Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 2
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 a factual claim and not as an experience
- C. S. Lewis, aesthetics, and postmodernity
- Genius, fitting reality, and the analogy to Bach
- God as binding authority and accepting Him as a deity
- Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance: serving out of love and serving out of fear
- Pleasure, Torah study, and the introduction to Eglei Tal
- Eight Chapters, chapter six: one who rules himself, the superior person, and revealed commandments
- Laws of Kings: the pious among the nations and the seven Noahide commandments
- Ought-is, the naturalistic fallacy, and the normative meaning of “God”
- Disputes about facts, the Revelation at Mount Sinai, and the Kuzari
Summary
General Overview
The speaker argues that faith is a factual claim about reality, not a report of an experience or emotion, and contends that a religious experience by itself can also exist in an atheist and therefore is not faith. He uses an example from C. S. Lewis to show that even when a person describes an inner feeling, he may be making an objective claim about the world, and from this he concludes that there are real disputes and not just “narratives.” He sharpens the point that belief in God is not merely the descriptive statement that there is a creator of the world, but an acceptance of binding authority, and he grounds this through Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, the Laws of Repentance, Eight Chapters, and the Laws of Kings. He concludes that if faith is a factual claim, then it requires ways of justification, and next he intends to examine how one establishes the factual claim of the Revelation at Mount Sinai through the Kuzari argument.
Faith as a factual claim and not as an experience
The speaker says that experiences and emotions belong to psychologists, and that faith is a factual claim, namely, that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists. He argues that someone who replaces faith with emotional experience is really holding atheism with religious experiences, and that such experiences can also be the result of a pill. The speaker states that the mere presence of a religious experience does not make a person a believer; only if the person assumes that the experience is the product of something that exists in reality itself is there faith. He adds that someone who does not have the “part of the brain” for such experiences can be a believer just as much as someone who does, and that experiences are at most an indication, not the peak of faith.
C. S. Lewis, aesthetics, and postmodernity
The speaker brings up C. S. Lewis and the short book The Abolition of Man, written during World War II, and credits him with an early identification of processes that later became postmodernity. He describes how Lewis criticizes a textbook that teaches that there is no argument between a person who is moved by a waterfall and a person who remains indifferent, because each is merely reporting an inner psychological state. The speaker adopts Lewis’s claim that there is a real argument over whether there is something in the waterfall worthy of evoking awe, and therefore a subjective report can reflect a claim about the world and not only about the speaker. He connects this to the narrative approach according to which there are no true claims about the world, only different bubbles, and with irony presents the hope that such an approach would bring world peace, while hinting at its failure when confronted by a forceful reality.
Genius, fitting reality, and the analogy to Bach
The speaker presents a thought experiment about Bach and musical genius, and argues that if one could “synthesize” creatures who would specifically enjoy his own compositions, then in their eyes he would be considered a genius. He rejects the conclusion that genius is only accidental fit to a given audience, and argues that Bach would know how to adapt music to another population better than he himself could, so what we have here is a capacity and an interaction with reality, not mere chance. He uses this to reinforce the distinction between “that’s just how you’re built” as a neutral subjective explanation and the claim that there is something in reality worthy of being perceived, and that failing to perceive it is a kind of blindness or missing something.
God as binding authority and accepting Him as a deity
The speaker says that God is not a “neutral object” and distinguishes between descriptive and prescriptive statements in moral philosophy. He argues that “there is a God” in the religious sense means a factor with inherent authority, such that what He says is binding. He cites Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, halakhah 6, that one who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt unless he accepted it upon himself as a deity, and explains that “deity” means: what it says, I do. He argues that one may accept all the facts about God, the Revelation at Mount Sinai, and the giving of the Torah, and still ask “so what?” if one has not accepted the meaning that God obligates, so there is an additional step beyond the factual claim. He adds that judges are called “gods” in the Torah because God is an institution of power and authority, and that belief in God includes commitment to fulfill what He commands: “Why? Because He said so.”
Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance: serving out of love and serving out of fear
The speaker quotes Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, that one who performs commandments in order to receive blessings or the World to Come serves out of fear, and that this is not the level of the prophets and the sages. He quotes the definition that one who serves out of love “does the truth because it is truth, and the good will ultimately come because of it,” and emphasizes that the good will come, but it is not the motivation. He points to the linguistic gap between “love” and the cold phrasing “to do the truth because it is truth,” and argues that this is a model of action without self-interest. He asks how halakhah 3, which describes intense love as “love-sickness” and the Song of Songs as a parable for this matter, fits with the earlier definition, and suggests that the parable conveys the idea of intensity and constancy, not necessarily the emotional dimension.
Pleasure, Torah study, and the introduction to Eglei Tal
The speaker brings the introduction to Eglei Tal, that people mistakenly think it is forbidden to enjoy Torah study because enjoyment is not for its own sake, and argues that the mistake is thinking one may not enjoy it, whereas the truth is that one may not study for the sake of the enjoyment. He uses this to sharpen the distinction between a side indication and motivation, and parallels it to reward and punishment: “the good will ultimately come,” but one does not serve for the sake of the good. He applies the principle also to conscience and emotions, and argues that it is permitted, and even right, for emotions such as pangs of conscience to accompany the act, but one should not perform the act in order to “support” the emotion.
Eight Chapters, chapter six: one who rules himself, the superior person, and revealed commandments
The speaker quotes Maimonides in Eight Chapters, chapter 6, who distinguishes between “one who rules himself,” who does good deeds but is distressed in doing them, and “the superior person,” who is naturally drawn to good things and desires them, noting that the philosophers prefer the superior person. He quotes that the sages prefer the one who desires transgressions and overcomes that desire, along with the saying “whoever is greater than his fellow, his inclination is greater than his,” and with the statement of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, “I could desire it—but what can I do, when my Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.” He quotes Maimonides’ resolution of the contradiction: the philosophers are speaking about rational moral evils such as bloodshed and theft, where it is better not to have the desire, while the sages are speaking about revealed commandments which “if the Torah had not forbidden them, they would not be evil at all,” such as mixed fabrics and meat with milk. The speaker concludes that with commandments of the revealed type there is no special value in natural identification, and there may even be an advantage in overcoming desire, and this fits with the idea of “doing the truth because it is truth.”
Laws of Kings: the pious among the nations and the seven Noahide commandments
The speaker quotes Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings, that one who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to observe them is among the pious of the nations and has a share in the World to Come, on condition that he does them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher, and not because of the dictate of reason. He emphasizes that even in commandments toward which “reason inclines,” there is no religious value if they are observed only out of moral logic and not because of the command. He explains the concept of a resident alien as one who accepts the seven commandments before a religious court, and argues that the concept itself arose because the nations do not in practice observe the commandments they are obligated in. He uses this to reinforce the claim that there is no contradiction between natural identification and observance because of command, since the identification can be a side effect but not the motivation.
Ought-is, the naturalistic fallacy, and the normative meaning of “God”
The speaker brings David Hume’s distinction between ought and is, and argues that norms are not derived from facts without hidden “bridge assumptions” such as “it is forbidden to cause suffering.” He argues that even a factual proof for the existence of an entity that created the world is not enough for religious obligation, because obligation is a norm and does not emerge from a fact. He states that the bridge assumption in the religious case is the very meaning of the concept God as absolute mandatory authority, and therefore “God commanded” is not a neutral description but a loaded fact that generates obligation. He compares this to the claim “there is a moral prohibition against murder,” where someone who understands it cannot ask “why not murder,” and argues that someone who asks “God commanded, but why should I do it?” does not understand what God is.
Disputes about facts, the Revelation at Mount Sinai, and the Kuzari
The speaker argues that disagreement does not cancel objective truth, and gives the example of a dispute about the shape of the earth to say that someone is right and someone is wrong. He defines the Revelation at Mount Sinai as a factual claim about an event that either happened or did not happen, and argues that if the event happened, the Torah is true, and if it did not happen, it is not true. He states that when faith is a factual claim, justifications and evidence are required, and announces that next time he will begin clarifying the ways to justify the factual claim that God exists. He points to the Kuzari argument as a direction for rationally grounding the factual claim about the Revelation at Mount Sinai, and raises the question whether that argument really does provide such a basis.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. We can start. I said the recordings go up both to the model and to my site, so if someone misses it or wants to go back over something, you can look there. Whoever is in reserve duty, of course, though I assume no one here is in reserve duty. Last time we talked a bit about the essence of what faith is. Is faith a factual claim, or some kind of experience, emotion, and so on? I said that experiences and emotions are the business of psychologists; faith is a factual claim. If someone wants experiences and emotions—just now someone asked me about Tzadik, about Shalom Tzadik, these controversies that are now taking place in the Makor Rishon supplement—they asked me whether it’s similar to what I’m saying. So he mentioned two differences there. One of them—I have no idea where he got it from me—it’s just not true. The second is true. And the second difference he mentioned is that he sees the commandments, in a certain sense, as instrumental. Meaning, you don’t really need the factual infrastructure in order to observe the commandments. The Revelation at Mount Sinai, in principle, doesn’t need to have happened. It seems to me he even says he doesn’t believe in it; I don’t remember exactly, something like that. And my claim is that faith is a factual claim: that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists. And regarding commandment observance—I’ll talk now about the Revelation at Mount Sinai, I’ll get to it in a moment, I already began a bit last time—but I think that without that infrastructure, without that faith-based foundation, observance of commandments has no meaning at all. And someone who sees faith as a kind of experience or emotion should take a pill. I mean, pills also produce experiences and emotions; I think they do it even better. That has nothing to do with faith. It’s simply atheism with religious experiences.
So I want first of all to sharpen this point with a certain passage. I didn’t bring the book with me. Do you know the author of Narnia, may he live long and well, C. S. Lewis? Besides being a children’s writer, he was also a philosopher, a Christian philosopher. I mean, he had different periods in his life, but he was a Christian philosopher, one of the sharpest I know. He’s dead—an exceptionally sharp person, with clear, precise formulations, just a pleasure. Anything by C. S. Lewis that you can get your hands on—don’t pass it up. In any case, he has a short book called The Abolition of Man. And there he opens—the book, incidentally, was written during World War II—and he really identified processes that later fully crystallized into what was called postmodernity. Back then it was still at the beginning of its appearance, and he really put his finger very nicely on those processes.
He brings there two authors of literature textbooks for tenth grade, or something like that, teaching books in literature for tenth grade, and he presents a critique of them. He doesn’t mention their names—he’s careful about slander—but he critiques them. And his basic claim, one of the things he brings there, is when they discuss the poet Coleridge, who has some poem about someone arriving at a very impressive waterfall and meeting someone else there. One person is deeply moved by the sublime sight, and the other remains indifferent. Nice, but it doesn’t do it for me. So in that book they taught the students that basically there is no disagreement between these two people. Why? Because what are you saying when you’re moved? You’re really reporting, as we discussed last class, some inner psychological state of yours, right? You’re basically saying: there’s some feeling inside me that I call awe. I’m moved by this landscape. That’s not a claim about the landscape; it’s a claim about me. I’m telling you that there is awe inside me. Someone else says: inside me there isn’t. Last class I talked about the fact that if I say I love someone and someone else says he doesn’t love that person, we don’t have an argument. I’m built in such a way that I love him; he’s built in such a way that he doesn’t. I’m not making any claim about the world; I’m reporting some inner psychological state. So my psychological state is one thing, someone else’s is something else—that’s not a disagreement. A disagreement has to be on the same subject: if on that subject you say X and he says not-X, then there’s a disagreement. When I say that in me there is X and you say that in you there is not-X, there’s no disagreement. Only if you say that in me there is not-X is there a disagreement.
So they claim the same thing here too. That’s why I said that faith as well—if all you’re doing is reporting feelings, emotions, experiences nesting inside you—then you’re really not making any claim about the world. You’re merely reporting a psychological state you happen to be in, okay? That has no connection to faith. It’s simply—yes—it could also be the result of a pill. I said there are quite a few atheists who report having religious experiences and religious emotions inside themselves. Fine, that’s a matter of psychological structure. So there, in that textbook, he says they teach the students that basically there is no disagreement at all between those two people looking at the waterfall. Why? Because each one is reporting an inner state, exactly like the example of love I mentioned before.
And he attacks this sharply. He says, of course, these people are messing up the students’ minds. You understand that this is really the first seed of narrativity, of postmodernity, what later developed much more strongly: that everything is only a matter of the bubble I live in, or the narrative within which I function and which I use, and there really are no true claims about the world and therefore no actual disagreements either. And if we make different claims, that only means we live within different narratives. There was great hope that this view would bring sublime world peace, yes? The Palestinians will live in their narrative, we’ll live in ours, and everything will be fine; we have no disagreement at all, everything is wonderful, right? The only question is just how not to find ourselves in the sea. That they didn’t take into account—those small, annoying questions.
In any case, in that little book, The Abolition of Man, he basically argues that this is wrong. There is a disagreement between those two people. And that disagreement is really rooted in the question whether there is something in the waterfall that is worthy of evoking awe—such that the feeling of sublimity inside me is its expression. Meaning: when I tell you that there is a feeling of sublimity in me when I stand before the waterfall, I’m not telling you that when I’m lying on the couch and we’re sitting there and, you know, I’m feeling some wonderful sense of sublimity right now. That’s not interesting. Fine, everyone with his own sublime feelings. When I tell you that the waterfall arouses in me a feeling of sublimity or awe, I am really making a claim about the waterfall. I’m basically saying that this sight—the waterfall or the view, whatever—the sight is something worthy of arousing awe. In other words, I’m saying: if it doesn’t arouse awe in you, then something is wrong with you. So yes, it is a disagreement.
The fact that I formulate it in subjective language—I’m describing things happening inside me—those things happening inside me are an expression of something outside. And really my claim is about that, not about what’s happening inside me. And if you make a different claim, even though ostensibly you’re speaking about what is inside you, in fact we do have a disagreement. The disagreement is over whether it is fitting to be moved by this spectacle. You can certainly say otherwise. The question is whether it’s true. You can say anything. But I’m saying—no, I’m not saying this sarcastically—I mean it genuinely. It’s true that in every case one can say something like this; it won’t always be correct. Sometimes there’s room for doubt. For example, someone could say to me: listen, right, when it comes to the waterfall there’s nothing objective at all, it’s just subjective—you’re built in a way that you’re moved, he’s built differently and isn’t. And that’s a claim. He could be right. How will he force me to be moved? Hit me if I’m not moved? Yes, but that’s just force. I’m talking right now about the argument itself. So we moved from Coleridge to Orwell.
So Lewis’s claim is that there is a real disagreement here. Now, I’m not saying you must accept what he says, but you also don’t have to reject it. What I want to draw from him is not that every aesthetic disagreement is necessarily a real disagreement, but that it can be. That’s the important point. Because those textbook writers assumed as obvious that it’s certainly subjective, since each person is reporting his own experiences, so what disagreement could there be? And he comes and says: no, not necessarily. Just think: when from time to time you argue—was a film good, was a film not good, was a concert beautiful, was it not beautiful—is that always just empty talk? Is there no argument at all? No—you come and argue that it was beautiful, someone else argues that it wasn’t. So what, there are no arguments in aesthetics? It’s just a pointless exchange of words? I think most of us don’t feel that way. In other words, if someone is not impressed by something that is worthy of being appreciated, I understand that there is some kind of blindness there.
Now maybe he’s wrong and I’m seeing things that were never there—maybe I’m seeing too much and he’s not blind. Fine. But still, my feeling is that there is some kind of blindness. I don’t attribute it merely to some “that’s just how I’m built.” Now this reminds me of something else. I once said—no, “that’s how you’re built” means there is no external source for it. No, you’re built that way and therefore you’re impressed, but not that there is something in the waterfall that is worthy of awe. By contrast, blindness means that the reason you’re not impressed is that you missed something. There’s simply something defective there. Obviously, when you’re blind then you are built badly. In other words, a blind person is not just someone different. A blind person has a deficiency relative to someone who sees. He is also different. No, but I’m talking about the intuitionists. I’m talking exactly about the intuitionists. The question is whether there is something in the waterfall worthy of awe or not. That’s the question. The authors of that book assumed there isn’t. There isn’t; it’s simply that you’re built one way, he’s built another way; it’s not blindness or anything like that, each person according to how he’s built.
[Speaker B] But here there’s a possibility that there are differences between people.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—the question is whether you grasp a certain point that exists in the waterfall. If you’re not impressed, that means you’re not grasping it. You’re blind to that point. And therefore—no, it is. What are you—? Fine, so we’re in the middle of what I was saying about C. S. Lewis, right? About the disagreement between those two people there at the waterfall, and his claim was that the fact that you report inner feelings or inner experiences does not necessarily mean this is subjective. Sometimes that inner feeling or inner experience reflects something in the world itself. And therefore he argues that this is a real disagreement. You can claim otherwise, and that’s perfectly fine; the point I want to take from him is not that an aesthetic dispute is necessarily a real dispute, but that it can be a real dispute. That’s the important point.
Because those who wrote that book took it for granted that it was certainly subjective, since after all each person is reporting his own experiences, so what disagreement is there here? And he comes to claim: no, not necessarily so. Just think, when you sometimes end up arguing whether a movie was good or not, a concert good or not—are these always just words? Is there no argument there at all? No, you come and argue that it was good, the other comes and argues that it wasn’t. So what, there are no arguments in aesthetics, just a pointless exchange of words? I think most of us don’t feel that way. I mean, if someone isn’t impressed by something worthy of being impressed by, I understand that there is some kind of blindness there. Now maybe he’s wrong and I’m seeing things that were never there; maybe I’m seeing too much, not that he’s blind. Fine—but still the feeling, from my perspective, is that there is some kind of blindness. I don’t attribute it only to some “that’s just how I’m built.”
Now, if that’s how you’re built, that means there is no external source for it. You’re built that way, and therefore you’re impressed, but not that there is something in the waterfall worthy of being impressed by. Whereas blindness means that if you’re not impressed, you missed something. Something’s just wrong with you. Of course—but when you’re blind then you’re built badly. In other words, blind isn’t just someone different. A blind person has a deficiency relative to someone who sees. He’s also different. No, but I’m talking about the intuitionists. I’m talking precisely about the intuitionists. The question is whether there is something in the waterfall that is worthy of admiration or not. That’s the question. Those book authors assumed there isn’t. There isn’t—it’s just that you’re built this way, he’s built that way, it’s not blindness or anything, each one according to how he’s built. So if—
[Speaker B] If that’s how you’re built, and someone else is built differently, then there is a real difference here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously—there’s a real difference in you, but there’s nothing in the waterfall. No, that matters a lot. Because the question is whether I’m claiming something about the waterfall, and then if you don’t see it, that’s a kind of blindness. There’s already a judgment here. That’s why I told you, I’m talking about the judgment, not about merely pointing to a difference. You can always point to differences. One person is five foot eleven, the other is six foot. Who’s better? Not who’s better—he’s that height and he’s that height. What? But there are differences that are advantages and disadvantages; they’re not just neutral. And the claim here is not merely that there’s a difference—there are always differences—but that this difference is an advantage or a disadvantage, blindness, yes, what I said before. That’s the claim. In other words, that it’s worth arguing about.
Let’s say, for example, I can try to take you to a place where you’ll look—not a physical place, but to a perspective—from which suddenly you’ll understand what I mean. And when you understand what I mean, you’ll understand that earlier you missed something. There is something here worthy of admiration. And if you can change—
[Speaker B] Your point of view, and it wasn’t there—maybe I just wasn’t looking correctly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s the claim. No, that’s not physics; there’s a difference depending on where you look from. In other words, if it’s something that’s built differently, then maybe I won’t be able to fix it. But even something that’s built differently might perhaps be corrected. What made you look from that angle and me from this angle? Right—when I bring you to this angle, you’ll also agree with me. But why did I initially look from this angle and you didn’t? Maybe because you’re built differently. But “built differently” can happen for many reasons. Types, it’s not…
This reminds me that once I asked why Bach is considered a musical genius and I’m not. Why, what’s the difference? After all, in the end, do you realize that if I could create a certain type of creatures entirely under my control, I could create creatures that would most enjoy my compositions? From their perspective I would be the greatest musical genius. I’d build their brains in such a way that my compositions would be the perfect thing for them, right? So really everyone is a musical genius. It’s just that Bach got lucky that our world happens to be built with people like that—people who don’t need to be engineered in order to enjoy Bach’s compositions. In my case you’d have to synthesize them. In other words, he just happened by chance to land in a world built that way. A fortunate accident, yes? So what makes him a genius and not me?
I think that’s wrong. Why is it wrong? I’m sure it’s wrong. Why is it wrong? Because I think that if Bach arrived in a different population, he would know how to adapt music to them too, better than I would. In other words, there is some kind of interaction with reality here. It’s not just that he’s built a certain way, he makes music, and oops—it happens to fit the audience exactly by chance. Yes, better than me. I don’t know if better than Umm Kulthum, but better than me. What? Maybe, I don’t know, I’m not familiar enough, I don’t know. But maybe she too could synthesize people who… Maybe if she had been born in I-don’t-know-where, she would have written wonderful Western classical music. I have no idea. Maybe yes, maybe no. If it’s chance, then it really isn’t genius. You have to understand: if it’s chance, it’s not genius. It’s genius only because you think that he really has some kind of ability, not because he just happens to be built in a way that suits his environment. And ability means, again, not necessarily that he could do it in every population, but still there is some kind of work that he does given the population listening to him, rather than it simply turning out that way. Which is something I can’t do, yes? I don’t have that talent.
Okay, let’s get back to our topic. So in short, the claim is—and I’m returning to faith itself through all these examples—not the music you gave; can she synthesize a brain?
[Speaker B] You can synthesize—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A world that would have the mechanics I discovered. Not much of a world. But fine, maybe you can build a world whose mechanics are the mechanics I invented. Fine, okay. The moral, in the end, is really what I said about the lack of value of feelings and experiences in the realm of faith. Yes, if you have feelings and experiences—if you have religious feelings and experiences—you can still be an atheist; that has nothing to do with faith. But in a place where the feelings or experiences reflect something that, in your opinion, exists in reality itself—in other words, you assume that the existence of God is what produces these religious experiences in you—then yes, you are a believer. Okay? I’m only claiming that the mere presence of a religious experience does not make you a believer. If you think that this experience is a product of something that exists in reality, then very good. But again, you believe because you think that’s what is happening in reality. The experience and feeling are only the indication. In any case, it is not faith itself.
And if someone doesn’t have that section in his brain that produces such experiences and feelings, then he doesn’t have it. He believes exactly like the person of experience and feeling. He just doesn’t have that section in the brain, so he doesn’t have that kind of experience and feeling. But his faith is exactly like the other person’s. And therefore, in that sense, it’s merely an unimportant symptom. Sometimes people think that emotion and attachment and all these things are the pinnacle of faith. No—I don’t see why. It seems to me fairly worthless. Very often it may be that a person who is built in a normal, reasonable way—I don’t know exactly what that means—if he is a true believer, maybe that should arouse certain feelings or experiences in him. I hope not, because I don’t find such things in myself. But perhaps—if someone would argue that, maybe yes. Fine? But again, the emotion and the experience would be an indication, not the thing itself.
Okay, so now we’ve talked about faith in God. Last time I mentioned a bit the meaning of this. I said that God is not merely a neutral entity. In moral philosophy they distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive statements. Descriptive statements describe, and prescriptive statements are normative—they command. “There is a God” means a factor with inherent authority. That is, by virtue of being God, what He says is binding. That is the meaning of the concept God. Therefore, to believe in God is not only to conclude that there is some transcendent being who created the world, or I don’t know, however anyone wants to define Him—we’ll talk about that later. Rather, if we are speaking on the religious plane—not the deistic plane but the theistic one—we are speaking about God in a sense such that maybe the fact that He created the world gives Him authority, or something else gives Him authority, but it is a factor with some sort of authority that is not conditional. Meaning that what He says I am supposed to do. Why? Because He said so. Just so. That non-arbitrary “just so” that I discussed last time.
On this matter I want to sharpen a bit more what the meaning of this is. I spoke—I think I spoke—about Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, halakhah 6. I heard this from your father. I spoke about this last class, right? Maimonides says that one who worships idolatry out of love or out of fear is exempt, unless he accepted it upon himself as a deity. Okay, so that is perhaps the clearest example of the meaning of a deity. A deity is not a neutral object, not just some thing—okay, I’ve concluded that something or someone created the world—but rather it is a deity. Deity means: what it says, I do. In other words, it has some kind of built-in authority. Therefore when it says something, I don’t need to ask whether it obligates me or why it obligates me. Someone who asks that question is really not believing in a deity. He believes in someone who created the world. But God is a factor such that when He says something, it obligates by virtue of His being God. That is called accepting Him as a deity.
Therefore, when we speak about faith in God, we will encounter quite a few ways of arriving at that faith—that will really be our topic later on. But the different ways of arriving at that faith are often ways of arriving at belief in the descriptive, neutral sense. You come to the conclusion that there is something that created the world. Or I come to the conclusion that there is something that engineered the world—the cosmological and physico-theological approach, in Kant’s language. Okay? But all these are neutral statements. When we talk about Him being God, I also said something else: maybe the fact that He created the world gives Him some sort of authority, such that if He says something I am obligated to carry it out—then from my perspective He is God. Otherwise He is the creator of the world. Fine, but what does that have to do with me?
We spoke about the fact that often arguments between a believer and an atheist are reduced to the question whether there was a Revelation at Mount Sinai or not, whether God revealed Himself or not, what He gave there or didn’t give there. But really someone can come and say: yes, there is a God, and yes there was a Revelation at Mount Sinai, and yes He gave the Torah, all true—so what? I don’t feel like observing it. Why should I observe it? There is another step here that is very important to take. And that step says: given all these facts—that there is a God, revelation of the Torah at Sinai and all that—once all the facts are done, okay, but the Torah He gave is also binding. Where does that come from? It comes from the fact that I relate to Him as God. Meaning: what God says, I do.
God is an entity or institution that has power. That’s why judges are called “gods” in the Torah. In other words, He has power, He has authority; what He says must be carried out. Okay? So belief in God is not only what we will later see—coming to the conclusion that someone created the world—but seeing Him as God. That is a separate question. Therefore all the proofs we’ll discuss later, about how one reaches the conclusion that such an entity exists, do not finish the job. That is only the first step. After that, one has to understand why that entity has the status of God. Does the fact that He created the world give Him authority as a result? Or I don’t know. In other words, we need to talk about that. Okay. What’s the reason? What?
[Speaker E] What’s the point of the thing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can ask what the point of the thing is, but the point is not the reason why you do it. You do it because God commanded it. You can ask why He commanded it, what benefit there is in it. Fine—that’s another question. So there is a difference between asking what the point of the thing is and asking what the point is of my doing it, or why I should do the thing. Those are two different things, okay? Like a father giving his child candy so that he’ll do something the father thinks should be done. So the child does it for the candy. But why did the father really do the whole candy routine and all the rest? Because he wants the child to do that act. That matters to him for some reason. Okay? The child does it for the candy, but the act—perhaps. Good question. Okay, what does this have to do with us? What, observance of the commandments. What are the commandments? I don’t know, you decide. What was given at Sinai or what branches out from what was given at Sinai—that’s another discussion. We can discuss what’s included in that and what isn’t included. Fine, that’s a whole separate issue.
There is a Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, a Maimonides I’m very fond of. Repentance.
[Speaker B] You—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can try to disprove my enjoyment of a symphony, so what does that say? I have an emotion and you can disprove it? You can’t disprove it—why is that relevant? Disprove it, fine, fine. So if they fooled me, then convince me that it’s not true. No problem, everything’s fine. What—is faith supposed to be immune to refutation? Why? On the contrary, in my eyes if it’s immune to refutation then it loses its value. In other words, something that can be refuted is generally considered, in philosophy of science, to be something stronger. Very often that’s part of the escape I talked about last time, in Rabbi Shagar and his colleagues. That flight into these subjective territories, where then it can’t be refuted and you can relax because you don’t have to deal with any argument. Everything’s fine: it’s my feeling and I live on the circle of difference and all is well. No problem—but then you don’t have to deal with any claim, right? Because you’re not claiming something objective. You say: fine, this caused me some experience and therefore I’m very moved. You don’t have to deal with arguments like: wait a second, but that’s nonsense. By the way, even here one can tell you that you were trained and programmed; the arguments you raised earlier against intellectual beliefs can be made here too, even more so. So fine, I’m not looking for a position that is immune to refutation. There is no such way. Anyone who thinks he has one is fooling himself. There’s no such thing, and there shouldn’t be.
Okay. Maimonides says: “A person should not say: I will perform the commandments of the Torah and involve myself in its wisdom in order that I receive all the blessings written in it, or in order that I merit the life of the World to Come; and I will separate myself from the transgressions against which the Torah warned, in order that I be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or in order that I not be cut off from the life of the World to Come. It is not fitting to serve God in this way, for one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the sages. And only the ignorant, women, and children serve God in this way, for they are trained to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.” Fine. So this is service not for its own sake—for reward or things of that sort.
“One who serves out of love,” halakhah 2, “occupies himself with Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world, nor out of fear of evil, nor in order to inherit good, but does the truth because it is truth, and the good will ultimately come because of it.” So what is one who serves out of love? He does the truth because it is truth. Does that sound to you like love? If I were to say to my wife, listen, in my eyes you are the absolute truth, she’d probably hand me a divorce bill on the spot, I would assume. This is called serving out of love—to do the truth because it is truth? Maimonides says yes—that is called serving out of love. In a moment we’ll continue. “And this level is a very great level, and not every sage merits it; and it is the level of Abraham our father, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, called His beloved, because he served only out of love. And this is the level that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses our teacher, as it is said: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God,’ and when a person loves God with the proper love, he will immediately perform all the commandments out of love.”
Okay? So this is service out of love. Now what does this definition of service out of love look like? It looks like a very cold definition, right? To do the truth because it is truth. You ask me why I do it? Just because. Because that’s the truth. This is called service out of love. What is service out of fear? He defined that in the previous halakhah. That is when you have some explanation or interest that explains why you do it, right? The World to Come, this world, doesn’t matter. You want to get something. Fear of punishment? Doesn’t matter. When you have some kind of explanation why you do it—that’s service out of fear. Okay? You have some kind of self-interest. Service out of love is when you have no self-interest at all; you do it because that’s the truth. They ask you why you do it? Just because.
Fine. The moment you have explanations, it’s service out of fear. “The good will ultimately come”—that, he says, is factual: the good will come. But you are forbidden to serve for the sake of the good or because of the good. That’s what he says. “He will immediately perform all the commandments out of love.” Right? You do it because you love it.
[Speaker B] You do it because you love it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he says: what is “the lover”? One who serves out of love—that goes back to the beginning of the verse. One who serves out of love, he defines it, right? He does the truth because it is true. That’s called serving out of love. What is he expanding on, where is he expanding? “Proper love” means that he understands that the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth, and he does things out of truth; immediately he’ll also do all the commandments because they are true. Right. He already defined above what love is, didn’t he? Service out of love. Yes. That the truth is that what God wants ought to be done. Right, that will happen. He says Maimonides only wants to tell you: I’m not coming to tell you there is no World to Come or no reward and punishment, but reward and punishment are not supposed to be your motivation for serving. The motivation for serving is the truth. Don’t panic—well, yes, panic over a different question—but the service, the motivation for service, is not the good that will come at the end. He wrote this in order to tell you that although the motivation should be that this is true, I’m not telling you there is no reward and punishment, no World to Come. I’m only saying: the World to Come exists, only you don’t serve for the sake of the World to Come. The World to Come you will receive if you serve, but that’s not why you serve. If it’s like in the introduction to Eglei Tal, where he writes that there are those who err from the path of reason and think that it is forbidden to enjoy Torah study. Why? Because if you enjoy it, then you’re studying not for its own sake, right? You’re studying for the enjoyment. So therefore it’s forbidden to enjoy Torah study; you have to suffer. Okay. So there’s this thing, as they say, “too good to be kosher,” right? Something that’s too good to be permitted. Meaning, it can’t be allowed if it’s that good—you have to suffer. So the Eglei Tal says that this view is mistaken. It is mistaken—why is it mistaken? He doesn’t explain exactly, but he says it is mistaken, and on the contrary: if you enjoy it, it also enters you more, you understand it better, you internalize it more, and so on and so on. First of all, in the morning blessings over Torah we say, “Please make the words of Your Torah sweet in our mouths, O Lord our God,” right? So it sounds like this is viewed as something not invalid, right? At least not invalid. But after he finishes saying that, there’s another sentence there, less well known, in the introduction to Eglei Tal. He says: but one who works for the sake of the enjoyment is in fact working not for its own sake—studying, sorry, for the sake of the enjoyment is in fact studying not for its own sake. Meaning, he says it’s a mistake to think you may not enjoy, but it is not a mistake to think that you may not study for the sake of the enjoyment or because of the enjoyment. That part is true. Between those two, don’t get confused. It’s not that you may not enjoy; it’s just that the enjoyment is not supposed to be your motivation for the service. Same thing here. “The good that will come in the end”—you’ll receive reward for what you do, but that doesn’t mean you do the service for the reward. Those are two different things. You do the service because it is the truth. Okay? Now look at Jewish law 3; we still haven’t finished our adventures here. “And what is the proper love? It is that one should love God with a very great, exceeding, intense love, until his soul is bound up in the love of God, and he is constantly obsessed with it, like one who is lovesick, whose mind is never free from love of that woman, and he is obsessed with her always, whether sitting or rising, even when eating and drinking. Even more than this should the love of God be in the hearts of those who love Him, obsessed with it always, as He commanded us, ‘with all your heart and with all your soul.’ And this is what Solomon said metaphorically: ‘For I am sick with love,’ and the entire Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter.” Now here he’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater for me, right? Suddenly it’s all emotional. Like love of a woman, constantly obsessed with her, and the whole Song of Songs is a metaphor for this. How does that fit with the previous Jewish law? Did he forget what he wrote there? “To do the truth because it is true”—that is service out of love. By the way, commandments too—here he is not talking about the commandment to love God. The commandment to love God appears in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. Here he’s talking about service out of love. Two different things. Service out of love is a meta-halakhic principle; it is not a commandment. When you serve, you should serve out of love. The commandment of loving God appears in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, and there too there is room to discuss: is the commandment to feel emotional—to feel a feeling of love toward the Holy One, blessed be He—or is something else meant there? In my view, something else is meant there too. But here, in this context, when we are talking about service out of love, first he says that this means doing the truth because it is true—that’s in Jewish law 2—and in the definition for Jewish law 1 it means without any reason, just like that: you serve this way because this is the truth. And in Jewish law 3 suddenly he talks about being constantly obsessed with it like love of a woman—yes, because the woman is the objective truth; go tell your spouse that she is the objective truth between you. To be constantly absorbed in love of the woman. So how does that fit with what he said in Jewish law 2? It seems to me that here, at least I think, one has to be careful. Parables are always dangerous, especially when your listeners are nitpickers. If your listeners are nitpickers, don’t use parables. If you use parables, it’s always, yes, but in the parable his name was Moshe and not Yentl, or in the parable it was by day and not by night. Fine—the parable is drawn in a certain picture. I’m trying to tell you one certain point. Don’t now take the whole parable one-to-one with what it stands for. It’s not a full analogy. A verbal analogy in the Talmud can’t work by halves, and an inference from juxtaposition can’t work by halves—but a parable can work by halves. There is a certain parable saying: I want to convey a particular point, so I illustrate it through a parable. And in the parable I can describe foxes and this and that, and he said something there and went like this and it was here and adventures. None of that is relevant; it doesn’t appear in what the parable stands for. But it helps me paint the picture of the parable. Okay, maybe here what Maimonides wants to say is that the Song of Songs is a metaphor for this matter, not in the sense that love of God has to be emotional, or that performing the commandments has to be emotional, but rather: just as emotional love occupies us day and night and one is constantly obsessed with it, so too love of God—which is an intellectual thing, not an emotional one—also has to occupy you all the time and accompany you constantly. “I have set the Lord before me always.” In that sense the Song of Songs is a metaphor for the service of God. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be understood that way. You could understand it that way, but I’m saying that in light of Jewish law 2 it isn’t reasonable. In light of that, I’m saying, you don’t have to transfer the emotional dimension into the service of God as well. The fact that someone loves a woman emotionally does not mean that his love of the Holy One, blessed be He, also has to be emotional. No, “I do the truth because it is true”—that’s also good. Yes, here there is a very strong emphasis.
[Speaker B] Yes,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously, all the time—“until his soul is bound up in the love of God and he is constantly obsessed with it.” All the time you are occupied with the truth. This intensification—being in a love to which you are bound. And that’s the meaning, that’s the meaning—constant, yes. You say constant as if it’s, yes, what’s the problem? To think about the Holy One, blessed be He, and that truth is truth every single moment. Yes, it’s simple—you just have to do it every single moment. Why make a big deal out of everything? “His soul is bound.”
[Speaker B] Yes,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “His soul is bound” means that truth, for him, will be something—you know, I once wrote on my website a column about the Brisker experience. People think Briskers are radishes, that they have no experiences. Sometimes that’s even true, but it’s not necessarily so. Briskers also have experiences, but they’re intellectual experiences; it’s a different kind of experience. Meaning, when you encounter a difficult puzzle and an elegant solution to a difficult puzzle or a scientific problem or whatever, something like that—you undergo some kind of experience too. It’s not just a purely intellectual matter. But it’s not the same dimension; it’s not an experience in that same emotional sense as experiences of love, fear, things of that sort. It’s also a kind of experience, but it’s not emotional. As opposed to a person who gets up in the morning and is moved by putting on tefillin and wants to do it both on the intellectual level and as spiritual enjoyment, so to speak. Okay, one—what we were talking about—he loves
[Speaker B] getting up in the morning to put on tefillin, and that’s what he wants.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think he means the first and not the second. On the contrary: don’t love it and don’t want it, but do it because it needs to be done, because that is the truth. By the way, this is not my invention. It’s written in chapter 6 of Eight Chapters; Maimonides writes this. Come look. Not to suffer, but not to identify with it. Come look. Right, putting on tefillin belongs exactly to the second type. To do it because—look here, Maimonides is a darling in this context too, so this is already an opportunity; let’s have a look at him—Eight Chapters, chapter 6. Let’s see here, yes. “The philosophers said that one who rules his soul, and the powers of his desire and the disposition of his soul, and does good deeds while suffering in doing them”—does that remind you of anyone? Exactly the pattern you described, right? He does good deeds but suffers in doing them. Wait, wait, we’ll get there afterward, we’ll get there afterward; for now we’re here. I’m here for now, we’ll get there in a moment. Here, that’s what is written. Okay, so he does good deeds and suffers in doing them. That is the figure he calls “one who rules his soul,” okay? The one who subdues his inclination, rules his soul, and so on. “But the virtuous one”—that’s the second figure, because there is one who rules his soul versus the virtuous one—“the virtuous one is drawn in his actions after that toward which his desire and disposition incline him, and he does good deeds while desiring and longing for them, and with the soul’s full agreement.” Up to here. So those are the two figures. Okay? One identifies with the things naturally, and the other, on the contrary—the virtuous one identifies with the things naturally; that is his natural tendency. And the one who rules his soul is someone who basically would not want to do it; he suffers, but he does only the thing—what in the Tanya is called the beinoni. A beinoni is someone who does only good, but he has not slaughtered his evil inclination. Fine? He still has the craving for evil, but on the practical level he does only good things and not bad things. Good. So, then Maimonides says: “And the philosophers agreed that the virtuous one is better and more complete than the one who rules his soul.” The virtuous one is better than the one who rules his soul. That was your assumption earlier. But they said it is possible that the one who rules his soul may stand in many matters where the virtuous one stands, yet his level is necessarily lower, because he desires the evil deed. And even though he does not do it, his desire for it is an evil trait in the soul. And Solomon already said something similar,” and so on. “But when we examined the words of the Sages on this matter, we found that for them, one who desires transgressions and longs for them is better and more complete than one who does not desire them and does not suffer in refraining from them.” The Sages say the opposite. The philosophers say the virtuous one is better, and the Sages say the one who rules his soul, or who subdues his inclination, is better. “To the point that they said that the greater and more complete a person is, the stronger his desire for transgressions and his pain in refraining from them will be,” and they brought stories about this and said, “Whoever is greater than his fellow, his inclination is greater than his.” By the way, that’s no proof at all; I don’t understand what the proof is from that. The fact that someone greater has a greater inclination doesn’t mean there is value in having an inclination. He wants to claim there is some special value in the fact that you have an inclination and overcome it. Here it only says: okay. But that doesn’t mean that overcoming the inclination is what makes you great. Overcoming the inclination is a result; it’s not the cause. Right, but what he said above was something else. He said above not that the inclination is an indication that you are great, but that your greatness lies in overcoming the inclination. And that is the greatness; the inclination is the cause of your greatness, not an indication of your greatness. Right, but that still doesn’t say his model either. It doesn’t seem to me that way; he intends to bring proof for his model. Anyway: “And moreover, they commanded that a person should rule his soul, and warned against saying, ‘By nature I do not desire this transgression, and even had the Torah not forbidden it…’ And this is what they said: Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, ‘A person should not say: I do not want to eat meat with milk, I do not want to wear shaatnez, I do not want to have relations with forbidden women; rather he should say: I do want to, but what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.’” Yes, so basically we see that one who subdues his inclination is greater than the virtuous one in the eyes of the Sages, and this is contrary to the position of the philosophers. That itself already presents an interesting difficulty. Philosophers say one thing and the Sages say another. Okay, so the philosophers were wrong. What’s the problem? Where is the question? The question is apparently that Maimonides—one second—Maimonides apparently understands that when the philosophers say something and the Sages say something, we have a problem. Meaning, he accepts the conclusions of wisdom; from his perspective this has validity. It’s not something like, okay, the Sages said otherwise so it turns out the philosophers were wrong. That’s not how it works for him, okay? Did you want to comment? He says
[Speaker B] Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, “A person should not say”—it could be that he feels that way, but don’t say it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, “a person should not say” generally refers to the practical plane, not the plane of what you happen to verbalize. It’s like just now someone said to me, wait, how does it go there,
[Speaker C] just now someone wanted to throw some line at me, I don’t remember what.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, never mind. In any case, yes—according to the plain meaning of the two statements, at first glance they contradict one another. And… that is not so; rather, both are true and there is no disagreement between them at all. “And the evils that are called evils by the philosophers are those concerning which they said that one who does not desire them is better than one who desires them and rules his soul away from them.” And these are the things universally accepted among all people as evils, such as bloodshed, theft, robbery, fraud, harming one who has not harmed you, repaying evil to one who has done good to you, dishonoring parents, and the like. “And these are the commandments about which the Sages, peace be upon them, said: had they not been written, they would have been worthy of being written.” Yes, what are called the rational commandments. “And some of our later Sages who fell ill with the sickness of the dialecticians called them ‘rational commandments.’ And there is no doubt that a soul that desires any of these things and longs for them is a deficient soul, and that the virtuous soul does not desire any of these evils at all and does not suffer in refraining from them. But the things about which the Sages said that one who rules his soul regarding them is better and receives greater reward—those are the revelational commandments.” And that is correct, because had the Torah not existed, they would not be evils at all. Therefore they said that a person should leave his soul inclined toward loving them, and let nothing restrain him from them except the Torah. So he says: look at the examples Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel brings. What examples does he bring? Shaatnez, forbidden sexual relations, and meat with milk. Forbidden sexual relations—some would say that is rational too, but plainly he doesn’t think so. The prohibition of forbidden sexual relations is not a rational prohibition, I think at least. In any case, these are three examples, and Maimonides brings this later on. From these examples we understand that the Sages too agree with the philosophers regarding rational commandments. What they said was about revelational commandments. And therefore the claim is—we talked earlier about putting on tefillin—so Maimonides is basically saying that in putting on tefillin there is no point at all in identifying with it naturally. On the contrary: if you overcome your inclination, you are greater. Yes. If you assume that love is something emotional, then yes—but if love is doing the truth because it is true, I don’t see why you wouldn’t have that. On the contrary: if you overcome your inclination and keep doing it all the time, then you are truly doing something true because it is true. And it is truth, not
[Speaker C] love—the concept of love is confusing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, Maimonides says what is called “service out of love” means, at least regarding the Holy One, blessed be He, doing the truth because it is true. That’s the claim. To serve the Holy One, blessed be He, in a way similar to love of a woman—the thing you’re suggesting,
[Speaker B] I see something implausible in that. Look at Jewish law 3—it elaborates and it’s super romantic and confusing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, all of Jewish law 3 elaborates the intensity of the matter; the emotional dimension only accompanies it. Obviously, otherwise
[Speaker B] I wouldn’t be here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And it is hard to separate. There is loving the Holy One, blessed be He,
[Speaker B] in Himself, and there is doing the truth, meaning keeping the commandments.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but you have to look at the context. The entire discussion in chapter 10 is only about the reason to do the commandments. He is not dealing with the commandment to love God. Therefore I said that earlier: the discussion of the commandment to love God is in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. Fine, and “it is
[Speaker B] the level that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses, as it is said, ‘And you shall love the Lord your God.’” Fine. In the Torah: “And you shall love
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the Lord your God”—possible. “And it is the level that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses, as it is said, ‘And you shall love the Lord your God,’ and until
[Speaker B] he serves God with proper love.” What is proper love? Everything I described above.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Immediately he will do all the commandments out of love.” Well, you’re using the same concept in the same sentence—that’s strange. I don’t think that’s right. In any case, the commandment to love God is in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah; if anything, he should have elaborated there. There he’s talking about the commandment to love God; here he’s talking about the question of why to do commandments. Love of God is not the discussion here. It reminds me: once I was in Yeruham, and a good friend of mine was the principal of the environmental high school in Sde Boker, a good high school. He said to me: come give us a talk during the Ten Days of Repentance, but without any connection to religion and things like that—that is, without the Holy One, blessed be He, without religious matters. Themes of the day: atonement, forgiveness, things like that. Fine. So I rose to the challenge and began the talk there. I said to them: look, think about someone who hurt his friend. And he has absolutely no pangs of conscience. He goes home cheerful and happy, whistling some jaunty marching tune to himself. But at some point he comes to the conclusion that he was in the wrong. He hurt the other person. So he decides to go appease him, ask him for forgiveness. Again—he doesn’t have one drop of guilt, nothing, nothing at all. Everything’s fine. So he goes and asks him for forgiveness. Now suppose you were the one being asked for that forgiveness, and suppose Elijah the Prophet came, or someone else non-religious, and told you that this wasn’t sincere, he’s a psychopath, he doesn’t have any guilt. Would you accept that request for forgiveness? That’s what I asked them. And there was wall-to-wall consensus there that no, that’s hypocrisy, what do you mean, it’s not genuine. Teachers too, students too—everybody, wall-to-wall consensus. I said to them: in my eyes, that is the greatest request for forgiveness possible; that’s the only kind I would accept. Because if his stomach hurts, then he goes to ask forgiveness in order to feed his stomachaches. He’s doing it for himself. But if he goes to ask forgiveness because he understands intellectually that he was in the wrong, that is the truest and most sincere request for forgiveness possible. Now what happens? Many times—and again I qualify this a little. In my opinion this is completely true, but no—human beings are not robots. Therefore I say: I can also feel. That is the qualification I’m giving now, exactly like the albatross, exactly like Maimonides, exactly like everyone. What I basically want to say is: you don’t need to extinguish your pangs of conscience. Conscience has a role. But you shouldn’t do the acts because of the pangs of conscience. Those are two different things. Like enjoyment in learning. It is permitted and good that you enjoy learning, but to learn for the sake of enjoyment really is learning not for its own sake. Meaning, same thing here. Meaning, you don’t need to be a robot and shut off your conscience, but you do
[Speaker B] need to be a robot in this sense: when you decide to do something, do the truth because it is true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And don’t do it because you need to feed your pangs of conscience, because then you’re doing it for yourself, not in order to appease the one who was harmed. Ah, so what you’re basically saying, what you want to say, is that many times that feeling of guilt is some kind of indication that I’ve reached the conclusion that I was in the wrong. Meaning, a reasonable person—like with Coleridge’s map—meaning, a reasonable person, if he’s built like a normal person, then when he hurts someone and understands that he hurt him, he has pangs of conscience. That’s perfectly fine; you don’t need to shut it off. That’s what Maimonides says. It’s good that you have identification with good deeds and lack of identification with bad deeds. But when you do them, you need to do the truth because it is true, not because of the identification. It’s good that you have identification, but the identification is not the motivation for the action. And how do I know this from Maimonides himself? Because Maimonides in chapter 8, at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings—this is what I mentioned earlier, right? Didn’t I mention it? It’s just in my head. You were thinking here not like Maimonides, who says he agrees with the philosophers that it’s better to be—not, no, in a moment, that’s why I’m bringing it. Wait. Ah, Laws of Kings, we said, right? Laws of Kings. The matter of the seven Noahide commandments. A resident alien is someone who accepts upon himself the seven Noahide commandments. You see: “A Noahide who wants, just incidentally—I happen to see now—a Noahide who wants to perform a commandment from the other commandments of the Torah in order to receive reward, we do not prevent him from performing it properly.” It’s not his commandment; he does it in order to receive reward. Fine, he’ll receive reward, not so terrible. Anyway, for our purposes—ah, chapter 8, why chapter 10? End of chapter 8. Maimonides says as follows: “Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to perform them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the World to Come—provided that he accepts and performs them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher that the descendants of Noah had previously been commanded concerning them. But if he performs them because reason compels it, he is not a resident alien and is not among the pious of the nations of the world, but among their wise men”—but not—the reading here is “but among,” not “and not.” Yes, so if he does it because of rational compulsion, then he is not a resident alien and not among the pious of the nations of the world, but among their wise men. Meaning, he does a good deed, but it has no religious value. He is not among the pious of the nations of the world. Why? Because religious value exists only for things… that you do because of the command. Yes, you need to do it because “the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher that the descendants of Noah had previously been commanded concerning them.” What? Yes. The question is whether he keeps them because of Mount Sinai or because Jesus commanded it. No, you’re not distinguishing between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In philosophy of science they make a distinction. The question of how I arrived at a given theory is the context of discovery. My grandmother appeared to me at night and told me string theory in sixty-three dimensions. What? Yes, understood. You’re asking how it came to me, but I’m not asking how it came to me; I’m asking why I observe it. Not because of Moses—because of Jesus he observes it. Yes, Jesus said these commandments should be done, and that’s why he does them. If he does them because of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, then indeed he truly can be a resident alien—except perhaps for idolatry, which one could debate—but yes. He thinks that this is the proper way to behave. He doesn’t do it—no, he may have heard there is a command, but he doesn’t do it because of the command. Rather, because this is the proper way to behave, yes—a good person should behave this way. Then he has no commandment; it is not a commandment. A commandment is only when you do it because of the command that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses in the Torah. What? Also for a Jew. Of course, what do you mean? Same thing. What? Of course not. What? Why? I once wrote an article about this: commandments require faith. Whether commandments require intention is a dispute, but according to all opinions commandments require faith. Meaning, someone without faith who performs a commandment has no commandment at all. We spoke earlier about putting on tefillin, and with that too I got confused. We spoke—fine. So the claim is that one must do it because of the command. Now notice what kinds of commandments Maimonides is talking about here. Statutes, or rational commandments? What are you talking about? The seven Noahide commandments. Maimonides says: what are the seven Noahide commandments? Maimonides says they are things toward which reason inclines. That’s what he says several laws earlier. Yes, a limb from a living animal is always a side note, but in principle the seven Noahide commandments are commandments toward which reason inclines. And about that Maimonides says that you need to observe them not because of rational compulsion, not because you think this is how one ought to behave, but because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them. Without that, it isn’t a commandment. Now I remind you that in chapter 6 of Eight Chapters, Maimonides says that with commandments of this sort it is specifically proper that you have natural identification. Exactly. This joins up with the Eglei Tal and everything else I brought, and Coleridge and the whole holy fellowship. The pious of the nations of the world—that means a resident alien. Yes, a resident alien, that’s what “the pious of the nations of the world” means. No, not those who saved Jews in the Holocaust.
[Speaker B] The question is whether this is something formal because of status.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—it’s a resident alien. Only the resident alien has to do the commandments because… A resident alien is someone who accepts upon himself before a religious court to observe the seven Noahide commandments.
[Speaker B] The question is whether there really has to be some sort of innovation or special idea in doing it—in being a resident alien, in being among the pious of the nations of the world. Obviously yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In principle, the whole concept of a resident alien is itself a contrived concept. The descendants of Noah are obligated in the seven Noahide commandments not because they accepted them before a religious court, but because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them the seven Noahide commandments. It’s only because of the Talmud in tractate Bava Kamma 38—“He stood and saw the nations and permitted their money to Israel”—the Talmud says He saw that the nations were not observing the seven Noahide commandments and permitted their money to Israel. Meaning, at some stage the nations reached a state where they were not observing the seven Noahide commandments, and then the concept of resident alien was born. The concept of resident alien means: nations who are willing to return and observe the commands that are imposed on them anyway, and they observe this before a religious court—then they have the status of resident alien. In principle all the nations should have been like that. The concept of resident alien should not exist in the world at all. And then he says here: “Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to perform them is among the pious of the nations of the world”—that is a resident alien. He is from the ordinary nations of the world, only now he is considered among the pious of the nations of the world because the nations… But the non-Jew is obligated to observe the seven Noahide commandments—what do you mean? No, obviously he isn’t obligated to accept them—who said he’s obligated to accept them? To accept the commandments before a religious court he is not obligated; he is obligated to observe them. If he accepts the commandments before a religious court, he has the status of resident alien, and one may let him live in the Land and various things like that. So he’s perfectly fine, everything’s fine—only he won’t live in the Land, because a resident alien may be allowed to dwell among us. Yes, obviously, but the seven commandments are not beyond that—he is obligated in the seven commandments. To accept upon himself to observe the seven commandments—if you want, do it; if you don’t want, don’t do it—but that is what gives you the status of resident alien. Why am I bringing this? I’m bringing it as an example, as an answer to what you said before: on the one hand, in chapter 6 Maimonides tells us to identify with rational commandments because they need… but here he is talking about rational commandments and says they must be observed because of the command and not because of rational compulsion. Meaning, there is no contradiction. It’s like the Eglei Tal; meaning, it’s the same thing. The fact that you should identify is fine, but that is not the reason or motivation for which you observe. Those are different things. So why do you observe? You do the truth because it is true. What does that mean? Because God commanded. God is a concept such that whatever He commands obligates me. “To do the truth because it is true” is the same thing as accepting God. Accepting God means: I accept upon myself what God has said; that’s what I do. Why? Because God said it. Like Mallory the mountain climber—Mallory, Thomas Mallory—when they asked him why he climbs Everest, he said, “Because it is there.” Now an outsider won’t understand this. I assume that’s a sincere answer; it’s not a joke. Meaning, when he sees that mountain, it is simply obvious to him that one should climb it, right? That is what it means to do the truth because it is true. Why so? Because God commanded. That’s it. Now, someone who does not live this thing and doesn’t have this intuition that what God commanded must be observed—he truly does not understand; it sounds irrational to him. So what if He said it? He said it—so what? Why should one observe if He said it? And if I say it, should one observe too? What do you mean? It’s a matter of perception, of how you understand the concept of God. The concept of God includes within it, in the religious view, the obligation to observe what He commands. It’s not just some statement because He created the world. That is a theoretical statement; even a secular person could agree to that. But the secular person says: okay, I’m religious in the philosophical sense, I believe in the philosophical sense; there is a God who created the world. It has nothing to do with me what He said. So He said it. Even if He said it—or if He didn’t say it—but even if He said it, so what? Then he is not religious. He believes in God, but not in God in this sense—in God as an authority. Good. So what I wanted to do here was simply add another layer to the claim from the previous lesson, where I spoke about faith being a factual claim. And to say that when I say I believe in God, I am not reporting a feeling; I am making a claim about something that exists in reality. Therefore, if someone does not believe in God, then it isn’t like I love someone and he doesn’t love someone, which is not an argument. Here there is an actual argument. I am making a factual claim, and he is claiming that this factual claim is incorrect. And we have an argument, and we can discuss who is right—but it is an argument, because the claim is a factual claim. And what I want to say now is more than that. There is a philosophical distinction between ought and is, yes, of David Hume—between ought and is. “Ought” is what should be done, and “is” is what exists, what the fact is, yes? There is a gap between facts and norms. Facts do not dictate norms. Yes—for example, if someone says to me, murder is forbidden because if you murder it causes pain to many people—that is an invalid argument. The argument is invalid because the fact that it causes pain is a fact, and the claim that murder is forbidden is a norm. A norm never comes out of a fact. If you add the assumption that whatever causes pain is forbidden, then fine. Because then you have added into your premises, beyond the fact that it causes pain, also the normative assumption that it is forbidden to cause pain. And now you can derive the conclusion that murder is forbidden. Let’s say—just an example, okay? Not that that is why murder is forbidden. So the naturalistic fallacy—or what some call the naturalistic fallacy—this gap between ought and is, is a huge gap that really cannot be bridged. So how do we nonetheless draw normative conclusions—moral, legal, whatever? How do we derive such conclusions? We have certain assumptions, and sometimes they are implicit, but sometimes we have such assumptions—bridge assumptions. Assumptions that move us from facts to norm. Like: if it causes pain then it is forbidden; causing pain is forbidden. For example, that assumption. Therefore many times you will hear someone say: murder is forbidden because it causes pain, and it sounds to everyone like a reasonable claim. Meaning, okay, right—why? Because we simply understand that he is also assuming that pain is a bad thing. He doesn’t say it because it seems obvious to him, but clearly that assumption is there too. Without that assumption it cannot hold. This is what in logic is called completing enthymemes. You present arguments in everyday language, and many times you do not present all the premises. Therefore, when you want to formalize it, to write it as a logical argument, you need to think: perhaps there are additional premises involved in the argument that the person simply did not put on the table, maybe because they seemed obvious to him. Okay, and in our context too: when you prove that there is a God, when people speak about proofs for the existence of God and so on, you arrive at a factual conclusion—that there is something that created the world, that there is something that expects us to be moral, I don’t know, all kinds of things like that. But the fact that there is something is only a fact. The obligation to obey what it commands is a norm. A norm never comes out of a fact. Okay? Therefore, in essence, one always has to add that same kind of assumption I spoke about earlier—sometimes implicit, but it always has to be there in the background. And in our case, it seems to me that this assumption is basically the meaning of the concept God. God is not merely a description. God is basically a figure or entity that has some kind of absolute mandatory authority, such that what He says, I do. Why? Because He said it. When I understand the concept of God in that way, then I now say: if God said it, then I have to do it. The fact that God said it is a fact. The claim that I have to do it is a norm. How do you derive the norm from the fact? Because when I say “God said it,” that is not a mere fact. When I call Him God, that is no longer mere fact. It is something colored in a certain way; it already obligates me. It’s like if I were to tell you, look, murder is forbidden—like I spoke about in the previous lesson. If someone says: look, I know murder is morally forbidden, but why not murder? It is morally forbidden, yes, not to murder, but why not murder? Clearly he doesn’t know that murder is morally forbidden, right? If he knew, he wouldn’t ask why not murder. Why? Because the moral prohibition on murder means: do not murder. Right? If he doesn’t understand that, then he doesn’t really understand that there is a moral prohibition on murder. But ostensibly, to say there is a moral prohibition on murder is a description, a fact. And not to murder, or the command not to murder, is a norm. How does a norm emerge from a fact? Because that fact is not really a fact. It is a non-neutral fact, a prescriptive fact rather than a descriptive one. It is not descriptive; it is something carrying a certain charge, meaning it obligates you or causes you not to do something—but it is charged, not neutral. Same thing when I say “God commanded.” That is not a neutral statement. It is not like when I say that I commanded. I commanded—okay, I commanded, so what? What does that mean for someone else? Nothing. When I say “God commanded,” that is not merely a factual claim. When I say “God commanded,” it is a factual claim, but it also contains practical force. If God commands, you must do it. You cannot say: God commanded—true, but why do it? That is the same as asking: I know morality forbids murder, but why not murder? It’s the same thing. Meaning, anyone who asks that question simply doesn’t understand what God is. Okay? So therefore I just want to sharpen this point: the concept of God includes within it the obligation to His commandments, to do truth because it is truth, accepting God, everything we discussed today. Therefore, when we speak of arriving by some path at faith and religious obligation, we need to get through both of these stages. A: to show descriptively, factually, that such an entity exists; and B: that this entity is God. Meaning, that it has some kind of authority such that what it says is binding simply because it said it. Okay? It is not enough to prove that such an authority exists. Okay? Now of course the question that arises—and we’ll begin to address next time—is: if this is indeed a factual claim that there is a God, after that there are also value judgments, but first of all the factual claim that there is a God—how does one reach that conclusion? What are the ways to reach faith? What are the ways to arrive at the understanding that this factual claim is true, that there is a God? Okay? So once I reach the conclusion that this is a factual claim and not a feeling—if it were only a feeling, then there would be no question how one arrives at it. If you have that feeling, you have it; if you don’t, you don’t. Okay? But if I claim that this is a factual claim, then we have moved to an entirely different plane. Now we have to understand: okay, a factual claim has to be checked. Why do you think it is true? What is the basis? Do you have evidence for it? Did you just decide? So he decided yes and you decided no and everything is fine. So what? Just some empty dispute. But if you’re talking about factual claims, factual claims require justification and can also be justified. So now we need to understand what the ways are by which one can justify holding this factual claim. Okay? So that is what we’ll begin discussing next time. There are disputes about facts too. There are disputes about facts too, and in the previous lesson I also spoke about moral facts, where certainly there are disputes. Right, there are disputes about facts too. There are disputes about facts too, and in the previous lesson I also spoke about moral facts, where certainly there are disputes. But also about scientific facts, empirical facts, there are disputes. There are people who think the world is flat and people who think the world is round. So what? Does that mean there is no fact about the shape of the earth? Of course there is a fact; it’s just that one person is right and one person is wrong. Meaning, the mere existence of a dispute does not mean there is no objective truth at the base of the matter. The argument is about who holds the truth and who is mistaken. Now, in the religious claim, when we speak about the revelation at Mount Sinai, we are making a factual claim. It is not a matter of opinion, not a matter of value; it is a claim about an event that either happened or did not happen. If it happened, then the Torah is true. If it did not happen, then it is not true. Now the question is how we can establish the claim that this event indeed happened. And here we arrive at the Kuzari argument, and that is what we will try to examine—whether this argument really provides a rational basis for belief in that fact.