Faith – Lesson 7
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
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Table of Contents
- Faith as commitment to command in Maimonides’ sources
- Identification, rational and non-rational commandments, and motivation for action
- Charity to a non-Jew, returning lost property, and the asymmetry between moral and command-based motives
- Emotion, intuition, and the claim that emotions have no intrinsic value
- Defining “God” as formal authority and the move from fact to obligation
- Rejecting experience, meditation, “a Sabbath that brings you closer,” and education as the basis of faith
- The two “toolboxes” for facts and the presentation of the “paradox of faith”
- Critique of logical proofs: validity, begging the question, and mathematics
- Implication: proofs do not bring an atheist to faith, at most to awareness
- Critique of “do not stray” as a ban on inquiry and of naive faith
- The commandment of faith in Maimonides and the rejection of “Pascal’s Wager”
- Interim summary: a dead end and the promise of a solution later on
Summary
General Overview
The text defines the essence of theistic faith as commitment to command and to Jewish law, and not as an emotional experience or merely an abstract philosophical position, and grounds this in various sources in Maimonides. It distinguishes between a desirable identification with rational commandments and the lack of any special value in identifying with non-rational commandments, while maintaining that even in rational commandments the motivation for performance must be the command itself and not emotion or identification. It then argues that emotions have no value significance in and of themselves, and that faith is a factual claim and therefore is not acquired through experiences, meditation, or education alone, but apparently only through philosophy/logic or through an empirical route—except that both routes seem incapable of really “bringing” a person to faith. From this comes a sharp critique of the idea that there is a prohibition against investigating heretical books or of “simple faith” as a stance that prevents clarification, and a tangle is presented whose solution is promised later.
Faith as commitment to command in Maimonides’ sources
The text states that the essence of religious faith is commitment to command and to Jewish law and not only abstract belief, and brings sources from Maimonides for this. In the Laws of Repentance chapter 10, Maimonides sets the ideal of “doing the truth because it is truth,” and in the Laws of Idolatry he presents acceptance of God as a condition for religious service. His commentary to the Mishnah in Hullin is presented as emphasizing that one does things “because of the command from Sinai,” and at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings the discussion is brought about one who does things out of “the necessity of reason.”
Identification, rational and non-rational commandments, and motivation for action
Maimonides in Eight Chapters chapter 6 is presented as stressing the importance of a person’s identifying with the commandments, and not doing them only as one who is “commanded and does,” while suppressing his inclination, and the text argues that this does not contradict the view that action is measured by commitment to the command. Maimonides distinguishes between rational commandments, where there is value in identification, and non-rational commandments, about which it is said: “Do not say, ‘I have no desire to eat pork,’ but rather, ‘I do desire it, but what can I do? My Father in heaven has decreed it upon me.’” The text explains that in non-rational commandments there is no value benefit in identification, and therefore there is no need to work to achieve it. It argues that even in rational commandments, although there is an advantage to identification, the motivation for performance remains the command; the test is whether a person would fulfill the commandment even when he has no natural desire or emotional inclination to do so. It cites the Eglei Tal regarding Torah study: one should rejoice in study, but the joy is not the reason for studying, only an accompanying addition.
Charity to a non-Jew, returning lost property, and the asymmetry between moral and command-based motives
The text distinguishes between actions in which there is no commandment and the performance of commandments, and argues that where there is no commandment one may act out of natural morality without any halakhic problem. It rejects the claim that a moral act without command proves that even when there is a command a person acts only from morality, and formulates an asymmetry: the command-based motive does not require exclusivity but rather must be a sufficient condition even without natural emotion, whereas there is no problem with a person acting when there is only a moral motive. It discusses returning lost property to a non-Jew and the opinion that forbids it, and argues that the prohibition, where it exists, is not meant to “work on one’s character” or prove action for its own sake, but rather as a sanction on the non-Jew “because of who he is.” Meiri is brought as holding that with non-Jews who conduct themselves as human beings, all the obligations that apply toward a Jew also apply toward them, and the text presents this as proof that the prohibition is not connected to command-based motivation but to one’s relation to social reality.
Emotion, intuition, and the claim that emotions have no intrinsic value
The text argues that experiences and emotional identification do not “play on the field of value,” and that there is no value in the existence of emotions in themselves, even with respect to faith and commandment observance. It says that a person devoid of emotions is no less righteous if he does the right thing, and suggests that when Maimonides speaks of identification he mainly means intellectual identification of “the necessity of reason,” and not necessarily an emotional dimension. It argues that commandments such as love and fear are not emotional commandments in the emotional sense, and refers to the article “The Status of Emotion in Jewish Law” and to a column where the matter was summarized, clarifying that emotions at most serve as a sign or indication of intellectual identification and not as a cause or an independent value. It adds the distinction that emotional identification is not the same as intuition, and states that intuition may indeed play a role, but that will be discussed later.
Defining “God” as formal authority and the move from fact to obligation
The text defines the concept “God” as one who possesses absolute formal authority such that “whatever He says, I do,” and not merely as Creator of the world or as omnipotent, and presents this as the foundation from which the obligation to fulfill commandments derives. It argues that faith is first and foremost a factual conception that God exists, and from that fact it follows that He is “God” in the sense of an authority that obligates obedience. It returns to the distinction between essential authority and formal authority, and argues that the source of formal authority is the Holy One, blessed be He.
Rejecting experience, meditation, “a Sabbath that brings you closer,” and education as the basis of faith
The text states that since faith is a factual claim, paths such as meditation, experiences, “come stay with us for Sabbath,” candle lighting, and the Sabbath meal are not relevant to building faith, because at most they develop a “religious feeling” that can also exist among atheists. It argues that education in itself is not a basis for faith, and someone who says “I believe / keep commandments because that’s how I was educated” is defined as an atheist, similar to a pagan who does so only because that is how he was raised. It adds that if a person means that his education brought him to internalization and to independent faith identification, then there is no problem with that; but if he means that he has no real reason beyond social-family inertia, then the commandments “are worth nothing.” He illustrates this with the example of putting on tefillin: if a person acts only by the force of education and not by the force of faith, it is argued that if he repents afterward he would need to put them on again, because he did not fulfill the commandment properly.
The two “toolboxes” for facts and the presentation of the “paradox of faith”
The text argues that there are only two tools for dealing with facts: logic/philosophy on the one hand, and empiricism/science and observation on the other, and that every other path is subjective and therefore does not settle factual claims. It argues that the empirical path alone cannot lead to the existence of God because there is no direct observation or falsifying experiment in Popper’s sense, and God’s existence does not provide experimental predictions. It agrees that arguments like “the world appears designed” may be good ones, but they are philosophical conclusions drawn from observation and not “pure” observation.
Critique of logical proofs: validity, begging the question, and mathematics
The text argues that a valid logical argument always rests on premises that already contain the conclusion, and therefore it “begs the question” in the sense that it adds no new information but only exposes what was already contained in the premises. It illustrates this with the joke about “And Abraham went,” which leads to the conclusion that every Jew must walk around with a hat, and explains that the argument is valid but worthless because it persuades only someone who accepts the premises. It also illustrates this with the syllogism about Socrates and explains that the conclusion is already contained in the general statement, and therefore every valid deduction is an exposure of content implicit in the premises. It expands on mathematics as a field that does not add information but opens the “safe” of what already follows from the axioms, and brings the hot-air balloon joke to illustrate precision that is of no practical use.
Implication: proofs do not bring an atheist to faith, at most to awareness
The text concludes that logical arguments cannot turn a nonbeliever into a believer, because if he does not accept the premises the argument will not compel him, and if he does accept the premises then he was already a believer “implicitly,” and the argument only makes him aware of that. By the same logic it argues that philosophical inquiry that ends in heresy only reveals that the person was an “unaware atheist,” and that one can even be “an atheist in a frock coat.” From this it presents a position according to which the religious fear of philosophy as something that produces heresy is unjustified, because philosophy at most strips away wrappings and reveals what is already present in a person’s basic positions.
Critique of “do not stray” as a ban on inquiry and of naive faith
The text argues that fear of engaging in philosophy is unjustified, and presents a principled position according to which it is better for a person to discover what he really thinks. It attacks the prohibition attributed to “do not stray after your hearts” in the cognitive sense, and argues that it is “an utterly unacceptable prohibition” and even “logically impossible,” because one cannot forbid a person from checking whether a system obligates him while that same system demands that he accept it without checking. It compares this to a pagan who is forbidden to examine other arguments, and argues that this is a circle that leads precisely to the position of “I do it because that’s how I was raised.” It presents the position that there is no intellectual free choice in the sense of adopting factual conclusions by force of command, and adds that even the claim that people are “not mature enough” does not solve the problem, because the decision about to whom to grant authority is itself a decision that requires clarification.
The commandment of faith in Maimonides and the rejection of “Pascal’s Wager”
The text returns to the critique of Maimonides’ first positive commandment as a command to believe, and argues that one cannot command faith for two reasons: faith is a factual claim that is not accepted by command, and faith is a condition for fulfilling the commandments and therefore cannot itself be a commandment that precedes the condition for obedience. It rejects the suggestion to view this as an existential commandment, and argues that merely arriving at a factual conclusion is not a “fulfillment of a commandment,” because commandments belong to norms and decisions. It declares that Pascal’s Wager “doesn’t even get off the ground” and promises to deal with it later “with a heavy hand.”
Interim summary: a dead end and the promise of a solution later on
The text summarizes that faith is a factual claim that requires conviction, and therefore emotions, experiences, and education are not a basis, leaving only logical and empirical tools, which seem unable really to bring one to faith. It presents a state of entanglement that leads people to speak about “faith above reason” or a “leap of faith,” and rejects that way out as irrelevant. It ends by stating that there is a way out of the tangle, but it requires “working with your head and not being lazy,” and points ahead to the continuation of the series where the solution will be built.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re in a series on faith, and in the last few times—last time, really—we arrived at the point that the essence of faith, in the religious sense, in the theistic sense, is commitment to command, or commitment to Jewish law, and not just faith in the abstract philosophical sense. And I brought quite a few sources from Maimonides, who I think presents this conception there very, very sharply. Among them, the beginning of chapter 10 in the Laws of Repentance, where he talks about doing the truth because it is truth. In the Laws of Idolatry, where he talks about acceptance of God as a condition for religious worship—both for idolatry and, apparently, also for the worship of God. We talked about his commentary to the Mishnah in Hullin regarding doing things because of the command from Sinai. And in the end I also finished with chapter—yes, there’s also the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings—about someone who does things out of the necessity of reason. And finally I ended with the sixth chapter of Eight Chapters, where Maimonides talks about the importance of a person’s identifying with these things—let me mute here—the importance of a person’s identifying with these things, and not doing them only as one who is commanded and acts, suppressing his inclination. And I said that at first glance this seems to contradict the picture I described up to that point, but I explained that I don’t think there’s a contradiction, because Maimonides is talking about the importance of identification. First of all, Maimonides distinguishes between rational commandments and non-rational commandments. Regarding rational commandments, he says there is importance to identification. Regarding non-rational commandments: do not say, “I have no desire to eat pork,” but rather, “I do desire it, but what can I do? My Father in heaven has decreed it upon me.” But I said that even the rational commandments—after all, in the Laws of Kings Maimonides is talking about rational commandments; the Noahide commandments are rational commandments—and there he says that one must do them because of the command, not because of your own necessity of reason. So how does that fit with the sixth chapter? So I said that in the sixth chapter Maimonides talks about the importance of identification, but he does not say that identification must be the motivation for performance. Meaning, let’s say I give charity. Maimonides says it’s very important that I also identify with it, that I have a natural inclination to give charity, and not only that I do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it, and that’s it, in some emotional vacuum, let’s call it that, where the emotion is basically detached from the matter, or the personal identification is detached from the matter. So he says no: it is much better, much more elevated, if there is also personal identification with these commandments—the rational, moral commandments and the like. But the commandment of giving charity itself really must be done because of the command from Sinai, not because of the identification. True, there should be identification, but not that the action be because of the identification. Those are different things. I do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, and not because of what I think or what I want. At the same time, I also think and want to give charity. But I would do it even if I did not want to give charity, because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. That’s the criterion. If one morning I wake up without that identification, I myself don’t feel like doing this commandment, the question is whether I still do it. If yes, then that means that my motivation in acting is the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. And the fact that I also have identification is true, but the identification is not the motivation. I brought the Eglei Tal there regarding Torah study: one should rejoice in Torah study, but the joy should not be the reason why I study. Those are different things. You should rejoice and enjoy it, all that is true, but the study should be for the sake of the study, and not because of the pleasure and joy it gives me.
[Speaker B] What happens if I give charity to a non-Jew? Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then there really isn’t a command there.
[Speaker B] I do it because of peace with the environment, all kinds of reasons, but not because of a command.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what’s the problem?
[Speaker B] It
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] shows
[Speaker B] that I give charity not because of God’s command.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. First of all, two things. First, one halakhic, and the second logical. Meaning, on the halakhic level, there’s no commandment there, so when there’s no commandment, you don’t have to do it because of the command. Actions that are not connected to commandments you can of course do because of your moral principles. What Maimonides is talking about is how and why to do commandments. One second—what’s going on here, some noises. Okay. So when Maimonides talks about the proper motivation for performing commandments, he’s talking about things that are commandments, not things that are not commandments. Obviously, if something is not a commandment, I can’t do it because of the command. The question on the logical plane is what you’re asking, right? Fine, but there’s a proof here: the fact that I give charity even without a commandment, and I give it to a non-Jew—not that I need to do it because of the command, that’s not the question. I can do it because of my moral feeling or my moral outlook. But seemingly that indicates that even when I give charity to a Jew, I’m not doing it because of the commandment but because of the moral feeling. So here I would answer—I think here we really have to distinguish, and I was precise about this earlier when I said it—what is the criterion that determines whether you do it because of the command? The criterion is not the question whether you would do it without a command, because many times you can do something without a command. The criterion is the opposite: would you do it without the natural feeling, with only the command? If yes, then you do it because of the command. Because as far as I’m concerned, there’s no problem with it also being because of the natural feeling, or with your doing it also when there is only a natural feeling without a command. What has to be verified is that when there is a command, you do it because of the command even if you have no natural feeling, even if it’s not—meaning, there’s an asymmetry between the two motives, the moral motive and the command-based motive. The command-based motive does not require exclusivity; it requires—it needs to be a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. Meaning, if it exists on its own without the natural feeling, I’m supposed to act. If that exists, I don’t care that I also do it when there is only a natural feeling without a command. Because overall, as Maimonides says, there is value in identifying and wanting naturally to give charity. It’s only that, in order for this not to detract from the commandment act, you have to see whether I do the commandment even when I don’t have that. If yes, then even if I do have it, that’s not terrible.
[Speaker B] Is this connected to returning lost property to a non-Jew, where we said that some say it’s even forbidden because it shows that you’re not doing it for the sake of the command?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I don’t know. I don’t think the prohibition there is a prohibition because—or in order to show—that what I do is only because of the command. Because the point is that if I need to do it because of the command, then I do what I need to do. Meaning, how would it help to forbid me from returning lost property to a non-Jew? First, what did the non-Jew do wrong that I need to work on the character traits of my service of God? Meaning, he has lost property that ought to be returned to him. And second, if I really don’t do it for its own sake, then how does it help to command me not to return it to a non-Jew? So I won’t return it to a non-Jew because I’m commanded not to return it to him, but practically speaking, when I return it to a Jew, I still won’t be doing it for its own sake. So I don’t think that helps. Also, simply speaking, this prohibition against returning lost property to a non-Jew is not there in order to work on my character. The prohibition against returning lost property to a non-Jew is there to impose a sanction on the non-Jew because of who he is, not because of my character work. And therefore, first of all, there are opinions that say there is no prohibition. But Meiri says altogether that yes, the non-Jews of his time—and certainly, I assume, all the more so in our time—have all the obligations that apply toward a Jew also applying toward non-Jews, because they conduct themselves like human beings, and once they conduct themselves like human beings, there is no reason not to treat them as human beings. And therefore that itself is the proof that even when there was a prohibition against giving lost property back to a non-Jew, it was not in order to work on my service of God, on the manner of my service of God, but rather as a sanction on the non-Jews as they were. But once that changes, then perhaps even if there were, hypothetically, no commandment, you would still need to return their lost property.
[Speaker D] Fine, so Rabbi, Rabbi—yes—so according to Maimonides, the way the Rabbi explained Maimonides, what bothers us about non-rational commandments if there is identification?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? I didn’t understand.
[Speaker D] So why should it bother us—why is there a difference between non-rational and rational commandments if in any case you have to do them because of the command? So what’s bad about identifying with the non-rational ones? After all, in any event you do them because of the command.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That really is a good question. Meaning, I think what one has to say in explaining Maimonides is: Maimonides doesn’t say that there is some issue with not identifying, perhaps; rather, Maimonides says there is no value in identifying. Meaning, there is no benefit in identifying, because there is no moral value to these commandments. So identification has no value. If you have it, fine, good health to you, but you don’t need to work to achieve identification. That is unlike the rational or moral commandments, where there is value in identifying. It could be that after we say there is no value in identifying with this type of commandment, it may also be that there is some value in not identifying, in order to receive reward for suppressing the inclination, for acting for the sake of heaven. So if you absolutely do not identify, and nevertheless act, then maybe that is even more an act done for its own sake. So perhaps it even has some kind of virtue. But true, on the principled level it shouldn’t be preferable; it’s just that there’s no need to work for it to be there, that’s all. So that’s regarding the connection between faith and performance, yes, the hyphen I talked about. And now I want to move one step further, and the claim is basically that in the end—and I also spoke about this in part at the beginning of the series—that this whole realm of experiences and emotional identification, to the best of my understanding at least, does not play on the field of value. Meaning, there is no value in the existence of one emotion or another. In general, not only with regard to faith or commandment observance. The existence of emotions is a fact. We are all people with psychology, with emotions, with experiences, and so on, but I do not think the Torah wants—or that there is value in—the existence of emotions. If someone does the right thing and there is no emotional dimension accompanying the matter, he is righteous to the same degree. I do not think there needs to be an emotional dimension. Even when Maimonides talks about identification, I’m not sure, or I don’t think, that he means identification in the emotional sense. He means identification in the intellectual sense, what he calls in the Laws of Kings doing things because of the necessity of reason. The necessity of reason means that my reasoning tells me this is the right thing. That does not necessarily mean that I have emotions pushing me to do it. If I have them, I have them; if not, not. But there is no value in the existence of emotions. If there is someone who is sort of emotionless, born with some brain defect, he has no emotions, he doesn’t feel all these things, yes? He’s this kind of cold, alienated creature—would he be less righteous because of that? He’s simply built differently from other people, that’s all. And I don’t think emotions are something that should be given value significance, even though somehow in our generation emotions are overrated. Meaning, they’re super-rated first of all; I claim they’re also overrated. There is a very great elevation of emotion in the broader world, but somehow it has also penetrated the Jewish world, perhaps with the gracious assistance of Hasidism, I don’t know. In any case, I think the existence of emotions has no value significance whatsoever. Sometimes I’ve spoken about how emotions can express how much I really identify with something or think that this is the right thing to do, because human beings are built in such a way that what is very important in their eyes they also identify with emotionally, if they are built in the ordinary way. And then the emotional expressions merely express the intellectual identification that I have. So that’s fine—but the importance is in the intellectual identification, not in its emotional expression. And the practical implication, again, is the question: what about someone who identifies intellectually, but is built in such a way that this is not accompanied by an emotional dimension? Yes, there are no expressions of it in the emotional dimension. There is no problem at all. He is righteous to the same degree. He is simply built differently, that’s all.
[Speaker E] But we have commandments to feel things—to love and to fear and so on and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think we don’t. Those commandments are not dealing with emotion. I wrote an article about this; if you want, you can find it on my website. I wrote about it—there’s also actually a column where I summarized the main points. I think it’s column twenty-two, if I remember correctly.
[Speaker E] The column there talks about love of God.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I also talk about love of God. Love of God is a commandment—the question is only what is meant by it. Whether something emotional is intended.
[Speaker E] Right, but a man’s love for his wife, or “love your fellow as yourself.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listen, regarding a man’s love for his wife, I spoke about that in the previous lecture, at the beginning of chapter 10 in the Laws of Repentance, and there I explained that from the text itself you can see that this is not an emotional dimension, and there the connection between halakhah 2 and halakhah 3—otherwise it looks like a contradiction. But in general I’m saying: because emotion, in my eyes, has no value significance, I think the commandments that seem at first glance to be emotional commandments are interpreted differently, and I brought evidence for that too. You can look there—search on the site for “The Status of Emotion in Jewish Law.”
[Speaker E] Yes, I understand. Bottom line, “love your fellow as yourself” isn’t emotional, it’s intellectual.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, yes. Again, there can be emotional expressions, because if I’m connected to a person and I understand that I’m obligated toward him, it could be—it could be that a normal person also feels emotions accompanying this matter. But that’s a side effect. Meaning, if there are such emotions, fine, but what matters to me is what they express, not the existence of the emotion. The emotion is a sign, not a cause; it’s an indication. Okay? And if someone doesn’t have that indication, I don’t care. The main thing is that he has the underlying thing, the important thing. Fine, so that was just a comment I made following Maimonides in the sixth chapter; I just wanted to sharpen these points again. One more sentence that I’ll get to in a moment or later, just to complete the picture: when I say that emotion shouldn’t play a role here, that says nothing about our intuition. There are people who identify emotion with intuition—that’s not correct. Meaning, many times we have something that many people call emotion, and I think they are mistaken in the diagnosis. It’s not emotion; it’s something else. I’ll call it intuition in a moment, and that definitely does play a role on this field. But I’ll make that distinction in a bit; I’m only saying it here to complete the picture. So basically let’s try to see—so how do we move forward here? We need to talk about identification, first of all with a philosophical conception that there is God, that understanding the concept of God basically means that whatever He says, I do. That’s the hyphen, the commitment to fulfill His commands. But I said that this comes from the very understanding that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God. God means that whatever He says, I do. That’s the concept of God. Not someone who created the world, not someone who is omnipotent—all these may be His characteristics, but that is not divinity. Divinity is the absolute authority He has, such that whatever He says, by virtue of the fact that He said it, must be done. That’s the source of—we once talked about the difference between essential authority and formal authority. The source of formal authority is the Holy One, blessed be He. God is the factor that has formal authority. That is the definition of the concept “God.” So the question that now arises is: how do you arrive at this conclusion, at faith? How do I build faith? Or how do I come to faith? And I’ll remind you again: if this is not emotion, but first of all a factual conception—and after the factual conception, I grasped the fact that there is God, and from that it follows that He is God. God means someone whose commands must be fulfilled. So I’m talking here not about emotions and not about experiences, but about facts. And if that’s so, then when I ask myself how one comes to faith as I’ve defined it here, then we can already rule out paths like meditation, experience, “come stay with us for Sabbath,” “light Sabbath candles and see what a wonderful Sabbath meal we have with the family.” All these things are completely irrelevant to faith. All these things can develop in a person a religious feeling. Okay, but a religious feeling can also exist among atheists. Religious feelings—quite a few atheists report having religious feelings. Sometimes maybe a religious feeling is a trigger for developing a conception of faith. That may be. But a religious feeling as such is valueless. As a feeling, it is valueless. Therefore this is certainly not the royal road to faith. I also want to claim that education is not the way to this either. Meaning, many people say, “I keep commandments” or “I believe in God because that’s how I was educated; my parents educated me that way.” A person who says that is an atheist. Because—so what? The pagan does what he does because he was educated to be a pagan. His parents educated him to be a pagan. The question is what you think, not what your parents wanted you to think. It may be that you reached a religious conclusion with the gracious help of your parents, who educated you and wanted to help you reach a conclusion of faith. That’s perfectly fine. But now, if you do the commandments, then you need to say, “I do them because I believe,” not “because I was educated that way.” True, the fact that I came to faith was with the help of the education I received—perfectly fine. But many people who say, “I do the commandments because that’s how we were educated” or “because that’s how I was educated,” mean to say, “I don’t really know why I do this, I don’t really identify, I don’t really think this is what should be done, but that’s how I was educated; I’m Jewish, and a Jew has to keep commandments.” So he’s an atheist. He’s a Jewish atheist whose commandments are worth nothing. He can put on tefillin—like I said earlier with Chabad’s tefillin-laying—if he repents in the afternoon after he told me this in the morning, I’ll tell him: “You need to put on tefillin again; you did not fulfill the commandment of tefillin this morning.” Because the commandment of tefillin has to be fulfilled out of faith and out of commitment to the command—not out of commitment to my parents’ command, but out of commitment to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So I’ll say again: it’s not that I deny the importance of—so I’ll say again: it’s not that I deny the importance of education; education is important. But education is a means. Education is a means to expose the student to faith and to develop in him faith of his own. But if I leave the student at the point where he does commandments because that’s how he was educated, I have failed miserably. And therefore I think this claim has very far-reaching educational implications, because a great many people try to ensure that their children have no possibility of choice, because then they guarantee that they’ll do what—
[Speaker D] But how, for example, how can I know whether I do it because that’s how I was educated, or because I do it because—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether you believe or not—I know? How do you decide whether you believe anything else? You come to the conclusion that you believe, then you believe. If you don’t have such a conclusion, then you don’t believe. It’s no different from any other conclusion you have. But someone who says that you do it—someone who says to me, “I do it because that’s how I was educated,” is basically saying: I don’t have a good answer for why I do it, I don’t really believe it, it’s simply how I was educated, Jews are supposed to live this way. Sometimes when he says it, he doesn’t mean that, and then it’s fine. I don’t mean to catch a person on a word. Many times a person speaks imprecisely, says, “I do it because that’s how I was educated,” and what he means is: after I was educated, I also internalized it and understood it and identify with it; it’s just that my parents were the ones who brought me to that identification. That’s perfectly fine, I have no issue with that. I’m not attacking people’s ways of speaking here; I’m not interested in the manner of speech. The question is what the speech is meant to say. Meaning, if it’s meant to say, “I do this because that’s how I was educated even though I don’t really see a real reason to do it,” then what he does is worth nothing. But if he says, “I do this because that’s how I was educated,” and means that the education instilled faith in me and I really do it because I believe, that’s perfectly fine; I have no problem with that. What interests me is what he means, not what he says. I don’t intend to catch a person on a word because of imprecise language. That’s not the point. So education too is basically not the way; it may be an assisting means, but education is not a reason for which I can say, “I believe because that’s how I was educated.” So how, then? Meaning, on what can I base faith when I say “I believe in God”? That’s a factual claim. Therefore not emotions, not experiences, not education, nothing of that sort. National identification, Ahad Ha’am, all kinds of things of that sort. None of those things are relevant; they are not tools relevant to handling facts. So what is? There are two possibilities, it seems to me, once we’ve focused on this as the definition of faith. And therefore, basically, everything I’ve done until now—the whole series from the beginning until now—was really an introduction to this point. Because once we reached the conclusion—until now I defined what faith is, I finished the first part of the series. Now I’m asking myself: how does one get there? But it was very important to define the concept of faith in order to see which paths are even relevant, which paths are open to me. So I’ve already ruled out a number of paths that I think are pretty popular with many people. It seems to me that these paths are not relevant to faith. They can help perhaps after you come to genuine identification—then fine, there’s no problem if you have emotions and experiences and education—but if it’s only emotions and experiences and education, then you’re an atheist. You’re an atheist with religious feelings. So what is relevant? We have two toolboxes meant for dealing with facts. One toolbox is the logical-philosophical toolbox, and the second toolbox is the empirical-scientific one. Either logic and philosophy, or science and observation. Those are the two ways we have. All the other ways are experiences, subjective matters; that’s not dealing with facts.
[Speaker E] Does logic and philosophy include Torah study? I can’t hear. Does logic and philosophy include Torah study?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The intention is intellectual, not observational. Obviously—whatever you want. Now let’s try for a moment to examine these two paths and see that, on the face of it, we seem to be stuck. This is the paradox of faith. Why? Let’s start with the empirical path. On the empirical path, we really have no way to arrive at the existence of God through observations. I can’t see God or observe Him with scientific measuring instruments. The fact that there are good and talented scientists who do not believe in God means that I can’t claim to a person, on the basis of observation alone—without philosophy, observation alone—that God exists. Observation is not a tool that can bring me to that conclusion. So the statement “God exists” may be a factual statement. But it is not a scientific statement. It is a factual statement, but not a scientific one. Those are two different things. Because I can claim that God exists, and as I said before, that is a factual statement. I am claiming, as a matter of fact, that God exists. But to say that this is a scientific statement means that I can test it in a laboratory. According to Popper’s definition, I can at least try to refute it in a laboratory. There is no way to refute the existence of God experimentally. And the existence of God does not give me predictions for future experiments. That’s the other side of the coin. So it is not accessible to scientific tools.
Again, there are—we’ll talk about this more extensively later—but there are many people who infer the existence of God from facts. For example, we have a very complex world, and it seems designed, it seems special. Okay? So people say: it can’t be that it came into being on its own; apparently there is a God who created it. In my view, by the way, that is an excellent argument, despite the fact that many people dismiss it. It is an excellent argument, and we’ll talk about it. But notice: this argument is not an empirical argument. The facts in and of themselves will not show me the existence of God. That is a philosophical conclusion that I draw from things I have observed. Therefore you can’t say that this path is a purely observational path. I have to talk about the conclusion I infer from those facts. And regarding the conclusion, there are philosophical steps here that have to be examined—whether it is right, whether it is not right—but that is a philosophical question, not a purely scientific-observational one. Therefore I say that the observational path, or the scientific path in the narrow sense, seemingly cannot lead us to faith.
So what we are left with is the philosophical path, the logical path, the rational path, the path of thought rather than observation. Because it’s either thought or observation. But this path too is problematic, because one of two things must be true. If I have a logical argument that proves the existence of God, then that basically means that the existence of God is derived from some axioms, from some fundamental assumptions. But if the conclusion is derived from those assumptions, that means that in some implicit way I already assumed the existence of God, because I assumed assumptions that include within them the existence of God.
Here I’ll elaborate a bit—whoever has read the books probably knows this. There’s a joke in the yeshivot, right? How do we know that every Jew has to wear a hat? The proof is very simple. It says, “And Abraham went.” There, there. A Jew like him obviously didn’t go around without a hat, right? Fine. So if Abraham went with a hat, then we, who are supposed to walk in the ways of our forefather—that’s how we were educated, I remind you—so to walk in the ways of our forefather means that we too have to walk around with a hat. QED. What do you say about that proof? A completely valid proof, in my opinion. So now everybody should go get hats.
It reminds me that once I gave a philosophy seminar at Tel Aviv University, and I presented proofs for the existence of God. And when I finished presenting the proof, I asked the students if any of them wanted to object or raise a refutation or something like that. There was silence in the room. So I told them to bring in the cart with the skullcaps and fringed garments—that is, everybody had become religious. Then suddenly everybody remembered that they disagreed. That is, not that they came up with such great arguments, but many times you have to coax people a little.
This claim that proves every Jew has to wear a hat is, in my view, a valid argument. What is funny there, or what makes people smirk, is something else—not the validity of the argument. So what actually is the problem with such an argument? How do you understand the problem with such an argument?
[Speaker E] That you’re assuming Abraham went with a hat.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not assuming it, I’m proving it. I’m saying Abraham went, and a Jew like him obviously didn’t go without a hat. Hence Abraham went with a hat.
[Speaker E] That’s what you want to prove.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do I want to prove?
[Speaker E] That everyone has to go with a hat.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you’re saying that in fact, right, you’re saying that in fact I smuggled the conclusion I want to prove into a premise—I just phrased it a little differently. A Jew like him didn’t go without a hat. What did I say? That every Jew has to go with a hat, right? So basically what I wanted to prove entered as a premise. This is what’s called the fallacy of begging the question. Yes, I’m trying to prove some claim, and I place that very claim among the premises. And therefore, again, the argument is a valid argument. The conclusion really does follow from the premises. Except what? It is a worthless argument, because whoever accepts the premises does not need the argument, since he already accepts the conclusion—it is right there in the premises. And whoever does not accept the premises—how does it help to prove to him from those premises the conclusion? He doesn’t accept the premises, so he won’t accept the conclusion either. So this argument has no problem with validity—it is valid. It’s just worthless. It does no work at all. It can convince only the already convinced. That’s all.
Okay—but the thing is that people don’t notice that every logical argument is like this. Every valid logical argument is like this. When I say: all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, therefore Socrates is mortal. That is a valid argument, right? Whoever accepts the premises must accept the conclusion. Now I ask: why? Think of an alien who landed here from who knows where, from the Little Prince’s planet. Fine? And he arrives and you say to him: listen, let me introduce you to the world. Fine? In the world there are human beings. Human beings are mortal. He says, ah, interesting, I learned something new. Then you say to him: and Socrates, that nice fellow over there in Greece, he’s also a human being. Wow, interesting. Then you say: you know, the conclusion is that Socrates is mortal. And then he asks you: how do you know? You say: what do you mean, how do I know? We agreed that all human beings are mortal, and we agreed that Socrates is a human being. So obviously Socrates is mortal. He says: no, no, I agree that all human beings are mortal, I agree that Socrates is a human being, but I don’t see why I have to conclude that Socrates is mortal. What would you say to such a person? Before institutionalizing him. It’s a little hard to say anything to him. What are you going to say? I don’t know what to say to him. You don’t understand that on your own? So he’ll say no, I don’t understand it on my own. What can I tell him?
The only possible way to try and explain it to him is to say this: look, when you accepted the premise that all human beings are mortal, let’s break it down into small change. What does that mean? It’s a general sentence, right? But in fact there are billions—or millions, billions, billions—of sentences that you’re combining into one general formulation. But really you assumed billions of statements. Moshe is mortal, Nissim is mortal, Muhammad is mortal, Mickey is mortal, Socrates is mortal. Right? You can go one by one. Instead of saying all that, you say: all human beings are mortal. And in fact what you mean to say there is a billion statements. Right? One of those statements is the sentence “Socrates is mortal.” Because Socrates is one of the human beings—you accepted that within the premises. Right? So you yourself said that Socrates is mortal; I don’t need to tell you that. You already agreed to it in the premises. That’s what I can tell him, right?
But notice what I told him by saying that. I told him that this argument was actually unnecessary from my point of view. Because it begged the question. What were you trying to prove? That Socrates is mortal. Notice that in your premises you inserted the conclusion as one of the premises. One of your premises was that Socrates is mortal. So in fact this is an argument that begs the question.
And now understand that this is something much stronger than what I just said. Every valid logical argument begs the question. That is the meaning of validity in an argument. The validity of an argument—that is, the fact that the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, which is what it means for an argument to be valid—is always because the conclusion is contained within the premises. The premises include the conclusion as well. Therefore whoever accepts the premises must also accept the conclusion. Which means that a valid logical argument always begs the question. Begging the question is not a fallacy. Begging the question is the other side of the coin of saying that the argument is valid. It is the same thing.
[Speaker E] Also in mathematics? Also, yes. When we want to prove things?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but if you prove it on the basis of the axioms, you are basically saying that it is already there inside the axioms. You don’t always feel that. Sometimes you have to be very smart to see it inside the axioms, but in the final analysis, after someone has shown it to you, you understand that it was really there, inside. When you study geometry, it’s not like studying physics. When you study geometry, you don’t have to go out and make observations. After the teacher has taught you that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees, and he showed it to you from the axioms, you yourself understand that this had really always been inside the axioms. You just didn’t notice. You didn’t see it. You saw it—you needed the teacher’s help in order to see that it was there.
It’s not like physics, because in physics, someone who has never seen anything in the world and keeps his eyes shut would not know the law of gravitation. In order to know the law of gravitation you need observations. You need to see that in the world objects are pulled downward. Without that, you won’t know it. There is an essential difference here between science and logic. Logic does not need observations. So how is it built—how does the conclusion emerge? It is simply found within the premises. That’s all. So he says that every valid logical argument essentially always begs the question.
[Speaker F] But the premises have to be true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine—but now you have to decide whether the premises are true. If you’ve decided that the premises are true, then of course you have also accepted the conclusion. But the argument that takes you from the premises to the conclusion is unnecessary. If you accepted the premises, we’re done, there’s no need to go further. If you didn’t accept the premises, then the argument won’t help, because you didn’t accept the premises. So either way, there’s no point to the argument.
It’s like the hot-air balloon joke that I always attach here to Abraham our forefather and the hat. The hot-air balloon joke says that two people had lost their way in a hot-air balloon, they were in a balloon, didn’t know where they were, they saw someone plowing in a field down below. One of them shouts to him: tell us, where are we? He looks up and says: above my field. So the guy up in the balloon says to his friend: that fellow down there is definitely a mathematician. Why? A. What he said is completely precise. B. It doesn’t help us at all.
Now what’s the point here? The point is—it’s not a joke, it’s a sad truth, or not a sad truth, but it is the pure truth. A mathematician, by definition—sorry, Professor Turker—a mathematician, by definition, does not help us at all. Why? Because mathematics is built on deductive arguments, necessary arguments, logical arguments. And logical arguments really only keep showing you what you already knew when you knew the axioms. If you don’t agree with the axioms, the conclusion won’t help you. And after you have been convinced by the conclusion, that means that someone showed you that it was already there in some form inside the axioms. But if that’s so, then I knew it beforehand; you didn’t help me at all.
So if I ask a mathematician what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, he should answer me, in his capacity as a mathematician: the answer is, I don’t know. It depends on what your axioms are. If you have one set of axioms, then the sum of the angles is one hundred and eighty degrees. If you have other axioms, the sum of the angles is pi, I don’t know, whatever you want—not in radians, in degrees. Pi degrees. So really that’s two pi, but never mind. Fine, pi. So in his capacity as a mathematician, he cannot tell me that. The mathematician can tell me: listen, give me your assumptions, your axioms, and I’ll calculate for you what the sum of the angles in a triangle is. That is the mathematician’s expertise. But I set the assumptions just as much as he does; he is no more qualified than I am to determine the assumptions. So what does that mean? That the moment I adopted the assumptions, I adopted the conclusions as well. So that means that a mathematician, by definition, does not help us at all.
A mathematician says things that are certainly true, but why are they certainly true? Because they do not add any information for me. There is no information in the conclusion that I did not already have when I adopted the conclusions—I mean the premises. Mathematics does not add information for me. That is what I mean when I say it does not help me at all. Of course it helps me, because very often even the information that is contained in my premises I do not know how to extract. Like the theorem that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. Ask any sixth-grade child whether two parallel lines meet or not, and he’ll tell you no. And ask him how many straight lines there are between two points, and he’ll tell you one. A smart child will tell you that. But if you ask him what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, he won’t know how to answer you, unless he is some kind of pathological genius. He won’t know how to answer. Why? Because true, it is found inside the axioms that he knows, but you have to be very smart to extract it from there.
If you like, then logic is a kind of key that helps me open my own safe, which is sitting in my house, and discover for me what is already inside it. I am the owner of everything inside the safe, but it wasn’t accessible to me. Without having a key to open the safe, I can’t make use of the things that belong to me. In the parable, it is the same thing. Whoever knows the axioms knows all the results that follow from the axioms. But he knows them in a way that is not accessible to him—they are locked in the safe. If the logician or the math teacher or whoever comes along, he helps me—he has a key. He helps me open my safe and discover everything that belongs to me that is inside, everything I already know. So mathematics helps me on the practical level, because there is information that is inside me but not accessible to me. But it does not help me in the essential sense, meaning it never adds information.
Yes, Moshe, did you want to ask? Okay. So the claim is basically that if… So the claim is basically that if this is so, let’s go back for a moment to my line of thought, then it turns out that a logical argument also cannot persuade me and bring me to faith. Why? Because a logical argument basically tells me that if I adopted… the logical argument is built on axioms, on assumptions. If I adopted the assumptions, then I am already a believer now. And if I did not adopt the assumptions, then how will it help to prove the conclusion to me on the basis of those assumptions if I don’t agree with them? So either way, if those assumptions are acceptable to me, then I am already a believer. So the logical argument did not bring me to faith. The logical argument revealed to me that I was already a believer. But if I am not a believer now, meaning I did not adopt those assumptions, then the logical argument will not succeed in bringing me to faith. Because the logical argument is built on the assumptions. If I do not adopt them, then I also won’t be able to accept the conclusion. So in short, not only can observation not bring me to God, but logical and philosophical arguments also cannot bring me to God.
So what is left? I have either the logical-philosophical route or the observational-scientific route, and neither one can work. So if on the one hand I defined faith as factual propositions, then experiences, emotions, education—none of that is relevant. So what is relevant? Either logic/philosophy or empirical science. But neither logic/philosophy can bring me there, nor can empirical science bring me there. So I am left standing with a broken cistern. Therefore, many times you hear all kinds of statements from people like: faith is above reason, and faith is a deep emotion, and faith is I-don’t-know-what—things nobody understands and does understand, and all sorts of statements that the speakers themselves do not understand. And the reason for this is that they stand bewildered before the broken cistern I just described. Because apparently there is no way to justify it, yet on the other hand I do feel that I believe. So I don’t know how to justify it, I don’t know how to explain it, certainly not how to convince someone else—but it seems terribly true to me. So the solution is: it’s above reason, it’s a deep emotion, it’s an experience, it’s all kinds of things of that sort. But no, that solves nothing.
[Speaker B] I don’t understand the problem with logic. There are some axioms I believe in, and there is some result that’s very complicated. In principle it’s all there, but it takes a year-long course to extract it. And I teach him that from an assumption that he does understand, it follows that he has to believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I agree. I’m just saying that the only way… the only thing logic can do, if anything, is only reveal to you that all along you were a believer. It cannot take a real atheist—not someone who is simply unaware. There are unaware believers. Believers who don’t… like people who know that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty—they know it, but they are not aware that they know it. So the math teacher reveals to them that in fact they already know it. Same here. In other words, a logical argument can take a person and show him that he was already a believer beforehand, only he wasn’t aware of it. But a logical argument cannot bring a non-believer to become a believer. Because if he really doesn’t believe, then he won’t accept the assumptions of the argument.
[Speaker B] But if he’s not aware, then he doesn’t believe. No, no. You can’t say about every person… you have someone in Africa, you have some assumptions or something, and therefore you believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, because it’s hidden inside the axioms. He says: I don’t understand, I don’t know—awareness is different.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question of whether someone who is unaware counts as a believer or not is a bit of a definitional question. I don’t want to get into that because it’s not important. I agree with everything you’re saying. In other words, if there is a believer who is unaware, a logical argument can help him become a conscious believer. But if there is a person who is truly not a believer, there is no logical way to turn him into a believer. Truly not a believer—even inside, even unconsciously. Okay? That is the claim. What you call believer or non-believer is already a semantic question. That is not important to me right now.
[Speaker D] What I wanted to say is—I was on mute, sorry.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what I wanted to say is that there is no real way to take a person who is not a believer, truly not a believer, and turn him into a believer. There is a way to reveal to a person that until now too he was an unaware believer, and turn him into a conscious believer. That, yes—or at least theoretically that may be possible. But it is not possible to take a non-believer and turn him into a believer.
Now here this is a point that has importance beyond just examining the paths to faith. Because think about what this actually means regarding all sorts of statements about the prohibition on philosophical inquiry. Right? Among many people in the religious world it is somehow accepted that engaging in philosophy is dangerous. You can arrive at heresy. You can arrive at the conclusion that there is no God. Right? We are supposed to investigate with straight thinking, provided that we reach the conclusion that was prescribed for us in advance, of course. In other words, otherwise if Heaven forbid we reach a different conclusion, then there is a problem. Right? That is the well-known religious method. In other words, we are careful about intellectual honesty as long as the conclusion is the one we are supposed to reach.
So the problem I see in these concerns is that these concerns are strange in light of what I described. Because if a person really reaches the conclusion, through logical-philosophical arguments, that he is not a believer, this only reveals to him that he was never a believer in the first place. He just didn’t know it. He was an unaware atheist. Until now I was speaking about an unaware believer, so there are also unaware atheists. There are atheists in a frock coat. Yes? A person walks around in a frock coat and prays every morning, and basically he is an atheist. He lives with some sort of feeling—take for example the person who says, I keep the commandments because that is what I was instructed to do, because that is how I was educated. That is an unaware atheist. He is essentially an atheist.
[Speaker G] What do you mean, unaware? What does that mean? Is he an atheist or an unaware religious person? It’s not—if a person never thought about something, and if he didn’t know calculus or something, okay? Let’s say he really understood it, he just hadn’t actually learned it yet. That’s not true. After he learns it, now he understands it, he internalizes it. And to say that before that he also was—no. There’s also maybe some point here about free choice: when you explain something to a person, he has the option of accepting it or not accepting it. It’s not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Free choice—well, what can you do? There is no intellectual free choice. If that’s the conclusion, then that’s his conclusion.
[Speaker G] No, but there are things you do not know with certainty. It could be this way or it could be that way. In the end you have to decide.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not a matter of free choice. It’s a matter of whether it passes the threshold of certainty that is acceptable to you. We’ll talk about that too, but…
[Speaker G] If it passes…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The threshold.
[Speaker G] Then it passes the threshold. But it may be that I convince you that it is more plausible than not to believe, and not that you were an unaware believer beforehand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then you really weren’t.
[Speaker G] You’re just now hearing the explanation, and you say, you know what, now I understand, that makes sense. I didn’t think so before, but yes, now I do. It’s not that he was aware of it before.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there are two different formulations here. One formulation you gave is that it turns me into a conscious believer or non-believer. That’s the formulation I also used. But the second formulation you used here is that sometimes it can increase the plausibility of the thing in my eyes. Here I disagree. Because if you’re talking about logical arguments, I disagree. We’ll still talk about other things perhaps, but when you speak about logical arguments, you are basically proving to me the conclusion that God exists on the basis of assumptions. I accepted the assumptions at the start. If I accepted them at the start, then implicitly I also accepted that God exists, because that is included in their content. Otherwise it would be impossible to prove it from them. Only what? I just wasn’t aware that this conclusion really exists inside my assumptions. That’s what I called an unaware believer.
Now again, whether to call that an unaware believer or not is a semantic matter, but I mean to speak about such a person. If a person is an unaware believer, then the proof can reveal this to him or turn him into a conscious believer. But if the person is essentially not a believer, then he also will not accept my assumptions, and therefore the argument will not be a relevant argument for him. And here what I wanted to say now in the last few sentences is that on the other side of the coin it is the same thing. Among atheists too there are these two phases. There is a conscious atheist and an unaware atheist. A person can be an atheist in a frock coat. He thinks he is a believer, but deep down he does not really believe. And how—if I bring him, say, some philosophical-logical inquiry and he reaches the conclusion that there is no God, then it turns out that the assumptions from which he set out contained the conclusion that there is no God. So it turns out that even before he began the journey he was already an atheist—he just was not aware of it.
And so now, when I ask—I’m not sure, or in fact I am even inclined to think that insofar as there is value in the commandments, the question is whether commandments of this kind have value? Is there value in the service of God of such a person? And therefore I want to argue that the dangers people see in philosophical-logical investigation of faith do not really exist. Since that investigation can at most reveal to you what was already inside you beforehand. So what—then is it better to remain unaware and not become aware? Either way, if you are a conscious believer, then you’ll discover that you believe. If you are not a conscious believer, then you were always a non-believer, not only because of philosophical investigation. The philosophical investigation merely revealed it to you. That’s all.
Therefore I don’t think one should fear this thing. On the contrary, a person will at least finally discover what he really thinks, strip away all the wrappings that hide what he really thinks. And therefore I, as a result of this analysis, it seems to me that the main fears regarding engagement in philosophy and logic are fears that I do not accept. For example, the prohibition on inquiry into the foundations of faith—“do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes.” This is no longer a question of taste or agenda or religious outlook. This is an explicit halakhic prohibition: “do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes.” It is a matter of Jewish law; it is not a question of whether you are Rabbi Nachman, who doesn’t like this and favors simple faith and opposes using the intellect, or whether you are Maimonides, who is a philosopher and thinks one should use the intellect. Those are matters of approach. But here there is a prohibition: “do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes,” a halakhic prohibition.
My claim is that, first, these fears are not real fears in my view, because I am in favor of a person discovering what he really thinks and not fooling himself. Second, I think a prohibition of this kind is an obviously unacceptable prohibition. It is the other side of the coin of the commandment to believe. Remember, in one of the recent sessions we spoke about the commandment to believe, positive commandment number 1 in Maimonides. And I said that this is a commandment that cannot be commanded. You cannot command a person to believe for two reasons. First, because belief is a factual claim. You cannot command a person to adopt a fact; you can persuade him that the fact is true, but you cannot command him to adopt a factual claim. Okay? And second, you cannot command him to believe, because belief is the condition for his obeying the commandments. Without believing, he will not obey, so how can there be a commandment saying to believe if belief is the condition for the commandment? We discussed that.
He says: the other side of the coin is the prohibition “do not stray.” I’m talking about “after your hearts,” not “after your eyes.” “Your eyes” refers to sexual prohibitions, but I’m speaking about the intellectual, cognitive “do not stray.” Okay? So what are they telling me there? Don’t read heretical books because otherwise you’ll arrive at heretical conclusions. In other words, if I arrive at heretical conclusions, then apparently I was always a heretic. So in any case I also do not accept this prohibition, because I am a heretic. So either way I do not see what place there is for this prohibition.
It could be that this prohibition means: look, but maybe you’ll make a mistake—after all, a person can make mistakes in his logic and his philosophy. And really you are a believer, but philosophical sophistry may lead you to false conclusions. There is a mistake in your logic. Fine, but mistakes can happen anywhere. You cannot forbid me to think because maybe I’ll make a mistake. And maybe my adopting your position without thinking is itself a mistake? Here I can’t make a mistake?
The pagan person born into a pagan home—they also tell him: “do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes,” you must go on serving Peor. Okay, you are forbidden to look into books of Jews or other heretics, you must continue serving Peor. So he will ask: wait a second, what do you mean? On what basis am I supposed to decide whether to serve Peor? I need to examine it, don’t I? I need to make decisions. You want me to make decisions because you decided, because you think? That is exactly being a believer because that is how I was educated. You see how the circle closes. It exists among idol worshipers too. You have to be a believer because that’s how you were educated. So I say: whoever accepts the notion that you need to believe because that is how you were educated should also accept paganism because that is how he was educated. But “that’s how I was educated” is not an excuse for anything. I need to examine things myself and reach my own conclusions.
Therefore I cannot accept such a prohibition—“do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes.” As for explanations or interpretations of what is included in this prohibition, I can offer you all kinds of explanations. But first and foremost, before explanations, I simply do not accept the existence of such a prohibition. There cannot be such a prohibition. On the logical level there cannot be such a prohibition.
Now we can start looking for explanations of what it does include. So this is a necessary conclusion from the analysis I have made here. I do not think there can be a commandment telling a person: fool yourself, or accept something because that is what I said. You said it, and other people say the opposite. Why should I accept only what you said? I need to decide, I need to examine, I need to read books with arguments and positions from different sides in order to see and formulate. How can it be forbidden for me to formulate a position? That itself is a position. Adopting Judaism is itself a position. If you forbid me to formulate a position, then I can’t formulate that position either.
It is simply a prohibition—so many people pass by this prohibition with complete calm, and I cannot understand that. It is simply logically impossible. If the Holy One, blessed be He, were standing here together with Moses our teacher and Joshua son of Nun at his two sides, and He said to me, “Do not stray after your hearts; you are forbidden to open books with heretical arguments,” I would say to Him: I do not accept it. I do not accept it. Because I am not… what do you mean? Why should I accept something just because You said so? I want to be convinced that what You are saying is really binding. And if someone else argues differently, I want to hear what he says, so I can decide whether I agree or disagree. A person cannot tell me—or not a person, nobody can tell me—accept system X, and part of system X is that you are forbidden to examine whether you agree with system X or not. Why would I accept it? Do you understand the absurdity of this?
Therefore I say that beyond this analysis of which paths are open to us in order to arrive at faith, there is also, in a very deep sense, a claim here against this approach of simple faith, or a prohibition on investigating the foundations of faith, or a prohibition on reading heretical books. There is no such thing. What does it mean, forbidden to read heretical books? Nonsense. I’m talking about heretical books that raise arguments, not heretical books that preach. If they preach, then there is simply no point in reading them, because there is no need to read sermons. Not Jewish sermons either, not only heretical sermons. One does not need to read sermons at all. But if you are reading arguments—of course, I want to read every argument in every direction, because I want to formulate a position. I cannot think of everything on my own. To me this is absolutely basic; I simply cannot understand these approaches at all.
Fine, so if that is the case, then we reach a conclusion—and here I’m stopping, but I’m stopping while the cistern is still broken. We’ll try to rebuild it next time. I just want to sharpen the point. So faith is a factual claim. For a person to accept a factual claim, he needs to be convinced of it; he cannot accept it because he was commanded to, or because that is how he was educated, or because he has an emotion or an experience or I don’t know exactly what, but because he reached the conclusion that this is a true fact. And now I asked: by what routes can one reach such a conclusion? Either by a philosophical-logical route or by a scientific-empirical route. And I tried to show that neither of those routes can work. And if that is so, then we are in a bind. This is a factual claim that there is no way to reach. So then what? Then Rabbi Shagar will tell you that you need to make a leap of faith, jump into the empty void and say abracadabra. I’m out; whoever wants, good health to him, let him say abracadabra until tomorrow. But when I formulate positions in certain areas, I don’t jump either into the empty void or, certainly, into a non-empty void—you can crack your head. What I do is try to think and reach my own conclusions. So we need to see what to do with this bind, but no other escape route is relevant. We need to use our heads and not be lazy. And I think there is a way out of this bind; we’ll talk about it next time. Does anyone want to comment or ask? Now is the time. Yes.
[Speaker E] Rabbi, may I? You asked about Maimonides, who commanded belief—who says there is a commandment to believe. So maybe it can be understood that this is not a commandment… maybe he wants to say that you yourself should decide whether you want to believe or not, but once you do believe, then you are also fulfilling a commandment. It’s an existential commandment, in a different formulation.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but that’s strange. It’s strange because logically there cannot be such a commandment. What commandment are you fulfilling? I reached this conclusion—that is the conclusion I reached. Someone else did not reach that conclusion, so he didn’t; he has a different conclusion. The concept of fulfilling a commandment is a concept that fundamentally begins with choice, with decision. So you can tell me: if you decide to be faithful to this belief and to keep the commandments, then perhaps you fulfilled a commandment. But you cannot tell me that my very conclusion is a commandment. That’s irrelevant. Facts are not commandments; commandments are norms.
[Speaker E] I understand. And there is this argument about someone who believes—it’s an either-way argument: if you don’t believe and you keep the commandment, then you’ve lost nothing, and if you do believe…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Pascal’s Wager. Yes, right. We’ll deal with Pascal’s Wager—we’ll deal with it harshly, I promise you. It doesn’t even get off the ground at all. Okay.
[Speaker D] Rabbi? Yes. Rabbi, regarding what the Rabbi said about the prohibition on inquiry and philosophy, right? I wanted to ask whether it isn’t possible to say that there are areas in which people who are not sufficiently mature—if they investigate them, they can become confused, go crazy…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, they’re not mature enough, and therefore what? So what do you suggest for them? They’re not mature enough, and therefore they should do what you think? Why shouldn’t they do what Dawkins thinks?
[Speaker D] I don’t know, what does the Rabbi think—that every topic…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not saying every person is mature. I’m saying every person is the only entity that can make the decision whether he is mature or not mature. I don’t know what to tell you. But even if he is not mature, who will make the decision in his place? A person has to make decisions for himself. There is nobody else who will make the decision for you.
Otherwise, understand—you know, I have a friend who was the representative of Mishmeret STaM in Pardes Hanna. Mishmeret STaM is the large organization in Bnei Brak that regulates scribes of Torah scrolls, phylacteries, and mezuzot, okay? It coordinates the field; actually it’s a very, very nice organization. In any case, he was Mishmeret STaM’s representative in Pardes Hanna; he was appointed by them to answer questions. So a lot of questions came to him on matters of mezuzot, phylacteries, and so on. And he told me: look, there’s a question that has already come up several times. If I go to Rabbi Wosner, he permits it; if I go to Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, he forbids it. I know this in advance. Now the question is what to do. Because the moment I chose the rabbi, I already chose the answer. I don’t even need to travel to Bnei Brak; I only need to decide where I’m traveling and stay in Pardes Hanna, because the moment I decide where I’m going, I already have my answer.
So I told him: what do you mean? Your only path is to get into the topic, reach a conclusion, and tell them what you think—not what Rabbi Wosner thinks and not what Rabbi Nissim Karelitz thinks. Same thing here. You say: I’m small, I’m not Rabbi Nissim Karelitz and I’m not Rabbi Wosner. Fine, but you are you, and you have to make decisions. You want someone else to make the decisions? That too is a decision. If you allow Rabbi Nissim Karelitz to make decisions for you, or Rabbi Wosner to make decisions for you, that itself is a decision. That one you are mature enough to make? How? On what basis? There is no way out. Whether a person is mature or not mature, in the end there is no one who can make the decisions in your place. You have to make the decisions.
Try to be mature. Because part of making decisions is that you really do need intellectual skill, philosophical skill, analytical skill, and then to make a more informed decision. That is always true, in every decision. But there is no one else who can make decisions for you, unless we are talking about matters of expertise. Say, you go to a doctor, and you trust that he is an expert, so you let him make a decision for you. And that is a decision that I made—whether or not to hand over the authority to make the decision. And why? It is an informed decision, because I understand that he has the knowledge and I do not, so he will make the decision. But in disputes between Rabbi Shach and Dawkins, I do not know who is more of an expert on the question of whether there is a God or not. I do not understand how it is possible to decide to which of the two I should hand over the decision for me. As long as I have not decided for myself whether there is or is not a God, I have no way to decide whether to hand the decision over to Rabbi Shach or to Dawkins.
[Speaker C] And can the default of the place where you were born play any role in this question?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It can play some technical role, maybe, meaning to say: fine, better passive omission than active commission. But I don’t think that makes you a believer; it leaves you there because you have no reason to do anything else.
[Speaker C] It’s hard for me to call such a person a believer. But I think there is a genuine line of reasoning to say that a person who is in a certain place should act and even believe like the establishment in which he finds himself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To me there’s no logic in that at all; I don’t understand that claim in the slightest. It’s exactly the same as saying, “I do this because that’s how I was educated.” A person who grew up in a pagan home can also say, fine, I keep worshipping Peor because that’s how I was raised. So what? Does that mean he therefore ought to go on worshipping Peor? It doesn’t sound reasonable to me. I don’t know—I just don’t understand the logic. Practically speaking, I can understand that if I have no reason to change, then out of inertia I stay where I am. That doesn’t make you a believer; it just makes you someone who keeps going in the same direction because he doesn’t know what else to do.
[Speaker C] The question is what we’re looking for in faith.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If a presumption—if a legal presumption means that the object is yours, or only that you’re allowed to hold onto it and there’s no prohibition of “do not steal” involved—do you understand? It’s the question of whether this is practical legal conduct or factual clarification. Yes. That’s it? Thank you very much, and Sabbath peace. Sabbath peace, Itai.