Faith – Lesson 48 – Summary

Table of Contents

• The value of clarification and the claim that there is no prohibition against examining
• Experiments on prayer and intellectual honesty
• Criticism of faith based on upbringing and the need for a well-formed position
• Intuition in halakhic ruling and in science
• Defining faith as a factual claim rather than a mental-genetic state
• Genetics as “spiritual eyes”
• The ways of arriving at faith and the critique of the science/philosophy dichotomy
• Faith as intuition and the justification of its legitimacy
• Tradition, intuition, and the four philosophical proofs
• From the philosophical God to revelation and commandments
• Why specifically Judaism, and the concept of “first claim”
• The obligation to obey and ontological gratitude
• The meaning of the term “God” as binding authority
• Questions about the Holy One, blessed be He, being involved in the world, reward and punishment
• Hasidism, the tzaddik, and tzimtzum

Summary

General Overview

The speaker sums up a roughly two-year process of grounding faith from a philosophical perspective, and argues that there is no logical or religious prohibition against examining faith; on the contrary, honest and proper clarification is a condition for a position to have value. He defines faith as a factual claim about the world, not merely a mental or genetic state, and develops the idea of intuition as a cognitive sense that mediates between science and logic and also makes faith in God possible. He presents different ways of arriving at faith and grounding revelation and obligation to the commandments, and concludes by clarifying the meaning of the term “God” as an authority one obeys by virtue of its very nature, alongside remarks on questions about God’s involvement in the world and about Hasidism.

The value of clarification and the claim that there is no prohibition against examining

The speaker says that you cannot forbid a person from examining his path, because such a prohibition already assumes the authority of the very system one is trying to examine. He cites the principle, “By God — had Joshua son of Nun said it, I would not obey him,” to argue that a prohibition that prevents examination has no meaning before one has accepted the authority in question. He interprets “Do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes” as a warning against desire-driven examination that looks for an excuse to leave, not as a prohibition on examination itself, and cites “the heart and the eye are the two brokers of sin” as guidance toward honest inquiry. He argues that the fear that examination may lead to heresy is baseless, because if the true conclusion of the inquiry is that the story is not true, then for the person examining, that is the truth; and if one does not examine, then one remains in practice without faith, only without admitting it to oneself — like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

Experiments on prayer and intellectual honesty

The speaker describes a question about experiments testing the effectiveness of prayer by comparing patients prayed for with patients not prayed for, and notes that such experiments have been done among Christians and that some showed significant benefit, though there are criticisms of them. He says that results in Christianity are irrelevant to Judaism in his view because that is “idolatry,” and adds that the main problem is dishonesty when approaching an experiment already knowing or deciding in advance the desired result so that it will “strengthen what he already thinks beforehand.” He connects this to the tendency of people to avoid a real experiment or ignore the implications of its results, and therefore says the central test is honesty in inquiry, not looking for reinforcements.

Criticism of faith based on upbringing and the need for a well-formed position

The speaker rejects admiration for “simple faith” in the sense of blind acceptance based on one’s family home, and defines this as “a collection of ignoramuses” and “fanatical people with no substance,” because there is no guarantee of truth in the mere fact that one’s parents raised one that way. He says there is no value in continuity in and of itself, and that if the parents were mistaken there is no reason the child should err with them. Therefore, a position without examination “is not a position” and has no value. He distinguishes between intuitive faith that a person reaches through sincere inner clarification and adopting a system as a “constitutive step” just because that is how one was educated, and argues that not everyone needs philosophical analysis, but everyone does need to formulate his faith for himself in his own way.

Intuition in halakhic ruling and in science

The speaker cites Rabbi Soloveitchik as describing the halakhic decisor as someone who “knows the answer in advance,” and only afterward looks for the sources. He distinguishes between a Reform-style reading, in which the decisor simply does whatever he wants, and a reading in which there is an initial halakhic intuition about “what Jewish law says,” not about “what I want,” and then one checks and grounds it in the sources. He compares this to science and mathematics, and cites Andrew Wiles as an illustration that years of work on a proof rest on a prior intuition that the theorem is true. He emphasizes that honesty is always required, in order to admit error when sources or facts contradict the intuition.

Defining faith as a factual claim rather than a mental-genetic state

The speaker says that defining faith as an emotion or subjective experience leads to the view that faith is not a claim about the world but a mental state, to the point of speaking about “the gene responsible for religious faith” and “opium for the masses, in Marx’s language.” He argues that even if there is a genetic tendency toward faith, at most it influences feelings and inclinations; it does not deterministically decide the choice and conclusion, just as a cowardly person can behave courageously. He argues that if faith were only an inner experience, there would be no room for debate between believers and heretics; therefore, the very existence of the debate assumes that “there is a God” is a factual claim. He interprets “faith” as a worldview about reality, not as a subjective preference.

Genetics as “spiritual eyes”

The speaker suggests that one can view the genetic affinity to faith as a perceptual tool, like good eyes that allow someone to see a distant star that others do not see, without turning the star into a product of the eyes. He says genetics may make it easier to “encounter God,” but the statement “there is a God” still remains a claim about the world, not merely a description of an experience.

The ways of arriving at faith and the critique of the science/philosophy dichotomy

The speaker presents two apparent ways of arriving at the existence of God: an observational-scientific route and a philosophical-logical route, and argues that both have difficulties, because God is not accessible to sensory measurement, and a valid logical argument only exposes a conclusion already contained in its premises, so it does not create new information. He says the naive conclusion from this is that faith exists only “inside me,” and then it once again becomes a subjective feeling. But he challenges the sharp separation between empiricism and rationalism. He argues that even in science, laws of nature are generalizations that require an act of thought beyond observation, and identifies this with “Kant’s synthetic a priori.” He concludes that intuition is another “sense” that allows perception of abstractions, laws, and patterns, and perhaps also of God.

Faith as intuition and the justification of its legitimacy

The speaker argues that the cognitive capacity called faith is nothing other than intuition, and that anyone who accepts science and philosophy already trusts intuition, so he cannot completely dismiss faith based on it as illegitimate. He says philosophical arguments for faith in God do not create faith out of nothing, but rather help reveal an intuition already present in a person’s premises and bring it to consciousness. Therefore, “the faith of a simple person” can be valid in the sense of direct awareness of intuition without the need for logical analysis.

Tradition, intuition, and the four philosophical proofs

The speaker says there are different philosophical routes that in the end are all based on intuitions, and he mentions tradition as one possibility, in which a person “believes my parents” after reaching the conclusion that what they say is true, and not because “there is value in doing what my parents said.” He presents four kinds of proofs: the ontological proof as a conceptual analysis of “the perfect being”; the cosmological proof from the very existence of something; the physico-theological proof from the purposiveness and complexity of what exists; and a “theological” proof that he adds, in which one starts from a conclusion such as the validity of morality and looks for the premises that require it. He distinguishes this proof from a pragmatist argument that invents God for the sake of utility, and argues that the valid argument is: “There is valid morality,” therefore a premise of God is required — using the logic of implication and denial of the consequent.

From the philosophical God to revelation and commandments

The speaker says that philosophical faith in God as creator is not identical to obligation to the commandments, but the distinction is not as sharp as it seems. He uses “Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot” to explain that once one already accepts the existence of God, a traditional claim about revelation and commands is not automatically dismissed as unreasonable in the way a claim about “Tinkerbell” would be. He argues that no single argument for revelation is decisive, but that the “collection of arguments” creates a web stronger than the sum of its parts. This includes a philosophical expectation of revelation if God created a world and expects proper behavior from human beings. He says morality alone explains a functioning society, but does not explain why to create a society in the first place, and therefore “religious values or the commandments” are needed — and these cannot be known without revelation. He combines this with the Sinai tradition, arguments from the Kuzari such as “a father does not lie to his son,” and indicators such as the uniqueness of the Jewish people, redemption, and the fulfillment of prophecies, and concludes that the degree of certainty is not one hundred percent but is sufficient for practical decision, just as we decide things in life.

Why specifically Judaism, and the concept of “first claim”

The speaker says that the question why specifically Jewish obligation, and not Christian, Hindu, or pagan, is answered through “first claim,” because the other monotheisms present themselves as a continuation of the Torah or as the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, changed direction. Therefore there is an agreed starting point that places the burden of proof on whoever claims a deviation from it. He notes that the witness argument and the Kuzari argument are stronger than contemporary philosophers tend to mockingly suggest.

The obligation to obey and ontological gratitude

The speaker asks why, even after accepting the existence of God and revelation and commandments, there is still an obligation to obey. He answers that one who “created the whole world and us” possesses “rights over us,” which can be called gratitude. He distinguishes between moral-ethical gratitude, which is hard to apply toward the Holy One, blessed be He — bringing Rabbi Amital and the Holocaust as examples showing that things are not always “good for us” — and “ontological” gratitude arising from the verse, “Is He not your father, your maker? He made you and established you,” and from His very being the creator. He brings intuitive-legal examples such as “wrongful birth” and the example of “intellectual property” to argue that one who creates something acquires rights in relation to it; therefore there is a basis for an obligation to obey.

The meaning of the term “God” as binding authority

The speaker argues that the term “God” in the Bible means an entity with formal authority, whom one obeys “by virtue of the very fact that He commanded,” and therefore judges are called “elohim” in the Torah, and “See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh” was said about Moses in the sense of coercive authority. He interprets “The Lord is God” not as identity between two names, but as subject and predicate, in which “the Lord” is the Tetragrammaton and “God” is a description of an entity one obeys by virtue of its essence. He rejects utilitarian reasons for obedience as “service not for its own sake,” and cites Maimonides in chapter 10 of the laws of repentance about serving not for the sake of reward as the path of “children and women,” and Thomas Malory’s image of Everest, “because it is there,” to present obedience as an inner meaning of the concept of God.

Questions about the Holy One, blessed be He, being involved in the world, reward and punishment

In the closing questions, the speaker clarifies that the discussion of the Holy One, blessed be He, being involved in the world is not part of the line of argument being summarized, even though he says that in his own view, “at least in recent generations,” the Holy One, blessed be He, is “less and less involved.” He rejects the assumption that the commandments were given so that “life would be peaches and cream,” and says that obedience does not depend on the fulfillment of promises of rain and abundance, and that discussion of verses such as “And I will give your rains in their season” and of reward and punishment belongs to a separate topic. He emphasizes that the obligation arises from the duty itself, not from the promise of good, even if “in the end, the good will come.”

Hasidism, the tzaddik, and tzimtzum

In response to a question about Hasidism, the speaker says he does not think highly of “Hasidim and Hasidism,” and distinguishes between intuition toward God and Hasidism as a tendency to see “a tzaddik who is the channel to God.” He argues that the faith of a Hasid and of a Litvak is the same faith, and that the dispute is mainly about the way of serving God. He notes that “tzimtzum literally and not literally” is a central philosophical root of Hasidism, while “the rest,” in his view, is not the main thing. He concludes by announcing a new series in the same format of one lecture every two weeks, without specifying the topic.

Okay, at the public’s request, at the end of last time I said I’d devote today to summarizing this whole line of thought. We worked on it for about two years, so it’s worth taking a broader look at what we did. And naturally, when I’m summarizing, I can’t get into details on any of the points, but there is value in seeing the big picture in broad strokes. So I started with this—let’s begin with the question: what is the meaning of this whole business of philosophically examining faith, grounding faith, and so on? There’s a built-in fear in the religious world of dealing with this. In some places it’s written that it’s forbidden—“do not stray after your hearts,” and things of that kind. So why does this have value at all, or why is it not forbidden? Here I say: one of two things. First of all, nobody can forbid me from examining my path, because when you forbid me from examining my path, you’re doing so in the name of some path—but as long as I haven’t adopted that path, how can that path dictate to me what’s forbidden and what’s permitted? In other words, when I come to examine whether I’m obligated to Jewish law, it cannot be that Jewish law says to me: I forbid you from examining me. As long as I haven’t accepted you, I also don’t accept that prohibition from you. In other words, first I have to examine, and after I examine, I’ll form a position for myself about what obligates me and what does not. Therefore, such a prohibition—even if someone were to prove with signs and wonders that it exists—cannot exist. About that the Talmud already said, yes: “By God, even if Joshua son of Nun had said it, I would not obey him.” If the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, or Moses our teacher himself, were here shouting and saying it’s forbidden for you to do this, I wouldn’t pay attention to them. In other words, there is no such thing. I cannot accept a prohibition—just as the law cannot tell me that it is forbidden to violate the law. There has to be something outside the legal system that dictates obedience to the law. Same thing here. Therefore, a prohibition of this kind cannot even be defined on the logical level—before we even get to verses and interpretations and how to understand “do not stray,” or any other source. It simply cannot be.

Now, okay, what do we do with the verses? The gates of interpretation have not been locked. I think the simple view is that the prohibition is against doing this out of impulse. You are formed in your position, you know what is right and what is not, but human beings have impulses. Once there was an impulse to worship idols. Today there may be some urge to try to find some contrary possibility—that it isn’t true—when you don’t really think it isn’t true, but rather it serves as backup for your impulses, because really you want to leave it. Maybe about that state they tell you: “do not stray after your hearts and after your eyes.” It seems to me that this is even the plain meaning of the verse. In other words: don’t let your heart and your senses take you somewhere when you know you’re not really there. Don’t let them lead you. But it doesn’t mean don’t examine. It means that when you examine, examine properly, and don’t let your heart and your eyes take you away. The heart and the eye are “the two brokers of sin,” as the Sages say. And in my view that statement says exactly what I’m saying here. It’s not a forced interpretation. It’s exactly this: when you examine, really examine. Don’t let impulses carry you away. Do a serious examination. But a serious examination is certainly possible, permitted, and appropriate. That’s the first remark.

The second remark is: what danger are you worried about? Assuming we do the examination, the danger people fear is that in the end we might conclude that maybe the whole story isn’t true, and therefore we’ll leave our religious commitment, our faith, our commitment to Jewish law, and so on. So here I say: one of two things. If that really happens, then apparently it’s true. So what’s the problem? If I reached that conclusion not out of impulses—we already talked about that—but through inquiry that at least to me seems genuine, then okay, I reached the conclusion that the whole story isn’t true. So not to do it because I might conclude it’s not true? But if that’s the truth—that it’s not true—then what kind of concern is that? It’s a bit like what I once compared to vows of self-encouragement. When a person swears that he will fulfill a commandment, the Talmud says that an oath to fulfill a commandment does take effect, in tractate Nedarim 8b. Why does an oath to fulfill a commandment take effect? Because these are vows of self-encouragement: a person comes to spur himself on to do the commandment. Now, he knows he has to do the commandment, yes, but he swears in order to give it extra force. So here too, when you swear in that kind of self-encouraging vow, when you swear to do a commandment—after all, when the time comes to do the commandment, if you don’t really want to do it, then also—you won’t keep the oath, because you don’t keep the whole system’s obligation at all. In other words, this whole story speaks only to people who indeed have a formed position of that kind. But if you really don’t think so, then what’s the problem if you reach the conclusion that it isn’t true? Because from your standpoint it really isn’t true.

And beyond that, suppose you don’t do this, and you don’t start philosophically examining the issue of faith because maybe you’ll reach the conclusion that it isn’t true. What is your situation right now? After all, right now you basically are not a believer; you’re just not aware that you’re not a believer, because you haven’t allowed yourself to expose that to yourself. But inside, if you took everything into account, all the arguments, in the end my conclusion is that if I were to examine all this, I wouldn’t believe. So in fact I don’t believe—I’m just not admitting it to myself. It’s like an ostrich that refuses to look outside and buries its head in the sand. The fact that you bury your head in the sand doesn’t mean there isn’t a tiger outside. The tiger exists. In other words, burying your head in the sand won’t help. Also in our context, this fear of engaging in philosophical examination of the issue lest I conclude that I don’t believe—even if I don’t do the examination, I still don’t believe. I may continue to observe all the commandments as usual, but I’m not really a believing person. So what did you gain?

And ultimately, therefore, it seems to me that the fear of dealing with these things is an unfounded fear; it doesn’t really exist. And certainly there can be no prohibition on this—unless it’s something done to support one’s impulses rather than out of genuine inquiry. Someone asked me on the website yesterday or the day before, I don’t remember anymore—someone asked me whether it’s permitted. There are experiments like this that test the effectiveness of prayer. They compare patients who were prayed for and patients who weren’t prayed for, and they look at the rates of recovery. Okay, there have been such experiments, by the way. Christians have done this. Jews don’t do it, because Christians really believe—not like us, playing marbles. So we aren’t really willing to put it to the test. And yes, the Sages say it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, and things like that. They put up fences so that we wouldn’t test. So someone says to me: look, but some of these experiments were done on Christians. And among Christians they prayed, and the experiment showed that it helped significantly. Yes, there are such experiments that showed this. There are criticisms of them, but that’s not the point right now. So he says—well, I said to him: that of course I don’t consider, because that’s idol worship; it’s irrelevant. I’m asking what the significance would be of such experiments done on Jews. I said to him: I don’t understand. Are you approaching the experiment already knowing the result? If you know the result, don’t approach the experiment. If there’s an experiment with Christians showing that their prayers work, then apparently their prayers really work. You decide in advance which results you’ll accept and which you won’t—so why go to these experiments at all? The fellow is only going to the experiments so that it will strengthen what he already thinks beforehand. So if you already hold what you think beforehand, don’t go to the experiment. So why are you dealing with it?

That’s what usually happens, really. People don’t go to the experiment anyway—either because they think it will strengthen what they already thought, or, more realistically, because even if it doesn’t strengthen what they thought beforehand, nothing will change for them, because we are not honest. Fine, just a side remark. In any case, for our purposes, I think the fear is a problematic fear.

Beyond that, not only is the fear a problematic fear, I think there is value in arriving at a formed position of your own. People often relate with some kind of appreciative or even admiring attitude toward simple faith—people who hold strongly to their faith because that’s what they received from their parents’ home. Their parents raised them that way, and therefore they are prepared to give their lives for it. In my eyes, this is a collection of ignoramuses. Someone who does that is just a bunch of tasteless, mindless fanatics. Why? Because your father and mother educated you about something—so what? Pagans too were educated by their father and mother about something. Everyone, wherever he is born, his parents educate him as they understand things. Fine. Why is that any guarantee that you’re right? Is continuing your parents’ path some sort of value? What value is there in continuing your parents’ path? I don’t see any value in that at all. You can examine and see. If they’re right—excellent. And if they’re not right, then so what if this is my parents’ path? Then they were mistaken. So if my parents were mistaken, should I also be mistaken? What are you?

Therefore, in my view inquiry is something of very great value. Not only is it not forbidden, and not only is it impossible to forbid a person from inquiring—because how am I supposed to form a position without inquiry?—I claim that a position you arrived at without inquiry is not really a position. In other words, it has no value. And therefore, in my view, inquiry is not only permitted, it is necessary, it is worthy. Without it, the whole position isn’t really worth much. Your faith.

I’ll already add here that I said such inquiry does not necessarily mean some philosophical investigation of one kind or another. Inquiry can sometimes simply mean that a person asks himself: do I really believe this? Am I really there? And if intuitively he reaches the conclusion that yes, then that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone has to be a philosopher; that’s not what I mean. What I do mean is that a person has to form his faith for himself and not be satisfied with the fact that his father and mother educated him into it. So what if they educated him into it? That means nothing. How to do the inquiry—philosophical inquiry, this kind of inquiry, that kind of inquiry—each person according to his way, each person according to his inclinations. There are no rules here. Very often we make do with a good intuition we have, and that spares us all the philosophical hair-splitting, and that’s perfectly fine. In that sense I have no problem at all with simple faith. It’s perfectly fine. Simple faith in the sense that it is not philosophical but intuitive—clear to me that it is true. Simple faith in the sense of: leave me alone, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I make the foundational move and adopt this whole system because my parents educated me that way—that, in my view, is ignorant nonsense. It’s worth nothing.

Sometimes this is a dyadic business. It reminds me also—just a few days ago I was speaking with Rabbi Shabtai Rappaport; we were at some conference. Someone there mentioned in the name of Rabbi Soloveitchik that Rabbi Soloveitchik said that when a halakhic decisor is asked a question, he basically knows the answer in advance; the sources he looks for afterward. That is, you know what you’re going to answer, and afterward you build the responsum in a way that supports what you thought from the start. And he got very angry about that statement. He said: what do you mean? That’s Reform, that’s ignorance. What do you mean, a halakhic decisor does whatever he wants? A halakhic decisor has to rule according to what Jewish law says. I said to him: look, there are two meanings to this description of Rabbi Soloveitchik. One meaning is indeed that the decisor does whatever his heart desires, and you can always recruit sources to support what you want—that’s Reform. But if I say no: I have some initial intuition that tells me this is the correct ruling, that this is what Jewish law says—not what I want. My intuition tells me that this is what Jewish law is in such a case, and now I check the sources and anchor or support this intuition in sources—that, it seems to me, is what Rabbi Soloveitchik meant. It has nothing to do with Reform in any way, and I think it is also a correct description. I don’t know if in every case—I don’t think in every case—but in many cases you have an initial intuition.

By the way, in science too it’s like this. Many scientists have some initial intuition about what is true, and afterward they do an experiment in order to support the matter. The best example of this—what’s his name, the one who proved Fermat’s theorem? Wiles, Andrew Wiles, okay? He proved Fermat’s theorem. Now, he invested six years in it. Six years of his academic career he sat alone in a room, told nobody, and worked on that proof. Now I ask you: did Andrew Wiles not have a position regarding Fermat’s theorem before he found the proof? He didn’t know whether it was true or not? Obviously that’s nonsense. If he were in a state of doubt, who invests six years in something with a fifty percent chance that it won’t work at all? It was clear to him in advance that the theorem was true. That was intuitively clear to him. But mathematicians don’t go to the grocery store with intuition—you have to find a proof. So he sat for six years and looked for a proof. But he was looking for a proof for what his intuition had already told him was true. So usually intuition guides scientists too, mathematicians too; afterward they look for experimental confirmation or proof or whatever it may be. Therefore, I see no problem—on the contrary—even with halakhic ruling in this way. My intuition tells me this is what is correct; afterward I look for how to ground it in the sources. You just have to be honest enough that if the sources come out the opposite, or show that it isn’t grounded, then I’ll be honest enough to say: no, in this case my intuition was mistaken. In science, in Jewish law, in mathematics—honesty is always required. But having an intuition in advance—there is nothing wrong with that at all. On the contrary, intuition often directs us where to look for proofs and empirical facts.

So that’s regarding the importance of inquiry.

After that we entered the issue of faith itself—what is faith? Up to now we spoke about engaging in faith: what value it has, whether there is room for such engagement, and so forth. Now I ask: what is faith? Often people answer that faith is some kind of feeling, experience, or something like that. But feeling or experience are things that are subjective by their essence. A person—yes, every now and then these studies appear claiming they found the gene responsible for religious faith. When they say there is a gene responsible for religious faith, they usually mean to say that faith is some kind of psychological state or emotion, and therefore it is a function of a person’s genetic or psychological makeup. There’s a believing person, there’s a non-believing person, but it’s all genetics. That is a conception that basically says that faith is not a claim about the world. Faith is an inner psychological state. It has nothing to do with the Holy One, blessed be He, whom I’m speaking about; that is essentially an entity I invented—opium for the masses, in Marx’s phrase. In other words, it is not really the claim that there is a God who created the world, or whatever, that there is God in some sense as a factual claim. Rather, it is something subjective, dependent on the person’s genetics. One person is timid, one person is stingy, one person is brave, one person is believing. To each his genes. But I claim that this is not true. That is not the definition of faith, and it is also not true that it derives from genes.

So you’re saying that the distribution between believers and non-believers would have been consistent throughout history and wouldn’t have changed very much? I didn’t understand. Because if it’s a matter of personality or something natural in a person, yes or no, then you’d expect the number of believers versus non-believers not to change dramatically throughout history. No, that’s just too extreme a view of genetics. It’s obvious that environment also affects phenomena that are genetic. In other words, maybe I have the genes of a believing person, but if the environment doesn’t support that, then I suppress it and define myself as an atheist—or the opposite, what difference does it make? The fact that I have genes of a certain type does not mean that the matter is determined in a deterministic way. Maybe this relates to the next sentence I’m about to say, like the gene responsible for courage. What is a gene responsible for courage? A gene responsible for courage is a gene that has to do with the question of what my feelings are, what my experience is. It is not a gene that says what I will do. In other words, it could be that a person is fearful but overcomes it and behaves courageously. His behavior is courageous; his feelings are feelings of fear. Genes dictate the feelings, but still, if I’m someone who believes in free choice, then the fact that genes try to push me in a certain direction or stop me from another direction doesn’t mean that that’s what will happen. I can decide to go here against my tendency—to overcome fear, or the opposite, or at least in a place where I’m less afraid, or whatever, to overcome stinginess, to overcome all sorts of things. So the tendencies are tendencies that perhaps come from genes, but what I do is not dictated by my tendencies.

Likewise, even if there is a gene responsible for faith—and I very much doubt it, but let’s say there is—what that gene would really mean is that you have some tendency to be a believing person. But in the end it is entirely possible that you will make a rational judgment and reach the conclusion that there is no God and overcome that tendency. Or you’ll reach the conclusion that there is a God and then say: okay, I have a tendency, but I also think it’s true, and I’m a believing person because I think it’s true, not because of the tendency. If I had reached the conclusion that it wasn’t true, I would have overcome the tendency.

Yes, like people always say: there are no atheists in foxholes. When you’re under bombardment, all the atheists suddenly turn out to be believing people and turn to the Holy One, blessed be He, or to God, to protect them. I very much doubt what the faith of that kind is worth. It’s a faith that arises from some fear or something of that sort; the fact is that after the war it passes pretty quickly. They don’t usually go and pay the vows they made there under fire. Fine, maybe one could say there’s something deeper here, not important right now. But the fact that we have a tendency to do something does not mean that when we do it we do it because of the tendency. The fact that I am brave does not mean I have genes of courage. Sometimes I overcame it, while my genes would have caused me to be afraid, but I overcame them. The fact that I believe does not mean I have genes of faith. It could be that I don’t have such genes, but I reached the conclusion that it is true, and therefore I believe—or the opposite. Therefore the fact—not the fact, but even if they did find some genetic structure supposedly responsible for faith, that still would not really mean that faith is not talking about the world, that it is just the product of experience or merely a description of an inner psychological experience, and so on.

And therefore I indeed argued that faith, in the essential sense—the faith I’m speaking about, at least—is not a feeling, not “faith” that is in us because of genes of this or that kind or some psychological structure or another. Rather, the faith I’m talking about is faith that is a factual claim about the world. When I say “I believe in God,” I mean: there is a God. That is the claim. And someone who says there is no God is mistaken. Because if it is only a genetic experience or some inner thing in me, then someone who has a different experience or is built genetically differently—I won’t say he is mistaken. Suppose I’m brave because I have genes of courage and someone else has the genes of a coward. Then he is fearful. Shall we say he is mistaken? He isn’t mistaken—that’s his genes and these are mine. There is no claim here about the world. Each person has his inner experiences. I love someone, someone else doesn’t love him—so is he mistaken? No, that’s my taste and that’s his taste. These things are subjective; they are not claims about the world, and therefore argument about them is impossible. Each person has his own subjective experience.

If there is an argument between believers and heretics, that means both the believers and the heretics agree that the claim “there is a God” is a factual claim about the world. It’s just that the heretics don’t accept it and the believers do. But both have to agree that faith in God is a factual claim about the world, because otherwise there is no point arguing. There’s nothing to argue about. All you’re saying is: you have one kind of experience, you have another kind of experience, let each person do whatever he wants with his own experiences. Why would we argue about that? Therefore the point of departure for my whole line of thought was that faith is a factual claim about the world. In other words, there is a worldview—there is a God.

What? That’s basically the conceptualization—again, excuse me for quoting Rabbi Bogatch from the yeshiva. There were arguments about these matters, and the boy would say: I don’t believe. And he’d say: there’s no such thing as not believing. Everyone believes. The question is in what. One person believes in religious faith and another believes in secular faith. But what is faith? Faith is a worldview. How do you understand the universe around you? Okay, so okay, then it’s not “non-believing,” but rather you believe in something else. But still, one can ask about both religious faith and what you called secular faith—which I’m less inclined to accept as a term—one can ask about both types of believers whether they are speaking about their inner experiences or subjectivities, or whether they are making a claim about the world. The fact that everyone has some kind of beliefs still doesn’t tell us the nature of that belief—whether the belief is a claim about the world or a description of my inner psychological state.

So it’s like we said five minutes ago. Some people—not everyone has the same box. Some people are deeper, and for them faith or worldview is indeed more intellectual. And some people’s minds are not that strong. It doesn’t matter to me; I’m not talking about whether you’re a philosopher or not. For everyone, his beliefs can be the result of raw intuition. Okay, true, but I’m asking what this belief is. Is this belief a claim about the world, or is this belief my psychological state? That has nothing to do with whether you’re a philosopher or not. Those are two completely different questions. And I want to claim that the faith I’m talking about is a claim about the world. How did I get there? Through simple intuition, observation, philosophical reasoning—it doesn’t matter, each according to his path. But what is faith categorically? It is a claim about the world. And I’ll say more than that—the term worldview. Fine, but the question is: what is a worldview? Is a worldview a claim about the world, or is it a subjective feeling inside me? That’s the question I’m asking here. A feeling inside me that explains how I see things. Not how I see things—that doesn’t interest me. I’m asking what things themselves are. Do you have an argument with someone who sees them differently? It’s like you love someone and someone else doesn’t love him. Do you have an argument? No. You are built so that you love him and he is built so that he doesn’t love him. I’m asking whether you say the same thing about faith in God. I don’t—I don’t see it the same way. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say here.

Therefore it doesn’t matter that other people have various beliefs; each person has his beliefs. Anyone who tells me “I believe in something,” I’ll ask him what he means by “believe.” Do you mean you have some inner experience like that, or that you are making some claim about the world? And now let’s start arguing.

Maybe one more remark about the genetics I spoke of earlier. A person’s genetics can certainly play a role in his ability to encounter God. That yes. In other words, it could be that there is a person whose genetics enable him better to encounter the religious dimension, or God, and arrive at faith—just as a person with better eyesight will see some distant star that a person with weaker eyesight won’t see. So the fact that it depends on the quality of your eyes is true, but the eyes are only the instrument by which you see the star. Now you are claiming that there is a star out there in the world. The genetics responsible for faith—if such a connection, such a correlation, exists at all—what I want to argue is that at most genetics are a kind of spiritual eyes. In other words, someone with sharper eyes can more easily arrive at seeing the conclusion that there is a God. But now when he says “there is a God,” he is not making a subjective claim about his experience; he is making a claim about the world, like saying there is some star way off there. And someone else does not see it because his eyes are less good. So the fact that it depends on my structure, on my perception or thought, on my genetics—that may indeed be true. But that does not mean it is the product of my genetics. It means that my genetics give me better tools to discern that fact than someone whose genetics are different. And still I claim that this is a factual claim. And I say that when I say “I believe in God,” the meaning is a factual claim: there is a God.

Now, if indeed that is so, then we moved to the next stage and asked: if this is how we identify the concept of faith, how do we arrive at it? And here I said there are ostensibly two ways. One way is the observational way: simply observe God and discover that He is here. Just as I look here and see there’s a table here—the observation shows me there’s a table here—so let’s call this the observational, scientific way, and so on. The second way is the philosophical way. I make some philosophical calculation from certain assumptions and arrive at the conclusion that there is a God. Those are the two toolboxes we have: the scientific toolbox and the logical-philosophical toolbox. Okay.

Now, ostensibly neither of these toolboxes can lead us to the conclusion that there is a God. Observation—obviously. What observations can I make in order to conclude that there is a God? He is not something accessible to my sensory tools, to my senses, to my measuring instruments. There is no scientific way to arrive at the conclusion that there is a God. And the philosophical way is also problematic, because essentially it begs the question. We discussed this: when I have a valid logical argument—All human beings are mortal; Socrates is a human being; conclusion: Socrates is mortal—why does the conclusion necessarily follow from the premises? Simply because the premises already contain it. If I say all human beings are mortal, then hidden within that is also that Socrates is mortal. So the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises simply because it was already inside them. When I posited the premises, implicitly I had already posited the conclusion too. Or in other words, every valid logical argument, every valid philosophical argument, already has the conclusion inside its premises. Therefore I can never take premises and, by logic alone, reach a conclusion that was not already embedded within them.

But then it turns out that by means of logic and philosophy I cannot really accumulate new information. I cannot arrive at factual claims that I did not already assume in advance. So if I arrived at the conclusion that there is a God by means of philosophical reasoning, that only means that in the premises of that reasoning I had already encoded the conclusion that there is a God. And once again the question returns: fine, and where did I learn the premises from? In other words, the philosophical-logical route also doesn’t really succeed in bringing me to the conclusion that there is a God. All philosophy or logic can do, at most, is reveal to me what I already believe. The logical argument merely exposes things that are inside the premises. The conclusion I arrived at was already inside the premises, so the logical argument helps me discover that inside my premises there is already this conclusion as well. Like in geometry: the conclusions, the theorems—I expose them by means of mathematical tools, I expose them from the assumptions, but they were already in the assumptions. So it turns out that logic and philosophy are not tools for acquiring new information; they can only reveal information that already exists in me. But then I ask: how does it exist in me? Where did it come from? It can’t come from observation, and logic or philosophy cannot bring me new information, only reveal information that already exists.

Ostensibly the conclusion is what I denied earlier—and indeed many people think exactly this—that faith is really not a claim about the world; it is something built into me. And the logical argument only shows me that it is built into me, that’s all. Because if observation can’t get there, then apparently it is somehow inside me. And if it is inside me, then who says it really describes something in the world? The fact that there is within me such a religious feeling or such a religious experience of God does not mean that in the world itself there is a God. Therefore the way of looking at these two toolboxes is really a kind of perspective that brings us back to the starting point. If not through the scientific toolbox and not through the philosophical toolbox, then what is faith? So ostensibly we are back to faith being merely a subjective emotion or subjective experience.

Here I want to challenge a bit this dichotomy between the philosophical toolbox and the scientific toolbox. And this is the difference, the dispute, between rationalism and empiricism. Empiricism believes in science; rationalism believes in thought, philosophy, and logic. But both of these approaches are naive approaches, even though the argument between them has gone on for thousands of years throughout history. Both approaches are naive. It is impossible to make a sharp distinction between thought and cognition.

Let’s look at science. In science, when we make a scientific generalization and arrive at a law of nature, it is basically a generalization resulting from cases we have observed. The generalization is an act of thought. One cannot say that a law of nature is the product of observation. That is not true. Observation begins the process, but observation alone is not enough to establish a law of nature. A law of nature is a generalization based on the observations we made, because a law of nature speaks about infinitely many cases. The observations we made are however many observations we made—I don’t know, two, five, ten, fifty. But a law of nature speaks about infinitely many situations and cases. Therefore there is always also an act—inside science itself, the route to laws of nature always contains an act of thought, and it is not only pure cognition. This is basically Kant’s synthetic a priori. I won’t get into it again, but that is essentially Kant’s diagnosis: that the distinction between the a priori, or logical-philosophical, and the scientific is a false distinction. There aren’t really two such toolboxes.

So what is there? Apparently—and I say this is the only explanation one can offer for it, and again I’m not going into the whole line of thought, I’m only summarizing—we can only explain our ability to generalize and arrive at scientific laws or insights about the world by seeing intuition as a kind of sense. I can look at the world not with my eyes, not with my ears, not with the senses, but with the eyes of the intellect. And suddenly I see that there is some general law here, or things like that. This is abstract perception. It is not “sense” in the scientific-empirical meaning. On the other hand, science itself operates by means of these intuitions; it cannot do without them. Because without them we would remain with the collection of facts we observed. We could never arrive at the general law. And if so, then that means that intuition is really some sort of additional sense. I think we have a sixth sense, six senses not five. Intuition too is a kind of sense, and it can perceive abstract things—laws of nature, abstract entities, perhaps also God.

Now my claim is that faith—not faith in God, but the concept of faith, this cognitive faculty called faith—is none other than what we call intuition. It is a kind of perception, and this perception enables us to see in the world things that the senses do not have access to, that the senses do not manage to see. We can see generalizations, general laws, structures, patterns—yes, the law of causality, induction, all sorts of things like that. These are perceptual tools we have, which give us the possibility of reaching conclusions that the senses in the narrow sense cannot lead us to. And if so, then also with regard to faith in God, I think it is not right to look at it dichotomously—either a scientific toolbox or a philosophical toolbox. Rather, intuition, which has a role in both this toolbox and that toolbox, and basically shows that they are not two separate toolboxes, can also arrive at faith in God. And if so, then the claim is that a philosophical argument leading to the conclusion that there is a God is an argument that exposes before me an intuition I have that there is a God.

And therefore we have a way of arriving at the existence of God if we assume—or place trust in—what is called intuition, in our intuitive faculty. And I say again: if we do not trust it, then you can throw out all of science and all of philosophy and everything. You can be a total skeptic. But if you are not a total skeptic, then you necessarily trust your intuition. And if so, then you cannot come with claims against someone who says his intuition leads him to faith in God. That is completely legitimate, rational, whatever you want. Yes, this division into either philosophy and logic or science is a false division. It is not true. There is no such sharp dichotomy between the two.

Now what this basically means is that a philosophical or logical argument really can only reveal to me the fact that I already believe. But the fact that I already believe does not mean this is my subjective experience. It only means that my intuition gives me the possibility of encountering God. And I discover this to myself, or bring it into my awareness, by means of a logical-philosophical argument. Therefore all the philosophical arguments that lead to faith in God are arguments that proceed from premises and reach a conclusion. As I said, in a valid logical argument the conclusion is always embedded within the premises. Therefore this really reveals to me that in the premises I adopted there exists—that in the premises I adopted there exists—this philosophical argument only tells me that within the premises from which I set out there is actually this intuition that there is a God. And the logical analysis merely exposes that to me.

In the end, faith in God is always intuition. I have an intuition that there is a God. And this basically means that when I examine the paths by which to reach God—and that was the next stage we covered—how to reach God, there are several ways. There are philosophical ways—Kant divided them into three; I added one, so there are four. There is the way of simply having an intuition that there is a God. And I said that all the philosophical ways too are really based on some intuition; it just takes logical and philosophical analysis to expose that I have such an intuition. And there are people who are aware of it even without the philosophical analysis, so they immediately say: I have an intuition that there is a God, and therefore I am a believer—which is completely rational and legitimate; there is nothing wrong with that. In that sense, the faith of a simple person has nothing defective about it. On the contrary, it is someone who doesn’t need the logical tools in order to discern that he has an intuition that there is a God. There are others for whom this is more blocked, and so they need logical and philosophical analysis to reveal this matter to them.

There is tradition—yes, tradition, but not in the sense that I do what my parents educated me to do, but in the sense that I believe my parents. In other words, not that there is value in doing what my parents said, but rather I reached the conclusion that what my parents said is true, and therefore it is my conclusion, not theirs. But the tradition that conveys to me the encounter at Sinai, or whatever it may be, is basically my basis for faith. And as I said before, there are four philosophical ways.

So the two ways—the four philosophical ways—I said I divided philosophy into four, the philosophical arguments for faith in God into four. Kant divided them into three. One of them is conceptual analysis, what he called the ontological proof. God is defined as the perfect being. If He does not exist, then He is less perfect than someone who does exist; therefore He must exist. I’m presenting this in a very unserious and abbreviated way because I can’t get into it. I spent a rather long series of classes arguing that this argument is not as foolish as people always make fun of. It is a very sophisticated argument, and it is not merely conceptual analysis, as Anselm or Kant thought. It also contains premises, contrary to what they thought. They thought it was an argument without premises. But still, as an argument with premises, it is not to be dismissed. But that is the first route: conceptual analysis.

The second route was the cosmological proof: from the fact that something exists, apparently there is something that produced the thing that exists, without assuming anything about what exists—whether the world, us, or whatever. That is the cosmological proof. The physico-theological proof says that what exists is very complex, or appears purposeful, coordinated, has very special properties, and therefore apparently someone arranged those special properties in what exists. That is called the physico-theological proof, and it brings proof from physics—not from cosmology, not from the mere fact that something exists, but from the special properties of what exists. And those are Kant’s three kinds.

The fourth kind that I added is a theological proof, in quotation marks. I said that a philosophical proof is to proceed from premises and arrive at a conclusion. A theological proof is to proceed from the conclusion and look for the premises that lead to it. And so, just to remind you, theological proofs basically went in the opposite direction. For example, I think there is binding morality—I am obligated to morality, I believe morality is binding, valid. Now I go backward and say: wait, what premises could underlie this conclusion that there is valid morality? If there is no God, there cannot be valid morality—that’s what I argued there. So if that’s the case, then clearly if I think there is valid morality, I am probably assuming that there is a God. So morality proved God—not that faith in God causes me to be obligated to morality, but that the commitment to morality led me to recognize that I believe in God. That’s why I call it a theological proof, yes, following the joke that says philosophers take premises and derive a conclusion from them, whereas theologians take a conclusion and derive a premise from it. They take the conclusion that there is a God and derive from it the premises that lead to it. Usually. So this is usually said to make fun of theologians, but in truth it isn’t right. We often have philosophical arguments that do exactly this route. Because if I really do reach the conclusion that there is valid morality, if I have an intuition that morality is a system of valid principles, and I ask myself what underlies this intuition, I say: this is probably an implicit faith in God. And this is a completely rational and legitimate way to arrive at the conclusion that there is a God—even though it is very easy to confuse it with a pragmatic argument.

The pragmatic argument says: yes, God is opium for the masses. What does that mean? You want there to be valid morality, because otherwise everyone here will murder everyone else. So let’s invent God, let’s say He commanded us to be moral, and then we can feel safer. This is basically the invention of God for pragmatic needs, so He’ll help us. Yes—“In the beginning, man created God,” as they say, replacing the first verse of the Torah. But that is a pragmatic argument, which is of course nonsense. You cannot believe in God just because He will help me establish valid morality. The fact that I want there to be a God does not mean that there is one.

I’m making a different claim. It is very similar, but essentially different. I say: there is valid morality—not that I want there to be valid morality, but there is valid morality. Now I ask: how can there be valid morality? After all, if there is no God, there cannot be such a thing. So there must be a God. We discussed that there is entailment: A implies B, from which there is the equivalent entailment that not-B implies not-A. Right? In other words, if A implies B, then not-B must imply not-A, because if A were the case, then B would also be the case and not not-B. Therefore this is what is called denying the consequent. The consequent of the implication is B. A implies B—A is the antecedent, B is the consequent. So one can deny the consequent and say not-B implies not-A. So if I say only if there is a God is there morality—let’s put it this way: if there is no God, there is no morality. There cannot be valid morality if there is no God. That is A implies B. I deny the consequent: if there is morality—yes, B here is no morality, so not-B is there is morality—there is morality implies there is a God. And that argument is just as valid as the argument that if there is no God, there is no morality. The difference between them is not in the logic. The logic—A implies B and not-B implies not-A—is the same thing. The difference between them is in the philosophy. Because philosophically, in the first argument I assume A, I assume there is a God, and from that I derive that there is morality. In the second argument I assume there is morality, and from that I derive that there is a God. So the entailment itself is the same. The question is what is the point of departure and what will be the conclusion. That is a philosophical difference, and a very important one.

Health to you. It is a philosophical difference, and it is very important. Valid morality, which obligates me. Yes, yes—valid morality, not a subjective experience of morality. This is morality that obligates, and if someone does not act that way I have claims against him, I judge him—that is what I mean by morality. And we defined this at length; here I’m really only summarizing in bullet points.

In short, I ran quickly through the four philosophical ways, intuition, and tradition. Broadly speaking, those are the six ways one can arrive at faith in God, without getting into the details of each of those ways; we spoke at great length.

At the end of the process I came to the question: even if I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God, how do I derive from here an obligation to His commandments? The very fact that He was revealed—and even if He was revealed, why am I obligated to His commandments? Often people say: I believe in God in some philosophical sense; there is some entity here that created everything that exists here, that sounds very plausible to me. But what is the connection between that and putting on tefillin, or eating holy bread in church, or I don’t know exactly, various religious commandments? Yes, where did you invent this thing from?

So I said that in principle these really are two different questions. But I think the distinction between them is not as sharp as people usually think. Because I brought Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot and said that after I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God, when a tradition comes to me and says that God was revealed at Mount Sinai and commanded me various commandments, this is no longer something I reject out of hand. Because if I have no idea what God is, whether He exists at all, and suddenly someone comes and says: look, there is a God, He was revealed to me at Sinai, and He told me to put on tefillin every morning—then I say to him: and Tinker Bell was revealed to me and told me to smoke a pipe every day at five in the afternoon. What do you want from my life? But that’s the celestial teapot. If, however, I’ve reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God—on that we agree—now someone comes and says: look, that same God whose existence you also accept, I met Him, and He told me such and such. Well, that’s no longer absurd. It’s not necessarily true, but it’s no longer something absurd on its face. It’s not something I’ll dismiss immediately. And so now I enter the question whether it is true. But I don’t have built-in antibodies that reject it out of hand.

How do you check whether it’s true? You check the tradition, you check the different indications there are for that revelation. And basically what I said is that each of the arguments brought in this context, on its own, is not always enough to convince. I didn’t say there’s nothing to them. As was mentioned here earlier, I said that each one on its own is not absolute; it is not enough to convince. But the collection of these arguments together creates some structure that in my view is stronger than all its individual components.

So I spoke about the fact that if there is a God and He created the world—because that’s the physico-theological proof and the cosmological proof—He created the world and He created morality, meaning He also expects us to behave properly, then that means He basically has some expectation of us. We weren’t just created here for no reason. And therefore I would expect Him to reveal to us what He wants from us, because otherwise how would we know? And I said that morality by itself is not enough to explain the purpose of the world’s creation, because the role of morality is to create a proper society. But if you hadn’t created society, there would have been no need for it to be proper. Therefore the fact that society is proper cannot be the reason to create that society. The reason has to be something beyond the world, beyond people—something spiritual. And this is what I call religious values, or the commandments. And we cannot know that unless there was revelation.

Therefore the fact that there is a tradition about there having been a revelation, and the Kuzari’s argument that a father does not lie to his son, and so on—we found stronger arguments than that. But together with this a priori claim, that I expect there to be revelation on philosophical grounds, and the indications regarding the uniqueness of the people of Israel, redemption, fulfillment of prophecies, and all sorts of things—we talked about all these things. All of these together create a kind of web that is stronger than any one of them alone. And the debates are always conducted over each of them separately, and therefore they miss the point. Even after this web, of course, there is still no one hundred percent here; nothing is one hundred percent. But it is good enough to make decisions, like we make decisions in every area of life. It is enough that I reached the conclusion that it is sufficiently reasonable in order to make the decision about commitment.

I spoke about the question why specifically Jewish commitment, and not Christian, Hindu, pagan, or whatever else you want. So I said there is here a first-claim advantage. The monotheisms are basically continuations of the Torah, or they claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, changed direction. There is some kind of starting point here to which everyone agrees, and the burden of proof is on whoever claims otherwise. We won’t go back into all those details again. I spoke about the testimony argument, the “a father does not lie to his son” idea from the Kuzari. I said that it is a stronger argument than what all kinds of philosophers today make fun of.

And at the end I concluded the process with one further question. Even if I reached the conclusion that there is a God, and I reached the conclusion that He was indeed revealed at Sinai and gave commandments, who says I have to obey? I can accept all those premises and it still does not mean I am obligated to what He commanded me. And here I spoke about the concept of God, or ontological or philosophical gratitude. And the claim is that if there is something or someone who created the whole world and us, then He has some rights over us, which one can call gratitude. And this is not gratitude like when a person does me a favor and I owe him gratitude in return, because with regard to the Holy One, blessed be He, those categories don’t really apply. I brought Rabbi Amital: He didn’t exert Himself at all, and many times things are not so good for us but bad for us—the Holocaust, and so on. Therefore the usual moral and ethical concepts of gratitude are difficult to apply to the Holy One, blessed be He.

But I brought the verse: “Is He not your Father, your Creator? He made you and established you.” And I brought several commentators there who speak about the fact that our obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He, is twofold: both moral gratitude—meaning, He did me a favor so I should return good to Him—but also gratitude from the very fact that “He made you.” That is, He made me. And the moment He made me, He has some rights over me. I brought the legal example of wrongful birth, which deals with children’s obligations toward their parents, that they cannot sue them, and all sorts of things of that kind. In other words, we have some intuition that says that if someone created everything, created us, he has some rights over us. We need to obey him.

I brought as an example of this intellectual property. If someone created an idea, the accepted view is that the idea is his. In other words, you may not take the idea from him. Why? Because he created it. Meaning, if someone created everything, created us, he has some rights over us. We need to obey him. Like—I brought as an example intellectual property. If someone created an idea, the accepted view is that the idea is his. In other words, you may not take the idea from him. Why? Because he created it. In other words, whoever creates something has rights over that thing. And therefore our obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He, is not only ethical gratitude but also ontological gratitude—that is, gratitude by virtue of the very fact that He created us. And that is basically the end of the process, because we reached the conclusion that there is a philosophical God, He was revealed at Sinai and gave us commandments. And if one indeed accepts those two premises, then there is also an obligation to what He commanded.

I spoke about the fact that the concept “God” in the Bible means a being whom one must obey, who has formal authority. That is why judges are called “god” in the Torah. Why? Because what they say has to be done—not because they are right, but because they are the judges. It is institutional authority, formal authority. Why is that called “god”? Because that is the concept of God. The concept of God is not just someone who created the world and that’s it, but someone to whom one must obey. “See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh,” the Holy One, blessed be He, says to Moses. What does it mean, a god to Pharaoh? I am placing you in a situation such that Pharaoh will have to do what you say because you said it—like a god. This is Maimonides with idol worship out of love or fear, where one is exempt unless he accepted it as a god. “Accepted it as a god”—that means I fulfill the commandments or commands of someone because of the mere fact that he commanded. Not because it is right, not because it is reasonable, not because it is moral, not because it benefits me, not because I love him, and not because I fear him, but because he is he.

Yes, I spoke about Thomas Mallory, the mountain climber, who was asked why he climbs Everest, and he answered: “Because it is there.” Meaning, that is not what requires explanation. If you ask me why I obey the Holy One, blessed be He, that question reflects a lack of understanding. If you understand that He is God, you don’t ask why obey Him. God is someone whom one obeys by virtue of the fact that He is God. Just as one cannot ask the question: I understand that it is immoral to murder, but why really not murder? If you ask such a question, then you don’t understand the meaning of the concept, the statement “it is immoral to murder.” When you say it is immoral to murder, that means it is improper to murder, wrong to murder, forbidden to murder. Therefore likewise, when you say “I believe in God,” or “I believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God,” this basically means that He is a being whose very commands are binding.

Therefore when we say “The Lord is God,” ostensibly that sounds like a tautology. What does it mean “The Lord is God”? That name A of His equals name B of His? What? “God” is not a name; it is a description. Y-H-V-H is God’s name, and “God” is His description. What does that mean? It means: He is such a being that one must obey what He says by virtue of who He is. That is called God. That is why a judge too is called “god.” When I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, I am describing something. The Holy One, blessed be He, is His name—or Y-H-V-H is His name—and I say He is God. What does that mean? He is such a being that one must obey what He says. Therefore this is not identification between—analytic philosophers talk about the statement “the evening star is the morning star.” Once they thought these were two different stars until they discovered it was the same star. In the evening you see it as the evening star; in the morning you see it as the morning star. So analytic philosophers ask what the meaning of such a sentence is. “The evening star” is a term pointing to some star in the sky. “The morning star” is also a term pointing to some star in the sky. When you say “the evening star is the morning star,” you’re basically saying that star is that star. What is the meaning of such a sentence? Yes, so the same question can be asked about the sentence “The Lord is God.” Fine—so, blessed be He, these are two of His names. He is called “the Lord” and He is called “God.” No. It is a statement with a subject and a predicate—a subject and a description. The subject is Y-H-V-H, “the Lord,” and “God” is a description. “God” means a being whom one must obey by virtue of the fact that He is who He is. Okay? That is the meaning of obligation toward Him.

Any other explanation for our obligation—gratitude of this kind, or because it will benefit us, because it will improve our lives, because it will create a healthy society—all these things are service not for its own sake, service done incorrectly. Fundamental religious service is because He said so. That’s it. “His soul departed with ‘so.’” Here we conclude the—

That’s it, so this is a side question. As a result of questions that came up regarding, heaven forbid, the Holocaust, or any family killed suddenly—whether in a terror attack, an accident, or all kinds of disasters—what was said here was basically, in my opinion, something of a novelty, a novelty we haven’t heard until now over all this time: that basically the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved in these matters. He—He is not— That’s not our subject here. I do indeed think so. But that is not our subject here; I didn’t say that. Why? So what does that mean? That He is basically the manufacturer, He gave us an instruction manual and that’s it? What? I didn’t say here that He isn’t involved. I really think He isn’t involved, but that wasn’t the subject, I didn’t say it. Why not? So what does that mean? He basically gave us the operating instructions. If these are operating instructions, then what—why does that relate to whether He is involved? We received a book with operating instructions, and besides that He is also involved in the world. What? No, but it was said that He’s not involved. Where was it said? By the Rabbi. When? Two weeks ago, three, four. Ah, so I mentioned that—indeed that is my position, but it has nothing to do with what I said here. Why doesn’t it? What does it have to do with it? Because if He gave an operating manual and left the picture, then basically okay, then either one keeps this— I’m not even speaking about the fact that the operating manual also seemingly doesn’t always— even if we act by it, things still don’t always work out. And then they tell me, okay, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper, but in the world to come things will work out for you. You’re making incorrect assumptions. I’m quoting—you’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say that this book will make our lives good or perfect. This is the book that says what should be done. Will our lives become roses if we do it? Who said? It says so: if you obey, you’ll have rain and produce and so on and so on, and if not then— You’re dragging me into other issues. I did speak about those things, but that isn’t related to this line of thought. I think He is not involved. Rain and all that—yes, that was true once, not today, not in the later generations. I think the Holy One, blessed be He, used to be more involved than He is today. But that has nothing to do with today’s discussion.

In the last minute the picture was cut off, so I don’t know if something was said— Rabbi, the last sentences you said got cut off, there was some technical problem— Yes. What I said is that God’s involvement in the world, and the verses “I will give your rains in their season,” and so on, are a subject not connected in any way to what I said until now. I indeed think He is not involved, at least in the later generations; as the generations pass He is less and less involved. It is true that this is my position, but it is unrelated to the whole line of thought I presented here. These are two independent things. I—I do see it as one picture. Why? How? Because if it’s a manufacturer who gave the instructions and went home, then really why do I owe Him anything? Why? You owe Him because He created you, and you are obligated to obey His instructions. Fine, but I see that these instructions, this instruction book, even when I act according to it, it doesn’t always come true, and then they’ll tell me okay— What does “come true” mean? Again, this “come true” is wrong. You don’t do it so that something will come true. You do it because you are obligated. So why do they tell me reward and punishment? Then let them just say: do it, period. And in fact they do tell you: do it. Have you seen Maimonides? In chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance he says you do not do things for reward—that’s the service of children and women. You do it because that is what should be done. In the end the good will come, fine, but I am not doing it because of the good. Therefore the fact that in the end good will come—when it comes, if it comes, we’ll talk—but it plays no part in the question whether to do it. And the answer is simply—yes. This is a different discussion. It has to be discussed separately. I also spoke about it, wrote about it, but in my view it is a discussion independent of what we did here. Okay. That’s it, friends. Toward next time I’ll already publish maybe a new series.

Can I ask one more question? Yes, yes. If I understood correctly, the Rabbi doesn’t think too highly of Hasidim and Hasidism. You understood correctly. But isn’t Hasidism a clear example of a strong intuition that there is a God? What does that have to do with God? Hasidism is a strong intuition that there is a rebbe who is the channel to God. No, but the Hasid believes in God out of that same intuition; my father was a Hasid— Why would a Hasid believe in God more than a Mitnaged? What—what does that have to do with it? No, that’s one of the ways the Rabbi said that if you arrive at faith— It has nothing to do with faith. Hasidism is a certain path in serving God. What does that have to do with faith? The faith of the Hasid and the faith of the Litvak are the same faith. The question is what to do by virtue of that faith, how to serve God. On that there are different paths. But it has nothing to do with one’s conception of God. There is “contraction” literally and not literally—that is the philosophical root of Hasidism. The rest is just people talking nonsense. But the mode of conduct of Hasidism—fine, it is one path in the service of God, one among several paths.

Okay, so the Rabbi is going to publish a class that will be every Friday once every two weeks? We’re continuing in the same format, just a new series. But only once every two weeks, not once a week? Yes. And what will the topic be? I’ll publish it. I haven’t decided yet; I’ll publish it. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much, have a peaceful Sabbath. Peaceful Sabbath. Goodbye.