Platonism – Lesson 6
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Plato and Aristotle on abstractions and their implications for understanding Jewish law
- The Pnei Yehoshua, a slave awaiting a bill of emancipation, and ownership as meta-legal
- Ownerless property, rights to produce, and rental as a connection beyond a mere right of use
- The laws of conditions according to Rav Shimon Shkop: retrospective clarification versus “from now on, retroactively”
- The Jerusalem Talmud and the Rosh on annulment of vows as a model of “from now on, retroactively”
- The intermediate state under a condition: “both divorced and married” and the parallel to Schrödinger’s cat
- A critique of yeshiva intuition, the “legal status of a married woman,” and the internal versus external point of view
- Rejecting “the unity of opposites” and “quantum logic” as explanations, and defending logical non-contradiction
- Resolving the apparent contradiction: contradictions between properties, not between entities, and legal status as a Platonic entity
- Halakhic decision-making in a state of double legal status: an actual rule versus the absence of a rule, not the laws of doubt
- A concluding note on existing properties versus entities: a step beyond the discussion of ownership
Summary
General Overview
The text presents the dispute between Plato and Aristotle over the status of abstract objects as a basis for understanding halakhic concepts, and argues that in Jewish law there appears a Platonic tendency that views legal statuses such as ownership and the “legal status of a married woman” as metaphysical realities with legal consequences, rather than as mere convention or abstraction. It demonstrates this through the Pnei Yehoshua on a slave whose bill of emancipation is being withheld, and develops the claim through an analysis of the laws of conditions according to Rav Shimon Shkop, who argues that a condition is not merely retrospective clarification but an act that retroactively generates a result “from now on, retroactively.” It then grapples with the logical difficulty in claiming that during the intermediate period a woman is both divorced and married, and rejects solutions such as “the unity of opposites” or “quantum logic” as empty explanations, while proposing a distinction between contradiction between properties and non-contradiction between entities / legal statuses. Finally, it argues that halakhic rulings in situations of “double legal status” are not governed by the laws of doubt, but by resolving conflict according to the priority of a positive rule (prohibition / obligation) over a rule of absence (permission as the absence of a prohibition), and concludes with the remark that moving from ownership as an existing property to ownership / legal status as an entity is a further step required by the Platonic model.
Plato and Aristotle on abstractions and their implications for understanding Jewish law
The text defines two conceptions, Plato’s and Aristotle’s, regarding abstract objects, properties, and characteristics. Aristotle understands them as abstractions formed from encounters with concrete objects, whereas Plato understands them as spiritual entities, ideas, existing independently and grasped by the intellect. It argues that in Jewish law one can identify a Platonic conception according to which concepts like “horseness,” the “legal status of a married woman,” and ownership are not merely definitions or legal conventions but “facts in reality” that have halakhic consequences. It compares this to Borges’s image of “the planet of the idealists,” in which concepts are not constituted by human beings but are apprehended as something existing.
The Pnei Yehoshua, a slave awaiting a bill of emancipation, and ownership as meta-legal
The text cites Tosafot on one who injures a slave awaiting a bill of emancipation and the Pnei Yehoshua’s difficulty: compensation for injury is payment to the injured party and is not a fine, so apparently there is no reason to pay the master when the master has no monetary rights in a slave who has been declared ownerless. It proposes that declaring the slave ownerless severs monetary rights but does not necessarily sever the fact that one is still the “owner,” because ownership is a “meta-legal or metaphysical” determination of an actual connection in reality between a person and an object, and rights are only a result of that connection. It describes a Platonic conception in which “ownership” is an entity in reality, while the halakhic definitions are properties or characteristics of the thing, not the thing itself.
Ownerless property, rights to produce, and rental as a connection beyond a mere right of use
The text identifies rendering an object ownerless as severing the connection of ownership and rejects any further distinction between severing monetary rights and severing the “entity of ownership” beyond that. It hesitates to tie the discussion to the dispute over whether rights to produce are considered like ownership of the body itself, and argues that even if they are not, they still amount to “some kind of ownership over uses” and not merely a right of use. It distinguishes rights to produce from rental, which according to some medieval authorities (Rishonim) is merely a contractual matter of usage rights without ownership.
The laws of conditions according to Rav Shimon Shkop: retrospective clarification versus “from now on, retroactively”
The text presents Rav Shimon Shkop’s view that understanding a condition as a process of retrospective clarification is incorrect, and cites in his name sources among the medieval authorities (Rishonim), such as Maimonides and the Baal Ha-Ittur, indicating that a condition works differently. He formulates the mechanism as “from now on, retroactively,” in which fulfillment of the condition at a later time is a cause that retroactively generates the earlier result, but only from the moment the condition is fulfilled and onward can one look back and see the result as though it had taken effect from the outset. It explains that this difference creates a practical distinction between the perspective of Wednesday, from which the result is not yet seen as having taken effect, and the perspective of Thursday and onward, from which the result is experienced as taking effect retroactively.
The Jerusalem Talmud and the Rosh on annulment of vows as a model of “from now on, retroactively”
The text cites the Jerusalem Talmud’s question concerning a vow as something that “has a means of being permitted,” because if annulment of vows operates retroactively, it would seem either that the vow never took effect at all or that it remained prohibited forever, and so it would not resemble something that becomes permitted at a future time. It explains in the name of the Rosh that the sage uproots the vow “from now on, retroactively,” so that the vow was valid during the earlier days, and only after annulment does the backward-looking perspective change so that from that point on it is considered as though there had never been a vow. It applies this to the law of lashes and argues that the possibility of administering lashes depends on the time at which the religious court discusses the case, because the perspective of “after the annulment” changes halakhic history retroactively in relation to the act done beforehand.
The intermediate state under a condition: “both divorced and married” and the parallel to Schrödinger’s cat
The text describes Rav Shimon Shkop’s further claim that the state between the creation of the condition and its fulfillment is a double state in which the woman is “both divorced and married,” and that the future event transfers us into one of two alternative worlds in which halakhic history is written retroactively in one direction or the other. It emphasizes that this is not “doubt” in the sense of lack of information, but a double certainty in which both statuses exist together. It explicitly compares this to Schrödinger’s cat in quantum theory, where the future state “collapses” one of the possibilities, while stressing that here the issue is legal rather than physical.
A critique of yeshiva intuition, the “legal status of a married woman,” and the internal versus external point of view
The text recounts the response of students in Yeshivat Yerucham, who stopped the argument about “both divorced and married” by claiming that it was a logical contradiction, and presents this as an example of the fact that intuitive use of conceptual-talmudic language does not necessarily amount to conceptual understanding. It cites in the name of Rabbi Shagar a distinction between speaking about “a married woman” and speaking about “the legal status of a married woman,” and argues that the Haredi world grows up on this language and so is not alarmed by it, but has difficulty defining the differences, whereas an external perspective asks questions that force clarification. It draws an analogy to the debate in anthropology between internal experience and external observation, and argues that the aspiration should be to wear both hats in order to understand and define.
Rejecting “the unity of opposites” and “quantum logic” as explanations, and defending logical non-contradiction
The text attacks the use of expressions like “the unity of opposites” as an explanation and argues that this is an “English-English dictionary,” replacing one lack of understanding with another, and presents it as “the refuge of the lazy,” following Rudolf Otto. It states that logical contradiction empties any system of content because from it one can infer anything and its opposite, and therefore a theoretical system that produces predictions cannot contain an internal logical contradiction. It distinguishes between logical contradiction and something that is “not understandable in reasoning,” and gives as an example the red heifer, which purifies the impure and renders the pure impure, as something strange but not logically contradictory. It also explains that questions like “a round triangle” or “a stone that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot lift” are meaningless, because they involve empty concepts.
Resolving the apparent contradiction: contradictions between properties, not between entities, and legal status as a Platonic entity
The text proposes that the contradiction is not between objects but between properties, illustrating this by noting that there is no problem with a dish containing both salt and sugar, whereas the problem arises when contradictory properties are attributed to the dish itself, such as “completely salty” and “completely sweet.” It uses this to argue that the “legal status of a married woman” and the “legal status of a divorced woman” are not properties but entities or metaphysical objects, and therefore there is no contradiction in the very coexistence of the two legal statuses on the same woman; only at the level of halakhic consequences do conflicts arise. It ties this directly to the Platonic claim that Jewish law describes realities rather than merely defining norms, such that the “laws of a married woman” are properties / consequences of the metaphysical entity and not the identity of the entity itself.
Halakhic decision-making in a state of double legal status: an actual rule versus the absence of a rule, not the laws of doubt
The text rejects defining the intermediate state as “doubt” and argues that it is a case of full knowledge of double legal status, so the ruling is not based on the laws of doubt. It states that when there is a clash between an actual rule (a prohibition or obligation as an active statement of Jewish law) and a rule of absence (permission as the absence of a statement), the actual rule is dominant and the absent rule is recessive. It applies this to examples such as the prohibition against marrying into the general public due to the legal status of a married woman versus the absence of such a prohibition due to the legal status of a divorced woman, and to the prohibition against marrying a kohen due to the legal status of a divorced woman versus the absence of such a prohibition due to the legal status of a widow. It explains that the contradiction dissolves because the woman bears two legal statuses simultaneously, and the consequences are decided according to a conflict-resolution mechanism rather than according to incomplete knowledge.
A concluding note on existing properties versus entities: a step beyond the discussion of ownership
The text concludes with the distinction that even properties such as speed, color, and height are objective facts in reality even though they are not entities, and suggests that in the discussion of ownership regarding a slave awaiting a bill of emancipation it might have been enough to say that ownership is an existing property and not necessarily an object. It argues that here, in order to solve the problem of “both divorced and married,” one needs a further step in which divorced woman and married woman are not properties but entities / legal statuses, because “between entities there is no contradiction,” whereas contradiction exists only between properties. It leaves open the possibility of interpreting these legal statuses as a conceptual model that does not require a direct claim about reality as such, but maintains that halakhic language itself operates as though the legal statuses are metaphysical entities with consequences.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, let’s start. We’re in the middle of a discussion about Platonism, and I defined two conceptions, Plato’s and Aristotle’s: how we understand abstract objects, properties, characteristics. Aristotle understands this as some kind of abstraction, and Plato understands it as entities, spiritual entities, entities—what he calls ideas—that we grasp in some way through the intellect. But we don’t constitute these concepts; rather, they exist and we apprehend them. According to Aristotle, we create these concepts—they don’t really exist—but it’s useful for us to abstract them out of the concrete objects we encounter. And after I defined a bit the distinction between Plato and Aristotle, I moved into the halakhic question and said that in Jewish law you can see a Platonic conception. I first demonstrated that through the Pnei Yehoshua’s comments about someone who injures a slave whose bill of emancipation is being withheld. A slave awaiting a bill of emancipation is a Canaanite slave whose master has declared him ownerless, so in effect he is not really his owner anymore, he has no monetary rights over him, and yet someone who injures that slave has to pay the master. And Tosafot says: what difference is there between killing him entirely and killing him halfway? If you kill that slave, the law of a slave—the thirty-shekel fine for a slave—goes to the master, so if you injure him, which is like half a killing, you also pay that to the master. So the Pnei Yehoshua asks: what do you mean? A fine is a punishment; a punishment you can give to whoever you want. But damages for injury are compensation, and compensation has to go to the one who was harmed. And the one who was harmed is not the master—the master is no longer the owner of the slave. So why should I care that you injured the slave? From the master’s perspective, the master lost nothing. I said that I think what the Pnei Yehoshua is answering there, if I understand him correctly—and if not, then I’m suggesting this—is that the fact that I declared the slave ownerless does not mean that I’m not his owner. It means I have no monetary rights regarding him. But being an owner does not mean having monetary rights. The monetary rights are a consequence of the fact that I am the owner. So what does it mean that I’m the owner? The claim that I’m the owner is not a legal claim; it’s a meta-legal or, if you like, metaphysical claim. There is some actual connection in reality between me and the object; that is called my being its owner. That connection has implications in terms of rights: I have rights in this object, others are forbidden to use it. But all of those are consequences of the fact that I’m the owner, and they are not ownership itself. Or in other words, this is a Platonic conception. A conception that says ownership is some kind of concept that exists in reality, and its properties, its characteristics, its definition—like that I’m allowed to use it and he is not allowed to use it, and that I do this through this kind of act of acquisition and not another kind—all those definitions are properties of the thing, but they are not the thing itself. Or the definition of the thing, but not the thing itself. The thing itself is some kind of entity that exists in reality. We define it through our halakhic tools. Exactly like what we saw in the dispute between Plato and Aristotle, in Borges—if you remember—in his story about the planet of the idealists. So in effect, this discussion brought us to the point that in Jewish law we see abstract concepts, like horseness, or the legal status of a married woman, or something like that, as some kind of reality. It’s not just a definition, not a legal convention that we agree among ourselves about who is an owner and who is not. It’s a fact. It’s a fact in reality itself that I am the owner, and that fact has halakhic implications. So what does it mean to sever ownership beyond rights? I didn’t really understand that question. Anyone who wants can jump in and ask, because in the chat it’s harder for me to follow the conversation.
[Speaker B] No, if I am the owner, can I sever that connection and say I’m not the owner?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, you can declare the object ownerless.
[Speaker B] No, not declare it ownerless, but not only in the sense of monetary rights—rather severing that connection itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of…
[Speaker B] The ownership, the entity of ownership.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Declaring the object ownerless is that severing. Declaring the object ownerless is that severing.
[Speaker C] Is this connected to the dispute over whether rights to produce are considered like ownership of the body itself or not?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure, because rights to produce are also some kind of reality—just that this reality is attached to the body itself. But still, you could say that rights to produce, even if they are not like ownership of the body itself, still involve something beyond a mere right of use. Because basically what you want to say is that if I say that rights to produce are not like ownership of the body itself, then what we have here is only some right of use. I have no connection with the object itself; rather, its legal owner allows me to use it, but it’s not that I’m an owner in any sense with respect to the object. That’s probably not correct, because rights to produce, whether I view them as like ownership of the body itself or not, are not the same thing as rental, for example. In rental there is a conception—it’s also a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—but there is a conception that says that in rental,
[Speaker D] Rabbi, during the last minute you got disconnected.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, sorry. Even if rights to produce are not like ownership of the body itself, there is still some kind of ownership over uses here, even if it’s not ownership over the object itself. And that differs, for example, from rental—at least according to some of the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—where rental is just a right of use: I pay you, and in exchange you give me the right to use it, but the object is yours, not mine. I’m only allowed to use it. It’s a contractual matter, not a matter of ownership. With rights to produce, even if they are not like ownership of the body itself, in the plain sense this is a matter of ownership, not just a contract giving me usage rights. So there’s no need to make it depend on the question whether rights to produce are like ownership of the body itself or not. And of course, on the other hand, it also certainly doesn’t have to be so. Meaning, someone who says that rights to produce are like ownership of the body itself does not necessarily understand this as some metaphysical ownership. It’s like ownership of the body itself, and whatever you say about ownership of the body itself you’d say about rights to produce too. But even regarding ownership of the body itself, there are people who will tell you it’s not a metaphysical matter—it’s a legal definition that you are the owner of the body. So I’m saying, in both directions I’m not sure how necessary it is to connect it to that issue. Okay. So that’s basically what we’ve seen until now. At the end of last time I started talking about the laws of conditions, because I wanted to use that to illustrate the significance of what I’m saying here. So we began with Rav Shimon Shkop’s understanding of how exactly a condition works. Rav Shimon Shkop argues that contrary to the accepted view, a condition is not retrospective clarification. For example, if I divorce a woman on condition that she gives me two hundred zuz within a week, then if she gives me the two hundred zuz, it turns out that she was divorced from the outset. If she doesn’t give me the two hundred zuz, then she was never divorced. So what does the condition do? The condition merely reveals a reality that in fact already exists prior to the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the condition—I just don’t know it. After the condition is fulfilled, the condition reveals to me that that was the reality. But, for example, the Holy One, blessed be He—before Heaven it is known—knew it from the start already, whether she was divorced or not. I didn’t know, so I had to wait until the condition was fulfilled or not fulfilled. That is the conception of a condition as retrospective clarification. But Rav Shimon Shkop brought several sources in the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—Maimonides, the Baal Ha-Ittur, and several others—from which it emerges that this is not the correct conception. I’m not going into that whole issue again, but from them it emerges that this is not the correct conception. He wanted to argue that the conception is not retrospective clarification but rather “from now on, retroactively.” What does “from now on, retroactively” mean? When I divorce a woman on condition that she give me two hundred zuz within the coming week, then when she gives me the two hundred zuz, that act is the cause that retroactively generates the divorce. There is a cause here that generates. A cause on the timeline after the effect. The effect is the divorce, let’s say on Sunday, and the cause is on the following Thursday. The moment she gave the money, that—revealed? no, sorry—that generated the divorce retroactively. But, says Rav Shimon Shkop, it’s not simply retroactive, because there is the principle of causality. The cause cannot come later than the effect on the timeline. And therefore he says it is “from now on, retroactively.” What does that mean? From the moment she fulfills the condition, I see her as though she had already been divorced from Sunday. But on Wednesday, for example, I do not see her as divorced. That is exactly the difference between this and retrospective clarification. With retrospective clarification, of course she is divorced even on Wednesday—I just didn’t know it; on Thursday it became clear to me. But once it became clear, it had always been true. Rav Shimon Shkop says no: it does not become clear, it comes into being on Thursday. On Thursday she becomes divorced starting from Sunday. Meaning, when I look at it from the vantage point of Thursday and onward and look backward along the timeline, as far as I’m concerned she was divorced from Sunday. But if I ask myself on Wednesday whether she is divorced, the answer is no. And we brought as an example the Jerusalem Talmud cited by the Rosh in tractate Nedarim regarding the annulment of vows. Annulment of vows works retroactively, unlike a husband’s nullification. Annulment of vows works retroactively. And annulment of vows basically means that it is as though the vow had never existed. The Jerusalem Talmud asks: if that is the meaning of annulment of vows, then why is a vow called something that “has a means of being permitted”? “Something that has a means of being permitted” is a halakhic category of something that at some point in time will become permitted, so there are special stringencies and we don’t apply any leniencies to it during the period when it is prohibited. Why be lenient with you? Wait until it becomes permitted, and then use it with full permission. Therefore there are special stringencies regarding something that has a means of being permitted, and a vow is such a thing. That’s what the Talmud—the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud and everyone—says. The Jerusalem Talmud asks: why is it something that has a means of being permitted? After all, it has a means of being permitted because I can go to a sage who will annul it. And if the sage annuls it, then it turns out that all along it was never a vow at all. And if the sage does not annul it, then it remains a vow forever. So either way, it is not something that has a means of being permitted. Something that has a means of being permitted is something that was prohibited until a certain point in time, and from that point onward became permitted. Here that is not the case in any event. Either it turns out that it was never prohibited, or it will always remain prohibited. But there is no scenario in which it was prohibited until a certain moment and from that moment onward became permitted. That is not called something that has a means of being permitted. So on this the Rosh explains, according to the Jerusalem Talmud, according to the Rosh’s explanation, according to Rav Shimon Shkop, that when the sage annuls the vow he uproots it “from now on, retroactively.” Meaning, the vow takes effect. Even if the sage uproots it on Thursday, the vow was made on Sunday. Even if the sage uproots it on Thursday, the vow was valid on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. When I came to the sage on Thursday, he uprooted it retroactively. What does that mean? That from Thursday onward, as far as I’m concerned, there was never a vow. But on Wednesday, if I ask, then there is a vow here. And if someone violated the vow, in principle the religious court could have given him lashes. Even though afterward he goes to a sage who annuls the vow for him, and that annulment supposedly uproots the vow retroactively from Sunday. So how could they have given him lashes on Wednesday? Because from Wednesday’s vantage point there was a vow here. True, now if I come—he ate the forbidden thing of the vow on Wednesday, and now he went to a sage and had the vow annulled, and on Friday it comes to the religious court. Now the court discusses whether to give him lashes. In that case they won’t give him lashes. Why? Because from Friday’s vantage point, which is already after Thursday, the vow never existed from the outset, already from Sunday. It was uprooted. So if I ate it on Wednesday, then from the court’s perspective that is already a time at which the vow did not exist. Meaning, the question whether the court sits and judges on Wednesday or whether the court sits and judges on Friday—about the same day on which I ate; I ate on Wednesday—the question is when the case is judged. That is the meaning of “from now on, retroactively.” I brought an example for this… no, I’m not going into that again now. That is the meaning of “from now on, retroactively.” Good. So up to here, that’s the introduction to how a vow works. Now Rav Shimon Shkop continues and asks himself: what is the situation in the intermediate state? I divorced a woman on Sunday on condition that she give me two hundred zuz during the week, and she gave me the two hundred zuz on Thursday. Now the question is: what is her status in the meantime? Rav Shimon Shkop basically wants to argue that her status in the meantime is that she is both divorced and a married woman. And the giving of the money on Thursday transfers us into a world in which she had already been divorced from Sunday. If she does not give the money, then I move into a world in which she was never divorced. Meaning, the giving of the money or the failure to give the money takes me into one of two alternative worlds, and in each of those worlds the matter works retroactively—except that in one case it works retroactively such that she was divorced, and in the other case it works retroactively such that she was not divorced. Therefore the state until she gives the money is basically a state in which she is both divorced and married at the same time. Or, with a person who took a vow before he went to the sage, the vow both took effect and did not take effect at the same time. Therefore, if you ate it, why would you get lashes? Why would you get lashes? Because at the moment the vow both did take effect and did not take effect. True, the fact that it did not take effect does not obligate lashes, but from the side that it did take effect, you are liable for lashes. I may sharpen that a bit more in a moment. So that is basically what Rav Shimon Shkop argues, and therefore he claims that in the meantime, until the stage at which the condition is either fulfilled or not fulfilled, the woman’s state is a double state. The legal state in all contexts—not only for a woman, but with vows, divorce, betrothal, everywhere, acquisition on condition, whatever—it’s both-and. Meaning, she is both divorced and married; that’s basically his claim. Now, in effect we somehow rewrite history. Now Rav Shimon Shkop calls this state a state of doubt. But it’s clear that it’s not really a state of doubt. A state of doubt means that the woman is either divorced or married, and I don’t know which. In the mechanism of retrospective clarification, that really is a state of doubt. A state of doubt is always a situation in which there is one clear truth—the Holy One, blessed be He, knows it—and I lack information, so I am in doubt. Doubt is lack of information, okay? Now here, in this case, there is no lack of information. In retrospective clarification, then truly until the condition is fulfilled or not fulfilled I lack information; the Holy One, blessed be He, already knows, there is a truth, and I don’t know what it is, so that is called doubt. But in Rav Shimon Shkop’s mechanism of “from now on, retroactively,” then until the stage of fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the condition she is both divorced and married. Such a state is not a state of doubt; it is a state of certainty. She is both this and that. It’s not either this or that and I don’t know which one. No—she is both divorced and married. It’s a clear, definite state; there is no doubt in it at all. It is a double state: she is both divorced and married. So that is his description of the woman’s state until the condition is fulfilled or not fulfilled. Now the big question is how that is even possible. Yes, when we learned this topic in the yeshiva in Yerucham, I told the guys there—I brought Rav Shimon Shkop and told them that in the meantime she is both divorced and married, and therefore basically it’s like in quantum theory, like Schrödinger’s cat, which is both alive and dead, and the future event collapses it into one of the two possibilities. It’s really parallel; it’s exactly the same thing as in quantum theory. Only here, of course, we are talking about a legal state, not a physical one, but in principle it’s the same thing. Now the question that came up here when we learned the topic in Yerucham—guys, I said it casually and intended to move right on. And suddenly the guys stop me and say, wait a second, what do you mean she is both divorced and married? There’s a logical contradiction here. If she is divorced, then she is not a married woman; if she is a married woman, then she is not divorced. How can you say that a woman is both divorced and married at the same time? These are opposites. You can’t say that. It’s a contradictory statement. It was such a simple question that after I heard it, not only was I struck dumb, but I also didn’t understand how it hadn’t bothered me until then. I mean, why did I say these things so calmly and intend to move on, when suddenly the guys stopped me and said, wait a second, you’re talking nonsense. How did I not feel that? That shows you that yeshiva students often say all kinds of things they’re used to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they understand them. And in my article on chalitzah, which these lectures are now following, I opened with a story that I once heard from Rabbi Bloch—from the film about Midrashiya. He told me that once they were with Rabbi Shagar, the rebbe at Midrashiya, and Rabbi Shagar said to them that in the Haredi world they speak about a married woman, or they speak about the legal status of a married woman. In the world of hesder yeshivot, in what we might call the modern religious world, “the legal status of a married woman” is this sort of conceptual-talmudic term that someone who isn’t deeply rooted in that conceptual world doesn’t really understand. Then I thought a bit about that statement. It’s an interesting statement, but my attitude toward it is complex. Because on the one hand, I totally agree. There is something about a world that raises you on this conceptual world, like in the Haredi world, in Haredi yeshivot—mainly Lithuanian ones, which I know better—where you grow up on this conceptual world, you almost absorb it with your mother’s milk. So you don’t even ask questions about it. It’s obvious to you, understandable to you. You use “the legal status of a married woman” and “a married woman,” and there’s no problem—you understand both those things. But in that kind of situation there is a certain type of… I’m not claiming they don’t understand; they do understand. But they would not know how to define for me what exactly the difference is. If I ask them, wait a second, tell me what the difference is between the legal status of a married woman and a married woman, they wouldn’t know how to define it, even though they use the concepts correctly. There is some kind of intuitive understanding where, even though you don’t know how to define things to yourself, you understand them and use them correctly. Think of it like language. If I use a language correctly even though I don’t know the rules—for example, as a child I don’t know the rules of grammar, but I use it correctly. I don’t know how to define the rule that certain letters at the beginning of a word take a dagesh. But when I pronounce them at the beginning of a word, I always pronounce them with the dagesh. I know how to do it; I don’t know how to define and explain what the rule is, why I do it, but I do it correctly. That’s roughly similar to the Haredi world’s use of conceptual-talmudic terms. But that’s also the downside of it. The downside is that if you get stuck with a question like this, you won’t know how to answer it. You’ll get confused, and you’ll think maybe you really made a mistake and it’s really the same thing, and you just got used to some foolishness like that and so you keep using it—but really there is no actual difference between a married woman and the legal status of a married woman. And someone who didn’t grow up on this, someone who encounters it later in life, someone for whom this isn’t his intimate world but only one of the worlds he encounters and shares—in the world of hesder yeshivot this is usually the case—when he encounters something like this, he immediately asks the question. Yes, when I was a yeshiva student, I said, yes, both divorced and married, everything’s fine, let’s move on. But the guys stop me and say, wait, what do you mean? If I had said this in Ponevezh, nobody would have blinked. It would have been obvious, and they would have immediately continued the lecture. But there they stopped me and said, wait a second, a divorced woman is not a married woman, a married woman is not divorced, you can’t be both married and divorced, that’s a logical contradiction, that’s a round triangle. You can’t say such a thing. The great advantage of those guys who don’t have that intuition and don’t really understand intuitively the difference between the legal status of a married woman and a married woman is that they really ask good questions, and then you have to give an account to yourself of what the difference is. And after you give yourself that account and manage to clarify what the difference is, you discover new worlds. Even though intuitively you used those concepts correctly, you don’t really understand them, and there are certain applications you won’t be able to make. And in that sense I think it is דווקא an advantage for people who encounter this from a fresh, un-captive point of view. They ask you: wait, explain—what are you saying here, a logical contradiction? Okay? So I think, say, a rebbe in a Haredi yeshiva, if he ran into a question like this, I’m not sure he would know how to answer it, how to explain it. He would understand the concepts correctly, but he wouldn’t know how to explain them. He never really gave himself an account of what’s going on here; he’s just not used to it. I think in that world people aren’t really used to giving themselves an account of the meaning of the concepts they use. That’s just your language—you don’t look at your language from the outside. And that is a certain advantage of those who do look from the outside. You know, there was a debate at the beginning of the age of so-called scientific anthropology—whatever kind of science that is, never mind, but that’s how it’s defined. There was a big debate about how one should do it, or sociology and anthropology, the social sciences. In order to study the sociology and anthropology of some tribe in Africa, do you need to live together with the members of the tribe, from inside, experiencing it from the inside in order to understand their mindset and their culture properly? Or on the contrary, should you sit on the hill above, be completely detached from them, and document the facts objectively? There’s an advantage to this and an advantage to that. There is no simple answer here. I think the approach one should strive for is to try to wear both hats. That is, to live it from the inside in order to understand what they mean, but not to lose the ability to look at it from the outside and ask why, what does it mean, and define for yourself what they think as opposed to another tribe—which they themselves wouldn’t know how to tell you. They just say what they say, and that’s it. They don’t do comparative studies of the relation between themselves and another tribe. By the way, in anthropology this is the problem of narrative,
[Speaker F] It’s like why computer scientists say that if you can’t code it, you don’t really know it. Okay, and you have to tell the computer either this or that, not something vague.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But here I’m not sure how far you can go with that. What does it mean to code the difference between a married woman and the legal status of a married woman? I’m not sure it’s the same kind of problem, because I can code it technically. Feed ChatGPT the legal status of a married woman and a married woman, even if you don’t understand it. As a Haredi person, tell it in every place where you use “a married woman” and where you use “the legal status of a married woman.” Give it enough examples and it will use them correctly. You’ll code it without yourself really understanding or really knowing how to define the difference, because what you’re doing is practice, right? You’re training it, and it learns to imitate you. It uses it the way you use it without understanding. It too will use it without understanding. By the way, that’s exactly the difference: if I program ChatGPT with this when I do understand it, it will still function as though it doesn’t understand. It’ll do it correctly, but without understanding. Okay, but now I’m getting into the territory of AI people, who always get upset when I say things like this. For many of them, the machine is exactly the same as a human being—it’s only a question of complexity. Anyway, returning to our subject: what I want to say is that the question is a good question. The fact that I’m used to speaking about these concepts as distinct concepts—how can you say that she is both divorced and married at the same time? What do you mean? That’s a logical contradiction. Good question. Then I thought a bit and said to them—an answer came to mind—I said, look, when I look at opposites… or maybe one more important methodological introduction before I get to the answer. Very often when we encounter this sort of thing, there is an article by some physicist named Daniel Vaid. I don’t know him; I just saw his article. It was published in Hegayon Aleph—it once came out at Bar-Ilan, before Bedad, before “In all your ways know Him”; it was called Hegayon. And in volume one of Hegayon there was an article of his in which he explains that Jewish law operates with quantum logic. From various perspectives—not important right now—I think there are topics in Jewish law that completely overlap with quantum logic. The point is that he saw this as some kind of explanation. Once you say, ah, it works with quantum logic—no problem, you’ve explained it. Now that’s what I call an English-English dictionary. The difference between an English-English dictionary and an English-Hebrew dictionary is that an English-Hebrew dictionary takes a word you don’t understand and explains it with words you do understand. An English-English dictionary takes one word you don’t understand and explains it with ten other words you also don’t understand. So to explain strange phenomena by saying it’s quantum logic is an English-English dictionary. You explain one incomprehensible thing by means of another incomprehensible thing. So what have I gained? At best, you’ve transferred the question mark to quantum theory too. So the question is, fine—but what’s the explanation? There is something in the philosophical world, or mainly in philosophy of religion I think, where people treat the claim that “ah, it’s the unity of opposites” as if that were an explanation. Yes, Nicholas of Cusa—that’s the name of his book—the Christian scholar from the 14th or 15th century, something like that, who wrote a book called The Unity of Opposites; it’s a basis for Christian theology, which believes in contradictions. Yes, Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, said: I believe because it is absurd. Not despite the fact that it is absurd—I believe because it is absurd. Meaning, his conception is that if it weren’t absurd, it wouldn’t be called belief; it would be called knowledge. Belief applies only to something absurd by its very logical definition. And that’s where faith enters. Meaning, faith is supposed to relate only to things that are not understood or things that are contradictory. In my view, that’s nonsense—even though it’s very appealing to Hasidim and to Rabbi Kook and all those influenced by this Christian thought. So they import this nonsense into our world too. But that nonsense says nothing. When you say “the unity of opposites,” it sounds terribly profound, but in fact you haven’t explained anything.
[Speaker C] But regarding quantum, Feynman would say that the explanation is the equations, right? You look at the mathematics.
[Speaker E] You…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Can you hear?
[Speaker E] It’s less severe than the Mishnah, because the Mishnah changes completely.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t hear.
[Speaker E] Is someone talking here—is that directed at us?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At us or not? Daniel, did you want to say something?
[Speaker C] Yes, regarding quantum mechanics—Feynman would say that the explanation is the equations, yes, that you look at the mathematics. You look at the mathematics and that’s the truth. I don’t—there isn’t any explanation beyond that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but—
[Speaker C] Maybe regarding Jewish law we’d say the same thing here: the truth is the Jewish law, and there’s no explanation beyond that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but in the end I believe that both in physics and in Jewish law there ought to be some explanation. The equations don’t exist for their own sake; they come in the wake of some kind of reality, and you have to understand what that reality is saying. So I don’t think you can dismiss it that way. You know, it’s like—I once wrote an article on Zeno’s arrow paradox, the arrow in flight. By the way, that’s not even just an example; it’s really this very thing itself. I explained it using the uncertainty principle in quantum theory. But I said that this is not an explanation. It’s an English-English dictionary, because I don’t understand the uncertainty principle either, so how does it help me explain the paradox of the arrow in flight with it? Then I went on and explained the uncertainty principle itself on the philosophical level, and then it can be an explanation. You can’t stop with the scientific statement. What, is quantum theory preferable to Jewish law? Then in Jewish law too you don’t need an explanation, so just stay with the Jewish law and that’s it. After all, if I want explanations, then the fact that you quote quantum theory to me is not an explanation. What I’m saying is that in the end you have to understand things. For example, with Zeno’s arrow, the solution—I wrote an article that solves this paradox of Zeno’s arrow. To my surprise, I poked around a bit and it seems to me that to this day there isn’t really a solution. Nobody has truly solved it, unlike Achilles and the tortoise. There it’s clear: that’s a convergent infinite series. But the arrow in flight, which is infinitesimals—that no one has solved to this day, and the solution people always wave around is infinitesimals. Now, fine, if people knew infinitesimals, everything would be fine. Infinitesimals solve nothing, because the problem exists there too. And therefore you can’t say that because you have a formal description, an equation that describes it, that solves the problem. The question is how you explain the thing itself. That’s why I proposed there some philosophical explanation, or an essential explanation, that can also perhaps explain infinitesimals, can also explain the uncertainty principle, and many other things—but you need an explanation. The fact that you link me to another scientific problem or another mathematical problem is not an explanation; it only says that the problem exists there too. Well, I’m optimistic, because I think things are supposed to have an explanation. There is an explanation, there ought to be an explanation, and in many cases at least it’s accessible to us. You don’t have to give up too early. And my feeling—Rudolf Otto writes this; he has a book called The Idea of the Holy, actually an interesting book. Philosophy of religion is nonsense, but The Idea of the Holy I think is actually an interesting book. And in the English edition of it—it originally came out in German—in the introduction to the English edition he writes that the unity of opposites is the refuge of the lazy. The unity of opposites is for someone too lazy to think. If you’re too lazy to think, then it’s the unity of opposites and everything is fine, you’ve solved the problem. There’s a logical contradiction here? Ah, it’s the unity of opposites. It’s like divine foreknowledge and free choice, right? The Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, so how do I have free choice? Ah, that’s the unity of opposites, we live, we leap into the empty void, live in contradiction, and I don’t know what, and say blah blah blah blah blah. And then everything is fine, we’re considered terribly deep, and we’ve solved the problem, and everything is wonderful. But what can you do—it is a logical contradiction. And when there’s a logical contradiction, if there is a logical contradiction in your doctrine, then that means I can infer any conclusion whatsoever from your doctrine. Anything and its opposite. Meaning, once there is a logical contradiction—and by the way, that’s a theorem in logic.
[Speaker F] But quantum theory—nobody really understands it; people just use it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, those are two different things. That’s another statement—I thought maybe that’s what Danny meant earlier, that statement of Feynman. Feynman said—they once told him, I already don’t remember what exactly they told him—he said that relativity, they told him relativity is a very complicated thing, nobody understands it. Meaning—ah no, it started like this. They came to Arthur Eddington and said that people claim there are only three people in the world who understand relativity. So he asked, who is the third? It was obvious to him that Einstein and he himself made two; he just didn’t know who the third was. When Feynman heard that story—because Feynman came later, he was younger than him—when Feynman heard that story he said that’s nonsense. Relativity many people understand; quantum theory nobody understands. We’ve just gotten used to it and know how to use the equations, but we don’t really understand. But I think there’s— I think that’s not correct. Meaning, it’s not correct in the sense that the question is what counts as understanding. I also don’t understand quantum theory, but there is no contradiction in it. There are things in it that are not understood, but not contradiction. If there were a contradiction in it, then on the logical level you could derive any conclusion whatsoever from quantum theory. Anything and its opposite. And that can’t be true of a scientific theory: if you can derive any conclusion from it, then it has no predictions, you can’t falsify it, because anything that happens fits it. Therefore there cannot be a scientific theory that contains a logical contradiction. There are the equations, that’s true. And you wouldn’t be able to derive any conclusion from it. So that’s exactly what I want to say, that there is—
[Speaker F] The famous Schrödinger’s cat—nobody understands how it can be both alive and dead.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that’s not a logical contradiction, that it is both alive and dead, and that’s what I want to explain now. In other words, the claim—if it were a logical contradiction, then you couldn’t use quantum theory. That’s a proof by contradiction that there cannot be a logical contradiction in quantum theory. Now the question is, so what is happening there? So I say: understand—I don’t understand, I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s not that there’s a logical contradiction there. It’s not that I’m using a thing and its opposite, because if that were so it would be unusable; you couldn’t use it. Rather, there are things I don’t know how to explain, don’t know how to understand. For example, when people talk about particle and wave in quantum theory, people say: how can the particle pass through both slits at the same time? If it passed through this one, it can’t pass through that one, and vice versa. That’s not a logical contradiction, because in reality itself there is no particle and no wave; there is something called a wave function, and this wave function can appear to us in various forms—in the form of a wave, in the form of a particle—but what really exists is neither a wave nor a particle, but a wave function. And a wave function can pass through both slits; there’s no problem with that. It passes like a wave—like an electromagnetic wave that you send toward this screen, you’ll see that it passed through both slits and nobody would bat an eye. Everything is fine. A wave can pass through both slits, so there is no logical contradiction here. True, there are other problems here—it’s not local, or each person takes the problems in different directions, the problems in quantum theory—but there is no logical contradiction there. That’s an important point people don’t understand. All the people who talk about quantum logic, for example—now, you can talk about quantum logic as a methodological aid; by the way, I wrote about all this in an article in Tzohar. You can use quantum logic as a methodological tool; it’s a logic that describes how we think in quantum theory. But if you use it as a philosophical explanation of quantum theory, you’re mistaken, because if that explanation doesn’t fit ordinary logic, that means there is a contradiction in quantum theory, and there is no contradiction in quantum theory. All you can say is that this is a logic that, if we use it, will help me on the methodological level, but it’s not that I now have an explanation of quantum theory—that it works with a different logic. Wonderful, excellent, there’s no transitivity, or the law of the excluded middle doesn’t exist, or something like that—there’s no such thing. The law of the excluded middle always exists. More than that: quantum theory itself is built on mathematics, some of whose theorems are proved by contradiction. If the law of the excluded middle isn’t true, then proofs by contradiction are not valid. A proof by contradiction says: if you proved that not-X is false, that’s a proof that X is true, right? You can assume not-X, show that it leads to a contradiction, and then I say: from here we see that X. But if the law of the excluded middle doesn’t exist, then the fact that you eliminated not-X doesn’t mean that X is true; there is a third possibility.
[Speaker F] But apparently there are contradictions between quantum theory and relativity. Again—there are contradictions between quantum theory and relativity.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a different discussion. They don’t know—they currently don’t know how to reconcile them; that’s what all of string theory and the great effort being made today is about. They don’t know how to reconcile quantum theory with relativity, or with gravitation—how to do quantum gravity. Fine, that’s a different discussion. I’m talking right now about quantum theory itself. Forget relativity and gravitation—just with respect to the electron. So there are things there that seemingly look like contradiction, but they are not contradiction; they cannot be contradiction. And to say that quantum logic is an explanation or a solution because logic isn’t correct—that’s nonsense. You don’t measure logic in a laboratory. Logic is something a priori. If we measured logic in a laboratory, then the instruments I used to make the measurements could be thrown in the trash, because I built them on the basis of binary, classical, ordinary logic. And if in the laboratory you suddenly saw that this logic isn’t correct, then the instruments with which you made those measurements can be thrown in the trash. The mathematical theorems on which you built quantum theory—those too, at least some of them, you can throw in the trash, because some of them were proved by contradiction.
[Speaker F] I’m talking more about something called entanglement. Again—there’s something called entanglement, that there is a connection between two particles.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s something else; it’s not a logical contradiction. It’s called entanglement—quantum entanglement.
[Speaker F] Yes, but it’s a connection that’s much faster than the speed of light.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that contradicts the principle in relativity that things can’t travel faster than the speed of light. So that has to be reconciled. That’s a problem in physics, not a problem in logic. You have to find an explanation for why relativity doesn’t work here, or— but you can’t say that relativity does work here and it’s still fine, because if that were so there’d be no need to keep working on it. After all, all the work being done today is to reconcile those two things. Why do we need to do work? What, can we just live with both of them—they contradict each other and everything is excellent? All the work being done is to show how I explain this without there being an internal contradiction. If an internal contradiction were acceptable—if I can live with an internal contradiction—then nothing needs to be explained; everything is excellent. Therefore very often they use that language, even physicists, certainly in the popular literature, but it’s nonsense. It has no meaning whatsoever. You can’t live in contradiction. Living in contradiction is just words, moving your lips. Someone who lives in contradiction simply doesn’t live, or doesn’t think. There is no such thing as living in contradiction. It may be that many times when people use the phrase living in contradiction they mean a contradiction that is not a logical contradiction. Right, take the red heifer. Fine? The quintessential halakhic model of a paradoxical law. Why? Because it purifies the impure and renders the pure impure. Is that a logical contradiction? Absolutely not. What’s the problem with there being something that purifies the impure and renders the pure impure and purifies the impure? It just doesn’t seem logical to us. But there’s no logical contradiction here. It needs to be explained, we should try to explain the logic—whether we succeed or not, maybe it’s a different logic—but there is no logical contradiction here. If there were a logical contradiction here, then you couldn’t draw any conclusion, you couldn’t infer any conclusion from the law. If there are logical contradictions within Jewish law, there is no way to derive conclusions from it. I could infer from it that there is God and that there is no God, that one must keep the Sabbath and that one need not keep the Sabbath, that there are thirty-nine primary categories of labor and that there are forty-three primary categories of labor, or that there are minus pi primary categories of labor. You could infer any conclusion you want. Therefore within Jewish law too there cannot be a logical contradiction. There are things I don’t understand, that seem to me not to fit together, but that is not a logical contradiction. Okay, so I’ll get back to our issue after the—
[Speaker F] There’s a joke here—about von Neumann, that he said that if you assume one equals two, you can prove anything in the world. So they asked him, okay, assume that—how can you prove that you’re the pope? So he said: the pope and I are two, and if two equals one, then we are one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know some version about the Holy One, blessed be He, I think. That you can prove that there is God or that there isn’t God—I don’t remember whether it was based on one equals two. Yes, same principle.
[Speaker G] Rabbi, but in the realm of feelings and values, to my mind it’s the same thing. There, Rabbi, you yourself talk about this many times—that there are contradictions within essences, within yourself. You both want to eat chocolate, and you also think it’s important to eat chocolate, and you also think it’s important not to eat chocolate. You have to decide. No, not that there’s a conflict—you have to decide. And you decide, and you decide between the two things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you—
[Speaker G] Live in a real dialectic. We all live this.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not true. In all the places where I spoke about this matter, I also explained why that is not a contradiction. The chocolate is tasty, so I want to eat it because it’s tasty, and I don’t want to eat it because it’s unhealthy. What’s the contradiction?
[Speaker G] Right, but no, there’s no contradiction—but you still have to decide. Now I’m telling you: decide. So what are you in the end? I’m both for it and against it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sometimes—no, but a decision—you can’t decide contradictory things.
[Speaker G] In the end you have to decide one of them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Conflict is not contradiction. I’ll decide on one of them, no problem.
[Speaker G] But you didn’t decide.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When you don’t manage to decide and you live in dialectic and you live in both worlds—no, no, not true. You’re mixing levels here. When I decide there, I decide what to do; I don’t decide what I want. There’s nothing to decide. I both want the chocolate because it’s tasty, and I also don’t want it because it’s unhealthy. There’s nothing to decide here because this is not a contradiction. Both are true. What I need to decide is what I will actually do. And what I will actually do is not determined by the question which of the two is right. Both are right. The question is: what’s more important to me, health or taste? An entirely value-based decision. No problem with that.
[Speaker G] But the decision is the most important thing. In the end, where are you really?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so decide, because it’s important.
[Speaker G] But when you don’t manage to decide, or you decide both, and you live in—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The fact that you don’t manage to decide doesn’t mean there’s a contradiction here; it means you don’t have the ability to decide. When I don’t know some scientific fact, does that mean it’s a contradiction? No, it means I don’t know it. So what?
[Speaker C] But the Talmud says there are things that contradict one another and were said in one utterance. There are some where you could say they aren’t contradictions, but like “Do not wear wool and linen together,” and also regarding ritual fringes. There are things where the Talmud does say they contradict one another, and that’s why they—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About that Talmudic passage I’ll say what I say in other contexts too: it is not talking about a logical contradiction. It’s exactly the same thing as the ashes of the red heifer that purify the impure and render the pure impure. That’s not a logical contradiction. If it both purified the impure and rendered them impure, that would be a logical contradiction. But if it purifies the impure and renders the pure impure, that’s something I don’t understand, but there is no logical contradiction here at all. What— is there a logical contradiction between the statement “something renders the pure impure” and the other statement “something purifies the impure”? Does one logically contradict the other? Of course not. No. It’s just something that’s hard for me to understand rationally.
[Speaker C] It’s exactly again—some are like that, and some are like “Do not wear wool and linen together,” which is a rule, a general rule, and then they say there is something exceptional, that deviates—yes, regarding ritual fringes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the Talmud says what the exception is: a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. In Yevamot. So that means there is an explanation; there is no contradiction here. It’s completely true that I’m forbidden to wear wool and linen together, but a positive commandment overrides a prohibition. So when I have a clash—and again, that’s a conflict, not a contradiction—a clash between the positive commandment of ritual fringes and the prohibition of wool and linen together, then the positive commandment overrides the prohibition. Fine, everything is fine. That’s a solution to a conflict; it’s not a contradiction. There are no contradictions in the world. None. There cannot be contradictions in the world. If there were contradictions in the world, we couldn’t make sense of anything; you couldn’t say anything. Very often when we use the concept contradiction, we use it a bit rashly. We declare something to be a contradiction when what we really mean is: this is something I don’t understand. A logical contradiction is something very specific and very severe. And if you introduce into the system you use or believe in a logical contradiction, you have emptied it of content. That’s it, period. You believe in nothing—and also in everything. Together. What you’re saying simply has no meaning.
[Speaker F] There are views that the Holy One, blessed be He, can do anything even if there are contradictions. Like create a stone that He can’t lift.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ask—ask the people with those views how they can mumble those meaningless words. What do you mean there are views? There are all kinds of people who say nonsense. Fine, so what can you do? That’s not proof of anything; it’s only proof that they’re saying nonsense. No—the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot lift a stone that He cannot lift. Meaning, there are no words here—it doesn’t—this isn’t even the issue, by the way. People are bothered because it supposedly comes out that He isn’t omnipotent, and that’s a misunderstanding of what omnipotent means. Omnipotent does not mean someone who can do everything, but someone who can do everything that can be done. But if something isn’t defined, then by definition—can He make a square triangle? First explain to me what a square triangle is, and then I’ll answer you whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can or cannot make it. But a square triangle is a meaningless concept. So to say—it is like, I think we discussed in some other context, I already don’t remember when, yes—the question whether the current king of France is bald. So look in the group of bald people, you won’t find him. Look in the group of hairy people who have hair on their heads, you won’t find him there either. How can that be? Either he’s in one group or in the other; there is no third group. The answer is that France has no king. Therefore he is in neither this group nor that group. Can the Holy One, blessed be He, make a square triangle? Seemingly either He can or He can’t. If He can’t, then He isn’t omnipotent, and if He can, then it’s a logical contradiction; something here makes no sense. Right, that’s the question. The answer: there is no such thing as a square triangle. Explain to me what a square triangle is and I can answer you whether He—yes. Same thing with a stone that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot lift. A stone that the omnipotent cannot lift—that’s like a square triangle. You uttered words that have no meaning whatsoever. What does it mean, a stone that the omnipotent cannot lift? It’s like saying a stone that is a square triangle. It has no meaning. Therefore I can’t say that the Holy One, blessed be He, can, and I can’t say that the Holy One, blessed be He, can’t, because the concept I’m using is a meaningless concept. Explain that concept to me, and then I can try to think whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can lift it or not. But you’re using a concept that is merely lip service; the concept says nothing. So therefore the motivation to say such things—where the motivation is to present the Holy One, blessed be He, as omnipotent—simply stems from misunderstanding what omnipotence is. The Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a shell that penetrates all walls and also a wall that stops all shells. He cannot. Why? Because there is no such thing. There is no reality in which there is a shell that penetrates all walls and also a wall that stops all shells. So therefore He cannot do that. But cannot here doesn’t mean that He lacks ability; rather, there is no such thing. It’s not inability on the part of the Holy One, blessed be He. So when there is such a thing, when it can be defined, when it is imaginable, then let’s see whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can realize it or not. Then He is omnipotent; He can realize everything imaginable. But if there is something that is logically contradictory, then the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do it—but that isn’t really cannot; rather, there is nothing there to do. The statement is simply meaningless. Therefore it is not a blow to His omnipotence when I say He cannot do that. In another context I said that the laws of—we are used to saying there are the laws of logic and the laws of physics and the laws of biology and the laws of the state, the rules of chess and FIFA rules and all kinds of systems of rules. The laws of logic are not a system of rules in the same sense as all the other systems. Because the other systems are rules that someone legislated, and they could also have been legislated differently. The laws of logic—even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot legislate them differently. He didn’t legislate them at all. They are simply that way because they are that way. They cannot be otherwise. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create a world with a different logic. Therefore calling it a system of rules is equivocation; it’s a mistake. And by the way, that mistake is what underlies the confusion—you mentioned earlier, Professor Turkel. What you explained earlier, those views you mentioned earlier stem from this: they think that the laws of logic are also like the laws of physics. And just as the Holy One, blessed be He, can override the laws of physics, He can also override the laws of logic. And that’s a mistake. The laws of logic and the laws of physics are not the same thing. The laws of logic are not laws in the ordinary sense in which we use that term. They are simply principles that we conceptualize, but they are so and cannot be otherwise. Nobody legislated them. You cannot legislate another system of such laws in another world. Okay, that’s just—I see this took me a long time. And it’s only to move aside various possible ways of dealing with this contradiction of being both a married woman and a divorced woman. Fine. So now that I’ve committed myself, I say: then it has to be solved. You can’t remain with a contradiction. What can you do—how do you solve it? What I told them is the following: when we talk about a contradiction between two things, we usually—not usually, always—we are talking about a contradiction between properties, not a contradiction between entities. Between entities there is no contradiction. To say that in some dish there is both salt and sugar—there’s no problem with that. A dish can contain both salt and sugar. Salt is not the opposite of sugar. The properties of the salt are the opposite of the properties of the sugar. This is salty and that is sweet. An interesting question why that is the opposite of this, but it doesn’t matter right now; I’m not entirely clear why we see a connection between them and why it’s the opposite of that, but that’s how we generally perceive it. So the relation of opposition does not exist between the salt and the sugar, but between the properties of the salt and the properties of the sugar. Therefore to say that in a dish there is both salt and sugar is not contradictory. To say that in a dish—that the dish, sorry, its taste is both fully salty and fully sweet—that would be a logical contradiction. Either it’s salty or it’s sweet; you can’t say it’s both. Again: fully salty or fully sweet. Okay? You can’t say it’s both. But the fact that it contains salt and sugar—there’s no problem with that. Because the contradiction does not exist between the objects. The contradiction exists between properties. Once I went to a friend—where did this click for me? Many years before that class in Yeruham when I used it. I had a very good friend who wasn’t religious at all, but we liked to exchange examples with one another. So I said to him—from time to time I said to him—my swimsuit thesis, for example, comes from those conversations. But among other things I said to him: look, I can’t manage to find something that has no opposite. Everything has an opposite. Can you think of some example of something that has no opposite? He said, what do you mean? There are millions of such things. What’s the opposite of a dove? What’s the opposite of a cloud? Of a chair? Suddenly I caught myself and said: I couldn’t find even one example, and he’s now giving me a hundred. On the spot. What did I miss? Something here doesn’t make sense. And then I understood that I was looking for a property that has no opposite, and he was giving me objects. Oppositeness is not a relation between objects. Oppositeness or contrast is a relation between properties. Objects certainly don’t have opposites. The question is whether there is a property that has no opposite. Because the relation of opposite or contrast is a relation between properties and not between objects. Why am I saying this? As with salt and sugar, or saltiness and sweetness. What I want to say is the following: when I say that a woman is a married woman, I have stated some set of laws that apply to her. Prohibitions, permissions, obligations, all kinds of things—Torah-level, rabbinic, everything. When I say that the status of a married woman applies to the woman, that means that the woman’s metaphysical state is different. Consequently, the laws of a married woman apply to her. The status of a married woman is the Platonic idea. It’s some kind of entity. A legal status—it’s an entity. When I say a woman is a married woman, I described the woman. When I said that the status of a married woman applies to the woman, I didn’t describe her; I said something about an object that exists in the world. These are not properties; they are entities. The statuses are entities; they are not properties. The laws of a married woman are properties of a married woman—what is forbidden to her, what is permitted to her, halakhic properties. But her being a married woman is a metaphysical reality, as we saw regarding ownership with the Pnei Yehoshua. So what? So when I say that the status of a married woman and the status of a divorced woman apply to a woman simultaneously, there is no problem with that. It’s like saying there is salt and sugar in a dish. The question will be which laws apply to the woman. And in the laws it cannot be that she is both permitted to the world and forbidden to the world. That would be a logical contradiction. Why? Because permitted and forbidden to the world—one second—permitted or forbidden to the world are halakhic properties, and those properties are contradictory. She cannot have two contradictory properties simultaneously. But it can indeed be that the status of a married woman and the status of a divorced woman both apply to her. Now we will just have to discuss the conflict, not the contradiction—the conflict—of which laws apply to her: the laws of a married woman or the laws of a divorced woman. In a moment I’ll get to that. But first I want us to understand that Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s statement—that until the stage of fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the condition, the woman is both a married woman and a divorced woman—contains no logical contradiction. What he means to say is that two statuses apply to her; she’s carrying two backpacks on her back. One backpack is the status of a divorced woman and the second backpack is the status of a married woman. That’s it. Both things exist. And that’s a reality, just as there is salt and sugar in a dish—there’s no contradiction in that. Now I have to ask myself, okay, what does this mean halakhically? Is the dish salty or is the dish sweet? Is she permitted to the world or forbidden to the world? And here the discussion is a discussion of conflict and not of contradiction, and here it’s obvious that the answer will be only one of the two: either she is permitted to the world or she is forbidden. Either she is forbidden to a kohen or she is permitted to a kohen. A divorced woman is forbidden to a kohen, right? So here there is only one correct answer. You can’t live with logical contradictions. So how do you find the answer? Rabbi Shimon Shkop uses the language of doubt. A state of doubt, and I behave according to the laws of doubt. But that’s not correct, of course; it’s not really a state of doubt. What I said earlier—it isn’t doubt, it’s certainty. She is both a married woman and a divorced woman. There’s no doubt here; there is no information missing. I know all the information: she is both a married woman and a divorced woman. Meaning, the status of a married woman and the status of a divorced woman both apply to her. Okay? Now what? How do I determine these laws? I determine the laws according to—usually in such situations there is a positive law and a law of absence. For example, if I want to discuss whether this woman is permitted to the general public, then from the standpoint of her being a married woman she is forbidden. From the standpoint of her being a divorced woman she is permitted, right? So what should the law ultimately be? Forbidden. She is forbidden on account of the married-woman aspect in her. Is that because of the laws of doubt? No, absolutely not. There is no doubt here at all; she is certainly forbidden. A practical difference would be, for example, if there were now an additional doubt, that would be one doubt, not a double doubt. She would still be forbidden. Because the first determination is not a determination based on doubt; she is certainly a married woman and also certainly a divorced woman. So from the certainly-married-woman side she is forbidden. From the divorced-woman side there is no prohibition, but that’s a negative statement, a passive statement; it’s not an active statement. In Jewish law, a prohibition is an active statement. The absence of prohibition—yes, permission—is a passive statement; it’s no statement. Jewish law has nothing to say on that matter; that’s called permitted. When Jewish law says forbidden, Jewish law has something to say on that matter. So if from the married-woman side Jewish law has something to say on the matter, and from the divorced-woman side Jewish law has nothing to say on the matter, then practically speaking Jewish law has something to say on the matter, and she is forbidden. This is not the laws of doubt; rather, the positive law is always dominant, and the law of absence is recessive. Yes, it basically won’t come to expression, because it isn’t a law; it’s only the absence of law. For example, regarding permission to a kohen, it will work the other way, because the divorced-woman side imposes on her a prohibition to a kohen. So the prohibition is the statement of Jewish law. But if she is a married woman after her husband dies—because otherwise she’s just a married woman; if her husband dies she is a widow and a divorced woman. The practical difference is for an ordinary kohen; for a High Priest both are forbidden, but for an ordinary kohen a divorced woman is forbidden and a widow is permitted. Is she permitted to an ordinary kohen? From the divorced-woman side she is forbidden. From the widow side there is no prohibition. Not that she is obligated to marry a kohen, but there is no prohibition; Jewish law has nothing to say. So the positive law will always overcome the law of absence, and therefore she will be forbidden to a kohen. And that will contradict her prohibition to the general public, because being forbidden to a kohen means I treat her as divorced. Her prohibition to the general public means I treat her as a married woman. But there is no problem, because I’m not saying either that she is a married woman or that she is divorced—she is both. The status of a divorced woman and the status of a married woman both definitely apply to her, not as laws of doubt. The practical consequences will always be one positive and one absence, and I will choose the positive law, not the law of absence. The practical difference, for example, would be what happens in a rabbinic law. Let’s say that this woman is divorced and a married woman only on the rabbinic level; for the sake of discussion let’s say there is such a thing. Regarding a divorced woman there is such a thing, but regarding a married woman it’s a question. Let’s say there is. Okay? What would happen in a situation where I say now it’s conditional, I did something conditional, and now she is both divorced and a married woman. If it’s a rabbinic law, seemingly with rabbinic doubt we are lenient. But if I say that this is not doubt, it is certainty—she is definitely a married woman and definitely divorced—then even in rabbinic law we will go stringently, because she is definitely a married woman rabbinically, not a doubtful married woman. From the married-woman side in her she is forbidden even if it’s rabbinic, because it is certain, not doubtful. It’s like we once spoke about twilight—I don’t remember in which series it was. With twilight there is a question how to understand twilight. The Or Sameach claims that there is a three-way dispute—seemingly it’s a baraita in tractate Shabbat, that’s how he explains it. There is a three-way dispute. The question is whether it is doubtfully day or doubtfully night, neither day nor night, or both day and night. Fine, three views. Where is the practical difference? If there is something I need to do, let’s say there are laws that must be done only at night. The question is: why must they be done only at night? Is it because daytime is forbidden? Then twilight too would be impossible for this, because twilight is both day and night. So if daytime is forbidden—not that night is required, but that day is forbidden—then during twilight we won’t do it. But if it’s because night is required, not because day is forbidden, twilight is also night, and you can do it during twilight too. And that’s exactly the same kind of reasoning. This perspective, that it is both day and night, is not the laws of doubt; rather, I always take the positive law and it overrides the law of absence, the absence of law. Permission is always absence of law. Prohibition or obligation is law. This is contrary to what people—once I heard from the Klausenberger Rebbe, he said that if it were not written in Jewish law that it is permitted to cut challah on the Sabbath, he wouldn’t do that either. Meaning, everything is presumed forbidden unless it is written that it’s permitted, right? But that’s obviously nonsense. Clearly everything is presumed permitted unless it is written that it is forbidden. To be permitted you don’t need permission from Jewish law; permitted means every single thing is permitted unless Jewish law prohibited it. To prohibit requires proof, not to permit. Simple enough. And it’s exactly the same thing here. It’s not because of the laws of doubt; that’s just how it’s built. The prohibition is a statement of Jewish law; permission means Jewish law has nothing to say. So if I am now in this doubled situation, where on one side Jewish law has something to say and on the other side Jewish law has nothing to say, then practically speaking we take what Jewish law has to say about the situation, and therefore I am stringent. And that’s Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s solution to this situation where the woman is both a married woman and a divorced woman. But notice what actually underlies this solution. What underlies this solution is that to say that the status of a married woman applies to the woman is not to say that she is a married woman. It is to say that there is a reality upon her, a Platonic idea, that she is a married woman, and it has various consequences. The consequences, by the way, sometimes will not appear. If there is another status that is also present upon the woman, it may be that the consequences of that status override the consequences of this status. Exactly as we saw with ownership in the case of a slave whose bill of emancipation has been delayed, where the metaphysical bond between me and him exists, but without the consequences—I have no monetary rights over him even though I am his owner. That’s exactly the implication of the distinction I am making here, when I say that Jewish law is not a collection of norms floating in the air, but rather consequences of a metaphysical state. The metaphysical state is the halakhic determination; the halakhic consequences are only consequences of the metaphysical state. This is exactly the Platonic perspective on Jewish law. What that means is that sometimes there can be a situation in which the metaphysical situation indeed exists—ownership, married-woman status, divorced-woman status—still exists, but some of the consequences or all of the consequences will not appear because there is another problem preventing them from appearing. But she will still be a married woman, or I will still be an owner, even though the consequences did not appear. Because to say that I am a married woman or to say that I am an owner is not to say the consequences; it is to say the metaphysical reality, and the consequences only derive from it. One last point that I want to end with: notice that when I supposedly brought the proof from the Pnei Yehoshua, there are two things here. When I say that something exists in reality, I have not necessarily said that it is an object. For example, the speed of the car is a property of the car. Does it exist in reality, or is it only my subjective hallucination? Obviously it exists in reality. But the speed of the car is not an object; it is a property of an object, a state of an object. The object is the car. The speed is its property, or the color of the car, the height of the car. All of these are not subjective things; they are objective things, but they are not entities. Meaning, the properties of things too are something that exists in reality itself. In reality itself there are things, and their properties or states. Okay? It’s exactly the same thing. When I spoke about ownership of a Hebrew slave or a Canaanite slave whose bill of emancipation has been delayed, there I only argued that it exists in reality, but I didn’t say that it is an object. It could be that it is a property. Being the owner of a slave is perhaps a property of the slave. It could have been a property of the slave, but it is a property that exists and has other halakhic consequences. Here we have already advanced one step further, because here, in order for there not to be a contradiction—when I say that the woman is both divorced and a married woman—I need to say that being divorced and being a married woman are not properties, but objects, entities, and therefore there is no contradiction between entities. There is no opposition or contradiction between entities. There is contradiction between properties. So here I advanced one step beyond what we saw in the Pnei Yehoshua, where there it was only a property. It could have been only a property.
[Speaker H] Okay, and still I didn’t understand what—how can there be a contradictory status? Meaning, can a person have a status that’s both a human being and an animal? Could there be a status that she’s both married and a widow? Call it whatever we call it, but still two statuses can’t both apply.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A dish can contain both salt and sugar.
[Speaker H] A dish contains several things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, and within a woman there are several things too.
[Speaker H] A status that she is both married and widowed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He said that he is—
[Speaker H] Both human and—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the woman there are two things: the status of a divorced woman and the status of a widow. Yes. What’s the problem?
[Speaker H] What is the real-world interpretation? How is it expressed in reality that she is both a widow and married?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In reality it is expressed halakhically, but in the laws there won’t be—
[Speaker H] No, no, not Jewish law. I’m asking right now about the status. How does it take effect upon her at that very moment that she is both married and widowed?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, what’s the problem? Why not? Like salt and sugar in a dish, it’s exactly the same thing. There is a contradiction between the properties of a married woman and a widow, but there is no contradiction between the legal/metaphysical status of a married woman and the legal/metaphysical status of a widow, just as there is a contradiction between the properties of salt and sugar but not between the salt and sugar themselves. They can be together in the same dish.
[Speaker H] Because they are two things that don’t contradict each other, two tastes that are inside the dish. But how can it be that within the woman herself she is both married and a widow? I don’t understand that. What can I tell you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is there to understand? What’s the problem?
[Speaker H] How can a woman—how do the halakhic implications work? The halakhic implications—not Jewish law, I’m asking about reality, not Jewish law. So what’s the problem in reality? She has two legal/metaphysical statuses. What does it mean that at the same moment she is both married and a widow? What does it mean? Is there a husband? Is he alive? Is he dead? What does it mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In what language do you want the answer? In what language do you want to receive the answer? I said: she has the legal/metaphysical status of a married woman and the legal/metaphysical status of a divorced woman. What is the meaning of the fact that a dish has both salt and sugar in it? Are you asking me in terms of the taste?
[Speaker H] No, I’m asking what it means—what does the word “status” mean, then? I didn’t understand that here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A legal/metaphysical status is a metaphysical object that has halakhic implications, and there are different metaphysical objects, some of which have contradictory halakhic implications, but still, between the two objects in themselves there is no contradiction, and they can both exist on the same woman simultaneously.
[Speaker I] Rabbi, why isn’t this like, say, salty and not salty—married woman and widow?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If there were an object called “not salty,” you’d be right, but there isn’t. “Not salty” means the absence of salt.
[Speaker I] Maybe—maybe then black and white.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sugar isn’t salty, right? Leave aside the fact that it’s sweet—it is, first of all, not salty. Yes. Good. So this dish is both salty and not salty.
[Speaker H] But you can’t make sense of the dish. I’m asking: is the husband alive or dead?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether the husband is alive or dead is a physical question; the question here is halakhic, so halakhically there can be a situation where he is also—non-halakhically I don’t—
[Speaker H] Halakhically—I’m not asking in Jewish law, I’m asking in metaphysics, in terms of this status: is the husband alive or dead?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying again: regarding objects, I didn’t say that objects can be both alive and dead. That’s physics. In physics I don’t know of such a situation. As for Schrödinger’s cat, by the way, there the situation really is like that, and my explanation there is very similar to the explanation here. Because there too it cannot be a logical contradiction, because if it were a logical contradiction, quantum theory would have to be thrown in the trash. So what’s the explanation there? Exactly what I said here. The cat in itself cannot both not be alive and not be dead. Alive and dead are modes in which I perceive the cat, and then the claim is that it can be both alive and dead. When I measure it, I will perceive it only in one of those ways. Exactly like what I’m saying here. Otherwise it’s a logical contradiction. And when there’s a logical contradiction, I said, the whole theory is worthless. Okay.
[Speaker J] Rabbi, so why, instead of inventing these fictions of statuses and the fictions of abstract categories—instead of inventing the fiction of status and the whole fiction of Platonic entities—why not say that we are looking from the person’s existential standpoint, and then it’s much more—because basically that’s what the Rabbi is saying, only he’s saying it in the language of status and in Platonic language. But really this is an ultra-existential statement.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I haven’t gotten into the question right now of whether these things are fiction or not. You can say that there really are such things in reality and these are their implications; you can say that all of this itself is only our way of looking. We look as if these things are entities that have implications, without committing ourselves to anything about reality itself. I can accept that interpretation; that’s a different issue. But it’s still different from when I look at things and don’t see entities there, only properties. At least from my perspective there are also entities there. Are there really entities? That can be debated. It doesn’t follow necessarily from what I said here. Yes. It’s like Zeitlin’s question about Kant. Kant made a distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as I perceive it. Why? Because I can’t—I have no access to the thing itself, only to things as I perceive them. So Zeitlin asks: on what plane was that distinction itself made? On the plane of things in themselves or on the plane of my perceptions of things? Even the distinction between the thing itself and the thing as I perceive it is itself a distinction that exists within my perception. After all, I have no access to reality itself. So even when I said that a thing in itself exists, it could be that all I said was that I perceive that a thing in itself exists. That’s not a statement about reality; that’s also a statement about my perception. Right. In principle that could be true. Meaning, I’m not getting into it—it’s an interpretation that you can adopt, you can adopt it, whatever you want. If you think it’s fiction, then you’ll probably adopt the second interpretation. I’m not sure about that, but fine, that’s a different discussion. I’ll say—
[Speaker K] This Haredi Lithuanian approach, this Brisker approach, of this kind of invention really is, just as the Rabbi described earlier, a way of exempting them from actually understanding things a lot of the time. Some of them maybe feel it intuitively, but some of them, because they’re already swept up in this fictive creativity, don’t really understand things. You hear descriptions of reality and you say, what are you talking about? He really doesn’t know how to tell you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] נכון. The truth is that in Haredi thinking in general, many times you can hear terribly detached statements about life, about the world, not only in learning. And I think part of that is because the learning is detached in a certain sense. There’s something in this outlook where you create this kind of logical intellectual construction and impose it on reality, and as far as you’re concerned, that is reality. You’re not willing to accept that it’s a kind of model, but reality does not necessarily obey that model.
[Speaker K] And in the end human beings have to live these things. That’s the problem. If it stayed in the air, then fine, but someone will pay the price.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s why we have high-tech—they’ll pay the price.
[Speaker K] Rabbi, how can one ask the Rabbi about his article on that film, about the article, the column the Rabbi wrote very beautifully about the Midrashiya film?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can ask on the website; I think you can ask there.
[Speaker K] On the website is good? Very. Okay, thank you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, goodbye friends, have a peaceful Sabbath.
[Speaker H] Goodbye, have a peaceful Sabbath.