2019-04-22 – Between Midrash and Logic – Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• The language analogy and deriving rules from outputs
• Midrash as a mechanism learned from transmitted facts
• Tosafot Yom Tov: shown at Sinai versus transmitted at Sinai
• Intuition versus rules: after the fact, approximation, and not mathematics
• The development of the rules over the generations and Otniel ben Kenaz
• “A halakha to Moses at Sinai” as potential: Moses and Rabbi Akiva
• The renewal of Jewish laws and the accumulation of material: Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Akiva Eiger
• The attitude toward the medieval authorities (Rishonim), Maimonides, and the weight of authority
• The purpose of the rules: reconstructing an intuitive mode, not producing an algorithm
• Standard Hebrew and language change versus Torah
• Interpretive revolutions, “an eye for an eye,” and a mistaken religious court
• One does not derive from generalizations, and the casuistic structure of the Sages
• Stradivarius, the decline of the generations, and reconstructing a lost ability
• Testing rules: coherence, prediction, and limitations without feedback
• “It is not in heaven”: the obligation to do the best one can
• One truth versus the obligation to issue a halakhic ruling: Rabbi Meir
• Disputes, the students of Hillel and Shammai, and two study houses
• Inconsistency in Maimonides and interpretive synthesis
• Decline and ascent together: enriching understanding through dialectic
• A sage is preferable to a prophet, and mathematics as a formal instrument
• Interim summary: Moses our Teacher had intuitions, not rules

Summary

General Overview

The text presents an analogy between language acquisition and the work of midrash and interpretation in Torah: the listener gathers cases and outputs, understands them through context and intuition, and from them distills rules after the fact—rules the speakers themselves are not necessarily aware of. The Rabbi argues that the Holy One, blessed be He, transmitted a “language” and not an explicit system of rules. Therefore, the hermeneutic rules are a later, developing formulation of ancient intuitions, and they are always an approximation that requires being combined with intuition; they cannot become a mathematical algorithm. Within that framework, the text explains how one can say that “everything a veteran student will one day innovate was given to Moses at Sinai” in a potential sense, how disputes grow as conceptualization increases, and how there is still one truth, yet the halakhic obligation is to rule according to what the halakhic decisor understands to be the truth within the framework of “it is not in heaven.”

The language analogy and deriving rules from outputs

The text describes a language researcher who listens to many sentences, understands their meaning through prior and visual context, and only afterward distills grammatical rules that are the product rather than the starting point. A child learns to speak correctly intuitively without formulating rules, and an adult studying the language formulates a set of rules that even native speakers are unaware of, even though they use them. The Rabbi presents the distinction between interpretation that makes use of common sense and basic generalizations, and midrash, in which “modes of interpretation” are distilled from traditional outputs.

Midrash as a mechanism learned from transmitted facts

The text formulates a position according to which Moses our Teacher transmitted outputs such as “You shall fear the Lord your God”—including Torah scholars—and from the collection of outputs we try to reconstruct the mechanism of midrash and derive rules from it. The Rabbi argues that this is how one can reconstruct “seven hundred a fortiori inferences and verbal analogies that were forgotten during the days of mourning for Moses,” and even derive Jewish laws that were not transmitted, by formulating hermeneutic rules from the examples. The question, “Who says we are supposed to formulate rules?” is answered by saying that this is how human beings work and how the Holy One, blessed be He, created them, so there is no need for “permission” to use generalizations in order to understand a text.

Tosafot Yom Tov: shown at Sinai versus transmitted at Sinai

The text cites the introduction of Tosafot Yom Tov to his commentary on the Mishnah, according to which there is a difference between the Jewish laws that the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses at Sinai and the Jewish laws that He transmitted to Moses at Sinai. “Everything a student will one day innovate” can be something shown to him in prophecy, but that does not mean Moses transmitted all of it through tradition. Over the generations, many Jewish laws are renewed according to the hermeneutic rules, and one can say that they were “presented” at Sinai even if they were not “transmitted” as an explicit tradition.

Intuition versus rules: after the fact, approximation, and not mathematics

The text argues that the rules are created after the fact because of the loss of the intuitive ability to use the language, like someone learning grammar rules in an ulpan instead of speaking naturally at home. The Rabbi presents the view that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted us to know how to read Torah intuitively, and the rules are meant to support that, not replace it. Therefore, a “mathematical” use of the rules alone will not yield correct results. The text relies on the idea of basic capacities and primary intuitions, and emphasizes that the combination of rules and intuition is what makes proper work in midrash possible.

The development of the rules over the generations and Otniel ben Kenaz

The text describes a process beginning with Otniel ben Kenaz and continuing throughout the generations, in which initial rules are formed and then a branching system of rules, sub-rules, and qualifications for a fortiori inference and verbal analogy develops. The farther one gets from the revelation at Mount Sinai, the more an elaborate formal system is needed, but the rules are approximations and not “the thing itself.” The Rabbi presents an attempt to reconcile the scholarly picture with the traditional one by saying that the rules were “formulated” over the generations on the basis of a language passed down through tradition, and therefore were not “invented” in the sense of creation ex nihilo.

“A halakha to Moses at Sinai” as potential: Moses and Rabbi Akiva

The text interprets the story in which Moses our Teacher hears the midrashim of Rabbi Akiva and does not understand them until he is told, “This is a halakha to Moses at Sinai,” as meaning that these things lie potentially within what Moses received. The Rabbi describes a gap between medieval authorities (Rishonim), who operate intuitively without formal systems, and later authorities (Acharonim), who define and conceptualize their principles. The text includes Rabbi Kook’s words in his eulogy for the Sochatchover, about the two contradictory midrashim regarding Rabbi Eliezer, and presents the idea that the student’s formulation and conceptualization can reveal to his teacher something that is already latent in the teacher’s Torah, even without explicit awareness.

The renewal of Jewish laws and the accumulation of material: Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Akiva Eiger

The text states that in the period of the tannaim, verses were expounded and Jewish laws were derived that had not been practiced earlier, and therefore “the Jewish people did not observe them” before they were clarified, and this “just keeps going and going.” The Rabbi argues that today “we observe much more,” and that the amount of material Rabbi Akiva Eiger deals with exceeds that of Rabbi Akiva, even though Rabbi Akiva held the ideas in a more raw and potential form. Assuming that a later authority correctly interprets the tanna, he brings into actuality what was already latent there, and he may even dispute him if, according to his analysis, the conclusion is different.

The attitude toward the medieval authorities (Rishonim), Maimonides, and the weight of authority

The text presents the view that native speakers of the language are usually more correct than those working through rules, since rules are only an approximation, and therefore there is a tendency to see the medieval authorities (Rishonim) as more precise. The Rabbi mentions that Maimonides says there is absolutely no barrier to disputing anyone and no Torah-level restriction on doing so, but in practice one balances the weight of authority against one’s inner conviction based on the tools and the reasoning. The text compares this to weighing medical advice, where the expert’s knowledge carries great weight, but not infinite weight.

The purpose of the rules: reconstructing an intuitive mode, not producing an algorithm

The text argues that the purpose of using rules is to get back into an intuitive mode of using the language, like someone who leaves the ulpan and arrives at creative writing. The Rabbi gives Kishon as an example: in order to write feuilletons and poetry, you need a kind of mastery that comes only after acquiring tools, and that mastery also includes consciously deviating from the rules. The Rabbi states that anyone who does “just mathematics” with the system of rules will not arrive at the correct answers, and therefore midrash is not an algorithm that can simply be handed over to a computer.

Standard Hebrew and language change versus Torah

The text argues that standard Hebrew is an after-the-fact attempt to define the language and be consistent with established rules, and therefore there is reason “not to surrender so quickly to standard Hebrew,” because the rules are not constitutive but derivative. The language changes, but it has an “inner rhythm,” and the text asks whether laws also change according to an inner rhythm. With regard to Torah, it says the possibility is limited because “we are trying to reconstruct what the Holy One, blessed be He, means,” and there is no such thing as “halakhic slang” that invents new content like canceling the Sabbath.

Interpretive revolutions, “an eye for an eye,” and a mistaken religious court

The text raises the possibility that theories such as Halbertal’s “interpretive revolutions” point to moral change, and distinguishes between change and the claim that it accurately captures the true intention. The Rabbi accepts the possibility that an earlier religious court “simply made a mistake,” and cites Maimonides in the Laws of Rebels regarding the ability of one religious court to disagree with its predecessors. The emphasis is that the halakhic decisor does what he understands Torah to require after weighing the accumulated modes of understanding.

One does not derive from generalizations, and the casuistic structure of the Sages

The text mentions the Talmudic statement, “One does not derive from generalizations, even where it says ‘except,’” as evidence of the Sages’ reservation about using rules. The Mishnah and the Talmud are not built in the form of rules but in the casuistic form of cases and discussion, because the rules are only an approximation and do not capture the whole picture. The Rabbi argues that someone who understands the language well is better off not using rules, because they may “spoil” things; they are intended for someone who has become distant and lost intuition.

Stradivarius, the decline of the generations, and reconstructing a lost ability

The text brings a parable about the violin of Stradivarius to describe the formal reconstruction of a craft that was transmitted through use and not through a list of instructions. The apprentice learns to “get inside the master’s head” through practical work, but usually there is decline, because the original intuition erodes, and then one turns to formalization in order to get closer again. The hermeneutic principles are presented as a similar approximation: it is impossible fully to reconstruct “the language of Moses our Teacher,” but one can get closer through rules.

Testing rules: coherence, prediction, and limitations without feedback

The text proposes a method of testing in which one suggests a rule that fits the facts, and even strengthens it by generalizing from some of the facts and testing the ability to “predict” the rest. The Rabbi emphasizes that the halakhic outcome itself cannot be directly tested, but the reliability of the tools can be examined through how well they fit the given collection of cases. The discussion compares this to the empirical sciences and the possibility of error, and recognizes that in Jewish law there is no feedback from heaven because “it is not in heaven,” but there is still an advantage to working with rules and intuition together rather than giving up on the tools.

“It is not in heaven”: the obligation to do the best one can

The text states that the Holy One, blessed be He, expects a person to get “as close as I can,” and does not promise absolute certainty. The Rabbi rejects the image of someone who uses tools as a “revolutionary reformer” and argues that this is simply using the toolbox of the Sages to decipher the Torah. When the conclusion contradicts accepted convention, the Rabbi describes a dilemma of weighting prior authority against confidence in one’s tools, and allows deviation when the confidence is high.

One truth versus the obligation to issue a halakhic ruling: Rabbi Meir

The text states that there is “one truth,” but “we do not know it,” and therefore a person must do “what needs to be done”—that is, what he thinks is the truth. The example is the Talmudic passage about Rabbi Meir, whose view was not ruled in accordance with because his colleagues could not fully grasp his reasoning; the implication is that Jewish law does not require one to follow whoever is truly right if there is no ability to understand his reasons. The text sets up an alternative between “arriving at the truth” and “doing what you think is the truth,” and distinguishes this from relativism of the sort that says, “everyone does whatever he wants.”

Disputes, the students of Hillel and Shammai, and two study houses

The text states that disputes have always existed and that the entire Talmud is full of them, but explains that they multiply once people begin to conceptualize and formulate rules. “The students of Hillel and Shammai did not serve them sufficiently” is explained as the loss of a natural language and a decline into working with rules, which allows several different generalizations to be made from the same set of data. The text describes the dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael over amplifications and exclusions versus general and particular formulations, and the development of two study houses associated with Nehunya ben HaKanah and Pinchas ben Yair.

Inconsistency in Maimonides and interpretive synthesis

The text argues that Maimonides is “inconsistent” in his rulings in disputes between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, and that even in the Talmud there are tannaim such as Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi who sometimes expound one way and sometimes another. The Rabbi explains that inconsistency at the level of rules comes from the mistaken perception of rules as mathematics, and presents the possibility of a complex system that makes distinctions about when to use each rule. The process is described as an ongoing branching-out that produces many possibilities and many more disputes, not fewer.

Decline and ascent together: enriching understanding through dialectic

The text presents a paradox in which the proliferation of rules and disputes results from decline and the loss of intuition, yet also reveals genuine new facets and enriches the understanding of Torah. It describes a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, in which an initial intuition gives way to conceptualization that makes it possible to identify different facets and lines of reasoning that would not previously have been visible. The Rabbi argues that intuition sometimes “limits” us, and in complicated cases it fails, so formal tools make it possible to go further, cautiously.

A sage is preferable to a prophet, and mathematics as a formal instrument

The text brings the idea that “a sage is preferable to a prophet” and describes the advantage of formal calculation over limited intuitive vision, using imagery from higher worlds and the equality of “two plus two equals four” on every level. It cites studies about tribes with “one-two-many systems” of “one, two, and a lot,” to show that without a conceptual system people struggle with simple problems, whereas rules make it possible to handle complex ones. The text concludes that the rules are a “ladder” that one climbs with until understanding becomes more intuitive, and then one can move on to more complicated problems.

Interim summary: Moses our Teacher had intuitions, not rules

The text explicitly sums up the position that Moses our Teacher did not have the rules as they are formulated for us, but rather intuitions and a language, and the rules are an after-the-fact formulation meant to draw closer to that language. The Rabbi presents the continuation of the lectures as a continuation of “the process of conceptualization” of the hermeneutic principles, while emphasizing that they will never become full mathematics and that there will always remain a “wild area” that does not submit to rules.

An analogy for this is some kind of study of language. When I see a group speaking some language, and I try to understand what rules guide their speech, I listen to how the whole thing works, I hear lots of sentences, I understand the meanings of the sentences, and from that I manage to distill some grammatical rules that govern how that language behaves. Don’t you think it’s practical contexts in language—that is, a context that creates some prior knowledge or some visual context so that you can understand? You need lots of things, but there are, there are all kinds of contexts. You go somewhere. It’s not only by hearing and understanding the grammatical rules, it gets added to your… No, understanding the grammatical rules is the product. You hear, you understand what’s going on here because you understand from the context or something like that, the way a child learns a language, and slowly you can extract from that a system of rules. By the way, the child figures out how to speak correctly even without extracting rules from it. He simply knows intuitively how to speak correctly without explicitly formulating the grammatical rules for himself. But a person who comes with the purpose of investigating, an adult, can indeed try to extract what rules guide speech in that language, and then he’ll write for himself some set of rules that the speakers themselves may not even be aware of. That doesn’t matter. They know it because they learned it as children, so they learned intuitively how to speak, and the researcher turns that into some closed system of rules. But according to the Rabbi’s words, it comes out that Rabbi Hanai, even though he didn’t transmit to Moses formulated rules for how to learn, but rather he learned from Moses, “You shall fear the Lord your God,” with “et” coming to include Torah scholars, and so on—so he went through all the cases? Like that? Really? No, certainly not. There were many Jewish laws that were not known. So who says that we’re even… what do you mean, “no”… who says that we’re even supposed to formulate rules from the individual cases that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us and actually derive things from that? The way we always do. What do you mean? When we do interpretation—not midrash, not in midrash—when we just do ordinary interpretation, don’t we use rules? We also use rules. Where is it written that you’re allowed to use rules? Because that’s how a human being works. The Holy One, blessed be He, created us in such a way that we use rules, so apparently that was His message to us. There is interpretation and there is interpreting something else; in interpretation you have some text and you have to… And what is interpretation? What is interpretation? It says, “If one man’s ox gores the ox of another,” so what about a dog that bites? That too. Why? Because there’s a rule that anything involving property is liable for its damages. Where do I get that rule from? Maybe it’s only talking about an ox? You activate your common sense, you extract and generalize some rules, and you use them. You don’t need permission for that. So the Rabbi says that once we learned that “You shall fear the Lord your God” comes to include Torah scholars, then as it were… we received that there are interpretations of the Torah. What are the interpretations? We received only the facts, the products of the interpretation. We take those products and try to distill from them the methods of interpretation. So the formulated rules are not interpretation but exposition. That’s the difference—that it’s not interpretation, it’s exposition. Fine, so what? So who says we should keep expounding from a place the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t go through… Moses our teacher said so. After all, Moses our teacher expounded for us. Moses our teacher told us: look, “You shall fear the Lord your God”—this comes to include Torah scholars. So what does it mean to include Torah scholars? It means that it is derived from the verse. So we understand that these verses must also be expounded, not just interpreted. How do you expound? We have a collection of facts we received from Moses our teacher. That is the product we received, a collection of cases, halakhic facts, as it were. Now I try to understand how this mechanism of exposition works, and then I derive rules from it. After I derive the rules, I’ll be able to reconstruct the Jewish laws—those seven hundred a fortiori arguments and verbal analogies that were forgotten during the mourning for Moses, and likewise also laws that perhaps were not forgotten during the mourning for Moses but were never transmitted at all. In the introduction of Tosafot Yom Tov to his commentary on the Mishnah, he says there is a difference between the laws that the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses at Sinai and the laws that the Holy One, blessed be He, transmitted to Moses at Sinai. What the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses at Sinai—everything that a student would one day innovate—even if we take that midrash literally, the point is that He showed it to him. But that doesn’t mean that Moses our teacher then also passed on all those laws. He showed him. Fine. What he passed on is what he passed on, some particular body of laws. That’s what we received. Many laws were innovated over the generations according to these rules of exposition. It may be that the Holy One, blessed be He, already showed this to Moses our teacher at Sinai. Okay, but that’s in prophecy. We did not receive those laws by tradition. We created them through exposition. Maybe there is no mechanism? What do you mean maybe there is no mechanism? Then it’s one of two things. Either Moses our teacher said there is a mechanism, like you… think about language. When you come to learn a language, maybe there is no mechanism? How do you conclude that it’s permissible to say a sentence you’ve never heard before, some new sentence that you speak? Because there is some mechanism, and the Holy One, blessed be He, simply gave us that mechanism instead of giving us rules. Why? Then why don’t parents teach their child beged kefet at the beginning of a word, but instead teach him to speak? Because it’s much better to speak that way; you speak more correctly that way. If you work according to rules, you’ll have a talking robot. You want to teach him the language itself. If you want to teach him the language itself, on the contrary, it’s better not to be bound by rules. The rules are something retrospective—that’s another very important point. The rules are created only because we lost that intuitive ability to use the language naturally. Like when a person comes to an ulpan and wants to learn the language: he doesn’t have the natural ability to use the language, so he learns the rules in ulpan. But that’s after the fact. Someone who learned the language at home without the rules speaks better than someone who speaks with the rules. The Holy One, blessed be He, wanted us, intuitively, like Him, to know how to read the Torah. Like Him or like Moses our teacher, it doesn’t matter, each according to his level—but He gave us a language, He didn’t give us rules. We made the rules, but these are not rules we invented. They are the rules that really are the rules, to the best of our judgment—they really are the rules of the language that the Holy One, blessed be He, transmitted to Moses our teacher. Now it’s true that disagreements can arise, and that’s why I’m saying all this—to explain the picture I described in previous classes. Because in previous classes I described a picture in which this system of rules keeps developing and branching out and being created over the generations. So it certainly seems that this is not a law given to Moses at Sinai, at least not in the simple sense. What I’m claiming is that this process, which began with Othniel son of Kenaz, continues throughout the generations. Othniel son of Kenaz began it; he apparently created some initial rules, maybe not fully formulated, but that was enough for those who were close enough to the source. After all, the closer we are to the source, the easier it is for us with this thing, right? Someone who heard this language in childhood—even if later he has to reconstruct it, he won’t need ulpan; people will start speaking to him and it’ll come back to him. Meaning, someone who is close to the source obviously has an easier time reconstructing it; the farther we get from the source, the more elaborate a system of mathematics we need—yes, of rules for how to do it. But all these rules are approximations. All these rules are approximations; they are not the thing itself. And therefore it may be that using these rules will not yield the correct result, because these rules are generalizations that we made. And therefore it seems to me that we shouldn’t be so alarmed, as our modern mindset is so used to being alarmed, by the fact that the use of rules is not so systematic. The use of rules is always accompanied by some intuition. Because at some level of intuition there still was such a thing after Moses our teacher, down to our own generation. The rules come to support; they do not come to replace. Someone who has no linguistic intuition and just goes through ulpan will not know how to speak Hebrew. It is impossible to speak Hebrew that way. Rules never capture the whole range of speech. You have to be equipped with some system of linguistic connections, as Chomsky calls it, some basic capacities, primary intuitions that are already within you, to which the rules can then join themselves and help you in places where you get stuck, in places where you don’t know. So the combination together of rules plus intuition is what yields the result. And therefore one has to be careful not to treat these rules like mathematics. They are always accompanied by some intuitions about what is right and what is not right, and notice: these intuitions too keep branching out and also undergo conceptualization and formalization, so the longer the generations go on, the farther we get from the revelation at Sinai, there are more and more rules and sub-rules and qualifications to rules. And if you open the literature of rules you’ll find there hundreds of rules with all kinds of qualifications on a fortiori arguments and verbal analogies. All those qualifications were invented by the later authorities—formulated by the later authorities, more precisely, not invented by the later authorities—because they tried to capture more and more of the intuitions of the earlier authorities, and again I’m not speaking specifically of the period of the medieval authorities, but “earlier authorities” meaning anyone before us; each person regards those before him as earlier authorities. I am trying to grasp the intuitions they used completely naturally; I don’t have that intuition, so I try to distill rules from it, as Othniel son of Kenaz did. And then suddenly it comes out that for this type of a fortiori argument we say dayo, for that type we do not say dayo; this a fortiori argument is like this, that one is like that; or this type of verbal analogy requires being free on one side, free on both sides, free on five sides. All that was not there with Moses our teacher, but the intuitions were. The intuitions were there; Moses our teacher did all this. We keep formulating more and more rules all the time as we lose the original intuition. And therefore, one more second, therefore it seems to me that the two pictures—as they emerge, say, from the scholarly world and from the traditional world—do not necessarily contradict one another. The system of rules really was invented over the generations. That’s true. But what does “invented” mean? Formulated over the generations, not invented. It was formulated over the generations on the basis of a certain language that was transmitted by tradition. Therefore it is also true that everything an experienced student will one day innovate was given to Moses at Sinai—it was given to Moses at Sinai potentially. Since this language was given to Moses at Sinai, and if we use this language on additional verses that Moses our teacher had not yet studied or had not yet performed these logical manipulations on—manipulations, of course, not in the negative sense, but had not yet carried out the logical derivations on those verses—then we do them, but what we do was given to Moses at Sinai. From Sinai, because potentially it is there. The fact that Moses our teacher had not yet done it in practice is not important. And therefore, for example, that midrash about Moses our teacher and Rabbi Akiva—yes, where he does not understand what Rabbi Akiva is saying, and then Rabbi Akiva says, “This is a law given to Moses at Sinai,” and he is reassured—what does that mean? It means that this is what lies within what Moses our teacher received. I formulate it differently, I conceptualized it, I defined it. Moses our teacher did not work so much with definitions, just as the later authorities define what the earlier authorities do. The earlier authorities state some reasoning and that’s it; they don’t make “two laws” and definitions and then say from that it comes out here—no systems like that will you find among the earlier authorities. Among the earlier authorities there are no systems. Why are there no systems? Because they are intuitive; they work intuitively. But behind their words, assuming the system is correct, those conceptions are sitting there. In our formulation, that is the right way to formulate it. Or maybe we erred, it doesn’t matter—but assuming we were right, what we did was bring into actuality something that was already behind the consciousness of the earlier authority. By the way, he was not necessarily aware of it. I think I mentioned what Rabbi Kook writes in his eulogy for the Sochatchover—yes, I’m a descendant of the Sochatchover—that after the Sochatchover died, he says there are two contradictory midrashim about Rabbi Eliezer: one says he never said anything he had not heard from his teacher, and the other says he said things no ear had ever heard before. So he says that what he heard from his teacher no ear had ever heard before. Meaning—and that is completely true, absolutely true. There is the student’s formulation, when he formulates his teacher’s Torah, analyzes it, and defines what principle stands behind it; that can surprise even the teacher. Even the teacher would not have thought of it, but that is what lies there. I am merely processing, conceptualizing, defining what I received from my rabbi. My rabbi will not recognize all these rules. He will not recognize them. If he does not live in my mode of thought, he also will not understand what I want from him, because he does not work with the logic I work with. But translated into our language, into our mode of thought, that is the Torah I received from my rabbi—that is exactly it. That is a law given to Moses at Sinai. Now an interesting situation arises here. We spoke here about laws that, say, in the period of the Tannaim, the Tannaim expounded, and from the exposition they extracted laws. So if before that people did not keep them, or Jewish reality did not contain those laws, then the Jewish people did not observe them? Obviously. Completely obviously. And that’s how it keeps going and going. Certainly. Today we observe much more. Much more. Right. Rabbi Akiva—Rabbi Akiva cannot compete with Rabbi Akiva Eiger. The amount of material he needs to master simply does not begin to compare. But Rabbi Akiva held all the material—he just held it in a raw way, in a potential way. He did not think through all the implications and all the cases and all the situations. He dealt with what he dealt with. And in matters he didn’t deal with, he didn’t think about them. So there are laws he did not extract. But assuming Rabbi Akiva Eiger is right when he interprets Rabbi Akiva, then he is actually extracting from Rabbi Akiva what Rabbi Akiva himself says. It doesn’t matter whether Rabbi Akiva said it in practice. This is Torah-level law. And by the way, if he disagrees with Rabbi Akiva, he can do that too. He thinks Rabbi Akiva erred here, because according to these rules it comes out that the conclusion should be this way and not that way. That’s what my analysis says. Usually, with the earlier authorities our assumption is that they are more correct. And I think this is not mysticism and nothing of the sort. They are more correct because really, just as someone who graduates ulpan goes out into the street and sees the natural speakers of the language, usually if there is an argument between them, the natural speakers will be right. Usually they will be right. Why? Because the rules are an approximation. The language is the real thing. But on the other hand, I have nothing but the rules. I think with the rules. What can I do? So I work with the rules, and if it comes out differently for me, Yiftach in his generation is like Samuel in his generation. And sometimes, when I am very, very convinced, I will even disagree with earlier authorities. I already mentioned that Maimonides says there is no obstacle at all to disagreeing with anyone. There is no Torah-level restriction on that. But in language too, after a person goes beyond learning the rules and begins speaking in the street with people, his intuitive understanding of the language opens up, right? Right, and here too it is like that. Here too it is like that? Yes. It’s just that we need more and more rules in order to create that intuition, because we are farther away. But my assumption—and I think it is also my goal, not just my assumption—is that after using this whole collection of rules, we should not end with them, but use them in order to try to reconstruct or re-enter that intuitive mode of using the language. Yes? I think I mentioned Kishon, yes, who left ulpan and started writing feuilletons. You can’t write feuilletons when you leave ulpan. Satire, that is, satirical pieces. You can’t, you can’t write poetry when you leave ulpan, it’s a joke. But you need ulpan so that afterward you can enter a state where you command the language at such a level that you can write poetry and satire and all kinds of such things, where you have amazing command of the language even in deviating from the rules. By the way, sometimes what is funny in his work is precisely that he follows the rules exactly—Kishon—because we are already used to the fact that it doesn’t work like that according to the rules, and he finds all sorts of words that no one uses because they appear in the dictionary, and “machnak” like that, I don’t know, he has all kinds of words that only he knows, and it all appears in the dictionary. But then sometimes the satire is indeed in using the dictionary. But he also knew the satire of deviating from the dictionary. Because human beings—and this is what I’m saying—human beings are born, as you mentioned Chomsky earlier, and that is true also in relation to Torah, not only in relation to language use, to speech. We are born with a certain Torah capacity, with a certain perception, tools of Torah perception, and therefore the rules that we conceptualize and receive from our teachers merely fit onto certain capacities that are already within us, and join together so that we can deal with Torah material. Someone who does only mathematics with the… I’ll maybe talk about this a bit this afternoon. Someone who does only mathematics with the system of rules he developed will not arrive at the right answers. It always has to be integrated, and this is a very important point in understanding exposition, this point. And therefore the whole model I described until now is very important also on the practical level, not only on the theoretical level to explain why the researchers and tradition are not arguing. It is important also on the practical level; one has to understand what one can expect from exposition, and how exposition is used. And the point is that exposition is not used like an automatic system, an algorithm you could hand to a computer. It does not work like that. There is always, it is accompanied by some intuitive dimension, always. The logical expositions no less than the illogical expositions. About the logical expositions I’ll still speak a bit at the conference today, whether that really is so—if I manage to get to it. Yes. Regarding the comparison between language and rules: in language, at the end of the day, today if you speak about the language we speak, this is supposedly not the most standard Hebrew there is. There is, but how do they… The question whether the language is standard Hebrew is an ideological debate that we won’t open here. But still, regardless of that ideological debate, standard Hebrew too is some retrospective attempt to define the language we received, and to be consistent with those rules we established. And therefore I think one of the good reasons not to surrender so quickly to standard Hebrew is exactly this: one must be careful not to see the rules as constitutive. The rules do not constitute the language; the rules came after the fact. The language was there first. But the language changes. The language changes, but it has some inner rhythm. There is change, there is also an internal logic to the change. That too is part of it; the derivative too is part of the language. The derivatives too come down to us in some form—first derivatives, second derivatives, third derivatives, who knows, depending on the intensity of the change. Does this exist also in laws? Is there perhaps also the possibility of change according to an inner rhythm? That’s an interesting question. I don’t know, maybe yes. Maybe yes, I don’t know. In language… in the Torah itself that is a bit problematic, because we are not free to do whatever we want; we are trying to reconstruct what the Holy One, blessed be He, means. It is true that we use our own tools to reconstruct what He means, but here there isn’t really… this isn’t a question of halakhic slang, let’s call it that, yes? It can’t be that suddenly someone develops halakhic slang and decides that in slang one doesn’t need to keep the Sabbath, because in slang that’s… a language can develop in directions its originators did not intend, because they are no holier than I am. Meaning, everyone uses the language, the group. True, there is some inner rhythm and it is indeed a continuation of the previous language, but it is not always a continuation that reveals additional layers within it; sometimes it is a continuation that generates further layers. In Torah, in principle, we are supposed to know what is there. We’ll see later that this is not entirely simple. You can see that even in Jewish law there are customs that the public begins to practice, and even though the rabbis and so on say otherwise, in the end that becomes the law. Yes, but that is not Torah-level law; I’m speaking at the moment about Torah-level law. Rabbinic law too is an addition. In enactments, for example, after a few generations go ask a rabbi what to do? Yes, but that is not Torah-level law, again. Rabbinic enactment too is an addition: the rabbis sitting around the table enacted and added something to the law; certainly that is possible. I am speaking now about the interpretive aspect, meaning our relation to the biblical text. In our relation to the biblical text we are supposed to draw more and more things out of it, to expand it in some way—but not to invent our own things and attach them to it. That’s not… it doesn’t work that way. Maybe theories like Halbertal’s, his book Interpretive Revolutions, with all the moral things there where they claim they supposedly changed it completely from what it was? Changed it from what it was, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it fails to hit the true intention. Those are two different things. Like the exposition of “an eye for an eye,” where supposedly it was certainly monetary? Yes, yes, why not? That doesn’t clash at all with what I’m saying. It doesn’t bother me in the least. I don’t know if it was so, but it doesn’t bother me in the least. Because if that generation thought that’s what it says there, and the next generation thought that’s what it says there, then it did not merely develop the previous generation—it developed the Torah differently. The previous court simply erred. Right, obviously. That’s why I brought the Maimonides from the Laws of Rebels. Maimonides says this openly in the clearest way possible: that any court in any generation can disagree with any court in any previous generation, however great in wisdom and in number and in whatever you want. It makes no difference. If this is how you understand the Torah, then for you this is the Torah. Of course, part of your modes of understanding the Torah is also what has accumulated over the generations, but after all that, when you weigh everything, you are supposed to do what you understand in the Torah, not what Rabbi Akiva understood in the Torah. Unless you use him because you believe he will give you a better understanding. Okay. So that is regarding the general picture, and it has many implications that we’ll also encounter later in the application of the hermeneutical principles, because in applying the principles I will try to present some rules—in effect, to continue the process of conceptualization. To continue showing some rules that guide the work with the various hermeneutical principles of exposition. But you will see all along the way that these rules, at least in most cases, do not really turn into mathematics. Some perhaps already come very close, but some do not really turn into mathematics. But they do help me, together with my intuitions, to try to understand better what one does. It is simply that more and more wild territory gets conquered by conceptualization. The intuitive territory, yes, which is wilder, gets conquered by the rules that we have defined and conceptualized. But still, we always operate within an environment that is wild, an environment that does not submit to rules. And therefore one really, really has to be very careful. I think I mentioned this Talmudic statement that says: one does not derive from general rules even in a place where an exception was stated. The Sages were very wary of using rules. Very wary. It is no accident that the Talmud and the Mishnah are not built in the form of rules but in a casuistic form. They state a case, discuss it, and that’s all. They do not give me the rule so that I can then deduce from it, in a deductive way, everything that can be deduced from it. It does not work in what is called a positivist fashion. It works by way of examples, by generalizing examples. And why? Because the rules really are a kind of approximation. It does not work like that. And in any event, since it is an approximation, someone who understands the language well should not use rules. It will only ruin things for him, it will spoil them. The one who uses rules is only that person who can no longer manage with the language; he has become distant, he lost the intuition. Fine, he uses rules to try to get back onto the field, like with ulpan. And even then he has to be careful not to correct those in the street who speak naturally and tell them, no, no, beged kefet is pronounced this way and not that way. He’ll make a fool of himself. He’ll make a fool of himself, and the language is more right than he is. Truly, more right than he is. The rules are an approximation. There are distortions too, fine, but I mean on the principled level the rules are an approximation, and one must be careful not to take them too far. Even though this is a law given to Moses at Sinai and despite everything. That’s why I described everything I described earlier. It is a law given to Moses at Sinai that is an approximation. Because after all, we created it, we conceptualized that law given to Moses at Sinai. There is some… I mentioned the example, I no longer remember exactly what. In philosophy of science they bring as an example for such processes some… George something, some philosopher of science, I don’t remember his name. He brings the example of the Stradivarius violin. Stradivarius was a master craftsman in building violins, and today we try—those who try with computers and all kinds of very precise devices—to reconstruct Stradivarius’s ability to build violins. So what do they do? They do the reconstruction work that Othniel son of Kenaz did, right? After all, he did not leave a list of instructions. So we try to understand what the proportions and sizes should be, and if you made such-and-such a string, then what volume should the cavity have? I have no idea, I understand nothing about this. But you are supposed to try to distill from these violins—look, these are the violins Stradivarius made, come see what characterizes them as compared to others, and see by what rules one must work. Because the assumption is that he really was a master craftsman; no one competes with him. Now, the more one tries to conceptualize this, the less one succeeds in reaching what he reached. So the experts say. Again, I really understand nothing about this. But the experts claim that with all the equipment and all the capabilities we have, we still do not succeed in producing violins like Stradivarius. That is decline of the generations. That is decline of the generations in the plain sense. When Stradivarius taught his apprentice how to make violins, he didn’t say to him, look, there is a set of rules, like programming a computer. He worked with him hands-on—that is apprenticeship, yes, apprenticeship of Torah scholars. So he worked with him hands-on until he understood the mindset. He absorbed the language naturally. But not completely, because he was only a student. He probably did not grasp everything that was in his teacher’s head, generally speaking, and so there is decline. Sometimes there is some exceptionally gifted student, like Stradivarius himself apparently. But generally such a process will always lead to decline, because you can only lose from the original intuition. Once the decline is strong enough and you already see that you are producing violins not at the proper level, you move to formalization. Fine, so let’s go back to Stradivarius himself, not to his students, and try to understand from his violins how to do it right. We have already lost the intuitive ability to build a violin. Then one uses rules. With all the computers and all the great and powerful tools we are already equipped with, and we try to do it as well as possible. We will always do it less well than Stradivarius, but that is the best approximation there is. And therefore the hermeneutical principles of exposition are like that too. We cannot expect to reconstruct Moses our teacher’s language completely. We can get as close as we can through these rules. And with violins you really can test yourselves as to how close you are by hearing the violin, noticing the differences, and listening. But with the hermeneutical principles of exposition you can’t. If I now expound something, how will you know if it is correct? No, we do have [a way], certainly we do. It’s exactly the same, exactly the same as what Othniel son of Kenaz did. How did Othniel son of Kenaz do it? He checked coherence. Meaning, when you do research, you say: I take the set of facts before me and I try to propose a rule that will fit them all. If it fits them all, then in my view that is the correct rule. Now, if you want to be even better, make a generalization on the basis of ninety percent of the facts, and after you do that check whether you can predict the remaining ten percent. If you can predict the remaining ten percent, that gives you an excellent indication, because then it is not just de facto, it is de jure. No, I’m not talking now about inferring a rule; I’m talking about acting and expounding yet another new verse in the Torah. But if the rule is correct, then fine, you can use it. The whole question is whether the rule is correct. So that’s why I say: check whether the rule is correct. The result itself you can never verify, that’s clear, but you can check whether the tools that led you to it are reliable. No, but the rules, the tools, have very many sub-examples in them—when one says verbal analogy and when one does not say verbal analogy. There is “free,” not “free,” fivefold “free,” yes, so you can never… Fine, in science too you never saw all the facts before you built the theory, right? And still the first person who built an airplane also got on it. Why? Maybe the plane will crash; that’s a fact no one has yet seen. He got on it—maybe it also crashed, I don’t know, but the third plane already didn’t crash. Meaning, true, we can make mistakes along the way, there is no guarantee, but we can indeed accumulate more information and begin to attribute reliability to it. Right, but with a plane, if it crashed, fine, it crashed twice, he knows that crashing is failure. With the hermeneutical principles of exposition we won’t know. Right, but the fact that it crashed and then you learned the right lesson and now planes no longer crash—what does that mean? It means we have the ability to learn the rules empirically from facts. No, but you still didn’t succeed in knowing whether… Again I say: listen one more time. It proves that we have the ability to learn general rules from empirical observations of facts. We are not always right, but the fact is that this is not a shot in the dark; we do have the ability to do this. So now I go to a place where I don’t get feedback, like Jewish law. And I say: fine, if I have the ability to make generalizations of that kind, I believe that in Jewish law too I am getting closer. I’m not sure I’m right, but I’m much closer than if I did not use this. Because here indeed I do not get feedback in the end. But the fact that things progress means that yes, this is not a shot in the dark; we do have the ability to generalize. Science helps a great deal in convincing us of our ability to generalize, because there we get feedback. No, but really without feedback it comes out like all kinds of pseudo-scientific models of various medieval philosophers who built things this way on foundations and spheres and all that… This is not science; Jewish law is not science, okay, that’s unequivocal. No, but then what happens today is discussions arise and coherent world-pictures emerge with all the spheres and all the models, and according to that they knew how to predict the movements that existed then. Right. And nevertheless it was not right at all. What does “not right” mean? Why is it not right? It’s very right—why is it not right? What? That there is no such thing as spheres? So what if there is no such thing as spheres? The description was completely precise. It gave you precise observations with endless epicycles and deferents and everything was fine—a wonderful description. Today we use a simpler theory to describe those same facts, so what? So what happened? The proof is that the fact that something is coherent—and especially that here it is even more… No, but if there were predictions from that theory, most of them would come out correct. Yes, fine. That means generalization is not a shot in the dark; it doesn’t mean it is always right. It means it is not a shot in the dark—that’s what I’m claiming. But even when you still have something by which to test it against… I do have [something]: facts. Let’s talk, say, about investigations into I don’t know what, this world or that world, things where you have no… I’m talking about halakhic exposition; leave me alone with philosophical inquiries. I’m talking about halakhic exposition. Can a person establish some rule in Jewish law… So let’s see whether it stands the test of the facts. You… So I say again, suppose there are one hundred laws. How would I work in Othniel son of Kenaz’s place? This is also how I try to work today. I say: there are one hundred laws, okay? Exactly. I don’t take all one hundred and create from them a rule, because then indeed I’m stuck. I take ten or twenty—after all, I never really go over all of them. I take a certain group from them, until I arrive at a picture that I am sufficiently convinced is a good generalization and not just some specific example. And now I test it on other laws that I did not examine. If I can predict what will come out there, that gives me feedback, even though theoretically of course I could have simply considered all one hundred from the outset. But it’s stronger than building a theory on the basis of the entire hundred. That’s the maximum I can do. I get no feedback, because it is not in heaven. If the Holy One, blessed be He, could give me direct feedback, I would have feedback too. But there isn’t any. The Holy One, blessed be He, told us: you will not receive feedback. Fine. So this is the best way I can work with it. But I think it is worthwhile to work with it because it comes out more reliable than not working with it. Meaning, if we don’t work with it then what happens? We simply know nothing. So true, we can always err, but this is closer—as close as we can get—to the truth. First of all, the assumption, I think, today is that we don’t need to work with it. What? We have enough material from previous generations. I don’t think that’s true. That assumption is unfounded. Unfounded. It’s unfounded because the material from previous generations does not give us solutions to all our questions. Besides which, the solutions it does give me do not always seem terribly convincing. And part of the reason they don’t always seem terribly convincing to me is that the material that reached us was not really based on work that uncovered modes of thought, but on some intuition—and there wasn’t always intuition. But today we have the ability to use different tools to uncover modes of thought, and we can achieve better results. Fine, and this again returns to the matter of the airplane: even the person who invented the plane beforehand and made some generalization from twenty or thirty things he knew about—still, he crashed badly. Okay. Right. There is no guarantee of anything. Do you think that if you don’t use rules you won’t crash badly? Now just act on the basis of the sources you have and derive the law. The chance that you will crash is higher than mine. Because you are working even without the help of the… without that formal aid, but just like that. And your intuitions I have too, assuming we are equally talented, know the same amount, and so on. Right? So we both have the same intuition. What I do with the rules is merely find another measure, another check, to see that I’m really right. Now I work with these two kinds of tools. You insist on working with only one, so by definition you will arrive at less good results. Therefore you have no other option. It’s not that I’m now proposing to make revolutions on the basis of some tool like this and not use the old tool. No. Let’s improve the old tool by making use of tools that I know exist. Because there were tools of exposition. Today we do not know what to do with them. But I know they existed. So let’s try. If I manage to reconstruct them and I test it on the remaining ten and it works, that will help me a lot to convince myself that my intuitions are correct even at that level—not to innovate laws. Much more than if you do only what you do. Meaning, just to work according to the sources and make one thing analogous to another, and what people usually do today. So this can only improve the situation. I am not claiming that I am always right. Obviously not. Nor do I think I am always right without it, of course. Even less so. So therefore I say: I get as close as I can, and since it is not in heaven, that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, expects from me too. The Holy One, blessed be He, expects me to get as close as I can. If He wanted me always to do the truth, then He would have said it is in heaven and would tell me each time what needs to be done. He does not tell me, because He says to me: the field is yours, play in it according to the rules you understand, and as best as you can—that is what I want from you. That’s what He told me. So that’s what I do. The best I can. But from the moment we say it is not in heaven and play according to the rules, then why not really remain with the… Because I think I need to do the best I can, not just do what I happen to do. Those are two different instructions. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not say do what you want. The Holy One, blessed be He, says do the best you can. And since the best I can includes this toolbox too—not only, but also this toolbox—and it is clear to me that it played a role there, after all there is a world of exposition and hermeneutical principles of exposition, and the Sages used it. Today I don’t know how it works. If I know how it works, then there is no doubt I will understand better. Certainly not less well. So why not do it? I’m trying the best I can. Again, with no guarantees. I am never sure that I am right. Right. But no one is ever sure that he is right. The feeling that whoever makes use of these rules is some kind of revolutionary Reform figure—what nonsense. He is only more conservative than all his predecessors. Because he will simply arrive at more correct results than they reached on the basis of previous Jewish law. I am not now inventing a new Torah. I have additional tools for deciphering what is in the Torah that they did not have. Why should I not use them? And what happens if it contradicts the accepted view? Huh? What happens if it contradicts the accepted view? Here I’ll find myself in a dilemma. I mentioned this earlier. I’ll find myself in a dilemma. In a place where I am not entirely convinced that my conclusion is correct, the fact that Rabbi Akiva Eiger thought differently from me carries very great weight. But these tools also carry great weight in my eyes. And if I am very convinced that these tools give me a power that Rabbi Akiva Eiger did not have, and I am convinced that I understand this tool well and apply it correctly—and I can always be mistaken, but that is what I am convinced of—then that will outweigh my conviction that Rabbi Akiva Eiger is more correct, and there I will depart from his path. It is a matter of weighting. It is like the later authorities do not disagree with the earlier authorities unless the earlier authorities are speaking too much nonsense. Right? That is basically what I am saying, in quotation marks, yes? I mean unless these are things that are completely unreasonable. Then you do not follow the earlier authorities. Why not? There is a rule that later authorities do not disagree with earlier authorities. That rule remains in its place with all due honor; it has weight. But there is also weight in a place where my own reasoning tells me as clearly as possible that this is the correct ruling. Then even if the earlier authorities said otherwise, I will do this. But the earlier authorities carry weight in a place where I am not entirely convinced, in a place where there is consensus among the earlier authorities. After all, there are many calculations here. If all the earlier authorities said this, it is not likely that all the earlier authorities missed something elementary. So probably I am missing something here too. If it is not something elementary but something subtler, then I am more ready to assume that many earlier authorities missed it. These are a lot of impressions; I don’t know how to formulate them into rules, but we work this way in every area of life. When a doctor gives me some medical instruction, and I as a layman who understands nothing in medicine am convinced he is mistaken, I will not do it. I will not do it. Not because I am a better doctor than he is, but because the doctor’s ability and knowledge carry very great weight with me, but not infinite weight. Meaning, if I am completely convinced, that too has great weight, so I always have to decide what is stronger for me. But Rabbi, forgive me, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but let’s try—if the Rabbi has worked a bit on these concepts, on these generalizations, what would the Rabbi derive from the verse “Whoever eats, or sits in the house, shall become impure and wash his garments”? No, what does that have to do with it? I’m not, no, I’m just curious. Suppose the Rabbi investigated twenty cases, so here are a few more cases. Let’s see what the Rabbi thinks. Fine, you want examples now? When we get to examples, I’ll give examples. But first of all, who says? I still don’t yet have the tools of the midrashim; I’m only just beginning to work on it. I only want to mark out goals. There are fields in which I do think I already have the tools, and there I’m prepared to tell you in several places that I disagree with earlier authorities and I’m sure I’m right too. I have no doubt that I’m right. When we get there perhaps we’ll understand. Yes. You said that the Holy One, blessed be He, as it were clothes him with the clear laws—you said, “Decide according to your understanding; whatever you determine is fine.” Yes. So basically, as I understood from what you said, there could be a theoretical situation in which today or from now on someone sufficiently wise, as you said things change, will come and decide something against everything we’ve done until now, and that will be okay? Right. Maimonides writes that. And that would be okay from the standpoint of… Perfectly okay. This is what we… not only would it be okay, if they did not do it, they would not be okay. They have to do what they think, not what the previous generation thought. Is there one truth? Huh? Is there one truth? There is one truth. But we do not know it. Right. So we need to do not what is true, but what needs to be done. There is—perhaps I already… you’re taking me into areas I hadn’t thought I’d reach—but in halakhic guidance usually a large part of the problems that arise around here stem from the conception that when a person makes a halakhic decision, his job is to arrive at the truth and that’s all. The halakhic truth, again, yes? Of the halakhic decisor? Yes, yes. Or alternatively that there is no truth; that is the second alternative, in which case everyone does whatever he wants. I propose a third alternative. There is one halakhic truth, but your role is not necessarily always to arrive at the truth, but to do what you think is the truth—and that is not the same thing. Could it be what is right for that moment too? No, that’s fine, it is always right, because even that decisor, if he were there at that moment, would say it is so. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about another case. For example, the Talmud says that the law was not ruled in accordance with Rabbi Meir because his colleagues could not get to the depth of his reasoning. Okay? What does that mean? Rabbi Meir was such a genius that people would not understand why he ruled that the law is this way or that; it would sound to them contrary to reason. So what do you do in such a situation? So I would rule like Rabbi Meir everywhere, obviously, right? After all, I’m such an idiot that I can’t even understand his reasoning. So if he says so, he is certainly right, no? No. As a result, the law is not like Rabbi Meir. Why? Because Jewish law expects us not to do… the truth. If you ask what is the truth? The truth is what Rabbi Meir said, because he is much greater in wisdom than I am. If you ask what I need to do? What I need to do is what I think is the truth. And that is not the same thing. Does that mean each person decides for himself? Say the halakhic decisor of the generation for the sake of discussion. The question of where that stops is another question. Fine, but the supreme court of the generation for the sake of discussion. Fine, we’ll discuss it, because there it is simple, and from there on it gets more complicated. If there is a group of Torah scholars, each one can basically… a hundred Torah scholars, each one will arrive at something else… Obviously. That’s how it has always been. No, is this new to you? The whole Talmud is full of such disputes. What’s the problem? That is exactly what happened there. Rabbi Yosei reached this conclusion, Rabbi Ishmael reached that conclusion, Rabbi Akiva reached this conclusion, Rabbi Shimon reached that conclusion. In the end it was sealed in Jewish law and in the Shulchan Arukh, where they no longer attribute… It was sealed, and the number of disputes only increases. The more things are consolidated, the more the number of disputes grows. That’s how it is; there’s nothing to do. You can’t force this whole business into some kind of tidy and mathematical framework. No, it won’t help. The more we conceptualize, it will not reduce the number of disputes; it will only increase them. That’s it, there’s nothing to do. Once you formulate a rule, it becomes possible to dispute it. Yes, exactly. After all, that is precisely Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. I described this also in previous classes, right? What is the dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael? Rabbi Ishmael expounds by general and particular, and Rabbi Akiva expounds by inclusions and exclusions. Where did this dispute suddenly come from in Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael? Did Moses our teacher also have a dispute with Joshua son of Nun about this? No. The Talmud says this in fact began before them; it didn’t begin with Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva, it began with Nechunya ben HaKanah and Pinchas ben Yair, right? But it doesn’t matter, it began at some point and became two schools. Why? Because once people begin to conceptualize things and formulate rules, you think that this rule is the right generalization of the laws we received from Moses our teacher, but I make a different generalization. As long as you talk about the laws themselves, what we received from Moses our teacher—we received them, or we forgot them, fine, but if the body of laws is given, there are no disputes. When do disputes begin? Disputes begin when the students of Hillel and Shammai did not apprentice themselves sufficiently. Right, that is also what Maimonides writes. What does that mean? “Did not apprentice themselves sufficiently” means they began to forget. It was no longer a natural language for them. So what did they do? They began to work with rules. Once people begin to work with rules, disputes arise. Why? Because the same set of data—you will generalize it this way and I will generalize it that way. What is the correct generalization? As you said before, there is no feedback. Both of us fit all the laws. So what can you do? Two schools emerge, there is nothing to do. Two schools emerge, and therefore the more one defines and conceptualizes, the number of laws grows, not shrinks; the number of disputes grows, not shrinks. There are more forms of conceptualization, more forms of generalization. There is nothing to do, okay. But what can we do? We have no other alternative. Because without the generalizations we cannot work today at all. So there is no choice, we generalize, and the number of disputes keeps increasing over the years. That’s how it is. No, in practical ruling, again, I’m not talking about that now. In practical ruling you are right, because in ruling when there is a supreme court, the supreme court can decide, can vote and decide who is right. By the way, even in practical ruling, if you check, in the dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael in Shevuot 26, there the Talmud brings it in the sharpest wording for the fact that these are two different schools, each one from Pinchas ben Yair and the other from Nechunya ben HaKanah. So check Maimonides’ rulings—Maimonides’ rulings, sorry—in every place where there is a dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael whether one expounds by general and particular or by inclusions and exclusions. On the past and on the future in Shevuot. So that is a dispute of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, and the Talmud says this is a dispute over whether one expounds by general and particular or by inclusions and exclusions. There is also a dispute in Shevuot 3, at the same point the Talmud says so. And there are also disputes in other places at the same point. Check Maimonides; he is not consistent. He is not consistent. There are places where he rules like Rabbi Ishmael even though it follows from the approach of general and particular, and there are places where he rules like Rabbi Akiva even though it follows from the approach of inclusions and exclusions. More than that: in the Talmud itself there are Tannaim who sometimes expound by inclusions and exclusions and sometimes by general and particular. Rabbi, for example, in Shevuot 3, which I mentioned earlier—sometimes general and particular, sometimes inclusions and exclusions. Why? Because after the two extreme generalizations were created, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, later students learn both of them. Both were important Jews. One has to understand the generalization this one made and the generalization that one made, and now I build my own synthesis. I think that the rule Rabbi Akiva built is correct in these places, but Rabbi Ishmael’s rule is more correct in those places. The generalization is more complex than they thought. Or in other words, I am already making an additional generalization. So when we see—wait, you are not consistent, here you rule general and particular and here inclusions and exclusions—that is again the conception of rules as mathematics. It doesn’t work like that. You are not supposed to be consistent at the level of rules. You are supposed to be consistent with your own rules, not with other people’s rules. Assuming you have a consistent system of rules, you go with it. That system can include inclusions and exclusions and general and particular. It simply makes distinctions: when one does this and when one does that. There are such determinations in the Talmud too. Meaning, it keeps developing all the time, keeps branching all the time, of course creating many, many possibilities all the time. Okay, that is the situation; there is nothing to do. So on one hand it is because they did not apprentice themselves sufficiently, and it seems this is decline of the generations, these disputes—which is true. Meaning, “did not apprentice themselves sufficiently” means we lost the intuitive ability to deal with Jewish law, with Torah, and therefore we work with rules. Once we work with rules, we have declined into rules, and disputes arise. But on the other hand, that does not mean these disputes do not reveal real points, points that have real sides to them, which perhaps would not even have emerged if we did not have the rules in hand. Someone who rules intuitively would simply say straight out, intuitively, it’s like this, period. He would not notice—wait, there is a side here and a side there. Therefore in a more complex case, suddenly that side you rejected can jump up and emerge; it is indeed relevant. Meaning, there is a certain ascent of the generations that emerges as a result of this process of decline. As a result of this process of decline, more and more sides are exposed, more and more rules. After all, in every generalization there is also some kind of logic. So Rabbi Akiva held one generalization, Rabbi Ishmael held another. But each had some logic of his own. And suddenly we see that both these logics exist in the Torah. If we had not gone through this dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, we would not understand anything. We would remain at the first, intuitive stage, before Rabbi Akiva’s generalization, Rabbi Ishmael’s generalization, and Rabbi’s synthesis. We would be poorer in our understanding of Torah, not richer in our understanding of Torah—at least with respect to the tools we need. And we do need rules and formal, conceptualized understandings. Okay? So this process on one hand stems from decline and deterioration; on the other hand it gives us possibilities that did not exist in the intuitive period. For example, there are things that people with healthy intuition will not be able to solve. The intuition does not work there; there you need to work with mathematics. Someone who has excellent physical intuition—for example, scientific intuition—there will be cases in which that intuition will mislead him, despite the fact that he has excellent intuition, better than mine. By contrast, I will take the simple cases, make controlled generalizations from them, keep checking all the time, and then with the rules I reached I will solve the case regarding which I have no intuition. It may be that I will arrive at better results. Meaning, often intuition limits me, because there are cases where one needs the rules in order to handle them correctly. Intuition works there—this case is too complicated, intuition no longer works; here one has to calculate. Someone who lacks the rules of calculation will not know how to solve the problem. But the Rabbi is pulling a trick here, because the difference between physics and midrash is that the physicist’s intuition is only… the truth is what exists in the world, and the physicist either hits it or misses it accordingly. And here in midrash, the intuition is the objective truth we received from Moses, from the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning, intuition—the Rabbi referred to it at the beginning as… Intuition is an expression of truth; it is not truth itself. No, but this is the language and this is the creation… This language expresses… the language does not stand by itself. The language expresses a set of ideas, right? You can express them—as when you learn to speak, you speak contents. So the language does not stand by itself; it expresses a world of contents, right? The contents are the Torah, not the language. The language is the way to handle the contents. So you can handle the contents in an intuitive language, but there will be situations where the contents are already too complex and the intuition will fail there—it will not succeed. It will not reach the answers that the Holy One, blessed be He, would expect us to reach. So if we have formal instruments, the advantage of a formal instrument is that you can go far with it. You may make mistakes, and therefore one has to do this carefully and in a controlled way. There is—one more second—the same thing, it seems to me the Maharal writes this in the introduction to Gevurot Hashem or in one of the introductions, I think it is written there, I am not one hundred percent sure. There is—what does it mean that a sage is preferable to a prophet? What? Gevurot. What does it mean that a sage is preferable to a prophet? A prophet, when he looks and thinks about the upper worlds, looks at them—he simply sees them. Okay? So what could be better than that? He simply sees them. The sage calculates them. Meaning, he says what must be there because he understands the rules. Why is a sage preferable to a prophet? Because two plus two equals four both in the world of Atzilut and in the world of Adam Kadmon. Now a prophet—so far as he sees, he sees; where he no longer sees, he can do nothing, he has no tools to handle it. He sees up to Atzilut, up to the foundation of the kingship of Atzilut he sees. Fine? Let’s say there is a prophet who stops there. What will he do with a problem that exists in, I don’t know, the beard of Arikh Anpin? What will he do there? So if he is not equipped with formal tools, he will have nothing to do there. The advantage of two plus two equals four over the intuitive understanding that everyone has that two apples plus two apples is four, even if you do not understand what “two” is and what “four” is and what “plus” is—the advantage is that with seven hundred and forty-eight times five hundred and ninety-four, you will not know how to do it and I will know how to do it, because I know the rule. There are very interesting studies on one-two-many systems. In Brazil, the Pirahã tribe—there was once an article in Nature about this. There are such tribes in a few places; in Indonesia too there is such a tribe, where they have no numerical system in the language. They have one, two, and many. That’s it. One, two, and many—that’s what they have. A one-two-many system. And researchers tried to check what kinds of problems they know how to solve, because theoretically, theoretically, one could solve any problem even with a one-two-many system. It doesn’t matter. He understands it intuitively; he doesn’t have concepts for it. But if you asked him how much is fourteen times eighty-four—assuming you could somehow explain to him what fourteen is, what eighty-four is, and what multiplication is, somehow describe a practical problem to him—he could in principle know the correct answer, do it intuitively, without understanding the mathematics and the rules. But obviously, you understand by yourselves that this won’t happen. It won’t happen. And not because he doesn’t have the intuitions; he has them, but it is too complicated. Too complicated for the intuitions to work there. In a complicated problem you need to translate intuitions into rules and work with the rules, and then you have some chance of arriving at the right answer concerning a complicated problem. And you’ll see how simple some of the problems are that they can’t solve. They don’t know—if you put three batteries in front of them and five batteries in front of them, they don’t know which group has more. Do you understand? That’s the level we’re talking about. Now, these are not stupid people, they are not stupid. Because when they were taught, they understood exactly what we understand. It’s not that they are not intelligent on the principled level. When you don’t have a conceptual system, a system of rules that you’ve conceptualized, you’d be surprised at how simple some problems are that we won’t manage to solve. And if, for example, they put five batteries here and ten batteries there and asked what would you like to take—would he take the five? Not certain. With five and ten it may perhaps be very obvious, but with five and seven he would not take the seven. I no longer remember the exact results; look there, there are experiments they did with them, very interesting. Again, there is some limit within which they can obviously succeed intuitively, but not far beyond that limit the intuition goes bankrupt. Things that seem ridiculous to us—a first grader wouldn’t know, maybe not first grade, maybe second. Why? Because the system of rules enables us to think about it. Now where did those rules come from? They came from the same intuitions that exist in them too. We started that way too. From those intuitions we built rules, but with those rules we can launch spacecraft to the moon. Those people can’t add three plus four with that same intuitive system. It is the same thing here—understand, it is the same thing. Therefore it does not mean that I am smarter than they are, but that I have more tools than they do. That is the point. I may be less smart than they are, but I have more tools, so I will get farther. Intuitions develop, according to the example you gave, because today if you give someone five groups of six, he’ll immediately know without thinking that it’s thirty because he has some… Right, obviously. That is what I said earlier: after you learn the language in ulpan, suddenly the intuitive understanding of how to use the rules returns to you, and you no longer go back to the rules. The rules are a kind of ladder that you climb up the tree with and afterward you throw away the ladder. Meaning, the rules are a way of entering into an understanding of the language, but there are situations that are complicated—at least complicated for us; maybe in another two hundred years they will no longer be complicated because then for them these rules will already be very intuitive—and then they will get to more complicated problems. That is why people solve more and more complicated problems over the course of history, because the more conceptual tools we develop, the more complicated problems we will succeed in handling. Even though there is decline of the generations, and that does not contradict it at all. So basically Moses our teacher did not have the rules? Yes. What? He didn’t have the laws, he had the intuitions. You weren’t here at the beginning; I described this at length earlier. Okay? Fine, we’ll continue.