the right word—more emotional, more tangible dimensions, are really important. Experiential. Yes, exactly, experiential. Are they really important, or can one build religiosity—or humanity, not only religiosity—on the rational plane alone? Again, we have emotions, so this is not a factual argument. Factually, of course people have emotions and experiences and psychology; unfortunately, people have that too. But the question is to what extent this should play a role in our conduct, in religious conduct and in conduct generally.

And here I want to note a series of remarks—I don’t know how many I’ll get through—on the second question really, on the place of emotion, of what I might call primitive religiosity, old religiosity, in our world today. Okay? So let me start maybe with a series of commandments that command emotions. This also came up earlier: fear of God, love of God, love of one’s fellow, love of the convert, all kinds of emotional commandments. Now it seems to me that these emotional commandments are wonderful proof that emotions do not need to be involved in serving God. And I’ll give a few examples.

I once mentioned this, I think—the question of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner in Pachad Yitzchak. Maimonides writes that if there are two commandments with the same practical content, you do not count both of them. Meaning, two commandments that practically impose exactly the same thing on me. For example, neshekh and tarbit—biting interest and increasing interest. These are two different prohibitions; the Talmud says you violate two prohibitions. But in practice it is exactly the same thing. When you lend or borrow with interest, you violate the prohibition of neshekh and the prohibition of tarbit. Rashi on the Mishnah at the beginning of “What is neshekh” explains that the prohibition of neshekh is to bite the borrower, and the prohibition of tarbit is to increase my money in an improper way. But of course, whenever I improperly increase my money, it is by biting the borrower. Practically, it is the same prohibition. So such a thing indeed is not counted separately. Even though the Talmud says two prohibitions, and Maimonides says in the Mishneh Torah two prohibitions, in the Book of Commandments it does not appear as two prohibitions but as one. Fine?

Now a certain sage asked Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner: what about love? Love of the convert and love of one’s fellow. We have a commandment to love one’s fellow, to love the Jew, and a commandment to love the convert. Now love of the convert is included in love of one’s fellow, because a convert is a certain kind of Jew. Surely the obligation to love Jews applies to him too, right? So why do we need love of the convert? And that Maimonides does count in his list of commandments. That’s what this sage asked Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner.

So Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner answered him that love of the convert and love of one’s fellow are not commandments to love so-and-so, but rather a commandment—he gives an example there—suppose I have a neighbor who is a convert, but I don’t know he is a convert. I think he is a Jew by birth, and I love him very much. Have I fulfilled the commandment of loving the convert? He says no. One has to love him because he is? Yes. So I don’t need to love the convert. I need to love the convert-ness in him. To love him because he is a convert. By the way, that’s not exactly the same wording. To love the convert-ness in him and to love him because he is a convert are not the same thing. There’s room to discuss that a bit. But I need to love him because of the conversion. Now notice: this somewhat neutralizes the emotional content of that love. You’re really loving ideas, or actions, values; you’re not loving human beings. Yes. He says there: why does Maimonides count the commandment of love of the convert and the commandment of love of one’s fellow? Because all commandments of love are not commandments of love toward a person, but commandments dependent on a reason. The reason is part of the definition of fulfilling the commandment; it is not the reason for the commandment. It’s not that you have to love him, and the reason is because he is a convert. No—the definition of the commandment is to love him because he is a convert. That is the definition of the commandment. And if I loved him not because he is a convert, I did not fulfill the commandment.

The same with love of one’s fellow, the same with every love. Meaning, all halakhic love—again, not that we don’t have other love—I’m only saying that the halakhic command concerning these seemingly emotional actions is basically not a command concerning emotions. And “love your fellow” means to love him because? To love him because he is a Jew. Not because he is a nice person. Solidarity. Yes, exactly.

Now here too, as I mentioned earlier, you can take this very far or somewhat less far. You can say that you don’t need to love the convert at all; you need to love the convert-ness in him. That seems to me to go a bit too far. That’s how people fulfill “love the immigration but not the immigrants.” Yes. There are people who love the Jewish people in general; it’s just the individuals they have a bit of a problem with. Yes, that’s the same thing. So that’s an extreme formulation. A somewhat more moderate formulation—and here it really is somewhere in the middle—is one that says: yes, I need to love him. But it cannot be disconnected from the fact that he is a convert, not simply because he is a nice person. It has to resolve itself in the person. Meaning: not to love an idea, not to love an act, but to love a particular person. But yes—not simply because he’s nice, but to love him because he is a convert, because he converted. So there’s something here that greatly neutralizes the emotional layer in this whole business.

Now the same applies to the commandment to hate. There it’s even very popular to say this, right? To hate the wicked. “I hate those who hate You, O Lord.” Right? What is that there? There all the moral overseers tell us, right? That one may not hate a Jew; one should only hate the sins in him. Right? One should “let sins cease, not sinners,” right? Even though that of course doesn’t begin with the plain language of the verse; “sins” there means sinners. But no—they say there “let sins cease” means the sins they do, not the sinners. Don’t hate the person; hate the sins in him. Then look at the second half of the verse: “and the wicked shall be no more.” And not “wickedness shall be no more.” Yes, no, but you can say that once the wicked person is no longer wicked, then he is no longer among the wicked. So you see that this can be seen elsewhere too, in a fairly consistent way. And I think that this stems exactly from what was said earlier: it is difficult to command emotional states.

And yet the Torah did command them. No. I’m saying that what it commanded was not emotional states. It did not command emotional states. It commanded—no, there too I’m claiming—all the commandments of love, love of the convert, love of one’s fellow, love of God, all these commandments of love, in my opinion, are exactly the same thing. They are commandments that are basically fulfilled more on the intellectual level than on the emotional one. And if they are fulfilled on the emotional level, that level is derivative, not constitutive. I said: it is dragged along, derived. Meaning, in the end I need rationally to decide that I love him. Now, because I don’t accept the extreme wording I mentioned earlier—not to love the convert-ness in him; one has to love the person. But to love the person because he is a convert—then it’s not disconnected from the “because.” In that sense it basically places the emotions at a stage after the intellectual decision. Meaning, I need to decide that I love him, and then try to build that within myself, as opposed to the Hollywood-Cupid model where someone shoots an arrow, the arrow hits, and pop, I fall in love. It doesn’t start there—it works the other way around. I choose where to shoot the arrow. I shoot the arrow where I decide.

Maybe they don’t want emotions at all. Maybe they want you to perform actions that show you love him even though you… I think that… I think that… The fact that you choose doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to… I said, to arrive there in the end, yes—but it’s derivative. You’re already at a stage—but it’s derivative. It doesn’t start there; it’s derivative.

So emotion really—and this brings us to the second-order question I mentioned earlier—there is definitely room for emotion in our world, but not as something that makes decisions. It is not commanded, it does not direct us anywhere; it is simply a wagon that the wagon driver leads. That’s all. And if you now take emotion there, because that’s where it needs to be taken, then that’s where it will be, and there emotion will be. My conscience is here. I talked about this last year, in the proof from morality. And anyone whose conscience is here—keep away from him like fire. I’m telling her to stay away from him like fire. But I’m saying: when we come to that place of… you feel in your experience something that I’m uncomfortable with; I did something that doesn’t sit comfortably with me. Where do you feel that? Not in the head. In the heart. Right, and therefore it’s a very dangerous feeling, certainly. One must critique it by means of the intellect.

A person feels inside himself—sometimes two people do the exact same act, and for one person it’s fitting and for the other it isn’t. Where does that come from? Of course he feels things, of course a person has all kinds of emotions. But that doesn’t mean he is feeling correctly. Just because he has such a feeling—so what? Emotion is something that either exists or doesn’t. But the question is whether it is right that I have such a feeling. Should it direct me to action? My answer is no. Can it be dependent on Jewish law? No. I need to decide whether that feeling is right or not. If yes, then certainly maybe one should even cultivate such a feeling, because it will help me act correctly. But one must not let emotion make the decision, direct me what to do and where to do it. That’s…

Therefore I say: there is room for emotion as something derivative, not as something leading. And in that sense I accept the more moderate formulation, not the extreme one of loving the convert-ness, but loving the convert because he converted. That’s a formulation that leaves room for emotion, but the emotion is not leading. I don’t start there; it doesn’t direct me; it determines nothing. Meaning, it is not supposed to determine anything—not that I claim it in fact doesn’t; it may well determine things. But it is not supposed to determine them, okay? I need to take a pill if that happens. That… that’s the claim.

Now I can show this in many other places. If you’re talking about the suggestion that was raised earlier—maybe commandments of love are really only to behave the way a loving person behaves—then there is a Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 14 of the laws of mourning. Maimonides writes there that there is a commandment… that the commandments the Sages enacted—to accompany a bride, to escort the dead, to visit the sick, and so on—all this is included in “love your fellow as yourself.” That’s what Maimonides writes. So he begins by saying the Sages commanded them, and he ends by saying that this is a Torah positive commandment of “love your fellow as yourself.” How are we supposed to understand such a thing?

It seems to me that what Maimonides means there is this: the commandment of “love your fellow as yourself” means to love your fellow as yourself. That is the commandment. The practical actions that flow from it are only a rabbinic commandment. Now, someone who performs those commandments, those actions, and of course does so out of love, also fulfills the Torah positive commandment of “love your fellow as yourself,” that’s obvious. But if someone visits the sick while inwardly despising that sick person, then he fulfilled a rabbinic commandment, but he did not fulfill the Torah commandment. If someone loves the sick person very much but does not come visit him, then he fulfilled the Torah commandment and not the rabbinic one. If someone comes to visit the sick person because he loves him, then he fulfilled both. So Maimonides is trying to show us the model here: what is the relation between the Torah commandment and the actions… the emotion, let’s say—not necessarily emotion but something akin to emotion—and the practical consequences.

The Torah commandment of “love your fellow as yourself” tells me to love, and the practical consequences are rabbinic law. Therefore I don’t think it’s correct to say that the commandment of “love your fellow as yourself” is a collection of behaviors expected of us, that we’re supposed to behave as a loving person behaves. No—it’s a commandment to love. On that point I don’t agree with that extreme formulation. But the Sages come and tell us what behavior is expected of someone who loves. Yet even when I speak of the commandment to love, the Torah commandment, there too one must discuss: is this commandment carried out here or carried out here? Does this lead and that follow it, or does this lead and that follow it?

I think we discussed the Tanya, a chapter from Tanya—we learned it last year, I think—and there I talked about the question of what… the divine soul and the animal soul, what leads and what is led. And in this sense it seems to me that the more we mature, historically too, not only in each individual biography, then we are—so it seems to me—expected to have a more mature religiosity. Meaning, a more rational religiosity and a less sentimental one, less emotional.

Now today there is some phenomenon—and I won’t have time to get into it now—today there is some phenomenon of a kind of return, a renewed search for emotion, because the modernist period dried everybody out. Meaning, the attempt to live with intellect alone and neutralize emotion—the scientific period, the philosophical period—today there is a very strong reaction against this, with some kind of return to mysticism, to emotion, to New Age. New Age. Yes, New Age is of course the strongest expression of this. What? Going back to Uman. Going back to Uman, yes, exactly. So there is such a return. But I think this really is a reaction of people who are not managing to cope with maturity. Meaning, it seems to me that one should not surrender to it—that’s what I think. History will judge. But it seems to me that one should not surrender to it. I think that somewhere in the subconscious people have not succeeded in getting rid of the longing for the old model.

But you said that we can’t really distinguish when our reasoning is truly pure intellect and when my emotion has a kind of intellect of its own, a very cunning one. There’s something about rationalism that can detach you entirely from the real place. Meaning, from the real place… No, no—“real” you have already decided. Detach me from emotion. The real place is a living, joyful place. I can tell myself all kinds of things. A real place is real. “Real” means what fits; a true statement means a statement that claims something that correctly describes a fact in the world. That’s a true statement. That’s the meaning of “true.” This whole discourse of “our real place” that you’re talking about—it’s all emotional discourse, and I don’t agree with it.

Christianity, Bernadette, and how it was received, right—that she couldn’t read or write and yet she was holy, very much so—and modernity, she couldn’t read or write and she kept her cows and three times she saw… We have a few like that too. The less you know how to read and write, the holier you are—that’s the rule. That’s Christianity; there’s no control over it. This yearning people have—why is it so successful? It’s very successful. I think it’s a very great danger. A great danger. I think it’s a great danger. The rationalist can be happy from time to time too. What? Rationalism is a great joy.

You don’t like Hasidism, but the Rebbe of Piaseczno says that there is intellect that comes from the soul and intellect of the world. Intellect of the world is the intellect of what they teach you and insights they bring you. And intellect that comes from the soul is what you feel within yourself. No, no—but “feel” here is equivocal… What you feel within yourself is intuition, it’s not… “Feel” has a double meaning. There’s a difference between emotion and intuition. Emotion is emotion. Intuition is what… at least if I understand correctly what he said—I don’t know this source—that’s what he means. And intuition is something else. Meaning, it’s an intellectual faculty, but it does not belong to emotions. It has nothing to do with emotions. I’m not saying we need emotions. I don’t think we should act according to emotions. But this yearning to return to… that place is so important, because otherwise you get a disconnected person. But what is that “place”? It’s intuition, not emotion. That’s what I’m talking about. We’re all talking about intuition, not emotion. No, those are two different things.

Sorry, we were talking about those people who are extremely careful about the fine points of commandments, and they’re less pleasant than those who are more… Right. That really is a difficult problem. You know what, maybe we’ll continue a bit in that direction. The unpleasant ones. Okay.