Faith – Lesson 2

Table of Contents

• [0:00] Defining faith and its relation to the world
• [1:09] Religious feelings among atheists
• [3:24] Factual claims that cannot be measured
• [6:32] The technical problem of proving existence
• [9:46] Defining the world and fact
• [10:54] Religious feeling versus rational faith
• [11:57] The connection between a sense of sublimity and a waterfall
• [21:42] Forgiveness without feelings of conscience
• [25:13] A sociopath and asking forgiveness
• [29:37] Sociopathy and intellectual morality
• [31:20] Religious feeling and faith
• [32:28] Regret, conscience, and the definition of a wicked person
• [34:05] Hasidism versus feeling and intellect
• [35:07] Visiting the graves of the Patriarchs and emotions
• [36:24] Faith without observance of commandments
• [37:35] Observing commandments without emotional understanding
• [40:42] Trust in the commandments like flying on an airplane
• [42:28] The airplane as a metaphor for a spiritual goal
• [46:21] Maimonides – serving out of love
• [51:43] Intellectual love vs. emotional love
• [57:23] The example of Maimonides, Jewish law 3

Summary

General Overview

The speaker defines faith as a factual claim about reality, not as a report about a mental state, and argues that the difficulty of confirming a belief empirically does not make it subjective, but only raises a separate question of verification. He removes religious feeling from the essence of faith and sees it at most as a possible indication, because a religious feeling can also appear among atheists, while the absence of such feeling can also appear among believers. He suggests that the practical expression of faith is not emotion but commitment to the commandments, and grounds this in a reading of Maimonides on serving God out of love as doing the truth because it is truth, while interpreting the parable about love of a woman as describing intensity, not necessarily emotionality.

Faith as a Factual Claim and the Distinction Between the Type of Claim and the Method of Verification

The speaker argues that a statement like “I believe in God” means “God exists,” and therefore it is a claim about reality, not about the speaker’s inner experience. He attributes the tendency to interpret faith as subjective to the fact that there is no simple observational way to verify it, but he maintains that there are many factual claims that cannot be tested empirically and still remain factual claims, giving the example of counting the number of ants in the world. He says that an atheist too, when saying “There is no God,” is making a claim about reality and not merely expressing an emotional stance, and he rejects the common distinction according to which the believer speaks about a personal experience and the atheist speaks about the world. He sharpens the point that the question of what kind of claim it is is separate from the technical question of how one confirms or refutes it, and he defines “world” in this context as reality outside personal experiences.

Religious Feeling as an Indication, Not as Essence

The speaker says that defining religiosity through religious feeling is mistaken, because belief in God is a claim about reality, and therefore the presence or absence of feeling is not essential to being a believer. He uses the example of Coleridge and the argument over whether a waterfall is “sublime” or “beautiful” in order to claim that statements using the language of inner experience can still be claims about the external object, where the feeling serves as a sign of what is in the thing itself. He argues that a cool-headed person or someone lacking an emotional dimension can be just as much a believer, just as someone who is not moved by art can still understand art very well. He adds that religious feeling can sometimes replace faith instead of expressing it, and describes the possibility of people who generate a religious experience and dance with enthusiasm, yet have never cognitively clarified the question of God’s existence and may even be atheists. He concludes that feeling does not always express faith, and the absence of feeling does not necessarily express the absence of faith, and that feeling has, at most, the role of an instrument or indication, not value in itself.

Asking Forgiveness Without Regret and the Value of Rational Action

The speaker gives an example from a lecture during the Ten Days of Repentance at a secular school in Sde Boker and presents a case in which a person asks forgiveness without feeling any regret at all, arguing that in his eyes this is the purest form of asking forgiveness, because it does not stem from self-soothing over pangs of conscience. He distinguishes between a case in which regret and guilty feelings motivate an action that may ultimately be for the sake of the self, and a case in which the intellectual understanding, “I was in the wrong and therefore I need to make amends,” motivates action without emotional incentive. He extends the claim even to extreme cases, including the possibility of a sociopathic person who understands intellectually that he sinned and asks forgiveness without feeling, and argues that this does not negate morality or authenticity so long as there is no social self-interest involved. He clarifies that he is not recommending shutting off feelings of conscience, but rather not letting them run the person, and that in the end value is determined by doing the right thing, not by the intensity of one’s excitement about it.

Hasidism, Visiting the Graves of the Patriarchs, and Measuring Value Beyond Emotion

The speaker says that if one sees value in the feeling itself, that contradicts his view, and he estimates that, simply speaking, there is a clash here with a certain Hasidic line of thought, though he leaves room for interpretations in which feeling serves as a tool for a cognitive plane. He argues that someone who goes up to the graves of the Patriarchs in order to arouse feelings is doing something that has no value in itself if its purpose is only the experience, and he compares this to other pursuits whose aim is to stir emotion. He states that the value of actions is measured by their value, not by the feelings they arouse, and shifts the discussion to the question of commitment and obligation.

Faith as Commitment to the Commandments and Serving God for Its Own Sake

The speaker declares that religious faith in its essence is commitment to observance of the commandments, and that a person can be a believer even without observing the commandments, yet still be “not okay” because he is not doing what he is obligated to do. He argues that the practical expression of faith is not emotion but commitment, and he defends observing commandments “in order to fulfill one’s obligation” as the highest intention, while claiming that taking the lulav in order to arouse an inner experience or in order to “repair” hidden systems is service not for its own sake. He uses an analogy to a doctor and to an airplane to justify acting out of trust even without understanding the mechanism, and argues that one need not understand “what it does” in order to do what is right. He distinguishes between blind acceptance and acting out of an understanding that the thing is right, and presents trust as a sufficient basis for action even without direct experience.

Maimonides, Laws of Repentance Chapter 10, and Serving God Out of Love as Truth

The speaker reads Maimonides in Laws of Repentance 10 and cites his words against serving for the sake of reward or avoidance of punishment, and his description of serving out of love as doing the truth because it is truth. He interprets “love” in Maimonides here not as an emotion but as an intellectual love of truth, and connects this to his claim that the basis for observing commandments is not feeling but commitment to truth and command. He compares love to desire and brings the distinction of Don Yehuda Abravanel in Dialogues of Love and of José Ortega y Gasset in Five Essays on Love between the centripetal movement of desire and the centrifugal movement of love, in order to argue that the feeling of love can turn an action into something self-nourishing rather than something done for its own sake. He brings the homiletic reading of “and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her” in order to argue that love whose center is the other makes time easier, whereas love-as-desire makes it burdensome.

Interpreting the Apparent Contradiction in Maimonides Between Jewish law 2 and Jewish law 3

The speaker points out that in Jewish law 3 Maimonides describes love of God as a state resembling “love-sickness” and the Song of Songs, which on the face of it sounds emotional, contrary to the intellectual definition in Jewish law 2. He proposes interpreting this as a parable that emphasizes the intensity and constant presence of love of God, not its emotionality, and warns against transferring every detail of the parable to the thing being illustrated. He concludes with the general claim that emotions have no value in and of themselves, but at most a role as expression or indication, and that a less emotional person is not of lesser value if he does the right things.

An Anecdote About Swaying During Prayer

The speaker relates that as a child he asked his father why he did not sway during prayer like others, and his father replied that when he stands upright he has time to think. He mentions that there is a passage in the Kuzari explaining swaying during prayer as a way to drive away distracting thoughts, and remarks that this sounds strange to him, ending with “Sabbath peace.”

Okay, last time I began the series on faith / belief, and we devoted the first session to trying to clarify what exactly the meaning of faith / belief is, or the relation between a subjective feeling and a claim about the world. There are quite a few people who understand statements of faith / belief—”I believe in God”—as statements about me, myself, and not about the world. And last time I tried to show, to argue, that when I say “I believe in God,” what I mean is: God exists. In other words, that is a claim about the world. And again, of course, someone may say “I believe in God” and mean it in the first sense, but then I think that is simply an incorrect use of this concept of faith / belief. He can say: there is a religious feeling in me, a religious emotion. But such a feeling—I already mentioned this—such a feeling can also exist among complete atheists. There are quite a few atheist people who report religious feelings when they engage in science, in art, I don’t know, things that somehow bring them to some kind of encounter with the sublime, with what seems to them beyond ordinary, prosaic life. And then they say: there is some kind of religious feeling in me, some sort of awe, but they do not really mean to make any claim about the world; in their philosophical outlook they are atheists. Therefore I think that, to clear the table, or to clarify the discussion, we need to distinguish between these two kinds of statements. The subjective statement is simply a report about a mental state, about some feeling, and that doesn’t interest me—I’m not going to deal with that, everyone with his own feelings. The second meaning is to see faith / belief as a factual claim about the world. When I say “God exists,” I mean that there is something in reality—yes, God, however we define this entity, this object. So that’s the first part. And I explained that the tendency to see faith / belief as a subjective statement, a statement about me and not about the world, stems from the fact that it is indeed hard for us to verify that statement by observation. Someone says, “I believe in God,” and we interpret it as a claim about himself, because in the world it is not clear what exactly I am supposed to look at in order to check whether his claim is true or false. And so people have some feeling that this is not a factual claim. But I said that there are quite a few factual claims that cannot be checked empirically, and still it is hard to deny that they are factual claims. If someone says: how many ants are there in the world? I don’t know—1,544,212 ants in the world. That’s a factual claim, even though nobody really has the ability to check it empirically. How would you know? How could you know that you went over all the ants in the world, and that in the meantime one more wasn’t born or didn’t die? No chance. It’s impossible to do that in practice. But still, that statement is a factual statement. Is it true or false? Fine, I don’t know. But in principle, in terms of category, it is a factual claim, a claim that says something about the world. And what I want to say is that the same is true regarding God: the claim “God exists” is basically a factual claim about the world. The fact that it cannot be verified empirically or in any other way—it doesn’t matter, we’ll talk about that later—does not mean that it is not a factual claim, but a subjective one. It is a factual claim, and now we need to think whether at all, and how, it can be verified or refuted. And I’ll add maybe one more sentence—I think I said this, I no longer remember—that on this point I think the atheists too should agree. That is, when the atheist says, “I don’t believe in God, I disagree with you, I think there is no God,” he too does not mean merely to express a subjective feeling. Somehow, for some reason, it seems to people—sometimes even to religious people—that the statement “God exists” is a subjective statement, while the statement “there is no God” is an objective statement. But if we have no access to the concept of God in reality, then just as we cannot say that He exists, we also cannot say that He does not exist. We have no way of knowing whether He exists or does not exist. And then believers and atheists ought to stand on the same platform. In other words, if we have no access to this question, then every position regarding it is a subjective position—whether it is the believing position that God exists, or the atheist position that there is no God. But somehow, for some reason, in common discourse it is accepted or prevalent to think that the one who declares that God exists is talking about his personal or subjective experiences, while the one who says there is no God is a man of science, meaning he is talking about the world. That is, of course, utter nonsense. So the distinction I most want to get out of this whole discussion is the distinction between the question of what kind of claim this is, and the question of how I test it. In other words, regarding the nature of the claim, I want to argue that this is a factual claim about the world, not a feeling. Regarding the question of how I test it—that’s a good question. We’ll get to that later. Rabbi, with the ants it’s a technical problem. Presumably if we had a technical solution, we could count. Okay. We’d divide the world up and count. But God’s existence isn’t a technical problem. Why? Because there’s no way to prove it. That’s the technical problem. The technical problem is that I don’t have eyes that can discern God. Fine, just as I have no ability to count ants—what’s the difference? The difference is that there is an ability to count ants. I can’t. Nobody can. Why not? If we divide up the whole world and count, technically one could reach a state in which it would be possible to count. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible. You also can’t organize such a global operation. It’s impossible. There is no way to do it. There is no practical way to do it. So there’s no difference between proving God’s existence and counting ants? There’s no difference in that sense, no. An ant you can see, it physically exists. Okay, so what? God you don’t see. Right, so what? So those are two different things. Fine—and there are sounds I don’t hear, that’s also something different. But in the sense that I have a technical problem in producing empirical perception of the matter, it’s the same thing. The fact that the technical problem is not the same technical problem—fine, so what? Someone talking about sounds that can’t be heard and someone talking about sights that can’t be seen—it’s the same thing to me. It’s someone who has a technical problem verifying his claim, and that still doesn’t mean the claim is not a claim about the world. The fact that there are several kinds of technical problems—so what? Isn’t there a difference between the fact that the ants, first of all, clearly exist, as those before me said, but there is a problem with how many there are, because the main problem is that while we try counting in one place, more will be running around elsewhere? Regarding God, indeed, as those before me said, there is no possibility at all to see or feel that such a thing exists. We’re not talking about quantities, we’re talking about the very essence. What I want to compare is only this: if the dispute were whether there are three gods or one God or five, that would fit the ants. No, it wouldn’t fit the ants, because there’s still a difference: whether God is one or three gods, I have no way of seeing any of them. So what difference does it make whether the problem is quantitative or about existence? I am not making an analogy between the two questions in terms of content. I am comparing counting ants—not the existence of ants, the counting of ants—to the existence of God. The question of counting ants is not empirically accessible to me, and the question of God’s existence is not empirically accessible to me either. You’re right that the existence of ants is empirically accessible to me, fine, but I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the counting. And counting ants is like the existence of God—both are questions that are not empirically accessible to me. And that still doesn’t mean that when I make some claim about them, it is not a factual claim. That’s my whole point. But Rabbi, you’re making an analogy between ants and God. But maybe there is one essential difference: when you speak about a factual claim and you speak about the world, a claim about the world—is there room to say that “the world,” when we define what counts as the world for factual claims, means our physical world that is accessible by our senses? Some definition—what is the world? Says who? What are facts? Says who? I don’t understand. So it depends how you define it. I… when I say that God exists, I mean that He exists in reality. Whether you call that “in the world” or “not in the world,” I don’t care, but He exists in reality, and that is a claim about reality. When I say “the world” in the previous context, I mean reality. I don’t care right now whether that is the universe, the earth, or something broader, but something outside my personal experiences. Okay, fine. So the distinction is basically between the category of the claim—whether the claim is a factual claim—and the question of how I confirm or refute it, which is already a technical question. Whether I can, whether I can’t, by what means I can. We’ll talk about that later. Another implication of this is actually the importance of religious feeling. I’m already jumping far ahead, just so we can see the implications. Very often people have some feeling that someone who has no religious feeling is not a true believer. Deep faith / belief, true faith / belief, is faith / belief full of religious feeling and all kinds of things like that. I would say even more than that: there are people who define religiosity through religious feeling. Religiosity is basically someone who experiences some kind of religious feeling. Now, in the second formulation that is of course incorrect, because as I said earlier, belief in God is a claim about the world, not a claim about me. So what difference does it make whether I have religious feeling or I don’t have religious feeling? That is, it is not important—or I don’t know if not important—it is not essential to my being a believing person. Whether it is important or not, one can argue, but it is not essential to my being a believing person. But I want to claim even more than that. If indeed religious feeling is merely an expression of the fact that I believe—and I remind you of the example I brought in the previous lecture about Coleridge and the sublime waterfall, the debate between the two tourists there, where one says the waterfall is sublime and the other says it is beautiful, okay? And Lewis, who wrote the book, claims that there is an argument between them. And if there is an argument between them, that means that to say that the waterfall is beautiful or that the waterfall is sublime is not a statement about me, but a statement about the waterfall. Therefore we have some argument over whether it is sublime or beautiful. Now, one cannot deny that when I say the waterfall is sublime, directly I am describing an inner psychological state of mine, that it arouses in me some feeling of sublimity, a sense of grandeur. But what I explained is that this feeling or this experience is an expression of something happening outside. When I say that I am gripped by feelings of grandeur in front of the waterfall, that is a statement about me. When I say that the waterfall is sublime, that is a statement about the waterfall, though the statement uses terminology taken from my consciousness or my experience. So I say the waterfall is so sublime that it arouses feelings of grandeur in me. But my feelings of grandeur are an indication that there is something in the waterfall itself that really ought to arouse such feelings. Therefore I say that if another person sees this waterfall, I also expect him to feel the same feelings, because there is something in the waterfall that ought to arouse them, and therefore the focus is the waterfall, not me. There is a difference between saying “I feel feelings of grandeur” and saying “the waterfall is sublime,” even though in both cases, at the end of the day, I begin and end with a feeling inside me. The statement “there are feelings of grandeur in me” is a subjective statement about what is happening inside me. The statement “the waterfall is sublime” uses the feeling inside me in order to make a claim about the waterfall. Okay? The same applies to faith / belief. I can use religious feeling as a description of a conscious, experiential, emotional state of mine—inner, subjective, mine. Then, according to the previous definition, that is not called faith / belief. I can use it as an indication of something happening outside. I say: there is a religious feeling inside me because I encounter something out there—God—which arouses this religious feeling in me. Encountering God has some property that arouses religious feelings in us, just as encountering the waterfall arouses feelings of grandeur in us. Okay? So my feelings are an indication of something that exists in the world. That is basically the claim. But if indeed that is so, suppose there is someone built differently—in him, an encounter with God does not arouse religious feelings, emotions. It arouses no feelings. The man is cold as ice, cool-headed, his emotional dimension is severed, okay? It doesn’t exist. Fine, he believes in the existence of God, but it arouses in him no experience, no feeling, no emotional movement. Can one say that he is not a believer? Absolutely not. Is he less believing than a person who feels? In my opinion, that too is not the case. He is simply built differently. Suppose there were… The word “believer,” even when speaking from the side of the person himself, is already something rational and then something emotional. I didn’t understand why this is connected to feeling. That is, the moment he believes, even subjectively, beyond this meaning that God exists, he has a rational understanding—it can be said that he believes from his side regardless of feeling. That is exactly what I’m claiming. That’s what I’m claiming. Not only because you’re looking at the external side and not his side—I’m saying that faith / belief altogether is more a rational matter. Then it’s the same thing. I don’t see the difference between the statements; it’s the same statement. Right, that is exactly what I’m claiming. So very often there are people who feel that someone more flooded with religious feeling is a greater believer. So it depends. It is still a little more subtle than what I said before. If indeed he is a person built like you, and you feel religious feeling and he doesn’t, it may be that he really simply believes less, and therefore has less religious feeling. But if the absence of religious feeling stems from a different psychological structure—his emotional dimension is built differently, weaker or not existent at all or whatever—and therefore his encounter with God, which is exactly the same faith / belief as yours, simply does not arouse in him the feelings it arouses in you, then so what? That is simply a difference between me and you in how we are psychologically built. It has nothing to do with the question of how much we believe. It’s like the waterfall. What? It’s like the waterfall—it is sublime even if someone doesn’t feel sublime feelings. Exactly. In other words, someone standing before a beautiful landscape or a work of art and not being moved—does that mean he perceives the artwork less well? I am not at all sure. It may be that he is simply built differently, and in him excitement is not triggered by encountering good art. But still he can understand that the art is good art, he can explain to you that the art is good art, and therefore he understands art exactly like you. Very often the feeling is that if you are not moved by the art, then you missed something. Not true. It may be that I grasped everything; it’s just that my psychological structure is such that even if I grasp it, it doesn’t arouse in me the same excitement it arouses in others. I’m a Litvak, not a Hasid, and therefore I have no religious feelings. Does that mean I believe less? On the contrary. Very often my feeling is—not sure if on the contrary, but it could even be the opposite. In other words, very often my feeling is that religious feeling sometimes replaces faith / belief rather than expressing it. That is, there are people who construct within themselves some kind of religious experience or religious feeling, and in fact they have never really clarified for themselves whether they truly believe on the cognitive, rational level. Do they really believe? They prefer to dance in the fields before the Holy One, blessed be He, in secluded meditation, instead of asking themselves whether He really exists or whether we’re living in a movie, or on pills. Okay? And those pills can arouse in us very intense feelings. That doesn’t make us greater believers. We are atheists to the same degree. We can dance before the Holy One, blessed be He, with enthusiasm and be complete atheists. And by the way, there are such people. In my opinion there are even quite a few such people. Because they put themselves into that subjective experience, and on the table they say: this is subjective. Okay? Then in fact I see no connection between religious dancing and belief in God. Sometimes both exist and sometimes not, but one does not testify to the other. Okay? In other words, there is no connection between them. Therefore, once I understand feeling as a symptom of faith / belief and not as the essence of faith / belief, this goes in both directions: A, feeling does not always express faith / belief, and absence of feeling does not necessarily express absence of faith / belief. It depends on the person’s psychological structure. There are people who are colder, so their faith / belief is rational, intellectual, and that’s it; it does not find expression in emotional terms. Maybe I’ll bring some example… a nice example of this. I’ve brought it in the past in various contexts. When I lived in Yeruham, because I taught there in the yeshiva, I had a good friend who ran the environmental high school in Sde Boker, the environmental high school in Midreshet Sde Boker—not religious, and the high school wasn’t religious either, but a very high-level school. And he called me and asked me to come during the Ten Days of Repentance and speak to them about concepts of atonement. Meaning, to discuss the concepts as such in honor of the Ten Days of Repentance, not in a religious context. Not to study Torah sources, but to discuss the concepts themselves. Fine, so I accepted the challenge and got there, and I opened with the following example. I said to them: suppose I hurt someone. I come home, I realize I hurt him, and I decide to go and ask his forgiveness, to appease him. Now, inside me there isn’t a drop of remorse over what I did—nothing. I simply whistle, walk on my way whistling, cheerful and happy and gleeful. I don’t care a straw about the matter; it doesn’t interest me emotionally. Meaning, I do not feel it—the fact that the other person was hurt, that he is sad, that I did something bad to him. But I understand that I did something wrong, so I go to appease him. That’s all. I have no pangs of conscience, no heartache, nothing. Now I asked them: suppose I came to you after hurting you and I asked your forgiveness, and Elijah the prophet arrived—the non-religious prophet for our purposes, yes? Elijah the prophet arrived and told you that in my heart there is no relevant feeling regarding this matter, meaning I feel nothing. Would you accept my apology? There was, I think, a wall-to-wall consensus there that no. That’s hypocrisy, what do you mean? You don’t really feel that you hurt me, you don’t really regret hurting me, so what are you telling me stories for? You come ask forgiveness and pardon and to appease me? And I told them that in my eyes, if there is any apology I would accept, it is precisely that apology. That is the purest and most authentic, most genuine apology possible. Because a person who comes and asks forgiveness because he has pangs of conscience—it can certainly be said that he is asking forgiveness in order to sustain his own heartache. He feels guilty about what he did, and in order to ease his guilty conscience he goes and asks me for forgiveness. I’m not saying it’s always so. I’m saying that if you have pangs of conscience, it may be that when you go ask forgiveness, you’re really doing it for yourself and not for me. You want to calm your conscience, to cope with the difficult feelings inside you. In contrast, the fellow I described before has no other motivation at all to come and ask forgiveness. He is not coping with guilt, he does not need to overcome any stomach pains he has, or remorse and guilt feelings and all that. He doesn’t have any of it. The man is cheerful and happy and doesn’t care a straw. So why does he come? He comes because he understands he was in the wrong, and someone who was in the wrong ought to ask forgiveness. Completely rationally, completely coldly. Okay? And for that one doesn’t think he was in the wrong. What? He thinks he was in the right. The one asking forgiveness—in the Rabbi’s case—feels he was fine, only he thinks the other person was hurt so he goes to him not for himself. No, that’s not right. I’m not talking about that. He knows he was in the wrong. It’s just that the part of the brain that, when you’re in the wrong, creates pangs of conscience—that part doesn’t exist in him. In other words, the emotional dimension of being in the wrong does not exist. I was not okay, I am aware that I was not okay. I’m not talking about another problem where I think I was okay—why would I ask your forgiveness then? If you ask forgiveness then, that really is forgiveness on a high level. So I’m saying: if I understand that I was okay but I understand that you think I wasn’t okay—that’s an interesting question whether I have to ask forgiveness or not, and how. That is not the question I’m talking about here. I’m talking about another question. We both agree that I was in the wrong. I too understand that I was in the wrong. Only what? My emotional-psychological structure is such that even when I understand I was in the wrong, pangs of conscience are not aroused in me. That’s it—I’m built differently. The part in the brain is disconnected in me. Okay, so no, I don’t feel it. But I understand rationally that I was in the wrong, and therefore I go and ask forgiveness—that’s the situation I’m discussing here. And if we broaden this to murder, would you see it the same way? Of course. The same thing, exactly the same thing. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that a person who murders… It seems strange; it seems like an abnormal psychological structure in relation to ordinary human beings. But assuming I understand that this indeed is his psychological structure—there’s no… exactly the same. So his psychological structure is so complicated that he feels nothing. That he murdered someone? I don’t know if it’s complicated. Maybe our psychological structure is complicated. His psychological structure is simple. No, but that, that is almost, almost impossible to accept. There are people, there are sociopathic people. There are people… Again, again. But the sociopath isn’t going to take Maimonides now and read the laws of repentance and then go ask… No, no, that is exactly—Ezra, I disagree, that’s not right. That is exactly the point. Meaning, you assume that every person is built the same way. Then you say: how can it be that he doesn’t feel guilt? Obviously something is wrong with him. I’m saying it may be that what is wrong with him is in the wiring. The wiring in the brain. In other words, at the end of the day he completely understands that he was in the wrong, and he understands that he has an obligation. I say this on the assumption that this is known to me. Obviously if it isn’t known to me, I can suspect that the person is dishonest, that he really wants to gain points and therefore he asks forgiveness, but not really—the apology is not authentic. I’m not talking about that. Elijah the prophet comes and tells me: know that this man has damage in his amygdala. He doesn’t have that section in the brain, okay? That’s the claim. And now the question is: what is his apology worth? Okay, that is the discussion. And then I say: it doesn’t matter what the severity of the crime was. Even if it were Hitler, who murdered millions of Jews or millions of people around the world, okay? And he is a complete sociopath, a complete sociopath in the emotional sense. Meaning, he feels absolutely no pangs of conscience for what he did, but suddenly he understands intellectually that this isn’t right. What he did is immoral. So he goes and asks forgiveness. In my eyes, that is an exalted apology. It is the purest apology I can imagine. Because there it is clear that this does not come for his own sake. There it is clear that when he comes to ask forgiveness, it is for me. It is because he understands that he was truly in the wrong. Not in order to sustain some difficult feelings nesting inside him. Therefore in my eyes that is a wonderful apology. Why? It could support something else. It could support the fact that he only wants social approval, not necessarily moral feeling. That’s also possible. I said that, I mentioned that possibility earlier, and I’m saying that right now Elijah the prophet came and told me that it’s not that. This is an authentic apology even though he has no feelings whatsoever. Okay? Not that he comes to score points. As I said earlier, there is a possibility that he comes to score points; we often assume this about human beings, by the way. After all, we don’t know what is in a person’s heart. But if we see a person and it is somehow clear to us that he feels no pangs of conscience at all and nevertheless he comes and asks forgiveness, we have a tendency to attribute it to self-interest. He wants to gain points or something. But okay, so let’s go the other way. Who says that if a person mixes in his feeling—not feeling, his moral aspect and his feeling—that this is considered self-interested? That’s his structure; you can’t judge him, after all that’s his structure; he also has a conscience. Because you said it is more exalted when there is no conscience, when it is totally clean, only moral. I’ll explain—I didn’t say that. What I said is that when you have feeling, one can perhaps attribute it to the feeling, that you are coming to sustain the feeling. I didn’t say it is necessary. I said explicitly: it may be that despite your having feeling, the request is authentic. But when you have feeling, there is also the possibility of interpreting it as coming in order to satisfy yourself, to cope with something inside you. When you have no feeling, then clearly it is a pure request. That’s the claim. Obviously if there is… I certainly do not recommend that people shut off their conscience, their guilty conscience, even if we had some technical ability to do that. I do recommend that people not let those feelings direct them or manage them. They can give us some indication that we were in the wrong, awaken us to the fact that we are in the wrong, but in the end, in the end, I need to understand in my head that I was in the wrong, not act from the gut. So one need not shut off the gut, but the gut must not run us. Okay? Those are two different things. And the claim—what exactly is so infuriating or confusing in these statements? We are used to people being built the way they are, the way we are built. Each person interprets his surroundings in light of how he knows himself. And then when I see a person who comes and feels no pangs of conscience over something he did, I attribute it to the fact that he is probably wicked—he doesn’t recognize that he was in the wrong. But that is of course only on the assumption that he is built like me, that he is built like the ordinary normative person, that he is not a sociopath. Okay? But if he is a sociopath—and by the way, sociopath is not an insult, it is a kind of disorder. What kind of disorder? Deviance. Whether it’s a disorder or not is already a judgment. It is deviance. It is different from ordinary human beings. He lacks the dimension, the part responsible for empathy. Okay? But that does not mean he cannot be completely righteous. This person can behave correctly in an entirely intellectual way, without pangs of conscience and heartache and remorse and guilt feelings and so on. Why? Because his head says this is how one must act and this is how one must not act, and that is what he does. Such a person may be built differently from me, but he is certainly no less moral than I am. And this means, in essence, that we need to distinguish between a situation in which feeling is an indication of something, and treating feeling as something in itself. And my claim is that in every situation where feeling has evaluative significance, the feeling actually serves as an indication, and the value, the evaluative dimension, is not connected to the feeling as such, but to what the feeling expresses. So in this case, when a person regrets a bad act he did, the regret is valueless in my eyes. All the value there is only if the regret expresses recognition that you were in the wrong. Normal people, when they recognize that, then feel remorse or guilt feelings. But those feelings are an indication that you are okay; the feeling itself is not what is demanded of you. And that is the claim. And the same thing I want to say about religious feeling, whether in relation to art or in relation to belief in God or in relation to anything else. If I understand that feeling is not the essence of faith / belief, because faith / belief is a factual claim, then why tie it to feeling? Because many times people who believe in the existence of God—yes, that we have some sort of encounter with Him—it arouses emotional dimensions in them, and because of that we identify the emotional dimension that is aroused with faith / belief. But that is a mistaken identification. The emotional dimension is a consequence of faith / belief, not the essence of faith / belief itself. It is a consequence of the fact that I believe. Therefore, if there is a person in whom this dimension does not exist, this consequence does not appear, that does not mean he has no faith / belief. He has the faith / belief; it’s just that its consequence, its emotional consequence, does not appear in him, because he is built differently. So that means that feeling too has no value in itself, but on the other hand there certainly is room to see in feeling some kind of indication. In other words, a normal person, after he murders, has pangs of conscience. If he has no pangs of conscience, then either he is simply built differently, or he truly does not think he was in the wrong for the murder, in which case he really is a wicked person or someone holding wicked values. So it depends whether feeling is an indication of the thing or whether I grasp the feeling as the essence of the thing. The same in faith / belief. Religious feeling can perhaps serve as an indication of faith / belief, on the assumption that when human beings believe, it arouses in them one feeling or another. By the way, I’m not entirely sure this is really so. There are people for whom this is so, but it’s not like, say, guilt feelings after murder. Almost every person after murder feels guilt feelings. Almost every person, it seems to me, at least as far as I understand. Therefore not to feel guilt is deviant. Not to feel religious feeling—even for a believing person—I don’t think that’s deviant. Some feel and some do not, depending on how you are built. Therefore in this context religious feeling may serve as an expression of faith / belief, but its absence does not mean there is no faith / belief. More than that—even its presence does not mean there is, since there are religious feelings among atheists. Therefore the emotional dimension of faith / belief, in essence, I set aside in light of what I said in the previous lecture, except perhaps as an indication of faith / belief: if your psychological structure is such, then the existence of the feeling may serve as an indication of faith / belief. And here, here a question arises on the curious level: do you see the world of Hasidism as something that opposes the way you are describing these things, or as something that can coexist with the way you explain these things, on the level of the relation between feeling and rationality in these matters? Look, in the simple sense it seems to me that it opposes it. Because if you see value in feeling as… I should actually have been in Lizhensk now because of the yahrzeit, but I couldn’t because of the coronavirus, so these questions are occupying me. You gained—you were spared, so you gained, you see, I saved you from that. In any case, what I want to say is that if you see value in feeling, that contradicts what I’m saying. It may be that you can use feeling to produce something more on the cognitive-intellectual plane; then maybe there are such interpretations of Hasidism too. I don’t deal with Hasidism, so I don’t know exactly. So if you suggest such interpretations, then it doesn’t… conflict. But I think that in a basic sense, in many places at least, I do see a clash. Rabbi, someone who goes up to the graves of the ancestors and feels nothing? Yes. Then what is the reason he would go up to the graves of the ancestors? It’s not like I come and say I hurt someone and I know he was hurt and therefore I need to ask forgiveness and therefore it is pure. Why? Who said he has to go up there? I didn’t understand. Meaning? So he doesn’t have to go up. Someone who goes up to the graves of the ancestors because it arouses feelings in him—that too has no value. So he wants to arouse certain feelings, so he goes to graves of ancestors in order to arouse those feelings. Someone else dances salsa in order to arouse those feelings. Each person with his own way of arousing feelings inside himself. That is not valueless. The value of things is measured according to their value, not according to the feelings they arouse. So why do I fulfill commandments according to this? Because that is what is right, because you are obligated. Yes. And this isn’t supposed to affect me? Weren’t the commandments meant to refine? No, I don’t know, I don’t think so, or at least in many cases I don’t think that’s correct. So that means there is a believing person who does not keep commandments and that’s okay. No, that’s not okay. Why? He believes, but he doesn’t keep commandments. Here there is a feeling of faith / belief—it doesn’t need to express itself in commandments. No, who said so? You decided that. I’m saying he has a feeling of faith / belief, meaning he is a believing person even without keeping commandments. But saying that he is okay is not the same as saying that he is a believing person. That he is a believing person is one thing, and the question of whether he is okay is something else. Okay, he is not okay because he isn’t doing what he is obligated to do. Two different things. In fact, more than that: I claim that faith / belief, in its essence, religious faith / belief in its essence, is commitment to keeping commandments. That is exactly the alternative I propose to the emotional conceptions of faith / belief, according to which faith / belief is supposed to be some kind of experience or feeling or sensation that accompanies us. No. Faith / belief means commitment to keeping commandments. The practical expression of faith / belief—the faith / belief itself is belief in God—but the practical expression of faith / belief is not feeling. The practical expression of faith / belief is commitment to commandments. That is faith / belief. If I don’t understand why I have to do a commandment, it’s like if I don’t understand why I need to appease the person—I don’t understand that he was hurt—then what’s the point? I didn’t understand. You understand that it is right to keep commandments; you just don’t understand what it does. So what difference does that make? If you understand that it is right, then you understand that it is right, so you have to do it. You don’t need to understand what it does. Like when I go to a doctor. If I don’t understand that the person was hurt, what is the point of asking his forgiveness? Because I have some rule that says so, let’s say? Not a rule. I think it is right to appease a person who was hurt. If you don’t think so, then indeed you won’t go appease him. What’s the question? And I do understand that it is right to appease him, I just have no feeling there. Then you need to understand that one must appease him. Obviously—otherwise why would I go? What do you mean? But taking a lulav—what can I understand in that? Understand that this is what one must do. The Torah says, “And you shall take for yourselves the fruit of a beautiful tree, palm branches, and willows of the brook,” and therefore one must do it. So what am I—a robot? Some sort of robot that takes a lulav? Not a robot. You know that this is what is right, and that is what you do. Why is that called a robot? Because there is no intention or thought here that I need to… There is intention—to fulfill one’s obligation. The highest intention on earth: the intention to fulfill one’s obligation. What you call intention is idolatry. What you call intention is taking a lulav in order to trigger some third nerve from the left in my heart. That means you are taking a lulav not as service of God but in order to activate some part of your psyche. That is worship very much not for its own sake. Even if not idolatry, still worship not for its own sake. On the contrary, someone who does it in order to fulfill his obligation—that is worship in its purity. Exactly like the apology I discussed; it is really parallel. But in the apology I understand that he was hurt. I have to understand that he was hurt, because if I don’t understand he was hurt then what is the point? And here too I understand that this is the right thing to do. I don’t understand why it is right or what it does, but I understand that this is what is right. It’s like a doctor prescribing me medicine. I take the medicine even though I don’t understand how it fixes what it fixes. But I understand that it fixes it, without understanding exactly how it does so and so on. So I will take the medicine. Okay? Thank you, Rabbi. If I may ask a question? Could it be that there is some conflation here between acceptance and understanding, the two concepts? I can take upon myself to take a lulav, I can… take upon myself to ask someone’s forgiveness because I was told that this is what one should do, without understanding why I am doing it and without feeling any emotion. And in parallel I can do something because I understand it intellectually, understand it rationally. If you do something… you could call this a semantic question of some kind. I… those are two very, very different things—to do something, to act in the world out of simple acceptance because someone said so, a kind of robot, but simple acceptance under the guidance of someone or something else and not necessarily out of thought or understanding. Those are different things, entirely different things. When I fly on a plane, I fly on a plane, I don’t know how a plane works, but I know that it works, so in order to get to Australia I get on a plane. So what is that? Am I less okay than the pilot who also knows how a plane works, or the avionics expert, someone who specializes in avionics? What does that have to do with anything? If I understand that this thing is right, then I do it. Do I also have to understand in what way it is right or what it does in order for it to be right? I don’t see why that is so important. On the contrary, suppose I understood what taking a lulav repairs in the upper worlds, and because of that I did it. In my opinion that would actually be less for its own sake than the waving of the lulav I described earlier. Because then I would be doing it not in order to fulfill the commandment, but in order to repair the netzach within hod. Whereas here I am doing it as service of God because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it and because this is what is right to do. That is an interesting example, and maybe there really is a spectrum here. The extent to which I accept something often depends on the extent to which I trust it, and the extent to which I trust it depends on the extent to which I understand certain things about it. So if I fly on a plane, I trust it. You are right that I don’t understand all the mechanisms involved, but I understand many of the mechanisms that I know it is based on, in order to give me some level of confidence. No, not at all. You don’t have to understand anything. There are people who truly understand nothing and are very, very afraid to fly on a plane. Fine, and there are people who understand nothing, but they trust those who do understand, and therefore they get on the plane. I don’t see what the problem is. But the plane takes you from one place to another. You know, you have experience with these things. With keeping commandments or with… you don’t know that it takes you somewhere else. The first time you flew on a plane you had no prior experience. You have no experience, but for most people you see that it happens. You don’t see anything the first time you were on a plane. You see that your friend was just now in Ra’anana and after several hours he lands elsewhere. You perhaps see, but I’m talking about another situation. I didn’t see. The first time I ever see a plane. Now people come to me whom I trust, and they say to me, listen, if you get on it, it’ll take you to Australia—and I get on it. Am I irrational? Am I not okay? What’s the problem? There’s no problem. For some people it comes from experience; for some it comes from trusting others who tell them. If you trust them, everything is fine. So I trust the Holy One, blessed be He, that these commandments are the right thing, and therefore I do them. But that—you’re sure of. It’s a fact, you can prove it. Okay, no, but you were here and now landed somewhere else. That proves nothing. I’m talking about before I get on the plane. You were in Ra’anana and now you are in Australia. But I’m not yet. I’m still in the Ra’anana airport debating whether to get on a plane to Australia. Okay, that’s in the initial state. So in the next state you are somewhere else. You see… But why did I get on? Why did I get on the plane? Because there was a purpose. There was a purpose—you wanted to get to Australia. And I believe that it takes me to that purpose. I don’t understand how it does that, but I got on the plane for the sake of a purpose. But you don’t get on it just like that; you get on it because you assess that it will realize the purpose. Right. That’s all. So I also perform the lulav because I assess that it will realize some purpose. I have trust in the Holy One, blessed be He. But that purpose… But that purpose you see. The purpose of taking a plane and landing somewhere. After I traveled. I return… we keep going over this again and again. After I land, I see. I’m asking: how do I get on it in the first place? That trust with which I get on it in the first place is equivalent to the trust involved in taking a lulav. Afterward, when I get to Australia, it will turn out that it also brought me somewhere. Perhaps with taking a lulav too, when I get to the heavenly court or the World to Come, there too I’ll discover what exactly it did, and maybe… I don’t see any difference. There you see a result; here you don’t see a result. No, I don’t see a result, but that’s not right. You land in Australia; here you don’t land in Australia. No, I don’t land in Australia—I board in Ra’anana. When I land in Australia it’s already too late; I already boarded the plane. If I didn’t need to board in Ra’anana, then I also won’t land in Australia—I’ll crash after two minutes. When I board in Ra’anana, I assume that I will probably land in Australia and not crash after two minutes. On what basis do I assume that? I’ve never seen it happen. After I got to Australia, that no longer helps me—I already got on the plane. I’m asking what causes me to get on it. Anyway, let’s return to our matter. So what I basically want to say is that religious feeling is not the essence of faith / belief. At most it is an indication or some kind of expression of faith / belief. Now I want to read you a Maimonides that I’m very fond of. Maimonides, chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance. Maimonides says as follows: “A person should not say: behold, I perform the commandments of the Torah and engage in its wisdom in order to receive all the blessings written in it, or in order to merit the life of the World to Come; and I separate from the transgressions against which the Torah warned in order to be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or in order not to be cut off from the life of the World to Come. It is not fitting to serve God in this way. For one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the sages. And only the ignorant, women, and children serve God in this way, and they are trained to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.” So what is service out of love? In law 2: “One who serves out of love engages in Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom, not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil, and not in order to inherit the good, but does the truth because it is true, and in the end the good comes because of it. And this level is a very great level, and not every sage merits it. And it is the level of our father Abraham, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called His beloved, because he served only out of love. And this is the level concerning which the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses, as it is said: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God.’ And when a person loves God with the proper love, he immediately performs all the commandments out of love.” Now there is an interesting point here. Maimonides explains to us that we need to serve out of love and not out of fear. But within his words he also gives us a definition of what is called serving out of love. One who engages in Torah and commandments and walks in the paths—not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil and not in order to inherit good, but does the truth because it is true. In other words, serving out of love means doing the truth because it is true. Period. Which I think is exactly what I was talking about before. I do this thing not because it arouses in me one feeling or another, not even love and fear of God in the emotional sense. Because love and fear of God in the emotional sense—as an impulse or as the basis for service of God—is actually to perform the service of God in order to sustain one or another feeling inside me. But Maimonides speaks about doing the truth because it is true. That, in his view, is what is called serving out of love. And in this sense I think it is really parallel to what I described earlier—someone waving a lulav because he knows that it is the right thing, not because it arouses in him intense religious feelings, not because he knows that it repairs the netzach within hod, and not because he knows, I don’t know, that it will make him into a more moral person. He does it because that is the obligation, because the truth is that this is what one must do, because that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded. That is what is called serving for its own sake. And where does he get the word, the issue of truth, out of the concept of love? What? I didn’t understand. He basically takes the concept of serving out of love, and in effect talks—as you say—about because it is true. Where does Maimonides—how is that consistent for him? Are truth and love synonymous concepts for Maimonides? Love, yes—in this case, yes. Love appears in his writings in several meanings. There is an emotional dimension of love. Here, in my opinion, Maimonides is not speaking about the emotional dimension of love; he is speaking about the yes, it’s like in Pirkei Avot where it says there, how does it go there? “Any love that depends on something—when the thing ceases, the love ceases. Love that does not depend on something—when the thing ceases, the love does not cease.” What does that mean? Love that does not depend on something—what is that? It is love that does not stem from some particular thing in the beloved. Suppose there is some quality of the beloved that I love. Then maybe he will have some accident, that character trait will change, and then I will stop loving him. Love that does not depend on something—when the thing ceases, the love does not cease. But on the other hand, if the love does not depend on anything, then why do I love him? After all, if there is nothing in him worthy of love, then why love? Family bond, a child, your own child. Okay, but that is treating love as a state. I am talking about love as a demand. For example, the commandment of love—to love the stranger, to love the Holy One, blessed be He, “love your neighbor as yourself,” all kinds of things like that. Here there is a normative demand of love, not a psychological state in which I happen to love. And I ask what this is based on if it is not conditioned on anything. And the claim is: because that is the truth. The moment I hang it on something side-related, I am not really doing it because that is the truth; I am doing it because I have some purpose or another. When someone serves the Holy One, blessed be He, because he loves the Holy One, blessed be He, or fears Him, that is actually not service for its own sake. Service for its own sake is to do it because that is the truth. Not because of feelings of love and fear. The concept of love in Maimonides here, in my opinion, cancels the first thing, not the second. Not emotional love, but love as… love of truth—what several writers call the intellectual love of God. This is not emotional love; rather, it is understanding that this is what is right, that my connection with the Holy One, blessed be He, exists and ought to exist not because it gives me something, but because that is the truth, that is what should be done. And the concept of love as it appears here is not similar to the concept of love that appears in other contexts in Maimonides, where it is emotional. Here Maimonides defines it explicitly: to do the truth because it is true—that is what he calls love. By the way, this is as distinct from desire. What is the difference between desire and love? Love that is because of something—that is desire. Because if I love something because it smells good, I love something because it is tasty, I love something because it gives me a good feeling, or I love someone because he gives me a good feeling—I do not love him, I love myself. As the Gashashim say: does a fisherman love fish? If he loves fish, then why does he fish for them? In other words, you really love yourself, not the fish. Love that depends on something is not love; it is desire. Love in its essence is doing the truth because it is true, not because of this reason or that. Not even positive reasons, by the way. Love of God and fear of God are commandments, and therefore they are positive things. But they are not supposed to be the basis for keeping commandments. Those are two out of the 613 commandments—love of God and fear of God. The basis for doing commandments should be the truth of it. I do the truth because it is true. That is what Maimonides is really writing here. And then this completely neutralizes the emotional dimension I have in the matter. Actually, commitment to truth is the essence, or the purest expression, of faith / belief. So why does he use love, the word love? He could avoid it, because love usually means something with feeling. He could have written: “one who engages in Torah and commandments, etc., etc., does the truth.” He does not need to introduce the word love at all. Why does he introduce it? I explained, I explained earlier that the concept of love itself, when you dig into it, you see this within it. The emotional expression of love is not love. It is the emotional expression of love. Exactly like in faith / belief. As distinct from desire. Desire doesn’t begin from some sense that this is the truth; rather, everything begins and ends with the fact that I want to obtain the thing. But love begins—some philosophers define the difference between love and desire, like Don Yehuda Abravanel, who has a book, Dialogues on Love, which is really parallel to a work by a philosopher, scientist, statesman, Spanish politician named José Ortega y Gasset, who has a book called Five Essays on Love. And there he distinguishes between love and desire. He says that desire is centripetal, love is centrifugal. In other words, in desire I am at the center and I want all things to come to me. I basically want to draw all things toward the center. I am at the center, and everything at the periphery is really supposed to come to me. I want to obtain it. That is called desire. Love is when I work for the other. Now notice that the feeling of love, which people very often praise so highly, is actually a feeling that interferes with real love, because when I have a feeling of love, then if I do something for the beloved, at least it can be—as I said regarding faith / belief, it is the same thing—it may be in order to sustain the feeling inside me and not really for him, but rather there is some feeling inside me that causes me to want to act for him. So in the end I am doing this for myself, not for him, and therefore there is actually an element of desire here and not of love. You see the analogy between love and faith / belief. It is the same thing, and therefore I think it is no accident that Maimonides here chooses this metaphor or this expression of love. Yes, you know that little teaching that some Torah commentators remark on, where it says about Jacob: “And they seemed to him like but a few days because of his love for her.” Yes, so the famous question is: when I love a woman and want to attain her, every day seems to me like eternity. But with Jacob it works the opposite way. Seven years seemed to him like a few days because of his love for her. How does that work? Usually love causes the opposite state, where every day seems like eternity, and here eternity seems to him like a day. And the answer is that Jacob loved Rachel, not himself. The ordinary love we are used to is that I love myself. I want to attain Rachel. So if I work for her seven days, it seems to me like seven years, because I already must have her, I must attain her. But if I work for her, if she is at the center and not I, then even if I need to work seven years, in my eyes it is like a few days, because I love her, not me. In other words, there is a difference. Love in the emotional sense always contains some dimension in which I too am present, some dimension of desire, as opposed to the intellectual love of God, what Maimonides talks about here, which is something intellectually cold that does not have to find emotional expression—though it may, by the way, but it doesn’t have to. Exactly as I said regarding faith / belief: the feeling of faith / belief may be an expression of faith / belief, but it doesn’t have to be. Faith / belief without feeling can also be perfectly fine. Just to conclude, let me bring law 3 here, which is really an amusing anecdote especially. In law 3 Maimonides says this: “And what is the proper love? That one should love God with a very great, exceeding, fierce love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God, and he is found to be constantly obsessed with it, as though sick with lovesickness, whose mind is not free from love of that woman, and he is obsessed with her constantly, whether sitting, rising, or at the time he eats and drinks. Even more than this should the love of God be in the hearts of those who love Him, constantly obsessed with it, as He commanded us, ‘with all your heart and with all your soul.’ And this is what Solomon said by way of metaphor: ‘for I am sick with love’; and the entire Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter.” Now here Maimonides seemingly turns the whole thing upside down. After he explained to us that love here means doing the truth because it is true—the coldest, most rational thing detached from emotion possible—suddenly here in law 3 he compares it to love of a woman and Song of Songs and all the emotional storms that accompany love. How does that fit with what he said one law earlier? This is just an anecdote to complete what I said earlier, but in light of what I said earlier, I think this law should be interpreted as follows. Very often we have some tendency to take a metaphor and derive from it every conclusion regarding the thing being illustrated, to take it too far. But a metaphor often comes to illustrate one certain point. Don’t take the side details of the metaphor and liken them too to the thing being illustrated. That is not the point. The metaphor comes to emphasize a particular point; there are also other points that are not relevant. And I claim that love, romantic love, what Maimonides brings here as a metaphor for love of God—when he says it should be like this—he means in the sense of intensity, not in the sense of emotionality. In other words, just as in the love of a man and a woman it is clear to us that it accompanies us always, agitates us, occupies us day and night—they are constantly preoccupied with it—so Maimonides says the love of God, even though it is intellectual love and not emotional, should accompany you all the time just as you find in romantic love. Not that it should be emotional like romantic love, but rather that despite the fact that it is not emotional, as he explained in the previous law, its intensity should be like emotional loves, which accompany us all the time. It seems to me that is what he means to say here in law 3, and then there is no contradiction between law 2 and law 3, and this sharpens even more what I said earlier about the place of feeling in faith / belief, and generally in values. I think that feelings have no value at all. Feelings are at most an expression of things that do have value, but feeling in itself has no value. Someone who is built in a way that is not emotional, then he does not get emotional. So because of that he is a less moral or less good person? No. He is simply built differently. What determines whether you are a moral person is whether you do the right things, not how emotional you get about doing them. At most it is an indication, if at all. Okay, that’s it. Do you want to comment or ask? So… in my opinion with Maimonides it’s simple—that it actually strengthens things when he says to you “like love,” because love with a reason is no good, it depends on something, and when it doesn’t depend on something, when you do it without a reason, that means you believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. There is no reason. Exactly… that’s clear, but in law 3 he seemingly makes an analogy and describes love of God as something emotional like Song of Songs. That was the problem. So why do you love when there is no reason? Because you feel something emotional. That is love without a reason. No, the opposite. The emotions are a reason. When I speak about love without a reason, I mean loving something because that is what is right, not because there is something that pushes me to love it, that causes me to love it. I decided to love it. The result… I don’t know if it is because it is right or perhaps chemistry or something non-rational. It doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to say is that the result is a certain feeling that I feel. But as I said regarding faith / belief, I’ll say here too. Of course religious feeling does not disqualify faith / belief. I am only claiming that it is not the essence of faith / belief. If it doesn’t appear, nothing happened. This does not mean that someone who has religious feeling should take a pill and shut it off. I did not say that. I only said that religious feeling is not the essence. At most, it is an expression of your being a believer, just as the feeling of love is an expression of your feeling connected to your spouse or to whomever you love. But the feeling in itself has no… The great feeling a person has toward his children—does that have value? It is just an evolutionary fact. According to this, is there such a thing as love without feeling? I think so. Yes. The intellectual love of God can appear in a person as love without emotional expressions. No, not love of God. I mean love of… It’s the same thing. What’s the difference? If it can appear in relation to God, why can’t it appear in relation to a friend, a spouse, I don’t know, children? One may feel nothing and still be deeply concerned for them because they matter to you. Not matter to you emotionally—matter to you cognitively. But I also assume that feeling often strengthens the rational side. People need feeling, otherwise it’s boring, otherwise it suddenly changes. Feeling feeds thought. Sometimes even more than that. Sometimes there may even be value in building an emotional dimension because it will fuel my action in the right direction. That’s fine. But still, feeling in itself has no value; it is an instrument. So what is the difference between faith / belief and love according to Maimonides? Because according to the interpretation the Rabbi is giving, they sound very close to one another. And after all, Maimonides at the beginning of Sefer Mada speaks about belief, and at the end he speaks about love. No, that is exactly the point. What I read now was from chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance. Besides that, in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, chapter 2, Maimonides speaks about the commandment of love of God. And it is not the same thing. When he speaks about the commandment of love of God, he is apparently speaking about love in its ordinary sense—perhaps even with emotional expressions, or perhaps not, but he speaks about love in its ordinary meaning. That is the commandment of love of God. So why does he repeat it in the Laws of Repentance? He already said it in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. Because in the Laws of Repentance he is speaking about another concept of love, a concept that is really connected to faith / belief—to do the truth because it is true. And repentance means to return to being a person who acts, who does the truth because it is true. That is what it means to repent. That is why Maimonides ends the Laws of Repentance with love in this meaning. In the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah he speaks about the commandment of love of God, which is a commandment, one of the commandments. That is something else. I can’t avoid… The whole context in the Laws of Repentance in these chapters is service of God for its own sake. I can’t avoid telling a very small and short story, although the lecture is over, regarding the religious issue and feeling. When I was a small child, six or seven years old, I stood next to my father on the High Holy Days and asked him: tell me, why don’t you do like the people here around us with the prayer shawl with the silver dots, swaying all the time, swaying all the time? Why aren’t you like that? So my father told me: listen, if I sway all the time… this way I stand upright, the prayer shawl on my shoulders, and I have time to think. There’s, you know, a famous Kuzari that discusses the question why people sway during prayer. To drive away the thoughts. Meaning, a really bizarre statement—I don’t remember, it’s a really bizarre passage. To drive away stray thoughts. Yes, he has some other little teaching there, but it’s an extremely strange one, I no longer remember. You’re reminding me—I have an association, I need to check what exactly he says there. Because they only had one book, they stood around it and had to sway to see the letters. Okay, Sabbath peace. Sabbath peace.